ABSTRACT
The most important part of assimilation into Roman ways concerns the adoption by the barbarians of the dominant belief-system of the late Roman Empire, Christianity. It was a slow process; it was not until the thirteenth century that the last European people was converted. 1 Conversion was not a simple process of changing from one set of beliefs to another. There were numerous types of paganism, which can only be partially reconstructed from archaeology and from much later literary accounts; there were also various types of Christianity. This chapter will look at what we can know about the religious beliefs which the barbarians were abandoning, at the process of conversion itself and will also examine the implications of the barbarians’ adoption, in most cases, of Arianism, a heretical form of Christianity.
