ABSTRACT
The relations between the German rulers and their followers and the peoples who lay in a long arc from the north to the south-east of the Reich were inevitably somewhat different from those with the other Carolingian successor-states. The fact that the peoples were not or were only incipiently Christianized meant that an attitude of superiority and dominance was possible; it also meant that there was an obligation felt by rulers, if not always by their followers, to support missionary work. In the tenth century this was more institutionalized than it had been in the ninth. The Saxons had been converted by individual missionaries, even though these had institutional back up. But in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries the archbishoprics of Mainz and Bremen in particular had acquired #x201C;missionary territories#x201D;, and hence implicitly an institutional commitment to mission. This model was followed for the tenth-century episcopal foundations, especially Magdeburg, Merseburg and Meißen, which were institutions with defined (though changeable) spheres of influence. Individual missionaries continued to play an important role, as the careers of Adalbert of Prague and Brun of Querfurt show, but it was the rights and obligations of institutions which would dominate. Almost all the peoples concerned were the immediate neighbours of the Saxons; relations with the one exception, the Hungarians, took a rather more relaxed course from those with Danes, Slavs, Poles and Bohemians. The Saxons were the military backbone of the new empire; raiding and tribute-taking continued to be the basis of their political economy up to the end of the tenth century, and it was the drying up of these opportunities among other things which was to lead to the estrangement between the Saxons and their kings in the eleventh century.
