The history of the land that is today Austria as a country, “in between” is long. It is even celebrated in Austria’s anthem. Every schoolchild in Austria still learns to sing: Liegst dem Erdteil Du inmitten (You lie in the middle of the continent). Geographically, however, this is wrong. The geographical center of Europe is in Ukraine and not in Austria. The idea behind this anthem is a post-1945 self-representation of Austria as a country, one that connects different worlds within Europe—north and south, east and west. Not so long before 1945, the young First Republic (1918–38) instead emphasized its position as a borderland: the easternmost bulwark of German culture. During the long rule of the Habsburg dynasty before 1918, the Österreichischen Erblande—Austrian possessions of the Habsburg dynasty—were interpreted either as a crossroads or as the last border of Western Christendom against the “eternal enemies” of the East.Footnote ¹

Although Austria does not lie in the geographic middle of Europe, notions of it as either a historical borderland or middle ground are justified.Footnote ² These ideas have a long history that goes back to the Roman Empire, when, in the second century CE, the Danube limes were connected to the dense network of Roman roads, castra, and cities that distinguished the Roman provinces south of the Danube from the world of the barbarians north of the river. This north/south axis became increasingly blurred during the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. With the end of the Western Roman Empire, after the Roman general and barbarian king Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, the limes on the Middle Danube also ceased to exist.Footnote ³ This was, however, not the result of a Germanic or barbarian invasion from outside. Odoacer’s deposition of the emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE was more a putsch than a conquest or invasion. It was not prompted by his ambition to end Roman rule but to strengthen it under his own command. As the governor of the Italian diocese, he was determined to prevent the emergence of competing barbarian-Roman power blocs on the Middle Danube.

The creation of such power blocs in many regions of the Western Roman provinces had been a crucial factor behind the dissolution of the empire in the century before Odoacer deposed the last emperor. In the words of Peter Brown:

Odoacer had observed the further development of such little Romes into increasingly independent regna such as the Visigothic, Burgundian, or Vandal kingdoms in the regions of Gaul, Iberia, and Northern Africa.Footnote ⁵

On a smaller scale, local Roman elites on the Middle Danube had already started to create their own little Romes. In Comagenis/Tulln, for instance, they hired a barbarian army to protect the city and its inhabitants.Footnote ⁶ To prevent the further crystallization of these Roman-barbarian alliances on the northern periphery of Italy, Odoacer ordered the removal of the local nobility in the Middle Danube region.Footnote ⁷ In doing so, Odoacer removed not only the Roman population but also deprived the area of the social, economic, and political resources necessary for the formation of a barbarian Roman polity like those emerging on the Roman limes along the Rhine. There, Frankish generals and kings had developed their own social and political synthesis and successfully expanded their rule into the former territories of northern and later southern Gaul.Footnote ⁸

In sharp contrast, the territory of the Middle Danube could never build on the same infrastructure and prehistory of a middle ground between the Roman and barbarian worlds.Footnote ⁹ In the course of the sixth century, the territory and its remaining population were left behind in efforts to recreate and reconfigure the political topography of the former Western Roman provinces. When the rulers and elites of the emerging hegemonial power north of the Alps—the Frankish kingdom in the former provinces of Gaul—looked to the East, they looked to the centers of gravity in southern and southeastern Europe: Italy and the Byzantine Empire.Footnote ¹⁰ The old limes pathway along the Danube to the Black Sea fell by the wayside in the political maneuvers and activity of the sixth century, and for a long time, modern historiography followed this same direction.

Precisely in this period, however, the Middle Danube region became a different type of borderland. It became defined as an absolute frontier when the steppe people of the Avars established control over the former Roman provinces of Pannonia and Noricum. For contemporaries, the Avars were the new Huns, representing the ultimate “other” of nomadic steppe peoples whose ominous otherness had been cultivated in classical ethnography since the days of Herodotus.Footnote ¹¹ Like the Huns, the Avars established their rule over large territories of Central Europe north of the Danube from the Black Sea to the Middle Danube, and they controlled this territory for more than 200 years.Footnote ¹² During that time, the frontier zone rotated from a north–south axis into a west–east divide, and the position of Central Europe became a middle ground between the West and the East. The social imagination of this division and its orientation would be decisive and would be reconstituted in many iterations from the early Middle Ages to the time of the Iron Curtain.

A decisive moment in the crystallization of this East–West Divide was the campaign of the first medieval Roman emperor, Charlemagne, against the steppe people of the Avars at the end of the eighth century. Charlemagne and his advisors prepared for this war for quite a while, both ideologically and practically. The Avars were presented as the ultimate enemies of Christendom, and the march to the East as a holy mission.Footnote ¹³ In the year 791, Charlemagne started the campaign. Three armies marched against the East, one coming from north of the Danube, the other from the south, and another marching along the Danube to meet them at Lauriacum/Lorch. This is the place where the river Enns flows into the Danube, which the revised version of the Royal Frankish Annals describes as a limes certus—the safe frontier or the last safe place between the Frankish kingdoms and the Avar territory.Footnote ¹⁴ At this limes certus, the three Carolingian armies halted to prepare themselves for what they saw as an advance into a “Great Frontier.”Footnote ¹⁵ We have a letter that Charlemagne himself sent to his wife, Fastrada, in which he sent her and his daughters his best wishes, and reported that he and his armies were getting ready to cross the river. Before moving into the Avar territory, he wrote, the whole army held three days of litanies on the nones of September. Everyone in the army was supposed to refrain from eating meat and drinking wine; the priests held masses, sang fifty psalms daily, and walked barefoot. With these rituals, Charlemagne and the army asked for God’s mercy and grace, for His help and guidance, as well as for protection against all the calamities that they would encounter on this campaign.Footnote ¹⁶

The liturgical ceremonies at the river Enns illustrate well that the Carolingian armies regarded this campaign as one with special meaning and particular danger. It was the first campaign of a Western army against the steppe people of the Avars since their arrival in Central Europe at the end of the sixth century. By then, steppe peoples such as the Huns and their Avar successors were compared to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and some of their campaigns into the Byzantine Empire certainly confirmed the image of these barbarians as the ultimate other.Footnote ¹⁷ From early on, Frankish chroniclers too reported stories about them as terrifying warriors on horseback, who suddenly appeared and disappeared like ghosts and were also accompanied by magicians in their armies.Footnote ¹⁸ But apart from a few smaller military conflicts at the end of the sixth century, Frankish and Avar armies never confronted each other on a larger scale. The Avars seem to have been content so long as the Frankish kings respected their zone of influence, and for most of the time, the Franks had kept their distance. Additionally, the increasing settlement of Slavic communities over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries along the Western periphery of the Avar empire created a buffer zone between the Franks and the Avars in Central Europe.Footnote ¹⁹

The uncertainty of Charlemagne’s army was not only due to a lack of experience with the Avars as a military opponent. There was also a lack of information about the conditions of the territory into which the armies subsequently marched. This had a very practical explanation. Early medieval societies had inherited from the Romans tools of geographical orientation, which were very different from our modern cartographical perception of geographical space. As modern research has shown, Roman maps such as the Tabula Peutingeriana presented an outline of roads as connections between places.Footnote ²⁰ It was an illustration of an itinerary that told Roman travelers how long it took to move from one place to another. The Romans did not use scale as a representation of geographical space and of the relationships of locations and places within it as we do today. Instead, their itineraries were lists that told travelers exactly how to get from the point of departure to the final destination, where to turn and in which direction, and how long the different sections of routes would take. Pietro Janni has described the Roman perception of space as spazio odologico—a path-oriented perception of space.Footnote ²¹

This is not an uncommon perception of space for human orientation without the help of scaled maps, and it exists alongside two other forms of space perception.Footnote ²² One is designed to operate in small spaces and was used by Roman Agrimensores—land surveyors. The other one is a more symbolic perception of space, where the actual location of a marker is less important than its meaning—such as the lighthouse of Alexandria, or the Rome to which all roads led. It is important to keep in mind that these three perceptions of space principally operate independently of each other, but they can be linked if something like a narrative or a perspective takes over the function of the scale in our modern cartographical perception. The Tabula Peutingeriana, for instance, is not just a road map: in the fourth century, it was most likely displayed on a wall to demonstrate the extent and power of the Roman Empire.Footnote ²³

If we keep in mind how strongly the perception of space inherited by post-Roman societies from the Roman world depended on the political and logistical control of the Roman empire—represented, for example, in itineraries, illustrations, narratives, descriptions, and lists—we can easily imagine that the members of the Carolingian army were quite concerned about the accuracy of their orientation for their march into the East. It was very unlikely that the road maps they had access to would still be accurate after 200 years of Avar rule in the former Pannonian and Dacian provinces, and one would also have to expect that the campaign could easily lead the armies into territories that had never belonged to, and so had never been charted by, the Roman Empire.

As already mentioned, information on the Avars was strongly inflected by the perception of them as the new Huns, and thus they were mainly understood through the lens of the antique topos of the Scythian steppe peoples.Footnote ²⁴ Texts that provided more information about these peoples in the East, such as the Cosmography of Aethicus Ister or the Latin translations of the originally Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, were dominated by mythical and eschatological imaginations.Footnote ²⁵ It was also known that by marching deeper into the East, one would sooner or later arrive at the Caspian Gates, where Alexander the Great had enclosed the apocalyptic peoples. The eschatological dimension of the march toward the Great Frontier was also emphasized by Carolingian propaganda, which depicted the campaign against the Avars as a war against the archenemies of Christendom. Some of the more learned members of the army might also have been aware that, in some chronological calculations, the year 800 marked the end of the sixth age.Footnote ²⁶ We can therefore assume that many members of the army took the three days of fasting and prayer very seriously before they crossed the river Enns into the East.

However, the campaign that Charlemagne started, according to his biographer Einhard, with “more zeal and preparation than any other,” did not lead to a great triumph.Footnote ²⁷ On their march along the Danube, the army barely found any Avars. We hear of some small skirmishes in what is today northern Lower Austria, but after that, the army went as far as the river Raab, close to Austria’s modern border with Hungary, without meeting or seeing any Avars.Footnote ²⁸ After a couple of months, the army had to head back across the river Enns without any major confrontation or success. While Carolingian propaganda could hardly sell this as a triumph, the fact that a Frankish army could march unhindered in Avar territory for such a long time may still have had some effect. The loss of prestige for an Avar khan in whose territory a Frankish army marched around for months could have motivated some of his subjects to change sides, and we do hear of Avar groups who came to Charlemagne to offer submission and conversion.Footnote ²⁹

In 796, Charlemagne’s son Pippin marched into the centers of the Avar realm and conquered the seat of the Avar khan. From there, he brought large parts of the enormous Avar treasure that the Avar khagans had accumulated and sent it to his father, Charlemagne.Footnote ³⁰ After receiving the treasure, Charlemagne presented himself as the triumphal conqueror of the enemies of Christendom. He sent part of the treasure as presents all over Europe to highlight his role as the most powerful Christian king of the West and the future Roman emperor.Footnote ³¹

In his triumph, Charlemagne was compared to the first Christian emperor Constantine and even called a praedicator gentium, the preacher to all nations.Footnote ³² After the conquest of the Avar empire, there was no time to lose in bringing Christianity to the Eastern territories of the soon-to-be Carolingian empire. Already one year after Pippin’s victory, a synod was held in the centers of the Avar empire.Footnote ³³ Arno of Salzburg was elevated to the rank of archbishop and, together with his colleague Paulinus, the patriarch of Aquileia, was entrusted with responsibility for the Christian mission in the former Avar territories. The people in the conquered territories needed to be baptized as soon as possible in order to turn them into loyal subjects of the Christian emperor.Footnote ³⁴

Here, however, Charlemagne and his secular advisors met resistance from their spiritual advisors. None other than Alcuin, the head of Charlemagne’s palace school and close friend to Arno of Salzburg, warned that the mistakes that had been made during the conquest of the Saxons had to be avoided.Footnote ³⁵ Conquest was not synonymous with Christianization: they were two separate things. True Christianization takes time, requiring guidance, teaching, and the observation of liturgical rules. This was particularly true for the Avar territory, where missionaries would encounter people with a very different cultural background from the rest of the Latin West. And even if there were already those who professed Christianity, no one knew what kind of Christians they were. The regions of Central Europe had already been a hinterland of unorthodox Christian beliefs during the later Roman Empire. The former imperial capital Sirmium had been a well-known center of the Arian alternative to the Nicaean Creed,Footnote ³⁶ the regions north and northeast of the Alps had become a refuge for clerics who dissented from Rome in the Three Chapter Controversy,Footnote ³⁷ and the Bavarian church had only been brought in line with Carolingian orthodoxy with the help of the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface several decades before the campaign against the Avars.Footnote ³⁸ About half a century before the Avar campaign, Boniface had already noted some discrepancies with proper rituals, particularly in the context of baptism in the Bavarian borderlands: a priest with bad Latin had baptized a candidate with the wrong formula, namely “Baptizo te in nomine patria, filia et spiritus sanctus” (I baptize you in the name of the fatherland, the daughter and the holy spirit), and asked for the rebaptism of the person.Footnote ³⁹

Fifty years later, Alcuin, Arno, and Paulinus of Aquileia argued in their letters to Charlemagne, as well as at assemblies and synods, that one needed to be careful and to get the process of conversion right this time. If the populations in the new territories were to become loyal subjects of the Christian empire and emperor, they needed to first be instructed in how to become good Christians.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the synod in the former centers of the Avar realm, we find this program outlined with great ambition. The council took place in 796, and both bishops responsible for the Christian mission of the East, Paulinus of Aquileia and Arno of Salzburg, had to travel into the unknown and uncertain territories of the former Avar empire. Arno’s concerns about the dangers of the mission in the East are well documented in his letter exchange with Alcuin. Arno had even asked Charlemagne for his permission for a donation to the church of Salzburg if he would not return from the journey.Footnote ⁴¹

Once there, the bishops had only a very unclear sense of where they were, and the location is described only as an assembly at the banks of the river Danube—supra ripas Histri Danubii.Footnote ⁴² Consequently, the bishops did not concern themselves with ecclesiastical boundaries such as the division between the territories of the metropolitan sees between Aquileia and Salzburg, or with other ecclesiastical politics. Instead, they concerned themselves exclusively with the framing of liturgical boundaries and, in particular, the integration and admission of new members into the Christian-Frankish community. They discussed the dating of Easter and Pentecost, the two correct dates for baptism, the right verbal formulae, and attempted to define precisely under which conditions a baptism could be considered valid and correct. They also highlighted the importance of careful and thorough instruction of the candidates.

However, the ambitious framing of liturgical boundaries did not go hand in hand with the establishment of a clearer understanding of the political topography of the region defined by the political relationships between Carolingian rulers and their new subjects. In the early years, we encounter the term “Avaria” replacing the old Roman terminology of the provinces of Pannonia.Footnote ⁴³ But the Avaria disappeared along with the name of the Avars from the political map of Eastern Europe, with the name attested for the last time as the name for a group or polity at a Carolingian council in 822.Footnote ⁴⁴ Instead of establishing an Avar client kingdom and using this polity as their base for further political and missionary organization of the ill-defined territory, the Carolingians lost not only their main partners in establishing control but also had no starting points to rebuild a clearer sense of orientation through connections to places and peoples. It would take half a century until we hear of Slavic communities as more clearly identified political partners of, or opponents to, Carolingian rulers and governors.Footnote ⁴⁵

When, around 830, the biographer of Charlemagne, Einhard, depicted the expansion of Frankish rule by listing the areas subject to Charlemagne, he could illustrate his point with established regions such as Aquitaine, Wasconia, and Saxony, regions in which an ethnic name had become a territorial area. For the central Danube, however, he was still forced to build on Roman geographical or provincial terminology, describing the territory as “both Pannonias and Dacia, which lie on the other side of the Danube.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The Danube, too, however, seems to have been of little help for the establishment of clearer orientation. As late as 870, a text written in Salzburg imagines the Danube as running eastward from Bavaria in a straight west–east line to the Black Sea.Footnote ⁴⁷

This, of course, also had an impact on the Christianization of the region. While Alcuin, in his letter to the new archbishop Arno, constantly inquired after the progress of the mission to the Avars and repeatedly asked to be kept informed of all new developments,Footnote ⁴⁸ it seems to have been difficult to find people who wanted to take on such a mission. An excellent example is an antiphonary from Regensburg in which Saint Emmeram, the patron saint of the Church of Regensburg and one of the main saints of the Bavarian church, was suddenly turned into a model for a Christian missionary to the East.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the original life of the saint, who died in the seventh century, Emmeram’s activity was presented along a north–south axis, with interactions above all with the pagan Thuringians and Saxons in the north of the Bavarian duchy. Now, however, the monks and clerics of Regensburg sang or heard in this antiphonary that the saint’s missionary gaze was strongly directed to the East. In his back and forth with the Bavarian duke, Emmeram now told him that he had come from Gaul to Bavaria to convert the Avars in the East. That was something the authors of the antiphonary indeed found in the original life. However, in the older version, the duke refused to allow this endeavor. In the rewritten life, however, the duke is very much in support of the mission and helps Emmeram to become the bishop of the Avars and found a monastery in their territory. The revision was intended to motivate the clerics of Regensburg and Saint Emmeram to follow their saintly model into the East and continue his work in the first decades of the ninth century. The Avars disappeared here too, and were replaced by Slavic communities as the main target of the Christian mission.

Emmeram’s great success in the antiphonary remained just a pious wish for some time. For the whole of the ninth century, neither imperial rule nor Christianization could keep pace with the grand words and high ambitions of the time around 800. The main reason for this slow progress was the unresolved tension between Frankish-Carolingian strategies to establish political control over conquered peoples and the ambitious establishment of liturgical boundaries that were strongly inspired by the eschatological framing of the move into the Great Frontier of the East.

From early on in the history of the Frankish kingdom, their rulers established their authority over the quite diverse regions and populations of the former Roman provinces not only by their military power, but also through their negotiating skills. The first Christian Frankish king, Clovis, who died in 511, and his successors had already added region after region to their realm and granted often far-reaching autonomy in exchange for the acknowledgment of their authority as kings.Footnote ⁵⁰ Under Charlemagne, this strategy was further developed on an imperial level. When, after his coronation as Roman emperor, Charlemagne asked the whole population to swear the oath of loyalty to his nomen Caesaris—his new name of Caesar—he promised each and every subject that he would respect their various birth laws. One important precondition for the validity of the oath, however, was that the subjects who were to swear it be Christian.Footnote ⁵¹ This was an important background for the equation of subjugation and Christianization that we observe in the decade-long conflicts with Saxon groups, who were forced to be baptized in order to swear the oath of loyalty to the king and later emperor.Footnote ⁵²

During the Avar campaign of the 790s, the subjugation of Saxon territory was still an ongoing endeavor, with many setbacks for both Christianization and Carolingian control. For the Christianization of the former Avar territory, Charlemagne’s advisors suggested avoiding the mistake of equating subjugation and conversion.Footnote ⁵³ The gentle yoke of Christ should be put on in a more gentle way—by instruction of the baptismal candidates to properly prepare them for the transition to a new Christian life.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, this in turn triggered a larger debate about the correct rules and rituals for baptism not only in the Eastern periphery but throughout the whole Carolingian empire. After 800, the emperor himself sent out a questionnaire to theologians and ecclesiastical leaders in the empire, asking about current practices and their suggestions for the correct rituals and rite of baptism.Footnote ⁵⁵ The connection to the Avar campaign is particularly obvious in a Carolingian Ordo de catichizandis rudibus—a handbook for the instruction of uneducated candidates for baptism. One of Alcuin’s letters to Archbishop Arno of Salzburg, written in the context of the mission to the Avars, serves as a preface in one of the manuscript editions of the Ordo. Alcuin’s engagement and influence in that debate are not only well documented in his letter exchange with the archbishop of Salzburg. Many other prominent members of the Frankish church used Alcuin’s ideas and input in their responses to Charlemagne’s “Baptismal Questionnaire.”Footnote ⁵⁶

With regards to the establishment of the correct rituals for baptism, the Carolingian correctio laid out the rules that would define the rituals for a valid baptism in Western Christendom.Footnote ⁵⁷ But at the same time, the debates also drew stricter boundaries between baptized and unbaptized and established canonical restrictions that made it harder to continue the successful recipes of political integration. The stricter framing of liturgical rules and divisions also affected interpretations of political success or failure, as an episode from the 840 s in the Eastern Frankish Annals of Fulda shows. In the year 845, the Annals report the baptism of fourteen Bohemian dukes by Charlemagne’s grandson, the Eastern Frankish king Louis the German.Footnote ⁵⁸ After the dukes had arrived and freely requested entry into the Church, King Louis ordered them in octavis theophaniae baptizari, which was the 13th of January. Nothing is mentioned, however, about the instruction of the candidates, and it seems that the need to quickly affirm the new political status of the dukes as fideles of Louis the German was the primary concern. What is more, the Annals also report that the baptism did not take place on the correct liturgical dates, namely Easter or Pentecost, and not even on a Sunday. In 845, the 13th of January was a Tuesday. No wonder that in the following year, in 846, the king faced difficulties in the lands of these quickly and incorrectly baptized dukes. On returning from a successful campaign against the Slavs, Louis was only able to cross their territory with great difficulty and severe losses to the army.Footnote ⁵⁹

The stricter rules, however, did not only concern baptism and conversion, but also limited or even restricted the intercourse of Christians with non-Christians or pagans, which would have been crucial for the forging of connections and/or alliances. In many canonical collections of the ninth century, we find canons that forbade interaction with pagans. An older canon of the Collectio vetus Gallica is repeated again and again in these ninth-century collections, enforcing the prohibition of dining, feasting, or celebrations with pagans.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the second half of the ninth century, Pope Nicholas even prohibited playing games with pagans.Footnote ⁶¹

The same theme is prominent in the narrative of the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum, the history of the conversion of the Bavarians and the Slavic Carantanians. It was written around 870 in Salzburg to emphasize the important role that the bishopric had played in the Christianization of the East from early on.Footnote ⁶² In one of the longer narrative sequences, we hear of the priest Ingo, who was one of the priests sent to the East after the victory over the Avars. At one point, Ingo invited the people in his territory to a banquet but carefully sorted them into Christians and pagans.Footnote ⁶³ While he invited the Christian servants and even slaves, their pagan lords had to sit outside and eat like dogs the bread and wine he had ordered brought to them. When they asked him why he would treat them in this way, he replied that their unclean bodies meant that they were not worthy to celebrate the holy meal together with those who had been reborn from the holy water.

The composition of the history of the conversion of the Bavarians and Carantanians in the 870s leads us to another context that illustrates how the affirmation of liturgical boundaries prevented the integration of the territories into their sphere of influence. It not only made it more difficult for a Western Christian ruler, governor, or commander to operate in the middle ground of the Middle Danube. It also opened opportunities for competing efforts at Christianization. This is exactly what happened in the 860s with the mission of two brothers, Methodius and Cyril, who were sent from the capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople, to Central Europe.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Moravian prince Rastislav had asked the Byzantine emperor Michael III for his support to seek out alternatives to the annexation of his territory by the Western-Frankish church. Methodius and Cyril were both well-trained theologians and came well prepared with an alphabet for the Slavic or Slavonic language for a proper introduction of a more standardized Slavonic liturgy. As Mirela Ivanova has emphasized, the invention of the Slavonic alphabet by the two missionaries started a much more complex and open-ended process of the formation of Slavonic literatures and languages, even in its earliest stages.Footnote ⁶⁵ Frankish-Bavarian bishops may not have escaped the fragility of the new Slavonic literacy, but they also had experienced and instrumentalized the power of the written word and the standardization of literacy since the early days of the Carolingian correctio.Footnote ⁶⁶ In their response, Frankish–Bavarian bishops reacted along the lines of the established affirmation of liturgical boundaries. They accused the apostles of the Slavs of using an uncanonical language and argued that the only canonical languages were those used at the Crucifixion of Christ: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.Footnote ⁶⁷ The two brothers responded quickly and accused the Latin bishops of the heresy of Pilatianism, named after Pontius Pilatus, the supposed author of the inscription on Christ’s cross. They also appealed to the pope in Rome, who supported their position and the use of the Slavic language as a liturgical language. In 869, Cyril died; Methodius continued the mission and was appointed by Pope Hadrian II archbishop of Sirmium (today Sremska Mitrovica in modern Serbia).Footnote ⁶⁸

Sirmium had been one of the imperial capitals in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, but with its exposed position at the northern border of the empire, its glorious past was long over by the ninth century, and it was a largely deserted place. However, the symbolic significance of the former Roman capital as the center of a new metropolitan structure was obvious to everyone. The Latin bishops reacted immediately and even captured Methodius to bring him before a synod where he had to defend himself. It was in this context that the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantonorum was composed.Footnote ⁶⁹

The authors of the Conversio might well have had the capture of Methodius in mind as well when they wrote their narrative about the priest Ingo. Their version of the story has obvious references to the wedding parable in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew, the king orders that the wedding guest, who is not properly dressed, be bound by his hands and feet and thrown into the darkness.Footnote ⁷⁰ Still, the imprisonment of Methodius was not the main message of the Conversio. The main purpose of the whole narrative was to historically prove the jurisdiction of Salzburg over the territories which were the actual regions of Methodius’s activities—Moravia and the region around Lake Balaton.

If we look at a modern map of the territories of Methodius’s extensive “Pannonian Illyrian archdiocese,” we can see that Sirmium is quite far from his actual main radius of action in the Middle Danube region. Methodius’s seat was about 200 miles from Lake Balaton, and probably another 200 miles from Moravia.Footnote ⁷¹ As mentioned, the old imperial city was also largely abandoned and mostly under the control of the Bulgar khans at the time when the Sirmian archdiocese had been assigned to Methodius.Footnote ⁷² The Latin bishops nevertheless regarded the archdiocese’s creation as a serious threat to their ambitions and jurisdictions in the Eastern periphery of the Carolingian empire, which illustrates that their own efforts to establish an ecclesiastical topography had not yet become firmly anchored in the region from the river Enns to the Balkans. The lack of a sense of geographical realities reflects the lack of a sense of reality with regard to the political and ecclesiastical structures of the region along the Middle Danube.

As this article has shown, there were good reasons for this lack of geographical orientation during and after Charlemagne’s campaign into the “wild” East in the 790s. The main foundations of geographical orientation in a path-oriented perception of space had fundamentally changed. The old Roman limes as the border between the Roman civilization in the south and the northern barbarians was turned by 90 degrees into a division between west and east. From the perspective of the Carolingians, the short lower course of the Enns became now a limes certus between their world and an unknown world of a steppe empire, paganism, magic, and apocalyptic imaginations. Moving into this Great Frontier was closely linked to the ideology of Carolingian Christian triumph, and the eschatological dimension of this endeavor triggered an ambitious program of ecclesiastical ideology.

The formation of this ideology was certainly underway from the 780s onwards, but with the triumph over the proclaimed enemies of Christendom, we observe a massive intensification of this ideology and the belief that it could be truly realized. The intensification of this ecclesiastical ideology brought the whole Carolingian empire to the brink of destruction under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious.Footnote ⁷³ He was twice deposed by his own sons because he did not live up to the ambitious ideals of liturgical and Christian reform of the empire. After his death, the empire was divided among his sons. In these successor kingdoms, however, we observe a new sense of reality and compromise in the second half of the ninth century. A good example is the integration of the Normans, who became Christian dukes but were also able to blend their existing culture with those of their Frankish or English lords and kings, and fundamentally shape the history of the Latin West.Footnote ⁷⁴

As the case studies examined in this article have illustrated, the situation in the East was different. The reports about the baptism of the Bohemian dukes, the Conversio, and the conflicts with the “Apostles of the Slavs” Methodius and Cyril show that a continuity of the ecclesiastical ideology of the early 800s hindered the integration of the population into the religious, social, and political texture of the Eastern Frankish kingdoms. When a new steppe people arrived in Central Europe—the Hungarians—they were immediately identified as yet another version of the Huns or Avars.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the year 907, the Hungarians met the Western armies in the territory of modern Bratislava, about fifty miles east of Vienna. The Western armies suffered a devastating defeat, and the Hungarians obtained control of territory as far as the river Enns, the limes certus that Charlemagne had crossed more than a century before. About half a century later, in 955, the German king Otto I won a decisive battle at the Lechfeld close to Augsburg, 350 miles east of Bratislava, and about 200 miles east of Lorch an der Enns, and again gained control of the Middle Danube region. Unlike the previous Huns, the actual Huns and the Avars, the Hungarians, however, adopted the mainstream model of Western Christendom. With their first Christian king, Stephen I, the Hungarians established an ethnically defined Christian kingdom with the strong support of Otto I’s grandson, the German king and Roman emperor, Otto III, and Pope Sylvester II in Rome. Their history and prestige as a steppe people and their place may well have been an important factor in granting Stephen and the Hungarians the status of a kingdom. Even so, precisely their history as steppe people, and their place in the East of Western Christendom, allowed the imaginations and instrumentalizations of the Hungarians as the other in Latin politics and discourse as well.Footnote ⁷⁶ About 200 years after the battle of Lechfeld, and about 150 years after the coronation of the Hungarian king Stephen I, the historian and bishop Otto of Freising would still portray the Hungarians as the ultimate other:

Otto, a member of the Babenberg dynasty who ruled the duchy of Austria, knew the Hungarians very well and was even the brother-in-law of the Hungarian king Bela II. He and the numerous members of his family, and above all, hopefully his sister, had certainly different experiences with their Hungarian neighbors. For the audience of his successful history, however, he fell back on the old stereotypical images of foreign steppe peoples who had invaded Europe. For Otto, it might have been particularly important that the Austrian duchy ruled by his father could be presented as the last reliable and safe power of Western Christendom. For the social and political topography of Europe, however, his histories affirmed the social imagination of an absolute frontier between the West and the East which would have a long history far beyond the Middle Ages, to early modern strategies of distinction in the context of the wars against the Ottoman Turks, or to Iron Curtain in the twentieth century, likely the most elaborate and divisive frontier line ever constructed in Central Europe, and to further instrumentalizations of this divide even today.