Islam in Eastern Eruope

If the Byzantine Empire has fallen in the initial spread of Islam along with the Persian Empire, would that have opened up Eastern Europe for an eventual conversion to Islam?

How set was it that Christianity would be adopted by Germanic and Slavic peoples?
 

NoMommsen

Donor
As we are talking of a timeframe well before any kind of reformation started (with its - compared to catholicism - puritanism) and the missionary of the germanic and slavs was still far from ... "finished" (not even "completed" today IMHO) :
well and maybe even better set for christianity.

Why ?

At first :
Islam - AFAIK - has much less paganism as the christian missionaries were prepared to accept. You know ... all the "saints" replacing the pagan gods, the several Mary-figures replacing the female goddesses, the same holy places just turned churches ...
At second (at least for the germanics) :
Christian faith still "leaves" some space for the individual to "choose", something important to northern european mind and well estabished in germanic faith before ... in their mythology mortal, even if they were not "special" heroes were able to "win" and sometimes even "harm" the gods.
(A lot of this can also be found in slav myths).



P.S.:
Won't this fit more into "Before 1900" caregory ??
 
Tutrledove wrote a story about this . Islands in the sea I think. It was about a small principality in eastern europe having to decide between staying crhistian or becoming muslim . It had some political intrigue as the religious envoys made their cases
 
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