discovered by a distinguished Icelander, Eric the Red, and had then been colonized in A.D. 985, owed its Christianity to Olaf Trygvesen, who in A.D. 1000 sent the son of the discoverer, Leif the Fortunate, with an expedition for its conversion. The inhabitants accepted baptism without resistance. The church continued to flourish there uninterruptedly for 400 years, and the coast districts became rich through agriculture and trade. But when in A.D. 1408 the newly elected bishop Andrew wished to take possession of his see, he found the country surrounded by enormous masses of ice, and could not effect a landing. This catastrophe, and the subsequent incursions of the Eskimos, seem to have led to the overthrow of the colony.--Continuation, § 167, 9.--Leif discovered on his expeditions a rich fertile land in the West, which on account of the vines growing wild there he called =Vineland=, and this region was subsequently colonized from Iceland. In the twelfth century, in order to confirm the colonists in the faith, a Greenland bishop Eric undertook a journey to that country. It lay on the east coast of North America, and is probably to be identified with the present Massachusetts and Rhode Island. § 93.6. =The Slavo-Magyar Mission-field.=--Even in the previous period a beginning had been made of the Christianizing of =Bohemia= (§ 79, 3). After Wratislaw’s death his heathen widow Drahomira administered the government in the name of her younger son Boleslaw. Ludmilla, with the help of the clergy and the Germans, wished to promote St. Wenzeslaw, the elder son, educated by her, but she was strangled by order of Drahomira in A.D. 927. Wenzeslaw, too, fell by the hand of his brother. Boleslaw now thought completely to root out Christianity, but was obliged, in consequence of the victory of Otho [Otto] I. in A.D. 950, to agree to the restoration of the church. His son Boleslas [Boleslaw] II., A.D. 967-999, contributed to its establishment by founding the bishopric of Prague. The pope seized the opportunity on the occasion of this founding of the bishopric to introduce the Roman ritual (A.D. 973).[265]