It is very noticeable that under Pippin’s rule and by his aid the conversion of Germany to Christianity was begun. The descendants of St. Arnulf were, as befitted the issue of such a holy man, zealous friends of the Church and patrons of missionary enterprise. The Merovingian kings had been, almost without exception, a godless race, Christian in name alone. They had taken no pains to favour the spread of Christianity among their vassals: it was sufficient in their eyes if their own people, the ruling race, conformed to the Catholic faith; for the souls of Suabians, Frisians, or Bavarians, they had no care. Such missionaries as had hitherto been seen in the German forests, along the shores of the Bodensee, or the upper reaches of the Danube and Main, had been, almost without exception, Irish monks, drawn from the Isle of Saints by their own fervent zeal for the spread of the Gospel, not by any encouragement from the Frankish kings. In the sixth and seventh centuries these holy men overran the whole Continent, seeking for heathen to convert, or planting their humble monasteries in the wildest recesses of the mountains or the primeval forest. They wandered as far as Italy and Switzerland, where two of the greatest of them fixed their homes, St. Fridian at Lucca, St. Gall in the hills above the Bodensee. [Sidenote: Conversion of Germany.] But till the time of Pippin no systematic attempt had been made to convert those among the German races who still lay in the darkness of Paganism. It was Pippin who first saw that this duty was incumbent on the Frankish government. He sent to England for St. Willibrord, the first apostle of the Frisians, who with his twelve companions wandered over the newly-conquered West Friesland, preaching to the wild heathen. It was by Pippin’s encouragement also that the Englishman Suidbert laboured among the Hessians, till he and his converts were driven away by the invasion of the pagan Saxons. At the same time St. Rupert, bishop of Worms, completed the conversion of Bavaria, and founded there the great bishopric of Salzburg (696). Much about the same date the Irish monk Killian passed up the Main and along the skirts of the Thüringerwald, to preach to the Thuringians, till he met with a martyr’s death at Würzburg. Everywhere the ascendency of the grandson of Arnulf was followed by the arrival of zealous missionary workers, Franks, Irish or English, who strove to bear the standard of the Cross into the German woodlands, where Woden and Thunor alone had hitherto been adored. What Pippin began, his greater son, Charles the Hammer, and his still mightier great-grandson, Charles the Emperor, were destined to complete. By this work alone the house of the great Austrasian mayors did more to justify their existence in three generations than the wicked Merovings had done in eight.