Modelling Religiopolitics. The Imperium Christianum via its Commoners

Project Information

RELIC

Grant agreement ID: 101115501

DOI

10.3030/101115501

EC signature date 24 September 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 498 755,00

EU contribution

€ 1 498 755,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RELIC (Modelling Religiopolitics. The Imperium Christianum via its Commoners)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the Middle Ages, narratives of Christianisation were constructed mainly based on written accounts and the foundation of the highest ecclesiastical institutions, thus creating a narrative of the secular and ecclesiastical elite, which makes it easy to tell a story about rulers, bishops, and “first foundations”, and much harder to say anything solid about how conversion worked for ordinary communities. RELIC starts from a simple point: if we want to understand Christianisation as a historical process, we have to treat non-elite practice and local structures as central evidence, not as background. The project’s objective is therefore a comparative study of Christianisation across East-Central Europe that integrates archaeological evidence with a systematic, source-critical corpus of local church and clergy-related primary evidence, supplemented into a comparative network analysis of socio-institutional proxies of both the elite and the commoners connected to elite structures. Nevertheless, RELIC does aim to replace current narratives, but to create models of these processes involving the evidence linked to the everyday people. We aim to compare and test these models against the state of art, and refine it using a broader and better structured evidence base, resulting in a more comprehensive picture.
The expected impact is twofold. Scientifically, RELIC provides a model for historical research on how a synthetic, comparative spatial approach can connect a variety of micro-level evidence to macro-level interpretations across regions. Secondly, RELIC demontrates the potential in the often-discarded historical-archaeological evidence, that is rarely examined as individually, they have little information. A synthetic, comparative investigation of such data, is, however, the way to discover more about the majority of the society, of whom traditional sources remain largely silent. A significant foundation of both of these are how the project is anchored in the humanities and social sciences, useing digital and spatial methods as a way to sharpen historical reasoning, not to bypass it. Finally, beyond these main goals, and beyond academia, it offers a more grounded account of a heavily politicised medieval process, through an open, traceable research infrastructure and methodology, rather than opaque narratives and unclear sources.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first two years of RELIC (2024–2025), the project established the research base needed for a comparative study of Christianisation in East-Central Europe. We built the underlying data framework and began integrating archaeological and historical evidence in a consistent, source-critical way, with a particular focus on local churches, clergy, and the structures that connected communities to emerging institutions. In parallel, we implemented and tested the spatial methods through pilot studies and produced first analytical results, especially on modelling service-village networks as a window onto institutional and social organisation. These pilots have already generated new, testable hypotheses for the next phase of the project’s comparative work. The period also resulted in two peer-reviewed publications explicitly linked to the ERC project. The next step is to scale the comparative analyses across regions and turn the pilot findings into a broader set of publications and synthetic results.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

RELIC goes beyond the state of the art by changing what counts as model-ready evidence for Christianisation, and by making comparisons between evidence types explicit rather than implicit. Instead of relying mainly on archaeological distributions with selective textual illustration, the project builds a framework in which archaeological records, local-church and clergy related primary evidence, and socio-institutional proxies can be aligned, compared, and evaluated without forcing them into the same categories. This matters because many of the most important historical questions sit precisely at the boundary between these evidence types.

A concrete advance is the systematic identification and structuring of evidence for proxies that are often treated either as unconnected or as background, rather than as analytical input. Institutional networks and their proxies are not used as decorative add-ons or substitutes for archaeology, but as an additional layer that can test and refine archaeology-led models and point to research paths that archaeology alone often cannot open.

For further uptake and long-term success, the key needs are straightforward: completing the planned integration work to a stable “critical mass”, final quality control, and then launching the public interface with clear documentation of data structure, provenance rules, and methodological choices. Sustained hosting and maintenance, stable identifiers, and open licensing, where possible, will be important so that the resulting infrastructure can be reused. The broader impact will grow as the comparative programme matures into additional peer-reviewed outputs and as the framework and the methodological concept is applied to further regions and datasets beyond the initial core.