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Around the year 965, King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark and his Viking warriors were discussing which god was most powerful. Some favored mighty Thor, who defeated giant trolls with ease and caused lightning by throwing his hammer. Others picked Odin the Wise on his eight-legged horse, leading a horde of all dead warriors who ever perished in battle. One mentioned mischievous Loki, who tricked the other gods to serve his evil purposes.

But what about this new god, Hvíta Kristr, White Christ, who was said to rule the hosts of heaven?

A foreign priest named Poppo at this meeting was a servant of Hvíta Kristr. The Viking warriors called upon him to prove the power of his god.

At the forge of the smith, so the story goes, Poppo took a red-hot iron and held it in his hand. When he set it down, the king looked at his hands. There was not the slightest sign of injury.

That was enough for King Harald Bluetooth. He was baptized without delay and ordered all his subjects to follow his example.

Even if it did take a miracle to formally convert King Harald's realm to Christianity, the process did not begin that instant. For two centuries a variety of forces had been at work to bring the Christian faith to Denmark, but none so important as the missionary presence.

The first missionary to Denmark was Willibrord, an Irish monk known more for his work in Friesland than in Scandinavia. In his efforts to evangelize Friesland (now parts of the Netherlands and Germany), he visited Denmark briefly in the early 700s, returning with 30 Danish boys to educate as Christians.

But as often happened in Denmark's turbulent history, missionary work was interrupted by war. In 772 the great Frankish emperor Charlemagne launched a crusade into Saxony, and his troops slowly conquered and forced its conversion to Christianity. In less than 30 years, his armies approached the borders of Denmark, which was ruled by a powerful king named Godfred.

To Godfred and his Danes, it seemed obvious that Frankish conquest and Christianity went hand in hand. They did not want to be conquered, so that meant they had to reject Christianity, as well. He built a great wall, the Dannevirke, along his southern border and manned it with warriors to hold back the Franks. Then he launched a counter-attack, sending waves of Viking ships to harry the coasts of the Frankish empire, and the crusade was stopped cold.

But Christian merchants ventured where Frankish armies could not go. They traveled to Hedeby, just beyond the Dannevirke, where they traded with the pagan Danes, sustaining a Christian presence.

A quarter-century after the Danes repulsed Charlemagne's troops, they found themselves immersed in civil war. One of the contending princes, Harald Klak, sailed to the Frankish empire to seek the aid of Charlemagne's son, Emperor Louis the Pious. As part of the alliance, Harald and a great host of his Viking followers were baptized, and Ansgar became Harald's chaplain.

It was a position that Ansgar, a devout monk from Picardy, longed for, despite the dangers. "Since there could not be found a preacher who would go with them to the Danes because of their barbarous cruelty—on account of which everyone shuns that people," Adam of Bremen writes in his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, "the blessed Ansgar, inspired … by the Holy Spirit and desirous of obtaining martyrdom … presented himself."

Unlike other hagiographies of saints' lives, Ansgar's is not replete with miracles and signs. While Rimbert, his biographer and successor, writes that many were healed during his ministry, Ansgar himself denied he had any such gift. "Were I worthy of such a favor from my God," he told one of his followers, "I would ask that he would grant to me this one miracle, that by his grace he would make of me a good man."

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