Unlike Islam which which usually wiped out local cultural and linguistic identities (during the periods of Arab conquests, that shifted quite a but later on of course)
thats why all the signs in downtown Manhattan are in Munsee....
And when you say “historically better at integrating local cultural practices”, India, China and Australia, would like a word with you. Holy shit you should just delete your account right now
For the most part it's enough to conquer a place. People below the timing elite would switch religions as it would be beneficial for them, and eventually trickle down to peasants and such.
Many of the regions they invaded were still (or until quite recently) majority Christian. After all initially it was a defensive relief expedition organized by the pope and the Byzantine emperor to free the territories the empire lost in Anatolia very recently. Of course it was massively more successful than anyone anticipated and they just kept on going and then the whole thing got “slightly” out of hand..
But yes, as I said there were some huge exceptions. However early on the way Christianity spread was fundamentally different to Islam. It was usually not through violent conquest but bottom up.
European imperialism was quite mixed as well. Christianity played a huge part in the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Much less so in British India and other similar places.
Northern crusades were extremely bloody and defeated people would accept baptism or be executed.
Charlemange was more of the same deal.
Catholic church left pagans to their own devices?
Christian history is littered with these examples, it has not been a peaceful religion since it merged with Roman society. The only real good examples you could have are missionaries and top down conversion as kings and such voluntarily switched religions.
> Catholic church left pagans to their own devices?
It varied, although generally the Catholic church was fairly open at integrating or even occasionally tolerating pagan practices or providing alternative options to people used to more polytheistic religions. Like the whole saint worshipping (“venerating”) thing. Often (with some exceptions) pagans found conversion fairly easy since they could just map their gods to equivalent Christian saints continue worshipping them. Basically every converted pagan society had a multi-generationa transition period.
Then you had stuff lime praying to magical corpses or body parts, so their previous owners could perform miracles. With some exceptions it has generally been a highly flexible religion before the reformation.
Islam is much more rigid about following the rules and stuff like idol worship (as a consequence they brought back visual arts back to the stone ages..)