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> the idea it was voluntary is incorrect in far too many cases to be a coincidence.

Indeed. King Olaf Tryggvasson and St. Olaf, for instance, brutally tortured and killed many of the old faith in their quest to Christianize Norway. Iceland Christianized about the year 1000 as a way to stop the fighting between the pagans and the Christians... the means of conversion being that everybody voted on which religion the island should be, the Christians won the vote and the pagans converted. One wonders who well that woudl work in an area where Muslim population had suddenly exploded and equalled the local Christian population, and they had been causing lots of trouble...

You anti-Christians are, if nothing else, amusing in your partial understanding of history. Part of the legacy of Roman ideals of imperium involved the Emperor (or king, in the case of the barbarians) as steward of society. This always had a religious aspect to it, whether it was the role of pontifex maximus and proclaimed divinity of the pagan Emperors or the Caesaropapism of the Christian Emperors. This meant that the Emperor was responsible to the pagan gods (or the Christian God) to the extent that he was able to glorify them (or Him) and surpress activities that they (or He) would find offensive. Thus, many Christian temporal rulers differed little from their pagan predecessors in terms of their tactics when dealing with religious dissidents. And why not? After all, this was the cultural heritage from which they had sprung.

Of course, there was also a political aspect to this. States with a homogeneous religious population tend to be easier rule. Plus, a state-sactioned religion had serious propaganda value for the regime. Many of the pagan Emperors saw Christians as dissidents to the Imperial cult and sought to dealt with them as insurgents to the political system. You have to remember, the Roman Emperors viewed practically any civic or religious organization which operated outside the Imperial system as suspicious. Similarly, many of the Christian Emperors viewed paganism, Judaism, and the various Christian heretical sects as dangers to the internal cohesion of the Empire during a time when it was being pressured from all sides by external enemies. In dealing with these threats, they drew upon the legacy of Imperial law and though persecutions of pagans did occur during the Christian Roman Empire, they were mainly threats to the status and property of the pagans in question, generally not to their lives--unlike the brutal pagan persecutions of Decius and Diocletian.

That said, coerced conversions are not acceptable, according to Catholic teaching.