European Protestant and evangelical Christians did not have to look far to find ‘infidels’ in the 16th and 17th centuries: as well as the ‘pagans’ of northern Scandinavia, Jews were scattered across the continent and Muslim powers were all too close. This lecture will consider the repeated, and repeatedly failed, attempts to convert these peoples: some naively well-intentioned, some openly violent. Those bitter experiences would become a crucial lens through which Christians viewed global missionary projects, sometimes with unexpected consequences.