While conventionally the period after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West is thought of as an age of darkness, in fact it was the formative period of a new culture. Christian missionaries brought a form of Christianity to the Germanic peoples that had strong Greco-Roman elements. While the intention was to Christianize and civilize these "barbaric" people, in the end, a new form of Christianity developed in which Greco-Roman cultural elements were combined with aspects of Germanic culture.