The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The crusade provided an ideology for exploitation and alliance with an imperialist church hierarchy. Conquests were justified as protecting missionary churches or punishing apostasy, their protagonists ‘knights of Christ’.15 In the Livonian mission capital of Riga, a religious order of knights, the Militia of Christ or Swordbrothers, was created by the missionary bishop c. 1202 that within a decade become co-ruler with him of Livonia and neighbouring Lettia (Latvia south of the Dvina). A few years later, a similar order, the Militia of Christ of Prussia, also known as the Knights of Dobrin (or Dobryzin), was founded at the Polish–Prussian border on the Vistula, receiving papal recognition in 1228. Unlike the Templars, whose rule they imitated, or the Teutonic Knights, these orders were parochial, tied to their local bishops, held no international property, and relied for endowment on what they could seize for themselves in the inhospitable Baltic terrain. As permanent Christian garrisons, they provided a precedent for the regional dominance established from the 1230s by the Teutonic Knights. The presence of holy warriors combined with the idea of holy space. The papacy claimed Livonia and Prussia for St Peter while the Livonian missionaries at Riga took the Virgin Mary as patron. Albert of Buxtehude, the dynamic entrepreneurial bishop of Riga (1199–1229), apparently insisted Livonia was the land of the Virgin Mary as Jerusalem was that of Christ.16 The identification with the Virgin was strengthened by the Teutonic Knights, whose patroness she was, when they ruled both Prussia and Livonia after the 1230s. The Baltic conquests were thus incorporated into a parallel transcendent narrative of defending Christian lands and proselytising the faith.

  Reality challenged this narrative. Unity among the Christian conquerors was secondary to institutional and national rivalries. Danes fought the Swordbrothers and the Teutonic Knights in Livonia and Estonia. In 1234 the Swordbrothers in Riga massacred a hundred servants of the papal legate.17 Later in the century, academics such as the Oxford scholar Roger Bacon and the Dominican preaching expert Humbert of Romans even questioned the justice and efficacy of violence as a tool of conversion. The image of eternal conflict ignored processes of conquest and colonisation. While Germans and Flemings settled in Prussia in some numbers, the few westerners in remote, harsher Livonia and Estonia largely confined themselves to defensible riparian trading posts. In Prussia, faced with a repressive discriminatory regime, indigenous Balts slowly acculturated to German religion, laws and technology and over time, like the Slavs between the Elbe and Oder, became German. In Livonia, foreign settlement was largely confined to small military, clerical and commercial communities relying for survival on force and the management of local trade through control of rivers and coastal ports. This position inevitably encouraged a measure of accommodation with native rulers in pursuit of their own trading opportunities and protection. The crusades overlaid such developments, but did not create the circumstances for colonial exploitation.

  Livonia, 1188–1300

  The invasion of Livonia was launched through an alliance of commercial and ecclesiastical interests in Bremen and Lübeck attracted by trade and Christian mission in the increasingly prosperous eastern Baltic. The alliance was initially the work of Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen (1185–1207), who had elevated a lone missionary station in the Dvina valley into a bishop-ric in the 1180s. Despite teaching the locals how to build forts in stone, the missionary bishop, Meinhard, achieved few converts before his death in 1196. His successor, Berthold, followed a preliminary reconnaissance in 1196–7 with a military expedition in 1198 supported by a papal grant of remission of sins from the crusade enthusiast Celestine III. Although Berthold was killed during an otherwise successful German campaign, the precedent was set. His successor, Archbishop Hartwig’s nephew Albert of Buxtehude, immediately began promoting German commercial interests as holy war and turning trading posts into a missionary state. While the project was largely a family business, Albert’s core following and main beneficiaries of the conquest formed by his and Archbishop Hartwig’s kindred, it received international political support. In a papal bull of October 1199, Innocent III offered non-Holy Land pilgrim remissions for those who took up what was branded the defence of Livonian Christians.18 Bishop Albert ignored Innocent III’s reluctance to equate the Livonian campaign with a Holy Land crusade. Unilaterally appropriating the full panoply of a crusade – cross, preaching, full remission of sins – for his enterprise, in 1199–1200 he recruited crusaders from Saxony and Westphalia and the strategically crucial mercantile community at Visby in Gotland, where five hundred apparently took the cross. He simultaneously negotiated with a potential rival, King Canute VI of Denmark (1182–1202), for safe passage to Livonia for his armada.20

  HENRY OF LIVONIA

  Crusading was a written phenomenon. The events of war, conquest and settlement are filtered through the interpretation contained in the texts describing them. There is no neutral witness. The Chronicon Livoniae by the German missionary priest known from his chronicle as Henry of Livonia is no exception. Despite its autobiographical tone, apparent narrative simplicity and unfussy Latin, this represented a skilfully fashioned political advocacy and religious polemic, artful in its superficial artlessness. Henry constructed a coherent creation myth that made the early thirteenth-century German conquest and settlement of Livonia (modern Latvia and Estonia) appear providential, proof of God’s immanence, a triumph of truth, faith and justice against the eternal miscreant forces of darkness and evil.

  Henry (c. 1188–after 1259) came from Saxony, near Magdeburg, before education at the Augustinian monastery of Segeberg in Holstein, where Meinhard, the first missionary bishop of Livonia (d. 1196), had been a canon. As well as sound training in Latin and the scriptures, at Segeberg Henry may have acquired Estonian and Latvian from Livonian hostages sent there by the brother of Abbot Rothmar, the redoubtable Albert of Buxtehude, bishop of Riga, a connection that determined Henry’s future calling and career. In 1205, Henry joined Bishop Albert at Riga before being ordained in 1208 and assigned the missionary parish of Papendorf (near the modern Latvian/Estonian border). Henry’s proximity to Bishop Albert provided him with first-hand experience of the German conquest and Christianisation of the region and the dynamic central character in the drama that Henry’s chronicle, probably written between 1225 and 1227, unfolded.

  Henry wrote an extended apologia for German invasion, conquest and military suppression of the native population. The language is heavily scriptural, much of it from the martial Books of the Maccabees, long associated with crusaders. The insistence was on the religious and canonical probity of the German occupiers confronted by the relentless perfidy and malice of the natives. Clearly aware of the canonical prohibition on forced conversion, Henry emphasised that the locals were punished for apostasising after initial free conversion or for attacking Christian communities. In Henry’s vision, the German settlement was sustained with papal grants of remission of sins equivalent to those of Holy Land crusaders, a probably deliberate distortion by Henry or his source – Bishop Albert – exaggerating papal policy and practice. Henry aimed to secure the reputation and status of the see of Riga and to promote Livonia as the land of the Virgin Mary, a site of pilgrimage and grace. While not minimising violence or suffering, Henry provides insight into various methods of conversion, from coercion, bribery and entertainment to persuasion and genuine conviction. The force of Henry’s polemic may have been stimulated by possible challenges to the Riga legend from papal legates, discontented locals or rival Danes. Henry’s chronicle fits a medieval type as a colourful and coloured creation myth and a powerfully confident account of frontier conflict, Christian conquest and cultural annexation, in this instance blessed by the cross of the crusader.19

  102. A page of Henry of Livonia’s Chronicle.

  14. The Baltic crusades.

  103. Baltic amber.

  Bishop Albert’s expedition to Livonia in 1200, which he and his apologists insisted on portraying as a crusade equivalent to the concurrent eastern Mediterranean expe
dition, set the pattern for the next twenty-five years. Bishop Albert made annual recruiting tours of Germany and the western Baltic, providing soldiers, merchants, seamen, entrepreneurs, clerics and adventurers with absolution of sins in the pursuit of profit – even though, despite a bull of 1204 allowing Holy Land vows to be commuted to service in Livonia, Innocent III continued to avoid recognising Livonia’s parity with the Holy Land. Albert’s campaigns met with success. By 1210, the coast and lower Dvina had been subdued or overawed; a capital established at Riga whose harbour could be used by large cargo round ships, known as cogs; a cathedral had been started and the Swordbrothers founded. The new settlement rested on volatile foundations. The locals treated conversion as a temporary consequence of defeat to be reversed once the Germans moved on or away. Internationally, Bishop Albert faced challenges to his sovereignty from the papacy and the king of Denmark. Internally, clerical rule depended on the support of the German merchants, whose interests were primarily economic not spiritual; for them conversion was useful as a means to bind locals to German trading practices. The Swordbrothers controlled a third of all territory and claimed rights to share future conquests. The interests of the ecclesiastical, commercial and military establishments regularly conflicted, united only by an entrepreneurial imperative to exploit the indigenous people and economy. The Christian mission imitated secular acquisitiveness in creating bishoprics and monasteries. The whole project relied on Bishop Albert’s almost annual crusades providing physical force and ideological respectability.

  104. People-and-cargo-carrying cogs on the seal of the Baltic trading Hanseatic League and in the port of Riga.

  The conquest of the lower Dvina valley, the Semigallians to the south and west and the Letts to the north and east, secured the Livonian coast. This allowed the Germans to protect local allies and control trade from the interior, both incentives for indigenous rulers to come to terms. Further advances between 1209 to 1218 northwards into Estonia were checked by the competing ambitions of Valdemar II of Denmark (1202–41), who built a fort on the north coast at Reval (now Tallinn) in 1219, leading to the partitioning of Estonia in 1222. The Danes dominated the sea-lanes from Lübeck, the vital entrepôt for manpower and trade without which the German Livonian enclave could not survive. Bishop Albert died in 1229. Contending interests remained: the Danes; the papacy; settlers; merchants; the Swordbrothers; local converts, allies and pagans; disturbed or hostile neighbours: the Curonians, Lithuanians and Russians of Novgorod. Internal divisions were matched by threats of rebellion and invasion. Territorial advances were balanced by fierce rivalry for land, desperate revolts by the hard-pressed peasantry (1222 and 1236), and the Swordbrothers’ increasing violence and gangsterism. Pursuing an aggressively independent military policy under Master Folkwin (1209–36), from 1225 the Swordbrothers annexed Danish northern Estonia, allied with Livonia’s enemies to acquire more territory, plundered church property, impeded baptisms and massacred converts. The Swordbrothers appeared more interested in locals as slaves not Christians, an intriguing, but not unique, attitude for a religious Order. The papacy had been scrutinising the Order for years before the massacre of the legate’s men in 1234. The death of Folkwin with fifty brothers, almost half the Order’s knights, at the battle of Saule against the Lithuanians in 1236, provided the opportunity the following year for the transfer of the remnant of the Order, its prerogatives and property, to the equally violent but more orderly Teutonic Knights.

  105. Conquest: Turaida Castle, begun by Bishop Albert of Riga in 1214.

  The Teutonic Knights reshaped Livonia. They ended the awkward duopoly with the Rigan Church; mended relations with the papacy and the Danes (restoring Estonia to them in 1238); and used diplomacy as well as force to pacify neighbours. Hardly eirenic in dealing with internal opposition, their wider resources helped the Order overcome revolts and resistance from satellite provinces. From the late thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights imposed security for the German settlement by creating a depopulated scorched earth cordon sanitaire in Semigallia that protected Livonia from Samogitia and Lithuania. The consequent struggle with Lithuania dragged into the fifteenth century. Ruling an autonomous province within the Order, with its own Master answerable only to the Grand Master based after 1309 in Prussia, the Livonian Teutonic Knights survived until 1562, when the last Livonian Master made himself duke of Courland and Semigallia.21

  Danish and Swedish Crusades

  Territorial ambitions of Scandinavian kings were linked to efforts to elevate their internal as well as foreign status through alliance with the international Church. While the crusade provided a suitable context, motives for conquest were material: to police piracy, exploit maritime trade and manipulate access to valuable raw materials. So were the means: raiding, a sort of counter-piratical piracy, and planting combined religious and trading stations, a continuation of the Viking tradition under the flag of Christ. Church approval of wars of conquest supplied ideological gloss for existing habits. In the twelfth century, the Danes fought the Wends and other pagans in the southern Baltic, while their fleets penetrated eastwards in pursuit of increasing regional trade. Swedes started to harry the shores of the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Riga. Such aggression against non-Christians traditionally gained ecclesiastical support. When an attack on non-Christian pirates led by the Danish Archbishop Absalon of Lund (1178–1201), a vigorous pagan-basher, was described as ‘making an offering to God not of prayers but of arms’, this was not an account of a crusade, but a reflection of a far older tradition of war against the pagans deo auctore; as was a promise of heaven to those who died fighting pagans in defence of the Norwegian patria made during a royal synod held at Trondheim (1164).22 Nonetheless, by presenting such wars as extending or defending Christianity, papal approval could be sought, enhancing regal image.23 Alexander III’s 1171 offer to Valdemar I of Denmark of a year’s Holy Land plenary indulgence to participants on an expedition against pagans in the eastern Baltic, probably the Estonians, and a full remission for those who died on campaign, while lacking the full crusade apparatus of vow, cross, preaching and temporal privileges, confirmed available justifications and incentives.24

  Yet, however much Valdemar I was a devotee of holy war against pagans, no Danish crusade to the eastern Baltic occurred until 1206 when, according to the not always reliable chronicler Henry of Livonia, the troops accompanying Valdemar II’s raid on the island of Osel were given the cross by the archbishop of Lund.25 The Danish invasion of northern Estonia in 1219–20, in coalition with the Swordbrothers and King John I of Sweden (1216–22), was backed by a papal crusade bull. The Swedes briefly occupied Leal on Estonia’s west coast while the Danes built a fort overlooking Reval’s large natural harbour. Thereafter, the Danes acted as absentee landlords, taking profits from trade and land as the new town at Reval was settled chiefly by Germans. Danish overlordship was recognised by the Teutonic Knights (1238). Further Danish conquests eastwards provoked confrontation with the Russians of Novgorod, branded hostile schismatics by successive popes who provided crusading support for campaigns against them in the hope of further converts in the pagan lands of the eastern Gulf of Finland. The results were meagre. Valdemar II joined the Teutonic Knights and Swedes from Finland in the disastrous anti-Russian crusade of 1240–2 that saw defeats for the Swedes on the River Neva in 1240 and for the Teutonic Knights at Lake Chud-Peipus on 5 April 1242; Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod’s victory received vividly iconic if fanciful reworking in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous patriotic 1938 film. Eric IV of Denmark’s (1241–50) taking the cross in 1244 led nowhere. A fresh crusade in 1256 to the lower Narva failed to achieve converts. Danish interest in the eastern Baltic waned; in 1346, Danish Estonia was sold to the Teutonic Knights.

  106. The Battle on the Ice, 5 April 1242.

  Increasingly only the Swedes, already established on the Gulf of Finland, seemed attracted to further military action in the bleak unproductive area further east where material returns were exi
guous and conversion hardly a priority. Swedish incursions into Finland began in the twelfth century, later accompanied by missionary attempts. After some success in south-west Finland, resistance became stiffer further east in Tavastria where the Swedes confronted the neighbouring Karelians and Novgorod Russians in wars that lasted into the fourteenth century. Crusades were attached to Swedish expansion into eastern Finland, in 1237, 1249, 1257 and 1292. Appropriate histories of Swedish martyrs and a saintly royal holy warrior, Eric IX (1156–60), were invented retrospectively. Holy war was urged on Magnus II (1319–63) by his cousin, St Bridget, conveniently as a legitimate excuse for royal taxation.26 Magnus, supported by another crusade enthusiast, Pope Clement VI (1342–52), responded with two crusades (1348 and 1350) against the Russians that achieved little. A subsequent papally backed scheme in 1351 produced rich tax pickings from a church tithe which, in the absence of any military action, the papacy demanded be paid back. Later efforts to drum up support for an anti-Russian crusade by King Albert (1364–89) failed. Ideas for crusades still circulated into the late fifteenth century as Karelian raiding continued, but the last Swedish crusade bull in 1496 never even arrived, confiscated in transit by King John of Denmark (1481–1513). Although Swedish rule of Finland lasted until 1809, the role of the crusade in its beginnings was insignificant.