God's War: A New History of the Crusades
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The new God was unambiguously a German God, His success accompanied by German settlers. Rejection of political subjugation was expressed in religious opposition. Henry of the Abotrites, his rule buttressed by German and Danish mercenaries, having himself converted, allowed Saxon missionaries to lay waste Wendish cultic shrines in his territories. With the Christian priests came the prospect of church taxes, land-grabbing and a loss of political and economic as well as ecclesiastical autonomy. However strong the private or corporate devotional ties to the old beliefs, the political consequences of the choice of paganism or conversion were unmistakable. Religion was politics. After the death of Christianizing Henry, Wendish independence reasserted itself under the vigorously pagan prince Niklot. The end of the independence of the Rugians was marked by the destruction of the temple and public pagan worship at Arkona in 1168 by Valdemar I of Denmark, a more lasting repeat of the enforced baptism of the Arkona garrison by the Danes between 1134 and 1136. Apostasy, as of the Rugians after 1136 and the Wends after 1127, expressed communal identity. Conversion was more important than a matter of faith. Long before the 1147 crusade, political confrontation had been articulated in religious terms.
Bernard of Clairvaux’s stark and canonically suspect choice, baptism or death, implicitly acknowledged this religious component to competing perceptions of ethnicity, cultural identity, political autonomy and racial awareness. He referred to the conversion or extermination of the pagan races. While this may have appeased legal experts by avoiding direct approval of forced individual conversion, equating the threat of collective destruction of the pagan nation with the alternative of personal baptism exposed a clear contradiction to canon law. More obviously, Bernard’s direct exhortation to arm the faithful ‘with the Holy Cross against the enemies of the Cross of Christ’ invited a far simpler interpretation and response.7 The Wendish crusade of 1147 was a missionary war not cloaking but glorifying and legitimizing a campaign of undisguised material aggrandizement. The distant memory of the conquests beyond the Elbe by Saxon and Salian German kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries combined with the confused recent history of conversion ebbing backwards and forwards according to the political and ecclesiastical interest of local rulers to allow a retrospective justification in the concept of a reconquest of lost Christian lands.8 In practical military or political terms, such excuses made little difference to the reality while intellectually and rhetorically, if not entirely spurious, they formed a convenient exercise in double-speak. Nonetheless, the easy acceptance of the trappings of crusading in the Baltic revealed how far a positive ideology of legitimate religious violence had penetrated the western Christian world and how far cultural and territorial acquisitiveness marched with spiritual imperialism.
The longer-term implications scarcely intruded directly into the circumstances of the 1147 crusade. A generation later, the frontier missionary priest Helmold of Bosau, following Bernard’s lead, sought to equate the desultory fighting of the summer of 1147 with the struggle for the Holy Land, characterizing the expeditions in terms of vengeance against Slavs occupying previously Christian lands and retribution for attacks and atrocities on Christians. Yet he also described the complicated cross-frontier relations between one of the crusade’s leaders, Count Adolf of Holstein, and Niklot of the Abotrites, one of its targets. They had entered into an alliance shortly before the 1147 campaigns.9 The context of the decision to extend the Holy Land privileges to the Saxon princes included the need of King Conrad III to leave a peaceful realm behind him when he departed for Palestine. Unwilling to accede to Henry the Lion’s demands at the Diet of Frankfurt of March 1147 for restitution of his ancestral claims in Bavaria, Conrad nonetheless sought to bind the potentially dissident magnate within the general Peace of the crusade. Henry’s uncle joined Conrad’s army, but Henry’s Saxon allies refused to join the eastern campaigns. By extending the crusade vow and obligations to the annual summer raids across the Wendish frontier, Conrad and Bernard performed a neat trick of offering ecclesiastical approval to traditional autonomous regional conflict in a manner that implicitly tied the participants to royal policy, if only temporarily. Significantly, among those mustered at Magdeburg in August 1147 was Wibald abbot of Stavelot, a leading member of the regency government, his presence signalling the element of royal sanction, if not control. The unusual, local and distinctive nature of the German Wendish crusade was recognized symbolically. According to Otto of Freising, a Holy Land crucesignatus, the Saxon crusaders’ crosses ‘differed from ours in this respect, that they were not simply sewed to their clothing, but were brandished aloft, surmounting a wheel’, to all appearances as much a totem of religious aggression and triumphalism as a badge of penance.10
For all the religious propaganda, and the large turnout of German bishops (at least eight), many of whom, wielding temporal as well as ecclesiastical authority in their cities, were able to raise substantial armies of their own, the nature of the 1147 campaigns to Dobin and Demmin was more accurately captured by the complaint of Saxon crusaders when the siege of Dobin turned to a war of attrition:
Is not the land we are devastating our land, and the people we are fighting our people? Why are we, then, found to be our own enemies and the destroyers of our own incomes? Does not this loss fall back on our lords?11
The temporal dynamic was more embarrasingly exposed when one of the crusader armies found itself besieging the Christian city of Stettin until the local Pomeranian bishop pointed out their mistake. The 1147 crusade was regional warfare under a new flag of convenience. As a crusade, it achieved nothing; as Abbot Wibald reflected, ‘it didn’t work’.12
However, the potential in holy war was suggested by the involvement of the two warring claimants to the Danish throne, Canute V and Sweyn III. They temporarily ceased their contest to join together with a German force under the archbishop of Bremen and Henry the Lion in the attack on Dobin. Domestically, the crusade acted in Denmark as elsewhere in western Christendom, legitimizing the annexation of territory, providing a respectable context for the resolution of political conflict and encouraging the development of the institutions of the state by associating royalty with a recognizable divinely inspired mission. Like the Saxons, the Danes had appeared reluctant to join Conrad III’s eastern expedition, but the prospect of what must have seemed easy pickings at the Wends’ expense combined with the offer of crusade indulgences to prompt the royal rivals to joint action. The year before, Sweyn had translated the bones of his uncle, Duke Canute, murdered by Canute V’s father in 1131, to a monastic tomb preparatory to canonization (which came in 1169). Duke Canute had fought against the Wends in campaigns later characterized as holy wars. His son, Valdemar I (1157–82), while continuing to fight the Wends, secured his father’s status as a saint, incorporated the image of a holy warrior in his coinage and became a patron of the Hospitallers. Although involvement in the 1147 expedition proved a flop, subsequent Danish rulers eagerly associated their kingship and their conquests across the Baltic with religious warfare, some of which attracted the formal apparatus of crusading, introducing a competitive element in the Christian grab for the Baltic over the next two centuries.13 Yet, to define the Denmark of Valdemar I and his successors as a ‘crusading state’ places too precise an emphasis on what was a more general concept of armed expansionism that, by virtue of its Christian tinge, was held up in favourable comparison with the glorious Viking past. As Esbern, brother of the Slav-bashing Archbishop Absalon of Lund, declared at the start of the Third Crusade, the crusade offered ‘greater and more profitable conquests’ than those achieved by the heroes of former times.14 The profit was spiritual; it was also material.
DEVELOPMENT
Crusading in the Baltic contributed to the twelfth-century German expansion into territory between the Elbe and Oder and western Pomerania; thirteenth-century German penetration into the southern Baltic lands between the Vistula and Nieman, Prussia, Courland and, in the fourteenth century, Pomerelia west of the V
istula; the transmarine colonization of Livonia in the thirteenth century by a combination of churchmen and merchants from German trading centres such as Luübeck and Bremen; the aggressive expansionism of the Danish crown, especially in northern Estonia; and the advance of the Swedes into Finland. As secondary involvement, these theatres of war expanded to include Greek Orthodox Russian Novgorod and, from the later thirteenth century, Lithuania, a front of religious as well political contest that sustained the idea and practice of holy war in increasingly quaint and attenuated, if still bloody, forms into the fifteenth century. Yet to ascribe responsibility to the crusade for the harsh barbarism of aspects of German, Danish or Swedish imperialism would mislead. One might as well accuse the medieval western church. Equally, it should be remembered that Baltic pagans were just as enthusiastic about massacring opponents and eradicating the symbols of an alien faith when opportunity arose. The secular reality of these wars was brutal for the conquered and only little less harsh for the conquerors or the Germans and Flemish who settled in their wake.
After 1147, formal crusade bulls were not again issued for Baltic warfare until 1171 and only became a regular feature of Christian conquest there from the 1190s. Appearances could deceive. Local observers such as Helmold of Bosau or the Danish historians Sven Aggeson and Saxo Grammaticus invoked the language of holy religious war. In 1169, Pope Alexander III described Valdemar I’s conquest and forced conversion of the islanders of Rügen the previous year as ‘inspired with the heavenly flame, strengthened by the arms of Christ, armed with the shield of faith and protected by divine faith’.15 The crusade bull of 1171 looked forward to an extension of holy war from Wendish Pomerania to distant Estonia. Yet, that bull excepted, the institutions of crusading – vow, cross, indulgence – were absent.16 Saxo depicts the motives for Danish attacks on their pagan neighbours as revenge and imperialism. Helmold famously decried Henry the Lion’s secular greed: ‘in the several expeditions the young man has so far undertaken into Slavia, no mention has been made of Christianity, but only of money’.17 One of the veterans of 1147, Albert the Bear (d. 1170), did not need crusade bulls to carve out a principality of Brandenburg beyond the Elbe, even though his acquisitiveness was predictably portrayed by apologists as attracting the approval of God, ‘who had given him his victory over his enemies’.18 For pagans too, motives concerned the material as much as the eternal. In 1156, Pribislav of Luübeck was prepared to accept baptism, erect churches, even pay tithes, provided ‘the rights of Saxons in respect of property and taxes be extended to us’.19 Until the turn of the century, the extension of German and Danish power along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, while susceptible to holy war interpretation, remained largely unmoved by holy war priorities.
Crusading in the Baltic directly served political, economic and ecclesiastical ambitions: the extension of German or Danish rule; the establishment of new towns, trading posts and privileged immigrant rural communities; the creation of bishoprics and the proliferation of, in particular, Cistercian monasteries. The crusading dimension assumed the highly distinctive element of being allied with conversion, Bernard of Clairvaux’s choice, baptism or death. Converts were welcomed; resisters were degraded or exterminated. Innocent III freely used the language of compulsion, in 1209 encouraging Valdemar II of Denmark to pursue ‘the war of the Lord… to drag the barbarians into the net of orthodoxy’.20 This unsound doctrine acknowledged the assistance religion lent to political aggression. It also recognized the religious component in practical as well as theoretical distinctions of ethnicity, cultural identity and racial awareness. In contrast with Spain or the Near East, in the Baltic crusades conversion came as a corollary and recognition of conquest. Although destructive and brutal during initial contact, paradoxically the insistence on conversion as the price of constructive coexistence allowed for greater long-term cultural accommodation. As pagans could become Christians, so, as Pribislav of Luübeck was hinting, Slavs, Letts, Balts and Livs could become Germans.
This process rested on self-interest as much as self-image. The Wendish Abotrite ruler Niklot had been killed by Christian forces in 1160. Despite converting the same year, his eldest son Pribislav had been disinherited. He spent much of the 1160s in revolt against the new ruler of the area, Henry the Lion, until at the end of the decade he was finally installed as ruler of Mecklenberg, essentially as heir to his father’s principality. For much of this period, according to Christian sources, Pribislav had emphasized that he was fighting for Slavic independence against the new German yoke. Once reconciled politically with the new regime, he embraced its Christianizing policies, helping Valdemar I destroy the idols and temples on Rügen in 1168, allying with the leading missionary to the Abotrites, Bern of Amelungsborn, and becoming an active patron of the Cistercians. In 1172, Pribislav accompanied his overlord Henry the Lion on his elaborate pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His own son was baptized with a politically correct non-Slavic name, Henry. In subsequent generations of his family German and Latin names predominated over Slavic ones. His heirs, the dukes of Mecklenberg, become patrons of the Hospitallers. In 1147 Pribislav’s father had been the target for a crusade. In 1218 one of his descendants joined a crusade to Livonia.21 On the southern shores of the Baltic, at least, the scramble for status, wealth and power, and the desire to exploit the opportunities for conquest and redemption further east, dictated such transformations. Even the heirs of the strongly pagan princes of Rügen, forcibly converted in 1168, joined in the assaults on the pagans of the east Baltic in the thirteenth century.
However unpalatable to the religiously fastidious, when allied with material advantage, enforced conversion worked. By 1400, the Baltic had become a Latin Christian lake, even at the cost of sustained conflict with the Greek Orthodox Christians of Russia as well as the various pagan communities and peoples. Beneath the surface, elements of pagan culture swam freely. But in towns, cathedrals, churches and forts; in new liturgical calendars, even where infected by older beliefs and ceremonial custom; in new saints’ cults; in the payment of tithes; in the presence of western-trained scholars and church leaders; in new laws for the western immigrants; in literature, both Latin and vernacular; in ideologies of rule; and in the actual presence and activities of rulers, lay, clerical and that peculiar mixture of the two, the military order, Latin Christendom imposed itself indelibly on the physical, mental and human landscape. Conversion not backed by coercion, painful and laborious as it was, may have experienced a harder struggle, especially in regions removed from the immediate frontier with Latin Christendom in eastern Germany and Poland. The survival of paganism in Lithuania derived from effective political and military resistance and the development of a strong, pagan state. Only in 1386 did the Lithuanians accept Christianity, on their own terms, as a consequence of their king Jogaila’s acquisition of the Polish throne. Everywhere, popular religious conversion followed, if at all, far behind the imposition of Christian political and ecclesiastical authority. Formal observance or occasional conformity may have been necessary for social and economic survival. But, equally, Christian conquerors of the Baltic coasts needed to retain open commercial links with pagan or Orthodox Christian interiors. Alone, it is hard to see missionaries having the same success as the killers, the adventurers, the entrepreneurs and the empire-builders. The application of crusading incentives to German, Danish and to a lesser extent Swedish political and economic competition did not create the link between force and faith. The process of cultural and territorial imperialism was established well before 1147 and already articulated by enthusiasts in religious as well as racial terms.
The real impetus towards fixing the technical apparatus of crusading – vow, cross, indulgence and so on – to Christian conquest in the Baltic came when attention shifted in the late twelfth century from the Wends and western Slavs of the southern Baltic to the heathen tribes further east, first Livonia (modern Latvia), then Estonia, Prussia and Finland. These theatres dominated the crusading operations for th
e century after the 1190s. Celestine III authorized a crusade to Livonia in 1193, a call repeated by Innocent III in 1198. Formal crusade bulls and crusading recruitment were then sporadically attached from the early thirteenth century to the increasingly belligerent Danish attempts to colonize Estonia and its neighbouring islands, the conquest of Prussia and to Danish and Swedish attacks on Finland. The new focus followed the revival of crusading formulae and consciousness after 1187, evident both in ideology and practice. It came with the commitment to the broadest prosecution of the Lord’s War by successive popes from Celestine III, an enthusiastic crusade promoter in Spain and Palestine as well as the Baltic, and Innocent III. It also reflected the commercial and ecclesiastical ambition of German mercantile cities, Bremen, Lübeck even Cologne. Political and civil unrest and social conflict within Germany from the 1190s created a pool of people willing to take risks to establish new lives as colonists and conquerors. Arnold of Lübeck described the recruits for the disastrous Livonian crusade of 1198 as including bishops, clergy, knights, the rich, the poor and businessmen or merchants (negotiatores).22 Across the Baltic in Denmark and Sweden, the prospect of ecclesiastically condoned wars of expansion appealed to monarchs eager to assert their authority through martial expansion beyond traditional frontiers. The pagan communities of the east and north Baltic appeared vulnerable in their relative lack of technological sophistication, political disunity and openness to commercial exploitation. Their attraction lay rather more in their furs, fish, amber, wax and slaves than the need to reform their benighted beliefs. The Baltic crusades rode a new, decisive balance of power in the region to which it gave a reassuring ideology and a cruel edge. The pagan Estonian defenders of Fellin in 1211 saw the point. After a short, brutal siege, marked by uncompromising butchery by the Christian besiegers, the garrison surrendered in return for baptism: ‘We acknowledge your God to be greater than our gods. By overcoming us, He has inclined out hearts to worship Him.’23