God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The identification of Baltic warfare as religious adopted different guises. In Livonia or Estonia, around 1200, expansionist conquest could be justified narrowly as defence of missionary churches. Previous Christian evangelism and conversion lent legitimacy to wars against the Wends or in parts of Pomerania. The theme of apostasy and restoration of lost Christian territory became pervasive, from Prussia to Finland, when each transient summer raid by Christian fleets produced temporary submission by local pagans, and the Baltic coasts were littered with the remains of abandoned or destroyed mission stations and a few surviving ones. Henry of Livonia, committed mission priest and triumphalist Christian apologist for the Livonian colony and its wars, significantly described the Livs as ‘perfidious’, breakers of faith.24 The campaigns of the kings of Denmark along the southern Baltic shore or in northern Estonia were conducted by monarchs who wrapped themselves in the aura of Christian warriors, ‘active knights of Christ’.25 By rooting out paganism, the conquerors were performing holy tasks, their conquests, by incorporation into Christendom, ipso facto holy. More generally, the areas attacked were assigned a new holy status, mimicking the Holy Land of Palestine or the lands of St Peter or St James in the Iberian peninsula. This allowed for a very particular form of military and political management. From c.1202, the missionary bishop of Riga, in Livonia, recruited a religious order of knights, the Militia of Christ or Swordbrothers, to defend and extend his diocese on the river Dvina. Their symbol was a sword surmounted by a cross. In 1207 they were granted a third of the Christian settlement. In 1210 an agreement between the Swordbrothers and the bishop established a permanent condominium in Livonia and neighbouring Lettia (Latvia south of the Dvina). A few years later, the missionary bishop on the Polish–Prussian border assembled a similar body, the Militia of Christ of Livonia against the Prussians, also known as the Knights of Dobrin (or Dobryzn) after their original headquarters on the Vistula. Recognized by the pope in 1228, their emblem comprised a sword topped by a star. Although deriving their rules from those of the Templars and sharing characteristics in defence and settlement with the military orders on the Muslim – Christian borderlands in Spain, these orders displayed unique characteristics. Officially they held land and authority from the local bishop. Their resources came almost exclusively – and meagrely – from what they seized for themselves. Unlike the international orders, they had no lush estates in the prosperous west to cushion them from the impoverished realities of the barren frontiers and wastes of the Baltic interior. They were also confronted by the legal and practical problems of dealing with pagans and forced converts. Yet the model of a permanent garrison of Christian warriors who sustained the frontiers and colonies between crusades, helped plan and direct the expeditions that did arrive and, most distinctive, ruled over the conquests they secured, was one that, in the form of the Teutonic Knights from the 1220s onwards, came to dominate Christian aggression in much of the eastern Baltic for the rest of the middle ages.26

  The sanctification of the Baltic wars recast the region as holy space. In 1212 Innocent III declared Livonia to have been subjugated for St Peter, a claim his successors attempted to make good over the next quarter of a century. Prussia became a papal fief in 1234. Thirty years earlier, at Riga in Livonia in the first decade of its settlement by German missionaries, knights and merchants, a cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the settlers’ protectress, and a church to St Peter, guarantor of ecclesiastical privileges. Recruits to defend the colony were urged to ‘accept the Cross of the Blessed Virgin’. At the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Albert of Buxtehude, bishop of Riga, declared Livonia to be the land of the Virgin Mary, just as Jerusalem was the land of her Son. This designation of the Virgin as patroness of the Riga colony, the land of Livonia her dowry, allowed apologists to describe crusaders as pilgrims or the ‘militia of pilgrims’, in line with crucesignati elsewhere, even in Languedoc.27 When the Teutonic Knights assumed direction of war and government in Prussia and then Livonia in the 1230s, absorbing the other military orders in the process, identification with the cult of the Virgin Mary was reinforced, as she was the order’s own patroness. In Livonia the knights bore her image as a war banner. By the end of century, in the view of the religious knight in the rhyming history of Livonia, the Livlandische Reimchronik, Mary had become a war goddess. In the absence of a genuine historic justification, the author, possibly a Teutonic knight, insinuated a transcendent context. Beginning by recounting the Creation, Pentecost and the missions of the Early Church, he admitted that no apostle reached Livonia, in contrast to the myth of St James converting Spain. Instead, a higher mission was being conducted in the wilderness of the eastern Baltic. The holy task begun by the Apostles of proselytizing the world was now being prosecuted through service and death in the armies of the Mother of God in defence of Her land.28

  Such literary and rhetorical devices reassured participants and attracted recruits partly by refusing to disguise the true nature of the wars in their bitterness, difficulty, frustrations and violence. Some aspects could not so easily be translated into such robust edification. Christian efforts were marked as much by rivalry and competition as by the unity of faith. In Livonia and Estonia, the Danes contested the ambitions of the Swordbrothers and later the Teutonic Knights. In 1234, the Swordbrothers of Riga displayed their contempt for the pope’s authority by killing 100 men employed by the papal legate and then heaping their bodies into a pile, sticking ‘one of the slain who had been too faithful to the Church on top of the other dead to represent the Lord Pope’.29 As reported to Gregory IX, by this atrocity these knights of Christ wished to show themselves to ‘converts, Russians, pagans and heretics to be greater than the Roman Church’. Later in the century, the brutality of the Teutonic Knights faced criticism. The Oxford scholar Roger Bacon argued in the 1260s that the Knights’ desire to rule and enslave the pagan Prussians presented a barrier, not an incentive, to conversion. In his advice to the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the Dominican preaching expert Humbert of Romans challenged the premise that the pagans posed a genuine threat to Christian lands, a perception hardly shared by frontiersmen in Livonia or Lithuania.30

  The almost Manichaean view of a conflict between world forces of good and evil hardly matched the very different practical realities of conquest and colonization. Contact, compromise and change filtered across the innumerable political and religious boundaries from the Elbe to Lake Lagoda. In Prussia, especially the western parts, German and Flemish settlement appeared substantial. In Livonia and Estonia, accessible only by a tricky and expensive sea voyage when the water was free of ice, western colonization was negligible, limited almost exclusively to fortified trading posts on the main rivers. Prussia witnessed a slow process of acculturation similar to the earlier experience between the Elbe and Oder. Slavs became Germans, an uncomfortable notion for later racial nationalists on both sides of the linguistic divide. The judicial pluralism and segregation familiar from other crusading fronts did not prevent the Prussians adopting elements of German inheritance laws and, more awkwardly for the invaders, German military technology. Over generations, the brutality of forced conversion, occupation, dispossession, alien settlement and discrimination transformed Prussia into a distinctively German province. By contrast, only a small military, clerical and commercial elite was established in Estonia and Livonia, largely confined to the coast and river valleys, especially the Dvina. Power depended on solid fortresses; technological superiority in artillery, siege machines, armour and weapons; uneasy alliances with native rulers who sought the invaders’ protection from other regional enemies; and Christian control of the ports and access to maritime trade routes for local produce from the pagan interior. These different colonial experiences cast long shadows. In March 1939, Adolf Hitler insisted that Lithuania cede Memel, established by German invaders in 1252, to the Third Reich, an act that provoked Britain’s guarantee to protect Poland. No part of historic Prussia was to be outside Greater Germany. Yet, five
months later, Hitler was content to consign Latvia and Estonia as well as Lithuania to the lot of the Russians as if they were, in a sense crucial to the Nazi perversion of the past, less ‘German’.

  CRUSADES AND CRUSADERS

  Livonia 1188–1300

  The origins of Christian dominion in Livonia were prophetic, combining genuine missionary enthusiasm, church politics, cultural imperialism and profit, the building blocks of conquest. Drawn by growing trading links between western German and Baltic ports such as Bremen and, especially, Lübeck, an isolated mission to the Dvina valley by a German canon, Meinhard, was taken over by his ecclesiastical superior, Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen (1185–1207), who elevated the missionary into a bishop and began to solicit papal support for a Christian invasion. Meinhard’s failure to secure any lasting converts, despite showing the locals how to construct stone fortresses, encouraged a more vigorous policy after his death in 1196. Hartwig, eager to secure a new ecclesiastical empire for Bremen, which a century earlier had dominated the north, despatched a new bishop, Berthold. A futile initial foray in 1196–7 was succeeded by an armed expedition in 1198 recruited with the help of papal privileges. Despite the German army’s military success, Berthold managed to get himself killed. The expedition achieved nothing beyond coercing a few temporary converts and showing off the effectiveness of German scorched earth tactics.

  Archbishop Hartwig was not so easily deflected. He was not content just to preside over a series of piractical raids or even the creation of trading stations on the Dvina. His concept was of a new ecclesiastical missionary state, under episcopal not secular control. For this he needed a suitable cleric, political backing and papal support. Each were conveniently to hand, in the shape of his nephew, Albert of Buxtehude; Canute VI of Denmark and his brother Valdemar; Philip of Swabia, Hohenstaufen candidate for the contested German throne; and Pope Innocent III, for whom Hartwig’s scheme represented a practical demonstration of the sort of theocratic authority that chimed precisely with his own grander ambitions. Albert became the new bishop of Livonia (1198–1229) while in October 1199 Innocent III issued an unequivocal call for a crusade to defend the Christians of Livonia, a fiction made possible by reference to Meinhard’s evangelizing and the Livs’ subsequent apostasy. The news of the crusade bull reached Philip of Swabia’s Christmas court along with Bishop Albert, who engaged in a strenuous tour of preaching and diplomacy. The cross was preached in Saxony and Westphalia, but the most important backing was garnered by Albert’s visits to the mercantile community at Visby in Gotland, where 500 apparently took the cross, and his meeting with King Canute, his brother, and the veteran holy warrior Archbishop Absalon of Lund. Although Danish support was vital to allow recruits to sail unimpeded from Lübeck to Livonia, it was later regarded by them as an acceptance of overlordship, a clash of interests only too characteristic of colonization in the eastern Baltic.31

  Bishop Albert’s crusade to Livonia in 1200 provided the basis of the new Christian state, setting the military and ideological pattern for its conquest and occupation. The central dynamic combined ecclesiastical with commercial imperialism. More than most other crusade locations, Livonia was unequivocally a colony, of north Germany and Latin Christianity. For a quarter of a century, Bishop Albert followed a routine of more or less annual recruiting tours of Germany and the west Baltic. In 1204 he received a papal bull effectively authorizing him to sign up crusaders whenever he wished.32 Although the Holy Land crusade was regarded as paramount – Albert’s new colony contributed its own share, for example, to the church tax for the Fifth Crusade – the habitual support of crusade privileges lent a special quality to the bishop’s sales pitch and responses to it. As Eric Christiansen has observed, ‘the Lübeck – Livonia run became a steady source of profit and absolution for skippers, knights, burghers and princes’.33 Within a decade, Bishop Albert had subdued the pagan tribes of the coast and lower Dvina, built a new capital at Riga with a port to accommodate the great trading cargo ships from the west, begun his new cathedral and created his permanent garrison of Christian knights, the Swordbrothers. In the process, like any conquering lord, he provided a bonanza for members of his own family. Albert’s brothers, a brother-in-law and cousins were rewarded with important, potentially lucrative positions in church and state, founding dynasties that formed part of the nucleus of the German settlers’ establishment.

  The Livonian state rested on volatile foundations. 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, and the nominally subservient but actually autonomous Swordbrothers, who controlled a third of all territory and claimed the right to the same share of all future conquests. Critics saw little difference between the businessmen and the knights, accusing the Swordbrothers of being crooks, wealthy renegade merchants from Saxony. The mercantile elite refused to allow Bishop Albert to surrender Riga to the Danes as part of a settlement of jurisdictional rivalries in 1222. The Swordbrothers were increasingly a law to themselves, especially after Albert’s death in 1229. Both knight and trader were self-evidently entrepreneurial in their attitude to Livonia, as was the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The spreading of Christianity became indistinguishable from the creation of privileged trading depots, commercial cartels and fresh estates for the military order alongside the foundation, endowment or annexation of bishoprics (such as Dorpat, founded in 1133) and monasteries, like Dunamunde. The regular Livonian crusades of the first third of the thirteenth century were central to sustaining the practical aspects of this congruence of material and spiritual expansionism by providing physical reinforcements for defence and attack. These wars of the Cross maintained the ideological credentials of the operation, even in the face of exploitation, scandal and corruption, which by the mid-1230s threatened the colony’s very survival.34

  The first wave of conquest to 1209 brought the lower Dvina valley under Rigan control, as well as the subjugation by a combination of alliance and force of the Semigallians south and west of the river and the Letts to the north and east. One advantage the Germans held was their perceived ability to protect local rulers from their traditional enemies, the Lithuanians to the south and the Estonians to the north. The ruler of Polotsk, upstream from the Livonian enclave, came to terms with the new settlers in order to ease commerce. From 1209 to 1218, the Livonians pressed northwards into Estonia, but were then checked by the intervention of Valdemar II of Denmark, who claimed sovereignty there. After an initial alliance of convenience between the Livonian Germans and the Danes in 1219, acrimonious rivalries threatened to undermine not only the new conquest in Estonia but Bishop Albert’s lordship in Livonia itself. Estonia was partitioned in 1222, leaving the Danes in control of the north coast around their new fortress of Reval (now Tallinin, built in 1219), and with a measure of recognized overlordship over the rest. The problem for Bishop Albert lay in King Valdemar’s stranglehold over Baltic shipping and over Lübeck in particular. Without Lübeck as a base for recruits and cargoes, German Livonia, whoever exercised power, could hardly exist. Thus Albert bequeathed an essentially unstable political system, contested between distant or absentee foreigners, the Danes and the papacy; local settlers and merchants; the Swordbrothers; the indigenous population of converts, allies and pagans; and nervous or aggressive neighbours, such as the Curonians, the Lithuanians and the Russians of Novgorod. This hardly made for a model Christian state, whatever the rhetoric of pilgrimage and the cross.

  In the generation after Bishop Albert, despite further conquests, the main challenges to the viability of German Livonia remained invasion, rebellion and internal disintegration. The islanders of Osel and the Curonians had capitulated by 1231, and a network of defensive barrier forts begun to consolidate a sort of frontier with the Samogitians and Lithuanians in the south and the Russians in the east. The modest returns on land led to fierce competition between the Sw
ordbrothers and other ecclesiastical and lay landowners. Rapacious exploitation of local peasantry and commercial tolls provoked rebellion in 1222 and, in concert with military defeat of the Swordbrothers by the Lithuanians, in 1236. Between 1225 and 1227, the Swordbrothers, keen to maximize their income, seized the Danish areas of northern Estonia, including Reval, which they held until 1237, in direct contravention of the 1222 partition. By this time the Swordbrothers’ unruly independence had attracted the disapproval of the papacy as well. Despite, or perhaps because of, their success, the knights, who never numbered more than about 120, had developed a taste and earned a justified reputation for loutish thuggery and barbaric cruelty. Wenno, the first Master, had been murdered with an axe by a fellow brother. His successor, Folkwin, a nobleman from Hesse, pursued a policy of vigorous military enterprise and selfinterested gangsterism. The Swordbrothers were content to ally with Livonia’s enemies to gain territorial advantage. After Bishop Albert’s death, they ignored the 1204 and 1207 agreements by encroaching on episcopal property. Cistercian monasteries were plundered, converts were massacred and baptisms prevented. For the Swordbrother, the best Liv or Lett was a slave, not a co-religionist. The atrocity of the massacre of the papal legate’s men in 1234 further alienated the papacy, which had been critically investigating the order for years. By the mid-1230s, the Swordbrothers were isolated. The pope had condemned them; the king of Denmark had been made an enemy. In 1236, Folkwin and fifty brothers, at the head of an army of crusader recruits, were killed by the Lithuanians at the battle of Saule in Samogitia. The following year, the order was wound up, the remaining members absorbed by the Teutonic Knights who now assumed their responsibilities in Livonia.