God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  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 Vistula; 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 the 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

  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