The History of the Renaissance World (48 page)

The Polans duke Konrad of Mazovia, in the north, hoped to conquer the lands directly above him. These lands were occupied by another tribal people, known (from the language they spoke) as Lithuanians; and the Lithuanian-speakers themselves were divided into three groups, each of which spoke a different Lithuanian dialect. Farthest to the north were the Letts, bordered by the Rus’ on the east and just below the cold Baltic Sea. In the basin of the Vistula river lived a second group of Lithuanian-speakers, known, generally, as Prussians. Between them lay a larger group who simply claimed the name Lithuanian.
⁷

To European eyes, all of the Lithunians dwelt at the very edge of civilization. According to Oliver of Paderborn, they “venerated the waters, trees, hills and caves . . . and worshipped all kinds of mythological creatures.” “They burned their dead, along with the horses and weapons and magnificent clothes,” offers the anonymous thirteenth-century chronicle
Descriptiones Terrarum
, “for they believed that they can use these and other burned items in the world to come.” These were markers of wild paganism, and Honorius III had already sent missionary bishops into Lithuanian lands to convert the tribes. The efforts had not yielded much success: the “evil, sinful wickedness” of the Prussians, writes the German historian Nicolaus von Jeroschin, “had made them so stubborn that no teaching or exhortation or blessing could move them from their error.”
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There was one good thing about the Prussians, Nicolaus von Jeroschin adds as an afterthought: they “lived at peace with the Christians who had settled alongside them.” This was soon to end.

The Polans, just a little ahead of the Lithuanian tribes in the evolution of their state, saw them as fair game. Konrad of Mazovia offered the Teutonic Knights another opportunity to crusade: they could come into his dukedom and fight against the enemies of Christ who lived around the Vistula. In exchange, he promised them a northern tract of land in his dukedom for their own “in perpetuity . . . and in addition the lands which they might conquer thereafter with the help of God.”
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For a relatively small payout, Konrad thus got a heavily armed, zealous, and experienced border guard. The Teutonic Knights gained a base of operations and the chance to conquer a kingdom, plus all the benefits of holy war: In 1226, Honorius III declared the fight against Lithuanian-speakers to be a new crusade, complete with full absolution of sin for those who took part.

40.1 The Baltic Crusade

The Teutonic Knights took some time to organize and assemble themselves, but in 1233 the first invasion of Prussia, across the Vistula river, began. It was the beginning of a war that would last for decades. What began as the “Baltic Crusade” turned into an ugly, bloody, protracted struggle in which (as the historian Kenneth Setton puts it), “primitive tribes with no common political organization were obliged hopelessly to protect their lives, farms, tribal independence, and religion against the superior might of the west.” Before long, the fighting forked into a double war, one against the pagan Lithuanians, the other against nearby Christians who hoped to seize some of the land east of the Baltic for themselves.
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“It was completely joyless and full of hard fighting,” writes Nicolaus von Jeroschin of the new Crusade, “. . . a land of horrors and wilderness . . . [where] the knightly sword of Christianity greedily devoured the sinners’ flesh.” For the next fifty years, the Teutonic Knights would lay waste to the lands of the Lithuanians—fighting, perhaps, for Christ, but hoping to gain themselves a kingdom.
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Chapter Forty-One

Lakeshores, Highlands, and Hilltops

In Africa, between 1221 and 1290,
a descendant of Solomon overthrows a descendant of Moses,
a Muslim king extends his reach,
and the kings of Mapungubwe move to the hilltops

I
N
1221, the greatest church builder in Africa died.

Eight hundred years before, an eastern African king named Ezana had been converted to Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine himself.
*
His kingdom, Axum, had remained a Christian realm until its disintegration, sometime in the middle of the tenth century. The fall of the capital city left the ghost of the empire behind: a network of monasteries and nunneries, a scattering of conquered and converted peoples who went on living, in peaceful obscurity, between the highland headwaters of the Nile river and the shores of the Red Sea.
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Sometime in the middle of the twelfth century, a local chief named Marara had managed to reclaim the title of king once held by those long-ago Christian rulers. He lived on the southern edge of the old Axumite land; his people, the Agau, had been forced to submit by the Axumites nearly nine hundred years before. But he claimed to be the rightful successor to the Axumite throne. He took the small southward town of Adafa as his capital, the descendants of the bygone Axumites as his subjects. His dynasty, the Zagwe (“of Agau”), left almost no records behind; no chronicles, no inscriptions, not even any minted coins.
²

But they did leave churches, carved from single massive chunks of rock.

Marara’s great-nephew, Gebra Maskal Lalibela, was by far the most accomplished of all the Zagwe church builders. He was, by his own claim, a descendant of Moses and his Ethiopian wife.
†
Ancestry from a patriarch revered by Christian scripture was an efficient way to bolster his claims to be in the Axumite royal line, as was the elaborate coronation ceremony built around the Zagwe kings, observed by the Arab traveler Abu Salih. The king was crowned by a priest, beneath the portrait of the angel Michael in the church that bore the angel’s name; tonsured to represent his spiritual calling, he was clothed in priestly clothes rather than a crown.
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In the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Lalibela built nearly a dozen churches, carved out of the red volcanic rock. A narrow rocky river cut through his capital city; this river, channeled into deeper hand-cut narrows, was renamed
Yordanos
, the Jordan. The steep rock faces on both sides of the Yordanos were whittled away into huge standing outcrops, enormous lumps of stone on the banks; and then those blocks were chiseled, hollowed, and shaped, by skilled masons of the king, into churches with domes, pillars, and arches. The Mount of Olives church stood to the north, the Mount of Transfiguration to the south. A new holy landscape, the distant and inaccessible Israel of the Gospels, had been carved into African ground.
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There is not much more that we know about the Zagwe; only that, in 1270, a highland dweller named Yekuno Amiak married the daughter of the last Zagwe king and then usurped his father-in-law’s throne. He too had no real right to claim the Axumite mantle—he came from yet a third people, the Amhara—but he also claimed to be descended from a patriarch. In his case, the distinguished ancestor was King Solomon; a continually elaborated legend held that the queen of the western Arabic kingdom Sabea, who had visited Solomon to see his splendor, had returned from her journey pregnant; her son Menelik had then stolen the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon himself and carried it into Africa. This made Yekuno Amiak both the son of kings and the guardian of the (as yet unseen) Ark, a worthy successor to the Axumite throne.
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It also garnered him the support of the monasteries and nunneries. With their recognition of his right to rule, Amiak moved the capital to Shewa. From that city, his descendants, the Solomonid dynasty, would rule for two and a half centuries.

I
N THE CENTER
of the continent, the kingdom of Kanem was at its zenith.

Dunama, the first royal convert to Islam, had not managed to bring all of his people into the fold behind him. But his descendant and namesake Dunama Dibalemi, ruling from sometime in the early 1220s and staying in power until 1259, took more direct action. He first requested, and then ordered, his people to abandon their traditional practices and follow the ways of Islam; and then, to make his point, he destroyed Kanem’s most precious religious object.
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“In the possession of the Saifawa [dynasty],” an Arab account tells us, “there was a certain thing wrapped up and hidden away, whereon depended their victory in war. It was called
Mune
and no one dared to open it. Then the sultan Dunama . . . wished to break it open. His people warned him, but he refused to listen to them. He opened it, and whatever was inside flew away.”
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41.1 Zagwe, Kanem, and Mapungubwe

The exact nature of the
mune
is never made clear, but this was part of its power. The sacred object required obscurity for its power. Veiled, it was potent. Unveiled, trivial. Dibalemi ripped away its secrecy.

He had no need for talismans to give him victory in war. Dibalemi was good at war. He spent the early years of his reign building up his cavalry units, until he could put forty thousand mounted soldiers on the field at one time. He established a sizable arsenal on the northern shore of Lake Chad; from there, says the Arab geographer Ibn Sa’id, he often launched a fleet to make sea raids “on the lands of the pagans, on the shores of this lake . . . [he] attacks their ships and kills and takes prisoners.”
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During his thirty years on the throne, Dibalemi used his ships and cavalry to stretch his reach across the entire basin of Lake Chad. This gave him control of the southern part of the Eastern Trade Route, and a guaranteed path to trade in the north.

It also limited, somewhat, his enthusiasm for the spread of Islam. His refusal to abide by the secret of the
mune
speaks to his deep conviction of the truth of Islam. He lived by the pillars of Islam; he went on
hajj
not once but twice; he gave alms to the poor; he was known, says Ibn Sa’id, “for his religious warfare and charitable acts.”
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But like his predecessors, he used captive non-Muslim slaves as his primary currency, trading them north for horses and goods in short supply in central Africa. And so the lands south of Lake Chad remained non-Islamic, profitable hunting grounds for slaves that did not fall under Islamic prohibition.
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The quick and massive assimilation of nearby tribes and kinglets did not make Kanem a peaceful empire. By the end of his reign, Dibalemi was facing a serious undercurrent of rebellion. Some accounts chalk the unrest up to the clan of the Bulala, African traditionalists who resisted Islam and were aghast by Dibalemi’s desecration of the
mune
. Others suggest that, as the empire expanded, Dibalemi placed his sons as lieutenant governors in the outer reaches and then was forced to deal with their growing independence: “The sons of the ruler,” the Kanem king list remarks, tersely, “became separated in different regions.”
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Whatever the cause, Dibalemi died with his empire still intact, firmly Muslim, heavily armed, the strongest kingdom in central Africa; but with seeds of unrest just beginning to sprout.