The Northern Crusades (13 page)

Three men may be singled out as examples. The most influential was Eskil, a Danish nobleman who succeeded his uncle as archbishop of Lund in 1138 and ruled there for the next forty years. One half of him was a prelate of the old school: he had been married, he built castles, led armies, made kings and tried to unmake them, accumulated vast treasures and fought for the privileges of his see and family with vindictive zeal. The other half was different. He had met St Bernard and had visited Citeaux. He was so impressed by the man and his order that he swore to join Clairvaux before he died, and lived out most of his archiepiscopal reign under the shadow of this future renunciation of the world, which finally took place in 1177. He encouraged Cistercians to settle in his province, and sank his differences with King Valdemar whenever that ruler was prepared to back the causes he believed in, especially the war on the heathen. He was an invaluable ally on crusade, because he talked the language of the soldiers and carried with him a network of noble kinsmen, as well as believing in the spiritual value of what he was doing. It was the threat of his anathema and the example of his personal participation which got Valdemar’s first attack on the Rugians under way in 1159; it was his rebuke that stopped the Danes from resting under their ship-awnings while pursuing the Rugians in 1160 (‘What! Buried before you’re dead?’
³⁰
); and it was he who in 1168 insisted that Valdemar stop his men from plundering Arkona, once the inhabitants had agreed to accept baptism and pay tribute. He probably had a hand in the sending of monks across the Baltic to Kolbacz and Dargun in the 1170s, and certainly assisted the consecration of the first missionary bishop to the Estonians, Fulk, in 1167.

Eskil’s successor, and somewhat uneasy partner in war and the encouragement of monasteries, was another magnate’s son turned bishop, Absalon of Roskilde (1158–92) and Lund (1178–1202). Absalon was also a patron and friend of the new orders, and a fanatical enemy of heathendom, but his approach was simpler than Eskil’s: he had been brought up with King Valdemar, and believed that the Church’s best interest lay in supporting the king’s, and in extending his power as widely as possible.
This meant fighting all his wars, not merely those against the heathen, and spending most of his life in the saddle or on the gangway of his ship; tactics, reconnaissance, raiding, military discipline, coastal patrols, espionage, subversion and terrorism were an essential part of his public duty as he saw it. From the start, according to the historian Saxo, who described much of his life and served him, ‘he deemed it vain to foster religion inwardly, if he let it founder outwardly, and he acted the pirate as much as the prelate. For it is no less religious to repulse the enemies of the public faith than to uphold its ceremonies.’
³¹
This is a long way from what is generally thought of as the Cistercian ideal, and, indeed, Absalon was no monk and never renounced the world; but his obsession with defeating and converting the unbeliever made him a powerful exponent of the crusading idea, and his ability to back this idea with the whole military strength of his king and country gave it a gruesome reality. He was no mere Slav-hater: he appears to have enjoyed good relations with those Wends who were not at war with him, and to have willingly served them as liaison-officer with his king. But, when it came to war, he outdid his comrades in arms; he was even prepared to prevent peace offers from being interpreted to the king if he thought they were not worth listening to, and might interrupt a successful assault.

Among the Saxons there were equally aggressive clerics, but the occupation of Slav lands by Saxon invaders made the problem of conversion as immediate as that of military power. The work of Vizelin was carried on after his death in 1154 by several disciples, but perhaps his most influential successor was Bern, a Cistercian monk from Amelungsborn in Saxony who became a mission-bishop among the Abotrites from 1158, first at Mecklenburg, then at Schwerin. Bern persuaded the local ruler, Nyklot’s son Pribislav, that he had more to gain by fostering the Church and joining in the war on heathendom than by opposing it as his father had done. This achievement was all the more remarkable as between 1160 and 1167 Pribislav was driven out of his ancestral land by Bern’s patron, Duke Henry the Lion; and, when reinvested as the prince of Mecklenburg, he had nothing to thank for it except his own hard fighting and political shrewdness – it was not a reward for his conversion, which had taken place in 1160, before his disinheritance. Pribislav became an ally of the Saxon duke, an enemy of the pagan Rugians, a friend of the Cistercians (who came to Doberan, the abbey where he buried his wife in 1172) and an active assistant in Bern’s work of conversion. In a sense,
Bern achieved by diplomacy and persuasion what the crusaders failed to achieve by war; but not really. He believed in fighting for the faith, and in the violent extirpation of paganism, as is shown by his joining in the 1168 campaign against Rügen, but the prestige he enjoyed among the Abotrites was not due only to the knowledge that the Saxon duke and his armies were behind him. He merely learned by bitter experience that conversion is much easier when the local ruler is on your side, and took pains to bring this about; as a result, the landless mission-bishop whom Pope Adrian IV had sent out in 1158 died in 1191 a rich and powerful prelate with a thriving and expanding diocese, covering all the mainland territory of Rügen as well as the Abotrite lands. There was a Saxon count at Schwerin, Gunzelin, who made his fortune on a small share of conquered Slav territory, but the bishop did better, in terms of both wealth and political importance; it cannot have harmed the popularity of the idea of converting the heathen to demonstrate that missionary work brought material rewards.

These three examples will be enough to give an idea of the sort of church-leader that fostered the crusade against the Wends in the period after 1147. The belief that fighting the heathen was good for the soul was older. It appears in the ‘Magdeburg Appeal’ of 1108, and in the
Song of Roland
(
c.
1135). Saxo has a story about an old German knight who, in about 1166, reproached Duke Henry the Lion for not pursuing the war on the Slavs with sufficient vigour. He reminded the duke that he had been ‘dedicated’ to fight this war by his guardians while still a child, and would incur God’s anger by neglecting their vow. ‘For my part,’ he claimed, ‘I have received three wounds in my body while serving in that war promised long ago. And, if, while fighting in the same cause, I had added two more to these, I would presume at the Last Judgement to look with audacious eyes at the wounds of Christ, which would be the same number as mine.’
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The story is an obvious invention, but it shows the sort of attitude the veteran crusader might have been expected to have, and the writers who describe these wars are apt to decorate their narratives with miraculous incidents that proved the spiritual value of the fighting.

The most important of these writers are Helmold and Saxo Grammaticus. Helmold, a Saxon priest working in the frontier parish of Bosau in Wagria, wrote his
Chronica Slavorum
(‘Chronicle of the Slavs’) in two stages between 1167 and 1172, as a continuation of Adam of Bremen’s
Gesta
. He had been trained under the influence of Vizelin, in his house of regular canons at Neumünster (Faldera), and was chiefly concerned with tracing the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity. This aim provided him with an inflexible standard of judgement: the peoples, princes and policies that aided conversion were good and worthy of record, and all that impeded or ignored it was bad and fit only to be condemned. The wars on the Wends were not always to his liking, because they often failed to win souls; and the reason for this, he insisted, was that they were waged not primarily to extend the Church, but in accordance with the ‘selfish’ political ends of the duke, his vassals and the king of Denmark. In the old days, the emperors had neglected their duties in the North, and thus ‘the imperial Henrys certainly retarded the conversion not a little’; in more recent times, Christian princes were either too friendly with the heathen, or too greedy for their lands and silver to care about their souls –— ‘the princes used to protect the Slavs for the purpose of increasing their incomes’, and until 1167 ‘no mention has been made of Christianity, but only of money’,
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in all Duke Henry’s Slav wars. Nevertheless, Helmold was not against war; it merely had to be the right kind of war, fought with the right motives against the right target. If Henry and Valdemar would only combine and attack the heathen, all would be well; if they would only follow up victory with religious indoctrination, there would be rejoicing in heaven. Helmold was a firm believer in a crusade that never happened. He is interesting both because of this misplaced idealism and because of his interest in the Slavs themselves, their beliefs and reaction to Christianity; nearly every generalization about the paganism of the Wends goes back to his text.

The Danish historian Saxo wrote his ‘History of the Danes’ (
Gesta Danorum
is the title of the most recent edition, probably wrongly) between about 1185 and 1215, using the reminiscences of Bishop Absalon for the period after 1150 or so. Nothing is known about Saxo, except that he was a cleric of vigorous literary pretensions whose father and grandfather had fought for the king, and who served Absalon and glorified him. For Saxo, the war on the Wends was the Punic War of the Baltic, a wholly magnificent effort by a warrior nation under the leadership of two heroic saviours: Absalon and Valdemar. He was interested in the spiritual regeneration of the heathen Slavs, but much more interested in the political regeneration of Denmark, and he seems to have believed
that both aims were equally acceptable to God. He was writing at a time when Denmark was a powerful and prosperous kingdom, and his concern was to give this kingdom a past as glorious as the present. He is, therefore, a highly tendentious and selective writer. However, his blind faith in the rightness of war and
Realpolitik
makes him an excellent witness, both of campaigns and of the attitudes of campaigners; he is not, like Helmold, embarrassed by spiritual reservations.

The two main reasons he gives for the war on the Wends are retaliation and imperialism, and there is no reason to quarrel with this interpretation. By 1158 a generation of coastal raids had brought Denmark low:

Helmold testifies that the Wendish slave-markets were thronged with Danish captives at this time, and condemns the Danish kings for doing nothing about it. Thus the natural desire to ‘get their own back’ must have led many Danes to join in the campaigns of King Valdemar both before and after the conquest of Rügen in 1168–9; but the king himself was increasingly concerned to acquire new territory and vassals along the south coast of the Baltic, and become the ruler rather than the scourge of the Wends. Saxo approved of both these ambitions; good servant, bad master, was his view of the Slav. Nevertheless, he atttached importance to the religious consequences of the wars, and was fully convinced that the Danes were fighting the devil as well as the visible enemy. The destruction of idols and the rooting out of‘vain superstition’ were the by-products of Danish aggression, but none the less admirable for that, and he justified the continuing of the war against the Christian princes of Pomerania in 1170–85 by claiming that their subjects were not true Christians, but still half sunk in heathendom. The argument is
specious, but it is interesting that he thought it worth making; and he even explains the downfall of Henry the Lion in 1181 as the result of the duke’s failure to respect the Church at home or extend it among the Slavs. His work shows how the crusading fleece had become wearable by even the most self-confident wolf; why, for example, Valdemar had a pilgrim’s palm-frond stamped on one of his coin-dies, and appears to have used the white-cross flag of the Hospitallers as his war-banner.

After 1147 the war on the heathen Slavs was fought without the benefit of papal authorization, or any of the apparatus of a formal crusade; there was no vow, no
ad hoc
legatine commission, no special preaching or promises of crusade privileges. Pope Alexander III congratulated Bishop Absalon on the conquest of Rügen in 1169, but the news had come to him out of the blue; it was not part of papal strategy. When Alexander did send a crusading Bull to the Christians of the North, probably in 1171, its wording suggests that he thought the Slav wars were over, and that the new target should be the Estonians of the east Baltic. And the next appeal was
Audita tremendi
, calling all the faithful to the defence of the Holy Places and the reconquest of Jerusalem (Christmas 1187); there was no allowance there for collateral action in the North, and in the event it brought a force of Danes and Norwegians to Palestine. However, the campaigns of Henry the Lion and Valdemar against the Wends may be viewed as wars carried on successfully in the shadow of the unsuccessful 1147 crusade.