The Northern Crusades (18 page)

Another innovation was the stone tower. The Teutonic Knights were experienced castle-builders in Palestine, but in the North they had to begin without labour, without local skills and with few deposits of workable stone; they had to make do with wooden blockhouses ringed by pallisades. Valdemar I had proved how effective brick towers could be as coastal defences, but the art of brickmaking was not yet widely known in the North outside Denmark, and, in any case, it needed manpower and settled conditions not available in the east Baltic. The alternative was masonry, a skill well established among the Saxons since counts began putting up stone castles in the early twelfth century; and it appears to have been emigrant masons from Germany who enabled the Knights to replace their first blockhouses with towers, and thus escape their enemies’ most dangerous weapon, fire. There were probably no more than five such towers in Prussia by the 1250s, and perhaps ten in Livonia, but their importance was crucial: they kept small garrisons alive when they would otherwise have been overwhelmed. In the fourteenth century brick would succeed stone as a cheaper and more readily available material.

And, finally, there was artillery – especially the crossbow, which had become a favourite weapon of the German merchant-venturer by 1200, and an indispensable arm of city militias. It was not a knightly instrument, and it was not the Sword-Brothers or Teutonic Knights who brought it to the North, but without it they would not have won their early struggle for survival; its accuracy and penetrating power shortened the odds considerably in the battle between many and few. Magnified into the ballista, or giant catapult, and mounted on a tower or wall, it became a weapon that could fell groups of men in close-packed assault, and deter attackers from otherwise flimsy defences.

These three examples are chosen for their immediate usefulness in the waging of war, but there were other innovations, in the fields of building, tool-making, ironwork, pottery, husbandry, fishery and carpentry, which gave material substance to the claim of the armed
knights that they were making new societies out of barbarian lands. These changes did not come out of mass-books, or from Rules that bound their observers to lives of material austerity; they came from a necessary partnership with secular Germans obsessive in the pursuit of profit, land and lordship, and infectiously ingenious at getting what they wanted. North-East Europe was about to succumb to a combination of religious and economic forces which its home-grown civilizations had few means of resisting, but to which they adapted with variable success. By 1300, Low German, the language of Lübeck but not of the Prussian Knights, had become the common language of business throughout the region, from the North Sea to Novgorod, and all the peoples round the Baltic were competing for shares in the increasing wealth of the North. In this scramble, Teutonic Knights, crusaders, colonists and natives were competitors, unequally matched.

During the thirteenth century, the east Baltic world described in chapter I was transformed by military conquest. First, the Livs, Letts and Estonians, then the Prussians and the Finns, underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes dispossession or extermination by groups of Germans, Danes and Swedes. Four new countries were born: the ‘dominions’ of Livonia and Prussia, and the ‘duchies’ of Estonia and Finland, all firmly anchored to Latin Christendom and open, to a greater extent than ever before, to the influx of people, ideas, trade and technical innovations from the West. In 1200 the limit of Latin Christendom could be taken as a line running 700 miles north from Danzig, by way of Gotland and the Åland islands to the mouth of the Umea river on the Swedish coast. By 1292 it ran between 150 and 300 miles east of that line, including a land-mass equal in area to the whole of Britain and supporting a population probably less than a quarter of the supposed 5 millions then inhabiting Britain. All this conquering was in some sense a fulfilment of the programme first put forward by Alexander III in
Non parum animus noster
. A new archbishopric and eight new bishoprics shared responsibility for these souls, many of them new converts or still unbaptized, and garrisons of knights and armed monks were posted along the new frontier to keep them from the world of heathendom and Greek Orthodoxy that lay to the east. For knights and armed monks had carved these lordships and bishoprics on the backs of indigenous populations for whose benefit all holy writ had been simplified into the catch-phrase ‘Compel them to come in.’

The best-documented conquests were those undertaken by the military Orders, and the first of these was the subjugation of the peoples who were brought together under the authorities of Livonia by the bishop
of Riga and his armed monks, the Sword-Brothers. This process marked the coming of a new concept, and a new technique of subjection, to the Far North, and made the old systems of supremacy obsolete. Before 1200 the Dvina-dwellers had already been subject to outsiders. The Russians of Polotsk had established a principality at Kukenois, and were obeyed by a Lettish under-king atjersika (Gercicke), halfway downriver from Polotsk to the sea. The princes of Novgorod and Pskov took tribute from the northern Letts and the southern Estonians at the forts of Odenpäh (Otepää), founded in 1116, and Dorpat (Tartu), founded in 1133; and the Lithuanians had a hold on the Selonian Letts south of the river. These overlordships were discounted by German invaders after 1200 as in some sense spurious or illicit, and were subverted wherever possible. By 1250 most Russian princes had acquiesced in their exclusion from these lands, and had come to terms with the new masters, who were good customers if bad neighbours.

There are two main sources, both contemporary, full and representative of the German groups to which their authors belonged. The earliest is Henry’s
Chronicle of Livonia
, written in Latin between 1225 and 1229 by a mission-priest who had shared in the birth-pangs of the colony and was still alive in 1259, working in the church he had founded at Papendorp among the Letts. Henry was interested in warfare, and described the annual campaigns in detail; but he appears also to have loved the indigenous peoples who submitted to the rule of his church, and to have seen this submission as an act that gave them the chance of a new and better life in both worlds. Before baptism they stole, robbed, murdered, broke oaths, committed incest and polygamy and behaved like fools; after, they came to their senses, went to judges for wrongs to be righted, and, after some backsliding, settled down to lives of virtue. Therefore he approved of whatever methods were used to secure baptism.

Some methods were humane; as when in the winter of 1205–6 the bishop of Riga put on a miracle play to explain Christian doctrine to the Livs. But for the most part he gathered in his flock by war, and even in the miracle play the battle-scenes were so well done that the audience panicked and tried to run away.
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In 1211 the Sword-Brothers and the Christian Letts marched to destroy the Estonians in the fort of Fellin (Viljandi). The besiegers first showed the garrison their Estonian captives, and offered to spare their lives if they would surrender and be baptized.
The garrison refused, and the prisoners were all killed and thrown into the moat. The siege continued for five days, with heavy casualties on both sides; then the Brothers repeated their offer. The Estonians answered; ‘We acknowledge your God to be greater than our gods. By overcoming us, he has inclined our hearts to worship him.’
⁵⁴
They surrendered, and the survivors were sprinkled with holy water and catechized. Henry’s comment is that the clergy were right to postpone full baptism for a while, since so much blood had been shed. He saw nothing wrong in this approach to conversion, because for him voluntary adherence to the faith and baptism under threat of death were both God’s will; it did not matter by what means the number of the baptized increased.

However, he believed that after baptism the convert should be carefully instructed in the meaning of his faith and fairly treated by his new rulers. He had no time for colonial profiteers – tribal judges who took bribes, knights who encroached on native property, extortionate priests – because such men undid God’s work. The new order had to be better than the old, not only because it was Christian, but also because it was meant to give subject populations peace, plenty and self-confidence; and Henry was writing during a peaceful interlude which he took to be proof that the previous bloodshed and devastation had been worthwhile.

As it turned out, he was wrong. During the next sixty years all the early battles had to be fought over again, the land resubjugated, the martyrdoms reiterated. His illusions about the peaceful transformation of the Letts were to be shattered again and again in his own lifetime; and the Sword-Brothers, whom he liked to see as the obedient agents of the bishop and his missions, were to be exposed as an international scandal, and taken over by the Teutonic Knights. The armies of the Blessed Virgin were to suffer twelve great defeats before her people could live in security. And the voice which came from Livonia at the end of the century was much harsher.

It spoke Middle High German, and belonged to the anonymous knight – perhaps a member of the Teutonic Order – who wrote a rhyming history of Livonia.

The
Livländische Reimchronik
gives the viewpoint of the monastic knight, rather than that of the missionary. The Virgin, whom Henry saw as the universal mother, is here a war-goddess. God is a hard master, whose service is military. The pay is salvation, but the only sure way of earning it is martyrdom: death at the hands of his enemies. Success in battle is one proof of his goodness, but he bestows it capriciously. What God likes best is martyrdom, and, next to martyrdom, the killing of heathen men, women and children, the burning of their houses, the lamentations of the bereaved.

Therefore the Teutonic Knights and their masters are continually going into battle against hopeless odds, in search of death rather than victory, and they set out on gratuitous (and often unsuccessful) expeditions against peaceful tribes because God’s lust for empire will not give them rest. He reveals himself in blood and fire; to kill and burn is to reveal him. The Rhymer even describes the mendicant Orders as joining the knight-brothers in this kind of mission. When the Order devasted Samogitia in 1255, he claims,

For, while God welcomed the voluntary adoption of the faith by heathen peoples, the only way of ensuring that the conversion was genuine was by bringing them to unconditional surrender, or, as with the Semigallians in 1290, by allowing only those who surrendered to remain in their country. A truce never paid; it was always better to fight, even unsuccessfully. The work of the unarmed missionary was always suspect, as in Lithuania during the 1250s, when the king accepted baptism and then allowed his people to attack the Order’s troops. The Teutonic Knights are never presented as preachers, and it is implied that their willingness to undergo martyrdom is worth more to the Church than any amount of verbal proselytizing.

The attitude of the Rhymer towards the natives is less paternal than Henry of Livonia’s, but not wholly unsympathetic. If they opposed the Order, they deserved no mercy whatever, but their valour as enemies was not denied. Their warriors go by the same epithets –
vromer helt, degen
(noble hero, man of valour) – as those of the Christian armies, and their successes are never played down. If they assist the knight-brothers they pass muster, and win unstinted praise for their deeds if they stand their ground in battle and not much blame if they run away. The Rhymer appears not to care much whether they go to church; but he likes to describe the loyal Curonians marching home laden with justly earned
booty and celebrating the Order’s victories. Even during peace-time, Christian allies such as Mindaugas of Lithuania are regarded as honourable men, entitled to respect, and, when the Lithuanians decide to break this peace, their motives are presented as rational: they want to prevent their country from being taken over by outsiders.

Nevertheless, just as God compels his servants to fight, so the devil drives the heathen Samogitians into battle by the inflammatory words of his agents, the sacrificer or
bluotekerel
. The war is really between two sets of war-gods, both using brave and honourable men as their pawns, and it so happens that God and his Mother, who use Christians, are the stronger. Battle is therefore inevitable; there is no other way of demonstrating to the enemy that his gods are wrong. The Christian wins both ways: by martyrdom, through defeat, and by converting the enemy, through victory. Therefore the Rhymer can look back on ninety blood-stained years without regret. Not, like Henry of Livonia, because war had led to peace and conversion, but because his side had come out top in the end.

These two sources, and many others, represent the opinions of the conquerors; none come directly from the conquered. What these thought can only be deduced from the number of times they tried to shake off their masters and the new religion, but this is inconclusive evidence. Some remained loyal at all times; others, like the Estonians of Fellin, accepted the verdict of battle as just, and served in the armies of the newcomers as a more effective way of pursuing longstanding local quarrels, or of excluding other invaders. German traders were, after all, a source of profit, and the natives’ own tribal chiefs had schooled them in devastation long before the foreigners moved in.

The Riga mission began as a family enterprise. The head of the family was Hartwig II, archbishop of Bremen (1185–1207), who spent his reign trying to regain lost territory for his once-glorious see, and reassert his rights. When he heard that an ancient canon of the house of Segewold in Holstein (a part of his diocese) had settled on the distant river Dvina to preach the word, he had the imagination to make him bishop of the Livs. After all, there had been a time, before 1103, when Hamburg-Bremen had exercised spiritual authority over the entire Northern world. Meinhard, the newly appointed bishop, made little progress. He bribed the Livs to accept baptism, by showing them how to build stone-walled forts at üxküll and Holm, and then found that they had no intention of
staying baptized. The pope wrote to him and advised him to use compulsion, but how? The German Dvina merchants wanted only to trade, the Swedes only to plunder; Meinhard died in 1196 after a harassed old age, and Hartwig sent out a younger man to replace him, the Cistercian abbot Berthold of Loccum, but Berthold sailed back the following year and reported that the situation was untenable. He had tried winning over the Livs with presents and entertainment; they had made it clear that they wanted to get rid of him.