The Northern Crusades (20 page)

The Christian ‘land of Prussia’ began
c.
1200 as a mission by monks from Lekno in Poland; was fostered by Innocent III; furthered by Bishop Christian with Danish help; but won by Teutonic Knights in two simultaneous wars: one against the heathen Prussians, the other against any possible Christian competitors.

The second war was sometimes open, as in 1242–8, when they were fighting Duke Swantopelk of Danzig (Pomerelia), but it was usually diplomatic. Throughout the conquest, the knight-brothers had to manoeuvre carefully lest any other power gain a claim or a foothold in their territory. Lübeck wanted to found colonies on the coast, and succeeded in doing so at Elbing. The Knights of Dobrzyn wanted to retain their lands on the southern Prussian frontier. The princes of Poland wanted shares of conquered Prussia in return for their help, and German princes hoped for dominion over all of it. Papal legates wanted to reserve more land for the bishops, and more liberty for converts, than the Order was prepared to give. German colonists were not always
docile. And, without help from Lübeckers, Poles, papal legates and colonists, the conquest would have been impossible; yet such was the luck and acumen of the Order that in the end it was achieved with only a minimal sharing of sovereignty to placate the bishops.

Nevertheless, it took fifty years. The Prussians were more numerous and better led than the peoples of the Dvina, and before the Order arrived they had successfully resisted all Polish attempts to subdue and convert them. ‘Tanto brevior, quanto coactior’
⁵⁸
was how the Polish historian Vincent Kadlubek described such efforts in about 1220: ‘the harder pressed, the shorter lived’. From 1217 to 1223, Pope Honorius III and Bishop Christian made strenuous efforts to organize an invincible crusading army against the Prussians, but the result was a futile convergence of German and Polish knights on the Chelmno side of the frontier, followed by a devastating heathen retaliation. This was why the duke of Mazovia, Conrad, then sent for the Teutonic Knights. The example of the Sword-Brothers in Livonia gave the Teutonic Knights the key to success. Their first task was to establish a line of river-forts. These they had to use as bases, from which crusading allies could intimidate or attract the riparian and coastal tribes. After that, they could conquer, garrison and open up the interior, and push east up the Niemen.

They began at the Polish fort of Chelmno in 1230.

All previous invasions had gone eastwards into the forests of the interior, but the captain of the Knights at Chelmno, Hermann Balk, concentrated his efforts in the west, along the Vistula. His first expedition, in 1231, secured the river above Chelmno by building a small fort at Torun (Thorn) opposite the mouth of the river Drweca (Drewenz), which flows into the Vistula from central Prussia. An army of Polish and German crusaders mustered there, the following year, and pushed north-east of Chelmno to found a new fort at Marien werder (Kwidzyn); another fort at Reden (Radzyn) protected the ‘Kulmerland’ east of Chelmno. The next crusade, under the young margrave of Meissen, harried the nearby Pomesanian Prussians until they made peace, and supplied Hermann with two large river-boats. With these he pushed north from Marienwerder and founded Elbing (Elblag) on the delta of the Vistula, and Christburg on Lake Dzierzgon, which dominated the country east of Marienwerder. The Pomesanians and Pogesanians found themselves cut off from their main trade-route, and made their peace with the Order. By 1239 there was a garrison at Balga, thirty-five
miles north-east of Elbing on the Frische Haff, and the master was waiting for the next wave of crusaders, to continue the encirclement.

So far, most of the fighting had been done by Polish and German crusaders, and the Order had merely built small timber forts. Losses had been light, and Hermann had been able to detach some of his men to occupy Livonia. But, when the duke of Brunswick arrived with more volunteers, harried the tribes round Balga into submission and left colonists to make settlements in their country, the Order found itself overwhelmed by a concerted attack from both sides of the Vistula delta. A former ally, Duke Swantopelk of Danzig, discovered that the new trading communities at Torun, Marienwerder and Elbing were competing with his own merchants, and that Balga threatened his hold on the sand-spit which enclosed the Frische Haff; in 1242 he came to an understanding with the Prussians, and together they destroyed all but three of the Order’s forts and settlements, and ravaged the Kulmerland.

This was the beginning of a ten years’ war. Swantopelk had a river-fleet of over twenty ships; he built counter-forts to contain the Order’s garrisons, and kept up a continual harassment of German populations. The Prussians soon discovered how to deal with the Order’s offensives, and annihilated two marshals and their armies at Rensen (1244) and Krücken (1249). Heavy-armed knights, big horses, and crossbows gave the Order an advantage on level dry ground within reach of a stockade. Elsewhere, the knight-brothers could be pinned down, cut off, and ambushed. But the Prussians could only attack forts by direct assault or by blockade, and crossbowmen and supply-boats frustrated these attacks. It looked like stalemate, especially when Swantopelk failed to destroy a force of knight-brothers which he had ambushed outside Torun in 1246.

What turned the balance against Swantopelk was the help given the Order by the papal legate and other Polish princes. The Poles wanted to dislodge him from the mouth of the Vistula, and the legate wanted him to co-operate with the Order against the heathen. A crusade was preached against him, and he agreed to make peace and share the Vistula delta with the Teutonic Knights. The Order was saved, but only at a price. In return for papal and German assistance, Master von Grüningen had to promise to endow three independent bishoprics out of his conquests, and to grant civil liberties to all converts. To get help for further conquests, he had to promise shares to Lübeck and the Polish princes; he could not prevent the pope offering the peninsula of Samland to
King Håkon IV of Norway, if he were to succeed in subduing it first. Three unexpected allies saved the Order from having to honour these promises. One was King Ottokar of Bohemia, who came on crusade in 1254, and paid for the building of the Samland fort named Königsberg in his honour. The other was King Mindaugas of Lithuania, whose conversion allowed the unopposed founding of two more forts up the Niemen river, Memel and Georgenburg. By 1259 the Sambian Prussians had been forced to submit – to the Teutonic Knights, rather than to Poles, Lübeckers, papal legates or Norwegians; but whether Samland could be kept free of outside Christian powers in future had yet to be settled.

The third ‘ally’, the Russian prince Daniel of Galicia, had no intention of assisting the Order: he wanted Prussia for himself. Nevertheless, between 1248 and 1254 the elaborate invasions which he and the Polish dukes Semovit and Boleslaw conducted up the Narew river from the Bug basin occupied the most powerful Prussian people, the Yatwingians, while the Order was gaining ground in the North. This pressure also helped drive Mindaugas of Lithuania into his
rapprochement
with the Germans, and in the subsequent decade it was the Russian, and occasionally Mongol, presence on the Bug which prevented the takeover of Prussia by Mindaugas’s successors.

For the defeat of the Livonians at Durbe in 1260 was followed by the military collapse of the Prussian Brothers in the face of a general revolt by their indigenous subjects. Many of their garrisons and colonies were massacred, and the first reinforcement of crusaders was wiped out at Pokarwis. Pope Urban IV, who had been trying to organize a crusade against the Mongols, urged all who had taken the cross to turn north and save the Order, promising full remission of sins for any length of service at all; but by 1264 two Prussian masters had been killed in battle and the Brothers were reduced to a few of their strongest forts. Even Marienwerder had been captured, and Königsberg only survived thanks to reinforcements from Livonia.

This time the Prussian nations were organized by
capitanei
and equipped both with siege-machines and with crossbows. Their knowledge of German enabled them to infiltrate the enemy camp, and they were helped by Duke Swantopelk’s son Mestwin and by the leadership of the Yatwingians, now free of Russian lordship. They showed mastery of river warfare, open battle and sieges. The knight-brothers were very
nearly ousted; but, once again, they were saved by German crusaders, in particular by the duke of Brunswick (1265), the landgrave of Thuringia (1265), the margraves of Brandenburg (1266) and the margrave of Meissen (1272).

The forts were relieved, the waterways reopened, and the bases of the
capitanei
were impoverished by systematic ravaging. Nations were forced either to submit or to emigrate, and if they submitted they had to accept garrisons and the demotion of their chiefs to feudal vassals of the Order. Meanwhile, the chief forts were rebuilt as brick or stone castles: Königsberg in the 1260s, Marienwerder and Marienburg in the 1270s. No papal legate intervened to moderate the process of resubjugation, and no deals had to be made with Polish and other neighbouring princes; all the Lithuanians could do was welcome and resettle those Prussians who fled to the east. All the central nations had submitted by 1277. Some of the Barthians, some of the Scalovians and all the Nadrovians had left their homelands for new lands on the Niemen, where they were joined by Pogesanian refugees, who had made a last bid for independence that year. By 1283 even the Yatwingians had been ravaged beyond endurance. One of their leaders came in with 1500 warriors to live under the Order’s rule, and another took the road to Lithuania with the rest of his nation. The war had become an affair of small guerrilla raids over no-man’s-land, for which the Order employed not German crusaders but bands of converted Old Prussians, who specialized in surprise attacks and furtive massacres. The converts made two more forlorn attempts at revolt, in 1286 and 1295, hoping in both cases that external enemies of the Order – the prince of Rügen and the rulers of Lithuania – would intervene on their behalf; but it was too late. The Teutonic Knights were firmly in the saddle.

The third phase of conquest was thus completed, and the Order was left in undisputed control of the lordship of Prussia, apart from enclaves held by the bishops of Warmia (Ermland) and Pomesania. The see of Samland was held by a nominee of the Teutonic Knights.

This control would have been much harder to establish if the Order’s chief patrons, the pope and the emperor, had not been more intent on fighting each other than on supervising the conquest. Each had a policy that would have brought the Prussian nations and their monastic conquerors under his own lordship; but so suspicious of each other’s interference were they that they preferred to keep outbidding each other for
the friendship of the Order than risk alienating the grand-masters by inhibiting their freedom of action. This was how Hermann of Salza got his initial grants of lordship both from Frederick II and from Gregory IX in 1226 and 1230, and why he was subsequently allowed to take over both the Knights of Dobrzyn and the Sword-Brothers; why the Bull
Pietati proximum
(1234), claiming Prussia for St Peter, and the Imperial Bull of Verona, claiming Courland, Semigallia and Lithuania as fiefs of the Empire (1245), were never made effective, and why the treaty of Christburg (1249) granting liberties to Prussian converts was enforced only up to a point. While papalists and Hohenstaufen fought each other to the death, the grand-masters took their pick of privileges, and thereafter their gains were confirmed and reconfirmed by succeeding popes and emperors, who liked to think of them either as a ‘flourishing limb of the imperial court, the tender plant and creation of the emperors’ (Rudolph of Habsburg’s Privilege of 1273) or as ‘our beloved sons and brothers, who, for long years past have exposed their minds and bodies for the cause of the faith’ (Boniface VIII, 1300).

The story of how the Danish kings reorganized their military system to conquer the Wends has already been told. After 1185 it remained to be seen how far their method of extending lordship through parallel campaigns of coastal devastation and church-building could be stretched. Pope Alexander III had pointed the way to the east for all Scandinavian believers; the growing volume of trade with Novgorod and Polotsk made the destruction of Sambian, Curonian and Estonian sea-power desirable aims, and the subjugation of the homelands of these pirates seemed a feasible way of going about it. Denmark was now a prosperous and united kingdom, well stocked with merchants, knights and monks, and able to bear the expense of war. Accordingly, kings Canute VI (1182–1202) and Valdemar II (1202–41) organized a number of eastward probes to follow up the raid of 1170 which their father, Valdemar I, had sent against the Estonians. Danish fleets attacked Finland in 1191 and 1202, Estonia in 1194 and 1197, ösel in 1206, and Prussia in 1210. These raids may have done some damage, and intimidated a few heathen for a while, but that was all. There were no territorial princes in those parts with whom permanent ties of vassalage could be created and in whose lands
monks could be settled; no Danish missionaries or settlers were prepared to found independent outposts like Meinhard’s at üxküll. And it may be doubted whether the conquest of the eastern Baltic came high on the king’s list of priorities until after 1216. Before that the Danes were busy with the more rewarding task of winning control of the lands between the Elbe and Pomerania. Once the whole Baltic coast from Lübeck to Danzig acknowledged Valdemar II as overlord, it was time to think of annexing less accessible areas in the east.

All this while, the idea of the crusade gained ground. Gregory VIII’s appeal for the reconquest of Jerusalem,
Audita tremendi
, inspired seven of the flower of the Danish nobility to make the journey to Palestine in 1191, and many had joined the north-German contingent which sailed in 1188. The Norwegian author of the work which describes the 1191 expedition (
De profectione Danorum in Hierosolymam
) puts into the mouth of Archbishop Absalon’s brother Esbern a speech to the king and nobility which criticizes the sordid materialism of his own times and conquests undertaken for mere glory, and exhorts the Danes ‘to greater and more profitable contests’. ‘Let us be “partakers of the inheritance of the saints” and share in their labours’, he demanded,
⁵⁹
and in the end over a thousand were said to have responded to the appeal. Further contingents sailed in 1197, 1216 and 1225. Meanwhile, the king and the archbishop were keeping an eye on Hartwig of Bremen and the Livonian mission, and wondering whether sordid materialism and the labours of the saints might be brought together, nearer home.