The Northern Crusades (23 page)

A comparison between these charters reveals the way in which the Curia worked its way towards each new Holy War by laying stereotype upon stereotype to form a paradigm. It went something like this: first, there are missionaries who ‘spread the net of their preaching for a catch of barbarian souls’, so that ‘the trumpet of sacred eloquence resounds in the innermost recesses of the minds of those barbarians’, and ‘the fountain of the faith distributes its streams among various provinces deluded by idolatry’. Then, some barbarians join ‘the household of God’ in the ‘new plantation of the faith’ and may be expected to become ‘equals in the love of good things, and harmonious in effective works’ with true
believers. Sometimes, however, ‘the Beast rises up, swallowing the multitudes with his gaping mouth, confident that Jordan may flow into his jaws, against whom it is necessary that Christian people gird up their loins’, for ‘the heathen do rage’ and ‘capture youths whom they wear out with continuous and horrifying labour, and immolate in demoniacal fires along with virgins crowned in mockery with flowers, and slay the old men, and slaughter the boys, some piercing with darts, some dashing against trees’. In that case, those ‘who take up arms against the barbarity of those pagans’ and ‘fight back with manful potency’, ‘protected by the armour of God on the right hand and on the left’, at the behest of ‘the Apostolic See which is the general mother of all, and grants the shield of her protection at the request of believers’, must bear in mind that ‘the exercise of piety is the more strenuously to be pursued in such places, in order that the greater impiety may be prevented’, and they must exercise their ‘ministry’ of warfare so that the Church may spread ‘into the place of their encampment, where they stretch the ropes of their tabernacles’, and they may ‘call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind to the wedding-feast of the king of kings’ and ‘green shoots and reeds may spring up where formerly dwelt the owls’.

By such language the crusade was generated and guided. It was not used simply for show. All over Europe there were men trained to respond to such words, and translate them into action, because they were committed by their professions, beliefs, and self-interest to do what the pope wanted. How the twelfth-century popes came to authorize the Northern crusade has already been described. After Alexander III, the Curia was increasingly concerned with North-East Europe, and under Innocent III (1198–1216) this concern took the form of intervening wherever possible in accordance with the theory of papal monarchy -the theory that as the vicar of Christ the pope had responsibility for the spiritual and political welfare of all mankind, and a duty to use both worldly and other-worldly powers to bring about the salvation of all men. Innocent’s successors continued to act according to this belief in the face of strong opposition by the emperors and certain kings; and, in spite of many proofs that the actual power of Rome was limited and inadequate, Honorius III (1216–27), Gregory IX (1227–41), Innocent IV (1243–54), Alexander IV (1254–61), Urban IV (1261–4) and Clement IV (1265–8) were all determined to regulate the Northern world, and ready to employ war, diplomacy, propaganda, administrative action,
bargaining, blackmail and bribery to achieve their ends. The Northern crusade was one of their instruments, although it also served the interests of others, and could be put to use only by compromise and co-operation. The setting up of new governments modelled on hierocratic principles was another; for in societies founded on the indoctrination of newly converted innocents, and governed by monks and bishops, there was in theory a better chance of saving souls.

The old-established churches of Scandinavia were better attuned to these policies than in previous centuries – less subservient to the wishes of their kings, more aware of the doctrine of ecclesiastical liberty. In the twelfth century, a French immigrant, Abbot William of Ebelholt, had been surprised at the way Danish churchmen actually respected the pope and handed over money without grumbling when he asked for it; but there were good reasons for this. In societies that still grudged the payment of tithe, and sometimes bullied and rejected their clergy, the papacy could represent freedom, justice and stability. In the newer colonial churches of the Wendish coast Rome also found servants. The archbishops of Bremen were no longer walking in fear of the great Saxon duke, since the old duchy had disintegrated in 1181. The bishop of Cammin, who governed the Pomeranian churches, was linked to the papacy by an exemption from intermediate ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Throughout the Baltic region, church courts had been established to regulate the discipline of the clergy and the morals of the laity, and, where canon law was respected, so was Rome, as the highest court of appeal. In addition, the popes could count on the new orders of mendicant friars. Both Dominicans and Franciscans were well established in the North by 1250, and were entrusted with the duty of preaching and collecting for the crusades.

Besides these local components of the great ecclesiastical machine, the pope could also make use of commissars sent out to bring the wishes of the centre direct to the periphery. Before the twelfth century, Roman legates had been sent to carry out restricted missions in specified provinces. By 1200 full power to represent the pope was being delegated to
legati a latere, or cardinal-legates, who were entitled to continue functioning even after the death of the pope who had sent them. Favoured prelates could hope to become ‘perpetual legates’, with the power of deciding appeals from the highest provincial church courts, but it was the legates a latere
who were ‘part of the body’ of the pope. They were
co-ordinators, inspectors, reformers, judges, generals and ambassadors, and they were usually given particular instructions about the problems of the Northern crusade and the military Orders. Four of them made a deep impression on the Northern world in this period.

There was William, cardinal bishop of Sabina, an Italian ex-papal notary, ex-Carthusian monk, Dominican sympathizer and bishop of Modena, who held legatine commissions in 1225–6, 1228–30 and 1234–42. There was the Cistercian Baldwin of Aulne, who functioned between 1231 and 1234, first as nuncio, then as full legate, and was sent to clean up Livonia. There was James Pantaleon, archdeacon of Liège, who reorganized Prussia in 1247 – 9. There was Albert Suerbeer, ex-archbishop of Armagh, legate to Russia and the Baltic countries in 1246–50, and legate-archbishop of Riga from 1254 to 1273. When these men reached the Baltic, the pope himself was there; even kings and Teutonic Knights had to listen, and sometimes obey. It was no good pretending that they were ‘false legates with false Bulls’, as the Sword-Brothers claimed of Baldwin of Aulne. They carried commissions which the papal bureaucracy confirmed in messages to the local authorities, and their coming was usually welcomed by all who had outstanding ecclesiastical or political business to settle.

By these various instruments the papacy could, at times, get its way in the North-East as in other quarters of Europe – perhaps more so, given the way political and economic power was distributed. The popes could establish special protection over seafarers, pilgrims and merchants and humanize the law of wreck and salvage; could issue embargoes on the arms trade with pagans and Russians; discourage debt-peonage among the Rugians; divert tithe from church-maintenance to the crusade, or books from old libraries to missions. These are a few random examples of Rome’s intervention. In sum, they amount almost to a power of universal supervision, even if power was exercised mainly at the request of local authorities.

At this point the reader may ask, ‘But were the popes really interested in what happened in North-East Europe?’ Surely they had enough to do defending their own states in central Italy, fighting the emperor, maintaining church rights in the more civilized parts of Christendom, and taxing the more taxable? Surely the crusade against Islam had priority?

The answer, I suggest, is that the popes were so deeply involved in their Italian problems that they could not afford to ignore anything that
affected those problems. The ‘propagation of the faith’ in the Baltic could not be left to itself, because the Germans most concerned in the enterprise, whether monks, merchants or princes, were all connected to Emperor Frederick by interest and lordship; and from 1236 to 1250 he was the foe. As more territory was converted to Christianity, new sources of papal revenue were created, in a century when the popes made financial demands on a much wider range of countries and institutions than ever before. New churches could mean new money, and fresh patronage, and it was not long before fee-paying litigants from these regions began appearing at the Curia and making contributions to the papal treasury – and, so, to the wars in Italy. Relations with the Greek Christians of northern Russia could not be left to arrangements between local interests, because, if these Russians could be made to give up their allegiance to the Eastern Church, the day when the leaders of that church submitted to Rome would be brought nearer, and an effective and Latin empire in the East would redress the balance between the papacy and the disobedient empire of the West. The religious filaments that led from Novgorod to Kiev led on from Kiev to Constantinople, and so connected with the struggle for power in the Mediterranean. The crusade against Islam still had priority. Honorius III expected the bishop of Riga to send money for the reconquest of Jerusalem, even before Livonia was subdued; it was conceded that the Northern crusades were second-best, cut-rate enterprises, for the benefit of penitents with limited resources. However, this very fact made them an essential part of the crusading movement; they filled a yawning gap between the means of most German
crucesignati
and the expense and labour of a passage to the Holy Land.

For these reasons, the popes made a determined bid for power in the Baltic world between 1198 and 1268. Their concern showed itself most clearly in two ways: in their attempts to mould the conquered lands on theocratic lines, and in their attempts to coerce the Russians into adopting Latin Christianity.

Innocent III made it clear that, in the case of Livonia and all future crusading conquests, the bishop was to have supreme political and spiritual authority, and the monk-knights were to act as his agents and
servants, keeping a third of the land and booty they captured for their own use. All conquered pagans were to be placed in the keeping of unarmed missionaries, and converts were to be given political liberty within the framework of a new theocratic state, where power would be exercised only in so far as it served the purposes of Christian law and teaching. In 1212 he claimed that Livonia had been ‘subjugated for us’.
⁷⁴
From 1224 to 1234 his successors attempted, through their legates, to turn all or the greater part of this territory into a ‘land of St Peter’ – a state ruled by vassals of the papal see.

But this programme was never realized in Livonia. The Sword Brothers were already taking more than their share of land and power before Bishop Albert died, and thereafter they became a terror to friend as well as foe. In 1234 Gregory IX was informed that, among their other misdeeds, they had recently killed a hundred of the men enlisted by his legate to enforce papal policies, and that

They had themselves enlisted those Russians and pagans to hold Dorpat for them against the bishop of Leal. They had killed 401 converts, beaten up the Cistercians of Dünamünde, pillaged the bishop’s lands, prevented would-be Christians from receiving baptism from the bishop, and reduced others to slavery. In sum, they had done 40,500 marks’ worth of damage to their Christian neighbours and to the pope himself For such deeds, the Sword-Brothers were never effectively tried or punished, and the results of their unruliness could not be wiped out, even after the Teutonic Knights had replaced them. Livonia remained an inharmonious concert of Christian authorities, where the masters quarrelled and the servants groaned.

In 1253, the see of Riga was raised to an archbishopric and given to Albert Suerbeer, who as legate and archbishop of Prussia had been fighting to reduce the power of the Order for the previous six years. He tried to continue the struggle in Livonia, but was unable to make headway on his own.

In 1267 he went to the length of forming an alliance with a north German prince, Count Gunzelin of Schwerin, against both the heathen and the Teutonic Knights. He had seen his position of supreme spiritual authority in the east-Baltic region steadily undermined by the Order, and he evidently preferred to share his power with a lay
advocatus
of his own choosing than with a monastic Order. The allies prepared for war, but in the following year the Livonian master had to face a Novgorodian invasion under Alexander Nevsky’s son Dmitri. Once he had saved the province from subjugation, he was able to use his influence with the Gotland merchants to rob Gunzelin of the recruits and sea transports he needed for his
coup d’état.
The count went home; the master arrested the archbishop, and released him only after he had promised not to appeal to Rome for redress, or oppose the Order in future. Suerbeer had been made archbishop and legate as a zealous champion of papal power, episcopal immunity and the rights of the convert; he ended his reign in 1273 as a spent force, unable to control either his castles or his chapter, let alone the Teutonic Knights. Riga remained a thorn in their side, but the archbishopric could no longer serve as the keystone of the edifice of papal power in the Baltic provinces.