The Northern Crusades (24 page)

Prussia was made ‘St Peter’s patrimony’ in 1234, but Innocent IV gave more to the Order than Gregory IX would have approved of. By the second half of the century, the Order was independent of two of the local bishops and controlled the third. It had imposed military service, labour service and legal jurisdiction on all converts, and would only grant political freedom as a privilege to a favoured elite. It aimed to keep two-thirds of any future conquests, and was accused of rejecting all means of converting the heathen other than conquest in war and forcible baptism. Something had gone wrong. But it was not just a case of an unruly Order defying papal instructions, for neither the knight-brothers, nor the missions, nor the succeeding popes were able to keep to the pure doctrine of Innocent III; both local conditions and political realism at the Curia led to its modification.

Innocent’s programme for Livonia had not solved the problem of how to maintain an unwelcome mission. He believed that force should be used only to protect it, and repudiated the old-fashioned idea of conversion at the point of the sword. But at Riga, and on the Vistula, the missions were situated among peoples for whom raiding and plundering were normal incidents in the annual routine. The choice for the missionary
was either to dig in, surround himself by a stockade and a military escort, and hope that prospective converts would come to him (in which case, as Bishop Christian found in Prussia, progress would be extremely slow) or else to join in, take sides, offer weapons and military help along with baptism, and establish a lordship (in which case progress of a kind could be spectacular, as with Bishop Albert in Livonia). But, if the mission took the second course, there was little chance of a state run for the benefit of converts. Instead the convert became a recruit in a society organized for war, where the priority was victory rather than justice or indoctrination.

Nevertheless, the Curia tried to ensure that in that kind of society the native populations enjoyed a measure of freedom. In 1225 the legate William of Sabina went round Livonia explaining to converts what their rights actually were, and to the Sword-Brothers how far they could go in exploiting their conquests. There were to be tithes, but no other taxes; the conquerors would have the power to judge, but not to impose ordeals or capital punishment; they could exact labour services but not to excess. Such was William’s interpretation of the general instructions given him by Honorius III: ‘You are to preserve all those who have been brought to the faith under the special lordship of the Roman Church, and promise a measure of liberty to prospective converts.’
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This was reaffirmed by Gregory IX: ‘If any slaves, or any under the sway of other rulers shall accept baptism… you must get the weight of their servitude somewhat reduced, and secure for them the freedom to confess their sins, go to church, and hear mass.’ In recommending this minimal programme, the Curia was supported by the self-interest of the ruling elites; if they were to maintain themselves against numerically superior pagan forces, they had to win the loyalty or at least the quiescence of their subjects. As Gregory IX wrote to William in 1239, ‘men signed with the mark of Christ must not be worse off than they were as limbs of the devil’.
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This was the lesson which the legate James drew from the rebellious state of the Prussian converts in the 1240s. He made the Order safeguard itself by conceding a ‘bill of rights’ to converts at Christburg in 1249. They were allowed to own freehold property, and bequeath it to near kinsfolk instead of letting it be taken by the tribe in default of male issue, as under paganism. They were to sell, buy, litigate and worship on a footing of equality with Germans and Poles. They were to be eligible for knighthood and priesthood. They were to be subsidized by
the Order when they built their own churches. As a result, the conversion proceeded steadily until 1259. The knight-brothers gained allies among the unconquered Balts, and the friars reported success in instructing would-be Christians. Churches were built inland, as well as along the rivers and coast. An attempt to establish an archbishopric in Prussia failed, but in 1251 a papal court at Lyon arranged a general settlement between the Order and the bishops so that all parties would, in future, be able to co-operate in the work of conversion without quarrelling over lines of demarcation. This was the last achievement of the former legate, William of Sabina.

However, the rebellions of 1259 to 1263, and the twenty years’ fight for survival that followed, put an end to the active intervention of papal legates on behalf of Prussian and Livonian converts. The result was that the Teutonic Order granted the Christburg liberties to a smaller number of Prussians than had originally been intended – only to the most loyal and powerful native families, not to whole tribes. For these favoured collaborators, Christianity brought great material advantages – property rights, rights of inheritance, freedom from tribal or communal discipline; and, if the conquered peoples were not better off under the Teutonic Knights, this was not simply because the knight-brothers wished to oppress them. As the wars dragged on, the real choice facing the Baltic nations was not between subjection to the Order and liberty but between two forms of dependence, either on the Order or on the Lithuanians. In either case, they had to fight or work for a military machine that was not greatly concerned about their souls.

Therefore the papal attempt to supervise and regulate the conversion of the heathen in this corner of Europe was not successful. On the whole, baptism remained a consequence of defeat in battle, and admission to the Church meant subjection to the victors. Neither Livonia nor Prussia became a ‘land of St Peter’; but neither became the exclusive property of the Teutonic Order. What the popes had done to preserve the independence of the archbishopric of Riga and its suffragans, and to establish the Dominicans (at Chelmno, Elbing, Riga and Reval) and Franciscans (at Torun, Chelmno and Braunsberg) could not be undone. While these churches and houses remained active, the Order’s treatment of its converts continued to be scrutinized and criticized.

Until about 1200 the differences between the rites and religious outlooks of the Eastern and Western Churches seem to have meant little in North-East Europe. They did not prevent marriages between the ruling dynasties of Russia, Scandinavia, Germany and Poland, or the coexistence of Orthodox and Latin churches in the mixed communities of Gotland and Novgorod. They did not prevent a Russian prince from allowing Canon Meinhard to set up his Latin mission on the lower Dvina.

The expansion of this mission into a militant lordship first brought home the danger of expanding Roman Catholicism to the north Russians. Not only was Russian hegemony over the Letts and Estonians pushed aside by armed force, but, in addition, the Latin insistence that these peoples should pay tithe to the clergy of Riga made it impossible for Orthodox churches to take part in their conversion. However, there is no evidence that the Russian clergy had yet made much effort to spread Christianity here, and the Riga priests justified their exclusiveness by sneering at their inactivity: to them, the Greek Church was ‘always a sterile and unfruitful mother’.
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This lack of serious competition for converts meant that Bishop Albert and the Sword-Brothers had no immediate interest in turning their occasional wars with Russian princes into wars on the Eastern Church. The Russians were too valuable as customers, and too troublesome as invaders, to be antagonized more than was necessary; if they could be persuaded to keep away from the Letts and Estonians, Riga was content. Similarly, the Russian princes were more concerned with pursuing their own internal quarrels than with the loss of unreliable tributaries on their western frontiers – a loss made up by gains through trade with the newcomers. Neither side could afford to maintain a properly defended frontier.

Meanwhile, Constantinople fell to Latin crusaders, and Innocent III attempted to impose his own authority and the Latin rite on the whole Eastern Church. He failed; but his successors were committed to following his example, especially on the western fringes of the Byzantine world, and where the see of Riga and the archbishopric of Novgorod shared a frontier.

In 1222 Honorius III insisted that the Greek rite was not to be allowed
in any lands controlled by Latins.
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In 1224 Dorpat was captured and made a Latin see, dedicated to St Peter, and the legate William of Sabina instructed the bishop to enter what he considered the promising mission field of Russia. Despite repeated invitations to turn Catholic, the Novgorodians were obdurate; in 1234 Prince Yaroslav devastated Dorpat, and then began obstructing the Latin mission in Finland. When William reappeared in 1237, as the agent of Gregory IX, he decided to use force rather than persuasion, and began organizing a crusade of Latin powers against Novgorod.

It has been argued that he was encouraged by the irresistible advance of the Golden Horde of Mongols, which reached the Volga in 1236, and wound its way towards Novgorod throughout 1237 and early 1238. But this argument assumes that the Curia had a better knowledge of what was going to happen in the interior of Russia than the Russians had themselves. The complete unpreparedness of the central Russian princes in Vladimir and Riasan shows that they had no idea where the Horde was going; it might have turned south to Kiev at any moment, and the fact that it had got to within sixty-six miles of Novgorod before it did so was something that no one could have foreseen. As it was, Prince Alexander Nevsky was so unconcerned by the Mongols that he did nothing at all to meet them; according to the Novgorod Chronicler it was prayer that saved the city, not the prince. In 1239 it emerged that the Horde had turned south, and had left Russian territory; it was not until 1240 that Gregory’s crusade got under way, with the Swedish raid up the Neva and the conquest of Izborsk and Pskov by the Danes and the Teutonic Order, and there it stopped. When Alexander Nevsky led his troops into Livonia in spring 1242, the boot was on the other foot: the Horde had penetrated far into Poland and Hungary, and the papacy was begging the Teutonic Order to come south and help resist its progress.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that William of Sabina timed the crusades of 1240–41 to coincide with the weakness of Novgorod; but this weakness was caused by the quarrels of Prince Alexander with other Russian princes, and with his own subjects, who expelled him after he had defeated the Swedes. These dangers were more immediate than the incalculable menace of the Golden Horde, and they gave Gregory IX’s plan at least a chance of success. The other factor in his favour was the desire both of the Teutonic Order and of King Valdemar II of Denmark to take over all or part of Livonia and Estonia after the collapse of the
Sword-Brothers in 1237. Only the pope could dissolve that disreputable Order, and dispose of the lands it had occupied; by granting half of Estonia to Valdemar in 1238, and Livonia to the Teutonic Knights, he satisfied both parties and put them in his debt. Assistance given to his crusade against the Russians was evidently part of the deal, although neither could well afford it. The Order was fully committed to another Holy War in Prussia, and had barely enough knights to hold Livonia; Valdemar was more immediately concerned with restoring his authority in Estonia by disseising unreliable vassals than with pushing on to the east.

However, the campaign began. The Swedes sailed up the Neva towards Ladoga, and were repulsed, in July 1240. In September, armies under the Teutonic Knights occupied Izborsk and Pskov. A friendly Russian governor was put in charge of Pskov, and early in 1241 the crusaders occupied Vod (Watland) and Ingria, the lands between Novgorod and the Finnish Gulf. Then the citizens recalled their prince, and the tables were turned. By the autumn of 1241, the invaders had been driven out of Vod; early in 1242 (according to the First Novgorod Chronicle),

The Livonian Rhyme-Chronicler saw it differently. He claimed that the Order had left only two knight-brothers to hold Pskov, and that Alexander triumphed by the lake because the Order’s forces were outnumbered sixty to one and surrounded. Some of the Estonian contingent – from Dorpat, apparently, not from Danish Estonia – were lucky enough to get away, but the loss of life was not severe: twenty brothers were killed, and six were captured. It was a disaster because it meant the abandonment of Pskov – not because the Order was decimated, or because Novgorod was saved; by this time, the eastward offensive appears to have halted. If the legate had planned to occupy Novgorod itself, he had failed to muster enough men, and he had underestimated the military potential of his enemy.