The Northern Crusades (46 page)

This approach in no way overlooks the fact that the wars against the heathen of the North were fought for the same reason as other wars. The belligerents wanted to capture trade-routes, to win land for the land-hungry, to increase the revenues and reputations of princes and prelates, to prevent piracy, to secure larger shares of natural resources, or any share at all of loot. These motives were always present. But they do not explain why the fighting was construed as a crusade, or why it was necessary to set in motion the machinery of preaching, privilege and redemption. If it was all about fish, fur and wax, or Danish, Swedish and German expansion, there was no need to pretend that it was holy. Moreover, there was no reason why so many outsiders, from the popes to the knights of England, France and Burgundy, should join in. The kings and monastic knights of the Baltic stood to gain more in material ways than those outsiders, but, even with them, the profit motive is not a convincing explanation. They were certainly profiteers, but among their means of getting wealth crusading wars cannot have ranked high. The risk of failure and the cost of warfare were too great, and the practical gains too meagre, to make the books show a profit.

To present these wars as false – either as matters of interest disguised as matters of conscience, or simply as misnamed events – is too easy. This type of judgement is itself fraudulent. It avoids the unavoidable question of why men who were never reluctant to wage war for profit, fame, vengeance or merely to pass the time, without any disguise or pretext, nevertheless chose to claim that certain wars were fought for God’s honour and the redemption of mankind. The answer must be that this claim was regarded at the time as no less real than, say, Edward Ill’s claim to France, or the king of Denmark’s claim to Estonia, or the baronage of England’s claim to represent the community of the realm: logically unsound, perhaps, but worth fighting for, and usually worth a sum of money as well.

There is little point in trying to distinguish between crusades undertaken for pure or spiritual motives and those that were political, papalist, perverted or corrupt in aim, execution or effect (between the First Crusade, and the Fourth, to take the commonest example). Such criticisms were made throughout the Middle Ages and applied to all crusades. They spring rather from the essential ambiguity of the idea, rather than from any measurable failure of idealism. It was never possible to convince all Catholics that crusades were a good thing, nor was it necessary. Holy Wars, like monasteries, provided an outlet for some, but not for all. A crusade was both a religious movement and (after
c.
1185) an enterprise that had to conform to certain legal restrictiojns: it had to be decreed by the pope, preached by the Church, dignified by the granting of privileges and indulgences to recruits, and justified by reference to the interests of Christendom. The Northern crusades were inspired by intermittent local enthusiasm; by appeals from Rome, and by the commission to wage perpetual Holy War which was granted to the Teutonic Knights. It therefore seems legitimate to treat 300 years of diverse warfare as the story of one recurrent phenomenon, and to deal more with the ideas and organization that provided the unifying theme than with the other motives and concerns of the crusaders. Nor is there space for more.

From this point of view, the Northern crusades began as a consequence of the closer involvement of the Baltic world with the civilization of Latin Christendom in the twelfth century. During this period the idea of the Holy War was grafted onto Baltic affairs to meet a need felt by those who wanted to conquer or convert the heathen coastlands, and who had been schooled in or touched by the Jerusalem crusade. These men were not one group, and their aims were not identical, but, in so far as they had a common cause, the Holy War defined it and gave it a structure and a meaning. After the experiments which were tried from the 1140s to the 1200s, a variety of crusading institutions took root: the German monastic Orders of knighthood, the monastic and episcopal states, the papal legations, the cross-wearing kings and kingdoms, and the colonies in conquered lands. Out of the conquests of 1200–1300 two of these institutions emerged as the strongest: the Teutonic Order and the Swedish kingdom. From the 1270s onwards the continuance of the Holy War was entrusted to these two in particular by the papacy. Neither succeeded in overthrowing the non-Catholic powers against which the war was directed, Lithuania and Novgorod-Pskov. Yet both preserved the gains of the thirteenth century against counter-attack, and kept alive the idea on which the enterprise was founded.

Sweden ceased to play a part in this movement after the dying out of the Folkung dynasty in the 1360s and the incorporation of the kingdom into Queen Margaret’s Scandinavian Union. The defining of the Russo-Swedish frontier continued to be a cause of friction under the Union, and occasionally of concern to the papacy, but generated no more crusades. When a Russian war broke out again in the 1490s, the cause of Catholicism was invoked, but in vain.

The Teutonic Order was outmanoeuvred in Prussia by the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, and during the fifteenth century found it increasingly difficult to sustain the crusade tradition in this area, owing to the fact that the Turk had replaced the Lithuanian as the leading non-Catholic power confronting Eastern Europe. The tradition was adopted to justify the defence of Prussia against Catholic foes and the maintenance of the
status quo
inside the province, but could not attract the outside support that was needed for survival.

In Livonia, the Order and its partners kept up the intermittent war on Russian Orthodoxy for longer, but the rise of Muscovy and the near-disaster of 1501–2 made it clear that the price of continuing this war would be annihilation. Both here and in Prussia the driving out of devils by armed force in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had raised up devils seven times stronger.

The start of the Northern crusades had marked a phase in the bringing together of peoples into a common Catholic civilization. Was their end a symptom of the dissolution of that civilization? No. The Baltic was still a Catholic lake in 1500, and the Baltic states were thoroughly integrated members of the Catholic family, some two generations after the crusading had ended. Catholic interests could no longer be served by continuing the Holy War in this region; that was the difference. The rise of Muscovy, Lithuania-Poland and the triple monarchy of Scandinavia was a political revolution which meant that the defence, and extension, of the faith in North-East Europe depended almost wholly on relations between these powers, and the Teutonic Order in Prussia and Livonia was (after 1466) too feeble to count as more than a makeweight.

This list is meant for the student with no knowledge of German, or any of the Slav or Scandinavian languages.

The contemporary sources of geographical information, Adam of Bremen’s
Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum
, Helmold’s
Cbronica Slavorum
, and the lives of Otto of Bamberg by Ebbo and Herbord have been translated, the first two by F. J. Tschan –
The History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen
(New York, 1959) and
Chronicle of the Slavs
(New York, 1935) – and the last by C. H. Robinson, as
The Life of Otto, Apostle of Pomerania
(London, 1920).
Olaus Magnus: A Description of the Northern Peoples
vol. 1, ed. Peter Foote (London, 1996) is a translation of books 1–5 of
De Gentibus Septentrionalibus
. W. R. Mead,
The Historical Geography of Scandinavia
(London, 1981) is the most concise and informative survey, especially chapters 2 and 3, and on Denmark and Sweden in this period see Birgit and Peter Sawyer,
Medieval Scandinavia
(Minneapolis, 1993). Not much of the recent literature on West Slav civilization has been translated into English, but on their towns see Helen Clarke and Björn Ambrosiani,
Towns in the Viking Age
(Leicester, 1991 and 1995), chapter 6, and on their origins Pavel Dolukhanov,
The Early Slavs
(Harlow, 1996). The creation of Russia has been ably reconstructed by Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard in
The Emergence of Rus 750–1200
(Harlow, 1996). M. Gimbutas,
The Balts
(London, 1963) remains useful on the early history and religion of this group. R. E. Burnham,
Who are the Finns? A Study of Prehistory
(London, 1946), and A. Sauvageot,
Les Anciens finnois
(Paris, 1961). On the Lapps (Sami) see Knut Odner in
Norwegian Archaeological Review
, xviii (1985), and Inger Storli in the same journal, xxvi (1993); also Inger Zachrisson in
Social Approaches
, ed. Ross Samson (Glasgow, 1991), 191–9.

Janet Martin has investigated the medieval fur-trade in
Treasure from the Land of Darkness
(Cambridge, 1986) and the concept of a ‘circumbaltic’ culture (Nylen) colours several articles in
Society and Trade in the Baltic during the Viking Age
, ed. Sven-Olof Lindquist (Visby, 1985). For new approaches to medieval Baltic navigation see C. Westerdahl, ‘The use of maritime space’,
Medieval Europe
, 11 (1992) (York). For trading and military interaction with the East: Thomas S. Noonan, ‘The Nature of Medieval Russian-Estonian relations 850–1015’,
Baltic History
(1974) was seminal.

On the genesis of the crusading movement in general, see C. Erdmann,
The Origin of the Idea of Crusade
, trs. M. W. Baldwin and W. Goffart (Princeton, 1977); and for an alternative view, C. Tyerman, ‘Were there any crusades in the twelfth century?’,
English Historical Review
,
cx
(1995) and J. Riley-Smith,
The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
(London, 1995). On the Pomeranian missions, R. Bartlett, ‘The Conversion of a Pagan Society in the Middle Ages’,
History
,
lxx
(1985), and for Slav-Dane relations T. Damgaard-S⊘rensen, ‘Danes and Wends’ in
People and Places
(Woodbridge, 1991), ed. I. Wood and N. Lund. A sketch of the mission-crusade connection is in Elizabeth Siberry, ‘Missionaries and Crusades’ in
The Church and War
, ed. W. J. Shiels (
Studies in Church History
,
xx
(1983)).

Sources for the 1147 campaign are Helmond (trs. Tschan, as above); book
xiv
of
Saxo Grammaticus
(trs. E. Christiansen, British Archaeological Reports int. ser. 84 and 118): and
Knytlinga Saga
, trs. H. Palsson and Paul Edwards (Odense, 1986). On Saxo, see Inge Skovgaard-Petersen, ‘Saxo, Historian of the Patria’,
Mediaeval Scandinavia
, 11 (1969) and B. Sawyer ‘Valdemar, Absalon and Saxo’,
Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire
,
lxiii
(1985), 685–705.

For a new archaeological perspective on the crucial development of Lübeck, see Günter P. Fehring, ‘Origins and Development of Slavic and German Lübeck’,
From the Baltic to the Black Sea
, ed. D. Austin and L. Alcock (London, 1990). Work by Friedrich Lotter, Hans-Dietrich Kahl and Tore Nyberg has superseded earlier interpretations of the Wendish wars and crusades, and Lotter’s is abridged as ‘The Crusading Ides and the Conquest of the Region East of the Elbe’ in
Medieval Frontier Societies
, ed. R. Bartlett and A. Mackay (Oxford, 1989). See also
The Second Crusade and the Cistercians
, ed. M. Gervers (New York, 1991), for H.-D. Kahl, ‘Crusade Eschatology as Seen by St Bernard’ and K. Guth, ‘The Pomeranian Missionary Journey of Otto of Bamberg and the Crusade Movement’.

Malcolm Barber,
The New Knighthood
(Cambridge, 1994) is unmatched on the Templars. A. Forey, ‘The Emergence of the Military Orders’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History
,
xxxvi
(1985), and
The Military Orders
(London, 1992) shed light on the German Orders, as does the useful Helen Nicholson,
Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights: Images of the Military Orders
(Leicester, 1993); and for valuable work on the recruiting of lay crusaders, James M. Powell,
Anatomy of a Crusade
(Philadelphia, 1986). But the essential work on the Teutonic Knights and their mission is in German. Lotter, Wippermann, Paravicini, Boockmann, Kahl, Nowak, Benninghoven, Hellmann and Sarnowsky have all published books or articles over the last twenty years, and have superseded earlier research. The series
Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des Deutschen Ordens
is now over fifty volumes long, and continues to debouch from Marburg.

However, Heldrungen’s eyewitness account of the amalgamation of the Sword-Brothers and the Teutonic Knights is translated from a sixteenth-century German version in Jerry Smith and William Urban’s indispensable
The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1977). And a caustic view of the Order’s rule appears in Indrikis Stern, ‘Crime and Punishment among the Teutonic Knights’,
Speculum
,
lvii
(1982).