God's War: A New History of the Crusades

to the Germans and Scandinavians as Wends, related but distinct from the Slavic Poles, Russians and Czechs and the Sorbs to the south and east. Among the Wends, tribal and political groups were sustained by an organized and resilient polytheist religion run by an ordered and powerful priesthood presiding over a network of regional cults and a system of rich local temples stocked with images and idols. Wendish paganism was closely bound up with the tensions between rural territorial princes and the market and trading towns, mainly on the coast, whose religious affiliations reflected often competitive aspirations for autonomy and power. To the Germans and Danes, Wendish princes and towns displayed recognizable political structures and habits. This was less the case further east. From the Vistula to the Dvina and up to the shores of the Gulf of Riga, the Balts were divided into four separate peoples: Prussians, Lithuanians, the Latvians and Curonians. Within these ancient tribal groups, political and religious authority operated on a smaller, less centralized scale than among the Wends. The power of local chiefs depended on their ability to organize the warrior aristocracy of their areas; to dominate the agricultural population from behind substantial earthworks rather than creating settled rural estates; and to exploit an array of fertility cults revolving around numinous places, plants, animals and the dead as well as gods. The tenacity and continued vibrancy of the paganism of the Balts testified to its importance to social and political cohesion. From the Gulf of Riga and Estonia into the Gulf of Finland and beyond were settled a range of Finno-Urgian-speaking communities, some of which existed on the very fringes of settled cultivation. Social structure rested on extended families, who combined when economically or militarily necessary into larger, although still very localized, political associations. The harshness of the environment imposed an intimacy with nature reflected in the religious cults, which helped explain the natural world and offered a chance to mitigate its severity.

Although nothing seems to have come from Magdeburg’s isolated exhortation, the Wendish crusade of 1147 emerged from an indigenous German context that displayed growing interest in fusing political, ecclesiastical and religious aggression. Despite John of Wurzburg’s gloom at the lack of German prominence in Palestine in the 1170s, interest in holy war penetrated German lands as much as those further west.³ The Emperor Henry IV had toyed with at least a pilgrimage and possibly a military expedition to Palestine in 1103–4. Twenty years later Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Conrad III, campaigned in the Holy Land.⁴ The ideology of holy war, even if imported by westerners such as the Flemish clerk at Magdeburg, soon infected German literature as much as politics, with such familiar epic figures as Roland appearing in the unmistakable guise of a crusading miles Christi.⁵ On the German – Slav borderlands, the early twelfth century saw an escalation in conflict over religious and ecclesiastical orientation. Religious observance defined communal identity and political authority on both sides of the shifting frontiers. Conquerors, such as the Christian Boleslav III of Poland (1102–38) in Pomerania, regional lords, such as the Pomeranian princes who accepted baptism in the 1120s, or local rulers, such as Henry, the Christian lord of the pagan Wendish Abotrites (d. 1127), used or embraced Christianity and Christian mission to assert their power, in particular over urban elites wedded to a thriving and wellorganized paganism. Much of the progress of Christianity between the Elbe and Oder valley revolved around the subjugation of independent towns, with their civic cultic shrines and priesthood, to a more amenable church structure run by prelates and priests sponsored and employed by the landed princes. The evangelism of Bishop Otto of Bamberg in Pomerania in 1124 and 1127 involved the violent destruction of pagan temples and the submission of cities such as Stettin.⁶

The new God was unambiguously a German God, His success accompanied by German settlers. Rejection of political subjugation was expressed in religious opposition. Henry of the Abotrites, his rule buttressed by German and Danish mercenaries, having himself converted, allowed Saxon missionaries to lay waste Wendish cultic shrines in his territories. With the Christian priests came the prospect of church taxes, land-grabbing and a loss of political and economic as well as ecclesiastical autonomy. However strong the private or corporate devotional ties to the old beliefs, the political consequences of the choice of paganism or conversion were unmistakable. Religion was politics. After the death of Christianizing Henry, Wendish independence reasserted itself under the vigorously pagan prince Niklot. The end of the independence of the Rugians was marked by the destruction of the temple and public pagan worship at Arkona in 1168 by Valdemar I of Denmark, a more lasting repeat of the enforced baptism of the Arkona garrison by the Danes between 1134 and 1136. Apostasy, as of the Rugians after 1136 and the Wends after 1127, expressed communal identity. Conversion was more important than a matter of faith. Long before the 1147 crusade, political confrontation had been articulated in religious terms.

Bernard of Clairvaux’s stark and canonically suspect choice, baptism or death, implicitly acknowledged this religious component to competing perceptions of ethnicity, cultural identity, political autonomy and racial awareness. He referred to the conversion or extermination of the pagan races. While this may have appeased legal experts by avoiding direct approval of forced individual conversion, equating the threat of collective destruction of the pagan nation with the alternative of personal baptism exposed a clear contradiction to canon law. More obviously, Bernard’s direct exhortation to arm the faithful ‘with the Holy Cross against the enemies of the Cross of Christ’ invited a far simpler interpretation and response.⁷ The Wendish crusade of 1147 was a missionary war not cloaking but glorifying and legitimizing a campaign of undisguised material aggrandizement. The distant memory of the conquests beyond the Elbe by Saxon and Salian German kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries combined with the confused recent history of conversion ebbing backwards and forwards according to the political and ecclesiastical interest of local rulers to allow a retrospective justification in the concept of a reconquest of lost Christian lands.⁸ In practical military or political terms, such excuses made little difference to the reality while intellectually and rhetorically, if not entirely spurious, they formed a convenient exercise in double- speak. Nonetheless, the easy acceptance of the trappings of crusading in the Baltic revealed how far a positive ideology of legitimate religious violence had penetrated the western Christian world and how far cultural and territorial acquisitiveness marched with spiritual imperialism.

The longer-term implications scarcely intruded directly into the circumstances of the 1147 crusade. A generation later, the frontier missionary priest Helmold of Bosau, following Bernard’s lead, sought to equate the desultory fighting of the summer of 1147 with the struggle for the Holy Land, characterizing the expeditions in terms of vengeance against Slavs occupying previously Christian lands and retribution for attacks and atrocities on Christians. Yet he also described the complicated cross-frontier relations between one of the crusade’s leaders, Count Adolf of Holstein, and Niklot of the Abotrites, one of its targets. They had entered into an alliance shortly before the 1147 campaigns.⁹ The context of the decision to extend the Holy Land privileges to the Saxon princes included the need of King Conrad III to leave a peaceful realm behind him when he departed for Palestine. Unwilling to accede to Henry the Lion’s demands at the Diet of Frankfurt of March 1147 for restitution of his ancestral claims in Bavaria, Conrad nonetheless sought to bind the potentially dissident magnate within the general Peace of the crusade. Henry’s uncle joined Conrad’s army, but Henry’s Saxon allies refused to join the eastern campaigns. By extending the crusade vow and obligations to the annual summer raids across the Wendish frontier, Conrad and Bernard performed a neat trick of offering ecclesiastical approval to traditional autonomous regional conflict in a manner that implicitly tied the participants to royal policy, if only temporarily. Significantly, among those mustered at Magdeburg in August 1147 was Wibald abbot of Stavelot, a leading member of the regency government, his presence signalling the element of royal sanction, if not control. The unusual, local and distinctive nature of the German Wendish crusade was recognized symbolically. According to Otto of Freising, a Holy Land crucesignatus, the Saxon crusaders’ crosses ‘differed from ours in this respect, that they were not simply sewed to their clothing, but were brandished aloft, surmounting a wheel’, to all appearances as much a totem of religious aggression and triumphalism as a badge of penance.¹⁰

For all the religious propaganda, and the large turnout of German bishops (at least eight), many of whom, wielding temporal as well as ecclesiastical authority in their cities, were able to raise substantial armies of their own, the nature of the 1147 campaigns to Dobin and Demmin was more accurately captured by the complaint of Saxon crusaders when the siege of Dobin turned to a war of attrition:

Is not the land we are devastating our land, and the people we are fighting our people? Why are we, then, found to be our own enemies and the destroyers of our own incomes? Does not this loss fall back on our lords? ¹¹

The temporal dynamic was more embarrasingly exposed when one of the crusader armies found itself besieging the Christian city of Stettin until the local Pomeranian bishop pointed out their mistake. The 1147 crusade was regional warfare under a new flag of convenience. As a crusade, it achieved nothing; as Abbot Wibald reflected, ‘it didn’t work’.¹²

However, the potential in holy war was suggested by the involvement of the two warring claimants to the