Danish throne, Canute V and Sweyn III. They temporarily ceased their contest to join together with a German force under the archbishop of Bremen and Henry the Lion in the attack on Dobin. Domestically, the crusade acted in Denmark as elsewhere in western Christendom, legitimizing the annexation of territory, providing a respectable context for the resolution of political conflict and encouraging the development of the institutions of the state by associating royalty with a recognizable divinely inspired mission. Like the Saxons, the Danes had appeared reluctant to join Conrad III’s eastern expedition, but the prospect of what must have seemed easy pickings at the Wends’ expense combined with the offer of crusade indulgences to prompt the royal rivals to joint action. The year before, Sweyn had translated the bones of his uncle, Duke Canute, murdered by Canute V’s father in 1131, to a monastic tomb preparatory to canonization (which came in 1169). Duke Canute had fought against the Wends in campaigns later characterized as holy wars. His son, Valdemar I (1157–82), while continuing to fight the Wends, secured his father’s status as a saint, incorporated the image of a holy warrior in his coinage and became a patron of the Hospitallers. Although involvement in the 1147 expedition proved a flop, subsequent Danish rulers eagerly associated their kingship and their conquests across the Baltic with religious warfare, some of which attracted the formal apparatus of crusading, introducing a competitive element in the Christian grab for the Baltic over the next two centuries.13 Yet, to define the Denmark of Valdemar I and his successors as a ‘crusading state’ places too precise an emphasis on what was a more general concept of armed expansionism that, by virtue of its Christian tinge, was held up in favourable comparison with the glorious Viking past. As Esbern, brother of the Slav- bashing Archbishop Absalon of Lund, declared at the start of the Third Crusade, the crusade offered ‘greater and more profitable conquests’ than those achieved by the heroes of former times.14 The profit was spiritual; it was also material.
DEVELOPMENT
Crusading in the Baltic contributed to the twelfth-century German expansion into territory between the Elbe and Oder and western Pomerania; thirteenth-century German penetration into the southern Baltic lands between the Vistula and Nieman, Prussia, Courland and, in the fourteenth century, Pomerelia west of the Vistula; the transmarine colonization of Livonia in the thirteenth century by a combination of churchmen and merchants from German trading centres such as Luubeck and Bremen; the aggressive expansionism of the Danish crown, especially in northern Estonia; and the advance of the Swedes into Finland. As secondary involvement, these theatres of war expanded to include Greek Orthodox Russian Novgorod and, from the later thirteenth century, Lithuania, a front of religious as well political contest that sustained the idea and practice of holy war in increasingly quaint and attenuated, if still bloody, forms into the fifteenth century. Yet to ascribe responsibility to the crusade for the harsh barbarism of aspects of German, Danish or Swedish imperialism would mislead. One might as well accuse the medieval western church. Equally, it should be remembered that Baltic pagans were just as enthusiastic about massacring opponents and eradicating the symbols of an alien faith when opportunity arose. The secular reality of these wars was brutal for the conquered and only little less harsh for the conquerors or the Germans and Flemish who settled in their wake.
After 1147, formal crusade bulls were not again issued for Baltic warfare until 1171 and only became a regular feature of Christian conquest there from the 1190s. Appearances could deceive. Local observers such as Helmold of Bosau or the Danish historians Sven Aggeson and Saxo Grammaticus invoked the language of holy religious war. In 1169, Pope Alexander III described Valdemar I’s conquest and forced conversion of the islanders of Rugen the previous year as ‘inspired with the heavenly flame, strengthened by the arms of Christ, armed with the shield of faith and protected by divine faith’.15 The crusade bull of 1171 looked forward to an extension of holy war from Wendish Pomerania to distant Estonia. Yet, that bull excepted, the institutions of crusading – vow, cross, indulgence – were absent.16 Saxo depicts the motives for Danish attacks on their pagan neighbours as revenge and imperialism. Helmold famously decried Henry the Lion’s secular greed: ‘in the several expeditions the young man has so far undertaken into Slavia, no mention has been made of Christianity, but only of money’.17 One of the veterans of 1147, Albert the Bear (d. 1170), did not need crusade bulls to carve out a principality of Brandenburg beyond the Elbe, even though his acquisitiveness was predictably portrayed by apologists as attracting the approval of God, ‘who had given him his victory over his enemies’.18 For pagans too, motives concerned the material as much as the eternal. In 1156, Pribislav of Luubeck was prepared to accept baptism, erect churches, even pay tithes, provided ‘the rights of Saxons in respect of property and taxes be extended to us’.19 Until the turn of the century, the extension of German and Danish power along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, while susceptible to holy war interpretation, remained largely unmoved by holy war priorities.
Crusading in the Baltic directly served political, economic and ecclesiastical ambitions: the extension of German or Danish rule; the establishment of new towns, trading posts and privileged immigrant rural communities; the creation of bishoprics and the proliferation of, in particular, Cistercian monasteries. The crusading dimension assumed the highly distinctive element of being allied with conversion, Bernard of Clairvaux’s choice, baptism or death. Converts were welcomed; resisters were degraded or exterminated. Innocent III freely used the language of compulsion, in 1209 encouraging Valdemar II of Denmark to pursue ‘the war of the Lord… to drag the barbarians into the net of orthodoxy’.20 This unsound doctrine acknowledged the assistance religion lent to political aggression. It also recognized the religious component in practical as well as theoretical distinctions of ethnicity, cultural identity and racial awareness. In contrast with Spain or the Near East, in the Baltic crusades conversion came as a corollary and recognition of conquest. Although destructive and brutal during initial contact, paradoxically the insistence on conversion as the price of constructive coexistence allowed for greater long-term cultural accommodation. As pagans could become Christians, so, as Pribislav of Luubeck was hinting, Slavs, Letts, Balts and Livs could become Germans.
This process rested on self-interest as much as self-image. The Wendish Abotrite ruler Niklot had been killed by Christian forces in 1160. Despite converting the same year, his eldest son Pribislav had been disinherited. He spent much of the 1160s in revolt against the new ruler of the area, Henry the Lion, until at the end of the decade he was finally installed as ruler of Mecklenberg, essentially as heir to his father’s principality. For much of this period, according to Christian sources, Pribislav had emphasized that he was fighting for Slavic independence against the new German yoke. Once reconciled politically with the new regime, he embraced its Christianizing policies, helping Valdemar I destroy the idols and temples on Rugen in 1168, allying with the leading missionary to the Abotrites, Bern of Amelungsborn, and becoming an active patron of the Cistercians. In 1172, Pribislav accompanied his overlord Henry the Lion on his elaborate pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His own son was baptized with a politically correct non-Slavic name, Henry. In subsequent generations of his family German and Latin names predominated over Slavic ones. His heirs, the dukes of Mecklenberg, become patrons of the Hospitallers. In 1147 Pribislav’s father had been the target for a crusade. In 1218 one of his descendants joined a crusade to Livonia.21 On the southern shores of the Baltic, at least, the scramble for status, wealth and power, and the desire to exploit the opportunities for conquest and redemption further east, dictated such transformations. Even the heirs of the strongly pagan princes of Rugen, forcibly converted in 1168, joined in the assaults on the pagans of the east Baltic in the thirteenth century.
However unpalatable to the religiously fastidious, when allied with material advantage, enforced conversion worked. By 1400, the Baltic had become a Latin Christian lake, even at the cost of sustained conflict with the Greek Orthodox Christians of Russia as well as the various pagan communities and peoples. Beneath the surface, elements of pagan culture swam freely. But in towns, cathedrals, churches and forts; in new liturgical calendars, even where infected by older beliefs and ceremonial custom; in new saints’ cults; in the payment of tithes; in the presence of western-trained scholars and church leaders; in new laws for the western immigrants; in literature, both Latin and vernacular; in ideologies of rule; and in the actual presence and activities of rulers, lay, clerical and that peculiar mixture of the two, the military order, Latin Christendom imposed itself indelibly on the physical, mental and human landscape. Conversion not backed by coercion, painful and laborious as it was, may have experienced a harder struggle, especially in regions removed from the immediate frontier with Latin Christendom in eastern Germany and Poland. The survival of paganism in Lithuania derived from effective political and military resistance and the development of a strong, pagan state. Only in 1386 did the Lithuanians accept Christianity, on their own terms, as a consequence of their king Jogaila’s acquisition of the Polish throne. Everywhere, popular religious conversion followed, if at all, far behind the imposition of Christian political and ecclesiastical authority. Formal observance or occasional conformity may have been necessary for social and economic survival. But, equally, Christian conquerors of the Baltic coasts needed to retain open commercial links with pagan or Orthodox
