God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Christian interiors. Alone, it is hard to see missionaries having the same success as the killers, the adventurers, the entrepreneurs and the empire-builders. The application of crusading incentives to German, Danish and to a lesser extent Swedish political and economic competition did not create the link between force and faith. The process of cultural and territorial imperialism was established well before 1147 and already articulated by enthusiasts in religious as well as racial terms.

The real impetus towards fixing the technical apparatus of crusading – vow, cross, indulgence and so on – to Christian conquest in the Baltic came when attention shifted in the late twelfth century from the Wends and western Slavs of the southern Baltic to the heathen tribes further east, first Livonia (modern Latvia), then Estonia, Prussia and Finland. These theatres dominated the crusading operations for the century after the 1190s. Celestine III authorized a crusade to Livonia in 1193, a call repeated by Innocent III in 1198. Formal crusade bulls and crusading recruitment were then sporadically attached from the early thirteenth century to the increasingly belligerent Danish attempts to colonize Estonia and its neighbouring islands, the conquest of Prussia and to Danish and Swedish attacks on Finland. The new focus followed the revival of crusading formulae and consciousness after 1187, evident both in ideology and practice. It came with the commitment to the broadest prosecution of the Lord’s War by successive popes from Celestine III, an enthusiastic crusade promoter in Spain and Palestine as well as the Baltic, and Innocent III. It also reflected the commercial and ecclesiastical ambition of German mercantile cities, Bremen, Lubeck even Cologne. Political and civil unrest and social conflict within Germany from the 1190s created a pool of people willing to take risks to establish new lives as colonists and conquerors. Arnold of Lubeck described the recruits for the disastrous Livonian crusade of 1198 as including bishops, clergy, knights, the rich, the poor and businessmen or merchants (negotiatores).²² Across the Baltic in Denmark and Sweden, the prospect of ecclesiastically condoned wars of expansion appealed to monarchs eager to assert their authority through martial expansion beyond traditional frontiers. The pagan communities of the east and north Baltic appeared vulnerable in their relative lack of technological sophistication, political disunity and openness to commercial exploitation. Their attraction lay rather more in their furs, fish, amber, wax and slaves than the need to reform their benighted beliefs. The Baltic crusades rode a new, decisive balance of power in the region to which it gave a reassuring ideology and a cruel edge. The pagan Estonian defenders of Fellin in 1211 saw the point. After a short, brutal siege, marked by uncompromising butchery by the Christian besiegers, the garrison surrendered in return for baptism: ‘We acknowledge your God to be greater than our gods. By overcoming us, He has inclined out hearts to worship Him.’²³

The identification of Baltic warfare as religious adopted different guises. In Livonia or Estonia, around 1200, expansionist conquest could be justified narrowly as defence of missionary churches. Previous Christian evangelism and conversion lent legitimacy to wars against the Wends or in parts of Pomerania. The theme of apostasy and restoration of lost Christian territory became pervasive, from Prussia to Finland, when each transient summer raid by Christian fleets produced temporary submission by local pagans, and the Baltic coasts were littered with the remains of abandoned or destroyed mission stations and a few surviving ones. Henry of Livonia, committed mission priest and triumphalist Christian apologist for the Livonian colony and its wars, significantly described the Livs as ‘perfidious’, breakers of faith.²⁴ The campaigns of the kings of Denmark along the southern Baltic shore or in northern Estonia were conducted by monarchs who wrapped themselves in the aura of Christian warriors, ‘active knights of Christ’.²⁵ By rooting out paganism, the conquerors were performing holy tasks, their conquests, by incorporation into Christendom, ipso facto holy. More generally, the areas attacked were assigned a new holy status, mimicking the Holy Land of Palestine or the lands of St Peter or St James in the Iberian peninsula. This allowed for a very particular form of military and political management. From c.1202, the missionary bishop of Riga, in Livonia, recruited a religious order of knights, the Militia of Christ or Swordbrothers, to defend and extend his diocese on the river Dvina. Their symbol was a sword surmounted by a cross. In 1207 they were granted a third of the Christian settlement. In 1210 an agreement between the Swordbrothers and the bishop established a permanent condominium in Livonia and neighbouring Lettia (Latvia south of the Dvina). A few years later, the missionary bishop on the Polish–Prussian border assembled a similar body, the Militia of Christ of Livonia against the Prussians, also known as the Knights of Dobrin (or Dobryzn) after their original headquarters on the Vistula. Recognized by the pope in 1228, their emblem comprised a sword topped by a star. Although deriving their rules from those of the Templars and sharing characteristics in defence and settlement with the military orders on the Muslim – Christian borderlands in Spain, these orders displayed unique characteristics. Officially they held land and authority from the local bishop. Their resources came almost exclusively – and meagrely – from what they seized for themselves. Unlike the international orders, they had no lush estates in the prosperous west to cushion them from the impoverished realities of the barren frontiers and wastes of the Baltic interior. They were also confronted by the legal and practical problems of dealing with pagans and forced converts. Yet the model of a permanent garrison of Christian warriors who sustained the frontiers and colonies between crusades, helped plan and direct the expeditions that did arrive and, most distinctive, ruled over the conquests they secured, was one that, in the form of the Teutonic Knights from the 1220s onwards, came to dominate Christian aggression in much of the eastern Baltic for the rest of the middle ages.²⁶

The sanctification of the Baltic wars recast the region as holy space. In 1212 Innocent III declared Livonia to have been subjugated for St Peter, a claim his successors attempted to make good over the next quarter of a century. Prussia became a papal fief in 1234. Thirty years earlier, at Riga in Livonia in the first decade of its settlement by German missionaries, knights and merchants, a cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the settlers’ protectress, and a church to St Peter, guarantor of ecclesiastical privileges. Recruits to defend the colony were urged to ‘accept the Cross of the Blessed Virgin’. At the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Albert of Buxtehude, bishop of Riga, declared Livonia to be the land of the Virgin Mary, just as Jerusalem was the land of her Son. This designation of the Virgin as patroness of the Riga colony, the land of Livonia her dowry, allowed apologists to describe crusaders as pilgrims or the ‘militia of pilgrims’, in line with crucesignati elsewhere, even in Languedoc.²⁷ When the Teutonic Knights assumed direction of war and government in Prussia and then Livonia in the 1230s, absorbing the other military orders in the process, identification with the cult of the Virgin Mary was reinforced, as she was the order’s own patroness. In Livonia the knights bore her image as a war banner. By the end of century, in the view of the religious knight in the rhyming history of Livonia, the Livlandische Reimchronik, Mary had become a war goddess. In the absence of a genuine historic justification, the author, possibly a Teutonic knight, insinuated a transcendent context. Beginning by recounting the Creation, Pentecost and the missions of the Early Church, he admitted that no apostle reached Livonia, in contrast to the myth of St James converting Spain. Instead, a higher mission was being conducted in the wilderness of the eastern Baltic. The holy task begun by the Apostles of proselytizing the world was now being prosecuted through service and death in the armies of the Mother of God in defence of Her land.²⁸

Such literary and rhetorical devices reassured participants and attracted recruits partly by refusing to disguise the true nature of the wars in their bitterness, difficulty, frustrations and violence. Some aspects could not so easily be translated into such robust edification. Christian efforts were marked as much by rivalry and competition as by the unity of faith. In Livonia and Estonia, the Danes contested the ambitions of the Swordbrothers and later the Teutonic Knights. In 1234, the Swordbrothers of Riga displayed their contempt for the pope’s authority by killing 100 men employed by the papal legate and then heaping their bodies into a pile, sticking ‘one of the slain who had been too faithful to the Church on top of the other dead to represent the Lord Pope’.²⁹ As reported to Gregory IX, by this atrocity these knights of Christ wished to show themselves to ‘converts, Russians, pagans and heretics to be greater than the Roman Church’. Later in the century, the brutality of the Teutonic Knights faced criticism. The Oxford scholar Roger Bacon argued in the 1260s that the Knights’ desire to rule and enslave the pagan Prussians presented a barrier, not an incentive, to conversion. In his advice to the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the Dominican preaching expert Humbert of Romans challenged the premise that the pagans posed a genuine threat to Christian lands, a perception hardly shared by frontiersmen in Livonia or Lithuania.³⁰

The almost Manichaean view of a conflict between world forces of good and evil hardly matched the very different practical realities of conquest and colonization. Contact, compromise and change filtered across the innumerable political and religious boundaries from the Elbe to Lake Lagoda. In Prussia, especially the western parts, German and Flemish settlement appeared substantial. In Livonia and Estonia, accessible only by a tricky and expensive sea voyage when the water was free of ice, western colonization was negligible, limited almost exclusively to fortified trading posts on the main rivers. Prussia witnessed a slow process of acculturation similar to