the earlier experience between the Elbe and Oder. Slavs became Germans, an uncomfortable notion for later racial nationalists on both sides of the linguistic divide. The judicial pluralism and segregation familiar from other crusading fronts did not prevent the Prussians adopting elements of German inheritance laws and, more awkwardly for the invaders, German military technology. Over generations, the brutality of forced conversion, occupation, dispossession, alien settlement and discrimination transformed Prussia into a distinctively German province. By contrast, only a small military, clerical and commercial elite was established in Estonia and Livonia, largely confined to the coast and river valleys, especially the Dvina. Power depended on solid fortresses; technological superiority in artillery, siege machines, armour and weapons; uneasy alliances with native rulers who sought the invaders’ protection from other regional enemies; and Christian control of the ports and access to maritime trade routes for local produce from the pagan interior. These different colonial experiences cast long shadows. In March 1939, Adolf Hitler insisted that Lithuania cede Memel, established by German invaders in 1252, to the Third Reich, an act that provoked Britain’s guarantee to protect Poland. No part of historic Prussia was to be outside Greater Germany. Yet, five months later, Hitler was content to consign Latvia and Estonia as well as Lithuania to the lot of the Russians as if they were, in a sense crucial to the Nazi perversion of the past, less ‘German’.
CRUSADES AND CRUSADERS
Livonia 1188–1300
The origins of Christian dominion in Livonia were prophetic, combining genuine missionary enthusiasm, church politics, cultural imperialism and profit, the building blocks of conquest. Drawn by growing trading links between western German and Baltic ports such as Bremen and, especially, Lubeck, an isolated mission to the Dvina valley by a German canon, Meinhard, was taken over by his ecclesiastical superior, Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen (1185– 1207), who elevated the missionary into a bishop and began to solicit papal support for a Christian invasion. Meinhard’s failure to secure any lasting converts, despite showing the locals how to construct stone fortresses, encouraged a more vigorous policy after his death in 1196. Hartwig, eager to secure a new ecclesiastical empire for Bremen, which a century earlier had dominated the north, despatched a new bishop, Berthold. A futile initial foray in 1196–7 was succeeded by an armed expedition in 1198 recruited with the help of papal privileges. Despite the German army’s military success, Berthold managed to get himself killed. The expedition achieved nothing beyond coercing a few temporary converts and showing off the effectiveness of German scorched earth tactics.
Archbishop Hartwig was not so easily deflected. He was not content just to preside over a series of piractical raids or even the creation of trading stations on the Dvina. His concept was of a new ecclesiastical missionary state, under episcopal not secular control. For this he needed a suitable cleric, political backing and papal support. Each were conveniently to hand, in the shape of his nephew, Albert of Buxtehude; Canute VI of Denmark and his brother Valdemar; Philip of Swabia, Hohenstaufen candidate for the contested German throne; and Pope Innocent III, for whom Hartwig’s scheme represented a practical demonstration of the sort of theocratic authority that chimed precisely with his own grander ambitions. Albert became the new bishop of Livonia (1198–1229) while in October 1199 Innocent III issued an unequivocal call for a crusade to defend the Christians of Livonia, a fiction made possible by reference to Meinhard’s evangelizing and the Livs’ subsequent apostasy. The news of the crusade bull reached Philip of Swabia’s Christmas court along with Bishop Albert, who engaged in a strenuous tour of preaching and diplomacy. The cross was preached in Saxony and Westphalia, but the most important backing was garnered by Albert’s visits to the mercantile community at Visby in Gotland, where 500 apparently took the cross, and his meeting with King Canute, his brother, and the veteran holy warrior Archbishop Absalon of Lund. Although Danish support was vital to allow recruits to sail unimpeded from Lubeck to Livonia, it was later regarded by them as an acceptance of overlordship, a clash of interests only too characteristic of colonization in the eastern Baltic.31
Bishop Albert’s crusade to Livonia in 1200 provided the basis of the new Christian state, setting the military and ideological pattern for its conquest and occupation. The central dynamic combined ecclesiastical with commercial imperialism. More than most other crusade locations, Livonia was unequivocally a colony, of north Germany and Latin Christianity. For a quarter of a century, Bishop Albert followed a routine of more or less annual recruiting tours of Germany and the west Baltic. In 1204 he received a papal bull effectively authorizing him to sign up crusaders whenever he wished.32 Although the Holy Land crusade was regarded as paramount – Albert’s new colony contributed its own share, for example, to the church tax for the Fifth Crusade – the habitual support of crusade privileges lent a special quality to the bishop’s sales pitch and responses to it. As Eric Christiansen has observed, ‘the Lubeck – Livonia run became a steady source of profit and absolution for skippers, knights, burghers and princes’.33 Within a decade, Bishop Albert had subdued the pagan tribes of the coast and lower Dvina, built a new capital at Riga with a port to accommodate the great trading cargo ships from the west, begun his new cathedral and created his permanent garrison of Christian knights, the Swordbrothers. In the process, like any conquering lord, he provided a bonanza for members of his own family. Albert’s brothers, a brother-in-law and cousins were rewarded with important, potentially lucrative positions in church and state, founding dynasties that formed part of the nucleus of the German settlers’ establishment.
The Livonian state rested on volatile foundations. Bishop Albert faced challenges to his sovereignty from the papacy and the king of Denmark. Internally, clerical rule depended on the support of the German merchants, whose interests were primarily economic, not spiritual, and the nominally subservient but actually autonomous Swordbrothers, who controlled a third of all territory and claimed the right to the same share of all future conquests. Critics saw little difference between the businessmen and the knights, accusing the Swordbrothers of being crooks, wealthy renegade merchants from Saxony. The mercantile elite refused to allow Bishop Albert to surrender Riga to the Danes as part of a settlement of jurisdictional rivalries in 1222. The Swordbrothers were increasingly a law to themselves, especially after Albert’s death in 1229. Both knight and trader were self-evidently entrepreneurial in their attitude to Livonia, as was the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The spreading of Christianity became indistinguishable from the creation of privileged trading depots, commercial cartels and fresh estates for the military order alongside the foundation, endowment or annexation of bishoprics (such as Dorpat, founded in 1133) and monasteries, like Dunamunde. The regular Livonian crusades of the first third of the thirteenth century were central to sustaining the practical aspects of this congruence of material and spiritual expansionism by providing physical reinforcements for defence and attack. These wars of the Cross maintained the ideological credentials of the operation, even in the face of exploitation, scandal and corruption, which by the mid-1230s threatened the colony’s very survival.34
The first wave of conquest to 1209 brought the lower Dvina valley under Rigan control, as well as the subjugation by a combination of alliance and force of the Semigallians south and west of the river and the Letts to the north and east. One advantage the Germans held was their perceived ability to protect local rulers from their traditional enemies, the Lithuanians to the south and the Estonians to the north. The ruler of Polotsk, upstream from the Livonian enclave, came to terms with the new settlers in order to ease commerce. From 1209 to 1218, the Livonians pressed northwards into Estonia, but were then checked by the intervention of Valdemar II of Denmark, who claimed sovereignty there. After an initial alliance of convenience between the Livonian Germans and the Danes in 1219, acrimonious rivalries threatened to undermine not only the new conquest in Estonia but Bishop Albert’s lordship in Livonia itself. Estonia was partitioned in 1222, leaving the Danes in control of the north coast around their new fortress of Reval (now Tallinin, built in 1219), and with a measure of recognized overlordship over the rest. The problem for Bishop Albert lay in King Valdemar’s stranglehold over Baltic shipping and over Lubeck in particular. Without Lubeck as a base for recruits and cargoes, German Livonia, whoever exercised power, could hardly exist. Thus Albert bequeathed an essentially unstable political system, contested between distant or absentee foreigners, the Danes and the papacy; local settlers and merchants; the Swordbrothers; the indigenous population of converts, allies and pagans; and nervous or aggressive neighbours, such as the Curonians, the Lithuanians and the Russians of Novgorod. This hardly made for a model Christian state, whatever the rhetoric of pilgrimage and the cross.
In the generation after Bishop Albert, despite further conquests, the main challenges to the viability of German Livonia remained invasion, rebellion and internal disintegration. The islanders of Osel and the Curonians had capitulated by 1231, and a network of defensive barrier forts begun to consolidate a sort of frontier with the Samogitians and Lithuanians in the south and the Russians in the east. The modest returns on land led to fierce competition between the Swordbrothers and other ecclesiastical and lay landowners. Rapacious exploitation of local peasantry and commercial tolls provoked rebellion in 1222 and, in concert with military defeat of the Swordbrothers
