by the Lithuanians, in 1236. Between 1225 and 1227, the Swordbrothers, keen to maximize their income, seized the Danish areas of northern Estonia, including Reval, which they held until 1237, in direct contravention of the 1222 partition. By this time the Swordbrothers’ unruly independence had attracted the disapproval of the papacy as well. Despite, or perhaps because of, their success, the knights, who never numbered more than about 120, had developed a taste and earned a justified reputation for loutish thuggery and barbaric cruelty. Wenno, the first Master, had been murdered with an axe by a fellow brother. His successor, Folkwin, a nobleman from Hesse, pursued a policy of vigorous military enterprise and selfinterested gangsterism. The Swordbrothers were content to ally with Livonia’s enemies to gain territorial advantage. After Bishop Albert’s death, they ignored the 1204 and 1207 agreements by encroaching on episcopal property. Cistercian monasteries were plundered, converts were massacred and baptisms prevented. For the Swordbrother, the best Liv or Lett was a slave, not a co-religionist. The atrocity of the massacre of the papal legate’s men in 1234 further alienated the papacy, which had been critically investigating the order for years. By the mid-1230s, the Swordbrothers were isolated. The pope had condemned them; the king of Denmark had been made an enemy. In 1236, Folkwin and fifty brothers, at the head of an army of crusader recruits, were killed by the Lithuanians at the battle of Saule in Samogitia. The following year, the order was wound up, the remaining members absorbed by the Teutonic Knights who now assumed their responsibilities in Livonia.
The arrival of the Teutonic Knights restored the territorial integrity and political coherence of the Livonian colony that had almost been swept away in 1236, helped by their extensive international resources, the backing of the pope and the acquiescence of the Danish king, to whom northern Estonia was restored in 1238. Through a winning combination of military strength, alliances with neighbours and a measure of tolerance towards client rulers, the Teutonic Knights made themselves undisputed masters of Livonia. Bishop Albert’s ecclesiastical experiment was abandoned as the bishops (after 1253 archbishops) of Riga ceded two-thirds of conquests to the order. But the settlement remained precarious. A further general revolt in 1259–60, aided by Russians and Lithuanians, threatened to sweep away the whole edifice of German power in the region. The uprising was based on those client states that the Teutonic Knights had carefully nurtured around its key holdings, while Livonia and Prussia, despite the hardness of their rule, remained loyal. For the rest of the century, the Teutonic Knights fought to reclaim territory and secure Livonia’s frontiers. This they achieved, at a high cost in devastation and death. Semigallia was laid waste and depopulated as its inhabitants fled to Lithuania. Samogitia remained outside Livonian grip. The victory of the Knights was won at the cost of a new, even longer confrontation with Lithuania that lasted into the fifteenth century. Yet the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Knights, with its own provincial Master, survived until 1562, when Gotthard Kettler abandoned his religious vows and turned himself into the duke of Courland and Semigallia, thirty-seven years after the secularization of the order in Prussia. By then, the German order appeared as something of a relic, faced with Muscovite pressure on Livonia’s borders and Lutheran converts within.35
The Conquests by Denmark and Sweden
The spectacular colonizing achievement of the Germans in Livonia and Prussia should not obscure the wider aspects of the invasion of the northern and eastern Baltic by outsiders. Just as relations between Latin Christians, indigenous pagans, converts and Greek Orthodox Christians were as much of accommodation and compromise as of visceral or racial enmity, so the conquerors were not all German or ecclesiastical. At the same time as Scandinavian kings were eager to enter the orbit of Latin Christendom, so they were keen to expand their interests and power eastwards. The two processes went together to consolidate new national ideologies and the cohesion of power elites. The motives for attacks on Estonia and Finland may have been commercial, the need to combat or regulate piracy and increase profits; the means – naval raids and the settlement of religious centres and trading stations – prudential rather than ideological. Yet, even without the assistance of their own military orders, the kings of Denmark and Sweden managed to attract the approval of the church for their wars of Baltic conquest.
Danish fleets had operated in the eastern Baltic on a number of occasions in the later twelfth century, from Finland to Prussia. The Swedes were also said to have launched occasional raids on the coasts of the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Riga. These transitory forays allowed later propagandists to assert supposed historic political, religious and ecclesiastical claims. More directly, by 1200, any Latin Christian war against non-Christians could expect to find religious backing. Locally, church-building and the construction of cathedrals, dioceses and monasteries anchored political and commercial imperialism. In alliance with the crown, the church ruled its tenants, collected raw materials and taxes (tithes) and dispensed justice on their estates. To such administrative structures was added social policing through conversion of the natives, at once a symbol and guarantee of local acceptance of the new order. The church gave the conquest, the conquerors and their allies a clear, shared communal identity. Internationally, conquests depicted as extending or defending Christianity could gain for the monarch who conducted such campaigns the recognition and sanction of the papacy, a valuable asset in elevating regional kingship above domestic challenge. Whether or not it actually produced material dividends, the attempts by Scandinavian kings to align their status with the great monarchs of western Christendom suggested that they believed such policies offered tangible rewards.36
In 1171, Alexander III offered to those who campaigned against the pagans of the eastern Baltic, probably the Estonians, a year’s plenary indulgence as given to pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. Those who died on the expedition would receive full remission of confessed sins. Although not technically exactly equivalent to a crusade – no vow, no cross and smaller spiritual privileges – such incentives recognized the direction of papal thinking.37 Despite Valdemar I’s interest in the area, nothing came of this initiative. It seems that the first full-blown Danish crusade in the eastern Baltic, complete with
The earliest threat to the Dano-German plantation in northern Estonia had come from former allies. Although the Swedes soon evacuated Leal, the Swordbrothers, as already discussed, continued to advance from the south, occupying Reval itself in 1227. Conflicts of jurisdiction led to an appeal to Rome. Only after the settlement with the new Livonia authorities, the Teutonic Knights, in 1238 was Danish overlordship accepted, at least by fellow Latin Christians. Thereafter, the main interest of the Danish kings concerned the prospects for further eastwards expansion into the Vod region controlled by the Russians of Novgorod. The limits to Danish expansion were set in a series of wars along Estonia’s eastern frontier. Valdemar II became involved in the anti-Russian crusade of 1240–42 beside the Teutonic Knights from Livonia and the Swedes moving east from their bases in Finland. However, the Swedes were defeated on the river Neva in 1240 and, after early success against Pskov, the Teutonic Knights were defeated at and on Lake Chud-Peipus on 5 April 1242 by Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod, an incident glamorously imagined in Eisenstein’s famous nationalistic film. Papal policy after the 1220s consistently branded the Russians as schismatics, who had to be opposed by force, as well as harbouring fanciful schemes for the conversion of the pagans at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland. Papal hopes for concerted anti-Russian crusades encouraged Eric IV of Denmark (1241–50) to take the cross in 1244, but without consequence. Pope Alexander IV revived the crusade in 1256, appealing to the faithful in Prussia and Livonia to assist the conversion of the pagans further east. In fact, the modest expedition that followed simply helped a local landowner consolidate his hold on the lower Narva; baptisms were not attempted. Future campaigns in the region, against Novgorod or the pagans of Finland, were entrusted to the kings of Sweden, who had already established a presence on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland. The political and economic returns from such remote and intractable lands appeared increasingly peripheral to the Danes, while relations between Livonia and the Russians were largely determined by commercial traffic, not religious controversy.39
