God's War: A New History of the Crusades (112 page)

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, Lübeck, 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 Lübeck 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.
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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.
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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 Lübeck – Livonia run became a steady source of profit and absolution for skippers, knights, burghers and princes’.
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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.
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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 Lübeck in particular. Without Lübeck 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 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.
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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.
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