The Northern Crusades (27 page)

Their complaints, the complaints of the Order and the complaints of the archbishop all went to Pope Boniface VIII, and the Curia had the task of deciding between them. According to the burghers, the knight-brothers had tried to steal Riga from its rightful lord, the archbishop. When they tried to appeal to Rome, the knight-brothers had said, ‘We will be pope enough for you’; they had killed citizens and burnt their houses, devastated the surrounding farmlands, threatened to force their wives to work at their mills grinding corn, and murdered eight poor pilgrims. They had built a new castle to oppress the citizens, and had tried to corner the Lithuanian trade for themselves: they were not interested in fighting the heathen, only in making money out of them.

Archbishop John III took up this theme. The Order was given Livonia, he claimed, to assist in the work of converting the natives and to keep out the pagans; instead of which it had oppressed the converts, hindered the work of conversion and refused to fight the Lithuanians. They were responsible for the failure of the church to keep King Mindaugas within the fold; they had deterred the Semigallians from the faith by their ‘savagery, cruelty and tyranny’. They had shown themselves friendlier to the king-elect of Germany than to the pope; they had rejected the authority of the Livonian bishops; they had besieged and imprisoned the archbishop himself, and fed him on bread and water for eight months; they had pillaged and impoverished him. The bishop of ösel claimed that they had invaded his island, arrested eighty of his flock under flag of truce, besieged him at Leal until he agreed to surrender all his castles and temporal rights, destroyed altars, sacred images, hospitals and almshouses. The bishop of Courland had his own list of grievances against the commander of Goldingen. He had killed the bishop’s people, stolen his grain, his wardrobe, thirty pairs of shoes, and a flask of communion wine; he had even given the bishop’s corporal-cloth to his maid, to make into a head-dress.
⁹¹

It sounded bad, but it was only one side of the case. The grand-master was summoned to the Curia to answer the accusations, and Boniface began trying to reconcile the litigants. He seems to have believed that, whatever the knight-brothers had done, Livonia had to be defended, and this would only be possible if the Livonian authorities co-operated.
From 1300 to 1303 he made the Order give back what it had taken, and compensate its victims, without pressing charges. There was a lull in the quarrel, broken when Benedict XI sent a new archbishop to Riga, and an even more comprehensive indictment of the Order arrived at the Curia. This had to be answered, and from a document produced in mid 1306
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we hear the other side of the story.

The knight-brothers claimed that they had merely been asserting rights granted to them by papal Bulls over the previous sixty years. It was the popes who had given them the lands and wealth they were accused of coveting so eagerly, and they had paid for them with their own blood – 200 knight-brothers and 2000 of their dependants had died in Courland alone, where the bishop was complaining about his shoes. The vacancy at Riga had given them the duty of looking after the archbishop’s lands, and the archbishop’s castle had been occupied as security for a loan to one of the archbishop’s vassals. The misconduct they were accused of – which by now included burning their dead, killing their wounded, and witchcraft – was mere slander; and, as for obstructing missions, they had co-operated with the archbishop in building forty new churches. They had built the castle of Mittau in Semigallia at their own expense, and had waged war on the natives only after they had massacred the garrison; and the bishops and burghers had helped them in the war. They had only taken over the archbishop’s lands on the Dvina to protect the country against the Lithuanians, at the request of converts. It was true that they traded with the Lithuanians – a papal charter of 1257
⁹³
authorized them to do so – but not in time of war; whereas the burghers of Riga supplied these heathen with weapons and foodstuffs in both war and peace, and had actually formed a military alliance with them. As for their neglect of the task of conversion, let anyone ask a Livonian native ‘Do you believe in God?’, and he would reply, ‘I believe in God, in the holy virgin Mary, and in the teachings of Holy God and the Holy Roman Church, and in the catechism, like other true and good Christians.’ In any case, their record spoke for itself: over 100,000 Christians in Livonia, won for the Church in less than a century, while in Estonia, Russia, ösel and Semigallia, where the Knights had no power, there was nothing but apostasy, schism and paganism.

This was not the end of the argument. However, it shows how tensions within the Order’s lands made it essential that the knight-brothers should continue, whenever possible, to carry out the task they had been sent
there to perform: to fight and convert the heathen and the schismatic. Without papal approval, they would be unable to hold their own against their Christian neighbours, or keep out the Lithuanians; the only way to keep this approval was to press on with the crusade and attract from outside as many crusaders as possible to assist them, both to gain ground and to enhance their international standing.

Two startling political events irrevocably committed the whole Order to the Lithuanian war. One was the fall of Acre in 1291, which made it impossible for the knight-brothers to continue fighting in the Holy Land, and led to the setting up of a new headquarters at Venice. Venice was the usual embarkation point for all Germans bound for the East, and was chosen in anticipation of a crusade of recovery; but the crusade never came. Meanwhile, the knight-brothers in Prussia did their best to divert more of the Order’s resources to the North. Grand-Master Conrad von Feuchtwangen had served both as master of Prussia and master of Livonia, and made a personal visit to Prussia in 1295 to help morale; Master Sack of Prussia and his eleven commanders wrote to von Feuchtwangen’s successor that the grand-master must stop ignoring reports of the danger their province was in, and take their problems seriously, or they would not be answerable for the consequences. When Grand-Master Gottfried von Hohenlohe did come north in 1302, he tried to make the Brothers keep their Rule more strictly, and met so much opposition that he resigned his office. His successor, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, found himself beset on all sides, both by Lithuanians and by Livonian litigants, and when his Prussian knight-brothers seized the Pomerelian port of Danzig in 1308 it seemed that Poland and Brandenburg were likely to join in against the Order.

This was particularly alarming at that moment because the grand-master of the Templars had been arrested at Paris the year before, and on 22 November 1307 Clement V authorized the arrest and dispossession of the Templars throughout Europe, pending the results of an inquiry into their conduct. The estates of France pronounced against them the following May, and that summer Clement V took up residence in France apparently on the best of terms with Philip IV, the persecutor of the Templars. The absurdity of the charges, and the ease with which that Order was destroyed in all countries other than Spain and parts of Germany, put the Teutonic Knights in jeopardy; if Templars could be hunted down and burnt alive merely on suspicion of collaborating with
the Muslims and disregarding their Rule, what would happen to an Order with a dossier of accusations against it ranging from genocide to the murder of pilgrims? Moreover, since 1305 King Philip IV had been urging that all the military Orders should be abolished, and a new one set up with himself at its head. Von Feuchtwangen prepared for the worst by leaving Venice, and in September 1309 he established the headquarters of his Order at Marienburg Castle (Malbork) within his own territory of Prussia, beyond the reach of any secular ruler.

He was just in time. The following June, Clement V issued the Bull
In vinea domini
, which ordered the archbishop of Bremen and Canon Albert of Milan to investigate all the outstanding charges against the Teutonic Knights, who

In 1312 Clement’s inquisitor excommunicated the Livonian knight-brothers from Riga, and, although the excommunication was removed the following year, the knight-brothers had evidently escaped dissolution only by a narrow margin. It cannot have been an accident that, when von Feuchtwangen died, they elected as his successor Carl von Trier, who ‘knew the French like his own language, and was able to talk to the pope and cardinals without an interpreter; he was so affable and eloquent, that even his enemies delighted to listen to him’.
⁹⁵
But his own knights drove him back to Trier in 1317.

Prussia became the main concern of the whole Order, and the whole apparatus of the crusade was applied to the Russian and Lithuanian frontiers. The grand-master was now a sovereign lord with three main political preoccupations: extending his sovereignty to include the surviving enclaves of episcopal and civic power in Prussia and Livonia; securing Danzig and Pomerelia against reconquest by Poland, and working towards the overthrow of Lithuania and the independent Russian princes – the heathen and the schismatic. At the same time he had to fight the propaganda battle and the continuous wars of litigation in the Curia, and prove to the world that the Teutonic Knights were doing their job as a military Order – winning converts and defeating the heathen. The war had to go on.

One question remained unanswered. Was warfare a lawful means of getting converts? The Schoolmen had been debating the subject for some time, and many were convinced that the answer was no. Friar Roger Bacon was one of them. In his
Opus maius
, completed in 1268, he argued that preaching was the only way of securing the minds of the heathen, and that the military monks were hindering the process ‘owing to the wars that they are always stirring up, and because they wish to have entire sovereignty’. He condemned the Teutonic Knights in particular: ‘many years ago, they deceived the Roman Church with subtle arguments’; and since then, he alleged, their record had proved the falsity of these arguments. He held (on astrological grounds) that

At the time of the great council of Lyon in 1274 the morality of the crusade came under fire from many quarters, and Humbert of Romans, former general of the Dominican Order, wrote to Pope Gregory X in his
Opusculum tripartitum
, that the war against Muslims ought to be continued,

Such arguments carried a certain weight in Rome, and filtered through to the Baltic by way of the friars and the educated clergy not attached to the Order. How could they be countered?

One objection came in the report sent in to the pope by a more impartial witness, the bishop of Olomouc.
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Neither the Lithuanians nor the Prussians, he pointed out, were harmless: they had inflicted grave damage on the Church in Poland, and the Polish churches ‘are walls next door to our own house, and when they catch fire we observe that our interests are clearly involved’. The princes of Germany were too divided among themselves to go to the assistance either of their own, frontier lands or of the Holy Land; if they were persuaded to set sail for Outremer they would leave their own country in danger. This was the ‘domino theory’ of the time, and to those living within reach of Lithuanian armies it was more attractive than Humbert’s argument that the heathen of the North were ‘enervated’ and harmless. According to the Volhynian Chronicler’s continuator, before the treaty of 1305 ‘the Lithuanians and Samogitians had done a great deal of harm to the Poles and had taken into captivity whole squadrons of Poles and Masurians, so that Poles were sold in Lithuania and White Russia for a
grivna
[four ounces of silver] or ten Lithuanian
groshi
, and the Lithuanians swapped them among themselves for horses and oxen.
⁹⁹
The Order had its own chronicle of Lithuanian raids to recount.

Another objection lay in the attitude of Lithuanian princes to Christian missionaries. At times, they were tolerant and apparently sympathetic. Between 1322 and 1324, Grand-Prince Vytenis’s brother and successor, Gediminas, who had let his daughter be baptized for the sake of a Polish alliance, made several friendly overtures to Catholic powers. He sent letters to the friars, to the Hanseatic cities and to the pope, inviting settlers, merchants, artisans, soldiers and missionaries to enter his country and dwell there under his protection. He asked the pope to be his father, and expressed a great desire to live at peace with the Church. On the other hand, he remained entirely unconvinced by arguments in favour of Christianity, however mildly they were put, and, when papal emissaries finally asked him to join the Church, in November 1324, all he said was ‘May the devil baptize me!’
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In the following January two Cistercian abbots
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testified that Gediminas had since killed or enslaved over 8000 Christians residing in or near his territory – and this at a time when he was at peace with the Teutonic Knights. His incipient conversion had been a sham; or, rather, a sensible diplomatic manoeuvre. The episode hardly demonstrated that warfare was a better method than preaching for securing conversions, but it did show that neither method was
likely to have much effect on a powerful and intelligent heathen ruler.