The Northern Crusades (35 page)

By August 1350, when the first harvest of plague-victims had been buried, another army of crusaders had been scraped together, and the king sailed back up the Neva to Orekhov. What he did on this occasion is entirely ignored by surviving contemporary sources; apart from one reference in the Icelandic Annals,
¹⁴⁰
the whole story of the 1350 expedition rests on the fictitious ‘Testament of King Magnus’ composed by a Russian monk a century later.
¹⁴¹
Without placing much confidence in this document, modern historians tend to assume that it contains an outline of events no more misleading for 1350 than for 1348; in which case it can be deduced that Magnus retired baffled from Orekhov, and continued his voyage south to Koporye. He may have tried to take this fort instead, but was again frustrated, and continued westwards to the mouth of the river Narva; there his fleet was hit by a storm and dispersed. This may not have been as great a failure as it sounds, since the purpose
of the expedition may have been harassment rather than conquest. Magnus must have had fewer men with him than in 1348, and was evidently hoping to achieve victory by interrupting trade, rather than by direct invasion. However, the loss of his ships was obviously a grave setback, as it placed the success of his anti-Russian campaign entirely in the hands of his German allies. Instead of returning to Sweden, the king remained in Estonia and Livonia for the winter of 1350–51 trying desperately to persuade or compel the Order, the bishops and the merchants to keep up the blockade, while his agents at the Curia got the pope to place the full weight of his authority behind a new campaign.

On 15 January 1351 the merchants at Dorpat reported to Lübeck that Magnus had spent Christmas at Reval and had insisted that the Livonian authorities should arrest all who had ignored his embargo and impound their goods. When the burghers of Reval and Dorpat demurred, he ‘told them they should be ready to give him satisfaction for the injury done him by the merchants’. In reply, two of them asked the king whether he wished to accuse the merchants in common, or one or more of them individually. To which the king replied, ‘We do not know what a merchant in common is, but we accuse all those visiting Novgorod.’
¹⁴²
He was put off with delays and soft answers, and it is unlikely that the Russian trade was ever seriously affected by his ban. Nevertheless, he was able to make a thorough nuisance of himself. He was able to enforce the seizure of all Hanseatic cargoes bound for Novgorod in Swedish ports; he was able to remind his hosts in Livonia that he had a slight claim to the duchy of Estonia, which they had bought from King Valdemar of Denmark not long before; he asserted his influence by granting an insubstantial privilege to Riga, and a meatier charter to the Cistercians of Padis in Estonia, giving them patronage, land and fisheries in Finland. By this time it was spring, and there was good news from Avignon and Sweden. Clement VI had agreed to let Magnus collect and borrow half of a four-year crusading tithe to pay for the forthcoming campaign. The archbishops and bishops of the North were instructed to begin preaching a full crusade against the Russians as soon as the plague abated.
¹⁴³
The Teutonic Order was told to give its full assistance,
¹⁴⁴
and the purpose of the enterprise was set out in rhetoric calculated to appeal to all the faithful.

According to Clement’s Bull of 14 March 1351, certain peoples called Karelians and Ingrians had recognized the error of their infidelity and
had especially called on Magnus to help them receive the Christian faith. Magnus had reached out his strong hand to protect them from the injuries and oppressions with which the Russian enemies of the Catholic faith were wont to afflict them. But, once they had received baptism and the faith, those same Russians, yearning to exterminate them now that the king had withdrawn, unexpectedly invaded both their country and other parts of Christendom, with bestial savagery. Some of the Catholics they slew with the sword, others by hanging from trees, others by exposure to the gnawing of dogs, and others by unbelievable varieties of torture, and so compelled the now cruelly enslaved survivors among the Karelians and Ingrians to turn again to their original blind error, while the king was prevented by the plague from expelling the invaders. So let all true believers rise up and rescue these unfortunate peoples! And to lend colour to these fictions came the news that the Russians had taken the offensive again, invaded Finland, besieged Viborg, and returned home unmolested after devastating the district.

The response of the Scandinavian clergy was magnificent; they had little chance of refusing to contribute to the tithe, once their bishops in synod at Jonköping had agreed to the papal loan. In 1351–2, the king’s high stewards and other royal officers acting for the nuncio fleeced them of £2937 sterling – more than the contribution for 1324–9. But nobody else showed any interest in helping Magnus to continue the war, which had ended with an exchange of prisoners in June 1351; the magnates of Norway and Sweden showed themselves increasingly hostile to his regime, and his friend Pope Clement died in 1352. Just at the moment when the quarrel with Novgorod appeared to have been raised to the status of something high and holy, it became apparent to almost everyone concerned that the whole enterprise was impractical, unprofitable and fraudulent. In 1355 the Curia suddenly asked for its money back, perhaps in response to the machinations of King Valdemar IV of Denmark. Next year, a revolt against the king broke out in Sweden; he was compelled to share his kingdom with his son Eric, and he spent the rest of his reign overwhelmed by political crises. He lived to see Scania reconquered, and the union between Norway and Sweden dissolved. His final humiliation took place posthumously, when an unknown fifteenth-century Novgorod scribe wrote the document attached to the Fourth Novgorod Chronicle which is known as the ‘Testament of King Magnus’. According to this writer, Magnus had ended his life as Gregory, a monk and convert
to the Orthodox faith in the monastery of Valamo on Lake Ladoga, where he had been received after being deposed and shipwrecked. Now that death approached, the ex-king addressed his son and an imaginary brother with a stern warning against ever attempting to invade Russia, and pointed the moral by recapitulating the history of Russo-Swedish relations since 1240.

In the disasters by land and sea which had befallen his people for the last hundred years, the penitent king was made to see clear evidence of God’s anger, and his own lamentable history was recited as final proof that no good could come of crusading against the Orthodox Russians. Therefore his successors must

Excellent advice; but Magnus could only have given it if he had indeed been a convert to the Orthodox faith. In his Latin world, fighting the Russians was a meritorious act, and if he had had any doubts on the subject they would have been stilled by his visionary kinswoman Bridget. Even after the crusade had failed, Bridget continued to claim that Christ expected the king and his archbishop to conquer and convert the ‘heathen’. The first attempt had failed because her instructions had not been properly obeyed, but Christ’s words were plain: ‘I consign this part of the earth to your hands, and I require you to answer for it.’
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Bridget expected such high moral standards from her crusaders that no actual expedition against the Russians could ever have satisfied her. If only the pure in heart were allowed to fight for Christ, the Orthodox of Novgorod were safe.

The eclipse of Sweden and Norway under alien rulers for the century after Magnus’s death meant that there could be no further attempts to turn local disputes along the eastern frontier into wars of conquest and conversion. The Mecklenburger and Danish dynasts who held power gained more by trade with the Russians than they could hope to get by fighting. King Albert of Sweden made an alliance with the Teutonic Knights of Livonia in 1375, and in 1378 Pope Urban VI authorized the Swedish bishops to grant indulgences to all who fought in, or paid for,
a further crusade against the Russians;
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but nothing happened. Swedish and Finnish frontiersmen attempted small campaigns in 1395, 1396 and 1411, but got nowhere. Russian and Karelian raiders clashed with Norwegians in the 1440s, but the Copenhagen government did little. When, towards the end of the century, a group of Swedish nobles managed to assert their independence of the Danish king by supporting Sten Sture as regent, the situation changed. Muscovite expansion to the west, and Sten’s ambition to consolidate his rule by reasserting Swedish power in Finland and, if possible, Livonia, brought about a state of war in the North. On 22 June 1496, Pope Alexander VI issued the last crusading Bull for the recruitment of warriors in Sweden, but in vain: the Bull was intercepted by the regent’s enemy, King John of Denmark, and Sture was deposed before he could push the war to a conclusion. Even in the Baltic the maintenance of the
status quo
was more important than the Holy War. In the 1540s, the exiled Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus recalled the good old days, when Swedish kings had dubbed ‘golden knights’ after their coronations, and had sworn them to defend the church; ‘and they used to observe this oath so faithfully and strictly that once they had heard war proclaimed against the enemies of the faith, especially against the Muscovite schismatics on the eastern limits of the kingdom… at once, at their own expense, they went off to war in a strong armed band to fight the Lord’s battle…’ But the next Swedish crusader was to be Gustavus Adolphus.

The Latin crusaders devised three ways of ruling their conquests in the Baltic region. As systems by which outside authorities controlled new countries, they met with varying success. Sweden and Finland remained together for nearly 600 years. The Teutonic Order kept Prussia and Livonia for nearly 300. The king of Denmark was suzerain of northern Estonia for little more than a century. No one factor decided how long they lasted, but logistics, economics, density of colonization, and cultural assimilation all counted as much as administrative efficiency.

The shortest-lived regime was the least intrusive. The king of Denmark intervened decisively in Estonia only twice: to conquer the province, in 1219, and to impose a land settlement, in 1238–42. After that, he sent out a captain and a bishop to Reval as overseers of royal and church interests, and left his vassals to pay tithe and land-tax and do homage to new kings. In theory, Valdemar II had the same royal powers over Estonia as over Denmark; in practice, his successors had limited rights, and delegated power to their Saxon tenants, the
Ritterschaft
, while their governors acted within a framework of consultation and legal process. In 1248 the
Ritterschaft
and the burghers of Reval were already acting as a legislative body for certain purposes, and in 1252 some vassals were granted automatic hereditary succession to their lands according to German feudal law. Danish inheritance customs never took root. By 1282 a council of vassals was advising the captain, and in 1315 the whole
Ritterschaft
was allowed to live, inherit and rule its fiefs according to its own law-code. It was established that the duchy belonged to the crown, and the king minted the money, but the efforts made by Danish rulers to maintain and extend their powers against their church and baronage
in the period 1242–1319 bore no fruit in Estonia. The loyalty of the province’s landowners rested on economic self-interest and guarantee of tenure.

This arrangement might have lasted longer but for the disintegration of the Danish monarchy in the 1330s, and the financial difficulties of Valdemar IV, its restorer, in the 1340s. Beset by pressing problems at home, and unable to break the Hanseatic trade monopoly at sea, Valdemar calculated that he would get more by selling the province than by hanging on to what was left of his rights as suzerain; he accepted 10,000 marks from the Teutonic Knights, and Estonia became a dependency of the grand-master, loosely federated with the Livonian province. Reval and the corporation of vassals kept their constitutional privileges, but the rule of the master of Livonia proved more effective and exacting than the distant hegemony which had released them. In effect, Danish power had been undermined by peasant revolt which the Order had crushed (see
p. 212
).

In Finland, on the other hand, the kings of Sweden tried to assimilate the new country to the old; their control was based on a greater variety of links, built up over a much longer period of conquest, and consolidated by closer contact. A community of Swedish immigrants and Finnish converts already existed in the south-west of the country before Birger Jarl asserted royal power in the 1240s, and this community served as a prototype of colonial society. Its members lived like the freeholding mixed farmers of Sweden, observing similar laws and obeying a Swedish bishop; the king and his captain at Åbo could build up their authority here, as at home, and gradually extend it beyond the pale as more Suomi and Tavastians were converted.

The majority of native freeholders were not consigned to the rule of a feudal baronage, as were the Estonians; rather, the whole population of Finland, except the slaves (
orja
) formed several more or less privileged groups, each directly connected with the king. There were magnates, but they were not a distinct order, and their status was determined by their usefulness as administrators. The royal castles established at Åbo, Tavastehus and Viborg were centres of authority to which estates and fiscal rights were attached, and were granted for a term to vassals who acted as captains or advocates and appointed subordinate prefects and bailiffs. Thus in 1340 King Magnus II empowered Daniel Nilsson to hold