The Northern Crusades (42 page)

Moreover, the pope’s powers over infidels were certainly never granted directly to the Christian emperors, and their charters to the Teutonic Order therefore remained null and void. Conversion could only be brought about by persuasion and kindness, and therefore the Teutonic Knights and their crusading friends were not only mistaken, but also in sin, when they waged war to extend the faith. Those who died in the Northern crusades were surely damned, unless they repented, for it was the duty of the Christian knight to ascertain the justice of the cause for which he fought. Those wars fulfilled none of the five necessary conditions for a Just War, and in addition they involved the crusaders in breaking fundamental prohibitions against fighting on Sundays and feast days. What was gained by such sinful aggression was stolen property, and ought not to be kept by the aggressors. Innocent IV had decreed
that an infidel was entitled to have stolen goods restored to him by the sentence of a Christian judge. Moreover, it was perfectly lawful for a Christian ruler (such as Wladyslaw) to use heathen allies to defend his country: had not the Maccabees made an alliance with the Romans? On all conceivable grounds, it was clear that the heathen had natural rights, and that their rulers were entitled to exercise lawful power over them; therefore it was the duty of all Christians to reject the opinion of the bishop of Ostia, and rather follow Innocent IV, who had written that ‘there can be lawful dominion and jurisdiction among infidels’ and that ‘infidels ought to be compelled to the faith’.

It was a powerful argument, but it was challenging rather than persuasive; Vladimiri was not trying to make friends, just seeking to make points. ‘You’re a good advocate for pagans against Christians’ reads a gloss in one of the manuscripts of the
Opinio
; for them, that is, against us – and this must have been how most of his audience reacted. Some had themselves been on
reysen
, and many more believed that heathens were bad and Christians good. Civilians were convinced that the emperor’s authority was virtually limitless, and canonists that papal power could be extended far wider than Vladimiri allowed. However, the Council had other business to attend to: the condemnation and burning of John Huss, to begin with. And Vladimiri and Witold had less theoretical arguments to use against the Order. On 28 November 1415 a Polish deputation had arrived, in company with some indignant figures who announced themselves as authentic Samogitians anxious to join the Roman Church but afraid to do so because of the continuing hostility and aggression of the Teutonic Knights. At last, the pagans were in the witness box. And at the same time King Wladyslaw informed the Council by letter that he would have begun a crusade against the Turks if he had not been held up by fear of an attack from Prussia.

The Samogitians presented their complaints in February 1416, and a week later the Polish and Lithuanian ambassadors made a formal appeal for justice against the wrongs inflicted on their countries by the Teutonic Knights. No immediate decision was taken. Then the Order’s advocate, Ardecino de Porta of Novara, asked that the Council excuse it from answering further charges; an attempt was made to read out a recapitulation of all the points at issue between Poland, Prussia and Lithuania, but the text was far too long to be heard in one session, and the Council suspended the reading and turned to investigating the heresies of
Jerome of Prague. It was evidently going to be difficult to swing the assembly either way; but the Samogitian deputies had made some impact, and the Order had no easy way of discrediting them. It was suspected in Prussia that they were simply the tools of Witold, and had in fact no intention of becoming Catholics; but how could this be proved? The answer, as too often with the Teutonic Knights, was an act of violence: in March the Samogitians were arrested on their way back from the Council, and held prisoner contrary to all international law and convention.

That September, both Wladyslaw and the grand-master wrote to the Council reassuring delegates that they had no intention of waging war on each other for the time being, but their intellectual troops were fully engaged. Vladimiri was composing a more detailed attack on the Teutonic Knights (
Articuli contra cruciferos
), proving not only that their political powers were unjustified, but also that their scandalous conduct was inconsistent with the profession either of knight or of monk. Dr Dominic of San Gemignano attempted to refute Vladimiri’s refutation of Hostiensis, and Dr John Urbach asserted once again the right of the pope to authorize offensive war in order to bring about the conversion of the heathen – there was no lack of texts to support him.
¹⁸⁰

Urbach was a paid polemicist of the Order, but he was not the fiercest opponent of the Polish king. That same autumn, the Dominican John Falkenberg was completing his own ‘Book on the Doctrine of the Power of Pope and Emperor’ in order to convict Vladimiri of heresy and error before the Council. Objecting to the Pole’s dismissive view of the powers of the emperor, he used Aristotle to prove that the civil power had a legality older than, and independent of, that of the papacy, and went on to claim that the emperor was God’s vicar in temporal matters, and therefore had a duty to repossess in God’s name that part of his earth that was occupied by those who defied him by disbelief, idolatry, schism and heresy. These were God’s enemies, regardless of whether they made war or peace with the rest of the world, and Augustine and Isidore proved that it was for the emperor, not the pope, to make war on them. Of course, love was necessary; but since the object of fighting the heathen was to protect Christians, such wars were the result of love. ‘And therefore, it is more certain than certain that to protect the faith by making war against infidels out of love is to deserve the kingdom of heaven.’ After that, it followed that the Teutonic Knights and the Northern crusaders were wholly justified in all that they had done,
because they had acted in obedience to the doctrines of the Church and in vindication of the legal rights of the emperor; they were entitled to wage war on the Feasts of the Virgin for the same reason that Christ had healed on the Sabbath – ‘are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the Sabbath day?’ (John 7.23).

But, when the Poles made use of unbelievers to devastate a Christian country, it was not only an outrage, it was heresy to pretend otherwise. Augustine and Chrysostom were agreed: it is never right to make friends with the devil. Therefore all Christians who helped Wladyslaw in the wars of 1410 and 1414 merited eternal damnation, and the whole Polish nation was liable to be condemned by the Church to lose both its political independence and life itself. Since Wladyslaw and Witold had made it clear that they intended to conquer Prussia and then overwhelm the rest of Central Europe to the Rhine, they must be condemned by the Council forthwith.

The Conciliar movement had given intellectuals a prominence in the conduct of political business which they had seldom previously enjoyed. Whether anyone benefited from this is doubtful; certainly not Falkenberg. His work suggests he was a clever man; his conduct proves that he was too clever by half. Attacking Vladimiri was fair game, but attacking Wladyslaw, and attacking him gratuitously, was folly. Moreover, at the same time as he published his
Liber de doctrina
, his much more scurrilous work, known as the
Satira
, was submitted to the professors of the Sorbonne. This was an exercise he had written some five years earlier, after moving from Poland to Prague to Magdeburg, where he was an inquisitor. He maintained that ‘Jaghel’, i.e. Wladyslaw, was a mad Lithuanian ‘dog’ who had persecuted Christians abominably, and was unworthy to be king even of Poland. He was merely an ‘idol’, and all Poles were idolators. Because Poles were idolators, they were apostates and heretics, and all who attacked them deserved eternal life. Because they threatened the Church from within, they were worse than pagans; to prevent them spreading their heresy, true Christians ought to exterminate all or most of them, along with their king, and if they did so they would certainly go to heaven.
¹⁸¹

What appears to modern readers as a satire on the concept of the crusade, or on medieval thought in general, was neither meant nor taken as either: Falkenberg used his treatise as ammunition in the campaign against Wladyslaw, and, since it was manifestly slanderous, Wladyslaw
had him dealt with. In the course of the year 1417, he was arrested, imprisoned, and condemned both by the Dominican Order and by the Council as the author of a scandalous libel. His flirtation with the doctrine of tyrannicide made him a public menace, but his more generally pro-imperial and anti-Polish propositions earned him a certain amount of sympathy, especially among the German nation. The Polish delegation found it more difficult to deal with the ideas than with the man; despite a detailed refutation by Vladimiri, and despite urgent appeals to the Council and Martin V, the new pope, there was no formal conviction of Falkenberg for heresy. Just before the Council dispersed, on 14 May 1418, he had the satisfaction of hearing a committee of three cardinals report that, although his
Satira
deserved to be ‘torn apart, ripped to shreds, and trampled underfoot’, it was not heretical. He was then carried off to spend six years in prison in Florence and Rome.

This uncalled-for intervention by Falkenberg had helped neither party. The Order’s chances of getting the Council to take some kind of action against Poland were reduced by the publication of what amounted to a caricature of what the grand-master wanted; the Poles’ determination to make a heresy out of Pole-hatred, and convict the Teutonic Knights of having briefed Falkenberg, roused considerable opposition even among those delegates not otherwise hostile to Wladyslaw. The heresy conviction was prevented by the English and the Spaniards. In the course of 1417 a number of polemicists expressed open support for at least two of Falkenberg’s conclusions: that it was legitimate and meritorious to wage offensive war on the heathen in certain circumstances, and that it was damnable to use heathen allies against a Christian people. In January the advocate Ardecino de Porta of Novara published a
Tractatus
¹⁸²
pointing out some of the inconsistencies in Vladimiri’s reasoning, and advancing a quaint anti-pagan argument of his own: since God had enfeoffed the heathen with the lands they occupied, they were obliged to keep his law; since by their idolatry they broke it, they ought to be disseised by God’s vicar, the pope. Ardecino was paid by the Order for his efforts, as was Urbach for the official reply to Vladimiri that appeared in June. But there also appeared two opinions in favour of the Order’s case by powerful independent thinkers who enjoyed widespread respect: Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, bishop of Cambrai, an old exercised theologian and advocate of church reform; and the Benedictine Andrew Escobar, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo and former student at Vienna University.

D’Ailly tried to simplify the debate by reducing it to two questions: ‘May Catholics wage a just war on Christians with the assistance of pagans?’ and ‘Are the Teutonic Knights entitled to wage war on infidels in order to acquire their lands?’ He concluded that there was no absolute prohibition against using heathen allies against Christians: a man was expected to fight for his lord, be he Christian or pagan. And, on the other hand, either pope or emperor was entitled to order Christians to make war on pagans, for one of three reasons: to regain lost Christian territory, to repress aggressive pagans, and to punish those who ‘shamed the Creator’ and seduced Christians by their unnatural way of life. Otherwise, peaceful infidels should be left in peace and their rulers and property should be regarded as lawful. Thus, if Wladyslaw’s pagans were his subjects, he was justified in using them against the Order; if the Order’s charters authorized the Knights to wage war for one of the three good reasons, their way was just. And then D’Ailly added that Falkenberg’s conclusion that Wladyslaw and the Poles ought to be killed by all Christian princes for heresy, idolatry and persecution of the Church was perfectly correct – provided that they had been tried, convicted and sentenced for these crimes by a legitimate authority. This brief opinion
¹⁸³
was meant to take some of the wind out of both sets of sails, but it was harder on Vladimiri than on the Order.

Escobar produced a rousing and very traditional vindication of the crusade in general and the Teutonic Knights in particular. He repeated the history of Poland’s relations with the Order down to 1414 in such a way as to convict Wladyslaw of hindering a lawfully constituted religious Order in its work. Then he tackled in some detail the question of forcible conversion. Vladimiri had argued that missionary work and the waging of war were incompatible, because men cannot be compelled to the faith. But the purpose of waging war was not to drive men to baptism at the point of the sword, but to deter them from their own blasphemous and idolatrous practices as a preliminary to the change of heart that must lead to conversion. We are all God’s children; if some of his children insult him by denying the true faith, it is the duty of the rest to correct them for the good of their own souls, and this is what the Teutonic Knights had been commissioned to do, and had done – because they love their neighbours, as well as loving God. And if the king of the Poles chose to call in pagans to help him assert territorial claims against these good men, he deserved to lose both his claims and his crown;
and all good Christians should go to the assistance of the Order.
¹⁸⁴

Against such arguments as these, Vladimiri’s contention that the Order was guilty of something called the ‘Prussian heresy’, and deserved to be treated as an illegal organization, carried little weight. So radical was his approach that it would have been impossible to condemn the Order for the reasons he gave, without impugning the good name of the papacy, the Empire and most Christian princes. However carefully he strove to distinguish between the Northern, the Spanish and the Palestinian crusades, the flaws in the distinction appeared obvious. Crusaders (and would-be crusaders) tended to stick together. However, the Council would never have decided for or against either side unequivocally, if only because it had far more important business to attend to. The new pope, Martin, concluded the last session by imposing silence on the king of Poland’s advocate; and then appointed Witold and Wladyslaw as his vicars-general in Russia. Their catholicism was loudly reaffirmed.