The Northern Crusades (11 page)

This apparent inconclusiveness of Northern wars was partly owing to the limited aims of the men who fought them. Rulers were content with a show of submission and the payment of tribute; if that was not obtained, they would burn and loot and withdraw, and their poets would assure them that they had achieved a great victory. They were not trying to change political geography.

In addition, techniques of warfare were limited by natural obstacles which made large-scale campaigning and annexation virtually impossible. All over the North, it was accepted that there were two kinds of campaign. One was the summer raid, which went out either before or after the harvest, usually within the periods May-June and August-September. Since land communications were at their worst in March-April
and October-November, with melting snow and autumn rains, it was essential not to exceed these limits, and the preferred method of fighting a summer campaign was always by sea, when this was feasible. Winter campaigns usually went overland, taking advantage of frozen bogs and rivers, and went out and back either before or after the Christmas or Midwinter feast; cold spells and shortage of foodstuffs usually made them either small or short affairs.

There were good reasons for these conventions. The Russian Primary Chronicle tells how in 1103 the prince of Kiev’s retainers advised him not to set out on a full expedition in spring, because this would mean requisitioning the peasants’ horses while they were needed for ploughing: advice which could have been given even more forcibly in Novgorod, where horses were scarcer. And a winter force that was too numerous, or ran out of supplies, was in for a disaster – as when the Danes invaded Sweden early in 1152, deliberately waiting for the frost in order to be able to take short-cuts over the lakes. But, when they reached the interior, according to Saxo,

After some fighting, the king wanted to advance,

Such campaigns were better fought by the Karelians, and the partisans of the Norwegian pretender Sverrir in 1175–9 – by small bodies of picked men using skis and hunting skills; but those forces could do little in densely populated lowland areas, where their fewness would tell against them, and it was lowland areas that it paid to raid.

Expeditions by sea were also much restricted by weather and season.
The open-decked warship was apt to be immobilized by contrary winds, and foundered in gales. To assemble a great fleet took time and planning; to have the fleet set sail in the right direction before it had consumed its own provisions required luck. This was what compelled King Valdemar I of Denmark to put to sea in a cross-wind in the summer of 1159; he had waited so long for calm weather that he had to risk his men’s lives by drowning, or go home. Their ships took such a battering that most were compelled to put back; the king had to leap from his to another, sword in one hand, standard in the other, and the few crews who kept going had to keep rowing while they ate their rations.
²⁵
It was a heroic crossing, but a risk that most levy-captains preferred not to take.

The longer the campaign lasted, the greater the chances of running into bad weather; a large amphibious operation was perhaps the most risky of all undertakings, given the combined chances of disaster on land and sea. It was not until the 1130s that the Danes and Slavs began transporting horses with their levy-ships, and thereby increasing the range of landing-parties; and, both before and after that innovation, there were good reasons for not putting to sea with a large proportion of a country’s warriors too often; as King Valdemar was reminded when he led his levy-fleet literally up a creek in the marshes of the Dziwna, the kingdom might lose its whole ruling class in one go.

Thus the effectiveness of both summer and winter raids depended on their overcoming problems of transport which could not be solved, as elsewhere in Europe, by the accumulation of vehicles, supplies and draught-animals. The combination of raid and conquest which Canute and William I had achieved in England, for example, was not feasible in the early medieval North; large armies could not survive a whole winter in enemy territory, or prefer the long-term gains of lordship and annexation of land to the quick advantage of a blackmail payment, loot and a safe journey home.

Trading and marauding were of course not the only ways the Northern peoples interacted: by the year 1100 there were negotiations between rulers, Christian missions, and marriage alliances, but these can wait till a later chapter. It was in trade and raids that most friction was being generated, and it was this friction that would lead to the Northern crusades.

Crusades are difficult to define, because there were many different types of warfare conducted in the name of Christianity, and none of them was called a crusade at the time. ‘Taking the cross’ became a preliminary move towards embarking on or contributing to a ‘holy war’ designated as such by the pope; but medieval lawyers and theologians were slow to work out what made such wars holy in general terms. The beast was born not because of an ideological development but because of a political adventure by dedicated clerics and warriors at a moment when the usual ‘defenders of the faith’, the kings and emperor, were at war with each other or with the pope himself. This detachment from the church militant was not a permanent state of affairs, and rulers were soon to take the cross in respectable numbers; but it happened that in the 1090s no great king was interested in avenging Christ’s honour overseas.

So Pope Urban II was able to take the initiative that caused the muddled international raid of 1096–9 to be known as the First Crusade. It resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem from the Muslims, and in the founding of new Christian governments and colonies in the Near East. But what set this enterprise apart from other wars were its objectives and results, the way the armies were recruited and led, not the conditions of service. The troops fought under vows of fidelity which freed them and theirs from secular cares and vexation, and obtained remission of sins for their souls – the same terms as were granted to pilgrims and to combatants in lesser campaigns for the defence of the church or good causes. Once Jerusalem was taken, there was no need for further action on this scale until the end of the twelfth century, and no need to define or institutionalize the holy war more precisely. It was agreed that what
we call ‘the first crusade’ was beyond the normal scope of human endeavour. It was the result of
Gesta Dei:
God’s Own Achievement.

At no stage was there general agreement about what exactly were the religious objectives that justified the first or later crusades. The rank and file went on believing that they were joining in a sort of pilgrimage, but it was difficult for raids on Alexandria, Tunis and Constantinople to be identified with pilgrimages in the ordinary sense. The defence of Christian communities on the Muslim frontier and under Muslim rule was a constant need, but this could usually be achieved more easily by negotiation and treaty than by war – as Frederick II was to demonstrate in 1227. Christian frontiersmen were seldom as eager for intervention by Western armies as the crusaders imagined; and, when the crusaders won new territory or recaptured lost ground, their achievements tended to conflict with traditional doctrines of the primacy of spiritual over temporal concerns. After the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, the need to regain the Holy City and to repeat the glories of 1099 led to the creation of a firmer concept of the crusade, and of machinery to make it real. It became a way of winning spiritual merit, by fighting or otherwise, instigated by popes through a system of persuasion, threat, and reward, aimed at recruiting warriors to serve Christianity wherever the faith was in danger. Its rhetoric, law, ritual and finance were ‘routinized’. But until then, holy war was an imprecise term.

Why, then, did the papacy decide to bring this weapon to bear on the pagans of North-East Europe in 1147? This region had known many previous invasions by Christian armies, usually under the leadership of the imperial dynasts; Carolingians, Ottonians and Salians had subjugated Danes and Slavs and forced them to accept baptism and obey bishops. But by the end of the eleventh century this tradition had run out of momentum. The Danes had become an independent Christian people; those Slavs who had rejected Christianity no longer had a strong claim on the attention of the emperor, since he was now preoccupied with the Rhineland, southern Germany, and Italy. The great north-German archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg were left to fend for themselves, and did so by encouraging peaceful missions – those of Vizelin, Norbert, and Otto of Bamberg in the 1120s. The Saxon counts and dukes who had once profited by eastward imperial expeditions were alienated from the later Salians and unable to wage wars of conquest on their own. They had not forgotten their ‘imperial destiny’, or their claims to
Wendish territory, but their pugnacity now took the form of frontier raids and reprisals between evenly matched and somewhat ineffective warlords. In 1108 there was an appeal in Magdeburg diocese for westerners to come and grab land from the Wends, and the Saxon duke Lothair made at least three vigorous inroads into Slav territory between 1110 and 1124, once reaching as far as Rügen; but the result of his wars was not to extend either the Empire or the Church. His captain Adolph of Schauenburg was left to hold Holstein as best he could, and this was only possible in alliance with the powerful Abotrite ruler Henry. Lothair became king of the Germans in 1125, and his attention was drawn to the south; the north-eastern frontier was largely left to the frontiersmen, and when Lothair died in 1137 a succession dispute left them without their traditional war-leader, the duke, for some years.

By ‘frontiersmen’ I mean the Saxons living across the Elbe, in ‘Holsatia’ or ‘Nordalbingia’ – the Western half of Holstein, behind the hedges and woodlands of the Limes Saxonicus. Saxons had a carefully nurtured reputation for bigness, bravery and brutishness; the Holsatians were reckoned lawless, fearless and ferocious even among Saxons. As might be expected along a frontier, a large proportion of them were free, technically noble, skilled at arms, and apt to make up for the poor living they got from their war-stricken farmlands by mercenary service or raiding. Dukes and kings had employed them, but seldom trusted them; they were kept in hand by distributions of spoil and the threat of Slav invasion. Whether to avenge a Slav raid on Segeburg, or because of rivalry between faction-leaders within Saxony, a group of these men suddenly decided to establish themselves as landowners in the country east of their ancient frontier. Between 1140 and 1143 some dozen noble families pushed into Wagria, displaced the Wendish Chiefs, built forts and halls, and settled. Their count, Adolph II, and his rival, Henry of Badewide, a claimant to the county, advanced further east into the lands of the Polabians, and took possession of the forts and towns of Lübeck and Ratzeburg. After 300 years, the Limes was no longer a political frontier. This was land-grabbing, not crusading, but, since the missionary Vizelin, who had been working in the area for fifteen years, could now be set up as a bishop (at Oldenburg; later at Lübeck) the result was a gain for Christendom; and the methods used by the invaders to grab and hold their land indicated how future ‘holy’ wars might be fought. Small forces of heavily armed knights, and small stockaded blockhouses
were sufficient to open up and subjugate the new territory; then colonists were brought in to clear unsettled areas and increase the revenues of the new landlords, and with the colonists came mission-priests to ‘tame’ and tithe the Slavs. This breaking-up of traditional Slav patterns of authority and society was something new, since the German conquerors of the tenth century had merely levied tribute and military service from the countryside and had lived much like the Slav warlords whom they had ousted. Their bishops had taken money in lieu of baptism, and life had gone on as before; now the Slav peasantry were detached from their hereditary lords and religion, and compelled to surrender grazing and forest lands to immigrant cultivators. By 1145 the Wendish overlord Nyklot had lost his western provinces for ever, and, further south, the Slavs of the old Nordmark had partly accepted the rule of the Saxon margrave Albert the Bear.

At this point the news that the Muslims had conquered the Christian principality of Edessa reached Western Europe, and Pope Eugenius III proclaimed an expedition to save the Holy Land. The main propagandist and organizer of the crusade was the influential Cistercian abbot St Bernard of Clairvaux. In the course of the year 1146 he succeeded in persuading large numbers of knights in France and southern Germany to take the cross and prepare for the journey eastwards under their kings, Louis VII and Conrad III, but outside these countries the response was less satisfactory; neither his golden voice, nor the brazen tongue of his letters, could stir up the Spaniards and north Germans to join him in the multitudes he had hoped for. Eugenius saved the situation in Spain by authorizing Alfonso VII of Castille to attack the Spanish, instead of the Syrian, Muslims; a similar measure occurred to Bernard on 13 March 1147, when he attended a
Reichstag
at Frankfurt and found the Saxon nobles clamouring to be allowed to attack the pagan Slavs on their own eastern frontier. He referred the matter to Eugenius, and on 13 April 1147 the Bull
Divina dispensatione
authorized the Christians of Northern Europe to make war on their own heathen, under Bishop Anselm of Havelburg, instead of marching to Jerusalem. The privileges, merits and insignia of these crusaders were to be exactly the same as those of the rest, but their aim was quite different. For St Bernard, the crusade was defined not by where it went, but by what it did. He urged crusaders to fight the heathen ‘until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or deleted’. There was to be no truce, no taking
of tribute from the unconverted; baptism or war were the alternatives.