The Northern Crusades (12 page)

Neither the idea of the crusade nor that of compulsory baptism was new to the Danes, Saxons and Poles who responded to this appeal. Contingents from all three peoples had gone to Jerusalem either to fight, or as pilgrims, or both, and had received the remission of sins and other benefits that such journeys earned. Their ancestors had themselves sometimes had Christianity imposed on them, under threat of death if they refused. The Danes may even have followed this rule in 1135, when they captured Arkona and baptized the garrison, although the results had not been encouraging. The Poles had tried to bring the Pomeranians to the Church in the same way. However, they were not accustomed to waging war on their own neighbours for spiritual rewards, or to rejecting offers of tribute. When the Saxons demanded to be let loose on the Slavs, they did so for good old-fashioned reasons, either to get submission and tribute, or to seize more land; for the Danes it was an opportunity for revenge and retaliation against the pirates and slavers, and for the Poles a chance of intimidating the Prussians. The fact that
knes
Nyklot and his people were heathen was a secondary consideration; what stiffened the sinews of the assembling armies was his sudden invasion of Wagria in June 1147, when he devastated the new settlements and made it plain that he meant to have his own again.

So the late summer of 1147 saw an imposing attack on the Abotrites by two Danish fleets and two Saxon armies. The contenders for the Danish throne, Canute V and Sweyn III, sank their differences for the time being, and co-operated with Archbishop Adalbero of Bremen, the young Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and one force of Saxons in a pincer-movement directed at Nyklot’s new outpost at Dobin; the other Saxon army marched under the legate Anselm from Magdeburg to the Liutizian stronghold at Demmin, a distance of over 135 miles. Nyklot seems to have played his hand very shrewdly. Dobin was a small place, off the beaten track, surrounded by marsh and lake, when he himself drew attention to it by fortifying it that very summer; yet it kept two armies busy, while a third had to keep watch on the Danish fleet in Wismar Bay. Nyklot got the Rugians to attack this fleet by sea; the other army of Danes was mauled by a sally from Dobin, in a position where the lake cut them off from Saxon aid, and before long the two kings were racing back to Denmark to continue their civil war. Duke Henry and the archbishop stayed by the fort until the garrison agreed to accept
baptism, then quickly withdrew, without doing farther damage. When some of the more enthusiastic crusaders wanted to lay the countryside waste to force a surrender, the Saxon knights objected, ‘Is not the land we are devastating our land, and the people we are fighting our people?’
²⁶
They did not want to kill the goose that laid the eggs, even for the good of their souls.

The army that marched to Demmin was full of bishops (Mainz, Halberstadt, Münster, Merseburg, Brandenburg and Olmutz, as well as the legate, Anselm of Havelburg), and succeeded in burning one heathen temple and its idols at Malchow; but it also contained two land-hungry Saxon marcher barons, the margraves Conrad and Albert the Bear, and on their instigation was diverted eastwards to besiege the Christian city of Stettin. Crosses appeared on the walls; the Pomeranian bishop, Albert, and prince, Ratibor, came out to explain: wrong bird! The leaders parleyed, the men grumbled, and, grumbling, trailed off home.

So the first Northern crusade was not an unqualified success, whether as a military enterprise or as the fulfilment of an ideal. Prince Nyklot was left in control of the Abotrites east of Lübeck, a heathen warlord in a heathen country, who had bought peace from the Saxons by a token submission. The baptism of his warriors had no visible effects: the idols, temples and sanctuaries remained. The experiment in co-operation between Christian rulers had misfired. Not a foot of ground had been added to Christendom. ‘We did what we were told, but it didn’t work’,
²⁷
wrote Abbot Wibald of Corvey, who had marched to Demmin in the hope of staking a claim to the island of Rügen. The baptisms were ‘false’, said the chronicler Helmold, and even when the Slavs liberated some of their Danish captives, as stipulated, they kept back all those who were still fit for work. There was bad blood between the different nations: the Saxons thought the Danes useless as allies, and there was a rumour that they had been bribed by the Slavs to stand by and let the Danish contingent be massacred. There was disunity between the bishops, who wanted souls as well as land, and the barons, who wanted land or tribute. There was disunity between the leaders, who went home as soon as they could patch up a treaty, and the rank and file, who wanted to fight on, presumably to get bigger shares of loot.

On the other hand if this campaign had not been undertaken as a holy war, it would have seemed fairly successful. It rounded off the Saxon occupation of Wagria and Polabia, and made Prince Nyklot a
tributary and ally of the Saxons; it produced a certain amount of loot, freed a certain number of slaves, and suffered only one serious defeat, when the Danes were thrown back at Dobin. This was not bad for one late summer behind the Slav frontier. There had also been a demonstration of the strength of Christendom in the old-fashioned sense. A temple had been burnt, heathen warriors had been dipped in the waters of salvation, and a wide range of peoples had been seen co-operating in the cause. For the war on the Wends, which was waged by the Saxons, the Danes and contingents from imperial Burgundy, Poland and Moravia, was at least, in the words of a Czech chronicler, a
commotio christianorum
: a rally of the faithful. And the following year, the Pomeranian prince Ratibor came into Germany to reaffirm his Christianity in public.

It was only from the point of view of St Bernard and the clergy of the Slav missions that the campaign appeared a failure. It was they who had decided to make the permanent conversion of the Slavs the main aim of the undertaking, and it is worth asking why they imagined that this could be achieved through a military campaign. On the face of it, the assumption was absurd, and the Pomeranian bishop who saw the crusaders off from Stettin said so: ‘If they had come to strengthen the Christian faith… they should do so by preaching, not by arms.’
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There were two answers to this. One was the belief that, before the preachers could have their say, and touch the hearts of their pagan listeners, the devil had to be physically defeated and sent about his business. He had visible agents in this world: the dark spirits who inhabited the idols and groves worshipped by the heathen, and the free-ranging spirits of the air, who spread their wings over pagan armies and assisted in their battles. For idols were vain, but not empty: from Roman times onwards, Christian missionaries who destroyed them had glimpsed their dusky tenants as they slipped back to Hell, sometimes in the shape of beasts (as at Arkona in 1168), sometimes as a swarm of flies (as at Gützkow in 1127); and the diabolic army that marched in the sky was sometimes visible to all. Smashing an image, or routing a force of heathens was an act that could be interpreted as a blow against the spiritual forces that misled mankind. Such blows had to be struck, or the truth would never become visible to the heathen, for the bigger demons were captains in an army that included myriads of smaller ones, each billeted in the soul of an unbeliever and holding his senses and his mind in thrall. Before baptism came exorcism; if this ceremony meant
anything, it meant that the unregenerate pagan was possessed, and the lives of the saints afforded many examples of the possessors leaving the mouths of converts in the shape of small black men, visible to some, if not all. Like all explanations of human behaviour, this one had pretensions to scientific status; and, like all scientific explanations, it had its comic side; but the sources make it clear that until the eighteenth century large numbers of educated people took it seriously, and saved their laughter for the deluded heathen who worshipped base matter and vile spirits when they might be worshipping God. The whole idea of diverting some crusaders to attack Northern ‘barbarians’, while others marched to the Holy Land, depended on a global strategy against the army of darkness; St Bernard knew that even if the devil were humbled by the defeat of his Near Eastern army, his rule on earth would continue until all the nations were converted, and he concluded that the battle for the North was a necessary prelude to the Last Days. How did he know this? The accumulated libraries of Christian teaching on the subject of idolatry, conversion and eschatology were on his side; the new-found freedom of church leaders to put doctrine into practice gave him confidence and credibility.

This doctrine was perfectly compatible with the belief that the heathen ought to be reasoned into Christianity, by preaching, teaching and example –— ‘weaned on the milk of learning’. Once the superhuman forces had been defeated, the humans would be receptive to gentle words; but first things first. There was no missionary among the Slavs or Prussians so mild that he was not prepared to take his axe and his torch to a sacred tree, image or temple, regardless of the protests of the local people; and any weapon was good enough to discredit or dismay a heathen priest. You could not be nice to Satan. His ‘bonds’ had to be forcibly snapped before those who had been his slaves could be taught to use their limbs. And there can be little doubt that in some cases this worked. There is a story about Otto of Bamberg’s mission in Stettin (1127) which sums up the way these preachers set about their work:

In the end, says the narrator, Herbord of Michelsberg, the excluded boys begged to be baptized. The anecdote illustrates how a conscientious missionary was prepared even to demoralize children in order to win them over to Christ; if it took fire and sword to work the same change in adults, that fire and sword were also blessed. In this way the pious soul-seeker and the freebooting warrior could be yoked together as partners.

And it was these missions which provided the other main justification for wars of conversion. By 1147 they had met with some success in Pomerania, and were active among the Abotrites and Wagrians and Polabians, but their work was unfinished: paganism was resistant and hostile throughout Nyklot’s country, and among the Liutizian cities. Nevertheless, both these areas had once been tributary to the Christian empire of the Ottonians, and the memory of earlier attempts at conversion was kept alive by ecclesiastical tradition, and by Adam of Bremen’s great
Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum
. Adam had pointed to the past – the ruined churches dating from the period 930–85, the martyrdoms and persecutions of converts and missionaries – to awake the modern age to its responsibilities; and it was tempting to construe this tradition as ground for a territorial claim on the lands inhabited by those who were still heathen. Reconquest was the objective of some Spanish crusaders of the twelfth century, although the lands they invaded had been lost nearly 500 years before; in the North, there developed among churchmen
a similar belief that soil irrigated by martyrs’ blood had been marked out for Christian rule, and that this blood cried aloud for vengeance. From this point of view, the heathen had no right to occupy their territory in peace: they were usurpers, who ought to be punished quite apart from their service as conscripts in the army of Satan. Many had been baptized and had then relapsed; they were guilty, not merely ignorant. The war waged against them was therefore defensive – of established Christian interests; and, if it was defensive, it was ‘just’.

These ideas encouraged one group of ecclesiastics to expect great things of the crusade of 1147, and the partial failure of the experiment disappointed them. Events had shown that it was not enough to recruit an army, sign it with the cross and send it into battle, because only a small number of those involved were prepared to put conversion and territorial annexation in front of the other possible gains from such a war. At this date the number included St Bernard himself, Pope Eugenius, Legate Anselm of Havelburg and the more reform-minded of the Saxon bishops, and the lower clergy engaged in Slav missions; it would be necessary to increase the size of the group, and make their ideas more popular before further success could be expected. It would also be necessary to elaborate the system by which crusaders were recruited and led.

St Bernard died in 1153, a disappointed man, but thereafter the influence of his teaching spread. The process was helped by the founding of Cistercian and other houses in Northern regions where monks and nuns had hitherto been rare or unknown, and by the promoting of bishops who were members of the order, or friendly towards it. Between 1150 and 1200, Denmark, Sweden, Saxony over the Elbe, and the Wendish lands underwent the shock of monastic colonization, which had been spread over centuries in Western and Mediterranean Europe, and absorbed in a short period much of the civilization that came with it: new ways of praying, educating, reasoning, building and writing. In these regions, the Cistercians, Premonstratensians and other ‘modern’ movements did not have to fight for their place within an old-established framework of monkish life, as in England or France; they were largely free to create monastic life from nothing, according to their own rules,
and to intervene boldly in worldly affairs to ‘cut corners’. Among other things, these monks and their friends were agreed that to wage war on heathendom was among the first duties of Christian rulers and their subjects, and to promote conversions among the heathen a laudable aim for all monks.