The Northern Crusades (15 page)

The fighting was not only to be defensive. They were to fight ‘intending to spread the religion called Christian with a strong arm’.

For the time being, the princes of the North were too busy fighting each other to pay much attention; it was not until 1184 that the Danes made ready to go on a large-scale raid to Estonia, and then they were distracted by the outbreak of their last war with the Christian Pomeranians. Once this was over, both the victors and the victims of the Wendish wars looked east for profit and salvation. For the assault
on east-Baltic heathendom involved not only Germans and Danes, but also members of the surviving Slav dynasties – the princes of Rügen in 1219 and 1279, the prince of Mecklenburg in 1218. The crusade had become an integral part of the Christian culture they had been forced to accept.

The story so far has been of the conquest of the west-Baltic heathen by Saxons and Danes. With the thirteenth century, the warships and field-altars set out for the eastern Baltic, and the picture becomes more complicated. In this chapter and the two following, parallel events and themes will have to be dealt with successively. New forces and people from outside the North make their appearance in this region, and the first thing that must be dealt with is an element that came to shape the whole history of Prussia, Livonia and Estonia: the religious military order.

These associations of monkish knights were not originally intended to colonize, domineer, convert the heathen or make profits. The first aims of the Templars, for example, were to live lives of poverty and chastity while defending or recovering the Temple and Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. The German Order of St Mary began in the same way. However, the accidents and adjustments which led them to become conquerors and rulers involved their committing the worst excesses of the world they had renounced. The atrocities of the Teutonic Knights fill books, if not this one.

Violence and religion had long been friends before this particular merger was arranged, even if only metaphorically. ‘Thou art God’s soldier’ wrote St Paul (2 Timothy 2.3); but ‘the weapons we fight with are not human weapons; they are divinely powerful. Yes, we can pull down the conceits of men…’ (2 Corinthians 10.4): by prayer, not by the sword. But later, the term God’s or Christ’s army was applied to conventional fighters engaged in a meritorious cause, such as a crusade. This perpetuated a very old tradition from the days when, in Gibbon’s words, ‘the attachment of the Roman troops to their standards was inspired by the united influence of religion and of honour’.

These, like other, pagan traditions, had been refined and transformed when the Christian emperors took over the old imperial army and civil service in the fourth century. The army had been united in its dedication to the divine emperor; now it was dedicated to Christ through the emperor. Military service was resanctified; by serving Rome with the sword, the legionary served the Church and saved his own soul. A priest was not allowed to become a soldier, because a mediator between God and man had to be free of the taint of blood; but, as late as the twelfth century, the Romans of the Byzantine Empire accepted that a professed monk could continue to serve in the imperial army.

This set of beliefs was extremely durable. It was good enough for Justinian and his successors at Constantinople, and it was good enough for Charlemagne, and the Ottonian and Salian emperors of the west. But here, in the eleventh century, it broke down. By this time the Western emperor was only one among hundreds of military paymasters; anyone who could afford a warhorse, armour and weapons was liable to exercise the military art without respect for the old conventions of what was called ‘public war’ – that is, war on behalf of the emperor. There had always been such men, but Roman lawyers had dismissed them as brigands, and the Church had condemned them. Now they were so numerous that, if the clergy were to continue moulding society to a Christian model, they would have to come to terms with them. Bishops and abbots could only maintain their rights and property by waging private war, which meant employing whatever warriors they could get, and sometimes leading them in person; it was no longer realistic to bless imperial troops and curse all the rest.

Therefore the clergy had to try and harness the amenable, and suppress or correct the noxious. Monastic knighthood emerged as one of three ways in which this was done.

The first was by encouraging discipline and taboo – to begin with, by restrictive agreements among the princes and prelates who employed the warriors. The Truce of God, the Peace of God, and some aspects of the
Bann
or King’s Peace of individual rulers were examples of this. Oaths and treaties also limited the occasions of warfare to certain stated grievances, and the sanction of excommunication was applied to those who broke the rules. The second way was by promoting Holy War,
which meant the recruitment and organization of warriors and clerks to serve what they considered to be the common cause of Christianity, whether in Spain or in Palestine.

However, these two devices did not succeed in turning military service into a Christian calling. Most clerics agreed that it was better not to fight at all than to fight with restraint and honour. By the early twelfth century it was clear that spiritual propaganda had not transformed the knights of Western Europe; only that the rising cost of equipment had made them a more exclusive class, with occasional crusades providing an outlet for the more adventurous, guilty or desperate. And most of the persistent fighting could not be fitted into the two acceptable categories of Just War and Holy War.

The third way came into being thanks to the encouragement and publicity of St Bernard of Clairvaux. He believed both in limiting home warfare and in crusades, but he wanted more; and in the 1120s he believed he had found it, in the shape of a small force of knights who had bound themselves to serve in the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem for life. In effect, they had taken to religious life without ceasing to be warriors. He was so impressed that he wrote his treatise
De laude novae militae
⁴¹
to inspire these knights and publicize what he took to be their ethos.

For he believed that they had reconciled spiritual and earthly warfare. The ‘new knighthood’ fought two manifestations at once: the Satan in themselves, represented by the imperfections in their bodies and minds, which were repressed by vows of chastity, poverty and obedience; and the outward Satan, manifested in the troops of Islam, whom they encountered in battle. Both were sacred duties; each was assumed to support the other. For St Bernard’s concern was both with the ‘cause of Christendom’ and with the soul of the individual warrior. He was a firm believer in the ruling class, but he wanted its members to be aware of their responsibility to God for the position of power in which he had placed them; since this position involved fighting, fighting had to be justified. Too often, a knight lost his soul in a meaningless private war, or even a tournament; but such dangers could be avoided if the battle was against both self and enemy at the same time. The Cistercians had made labour, as well as prayer, a path to God. Why not war?

It was a subtle view, but rested on clumsy and conventional assumptions. One was that the end justified the means. Another was that war
for the defence of the Holy Places was, or could be, a spiritually meritorious occupation. Another was that Muslims were merely robot agents of Satan’s foreign policy. Such beliefs were both popular and respectable at the time, particularly among crusaders. The author of the
Chanson de Roland
summed it up by making Charlemagne’s archbishop bless the Christian host before battle with the Saracens, and, ‘as their penance, he ordered them to strike’. ‘If you die, you will be holy martyrs. You will have seats in Paradise the Great.’
⁴²

This attitude had no clear theological foundation. From the time of Gregory the Great, a long line of churchmen had argued in favour of a kindly, rational and accommodating approach to the unbeliever, and Bernard himself was later to claim that, since the Church was destined to bring the whole world to Christ through conversion, it was better to argue with the heathen than to fight them. To justify the New Knighthood he assumed that the Templars would only be fighting defensive wars, but on the whole he preferred to avoid the problem. He sanctioned the current detestation of Saracens, and let the prevailing obsession with Jerusalem carry the armed monks on its back.

Thus even in the title-deeds of military monasticism – Bernard’s
De laude
, and the Rule composed for the Templars (1129–36) – there were ideas which set the new Orders at an angle from some Christian traditions; but this was no disadvantage. By 1200 the Templars, Hospitallers and Spanish Orders were rich, famous and effective, for in addition to St Bernard’s theoretical advocacy they enjoyed three further advantages.

The first was the continuing support of the Cistercian Order and its friends, which assured them of patronage and encouragement from a whole international complex of abbots, bishops and scholars – the dominant spiritual force of that century. They were ivy on the oak that sprang from Citeaux. But equally important was the second advantage, their military efficiency, particularly noticeable in a precarious military situation. Their Rules gave them the discipline, dedication and morale which other crusaders lacked. They were able to recruit selectively, train systematically, replace casualties automatically, and demand lifelong service as a matter of course. It so happened that the Rule of the Templars was a marked advance in military organization, although this was not its main purpose. And, thirdly, the Orders were given lands and money for which they were not accountable to anyone except the pope. Since they were fighting a war, they invested much of this wealth in castles,
and castles brought
dominium
– political power over the surrounding territory.

With these assets the Templars and Hospitallers became the backbone of the Latin cause in Palestine, and therefore an essential component of what was thought to be the right order of things. Which is not to say that they were above criticism. They were complained about almost from the beginning, and their success attracted increasing hostility, but the substance of these criticisms was that the Orders were not living up to the high ideals that they professed – not that there was anything wrong with those ideals. It did them little harm, because at least they could be seen to be shedding their own and Saracen blood in Palestine. They may not have succeeded either in keeping or in recovering Jerusalem, but without their help Outremer would fall.

Therefore, when the emperors Henry VI and Frederick II planned crusades of recovery, it was natural that they should invest in the military Orders, and that they should favour a small group of German knights and priests that had come together at Acre during the Third Crusade. It was accepted that crusading kings should be responsible for recruiting national contingents for crusading armies, and these Hohenstaufen rulers seem to have hoped that a German brotherhood would help them in their task of focusing and maintaining German interest in the Holy Land.

So the Teutonic Order of St Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem was singled out for development by a group of influential princes, and by the popes, at a time when its late arrival and puny growth would seem to have earmarked it for amalgamation with one of the two big Orders. It began about 1190 as a makeshift field-hospital at Acre, apparently using the title of St Mary’s, Jerusalem, as an allusion to the German hospital in the Holy City, which had been lost to Saladin three years earlier. These hospitallers were later given property in the city of Acre and round about, and recruited a small police force of knight-brothers; there were probably no more than a dozen to twenty until after 1210. Henry VI got them a charter of incorporation from the pope, and permission to use the Rule of the Templars without having to obey the Master of the temple, but his sudden death in 1197 stopped his crusade, and the Order was left idle.

His son, Frederick II, took the cross in 1215, got the Order’s privileges confirmed and extended, and promoted its master, a Thuringian knight
called Hermann of Salza, to the rank of a prince of the Empire – presumably so that he could work with born princes on a footing of social equality. Both emperors and their friends, but particularly Frederick, made donations of land in Italy, Greece, Germany and Palestine. From 1190 to 1210 the Order received eighteen recorded donations; from 1211 to 1230 sixty-one, of which seventeen came from Frederick and his son.
⁴³
At the end of this period the Teutonic Order was a thriving institution, a sturdy miniature version of the other two Orders, with only one important difference: its knight-brothers and priests were all, or nearly all, German. However, since its estates lay all over the Mediterranean, as well as north of the Alps, it could still be described as an international Order.

Both the Hospitallers and the Templars were still inclined to regard it as a potential candidate for incorporation. In the 1240s its master, Gerhard Malberg, went over to the Templars, and the Hospitallers were urging the popes to assign them the Teutonic Order as a dependent brotherhood. And throughout the first century of their existence, to 1291, the knight-brothers of the Teutonic Order remained a copy of the Templars and were dedicated primarily to the defence and advancement of the Latin colonies of the Near East. Their headquarters was the hospital at Acre, their chief citadel the castle of Montfort or Starkenberg thirty miles inland, which was built to dominate the territory gained in 1229 by Frederick’s crusade. When they assembled in general-chapters, the venue was always Palestine. The
Magister generalis
, whom the Germans called
Hocbmeister
, and we ‘grand-master’, spent much of his time at the papal and imperial courts, where crusading policy was formulated, but his deputy, the grand-commander,
Grosskomtur
, remained at Acre administrating the order through four local officers: the marshal, the hospitaller, the treasurer, and the
Trapier
, literally ‘master-draper’ or quartermaster. The names of these officers, and the whole administrative structure, were borrowed from the Templars; and when, in about 1220, the Teutonic Order was authorized to make its own statutes, the result was a virtual transcription of the Rule of the Temple.
⁴⁴
The Order assisted crusaders of all nationalities, and attracted donations from all over Europe: from the kings of Castile, Sicily, Armenia, England, Sweden and France, as well as from German princes. When in 1258 it at last got the Templars and Hospitallers to acknowledge it an independent equal, it was because it was at one with the other Orders in their commitment
to the Palestine crusade, and rich enough to hold its own in this field. The fact that it had already begun developing in a rather different fashion in other arenas, on the Vistula and Dvina, was irrelevant: it was essentially the same as the other big two, and would perhaps have remained the same, if the fall of Acre in 1291 had not deprived it of its original Palestinian base.