The Northern Crusades (19 page)

Hartwig already had an answer: the continuous crusade. In 1195 he had got Pope Celestine III to authorize full crusading privileges to all who took the vow to make a pilgrimage to the Dvina, and in 1198 Innocent III reiterated the offer; that year, Berthold sailed back to the Livs with a fully equipped force of Saxon crusaders. These knights proved effective in battle, and would have been more so if the bishop had not let himself be surrounded by the enemy and torn to pieces. The crusaders ravaged the countryside, forced some Livs to accept baptism, and then sailed off, leaving things as they were. However, Livonia had her first martyr, an almost essential component in the paradigm of conversion. To replace him, Hartwig appointed his own nephew, Albert of Buxtehude, who spent a year recruiting more crusaders, and arrived on the Dvina with a force of over 500 warriors in twenty-three ships.

The response to Hartwig’s appeals was not solely the result of sympathy with his aim of extending the power of his archbishopric; he had as many enemies as friends in Saxony. But the appeals came at the end of a decade of crusading propaganda, when there were many in Northern Europe who had taken the vow in the expectation of sailing to the Holy Land, and had been disappointed by the collapse of the Emperor Henry’s crusade before it could set sail, in 1197. The unrest and local warfare which had broken out in Germany after the emperor’s death had also produced a larger crop than usual of men with murder and bloodshed on their consciences, or reasons for leaving home; for those who lived near Cologne, Soest, Bremen or Lübeck and had connections with the eastern trade, the route to the Dvina, via Gotland, was a well-known way to riches, and therefore a not-unattractive path to salvation. Hartwig and Albert merely had to tap these reserves of manpower, and organize them, and then repeat the process year by year, as authorized by Innocent III in 1204; thus the Lübeck-Livonia run became a steady source of profit and absolution for skippers, knights, burghers and princes. Those
who came and went made things better for those who stayed overseas; and pre-eminent among those who stayed were the kinsmen of Archbishop Hartwig.

Albert, the bishop, was their chief; he moved his see downriver from üxküll to the more accessible port of Riga, where cogs could anchor, and built a new town there for German settlers. He went back to Germany every year until 1224 to drum up support, and secured his position by frequent contact with Innocent III and King Valdemar II of Denmark. He put his brother Dietrich in charge of a new Cistercian abbey at Dünamünde, and also persuaded him, in time, to marry a Russian princess and act as castellan of the fort at Odenpäh, which kept the Russians out. He enfeoffed his brother-in-law, Engelbert von Tisenhusen, with lands round Riga, and recruited his influential second cousin, another Dietrich, from Stade, as one of the military retainers. When Dorpat was captured, his brother, Rothmar, became bishop there, and another brother, Rothmas, became Hermann’s provost (dean). The families founded by these men, the von Tisenhusens, von üxkülls and von der Ropps were to count for much in Livonia, but Albert’s most enduring legacy was his monastic family, the Sword-Brothers, who were to emerge as the dominant political force in the country even during his own lifetime.

The Sword-Brothers appear to have been men of mixed social origins. In the eyes of a hostile chronicler, they were ‘rich merchants, banned from Saxony for their crimes, who expected to live on their own without law or king’.
⁵⁶
But some were members of Albert’s own noble kin-group, and the most important, Folkwin, may have been a son of the count of Naumburg, a district in north Hesse; those whose origins can be traced come either from this area or from the Bremen- Lübeck region, where most of the bishop’s connections lay. There were probably never more than 120 of them, dispersed among six convents, but they were not easy to control. Folkwin took over as master in 1209, when a brother called Wigbert, from Soest, killed the first master with an axe, and as time went by there was almost no crime of which they were not accused; they were a rough and ready lot. However, both under Wenno and under Folkwin they fought successful wars in conditions that left no room for mistakes.

The secret of their military success lay in the limited role which they played in the overall crusading strategy worked out by the bishop and
their masters. They were a heavily armed and heavily mounted elite, and had to be used sparingly in battle, both because of their fewness and because the terrain of the Dvina valley was not ideally suited to cavalry action. Their main duty was to organize crusaders and indigenous levies during the summer campaign, and to hold defensive positions in winter. Bishop Albert and the crusaders of 1200 managed to establish Riga as a base, enfeoff the first German landowners and win over half the Liv nation under their kinglet Caupo; after that the Sword-Brothers were required to press on upriver and consolidate what was gained. The Semigallians, south of the Dvina, came over in 1205, to share in a victory over Lithuanian raiders, and the kinglet of Kukenois gave the bishop half his land in 1207, also for help against the Lithuanians. Both Kukenois and Jersika were occupied in 1209, and most of the Letts brought under the rule of Riga; in 1212 Prince Vladimir of Polotsk conceded his former tributaries to the bishop, for the sake of a military alliance and free passage for his merchants on the Dvina.

From 1209 to 1218 a series of campaigns subjugated the southern Estonians, who inhabited the provinces of Sakkala, Ungaunia and Rotala, and beat off counter-attacks or rival bids for supremacy by Russians and Lithuanians. The arrival of Danish crusaders in northern Estonia set a limit to expansion in this direction for the time being, and in 1222 the Estonians were partitioned between King Valdemar and Bishop Albert. From 1223 to 1224 both Danes and Saxons were busy reconquering ground lost in an Estonian revolt. After a brief interlude, while the country was being set in order by the papal legate William of Sabina, the islanders of ösel were subdued (1227), and the Curonians capitulated by the treaties of 1230–31.

The outlines of ‘Livonia’ were drawn. During these grim campaigns the Dvina served as a lifeline between a series of fortified convents and stone blockhouses: Dünamünde, Riga, Kirkholm, üxküll, Lennewarden, Ascherade, Kukenois. The cogs unloaded men and supplies at Riga, and reinforcements could be carried forward by the river-boats that plied between Polotsk and the sea. South of the river lay heavily forested country from which Lithuanian and Curonian raiding parties periodically struck; these had to be attacked out in the open by the garrison troops, preferably on their way home, when slowed down by the herds they were driving with them. They could not be pursued into their own countries without grave danger. To the north, the country was more
open and mountainous, threaded with small rivers and approachable by well-worn invasion routes. There were more fields and villages to be won in this direction, and the ground could be held by hill-forts: Segewold, Treyden and Wenden on the Treiden Aa; Pernau (Pärnu) on the coast; Fellin, Dorpat and Odenpäh, and eventually Leal (Lihula) and Weissenstein (Vissuvere) in the far north. In penetrating these areas, the Sword-Brothers used every technical advantage they had. The forts themselves were the most important: square stone barracks for man and horse, usually planted on a captured earthwork, and crowned by a watchtower in one corner. Body armour, crossbows and large catapults were decisive in the early stages, and in 1207 the Brothers broke a Polotskian invasion by using calthrops, spiked devices that lamed cavalry. Siege-towers, trebuchets and fascines forced Fellin to surrender in 1211; a ‘great machine’ recaptured Kirkholm in 1220. After a defeat by the Curonians in Riga Bay in 1210, the Brothers stopped fighting in small ships and used the cogs, which drove back the Osilians from Riga in 1215 and could not be built by the enemy.

But the heathen always had the advantage of numbers and experience in local conditions, and soon began to copy the siege-machines and put on captured armour, or buy it from merchants undeterred by papal bans. The invaders could not rely on superior weapons alone. What made them more formidable was their ability to enlist the support of indigenous peoples, and for this intimidation was not sufficient. Nor was persuasion by the word: Henry of Livonia makes it clear that there were never more than a few who were prepared to renounce the old gods and fight for the new without other inducements. In the course of the wars, baptism became the consequence, not the cause, of adherence to the crusading army. The adherence came about because of material inducements. One was protection against Russians and Lithuanians, the bishop’s competitors. Another was the aid the crusaders were prepared to give to Livs and Letts in raiding the Estonians – a chance to settle old scores and get rich. And another was the fact that the bishop was in partnership with everybody’s best customers, the German merchants who brought silver and weapons and luxuries in exchange for furs and wax; and if necessary he could close the mouth of the river. Thus the peoples of Livonia were first either won over as allies, or conquered with the help of these allies; next, baptized, garrisoned and subjected to an occupying elite of priests and landlords. But would they accept the second phase?
Many had revolted against it, even before 1237; and many would revolt later. The next fifty years tested to the utmost the strength of this colonial superstructure.

These protracted disorders were largely the responsibility of the Sword-Brothers. They had won most of the country on the understanding (of 1204) that they could keep a third for themselves and must hand over the rest to the bishop. But the land produced small yields, and the wars were expensive. Their attempt to get more out of their peasants contributed to a widespread revolt in 1222, and they were rebuked by Pope Honorius III. They tried to compensate themselves by seizing the king of Denmark’s land in Estonia, but the papal legate made them return it. When he left, they took it back, started encroaching on the bishop’s share, and began levying tolls on the Dvina. Complaints reached Rome, and by 1230 the Sword-Brothers were becoming an Order of ill repute; another legate, Baldwin of Aulne, decided that they had outlived their usefulness, and reported that they ought to be suppressed. But, when he tried to recapture the Danish fort of Reval from them, with his own force of knights, he was defeated and made prisoner, and could only go back to Italy and begin a lawsuit against them. Master Folkwin began to feel the cold, and tried to persuade the unimpeachably respectable Teutonic Order to admit his knights as brethren; after a tour of inspection, a party of Teutonic Knights reported back to a chapter-meeting at Marburg that the Sword-Brothers ‘were people who followed their own inclination, and did not keep their rule properly, and merely wanted to be given
carte blanche
, and not have their conduct looked into unless they agreed to it’.
⁵⁷
They must have found out that the Sword-Brothers had even arrested their own master during the trouble with the legate.

The lawsuit at Rome went against Folkwin’s Order, and the Teutonic Knights refused to assist him without papal permission. Then, in the summer of 1236, the master was persuaded by his crusading reinforcements to launch an invasion into Lithuania. Assisted by the prince of Pskov, he marched as far south as Saule (Siauliai) and then discovered that the crusaders were unwilling to fight, for fear of losing their horses in surrounding swamps. The Lithuanians attacked, and the entire host was annihilated – ‘cut down like women’, according to the Rhyme-Chronicler. Folkwin and fifty of his brethren were killed, and the Sword-Brothers were finished. They had made enemies of the king of
Denmark and the pope, the only powers that could help them, and in May 1237 the survivors were placed under the rule of the Teutonic Knights. Hermann Balk, the master of Prussia, took over the defence of Livonia.

Master Balk and the papal legate, William of Modena, set about saving the province. A crusade was preached, reinforcements marched north from Prussia, the king of Denmark was pacified by the return of Estonia, and the archbishop of Riga was persuaded to rest content with one-third instead of two-thirds of the conquered country. By 1255 the Livonian masters had won back the territory south of the Dvina that had been lost in 1236. They had persuaded King Mindaugas of Lithuania to accept baptism and an alliance, and they were co-operating in the subjugation of the Prussian province of Samland.

This ascendancy was based, as before, on alliances with the frontier nations. Force was used to show the Curonians, Semigallians and Samogitians who was the stronger, but the terms of the ensuing submissions were not harsh. They had to accept baptism, but they could keep their forts and govern themselves; the Order would fight for them, if they fought for the Order. Hostages were the only guarantee of their good faith.

This system collapsed in 1259, when the Samogitians broke the truce and defeated Master von Hornhausen of Livonia at Schoten in Curonia, killing thirty-three of his knight-brothers. The Semigallians and some of the Lithuanians changed sides, and, when von Hornhausen tried to take a short-cut into Prussia in search of reinforcements, his army was ambushed and destroyed at Durbe (1260). He was killed along with 150 knight-brothers, and the news of his overthrow made all the Lithuanians and most of the Prussians reject Christianity and declare war on the Order. The Estonians of ösel followed suit, and the Russians recaptured Dorpat with Lithuanian help.

This revolt seems to have been the result of political calculation, rather than of resentment at racial oppression; the peoples governed directly by the Order in the Dvina and Vistula valleys remained loyal. The rebels were those least burdened by garrisons or services. But an Order that let itself be defeated by Samogitians was an Order that had been discredited. So for the next thirty years the Livonian knight-brothers fought on with unremitting savagery to achieve two goals: first, to regain unchallenged military supremacy; second, to deprive their former
client-nations of political independence. The latter was long delayed, because the former was elusive; in 1262, 1270, 1279 and 1287 the Livonian knight-brothers met with heavy defeats, and four of their masters were killed in battle, as well as their marshal, Willekin, who was captured and burned alive. Their enemies could outnumber and outfight them; therefore, they had to impose permanent military garrisons on conquered territory, and protect them with a wide band of scorched earth. The Curonians were subjugated by 1263. The Semigallians were never subdued. Most of their nobles were kidnapped and beheaded; the people were driven from their lands into Lithuania, leaving a marshy waste overlooked by lonely castles. The Selonians continued to inhabit an unfortified forest, debatable between Livonian and Lithuanian raiders. The Samogitians remained unconquerable and aggressive enemies of the Teutonic Order. However, by 1290 there was a line of a dozen forts running from Dunaburg to Memel, and a ‘wilderness’ to the south of it. It was a stabilized frontier which kept the Lithuanians out, and the missionaries in, and committed the Order to a literal enactment of Luke 11.21: ‘When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace; but when a stronger than he shall come upon him…’