The Northern Crusades (22 page)

However, the Suomi were one people, the most agricultural of the Finns; the Tavastians were another, far less amenable to the Swedish way of life, and prone to supplement their gains by fur-trading with raids on the Karelian, Vod and Russian settlements of the eastern wilderness. As a result, the princes of Novgorod had built up connections with Vods and Karelians which by 1200 amounted to virtual overlordship, and resulted in an intermittent state of war between the Finnish nations. Were the Swedes to gain control of the Tavastians, they would find themselves committed to joining in this war; and they were already under attack from Karelian summer raiding parties, which put to sea on the north-eastern shores of the Bothnian Gulf and sailed southwards into the Swedish skerries. In 1227 Prince Yaroslav of Novgorod ‘sent priests to baptize the Karelians, and soon all the inhabitants were baptized’.
⁶⁷
This venture was followed by a corresponding mission to
the Tavastians, undertaken by an Englishman, Bishop Thomas of Finland; but by 1237 Pope Gregory IX had been informed that the Tavastians had rejected Christianity, and called on all Christians to join a crusade against them. Both the Church and the Swedish king suddenly found it desirable to use force in order to maintain the balance of power and religion in Finland.

Their first joint venture was the expedition of 1240, which was decisively defeated by Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod at the confluence of the Neva and the Izhora. After that it must have seemed all the more urgent to bring the Tavastians into the Latin Church, and the arrival of the Dominican friars ensured that Gregory IX’s appeal for a Tavastian crusade would not be forgotten. The friars were committed to missionary work, and were befriended by Bishop Thomas, by Archbishop Jarler of Uppsala, and by the rising magnate Birger Magnusson, a brother of the Earl Charles who had been killed by the heathen at ösel in 1220; thanks to this combination, King Eric XI, ‘the Lisper’, was persuaded to call out a full levy-fleet and sent it to Finland under Birger, his brother-in-law and now earl, in 1249.

The story of the ‘second’ and ‘third’ Finnish crusades was told in a Swedish rhyme-chronicle called
Erikskrönikan
,
⁶⁸
which was written (probably between 1322 and 1332) by an unidentified follower of one of Birger Jarl’s grandsons. The author expresses the attitudes of the new knightly landowning class which dominated Sweden at the time, and these attitudes to a large extent correspond to those of the crusademinded European chivalry – always allowing for a dash of xenophobia and social realism. He believed in the crusading ideal, and had the greatest respect for the Teutonic Knights – ‘God’s knights’, to him; but when he describes the Finnish crusades it becomes apparent that he has simply superimposed the opposition ‘Christian-heathen’ on the opposition ‘us-the enemy’, and regards Tavastians, Karelians and Russians as promiscuously pagan. Birger Jarl took command of the 1249 expedition ‘because he wanted to increase his fame’; but it was assumed that God’s reputation increased with the Earl’s. The effect of the Dominican mission on lay society at home seems merely to have consisted of giving Sweden’s enemies a new name.
Erikskrönikan
never refers to the expeditions of 1249 and 1292 as crusades, or implies that the participants expected full remission of sins for joining them; the author hopes that, by analogy with the Holy Wars of the Teutonic Knights, those who died will go to heaven, but the analogy is somewhat strained. It would appear that he, and the circle to which he belonged, were using the example of the crusade against the Balts as an encouragement to fight the Finns and Russians. In the narrative of the 1249 expedition, the attractions of loot, adventure and spreading the faith are given equal weight.

The harbour may have been Helsinki. There the Swedes landed and pushed upriver, driving the Finns before them.

So it did: not because the Tavastians had been subject to him, but because now they and the Suomi were under Swedish rule and were reinforced by castles at Åbo and Tavastehus. Novgorod and her Karelian allies would be liable to attack by combined armies of Swedes and western Finns. The Tavastians had gone raiding from the southern Finnish plateau down to the mouth of the Neva; if the Swedes built another fort there, they would be able to levy toll on all Russian and German merchants using the Gulf route to Novgorod, and drive a wedge between the city and the Karelians, who supplied a large proportion of her exports. If Swedish missionaries had their way, attempts would be made to win these Karelians from the Greek to the Latin faith and in 1257 Pope Alexander IV authorized the king of Sweden to conquer them. This was particularly annoying as the Karelian fur-traders were showing signs of independence – not only by driving out Norwegian tax collectors from Lapland (1271 onwards), but also by concluding separate treaties with German traders, which meant that they could supply furs direct to the Western market and bypass Novgorod.

Prince Dmitri reaffirmed Russian supremacy by an invasion of Karelia in 1278; five years later, Swedish raiders were fighting the men of Ladoga on the Neva again. 1291 was a bad year for Novgorod – flood, frost, loss of grain and horses – and the following spring a party of adventurers went on a raid into Tavastia to restock; in reply, Birger Jarl’s grandson, King Birger, launched the expedition of 1292 which is known as the third Finnish crusade. The popes had authorized action against the Karelians, as disturbers of the Christian Finns, but only half the invasion force was directed against them (400 men, according to the Novgorod Chronicle); the other half went against the people living on the Izhora, a tributary of the Neva some seventy miles north of the city. Their leader was the largest landowner in Sweden, Tyrgils Knutsson, a relation of the king
and bearer of the newfangled title of ‘marshal’. Neither war-band appears to have met with much success; but, before the marshal sailed home, he had laid the foundation of the third centre of Swedish power in Finland.

On 4 March 1295 King Birger was able to announce to the traders of Lübeck and other Hanseatic towns that he had convened the Karelians to Christianity and ‘with an immense army and laborious preparations we have erected the castle of Viborg, to the honour of God and the glorious Virgin, both for the protection of our kingdom and for the safety and peace of sea-farers’.
⁷²
According to this document, that safety and peace had long been disturbed by Karelian pirates, who had not only robbed, but also flayed and disembowelled Christian prisoners of both sexes; in future, the Gulf would be open to all merchants free of toll, provided that they were not carrying arms to Novgorod, or that there were more than three Russian passengers to a ship. In other words, King Birger hoped to establish himself as the protector of the main north-east trade-route, and thus make himself indispensable both to the Russians and to the Germans. Supremacy in this crucial area would ensure that he held the upper hand in dealing both with Hanseatic merchants in Swedish towns, and with Russo-Karelian fur-traders in the Far North. For the sake of justifying and legalizing the annexation, the king claimed the conversion of the infidel and the protection of persecuted Christians – even the unity of the Catholic faith – as his motives.

The majority of Swedes can have derived little advantage from this conquest, although it was an escape for some small freeholders who were feeling the pinch of the new seigneurial landownership. These were the men who populated the southern coastlands in the period 1250–1300 and turned them into Nyland, or ‘new country’. The profits, if any, of fighting in Finland went to the knights, bishops and magnates; the expenses were borne by their peasants. The commercial advantages that came from holding land along the main Novgorod trade-route are difficult to assess. Where they assume tangible form, in new markets and harbours, the king would seem to have been the chief gainer. Otherwise, it was a section of the nobility and clergy which benefited from the territorial annexation – in tithe, the cure of souls, and rent. The enterprise was essentially the work of a political elite and turned out to have side-benefits for larger and less favoured groups, including many of the Finns themselves. In bringing it about, the king and his advisers had to
mobilize both summer levies and forces of occupation from a military class that had little experience in fighting overseas, and probably feared the risks of meeting ‘wild Finns’ and Novgorodians in alien and treacherous country.

These dismal and isolated struggles against starvation and smoke were endurable to professed monks trained in self-denial and discomfort, but the warriors who were fighting in Finland were not monks. They were used to their butter and beef, their fresh salmon, barley bread and unstinted beer; not for nothing were they called ‘food Swedes’ by the Finns on whom they were quartered. By this date the knights were hearing stories of the chivalry of Alexander the Great, King Arthur and Charlemagne, winning prizes at tournaments, and feasting on imported luxuries at the expense of ostentatious magnates. Those who wanted to leave home in search of redemption, to rid themselves of an unbearable load of sin, had little reason to go to Finland. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a more attractive and fashionable alternative. Monasteries would advance loans to would-be pilgrims on the security of their land; thus Gisli Petersson set out in 1259, the bishop of Linköping went with a party of pilgrims in 1282; and in 1293 many took the cross at Uppsala in response to Pope Nicholas’s appeal for crusaders to the Holy Land. Two landowners are known to have joined the Teutonic Knights. Karl Ulfsson was killed fighting in Livonia in 1260 or 1261, and much praised by the Eric-Chronicler for his Christian heroism; Johan Elofsson, brother of the pilgrim-saint Ingrid, appears as a Knight of the Order between 1281 and 1295. There were many reasons, both spiritual and material, for not fighting the king’s war against the Russians and the Karelians.

It was, therefore, all the more important to invest this war with a religious significance of its own. Hence the promotion of the cult of St Eric through the translation of his relics in 1257 and 1273, and the composition of his legend not long afterwards; in this just warrior, compounded from the English prototypes of Oswald, Ethelbert and Edmund, the Swedish clergy laid down a pattern for all campaigners in Finland to follow. He had gone to war for the salvation of the souls of those whom he conquered, and had thereby won a glorious victory over sin. His bishop Henry, who lay buried at Nousiainen, north of Abo, had been murdered for trying to enforce the ecclesiastical penalty for homicide on a convert. Both the royal family and the prelates of Uppsala had thereby pledged themselves to the conversion of the Finns, and the fight must be continued by all devout Swedes. The papal bulls that authorized wars against the Tavastians and Karelians reinforced this tradition, and the papal rhetoric that construed Novgorodian raids as attacks on the Christian faith extended it to cover the gruelling frontier-wars of 1292 onwards. The Eric Chronicle was itself a statement of propaganda in this cause, and attempted against the evidence to prove that both knightly and religious values were upheld in fighting the Russians.

Thus, from one side of Lake Ladoga: ‘God grant his heaven to those souls/Who suffered death in that dire slaughter.’ And from the other: ‘Grant rest, O Lord, in thy kingdom, to the souls of those who laid their heads at that fort for St Sophia’s sake.’
⁷³

The Lord gives proofs of his kindness towards his faithful servants by reserving for them enemies (whom he could destroy by his word alone) in order that they might come to the aid of the many who dwell near those enemies, for love of him, and that they might have a means of atonement and salvation by repaying to him something of what he did for them.

Not an easy sentence to follow. It comes from the Bull, dated 12 September 1230, by which Pope Gregory IX authorized the Teutonic Knights to move into Prussia, and it will serve as a sample of the devious rhetoric through which the institutional master-mind of the crusading movement communicated with its agents. Bureaucracies have their jargons, and the eloquent Italian lawyers who formulated papal policy in the thirteenth century were presumably able to sleep the sounder for knowing that the chancery clerks would convey instructions in this rhythmical flow of officialese. It was a prosy counterpoint which linked day-to-day politics with the eternal truths of the faith.