The Northern Crusades (25 page)

Gregory IX’s successor, Innocent IV, made no attempt to resume the war of conquest against the Russians; he hoped to bring them into the fold by other means. From 1245 he was busy conducting a curious diplomatic dance with the ruler of the lands on the river Bug, Prince Daniel of Galicia and Volhynia, whom he tried to entice into the Latin Church by offering him a crown and military assistance against the Mongols. Daniel was not unduly worried by the Tartars, since his principality was also under attack from Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles and other Russian princes. However, he was disinclined to throw away the chance of any advantage, and it was not until 1257 that it became clear that he had got his Latin crown, but intended to remain ‘Greek’ in religion. Until then there was a good chance that the whole west-Russian region would be won over to Rome without fighting, and for most of that period the Curia left Novgorod alone.

When Innocent died, an attempt was made to revert to a policy of aggression. On 19 March Alexander IV ordered the new archbishop–legate, Suerbeer, to baptize the heathen east of the river Narva, and set a bishop over the Novgorod provinces of Vod, Ingria and Karelia.
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Two Estonian vassals of the king of Denmark had informed him that these peoples were eager to enter the Latin communion, and Suerbeer wrote back agreeing. Canon Frederick Hazeldorf was appointed bishop of Karelia, and in 1256 the Dominicans were instructed to preach the crusade for Prussia and Livonia, in preparation for a new offensive. But the ensuing campaign revealed a large gap between the Pope’s information and conditions on the spot. The ‘heathen’ gave no sign that they wished to join the Latin Church, and the only crusaders to appear
were a small band of Swedes, Finns and Estonians, led by one of the landowners who had originally written to the pope, Dietrich of Kiwel. Dietrich’s estates lay on the eastern frontier of Estonia, and he had a private interest in terrorizing the Vods on the other side of the Narva. He made no attempt to baptize or invade the schismatics, but used his troops to build a fort on the right bank, and went home before winter. By the time Prince Alexander arrived with an army from Novgorod, there was no Latin army left to fight; the prince ignored Estonia, and took the opportunity of leading a raid north into Swedish Finland. Bulls, preaching and ‘crusade’ had all been manipulated by one adventurous marcher baron, who was shrewd enough to play on the papal infatuation with the idea of a Latinized Russia.

From this time onwards, the Curia turned to the kings of Sweden for assistance in realizing that idea, and in 1257 Alexander IV entrusted them with the conquest of Karelia – a project they carried out in part over the following century. On the whole, Novgorod and the Livonian colonies were too closely linked by trade to wage war on each other for long; papal intervention had succeeded only in giving the Latins a pretext for invasions which they seldom dared or wished to undertake, and in reinforcing the Novgorodians’ adherence to the Greek Church. Having failed to conquer them, the popes lost any chance they ever had of persuading them. The memory of the crusade of 1240–41 became part of the civic consciousness of Novgorod, proving to the citizens that political and religious independence were one and the same.
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Nor were the Livonians anxious to pursue the crusade further south, against Polotsk, up the Dvina; fear of interrupting the river traffic kept the peace for most of the thirteenth century, and by 1305 this principality had fallen under the control of the Lithuanians.

Not that either pope or emperor had abandoned his interest in the north-eastern Catholic front: throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they both continued to assert their responsibility for the spreading of the faith into Russia and Lithuania. However, the ways in which this responsibility could actually be exercised were reduced in practice to either helping or hindering the Teutonic Knights; and, as each supreme authority went on outbidding and countermanding the other, neither could do very much. Nevertheless, while the going was good, the popes had been able to establish three of the institutions that shaped the Baltic world for the future: the crusade against the heathen, the crusade against the Russians, and the monastic crusading states. Round that tideless sea lay the stranded flotsam of papal ideology – partly dried, partly rotting, and partly fertile.

So, by the end of the thirteenth century, the Baltic had become a Latin sea, and a new religious frontier had been drawn. The balance of Northern civilizations described in chapter 1 had been upset by new ideas, new settlers, new governments and new inventions, all drawn in by the rivers and seaways that connected this region with Western and Central Europe. The North Sea, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder and the Vistula had all contributed to this change, and would continue to supply men, wealth and innovations. But the new Baltic provinces were now pressing against the dense forest of the great eastern river-basins: the Niemen, the Dvina, and the rivers that feed lakes Chud, Ilmen and Ladoga. Here they met a natural barrier, as already described; here they also met resistant and alien societies that barred the way. The Novgorodian and Lithuanian empires were built on manpower and resources drawn from vast contributory areas, and applied with skill to the service of the state. In each case, the state was drawn towards the Baltic by the drainage of its forests and plains, and by the momentum of its trade along these waterways. The Latins could not be left to enjoy their conquests in peace, nor were they prepared to let the two upriver empires develop unmolested. There was a partly blind, partly organized increase of pressure on the frontiers from either side, and the Holy War continued.

The next two chapters will describe in turn the attempts made by the Latin powers in the fourteenth century to revive and adapt the crusading ideal in the conflict of forces along the frontier: first, against the Lithuanians; then, against the Russians. No attempt will be made to give a full account of the wars and alliances of the Teutonic Order’s Prussian state in this period, of the long-drawn-out quarrel with Poland, or relations with the Hanseatic League and Scandinavian princes. These matters affected the crusade, but deserve much fuller treatment than there is room for in this study.

In 1283, according to the chronicler of the Teutonic Knights, Peter of Dusburg, the conquest of the Prussians ended and the war with the Lithuanians began.
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It was still going on when he was writing, in the 1320s, and would continue intermittently until the peace of Lake Melno in 1422, when the Order was compelled to surrender for good its claim to northern Lithuania and Samogitia. Moreover, Dusburg’s opening date of 1283 is not entirely accurate: the Sword-Brothers of Riga had first crossed swords with the Lithuanians in 1203, and throughout the conquests of Livonia and Prussia there had been clashes with the same enemy. Thus, for over 200 years there was either war or rumours of war, with a power judged in some circles to be founded on a denial of the Christian religion; and for most of that period crusaders from Germany and Western Europe were prepared to join in and fight for the Teutonic Knights in what they took to be the cause of Christendom.

But who were the Lithuanians? They were described in chapter 1 as Balts – members of the same language group as the Prussians and Letts – and in 1200 their way of life and political importance were about the same as that for the other Balt peoples. They consisted of a peasantry living under the rule of a mounted warrior-class in the densely forested basins of the rivers Niemen, Neris and Viliya, east of Prussia; five to eight homesteads, each with a holding of family land, made up a hamlet community – strictly exogamous, it appears – and the hamlets paid food rents and hospitality to the landowner, later called ‘boyar’. The boyar recruited his kinsmen and the more substantial peasants into his military retinue, where they were known as ‘friends’; led by the hereditary prince or kinglet of one of the nine districts of ancient Lithuania, groups of such retinues would go out raiding every spring, and return with cattle, slaves, silver and weapons. If their neighbours retaliated, they took refuge in the district fort, built like the Slav
gorod
, from which it took its name,
garadas
.

The Lithuanians had no coastline, no native supply of salt and little iron; they were probably fewer in number, and certainly less prosperous, than their Prussian cousins. Their strength lay in their inaccessibility, and in their horses – pampered chargers for the rich, promoted ploughponies for the less fortunate warriors. In the period 1200–1250 their
raiding-grounds were increasingly taken over by well-organized military powers: the Teutonic Knights and Alexander Nevsky’s Novgorod to the north, and the feudal princes of Mazovia, Little Poland and Volhynia to the south. To make matters worse, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, better armed, mounted and trained than the Lithuanians, began making forays into their homelands in the 1240s and 1250s. The future looked bleak; but in the midst of continuous devastation and bloodshed a remarkable dynasty was able to hold the people together, organize them to wage effective war on their neighbours, and begin the annexation of surrounding territory.

The leading member of this family was Mindaugas (Mindowe, Medovg), who ruled from the early years of the century to his murder in 1263. According to the Volhynian Chronicler,

In 1219 he was one of about twenty Lithuanian princes; by the end of his life he was supreme among a much smaller group, and had mobilized the whole free population to fight for him or his sons, either as cavalry or as infantry. His horsemen copied the tactics of the Mongols, but used short throwing-spears, and swords instead of bows, and protected themselves with mail. His infantry carried spears and axes, and his Lett auxiliaries made use of the crossbows they had got from the Sword-Brothers. An alliance with the Yatwingians brought him reinforcements skilled in combating the Teutonic Knights, and both the wealth and the technology of the Polish and Russian princes were pressed into his service. He fought for, and against, all the East European powers, involved them in his family quarrels, and allowed none of them to live in peace for long. They all tried to get the better of him, either by war or by offers of friendship, and sometimes he appeared to give way, either to superior force, or to diplomacy.

In 1249 his brother went over to Prince Daniel of Galicia, while his nephew allied with the Teutonic Knights of Livonia and accepted baptism. ‘Now is the time for us to go and fight the pagans’, said Prince Daniel to the Poles, ‘for they are warring among themselves.’
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But Mindaugas sent to Riga, and opened negotiations that led to his own
alliance with the Teutonic Order, and baptism. He made large grants of land to the knight-brothers, and appointed the Order his heir, should he die without surviving issue. He accepted a crown from Innocent IV, and invited German merchants and friars and settlers to enter his country. Continuing wars with Prince Daniel, the Tartars, Novgorod and the Poles and the continued disaffection of the Samogitians made the advantages of this German connection seem less apparent in 1260, and in the last years of his rule Mindaugas could not prevent his kinsmen from waging war on all his Christian neighbours indifferently. Lithuanian forces drove the knight-brothers out of Courland, Samogitia and Yatwingia, and penetrated to the mouth of the Dvina in 1263. There, Mindaugas’s nephew Treniota (Troinat) defeated the knight-brothers and burghers of Riga in a moonlight battle, and went on to devastate all Prussia and Mazovia. The king’s policy of intimidating or killing all his kinsmen had turned most of the survivors against him; his brother-in-law killed him the same year, and Treniota was killed in the bath-house the year after.

Mindaugas’s career followed the familiar pattern of ‘modernizing’ autocracy. His elimination of Lithuanian rivals, his importation of foreign ways, his use of foreign allies and his persistent aggrandizement of his country were policies that unified Lithuania, and left an indelible mark on Lithuanian society. Henceforward, his successors were to push their armies down all the great rivers that rose in the centre of their territory in order to construct a vast tributary system that absorbed the wealth of all the western Russian principalities. In the fourteenth century, the comparatively prosperous urban and manorial civilization of Pskov, Polotsk, Pinsk, Kiev and Volhynia-Galicia were yoked to the wooded heartlands of Lithuania proper and made to support a larger and larger military establishment: the grand-prince, his sons and vassal princes with their forts and retinues, the boyars and their retinues, the foreign technicians, and the court officials. The grand-prince rode round his own estates and his fortified towns at Trakai and Vilnius, secure in his ability to satisfy his princes with grants of conquered land, and in his personal control of the military machine. While he advertised his prowess and entertained his ruling class with herculean bouts of feasting and hunting (twelve hours eating a day, and a bag of a hundred bison, for example), his retainers were boarded out on the peasants, and his forts were manned by relays of recruits; in time of war, he or his kinsmen
led rapid and well-equipped armies to the frontier, and then penetrated deep into hostile country and conducted battues which brought home every living thing, leaving not a house or crop behind them. The threat of these raids brought in a steady stream of silver, wax and furs, but otherwise subject peoples were left to practise their trades and religions unmolested. Settlers of all races were brought in to develop the forestlands and increase the size and prosperity of Vilnius and the other princely strongholds. Success in war brought prosperity to the boyars, and a sharpened appetite for more; as consumers of wine, salt, sea-fish, woollens and fresh vegetables they greatly increased the volume of imports along rivers and caravan routes, and directed the attention of their rulers towards all the nearest sources of supply, either to trade with them or to annex them.