The Northern Crusades (26 page)

From the point of view of the Teutonic Knights and their subjects, this expanding Lithuania was both good and bad. Good, because it provided a lucrative market up the Vistula, Niemen and Dvina for their home products and Baltic cargoes. In about 1275 Mindaugas’s son Vaisvilkas (Voishelg) made some kind of trade agreement with the burghers and knight-brothers of Riga, and thereafter there is evidence of continual buying and selling between the two sides; the Lithuanians supplied furs, wax, honey and silver (from the Mongols, the price of slaves) and the Germans horses, salt, weapons, bread, cloth, cabbages, horseradish, onions and fruit. Such exchanges continued throughout the fourteenth century, in war and peace, and were largely conducted by German merchants benefiting from the favourable conditions established by the Hanseatic League in the west and the Golden Horde in the east.

However, the military might of Lithuania was always a threat, as both the Order and the grand-princes were trying to absorb territory along the great river routes, and incorporate it into their colonial systems. Since Lithuanian raiders had reached the sea, both in Prussia and in Livonia, it was evidently possible to bring both areas under Lithuanian rule, and, as the empire expanded, the territories of the Teutonic Knights became a conspicuous exception to the prevailing order in Eastern Europe. Mindaugas’s territory had occupied a rough circle, centred on Vilnius, with a radius of some 120 miles. A hundred years later, his descendant Algirdas dominated a huge semi-circle, radius over 400 miles to the south and east, with Poland and the Order’s lands forming a segment to the west and north, still in close proximity to the grand-prince’s
homelands. Both systems had grown by absorbing tribes and principalities along their frontiers, and had come into competition over the conquest of Yatwingian, Samogitian, Curonian and Semigallian peoples. Even after this competition had been ended by the creation of the belt of devastation in the late thirteenth century, there was a chance that either might be able to muster sufficiently effective forces to capture the centre of the other’s political system, and fall heir to the whole lot.

Moreover, the grand-princes and warriors of Lithuania remained pagan. Mindaugas had accepted baptism but the Galician Chronicler was not impressed: ‘this christening was only for appearances. Secretly he made sacrifices to the gods – to Nenadey, Telyavel, Diveriks the hare-god, and Meidein. When Mindaugas rode out into the field, and a hare ran across his path, then he would not go into the grove, nor dared he break a twig. He made sacrifices to his god, burnt corpses and conducted pagan rites in public.’
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Nevertheless, many of his subjects and kinsmen were displeased by his nominal conversion, and, according to the Livonian Rhyme-Chronicle, Treniota and the Samogitians sent to him at the end of his life and said,

By the mid-thirteenth century, the Samogitians were being sandwiched between Livonia and Prussia. They became intensely suspicious both of the Teutonic Knights and of the Christian faith, and the grand-princes had to be more careful in future about which religion they professed. There were always inducements to become Christian, since most of their subjects were orthodox White Russians, and the popes showed a periodic interest in bringing them into the Latin fold by gifts and diplomatic persuasion; but as long as their power depended on Lithuanian horsemen they avoided committing themselves either to
Greeks or to Latins. Although they never became high-priests of a public and official paganism that fulfilled the social and political functions of the Christian churches, the great princes avoided baptism however often their kinsmen and daughters took the plunge. As a result, their religion was viewed by outsiders as a sort of militant paganism; quite wrongly.

Both Prussians and Lithuanians had numerous gods, personifying and regulating every aspect of life and death. The four mentioned above, in the passage quoted from the Galician Chronicle, will serve as a selection: a god of ill fortune, a ‘far-spirit’ protecting the dead, a sky-ruler, and a goddess of the forest. When in 1258 a force of Lithuanians was disappointed of the chance to loot a town, ‘they grieved and spat, shouting
yanda
, invoking their gods Andai and Diveriks and others’,
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and both they and the Prussians were also reported to venerate Percunos, ruler of fire and lightning, Picollos, ruler of the underworld, and Potrimpo, god of rivers and springs. A seventeenth-century collector, Hartknoch, was able to list thirteen separate categories of minor gods, and folklore preserved details of what they were supposed to look like, although they were never worshipped in idol shape.
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To keep this god-world and our world together, the Balts had developed public rituals of sacrifice, propitiation and rejoicing. It was the policy of their rulers to put themselves and their armies at the centre of these rituals, and to exploit the whole complex of belief and action by linking them with their political and military success. Supernatural powers were easily attributed to successful fighters. It was said of the Yatwingian captain Skomond that he ‘was a fortune-teller and a magician and quick as a wild beast’. The most successful devoted a sizeable proportion – perhaps a third – of their booty to ritual cremation, and publicly invoked the gods to join the feast of blood and fire. While his warriors consumed the ‘victory banquets’, the ruler was drawing strength from the whole range of what Christians called ‘heathendom’, from sun-worship to the practice of keeping lucky snakes in the cow byre. When, like Algirdas in 1377, and Kestutis in 1382, he was cremated with immense piles of grave goods, and a whole stable of horses, he reaffirmed the reality of the kingdom of spirits (
veles
) in the sky, and ensured their blessing on his dynasty. When captured commanders of the Teutonic Order were burned alive or suffocated by smoke (as reported of Gerhard Rude in 1320, Henzel Neuenstein in 1365, and Marquard von Raschau in 1389), the inferiority of the Latin invader could be demonstrated in
public. When doomed Lithuanian garrisons had themselves killed by their own wise woman rather than fall into Christian hands (as at Pillen (Pilenai) in 1336), the power of Lithuanians gods and ancestors to reward their servants after death was asserted in the extremest possible way.
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It has been alleged since the thirteenth century that the Lithuanians were deterred from becoming Christians because of the brutality and greed of the Teutonic Knights. This view may have its merits, but it ignores the fact that the Lithuanian religion was successful in its own right. It was more successful than the similar religions of the Prussians and Letts, because the Lithuanian political system was more effective: each helped the other, and the Teutonic Knights could do little about either except contain them. Since the Lithuanians were not a small tribe, they could not be brought to the Church by intimidation or conquest. Since they were prosperous and well organized, the example of the neighbouring Christian peoples was not in itself seductive; the example of the Mongols was perhaps more to the point. Paganism allowed the Lithuanians to govern Latins, Greeks, Jews and Tartars impartially. If it was true that the Teutonic Order insisted on conversion by conquest, and by the subjugation of the convert, it hardly affected the issue of Lithuania’s belief, since the Order failed to conquer in this case. When Grand-Prince Jogaila finally accepted baptism in 1386, he was moved by the prospect of winning the Polish kingdom, and of depriving the Teutonic Knights of their
raison d’être
. The slow progress of the missionaries within Lithuania after 1386 suggests a deep-rooted and much-valued alternative religion which survived the baptism of the boyars.

The Order and the Lithuanians were first brought into conflict because both wanted to exploit the same Lettish and Prussian peoples. This phase of their relations was brought to an end in the years before 1283, when the Order subjugated or drove out the easternmost Prussian peoples, and created a no-man’s-land between their vassals and those of the grand-prince. During this period, Lithuanian expeditions broke into Livonia several times and won signal victories (over Master Otto von Lutterberg at Karki, near Sworbe, in 1270, and over Master Ernest von Feuchtwangen at Ascherade in 1279) and suffered signal defeats (on the Dubenaa in 1272, and at the new fort of Dunaburg in 1278) but were unable to stop the Order from consolidating its territory. However, the land frontier was vulnerable; the river Niemen flowed through it, and river-boats could carry an army. Only if the Niemen were controlled
at least as far up as the confluence of the Viliya would Prussia be safe; and the security of Livonia depended on a similar push up the valley of the Dvina. So from 1283 to 1296 there was a series of encounters along these rivers while each side tested the other’s strength. The Livonian Knights managed to occupy Semigallia, and the Prussian Knights established two or three forts on the left bank of the Niemen and destroyed a few Lithuanian forts on the right. The Lithuanians raided Courland and Samland, and provoked a brief Prussian rising in 1295. This war was not regarded as particularly critical by the grand-masters: there were no appeals for crusaders.

Then in 1297–9 Grand-Prince Vytenis (Withen), great-great-grandson to Mindaugas, made an alliance with the burghers of Riga. He occupied Livonia, defeating and killing Master Bruno, and sent a diversionary raid to devastate central Prussia. The entire population of the new settlement of Strasburg (Brodnica) was massacred in 1298, and 250 captives were carried off in 1299. It was then that the knight-brothers realized that the future of their colonies was at stake, and they called on the grand-master and the German princes for a crusade. They had themselves conquered Prussia by a skilful use of the rivers, and they would need all their resources to prevent the operation being repeated: and the only land-route connecting Livonia and Prussia was the new coastal road from Memel to Courland that ran through a strip of country defenceless against Samogitian raids.

But it was not as simple as that. Prussia was certainly under attack, and no doubt needed reinforcements. However, it was in Livonia that the Order was in real trouble, and the source of it lay not only in Grand-Prince Vytenis’s raids, but also in the state of civil war which had developed between the knight-brothers, the archbishop, and the burghers of Riga. This was one of several great scandals in the history of the Order, and one of the biggest rows of the Middle Ages. It is worth investigating.

Events had made Livonia into a pentarchy, where power was shared between the archbishop, his three bishops (of Courland, ösel, and Dorpat) and the Teutonic Knights. Both bishops and knight-brothers had enfeoffed secular vassals, who tended to form an increasingly independent class, and the archbishop had chartered a community of burghers at Riga which increased in size, wealth and power until it formed a further ruling authority. Competition both for land within the province
and for shares of trade on the Dvina prevented their living together in harmony, and weakened the military organization, which was the responsibility of the knight-brothers. In 1290 Master Halt von Hohembach wrote to the Prussian master, who wanted him to co-operate in a
winter-reysa
, that ‘you should know that on six separate occasions this summer we have gone to the lords of this province and begged them most urgently for their help in sending out an expeditionary force’. And, after three days’ pleading with the assembled province, he had been met with a blank refusal by all except the archbishop himself, who could only put 18 German knights and 300 natives in the field. ‘And on our part, the strength we can lead over the Dvina, including Courland, Estonia and the river lands, amounts as we reckon to 1800 men, both Germans and natives.’
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In the ensuing years, friction grew worse. Violence broke out when the archbishop went away and his burghers decided to build a weir upstream to prevent spring floods from drowning their property at Riga. The barrier would impede the pack-ice and let the water through, but it would also hinder river-boats and prove detrimental to the knight-brothers’ lands and markets upriver. It also meant trespassing on the archbishop’s own land, and it happened that the Order had been appointed to oversee his property while he was away. The knight-brothers broke down the bridge which led to the construction site; the burghers retaliated, and there was bloodshed. Houses were burnt, and goods impounded. Then the archbishop came back, and took sides with the burghers. The Order hung on to his lands, and closed the river.

This was the sort of quarrel that could be expected between any expanding municipality and the surrounding landlords. The burghers needed more land, and the Order was not going to be satisfied with less; the archbishop wanted to keep some hold on his townsmen, and supporting them against the Order was one way of doing this. What made the situation explosive was that all three parties had their headquarters within Riga, so that each was in a position to strike mortal blows to gain limited ends. Then the burghers called in Grand-Prince Vytenis to help them. The Lithuanians entered Riga and destroyed the Order’s castle, and the following year (1298) did further damage to the knight-brothers and their lands. The Rigans never denied that they were responsible for the incursions of 1297–9; but they complained all the
more when they were defeated by the knight-brothers at Neuermühlen after their allies had ridden away.