The Northern Crusades (36 page)

This leasing out of royal lands and rights on conditional tenures, as
Län
, was a way of binding Swedish magnates to their king, in Sweden as in Finland, and assisted their development into a powerful unifying caste; it meant that Swedish nobles could thrive in Finland, and that the two countries shared the same elite. Thus the king’s brother governed as captain and duke in 1284–91 and 1302–18, and at Viborg members of the families of Bielke, Stålarm, Grip, Vase, Bonde and Tott were installed between 1320 and 1483, employing bailiffs from the Sparres and Natt och Dags, among others.

The military retainers of these magnate–governors and of the bishops were boarded out among the freeholders, and in time some of them got land, intermarried with the better-off natives and colonists, and were recognized as
frälse
, or nobles: men of rank with hereditary taxexemptions. They were the leaders of local society in Finland proper and Tavastia in peace and war, with defensible halls, manors, coats-of-arms and seals, but not an all-powerful corporation and not exclusively Swedish. They co-operated with the king’s officers in administration and warfare, and dominated the local assemblies of freeholders, but were sharers in the commonwealth rather than political monopolists.

Beside them stood the clergy, heavily concentrated in south-west Finland, but recruited both from Swedes and Finns and enjoying the same privileges as the clergy in Sweden. In 1291 a Finn called Magnus became bishop of Åbo and in the same century priests and friars of Swedish, Finnish, English and German origin co-operated in advancing the conversion. Their work strengthened royal authority, at first by accustoming all Christians to pay tax – which the king took over from the bishop – and later by involving Sweden and Finland in the common enterprise of the anti-Russian crusade. Their wealth came largely from tithe (which was levied in three varieties, according to the density and economy of settlement), and the spread of this imposition, and canon
law, helped to bring a very loosely knit province within a single political framework.

By 1400 the burghers of the new towns established at Ulfsby (Björneborg or Pori), Rauma, Åbo, Borgå (Porvoo), Viborg and Pernå (Pernaja) formed another privileged group looking to the king for protection; and the settlers of Nyland were organized into localities with law-meetings and social customs similar to those of Sweden. The general body of rural freeholders lived under public law: whether the recognized code was Finnish or Swedish, they participated in open assemblies and were linked directly to the crown by contributing tax and military service. This diversity of political arrangements was also reflected in the difference between the castellanies of East and West Finland, for at Viborg the captain’s main duties were defending a frontier, and keeping track of thinly scattered and vagrant subject populations. He dealt with the headmen of Karelian districts and war-parties, and with fur-trading pioneers, who could not be fitted into the Åbo model of a Finno-Swedish society, and for whom royal authority meant little more than a poll-tax in furs and occasional leadership in war. West Finland, by contrast, was divided into parishes, hundreds and
snakke laghar
, or levy-ship districts.

As a result of these many different contacts, royal authority could be exercised in Finland very much as in Sweden, and in some ways this country became simply the
Osterlande
, or eastern provinces, of one monarchy. In 1362 the ‘law-man’ of the
Osterlande
was summoned to bring a jury of clerks and laymen to take part in the election and acclamation of a new king in Sweden, alongside the seven law-men of the old country, and this participation became a valued privilege. The union flourished because the Scandinavian tradition of local self-government flourished – assisted by poor communications, sparse population, and cultural diversity. From the viewpoint of the ruling elite of king and magnates, this meant that Finland could not be governed very efficiently, and did not have to be, either. King Magnus’s national law-code was not successfully exported there, the law-man was unable to perambulate and inspect all the law-meetings, and the governors of Viborg were very much their own masters. Under King Albert, the Swedish magnate Bo Jonsson Grip was able to build up a personal hegemony over all Finland, and it took his successor, the Danish queen Margaret, ten years to get control of it; but the effect of this ungovernability was not to separate the province from Sweden, but, rather, to encourage the growth of
Swedish institutions as a means whereby local interests could be protected. Hence the various law-meetings recorded in fifteenth-century documents (from the
lagmansting, vinterting, sommarting
and
häradsting
, to the
skatting
, and the
fiskting
) and the council of lay and clerical officials (
landzræth
), which met as a high-court at Åbo the week before St Henry’s summer festival (18 June), from 1435 onwards.

Swedish rule therefore offered many, perhaps most, Finlanders, whether of Finnish or Swedish descent, personal and property rights, which were given additional force by the nature of the country. Among these rights was that of owning slaves, and the condition of the thrall or
orja
population was not manifestly improved under this system; but the bulk of the peasant farmers had no burdens other than tax, tithe and military service to complain of, and the
ting
gave them the opportunity of making their grievances heard.

Prussia and Livonia were run on a quite different system. There, government came through a complex administration staffed by a trained ruling class recruited from countries lying some 500 miles away. This administration was only part of the wider organization known as the Teutonic Order, and its shape was dictated by the monastic command-structure. Its purpose was not merely to govern and fight, but also to carry out a mission on behalf of the Western Church. After 1309, when the headquarters of the Order were established within Prussia, the system still meant that natives, colonists and outsiders from all over Europe were being exploited by one connecting hierarchy of officers committed to a cause rather than to a country. In some ways this turned out to be a very efficient method of government.

At the top, it ensured continuity and dedication. Neither Prussia nor Livonia was plagued with the recurring crises of medieval government, in the shape of disputed successions, minorities, regencies, and feckless or useless rulers. When a grand-master died, or became incapable, the Rule laid down an almost foolproof procedure for finding and installing an acceptable successor. The vice-master convened the leading regional commanders to an electoral chapter-meeting. The meeting nominated a president, the president nominated a college of twelve electors: seven knight-brothers, four serjeants and one priest-brother, selected by progressive co-option. Once a majority of electors had agreed on a candidate, the minority acceded in a unanimous acclamation. So, in 1303, when Grand-Master Hohenlohe abdicated in Prussia and tried to make a
come-back in Germany, he met with no success; the election of his successor, von Feuchtwangen, was accepted by all. When Grand-Master von Orseln was murdered by a crazed brother in 1330, at a time when Prussia was at war with Poland, and the Order was discredited at the Curia and no crusaders were at hand to save the military situation, there was no crisis. The electors provided a new grand-master in three months, without undue haste, and the Order carried on as before. In 1345, when military disasters sent Grand-Master König temporarily insane, and König stabbed and killed a man for interrupting him at prayer, Vice-Master Dusmer simply confined him in Engelsburg castle, convened the electors, took office as grand-master, and immediately resumed hostilities against the Lithuanians. König later recovered his wits and returned to active duty, but never challenged Dusmer’s authority.

The system also produced a high standard of ruler, owing to the practice followed until 1498 of always choosing men who had served as senior administrators and proved their worth. Luder of Brunswick, for example, had held high office for sixteen years before his election, and Dusmer, von Kniprode and Zöllner for ten. The wealth and importance of the families from which they came hardly seems to have influenced the electors. Even a prince such as Luder was not necessarily bound for the top: his peer Duke Albert of Saxony sweated out his service as a commander of the frontier without going higher. In the period 1309–1525 only one grand-master was deposed for misgovernment, and that was Henry von Plauen, who saved the Order from annihilation in 1410. Not all were model rulers. Several earned the epithets ‘haughty’, ‘self-willed’ and ‘overbearing’,
¹⁴⁸
but none was found idle, indecisive or improvident.

This was important, because the constitutional checks on the grand-master’s power which were written into the original Rule were never fully applied, and became a dead letter after 1309. After the move to Marienburg, he had personal lordship over Prussia, a private demesne in Pomerelia and, in the end, the revenues of four German bailiwicks attached to his own chamber or financial department. His hold on the Prussian commanders gave him control of the general-chapter of the Order, which met at Elbing, and he was able to use it simply to ratify the measures he proposed: new ordinances, senior appointments, and admissions. Its function was to set the Order’s seal – half a Virgin and Child – on what he had done through his – a whole Virgin and Child.

The great officers of the Order (see above, chapter 3, first section) became the administrators-in-chief of Prussia. The grand-commander acted as castellan of Marienburg, and the treasurer also stayed close to the grand-master. The marshal took over Königsberg, the hospitaller Elbing, and the
Trapier
Christburg. As monks, they cohered and obeyed far more readily than the enfeoffed or salaried officials of lay kingdoms, and by the 1320s they had worked out ways of exploiting all the country’s resources for the profit of the Order. Grain came under the
Gross-Schäfer
(‘senior-manager’) of the grand-commander at Marienburg, who supervised the corn-growing lands adjacent to the Vistula – the Oberland – and appointed agents called
Lieger
to buy or sell, depending on the state of the trade. The economy of eastern Prussia – the Niederland – came under the
Gross-Schäfer
of the marshal, at Königsberg, and his
Lieger
(three at home, one each at Lübeck and Bruges) and their commercial salesmen, or
Wirte
, were chiefly involved in the amber trade. The year’s policy was dictated by Marienburg, and accounts were rendered annually to the treasurer; buyers and salesmen had to act within the scope afforded them by loans. Other sources of revenue – the common grain-tax, the forest, the mint, tolls, market dues, the profits of justice, fisheries and bath-houses – were exploited and developed by the grand-master and commanders within their spheres of jurisdiction, but for most of the fourteenth century the boroughs were not taxed directly. Instead, the grand-master received a share of the Hanseatic customs dues (the
Pfundzoll
) and became a member of the League himself.

To reinforce these economic controls, the Order divided Prussia into commanderies (
Kommende
), governed from castles by officers originally known as
preceptores
, and later as
Komturen
(commanders) or advocates, depending on whether they administered monks’ or bishops’ territory. These military abbots ruled for the grand-master by exercising political and military powers by and for the convent of brothers with whom they lived. Each house of Teutonic Knights was organized to function as a religious community, as a military cadre and as corps of officials. Many of these officials were fiscal specialists, accounting weekly to the commander for their departments, and while each convent was self-supporting, its efficiency was checked by monthly accounts rendered to a senior administrator. All fourteenth-century religious Orders were beset by secular concerns, and among the Cistercians and Benedictines the monk-wardens and numerous other estate agents were seen as signs
of decay; but in an Order which accepted government as one of its prime duties such proliferation of officials was unavoidable and legitimate. Since most knight-brothers were not born into ruling families, it was desirable that administrative experience should be widely distributed, and the hierarchy of offices served as a promotion ladder on which the fittest climbed highest.

In the course of the fourteenth century, the ordinary knight-brothers in Prussia and Livonia became known as lords, rather than brothers, and had continually to be reminded of their monastic vows. New ordinances forbade them to wear fine, eccentric or tight clothing, to appropriate money left over from conventual purchases, to make frivolous journeys with excessive pomp; they were not to use private seals, to hoard money, to swear profanely, to plot, to canvass for office, to keep packs of hounds.
¹⁴⁹
Since these things were forbidden, they were probably done. Nevertheless, the Order’s system of inspection and punishment ensured that its members continued to live communal lives, obey orders and uphold the political system. They formed a true ruling caste, dedicated to keeping other people in their places and telling them what to do.