The Northern Crusades (38 page)

In Danish Estonia, some 80 per cent of the indigenous population was subject to immigrant seigneurs, and owed them ‘tithe’ and military duty. When landlords reacted to falling grain-prices by upping tithe during a political crisis, the Estonians lost patience. On 23 April 1343 they rose up and began killing their masters. German sources give an unlikely total of 18,000 dead as a result of this rebellion. The survivors within the Domburg at Reval appealed to Master von Dreileben of Livonia for help (the Danish captain was his prisoner); he restored order by killing many more thousands of rebels. They captured one of the kings whom the Estonians had elected to lead them, and, when von Dreileben asked him why they had revolted, he replied that ‘they had been martyred and oppressed for so long that they could no longer submit or stand it.’ But why had they massacred twenty-eight innocent Cistercian monks at Padis? ‘They deserved what they got, sure enough; any German deserved to be killed, even if he were only two foot tall.’ The rebels offered to obey the master of Livonia, provided they had no ‘junkers or lords’ over them, but the offer was rejected and the kings were hanged.
¹⁵⁸

Here was an example of what unrestricted ‘colonialism’ could lead to: grinding the faces of men who were equipped with weapons and obliged to perform military service was dangerous and self-defeating. However, there is no evidence that after the Order had bought Estonia in 1347 the natives were better treated; the likelihood of revolt had been diminished by the killing and degradation of all potential leaders, and that was enough. By the fifteenth century, the freer Estonians were either serving as agents of German barons, or they had emigrated to Reval to work for the German burghers as carters, porters, boatmen, watchmen, servants and journeymen. They could not join the
Ritterschaft
, and in the city they were denizens (
inwaner
) rather than full burghers. Most were smallholders or serfs or thralls (
drellen, ora
) some prosperous, some destitute. The prosperous were kept in their places by the public and private services they owed for their lands –
malewa
(the peasant equivalent of
hervart
),
census
and various dues to the lord, tithe and fees to the priest; the poor, by hereditary servitude or attachment to a manor or a
trade. Whether most of them were worse off under German rule than they had been under their own warlords is impossible to assess, but there is evidence to suggest that many were. For example, in 1425 the friars of Reval complained that most poor Estonians were left in a state of uninstructed paganism by their bishop and parish clergy; but, if one of them died and were buried in consecrated ground before his family had paid the mortuary fee, the priest would have his corpse dug up and hung from the church door until the money was handed over.
¹⁵⁹
This sort of indignity cannot have happened often, but it could not have happened at all before the conversion.

From 1350 to 1500 Estonia was an increasingly prosperous country within which the enjoyment of wealth and liberty was carefully confined to those who fell on the German side of the line separating
Deutsch
from
Undeutsch
. It is unlikely that the small minority of knights, priests and burghers could have maintained their hold without such a system of discrimination.

The Lettish and Estonian peoples of Livonia underwent a similar if somewhat less rigorous subordination to the German ascendancy. On the whole, indigenous nations did worse north of the Memel river and south of the Gulf of Finland, where there were fewest immigrants. It was the need to provide conditions fit for incoming peasants that made Prussia and Finland better places for conquered peoples to survive in.

(b)
Colonists

In Finland there was little need for the crown to encourage colonization; hunger and new manorial exactions drove numbers of Swedes to the east. But in Prussia and Livonia the initial intractability of the land and the continuing harshness of the climate offered little inducement to settlers from Germany, especially as the whole of Central Europe lay open to them. The Teutonic Knights needed a secular nobility to hold down the countryside, and an influx of arable farmers to help develop it. They therefore made attractive offers to all Germans who chose to live under their rule.

Land-grants to knights could be extremely generous. In 1236 Hermann Balk enfeoffed one man with a fort, 300 Flemish hides with appendant fisheries, and tithe from three villages, to be held by him and by his heirs male or female in perpetuity. In return, the feoffee owed a pound of wax, a mark of silver and a tithe of grain every year; out of respect
for his noble birth, he was not bound to perform any specific amount of knightly service, but, should he sell the land, the buyer would owe two knights and a squire, and all future settlers would be liable to serve.
¹⁶⁰
That was in Prussia; in Livonia the Order was so hard-pressed for men that in 1261 the vice-master promised all knights and burghers who aided him against the Curonians fiefs of forty hides, with ten each for their squires, and tithe exemption for six years. In 1280 the Livonian master granted Andreas Knorring, a crusader, eight estates and an escheated inheritance with a marriageable heiress in return for only three horsemen a year.
¹⁶¹
The Knights of Estonia held their fiefs in return for military service fixed in 1350 at a flat rate of one German warrior and two Estonians per hundred
unci
(approximately 3000 acres) for the
bervart
. Such terms – and the enfeoffment of knights with tithe, rather than land – were the result of hurried occupation, and after the initial conquests, they no longer occur. However, the early grants did create a powerful baronage in Estonia, Livonia – especially episcopal Livonia – and parts of western Prussia, where the Order retained only the right of repossessing lapsed inheritances (
Heimfallsrecht
) or the option of buying back, if it wanted to curb baronial power. In Livonia the Lord had no right to take wardship, aid, scutage, marriage or relief; he could not prevent his vassal from alienating the fief he had granted, and had no say whether it was to be held in common or partitioned between brothers. Primogeniture – normal in Saxony by 1200 – was unknown.

In most of Prussia, feudal tenants were more strictly controlled. They had to perform more military services, and the Order kept greater residual rights over their fiefs. Not until the fifteenth century was the Prussian baronage able to combine as a class in a bid for greater political independence, as they achieved their partial success only with the assistance of the towns and the king of Poland.

Most German immigrants lived under municipal law –
Lübischer, Kulmischer
, or
Magdeburger Recht
– either in cities or villages, and these codes also offered the settler much better terms than he would get as a peasant in most parts of western Germany. As long as he paid an annual rent and did some form of military service, the newcomer was given virtual ownership of a sizeable town property or farm; the political independence of his community was restricted, but his personal and economic freedom were guaranteed.
¹⁶²
His value as a warrior and a cultivator, rather than birth and tenure, determined his status.

The leading cities, Reval and Riga, were let off with fairly light military duties, but on the whole all burghers and peasants were expected to fight, both on
lantwern
and on
bervart
, either as fully armed knights or as light horsemen, according to whether they held forty hides or under. The plots of land given to peasant settlers were seldom smaller than a hide (about fifty-three acres) and sometimes much larger; they were lightly taxed, and were conceded initial tax-relief as an encouragement to clearance and building. They owed suit of court to the manor, but the law by which they were tried was the law of Kulm or Magdeburg, rather than private or seigneurial law; labour dues and renders in kind to the lord of the manor were few or none. Such conditions prevailed in all the colonized areas of Prussia during the period 1250–1400, and were applied to all who were prepared to live in them: at first Germans, then native Prussians, then Poles, Ruthenes and Lithuanians. They represent the fact that throughout the Holy War this was a seller’s market for labour and fighting skills.

What the burghers got from the Order was above all the right to get rich. They were not subject to the tallages and town-aids which fleeced most north-European communities, they could trade within Prussia and Livonia without having to pay tolls, and they were allowed to join the Hansa of German towns while to some extent competing with other members. As long as Prussia was expanding, they, the feudal vassals, and the peasant settlers benefited from the rule of the Teutonic Knights, and co-operated with the Order, without being subjected to any rigorous state organization. Once the economic climate worsened and the Order began demanding more from its subjects, as in the period 1380–1410, the German community began to show signs of discontent; there were plots among disaffected townsmen, and a league among the west-Prussian knights was formed in 1397. In the fifteenth century, when the Order lost its military supremacy, and Polish armies began pushing down the Vistula, both burghers and Knights made bids for a greater degree of independence, and met with considerable success. In 1410 Prussia was still a lordship within which communities and individuals enjoyed privileges directly proportional to their usefulness to their monastic lords; by 1414 the Prussians were organized into estates of knights and burghers with constitutional rights and a share in government.

All three Baltic provinces thus followed different paths towards a broadly similar political condition: the sharing of power between
authoritarian rulers and colonial interest-groups which had secured the right to assemble, deliberate and bargain. In Finland this right sprang from a long-established Scandinavian tradition brought over by immigrants and matured in a climate favourable to self-help and self-rule. In Livonia it came from the monopoly of power enjoyed by a small German elite divided among semi-autonomous lordships and obliged to co-operate by the demands of war and the threat of the indigenous majority. In Prussia, the complexity and diversity of the society created by the Order, and the wide distribution of freedoms that was the price of economic and military expansion, made autocratic rule increasingly difficult, and the efforts of the grand-masters to maintain it led to the social unrest and civil war of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, while the going was good, the Order had established over ninety towns and a thousand villages in Prussia and Livonia.

Conquest and conversion brought the eastern and western Baltic countries closer together, and both closer to the rest of Europe. In all the conquests, the distinctive forms of Latin civilization took root and seeded, but the extent to which they flourished varied greatly.

Catholic Finland resembled Catholic Sweden in many ways, but both countries remained culturally impoverished by the standards of the outside Catholic world. Where Sweden was poor, Finland was poorer – in educated men, in books, in churches, in towns, in arts, in schools. This was inevitable, considering the size and economy of the country; most of its inhabitants lived hard and primitive lives beyond the reach of ecclesiastical culture. In 1460, the friars and most of the priests were concentrated in thirty-six south-western parishes, and twelve more along the southern shore; there were only four churches in the whole of Swedish Karelia, outside Viborg. While the bishopric of Åbo was held by learned men, such as the Parisian graduate Hemming or the old Praguer Magnus Tavast (1412–52), the flock and its up-country pastors remained ignorant. Whereas in Sweden the fourteenth century was a time of literary and artistic flowering, when works in Swedish and Latin were being written by both clerics and laymen, Finland lacked both the patrons and the audience for such productions. The entourage of the bishop and the captain could not compare with the courtly and learned
households of the king and the Swedish prelates, and the majority of the people spoke languages that were as yet unwritten; written texts were used only for the severely practical tasks of administration and saying the liturgy.

However, the success of the mission in attracting Finns to the priesthood (all the later medieval bishops, and most of the canons, were native-born) was in itself a striking achievement, unmatched in Prussia or Livonia. The enterprise to which these ordinands were called was largely that of making ends meet (chasing up parishioners for little bundles of fur, flax or hemp, tubs of butter, and, in the Åland Isles, the tenth seal); but they were also the key men who brought three cultures together – Finnish, Swedish and Latin.

The results of their work must not be looked for in great names or important books, or imposing buildings. The educational resources of the cathedral school at Åbo were fully stretched by the task of providing parish priests and sending the occasional high-flyer to the University of Paris (where the Finn Olaus Magnus was rector in the 1430s). Other schools existed, but it appears from a warning issued by Bishop Conrad Bitz in 1482 that they were so poorly endowed that the masters were apt to live off money, corn, and furs extorted from their pupils.
¹⁶³
When the Russians burned Åbo cathedral and the bishop’s castle of Kuusisto in 1318, they probably destroyed most of the books and records in Finland. Subsequent bishops built up a respectable library, as appears from the fragments preserved in Helsinki University Library, but the only large codices to survive the Middle Ages are about business: the
Registrum ecclesia Aboensis
, a collection of diocesan records compiled
c.
1480–1560, and the Skokloster
Codex Aboensis
, a private copybook kept for Dean Särkilahti in the 1480s.
¹⁶⁴
There are also the Tavastian ‘Judgement-Books’
¹⁶⁵
or records of law-meetings in central Finland between 1443 and 1510, and an extract from King Eric XIII’s Tax-Book, drawn up in 1413. An Åbo service-book and a few religious texts complete the total; even allowing for subsequent centuries of fire and pillage, it appears that medieval Finland was nourished on intellectual field-rations.