Through the second half of the 12th century, the pieces start to fall into place for the conquests of the 13th century.
[00:00:26] Hello and welcome to the Russian Empire History Podcast, the history of all the peoples of the Russian Empire.
[00:00:34] I'm your host, JP Bristow. This is Season 1, The Forest, The Steppe and The Birth of the Russian Empire,
[00:00:43] and Episode 62, The Baltic Crusades Part I. Please excuse the shorter episode, I've had a heavy cold for the last couple of weeks
[00:00:56] and I'm not sure how my voice will hold up, so I decided it was best to make it a briefer one this time.
[00:01:06] The Northern Crusades, as we heard back in Episode 51, did not appear out of nowhere.
[00:01:14] Although the Pope had not previously gotten involved in the region, Germanic attempts to expand eastward had been going on for centuries by 1147.
[00:01:25] And neither was this the first time that such expansions had been accompanied by forced conversions.
[00:01:33] That had been happening since Charlemagne spent thirty years conquering and forcibly converting the Saxons in the 8th century.
[00:01:44] The Poles had also already tried to impose forced conversion on the Pomeranians in their own efforts to control the Baltic coast.
[00:01:55] But by the 12th century things were looking different.
[00:02:01] Scandinavia had its own independent Christian kingdoms, the Holy Roman Emperor had too many problems in the south to worry about his northern borders.
[00:02:12] The Duke of Saxony might still look to the east and even go to war against the Western Slavs, but these were border skirmishes, not official imperial expansions or missions of conversion.
[00:02:27] In the 1847, Saxon frontiersmen had crossed the Elba to settle the disputed territory beyond the accepted borders.
[00:02:41] They were mostly free men, often with some minor claimed inability, supplemented their unreliable farming output with raiding, and cultivated a reputation for ferocity and lawlessness.
[00:02:56] In the early 1140s, a dozen noble families extended the raiding into the seizure of land and displacement of the local Wendish chiefs, including seizing Lubeck.
[00:03:13] They built forts, enabling small mobile groups of heavily armed knights to control territory, and then brought in colonists to clear the land and generate the income to support them.
[00:03:30] With the colonists came the church.
[00:03:33] A missionary named Viselin was set up in Oldenburg as the bishop.
[00:03:40] While previous raiding had only extracted tribute from the Slavs, and they had, for example, been allowed to buy themselves out of getting baptized,
[00:03:52] the church now led efforts to break down and reshape their society.
[00:03:59] Tithes were imposed, pastures and hunting grounds were confiscated.
[00:04:04] The peasants were forced to acknowledge new lords.
[00:04:08] The model that would inspire the Saxon lords' demands for a northern crusade was in place.
[00:04:15] As we have already heard, the first crusade attempt in 1147 was a failure, at least in its ecclesiastical objectives.
[00:04:35] Militarily it consolidated the Saxon hold on the lands they had been occupying, formalised the Wendish ruler Nicolot's status as a tributary,
[00:04:46] and brought together an alliance of Saxons, Danes, Burgundians, Poles and Moravians.
[00:04:54] Even for the church, the failure to convert the masses was not a disaster, since the church believed that pagan idolatry had to be physically defeated,
[00:05:06] and therefore any military action was also a contribution to this process.
[00:05:13] This idea was part of the justification for granting papal authority to the northern crusades,
[00:05:20] since the battle against the forces of the devil in the Middle East and in the North were seen as parts of a single war.
[00:05:30] However, the campaign was clearly a disappointment, and that meant more work needed to be done to prepare for the next campaign.
[00:05:38] In episode 51, we heard about the monk Bernard of Clairvaux's role in promoting the Crusades.
[00:05:49] Monks and monasteries generally were at the forefront of crusading.
[00:05:54] They developed the ideological underpinnings for crusading and then preached and recruited.
[00:06:02] Monasteries raised finance and material support.
[00:06:05] Monasteries also provided hospitals, logistics and care for pilgrims.
[00:06:12] Before this period, monasteries were almost non-existent in the North, but between 1150 and 1200,
[00:06:21] they sprang up like mushrooms across Denmark, Sweden, Saxony and the Wendish lands.
[00:06:27] And unlike in the South, where they had to compete against the older orders that had emerged out of the need to provide care, shelter and places of study for believers,
[00:06:40] the newer orders, like St Bernard's Cistercians, which were more concerned with intervening in worldly matters and waging war on the pagans, had free reign.
[00:06:53] The church quickly became another power base.
[00:07:02] Eskil, a German nobleman, became Archbishop of Lund in Scania in 1138 and held the post for the next forty years.
[00:07:12] He had already had one career, got married, built castles, bought campaigns and succession disputes and accumulated piles of treasure.
[00:07:25] Then he met Bernard, a life-changing experience for him that would eventually result in full renunciation of the world and the taking of monastic vows.
[00:07:35] He encouraged Cistercians in his territory and supported King Valdemar of Denmark in any campaigns against the pagans, where he was always ready to lead from the front or threaten the unenthusiastic with anathema.
[00:07:57] Eskil appointed the first missionary bishop to the Estonians, Falk, as well as other monks sent across the sea.
[00:08:11] Eskil's successor was another noble, Absalon.
[00:08:15] He was raised alongside King Valdemar and saw the church and the king's interests as aligned.
[00:08:23] Extending the king's power meant extending the church's power.
[00:08:28] He patronized the new monastic orders and saw campaigning as a natural part of a priest's life.
[00:08:36] Most of his life was spent in the saddle or on board a ship.
[00:08:41] According to Saxo Grammaticus, he saw no point in inward faith without outward action and believed that defeating the enemies of the faith was as important as any ceremony.
[00:08:54] Absalon took this to extremes, even refusing to deliver peace offers to the king if he thought they might block a successful assault.
[00:09:09] It's no accident that the most implacable of the early crusaders were on the Danish side.
[00:09:16] The Danes fought for territorial rights and to convert the pagans, but they did not settle en masse and live alongside the indigenous populations.
[00:09:27] For the Saxons, conversion and accommodation with the inhabitants of the lands they were occupying quickly became at least as important as military victory.
[00:09:40] Bishop Viselin was succeeded by Byrne, also a Cistercian.
[00:09:46] He managed to persuade Prubislav, son of Nuklot, to convert.
[00:09:53] Prubislav did not gain much from this to start with.
[00:09:56] He was expelled from his territory by Henry the Lion, but through hard work he managed to recover his position, although now in the position of tributary.
[00:10:12] Saxo Grammaticus, one of our main sources, wrote his History of the Danes between 1185 and 1215, based on Bishop Absalon's reminiscences.
[00:10:25] Next to nothing is known about the Chronicle personally, although his father and grandfather had also served the king.
[00:10:37] Saxo sees the War on the Wends as the Unic War of the Baltic, with the Danes as the heroic warriors led by near-superhumans Absalon and Voldemar.
[00:10:49] In the words of historian Eric Christensen, he is a highly tendentious and selective writer.
[00:10:57] However, his blind faith in the rightness of war and real politic makes him an excellent witness of both the campaigns and the attitudes of campaigners.
[00:11:07] Saxo is not embarrassed by spiritual reservations.
[00:11:14] Saxo is interested in converting the Slavs, but he sees the main reasons for the war as retaliation for Wendish raiding and piracy, and Danish desire for more territory.
[00:11:26] Saxo is not a great country.
[00:11:27] He grounds this in descriptions of Danish villages laid waste by Slavic raiders, and Wendish markets filled with Danish slaves, both of which are supported by other contemporary writers.
[00:11:42] But he is also, as a cleric, certain that the Danes were fighting the devil.
[00:11:49] When the Danes later went to war with the Pomeranians, who had already converted, he justifies the war with entirely evidence-free claims that they were not true Christians.
[00:12:02] His work shows how the cover of crusading and aims of the Crusades came to be adopted even by people who had started off acting out of war.
[00:12:24] After their first attempt, the Danes and Saxons continued to fight the Slavs, without any papal endorsement.
[00:12:32] It wasn't that the Pope had any objections, just no one had included him in the discussion.
[00:12:39] In 1169, Pope Alexander III wrote to Absalom to congratulate him on the conquest of Rugen, which remains part of Germany today.
[00:12:50] He was not involved, he just happened to hear the news from a delegation.
[00:12:56] Two years later, Alexander did send a crusading bill north, but he apparently thought that the wars with the Slavs were over, and the new target was the Estonians.
[00:13:09] But subsequently, the Slavs were also treated as if they had been part of the Crusades.
[00:13:18] Actually, they had been motivated by the usual aims of wealth and prestige.
[00:13:23] Henry the Lion and Valdemar had managed to keep good relations with Nicolot of the Arbitrates and Rathibor of Pomerania for ten years after their first crusade.
[00:13:37] But the Slavs continued their piracy and the Saxons continued to pick away at the frontier lands.
[00:13:45] Henry and Valdemar cooperated in a couple of punitive raids, which led them to think that they worked well together.
[00:13:55] The result was a combined operation where Valdemar worked along the coast and conquered Rugen, while Henry led his army into the Slavic hinterland.
[00:14:06] He killed Nicolot, drove out his sons and divided the Arbitrite lands among his followers and bishops.
[00:14:16] A few years later, the Arbitrites rebelled under Pribyslav's leadership, and succeeded in destroying one Saxon army sent against them.
[00:14:27] Once again, the Danes attacked the coast, while the Saxons attacked the towns and country.
[00:14:33] They drove out Pribyslav, but were unable to consolidate their winnings.
[00:14:40] In 1168, Valdemar completed the conquest of the Rugians, destroyed their temples and made them tributaries.
[00:14:49] The Danes moved on to the Oder, now in Poland, and continued their campaign against the people called the Lutisians.
[00:15:01] Henry moved against the Pomeranians, forcing their princes, Kazimmar and Bugislav, to accept him as overlord.
[00:15:10] When Henry was overthrown, the Pomeranians and Abitrites were forced to accept Danish overlords, now Valdemar's sons, as well as the power of the Counts of Holstein, Schwerin and Ratzeberg on the Saxon border.
[00:15:34] At this point, it was still far from clear that there was any prospect of the Germans and Danes conquering the Baltic.
[00:15:41] They've lost as often as they've won, and found it difficult to retain any of their gains.
[00:15:48] But while the Saxons had been learning about building networks of forts to allow small groups of knights to control territory,
[00:15:56] the Danes had also been learning how to combine their old Viking raiding techniques with broader strategic aims.
[00:16:06] Danish ships were unable to carry significant numbers of heavy troops,
[00:16:10] and the Danes had not developed siege techniques.
[00:16:14] But Absalon saw that combining attacks on Slav shipping with devastation of the countryside could force their enemies to capitulate.
[00:16:25] The Danes would repeatedly land and burn the suburbs around Slav fortresses, then leave.
[00:16:32] They timed their raids for the harvest, to burn the fields before they could be gathered, and too late to replant.
[00:16:40] They stole or slaughtered cattle, leaving the local population to starve.
[00:16:48] At the same time, they began building stone and brick towers in Denmark for defence against counterattacks.
[00:16:57] By 1172, Slav raids on Denmark were a thing of the past.
[00:17:04] The Slavs tried to defend their own territory by using archers to prevent the Danes disembarking.
[00:17:10] But the Danes began using crossbows to clear the shoreline.
[00:17:18] The Danes followed their raids with deliveries of Danish monks.
[00:17:23] Ostensibly, these monks were working with the Slavic rulers who acknowledged Danish or Saxon overlordship.
[00:17:29] But this did not affect the fighting.
[00:17:33] The region around the Oda estuary was devastated to the point that the entire population was killed or fled.
[00:17:41] And towns like Volgast, Usedom, Volin and Kammin stood empty.
[00:17:46] In 1184, the last Slavic fleet was destroyed.
[00:17:53] Prince Bogislav made a final attempt to take a stand in Pomerania, but was unhorsed and fled.
[00:18:00] The next day, he surrendered the whole of Pomerania to Archbishop Absalon, who got him drunk and sent him home.
[00:18:10] This had been accomplished without the Pomeranians ever being defeated in a pitched battle between armies,
[00:18:16] and without the Danes ever completing a successful siege of any Pomeranian fortress.
[00:18:27] So why did the Slav princes let the church in, if it undermined their ability to rule their people?
[00:18:35] It seems that they understood fairly early on that they were fighting a losing battle,
[00:18:41] and they saw the church as a way to hold onto power, albeit with reduced status.
[00:18:48] Henry had initially tried to expel the Slav nobility, and often even the common people from the land he acquired,
[00:18:57] preferring to settle it with Saxons.
[00:19:00] But the rebellions had persuaded him that it was easier to have his own vassal Slavs,
[00:19:06] and Valdemar took this experience on board in his conquests.
[00:19:13] But converting the masses undermined the Slav lord's power base,
[00:19:17] and so the wars remained wars of conversion.
[00:19:23] We can think back to earlier discussions of how the Slavs, Khazars or Borgas,
[00:19:28] adopted official religions with an eye to preserving their independence,
[00:19:32] and see how this was no longer an option for the Western Slavs and Balts.
[00:19:43] Despite not being an unqualified success,
[00:19:47] and despite the fact that the Germans and Danes appeared to be more interested in worldly gains,
[00:19:53] the campaigns, conversions and spread of monastic orders in the north
[00:19:57] were sufficient to attract the Pope's attention.
[00:20:01] And he had plenty of allies among German and Scandinavian clerics.
[00:20:06] This led to the issuance of that papal bull for a crusade against the Estonians and Finns in 1172,
[00:20:14] granting anyone who fought against the pagans remission of sins equal to those who fought in the Holy Land.
[00:20:23] It would take another decade for implementation,
[00:20:26] until the Danes were ready to launch a large-scale attack on the Estonians in 1184.
[00:20:34] That campaign is not especially effective either,
[00:20:38] and gets abandoned halfway through to come back to that war with the already Christian Pomeranians that we just mentioned.
[00:20:49] Before the Northern Crusades can successfully conquer and convert the Baltic,
[00:20:54] a couple of other players need to arrive on the scene.
[00:20:57] Players less affected by the personal interests of the German and Danish rulers,
[00:21:03] but equally interested in conquest, conversion and colonization.
[00:21:10] You're probably all familiar with the monastic military orders of the Middle Eastern Crusades,
[00:21:17] Templars, Hospitallers and other smaller orders.
[00:21:21] The Templars were founded to protect pilgrims.
[00:21:25] The Hospitallers, as the name suggests, were founded to provide care and then later militarized.
[00:21:33] Another order began in a similar way.
[00:21:36] A group of crusaders from Bremen and Lübeck founded the Teutonic Order at the Siege of Accra in 1190 as a field hospital.
[00:21:47] Eight years later it was also militarized,
[00:21:52] modeling itself on the Templars and shifting its focus to the new crusade in the north.
[00:22:00] Around the Teutonic Knights,
[00:22:02] Around the same time as the Teutonic Knights were moving from the Middle East back to Northern Europe,
[00:22:07] Bishop Albert of Riga founded the Livonian Brothers of the Sword,
[00:22:12] warrior monks, mostly German,
[00:22:15] with a mission to protect priests and missionaries
[00:22:18] and aid in the conversion of the Baltic peoples.
[00:22:22] They received the official sanction of the Pope in 1204.
[00:22:27] After fifty years of testing the waters,
[00:22:30] the 13th century was going to see a different kind of crusading in the north.
[00:22:36] The two orders will later merge and come to control most of the Baltic,
[00:22:41] creating a theocratic state by conquest that at its height will rule Prussia,
[00:22:48] Chelmna, Courland, Gotland, Livonia, Estonia, Newmark, Pomerilia and Samogitia.
[00:22:56] Join me next episode as we continue the story of the Baltic Crusades.
[00:23:01] Thank you for listening, and until next time, goodbye.