By the time of the official end of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE, most of mainland southern Europe and France and England had been converted to Christianity. And because the Germanic tribes that migrated into the territory of the Romans – and who would form the new kingdoms that replaced the empire had been converted as they crossed the borders or shortly after – Christianity retained a stranglehold on these areas. The only exception to the rule was England where the Anglo-Saxons formed a new Kingdom and had no interest in adopting the Christianity that had taken root there and would retain their beliefs well into the seventh century. In the north and east of Europe though, things were quite different. Importantly Germanic and Slavic European indigenous religion, beliefs and culture dominated east of the Rhine River right up to the Russian steppe and north of the Danube and right up into the Scandinavian peninsula and Denmark.
Seven hundred years later though the situation had completely changed. By the twelfth century, the only remaining strongholds of European religion were clustered around the shores of the Baltic Sea in the North-east of the continent. Essentially these were the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the territories of what are now the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and westwards through Prussia and what is now north Poland or Pomerania as it’s called and the north-west of what is now modern Germany. So what happened between 476CE and the twelfth century and when was Northern Europe converted? And how were these last pockets of resistance in the Baltic region eventually eliminated by an advancing Christianity?
There had been active measures by the Catholic Church and the Franks after the end of the Roman Empire to push the religious border further and further east. But the twelfth Century was the definitive beginning of major Christian European attempts to destroy what was left of these last pagan strongholds, abolish pagan belief and force this population into Christianity in military actions which became known as the ‘Northern Crusades’. This imposition of an alien religion on the Baltic population would not be an easy task as these people had no interest in renouncing their practices and culture and therefore these crusades would end up lasting a protracted three hundred years. Lithuania would have the privilege, as it were, of being the last European country to accept Christianity and that was as late as the 14th Century. In fact even this wasn’t quite the end of non-Christian Europe as some of the Sami people in what is Lapland in current day Finland were still non-Christian right up till the middle of the 18th Century when determined efforts by Norwegian and Swedish Christians were made to stamp out their beliefs.
So why were these Baltic regions the last to fall to Christianity? Its helpful to take a step back. Christianity three hundred years after Christ was still very much a minority religion. Its estimated only 5-10% of the population of the Roman Empire might have been Christian at that time. But once Constantine became Emperor and the religion received official sanction and promotion and unlimited finance to build churches and cathedrals, Christianity began spreading more rapidly. And much of the population of what was southern Europe and which formed part of the Roman Empire would be converted to Christianity either by persuasion, pressure or threat of force or by the real use of force when it was made the official religion of the empire and paganism was banned entirely in stages during the fourth century onwards. And this importantly included much of Gaul or what in the present day we call France.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the big deciding factor for Northern Europe was the conversion of the Franks. The Frankish tribe had settled in northern Gaul prior to the end of the Western Roman Empire and therefore had immersed themselves into a culture of gallo-Roman Catholicism. And over the next few decades, they had successfully captured large parts of southern and western Gaul as well. The important and key event for the Franks and the future of Northern Europe came in 496CE , only twenty years after the official end of the Western Roman Empire, when Clovis, the King of the Franks was baptised into the Catholic faith due to the influence of his wife, a Catholic Burgundian princess. And the bulk of the Frankish aristocracy and people quickly followed suit. And the couple of centuries following Clovis – what’s called the Merovingian period – allowed for a general consolidation of Frankish Catholic rule over much of France. And France would now become the launching pad and springboard for the conversion of Northern Europe. This was especially so during the Carolingian period, with a new ruling dynasty kicking off in 751CE. Charlemagne, the son of Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian ruler consolidated and strengthened Frankish control over existing territory and importantly began aggressively promoting Christianity in newly captured non-Christian territory to the east and north during the late 8th and early 9th centuries.
Christian expansion after the Roman Empire
This expansion into territory that is now modern day Germany wasn’t easy. There was protracted conflict with the people there resulting in what were called ’The Saxon Wars’ as the Frankish armies advanced into provinces like modern day Saxony. The Franks – all-powerful by this stage – had a lot of religious zeal and therefore began to actively coerce the people in these areas to convert. They would destroy the famous German pagan centre of worship at Irminsul in 772CE. In fact Charlemagne ordered all existing pagan sites to be destroyed wherever they were found. But the German Saxons had no wish to convert and put up a stiff resistance despite their sacred groves and temples being razed to the ground in the wars by the Franks. Ten years later in 782CE the refusal of the pagans to convert and submit to Frankish rule resulted in what is called the ‘Massacre of Verdun’ where around 4,500 Saxon warriors were put to death.
The Franks would eventually prove too powerful and organised and shortly after this, in 785, Charlemagne issued his famous threat to the now defeated Saxons to convert to Christianity or face the consequences. In this declaration, called ‘Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae’ (Capitulation of parts of Saxony) he ordered that…
If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.
Overwhelmed by the Frankish armies, the German Saxons were fully defeated and converted by 804CE. And during this time other pagan German areas like Bohemia, Thuringia, Bavaria and Carinthia and areas close to the Balkans were also annexed and the people converted under duress.
The Franks also advanced in the south against the powerful pagan nation of the Avars who had settled in the Hungarian plains in the Trans-Danube area. By the year 796CE, the Avars had also been defeated by Charlemagne and, having been pacified, were now being converted as well. So these Frankish advances meant Charlemagne by the end of his reign had extended his domain right up to the River Elbe to the north-east as well as up to the Hungarian plains to the south-east.
These Frankish campaigns against their immediate pagan neighbours essentially began the momentum that would continue on for several hundred years. These people after they had been converted would a generation or two later then pile on pressure on other pagan neighbours to convert. So Christianity could be said to have spread during this period essentially using a domino effect. To the north of the Franks, Denmark would officially convert to Christianity in 958CE with the Danish King Harald Bluetooth banning pagan worship and ordering the forced baptism of all his subjects.
And just a few years later, and to the east, Poland could be said to have converted in 966 when the Polish monarch Mieszko I was baptised although the process of converting the population took many decades and as elsewhere there was a strong reaction and rebellion during the 1030s – what was called the ‘pagan reaction’. The pagan reaction was a widespread counter to the imposition of this foreign Christian belief although this didn’t stop the newly Christian authorities from forcing the new belief on the population. And soon after this, in 995 Olaf Tryggvason became King of Norway and aggressively promoted Christianity at the expense of the local beliefs. Tryggvason invariably used force to stimulate conversion to Christianity, and was known to use execution and torture against those who didn’t comply with his orders. At around the same time Sweden had its first Christian king Olof Skötkonung, but again there were violent clashes between pagans and Christians who were trying to prevent pagan practices particularly in ending pagan worship at their holy places and sacred groves. Then finally just before the end of the millennium, Prince Vladimir of the ‘Kievan Rus’ converted and declared the Rus to be officially Christian. So what this meant was that by the start of the new millennium, the only Europeans still holding out, staying resolutely non-Christian and practicing their own indigenous beliefs despite the attempts of various Christian missionaries over the previous several hundred years were the Slavic people inhabiting the peripheries of the Baltic Sea. And as you can see on the map above this entire area was now completely encircled by Christian states.
The pagans of the Baltic
So who were these non-Christian Europeans of the 11th and 12th centuries? Well lets take a quick look at the people of the southern Baltic area closest to the Frankish Empire and consequently most in danger. These people were the Wends who populated the area which now comes under the German states of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg. The Wendish term or moniker was really an umbrella term for several communities who lived in the area between the River Elbe and the River Oder. The Wendish people were a confederation of three main separate tribes. These were the Wagrians who lived to the west adjacent to the Elbe, the Abotrites near the River Oder and the Polabians who lived further to the south but who collaborated with each other in terms of the Christian threat from the west.
One of the main deities of the Wends as recorded by the 11th Century chronicler, Adam of Bremen, and who they showed great attachment to was a god called Redigost (Redigast, Riedegost). They had a very important and famous temple to another important god as well situated in the town of Arkona on the island of Rugia which was just off the German coast and this drew many people from great distances apparently. The temple was dedicated to the god Swentovit who was the god of abundance and war. The great temple unfortunately was entirely destroyed by crusaders during the Wendish crusade just like the other various temples, sacred groves and holy sites so there’s nothing left to see there at the site unfortunately.
The Wends were apparently an enterprising people who frequently raided their Christian tormentors to the west – namely the Saxons and the Danes. They certainly weren’t scared of the Christian powers and would put up stiff resistance when the Christian onslaught began in 1147CE. Christian sources generally paint these pagans as uncivilised and barbaric but in many ways the Wends were substantially more sophisticated and cultured than their Christian neighbours to the west in culture, trade and warfare and some of their practices and beliefs must have surprised and confused the many Christian missionaries and monks who were travelling into the area. In contrast to the Wends, the Christian monks lived under authoritarian monarchies and in a feudal system where there was no middle class and where the serfs, the vast bulk of the people, had no say in issues affecting them and were practically slaves. But the Wendish communities women, unusually for that time, had the same rights as men. The Wends also had no monarchy and did not believe in the feudal system. Instead they had a rough and ready form of democracy which seemed to weld the various groups together and where each community had a council of elders and this included both men and women. However this form of democracy in an age of violence may have done them harm as they were frequently disunited because of differing opinions while the Christians were invariably led by a Duke or King who faced no such division and who had complete authority and command.
The Wendish people also refused to exploit natural resources as the Christians did – leaving much ground untamed saying they believed in the natural sanctity of the land and that who were they to change it. They engaged in trade though, exchanging furs and other manufactured goods for cloth etc but had no great fascination with gold and silver like the Christians. They were known for their high quality metal work. They were also known to show great hospitality but as to be expected this wasn’t extended to missionaries and monks who they knew were coming to alter or destroy their culture.
The Pagan towns themselves were quite prosperous. We have for example a 10th century Arabic writer called Ibrahim Ibn Jakub who described the pagan city of Wolin on the mouth of the Oder River as extremely well laid out with a well designed harbour. The city had wooden houses and streets laid out in a grid pattern with each square in the grid containing four buildings exactly which were surrounded by well made ramparts and fortifications. Adam of Bremen in the eleventh century described this pagan metropolis as ‘one of the greatest of all cities of Europe’, which was ‘crammed with the goods of all the peoples of the North’. The town was pretty cosmopolitan as well with people from all places there for trade. Archaeologists digging up the old ruins of the city in recent years have uncovered all sorts of trades that were going on in the town including smithing , smelting, textile manufacture, shipbuilding , leather work and many other activities. And of course there were Slavic temples to their gods in the town which were constructed in magnificent fashion.
Pressure before the crusades
So when did the Baltic people begin to come under aggressive Christian pressure and missionary efforts as sanctioned by the Catholic Church and what led to this pressure? The first intrusions into these areas came as early as the 9th Century. With the Saxons to their immediate west having been defeated by the Franks and subsequently converted, missionaries – including many from the converted Saxons themselves – now found they could travel further east trekking into the Baltic coastal areas much more easily. And this travel was made even easier when the Polish King converted.
Now, these various Baltic communities and nations were fiercely protective of their culture and didn’t like Christians being contemptuous of their beliefs as many of these overconfident Christian monks and bishops who trekked into these areas found to their cost. St Adalbert of Prague, for example, was killed by Prussian locals in 997CE for criticising the local beliefs. Another example was a chap called Saint Bruno of Querfurt in the year 1009 who rather foolishly began destroying statues of the local gods and demolishing sacred groves in the country of the Lithuanians – actions for which he was beheaded by the irate locals. But it showed the contempt for indigenous beliefs and the over arching confidence the missionaries had in wanting to eliminate these practices. So these early journeys by these individuals and others could be considered almost as recon missions for much more aggressive evangelisation that was coming up in the next century.
Pressure was steadily building up through the 11th and 12th centuries with the Catholic church being the main driving force to eliminate paganism across the River Elbe. A surviving example of this is the famous letter by the Archbishop of Magdeburg, a man called Adelgot in 1108CE to the princes and Kings of nearby territories asking them to defend Christians and Christian land from pagans. The Bishop portrayed the Wends who were just across the River as blood-thirsty savages whose only motive was to attack Christians and places of Christian worship. The Bishop interestingly makes mention of the Wendish God Pripegala to who he alleged Christians were being sacrificed to.
Their priests, moreover, whenever they giveth themselves to revealing on the appointed days, say: ‘Our Pripegala demands heads. It is fitting to make sacrifices of this sort. Pripegala, as they say, is Priapus and the shameless Belphegor. Then, when the Christians have been beheaded before the altars of their idolatry, they hold basins full of human blood and say, yelling with horrible voices: ‘Let us keep the day of joy. Christ is vanquished; our most victorious Pripegala has triumphed.’ In this way, we ceaselessly either suffer or fear afflictions, since we grieve that they always advance and have good success in all things… and in place of the horrible sound of the heathens before Pripegala a song of joy may be sung there, and in place of the sacrifice from the spilling of Christian blood….
According to Adelgot, it was strangely enough the Christians that had been suffering the most from the Wends rather than the other way around.
…The most cruel heathens, men without mercy, have risen up against us and have prevailed, and glorying in the evil of their inhumanity they have profaned the churches of Christ with idolatry; they have destroyed the altars; and they do not hesitate to perpetrate upon us things that the human mind shrinks from hearing. They very often rage against our region and, sparing no one, they seize, kill, vanquish, and afflict with exquisite torments. Some they behead and sacrifice their heads to their evil gods. Of others, after their entrails have been removed, they bind together the cut-off hands and feet, and mocking our Christ they say: ‘Where is their God?’.
And he then accused the Wendish king and people of routinely torturing Christians and having an insatiable appetite for Christian blood and suffering
Some who have been raised on a gibbet, in order to increase their suffering, they allow to prolong a life that is more miserable than any dearth, since while still alive they perceive their own suffering as each limb is cut off, and they are finally miserably eviscerated after the stomach is cut open. They skin many men alive, and disguised by the skin cut off from the head (!) they invade the borders of the Christians, and falsely presenting themselves as Christians they carry away plunder with impunity.
Whether any of this human sacrifice just across the river was true was another thing although you could probably understand some reaction judging by the treatment the Wends were getting from Christian slave traders searching for pagan men and women and children to sell in the slave markets of Christendom. They were seen as fair game not being Christians and therefore outside civilisation to all intents and purposes. In fact the whole Baltic Sea with its association with non-Christian belief around its coast was called the ‘Barbarian sea’ in those times. This trade in pagan slaves was done all along the slavic pagan areas on an almost industrial scale. In fact the word ’Slav’ became synonymous with this activity and the modern word slave came to be derived from the word Slav indicating the huge scale of the problem that slavery was for these people as they faced this advancing front of Christianity.
What this meant was that the Wendish people who were just on the opposite side of the river Elbe to Frankish territory and therefore geographically the closest of the pagan communities took the main brunt of the aggression and by 1147CE, they had lost a sizeable amount of territory. The Wendish overlord, Prince Nyklot could only really watch as this steady stream of Saxons occupying Wendish lands became a flood. To compound these problems, two local potentates of that area Count Adolph II and Henry of Badewide also took advantage and seized several Wendish towns around this time.
Prince Nyklot had to do something and he launched a preemptive raid of sorts into Christian territory. This however only gave more excuse to the Christians to wage war against the Wends. And when the time came, this raid by the Wends would come in handy as an excuse for the declaration of a general crusade against all non-Christians across the Elbe River. In fact Bernard of Clairvaux who famously arrived in Germany around this time campaigning for a crusade against the Muslims in the Middle East would make full use this attack by Prince Nyklot to encourage crusading against the Wends for those who couldn’t travel as far as the middle-East. These people he said could earn the same merit by attacking the pagan Wends.
Of the Baltic communities, the Pomeranian people to the immediate east of the Wends were the first to fall converting just before the Northern Crusades kicked off in earnest. The Pomeranians were under threat of a savage invasion by the Christian Poles and consented to convert in the year 1124 to ward that invasion off although it would naturally take a fair time for the rural population to follow suit and abandon their former beliefs. What this meant was that the the Wendish people who lived immediately to their west were now surrounded on all four sides by Christian powers looking to stamp out paganism and were therefore easily the most vulnerable of the non-Christian communities. All that was needed now to trigger of a full-scale invasion and a land grab of Wendish territory was official sanction from the Catholic Church.
The Second Crusade
And that official sanction came in the middle of the twelfth century when the Second Crusade was being organised against Islam and which provided the major organised impetus and drive to attack and convert the Wends and the Baltic people at the same time. The Baltic area had escaped the attention of the Christian powers when the first Crusade had been organised in 1096CE. The focus had been entirely on recapturing Jerusalem from Islam. But the Second Crusade around fifty years after the first Crusade proved very different. The second Crusade, was triggered by the fall of the city of Edessa on the 26th December 1144CE. Edessa was the capital of one of the new Crusader states that had appeared after the First Crusade. And therefore its fall caused a major sensation in Europe. Shortly after the city’s fall, ambassadors and messengers from the other three still surviving Crusader States arrived in Europe with pleas to the Pope and the various Christian powers to organise another war against the Seljuk Turks who were the premier power in the middle east.
The Pope at this time, Eugenius III on hearing the news would issue a papal bull on the 1 December 1145. This papal bull titled ‘Quantum praedecessores’ called for a new Crusade against the Muslims. It started off by pointing out how previous generations had sacrificed so much to capture Jerusalem.
How much our predecessors the Roman pontiffs did labour for the deliverance of the oriental church, we have learned from the accounts of the ancients and have found it written in their acts.
He talked of how they…
…congregating a very great army, not without much shedding of their own blood, the divine aid being with them, did free from the filth of the pagans that city where our Saviour willed to suffer for us, and where He left His glorious sepulchre to us as a memorial of His passion, -and many others which, avoiding prolixity, we refrain from mentioning.
And he talked of the city’s Christian past and the need to take it back from the Muslims.
But now, our sins and those of the people themselves requiring it, a thing which we can not relate without great grief and wailing, the city of Edessa which in our tongue is called Rohais,-which also, as is said, once when the whole land in the east was held by the pagans, alone by herself served God under the power of the Christians-has been taken and many, of the castles of the Christians occupied by them (the pagans).
The Pope, firm in his belief that a Crusade was required, would reissue the bull in March 1146. And he would remind King Louis VII and French aristocracy in general, who he was primarily aiming at, of the achievements of the First Crusade. And in this declaration, the Pope offered remission of all sins for anyone willing to fight as well as protection for their family and property and possessions. Anyone who died crusading was promised full absolution pretty much like the first Crusade.
The chap chosen to preach and promote the Crusade was Bernard of Clairvaux or rather St Bernard as he would later become. Bernard – who we mentioned earlier – would find there was a lot of enthusiasm in France and places like southern Germany and he managed to recruit around 25,000 crusaders from these areas. But he didn’t find the same enthusiasm in Spain. The Spanish were busy fighting amongst themselves and the Muslims already. And he also didn’t have much luck in Northern Germany either where the population density happened to be much higher and where he was expecting to actually recruit a lot more than places elsewhere. Many of the people were reluctant, he noticed, to travel the large distances to the Middle East but were enthusiastic about waging war on pagans. Could not they instead earn similar merit by fighting the Wends across the River Elbe, the people asked Bernard? Bernard readily agreed to this for the Wends were unbelievers just like the Muslims and so surely there was no difference in the two causes. If waging war on Muslims was just then destroying paganism across the river was just as much if not more important. And in fact he used the recent raid by the Wendish overlord Prince Nyklot to argue that the Wends had to be destroyed or converted to protect Christianity and Christian people. And therefore a crusade against the Wends – carried out concurrently with the Crusade in the Middle East was entirely justified.
When the news reached the Pope in Rome of the proposal for a Crusade against the Wends he too showed enthusiasm and readily agreed to the idea. And so was set in motion the wheels of a movement which would end up destroying Baltic paganism. The ‘Northern Crusades’ as these wars in the Baltic would be called had now received church sanction from the very top. Bernard of Clairvaux would famously declare to the crowds in Germany that ‘with God’s help, they shall either be converted or deleted’. In other words they were either to be turned into Christians or massacred and their lands taken.
So in consequence both Crusades – one against the Seljuk Turks and another against the Baltic region were planned pretty much simultaneously. The Pope would issue two separate bulls named ‘Divina dispensatione’. The first was issued on 5 October 1146 and called for a second Crusade related to the war against the Muslims and specifically asking Italian masses to join the struggle. But it was the second bull that legitimised war against the pagan Balts. This was issued on the 11th April 1147 at Troyes and called for a Crusade against the pagan Slavs. Anyone who could not travel to the Middle East could wage war closer to home against the pagans. In this bull , the Pope declared
Certain of you, however, (are) desirous of participating in so holy a work and reward and plan to go against the Slavs and other pagans living towards the North and to subject them, with the Lord’s assistance, to the Christian religion. We give heed to the devotion of these men, and to all those who have not accepted the cross for going to Jerusalem and who have decided to go against the Slavs and to remain in the spirit of devotion on that expedition, as it is prescribed, we grant that same remission of sin…and the same temporal privileges as to the crusaders to Jerusalem.
This declaration then elevated any action agains the baltic people to the same status as the action against the Muslims in the Middle East and with the Saxon Germans already being urged by their Catholic clergy to wage war on the pagan Wends, things began to move much faster and would result in what was called the ‘Wendish Crusade’ in which Wendish power was destroyed.
After the defeat and forced conversion of the Wends, the focus would move further eastwards pretty quickly into Prussia, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
And further encouragement would be made by twenty-five years later and reinforced by his papal bull of 1171CE addressed to the people and kings of Denmark, Norway and Sweden this time calling on them essentially for a crusade against the Estonians challenging them to suppress the pagans there because of the resistance they were showing to Christianity. He reminded them how the Germans were already punishing the Latvians pagans during the Livonian crusade that was taking place.
We are deeply distressed and greatly worried when we hear that the savage Estonians and other pagans in those parts rise and fight God’s faithful and those who labour for the Christian faith and fight the virtue of the Christian name. … to gird yourselves, armed with celestial weapons and the strength of Apostolic exhortations, to defend the truth of the Christian faith bravely and to expand the Christian faith forcefully.
The second and most important and interesting part of the bull was the annulment of any sins and crimes the man might have committed.
Again, on offer was an indulgence on top of a promise one years remission of sin to anyone who would take up the sword . Anyone who was killed in the fight against the pagans would receive full indulgence. In other words any sin they had committed would be wiped out in the presence of God.
Trusting God’s mercy and merits of the apostles Peter and Paul, we thus concede to those forcefully and magnanimously fighting these often mentioned pagans one year’s remission of sins for which they have made confession and received a penance as we are accustomed to grant those who go to the Lord’s Sepulchre. To those who die in this fight we grant remission of all their sins, if they have received a penance.
In order to try and persuade more Crusaders to try their hand agains the pagans, the area where Estonia and Latvia now exist was renamed Terra Mariana or ‘Land of the Virgin Mary’. And this was to encourage Crusaders to destroy the pagan nature of the communities there – for how could the land of Mary possibly be allowed to remain pagan? Another tactic was to put the pagans in the same bracket as the Muslims by using the same terms for them. The Christians fighting the Balts called them Saracens – the term used for Arab Muslims – even though they Baltic people had nothing to do with the former. The use of the term was in a sense psychological – to render the same fighting zeal that Crusaders had in the Middle East against the pagans. This term possibly went into currency in the year 1211CE when the holy Roman Emperor Otto IV called the pagans saracens and described them as ‘enemies of Christianity’.
The Northern Crusades – a primer
As seen from this table below, the Northern Crusades – not surprisingly since they kicked off during the Second Crusade – pretty much mirrored the Middle Eastern crusades in terms of time frame. The Northern Crusades would span around 300 years before the last pagan Kingdom of the Lithuanians accepted Christianity. The big difference was that the Northern Crusades were ongoing conflicts happening year in year out with both major and minor clashes rather than the much grander and larger scale crusades of the middle east which happened in specific time frames. So while this chart shows the various Northern Crusades its important to remember these were only the major expeditions and there were numerous smaller expeditions interspersed between these larger ones almost on an annual basis.
| CRUSADE | DATE | AGAINST |
|---|---|---|
| Norwegian Crusade | 1123 | Småland in Sweden |
| Wendish Crusade | 1147 | Wends |
| SWEDISH CRUSADES | – | |
| First Swedish Crusade | 1150 | Finns |
| Second Swedish Crusade | 1249 | Finns |
| Third Swedish Crusade | 1293 | Finns |
| DANISH CRUSADES | – | |
| First Danish Crusade | 1191 | Prussians |
| Second Danish Crusade | 1202 | Prussians |
| Livonian Crusade | 1198–1290 | Latvians |
| Prussian Crusade | 1217–1274 | Prussians |
| Lithuanian Crusade | 1283–1410 | Lithuania |
And in fact these Northern Crusades would have a fairly heavy impact on the Middle Eastern crusades in many ways. Some Christian communities like the Danes, the Swedes to their north and of course the north Germans in places like Saxony lost interest in the main Crusades as there was far more to gain much closer to home in terms of territory. The Danes would be particularly active agains the Baltic people. And in fact later these North Germans,Swedes and Danes would be joined by the relatively newly converted Poles to the south who were already eyeing wendish territory and who also saw a chance to eliminate the pagan beliefs of the people there.
So there were major differences between the Northern Crusades and the much more well known Middle-East Crusades. Firstly and foremost these Crusades were unashamedly campaigns to eradicate paganism rather than push back Islam. In the middle East, there was little effort made to convert the Muslims to Christianity. They were simply seen as the enemy that had to be defeated. In the Baltic however the pagans were seen as barbaric people who needed to be converted and saved from idolatry and superstition.
The second and perhaps most important difference was that there was no Christian holy site in danger in the Baltic area. In the Middle East, Jerusalem was under control of the Seljuk Turks who had conquered much of Byzantine Christian territory. In fact the Byzantines had specifically asked for military help in the aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert in 1071CE as Turkish Seljuk forces began approaching Constantinople itself. So the Crusades to the Middle East could be argued as defensive in nature to some extent and an effort to retake Christian holy sites captured by Islamic states. But in the North of Europe this was never the case. There was no deliberate occupation or advance by large pagan armies on to Christian soil from the Baltic region.
And that neatly leads on to the third difference – which was that these Northern Crusades were largely an excuse by the various Christian powers – ie the German kingdoms, the Danes, the Swedes and the Russians for conquest to capture new territories to colonise with their own people. Population in Western Europe and in fact the middle east was increasing rapidly and would in fact continue to increase right up till the advent of the Black Death in 1346, two hundred years later. In contrast the Baltic Sea area was much more sparsely populated compared to the heavily populated centres of south and west Europe and where the local population survived on subsistence farming and hunting.
In these circumstances and with land becoming more scarce the Christian population felt they could rightly grab land from people who they felt were merely heathens. By the year 1000CE many Saxons on the west side of the River Elbe (who had been Christians now for several generations) began to migrate and annex land and various towns and villages from the Wends who were the closest pagan community. And this process only accelerated during eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century. Much of the area around the Baltic coast as well as places further south like Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic which were formerly slavic populations in consequence would now have a heavy mix of German blood instead as German people moved eastwards to take up land taken from the defeated and converted Slav inhabitants who themselves became either serfs or essentially second class citizens with the landholdings taken over and possessed by German settlers instead.
And you could compare this eastward movement and land grab to pretty much what happened in America for instance in the 19th century with Europeans pushing back the American Indians ever westwards. In fact the Germans have a term – Ostsiedlung – literally meaning ‘East -settling’ for this mass migration and annexation of Slav territory. It was the same further north where the Danes and Swedes began to annex territories in Lapland, Finland and Estonia and elsewhere becoming the new land owning class there. The Baltic Sea was an ideal channel for trade and these areas were also rich in natural resources, fish stocks and so forth. So in fact this area would later dominate trade with the cities all along the Baltic shore joining what was called the Hanseatic league – one of the first trading organisation blocks in Europe.
In terms of terrain and local conditions as well, there was a big difference. Instead of the arid desert waterless conditions of Palestine that the other Crusaders had to deal with, in the Baltic areas there was an equally harsh but very different situation with extreme cold, snow and marshy land and frequently forested areas where it was difficult for cavalry to negotiate and movement was difficult. The battles themselves were fought frequently on the icy wastes and frozen rivers and lakes of the area. In fact the Crusaders preferred waging war during the winter as the frozen lakes and marshes which turned rock solid in the cold made travel much easier for their heavy war horses and carts and wagons. In summer the marshy ground was entirely unsuitable for horses and made the issue of logistics much harder.
One of the things that was common to the Northern Crusades and the Middle East crusades was the scale of brutality and ruthlessness during the conflict. The pagans knew a lot was at stake. It wasn’t only their religion and way of life that the Crusaders would destroy. It would be their liberty as well – the pagans would effectively be reduced to slaves and second class citizens as the Germanic knights of the Teutonic order and other German settlers to these lands became the new aristocracy and landowners.
The Crusaders rarely took prisoners unless the pagans agreed to convert mainly executing the pagan warriors they took prisoner and villages were looted with women and children if lucky escaping into exile in Lithuania but if not so lucky taken as slaves to be sold off in the slave markets. So mass killing, virtual genocide and enslavement were the order of the day as far as the Crusaders were concerned and prisoners were rarely taken.
Meanwhile the pagans, if they took Crusaders prisoner, delighted in sacrificing them to their gods and then burning the bodies in revenge. A classic case of this is after the Battle of Krucken in 1249CE when a large group of Knights attacking pagan territory surrendered but the enraged Natangian tribe whose land they were invading took full revenge. They massacred fifty-four of the knights, some being tortured or killed in religious ceremonies in temples in front of their gods although they saved others who were later ransomed.
A good description of the everyday kind of violence and brutality in war was written by Henry of Livonia. It concerned a mission by a Christian force against the pagans of Estonia
Then the army spread into all the roads and villages, killed many people in every spot, and followed the remainder into the adjoining provinces, captured from them their women and boys, and reassembled at the fort. On the following day and the third day, they went out and laid waste everything and burned what they found and took horses and innumerable flocks; for of the latter there were four thousand oxen and cows, not counting horses, other flocks, and captives, of whom there was no count. Many of the pagans, moreover, who escaped through flight to the forests and the ice of the sea, perished in the freezing cold – Henry of Livonia
And this kind of warfare would go on year after year in the freezing cold until the pagans were annihilated or the ones that were left capitulated and converted. Any prisoners who were taken didn’t necessarily survive as Henry described.
They beheaded all the men whom they had brought along as prisoners, in order to take vengeance upon those lying and unfaithful nations. They divided the spoils and together they praised Him Who is always blessed – Henry of Livonia
Another prominent example came in 1210 when the Crusaders tried to use pagan prisoners as a bargaining counter for the surrender of a fort.
‘If you will renounce the worship of your false gods,’ said their leader Berthold, ‘and will believe with us in the true God, we will return these captives alive to you. We will accept you in the charity of our brotherhood and will join you to us in the bonds of peace.’ The pagans would listen to nothing about God or the Christian name. … they prepared themselves for war, and with their shouting they jeered and mocked at the <Christian> army. The Christians, however, having taken all the captives and slaughtered them, threw them into the moat and threatened to do the same to those who were in the fort. – Henry of Livonia
Another tactic of the Crusaders was the use of captured pagan children – these children were taken as hostages from communities which had agreed not to war against the Crusaders. The Bishops of these areas would then take boys from the pagan aristocratic families – sometimes batches up to thirty at a time while other pagan children were taken from the slave markets set up in these areas. These children were then brought up as Christians and given a religious education, ordained as catholic priests and then sent back to work on converting their own people. These children knowing the language of their people were thought to be more effective at converting the locals. We have one prominent example mentioned in sources of a pagan boy in Northern Estonia who was brought up as a Christian by the bishop of Riga, given the name of John (known later as John of Wirland) and who was then sent back to convert his own people. This though was a dangerous activity and you can understand the locals being irate at their own children being used against them. John Wirland himself had an unfortunate ending the angry Estonians cutting off his head and then cutting up his body in small pieces.
The primary sources
There are several key contemporary or near contemporary primary sources we have on the subject that anyone wanting to read about the northern Crusades might want to check out.
The first is what’s called the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia. And this was written by a Catholic priest called Henry (or Henricus de Lettis in Latin) around 1229CE and who happened to be in Estonia during its conquest by the Crusaders. And it is in fact the oldest surviving source we have on Estonia and Latvia. Its an eye witness account of the military actions, politics, and machinations that occurred and the people that lived in these places so an extremely important first hand resource.
The second main source we have is the work by Saxo Grammaticus written circa 1200CE on the history of the Danes (or ‘Gesta Danorum’) which of course includes the Northern crusades as the Danes as well as the Germans played a major part in the expeditions to Livonia. Saxo Grammaticus was a historian and theologian who explores Danish history from its very earliest times to the 12th century.
The third interesting source is that written by Peter of Duisburg who was a priest and in his book – Chronicle of the land of Prussia ( Chronicon terrae Prussiae) written circa 1326 – he gives a good account of the Teutonic Order and the Old Prussians ie the original inhabitants as opposed to the German settlers. The book was written on behalf of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order of that time.
And finally I’ll just mention one more important work – and that’s the Chronicle by Arnold of Lübeck. This piece of work was originally begun by a Saxon priest called Helmold of Bosau. Arnold himself was an Abbott in Lubeck and this work is a good source on German activity in both the Middle East Crusades as well as the northern Crusades and the religious and financial interests involved in these ventures.
In terms of modern works, undeniably the best book on the subject and which covers the whole crusading period from the middle of the 12th century right up to the end of the crusading period in the 16th century is the one by Eric Christiansen called appropriately ‘The Northern Crusades’ first published in 1980 and it’s well worth a read although its quite dense and perhaps not the best book if you’re just wanting to dip your foot in the water as it were on the subject. One drawback of the book is that it covers a lengthy four hundred year period and several theatres of the conflicts in the baltic so it goes through a lot in a short space of time. But if you do want an overall and really comprehensive account of these events than it is probably the go-to book on the subject. And it is well written and does engage the reader as longs you can keep up with the many names and places mentioned.
The resurgence of indigenous beliefs and the Catholic reaction
The northern Crusades certainly destroyed pagan beliefs as state and cultural religions and effectively made Europe a Christian stronghold for the next seven hundred years. And of course these being purely Catholic Crusades by Catholic powers it meant that the border between the Greek Orthodox Church and Catholicism and later after the Reformation, Protestant Europe, was pushed much more eastwards than it had been in the early medieval ages. In fact some of the military actions developed into pretty much a full blooded crusade against the Russian Greek Orthodox as the Catholics had a desire to convert the Russians too into Catholicism. Sadly much of the Slav culture was lost in these ventures although languages and other remnants of the culture and belief did survive. As an example, the language of the Old pagan Prussians was still extant surprisingly till around the beginning of the 18th century in certain locations before it died out. So in a lot of senses, and in contrast to the much more famous Middle Eastern crusades, the northern Crusades were actually much more successful from the Christian perspective and the effects of this aggressive expansion are still with us today.
Finally in certain areas, non-Christian European beliefs and religions do seem to be making a comeback. For instance in Lithuania, what’s called the Romuva movement is trying to bring back the Lithuanian indigenous belief back into the mainstream. The movement is trying to piece together the traditions and customs and folklore that existed before Christianity was enforced on the general population. And this movement really took root as far back as the 19th century. In 2001 the Romuva movement had around 1,200 followers. In 2011 the census in Lithuania showed there were more than 5,000 followers – more than the 3,000 Jews in the country whose religious beliefs are officially accepted so the movement is growing in strength. The Romuva movement have chosen the tree as a symbol of the organisation and the name itself Romuva comes from an old Pagan Baltic temple which is mentioned in medieval sources from Prussia. The word itself means Temple or Sanctuary or Code of Inner Peace. And its a similar situation in the other Baltic republics. In Latvia for example there is what’s called the Dievturi community which is also growing. Dievturība means beholding God.
The problem that both Latvian and Lithuanian communities during the 20th and early part of the 21st century faced was that these beliefs did not have the official status of religion and pagan marriages and baptisms were not given the same official status as Christian, Jewish and Muslim baptisms and marriages were. And to make matters worse the Catholic hierarchy in these countries was actively blocking and organising a strong opposition to the recognition of pagan beliefs in the country, their way to acceptability and their bid to gain official status. And this vigorous opposition to the Lithuanian beliefs is still active up to the present times amongst the local Catholic organisations and Church.
So in 2018 when Pope Francis visited the Baltic states, several of the pagan movements including the Dievturi and Romuva communities would protest against the Christians and the Catholic Church for preventing the recognition of their Baltic beliefs. And they sent an open letter to the Pope asking him to stop the Catholic authorities from being so obstructive.
We sincerely hope that, while you visit, You will urge the brothers and sisters of Your religious beliefs to respect our own religious choice and cease impeding our efforts to achieve national recognition of the ancient Baltic faith.
They also wanted the usage of the term ‘pagan’ to be discontinued by Christians as the term was “loaded with centuries of prejudice and persecution”. There is hope amongst these groups that the Catholic authorities will relent in their opposition and allow these original Baltic beliefs to flourish again.
