Northern Crusades

• 1. Introduction

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  The Northern Crusades were military campaigns by several Catholic kingdoms and military orders aimed at Christianizing the pagan peoples of the Baltic Sea's southern and eastern shores. What makes them remarkable is not just their scale, but their mixed motives: while some were explicitly sanctioned by the pope as holy wars, others were labeled crusades only centuries later, by romantic nationalist historians writing in the 19th century. The war against the Estonians and nearby pagans, for instance, was authorized by Pope Alexander III's 1171 crusade bull, Non parum animus noster. The so-called First Swedish Crusade, by contrast, may have been partly mythical. Between those two poles lies a complicated story of forced baptism, territorial ambition, and fierce resistance that played out across what is now Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. How did a hospital founded around 1190 transform into the most powerful military force in the Baltic? Why did Catholic Denmark and Sweden compete as fiercely with each other as they did with the pagans they sought to convert? And what brought the whole enterprise to an end at a single battle in 1410?

• 2. A Continent in Motion

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  Pope Celestine III issued his call to crusade in 1195, but Catholic kingdoms had already begun subjugating their pagan neighbors before that date. The Saxons, Danes, and Poles had launched the Wendish Crusade as early as 1147 against the Polabian Slavs living between the Elbe and Oder Rivers. That campaign ran parallel to the Second Crusade to the Holy Land and continued intermittently for more than three centuries. The peoples targeted across the region were diverse. The Curonians and Semigallians faced crusader pressure from 1219 to 1290. The Old Prussians confronted campaigns beginning in 1219 and 1222. Campaigns against Lithuanians and Samogitians by the Germans ran from 1236 to 1410 without ever achieving a decisive military victory. Before the crusades arrived, armed conflict between Baltic peoples and their Saxon and Danish neighbors had already been common for centuries. The previous battles had been driven largely by competition over castles and sea trade routes, and the crusades followed that same pattern of economic rivalry, now cloaked in religious sanction. The Teutonic Order, a German military religious order that had started as a hospital around 1190 and became a military order in 1198, proved to be the primary institutional beneficiary. German merchants who fanned out along Baltic trading routes also profited immensely, following the crusaders deeper into previously inaccessible territories.

• 3. The Danish Rivalry

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  Crusader Esbern Snare mentioned a major Danish victory over the Finns in his Christmas-feast speech of 1187, and that reference is the earliest known record of the Danish campaigns in Finland. The journalist Matts Dumell explains that rivalry between the churches of Denmark and Sweden drove both kingdoms to compete through conquest, accumulating Christian adherents as a form of propaganda victory over each other. That rivalry makes it virtually impossible, in Dumell's view, that Finland was already part of Sweden in the mid-1100s to early 1200s. Sweden had its own internal troubles during that period: civil strife, battles, and assassinations among strongmen of the House of Sverker and the House of Erik made sustained foreign campaigns difficult. The Danish record is more active but also more uncertain. King Canute VI led a crusade to Finland in 1191 that Dumell considers well attested in multiple ancient sources. The king later embarked on further crusades against Estonia in 1194 and 1196-1197. A crusade attributed to Bishop Anders Sunesen and his brothers in 1202 is far more ambiguous; Dumell debates whether it was confused with a separate expedition to Ösel in 1206 or was a real and distinct event. A third possible Danish crusade to Finland in 1209 is so poorly attested that its existence cannot be confirmed. Only in 1216 did the pope declare that the Finnish territories should no longer fall under Danish jurisdiction but instead be placed under the Swedish king's protection.

• 4. The Livonian Frontier

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  Meinhard, a German canon later proclaimed a saint, landed at the mouth of the Daugava River in present-day Latvia in 1180, following old Viking trading routes alongside German merchants. Six years later he was made bishop, and Pope Celestine III's crusade proclamation of 1195 gave formal authorization to what followed. His successor, Berthold of Hanover, led the first proper crusading expedition into Livonia in 1198. The crusaders won their first battle, but Bishop Berthold was mortally wounded and the campaign was repelled. Albert of Buxhoeveden, appointed in 1199 by Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen, proved a far more durable figure. He arrived at the Daugava's mouth in 1200 with only 23 ships and 500 soldiers, but by the time he died 30 years later, the conquest and formal Christianization of what is now Estonia and northern Latvia was complete. Albert founded the city of Riga in 1201, which immediately attracted citizens from the empire and generated economic prosperity. To secure permanent military footing, he established the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in 1202. At Albert's request, Pope Innocent III dedicated the Baltic countries to the Virgin Mary as a recruitment device, and the name Terra Mariana, or Land of Mary, attached itself to the region and persisted into modern times. The first prominent Livonian to be christened was their leader Caupo of Turaida, who became a loyal crusader ally until his death at the Battle of St. Matthew's Day in 1217.

• 5. Resistance and Alliance

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  By 1208, the Germans were strong enough to begin operations against the Estonians, who were divided into eight territories of varying sizes, each led by elders with limited cooperation among themselves. A three-year truce from 1213 to 1215 proved more favorable to the Germans, who used the pause to consolidate political control while the Estonians were unable to transform their loose alliances into a centralized state. The Estonian elder Lembitu had drawn the attention of German chroniclers since 1211 as the central figure of the resistance. He was killed alongside the Livonian leader Kaupo in a crushing defeat near Viljandi on the 21st of September, 1217. Denmark and Sweden pressed in from the west. King Valdemar II of Denmark landed at the Estonian town of Lindanisse, present-day Tallinn, in 1219. The Danes established a fortress there that was besieged by Estonians in 1220 and 1223 but held out, and northern Estonia eventually came under Danish control. The island county of Saaremaa held out the longest. In January of 1227, a 20,000-strong army under papal legate William of Modena crossed the frozen sea while the Saaremaa fleet was icebound. After the fall of the strongholds at Muhu and Valjala, the Oeselians formally accepted Christianity. The conversion did not hold: Saaremaa renounced Christianity again, and by 1261 warfare resumed after the Oeselians killed all the Germans on the island. A final peace treaty was signed only after united crusader forces conquered the Oeselian stronghold at Kaarma.

• 6. Teutonic Power and Its Limits

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  Konrad I, the Polish duke of Mazovia, asked the Teutonic Knights in 1226 to suppress the Old Prussians after his own crusading orders of Dobrzyń, founded in 1220 on advice from the first bishop of Prussia, Christian of Oliva, proved largely ineffective. In 1234, a significant expedition saw Polish forces allied with the Teutonic Knights defeat the Old Prussians in a battle on the Dzierzgoń River. When the Livonian Brothers of the Sword were decisively defeated by Samogitians and Semigallians at the Battle of Saule in 1236, their remnants were absorbed into the Teutonic Order in 1237 and became its autonomous Livonian branch. This reorganization gave the Teutonic Order political control over vast Baltic territories. Their eastern ambitions, however, met a decisive check at the Battle of the Ice in 1242, when Novgorodian forces defeated the Livonian branch. King Mindaugas of Lithuania was baptized and crowned with papal approval in 1253 in an attempt to halt crusader attacks, but the conflict persisted. Lithuania's formal conversion began only in 1387, following Grand Duke Jogaila's baptism and his marriage in 1386 to Jadwiga, the young ruling queen of Poland. Even that conversion did not end the war. At the Battle of Grunwald, also known as Tannenberg or Žalgiris, in 1410, the allied forces of Poland and Lithuania, supported by Tatar, Moldovan, Ruthenian, and Czech contingents, decisively defeated the Teutonic Knights, bringing the crusading enterprise in the Baltic to a close.