The Northern Crusades

I. The Eastern Baltic around 1200

At the end of the twelfth century the lands along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, from the Vistula to the Gulf of Finland, were inhabited by peoples who had not accepted Christianity. In the south, between the Vistula and the Neman, lived the Prussians, a Baltic people divided into a number of regions such as Pomesania, Pogesania, Warmia, Natangia, Sambia and Galindia. Further north were the Curonians on the coast, the Semigallians and Latgalians inland, and the Livs around the mouth of the Daugava, while the Estonians, a Finnic people, occupied the territory north of them. East of the Prussians lay the Lithuanians, who were in the process of forming a powerful state.

These peoples practised religions centred on sacred groves, springs and fields, and on a priesthood whose influence varied from region to region. Later Christian writers, notably Peter of Dusburg in the fourteenth century, described a chief priest of the Prussians called Criwe who was said to reside at a place called Romowe, though the reliability of this account is disputed. What is clear is that religion was closely tied to local custom, to rites of burial and cremation, and to the agricultural year. The peoples of the region were organised into kin groups and territorial communities led by chieftains, and they traded in amber, furs, wax and slaves with merchants from Scandinavia, Rus and Germany.

Christian contact with the region was not new. Missionaries had tried to preach among the Prussians at least since Adalbert of Prague, who was killed there in 997, and Bruno of Querfurt, killed in 1009. The Danes and the Swedes had raided the coasts, and the Rus principalities of Novgorod and Polotsk had collected tribute from some of the Finnic and Baltic peoples and had established a small number of Orthodox converts. By the late twelfth century German merchants from Lübeck and Gotland were trading regularly at the mouth of the Daugava, and it was in connection with this trade that the first lasting mission was established.

II. The Mission to the Livs and the Crusade of Bishop Albert

Around 1180 an Augustinian canon named Meinhard of Segeberg accompanied German merchants to the lower Daugava and began preaching among the Livs. He built a church at Üxküll and, with the help of stonemasons from Gotland, a stone fortification that the Livs agreed to accept in return for promises of baptism. In 1186 the archbishop of Bremen consecrated him bishop. Many of those baptised returned to their former customs, and Meinhard's successor Berthold, who arrived in 1196, came with an armed force and was killed in battle in 1198.

Pope Celestine III had authorised a crusade in support of the mission in 1195, and Innocent III renewed the call in 1199. The decisive figure in the following years was Albert of Buxhoeveden, a canon of Bremen who became bishop of Livonia in 1199. Albert recruited crusaders each year in northern Germany, granting them the same indulgence as those who went to Jerusalem in return for a year's service in Livonia. In 1201 he founded the town of Riga on the Daugava, and in 1202 he established a military order, the Brothers of the Sword, whose members took religious vows and served as a permanent garrison.

Over the next quarter of a century Albert, the Sword Brothers and the annual crusaders brought the Livs, the Latgalians and eventually the Estonians under their rule. The campaigns combined military conquest with baptism, the building of churches and the imposition of tithes. The Danes under King Valdemar II conquered northern Estonia and founded Reval, modern Tallinn, in 1219. The Estonians resisted strongly, and a general uprising in 1223 was suppressed only after hard fighting. By 1227 the whole of Estonia, including the island of Saaremaa, had been brought under Christian rule, and Albert, who died in 1229, had created an ecclesiastical principality with Riga as its centre.

The Sword Brothers suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Lithuanians and Semigallians at the battle of Saule in 1236, in which their master Volquin and around fifty brothers were killed. The surviving members were incorporated into the Teutonic Order in 1237, and from then on the Livonian branch of that order was the principal military power in the region.

III. The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia

The principal source for the conquest of Livonia and Estonia is the chronicle of Henry of Livonia, a priest who came to Riga as a young man, was ordained, and served as a missionary among the Latgalians. His Latin chronicle, written around 1227, covers the period from Meinhard's arrival to 1227 and is one of the most detailed accounts of any medieval frontier conquest. Henry wrote as a participant, and he describes campaigns, negotiations, baptisms and uprisings in which he was personally involved.

Henry's account is shaped throughout by the language of Scripture. He presents the mission as the extension of the Church to the ends of the earth, citing the commission in Matthew 28:19, and he frequently describes the crusaders as fighting under the protection of the Virgin Mary, to whom Livonia had been dedicated as "the land of the Mother", terra Mariana. He compares the victories of the Christians to the wars of Israel in the books of Joshua and Judges, and he interprets the failures of the converted peoples who returned to their old customs as apostasy, using the image of the dog returning to its vomit from Proverbs 26:11 and 2 Peter 2:22.

The chronicle is also notable for its description of a mystery play staged in Riga in 1205, which presented the battles of Gideon, David and Herod to the newly baptised. Henry says that the audience, not understanding the performance, fled in fear when the armed actors appeared. The episode illustrates the attempt to teach the content of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Scriptures to peoples who had no prior acquaintance with them, and the difficulty of doing so in a context of conquest.

Modern scholars, among them James Brundage, who translated the chronicle into English, and Marek Tamm, have analysed Henry's work as a theological history which justifies the conquest while also recording its costs. Henry criticises the greed of some crusaders and the harshness of some officials, and he records the complaints of the Estonians that they had been oppressed by excessive tithes. His work is therefore a valuable record of the views of a missionary who believed in the cause he served while acknowledging that its methods were not always consistent with its aims.

IV. The Teutonic Order and the Call to Prussia

The conquest of Prussia began somewhat later and followed a different course. In the early thirteenth century a Cistercian monk named Christian of Oliva began a peaceful mission among the Prussians and was consecrated bishop of Prussia around 1215. The Prussians responded to the mission and to Polish attempts at expansion with raids into the Polish duchy of Masovia. Duke Conrad of Masovia, unable to defend his territory, sought outside help. He first supported a small military order, the Knights of Dobrin, and in 1226 invited the Teutonic Order to defend his frontier, offering them the territory of Culm on the Vistula.

The Teutonic Order had been founded at Acre around 1190 as a hospital confraternity of German crusaders and became a military order in 1198. Under its grand master Hermann of Salza, who was a close adviser of Emperor Frederick II, the order sought a territory where it could establish an independent base. In the Golden Bull of Rimini, dated 1226 though possibly issued later, Frederick II granted the order the right to hold Culm and any lands it conquered in Prussia as an imperial principality. In 1234 Pope Gregory IX, in the Bull of Rieti, placed the conquered lands under the protection of the papacy as property of the order.

In 1230 a small force of knights under Hermann Balk crossed the Vistula and built a fortress at Thorn, modern Toruń. Over the following decades the order advanced along the Vistula and the coast, building castles at Culm, Marienwerder and Elbing, and later at Balga, Königsberg and Memel. Each castle served as a base for further campaigns and as the nucleus of a town settled by German colonists. The site's pages on Bible scholarship in Toruń, Gdańsk and Königsberg describe the later history of these towns.

V. The Conquest of Prussia

The conquest of Prussia took more than fifty years. The order relied on annual contingents of crusaders from Germany, Bohemia, Poland and elsewhere, who served for a season and earned the indulgence. In 1254 and 1255 King Ottokar II of Bohemia led a crusade into Sambia, and the castle of Königsberg was named in his honour. The order's knights were few in number, perhaps a few hundred at any one time, but their castles, their discipline and the support of the crusaders gave them a decisive advantage.

The conquest was marked by treaties as well as by war. The Treaty of Christburg of 1249, mediated by the papal legate Jacob of Liège, granted the baptised Prussians of Pomesania, Warmia and Natangia personal freedom, the right to own property, the right to become priests or knights and the right to legal process, in return for their acceptance of baptism, the building of churches and the abandonment of pagan rites such as cremation and the worship of idols. The treaty shows that the papacy sought to secure the rights of converts and to limit the order's power over them.

In 1260 the Prussians rose in a general revolt known as the Great Prussian Uprising, following the defeat of the order and its Livonian branch by the Lithuanians and Samogitians at the battle of Durbe. Led by chieftains such as Herkus Monte of Natangia, who had been educated in Magdeburg, the Prussians captured many castles and killed many settlers and knights. The uprising lasted until 1274, and the order recovered only with the help of repeated crusades. The final subjugation of the Prussian regions was completed in 1283, when Peter of Dusburg records that the last resistance in Sudovia ended.

The consequences for the Prussian population were severe. Many were killed or died of famine during the wars, others fled to Lithuania, and those who remained were reduced to a lower legal status than the colonists. The Prussian language survived in rural areas into the seventeenth century, and a Prussian translation of Luther's Small Catechism, printed in Königsberg in 1561, is among the most important surviving texts in the language. The language died out by about 1700.

VI. Peter of Dusburg and the Ideology of the Order

The principal narrative source for the conquest of Prussia is the Chronicon terrae Prussiae of Peter of Dusburg, a priest of the Teutonic Order who completed it in 1326. Peter wrote in Latin for the brothers of the order, and his chronicle was translated into German verse by Nicolaus of Jeroschin in the 1330s. It contains an account of the foundation of the order, the history of its arrival in Prussia, the conquest, and a section on the customs of the Prussians.

Peter's chronicle explains the order's war through an extended allegorical reading of Scripture. Drawing on Ephesians 6:11-17, he describes the spiritual armour of the brothers, while also presenting their material arms as instruments of that spiritual war. He cites the books of the Maccabees, which were regarded in the medieval Latin Church as part of the canon, as the model of holy war, and he presents the brothers as successors of Judas Maccabeus. He also explains the founding of the order through the Psalms and the prophetic books. His work shows the order's conviction that its war was a form of religious service.

The rule of the Teutonic Order, which combined elements of the rules of the Templars and the Hospitallers, required the brothers to hear the reading of Scripture during meals. The order commissioned vernacular translations of several biblical books for this purpose in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, among them a German verse paraphrase of the books of Judith, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, Job and Maccabees, and translations of the Apocalypse and of the Acts of the Apostles. These works, studied by scholars of medieval German literature, are an important part of the literary culture of the order and of the history of German Bible translation.

VII. The Debate over Conversion by Force

The Northern Crusades raised the question whether non-Christians could be compelled to accept baptism. Canon law, following the teaching expressed by many Latin writers, held that faith could not be compelled, but it also allowed war against pagans who attacked Christians or prevented the preaching of the Gospel. Defenders of the crusades argued that the Baltic wars were defensive, protecting converts and Christian neighbours, and that the conquest was necessary for the safe preaching of the faith.

The question was debated at the Council of Constance in 1414–18 in a controversy between the Teutonic Order and the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. The Polish canonist Paulus Vladimiri, rector of the University of Kraków, argued that pagans possessed legitimate political rights and property and could not be deprived of them simply because they were not Christians. He maintained that the order's wars against the Lithuanians, who had been baptised in 1387, were unjust. The order's defenders, among them the Dominican Johannes Falkenberg, replied with arguments that the council ultimately condemned. Vladimiri's arguments are regarded as an important early contribution to the theory of the rights of non-Christian peoples.

The scriptural texts cited in this debate were the same texts that appear throughout the history of the Wars of Religion. Defenders of the order cited the wars of Israel and passages such as Luke 14:23, "compel them to come in", which Augustine had used to justify coercion against the Donatists. Critics cited Matthew 26:52, "all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword", and the words of Jesus in John 18:36 that his kingdom was not part of this world. Vladimiri also appealed to natural law and to the principle that grace does not abolish nature.

VIII. Livonia after the Conquest

After 1237 Livonia was divided among several authorities: the archbishop of Riga, the bishops of Dorpat, Ösel-Wiek and Courland, the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, the town of Riga, and the Danish king in northern Estonia until 1346, when he sold his territory to the order. Relations among these powers were often hostile, and there were periods of open war between the order and the archbishop and the town of Riga in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The local peoples, now Christians, formed the peasantry, while the German-speaking nobility and burghers held land, office and trade.

The Livonian branch also fought the Rus principalities. In 1240–42 it advanced towards Novgorod and Pskov and was defeated by Prince Alexander Nevsky in the battle on the ice of Lake Peipus in April 1242. This conflict, which later acquired great symbolic importance in Russian history, marked the eastern limit of the order's expansion and also the boundary between Latin and Orthodox Christianity in the region. The site's pages on the Reformation describe how, in the sixteenth century, Livonia became one of the first regions to adopt Lutheranism, and how the order's state was dissolved in 1561.

IX. Prussia after the Conquest

In Prussia the order built one of the most efficiently administered territories in medieval Europe. In 1309 the grand master moved his seat from Venice to Marienburg on the Nogat, where the order built the largest brick castle in Europe. The order's lands were divided into commanderies, each governed from a castle. German peasants settled the countryside under the law of Culm, towns such as Danzig, Elbing, Thorn and Königsberg joined the Hanseatic League, and the order exported grain and amber.

The Lithuanian wars continued throughout the fourteenth century. Each year knights from across Europe joined the order on campaigns known as Reisen, and among them were Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England, who served in 1390 and 1392, and the knight described by Chaucer in the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales, who had campaigned in Prussia and Lithuania. The baptism of the Lithuanian grand duke Jogaila in 1386, on his marriage to Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and the conversion of Lithuania in 1387 removed the principal justification for these campaigns. The order's defeat by Poland and Lithuania at Grunwald, also called Tannenberg, in 1410 marked the beginning of its decline.

In 1525 the grand master Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach adopted Lutheranism and transformed the Prussian territory of the order into a secular duchy under Polish suzerainty. This duchy later became the core of the kingdom of Prussia. The Albertina University, founded in Königsberg in 1544, became a centre of Lutheran theology and of the study of Hebrew and Greek, and the Prussian catechisms of 1545 and 1561 were among its earliest publications.

X. Assessment

Historians of the Northern Crusades have approached the subject from several directions. Eric Christiansen's The Northern Crusades, first published in 1980, placed the conquests in the context of the economic and political expansion of medieval Europe and emphasised the role of trade, settlement and the military orders. William Urban's studies of the Baltic, Livonian and Prussian crusades provided detailed narratives of the campaigns. More recent research, including the work of Aleksander Pluskowski on the archaeology of the conquest and of Marek Tamm and others on the chronicles, has examined the consequences for the local populations and the environment.

In national historiographies the conquests have been interpreted in contrasting ways. German historians of the nineteenth century often presented the order as the bearer of civilisation to the East, while Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian historians emphasised the destruction of the indigenous societies and the subordination of the native peoples. Modern scholarship has moved away from both positions, seeking to describe the conquests as a complex process in which conversion, conquest, colonisation and resistance were interwoven.

The Northern Crusades are relevant to the themes of this site because they raise questions about the place of Scripture in the justification of war. The chronicles and the literature of the order relied heavily on the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the conquest narratives of Joshua and the wars of the Maccabees, and on allegorical readings of the Greek Scriptures. The same texts were read differently by those who opposed the use of force in matters of faith. The debate at Constance shows that these questions were discussed seriously within medieval Christianity, and that the arguments advanced there anticipated later discussions during the Reformation and the European expansion overseas.

For summaries of the events, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Northern Crusades, the Teutonic Order, the Prussian Crusade and the Livonian Crusade.

XI. The Crusade Indulgence and the Recruitment of Crusaders

The Northern Crusades depended on the extension of the crusade indulgence to a theatre of war far from Jerusalem. The first step in this direction was taken by Pope Eugenius III in 1147, when, at the request of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Saxon princes, he authorised a campaign against the Wends, the Slavic peoples east of the Elbe, as part of the Second Crusade. The bull Divini dispensatione granted those who fought the Wends the same spiritual privileges as those who went to the East. The Wendish Crusade had limited military results, but it established the principle that war against pagans on the northern frontier could be treated as a crusade.

Under Innocent III and his successors this principle was applied systematically to Livonia and Prussia. Preachers, often Cistercians and later Dominicans and Franciscans, were commissioned to preach the cross in northern Germany, Denmark, Bohemia and Poland. The papal letters granted varying degrees of indulgence according to the length of service, and in the case of Livonia a year's service was held to be equivalent to the journey to Jerusalem. The recruitment of crusaders was closely tied to the trading networks of the Baltic, since crusaders travelled from Lübeck and other ports in merchant ships, and the success of Bishop Albert depended on his ability to bring several hundred men to Riga each spring.

The theological basis of these grants was the idea, developed in canon law during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that the pope could direct the use of force in defence of the Church and of Christians. The canonists distinguished between war to defend Christians against attack, which was lawful, and war to compel unbelievers to accept baptism, which was not. In practice the distinction was difficult to maintain, since the defence of converts and missionaries was often used to justify campaigns that resulted in conquest and mass baptism. The papal letters themselves frequently insisted that converts should be treated gently and that their liberties should be respected, and papal legates such as William of Modena, who visited Livonia in 1225 and 1234, attempted to restrain the conduct of the military orders.

XII. Conversion and Religious Life among the Baltic Peoples

The adoption of Christianity by the peoples of Livonia and Prussia was a gradual process that extended over centuries. In the early phases baptism was often administered to large groups after military defeat or as a condition of peace treaties, and the converts received little instruction. Henry of Livonia records several occasions on which communities were baptised and then returned to their former practices when the crusaders withdrew, and the clergy regarded these communities as apostates. Formal acts of renunciation, the building of churches and the appointment of priests followed, but the number of priests able to speak the local languages was small.

Archaeological evidence shows that traditional burial customs persisted for a long time after the conquest. Cremation was forbidden by the Treaty of Christburg, yet cremation burials and grave goods continued in parts of Prussia and Livonia into the fourteenth century, and in some regions traditional rites were combined with Christian symbols. Visitation reports from the sixteenth century still describe the veneration of sacred groves and stones among the Latvian and Estonian peasantry. These survivals suggest that the conversion was for a long time a matter of public conformity rather than personal conviction.

The first books in the languages of the region appeared only after the Reformation. A Lutheran catechism in Estonian was printed in 1535, of which only fragments survive, and Lutheran catechisms in Latvian and Prussian followed in the 1540s and later. The first complete Bible in Latvian, translated by Ernst Glück, was published in Riga in 1689, and the first complete Estonian Bible in 1739. Lithuanian translations of parts of the Scriptures appeared in the sixteenth century in both Protestant and Catholic circles, and the Protestant translator Jonas Bretkūnas completed a full Lithuanian Bible in Königsberg around 1590, although it remained in manuscript. These translations belong to the later history of the region, but they show that the peoples who had been converted under the military orders received the Scriptures in their own languages only three centuries after the conquest.

XIII. The Archaeology of the Conquest

Archaeological research since the 1990s has added considerably to the understanding of the Northern Crusades. Excavations at castles such as Marienburg, Elbing and Königsberg have revealed the stages of construction and the material culture of the order's garrisons. Studies of pollen, animal bones and plant remains have shown that the conquest was followed by changes in land use, including the clearing of forests and the expansion of arable farming to support the order's grain trade. The project led by Aleksander Pluskowski at the University of Reading on the ecology of the crusades examined these changes across several regions of Prussia and Livonia.

The results of this research suggest that the conquest transformed the landscape as well as the political and religious order. The building of brick castles, churches and towns, the settlement of colonists and the introduction of new agricultural practices created the cultural landscape of the southern Baltic that survived until the twentieth century. The archaeological evidence also confirms the scale of the destruction during the wars of the thirteenth century, with abandoned hillforts and settlements in several regions of Prussia.

XIV. The Danish and Swedish Crusades and the Rising of 1343

The German military orders were not the only crusading powers on the Baltic. The kings of Denmark had led campaigns against the Wends in the twelfth century, and in 1168 King Valdemar I and Bishop Absalon of Roskilde captured the temple fortress of Arkona on the island of Rügen and destroyed the image of the god Svantevit. In 1219 Valdemar II led a large expedition to northern Estonia and defeated the Estonians at Lyndanisse, where he built the castle of Reval. Later Danish tradition held that the national flag, the Dannebrog, fell from heaven during this battle. The Swedes campaigned in Finland in a series of expeditions traditionally dated to the 1150s, the 1240s and the 1290s, which brought the Finns under Swedish rule and the Latin Church and were also treated as crusades.

The rule of the Danish crown and the Livonian order in Estonia was challenged by a major uprising in 1343, known as the St George's Night Uprising, which began on 23 April in the region of Harrien. The Estonian peasants killed many German landowners and clergy, besieged Reval and sought help from the Swedish governor of Finland. The Livonian order suppressed the uprising with great severity, killing the Estonian leaders who had come to negotiate at Weissenstein. In 1346 the Danish king sold northern Estonia to the Teutonic Order. Estonian historians have regarded the uprising as the last major attempt by the Estonians to throw off foreign rule before the modern period, while the chronicles of the order present it as a renewed apostasy.

The uprising of 1343 illustrates the long duration of the conflict created by the crusades. More than a century after the conquest the indigenous population still regarded the German lords as foreign rulers, and the chroniclers still interpreted resistance in religious terms. The sources describe the rebels as having renounced their baptism, though modern historians emphasise that the causes lay mainly in the burdens of tithe, labour service and taxation imposed on the peasantry.

XV. The Northern Crusades in the Wider Series

The Northern Crusades were contemporary with several of the conflicts described elsewhere in this series. The Albigensian Crusade began in 1209, during the campaigns of Bishop Albert in Livonia, and the Stedinger Crusade of 1233–34 was preached in the same region of northern Germany from which many Baltic crusaders were recruited. The Bosnian crusades of the thirteenth century were also preached under the same indulgence. The papacy of Innocent III and Gregory IX thus extended the crusade to several frontiers at the same time, against heretics within Christendom and against pagans beyond it.

The differences are equally significant. In the south of France and in Bosnia the targets were Christians whom the Church regarded as heretics, while in the Baltic they were peoples who had never been Christian. The question of whether baptism could legitimately follow conquest was therefore distinctive to the Baltic, and the answers given to it shaped the later development of the canon law on the treatment of non-Christian peoples. In the sixteenth century the Spanish theologians of Salamanca, among them Francisco de Vitoria, would take up the questions raised by Paulus Vladimiri in the context of the conquest of the Americas.

XVI. Chronology

The following summary places the main events in order. In 997 Adalbert of Prague was killed in Prussia. Around 1180 Meinhard began his mission among the Livs, and in 1186 he was consecrated bishop. In 1198 Bishop Berthold was killed in battle. In 1199 Albert of Buxhoeveden became bishop and in 1201 he founded Riga. In 1202 the Sword Brothers were founded. In 1219 the Danes founded Reval. In 1226 Conrad of Masovia invited the Teutonic Order, and in 1230 the order began the conquest of Prussia. In 1236 the Sword Brothers were defeated at Saule and in 1237 they were absorbed into the Teutonic Order.

In 1242 the Livonian knights were defeated at Lake Peipus. In 1249 the Treaty of Christburg was concluded. In 1260 the Great Prussian Uprising began after the battle of Durbe, and it was suppressed by 1274. In 1283 the conquest of Prussia was completed. In 1309 the grand master moved to Marienburg. In 1326 Peter of Dusburg completed his chronicle. In 1387 Lithuania was baptised. In 1410 the order was defeated at Grunwald. Between 1414 and 1418 the Council of Constance debated the order's wars. In 1525 the Prussian lands of the order became a secular Lutheran duchy, and in 1561 the Livonian order was dissolved.

XVII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.