In Our Time - Baltic Crusades

Episode Date: November 24, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Baltic Crusades, the name given to a series of overlapping attempts to convert the pagans of North East Europe to Christianity at the point of the sword. From the 12th Century, Papal Bulls endorsed those who fought on the side of the Church, the best known now being the Teutonic Order which, thwarted in Jerusalem, founded a state on the edge of the Baltic, in Prussia. Some of the peoples in the region disappeared, either killed or assimilated, and the consequences for European history were profound. With Aleks Pluskowski Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of ReadingNora Berend Fellow of St Catharine's College and Reader in European History at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridgeand Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and CultureProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, from the 12th century, the popes approved a series of crusades on the Baltic lands, principally Prussia and regions now covered by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia. The Teutonic Order, later the Teutonic Order led the fight to convert, so-called pagans to Christianity, and if they refused, it was no sin.

to kill them. Over the next hundred years, the Teutonic Knights run their own state based in Prussia. Many German speakers settled the lands, claimed for Christendom. They built ports on the newly secured Baltic Sea, which through the Hanseatic League transformed trade in northern Europe. There was rarely peace after the Crusades, and the changes in who lived in the region and how they lived have had great significance for the history of Europe. With me to discuss the Baltic Crusades are Alex Blukovsky, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, Nora Berrin, reader in European history at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, and Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture.

Martin Palmer, what were the priorities of the Christian Church in Rome at the start of this period? Let's say the first half of the 12th century. Well, it was to embody Christendom and to, in a sense, say, this is that Europe is now the land of Christ, it is his domain, and the Pope is his appointed representative, and that therefore both secular and religious authority should reside within the papacy. And this was coming out of a period where it was quite dubious whether Christianity would actually make it to the 12th century.

You had the Vikings and the northern invasions of pagan communities that devastated Christianity in England, Scotland, Ireland, across the northern parts of France and Spain. And you also had the Muslim rise coming up from North Africa the conquest of Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and also the fact that piracy and slave trading meant that the Mediterranean, for the northern part of it,

was extremely dangerous. In fact, many cities ceased to function on the coastline. So you had a sense that Christianity had come through a period of immense trial for about 300 years had now established itself. The papacy had also brought in the peace of God, which was, in a sense, an attempt to control the feudal feuding that was going on by saying, come on, you know, as the church, we are going to determine what is a just war.

But then you also had, at the same time, a sense of a real threat that was coming into this Christendom. Because having established this notion that Christ had given this land, as it were, to the Pope to control, you then had the heresies, you had the bogamills coming in from Eastern Europe, spreading their notion of a sort of manichaean dualistic religion, that this world was essentially evil, that only the spiritual world. was true and was godly, which led to the Albigensians, a most famous heretical sect in the 12th century down in south of France. But you also had a sense that suddenly paganism was dangerous,

that there was actual evil forces in the world. And then you also had the fear of the Orthodox Church, because there had been the schism between the Western and Eastern churches in 1054, and the sense that if we didn't get to the Baltic first, those heretical orthodox would. So the crusade was called in 1147. Was there a particular circumstances that led to that, the calling of that crusoe?

It springs out of the call for the second crusade to go to the Holy Land, and it comes also with the extraordinary preaching of Bernard of Claervaux, who was probably the most astonishing preacher of the entire Middle Ages, who in a sense embodies this sense of a triumphalist Christianity, particularly within the monastic traditions, the Cistercians, but also this sense that that Christianity was under threat. Internally, he's the great beginner of the hunt for heresies, but also, of course, in Palestine itself and the lands there,

but also this sense that somehow there was this external force that was dangerous. How did he persuade the Pope, if he did, to call the Crusade the Port-Aid? Money. Well, tell us what it means. Money. That's the question. Money, essentially, he argued that here was lands that could be taxed, and where the money could go towards the papacy, he argued that therefore this was a land that was ripe for exploitation and development,

and he breaks the cardinal rule of the Catholic Church at that time, which was to say, pagans cannot be left to live in peace, which have been the attitude of the church up until that point. He was also convinced that if you killed them, that was okay. Yes, and he, of course, is the origin of pretty much all the military orders like the Templars and the Knights of St. Jerusalem, of the Knights Hospital as, as well as, eventually, the Teutonic Knights. So the Crusade was called by the Pope in 1147.

Alex Pukovsky, who was living in the Baltic? Who were these pagans? He was called against the pagans, partly because there'd been Christians there beforehand. There were Christians there, and the pagans, it was said were harassing the Christians, therefore they're going there. The crusades to protect the Christians. That's one of the reasons, apart from Martin went to the sort of core of the matter apart from money, land grabs and so on.

Who is living there? Can you give us some description of what's going on there? So you have a whole series of tribal societies dominating the Eastern Baltic, subdivided broadly into two linguistic groups, Balt and Finnaugreek, so Estonians and Lives. They are relatively small scale in terms of their territories, except for Lithuania that has formed the Grand Duchy by this point. So you have state formation in Lithuania. But the others are small scale.

extended kinship groups based on an aristocratic hierarchy that is male dominated and militarized and focused on powerful families based in strongholds that litter the landscapes of Eastern Baltic. Had they been warring against each other? They had, yes. So you have lots of examples of intertribal feuding. And this is one of the things that the Crusaders take advantage of, of course, especially in Livonia when they arrived at the end of the 12th century. Did they fight among themselves, or had they turned south and tried to go into further to Europe? Yes, that's right. So in Prussia, you have Prussian tribal expansion to the south and also to the west, the borders of Pomerania and the Kingdom of Poland. So there you have raids across the border, raids of monasteries, of towns like Dynsk, and this causes a lot of tension on the Polish frontier.

Now, the word that was used, and Martin's brought it into play already, was that there were pagans there. And this was either the reason or the excuse, whichever way you put in it, we might explore that later, for going there in the first place. what were these, how are these pagans expressing themselves, if we can say it in religious terms? Yes, because most of what we know is initially from the commentator's perspective, a Christian commentator's perspective, which paints the region as a very homogeneous religious system based on animism and investing spirituality in the natural environment, in trees, rocks, prominent boulders, lakes, rivers, so on and so forth. a classic sort of North European pre-Christian belief system. Can you just kind of stop there for? What does that mean? Do you worship there?

Do you ask for favours from a lake or a waterfall? Right. So it's problematic and obscure. But as far as we know, these places are associated with particular deities. And so they are the focus of cult activity. You can leave offerings. Cemetery are important sites of cult activity because we have a sense that there is ancestral worship happening. And these are the most prominent features of religious activity in the pre-Christian period. That's a long track back, isn't it, through almost a prehistory of the cemetery? That is. We're effectively dealing with the continuation of a culture over the last

thousand or so years. Obviously not timeless. There have been lots of changes. But for example, the ritual killing and deposition of horses is something that marks out the bolts in particular from the first century AD all the way through into the 13th century. In your notes, you emphasise that. What's going on there? That's a good question. The horse seems to be the most important ritual animal in the Baltic, or for the bolts, rather. And here we have a ritual that developed in the first century in northeastern Poland in the region of Missouri, associated with the Prussian Gillandian group later on as we know it. And here we have the living burial of horses developing as a specific ritual within a funery context. It is most likely associated with a cult of a sun or some solar symbolism, particularly in terms of how the horses are aligned, across the entire region. By the Viking age, we are seeing huge numbers of horses being deposited or rather being sacrificed and buried. Hundreds and hundreds in some cases we have. What do they hope to achieve by this? That's a good question. The horse is a vehicle to the other world,

as far as we can tell. We have some later written sources that associate the horse with traveling of passage to the other world. Is this area, I rattled off a lot of countries which now occupy this area at the beginning of the program, is this area heavily populated? thinly populated? Can you give us an idea? No, it's thinly populated. We're dealing with a dispersed rural, small-scale population, extended family units. Nora Barron, can we

go into, again, which Martin alluded to in his opening remarks, what justification were given to the Crusades? Can we dig into that a bit? It didn't come out of the blue. Martin went to the core of it, but let's dig around it first. I think it's important to emphasize

that even before the Crusades were called S-Crucades. There was warfare going on, and already in 1108, for example, a Flemish cleric wrote a letter asking Germans to come to the aid of this land and very specifically said, follow the example of your brothers from Gaul, there's the French, who went to Jerusalem to liberate Jerusalem and come here to liberate this land. So already pre-crucissade, there is justification that is very, very similar that the pagans are killing Christians in particularly cruel ways. They talk about disemboweling Christians and sort of, you know, very gruesome images in this letter. You can be gruesome, it's all right.

As long as we are rude. And so there's this sense of the pagans attacking Christians and needing to help Christian brothers. Another threat... Can I just say something? Excuse me. This is the same date as the second crusade goes to Jerusalem. No, this is before.

This is 11.08. So this is, I mean, crusading to Jerusalem already existed. Yes. But officially, the Baltic Wars were not crusades yet. wasn't that the same edge as the second crusade? That is, yes. So that's what I wanted to get in number. Why did they go in 1147?

Well, I just wanted to show the continuity a little bit. But then in the second crusade, this trend continues of helping Christians who are there. Also, there is this idea of conversion, which is fairly novel in the sense of actually tying the cause of the crusade very specifically to converting the local populations. This is where this convert or exterminate comes in

that Marty mentioned from Bernard of Clairvaux. But then there's another kind of borrowing, if you like, from the Holy Land Crusades in that by the very early 13th century, Livonia is seen as the land of the Virgin Mary. And Bishop Albert of Riga writes to Pope Innocent III, asking him not to abandon the land of the mother when he cares for the land of the son.

So what we have here is saying that Jerusalem, Holy Land is the patrimony of Christ, and Livonia is the patrimony of the Virgin Mary, his mother. So there is a kind of complete invention, if you like. There's absolutely, of course, no historical background to placing the Virgin Mary in Livonia. And, of course, initially, there were no holy sites. There were no places of pilgrimage in the Baltic, unlike in the Holy Land. So they're trying to make up in a sense for their deficit. We have this Bernard of Claibot who keeps coming up. He was a fearsome figure,

persecutor of heretics in Paris and all over France as well. But how did he, sorry to use a demotic term, but how did he get away with convincing people that killing pagans didn't matter? Well, he was not the first one. So the change... Yes, but in order to explain him, I think one really must put him in context.

The Catholic Church, by the time of Bernard of Claverro in the 12th century, was very much espousing violence in certain cases. So the right kind of violence was actually meritorious. And we have many sources from all over Europe, even extolling, taking booty as a sign of divine favor, killing people and taking their possessions as a sign that God was on your side. So Bernard of Claverro did not come out of the blue. he very much was building on this existing tradition.

Also, I think what is important is the interaction between local players and central players like Bernard and the Pope. In other words, people on the ground, people who were actually waging war for quite a while already in the Baltic, various Germans. There were also German merchants who had interest, long-standing interests, were the intermediaries who were basically appealing to. to Bernard and the Pope to espouse their cause. So it wasn't Bernard trying to convince people. There were people already on the ground who were very happy to do this, so to speak, and they just received the justification in this way.

Yeah, thank you very. Sorry, Roshu. You're quite right to go back. I was quite wrong to Rosh you. Right, Martin, the Teutonic Knights were established in Jerusalem, like a lot of the great, because of their work in Jerusalem, and they went out to help the German-speaking pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. That's how they began. How did they become part of the Baltic Crusades?

And can we revert, having heard what you said, can we revert to the idea of what is really going on there? How did they get part of it? In the beginning of the 13, 12 or something, they became part of the Baltic Crusades. They do. They emerge out of the hospital for Germans in Jerusalem. Jerusalem has lost at 1187 to Saladin. They moved to Acker, and there they say. set up another hospital, and in 1199, they are given permission to become an order.

And almost immediately, they are being recruited as essentially a religiously motivated mercenary group to go and fight, for example, for King Andrew in Hungary. And they help defend his kingdom. And then they're drawn up into the north. And they're given the Pope issues a bull in 1321 that says, go north, I think it's about 1326, he says, actually take Prussia, I give you Prussia. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, issues his own bull, which is completely unconventional in 1325,

and says, go north, go north. And the main reason, frankly, was that it was now extremely difficult to go crusading in the Holy Land. You'd taken your vow, you'd got all the tax relief that you got if you went on pilgrimage. And if you were a German or a Dane or indeed English, it was a jolly side easier to go to the Baltic on crusade

than it was to go all the way to the Holy Land, and you were far more likely to get land and a fiefdom. Though for the Teutonic Knights, of course, they were monastic, and therefore there was no claiming land for your family. You took it for the order. And initially they were offered all the land that they conquered. Later, as bishops begin to move in and parishes are established, the bishops actually say, you know, we need a bit of funding too,

and they get one third of the land taken. But also they're not the first. There were already, Norah's already referred to Albert and Riga and the bishoprics there appealing for help. There were a horrendous crowd called the Sword Brothers, who were founded around about 1,300. And they just were thugs of the most appalling kind. And they were German-speaking groups as well. They were brought in to defend the Bishop Rick that had been established. There was another group that was down in.

what's called Old Prussia, which were even worse. And they were so bad that eventually the Pope said, we're going to dissolve this order. It was like a Wild West frontier, in a sense, and give responsibility for a military, monastic, religious crusade to the Teutonic Knights. And they move eventually in 1309. They moved their headquarters from Venice,

which they've gone to after the fall of Akka in 1291, to Marienburg, picking up exactly as Nora said on this notion, this was the Virgin Mary's land. Alex, before we go any further with the Teutonic Knights, is it for many people

who are strange, seems to be a strange, not contradiction, but conflation of, they follow the strict life of monks. They're told, they're chased, they pray,

and at the same time they're fearsome warriors. And they come from mainly or centrally an aristocratic background. Can you give us some idea Well, I sketch it a little, but you tell us more about that. About the Teutonic Waters' composition?

Yeah. Well, yes, they're recruited from aristocratic families, mostly in the eastern parts of the Holy Roman Empire, German-speaking regions. And you join a military order as a crusader. So they are institutions dedicated to the promotion of Christian Holy War at the time, very much based on the model of the Templars and something that the hospital has also followed

and various other smaller military orders. they are directly obedient to the papacy. So if anything, they are the fighting arm of the papacy and the lands that were conquered in the Eastern Baltic were held as papal fiefs. It just seems an odd yoking, doesn't it? You're praying massively, you're following the rules of the monastic order

in which you fight yourself, and then you go out, put on full arm, jump on a horse and charge into battle for a few months. But as we've heard, the violence has a role within Christian ideology at this time, and especially within crusading ideology, and the fighting is something that is built into the lifestyle of the military orders. So you pray, you fast, but you fight as well, and you practice fighting. And the idea behind these institutions was to create a permanent

garrison in areas where Christendom had expanded, because most crusaders will go home after completing their period of penitential warfare. And this leaves a security issue for territories that had been conquered or recovered from the Christian point of view. So you have military orders providing permanent garrisons, which is why they became so popularly used around the frontiers of Europe, including, for example, Liberia, Transylvania, as we've heard. So they operated across all these regions. They seem to have been very effective. Effective, yeah. Yes, incredibly. They ever had amazing reputations as fighters. They were probably the most impressive, professional mercenaries at the time that's been used. Yeah.

Yes. Nora, should we, when does the crusade idea, as it would degenerate or transform itself into a feeling of total war? Whereas, and at the same time, normal life seems not only going on, but getting better in some ways with the handsientically being formed. Can you sort of unpick that? First of all, I would not talk about the degeneration of the crusade. The crusade from the very beginning had this idea of warfare and killing. and so I wouldn't call that degeneration of the ideal. And it wasn't total war in the sense that on the ground you had all sorts of interaction. Certainly you find a lot of chronicle accounts saying things like the snow turned red with the blood in a battle.

You know, so many people were killed. You have accounts of people being massacred. So you could get this sense of a total war. But then at the same time, there was trade going on, for example. The Teutonic Order, we have just heard about. was partly financing its own wars in the Baltic region through trade with Lithuania. And they had trade treaties where Lithuanian merchants and merchants from the Teutonic Order of State could cross, even though these two states were in war.

There were also cross-cutting alliances. So it was not necessarily Christians fighting against pagans. Alex already mentioned that there were internal wars between these tribes there. So they very much, the Letts, for example, then try to side with the Teutonic Order against the Estonians. Also, the town of Riga at one point was in alliance with the pagan Lithuanians against the Teutonic Order. So when you start looking at all this complexity, there is a kind of level of ideology declaring Christian war, which may even sound like total war. On the ground, you have the complexity of interaction, of trade and alliances which do not. really necessarily follow Christian versus pagan.

Is there any sense out of this complexity that you can get an idea that steadily or on steadily, but that more and more people are being, in heavy inverted, commas, converted or forced to be Christians? Yes, and certainly if you look at the very long-term outcome, you can say that... What's very long-term? Several centuries that the outcome is conversion and Christianization. At the time, there were various accounts. we have complaints against the Teutonic Order saying that they're not doing their job well enough in terms of converting people. There are other accounts which actually claim kind of forced conversion.

There are accounts from missionaries thinking that they managed to convert, but the minute they turn their back, the population just kind of shrugs off Christianity. We have accounts in the early period of people washing themselves in the river, in their local river, to wash away baptism. so they do a kind of un-baptism to return to their previous customs. So, yes, there is Christianization and conversion to Christianity, but it's kind of it stops and starts again, and it's only successful in the very long term.

Martin Palmer, what written records do we have with Baltic people? It may be part of it, slightly before it. You said very emphatically at the beginning, when I said what was really going on, you said money, and what happened with the... The trade began with stuff the Baltic had which they wanted in Europe. Timber, fur, grain, salted cord, herring, bulk stuff they came over and built up the hands adequately to that area to begin to rival the Mediterranean in a way. So, let's go back to money.

Was there a feeling we've talked about crusades, we've talked about ideology, we know that Christianity is in a tight spot, as you said from the beginning. But is there a sense that we're talking about land grabs? Can you just go in that rather coarse secular? capitalist direction and see how far it takes us. Happily. One of the earliest accounts we have is from the 11th century by Adam of Bremen. And I think he sums up in one sentence,

both the plurality, the complexity of the situation. He says, men cared as much for fur as they did for the salvation of their souls. And I think that dialectic, as it were, between the material and the spiritual world, which he's writing about towards the end of the 11th century, just flows right the way through. And as Nora said and as Alex has indicated,

there was this extraordinary amount of trade going on. There were compromises. There was also a great deal of confusion because, I mean, you've referenced the first crusade in 1147. The first city they go to, Stettin, was already a Christian city. And in fact, the bishop kind of got up on the walls with lots of crosses and said,

sorry, chaps, wrong place, wrong time, go away. So it was, there was this sort of sense. Those are very well, it's in the written record. It is in the written record. We have two really fundamental records. courts. One written around about 1230 by Henry the priest in Livonia, who was very much, as Nora Seine, was saying, look, we've got to preach to these people. We've got to be pastors to them, not slaughter them. If they rise up, fair enough, kill them, but if they don't, you know, be kind to

them. Then we have this extraordinary book called the Livonian Rhyming Chronicle, written almost certainly by a Teutonic Knight, we don't know who. And in this rather nice rhyming way, he talks about how wonderful it is to slaughter pagans. He also praises them for being noble warriors, but he has no qualms about wiping them out. He basically portrays the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, as a war goddess. And these are almost sacrifices to her.

But then at the same time, you've got the trade opening up. And one of the wonderful little bits is that the island of Gotland, of Sweden, it begins to develop around about 1220, a major trade in carved fonts, which they export to the new Christian communities on the south coast of the Baltic, because it's a good trade. But they're also trading with Novrogod, with the Russians,

and there is this very interesting difference, too. The Russians missionised their area, not with crusades. They have a completely different theology about war, but they have sort of eccentric mystics who go off into the forest and have mystical experiences and form a little hut

and people gather around them. So you've got these two very different spiritual traditions, but actually in terms of trade, Novragod and Gotland and Lubbac are these enormous trading emporiums. Of course, London joins in with the Hanseatic League, where Cannon Street Station is now, that was their fortified area. So you've got this, it really is both. It is a love for fur and a love for the salvation of their souls.

Alex. Can I just jump in and reinforce what's been said that I think in the 13th century we can characterize the Baltic region as having a war economy where crusading and commerce are entangled completely and you have merchants accompanying crusaders, participating in crusade, funding crusade, while opening up new markets and taking advantage of the new commerce. What we're interested in is, I mean, what you're saying is fascinating,

but can you unpick, are the merchants driving the crusaders, are the crusaders driving the merchants? No, it's difficult to unpick, no, no, no, no, no. Because in some cases we're talking about the same. same kinship groups. You know, your brother may be in the military order and you may be a merchant. And you're both following the same path, but in different, you know, in different trajectories. Can we bring in one moment, can we bring in Poland and then Russia? I said, where did that, what part did they play? We've had an intricate, intricate,

um, um, um, contribution from, from Nora. What are Poland and Russia doing there? Well, the kingdom of Poland is, uh, really where everything. starts with a Prussian crusade because Duke Conrad of Mazzovia invites the Teutonic order in the first place to secure his frontier and then following a short internal civil war within Poland, the Poles actually join the crusade and participate in taking Prussian territory. Of course the Teutonic Order ends up actually laying claim to all of his territory. And all of Prussia. And all of Prussia subsequently in the conquest. So they frustrate the territorial ambitions of the Mazzovian Dukes, of what emerges is the Kingdom of Poland,

and this creates a level of antagonism that persists into the later medieval period. In the case of Russia, we are dealing with a frontier between what becomes Western Catholic states that are created as a result of the Crusades and Eastern Orthodox states based on the principalities of Novgorod and Pskov at this time. And this becomes more or less a fixed frontier because the Teutonic order tried to launch crusades in the 1240s into this region and are defeated by Alexander Nevsky at Novgorod. And then subsequently, we don't have any efforts to really attack Russian territories until the end of the 15th, early 16th century, when crusading bulls assault again by the Livonian master to do so.

The defeat in Nefsky, that's a great charge across the ice. That's right, yes. A Teutonic match. Could I come in on this? I mean, just to add to that a little bit, there were also commercial rivalries between Novgorod and these Western merchants. So they were interested in partly the same territories. And that's why also why potentially this crusade was launched against the Rus. But I think in terms of whether Alexander Nyevsky really had this big victory,

scholarship is a bit more divided, because Alexander rose to power and stayed in power with Mongol backing. He was an ally of the Mongols. And after his death, the life that was written about him, which is our source, try to turn him into this hero. And it seems that this text really presented this Western danger as much more serious than it, in fact, was. So it kind of attributes to Alexander this fantastic victory on the ice. The same Livonian Rhymed Chronicle that was already mentioned suggests that there were only about 20 nights.

So it may not have been a huge battle. On the other hand, the Chronicle might be wrong. Now, maybe only one of the chronicles. I come marching just one second. It's intriguing to me that when you have that degree of warfare and the night's sailing in and people sailing, there's a feeling that there should be blight on the land and things should be expunged.

Instead of which, there's growth going on, heavy growth at the same time. Is there a key reason for that? It's the mercantile... I mean, commercial growth. Yes, I mean, it's a mercantile interest. And the merchants were already there before the Crusades. they, as Alex said, sort of participated in the crusade.

The town of Riga is very interesting in this respect. So Riga, there is already some kind of trading port there before the Crusades. Then Albert turns this into the seat of the bishopric. So this new bishopric that is possible because of the conquest, the Christian conquest of this land. And the same town, 80 years later in the 13th century, becomes part of the Hanseatic League. So you can really see how this movement settlement conquest, and trading interest is very much intertwined. I think what's also important is the Teutonic element is also in the merchants.

So what we're dealing with is not just German aristocracy in terms of the military, but then you have the merchant classes coming in from the German-speaking areas, and they predominate, which is why Prussia becomes a German-speaking zone right up until the present day. So you have a kind of kinship, exactly as Alex said, you have this kinship. between the aristocrats and the merchants, then you have this movement of really the workers coming out of the lowlands, the Netherlands, Belgium, North France, due to the huge population explosion that takes place in the 12, 1340s.

Artisans, mainly, right? Artisans. And so the ethnic mix of those areas is radically transformed. It's not just an occupying force, as it were, but you've actually shifted the balance of populations in favour of those. who come from Christian lands and come with German, particularly as an immigration has transformed the economy. Very much so. Hmm, contemporary, isn't it? No. We're not allowed to be contemplative.

Alex, which cultures, were the cultures that were more resistant to the Crusaders than others of these so-called pagan cultures? Well, generally speaking, we have sort of widespread resistance across the whole region, but it's relatively small scale and it fails. the ones who seem to be the most effective unite on a broad regional basis of the Estonians, who rise up again in the mid-14th century in the famous St. George's Night Uprising, and is defeated by the Lvon Rouge. It's famous because it is after almost a century of the conquest being completed, and the province of Estonia is part of Denmark, the Danish Crown, and you think that everything would have been settled at this point

in terms of political unrest and religious unrest, but then you have the... this massive, organized Estonian uprising that attacks Christianity specifically, but also, of course, the Danish and German colonists, or rather by this point we're talking about later generations. And it's unprecedented in terms of its scale, but it is suppressed, and at that point the Teutonic order by Estonia from the Danish crown. But in terms of resilience, cultural resilience, we see it mostly among rural communities, indigenous rural communities. They're at the edges of control in terms of a new Christian regime. So that is where we see pre-Christian practices

surviving old habits, old customs, clothing. We can talk about the 16th century, 17th century. In Estonia, we can talk about the 18th, even early 19th centuries, certain practices such as funerary rights continuing into that time. So a really long duree of pre-Christian practices. Nora, was there any prospect of the crusade is moving into Russia? to Rousse? Well, we already talked about this a little bit. There was in the 1230s, 1237, there was a call for a crusade. But whether we see the two victories against the Swedes and against the Teutonic Order of Alexandrnevsky as great victories or not, certainly there was no real attempt then for centuries to really go there crusading. And because Rousse was then under Mongol vassalage, there was. was a strong military power there.

This kind of society was very different from the tribal Baltic peoples where internal fights and so on could be exploited by the crusaders. So after this very short brief period for centuries, no, there was no real crusading. Because they were too strong to take on? Well, there was also kind of quite a lot to do in the conquered lands already. I don't think we mentioned it, that the Teutonic Order actually built a state, created a state in Prussia,

which was one of the most efficient in modern states at the time. The Hunseatic League that you mentioned started exploiting the local economy, taking grain from Mecklenburg, Pomerania, to Western Europe. So it became one of the kind of main grain-producing areas.

So this, in a sense, was a fairly, successful venture as it was. There was no real point. It's just worth mentioning that the Teutonic Order's own propagandists pitch the Teutonic Order's presence there during this time as providing security for Christendom against Russian territories, against Eastern Orthodoxy and against pagan Lithuania. So this is a justification for having these territories. In the same way that the hospitalers

are providing that defense in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 13th century. So you have these two frontiers of Christiastrian. And this is how the Teutonic Order basically justify the exploitation of the conquered territories as providing security against these neighboring hostile powers. From what I've read is that battle across the ice, when the Teutonic Order began to lose their power. They began to lose their power. Was it because of that, or was it around that time?

No, it was much later. I mean, they started really losing their power because they confronted Poland, Lithuania. As you said, they kept using this justification of fighting against the pagan Lithuanians, but in the meantime, the Lithuanians converted to Christianity in 1386 and had a dynastic union with Poland. And there was even a court battle at the Papal Court between Poland and the Teutonic Order over whether or not the Teutonic Order still kind of had a right to be fighting. But more importantly, they were defeated in 1410 at the Battle of Tannenberg or Greenwald,

and after that, I mean, it still took about a century and a half, two centuries for the Prussian Teutonic State to disintegrate, but that was the major turning point, and it was the military might of Poland, Lithuania, that led to that. And so did we see a steep decline in the power of the Teutonic Knights? Yes, I mean, they lost territories, they even had to move their headquarters, and then basically in the early 16th century,

the rest of it secularized, and then eventually became part of German. Martin, did the church have second thoughts about what its crusade was bringing about in these Baltic lands? Well, it had second thoughts, particularly as Nora said, because the major enemy, Lithuania, converted, notionally, and joined Poland and created this Commonwealth or joint kingdom of Lithuania and Poland in 1387. And that took away a lot of the justification. But then you have the Council of Constance,

which takes place between 1414 and 1418, which was an attempt to deal with a schism within the papacy to start with. You had two popes and so forth. It was also an attempt to do a reformation, kind of a hundred years before the reformation takes off itself. And issues that have been long simmering were brought to the forum. One of these was that Poland came to the Council in 1415, denounce the Teutonic Knights,

as attacking Christians, as having failed to actually preach or to convert properly, and having seized lands illegally, at having basically become only interested in gain. And they put up a spirited defense based on the theology that had been espoused in the papal bulls and then the bull of Frederick II, which was these pagans have to be defeated, they're a threat to us.

But from that date on, in a sense, the theological ground for their position has been undermined. And it's only four to five years after the Battle of Tannenberg where their military might has been undermined. And in a sense they kind of go into a sort of, okay, let's hold on to what we've got and kind of go a little bit more quiescent. They join in various walls. But they are at that point, theologically, they just squeak through, but they know they're under threat.

Alex, how did the Crusades affect the map of Europe? Can you tell our listeners, after a couple hundred years or so, is the map of you radically different? They created basically the modern border or roughly modern border area. between Estonia, Latvia and Russia, and also northern Lithuania and southern Latvia. In Prussia, it was a little different because you have major political shifts in the post-medieval period with the expansion of the Kingdom of Prussia. And then, of course, what happens afterwards with the Ulter Agreement in 1945, where you have Prussia being dissolved and separated between Lithuania, Russia and Poland. So there the geographical boundaries have shifted dramatically.

Having said that, you have a German heritage, a legacy that lasted for almost 800 years in that region. And as we've already heard, a German-speaking culture dominated from the 13th century. Would you like to add to the consequences, Mara? I think the shorter term consequences actually led to the development of a pagan state in Europe, which is quite interesting. That is Lithuania, which became a united round. and created probably on the model of Christianity, a kind of pagan religion that was much more centralized. Although that was short-lived, I think that's still an interesting consequence.

Longer term, I agree. It's basically Germanization, new political structures, Christianization, and sort of becoming part of Europe that was the most important. Martin, you started with very graphic and convincing a statement that Christianity was under threat from the Vikings, from the Muslim threat in the south, and so on and so. After this, has it survived the threat? Is it stronger because of this? Much stronger. It's also, exactly as Alex said, it's kind of set the boundaries of how far Christendom can go when it butts up against Russian orthodoxy.

But it's also given Christendom a sense of its own integrity. And it has also confronted head on this idea that you can use military force for religious purposes, including the execution of kings who were captured and so forth. And that really sows the seeds for a radical reassessment of Christianity that comes up in the Reformation. It's fascinating. The Teutonic Knights end effectively as a force, as a governing force, because the grand master of the Teutonic Knights converts to Lutherism in 1525. And so you can't have monks in Lutheranism.

So you have a huge shift away from the medieval Catholic model because frankly, it's beginning to creak. Well, thank you all very much, Nora Berrin, Martin Palmer and Alex Polkowski. Next week, it's our listener week. We'll be discussing one of the many ideas you suggested for that listener week, but it's going to be revealed nearer the time. I'm told by the producers, so thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out? I think the English dimension. We didn't touch on the English as major missionaries into that area from the 8th, 9th, 10th century, so the patron saint of Finland. From the northeast? Yes, from the, well, not just from the northeast.

I know you have a particular bent towards that, Melvin, but we'll be... Or the northwest is even more of a bent. Exactly. But Henry, the Englishman, is martyred in about 1147 in Finland, and is the patron saint of Finland to this day. You also have still a very close link between Canterbury and the churches in Norway and Sweden, Denmark, not so much Finland. And then, of course, you have Henry Bollingbrook in 1399, who later goes on to become, of course, Henry IV, as actually goes crusading.

But, Alex, you know far more about that than I do. Well, you have lots of participation from English knights in the Baltic Crusades. One thing we didn't talk about was that after Prussia and the region known as Livonia become the... fixed Christian polities under the control of the Teutonic Order and bishops. We then have a century of warfare, of ongoing crusading against Lithuania, which includes knights from all over Europe who participate, who go there to fight alongside the Teutonic Order, and there are many English knights who participate, and many of them die out there, many of them are financially ruined, but Henry IV, before he is, Henry IV, is probably the most famous, and reaches Vilnius

with a huge contingent of English archers before attempting to go down to Jerusalem. So it's this crusading ideal that lives on. But yeah, the English component is very interesting. And we have lots of English merchants present as well. In fact, in Gdynzsk, German Danzig, we have a whole English merchant quarter that's established because of the trading connections.

I think the multiplicity of the people who participated, not just the English, but we didn't really talk about the Scandinavians the Danes, Waldemar, the Danish king was quite an important crusader, the Swedes, and also the rivalries between these different groups. That's kind of one thing. And the other one, I think, is this Lithuanian aspect, which I find very interesting. The Lithuanians developed a fantastic diplomatic procedure to deal with the Christians, so they kept promising baptism at crucial moments when it seemed that they were going to be defeated in war. And one of these, in the early 14th,

century, Castoutis, who was then the Duke of Lithuania, took this oath, which is probably kind of a traditional Lithuanian oath, cutting a dog to pieces and smearing the blood on oneself, saying that if one does not actually fulfill the oath, this should be the fate of the oath breaker. And this made such an impression on the Europeans that even Petrar heard about this and wrote about it eventually. You mentioned going and washing off. That There is a very famous story of a German bishop who converts a tribe somewhere up in Old Prussia. And as was the tradition, blesses an entire river, and the chieftain leads the tribe through, and they come out Christians the other side.

They're having a grand banquet in the evening, and they're into their cups, and the chieftain leans towards the bishop and says it's fantastic this. You know, where Christians are going to go to heaven, I shall see all my old friends, my battle warrior friends, and the bishop. Huge diplomatic mess goes, no, no, no, no, no, they're not Christians. in hell. So the chiefman goes, Winnamit, you mean, you mean they're there and I would be up there? Okay, he gets up and he drives the entire tribe

back through the river and out the other side as pagans, because he's rather be with his ancestors than he would be with the bishop. Is that true? Well, it's a good story. I think it has elements of truth in it. Let's put it that way. If it's true, it's terrific. If it isn't, it's still a good story. I think it's also worth talking about the pragmatism

of Teutonic Order. We've heard a lot about the sort of ideological confrontation between paganism and Christianity, but just to give you one example, in southern, what is today's southern Latvia, in the region of Kouronia, we have commanders of the convent of Goldingen, which is Koldiga today, tolerating cremation practices among the local indigenous aristocracy, and hunting in sacred woods, which in a pre-Christian context is a continuation of local beliefs. And the commanders of the Teutonic order actively to tolerate this. You know, this is something that would be otherwise unheard of within a core orthodox part of Europe if we're talking about the Christian mainstream. So the Teutonic

order seemed to also be very pragmatic when dealing with local people. I think we're going to get an important announcement from our producer. There are many more history and discussion programs from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk.uk slash radio 4.