The fall of Seville in 1248 concluded the rapid Christian territorial advances of the previous quarter of a century. However, wars continued with Granada; fresh threats came from the new Marinid rulers of Morocco, who invaded Spain in 1275, 1276 and 1282–3; occasional military excursions continued to north Africa (for example, the Castilian attack on Salé in 1260); and a prolonged struggle was waged for control of the Straits of Gibraltar, accompanied by a scattering of crusade privileges. Alfonso XI of Castile (1312–50) pursued a concerted Reconquest policy, regularly backed by crusade bulls. He defeated a major Marinid invasion at the River Salado in 1340 and, with international aid, captured Algeciras in 1344 as well as unsuccessfully besieging Gibraltar (which had been in Castilian hands since 1309) in 1333 and 1349–50, the second attempt ending when the king and many of his troops succumbed to the Black Death. The subsequent half-century of armed co-existence was broken around 1400 by a revival of Christian aggression. In 1410 the Castilians annexed Antequera. In 1415 the Portuguese capture of Ceuta on the north African coast was supported by crusade indulgences despite the complications of rival papacies during the Great Schism (1378–1417).
From popular literature to frontier plundering, the culture of crusading continued to suffuse Spanish aristocratic society, especially in Castile which from the thirteenth century possessed the only land border with Granada. Materially, in the fifteenth century, as elsewhere in Christendom, crusade bulls, preaching and indulgences were primarily fiscal devices, aimed at raising money through the sale of the crusade indulgences. From the pontificates of Martin V (1417–31) and Eugenius IV (1431–47), the Spanish bula de crozada became standardised, offering increasingly lowered fixed flat rates of purchase to attract more customers. In 1456 the Spanish Borgia pope Calixtus III (1455–8) extended the indulgence to the dead in purgatory. These bulls provided Iberian rulers with status and cash; and popes with international prestige and diplomatic influence. They became entrenched in Spanish public life, surviving the reforms of the penitential indulgence system at the Council of Trent (1545–63) and persisting in attenuated form until finally abolished by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5).
The ideology of crusade and Reconquest, sustained by the continued power of the Military Orders under royal command, lent an indelible providential tinge to the presentation of national identity. By the end of the fifteenth century, Castile itself was being promoted as a Holy Land in its own right, its Christian inhabitants the new Israelites, in clear appropriation of earlier crusade rhetoric.23 Such claims suited royal domestic policy. Campaigning against Moors provided a convenient mechanism for controlling and directing energetic and restless nobles in an incontrovertibly respectable cause. An active crusading holy war tradition was revived in the mid-fifteenth century, with campaigns against Granada in the 1430s, a raft of papal bulls around 1450 and the capture of Gibraltar in 1462. The renewal of war against Granada by Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, 1482–92, leading to the final expulsion of Moorish political rule from the peninsula in January 1492, regularly attracted full papal privileges. In a bull of 1482, Sixtus IV drew explicit parallels with the Holy Land crusades.24 Crusade privileges were also extended to Portuguese campaigns in the Maghreb that had been a feature of their foreign policy since 1415. Indulgences were awarded for campaigns aimed at Tangiers, for example in 1471, and from 1486 these copied the full Castilian Granada grants, repeated in 1505, 1507 and 1515. Charles V’s seizure of Tunis in 1535 was presented in crusading terms. As late as 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal (1557–78), supported by indulgences and papal legates, died fighting Moors in Morocco at the battle of Alcazar.
97. The surrender of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs by Muhammed XII in 1492, wood relief, c. 1495.
Wars in Morocco and Tunisia, driven by pursuit of fame, political advantage and commercial hegemony, could be fitted into traditional Reconquest justification of defence or recovery of Christian territory. However, Sixtus IV’s 1482 Granada crusade bull also insisted on the crusade as a mechanism for spreading the Christian faith. This had become important as crusading formulae were applied to Spanish and Portuguese expeditions down the west African coast and to the islands of the eastern Atlantic from the reign of Eugenius IV (1431–47) onwards. Canon law going back to the thirteenth century allowed for the forcible subjugation of indigenous pagans if they resisted missionary work, hardly an objective or neutral test.25 However, while the rhetoric and emotions of crusading were freely applicable to the conquests of the Canaries (1402–96) and later the Americas, formal crusade apparatus was less easily translated. Only by analogy could the Atlantic conquests be viewed as Reconquest or by stretching the reach of global crusade strategy, as in Christopher Columbus’s insistence that his expeditions were conceived in the context of the recovery of Jerusalem.26 In 1455, Nicholas V had granted the Portuguese the right to conquer and enslave African unbelievers. However, in the bull Inter cetera (1493) regarding conquests in the newly discovered Americas, Alexander VI (1492–1503), another Spanish Borgia pope, insisted that conversion was the sole justification for political dominion over indigenous peoples. In the event, the Spanish-Portuguese treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which carved up future global conquests, ignored papal authority, implicitly severing the new conquests from crusading. After the establishment of New Spain, America’s formal connection with the crusade, as a province of the Spanish Empire, was confined to bula de crozada fund-raising. The conquistadors do not seem to have sought crusade privileges. Despite sharing a historical, religious, emotional and psychological culture with crucesignati, the conquerors of America did not take the cross.
The revival of the crusade during the Granada war of the 1480s depended as much on a recasting of Catholic Spain’s manifest destiny as it did on Aragonese and Castilian crusading traditions. Domestically, this conditioned the creation of an exclusive sectarian Christian society and, externally, informed the projection of Spanish imperialism. Images of past and future crusading combined to forge a dynamic sense of duty, supremacy and mission. Diplomatic rhetoric in early sixteenth-century Europe was larded with pious references to a new holy war against the Turks. In this, propagandists claimed a unique historic role for Spain, feeding a form of messianism that entered deep into national identity. The Spanish crusades played their part in the profound, occasionally dramatic, political, social and religious transformation of the Iberian Peninsula in the later Middle Ages. Their cultural legacy and tenacious myths coloured Spanish attitudes for centuries to come.
98. The Fascist crusader: General Franco.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BALTIC CRUSADES
The crusades in the Baltic were defined by materials: fish, fur, amber, timber, slaves; ships’ carpentry and rigging; stone and brick for forts, castles and cathedrals; metal for weaponry. As in Spain, the use of crusading formulae overlaid existing contest for land and wealth. Like Spain too, the long-term political outcome was a triumph for Latin Christendom. However, unlike Spain, in two of the three areas where crusades were instituted in the Baltic – in Prussia (chiefly modern Poland) and Livonia (modern Latvia and Estonia) but not the Wendish lands east of the Elbe – new forms of government were established by a crusading Military Order, the Teutonic Knights, not secular rulers. The Baltic ideology of conquest was borrowed from other theatres of crusading: defence of Christians; retribution for apostasy; revenge for past wrongs; recovery of lost Christian territory supported by due authority and righteous religious intent. However, justifications for the northern crusades also fed off older German traditions and more recent Scandinavian experience of warfare against neighbouring pagans, all the time displaying the unmistakable reality of tangible profit.
The Baltic crusades were fought for territory, trade and the pursuit of secular and ecclesiastical glory and imperialism. Until the thirteenth century, the region’s wars rarely attracted full Holy Land papal crusade grants of cross, preaching, remissions, privileges. The more frequent papal issues of lim
ited remissions, of varying generosity and without other features of full crusade grants, built on pre-crusading attitudes to meritorious war. Two further aspects added to Baltic distinctiveness. For a century from the 1140s, German crusaders competed vigorously and occasionally violently with Danish kings. Moreover, these crusade wars, unlike those in the Levant or Spain, were directly associated with forced conversion. Bernard of Clairvaux explained in 1147 when sanctioning the adoption of Holy Land crusading symbols and privileges by the Saxon summer campaign against the pagan Wends: ‘They shall either be converted or wiped out’. This was, as Innocent III in 1209 declared to Valdemar II of Denmark, ‘the war of the Lord . . . to drag the barbarians into the net of orthodoxy’, a suspect principle in canon law, although elsewhere justified by Christ’s parable in Luke 14:23: ‘compel them to come in’.1
Origins
The Baltic crusades helped transform northern Europe. From the lower Elbe to Livonia, Estonia, Finland and the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia, the subjugation, exploitation and ultimate Christianisation of its indigenous peoples imposed permanent political, cultural and environmental change. The campaigns revived German attacks on the western Slavs that had stalled after the tenth-century Ottonian kings of Germany had abandoned earlier advances following the great Slav rising of 983. The German tradition of sanctified wars against non-Christians in eastern and central Europe, stretching back through the tenth-century kings to Charlemagne in the eighth, provided precedents and an ideology of defending and expanding Christendom by force, an enterprise now joined by expansionist rulers of Denmark. The incentives for a new advance across the Elbe towards Pomerania were obvious, as a Flemish clerk put it in 1108: ‘These gentiles are most wicked, but their land is the best, rich in meat, honey, corn and birds; and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for the wealth of its produce.’2
The region’s politically fragmented lordships, tribes and extended families were divided by ethnic and linguistic differences. The Wends, western Slavs between the Elbe and the Vistula, were related to the Poles and Czechs. With territorial princes, market towns, ports and a polytheism ordered around a strong priesthood, well-stocked temples and numinous cultic sites, the structural similarities of Wendish society to its German and Danish neighbours eased frontier accommodation and post-conquest assimilation. The lands further east, from the Vistula to the Dvina and the Gulf of Riga, were inhabited by separate tribal groups of Balts: Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Curonians. Less centralised than the Wends, political power was exerted by local chieftans whose warrior aristocracies exploited the countryside from fortified earthworks, backed by control of fertility cults. North of the Balts, scattered Finno-Ugrian communities from the Gulf of Riga, Estonia and the Gulf of Finland comprised extended families, temporary local confederations and strong religious nature cults. Across the region, religious practices supplied social cohesion and political identity. Whereas the Wends, after previous generations of regular contact, proved susceptible to German assimilation once conquered, the Balts and others proved more robustly hostile.
99. Baltic paganism: tree idols in Livonia.
In Germany and Scandinavia, as elsewhere, the First Crusade left its mark on the rhetoric of war and the habits of the nobility. The emperor Henry IV appeared to contemplate a journey to Palestine in 1102; King Eric of Denmark (1102–3), King Sigurd of Norway (1107–10) and Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Conrad III (1124), all travelled there. In 1108 a scheme to attack the Wends explicitly drew a comparison with the defence of Jerusalem.3 German literature cast epic heroes such as Roland as milites Christi.4 This coincided with renewed German political and ecclesiastical expansion into pagan western Slavic lands such as Pomerania, with religion as the touchstone of political submission and allegiance on both sides. Obliterating pagan cultic centres symbolised the transfer of power, even if the new rulers were previously pagans who, like Henry of the Wendish Obotrites (d. 1127), had converted to retain their status in the new religious and political order. Resistance or conquest was expressed through religion. Wendish independence was reasserted following Henry’s death by the reversion to paganism of the Obotrite prince Niklot (c. 1130–60). The Rugians’ defeat by the Danes in 1134–6 was signalled by enforced baptisms, their subsequent resistance by apostasy, and their final subjugation in 1168 by Valdemar I of Denmark (1157–82) through the destruction of their pagan idols at Arkona. The religious complexion of political conflict was a Baltic commonplace long before Bernard of Clairvaux’s offer of conversion or extermination of pagan races in 1147. However, conflicts were never binary. While in retrospect the missionary priest Helmold of Bosau justified the German campaign in 1147 as revenge for Wendish appropriation of previously Christian land and assaults on Christians, he also described the alliance shortly before between Count Adolf of Holstein, one of the 1147 campaign’s leaders, and Niklot of the Obotrites, one of its targets.5
1147
The extension of Holy Land privileges to Saxon princes at the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147 during the Second Crusade was an opportunist attempt to engage the disaffected and potentially rebellious Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony (1142–80), in a general political reconciliation that King Conrad III hoped to achieve before leaving for Palestine. Reluctant to join the eastern crusade, Duke Henry posed a threat in the king’s absence. Having rejected his claim to the duchy of Bavaria, Conrad used giving the cross to Henry and his followers for their summer campaign against the Wends as a means of binding them into royal policy, the crusade acting as both surety and reward for good behaviour. At Frankfurt, Bernard of Clairvaux provided the necessary ecclesiastical blessing, subsequently securing a papal bull authorising the initiative. The essentially political context was reinforced by the involvement in the Wendish campaign of one of the king’s regents, Abbot Wibald of Stavelot; its peculiar character was acknowledged by one Holy Land crucesignatus who later wrote that the Saxon crusaders’ crosses ‘differed from ours in this respect, that they were not simply sewed to their clothing, but were brandished aloft, surmounting a wheel’.6 While the religious panoply of the campaign was supported by the presence of at least eight bishops, its priority remained secular. Church approval attracted international support, with the Saxons joined by Danes, including rival kings Canute V and Sweyn III, and Poles in a two-pronged pincer attack on Dobin, a small recently fortified Wendish outpost, and Demmin. The attack on Dobin under Duke Henry faltered, the Danes withdrawing before the fort surrendered. The Saxons followed soon after, throughout appearing anxious to protect the future value of their conquests.7 The raid on Demmin failed to reach its objective, diverting to besiege the richer prize of Stettin, a Christian city. Once the city’s religion was recognised, the Germans retreated. The 1147 campaigns, despite their crusade flag of convenience, proved entirely nugatory.
Conquest and Crusade
The official employment of precise crusade formulae did not recur in the Baltic with any regularity until the 1190s. A crusade bull of 1171 looked forward to an extension of holy war from Wendish Pomerania to distant Estonia.8 Otherwise the crusaders’ vow, cross and Jerusalem remission were absent. Depictions of the Danish and German conquest of Wendish Rugians and Obotrites, while including the language of religious war, acknowledged the motives of revenge, imperialism and greed. Of Henry the Lion’s Slavic wars, Helmold commented: ‘no mention has been made of Christianity, but only of money’.9 For pagans, too, material considerations balanced religious loyalty, one convert lord expressly demanding as a price of baptism the same rights of property and taxation as those enjoyed by Saxons.10 On both sides of a shifting frontier, priorities concerned political aggrandisement, German, Danish or Wendish; for the Danes and Germans, the creation of new trading posts and privileged immigrant settlements; for the Church, the endowment of new bishoprics and religious houses, in particular Cistercian monasteries. Despite occasional well-publicised brutality, conversion of the Wends consolidated conquest by offering integration: throu
gh baptism Slavs, Letts, Balts and Livs could become Germans. The convert son of the pagan Niklot ultimately inherited his father’s lands as the Christian lord of Mecklenberg. He assisted the destruction of the pagan temples on Rugen by Valdemar I of Denmark (1168); supported Christian missionary work and the Cistercians; and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem (1172). His descendants patronised the Hospitallers and joined crusades to Livonia.11 If sustained by material advantage, enforced conversion worked even in thirteenth-century Prussia and Livonia where resistance was stronger and integration harder.
100. Danish soldiers under Valdemar I.
101. Conversion: a Christian pendant in thirteenth-century Livonia.
By 1400, the Baltic was ostensibly a Latin Christian lake, even if older habits persisted below the surface. Through laws, language, bishoprics, taxes, immigrants and iron-fisted rule, Latin Christendom reshaped the physical, mental and human environment. Conversion operated as integral to the transformation of political control. Yet only with the thirteenth-century conquest of the heathen tribes of Livonia, Estonia, Prussia, and Finland did crusading specifically play a significant role, even if inconsistently as papal priorities and regional demands did not always coincide.12 Papal enthusiasm to prosecute the Lord’s War was exploited by ambitious commercial and ecclesiastical elites in cities trading with the eastern Baltic, such as Bremen and Lübeck, and sustained by a steady stream of available recruits: one contemporary account of the unfortunate Livonian crusade of 1198 mentioned bishops, clergy, knights, the rich, the poor and merchants (negotiatores).13 Kings of Denmark and Sweden welcomed formal ecclesiastical sanction for their conquests. Ambitious clerics sought new ecclesiastical and monastic empires. Motives for conquest were grounded in material gain. Although technological limitations and political fragmentation made pagan communities of the eastern Baltic appear weak, their economic and commercial attractions were considerable as producers and traders in fur, fish, amber, wax and slaves. Recent archaeological study has suggested a thriving and growing economy that encouraged the heavy German investment to appropriate it.14
The World of the Crusades Page 33
