In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  People on the ground had been waging war between themselves for quite a while in the Baltic, and there were German merchants there who had long-standing interests and who were appealing to Bernard and the pope to espouse their cause. There were already people on the ground who were very happy to attack and to receive justification for their attacks in the name of crusade. Besides, even before Bernard of Clairvaux, the Church was very much espousing violence in certain cases, and the right kind of violence was actually meritorious.

  NORA BEREND: We have many sources, from all over Europe, even extolling taking booty as a sign of divine favour, killing people and taking their possessions as a sign that God was on your side. Bernard of Clairvaux did not come out of the blue, he very much was building on this existing tradition.

  The Teutonic Knights were most closely associated with crusading in the Baltics. Martin Palmer told how they emerged from the hospital for Germans in Jerusalem and, after that city fell, they moved to Acre and became an order in 1189. They became a military force, supporting King Andrew in Hungary, later moving their headquarters to Venice in 1291 after the fall of Acre, and then on to Marienberg in 1309. The understanding initially was that they would keep what they conquered in the Baltics.

  MARTIN PALMER: 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 sight easier to go to the Baltic on crusade than it was to go all the way to the Holy Land. You were far more likely to get land and a fiefdom.

  The Teutonic Knights were monastic, so the land they won was claimed for the order, not divided up among families. Later, as bishops began to move in and parishes were established, the bishops called for funding and they were given a third of the seized land. There was also a different order in Riga, supporting the bishop, made up of people who were, Martin Palmer said, ‘a horrendous crowd called the Sword Brothers, who were founded around about 1300, and they just were thugs of the most appalling kind’. There was another group in Old Prussia that was reputedly worse. These orders were dissolved by the pope and responsibility for the military monastic crusade was passed to the Teutonic Knights.

  The Teutonic Order drew its recruits mostly from German-speaking aristocratic families in the eastern parts of the Holy Roman Empire, Aleks Pluskowski said. The recruits joined the military order as crusaders, dedicated to the promotion of Christian holy war and directly obedient to the papacy. They were the fighting arm of the papacy and the lands that were conquered in the eastern Baltic were held by the order as papal fiefs.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: Violence has a role within Christian ideology at this time, especially with a crusading ideology, and the fighting is built into the lifestyle of the military orders. So you pray, you fast, but you fight as well. The idea behind these institutions was to create a permanent garrison in areas where Christendom had expanded, because most crusaders would go home after completing their period of penitential warfare.

  A wall mural from a cathedral in Poland depicting leaders of the Teutonic Knights.

  The Teutonic Knights had amazing reputations as fighters and they were probably the most professional mercenaries of their time. The Kingdom of Poland was really where everything started for the order’s Prussian crusade because Duke Konrad I of Masovia invited them to secure his frontier. Following a short internal civil war, the Poles joined the crusade and helped take Prussian territory.

  Despite the crusades, there was not total war throughout the Baltics. There was collaboration between the parties who might have been expected to be vigorously opposed to each other.

  NORA BEREND: You find a lot of chronicle accounts saying things like, ‘The snow turned red with the blood in a battle, so many people were killed.’ You have accounts of people being massacred. 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 was partly financing its own wars in the Baltic region through trade with Lithuania.

  There were trade treaties, allowing Lithuanian merchants and merchants from the Teutonic Order estate to cross regions, even though these two states were at war. There were also internal wars between the tribes, such as when the Lats tried to side with the order against the Estonians, or when Riga was allied with pagan Lithuania against the order. The trade and alliances did not necessarily follow Christian versus pagan.

  Over several centuries, there was a broad Christianisation. Some of the conversions may have been willing and permanent.

  NORA BEREND: There are other accounts that actually claim forced conversion. There are accounts from missionaries thinking that they managed to convert but, the minute they turn their back, the population just shrugs off Christianity. We have accounts in the early period of people washing themselves in their local river to wash away baptism. They do a kind of un-baptism to return to their previous customs.

  All the while, there was so much potential for trade as well as for fighting. One of the earliest accounts of this is from the eleventh century, Martin Palmer said, and it was written by Adam of Bremen who wrote, ‘Men cared as much for fur as they did for the salvation of their souls.’ It was a complicated picture. On the one hand, there were accounts by the likes of Henry, a priest in Livonia, writing around 1230, who said they all had to preach to the people and be pastors to them, not slaughter them, to be kind to them unless they rose up (in which case it was acceptable to kill them).

  MARTIN PALMER: Then we have this extraordinary book called the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written almost certainly by a Teutonic Knight, 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 portrays the mother of God, the Virgin Mary, as a war goddess, and these are sacrifices to her.

  The war was so closely entangled with trade, Aleks Pluskowski said, that merchants would accompany the crusades, take part in crusades and fund them, while taking advantage of the opportunities. There could be kinship groups, where one brother was fighting and another was trading. Trade and war were inseparable.

  The constant fighting and feuding created antagonism and the firming-up of borders between opposing sides. The new Catholic states pushed up against the Slavic principality of Novgorod, which was Orthodox. The borders became more fixed once the Teutonic Order tried to launch crusades into this region in the 1240s and were defeated by Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod in the famous Battle on the Ice in 1242. The orders then stopped attacking Russian territories until the turn of sixteenth century when the Livonian master sought crusading bulls again.

  NORA BEREND: The Teutonic Order actually created a state in Prussia, which was one of the most efficient and modern states of the time. The Hanseatic League started exploiting the local economy, taking grain from Mecklenburg, Pomerania, to western Europe. It became one of the main grain-producing areas.

  Prussia was a fairly successful venture in itself, so there was less value in expanding the boundaries into Russia. The border tension did provide grounds for the Teutonic Orders to justify their presence there, Aleks Pluskowski said, as they argued they were providing security for Christendom against Russian territories, against eastern Orthodoxy and against pagan Lithuania, and this was also a justification for holding the territories.

  To this, Nora Berend added that again the tensions between the Livonians and Novgorod were commercial, and that may have been a reason behind the crusade against the Rus.

  NORA BEREND: Whether Alexander Nevsky 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 a resource, tried to turn him into this hero, and it seems that this text really presented this western danger as much more serious than it actually was. It attributes to Alexander
this fantastic victory on the ice. The same Livonian Rhymed Chronicle that was already mentioned suggests that there were only about twenty knights, so it may not have been a huge battle.

  The movement, settlement, conquest and trading interests were still very much intertwined, she said. For example, there was some kind of trading port in Riga before the crusades, and then Albert turned it into his bishopric, thanks to the conquests, and, in the thirteenth century, it became part of the Hanseatic League. Swelling the population of the increasingly German-speaking lands were artisans from the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France, Martin Palmer added, where there had been a sharp rise in population, and this skilled migration was transforming the economy.

  The migrants from the west kept coming, but not without resistance. Aleks Pluskowski mentioned the Estonians, who rebelled in the mid-fourteenth century in what became known as the St George’s Night Uprising. It came almost a century after the crusades there had apparently ended, the area was owned by the Danish crown and the Estonians might have been expected to settle down.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: Then you have this massive organised 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 buys Estonia from the Danish crown.

  There was cultural resilience among rural communities at the edges of control under the new Christian regime. In Estonia, certain practices, such as funerary rites, continued into the nineteenth century.

  The Teutonic Order started to lose its power once it confronted the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania. The order had kept using the justification that they were fighting against the pagan Lithuanians but, in the meantime, the Lithuanians had converted to Christianity in 1386 and had formed a dynastic union with Poland. Poland even made a challenge at the papal court over whether the Teutonic Order still had a right to be fighting or not.

  NORA BEREND: More importantly, [the Teutonic Knights] were defeated in 1410 at the battle of Tannenberg or Grunwald. After that, 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 and Lithuania that led to that.

  MARTIN PALMER: The Teutonic Knights end, effectively, as a force, as a governing force, because the grand master of the Teutonic Knights converts to Lutheranism in 1525. You can’t have monks in Lutheranism. You have a huge shift away from the medieval Catholic model because, frankly, it’s beginning to creak.

  The Teutons lost territories, they had to move their headquarters, the state started to secularise and eventually it became part of the wider Germany. They created a German-speaking heritage in the region for 800 years, and their crusades changed the map of Europe.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: They created basically the (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 Yalta Agreement in 1945, you have Prussia being dissolved and separated between Lithuania, Russia and Poland. There the geographical boundaries have shifted dramatically.

  In the studio afterwards, there was discussion of the English dimension. Initially, this took the form of missionaries, and Martin Palmer mentioned Henry the Englishman, who was martyred in Finland c. 1147 and is the patron saint of that country today. There was also Henry Bolingbroke, who went on to be Henry IV and who went crusading in the Baltic region in 1390.

  ALEKS PLUSKOWSKI: He is probably the most famous and reaches Vilnius with a huge contingent of English archers before attempting to go down to Jerusalem. This crusading ideal lives on. But the English component is very interesting. We have lots of English merchants present as well; in fact, in Gdansk, we have a whole English merchant quarter that’s established because of trading connections.

  Nora Berend pointed out the multiplicity of the peoples who participated not just the English but also the Scandinavians and the Danes, and there were rivalries between these groups. The Lithuanians, she said, 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.

  RUMI’S POETRY

  The Sufi writer and teacher Rumi is so important in the Islamic world that four modern countries claim him for their own: Afghanistan, as he was born in that area in the town of Balkh in 1207; Uzbekistan, as he lived in Samarkand as a child; Turkey, as he lived, worked and died in the Anatolian city of Konya; and Iran, as he wrote in Persian. Rumi is treasured throughout Islam and beyond for his poetry: his Masnavi and Divan. His output was extraordinary, around four times greater than Homer’s Odyssey. The Divan is a massive collection of lyrical poems; the Masnavi are spiritual verses of enormous complexity, described controversially in the fourteenth century as the ‘Persian Qur’an’. His followers founded the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, known outside Turkey for their whirling dervishes.

  With Melvyn to discuss the poems of Rumi were: Alan Williams, Leverhulme Trust research professor at the University of Manchester; Carole Hillenbrand, professor of Islamic history at the University of St Andrews and professor emerita of the University of Edinburgh; and Lloyd Ridgeon, reader in Islamic studies at the University of Glasgow.

  While Rumi was very much of the Persian world, Carole Hillenbrand explained that he and his family lived originally in what is now Afghanistan and his father was a reputed teacher and scholar with a group of disciples around him. At one point, around 1212, they were living in Samarkand and Rumi’s father had a dispute with the ruler and left the area. That may or may not have been prompted by rumours of terrible activities by the Mongols, further east.

  CAROLE HILLENBRAND: The family, lock, stock and barrel, moved, and they travelled first to Baghdad and then Mecca and Damascus before, finally, having come from the extreme eastern part of the Islamic world, ending up on the western periphery in the Sultanate of Rûm, hence Rumi’s name, which is the Arabic word for Byzantium. They settled in the area of the Seljuk sultanate and, finally, the father of Rumi was invited to Konya, which is where Rumi was destined to remain.

  Rumi’s father, Bahā ud-Dīn Walad, helped make Konya into an important place of learning, teaching Islamic law and the Sufi doctrine, even before Rumi built on that himself, and the Maaref of his father, ‘intimations of the mystic path’, was an important text for him. Another influence on Rumi, Alan Williams added, was the head of the Madrassa in Konya, who was called Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq. He was perhaps the first visionary of some mystical attainment that Rumi had met.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: There is a non-human influence on him, which is the elephant in the room, if you like. It’s the Qur’an itself and the Hadith tradition. This is perhaps the greatest influence on Rumi and it runs through his life like a golden thread, and one must remember that before one speaks about human influences.

  One of the main influences on Rumi was Shams-e Tabrizi, who came into Rumi’s life around 1244 when Rumi would have been thirty-seven and Shams-e Tabrizi would have been fifty-five. He was a very mysterious and charismatic figure who was thought of as a mad wandering Qalandariyyah.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Mad wandering what?

  ALAN WILLIAMS: An antinomian wandering dervish, sometimes they were even naked – like naked fakirs. These are the wild-haired men of Islamic mysticism, Qalandaris, as they’re called, or Kalandars. Now we know now that Shams-e Tabrizi was actually a very learned man and we can see from his writings that he was both a man of immense kindness but, at the same time, of great severity. And his name, Shams, means ‘the sun’.

  Their meeting was seen as the transformation point in Rumi’s life. It was said that Rumi was raw that he beca
me cooked when he met Shams-e Tabrizi that when Shams-e Tabrizi disappeared, that he was burnt by the experience. For two years, with a brief period of separation, they had the most intense mystical relationship.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: Rumi’s own pupils were so jealous of that close liaison that [Shams] was hounded out of town, or he left of his own accord, we don’t know quite which. It seems, if we sift the evidence, that Shams left town and didn’t say where he was going and Rumi pined after him and wrote to him and begged him to come back. He came back soon but, within a year, he disappeared for ever, and there was a great controversy in the literature about whether or not he was bumped off by Rumi’s disciples.

  It is difficult to tell what Shams-e Tabrizi taught Rumi, Alan Williams continued, as we do not know enough about him, but it was probably the case that ‘he unlocked the poet in Rumi’. In the period after they met, there was a massive outpouring of poetry until his death in 1273. Theirs was not a sober relationship, but it was a chaste relationship of mystical companionship and communication.

  Sufism did not appear in the Qur’an, Lloyd Ridgeon observed, but emerged as a social phenomenon in the ninth and tenth centuries, and it was part of a movement and representative of ‘normative Islam’ that related to the performing of prayers, going on pilgrimage, fasting and other matters.

  LLOYD RIDGEON: Despite this, there were some individuals who perhaps took the emergence of the movement a little bit further. In particular, there was one Sufi called Hallaj and he was executed in 922 because of his supposed statement, ‘I am the truth,’ or ‘I am God.’ Many people thought he was blurring the distinctions between creator and created, between man and God.

  After that, Sufism became a little more conservative and this idea of mysticism, of some kind of unitive experience of man and God, was pushed into the background. Nevertheless, the Sufi tradition remained incredibly popular among the masses. For people like Rumi, mysticism was about the understanding of witnessing God, however that may be. Theologians and clerics wanted to preserve an ontological distinction between the human being and God, whereas the Sufis tended to blur these distinctions. There were also many interpretations of what Sufism was. There were the Kalandars, the wild dervishes, who were regarded by many Sufis as beyond the pale. There was also the more intellectual variety provided by Sufis such as Ibn Al-’Arabi, a famous Spanish mystic who ended up in Damascus, who had a famous disciple, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, who was a very close friend of Rumi as well.