With the fall of Seville in 1248, the main thrust of the Reconquest had been completed. Thereafter, and arguably for years before, the crusade in Spain was almost entirely subsumed in the mainstream of Spanish life, distinguishable largely in name only as a separate exercise of religious devotion, military enterprise or financial expedient. The occasional recrudescence of war, such as the campaign against the Marinid invaders from Morocco, which ended with their defeat by Alfonso XI of Castile at the river Salado in 1340, still elicited crusade bulls. The religious mentality crusading fostered and bequeathed to the conquerors was more truly reflected in the fiscal and penitential instruments it had created, such as the bula de la cruzada. These became obstinately cherished elements of Spanish public life, especially in Castile, after the early thirteenth century the only Christian kingdom with a land border with the Moors of Granada. The ideology of crusade and Reconquest, reflected in the continued material prominence of the military orders, induced a providential tinge to the rhetoric of state power and national identity.
Although the decline in active frontier militarism after c.1300 may be traced in the fading of the cult of Santiago before that of the Virgin Mary, the holy war tradition remained available in its crusading wrapping. Despite intimate social and economic exchange across confessional divides in Andalucia, Murcia and Valencia, for the knightly and noble classes and their royal and ecclesiastical sponsors engaged in wars against infidels – Muslim or heathen – in Granada, the Mediterranean, north Africa or the Atlantic, identification with the crusade remained a living cultural force as well as a stereotype. While his captains were observing west Africans outside the straitjacket of crusading aesthetics, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) embraced crusading aspirations and campaigned in north Africa.40 As late as 1578, a Portuguese king, Sebastian, died commanding an international force, armed with indulgences and papal legates, fighting the Moors of Morocco at the battle of Alcazar. The penetration of Latin Christendom into the islands of the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attracted papal grants for the extension of Christianity.41 The Iberian tradition ensured a sympathetic hearing for the Genoese crusade enthusiast Christopher Columbus. The crusade provided one strand in the conceptual justification for the conquest of the Americas and, more tenuously, in the mentality of the slave trade, which some saw as a vehicle for expanding Christianity. This was made possible by the idea popular by c.1500 that Spain itself constituted a Holy Land, its Christian inhabitants new Israelites, tempered and proved in the fire of the Reconquest, champions of God’s cause against infidels outside Christendom or heretics within.42
In the later fifteenth century, a revival of the crusading mission, with papal bulls for the war against Granada in 1485, depended as heavily on this recasting of, in particular, Castile, as itself a new Holy Land with a providential task as it did on genuine Aragonese and Castilian crusading traditions. The fall of Granada in 1492 and persistent attempts in the sixteenth century to conquer the coast of Morocco and Tunisia breathed new life into the myth of the Reconquest and the manifest destiny of Catholic Spain. Domestically, this was turned to justify the expulsions of Moors, Jews and moriscos and underpinned the development of an openly exclusive and racist sectarian society. Externally, the appropriation of crusading into the projection of national identity informed the creation of the Spanish empire, sometimes with bizarre consequences. In faraway central America, local allies of the conquistadors at Tlaxcala, a city state east of Mexico, marked the treaty of Aigues Mortes between Charles V and the French king Francis I in 1538 with a lavish pageant showing the anticipated conquest of Jerusalem by the king of Spain. On Corpus Christi Day 1539, in the presence of the consecrated host, a lavish display included two Christian ‘armies’ laying siege to the Holy City, one comprising Europeans, the other commanded by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, with the Tlaxcalans and other ‘New Spaniards’ in their own war costumes, complete with ‘feathers, devices and shields’. Seemingly, a good time was had by all. A few weeks earlier, the Mexicans to the east had laid on a similar show depicting the Turkish siege of Rhodes.43 Through these traditional images of past and future crusading, New Spain was being assimilated into the culture and faith of the old. The association was not accidental. Peace between the great Christian powers of early sixteenth-century Europe habitually came with hopes of a new holy war against the Turks. For some Spanish propagandists, the duty to defend and extend Christendom had devolved uniquely on to Spain, ‘Mother of the heroes of war, confidant of Catholic soldiers, crucible in which the love of God is purified, land where it is seen that Heaven buries those who to Heaven will be borne as defenders of the purest faith’.44 The words are those of Miguel de Cervantes. The crusade and Reconquest fed a new national messianism that became inextricably bound into Spanish imperial ideology and, more diffusely, into cultural identity. Further in time than Mexico was in space from the medieval battlefields of the cross, but oddly closer in sentiment, the power and longevity of the Spanish crusade myth, and its practical social and political implications, still found mighty confirmation in the twentieth century through its insidious but effective appropriation by General Franco and his fascist apologists.
21
Frontier Crusades 2: the Baltic and the North
‘They shall either be converted or wiped out.’1 So Bernard of Clairvaux announced the extension of Jerusalem indulgences to the summer campaign of 1147 against the pagan Slavs, or Wends, between the rivers Elbe and Oder. This decision, reached at the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147, set the tone for perhaps the most radical and effective association of holy war and territorial expansion. Crusading in the Baltic touched the destinies of every region east of the Elbe in a great arc stretching along the coast eastwards and northwards to Livonia, Estonia, Finland and the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia. Bernard’s analogy with wars fought for the Holy Land of Palestine provided ethnic cleansing, commercial exploitation and political aggrandizement with a religious gloss, a potent, lasting and, for some, sincerely believed justification for the cruel process of land-grabbing, Christianization and Germanization that brought the pagan communities of the eastern and northern Baltic littoral into the pale of Christianity and western European culture.
BEGINNINGS
Yet Bernard had not invented the religious excuse for conquest in the Baltic. He had been anticipated by the Magdeburg appeal of 1108, encouraging support for an attack on the Wends, probably composed by a Flemish clerk in the archbishop’s household. The campaign being urged was to liberate ‘our Jerusalem’, an ambiguous reference to the vulnerable Christian lands along the Elbe frontier and the lost ecclesiastical provinces beyond, briefly established by the tenth-century Ottonian kings of Germany before being abandoned after the Slav rising of 983. This challenging analogy prefigured the way crusading influenced
20. The Baltic
German eastward expansion by exploiting the new impetus and definition given to holy war by the eastern Jerusalem campaigns in emphasizing the need to defend all Christian frontiers and by implying that, in the Baltic, as in Palestine, the battle was for the recovery of Christian lands. In a mood of realism no less prophetic of the future Baltic crusades, the Magdeburg clerk augmented these emotional triggers and legal niceties with the harsher attractions of blatant materialism and spiritual reward:
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 wealth of its produce… And so, most renowned Saxons, French, Lorrainers and Flemings and conquerors of the world, this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live. May He who with the strength of his arm led the men of Gaul on their march from the far West in triumph against his enemies in the farthest East give you the will and power to conquer those most inhuman gentiles who are nearby and to prosper well in all things.2
The material greed of Christian Saxo
n lords in their dealings with the pagan Slavs stood as an uncontested if lamented commonplace amongst even the most sympathetic regional Christian apologists.
As much as in the Christian territories of the region, religion helped define cultural, social and political identity across the frontiers in the pagan lands that stretched along the Baltic shore to the Gulf of Finland and beyond. Although subdivided into numerous principalities, tribes or groups of extended families, the most prominent general division among the pagan peoples remained linguistic. Between Kiel and the Vistula lived the western Slavs, known to the Germans and Scandinavians as Wends, related but distinct from the Slavic Poles, Russians and Czechs and the Sorbs to the south and east. Among the Wends, tribal and political groups were sustained by an organized and resilient polytheist religion run by an ordered and powerful priesthood presiding over a network of regional cults and a system of rich local temples stocked with images and idols. Wendish paganism was closely bound up with the tensions between rural territorial princes and the market and trading towns, mainly on the coast, whose religious affiliations reflected often competitive aspirations for autonomy and power. To the Germans and Danes, Wendish princes and towns displayed recognizable political structures and habits. This was less the case further east. From the Vistula to the Dvina and up to the shores of the Gulf of Riga, the Balts were divided into four separate peoples: Prussians, Lithuanians, the Latvians and Curonians. Within these ancient tribal groups, political and religious authority operated on a smaller, less centralized scale than among the Wends. The power of local chiefs depended on their ability to organize the warrior aristocracy of their areas; to dominate the agricultural population from behind substantial earthworks rather than creating settled rural estates; and to exploit an array of fertility cults revolving around numinous places, plants, animals and the dead as well as gods. The tenacity and continued vibrancy of the paganism of the Balts testified to its importance to social and political cohesion. From the Gulf of Riga and Estonia into the Gulf of Finland and beyond were settled a range of Finno-Urgian-speaking communities, some of which existed on the very fringes of settled cultivation. Social structure rested on extended families, who combined when economically or militarily necessary into larger, although still very localized, political associations. The harshness of the environment imposed an intimacy with nature reflected in the religious cults, which helped explain the natural world and offered a chance to mitigate its severity.
Although nothing seems to have come from Magdeburg’s isolated exhortation, the Wendish crusade of 1147 emerged from an indigenous German context that displayed growing interest in fusing political, ecclesiastical and religious aggression. Despite John of Würzburg’s gloom at the lack of German prominence in Palestine in the 1170s, interest in holy war penetrated German lands as much as those further west.3 The Emperor Henry IV had toyed with at least a pilgrimage and possibly a military expedition to Palestine in 1103–4. Twenty years later Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Conrad III, campaigned in the Holy Land.4 The ideology of holy war, even if imported by westerners such as the Flemish clerk at Magdeburg, soon infected German literature as much as politics, with such familiar epic figures as Roland appearing in the unmistakable guise of a crusading miles Christi.5 On the German – Slav borderlands, the early twelfth century saw an escalation in conflict over religious and ecclesiastical orientation. Religious observance defined communal identity and political authority on both sides of the shifting frontiers. Conquerors, such as the Christian Boleslav III of Poland (1102–38) in Pomerania, regional lords, such as the Pomeranian princes who accepted baptism in the 1120s, or local rulers, such as Henry, the Christian lord of the pagan Wendish Abotrites (d. 1127), used or embraced Christianity and Christian mission to assert their power, in particular over urban elites wedded to a thriving and wellorganized paganism. Much of the progress of Christianity between the Elbe and Oder valley revolved around the subjugation of independent towns, with their civic cultic shrines and priesthood, to a more amenable church structure run by prelates and priests sponsored and employed by the landed princes. The evangelism of Bishop Otto of Bamberg in Pomerania in 1124 and 1127 involved the violent destruction of pagan temples and the submission of cities such as Stettin.6
The new God was unambiguously a German God, His success accompanied by German settlers. Rejection of political subjugation was expressed in religious opposition. Henry of the Abotrites, his rule buttressed by German and Danish mercenaries, having himself converted, allowed Saxon missionaries to lay waste Wendish cultic shrines in his territories. With the Christian priests came the prospect of church taxes, land-grabbing and a loss of political and economic as well as ecclesiastical autonomy. However strong the private or corporate devotional ties to the old beliefs, the political consequences of the choice of paganism or conversion were unmistakable. Religion was politics. After the death of Christianizing Henry, Wendish independence reasserted itself under the vigorously pagan prince Niklot. The end of the independence of the Rugians was marked by the destruction of the temple and public pagan worship at Arkona in 1168 by Valdemar I of Denmark, a more lasting repeat of the enforced baptism of the Arkona garrison by the Danes between 1134 and 1136. Apostasy, as of the Rugians after 1136 and the Wends after 1127, expressed communal identity. Conversion was more important than a matter of faith. Long before the 1147 crusade, political confrontation had been articulated in religious terms.
Bernard of Clairvaux’s stark and canonically suspect choice, baptism or death, implicitly acknowledged this religious component to competing perceptions of ethnicity, cultural identity, political autonomy and racial awareness. He referred to the conversion or extermination of the pagan races. While this may have appeased legal experts by avoiding direct approval of forced individual conversion, equating the threat of collective destruction of the pagan nation with the alternative of personal baptism exposed a clear contradiction to canon law. More obviously, Bernard’s direct exhortation to arm the faithful ‘with the Holy Cross against the enemies of the Cross of Christ’ invited a far simpler interpretation and response.7 The Wendish crusade of 1147 was a missionary war not cloaking but glorifying and legitimizing a campaign of undisguised material aggrandizement. The distant memory of the conquests beyond the Elbe by Saxon and Salian German kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries combined with the confused recent history of conversion ebbing backwards and forwards according to the political and ecclesiastical interest of local rulers to allow a retrospective justification in the concept of a reconquest of lost Christian lands.8 In practical military or political terms, such excuses made little difference to the reality while intellectually and rhetorically, if not entirely spurious, they formed a convenient exercise in double-speak. Nonetheless, the easy acceptance of the trappings of crusading in the Baltic revealed how far a positive ideology of legitimate religious violence had penetrated the western Christian world and how far cultural and territorial acquisitiveness marched with spiritual imperialism.
The longer-term implications scarcely intruded directly into the circumstances of the 1147 crusade. A generation later, the frontier missionary priest Helmold of Bosau, following Bernard’s lead, sought to equate the desultory fighting of the summer of 1147 with the struggle for the Holy Land, characterizing the expeditions in terms of vengeance against Slavs occupying previously Christian lands and retribution for attacks and atrocities on Christians. Yet he also described the complicated cross-frontier relations between one of the crusade’s leaders, Count Adolf of Holstein, and Niklot of the Abotrites, one of its targets. They had entered into an alliance shortly before the 1147 campaigns.9 The context of the decision to extend the Holy Land privileges to the Saxon princes included the need of King Conrad III to leave a peaceful realm behind him when he departed for Palestine. Unwilling to accede to Henry the Lion’s demands at the Diet of Frankfurt of March 1147 for restitution of his ancestral claims in Bavaria, Conrad nonetheless sought to bind the potentially dissident magnate
within the general Peace of the crusade. Henry’s uncle joined Conrad’s army, but Henry’s Saxon allies refused to join the eastern campaigns. By extending the crusade vow and obligations to the annual summer raids across the Wendish frontier, Conrad and Bernard performed a neat trick of offering ecclesiastical approval to traditional autonomous regional conflict in a manner that implicitly tied the participants to royal policy, if only temporarily. Significantly, among those mustered at Magdeburg in August 1147 was Wibald abbot of Stavelot, a leading member of the regency government, his presence signalling the element of royal sanction, if not control. The unusual, local and distinctive nature of the German Wendish crusade was recognized symbolically. According to Otto of Freising, a Holy Land crucesignatus, 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’, to all appearances as much a totem of religious aggression and triumphalism as a badge of penance.10
God's War: A New History of the Crusades Page 83
