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The Northern Crusades
The 'Northern Crusades', inspired by the Pope's call for a Holy War, are less celebrated than those in the Middle East, but they were also more successful: vast new territories became and remain Christian, such as Finland, Estonia and Prussia. Newly revised in the light of the recent developments in Baltic and Northern medieval research, this authoritative overview provides a balanced and compelling account of a tumultuous era.
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1980
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About the author
Eric Christiansen
17 books8 followersEric Christiansen was a medieval historian and fellow emeritus of New College, Oxford University.
Christiansen was educated at Charterhouse School after which he served in the ranks of the Northamptonshire Regiment. He became a fellow of New College after completing a thesis on modern Spanish history but subsequently specialised in medieval history.
Christiansen was educated at Charterhouse School after which he served in the ranks of the Northamptonshire Regiment. He became a fellow of New College after completing a thesis on modern Spanish history but subsequently specialised in medieval history.
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November 4, 2022First published in 1980 and revised in 1997 this book opened up the medieval Baltic region to the English language reader.
"At this point the reader may ask, 'But were the popes really interested in what happened n North-East Europe?' Surely they had enough to do defending their own states in central Italy, fighting the Emperor, maintaining Church rights in the more civilised parts of Christendom, and taxing the more taxable? Surely he crusade against Islam had priority?
The answer, I suggest, is that the popes were so deeply involved in their Italian problems that they could not afford to ignore anything that affected those problems" (p.126)
This book focuses on the crusades and the crusading states that emerged in Finland, Prussia (the Russian federation's Kalingrad Oblast' & parts of modern Lithuania and Poland) and Livonia (largely present day Latvia and Estonia). Christiansen covered the period from the 12th Centuries through to the 16th in a book of 260 pages. The temporal and physical scope mean that the pace is crisp.
The Northern Crusades form an interesting contrast to the crusade in and for the Holy Land. After the Second Crusade, crusading in the north developed its own momentum, and was associated with settlement and colonisation (not that this was unknown in the eastern Mediterranean) from northern Germany. Chapters like the brief but thorough run through of the background to and outcomes of the second crusade in modern-day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are a strength of this book.
The inevitable weakness in a book of this length is that the reader needs to know more about the developments in the surrounding countries for the entire situation to make sense, partly developments in Poland. Possibly as time goes on since 1989 more will emerge into print. Equally Christensen is stronger on the background of the crusaders, and the dynamics in the states which produced the crusades than on the regions that received the crusades. He doesn't seem to consider the impact of the Mongols on Lithuanian state formation, or how the decline of Mongol power allowed Lithuanian to expand to the South and east and how that meant it was increasingly more powerful and well able to resist Crusaders.
The Teutonic knights dominate the latter part of the book, which no doubt they would have found appropriate.
A minor quibble, again possibly a reflection of the state of the Baltic world before 1989, is the description a couple of times of Russian states (Novgorod, Pskov and eventually the Grand Duchy of Muscovy) as being in a state of perpetual warfare or hostility with Livonia from the 13th century. You really don't get that impression from reading the The Chronicle of Novgorod 1016 - 1471 or looking at the importance of the Novgorod trade to the Hansa.
This is very much a history of colonialism, power imbalances, but also social organisation. For instance the Danes had the kinetic power to be able to organise fleets to capture Northern Estonia, but didn't have the organisational structures to develop it into a powerbase and eventually they sell the territory.
The Swedes successful expand into Finland, from the south-west at first, and create a society with similar role-titles as in Sweden but due to the environment the social realities are quite different - a farm's income might mostly come from hunting, a Sami person might be bound as a slave to one farm that they only visit once a year (presumably to deliver a tribute of furs or similar). The social history is fascinating particularly as the German and Flemish settlers in Prussia and Livonia appear to construct a kind of apartheid with the indigenous population disadvantaged in different ways.
As with the more familiar story of the Crusades to the Holy Land, the success of the crusaders is due to the political disunity of those who were crusaded against, and as in the Middle East as more powerful states develop in response to the crusades, the crusades lose momentum, although, spoiler alert, in the Baltic region they are never pushed out, despite the best efforts of Ivan III of Moscow (and later his grandson Ivan IV), or the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth.
"At this point the reader may ask, 'But were the popes really interested in what happened n North-East Europe?' Surely they had enough to do defending their own states in central Italy, fighting the Emperor, maintaining Church rights in the more civilised parts of Christendom, and taxing the more taxable? Surely he crusade against Islam had priority?
The answer, I suggest, is that the popes were so deeply involved in their Italian problems that they could not afford to ignore anything that affected those problems" (p.126)
This book focuses on the crusades and the crusading states that emerged in Finland, Prussia (the Russian federation's Kalingrad Oblast' & parts of modern Lithuania and Poland) and Livonia (largely present day Latvia and Estonia). Christiansen covered the period from the 12th Centuries through to the 16th in a book of 260 pages. The temporal and physical scope mean that the pace is crisp.
The Northern Crusades form an interesting contrast to the crusade in and for the Holy Land. After the Second Crusade, crusading in the north developed its own momentum, and was associated with settlement and colonisation (not that this was unknown in the eastern Mediterranean) from northern Germany. Chapters like the brief but thorough run through of the background to and outcomes of the second crusade in modern-day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are a strength of this book.
The inevitable weakness in a book of this length is that the reader needs to know more about the developments in the surrounding countries for the entire situation to make sense, partly developments in Poland. Possibly as time goes on since 1989 more will emerge into print. Equally Christensen is stronger on the background of the crusaders, and the dynamics in the states which produced the crusades than on the regions that received the crusades. He doesn't seem to consider the impact of the Mongols on Lithuanian state formation, or how the decline of Mongol power allowed Lithuanian to expand to the South and east and how that meant it was increasingly more powerful and well able to resist Crusaders.
The Teutonic knights dominate the latter part of the book, which no doubt they would have found appropriate.
A minor quibble, again possibly a reflection of the state of the Baltic world before 1989, is the description a couple of times of Russian states (Novgorod, Pskov and eventually the Grand Duchy of Muscovy) as being in a state of perpetual warfare or hostility with Livonia from the 13th century. You really don't get that impression from reading the The Chronicle of Novgorod 1016 - 1471 or looking at the importance of the Novgorod trade to the Hansa.
This is very much a history of colonialism, power imbalances, but also social organisation. For instance the Danes had the kinetic power to be able to organise fleets to capture Northern Estonia, but didn't have the organisational structures to develop it into a powerbase and eventually they sell the territory.
The Swedes successful expand into Finland, from the south-west at first, and create a society with similar role-titles as in Sweden but due to the environment the social realities are quite different - a farm's income might mostly come from hunting, a Sami person might be bound as a slave to one farm that they only visit once a year (presumably to deliver a tribute of furs or similar). The social history is fascinating particularly as the German and Flemish settlers in Prussia and Livonia appear to construct a kind of apartheid with the indigenous population disadvantaged in different ways.
As with the more familiar story of the Crusades to the Holy Land, the success of the crusaders is due to the political disunity of those who were crusaded against, and as in the Middle East as more powerful states develop in response to the crusades, the crusades lose momentum, although, spoiler alert, in the Baltic region they are never pushed out, despite the best efforts of Ivan III of Moscow (and later his grandson Ivan IV), or the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth.
July 9, 2020
“Northern” and “Crusades” might not be words that would seem to fit together naturally. Most of us, when we hear the term "the Crusades," would think of the endless fighting over the Holy Land, of Saladin and King Richard the Lionhearted. But we probably wouldn't think of Crusades in association with places like Finland, or Latvia, or the area once known as East Prussia. But crusades occurred in the Baltic region nonetheless, as Eric Christiansen makes clear in his book The Northern Crusades.
Christiansen, a Briton of Danish heritage and professor of history at Oxford University, begins by describing the pre-Christian societies of the Baltic region, and then proceeds with a helpful setting-forth of how the crusading impulse first took shape in late-11th-century Europe:
Crusades are difficult to define, because there were many different types of warfare conducted in the name of Christianity, and none of them was called a crusade at the time. “Taking the cross” became a preliminary move towards embarking on or contributing to a “holy war” designated as such by the pope; but medieval lawyers and theologians were slow to work out what made such wars holy in general terms. The beast was born not because of an ideological development but because of a political adventure by dedicated clerics and warriors at a moment when the usual “defenders of the faith,” the kings and emperor, were at war with each other, or with the pope himself. (p. 50)
I read The Northern Crusades while traveling in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and while I was reveling in the beauty of the Baltic landscape, and observing the quiet strength of the people of those small, beautiful, oft-occupied republics, Christiansen’s book reminded me that the Northern Crusades in that region were characterized by the same sort of cynical political maneuvering that characterized the Nazis’ and Soviets’ campaign of occupation against the Baltic States 700 years later.
In the context of the 1209-18 campaign against southern Estonia, for example, the crusaders’ gaining of the aid of the pagans of Livonia (a region roughly corresponding to present-day Latvia) was a matter of “material inducements. One was protection against Russians and Lithuanians….Another was the aid the crusaders were prepared to give…in raiding the Estonians – a chance to settle old scores and get rich” (p. 101).
Reading The Northern Crusades, one also learns about the manner in which the crusaders, once they had conquered a pagan land in the Baltics, “tried to reorganize the traditional patterns of society they found there. They wanted to make them more ‘Christian’ – that is, either more like the home countries, or more like an ideal Catholic model, and they wanted to make them manageable” (p. 207). Their success in that endeavour was variable at best; and there is a certain sense of inevitability to the way that these crusades, which began with the conquest of massive territories of Northern land, eventually petered out, as described in a chapter aptly titled "The Withering of the Crusade."
As you read The Northern Crusades, you may find yourself referring frequently to the six maps that appear at the beginning of the book; the events of the Northern Crusades, both military and political, are sometimes quite Byzantine in their intricacy. The maps are helpful, but more illustrations might have helped further, especially in the context of a book that covers a period of over 400 years and introduces the reader to a sometimes-bewildering array of historical personages. No doubt there are paintings, engravings, statues, and other works of art that might have provided a useful visual supplement to Christiansen's narrative.
Nonetheless, the book not only chronicles an important period of Baltic medieval history but also looks ahead to future challenges that the Baltic region would face. Before reading The Northern Crusades, I knew that East Prussia was a predominantly German region, separated from the rest of Germany by Polish territory, and that Hitler made much of East Prussia’s status for propaganda purposes while whipping millions of Germans into a pro-Nazi, pro-conquest frenzy during the years before World War II; but I didn't understand before reading this book how or why East Prussia originally emerged as a German cultural exclave. Now I understand. Someday I would like to travel in what was once East Prussia, and is now the Kaliningrad oblast of the Russian Federation, and see a land where the Northern Crusades were only the first of many, many tumultuous events that would overrun that region.
The Northern Crusades particularly resonated with me when I went to Cathedral Square in Vilnius to see the “Stebuklas” tile. Stebuklas means "miracle" in Lithuanian, and the tile with the word “Stebuklas” on it marks the southern end of a thousands-strong human chain formed in 1989 by citizens of the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to protest the Soviets' then-tottering rule of their countries. In the square, I remember being struck by seeing, right next to the largest cathedral of devoutly Catholic Lithuania, a heroic statue of the Grand Prince Gediminas, a resolutely pagan ruler. While his forces killed or captured thousands of Christians, and Christiansen reports that Gediminas himself responded to a papal request to convert to Christianity by saying, “May the devil baptize me!” (p. 153), Gediminas is still a hero in Lithuania, and his statue looks out upon a great cathedral of the religion he affected to despise. Such are the intricacies of Baltic history.
In a thoughtful afterword, Christiansen reflects that the wars that have come to be known as the Northern Crusades “were fought for the same reasons as other wars. The belligerents wanted to capture trade-routes, to win land for the land-hungry, to increase the revenues and reputations of princes and prelates, to prevent piracy, to secure larger shares of natural resources, or any share at all of loot” (p. 259).
Yet, strikingly enough, the designation of these wars as “crusades” may not simply be rank hypocrisy on the part of the crusaders; rather, Christiansen suggests that in the context of that time, a claim by European Christian leaders to be fighting a war in the name and the cause of the Christian God “was regarded at the time as no less real than, say, Edward III’s claim to France, or the king of Denmark’s claim to Estonia…logically unsound, perhaps, but worth fighting for, and usually worth a sum of money as well” (p. 260). In this way and others, Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades provides a thought-provoking look back at an overlooked but important time from the history of Northern Europe.
Christiansen, a Briton of Danish heritage and professor of history at Oxford University, begins by describing the pre-Christian societies of the Baltic region, and then proceeds with a helpful setting-forth of how the crusading impulse first took shape in late-11th-century Europe:
Crusades are difficult to define, because there were many different types of warfare conducted in the name of Christianity, and none of them was called a crusade at the time. “Taking the cross” became a preliminary move towards embarking on or contributing to a “holy war” designated as such by the pope; but medieval lawyers and theologians were slow to work out what made such wars holy in general terms. The beast was born not because of an ideological development but because of a political adventure by dedicated clerics and warriors at a moment when the usual “defenders of the faith,” the kings and emperor, were at war with each other, or with the pope himself. (p. 50)
I read The Northern Crusades while traveling in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and while I was reveling in the beauty of the Baltic landscape, and observing the quiet strength of the people of those small, beautiful, oft-occupied republics, Christiansen’s book reminded me that the Northern Crusades in that region were characterized by the same sort of cynical political maneuvering that characterized the Nazis’ and Soviets’ campaign of occupation against the Baltic States 700 years later.
In the context of the 1209-18 campaign against southern Estonia, for example, the crusaders’ gaining of the aid of the pagans of Livonia (a region roughly corresponding to present-day Latvia) was a matter of “material inducements. One was protection against Russians and Lithuanians….Another was the aid the crusaders were prepared to give…in raiding the Estonians – a chance to settle old scores and get rich” (p. 101).
Reading The Northern Crusades, one also learns about the manner in which the crusaders, once they had conquered a pagan land in the Baltics, “tried to reorganize the traditional patterns of society they found there. They wanted to make them more ‘Christian’ – that is, either more like the home countries, or more like an ideal Catholic model, and they wanted to make them manageable” (p. 207). Their success in that endeavour was variable at best; and there is a certain sense of inevitability to the way that these crusades, which began with the conquest of massive territories of Northern land, eventually petered out, as described in a chapter aptly titled "The Withering of the Crusade."
As you read The Northern Crusades, you may find yourself referring frequently to the six maps that appear at the beginning of the book; the events of the Northern Crusades, both military and political, are sometimes quite Byzantine in their intricacy. The maps are helpful, but more illustrations might have helped further, especially in the context of a book that covers a period of over 400 years and introduces the reader to a sometimes-bewildering array of historical personages. No doubt there are paintings, engravings, statues, and other works of art that might have provided a useful visual supplement to Christiansen's narrative.
Nonetheless, the book not only chronicles an important period of Baltic medieval history but also looks ahead to future challenges that the Baltic region would face. Before reading The Northern Crusades, I knew that East Prussia was a predominantly German region, separated from the rest of Germany by Polish territory, and that Hitler made much of East Prussia’s status for propaganda purposes while whipping millions of Germans into a pro-Nazi, pro-conquest frenzy during the years before World War II; but I didn't understand before reading this book how or why East Prussia originally emerged as a German cultural exclave. Now I understand. Someday I would like to travel in what was once East Prussia, and is now the Kaliningrad oblast of the Russian Federation, and see a land where the Northern Crusades were only the first of many, many tumultuous events that would overrun that region.
The Northern Crusades particularly resonated with me when I went to Cathedral Square in Vilnius to see the “Stebuklas” tile. Stebuklas means "miracle" in Lithuanian, and the tile with the word “Stebuklas” on it marks the southern end of a thousands-strong human chain formed in 1989 by citizens of the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to protest the Soviets' then-tottering rule of their countries. In the square, I remember being struck by seeing, right next to the largest cathedral of devoutly Catholic Lithuania, a heroic statue of the Grand Prince Gediminas, a resolutely pagan ruler. While his forces killed or captured thousands of Christians, and Christiansen reports that Gediminas himself responded to a papal request to convert to Christianity by saying, “May the devil baptize me!” (p. 153), Gediminas is still a hero in Lithuania, and his statue looks out upon a great cathedral of the religion he affected to despise. Such are the intricacies of Baltic history.
In a thoughtful afterword, Christiansen reflects that the wars that have come to be known as the Northern Crusades “were fought for the same reasons as other wars. The belligerents wanted to capture trade-routes, to win land for the land-hungry, to increase the revenues and reputations of princes and prelates, to prevent piracy, to secure larger shares of natural resources, or any share at all of loot” (p. 259).
Yet, strikingly enough, the designation of these wars as “crusades” may not simply be rank hypocrisy on the part of the crusaders; rather, Christiansen suggests that in the context of that time, a claim by European Christian leaders to be fighting a war in the name and the cause of the Christian God “was regarded at the time as no less real than, say, Edward III’s claim to France, or the king of Denmark’s claim to Estonia…logically unsound, perhaps, but worth fighting for, and usually worth a sum of money as well” (p. 260). In this way and others, Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades provides a thought-provoking look back at an overlooked but important time from the history of Northern Europe.
August 19, 2016
Someone needs to tell the Islamophobes: Europe was made Christian at the point of the sword and the most important targets and lasting conquests of the centuries of Crusades were not the Muslims but the people of Europe.
This history looks at the enforced Christianisation of the northern lands around the Baltic, the long and fierce defence of the pagans against encroachment and the Christian commitment to endless warfare, characterized above all by the fanatical orders of crusading monks, for whom campaigning was never merely seasonal and never for limited objectives, but a total and uncompromising commitment to complete and final victory. Yet for the secular rulers in these lands, religion was always secondary to the material goals of plunder and tribute, conquest and the control of land. The choice between Christianity and paganism was largely a strategic one and ultimately, the Christians had the greater resources - and the more ferocious commitment to endless warfare.
Place this history alongside accounts of Charlamagne's brutal "conversion" of the Saxons, the Albigensian Crusade to "convert" the Cathars (or "kill them all"), the Normans in Southern Italy and Sicily and the Spanish "Reconquista" to get a more complete picture of the way Europe was reduced to (Roman) Christianity by fire and sword.
“Christianity had not pacified these peoples. They were still dominated by fighters, brought up to kill and be killed, whether they lived as princes, landowners or swordsmen; and between the fighting classes and the rest there was a barrier of birth, breeding and outlook reinforced by heroic tradition and law. ...foreigners found it brutal and unchristian.” [p.69]
“When the Saxons demanded to be let loose on the Slavs, they did so for good old-fashioned reasons, either to get submission and tribute, or to seize more land; for the Danes it was an opportunity for revenge and retaliation against the pirates and slavers, and for the Poles a chance of intimidating the Prussians. The fact that knes Nyklot and his people were heathen was a secondary consideration; ... ” [ P.112].
“Both rulers were religious enough. Henry went on an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172-3 and Valdemar donated half of his patrimonial lands to Danish churches. But neither could afford the luxury of religious wars. They fought to increase their wealth and prestige and did so by fighting each other, if necessary, the heathen Slavs at other times, and the Christian Slavs also.” [p 129].
This history looks at the enforced Christianisation of the northern lands around the Baltic, the long and fierce defence of the pagans against encroachment and the Christian commitment to endless warfare, characterized above all by the fanatical orders of crusading monks, for whom campaigning was never merely seasonal and never for limited objectives, but a total and uncompromising commitment to complete and final victory. Yet for the secular rulers in these lands, religion was always secondary to the material goals of plunder and tribute, conquest and the control of land. The choice between Christianity and paganism was largely a strategic one and ultimately, the Christians had the greater resources - and the more ferocious commitment to endless warfare.
Place this history alongside accounts of Charlamagne's brutal "conversion" of the Saxons, the Albigensian Crusade to "convert" the Cathars (or "kill them all"), the Normans in Southern Italy and Sicily and the Spanish "Reconquista" to get a more complete picture of the way Europe was reduced to (Roman) Christianity by fire and sword.
“Christianity had not pacified these peoples. They were still dominated by fighters, brought up to kill and be killed, whether they lived as princes, landowners or swordsmen; and between the fighting classes and the rest there was a barrier of birth, breeding and outlook reinforced by heroic tradition and law. ...foreigners found it brutal and unchristian.” [p.69]
“When the Saxons demanded to be let loose on the Slavs, they did so for good old-fashioned reasons, either to get submission and tribute, or to seize more land; for the Danes it was an opportunity for revenge and retaliation against the pirates and slavers, and for the Poles a chance of intimidating the Prussians. The fact that knes Nyklot and his people were heathen was a secondary consideration; ... ” [ P.112].
“Both rulers were religious enough. Henry went on an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172-3 and Valdemar donated half of his patrimonial lands to Danish churches. But neither could afford the luxury of religious wars. They fought to increase their wealth and prestige and did so by fighting each other, if necessary, the heathen Slavs at other times, and the Christian Slavs also.” [p 129].
November 21, 2019
Christiansen supplies a nice and tidy history of these often forgotten religious wars, arguably ones more successful than the stupid efforts to "take back" the heavily-populated, mostly Islamic Levant.
There is a lot to love here: C. contextualizes everything and then some. Why did these Crusades happen? What were their roots? Their justifications? He digs into the pre-Crusade economic complexity of the Baltic Sea and its environs, the need for Saxon peeps (and others) to have a kind of safety valve for their militantly amorous knights, the rise of militant religious groups like the Sword Brothers (nice band name!), and the ever-present yet often gentle pushback from the Orthodox east, with the Baltic peoples caught in the middle of course.
The work is nicely broken down into geographical nuggets: Wends, Prussians, the Baltic folks, the Finns, and so on, with some digressions on knightly, blood-lusting monasticism and the papal role in all these northern shenanigans.
My only quibble is C's short thrift given to local political entities, especially in the Baltic heartland, where he tends to give the impression of inchoate, disparate chieftains lording over what seems to amount to diddly-squat. But despite this, a rewarding and informative work for the layperson.
There is a lot to love here: C. contextualizes everything and then some. Why did these Crusades happen? What were their roots? Their justifications? He digs into the pre-Crusade economic complexity of the Baltic Sea and its environs, the need for Saxon peeps (and others) to have a kind of safety valve for their militantly amorous knights, the rise of militant religious groups like the Sword Brothers (nice band name!), and the ever-present yet often gentle pushback from the Orthodox east, with the Baltic peoples caught in the middle of course.
The work is nicely broken down into geographical nuggets: Wends, Prussians, the Baltic folks, the Finns, and so on, with some digressions on knightly, blood-lusting monasticism and the papal role in all these northern shenanigans.
My only quibble is C's short thrift given to local political entities, especially in the Baltic heartland, where he tends to give the impression of inchoate, disparate chieftains lording over what seems to amount to diddly-squat. But despite this, a rewarding and informative work for the layperson.
April 15, 2011
The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen presents a detailed account of the events of the crusades in the Baltic. In the Introduction Christiansen states, “This book is an attempt to describe the struggles waged round the Baltic from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries in the name of Christianity, and to explain the part they played in the transformation of northern societies which took place at the same time.” He expands upon this purpose throughout the book, and draws the events back to the theme. He began the book with a look at the geography and native tribes of the Baltic area before the crusaders invaded. Several maps were included which assist the reader in understanding the frontier regions.
Christiansen embraces a broad definition of crusades; he doesn’t seem to consider a vow as a necessary part. His writing is very British, dry ironic humour in a narrative style. He didn’t have an overt thesis but he did state that the Northern Crusades are important for study because they brought about lasting permanent changes to the Baltic region. They helped Latinize the areas where crusaders and colonists lived. The first official crusade bull for North East Europe was issued by Pope Eugenius III in 1147. The strongest military order during the centuries of the Northern Crusades was the Teutonic Knights. They were founded in 1190, and became a powerful political and military force in Prussia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Livonia.
The Danes, Swedes, Russians, and Knights all were interested in expanding their territorial borders and in controlling trade rights in the Baltic region, which happened to coincide with the Church’s desire to converting the pagan natives. The political and military struggles for supremacy in the Baltic lasted for three hundred years, as Grand Masters, kings, nobles, and princes all tried to outmaneuver each other and dominate the region. Christiansen seems to have no problem with admitting that much of the so called crusader activity in the region was really much more economically driven. Sure, the Teutonic Knights said they were there to convert the heathen, but they really didn’t seem to mind if they all stayed pagan. It gave them a reason to exist, and a justified reason to fight. The crusading mindset lasted so long through a combination of local enthusiasm, occasional appeals to Rome for help, and by the grant of perpetual warfare given to the Teutonic Knights.
The Northern Crusades provides a very readable overview of the crusades in the Baltic. The political and religious complexities of the region are clearly described and the reader comes away with a very good understanding of the key events. Many kingdoms wanted to rule the frontier lands and they all provided themselves with justifications for conquest. The crusading mindset provided the justification for the formation of the Teutonic Knights. Their actions were important to the dynamics of the Baltic region and they had a hand in the events that occurred. Christiansen shows the Knights as a central piece of the Northern Crusades.
The Teutonic Knights came under criticism from Poland. They had stolen land, and were currently fighting fellow Christians, since most of the Baltic area had been nominally converted. They were also pretty keen on fighting Russians, since they were schismatics, but that didn’t seem to qualify as a crusade. When the Northern Crusades came to an end and the Teutonic Knights were secularized the Baltic region was a changed place. “The Baltic was still a Catholic lake in 1500, and the Baltic states were thoroughly integrated members of the Catholic family, two generations after the crusades had ended.”
Christiansen embraces a broad definition of crusades; he doesn’t seem to consider a vow as a necessary part. His writing is very British, dry ironic humour in a narrative style. He didn’t have an overt thesis but he did state that the Northern Crusades are important for study because they brought about lasting permanent changes to the Baltic region. They helped Latinize the areas where crusaders and colonists lived. The first official crusade bull for North East Europe was issued by Pope Eugenius III in 1147. The strongest military order during the centuries of the Northern Crusades was the Teutonic Knights. They were founded in 1190, and became a powerful political and military force in Prussia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Livonia.
The Danes, Swedes, Russians, and Knights all were interested in expanding their territorial borders and in controlling trade rights in the Baltic region, which happened to coincide with the Church’s desire to converting the pagan natives. The political and military struggles for supremacy in the Baltic lasted for three hundred years, as Grand Masters, kings, nobles, and princes all tried to outmaneuver each other and dominate the region. Christiansen seems to have no problem with admitting that much of the so called crusader activity in the region was really much more economically driven. Sure, the Teutonic Knights said they were there to convert the heathen, but they really didn’t seem to mind if they all stayed pagan. It gave them a reason to exist, and a justified reason to fight. The crusading mindset lasted so long through a combination of local enthusiasm, occasional appeals to Rome for help, and by the grant of perpetual warfare given to the Teutonic Knights.
The Northern Crusades provides a very readable overview of the crusades in the Baltic. The political and religious complexities of the region are clearly described and the reader comes away with a very good understanding of the key events. Many kingdoms wanted to rule the frontier lands and they all provided themselves with justifications for conquest. The crusading mindset provided the justification for the formation of the Teutonic Knights. Their actions were important to the dynamics of the Baltic region and they had a hand in the events that occurred. Christiansen shows the Knights as a central piece of the Northern Crusades.
The Teutonic Knights came under criticism from Poland. They had stolen land, and were currently fighting fellow Christians, since most of the Baltic area had been nominally converted. They were also pretty keen on fighting Russians, since they were schismatics, but that didn’t seem to qualify as a crusade. When the Northern Crusades came to an end and the Teutonic Knights were secularized the Baltic region was a changed place. “The Baltic was still a Catholic lake in 1500, and the Baltic states were thoroughly integrated members of the Catholic family, two generations after the crusades had ended.”
November 1, 2016
_The Northern Crusades_ by Eric Christiansen is an attempt to shed light on a relatively poorly known aspect of European medieval and early modern history, that of the Northern Crusades. Less well known than the Spanish Crusade and certainly less known to the average non-specialist reader than the Crusades in the Middle East, the Northern Crusades of the Baltic Sea region can essentially be summed up as the struggles of Scandinavian rulers - chiefly those of Denmark and Sweden - and German military monks (the Teutonic Knights) to conquer and settle non-Christian Finland, Estonia, and Prussia before coming into conflict with the considerably more powerful and organized eastern empires of Orthodox Novgorod and pagan Lithuania (and later Catholic Poland). The period lasted roughly from 1147 (the launch of the First Northern Crusade, against the Baltic Slavs) to at least as far as the book is concerned 1562 (the partition and secularization of Livonia, ending the rule of the Teutonic Knights there, their last outpost).
Though less celebrated than the other crusades, the Northern Crusades were far more successful. Initially many areas were only thinly Christian after their conquest, as for centuries in many regions for instance Teutonic outposts existed like "knots in a net," a net that was full of holes and encompassed areas where "alien subjects lived unredeemed lives within sight of the steeple" and castle, thin scraps of Christian settlement squeezed between the coast and primeval forest, though in the end vast areas became and remain Christian to this day. In stark contrast to the efforts of the Crusaders in the Middle East, the Order and the Scandinavians were able to establish lasting settlements in formerly very hostile areas in the wilderness, lands with difficult terrain, fearsome winter weather, impassable roads (if they existed), and unwelcoming natives. The Order for example established over ninety towns and a thousand villages in Prussia and Livonia. Sweden was able in the course of two centuries to transform Finland from a mainly non-Christian, illiterate, and ungoverned world into a society recognizable as European and Catholic. Even though these outside powers lost the lands that they colonized, they still held them much longer than the Crusaders held the lands of the Middle East (Denmark held on in Estonia for more than a century, the Teutonic Order kept Prussia and Livonia for nearly 300 years, and Sweden remained in Finland for nearly 600 years).
In this book Christiansen sought to show what the world of north-east Europe was like before the Crusades, chronicle the history of the Crusades themselves, detail a little about the personalities involved, detail in particular the history, role, goals, and organization of the Teutonic Knights, the reasons for the Crusades, and the theological debates and political struggles associated with the Northern Crusades as well as the concept of crusade in and of itself. I found the book interesting and fairly well written though a bit dry and sometimes difficult going in parts. I was hindered a little by the many very unfamiliar place names and had to reference many times one or more of the six maps at the beginning of the book, though by the end of the book several places I had once never heard of were quite familiar.
Particularly striking to me in the book was though that particularly in the early centuries the religious aspect of the Northern Crusade was important, in the end the wars were basically examples of imperialism and fought for temporal reasons, for resources and for geopolitical considerations. Though Christiansen cautioned in his concluding chapter that one should not view the wars as fought for "matters of interest disguised as matters of conscience," and indeed until close to the end the religious pull of the Northern Crusade drew in outside forces, whole retinues of warriors or individual knights, absolutely vital to the survival of in particular the Teutonic Knights, it is obvious that religious considerations were but one of many for those who fought. Often political control could only be established by changing the religious affiliation of the inhabitants, owing to the general lack of any other shared cultural identity between ruler and ruled; what type of Christianity prevailed in a region (Latin or Greek) was a way of staking political claims (important in the continuing struggle in later centuries between the Latin Crusade lands and Orthodox Novgorod). In Sweden new lands gained in Finland meant more people paying the tithe (good for the Swedish church and for the Pope in Rome to fund his various goals in Italy) and more fiefs and offices for the more adventurous of the lesser nobility. The Danes went to war in the 1100s as much or more to stop Slavic piracy and slave raids than anything else. The rich fur, feather, wax, amber, fish, whale, and seal resources of the Baltic Sea region were highly sought after by many in northern Europe; the "fur-clad, pickled-herring eaters lolling on the feather-beds" of Western Europe (mainly those of the Hanseatic League) were one of the chief beneficiaries of the Northern Crusades. The Teutonic Knights towards the end of their existence in Prussia were often more concerned with ruling than with crusading and many were hardly monastic, with new ordinances forbidding them to hoard money, keep packs of hounds, to use private seals, to wear fine clothing, and otherwise act as traditional feudal lords appear to have often been ignored.
A very interesting aspect of the book was as noted the discussion of the nature and organization of the Teutonic Order. Christiansen described its existence as both a military organization and a monastic order. From the Order's beginning to near its end there was a continual debate about whether or not one could be a monk and a warrior, if Christianity could be spread at the point of a sword, what the nature of a just war is, and if even the original papal orders establishing the Order were legally or spiritually correct.
Though less celebrated than the other crusades, the Northern Crusades were far more successful. Initially many areas were only thinly Christian after their conquest, as for centuries in many regions for instance Teutonic outposts existed like "knots in a net," a net that was full of holes and encompassed areas where "alien subjects lived unredeemed lives within sight of the steeple" and castle, thin scraps of Christian settlement squeezed between the coast and primeval forest, though in the end vast areas became and remain Christian to this day. In stark contrast to the efforts of the Crusaders in the Middle East, the Order and the Scandinavians were able to establish lasting settlements in formerly very hostile areas in the wilderness, lands with difficult terrain, fearsome winter weather, impassable roads (if they existed), and unwelcoming natives. The Order for example established over ninety towns and a thousand villages in Prussia and Livonia. Sweden was able in the course of two centuries to transform Finland from a mainly non-Christian, illiterate, and ungoverned world into a society recognizable as European and Catholic. Even though these outside powers lost the lands that they colonized, they still held them much longer than the Crusaders held the lands of the Middle East (Denmark held on in Estonia for more than a century, the Teutonic Order kept Prussia and Livonia for nearly 300 years, and Sweden remained in Finland for nearly 600 years).
In this book Christiansen sought to show what the world of north-east Europe was like before the Crusades, chronicle the history of the Crusades themselves, detail a little about the personalities involved, detail in particular the history, role, goals, and organization of the Teutonic Knights, the reasons for the Crusades, and the theological debates and political struggles associated with the Northern Crusades as well as the concept of crusade in and of itself. I found the book interesting and fairly well written though a bit dry and sometimes difficult going in parts. I was hindered a little by the many very unfamiliar place names and had to reference many times one or more of the six maps at the beginning of the book, though by the end of the book several places I had once never heard of were quite familiar.
Particularly striking to me in the book was though that particularly in the early centuries the religious aspect of the Northern Crusade was important, in the end the wars were basically examples of imperialism and fought for temporal reasons, for resources and for geopolitical considerations. Though Christiansen cautioned in his concluding chapter that one should not view the wars as fought for "matters of interest disguised as matters of conscience," and indeed until close to the end the religious pull of the Northern Crusade drew in outside forces, whole retinues of warriors or individual knights, absolutely vital to the survival of in particular the Teutonic Knights, it is obvious that religious considerations were but one of many for those who fought. Often political control could only be established by changing the religious affiliation of the inhabitants, owing to the general lack of any other shared cultural identity between ruler and ruled; what type of Christianity prevailed in a region (Latin or Greek) was a way of staking political claims (important in the continuing struggle in later centuries between the Latin Crusade lands and Orthodox Novgorod). In Sweden new lands gained in Finland meant more people paying the tithe (good for the Swedish church and for the Pope in Rome to fund his various goals in Italy) and more fiefs and offices for the more adventurous of the lesser nobility. The Danes went to war in the 1100s as much or more to stop Slavic piracy and slave raids than anything else. The rich fur, feather, wax, amber, fish, whale, and seal resources of the Baltic Sea region were highly sought after by many in northern Europe; the "fur-clad, pickled-herring eaters lolling on the feather-beds" of Western Europe (mainly those of the Hanseatic League) were one of the chief beneficiaries of the Northern Crusades. The Teutonic Knights towards the end of their existence in Prussia were often more concerned with ruling than with crusading and many were hardly monastic, with new ordinances forbidding them to hoard money, keep packs of hounds, to use private seals, to wear fine clothing, and otherwise act as traditional feudal lords appear to have often been ignored.
A very interesting aspect of the book was as noted the discussion of the nature and organization of the Teutonic Order. Christiansen described its existence as both a military organization and a monastic order. From the Order's beginning to near its end there was a continual debate about whether or not one could be a monk and a warrior, if Christianity could be spread at the point of a sword, what the nature of a just war is, and if even the original papal orders establishing the Order were legally or spiritually correct.
October 11, 2019
Se siete appassionati sia di Medioevo che dei paesi Baltici questo libro fa per voi, invece se siete semplici appassionati di Medioevo ma siete abbastanza indifferenti al mondo Baltico, allora questo libro vi piacerà a metà, perchè qualche passaggio potrebbe risultarvi pesante in quanto richiede una buona conoscenza della geografia di quei luoghi.
Premesso questo, vale comunque la pena leggerlo perchè offre uno sguardo su un pezzo di storia un po’ bistrattato, ovvero su come quella parte di nord-est d’europa sia stata “occidentalizzata” per merito o per colpa della cristianità latina e come le motivazioni religiose si siano fuse con gli interessi dei potentati locali, a volte sfruttandoli, altre volte venendo sfruttata e altre volte perseguendo obiettivi comuni.
Uno dei punti certamente più importanti di questo libro è il ruolo enorme giocato dagli ordini religiosi militari, in particolar modo dell’ordine Teutonico, un ordine che come molti altri si rifaceva al modello Templare di monaci-guerrieri e che per molti secoli ha giocato in quella parte di mondo un ruolo fondamentale non solo dal punto di vista militare ma anche politico divenendo l’ago della bilancia nelle guerre interne fra i vari potentati locali oltre che il grande motore delle crociate contro i pagani.
Altra cosa molto interessante che esce dal libro è come i vari pensatori della chiesa tentassero di giustificare o non giustificare dal punto di vista non solo teologico ma anche legale l’esistenza di questi ordini monastici-militari e delle varie azioni tra cui queste crociate del nord contro i pagani che essi guidavano.
Un ultima considerazione, il termine “crociate” oggi viene spesso usato in modo ideologico per attaccare la chiesa, ma secondo me libri come questi, per apprezarli appieno vanno letti senza pregiudizi ideologici e senza il secondo fine di esprimere facili e anche un po’ banali giudizi morali sul cristianesimo ma vanno letti immergendosi nella mentalità del tempo, capendo che quel mondo funzionava e ragionava in quel modo e che quelle azioni giuste o sbagliate che fosserò, erano figlie del loro tempo.
Inoltre non sapremo mai cosa sarebbero stati quei popoli e quelle culture pagane senza la colonizzazione cristiana, ma quello che sappiamo per certo è che se oggi riconosciamo anche quella parte di mondo come parte dell’europa è stato anche e soppratutto per gli eventi narrati in questo libro.
Premesso questo, vale comunque la pena leggerlo perchè offre uno sguardo su un pezzo di storia un po’ bistrattato, ovvero su come quella parte di nord-est d’europa sia stata “occidentalizzata” per merito o per colpa della cristianità latina e come le motivazioni religiose si siano fuse con gli interessi dei potentati locali, a volte sfruttandoli, altre volte venendo sfruttata e altre volte perseguendo obiettivi comuni.
Uno dei punti certamente più importanti di questo libro è il ruolo enorme giocato dagli ordini religiosi militari, in particolar modo dell’ordine Teutonico, un ordine che come molti altri si rifaceva al modello Templare di monaci-guerrieri e che per molti secoli ha giocato in quella parte di mondo un ruolo fondamentale non solo dal punto di vista militare ma anche politico divenendo l’ago della bilancia nelle guerre interne fra i vari potentati locali oltre che il grande motore delle crociate contro i pagani.
Altra cosa molto interessante che esce dal libro è come i vari pensatori della chiesa tentassero di giustificare o non giustificare dal punto di vista non solo teologico ma anche legale l’esistenza di questi ordini monastici-militari e delle varie azioni tra cui queste crociate del nord contro i pagani che essi guidavano.
Un ultima considerazione, il termine “crociate” oggi viene spesso usato in modo ideologico per attaccare la chiesa, ma secondo me libri come questi, per apprezarli appieno vanno letti senza pregiudizi ideologici e senza il secondo fine di esprimere facili e anche un po’ banali giudizi morali sul cristianesimo ma vanno letti immergendosi nella mentalità del tempo, capendo che quel mondo funzionava e ragionava in quel modo e che quelle azioni giuste o sbagliate che fosserò, erano figlie del loro tempo.
Inoltre non sapremo mai cosa sarebbero stati quei popoli e quelle culture pagane senza la colonizzazione cristiana, ma quello che sappiamo per certo è che se oggi riconosciamo anche quella parte di mondo come parte dell’europa è stato anche e soppratutto per gli eventi narrati in questo libro.
June 27, 2021
The crusades: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin battling across the sands of Palestine as Christendom and the Islamic World clash over faith and earthly power, the crusader knights arrayed against the Mamelukes of Egypt against the backdrop of the holiest sites for three of the world’s largest religions.
But the political machinations that drove the crusaders eastwards also sent them to the far north, to the edges of Europe and the boundaries of the Catholic world: the Baltic Sea and the pagan tribes living there, the frontiers of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Northern Crusades never seemed to capture the imagination as the ones to the Holy Land but were just as bloody, just as full of unique characters and daring battles as their eastern counterparts. Inspired by the Pope’s call to expand earthly and heavenly power in the northeast of Europe, the Northern Crusades against the Samogatians, the Lithuanians, the Finns and Estonians, the Baltic tribes in Old Prussia. These crusades were far more successful than the ones in the Near East, establishing crusader states held by the Teutonic Knights and Livonian Order for over three hundred years.
Erik Christiansen’s updated work on the Northern Crusades remains one of the best scholarly and accessible works on the whole subject, despite being first published in the 1980s and having much scholarship be unaccessible owing to the Cold War. He comprehensively charts the history of the region and its wars, starting with a outline of the geography and cultures of the area before following the Knights as they fought to bring Catholicism and the earthly power of the church to the last bastion of paganism in Europe before turning their attention to Russia and the Eastern Churches.
Although the cast of historical figures, especially the grand masters and Lithuanian kings, can be a little overwhelming, Christiansen ensures that the reader doesn’t become bogged down in the names of the past, instead briskly charting the history of the Terra Mariana, but never feeling lacking in detail. In spite of its age, it is still the best treatment of the Northern Crusades, not just militarily but also from a political, religious, and economic perspective.
But the political machinations that drove the crusaders eastwards also sent them to the far north, to the edges of Europe and the boundaries of the Catholic world: the Baltic Sea and the pagan tribes living there, the frontiers of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Northern Crusades never seemed to capture the imagination as the ones to the Holy Land but were just as bloody, just as full of unique characters and daring battles as their eastern counterparts. Inspired by the Pope’s call to expand earthly and heavenly power in the northeast of Europe, the Northern Crusades against the Samogatians, the Lithuanians, the Finns and Estonians, the Baltic tribes in Old Prussia. These crusades were far more successful than the ones in the Near East, establishing crusader states held by the Teutonic Knights and Livonian Order for over three hundred years.
Erik Christiansen’s updated work on the Northern Crusades remains one of the best scholarly and accessible works on the whole subject, despite being first published in the 1980s and having much scholarship be unaccessible owing to the Cold War. He comprehensively charts the history of the region and its wars, starting with a outline of the geography and cultures of the area before following the Knights as they fought to bring Catholicism and the earthly power of the church to the last bastion of paganism in Europe before turning their attention to Russia and the Eastern Churches.
Although the cast of historical figures, especially the grand masters and Lithuanian kings, can be a little overwhelming, Christiansen ensures that the reader doesn’t become bogged down in the names of the past, instead briskly charting the history of the Terra Mariana, but never feeling lacking in detail. In spite of its age, it is still the best treatment of the Northern Crusades, not just militarily but also from a political, religious, and economic perspective.
June 12, 2008
This is one of the best, and one of the only books in English, on the Northern Crusades. Consequently, it has gone through several reprints. The book reads like a narrative of battles with little interpretation or analysis. It is very informative for cursory interest.
December 15, 2013
There seems to be an inexplicable lack of English language books on Baltic history in the middle ages. I was trying to find a book that explained the origin and evolution of the Teutonic Knights and this book was one of the few I came across. Unfortunately, this book fails to impress. It’s a mish-mashed jumble of names, dates, and places with little in the way of a coherent narrative or thesis - although part of the problem might be the complex nature of the region itself. Certainly not a good introductory book.
The thesis of this book is that the Northern Crusades played an important role in the “Latinization” of the Baltic and in bringing Scandinavia into the European fold. The book covers many of the “Orders” of knights that were involved in the history of the region and discusses differences between the Northern Crusades and the Middle Eastern crusades (basically the Northern Crusades were the “poor man’s” version of a crusade and were mostly about converting pagans to Christianity rather than reclaiming the Holy Land from Muslim occupiers). The book also covers some of the many abuses that the Teutonic Knights inflicted on local populations. If nothing else, this book is a good look at some of the perils of organized religion.
Some quotes below:
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The Northern crusades were less spectacular, and much less expensive, but the changes they helped to bring about lasted for much longer, and have not altogether disappeared today. The southern coast of the Baltic is still German, as far as the Oder; and it is not sixty years since the Estonians and Balts lost the last traces of their German ascendancy and fell under a new one. Western forms of Christianity survive in all the coastlands opposite Scandinavia, and the Finns remain wedded to Western institutions and tolerant of their Swedish-speaking minority. The reborn republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania look west for support and sympathy. For seven centuries these east-Baltic countries were colonial societies, bearing the mark left by their medieval conquerors whatever outside power tried to annex or change them. If ever the crusades had any lasting effect, it was here, and in Spain.
Secondly, the Northern crusades were a link between this region and Western Europe; they helped bring it into a common ‘Latin’ civilization.
‘Sea-power’ is the wrong term. It has come to mean the hegemony that depends on the naval power of a state; but what concerned the medieval North was more like ship- or boat-power, the ability of any group, from an individual to an association of traders or a king, to achieve a variety of ends through ownership or control of the appropriate type of craft. At no time could a fleet of big warships dominate the whole range of Northern waterways; at most they could patrol certain areas, routes and harbours, such as when Canute the Great and Valdemar the Great policed the waters of Denmark, but such periods of limited sea-power were exceptional. At most times, pirates, levy-ships, slavers, traders, fishers and river transports carried on their various businesses in a state of wary co-existence, with battles, pursuits and deals recurring as occasion served. In the 1070s the king of Denmark had an arrangement with the pirates who infested the Great Belt: they robbed, he took a cut and looked the other way. At the turn of the fourteenth century things were not much better: the queen of Denmark waged open war with an association of pirates based on the north German coast, the Vitalienbrüder, but Danish, Swedish and Mecklenburg landowners connived at their robberies and bought and sold with them. Nobody could rule the waves when nobody could rule more than a share of the coasts and rivers that hemmed them in so closely.
Nature thus presented certain obstacles to the intruder into this world. They were not insuperable; but they needed labour and organization to be overcome, and in the early twelfth century no outside invader or settler had been able to secure a permanent foothold for six hundred years. Ever since Roman times, the Baltic region had been an exporter rather than an importer of men.
This apparent inconclusiveness of Northern wars was partly owing to the limited aims of the men who fought them. Rulers were content with a show of submission and the payment of tribute; if that was not obtained, they would burn and loot and withdraw, and their poets would assure them that they had achieved a great victory. They were not trying to change political geography.
Between 1150 and 1200, Denmark, Sweden, Saxony over the Elbe, and the Wendish lands underwent the shock of monastic colonization, which had been spread over centuries in Western and Mediterranean Europe, and absorbed in a short period much of the civilization that came with it: new ways of praying, educating, reasoning, building and writing.
And throughout the first century of their existence, to 1291, the knight-brothers of the Teutonic Order remained a copy of the Templars and were dedicated primarily to the defence and advancement of the Latin colonies of the Near East.
The national exclusiveness was not insisted on from the beginning. The Sword-Brothers, Knights of Dobzryn and Teutonic Knights just happened to be three among many small bands of superfluous German warriors looking for employment outside Germany, like the Saxons who served the kings of Denmark, Hungary and Bohemia, and the Polish and Pomeranian dukes.
No similar groups developed in Scandinavia, because in fighting the Northern pagans Scandinavian warriors were enlisted by their kings, and could not embark on independent state-building. Those who were attracted to military monasticism were provided with an outlet by the Hospitallers, who were already established in Denmark and Sweden before the Teutonic Order went to the North.
The Spanish and Portuguese military Orders which developed out of earlier fraternities of knights, priests and townsmen in the period 1150–1220, were similar to the Teutonic Order in being committed to a local crusade against the infidel, and in their nationally biased recruitment, but very different in other ways. They were founded because Spanish kingdoms and churches were already irretrievably committed to a Holy War; the Teutonic Order was developed because most German princes were not. Thus the Spanish Orders served their kings and bishops; the Teutonic Knights attempted to make rulers and prelates serve the crusade. Their original purpose was to use Germans to extend Christendom, not to expand Germany.
During the thirteenth century, the east Baltic world described in chapter I was transformed by military conquest. First, the Livs, Letts and Estonians, then the Prussians and the Finns, underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes dispossession or extermination by groups of Germans, Danes and Swedes. Four new countries were born: the ‘dominions’ of Livonia and Prussia, and the ‘duchies’ of Estonia and Finland, all firmly anchored to Latin Christendom and open, to a greater extent than ever before, to the influx of people, ideas, trade and technical innovations from the West.
Success in battle is one proof of his goodness, but he bestows it capriciously. What God likes best is martyrdom, and, next to martyrdom, the killing of heathen men, women and children, the burning of their houses, the lamentations of the bereaved.
Nevertheless, while the going was good, the popes had been able to establish three of the institutions that shaped the Baltic world for the future: the crusade against the heathen, the crusade against the Russians, and the monastic crusading states. Round that tideless sea lay the stranded flotsam of papal ideology – partly dried, partly rotting, and partly fertile.
It was only after von Kniprode had managed to win control of the Niemen up to the confluence of Kaunas that one side gained a definite advantage, and could begin continuous raiding with a view to winning and holding the homelands of the other; and even then the advantage was to some extent counterbalanced by the introduction of cannon. The process took so long – ninety-three years to advance from Ragnit to Kaunas, a distance of seventy-five miles as the crow flies – because the armies were wearing themselves out on the terrain, rather than annihilating each other, and were constantly drawing strength from expanding economies a long way behind the front.
While the Novgorodian, Swedish and Norwegian realms were prime consumers of sub-Arctic produce, and were governed by prosperous elites most of whose wealth was securely based on arable farming, they were not at the top of the hierarchy of exploiters. By 1300 all three were to some extent dependent for their economic survival on the goodwill of the Hansa, the association of German traders based on the cities of northern Germany and the south-east Baltic, which had gained a privileged position – in Norway a monopoly – as importer and exporter of the main international commodities. Hanseatic merchants were the essential middlemen between the North and the consumers of England, France, Flanders and Germany, and in the course of the fourteenth century they were able to safeguard their privileges by naval and military action. As lords of the Baltic trade-route, they were courted by Russians and Swedes, and resisted in vain by the kings of Norway and Denmark; they alone had the organization, the resources and the credit to bring the great trading-areas together.
The conquerors of the eastern Baltic lands tried to reorganize the traditional patterns of society they found there. They wanted to make them more ‘Christian’ – that is, either more like the home countries, or more like an ideal Catholic model, and they wanted to make them manageable. They were all guided by the normal west European assumptions of the time, but they had to make concessions to pre-existing social patterns and to a variety of local difficulties: harsher climates, thinner populations, poorer soils, precarious economies and tenuous communications.
It was not the spiritual decadence of the Order, or the decline of the crusading ideal, that put an end to the rule of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. The subsequent reform of the German bailiwicks under Grand-Master Kronberg, and the part played by the Knights in the Habsburg offensives against the Protestants and the Turks indicate that armed monks still had a place in European politics long after 1525, and the survival of the Order in Livonia until 1562 proves that the Baltic convents still had life in them. It was the failure of the Prussian knight-brothers to come to a satisfactory political settlement with the Polish kingdom that put an end to the old Prussian system. By putting their trust in German princes, the Knights lost the power to preserve a monastic affiliation that was no longer essential to the military defence of the country and had become a contentious issue in the religious ferment of the 1520s. ‘It happened with us lords of Prussia, as it happened with the frogs who took a stork as their king’ – thus Brother Philip von Kreutz wrote a Relation of the whole ‘dirty deal’, as he called it. ‘Now all the estates had done their homage, and I saw that there was no means by which the dirty deal could be changed, I did homage too, in order to save my property thereby, for I had a large sum of money in my employment [he was commander of Insterburg], more than any other Teutonic lord. It is interesting that, in the debate that accompanied the dissolution of the Prussian houses, the question of the morality of the crusade played little part: both the Teutonic Knights and their enemies preferred to argue about the morality of monasticism.
In this survey, the Northern crusades have been treated as the result of a change in outlook which took place among the Scandinavian and German peoples during the twelfth century. Their rulers began looking at their eastern neighbours in a new and religious light, similar to the light in which other Europeans had already come to view the Muslims of Palestine and Spain. Their wars took on a new meaning, and led to unprecedented results. And these results – the complex of innovations which made up the Latinized east Baltic – confirmed and elaborated the outlook from which they sprang. For most of the Middle Ages, a powerful body of Catholic opinion saw the Baltic provinces as a Christian frontier held by armies of the true faith against a hostile outer world of heathendom and schism.
From this point of view, the Northern crusades began as a consequence of the closer involvement of the Baltic world with the civilization of Latin Christendom in the twelfth century. During this period the idea of the Holy War was grafted onto Baltic affairs to meet a need felt by those who wanted to conquer or convert the heathen coastlands, and who had been schooled in or touched by the Jerusalem crusade.
Sweden ceased to play a part in this movement after the dying out of the Folkung dynasty in the 1360s and the incorporation of the kingdom into Queen Margaret’s Scandinavian Union. The defining of the Russo-Swedish frontier continued to be a cause of friction under the Union, and occasionally of concern to the papacy, but generated no more crusades. When a Russian war broke out again in the 1490s, the cause of Catholicism was invoked, but in vain.
The Teutonic Order was outmanoeuvred in Prussia by the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, and during the fifteenth century found it increasingly difficult to sustain the crusade tradition in this area, owing to the fact that the Turk had replaced the Lithuanian as the leading non-Catholic power confronting Eastern Europe.
The thesis of this book is that the Northern Crusades played an important role in the “Latinization” of the Baltic and in bringing Scandinavia into the European fold. The book covers many of the “Orders” of knights that were involved in the history of the region and discusses differences between the Northern Crusades and the Middle Eastern crusades (basically the Northern Crusades were the “poor man’s” version of a crusade and were mostly about converting pagans to Christianity rather than reclaiming the Holy Land from Muslim occupiers). The book also covers some of the many abuses that the Teutonic Knights inflicted on local populations. If nothing else, this book is a good look at some of the perils of organized religion.
Some quotes below:
####################
The Northern crusades were less spectacular, and much less expensive, but the changes they helped to bring about lasted for much longer, and have not altogether disappeared today. The southern coast of the Baltic is still German, as far as the Oder; and it is not sixty years since the Estonians and Balts lost the last traces of their German ascendancy and fell under a new one. Western forms of Christianity survive in all the coastlands opposite Scandinavia, and the Finns remain wedded to Western institutions and tolerant of their Swedish-speaking minority. The reborn republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania look west for support and sympathy. For seven centuries these east-Baltic countries were colonial societies, bearing the mark left by their medieval conquerors whatever outside power tried to annex or change them. If ever the crusades had any lasting effect, it was here, and in Spain.
Secondly, the Northern crusades were a link between this region and Western Europe; they helped bring it into a common ‘Latin’ civilization.
‘Sea-power’ is the wrong term. It has come to mean the hegemony that depends on the naval power of a state; but what concerned the medieval North was more like ship- or boat-power, the ability of any group, from an individual to an association of traders or a king, to achieve a variety of ends through ownership or control of the appropriate type of craft. At no time could a fleet of big warships dominate the whole range of Northern waterways; at most they could patrol certain areas, routes and harbours, such as when Canute the Great and Valdemar the Great policed the waters of Denmark, but such periods of limited sea-power were exceptional. At most times, pirates, levy-ships, slavers, traders, fishers and river transports carried on their various businesses in a state of wary co-existence, with battles, pursuits and deals recurring as occasion served. In the 1070s the king of Denmark had an arrangement with the pirates who infested the Great Belt: they robbed, he took a cut and looked the other way. At the turn of the fourteenth century things were not much better: the queen of Denmark waged open war with an association of pirates based on the north German coast, the Vitalienbrüder, but Danish, Swedish and Mecklenburg landowners connived at their robberies and bought and sold with them. Nobody could rule the waves when nobody could rule more than a share of the coasts and rivers that hemmed them in so closely.
Nature thus presented certain obstacles to the intruder into this world. They were not insuperable; but they needed labour and organization to be overcome, and in the early twelfth century no outside invader or settler had been able to secure a permanent foothold for six hundred years. Ever since Roman times, the Baltic region had been an exporter rather than an importer of men.
This apparent inconclusiveness of Northern wars was partly owing to the limited aims of the men who fought them. Rulers were content with a show of submission and the payment of tribute; if that was not obtained, they would burn and loot and withdraw, and their poets would assure them that they had achieved a great victory. They were not trying to change political geography.
Between 1150 and 1200, Denmark, Sweden, Saxony over the Elbe, and the Wendish lands underwent the shock of monastic colonization, which had been spread over centuries in Western and Mediterranean Europe, and absorbed in a short period much of the civilization that came with it: new ways of praying, educating, reasoning, building and writing.
And throughout the first century of their existence, to 1291, the knight-brothers of the Teutonic Order remained a copy of the Templars and were dedicated primarily to the defence and advancement of the Latin colonies of the Near East.
The national exclusiveness was not insisted on from the beginning. The Sword-Brothers, Knights of Dobzryn and Teutonic Knights just happened to be three among many small bands of superfluous German warriors looking for employment outside Germany, like the Saxons who served the kings of Denmark, Hungary and Bohemia, and the Polish and Pomeranian dukes.
No similar groups developed in Scandinavia, because in fighting the Northern pagans Scandinavian warriors were enlisted by their kings, and could not embark on independent state-building. Those who were attracted to military monasticism were provided with an outlet by the Hospitallers, who were already established in Denmark and Sweden before the Teutonic Order went to the North.
The Spanish and Portuguese military Orders which developed out of earlier fraternities of knights, priests and townsmen in the period 1150–1220, were similar to the Teutonic Order in being committed to a local crusade against the infidel, and in their nationally biased recruitment, but very different in other ways. They were founded because Spanish kingdoms and churches were already irretrievably committed to a Holy War; the Teutonic Order was developed because most German princes were not. Thus the Spanish Orders served their kings and bishops; the Teutonic Knights attempted to make rulers and prelates serve the crusade. Their original purpose was to use Germans to extend Christendom, not to expand Germany.
During the thirteenth century, the east Baltic world described in chapter I was transformed by military conquest. First, the Livs, Letts and Estonians, then the Prussians and the Finns, underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes dispossession or extermination by groups of Germans, Danes and Swedes. Four new countries were born: the ‘dominions’ of Livonia and Prussia, and the ‘duchies’ of Estonia and Finland, all firmly anchored to Latin Christendom and open, to a greater extent than ever before, to the influx of people, ideas, trade and technical innovations from the West.
Success in battle is one proof of his goodness, but he bestows it capriciously. What God likes best is martyrdom, and, next to martyrdom, the killing of heathen men, women and children, the burning of their houses, the lamentations of the bereaved.
Nevertheless, while the going was good, the popes had been able to establish three of the institutions that shaped the Baltic world for the future: the crusade against the heathen, the crusade against the Russians, and the monastic crusading states. Round that tideless sea lay the stranded flotsam of papal ideology – partly dried, partly rotting, and partly fertile.
It was only after von Kniprode had managed to win control of the Niemen up to the confluence of Kaunas that one side gained a definite advantage, and could begin continuous raiding with a view to winning and holding the homelands of the other; and even then the advantage was to some extent counterbalanced by the introduction of cannon. The process took so long – ninety-three years to advance from Ragnit to Kaunas, a distance of seventy-five miles as the crow flies – because the armies were wearing themselves out on the terrain, rather than annihilating each other, and were constantly drawing strength from expanding economies a long way behind the front.
While the Novgorodian, Swedish and Norwegian realms were prime consumers of sub-Arctic produce, and were governed by prosperous elites most of whose wealth was securely based on arable farming, they were not at the top of the hierarchy of exploiters. By 1300 all three were to some extent dependent for their economic survival on the goodwill of the Hansa, the association of German traders based on the cities of northern Germany and the south-east Baltic, which had gained a privileged position – in Norway a monopoly – as importer and exporter of the main international commodities. Hanseatic merchants were the essential middlemen between the North and the consumers of England, France, Flanders and Germany, and in the course of the fourteenth century they were able to safeguard their privileges by naval and military action. As lords of the Baltic trade-route, they were courted by Russians and Swedes, and resisted in vain by the kings of Norway and Denmark; they alone had the organization, the resources and the credit to bring the great trading-areas together.
The conquerors of the eastern Baltic lands tried to reorganize the traditional patterns of society they found there. They wanted to make them more ‘Christian’ – that is, either more like the home countries, or more like an ideal Catholic model, and they wanted to make them manageable. They were all guided by the normal west European assumptions of the time, but they had to make concessions to pre-existing social patterns and to a variety of local difficulties: harsher climates, thinner populations, poorer soils, precarious economies and tenuous communications.
It was not the spiritual decadence of the Order, or the decline of the crusading ideal, that put an end to the rule of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. The subsequent reform of the German bailiwicks under Grand-Master Kronberg, and the part played by the Knights in the Habsburg offensives against the Protestants and the Turks indicate that armed monks still had a place in European politics long after 1525, and the survival of the Order in Livonia until 1562 proves that the Baltic convents still had life in them. It was the failure of the Prussian knight-brothers to come to a satisfactory political settlement with the Polish kingdom that put an end to the old Prussian system. By putting their trust in German princes, the Knights lost the power to preserve a monastic affiliation that was no longer essential to the military defence of the country and had become a contentious issue in the religious ferment of the 1520s. ‘It happened with us lords of Prussia, as it happened with the frogs who took a stork as their king’ – thus Brother Philip von Kreutz wrote a Relation of the whole ‘dirty deal’, as he called it. ‘Now all the estates had done their homage, and I saw that there was no means by which the dirty deal could be changed, I did homage too, in order to save my property thereby, for I had a large sum of money in my employment [he was commander of Insterburg], more than any other Teutonic lord. It is interesting that, in the debate that accompanied the dissolution of the Prussian houses, the question of the morality of the crusade played little part: both the Teutonic Knights and their enemies preferred to argue about the morality of monasticism.
In this survey, the Northern crusades have been treated as the result of a change in outlook which took place among the Scandinavian and German peoples during the twelfth century. Their rulers began looking at their eastern neighbours in a new and religious light, similar to the light in which other Europeans had already come to view the Muslims of Palestine and Spain. Their wars took on a new meaning, and led to unprecedented results. And these results – the complex of innovations which made up the Latinized east Baltic – confirmed and elaborated the outlook from which they sprang. For most of the Middle Ages, a powerful body of Catholic opinion saw the Baltic provinces as a Christian frontier held by armies of the true faith against a hostile outer world of heathendom and schism.
From this point of view, the Northern crusades began as a consequence of the closer involvement of the Baltic world with the civilization of Latin Christendom in the twelfth century. During this period the idea of the Holy War was grafted onto Baltic affairs to meet a need felt by those who wanted to conquer or convert the heathen coastlands, and who had been schooled in or touched by the Jerusalem crusade.
Sweden ceased to play a part in this movement after the dying out of the Folkung dynasty in the 1360s and the incorporation of the kingdom into Queen Margaret’s Scandinavian Union. The defining of the Russo-Swedish frontier continued to be a cause of friction under the Union, and occasionally of concern to the papacy, but generated no more crusades. When a Russian war broke out again in the 1490s, the cause of Catholicism was invoked, but in vain.
The Teutonic Order was outmanoeuvred in Prussia by the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, and during the fifteenth century found it increasingly difficult to sustain the crusade tradition in this area, owing to the fact that the Turk had replaced the Lithuanian as the leading non-Catholic power confronting Eastern Europe.
September 27, 2025
Decent though dated overview of the northern crusades, this book covers the lesser known crusades - the northern ones - including the Wends, Prussia, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, and Novgorod. Brief sketches of Denmark and Sweden are provided as well as an overview of the armed orders, particularly the Teutonic Knights. The importance of trade and crusading ideology are both covered, with the Hanseatic League present in the background. The book takes us up to the early 1500s, the time of the rise of Muscovy, Lithuania-Poland, and the Kalmar Union. Covering a lot of ground, this book feels all too short but it's a good intro nonetheless.
March 29, 2019
Usually, when we talk about crusades we tend to think about the crusades in Palestine for the conquest of Jerusalem. Then, we think about the Albigensian crusade or the Reconquista. Others might come to mind. However, we rarely think that another set or crusades occurred in Eastern Europe. For many reasons, they do not enjoy the same publicity as its counterparts. Hence, this book goes a long way to provide a comprehensive and thorough account of the crusades that led to the conversion to Christian faith of the eastern European peoples. The author takes the reader in a trip through Europe with papal bulls initiating holy wars in the East, spearheaded by German princes, monastic orders, and Scandinavian kings. It tells the primordial role played by the Teutonic Order and helps explain how regions such as Prussia, the current Baltic States and Poland, were settled by many Germans whose descendants are still present 700 years later. We also get an in depth view of the Teutonic Order's management of its lands and how it was organized. We also understand how it progressively lost its hold and how the Northern Crusades eventually lost their appeal. In the end, even if the West failed to subjugate wholly the Baltic states and the Russians, their legacy still lives on to this day as they managed to hold their conquests for hundreds of years and the Latin faith implemented itself strongly in what used to be pagan lands. This book is a compelling and unique reading on the subject.
March 12, 2019
Whilst I found this book interesting it is a mite cumbersome at times. I have other books and articles on the subject but all dealing only with the Teutonic Knights and the other Orders involved in the Baltic Crusades. I bought this book to get a wider view.
If you only have an interest in the Teutonic Knights I recommend"The Teutonic Knights" by William Urban.
One of the problems with "The Northern Crusade" is that all its maps are at the front and you have to keep switching back to them to get an idea of where the action is. "The Teutonic Knights" has its maps as you go and, in fact, I found having it helpful having it alongside me as I read "The Northern Crusade"and using Urban's maps for guidance.
So, not a bad read if you want to know about the Northern Crusade, and one that covers all aspects, but it could be better - even having 12 point font rather than 10 point would have made it an easier read for my aging eyes.
If you only have an interest in the Teutonic Knights I recommend"The Teutonic Knights" by William Urban.
One of the problems with "The Northern Crusade" is that all its maps are at the front and you have to keep switching back to them to get an idea of where the action is. "The Teutonic Knights" has its maps as you go and, in fact, I found having it helpful having it alongside me as I read "The Northern Crusade"and using Urban's maps for guidance.
So, not a bad read if you want to know about the Northern Crusade, and one that covers all aspects, but it could be better - even having 12 point font rather than 10 point would have made it an easier read for my aging eyes.
March 5, 2012
Given that this book combines two parts of history that aren't terribly popular in the U.S. (medieval history and eastern European history), I would wager this is the best general overview available on the topic. And even if competition for that title wasn't so scarce, this would be a strong contender.
March 19, 2023
Libro molto interessante. La prima lettura non mi aveva colpito in particolare. Riascoltandolo con l'audiolibro ho apprezzato la nitidezza della trattazione sia per il contesto (molto ben fatt0) sia per l'esposizione degli eventi.
August 7, 2012
interessantissimo... un capitolo di storia che a "squola" non viene neanche accennato , se non facendo degli studi specialistici.
July 27, 2016
Bleh. Had to read it for school.
September 5, 2017
Good account about crusades if You are yourself from target regions:-)
June 18, 2017
This is an excellent book on what is a complex and lesser known period of European history. The struggles between Pagans, Latin and Orthodox Christianity in the Baltic from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries has not had nowhere near the same degree of scrutiny today as the crusades in the Palestine but nonetheless still had important ramifications that can still be seen today in Northern European.
I should give a word of warning - as this is a complex topic the author has taken a general and more academic approach. This is not a popular history book with '1066 and all that' with a narrative of flamboyant individuals that drives us through the whole book. This is not a military history book - if you are looking for description of battles and campaigns of the Teutonic Order I am sure there will be other tomes better suited for your interest. I think both approaches would be impossible for this topic of the entirety of the period looked at.
Occasionally we do get glimpses of characters and their actions but this is more a history book about the civilisations of the Baltic and the changes they faced because of the phenomena that was the Crusades. It therefore provides a very excellent overview of many issues - economics, society, religion, government and how they changed over the period. This book is more about 'why' events happened and what were the consequences rather than exactly 'what' happened.
I personally thoroughly enjoyed the light it shone on an area of history and piece of the world that I had known very little about. The writing I found very clear and concise & I feel that the author has managed to synthesis an excellent one volume history of the Northern crusades from a very messy and complex actual history.
I should give a word of warning - as this is a complex topic the author has taken a general and more academic approach. This is not a popular history book with '1066 and all that' with a narrative of flamboyant individuals that drives us through the whole book. This is not a military history book - if you are looking for description of battles and campaigns of the Teutonic Order I am sure there will be other tomes better suited for your interest. I think both approaches would be impossible for this topic of the entirety of the period looked at.
Occasionally we do get glimpses of characters and their actions but this is more a history book about the civilisations of the Baltic and the changes they faced because of the phenomena that was the Crusades. It therefore provides a very excellent overview of many issues - economics, society, religion, government and how they changed over the period. This book is more about 'why' events happened and what were the consequences rather than exactly 'what' happened.
I personally thoroughly enjoyed the light it shone on an area of history and piece of the world that I had known very little about. The writing I found very clear and concise & I feel that the author has managed to synthesis an excellent one volume history of the Northern crusades from a very messy and complex actual history.
November 29, 2019
Really thorough exposition of the history of the northern crusades: white Christian Europeans (Germans, Swedes) thinking they had the right to invade/butcher/steal from neighboring pagan nations on the Baltic Sea,on the pretext of converting them to Christianity. That's not really what Jesus was talking about, guys.
In the Council of Constance there was debate and discussion about the rights of non-Christians and the nature of a just war, but the side of mercy and justice did not win. Its champion was Vladimiri of Poland. He was even less successful than Las Casas was to be 90 years later versus Sepulveda when he tried to defend the native Americans at the council of valladolid in Spain.
The northern crusades were a shameful episode on the history of the Christian church, but this book sheds light on how people thought and behaved then. Interestingly these conquerors behaved just as badly in Europe as they did in the Americas, which leads me to conclude they were motivated by greed, selfishness and cruelty in both cases, not so much racism against non-Europeans. The conquerors were able to convince themselves that anybody who wasn't Christian didn't deserve humane treatment. Truly evil.
In the Council of Constance there was debate and discussion about the rights of non-Christians and the nature of a just war, but the side of mercy and justice did not win. Its champion was Vladimiri of Poland. He was even less successful than Las Casas was to be 90 years later versus Sepulveda when he tried to defend the native Americans at the council of valladolid in Spain.
The northern crusades were a shameful episode on the history of the Christian church, but this book sheds light on how people thought and behaved then. Interestingly these conquerors behaved just as badly in Europe as they did in the Americas, which leads me to conclude they were motivated by greed, selfishness and cruelty in both cases, not so much racism against non-Europeans. The conquerors were able to convince themselves that anybody who wasn't Christian didn't deserve humane treatment. Truly evil.
September 27, 2022
Nareszcie! Skończyłem! Przebrnąłem przez roztapiające mózg upały, doprowadzające do depresji życie zawodowe i usypiający ton książki (czyli standardową wadę chyba wszystkich opracowań naukowych i prawie naukowych - maksymalnie dziesięć stron lektury do poduszki i osiem godzin spokojnego snu gwarantowane).
Ale co Wam powiem, to Wam powiem, ale Wam powiem: ciepło. Pomimo formy, treści i podjętej tematyki czyta się to dosyć przyjemnie. Zastosowany język choć może najprostszy nie jest, to jednak należy do tych bardziej znośnych i niewymagających powtarzania po kilka razy zdań rozpisanych na trzy strony. Te są stosunkowo zwięzłe, a co najważniejsze - treściwe. Niemniej pozycję tę polecam tylko wielbicielom wieków średnich, osobom odpornym na absolutny brak fabuły oraz tym, którzy są świadomi faktu, że religie i ich kapłani nie są tak święci, jak nieraz nam się wmawia. Ale to były inne czasy, inne światopoglądy... chyba...
Ale co Wam powiem, to Wam powiem, ale Wam powiem: ciepło. Pomimo formy, treści i podjętej tematyki czyta się to dosyć przyjemnie. Zastosowany język choć może najprostszy nie jest, to jednak należy do tych bardziej znośnych i niewymagających powtarzania po kilka razy zdań rozpisanych na trzy strony. Te są stosunkowo zwięzłe, a co najważniejsze - treściwe. Niemniej pozycję tę polecam tylko wielbicielom wieków średnich, osobom odpornym na absolutny brak fabuły oraz tym, którzy są świadomi faktu, że religie i ich kapłani nie są tak święci, jak nieraz nam się wmawia. Ale to były inne czasy, inne światopoglądy... chyba...
December 5, 2021
From the page length you could be mistaken into thinking this book couldn’t possibly provide any kind of serious insight into events that took place over the course of nearly 400 years but you would fortunately be wrong. As a compendium of the events that made up the so called Northern crusades this book provides a more than adequate account. The context in terms of the Wider World, origins, the course of the crusades themselves & their eventual decline are all laid out extremely clearly for the newcomer to the subject matter. The World the Crusades brought into being is also made very tangible. For anyone that was only vaguely familiar with this topic (like myself) they’d struggle to find a superior resource to explore it further.
February 18, 2018
A dry, but interesting, book. The northern crusades are interesting because they permanently changed the religious face of eastern europe, as opposed to the more commonly studied middle east crusades which, while important, were transient christian occupation of an area that was formerly muslim and which subsequently reverted back to muslim control after the crusaders were expelled. Christiansen does a good job setting the stage for the crusades, and taking us through the various phases of warfare that occurred in the region. A fun read, but definitely not THE most interesting book out there.
January 6, 2018
The Northern Crusades where the century-long effort to bring the heathen Baltic into the Christian fold -- for God, Glory and Gold. Well, not so much gold.
The book gives a good overview what happened during rougly the 12th-16th century. There's a bit of crusading, a bit of state-building and searching for a balance of power between the Germans ("Teutonic Knights"), Danes, Swedes, Poles, Livonians and, increasingly, the Russians.
The book gives a good overview what happened during rougly the 12th-16th century. There's a bit of crusading, a bit of state-building and searching for a balance of power between the Germans ("Teutonic Knights"), Danes, Swedes, Poles, Livonians and, increasingly, the Russians.
September 13, 2017
This is a political review of Northern Europe from 1200 thru 1510. As such it is really a review of the dealings and double dealings of Teutonic knights, Novgorod, Livonia's, Prussians, Poles, Germans of all states, the Papacy, and other European powers who were looking for a quick way to remit their sins. AS such it is also a slog at times. For a well done quick to read primer on Northern Europe it's fine but, if you are looking for stirring descriptions of battle not so much.
May 21, 2024
Volevo approfondire la mia conoscenza a riguardo, ma il libro è impegnativo anche se lo stile è abbastanza scorrevole. Il problema è che parla di tanti popoli e regioni di cui si è persa la memoria, tipo la Samogizia o simili. A volte torna indietro col tempo seguendo il soggetto ed io mi ci perdo. Direi che sia del tipo del I cavalieri teutonici all'origine dello stato prussiano che leggeva mio padre.
November 30, 2019
This history is more methodical than inspired, but it still kept my interest thanks to my personal ties to various parts of the Baltic region. It is also yet another reminder that we human beings find it much easier to come up with new reasons to do the same old things than to do something that's genuinely new.
January 10, 2021
Picked up this book as I lived in Finland for four years. Was interesting to read how the country and others developed with the less known Northern Crusades. Can be a little dry as for large parts its a lots of dates and people, however it does get onto the motivation of the Crusades. A good book if you want to read about this little known (in UK anyway) part of history.
November 13, 2025
Too many informations and a too long period for a 200 book. At the beginning we are overwhelmed with geographical details and then the information becomes recurring. There would be a far more interesting book if he explained about the pagan societies, about the protagonists, about the functioning of the different orders and about the juicy gossips that were said about them. Bah.
October 14, 2018
Teema on huvitav aga kuivaks jäi, väga läbi pidi närima paljudest ühetaolistest lehekülgedest, kus tihedalt koos erinevaid aastaarvude numbreid ja erinevaid riike ja kuningaid ja vallutajaid, kes kõik omavahel väikseid vallutus ja rüüsteretki pidasid.
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