Teutonic Knights (12 page)

Conrad von Feuchtwangen had never been in the Baltic region before, and, as it turned out, he did not like the country or the weather. Nevertheless, he performed his duties responsibly and won everyone’s respect by his thoughtful plans for breaking the military stalemate. The knights were especially pleased by the large number of reinforcements he had brought with him from Germany, though they must have been puzzled about his not sending them immediately into combat. Instead, he reviewed the situation, asking for advice lest he make serious errors out of ignorance; then he called a chapter meeting in Elbing. After all the castellans were assembled, he explained the new strategy that he had been ordered to implement – to first end the rebellions in Livonia, then deal with Prussian problems. His officers were sceptical at first, but in the end they, too, concluded that Prussia was in no serious danger. The delegates then approved sending the reinforcements overland to Livonia. Until more troops arrived, Master Conrad would limit operations in Prussia to those of a guerrilla nature.

Among the prominent figures in this border warfare with Sudovia was Martin von Golin. He was called a ‘freebooter’ even by the Christian chroniclers, who usually reserved such terms for the pagans. Alternatively, he was known as a
helde
(hero) or a
latrunculos
(a bold thief). He was no longer a young man.

There were a few large-scale raids led by Marshal Conrad the Younger, among which was a particularly devastating one in the winter of 1280 that penetrated over the ice to regions that no Christian army had ever reached before. By that time there was a new master in Prussia, Mangold von Sternberg. In early 1280 Conrad von Feuchtwangen had concluded that the idea of uniting the command of Livonia and Prussia was not a good one, at least not under his leadership. He petitioned to be relieved of his duties and was refused permission. Then he left authority in Prussia to Master Mangold and sailed to Livonia with a force of thirty knights. There he directed operations in Semgallia for a while, then again requested permission to leave his uncomfortable northern post. This time his plea was heeded, and the command was again temporarily united under Master Mangold.

At first Mangold was no more able to press the war on the Sudovian front than his predecessor. The Lithuanians and Sudovians invaded Samland in such force that they raided freely for ten days, burning every settlement and farmhouse that lay outside fortified walls. Even so, the crusaders were making significant gains, particularly in the guerrilla war inside Sudovia, where individual nobles were surrendering one after another. The master ordered these men and their families baptised, then issued them grants guaranteeing them the same rights to hold lands and serfs and be immune from taxes that the native Prussian knights had.

The order’s strategy was clearly wearing the Sudovians down. In February 1281 Mangold penetrated to the fortress inhabited by Scumand and killed 150 men and women. The operation was not a total success, since Scumand was able to ambush a party of raiders that had branched off from the main force, and killed an almost legendary warrior, the commander of Tapiau, but it was becoming clear that the Teutonic Order could capture almost any fort it decided to commit its resources to taking, while the Prussians remained master only of the forests. That was not a winning strategy for Scumand, however courageous and skilful he might be in guerrilla operations.

We know more about Scumand than we do about other Prussian war chiefs because he captured a young knight who lived to tell of his adventure, leaving us one of the few eyewitness accounts of life among the Sudovians. Peter von Dusburg retold it in these words:

Not long afterward Leszek the Black led an immense army into Sudovia and Lithuania. Within a few weeks he defeated two pagan armies, thrashing each so soundly that the Polish frontier was not menaced for several years thereafter. In that same year, 1282, Scumand and his followers abandoned their ancestral land and withdrew into Lithuanian-occupied Rus’, probably to nearby Black Russia, but perhaps as far away as Pinsk or Minsk.

The conclusion of the Sudovian war was not far off once Scumand had withdrawn from it; and it seems only just that, at that moment, command in Prussia was given to Conrad von Thierberg the Younger, who had served as marshal throughout the long struggle. When a grand chapter was called in Acre to elect a successor to Hartmann von Heldrungen, the last of the long Thuringian ‘dynasty’ that had dominated the Teutonic Order, Master Mangold had sailed to the Holy Land to cast his vote, then had died at sea on his return. The new grand master was a Swiss, Burchard von Schwanden, who had never been to the Baltic region. Wanting an experienced man in command in Prussia, he inquired of the membership for advice, and hearing good reports about Conrad von Thierberg the Younger presented his name to the grand chapter, which approved.

The Prussian Crusade came to an end in the summer of 1283. When Master Conrad led a large army into the enemy heartland, he found few Sudovians offering resistance. Louis von Leibenzelle arranged for the peaceful surrender of the 1,600 people in the clan that had befriended him, after which these ‘converts’ were sent west with all their belongings and given new lands upon which to live. The next day Master Conrad besieged the last important stronghold and forced its garrison to surrender.

Master Conrad, knowing that he lacked the resources to protect such a vast area from Lithuanian or Rus’ian attack, and that he would soon have to commit his troops to the war against the Samogitians, moved the remaining Sudovians from their homeland to other parts of Prussia, some to Pogesania and some to Samland. Even Scumand, now an old and tired warrior, surrendered. He was forgiven his past hostility and given lands in the vicinity of Balga, where, according to Christian witnesses, he died a pious death a few years later. A giant figure to contemporaries, admired by Christians and pagans alike, the description of Scumand’s valiant deeds was passed down to future generations largely in the chronicles composed by priests of the Teutonic Order. History may be written by the victors, but it is not always one-sided.

Sudovia was left unpopulated. The people disappeared from history as an organised entity, and the country became a heavily wooded desert, part of the great wilderness that separated Prussia, Masovia, and northern Volhynia from Lithuania. This wilderness had existed before, but as the rulers on all sides built log forts on its edges as bases for scouts and raiders, they soon eradicated whatever settlements remained in the forests and eroded the populated areas around the others’ castles. The
Grosse Wildnis
grew into a formidable barrier.

The Teutonic Knights had too few resources to conduct an effective holy war across this wilderness; moreover, the disorders in Poland and Pomerellia threatened their lifeline to Germany, potentially making the route unsafe for crusaders. For Master Conrad securing the rear took priority over further advances to the east. Later, in 1308, when the opportunity came to occupy Danzig and Pomerellia, the Prussian master took it. The result was several decades of conflict with Poland, during which the Lithuanian grand princes consolidated their hold over several nearby Rus’ian states and staked a claim to Galicia-Volhynia. When serious military expeditions against the pagans were once again possible, both sides were much stronger and self-confident than before.

To the north, on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, there was a crusade already three decades old when the Teutonic Order arrived in Prussia. In the course of time this Livonian crusade shifted its emphasis from an armed struggle against paganism to an aggressive/defensive war with Orthodoxy. This conflict – or, better said, series of conflicts – illustrates well the complexity of the human mind, the ways that individuals and groups can hold multiple goals dearly and from time to time subordinate one goal to another or discard old policies to make room for new endeavours.

Many of the crusaders who participated in the first armed invasions of Livonia before 1200 were merchants from Gotland who wanted to eliminate pirate and robber bases, and it is unlikely that any of them had a thought about Orthodoxy being involved in their little war. They were angry about recent raids by Estonian and Kurish (Courlander) freebooters on what is today southern Sweden, and of attacks on merchant ships making their way to Novgorod via the Gulf of Finland. A century later, the merchants were still concerned with the safety of maritime and overland commerce, but by then the robbers were often under the protection of Rus’ian states which had guaranteed safe-passage to western merchants. Some of these Rus’ian states, in fact, were by 1300 governed by Lithuanian princes whose anti-crusader policies found considerable support among the populace of their cities.

Prior to 1200, before the arrival of Germans and Scandinavians in Livonia, Orthodox princes had exercised a loose sovereignty over the pagan tribes there – very loose over the Livs on the coast, who were too far away to reach conveniently, and none at all over the even more distant Kurs and maritime Estonians. In contrast, the princes could easily send troops to collect tribute from the Letts along the Daugava (Düna, Dvina), the Estonians closest to Pskov, and the Chud people living on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Finland. These armies, however, then quickly returned home, leaving no governors or churchmen to represent their authority until the next payment of tribute was due. Efforts at conversion were minimal. Apparently bitter experience with pagans to the north of Kievan Rus’ and on the steppe had persuaded rulers and churchmen alike that little good would come of forceful measures; moreover, they seem to have concluded that even peaceful conversions would only result in a bastardised form of Christianity appearing, one that might even be dangerous to the true believers at home.

If the Rus’ians considered pagans bad, they believed that Roman Catholics were worse; they believed that the doctrine proclaiming the pope the head of the Church was a very dangerous heresy indeed. Consequently the princes and merchants of the northern cities watched the approach of Western churchmen with horror. Thus, since the northern Rus’ian states had both secular and theological reasons to oppose the German efforts to conquer Livonia, they made periodic efforts to drive the crusaders out. Sometimes Novgorod, Pskov and Polotsk sent armies, sometimes they encouraged and armed rebels, but most often they let the practical need to trade with German merchants determine their policies. It would be a mistake to view German-Rus’ian relations as either eternally hostile or dependably friendly.

The pagans in Livonia had one primary goal – to remain independent. To this end they played one great power off against another, sometimes very skilfully. To imagine the tribal elders as helpless witnesses of their own destruction is a mistake. The pagans’second goal was to use the great powers to destroy or cripple traditional rivals; this was a difficult balancing act, because one’s ally could easily become one’s master. Thus revenge and ambition were important in the decisions of the weaker groups to become allies with the crusaders, and in the determination of traditionally dominant regional powers to fight for the
status quo
. As the native peoples fought out ancient rivalries, they did so according to particularly brutal rules.

The twelfth century saw many efforts to expand the boundaries of the Roman Catholic world other than by means of crusades in the Holy Land, Spain and Portugal, and the West’s periodic quarrels with the Byzantines. Usually this was by missionary efforts into pagan lands, and, when the missionaries failed, by the application of economic pressure and force of arms. Most often, in cases where warfare was involved, theology took fourth place to dynastic ambitions, individual greed, and the rooting out of dens of pagan pirates and raiders. As a result, popular support for holy war in the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia varied according to the goals that potential volunteers and donors perceived. Vassals had to serve when summoned by the lords, of course, and relatives usually helped in outfitting and covering the travel expenses of those who wished to take the cross, especially if the total cost was reasonable; mercenaries were always eager for work, if the assignment did not appear
too
dangerous. Moreover, people who would have preferred to fulfil crusading vows in the Holy Land would calculate the risks to their health and lives, the time and money involved, and whether or not there was a serious military effort under way at the time; this usually worked in favour of crusading in the Baltic region. Lastly, some German nobles went on crusade to escape periodic civil wars; thus, civil unrest in the Holy Roman Empire sometimes hurt recruiting efforts for crusades, and sometimes it helped.

In short, motives for taking the cross were diverse, and more often than not secular motives were mixed in with idealism and religious enthusiasm. The medieval public, and those nobles and clerics whose interests were not being served, were as good at detecting hypocrisy as their modern equivalents; even then one tended to believe what one wanted to believe. Missionary efforts, in contrast, were generally endorsed enthusiastically. Although the cleric who sponsored the effort to preach the gospel might well be suspected of seeking fame and an enlargement of his diocese, the benefits would be widely shared and the risks would be few. Those who donated money would be honoured and perhaps saved in the afterlife, while those who went among the pagans would anticipate achieving either fame and honour or earning martyrdom.

Although the missions in the Baltic are usually remembered as German efforts, there were Swedish and Danish missionaries as well. In fact, the Scandinavian churchmen were well in advance of German monks until the merchant community in Visby, on the island of Gotland, opened the Livonian market at the mouth of the Daugava River in the late twelfth century. When the German merchants went to the Daugava, they were accompanied by their own priests. In 1180, one of them – Meinhard, an Augustinian friar – remained with the local tribe, the Livs (whence Livonia), as a missionary.

We have Meinhard’s story, and the history of the next fifty years of the mission, from one of the finest chroniclers of the Middle Ages, Henry of Livonia, who wrote a stirring account of the heroic efforts of missionaries and crusaders to overcome pagan scepticism and resistance. The careful reader can also note the chronicler’s comments about the Christians’ many personal and group failings.
¹⁵

Meinhard had sufficient success for the pope to name him bishop of Üxküll, the island where he had his small church; moreover, his success was sufficient to raise the ire of the pagan priests, who curtailed Meinhard’s activities significantly, fearing that the missionaries would soon be followed by foreign troops. The priests’ fears were not entirely groundless. The Livs and their neighbours upstream, the Letts, had already been visited by Rus’ian officials, collecting tribute for their distant lord, and their folklore undoubtedly contained stories of Viking raiders and travellers. Primitive societies often have widely divergent ways of dealing with strangers – sometimes both great hospitality toward guests and a suspicion that foreign visitors were generally up to no good.

Meinhard had built two fortifications to protect his small flock against Lithuanian raids, and had hired mercenary troops as garrisons. The earlier failure of the Germans to send volunteers to protect the small mission can be partly attributed to the conflict between Welf and Hohenstaufen parties for possession of the imperial title, the conflict worsening after the 1198 death of Heinrich VI. It was in the midst of this uproar that the mission to Livonia was changed into a crusading venture; it was partly to escape that conflict that numerous knights and clerics later took the cross to fight the pagans in Livonia, because by doing so their immunity as crusaders would protect their persons and property from seizure by whichever party was dominant at that moment.

So, with little help from his homeland, Meinhard had built – on the natives’ promise to pay the tithe and taxes – two small stone castles. When it came time to pay the workmen and the mercenary soldiers, however, many natives refused to honour their commitment. Moreover, they then mocked their impoverished bishop for his gullibility. Meinhard seems to have accepted this with Christian fortitude, but since he died soon afterward we cannot be sure what he would have done next. Certainly his successors were less forgiving and patient.

In 1197, before the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen left on crusade to the Holy Land he invested Berthold, the Cistercian abbot of Loccum, as bishop of Üxküll. The younger son of a
ministeriale
family which had colonised the swamps along the Elbe River, Berthold was familiar with many of the noble families of Saxony and the complexities of local politics.

Berthold first tried to make friends with the local tribal chieftains, entertaining them and distributing gifts, but his frightening experience at the consecration of a cemetery changed his approach. Pagans set fire to his fortified church, sought to kill him as he fled to his ship, and then pursued him downriver. Berthold went to Gotland, then to Saxony, where he wrote a detailed letter to the pope asking for permission to lead an army against the heathens. When the pope granted his request for ‘remission of sins to all those who should take the cross and arm themselves against the perfidious Livonians’, Berthold criss-crossed the North German countryside, preaching the crusade.

He returned to Livonia in July of 1198 with an army of Saxons and Gotland merchants. The Livs gathered their forces opposite the Christians, and, though they were unwilling to submit to mass baptism, they offered to allow Berthold to stay in the land and to compel his parishioners to remain faithful; but they would allow him only to persuade others to believe in Christ, not to force them to accept the new faith. This was not sufficient for Berthold. When the natives refused his demand for hostages and killed several German foragers, he ordered an attack. His army was not large, but it was well equipped. He not only had heavy cavalry – armoured knights on war-horses which easily overthrew the small Baltic ponies that failed to move out of their relentless path – but he also had infantry armed with crossbows, pikes, billhooks, and halberds, who were protected by iron armour and leather garments. By comparison the Liv militiamen were practically unarmed. Moreover, they were not particularly numerous, and their military tradition was one of perceiving a predictable defeat and evading its consequences. As the Western proverb puts it, discretion was the better part of valour.

Ironically, almost the only Christian casualty was Berthold himself. Although his Saxon knights quickly routed the pagans, Berthold’s horse bolted, carrying him into the enemy’s ranks among the sand dunes, where he was cut down before rescuers could reach him. After taking a terrible revenge for his death, the crusaders left small garrisons in the castles and sailed home. However, the size of these garrisons was insufficient to impress the pagans, who symbolically washed off their baptisms and sent them down the Daugava after the departing crusaders. They then besieged the castles, so that the monks were unable to go into the fields and tend their crops. When the Livonians warned that any priest who remained in the land past Easter would be killed, the frightened clergy fled back to Saxony.

The third bishop, Albert von Buxhoevden, brought a large army from Saxony, forced the Livs to become Christians, and founded a city on the Daugava at Riga. Within a few years the crusade he organised would overwhelm the Letts, push into Estonian territory to the north and east, and occupy the lightly settled areas south of the Daugava and along the coastline to the south.

Although adequate numbers of crusaders came almost every summer to protect the Christian outpost and even undertake offensive operations, it was clear that they were insufficient to conquer the pagans of the interior; and such crusaders contributed little to the defence of the country through the long winters. Bishop Albert’s first thoughts were to make the foremost native elders into a knightly class. This was only partly successful, because so few of them had sufficient income to equip themselves properly. Caupo and a few elders were important in Livonia – Caupo even travelled to Rome to meet the pope – and the ‘Kurish Kings’ were prominent locally for many years. Albert’s second plan was to grant tax fiefs to his relatives and friends; he gave this small number of German knights a share of the episcopal income rather than expecting them to live from the produce of their fields.
¹⁶
Some of the Germans married native noblewomen; and in time some of the native knights were absorbed into their number. But the number of German knights was small, and the bishop could not give out more tax fiefs without jeopardising his own slender income and that of his canons. His third plan was to create a new military order, the Swordbrothers. The Swordbrothers provided the garrisons that protected the conquests through the long winters and the military expertise that transformed visiting summertime contingents into more effective warriors.

Consequently thirteenth-century crusading armies operating in Livonia were composed of diverse forces: the Swordbrothers, the vassals of the various bishops, the militia of Riga and other towns, native militias, and visiting crusaders. Native troops were sometimes organised in uniformed infantry bodies, fighting under their own banner; such groups would take turns serving in the border castles, watching for enemy incursions; in battle they usually served on the wings (with the tribes sometimes being kept far apart, lest they mistake one another for the enemy or decide to fight out ancient rivalries right in the middle of a battle). When the prospect for victory seemed good, they fought well, but whenever the tide of battle turned against them, they fled hurriedly, leaving the heavily-armoured Germans in the lurch. Native light cavalry served as scouts and raiders; relatively unsupervised, they had more opportunities for loot, rape and murder than did the slower-moving knights and infantry. Many of the summer volunteers from Germany were middle class merchants who had the money to equip themselves as mounted warriors. All in all, the Livonian crusade differed significantly from crusades in the Holy Land or even Prussia.

After Bishop Albert moved his church to Riga, that city became an important mercantile centre, with Rus’ian traders coming down the Daugava to sell their wax and furs, and Germans sailing upriver as far as Polotsk with their cloth and iron. This brought an additional complication to his policies. The Orthodox Christian church held sway in the lightly settled forests of northern Rus’. These princes’ titles were grander than their present wealth, but their lands were broad, the fields and forests rich, the mercantile cities along the great rivers prosperous, and they were proud that their isolation kept them from the temptations and corruptions of the Roman Catholic world. Individually the Rus’ian dukes of Pskov, Novgorod, and Polotsk attempted to drive Bishop Albert out of Livonia, claiming to be coming to the aid of their subjects. Only the Swordbrothers saved the bishop in these crises, as well as saving his hide
¹⁷
from the king of Denmark, who wanted to make himself master of the entire Baltic coastline. However, the Swordbrothers refused to be vassals. They claimed their allegiance was to the pope and to the emperor.

In time Bishop Albert gave one-third of the conquered lands to the Swordbrothers, but he did so grudgingly and made repeated efforts to assert his authority over them. When these quarrels grew so heated as to endanger the crusade, the pope sent a papal legate, William of Modena, to resolve the differences. In the end the bishop had to recognise the Swordbrothers’ autonomy, then give much of his remaining lands to four subordinate prelates, two abbots, and his canons; then, once he had endowed his relatives with estates, there was little left to support a sizeable episcopal army. Nor could Bishop Albert rely solely upon the native militias, though they were very willing to join in the fight against traditional rivals. He needed advocates – experienced warriors who knew the native languages and customs – to train the militia in Western tactics and lead them in battle; but only the Swordbrothers had knights willing to live among the natives, and only the Swordbrothers would perform this task at a reasonable price (poverty, chastity and obedience had little lure for ambitious secular knights). Thus the Swordbrothers, whose military contingents were indispensable when crusading armies were not present, and who could provide knights to organise the native forces, became the leaders of the crusade in Livonia.

If the Swordbrother organisation had great strengths, it also had weaknesses. Foremost of these was its need for more convents in Germany. This lack of local contacts made sustained recruiting drives difficult and hindered efforts to solicit contributions among the faithful; also, incomes from estates would have eased the order’s chronic financial crisis. Secondly, the Swordbrothers’ revenues from Livonian taxes and their own estates were insufficient to hire enough mercenaries to supplement properly the numbers of knights and men-at-arms. This perennial financial crisis drove them to expand their holdings in the hope of increasing the number of ‘converts’ who would pay tribute and provide the warriors needed to make their armies more equal to those of their enemies. This resulted in conflicts with the king of Denmark over Estonia; with the Lithuanians, the most important pagans to the south; and with the Rus’ians, especially those in Novgorod.