The Northern Crusades (14 page)

Both rulers were religious enough. Henry went on an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1172–3, and Valdemar donated half his patrimonial lands to Danish churches. But neither could afford the luxury of a religious war. 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. For ten years after the 1147 crusade, Henry and his Saxon vassals, Adolph of Holstein and Henry of Ratzeburg, appear to have enjoyed good relations with Prince Nyklot of the Abotrites and Prince Ratibor of Pomerania, while heathen pirates from both principalities ravaged the Danish coasts and grew rich. Some of the profits passed into Saxon hands as tribute and blackmail. The situation
changed when Valdemar began paying Henry to help him and Nyklot got out of hand. A brief punitive expedition by the duke in 1158 failed to cow him, and the success of Valdemar’s two seaborne raids on the Rugians in 1159 must have suggested to the duke that combined operations might produce better results than letting things remain as they were. Hence the joint campaign of 1160, in which Valdemar worked along the Abotrite coast, keeping the Rugians busy, while Henry led an army deep into the hinterland; Nyklot was killed and his sons were driven across the Warnow. Most of the Abotrite lands were partitioned among the duke’s henchmen and bishops.

The next time the two rulers co-operated was in 1164, after Nyklot’s son Pribislav had briefly regained his father’s lands through a general Abotrite revolt, and had destroyed one Saxon army at Verchen, near Demmin. This time Henry marched to Demmin, and the Danes sailed up the Peene to cow Pribislav’s Liutizian allies; Pribislav was driven out, and the Danes attempted to colonize the Peene port of Wolgast. Neither victor held on to his gains: the Liutizians began to harass the Danes as before, and, according to Saxo, a further Abotrite revolt, engineered by Bishop Absalon, drove the Saxons back to the west. A treaty between Henry and Valdemar stipulated that they were to share future conquests; in 1168 – or possibly 1169 – Valdemar conquered the lands of the Rugians, destroyed their temples, carried off their treasures and made their prince his tributary. Henry wanted half, and in the ensuing war he encouraged the Wagrians, Abotrites and Liutizians to fight the Danes for him, until Valdemar bought him off, in midsummer 1171.

This left the Danes free to raid the Oder mouths at will, and drive the Liutizians off the sea; in 1177 Henry joined Valdemar in a last joint campaign, anxious not to miss the pickings which were now falling to his rival, and in the following year the Pomeranian princes Kazymar and Bogislav, who protected the Liutizians, were compelled to make peace.

The downfall of Henry the Lion, and the dismemberment of his duchy in 1181, left the Pomeranians and Abotrites without a protector to save them from Danish aggression, and the rulers of both peoples became vassals of Valdemar I’s sons, along with the Saxon frontier counts of Holstein, Schwerin and Ratzeburg, who had done well out of the war and had held on to the western Abotrite lands annexed in the 1140s,
entrenching themselves by importing colonists and Germanizing their territories. But the possibility of further conquest towards the east appeared slight.

However, in the period 1159–68 the Danes were learning how to fight a different sort of war. They were using the old technique of the Viking raid – a surprise landing on the shore or upriver, a quick sweep inland for slaves and booty, an embarcation rapid enough to forestall enemy retaliation – to pursue strategical aims. In 1160 and 1164 these aims were dictated by Duke Henry, whose land army needed diversionary action and transport; but, at the same time, King Valdemar and Bishop Absalon were working out a way of forcing Rügen and Wolgast to make peace, by devastating their territories at home while hunting down their shipping in Danish waters. The Danes had little experience in siegecraft, and found difficulty in taking any fortress that could resist direct assault. The number of their heavy cavalry was limited by the allowance of four horses to a ship. Nevertheless, by repeatedly burning the unwalled suburbs of Slav forts, and by going through territories at harvest time burning the grain on the stalk and driving off cattle, they could do enough economic damage to bring the cities to their knees. In times past, the Slavs had been able to recoup such losses by counter-raids on the Danish coast, and Helmold had written, ‘they think nothing of the attacks of the Danes; in fact, they think it sport to measure arms with them’;
³⁵
but by 1170 Denmark was protected by new stone and brick towers (Nyborg in Funen, Sprog⊘ in the Great Belt, Kalundborg and Tårnborg in western Zealand, Vordingborg in the south and Copenhagen in the east) and by continuous coastal patrols – at first organized by Absalon and his kinsmen, later made a permanent obligation on bachelors liable to
letbing
service. After their defeat off Falster on 6 December 1172, Slav raiding fleets never ventured into Danish waters again. And in their own coastal waters and rivers their warships could do little to deter the invading
snekker,
which had the advantage over them in height and length, and were not much deeper in the water. They could be hindered by archery from disembarking, and Duke Henry appears to have sent the Pomeranian dukes two experts to improve their men’s shooting in the 1170s, but there was an answer to this: both the crossbow and the Norwegian longbow were used to return fire from ship to shore. Bridges, fishing-weirs and underwater obstacles could be used to block rivers for a while, but they were dismantled or cleared without much difficulty,
and permanent booms or bars would have been as harmful to the Slavs as to their enemies; furthermore, the shore-forts which the Pomeranians put up at the mouth of the Swina were swept away by storm floods. Therefore, when the Danish and Rugian fleets began operating in concert against the Liutizian cities, the land armies of the Pomeranian princes could do little to protect them.

At this stage of the war, the raids alternated with the arrival of Danish monks to occupy Pomeranian abbeys. Cistercians from Esrum in Denmark came to Dargun on the Peene (1172) and to Kolbacz near Stettin (1175), and Premonstratensians from Lund to Belbuk (1177) and to Grobe. This spiritual penetration meant co-operation between Danish clerics and Slav princes, but never lessened the savagery of the raiding fleets. While the monks sang, the warriors so devastated the lands round the mouths of the Oder that the cities of Wolgast, Usedom, Wollin and Cammin became temporarily uninhabitable. A great sea-fight in the Greifswalder Bodden (19 May 1184) destroyed the Liutizian—Pomeranian fleet in its last effort to regain control of the Wendish littoral by invading Rügen, and thereafter both ‘Hither’ and ‘Hinter’ Pomerania were defenceless. At Cammin, in 1185, Prince Bogislav made one sally against the invaders, wheeled to avoid an unexpected counter-attack, fell off his horse and raced back to safety on foot. He had had enough. The following day he opened negotiations with Archbishop Absalon, and that night he was carried back to his tent from Absalon’s ship, dead drunk.
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There was nothing left for him to do but surrender the whole of Pomerania to Canute VI, and trust the king to let him continue ruling there as his vassal; yet he had never once been able to meet him on land with fairly matched forces, nor had the Danes successfully besieged one of his strongholds.

The later stages of this war made it clear that the destruction of heathenism and the implantation of Christian churches and abbeys had been only one of several ways in which Slav populations were made politically subject to outside invaders. But Slav rulers themselves made use of the same method, and were thereby able to survive as effective territorial princes. The Pomeranian prince Vartislav had understood this in the 1120s, when he sent Otto of Bamberg to baptize his recently annexed Liutizian subjects, and when in 1140 he got Innocent II to appoint an independent Pomeranian bishop. His brother Ratibor and his sons Kazymar and Bogislav, Prince Pribislav of the Abotrites, and
Prince Jaromar of the Rugians all followed the same policy, as far as the Danish and Saxon raiders would let them. The fight for power and the fight against heathenism were related, but they were carried on by Slavs, Saxons and Danes indifferently.

On two occasions it appeared that combined operations by Christian powers had succeeded in overthrowing ‘the forces of darkness’. That was in 1160, when Prince Nyklot was killed and the idols of his people at Mecklenburg, Rostock and elsewhere were broken by the invaders, and in 1168, when the Danes, aided by the Pomeranian princes, overthrew the gods of the Rugians and baptized their worshippers. So in November 1169 Alexander III wrote to Absalon of his joy on hearing that King Valdemar

And Saxo gives graphic descriptions of the ‘scandalous enormities’: the religious practices of the Rugians, the cult of the four-headed god Svantovit, and the worship of the lesser idols Rugievit, Porevit and Porenitz. In their place the king founded churches and manned them with Danish priests; the purpose of Alexander’s letter was to place Rügen under the bishop of Roskilde, as part of his diocese.

It is worth noting the differing political consequences of the two victories. From 1160 to 1166 Henry the Lion, probably in accordance with the wishes of his Saxon vassals, tried to diminish or root out altogether the native Slav dynasty, and bring the people under direct Saxon rule. Since 1143, some frontiersmen, including Bishop Gerold of Wagria and Count Henry of Ratzeburg, had been inclined to tame their Slav subjects by forcing them to emigrate from favoured areas, and introducing Saxon and Flemish settlers. There was a feeling that Slavs were untrustworthy and incorrigible, and for a while the duke appears to have shared it. But the great revolt of 1164, and the ensuing wars, convinced him that the policy of dispossession was too troublesome to continue; besides, many Saxon leaders also revolted against their duke in 1167–8, and it was always convenient to have Slav allies to keep them in check. Therefore Henry reinstated Pribislav as ‘prince of Mecklenburg, Kessin and
Rostock’ and in effect restored the principality of Nyklot which he had destroyed in 1160. Valdemar seems to have learned by this example. When he had conquered Rügen, he set up the existing prince, Jaromar, as immediate ruler of the people, and left him to govern as he pleased provided he supplied the Danes with tribute and military service; the bishop of Roskilde and the new priests were given lands that had formerly belonged to the heathen gods and their priests, but otherwise the Rugian nobles were left in possession. The war on the Wends was in one sense a competition between duke and king for reliable Slav vassals, and in this competition the destruction of pagan regimes was merely a preliminary to the building-up of more amenable political structures.

The idea of the war of conversion therefore emerged unscathed and strengthened from the brutal power-struggle of 1147–85. Northern rulers were made aware of its value as a key to political aggrandizement and greater wealth. From baptized communities came tithes of silver and grain – the bishop of Roskilde got seventy tons of corn a year from the faithful of Rügen – and the new abbeys and churches reimbursed their patrons with taxes and hospitality. A converted country could be ‘opened up’ to settlers from Christian lands, who came voluntarily rather than being captured and driven in as slaves, and paid for their plots and houses in rent. The monks led the way. ‘Whereas it is well known,’ runs a charter of Bogislav of Pomerania, ‘that the greatest part of the common people subject to our jurisdiction are rude and uninstructed in the discipline of the Christian faith, we have no doubt that if we support good provosts and men of holy life we shall succeed in making our unbelieving people recognize the true faith.’
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His brother Kazymar’s charter to Dargun abbey points to the other advantages. He granted the monks

‘… setting up parishes and priests, and opening taverns’ were to be part of the same process, which early in the thirteenth century was to include the founding of new towns on the Lübeck model along the ‘Wendish
coast’ – Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald; all stood on attractive sites which the slave-traders and pirates had made uninhabitable before. With such prospects in mind, Germans, Danes, Swedes and converted Slavs viewed with relish the prospect of further ‘wars of conversion’ in the east Baltic.

The papacy also began to take a more continuous interest in this prospect. Alexander III had congratulated and rewarded Valdemar I of Denmark not only as a ‘crusader’ but also as a recent adherent in his struggle with the Hohenstaufen emperor and his antipope. Archbishop Eskil and the new crop of Cistercian abbots drew his attention to the difficulties and dangers of the Northern churches, troubled by unruly magnates and lawless parishioners, and still hemmed in by the pagan world of the east Baltic. Wars between kings, piracy at sea, violent disputes over land-titles, vengeful outlaws and ruthless brigands made the whole Northern world seem stony soil for the ideal of Christian harmony which Alexander shared with the clerical elite of Scandinavia. It would encourage a better order if the weapons of secular society could be turned outwards against the heathen; and in the crusade the papacy possessed the means of bringing this about. Therefore, in either 1171 or 1172, the pope issued the crucial Bull
Non parum animus noster
, which placed the war against the pagans of the North – Estonians and Finns, in this case – on exactly the same footing as pilgrimage to the Holy Land: