The Northern Crusades (21 page)

They learned some useful lessons. In 1206 Valdemar II and Archbishop Andrew, Absalon’s kinsman and successor, sailed to ösel with a well-prepared force, and forced the Estonian islanders to submit. They put up a timber fort, but no one volunteered to man it, and it had to be burnt down before they re-embarked. When the fleet sailed home, Andrew and Bishop Nicholas of Schleswig went south to Riga for the winter, and when they got back to Denmark they were evidently wiser in the techniques of subjugation: timber forts and summer cruises were not good enough. However, a claim had been staked: henceforward Valdemar regarded the Estonians, and perhaps the Livonians as well, as his by right. The fact that he did virtually nothing about it for twelve years, while Bishop Albert and the Sword-Brothers were steadily advancing into Estonia, made little difference to his claim; he controlled Lübeck and the western Baltic, and they could do nothing without his permission.
Saxo, who was still writing his history of the Danes at this time, was livening his narrative with far-fetched stories of how the king’s forebears had populated Prussia and conquered the Dvina, the Estonians and the Finns; Innocent III was writing encouraging letters, and treating Valdemar as the favoured champion of the Church.

In 1218 Honorius III promised Valdemar that he could annex as much land as he might conquer from the heathen, and in the same year Bishop Albert, alarmed at an invasion from Novgorod, went in person to beg the king to attack the Estonians. In 1219 he mobilized his fleet, joined forces with the Rugian navy and arrived off the north-Estonian coast with his archbishop, three bishops and Prince Wizlav of Rügen, Jaromar’s successor. They landed in the one first-rate harbour of Lindinisse, in the coastal district of Revele, which was part of the land of Harria, and began building the fort which the Estonians called Tallinn, the Danes and Germans Reval, and the Russians Kolyvan. When the Estonians attacked, they were defeated with heavy losses, and, when the fort was ready, a garrison of knights, priests and bishops moved in and stayed behind when the king sailed home. The following year, the king returned with reinforcements and Dominican friars, and both Danes and Sword-Brothers harried and subjugated the northern Estonians, while King John of Sweden conquered the north-western coast (Rotala) and built a fort at Leal. The result was an ugly quarrel between the conquerors over jurisdiction, and an appeal to Rome. Henry of Livonia describes how the Danes went about putting up large crosses as tokens of their lordship, and distributed holy water to village headmen to sprinkle promiscuously over their people, while the German missionaries did their work conscientiously,
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but Henry was committed to Riga. The situation was simplified when the Swedes were pushed out of Leal by the Rotalians, and Valdemar closed Lübeck to Livonian crusaders; Bishop Albert had to surrender the whole of north Estonia to him (Harria, Vironia and Jerwia) as the price of opening Lübeck, and was only prevented by the intransigence of his burghers from handing over Livonia as well. The Sword-Brothers did him fealty for the lands they had conquered in southern Estonia. Sea-power had compensated Valdemar for the lack of other advantages. He had no military monks, no time for persistent campaigning in the east, and comparatively few would-be colonists to hold the land for him, but as long as he had command of the Baltic there was no getting rid of him.

Several attempts were made, and, thanks to the king’s unlucky kidnapping by a German prince in 1223–7, they almost succeeded. His garrison in Jerwia were caught and disembowelled by rebels, who are the governor’s heart; a Novgorodian army besieged Reval for four weeks, and in 1225 the Sword-Brothers seized Harria and Vironia for a while. Reval fell to the Sword-Brothers in 1227, but was handed back by the Teutonic Knights at the treaty of Stensby in 1238, along with Harria and Vironia. The popes still expected Denmark to take the lead in the Northern crusade, and Denmark still had the largest naval resources; the only way of keeping Valdemar interested was to let him have his Estonian dependency.

So he kept it; not by the diligence of his missionaries, not by the dedication and prowess of his garrison, not by the number and loyalty of his colonists, but because with some 200 ships at his disposal he was able to apply the requisite force at exactly the right moment, and outbid his rivals for papal approval. Much of his territory was subjugated for him by Bishop Albert’s men, and colonized by Saxon immigrants, many of whom were expelled after 1238 and replaced by more dependable men – also Holsteiners and Westphalians, for the most part. The new town of Reval was as German as Riga, and the continuation of the war against the ‘heathen’ Russians east of the Neva was left to the association of vassal landowners, without much interference from Denmark. But, as long as the king’s captain held Reval castle, his taxes could be collected and the proceeds of his large private estates were guaranteed. For this citadel commanded a spacious harbour on a rocky and treacherous coast, and sea-communications kept it safe when the hinterland was lost. Here were the arsenal, stables and treasury that constituted the heart of Danish rule; already by 1227 it contained a store of 400 hauberks, and stabling for 250 war-horses and 200 hacks. Most of the arms and troops were in the ‘lesser castle’, where the captain lived; this was built in the south-western corner of the ‘greater castle’, containing the bishop’s palace, the vassal’s houses and the cathedral of St Mary – the cathedral gave the whole acropolis the name of ‘Domburg’. Below the walls, and across the moat lay the new town, the house of Dominicans, the Cistercian nunnery of St Michael, eight churches, two chapels, a leper-house, a hospital, guild-houses, bath-houses – all the amenities of a Christian city, ready to stand siege. Halfway along the road to Narva, which the besiegers would be using, stood the castle of Wesenburg (Rakvere), built
by 1252; Narva was not successfully fortified until 1329. Only in these three places could burghers live together in safety.

After Valdemar II had sorted out his difficulties with the Teutonic Knights, and his archbishop had settled with the Livonian bishops the boundaries of his new suffragan diocese of Reval, there still remained the question of how far the king’s authority could be pushed towards the east, into the Vod country dominated by Novgorod. The papal legate got Valdemar to co-operate with the Teutonic Order in the anti-Russian crusade of 1240–42, and it appears that at first the king had hopes of winning at least a slice of Russia for himself. He sent his sons Abel and Canute to accompany his Estonian vassals on the campaign, and with them a fleet of men and women ‘to till the lands devastated by the Tartars, and settle them’;
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according to Matthew Paris, these preparations led to a rumour that the Danes were about to invade England again. But the failure of the invasion kept the king’s men to the west of the river Narva in future.

In 1244, Valdemar’s son Eric IV took the cross, and until 1254 there was hope at Rome that there would be another Danish push to the east. In the event, the Estonians were hard put to it to hold on to what they had gained, and the Danish fleets that sailed to Reval in 1268 and 1270 were needed to meet serious incursions by Russian and Lithuanian armies. Valdemar II’s successors had too much to occupy them at home for aggression into Russia; the once united monarchy was slowly disintegrating in conflicts between rival princes, kings, barons and bishops. They were content to remain absentee landlords of a fairly profitable colonial investment, and leave the problems of holding down and converting the indigenous Estonian population to local landlords and clergy. The combination of spiritual obligation and political opportunity which had produced the crusades of 1219 and 1220 were not to be repeated.

Denmark was not the only country with a levy-fleet and an interest in the eastern Baltic. The Swedish kings had a similar system of mobilization, and their subjects had to face a much more dangerous threat from the sea. Denmark’s eastward shipping and outermost province of Blekinge may have been preyed on, but the whole length of Sweden’s coast was liable to devastation and pillage by enemies living directly across the
water, a mere 150 miles away, with halfway anchorages off Gotland and the Åland islands. Curonians, Osilian Estonians and Karelian Finns had been plaguing these shores for some time before Swedish rulers began to embark on serious wars of conquest and retribution.

It was suggested in chapter 1 that the balance of loss by piracy and profit by reprisal and trade was not so unequal that Swedish kings had much incentive to disturb it. The only three eastward expeditions in the twelfth century for which there is reliable evidence suggest that these kings were more interested in practising and profiting by piracy than in suppressing it.

In 1142, according to the Novgorod Chronicle, ‘a prince of the Swedes with a bishop in sixty ships attacked merchants who were returning from overseas in three boats. They fought, and accomplished nothing, and they carried off three of their ships and they killed 150 of them’.
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This brush could have happened anywhere in the eastern Baltic. In 1164 the Swedes, with a fleet of fifty-five ships, tried to take the fort of Ladoga, but failed, and were routed by the prince of Novgorod on the Voronezhka; and in 1195 or 1196 they set out to assist Bishop Meinhard in Livonia, but followed the wind instead and ended up by pillaging Estonia, until the inhabitants bought them off with tribute. These were old-fashioned Viking raids, and the Swedes were not alone in making them: in 1186 King Sverrir of Norway’s brother Eric ran short of money, and ‘went to the Baltic to plunder heathen lands’. He plundered Rotala and the mouth of the Dvina, then sailed back to Gotland and captured two cogs from the Saxons and returned home with immense wealth.

Later tradition has it that in about 115–60 a Swedish king, Eric ‘IX’, led a full-scale expedition into Finland which conquered and converted the country, and has since been known as the ‘first Finland crusade’. The story was told in the
Vita Sancti Erici
, ascribed to Bishop Israel Erlandsen of Västeras, who died in 1328–9, and was associated with circles committed to missions and crusades; as it stands, it is an obvious literary construct, which cannot be accepted as historical. It tells how the king embarked for Finland with a Bishop Henry from Uppsala, and began his campaign by offering the people peace and the Christian faith. They refused, and attacked him; he defeated them in battle (after which he was found weeping because so many potential converts had been killed), and then preached to them again, with greater success; when he sailed back to Sweden he left behind a Christian community.
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The
legend of Bishop Henry relates that after a short ministry he was axed to death by a convert; and at least it is certain that in the thirteenth century Eric and Henry were worshipped as the patron saints of Sweden and Finland respectively. But the legend is crusade propaganda, not fact.

There is some reason to believe that King Eric did raid Finland, because Innocent III addressed a letter to his grandson, Eric X (1210–16), in which Finland is referred to as ‘the land which your predecessors of famous memory snatched from the hands of the pagans’;
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and some years earlier Alexander III had written to the Swedish archbishop and earl that he was distressed to hear that ‘the Finns always promise to obey the Christian faith whenever they are threatened by a hostile army, and eagerly ask for preachers and teachers of the law of Christ, and when the army retires they deny the faith, despise the preachers, and grievously persecute them’. If this is a reference to ‘St Eric’s crusade’, it suggests that it was not the only one, and that all had failed; but the pope clearly expected further developments, and proposed that in future the Finns should be made to hand over their forts ‘if they have any’ or other securities for their good behaviour. However, there is no clear evidence that the king of the Swedes actually ruled any part of Finland before 1200. It was still an open country.

When in 1209 Innocent III wrote to Archbishop Andrew of Lund thanking him for the news that ‘a certain land, called Finland… has lately been converted to the faith by the exertions of certain noble personages’,
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it would appear that he refers to the raids undertaken in 1191 and 1202 by Danish fleets, or, rather, to missions established after them. The pope allowed Andrew to consecrate a bastard as bishop of the ‘new plantation’, since nobody else wanted the job. It was said to be more likely to entail martyrdom than earthly honours. Nevertheless, a community of Christians had been established among the Suomi (south-west Finns), and in 1215 there was a Finnish convert, Peter Kakuwalde, working as a priest among the Estonians.

Denmark lost interest in Finland once territory had been gained in Estonia, and at the same time the Swedes stopped raiding the Estonians and began to show an interest in Finland. A number of Swedish peasants and landowners settled in the territory known as Satakunta, and joined the Suomi converts and priests as a Christian community under a bishop. This emigration was not the result of royal policy, but it was to have
political consequences once attempts were made to extend Christianity beyond the limits of this original ‘Finland’ into the central lake-district.

The motives of the Swedes who went into Suomi lands, and of the Suomi who accepted their faith and paid tithe to their bishop, can only be conjectured. That part of the country was fertile and temperate, and easily accessible, by way of the Åland Isles, to villagers in small boats. There was a harbour at Åbo (Turku) where merchants of both nations might have settled, under the usual conditions of shared independence; the trades in fur and fish may have accounted for smaller settlements, at first seasonal, then permanent. The wilderness inland offered summer pasture for the herds of the immigrants, as well as hunting grounds for the Suomi. And the priests and later friars who went among the Finns may have been taking their only chance to get away from the excessively landowner-dominated churches of their homeland in Sweden; according to Archbishop Andrew, ‘there is no church established anywhere in the world which is so oppressed by the insolence of the people’
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– by the local freeholders, that is, who paid for the church-building and were allowed by law to treat the parish priest as their own hired man. Among the Finns, a priest might find martyrdom, but he would also find freedom. And the Suomi themselves had long been familiar with the Swedes, and may have seen Swedish communities as desirable sources of profit which presented little obvious threat to their independence or prosperity; perhaps they even looked on them as a guarantee that there would be no more punitive raids by the king and his warriors.