The Northern Crusades (45 page)

The situation changed when Grand-Prince Ivan III, now virtually free of Mongol supremacy, began the ‘gathering in of patrimonial lands’ – that is to say, the annexation of all surviving Russian principalities under Moscovite rule. His ancestors had been called in to save Novgorod from the Swedes in the 1320s and in 1348, but the Novgorodian commonwealth had retained and reasserted its independence thereafter, despite occasional Muscovite intrusion. By 1471 Ivan was ready to put an end to this unsteady relationship, and make use of his gigantic military strength to incorporate the oligarchy of boyars into his autocracy. His ultimate design of wresting former Russian lands from the Lithuanian grand-duchy made it essential to root out the pro-Lithuanian faction within that oligarchy, and in that year he invaded Novgorod, overwhelmed the city’s forces, and compelled the boyars to submit and hand over those who were designated friends of ‘the Latin king’ of Poland-Lithuania. From 1471 to 1489 Ivan reduced Novgorod by stages to a humbled and demoralized dependency of Moscow, without a parliament or a policy of its own; Pskov was his willing collaborator, and all the resources of north-west Russia could be pressed into the service of his great war with Lithuania. The Teutonic Knights of Livonia found themselves confronted by an Orthodox super-power, able to take action against them as masterfully as the king of Poland had dealt with Prussia. Moreover, the Muscovites, like the Livonians, interpreted their expansion as a crusade; a crusade to save the western and northern Russians from the godless rites of the Latin Church.

The danger was understood as early as 1471, when Master Wolthus von Herse wrote to the grand-master that, if Pskov and Novgorod were to join forces with Moscow, ‘we shall then have to make peace on their terms, and resign to them all they extort from us, or else we will have to wage war against them all’.
¹⁹⁹

Wolthus planned an anti-Russian alliance with Lithuania, but he was deposed before he could go to war. His successor, Bernard von der Borg, reacted to Novgorod’s second submission to Ivan in 1478 by attempting
to gain control of Pskov on his own. On New Year’s Day 1480 he led a full muster of the Livonian army to the Velikaya and attacked the city of Pskov, but had to retire without doing more than sacking Vyshegorodok. On 20 January he reached Pskov again, and ravaged the country thereabouts while another force raided Gdov, on the east bank of Lake Chud. The Pskovians sent to Ivan for assistance, and in February a Muscovite army under Prince Andrew Obolensky retaliated with a rapid but devastating thrust through the bishopric of Dorpat and the Order’s commandery of Fellin. Then he went home; he was needed elsewhere. The master hit back with a
reysa
to Izborsk, round Pskov, and over to the other side of the lake, where he was said to have killed over 3000 Russians at Kobyliye.

But he failed to take Pskov, or Izborsk, and Ivan’s refusal to be drawn into an extended war suggests that there was little chance of his doing so. Master von der Borg was deposed by his commanders, after quarrelling with both the archbishop of Riga and his own knights, and incurring the ban of Pope Sixtus IV. His successor, Johann Freitag von Loringhoven (1483–94), was too much occupied with Riga to take action against the Russians, but he succeeded in crushing the burghers so decisively that by the end of his mastership Livonia was a more disciplined commonwealth than before. At the same time, Ivan III decided to establish a permanent Muscovite presence on the Livonian border, and built the great fort of Ivangorod to overlook the Estonian frontier town of Narva from the east bank of the river. The
afspröke
(agreement) of Wolmar in 1491, between Order, bishops and burghers, made it possible for the Livonians to wage war again; Ivangorod, the year after, made war both possible and probable, although the immediate consequence was a renegotiated peace treaty.

The new master, Wolter von Plettenberg, was a typical product of the Livonian system. His family were landowners near Soest, in Westphalia, from where so many knights and merchants had travelled to the eastern Baltic since the twelfth century. They had branches in Westphalia, branches in Livonia, and members in the Order. He went out to the fort at Narva when he was ten, and worked his way up the hierarchy of offices until he became marshal. Having hammered the burghers of Riga with success, he was elected master in 1494, while in his forties; a quiet, shrewd, decent and experienced man, so it was said. For the first seven years of his mastership, Livonia was under the shadow
of impending invasion. Each side committed offences against the other that were held to justify a breaking of the peace at any time.

The grand-prince closed down the Hanseatic office at Novgorod and imprisoned the German merchants trading there – not such a bad thing for Livonia, which would then became the main centre of North-Eastern trade, but some of the imprisoned merchants were Livonians. The citizens of Reval expressed their feelings by executing two Russians – one for passing bad money, one for buggery. The master got the Emperor Maximilian to appeal to the German princes for help for Livonia; a few volunteers took ship for Riga. Next year, 1496, Ivan was at war with the Swedish regent, Sten Sture, and a Swedish armada sailed over from Viborg and took Ivangorod; some Estonians helped them pillage the fortress, and, when the Swedes left, they bequeathed the place to the Order. Soon afterwards, the Russians were preparing a bridge to cross the Narva, and skirmishing broke out along the frontier. Von Plettenberg had to face the fact that Livonia, with a total levy strength of under 10,000 men, was drifting into war with a power that could mobilize several armies of up to 20,000.

He began his search for allies by approaching King John of Denmark-Norway (and, for the time being, Sweden); but John would help only in return for the former Danish duchy of Estonia. His father, Christian I, had reassumed the title of duke of Estonia in 1456, but to demand the country itself was asking too much. Then Wolter turned to the king of Poland’s brother, Grand-Duke Alexander of Lithuania, Ivan’s chief enemy, and after a visit to Vilnius concluded the offensive alliance known as the treaty of Wenden, on 21 June 1501. He persuaded the estates to pay for the hire of mercenaries, and 2000 German cavalrymen and
lanzknecbte
arrived on the boat from Lübeck. He was matching a corps of heavy-armed professionals, backed by an amateur levy of squires and native tenants, against a threat of incalculable but superior strength: an old formula, which had not always proved successful in the past, and was now to be tested to the limit. The dream of a joint Latin invasion of Russia might now be revived – provided the Lithuanian and Livonian armies could be brought to act in concert.

This was not what happened. Alexander was detained by the unexpected death of his brother and the need to secure the throne of Poland for himself. Von Plettenberg marched to Izborsk, won a victory on the Seriza with his field-guns, and then waited in vain at the appointed
rendezvous at Ostrov on the Velikaya. He destroyed Ostrov (7 September 1501) and marched home. His war of conquest had become a struggle for survival; Muscovite armies were
en route
for Livonia, and von Plettenberg had to face them on his own with the knights of his Order – some 430 – and a reduced number of hired men. The Russians arrived in November, and for six weeks central Livonia was systematically devastated by three separate armies, which von Plettenberg could do nothing to stop. When he summoned a
Landtag
to Wolmar in January, three of the bishops and the vassals of Estonia failed to attend. The commonwealth was divided, half the country in ruins and the other half demoralized; another Russian invasion followed, this time assisted by 7000 Tartars and 1600 tracking dogs to nose out fugitives. When the master sent to Lithuania begging for help, his ally merely told him to fight on.

That he did so was for centuries a source of pride and selfcongratulation to the German ascendancy in the Baltic, and won for von Plettenberg the status of a hero among German nationalists. There is no disputing his skill as a general; but it might be worth inquiring whether his policy of waging offensive war against Moscow was not simply a disastrous mistake. The Lithuanian alliance might well have proved a source of strength, but the risk of defeat or non-co-operation was always present, and for Livonia this could mean extinction, or at least subjugation. On the other hand, war with Moscow appeared inevitable by 1500, and neither an offensive nor a defensive strategy seemed to offer much chance of success; von Plettenberg was seizing his only opportunity of doing something. He could in theory have submitted to Ivan, but in practice the training and attitudes of the Livonian Knights made this unthinkable: they had too much to lose, and the long tradition of the crusade against the schismatics forbade them. The master had little choice in carrying on with his last-ditch stand. It was fortunate that in his mercenary troops, his field- and handguns, he had the same technological advantage that his predecessors had so often exploited against superior numbers in the past.

In August 1502, the frightened Estates met and agreed to mobilize the country for one more campaign. For three days after the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September) Livonia fasted and prayed; then von Plettenberg marched on Pskov with all his knight-brothers, some 3500 hired foot and horse, a train of guns and the Livonian levy-troops. At Lake Smolina, on the eve of the Exaltation of the Cross (14 September), he fought his
way through the Muscovites by gunfire and cavalry charges; both armies limped away from the battlefield, but there were no further invasions of Livonia that or the following year. It was alleged that the master had seen the Virgin in a vision, and had promised her a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in return for victory. A curiously old-fashioned story,
²⁰⁰
in the circumstances; for only in a superficial sense was von Plettenberg re-enacting the Livonian past.

Russians had invaded Lithuania before, and small armies, or forts, had resisted and repelled these invasions. Livonia’s chances of conquering or being conquered by the schismatic easterners had in those times aroused concern and intervention from Rome, Germany and Scandinavia. The province of St Mary had then had a standing and importance of its own, as an outpost of the Latin faith. In 1502 the antagonism which had formerly been concentrated into the Livonian-Russian frontier had been extended into a war between much greater powers – Muscovy and Lithuania-Poland, neither much concerned with the future of Livonia except as a possible dependency. As far as the pope was concerned, the danger to Livonia was far less important than the danger of the Ottoman advance into Europe. From 1495 to 1503 the Order’s proctor at Rome continually begged for a crusading Bull on behalf of von Plettenberg, but to no effect: Alexander VI was anxious to get the Russians as allies against the Turks. The last serious plea for a Northern crusade – in the tract entitled
Eyme scbonne bystborie
– fell on deaf ears. Ivan III made peace with von Plettenberg at Pskov in 1503, and the province was granted another fifty years grace before the serious invasions began; it had become a counter in a game played by more successful imperialist powers, any one of which could deploy far more men and guns than the Livonians. The local marcher warfare between Baltic colonists, which had been conceived of as a confrontation between the Greek and Latin faiths, had been superseded by a struggle for power between Muscovy, Poland and Sweden in which the medieval concept of the Holy War had no importance, except to the Russians.

The Livonian Knights, who personified that concept, held on to their position as a Catholic corporation garrisoning the strongholds of a partly Lutheran colony for as long as their more powerful neighbours allowed. A series of invasions beginning in 1557 annihilated their diminutive army and obsolete castles, and after the last master, Kettler, had renounced his vows and become a secular duke (on 5 March 1562) the
old commonwealth was partitioned between Muscovy, Poland, Sweden and Denmark. When the Prussian knights had done this, the Livonian nobles had advised Master Plettenberg to follow their example and secularize the province. He had refused, because in his opinion the Livonians were too weak and divided to resist the Muscovites without reinforcement by the German Order. When he was proved right, Catholic apologists wrung their hands and pointed to the backsliding of the Knights themselves. ‘As long as the knightes of the Order in Lifelande kepte and maintained the Catholike faith… ten thousand coulde in open filde put to flighte fourescore thousand of the Moscovites: but sens that the same worshypfull Order put downe the awncient religion,… all the victory hath enclined to our adversaries’ – so F. Staphylus, in
Apologia Recens
(Cologne 1562), translated for English readers by Thomas Stapleton, as a warning against the demoralizing effects of ‘the newe ghospell of Luther’.

A broadsheet published at Nuremberg advertised the plight of the martyred Livonian Germans to their fellow-countrymen. The coloured woodcut showed furry Muscovites firing arrows into three naked women hanging from a bough, to which the hearts of their children have been tied. The little bodies lie below them on the grass. The imagery is that of old-time crusading rhetoric (see above,
pp. 124
,
196
) but the responses were cool or calculating. The appeal and the apparatus of Holy War had been diverted by other causes more pressing than the defence of ‘the old soiourne and retire of the Saxon Nobilite’.

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.