General term applied to a series of expeditions aimed at the conquest and conversion of the lands on the southern and eastern coast of the Baltic Sea (Prussia, Livonia, Finland, and Lithuania) from the late twelfth century up to the Reformation.
The peoples living along the Baltic coasts had once all been pagans, but although the Scandinavian Norse gods were not identical to the deities worshipped on the eastern shores, these different religions nevertheless had significant characteristics in common. Most importantly, they endorsed a militaristic ethos based on feuds, pirate raids, and overland attacks upon weaker peoples, and the incomes thus generated supported local economies. When Scandinavian monarchs accepted Christianity and brought an end to the freebooting era, ethical concerns may have been less important than the desire to prevent the rise of charismatic competitors for power. The tribes on the eastern shore, in contrast, were insufficiently organized for powerful nobles to make themselves kings; hence, those tribes continued the traditions of piracy and raiding until crusaders put an end to their activities.
The first efforts to convert the pagans to Latin Christianity were made by Scandinavian, German, Polish, and Bohemian missionaries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These efforts failed, partly because the pagan priests feared competition, partly because an organized church needed the financial contributions of the entire community, especially if the churchmen were to assume responsibility for protecting converts from attack by neighboring tribes. Although taxes were the people’s most obvious objection, they also considered subjection to any lord, local or foreign, abominable. Pagan unwillingness to adopt the feudal practices that would organize their societies for war put them at a great disadvantage in any combat with Western knights, who possessed not only technology and military expertise far superior to those of the tribal elders but also impressive administrative and leadership skills.
Crusaders from Gotland and Saxony came to Livonia in the late twelfth century, and within a quarter of a century they had conquered most of what is today Latvia and Estonia. Scandinavians were also active, with Swedes pushing east into Finland, and King Valdemar II Sejr of Denmark (1170-1241) conquering Reval (mod. Tallinn) and most of northern Estonia. One military order, the Sword Brethren, provided a permanent occupation force through the long winters after the summer fleets of crusaders to Livonia had sailed home. The Sword Brethren soon acquired the knowledge of the land, the native languages, and customs, as well as the ambition, to make themselves independent or superior to the newly established bishops in Riga, Dorpat (mod. Tartu, Estonia), and Leal (mod. Lihula, Estonia). Their ambitions extended to the conquest of Lithuania and Russia, but those efforts met military defeats at the battles of Saule (1236) and Lake Peipus (1242). In 1237 Pope Gregory IX approved the absorption of the Sword Brethren into the Teutonic Order, but it was several years before this was accomplished. Thereafter the members of the Livonian branch of the order cooperated with the Prussian master and acknowledged being subordinate to the grand master; however, they refused to surrender their autonomy completely. The Teutonic Knights had been founded as a hospital order during the Third Crusade (1189-1192), and in 1198 were reorganized as a military order, but they were never as important in the Holy Land as the Templars and Hospitallers. Instead, the order found its true calling in the Baltic, making war against the enemies of the Roman church: pagan Baltic and Finnic peoples and Orthodox Russians.
The motives of those who organized the crusades and those who participated in them were decidedly mixed. Some wanted only to open the country to missionaries, others to protect converts; some wanted to acquire new lands and to extend their dioceses; yet others—especially the many burgesses who took the cross—wanted to open new markets, eliminate piracy, and reduce highway robbery. Some were doubtless in search of adventure, others of winning renown and honor; a few probably just wanted to get away from home. They rarely considered the rights of the native peoples for long; certainly they did not grant them the right to choose paganism as a religion, since that would condemn their souls to hellfire; and those who saw the corpses and burned villages left behind by pagan raiders had reason to consider the perpetrators as the personification of evil. As for the misdeeds of the crusaders, their armies were not populated with saints, and many atrocities were committed by native converts taking revenge for long years of oppression by their neighbors. Lastly, who was to quarrel with the popes, who urged true believers to take up the cross in defense of their faith, and who awarded crusaders the same spiritual benefits as those who made the far more expensive and arduous journey to the Holy Land?
The Baltic region
The Teutonic Order had enjoyed such great popularity in Germany under the direction of Grand Master Hermann von Salza (1210-1239) that it had more knights and money than could be employed usefully in the Holy Land. Consequently, when Conrad, duke of Mazovia in Poland, asked for assistance against pagan Prussians who were raiding his lands in retaliation for his efforts to conquer them, in 1228-1230 the grand master sent a handful of knights to fight alongside Polish and German volunteers. When the other crusaders went home, the order garrisoned castles at Thorn (mod. Torun, Poland) and Kulm (mod. Chelmno, Poland). With the help of regular crusading expeditions, they worked their way north, then eastward along the coast, until in 1254, King Ottokar II of Bohemia led a great army into the province of Sambia and overawed pagan resistance; in the monarch’s honor the Teutonic Knights gave the name Konigsberg (mod. Kaliningrad, Russia) to their great fortress on the Pregel River. By the end of the century they had conquered the last Prussians and begun attacks on the Lithuanians. This new war was to be much more difficult, since the Lithuanians were harder to reach, more numerous, and better organized and were already expanding into Russia and Russian areas claimed by Poland.
Throughout the thirteenth century Polish crusaders had supported the crusades against these pagans, at first serving in Prussia, later applying pressure from Mazovia. Royal authority, however, had never been strong, and real power had already come into the hands of regional dukes when the Mongols invaded in 1241 and sacked Krakôw; afterward, while the dukes concentrated on their own mutual jealousies, the Teutonic Knights began recruiting German lords, knights, and burgesses for their periodic offensives. As was the case in Livonia, crusading armies were most effective in the winter, when the lakes, rivers, and swamps were frozen, but it was easiest to recruit volunteers for summer campaigns. In 1294 the last duke of Pomerelia (later West Prussia) died, leaving his lands to the duke of Great Poland, who, unable to take effective possession, left governance to the most prominent local lords; these lords swore allegiance to each of the claimants to the Polish Crown who rapidly succeeded one another. When Wladyslaw I Lokietek became ruler of Poland in 1306, he made his new vassals aware that they had made a serious mistake in having supported his rivals. In 1308 the duke of Brandenburg, the overlord of Pomerelia, responded to the vassals’ appeals for help by sending armies to seize the principal towns. Wladyslaw I, distracted by more pressing matters, asked the Teutonic Order to drive away the Brandenburg forces. After the Prussian master had done so, he presented Wladyslaw I with a bill for services rendered (10,000 marks), which Wladyslaw refused to pay; the order then purchased the Brandenburg rights for the same price. Since possession of West Prussia guaranteed crusaders safe passage to East Prussia, the order decided to hold on to that land no matter what objections the Poles raised; and when the grand master transferred his headquarters to Prussia in 1309, it was evident that the order was making the lands along the southern Baltic coast into a very unusual clerical state.
In addition to its own mainly German knight brothers and men-at-arms stationed in regional convents, the Teutonic Order could rely on secular knights and gentry in several provinces, particularly West Prussia and the episcopal territories, which included many individuals whose mother tongue was Polish. It also had native knights of Prussian ancestry and native militias led by officers of the order, as well as urban militias. The order promoted agriculture and commerce, permitted burgesses and secular knights a limited voice in government, and made merchants from the Hanseatic League welcome in its ports. Immigration was encouraged, but only into the cities or into rural areas that had been depopulated by war or never settled. The knights oversaw law and order, economic activity, and military preparedness, but it would be a mistake to see them as early modern bureaucrats. Their role in religion was minimal— that they left to the bishops, most of whom were priests of the order and could therefore be more or less trusted; and they did no missionary work at all—that was the duty of the preaching orders, most importantly the Dominicans. Almost all their subjects understood that peace and protection were more important than sharing in government, and therefore they did not demand a greater role in making decisions until the fifteenth century, when the grand masters exacted ever higher taxes without being able to defend their citizens from attack. Besides, the order’s army was masterfully equipped and led.
When the Prussian master took Danzig (mod. Gdansk, Poland) in 1308, his troops slew many citizens of that German-speaking community; Polish propagandists quickly exaggerated this into a massacre of several times the population of the city and appealed to the pope to punish the Teutonic Knights and return the territory to the king of Poland. Investigations into this matter and the conflicts of the Livonian masters with the archbishop and citizens of Riga would last for decades and serve to justify claims on the order’s territories for many more decades to come.
The suppression of the Order of the Temple in 1312 was the culmination of a five-year process that frightened all the military orders. Since many observers had concluded that the Templars had failed in their obligation to maintain a foothold in the Holy Land, were arrogant toward their betters, and were more interested in a comfortable life and money than in religious services and warfare, they thought the suppression was deserved. It would be easy to transfer those opinions to the Teutonic Order, about which they knew less.
There were two important Christian enemies of the Teutonic Order. The most dangerous, the kingdom of Poland, claimed Danzig and Pomerelia on the somewhat shaky historical argument that these were a traditional part of the kingdom, as well as on the better grounds that they were in the diocese of a Polish bishop, that they paid Peter’s Pence, and that the last will of the deceased duke had named the Polish ruler as his heir. Wladyslaw I, however, went beyond the immediate issue to claim the province of Kulm as well, and thus implicitly all of Prussia. That may have been a bargaining chip in the beginning, but once it had been put on the table, public opinion prevented him from doing anything short of playing it to the end. The order’s second foe was the archbishop of Riga, who was spokesman for the citizens of Riga in a long-running dispute with the Livonian branch of the order, and who brought in Lithuanian pagans as a garrison. Although the immediate issues concerned trade with the Lithuanian enemy and travel on the Düna (Latv. Daugava; Russ. Dvina), the fundamental problem was the order’s desire to organize all of Livonia’s resources in support of the crusade. The Livonian knights were doubtless arrogant, ruthless, and unsympathetic to the interests of the burgesses and the prelate, but a careful reading of the records shows that their enemies were ambitious, unfair, and mean-spirited as well. In these and other conflicts, the order’s tactics were to refuse cooperation with the papal legates sent to investigate the matters, and then to concentrate all its formidable resources at the papal court, where there were experienced men who understood the realities of power and who would be reluctant to destroy a valuable arm of the church militant. This tactic was a practical means that avoided placing the fate of the crusade in the hands of individuals who might well be biased or ambitious, but it was ruinous in the court of public opinion, both in the minds of contemporaries and among modern historians, who accept with few questions the highly prejudiced testimonies collected by the legates. The Teutonic Knights were aware of the dangers of not responding to the charges, but they were better at war than debate, and were too mindful of their sorrowful past experiences with energetic and ambitious churchmen to trust any of them. Similarly, the Teutonic Knights mistrusted secular rulers, particularly those with a claim on their lands, Wladyslaw I of Poland especially. His reputation was less than saintly even among his countrymen, but he was masterful at handling political propaganda and ruthless in his employment of intrigue and force. Even more resourceful and dangerous was Gediminas, grand duke of Lithuania (1316-1341), a pagan who raised diplomacy to new levels of sophistication and duplicity. Seated in the middle of competing powers—Russia, Poland, the Golden Horde, and the Teutonic Order—Gediminas knew their strengths and weaknesses and how to play them against one another. In 1322, for example, he allowed the papacy to believe that he was ready to convert to Roman Catholicism. The Teutonic Knights, who knew better, learned that arguments to the contrary only made them appear to be lacking in goodwill and faith.
As Poles changed from crusader allies to enemies, the grand masters looked about for replacements. At first they recruited important lords from the Holy Roman Empire, John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, being the most important. Upon John’s death, however, this strategy ceased to work, since his more practical son, Charles IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, was fully occupied with German and Bohemian affairs. It was at this time that Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode began to recruit French, Burgundian, Netherlandish, English, and Scottish knights for forays (Ger. reysen) into Samogitia and Lithuania. Although the rationale for these campaigns was the defense of Christendom, their form was increasing chivalric values and noble display. The figure of the Knight in the Canterbury Tales was portrayed by Geoffrey Chaucer as a participant, honored three times as the most valiant warrior present. Contemporaries understood that this was a high honor indeed, generally reserved only for the highest nobility of Europe (who were expected to pay the banquet costs).
Battle of Tannenberg (Grunwald), in which a Polish-Lithuanian army, led by King Wladyslaw II Jagiello of Poland, defeated the knights of the Teutonic Order, 1410. By Jan Matejko (1838-1893), National Museum, Warsaw, Poland. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource)
This Ehrentisch (Table of Honor) was very popular, and squires flocked to the crusade hoping to be dubbed at this ceremony and thus obtain knightly status in a prestigious event at relatively low cost.
The Teutonic Order’s patron was St. Mary. It thus combined the most popular religious trend of the era, the veneration of the Virgin, with chivalry. The grand master’s palace was in the huge fortress of Marienburg (mod. Malbork, Poland) in Prussia, and numerous other localities bore her name. Thus, although the Teutonic Knights were masters of practical politics, never hesitating to circumvent direct instructions from prelates, legates, and even popes, they were also generally pious, conventional Roman Christians who believed in fasts, prayer, penance, pilgrimages, and, of course, miracles. The history of the order was a series of miracles, a fact that made it all the harder on its members when victories ended and a seemingly endless series of defeats began.
Conventionally, historians see the battle of Tannenberg (1410) as the turning point. This view may mistake the dramatic for the important, but certainly it was one of the greatest clashes of armed forces in the late Middle Ages. It was also among the least necessary. Poland had been at peace with the Teutonic Order since 1343, Lithuania since 1398. The Lithuanians had been Roman Catholics since 1386, when Grand Duke Jogaila married Jadwiga, heiress to the Polish throne, ordered his subjects to undergo baptism, and installed a bishop to oversee the handful of parishes that were being organized; Jogaila then left his cousin Vytautas (1350-1430) to rule Lithuania, while he, crowned king of Poland as Wladyslaw II Jagiello, concentrated on defending Polish interests in the south. The Teutonic Knights were reluctant at first to acknowledge that this conversion was genuine, having been betrayed repeatedly by both Jogaila and Vytautas, but in time their armies served alongside Vytautas’s boyars against the Mongols and the grand duke of Moscow. They occupied Samogitia, thanks to Wladyslaw II and Vytautas, who brought their armies to the area in 1398 to subdue the last resistance, then signed over their rights in the Treaty of Sallinwerder. Similarly, the Livonian Order made peace with Vytautas, thus ameliorating the longstanding conflicts with Pskov and other Russian cities ruled by Lithuanian princes. Peace allowed the Teutonic Knights to concentrate on eliminating the pirate base on Gotland, unifying Livonia, and addressing the advance of the Turks into the Balkans. The crusade meanwhile slowly faded from public consciousness.
Many members of the order must have wondered what their future role was to be. Such reflection probably came most often in the context of the incomplete Christianization of the Samogitians. The policy of Grand Master Konrad von Jungingen (1393-1407) was to open that country to commerce, encourage modern farming methods, and create out of the many petty nobles a smaller but more important class of gentry. Once the country was Westernized, then missionaries could begin their work. His successor, his brother Ulrich von Jungingen (1407-1410), was less patient, wanting to introduce clergy and raise taxes. Equally impatient now were Vytautas and Wladyslaw II, who had been spreading the word among the Samogitians that help was nearby, should they rebel. When war broke out in midsummer of 1410, the Teutonic Knights did not worry excessively; no enemy had invaded their lands for decades. The catastrophic outcome of the battle of Tannenberg thus came as a shock to everyone. If a relatively minor officer, Heinrich von Plauen, had not acted swiftly, all the major fortresses would have fallen into Polish hands. Help from Germany and Livonia, combined with the desire of Polish and Lithuanian warriors to go home, allowed Plauen to recover all the lost territories within a year.
Peace was not easily negotiated. Heinrich von Plauen was reluctant to surrender Samogitia, but he was not an autocrat, and in the end he had to accede to his officers’ demands for peace. A year later, when he ordered an attack on Wladyslaw II for his failure to live up to the agreements, his health failed at a critical moment, and he was removed from office by his subordinates. His successor, Michael Küchmeister (1413-1422), dismissed the mercenaries that Plauen had collected and went to Wladyslaw II for peace talks. There he realized the awful truth that the Polish king was determined to ruin the order, and that he no longer had the means to prevent it. Küchmeister could only drive away the invaders by systematically destroying everything there was to eat, and the end of the “Hunger War” (1414) left Prussia exhausted and starving. For years thereafter Wladyslaw II would threaten war almost every year; relying on a feudal levy, his expenses were minimal, whereas the Teutonic Order had to waste its slender resources on expensive mercenaries. In this way the order declined to a shadow of its former gigantic presence, while the Polish kingdom flourished. Seeing no way of saving Prussia, the German master declined to give the grand master obedience or assistance but instead assisted Sigismund, king of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor, in his crusading efforts against the Hussite heretics in Bohemia. What had promised to be an easy victory became a series of humiliating disasters, and in the end it was the Bohemians who ravaged German lands, not the other way around. At one point a Hussite army ravaged West Prussia (1434), collected seawater in souvenir bottles, and returned safely home.
The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order had also declined. Urged on secretly by the grand master to harass the Lithuanian state, the Livonian master intervened in a succession dispute that led it to disaster in 1435 at the battle of the Swienta River. The effort to use Hussite tactics failed miserably when the master’s Mongol and Russian allies fled ahead of the charge of Polish cavalry, disorganizing efforts to fire the cannons from the wagon laager. The cities, nobles, and prelates of Livonia took advantage of the situation to demand that the Livonian Order acknowledge their rights to approve all laws and foreign policy decisions, and in 1453 the Livonian Confederation supplanted the master as the ruler of Livonia. However, the confederation had all the weaknesses of a deliberative body that lacked coercive powers: it could negotiate matters of trade and determine how to regulate the growing institution of serfdom, but it could not lead in a crisis. Only the Livonian Order could, but only when led by an inspired leader. It had only one moment of greatness: after the attack in 1501 of Ivan III, tsar of Muscovy (1460-1505). Wolter von Plettenberg, the Livonian master (1494-1535), did not await attack a second time but invaded Russia in 1502; in a desperate battle fought near Pskov, his landsknechts, artillery, and cavalry slaughtered the Russians until they were completely exhausted. Then Plettenberg made peace swiftly, not wanting to risk another encounter against what might be a better general. This gained Livonia half a century of peace.
The Reformation swept through the Baltic region without provoking civil war, but only because almost everyone realized that neighbors were waiting and watching for an opportunity to swoop down on their lands. The comparative wealth of the crusader territories was fragile and to a certain extent illusory. The northern climate, the sandy soil, the swamps, and the forests were challenges to agriculture, and only peace, hard work, and good administration were able to wring more than a modest prosperity out of either Prussia or Livonia. The governments had sufficient revenues only because they encouraged commerce and managed agriculture and trade effectively; it was not because the lands were naturally rich.
Prussia was the first to become Protestant. In 1525 the last grand master, Albrecht von Brandenburg-Ansbach (1511-1525), saw secularization as the only means of resolving a variety of political dilemmas, the most important being the order’s relationship with Poland. As a Lutheran duke of Prussia (1525-1568), he could swear fealty to the king, thereby escaping the threat of immediate war. The title of grand master eventually passed to the German master (Ger. Deutschmeister), who devoted the order’s resources inside the Holy Roman Empire to the war against the Ottoman Turks. The Livonian Order remained Roman Catholic even as most of the burgesses and peasants of Livonia became Protestants. Wolter von Plettenberg could have become duke of Livonia, but his conscience would not allow him to betray his oath. Only as the order faced aggression from Ivan IV of Muscovy (1533-1584) did the Protestants become dominant in the membership. After the Livonian army was crushed by the Russians at the battle of Ermes in 1560, Master Gotthard Kettler secularized the order in 1561, giving some lands to the king of Poland, abandoning others to the kings of Sweden and Denmark, and remaining content to become duke of Courland (1561-1587). Local bishops became Lutherans, then sold their lands to more powerful figures. The order’s lands in central Livonia and Estonia were divided up to reward the captains of the mercenary forces that eventually drove the Russians back across the border or favorites of the Swedish and Polish monarchs.
A similarly indecisive result was all that came of the many contests of Swedes, Danes, and Russians for control of the mouth of the Neva River and the Finnish coastline. The most memorable battle was in 1240, in which Prince Alexander Yaroslavich of Novgorod earned his title Nevskii (from the name of the river) for routing the Swedish forces. Other campaigns across the next three centuries languish in historical limbo for lack of poets and historians to celebrate them. The chronicles and histories of the Russian cities and the Teutonic Order are now available even in English-language translations, but not even St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373) could stir up much interest in these holy wars, even among contemporaries.
What ultimately caused the Baltic Crusades to fail were changing social values and priorities. Individuals ceased to think of crusading as a means of earning salvation or even as likely to have much effect on the kind of wars being waged in the Baltic. The enemies were no longer pagan pirates, but well-organized empires, and victory could not be achieved even in long campaigns, much less in the course of a summer. For Germans, the Turk was a more plausible threat than the tsar, and a life piously lived was more to be praised than one lost on a distant battlefield.