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In the long story of the Crusades, it's often the battles between Richard I and Saladin that absorb much of the attention.
But in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Alex Ploskowski traces the story of the Baltic Crusades, a series of conflicts that often go overlooked, despite their transformative impact on the religious and political context of Central and Eastern Europe.
Today, I'm joined by Alex Ploskowski, and we're here to talk about the Baltic Crusades, which are perhaps the lesser known sibling of the Crusades that take place down in the Southern Levant.
This is the topic of your book, The Black Cross, and I do want to begin with some context here.
Obviously, the clue is partly in the name, but can you give us the top-line summary of the Baltic Crusades to orient us before we get into the details?
So the Baltic Crusades were a series of wars where Catholic armies conquered pagan societies around the So, particularly in what is today Northern Germany, Northern Poland, this little bit of Russia in between Poland and Lithuania, the Kaliningrad Oblast, tiny little bit of Belarus, and then up through Lithuania Latvia Estonia, Finland and the borders of Western Russia.
And the aim of these campaigns was to convert the pagan peoples of these regions to Catholic Christianity and to bring their lands under Catholic control.
Some crusades were also directed against what were called the Rus city-states to the east of these lands, particularly Novgorod, the main power in that region.
And these are Eastern Orthodox Christians.
So although the main targets were pagans, we also have Christians occasionally being included.
So these were wars about religion, but also about land, power, and commerce.
And can you then give us an overview of the timeline that we're working with here?
So this is taking place across the Middle Ages, but can we say when the Baltic Crusades began and when they ended?
Yeah, so just to remind everyone that the first crusade that targets Jerusalem really sets the precedent for this, and that conquest is in 1099.
And then, over the following decades, you've got that, inspiring rulers and churchmen in the north, in northern Europe, to launch their own campaigns, but typically without the authority of a pope, which is what you need for a crusade.
So this takes place in the first few decades of the 12th century.
The first official crusade takes place in 1147 BC.
And that targets a Slavic pagan group living in what is today northern Germany called the Wends.
And this is part of what historians call the Second Crusade, which targets not only the Levant but also Iberia.
So you've got essentially crusades happening on the edges of Catholic Christendom.
And then there's a bit of a gap.
And then in the end of the 12th century, from 1198 onwards, we've got crusades in what is today Latvia and Estonia beginning.
And these continue all the way through until the end of the 13th century, the 1290s.
Meanwhile, you've got crusades in a region referred to as Prussia.
This is largely what is today northeastern Poland and that little bit of Russia, the Kaliningrad Oblast, a little sliver of Lithuania in the west.
These are crusades that take about 50 years, from 1230 to 1283.
And then you've got an ongoing crusade against Lithuania that takes most of the 14th century.
It then turns into the full-blown secular wars between the Polish-Lithuanian Union and the Teutonic Order.
That continues throughout the 15th century.
So the Crusades have quite a long time frame.
They're quite fragmented.
We can say there's almost like an ongoing crusading culture in these frontier regions.
What becomes the eastern edge of Catholic Christendom.
And we can even invoke a planned crusade against Greenland.
This is a crusade planned against the indigenous Inuit by Christian II, who is the ruler of the Kalmar Union, the sort of unified Scandinavian monarchies.
And he tries to get from the Pope permission to do this crusade.
And this is in 1514, so it's pretty late.
But after two failed attempts, that doesn't go anywhere.
So plans for the Greenland Crusade are eventually abandoned.
So that's the timeframe we're dealing with which, in a way, is the span of the Middle Ages in Northern Europe.
So I guess they begin about half a century after the Crusades in the Southern Levant, but then they continue on for much longer, really extending on towards the early modern period in Europe.
When we think about the Crusades in the Southern Levant and we think about where that aggression is coming from, we think about the English forces with Richard I and we think about the French forces and those two countries really leading that push.
Who are the crusaders in the Baltic Crusades?
What countries, what states are these forces coming from?
So there's quite a big coalition, we can say, of actors involved in the Baltic Crusades.
We've got obviously the popes who are authorizing these campaigns.
We've got German bishops.
We've got Pomeranian bishops.
This is a region in what is today northwestern Poland, leading initial missionary attempts to deal with the pagan Prussians.
The biggest player of all is the Teutonic Order or the Teutonic Knights, a German military order who become involved really from the 1230s onwards but end up dominating the whole crusading enterprise in the Eastern Baltic and become the dominant power there following the conquests.
But we've also got Polish dukes.
We've got Danish kings and archbishops who have their own agendas.
Then we've got the Swedish kings, who are trying to extend their realm into what is today Finland, up to the sort of Russian border area.
And then it's worth mentioning the indigenous rulers and leaders involved as well, who are resisting the Crusaders.
They're all players in this historical.
Some of them, side with Crusaders, become allies, accept Christianity against their own neighbors, whereas others put up fierce resistance.
And some of this lasts a considerable period of time if we're thinking about Lithuania.
So there's quite a lot of actors involved and it's quite a complex situation, entangled network of different groups with their own agendas.
What I do want to look at before we begin to speak about these conflicts in more detail is the sources.
Where has this information been recorded?
By whom and how much can we trust it?
So we're primarily, if not exclusively, when it comes to the written sources, dealing with the conquerors themselves, the crusading cultures involved.
And there we're talking about medieval chronicles, legal documents, papal correspondence, church records.
And we do have some Eastern Christian Rus chronicles as well.
But our information about the Crusades is reliant largely on a few major chronicles.
We've got Henry's Chronicle of Livonia and we've got the equivalent for Prussia, written by a priest of the Teutonic Order, Peter of Duisburg.
For Finland.
We've got the Eric Chronicle and we've got various German, primarily Saxon chroniclers, but also Polish chroniclers for the conquests of Wendish lands.
Now, all of these individuals are priests or members of a church.
They are literate, educated people.
Some of them have witnessed these events firsthand.
Others are writing sometime after the events.
They claim to be using earlier documents or eyewitness accounts.
They're also clearly misunderstanding the cultures and societies that are being subsumed by the Crusaders.
So we have to look at that through a very sort of careful anthropological lens, because we can't take their opinions at face value.
We've got a lot of imaginings and fantasies and fears and anxieties coming out.
And we can see this repeated across all the Chronicles.
And in fact, this is something that Christian chroniclers did anyway, when referring to groups they called pagans.
I'm using the word pagan here quite loosely and I'll continue to do so, but essentially it's a Christian term to refer to non-Christians.
It was something that was very derogatory and something that was easy for dehumanizing your targets.
Of course, we've got to take all of these sources with a pinch of salt.
Unfortunately, the indigenous societies that were conquered by crusaders did not produce their own written records.
Everything was based on oral traditions in terms of how customs laws, religious beliefs were handed down.
So they don't preserve.
There we have to rely on archaeology.
So we are ultimately dealing with interpretations of material culture which have their own issues and problems.
They're very fragmentary.
But nonetheless they offer us a complementary source of information about the indigenous societies of the Baltic, alongside these problematic written sources.
So I'd say those are the main two sources when we're thinking about the sources for the Baltic Crusades.
So your book itself actually begins with mentioning Charlemagne, who was the most powerful European leader since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
He was this monumental figure across the 8th and 9th centuries.
What's his role in setting the foundations for the religious context that would then go on to set the stage for these Baltic Crusades?
So Charlemagne establishes the idea that war could be a legitimate tool for Christianization.
And this then becomes the underlying assumption for the Baltic Crusades.
So we can say he lays the religious and ideological groundwork that then later Crusades apply in the Baltic regions.
And essentially, this is enacted through his conquest of the Saxons.
There are already precedents for this.
Earlier Frankish rulers are twinning conquest with missionary activity, with baptism.
So this sort of relationship between accepting a Christian identity and showing fealty to the Christian regime becomes quite an important element for the later Crusades.
So I suppose it sets a precedent for rulers in Europe, for rulers in Northern Europe especially, to view wars against pagans as religiously righteous and also as a natural part of the expansion of Christendom.
And Charlemagne becomes quite a model, a role model for crusaders.
So really, Charlemagne is being invoked, centuries later after his death, as a tool to justify these crusades, isn't he?
Yeah, he's an inspiration, essentially.
He's like look our ancestors and the great sort of emperors of old.
The Holy Roman Emperor led these incredible campaigns that expanded Christendom, that protected the Christian community, and we should take his example in protecting Christendom today.
This is what the popes are saying, and this is what rulers in Northern Europe became fixated with, following the model of sort of Roman imperial rule, and particularly the model of Charlemagne that reinvented this idea.
So it's certainly something that everyone looks up to.
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Now let's move towards Eastern Europe and look at these Baltic states that are subjected to these crusades.
I want to know what these crusades various Baltic states looked like politically.
You said that paganism, you're using that word in a loose term.
What does this mean in practice in these places?
And is it comparable to the Viking Norse style of paganism?
Is it something completely different?
What's going on in these Baltic states?
What you have are a series of we can call them politically decentralized groups who are inhabiting these regions that are sandwiched between the Eastern Orthodox societies on one hand, the Catholic societies on the Western side.
So we've got the Baltic Finns in the far north.
So, in other words, the various groups inhabiting what is Finland today, and then the Estonians and the Livs going down the coast.
And then we've got a larger series of groups called the Balts, And there we're dealing with groups such as the Latgalians, the Curonians Lithuanians, the Prussians, Semigalians.
They all have common linguistic identity, but significant differences in terms of material culture.
And then we've got to the West of those, the Western Slavs.
So Slavic group, They're the ones I've referred to as the Wends, and that includes the Pomeranians.
So there are lots of little groups scattered around, surrounded by these centralized states, and they're governed essentially by small aristocratic dynasties who are based in hill forts or strongholds.
They control trade routes.
They control communication routes along rivers, especially, and agricultural zones.
And we're dealing with a warrior culture not dissimilar from the Scandinavian Viking Age culture and prestiges derived from, for example, the military successes of warfare, of raiding.
There's no literacy.
So everything is communicated orally in terms of law, in terms of cultural memory, in terms of religion.
And we've got major economies connected with the landscapes here.
So we're dealing with places that have a lot of forests and wetlands.
And so we've got fur, wax, So wax derived from beehives.
And we've also got amber and slaves.
These are major commodities that are being moved around even in the Viking Age across these regions.
Now, in terms of religion, you're right to compare them to Scandinavian, North European pre-Christian religions, because we're dealing with the same setup.
So polytheistic, local religious systems that are rooted in local places, particularly natural places with various deities that we know very little about.
They're occasionally mentioned in written sources, but a lot of what we think we know is actually probably later invention or rationalization, as people try to make sense of the religions of the pre-Christian Baltic, of a pagan Baltic, and mapped them onto what was familiar, in other words a sort of classical Greek or Roman pantheon.
The reality is, we get the impression from, for example, place names or recurring names in the sources that we have similar types of gods, for example of God of Thunder across the entire region, may be even venerated in similar ways.
So very similar to what we see, for example, with Thor in Scandinavia, similar sorts of things, very much embedded and tied to the land, to kinship groups and also the authority of the local sort of ruling dynasties, the political authority.
So religion is fragmented.
There's no sort of unified church or sort of supranational religion.
We do have groups of priests who sometimes wield significant political power.
We see this particularly in the Wendish region, the western Slavic region, where we've got quite powerful groups of priests attached to particular shrines.
And again, there are parallels for this in Scandinavia.
So I would say that the pagan religions of the Baltic fit squarely within that North European context pre-christian religious bracket.
Okay, so these religious beliefs in these baltic regions are distinct, they are dependent on their own regions, they are different even between each other, but the best analog to be thinking about is the viking norse system of religious belief.
That is the best parallel.
Yeah, I think so.
And in terms of things like funerary customs, the role of ritual specialists.
Obviously there are differences.
And even in Scandinavia, there are lots of local differences.
But you're right, that is a good analogy.
So we have these Baltic states in the east of Europe, and then we have these Catholic states in central Europe.
What is the moment that instigates the Baltic Crusades?
What is the spark there? that lights the conflict between these two forces?
There are a few particular sparks in different regions that are connected to very specific events.
But generally speaking, what you have is missionary activity.
So clergymen monks going out, often following in the footsteps of merchants across the Baltic, encountering these pagan groups and seeing opportunities for expanding the Christian community.
And they're able to convert a few locals, small communities, and then they find that they've waded into a quite complicated political and social situation where lots of neighboring groups are feuding with each other.
There are other big players vying for power, like the Lithuanian rulers. or the Rus princes.
And so it's quite a complicated situation that results in a lot of raiding and violence.
And before you know it, these initial missions, these outposts of Christianity become threatened.
And so, in order to have a successful and stable foothold and to protect those who've converted and those Christians who've established themselves there, you need some sort of military presence.
And by this time, by the time this starts happening so mid 12th century, late 12th century we've obviously got the precedent of the First Crusade, then the Second Crusade in 1147.
That expands it out to the rest of Christendom.
And this becomes a natural mechanism for protecting and expanding these missions.
So that really is the background for why this begins at that particular point.
You've got the precedent for violence being used to protect and expand Christendom.
So the sparks are very specific to what's going on in these particular areas.
But the context is the crusading movement provides a sort of rationale.
It normalizes the violence and sanctifies it.
It means this is actually something that you can get support for and the Pope's blessing.
And therefore this is a righteous war that you know can be endorsed.
You've mentioned the russ a few times and i don't want to go down that tangent now, but i did record a podcast with another historian a few months ago and, if listeners do want to know more about the russ, we talked about that in that conversation and i'll link to that in the show notes.
So, sticking with the baltic crusades you talked about the wendish crusade in 1147 let's go into this as one of the first really big moments.
Why was this so significant and what were the objectives with this first big crusading moment in the Baltics?
It's significant because it's really a turning point for the expansion of crusading ideology into Northern Europe.
It isn't part of the initial plan for what becomes known as the Second Crusade.
That focus really is the Levant, as you've said previously, but Saxon Catholic nobles see this as an opportunity to essentially legitimize their continuing conquests of these neighboring pagan Slavic lands.
So they persuade the great Cistercian orator Bernard of Clairvaux that instead of going to the Holy Land, actually maybe they can just crusade against the pagan Slavs on their doorstep.
And he thinks, yeah, great idea, persuades the Pope, Pope goes, fine, And with the added caveat that actually the crusade should include the conversion of these people to Christianity.
And that is actually quite an important step.
It's the first time the papacy explicitly says sanctions a military campaign in the Baltic with full spiritual rewards, with papal protection of the Crusaders themselves and property.
So it is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a full-blown crusade.
And it really does cement this idea of the Crusades as something that can be applied in the North.
But it's not very successful on the ground.
There are a few strongholds and centers, settlements are targeted, not very successfully.
It sort of fizzles out.
People are not massively impressed when they're writing about it.
So it's a bit of a non-event in many ways.
It's a continuation of a tit-for-tat conflict that's going on in the so-called Northern Marches, these Wendish lands that are coveted by German, Polish and Danish rulers.
But I think the important thing is that it sets a precedent and it then becomes remembered as this turning point that opens the floodgates for crusading in the north.
I do also wonder how relevant the geography is in the Wendish Crusade.
To what extent is territorial ambitions and the idea of taking that land because of its resources and its location, To what extent is that also an important idea in the objectives of the Wendish Crusades, as well as the conversion of the pagan peoples, which is almost the stated objective?
Yeah, it's a really important part, that idea of territoriality, which is why it's just a natural extension of the ongoing conflicts that essentially are about expanding the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire.
And some Cynical scholars in the past have said these are just land grabs, basically with religion being used as an excuse.
At the end of the day, these are ultimately about seizing territory, gaining economic resources.
Of course, there's an element of truth in that, because it is part of the ongoing expansion of these Catholic territories and we can't get away from that.
And, of course, this is something that makes some members of the papal court and some popes a little nervous, because it shouldn't be about booty, it shouldn't be about wealth, it shouldn't be about seizing land.
It should be about saving souls.
So after the Wendish Crusade, which is one of the first big military movements in this story, you then move on to the Livonian Crusade, and that's in the very late 12th century, just as the Third Crusade and the Levant is coming to an end.
What's this story?
How does it differ to the this moment's significance?
So this is a little different, because this starts off as a speculative mission, following in the footsteps of German merchants who are looking for an alternative route to reach the Rus markets.
And they're following the Dalgava River, which connects the Baltic coast to interior of the Eastern Baltic.
And missionaries are going there, German missionaries, and they're converting some of the groups that the merchants are trading with.
And it's this that I was referring to earlier.
The mission becomes threatened by neighboring groups and also by some of the groups that the missionaries are trying to convert, because not everybody is very happy to be converted to Catholicism.
There are all sorts of implications that go along with that.
It actually shakes your worldview completely in very realistic ways.
For example, all of a sudden you're expected to pay tithes.
This is something that we know happens from the very beginning of the so-called Livonian Crusade, because this is essentially a tax to upkeep the priests who are evangelizing you and provide for the pastoral infrastructure, and so on and so forth.
And people are probably very reluctant to start handing over their surplus produce to to these foreigners who are preaching a new religious vision.
And so you get pushback, and missionaries are attacked, churches are burnt down and eventually they come back with crusading armies.
And, before you know it, these spiral into bigger conflicts.
And then this idea of well, we need to actually start taking the war to these pagan neighboring groups because they present a threat and we actually need to expand Christendom.
We need to convert more people.
And this becomes a battle for souls and a battle for land and territory.
And I suppose the turning point is the foundation of Riga in 1201 by a German bishop, Bishop Albert Albert of Riga, as he becomes known.
And this becomes the bridgehead for subsequent crusades, the mustering point for crusading armies into the rest of a region that becomes known as Livonia, Estonia and Latvia today,
And Bishop Albert eventually creates his own military order.
The Sword Brothers who lead the conquests.
And then it becomes very clearly not just about conversion but also about the seizure of territory, these Crusades, and as we're moving through the centuries, now I think it is the right moment to talk about the Teutonic Order.
Obviously, your book is called The Black Cross.
The Black Cross refers to the symbol of the Teutonic Order.
Can we talk broadly through their own history, how they emerged and how they became such a dominant power in this story?
So they have very humble beginnings in what is known as the Third Crusade.
So in September 1189, a large German crusading contingent arrives from Bremen and Lübeck and they reach the port of Acre where they join other crusading forces besieging the city.
And essentially, the aims of the Third Crusade were to retake Jerusalem from Saladin, and Acre is one of his strongholds.
So we've got a siege, there's a big German crusading contingent, and the hospitalers who deal with all healthcare and essentially looking after infirm crusaders providing last rites for the dying when it comes to crusading contingents, clearly are overstretched and are primarily dealing with their own French-speaking, Frankish crusaders.
And so the German contingent, particularly the merchants from Bremen and Lubeck, realized that they need to set up their own hospital to cater for their own crusaders.
And so we've got the creation of a field hospital, which is organized as a religious brotherhood.
And they start dealing with German crusaders, some of whom are really important, nobles like the brother of the future emperor.
And they obviously make a good name for themselves after the city surrenders.
They are granted some buildings and property and they're also given some property and trading privileges by the new emperor, Henry VI.
And when he plans another campaign because obviously Jerusalem wasn't captured, wasn't successful, the crusading efforts is continuing.
A decision is made that what we need say the German Crusaders is actually another military order to support us.
And what better than to militarize this German hospital that was created during the Third Crusade?
So everybody agrees, the Pope ratifies it, and you've got the creation of what becomes known as the German Order, the Teutonic Order or the Teutonic Knights.
They're given the role of the Templars and the Hospitallers.
So they're based on both.
They take sort of traits from both.
And essentially, although they are a hospital, they are now tasked with defending Christendom and taking the fight to the enemies of Catholic Christianity.
They're a small military order, but within a couple of decades they shrug off the influence of the Templars and Hospitallers, at which point they adopt their own familiar emblem, the Black Cross.
That remains very distinctive.
And they really excel at developing their fighting reputation during the Fifth Crusade.
Because of how they fight and the care that they provide for their fellow German Crusaders, they become incredibly popular.
They attract a lot of members, a lot of support, a lot of donations, a lot of properties in the Levant, but also in Europe, particularly within the Holy Roman Empire.
And they have incredibly skillful leaders at this time, particularly Master Herman of Salza.
We should mention his name because he is the guy who basically elevates the order into a major international institution.
And he's a really skilled mediator and politician.
So In the early decades of the 13th century.
Really, this is the meteoric rise of the Teutonic Order.
So they really become the new spearhead for this movement across the Baltic states.
And they are really leading the charge in the latter half of the Baltic Crusades as it wages on, you know, especially in Lithuania.
But I do want to bring this towards looking at what these places looked like after conquest.
So.
These Baltic states that have been subjected to these crusades?
How much do they actually integrate Christianity into their political and religious systems?
Is this a total conversion or are there currents of paganism that are still present in their societies?
Well, we have to firstly remember that, from a structural point of view, these become essentially Catholic territories, with all the trappings that we would expect from a medieval Catholic state.
So for all intents and purposes, we're dealing with Catholic states, and large numbers of migrants populate particularly the towns of these regions, bringing of course with them customs from the West, including adherence to Catholicism, and the whole infrastructure is introduced.
Now, how successful this is in terms of actually converting the population is a complicated question.
We see the most effective examples of adoption of a new religion within the towns that are created within these new societies.
So there the church is the strongest, and the indigenous people who live within these towns, who move to these towns as they're being built, seem to quickly abandon their ancestral customs.
We see this most clearly through the funerary rites and seem to adopt, in general terms, the practices of the incomers when it comes to religion, religious behavior, funerary behavior.
Whereas in the countryside, particularly in more remote areas, The earlier customs survive the longest.
They're not completely unchanged.
So elements of Catholicism are adopted.
And some scholars even speak of a sort of parallel world of religious systems, where you've got Christian and indigenous belief systems existing alongside each other and people take the bits that they want from both.
And these persist forever. into the 16th and 17th century, to the point that that's where we start getting detailed documented accounts of practices, particularly by peasants in the countryside, that makes people think, oh, okay, so some elements of these pre-Christian customs have endured in some form.
Okay, people appear to be still signed up to the Catholic worldview on some level.
They're invoking saints, they're talking about God and Christ and the Virgin Mary, but they're also doing strange things, strange customs.
They're even sacrificing animals in some regions and doing rituals connected with harvest or with the summer solstice, with different seasonal activities.
That suggests that we've got a continuation or a sort of perpetuation of memory of earlier customs.
And we also have remarkably the continuation of natural sacred sites.
So sacred trees, sacred rivers, sacred hills continue to be used by local indigenous communities, even though in some cases, we see that there are Christian chapels and shrines attached to them.
So it's quite a complex picture and perhaps understandable, because the Teutonic order and the regions that the order controlled, its remit wasn't really the education of the indigenous population.
That was left to missionaries.
That was left to the church.
The order were there to maintain control, to defend these territories and to continue the ongoing war against paganism, in other words, against Lithuania, as you mentioned.
And so they sort of neglect the spiritual welfare of their subjects up to a point.
So perhaps it's not so surprising, given that there isn't huge amount of investment in trying to convert the rural populations of the conquered territories.
As i said, there is so much more to this story, especially in the role of the teutonic order and in the conflict in lithuania, which lasts a very long time.
But i do think we've touched on some really interesting points in this story.
Just as we think about wrapping up this conversation, how do you see the overall importance of the Baltic Crusades within the broader Central and Eastern European medieval story?
I think they're massively important.
We can see them as the final phase of Europe's Christianisation, at least in official terms.
They're important for all sorts of structural reasons.
They establish papal authority and crusading ideology in Europe.
They're sort of really instrumental in that.
They facilitate German and Scandinavian eastward expansion in terms of culture, in terms of population.
They enable the rise of the most important commercial network in the north, the Hansa, which dominates, as you know, the economies of northern Europe throughout the medieval period into the early modern period.
And they're really an integral part of the story of state building, of the formation of Europe as we know it today, in terms of defining borders, in terms of the societies that are created that are more comparable to what we see in the West in earlier centuries.
And I suppose they set the stage for the rise of what becomes Europe's largest state, which is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This has not surpassed in size or diversity until Russia in the 18th century.
And so it's a really fundamental part of Europe's history.
And in a way the Crusades provide the backdrop for that, pushing Lithuania and Poland together into this union that then grows into this massive commonwealth.
So I think that they're really important for Europe's medieval story, but also for the broader story of Europe and Western Eurasia in general.
That was Alex Ploskovsky speaking to James Osborne.
Alex is a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading and his new book, which covers the full span of the Baltic Crusades and the Teutonic Order, is The Black Cross a history of the Baltic Crusades.
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