Those Other Crusades

When one hears or reads of a reference to the Crusades, one generally thinks of the efforts by medieval Christian knights to conquer the "Holy Land" from the Muslims during the 11th through the 13th centuries. What most Americans do not realize is that during the 13th century there was also a series of crusades against the pagan tribes of the Baltic lands in northern Europe. These campaigns are known as the Northern or Baltic Crusades.

The Baltic lands at the time were seemingly an unattractive place to conquer. The region consisted of primeval forests, numerous lakes and bogs inhabited by hostile natives. It was truly Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness transported to northeastern Europe.

Though inhospitable, the Baltic region had much to offer in resources that were attractive to traders from the West, such as fur, fish, timber, honey, beeswax, and amber.

The Baltic Crusades got their start through the efforts of one Albert of Buxtehude, a German cleric invested as bishop of Livonia. Mindful of the death of his predecessor at the hands of the pagan Livonians, he was able to get a papal bull which declared that any Christian who took up arms to fight in Livonia would get the same automatic remission of sins as those who fought the Saracens in the Holy Land. (As an aside, I always found it appalling that leaders of a supposedly moral institution as the Catholic Church would tell their followers that going to faraway lands to murder strangers would guarantee their entry into a paradise in the afterlife.)

Touring northern Germany, Bishop Albert recruited a sufficient force with which to undertake his submission of the Livonians, including the creation of a new military order that came to be known as the Sword Brothers. Like other religious military orders, the Sword Brothers were bound by monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Over the course of the first decade of the 13th century, Bishop Albert and his Sword Brothers brutally subdued the Livonians. Next they set their sights on the Estonians. Allying with the Danes, another series of bloody campaigns ensued that spanned the better part of two decades. In a foretaste of things to come, the Crusaders also came into armed conflict with the Russians, who were also trying to gain control of Estonia. To the Catholics, the Russians were just as bad, if not worse than the pagans, because the Russians were followers of the Eastern Orthodox church and they did not recognize the supremacy of the papacy.

Skipping ahead a few years to 1236, the fortunes of the Sword Brothers took a turn for the worst when they suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the still pagan Lithuanians. The remaining Sword Brothers merged into another crusading military order, the Teutonic Knights. Established in 1198, the Teutonic Knights were originally based in Acre in the Levant. As time went by, they would be invited to serve in turn the Hungarians and the Poles. The latter employed the Teutonic Knights against their hostile pagan neighbors, the Prussians.

The Teutonic Knights had especially strict disciplinary requirements. A Teutonic Knight could not own property. He had to remain silent at meals. All forms of vanity were forbidden and the knights had to sleep in their shirts, breeches, and boots. On Fridays, the knights would flagellate themselves until they drew blood. Some knights, in order to suppress their carnal desires, would wear their chain mail underneath their clothing.

After conquering the Prussians, the Teutonic Knights set their sights on the principalities of northern Russia. This conflict would become immortalized by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in his 1938 masterpiece "Alexander Nevsky". Below is a clip from the film, which portrays the Teutonic Knights as a sinister force bent on the cruel subjugation of the Russian people. With the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1930's, "Alexander Nevsky" was more than just a historical epic, it was a piece of Soviet propaganda meant to rouse the Soviet people against the anti-Bolshevik Hitler.





The Teutonic Knights suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Alexander Nevsky in what is popularly known as the "Battle of the Ice" at Lake Peipus in 1242. This defeat effectively ended any serious attempts by the Baltic crusaders to subjugate the Russians. The Teutonic Knights continued on with their campaigns against the pagan Lithuanians. But in 1386, the Grand Duke of Lithuania converted to Catholicism, and by marriage to the Queen of Poland, he became ruler of a united Poland-Lithuania. With the last pagan state joining the Catholic fold, the Teutonic Knights had outlived their usefulness, and in 1410, a combined Polish and Lithuanian army inflicted a devastating defeat on the Teutonic Knights, and the era of the Baltic Crusades was at an end.

On another note, in the clip above from "Alexander Nevsky", the scene where some of the Teutonic Knights remove their ostentatious helmets reminded me of the scene below from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Conan the Barbarian". I wonder if director John Milius had seen "Alexander Nevsky" and if the Pskov sequence had an influence on this scene. Check it out and let me know if you agree.

Were the Crusades a Defensive Conflict?

When critics of Christianity list the sins committed by Christians throughout history, invariably they will mention the Crusades to the recover Jerusalem from the Muslims and the conquest of Muslim lands in the Levant from the 11th through the 13th centuries.

Some Christian apologists will counter that the Crusades to retake the "Holy Land", such as Robert Spencer in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), were in actuality defensive conflicts. The reasoning employed by Spencer and others is that the Crusades were a counter-offensive to recover land that was taken by the Muslims from the Christians during the 7th century.

This reasoning fails on a number of levels. If one wants to be technical about it, the lands of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt were provinces of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire before they were conquered by the Arab Muslims. The reason why the Muslims were able to take Jerusalem and the "Holy Land" is because the Byzantines and the Persians had beat each other to a bloody pulp like two heavyweight boxers only a few years earlier and were too weakened to resist. Their treasuries depleted, neither of the two regional superpowers of the day were able to continue paying their respective Arab client states, so they threw in their lots with their kindred Arabs. Thus, the Byzantines and the Persians lost their valuable buffer states. For the Byzantines, the situation was further aggravated due to the fact that their attempts to impose their brand of orthodoxy on their fellow Christians in the Near East were not welcomed by the latter. The Muslims, on the other hand, did not care what kind of Christianity their subjects practiced, as long as they paid their taxes.

If the Crusades were really a counter-offensive, then ideally the lands recovered by the Crusaders should have been returned to their previous Christian rulers, the Byzantines. Problem was, the Byzantines were Eastern Orthodox, whereas the Crusaders were Catholics whose religious allegiance was to the pope in Rome. And the two churches had formally split in the Great Schism of 1054.

The truth is, the Crusades to recover and hold Jerusalem were not about fighting a Muslim threat. Instead, they were carried out for entirely different purposes. For the popes, the Crusades were a great way to get the Christian powers of Western Europe to stop fighting each other and to instead channel their aggression to fight a far off enemy that posed no threat to them. The popes also had in mind to expand their hold over Christendom by forcing the militarily weakened Byzantines to accept the supremacy of the Catholic Church.

If the Crusaders were really serious about engaging in a counter-offensive against the Muslims, the logical first step would have been to assist the Byzantines in expelling the Muslims from Asia Minor. In fact, it was the Byzantine request for aid to recover territory in Asia Minor from the Seljuk Turks that served as the catalyst for the Crusades. As long as the Anatolian heartland remained in Muslim hands, the security of the Crusaders states in the Levant could not be maintained for long. While relations between the Byzantines and the Crusaders were frosty at best, the humiliating Byzantine defeat at Myriokephalon in 1176 confirmed the permanent presence of Islam in Asia Minor and deepened the isolation of the Crusader states. So much then for the Crusades being a counter-offensive against Muslim aggression.