Conceptualizing the Northern Crusades

[NB: I AM PLANNING ON ADDING PICTURES TO GO ALONG WITH THE TEXT HERE!]

In some ways, the northern crusades can fit the general definitions devised by historians of the Holy Land expeditions.[1] Northern crusaders called themselves pilgrims, for example, even though there were certainly no major Christian sites in the pagan lands of Prussia, Livonia, and beyond. Furthermore, the papacy played a pivotal role in promoting and authorizing crusading activity in the north. Eugenius III issued the document (Divina dispensatione) launching the first northern crusade against the “Wendish” Slavs along the Baltic coast of Germany, and Alexander III (Non parum animus noster) authorized crusading expeditions against Finns and Estonians twenty-four years later in 1171.[2] Thirteenth-century popes would build on earlier precedents by periodically renewing papal authorization of expeditions to different lands and peoples. In 1249, for example, Innocent IV reiterated his predecessors’ policies that northern crusaders were to receive the same spiritual benefits as their counterparts destined for the Holy Land.[3]

Innocent IV’s policy not only illustrates the importance of papal backing in the developing ideology of holy war, but also that it was the popes alone who governed access to coveted spiritual indulgences. Nor were these privileges limited only to members of the elite who had the resources to make the expensive journey. Innocent III granted partial privileges in 1215 to craftsmen who built ships for the great navy needed for the next great expedition to the Holy Land, an inclusive policy that his successor Honorius III would continue with an eye to the colonists and townsmen settling the northern wilderness—less flashy than their knightly superiors, but just as necessary to the crusading enterprise.[4]  The central role of the Teutonic Order in the conquest, conversion, and settlement of Prussia complicated matters further. Throughout the mid-thirteenth century, the papacy granted special dispensations to the Order’s priests and recruits which effectively enabled the Order to wage a continuous holy war, rather than the episodic nature of eastern crusading (due to needing new papal authorization for each expedition).

As pilgrims and penitents, then, the northern crusaders and their ventures had the papal backing which, as we have seen, has been a rare point of agreement among historians debating which elements “made” the crusades. As for the importance of Jerusalem as a goal of crusade, things only get more interesting. By its nature as a specific place, Jerusalem could only exist as a real entity in the Holy Land—a fact which might still demote the northern crusades to a place of less prestige.

But contemporaries may have drawn less of a distinction than modern historians have argued. Contemporary writers of chronicles and geographic treatises wrote of the Baltic not just as a wasteland, but also as a place of untapped abundance filled with people ignorant of the potential richness of their land. Authors blended the language of planting the seeds of good crops in new farmsteads and planting the seeds of good religion in new peoples. They claimed that the lands of the north rightfully belonged to the Virgin Mary, and even compared these fruitless (yet potentially bountiful) wastes with the ancient tribes and lands of the Old Testament before their conquest by the righteous Israelites.[5]

In their mental geographies, contemporary writers, witnesses, and participants associated or even equated the enterprise of the northern crusades with the goals and rewards of crusaders in the Holy Land. Further research into the imagination of space in the north on the one hand, alongside the documentary evidence for the Christian organization of its conquests on the other, can help illustrate how a broad spectrum of medieval society—popes, knights, farmers, craftsmen, and many others—believed they were participating in a shared European enterprise, and illuminate they made goals into realities in the communities, structures, and topographies which emerged.