Torben Kjersgaard Nielsen:

Saints  & Sinners, Converts & Cowards - Cultural Encounters between Pagan Livonians, Orthodox Russians and Catholic Germans in the Medieval Baltic

 

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed Christian expansionism targeting also the Baltic Sea region to the north and east of Christian Latin Europe. In the twelfth century attempts for conquest were undertaken by the Danish kings and the German Dukes of Saxony especially. These efforts targeted mainly the southern shores of the Baltic Sea and the Wendish peoples living there resulting among other in the conquest of the main island of Rügen by Danish forces in 1168.

 

By the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, the Christian expansion of mission, conversion and crusades targeted also the northern shores of the Baltic Sea, confronting the pagan peoples of what is today Latvia and Estonia. With a centre in the city of Riga, the Christian mission originally instigated by emissaries from the North German churches soon turned into a situation of continuous warfare. Several Christian powers would be competing with each other for the hearts and souls – and lands! – of the Baltic peoples. During the thirteenth century, Danish and Swedish kings launched crusades towards these regions, trying also to bolster the power and dominance of the German bishop of Riga. During all this, Russian petty princes of Novgorod, Polotsk and Pskov, who considered these regions very much their sphere of interest and for decades had been levying taxes and claiming tribute from the pagans, would also play a part in the muddled political and warlike state of affairs. If ever doubted, then the establishment of a new military order in the Baltic in the shape the Order of the Sword Brothers made it obvious, that these expansionist fights for worldly dominion and conquest melted easily together with crusading ideology and Christian holy war. These perpetual crusades in the North all enjoyed the acknowledgment of the papacy, although with a varied intensity.

 

This lecture will use the extant written narrative sources to discuss different kinds of encounters between the cultural groups, which come to the fore in this material. Given the nature of the source material, the perspective is of course Christian (German), but I shall investigate the material in order to give a voice to also the groups largely silenced in this material.  I hope to show that the pagans acted not just as mute victims of violent Christian expansionism and violence, but that they – even if conquered - appropriated their new situation through deliberate action.

 

I shall also try to demonstrate, how the situation in the Baltic did in fact have an impact on the attitudes of the conquerors. While trying to establish rather clear demarcations between mainly Latin Christian Germans, Orthodox Russians, and pagan Livonians, Estonians and Lithuanians, the Christian writers showed themselves to be placed in a state of fear of their adversaries and the pagan landscape, they found themselves largely subjected to. Thus the remainder of the lecture will focus on the impact of the ‘pagan landscape’ upon the Christian conqueror.
Emneord: Crusades, Middle Ages, the Baltic, Cultural Encounters