The Northern Crusades Read Free Page A

crusading movement. In the 1230s, Henry III granted a special privilege to the association of Baltic traders based on the island of Gotland, and a pension to the Teutonic Knights who had embarked on the conquest of Prussia; while at the same time an English bishop was leading the Swedes to baptize and annex the peoples of central Finland. Between 1329 and 1408 several hundred Englishmen served under the Teutonic Order in the crusade against Lithuania, and in 1399 one of them, Henry Bolingbroke, became King Henry IV of England. Quarrels and treaties between English kings, the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Order in Prussia and the Scandinavian rulers recurredthroughout the fifteenth century, and from the 1340s onwards the clothvending English merchant was a regular interloper in Baltic commerce, lured by tar, wax, fur, corn, longbows and timber. What happened in this distant world mattered in England, and mattered all the more by reason of the Northern crusades.
    For these reasons the story deserves to be retold. Few subjects have been worked at more exhaustively by continental historians, mostly Germans, during the last 150 years. Few remain more impenetrable to the English reader unfamiliar with German. For the most part, what is presented here amounts to a small scree on the mountainside of German and Scandinavian Ostforschung , with a few pebbles from Russia, Poland, Finland and the liberated Baltic republics thrown in. But the reader must be warned that the author has made very little reference to the attitudes and general conclusions of his sources. This may obscure the fact that the issues involved are by no means all dead ones, and that contentiousness remains a dominant characteristic in the field of medieval Baltic history.
    It has long been so, because the powers that dominated the region in the nineteenth century tended to justify current policies by rewriting the past, and identify themselves either with the crusaders or with their enemies. Thanks largely to the scholarship of Johannes Voigt, and to the journalism of Treitschke, the Teutonic Knights came to be seen as the harbingers of the Prussian monarchy, the Second Reich and German Kultur . ‘What thrills us,’ declared Treitschke, ‘is the profound doctrine of the supreme value of the State, which the Teutonic Knights perhaps proclaimed more loudly and clearly than do any other voices speaking to us from the German past.’ ‘A spell rises from the ground which was drenched with the noblest German blood,’ he intoned; and meanwhile, the foes of German imperialism denounced the Teutonic Knights and praised the rulers of Novgorod and Poland as champions of Slav nationality. (For example, the great Polish antiquary J. Lelewel, who wrote of the Teutonic Order, ‘They created a monastic state, which was an insult both to humanity and to morality.’) When nationalist movements got under way in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the polemical chorus grew louder; all that had happened in the distant past of these countries was either indicted as a crime against humanity or sanctified as a ‘stupendous and fruitful occurrence’. By no means all historians followed these fashions, but they were so much in accordance with the spirit of thetimes that millions were affected by them. In 1914 the name ‘Tannenberg’ was applied to Hindenburg’s repulse of the Russian armies in East Prussia, in deliberate ‘revenge’ for the defeat of the Teutonic Order in 1410; and, later on, Himmler’s plan to mould the S S as a reincarnation of that Order proved yet again the irresistible strength of bad history. Many Soviet Balticists wrote under a cloud of pure nineteenth-century Panslavism, merely streaked with dialectical materialism of the same vintage. All the honest and meticulous work of modern scholars has made little impression on the versions of Baltic history commonly received.
    This is understandable. The southern and east Baltic coastlands have had more than their