The Northern Crusades Read Free Page B

share of misery in the twentieth century. The forces of the modern world – fascism, communism, total war, and industrialization – have smashed almost every town from Kiel round to the Arctic Circle at least once within living memory, and have crushed both their servants and their victims with an oafish destructiveness that makes the wars of the Middle Ages seem almost picturesque by comparison. At least 5¼ million inhabitants of these coasts fled or were driven into exile between 1939 and 1950; few will ever go home. The Baltic became a political backwater, but the cost of this tranquillity was an implacable grievance among the millions who have left, and a continuing series of wrongs done to the millions who stayed put. In such a climate, old wounds do not heal, and old quarrels are not forgotten, even by historians. The interpretation of conflicts between Christianity and paganism, between Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, between German, Balt and Slav, still rouses passion after the ending of the Cold War.
    The work on which the first edition of this book was based was composed in haste over twenty years ago, and the author has had time to repent of the many errors and misconceptions which it contained. The flowering of Baltic and Northern medieval research since then has made it necessary not only to correct mistakes, but to revise almost every conclusion drawn from the evidence. The very notion of ‘crusade’, as it existed in the 1970s, has been largely discredited, and dark areas of Lithuanian and North Russian history are being continually lit. These developments have resulted in a fuller section on further reading at the end of the book, although work published in English or French is still scarce.

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NORTH-EAST EUROPE
ON THE EVE OF THE CRUSADES
     
    This is where the great North Russian Plain stops. It ends with a horseshoe of mountains and plateaux, curving round from Finland into the Scandinavian peninsula, and with an interlocking barrier of water, the Baltic Sea. It is the presence of this sea which gives the region its peculiar character; that, and the great rivers which connect it with more temperate climes.
LAND AND SEA
     
    The Baltic was not always a sea. In its underlying ooze there rest the shells of a little mollusc, Ancylus fluviatilis , which lives only in fresh water. Seven thousand years ago, the sea-bed was a lake, formed by water draining off the Scandinavian and Central European highlands: ‘Lake Ancylus’ to geologists. Round it was a marshy plain, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, until the ocean drowned the western area to form the North Sea. Then Lake Ancylus drained into this new sea through two channels. One, now blocked, is marked by the great lakes of central Sweden; the other consisted of the passages between the Danish islands and Scania, called the Sound and the Belts. Then the salt water began leaking into the lake through these channels, and it became the sea which has been known since medieval times as the Baltic, after the Belts.
    But the salt water has never succeeded in filling it, because of the volume of river water being discharged into it from the south and the east. The Baltic drinks up four huge continental rivers: the Oder and the Vistula, which flow from the Bohemian and Carpathian mountains, 300 miles away, and the Niemen and Dvina, which drain off the Russian Plain. In the north, where the Baltic forks into the Bothnian and Finnish gulfs, the water comes off the Fenno-Scandian highlands in numeroussmaller rivers, and remains almost fresh. So you have a brackish, mostly landlocked, half-sea, where the tide ebbs and flows very feebly, intruding sinuously into a region so austere that in very cold winters the ice has been known to cover almost the entire surface of water. As a result of this intrusion the region possesses several natural features which have influenced and partly determined the way local civilizations have developed.
    In the