The crusading order “The Sword Brothers” is incorporated
into the order, “The Teutonic Knights” by decree of Pope Gregory. Both
orders had been involved in the crusade against the pagan Prussians. It
was due to defeats and weakening of the Sword Brothers that they were
merged with the Teutonic Knights.
The twelfth century saw many efforts to expand the boundaries of
the Roman Catholic world other than by means of crusades in the Holy
Land, Spain and Portugal, and the West’s periodic quarrels with the
Byzantines. Usually this was by missionary efforts into pagan lands,
and, when the missionaries failed, by the application of economic
pressure and force of arms. Most often, in cases where warfare was
involved, theology took fourth place to dynastic ambitions,
individual greed, and the rooting out of dens of pagan pirates and
raiders. As a result, popular support for holy war in the Holy Roman
Empire and Scandinavia varied according to the goals that potential
volunteers and donors perceived.
Vassals had to serve when summoned
by the lords, of course, and relatives usually helped in outfitting
and covering the travel expenses of those who wished to take the
cross, especially if the total cost was reasonable; mercenaries were
always eager for work, if the assignment did not appear too
dangerous. Moreover, people who would have preferred to fulfil
crusading vows in the Holy Land would calculate the risks to their
health and lives, the time and money involved, and whether or not
there was a serious military effort under way at the time; this
usually worked in favour of crusading in the Baltic region. Lastly,
some German nobles went on crusade to escape periodic civil wars;
thus, civil unrest in the Holy Roman Empire sometimes hurt recruiting
efforts for crusades, and sometimes it helped.
In short, motives for taking the cross were diverse, and more
often than not secular motives were mixed in with idealism and
religious enthusiasm. The medieval public, and those nobles and
clerics whose interests were not being served, were as good at
detecting hypocrisy as their modern equivalents; even then one tended
to believe what one wanted to believe. Missionary efforts, in
contrast, were generally endorsed enthusiastically. Although the
cleric who sponsored the effort to preach the gospel might well be
suspected of seeking fame and an enlargement of his diocese, the
benefits would be widely shared and the risks would be few. Those who
donated money would be honoured and perhaps saved in the afterlife,
while those who went among the pagans would anticipate achieving
either fame and honour or earning martyrdom.
Although the missions in the Baltic are usually remembered as
German efforts, there were Swedish and Danish missionaries as well.
In fact, the Scandinavian churchmen were well in advance of German
monks until the merchant community in Visby, on the island of
Gotland, opened the Livonian market at the mouth of the Daugava River
in the late twelfth century. When the German merchants went to the
Daugava, they were accompanied by their own priests. In 1180, one of
them – Meinhard, an Augustinian friar – remained with the local
tribe, the Livs (whence Livonia), as a missionary.
We have Meinhard’s story, and the history of the next fifty
years of the mission, from one of the finest chroniclers of the
Middle Ages, Henry of Livonia, who wrote a stirring account of the
heroic efforts of missionaries and crusaders to overcome pagan
scepticism and resistance. The careful reader can also note the
chronicler’s comments about the Christians’ many personal and
group failings.
Meinhard had sufficient success for the pope to name him bishop of
Üxküll, the island where he had his small church; moreover, his
success was sufficient to raise the ire of the pagan priests, who
curtailed Meinhard’s activities significantly, fearing that the
missionaries would soon be followed by foreign troops. The priests’
fears were not entirely groundless. The Livs and their neighbours
upstream, the Letts, had already been visited by Rus’ian officials,
collecting tribute for their distant lord, and their folklore
undoubtedly contained stories of Viking raiders and travellers.
Primitive societies often have widely divergent ways of dealing with
strangers – sometimes both great hospitality toward guests and a
suspicion that foreign visitors were generally up to no good.
Meinhard had built two fortifications to protect his small flock
against Lithuanian raids, and had hired mercenary troops as
garrisons. The earlier failure of the Germans to send volunteers to
protect the small mission can be partly attributed to the conflict
between Welf and Hohenstaufen parties for possession of the imperial
title, the conflict worsening after the 1198 death of Heinrich VI. It
was in the midst of this uproar that the mission to Livonia was
changed into a crusading venture; it was partly to escape that
conflict that numerous knights and clerics later took the cross to
fight the pagans in Livonia, because by doing so their immunity as
crusaders would protect their persons and property from seizure by
whichever party was dominant at that moment.
So, with little help from his homeland, Meinhard had built – on
the natives’ promise to pay the tithe and taxes – two small stone
castles. When it came time to pay the workmen and the mercenary
soldiers, however, many natives refused to honour their commitment.
Moreover, they then mocked their impoverished bishop for his
gullibility. Meinhard seems to have accepted this with Christian
fortitude, but since he died soon afterward we cannot be sure what he
would have done next. Certainly his successors were less forgiving
and patient.
In 1197, before the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen left on crusade
to the Holy Land he invested Berthold, the Cistercian abbot of
Loccum, as bishop of Üxküll. The younger son of a ministeriale
family which had colonised the swamps along the Elbe River, Berthold
was familiar with many of the noble families of Saxony and the
complexities of local politics.
Berthold first tried to make friends with the local tribal
chieftains, entertaining them and distributing gifts, but his
frightening experience at the consecration of a cemetery changed his
approach. Pagans set fire to his fortified church, sought to kill him
as he fled to his ship, and then pursued him downriver. Berthold went
to Gotland, then to Saxony, where he wrote a detailed letter to the
pope asking for permission to lead an army against the heathens. When
the pope granted his request for ‘remission of sins to all those
who should take the cross and arm themselves against the perfidious
Livonians’, Berthold criss-crossed the North German countryside,
preaching the crusade.
He returned to Livonia in July of 1198 with an army of Saxons and
Gotland merchants. The Livs gathered their forces opposite the
Christians, and, though they were unwilling to submit to mass
baptism, they offered to allow Berthold to stay in the land and to
compel his parishioners to remain faithful; but they would allow him
only to persuade others to believe in Christ, not to force them to
accept the new faith. This was not sufficient for Berthold. When the
natives refused his demand for hostages and killed several German
foragers, he ordered an attack. His army was not large, but it was
well equipped. He not only had heavy cavalry – armoured knights on
war-horses which easily overthrew the small Baltic ponies that failed
to move out of their relentless path – but he also had infantry
armed with crossbows, pikes, billhooks, and halberds, who were
protected by iron armour and leather garments. By comparison the Liv
militiamen were practically unarmed. Moreover, they were not
particularly numerous, and their military tradition was one of
perceiving a predictable defeat and evading its consequences. As the
Western proverb puts it, discretion was the better part of valour.
Ironically, almost the only Christian casualty was Berthold
himself. Although his Saxon knights quickly routed the pagans,
Berthold’s horse bolted, carrying him into the enemy’s ranks
among the sand dunes, where he was cut down before rescuers could
reach him. After taking a terrible revenge for his death, the
crusaders left small garrisons in the castles and sailed home.
However, the size of these garrisons was insufficient to impress the
pagans, who symbolically washed off their baptisms and sent them down
the Daugava after the departing crusaders. They then besieged the
castles, so that the monks were unable to go into the fields and tend
their crops. When the Livonians warned that any priest who remained
in the land past Easter would be killed, the frightened clergy fled
back to Saxony.
The third bishop, Albert von Buxhoevden, brought a large army from
Saxony, forced the Livs to become Christians, and founded a city on
the Daugava at Riga. Within a few years the crusade he organised
would overwhelm the Letts, push into Estonian territory to the north
and east, and occupy the lightly settled areas south of the Daugava
and along the coastline to the south.
Although adequate numbers of crusaders came almost every summer to
protect the Christian outpost and even undertake offensive
operations, it was clear that they were insufficient to conquer the
pagans of the interior; and such crusaders contributed little to the
defence of the country through the long winters. Bishop Albert’s
first thoughts were to make the foremost native elders into a
knightly class. This was only partly successful, because so few of
them had sufficient income to equip themselves properly. Caupo and a
few elders were important in Livonia – Caupo even travelled to Rome
to meet the pope – and the ‘Kurish Kings’ were prominent
locally for many years. Albert’s second plan was to grant tax fiefs
to his relatives and friends; he gave this small number of German
knights a share of the episcopal income rather than expecting them to
live from the produce of their fields. Some of the Germans married
native noblewomen; and in time some of the native knights were
absorbed into their number. But the number of German knights was
small, and the bishop could not give out more tax fiefs without
jeopardising his own slender income and that of his canons. His third
plan was to create a new military order, the Swordbrothers. The
Swordbrothers provided the garrisons that protected the conquests
through the long winters and the military expertise that transformed
visiting summertime contingents into more effective warriors.
Consequently thirteenth-century crusading armies operating in
Livonia were composed of diverse forces: the Swordbrothers, the
vassals of the various bishops, the militia of Riga and other towns,
native militias, and visiting crusaders. Native troops were sometimes
organised in uniformed infantry bodies, fighting under their own
banner; such groups would take turns serving in the border castles,
watching for enemy incursions; in battle they usually served on the
wings (with the tribes sometimes being kept far apart, lest they
mistake one another for the enemy or decide to fight out ancient
rivalries right in the middle of a battle). When the prospect for
victory seemed good, they fought well, but whenever the tide of
battle turned against them, they fled hurriedly, leaving the
heavily-armoured Germans in the lurch. Native light cavalry served as
scouts and raiders; relatively unsupervised, they had more
opportunities for loot, rape and murder than did the slower-moving
knights and infantry. Many of the summer volunteers from Germany were
middle class merchants who had the money to equip themselves as
mounted warriors. All in all, the Livonian crusade differed
significantly from crusades in the Holy Land or even Prussia.
After Bishop Albert moved his church to Riga, that city became an
important mercantile centre, with Rus’ian traders coming down the
Daugava to sell their wax and furs, and Germans sailing upriver as
far as Polotsk with their cloth and iron. This brought an additional
complication to his policies. The Orthodox Christian church held sway
in the lightly settled forests of northern Rus’. These princes’
titles were grander than their present wealth, but their lands were
broad, the fields and forests rich, the mercantile cities along the
great rivers prosperous, and they were proud that their isolation
kept them from the temptations and corruptions of the Roman Catholic
world. Individually the Rus’ian dukes of Pskov, Novgorod, and
Polotsk attempted to drive Bishop Albert out of Livonia, claiming to
be coming to the aid of their subjects. Only the Swordbrothers saved
the bishop in these crises, as well as saving his hide from the king
of Denmark, who wanted to make himself master of the entire Baltic
coastline. However, the Swordbrothers refused to be vassals. They
claimed their allegiance was to the pope and to the emperor.
In time Bishop Albert gave one-third of the conquered lands to the
Swordbrothers, but he did so grudgingly and made repeated efforts to
assert his authority over them. When these quarrels grew so heated as
to endanger the crusade, the pope sent a papal legate, William of
Modena, to resolve the differences. In the end the bishop had to
recognise the Swordbrothers’ autonomy, then give much of his
remaining lands to four subordinate prelates, two abbots, and his
canons; then, once he had endowed his relatives with estates, there
was little left to support a sizeable episcopal army. Nor could
Bishop Albert rely solely upon the native militias, though they were
very willing to join in the fight against traditional rivals. He
needed advocates – experienced warriors who knew the native
languages and customs – to train the militia in Western tactics and
lead them in battle; but only the Swordbrothers had knights willing
to live among the natives, and only the Swordbrothers would perform
this task at a reasonable price (poverty, chastity and obedience had
little lure for ambitious secular knights). Thus the Swordbrothers,
whose military contingents were indispensable when crusading armies
were not present, and who could provide knights to organise the
native forces, became the leaders of the crusade in Livonia.
If the Swordbrother organisation had great strengths, it also had
weaknesses. Foremost of these was its need for more convents in
Germany. This lack of local contacts made sustained recruiting drives
difficult and hindered efforts to solicit contributions among the
faithful; also, incomes from estates would have eased the order’s
chronic financial crisis. Secondly, the Swordbrothers’ revenues
from Livonian taxes and their own estates were insufficient to hire
enough mercenaries to supplement properly the numbers of knights and
men-at-arms. This perennial financial crisis drove them to expand
their holdings in the hope of increasing the number of ‘converts’
who would pay tribute and provide the warriors needed to make their
armies more equal to those of their enemies. This resulted in
conflicts with the king of Denmark over Estonia; with the
Lithuanians, the most important pagans to the south; and with the
Rus’ians, especially those in Novgorod.
The End of the Swordbrothers
The military disaster experienced by the Swordbrothers in 1236 was
far from unexpected. For several years the order had realised that
its manpower was insufficient to accomplish the tasks that lay before
it. It dared not further overburden the natives, who had suffered
significant losses in lives, cattle and property during the conquest.
Consequently, its officers believed that the best way to increase the
revenue needed to support its knights, mercenaries and priests was by
obtaining property in Germany. Acquiring manors and hospitals in the
Holy Roman Empire, of course, could not be done instantly, and
certainly not without a powerful patron. In 1231 Master Volquin had
sought to resolve the economic and political crisis by uniting his
order with the Teutonic Knights. He had hoped that the superior
resources of the ‘German Order’ would provide the men and money
needed to defend Livonia, that its discipline would reinvigorate the
Swordbrother convents, and that its good offices with Pope Gregory
would resolve the conflicts with the bishop of Riga. Even more
importantly, there was a terrible row with the papal officer
appointed by William of Modena to serve in his absence, who seems to
have seen this assignment as a step toward a great career in the
Church.
The grand chapter of the Teutonic Order that met in Marburg chose
not to act on the Swordbrother proposal, but the idea was far from
impractical. In the interchanges of experience and ideas that took
place at their frequent meetings at the papal and imperial courts,
the Teutonic Knights probably learned more than they taught. The
Swordbrothers had the greater experience in the Baltic, having been
there for two and a half decades before the Teutonic Knights sent
their first permanent unit to the region.
Hermann von Salza sent two castellans from Germany to inspect the
situation in Livonia. They spent the winter of 1235 – 6 there and
reported their findings to the annual assembly that must have taken
place shortly after Friedrich II and the grand master had attended
the canonisation of St Elisabeth in Marburg. The report was so
negative that there could have been little discussion. In addition to
the political problems previously mentioned, they found that convent
life among the Swordbrothers was far below the standards of the
Teutonic Order, and that the Swordbrothers demanded such autonomy
within any future united order that reforming their convents would be
impossible.
The Swordbrothers came to their downfall soon afterwards. Their
greed and ruthlessness made them vulnerable to accusations before the
pope, and they were cut off from the money and the crusaders needed
to survive. Desperate for some way out of his situation, Master
Volquin led his armies into the pagan regions to the south. A
reconciliation with the papacy arranged by William of Modena came too
late.
The Swordbrother Order might have survived its financial crisis if
Volquin had avoided unnecessary risks. Unfortunately for him, a party
of crusaders from Holstein arrived late in the season in 1236 and,
despite the lack of adequate numbers to guarantee success, they
demanded to be led into battle. Master Volquin, not wanting to
disappoint his guests, reluctantly undertook a raid into Samogitia,
that part of Lithuania that lay between Livonia and Prussia. Perhaps
earlier expeditions into Lithuania had been no less risky, but this
time fate collected its due. Volquin led the crusaders across the
Saule River (Šiauliai), where they attacked Samogitian settlements.
Resistance was insignificant, because the native warriors chose to
abandon their homes in favour of ambushing the raiders at the Saule
River crossing on their way north. When the retreating crusader force
reached the ford, they found it blocked by a small number of resolute
pagan warriors. Volquin ordered the crusaders to dismount and wade
across the stream. He warned that unless they hurried, it would soon
be even more difficult to fight their way across, because the pagans
would be reinforced. The Holstein knights, however, refused to fight
on foot. Volquin could not impose his will on the visitors, and the
crusaders made camp for the night.
The next day, when the crusaders
splashed across the stream, they discovered that the leading
highlands chieftain, Mindaugas, had either led or sent a large body
of men to fight alongside the Samogitians. In the ensuing combat
Volquin and half his Swordbrothers perished, together with most of
the crusaders. The native militias scattered early in the battle;
unencumbered by heavy armour, most native warriors found ways to
cross the river and flee north while the Lithuanians were
preoccupied.
