Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier

A Companion to the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia

Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, Carsten Selch Jensen, Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, Carsten Selch Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754666271
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, written by a missionary priest in the early thirteenth century to record the history of the crusades to Livonia and Estonia around 1186-1227, offers one of the most vivid examples of the early thirteenth century crusading ideology in practice. Step by step, it has become one of the most widely read and acknowledged frontier crusading and missionary chronicles. Henry's chronicle offers many opportunities to test and broaden the new approaches and key concepts brought along by recent developments in medieval studies, including the new pluralist definition of crusading and the relationship between the peripheries and core areas of Europe. While recent years have produced a significant amount of new research into Henry of Livonia, much of it has been limited to particular historical traditions and languages. A key objective of this book, therefore, is to synthesise the current state of research for the international scholarly audience. The volume provides a multi-sided and multi-disciplinary companion to the chronicle, and is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Representations, ' brings into focus the imaginary sphere of the chronicle - the various images brought into existence by the amalgamation of crusading and missionary ideology and the frontier experience. This is followed by studies on 'Practices, ' which examines the chronicle's reflections of the diplomatic, religious, and military practices of the christianisation and colonisation processes in medieval Livonia. The volume concludes with a section on the 'Appropriations, ' which maps the reception history of the chronicle: the dynamics of the medieval, early modern and modern national uses and abuses of the text.

PART I
Representations

Chapter 1
Henry of Livonia and the Ideology of Crusading

Christopher Tyerman

The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia provides a rich mine for historians with a wide variety of interests: literary, religious, ecclesiastical, political, economic, philological, ethnological, archaeological, military and nationalistic. The concern here is with the context of the development across Latin Christendom of ideas justifying and promoting a particular form of religious warfare known to us as the crusades. To what extent does Henry’s text display the penetration into his north German and Baltic ecclesiastical world of theories of holy war current elsewhere? How does Henry fashion them to suit his local and immediate purposes? Does Henry indicate a coherent ideology at all?

Henry’s chronicle is far from an artless compilation. Behind the descriptive recitation of annual events lie clear threads that bind the whole together. It is a work of didacticism and advocacy, a sermon and a manifesto, its seemingly autobiographical tone concealing some of its main purposes. Henry does not seem to have been a chronicler or historian in the sense of sophisticated literati such as Gerald of Wales (c. 1146–1223), another who described a conquest (in his case of Ireland), or William of Tyre (c. 1130–86), who similarly wrought a creation myth for a new Christian state (the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem). The Livonian chronicle may have been Henry’s sole contribution to the genre. Henry was writing an advocate’s brief on behalf of the close group of pioneering clergy, often related to one another, with whom he had been associated as a protégé and dependant since before arriving in Livonia in about 1205. As Henry himself remarked, he had been persuaded to write by ‘his lords and companions’, probably in the light of the mission to Livonia of the papal legate William of Modena (c. 1184–1251) in 1225–27. Henry wrote to order; and that order probably came from Albert von Buxhövden, bishop of Riga (r. 1199–1229). If so, this may help provide a terminal date for the final version of the chronicle: 1229, the year of Bishop Albert’s death. Even if it was, as often argued, begun as a sort of briefing report for the legate, inconsistencies between Henry’s account and papal policy suggest a more precise context. The chronicle’s final version, completed after February 1227, promotes an episcopal Rigan narrative of the conquest of Livonia in contradistinction to rival versions. The years 1227–29 might appear propitious for this task, with the captivity (1223) and subsequent defeat at Bornhöved (1227) of Waldemar II of Denmark (r. 1202–41) reducing the potency of Danish claims to primacy and the departure of Legate William in 1227 allowing a Rigan view to be asserted in opposition to that of the papacy.1

Another difficulty concerns what is meant by crusade ideology and where it can be discovered. Writing in the earliest years of the twelfth century, the Benedictine Guibert of Nogent (c. 1053–c. 1124) memorably distinguished the praelia sancta, the new holy war of Jerusalem, from the just war or legitime bella of its predecessors in defence of the church.2 The model of what happened between 1095 and 1099 provided both the practical distinctive features of this manner of war – cross-taking, remission of penalties of sins and, by the 1140s at least, various temporal privileges – and the ideological justification. The latter leached into reformist evangelizing and was taken up especially by Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090–1153) and the Cistercian order, which later played such an important role in Livonia. However, crusade ideology followed no coherent or single line of development, being as much subject to nostalgia for the great deeds of the First Crusade, local enthusiasms and the reactive opportunism of the papal Curia as to carefully argued theology. Until the 1180s, theory, promotion, rhetoric, reception and implementation display no simple pattern of understanding and belief beyond the association with the Jerusalem war and the institutions linked to it, such as the exhortatory sermon, the giving of the cross, spiritual rewards and the promise of martyrdom. Away from Cistercians, the papal curia, universities and certain restricted aristocratic and clerical circles, crusade ideology was a thing of shreds and patches, ill-formed and far from a universal formula for war against enemies of the Christian church. Causa 23 of Gratian of Bologna’s Decretum, almost all of which appeared in the first redaction of 1139/40 and remained unrevised in the text’s subsequent reworking, makes no reference to specifically crusading ideology or institutions.3 In their accounts of wars between Christians and non-Christians other than papally proclaimed wars of the cross, writers such as Helmold of Bosau (c. 1120–after 1177) or even William of Tyre, the latter at least in touch with much of the latest smart thinking in the Western clerical elite, do not characterize these conflicts in identifiably crusading terms.4So, far from crusade ideology dominating justifications of inter-religious war, crusading appeared as often subsumed into the theology of pilgrimage, a rationalizing of the radical ideas of Pope Urban II (r. 1088–99) within a familiar, safe, traditional and conservative frame, even if at times an uneasy fit. The use of pilgrimage as a prism through which crusading could be viewed was followed in the later twelfth century by the increasingly legalistic attempt, by popes and university academics, to harness the crusade – a transcendent, redemptive holy act in answer to the direct command of God – to the temporal constraints of just war theory.5 Deus Vult provided inadequate precision as more care was bestowed on the justice and detail of cause, authority, intent, proportionality and so on. Of course, many of these elements had occupied commentators since 1095, but they now featured more centrally in the rhetoric, even if applied in practice with less scrupulous attention to legal norms.

By 1200, after the convulsive efforts surrounding the Third Crusade (1189–92), crusade motifs and institutions became increasingly embedded in the religious culture of Roman Christianity, at least as conceived and promoted by interested clerical elites. A range of associated ideas revolved around the cross and the Crucified Christ, a redemptive power accessible to the penitent faithful through the offer of remission of sins in return for an overt demonstrative act of taking the cross. The full indulgence was not unequivocally offered by popes to crucesignati until Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), although in many quarters – and some papal correspondence – a simple elision of ideas had led to a de facto belief in the remission of sin and not just penance before that. Linked to this was the idea – which long pre-dated 1095 – that those who died fighting for the faith were ipso facto martyrs. The crusade became a metaphor for the Christian life, a struggle in which each soul was tested, as was the sinfulness of Christendom itself.6 The crusader imitated Christ in bearing His cross. However, local issues coloured this elevated association. In the Baltic, conversion, not a prime feature of crusades in Palestine or even Spain, strongly shaped how crusading ideology was harnessed to the interests of ecclesiastical, commercial and aristocratic empire builders. To just war theorists, it became necessary to argue that pagans presented either a living threat to Christians as individuals or as a community, or that they were contumacious apostates. Pagans could not, according to some theorists, be attacked simply because they were pagan.7 This problem stalks Henry of Livonia’s text, and he took much care to get the solution to it legalistically correct. At the opposite end of the spectrum to just war came the association with the rights and status of pilgrimage, giving crusaders – or at least their apologists’ descriptions of them – the sense that they were marching with saints to saints. The most Holy Land of Palestine was therefore re-sited wherever crusaders hoped to gain remission of sins.8 Cross, Christ, penance and indulgence, martyrdom, just war, conversion, Holy Land and crusade as pilgrimage were consequently decked out in regional trappings.

A historiographical point might be made here, as it helps highlight how Henry differs from his predecessors in describing northern wars of Christians against pagans. War deo auctore was not an invention of the crusade. Nor, after 1099, were all such wars crusades, nor were they perceived as such. There has been a recent tendency to lump all Baltic religious war together under the banner of crusades, which seems both unhistorical and unnecessary. When Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150–1220) described Archbishop Absalon of Lund (r. 1178–1201) ‘making an offering to God not of prayers but of arms’, he was not describing crypto-crusaders.9 He was reflecting older traditions that then allowed imported crusade institutions to germinate. Crusading was always a sub-set of holy war. Fighting the infidel was – and had long been – seen as meritorious with or without the occasional Baltic crusading bulls of the half century after 1147, provided, Helmold of Bosau might lament, participants were moved by faith and charity, not greed and brutality.10 What makes Henry of Livonia of interest in this context is that, unlike Saxo or Helmold, and more so even than Arnold of Lübeck (c. 1150–1211/14), his chronicle is shot through with shards of c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures and Table
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Names
• Modern Equivalents of Place Names and Regional Names
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Henry of Livonia, The Writer and His Chronicle
• PART I: REPRESENTATIONS
• PART II: PRACTICES
• PART III: APPROPRIATIONS
• The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia: A Selected Bibliography
• Index