The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier

Alan V. Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351892605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The conversion of the lands on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea by Germans, Danes and Swedes in the period from 1150 to 1400 represented the last great struggle between Christianity and paganism on the European continent, but for the indigenous peoples of Finland, Livonia, Prussia, Lithuania and Pomerania, it was also a period of wider cultural conflict and transformation. Along with the Christian faith came a new and foreign culture: the German and Scandinavian languages of the crusaders and the Latin of their priests, new names for places, superior military technology, and churches and fortifications built of stone. For newly baptized populations, the acceptance of Christianity encompassed major changes in the organization and practice of political, religious and social life, entailing the acceptance of government by alien elites, of new cultic practices, and of new obligations such as taxes, tithes and military service in the armies of the Christian rulers. At the same time, as the Western conquerors carried their campaigns beyond pagan territory into the principalities of north-western Russia, the Baltic Crusades also developed into a struggle between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This collection of sixteen essays by both established and younger scholars explores the theme of clash of cultures from a variety of perspectives, discussing the nature and ideology of crusading in the medieval Baltic region, the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and the cultural confrontation that accompanied the process of conversion, in subjects as diverse as religious observation, political structures, the practice of warfare, art and music, and perceptions of the landscape.

Part I
Culture and Identity

Chapter 1
A New World into Old Words: The Eastern Baltic Region and the Cultural Geography of Medieval Europe

Marek Tamm

Introduction: Imagined Geographies

One of the results of the conquest and conversion of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea in the thirteenth century was the need to integrate the conquered lands into European cultural geography and translate this new information into Latin learned discourse.¹ Borrowing the terminology of today’s geographers we could define this need more abstractly as a task to appropriate the new space and transform it into territory. By ‘territory’, I mean a space domesticated by a community through the execution of power, in opposition to ‘space’ as something vague and indefinable.² ‘Power territorializes’, Kathy Lavezzo has recently written: ‘it permeates, controls, and fashions space’.³

In this chapter I am mainly interested in the discursive aspect of this process of territorializing: how the textual mapping of the eastern Baltic region by Latin authors came about in the thirteenth century, and what kind of rhetorical and narrative techniques were employed to this end.⁴ I will also address the question of what kinds of cultural clashes we may witness in this mapping.⁵ In general, one has to agree with Nils Blomkvist’s recent assessment that cultural conflicts on the eastern Baltic frontier were the most notable of the High Middle Ages: ‘As an ethnological experience, the penetration of the East Baltic countries was to be something very different from the earlier phases of the Europeanization process. On the far side of the sea the Westerners encountered communities which had had little or no previous influence from Western culture. Theirs were to be the most radical cultural encounters of the entire process of Europeanization on the Baltic Rim.’⁶

In many ways, the discursive angle is the only one a medievalist can choose in his work, since medieval geographical texts tend to convey cultural convictions and textual traditions rather than physical reality. Ruth Morse has put it successfully: ‘Even when they (i.e. medieval historians and geographers) were eyewitnesses they seldom seem to have expected close textual attention.’⁷ In the Middle Ages, geographical description was primarily a textual exercise of an authoritative canon of theological doctrine. Medieval and early modern theory of knowledge, as Anthony Pagden has pointed out, ‘claimed that the external world and all human life was legible, secundum scripturam’. Specifically, ‘understanding the world […] was dependent upon the interpretation of a determined canon of texts: the Bible, the Church Fathers, and a regularly contested although in practice restricted corpus of ancient writers’.⁸

Medieval geographical texts should therefore in general be considered as ‘imagined geographies’, to employ the expression coined by Edward Said.⁹ In this term, ‘imagined’ is used to mean not ‘false’ or ‘fictional’, but ‘perceived’. It refers to the perception of space created through different texts or discourses. All landscapes are seen as being imagined; there is no ‘real’ geography with which the imagined ones can be compared. Thus we cannot have the hermeneutic satisfaction of stripping away the false representations to arrive at a secure sense of reality. In this chapter I shall not try to distinguish between true and false representations but to look at the nature of the representational practices that the Europeans carried with them to the eastern Baltic.

Expansion of the Habitable World

Thirteenth-century Europe witnessed a remarkable extension of the view of the habitable world. Many regions previously unknown or little known to Christianity were textually mapped and integrated into Western cultural geography.¹⁰ One of the indicators of this extension is the emergence of the eastern Baltic region in thirteenth-century geographical descriptions.¹¹ Together with the expansion of the crusading movement and missionary work to the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, more and more descriptions of the region and its inhabitants appeared from the thirteenth century onwards, affording increasingly specific geographical knowledge and insightful testimony on the cultural clashes and compromises on the eastern Baltic frontier.

A quick glance at earlier traditions makes one conclude that descriptions of the eastern Baltic dating from before the thirteenth century clearly belong to the realm of geographical mirabilia and reflect most of all the textual circulation of mythical codes. One of the earliest surviving examples of this ‘mythological phase’ is an Old English text from the late ninth century, the so-called Voyage of Wulfstan, which is interpolated into the Old English translation of Orosius’s The Seven Books of History against the Pagans. It is an Englishman’s description of a journey across the Baltic Sea to Estonia and of the customs of the people found there. Arriving in Estonia, he finds many towns and a king in each. The local people drink mare’s milk if they are wealthy and mead if they are slaves or poor folk. Wulfstan mostly pays attention to the burial customs of the local inhabitants, which he presents as a kind of contest, where the fastest rider inherits the most valuable part of the heritage of the departed.¹² One of the latest commentators on Wulfstan’s journey, Sealy Gilles, pointedly remarks that in describing Estonians he actually attributes to them modes of behaviour widespread in Old English poetry: ‘Wulfstan’s account of pagan customs persisting on the margins of European Christendom is reminiscent of the ancient customs of the English themselves.’¹³ In order to avoid straying even further from the Latin texts central to this study, I merely indicate the numerous mentions and descriptions of the eastern Baltic region in early Nordic sources.¹⁴

A somewhat more thorough overview of the region, in kind still a part of the ‘mythological phase’ of medieval cultural geography, is provided by Adam of Bremen in his History of the Bishops of Hamburg-Bremen (c. 1075–76). The fourth book of the History, the ‘Description of the Islands of the North’, is wholly an account of peoples and lands that lay about the Baltic Sea. Adam builds up his narrative around the missionary mandate, which explains his curiosity toward the more distant Baltic regions.¹⁵ Basing his geographical worldview on earlier textual authorities and the mappaemundi layout, Adam depicts the eastern Baltic region mainly as separate islands in the middle of the Baltic or ‘Barbarian Sea’ (Lat. Mare barbarum).¹⁶ Adam takes a closer look at three regions: Curonia,¹⁷ Estonia¹⁸ and Sambia,¹⁹ adding to these descriptions additional information on the ‘Land of Women’ (Lat. Terra feminarum), where Amazons and Cynocephali live. At the end of his description he adds: ‘In this sea there are also very many other islands, all infested by ferocious barbarians and for this reason avoided by navigators.’²⁰ Also partly belonging to the phase of ‘mythological descriptions’ are the turn-of-the-century descriptions by Saxo Grammaticus on some of the people of the eastern Baltic region in his Gesta Danorum (c. 1208), although the historian Paul Johansen has with some success tried to identify the historical sources of his notes.²¹

A change in the textual tradition came about in the early thirteenth century, culminating in the middle of the century, when the first more thorough Latin descriptions on the eastern Baltic region were completed. Naturally this textual production is directly linked to the Christianization process in this region, because one of the raisons d’être of these geographical descriptions is to create authority and subordination. Not trying to present all the sources at this point, I merely mention the most important ones that up until today have not rated from historians the attention they deserve.

Besides the well-known Chronica Slavorum (c. 1210) of Arnold of Lübeck and Chronicon Livoniae (c. 1224–27) of Henry of Livonia, which first give an overview of Christianity reaching the eastern Baltic region,²² two mid-thirteenth-century Latin sources need to be highlighted, as they contain new geographical information and details on the history of religion in the region. These are the encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum (‘On the Properties of Things’), completed by the English Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus around 1245, and an anonymous geographical tract entitled Descriptiones terrarum (‘Descriptions of Lands’) that was written about 1255. The fifteenth book of Bartholomaeus’s encyclopedia, a true ‘bestseller’ in the Middle Ages and also the following centuries, is devoted in its entirety to describing the ‘provinces’ of the world and contains sections on six regions of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea: Livonia, Lithuania, Sambia, Semgallia, Revalia and Vironia.²³ The sole manuscript of Descriptiones terrarum known to have been preserved emerged only in 1979, and researchers have not yet agreed on its author.²⁴ He was probably a member of a mendicant order and was active in Riga at the time of Archbishop Albert Suerbeer (d. 1273).²⁵ Descriptiones terrarum is probably a surviving fragment of a more sizeable work describing the origin and customs of the Mongols. In current form the manuscript contains only a casual overview of the regions of Eastern and Northern Europe, containing, among other things, information on a dozen regions of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea (Livonia, Lithuania, Samland, Curonia and others).²⁶

Mapping the Eastern Baltic Region in the Thirteenth Century

Before the mid-thirteenth century the Latin sources contain only very random and unsystematic information about the more precise location and inner structure of the eastern Baltic region. Our most thorough source from that period, Henry’s Chronicle of Livonia, takes only a fleeting interest in the geography of the newly conquered territories. Since the spiritual centre of Henry’s chronicle is located in Riga, the Lettish territories merit the most attention. Other regions come under the gaze of the author only in describing isolated missionary and military campaigns.

Even though in the first decades of the thirteenth century the English historian Gervase of Tilbury had expressed a deeper interest in Eastern Europe, his influential work Otia imperialia (c. 1214) does not yet mention a single eastern Baltic area.²⁷ However, we can find several on the Ebstorf map of the world attributed to Gervase of Tilbury, but more probably composed at the end of the thirteenth century by an unknown author.²⁸ On this largest recorded mappamundi the following eastern Baltic regions are mentioned: Semgallia (Semigallia), Curonia (Curlant), Sambia (Sanelant), Prussia (Prucia) and the town of Riga in Livonia (Riga Livonie civitas).²⁹

But the most thorough information about the region reached the learned audience of the West thanks to the encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, of which over two hundred manuscripts have survived. As stated before, Bartholomaeus introduces six provinces of the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea; but since the structure of the encyclopedia is alphabetical, his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Contributors to the Volume
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Names
• Modern Equivalents of Place-names and Regional Names
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I CULTURE AND IDENTITY
• PART II CRUSADE AND MISSION
• PART III CONVERTING LANDSCAPES, CONVERTING PEOPLES
• PART IV CATHOLICISM AND ORTHODOXY
• PART V WARFARE ON THE BALTIC FRONTIER
• The Eastern Baltic Lands in the Age of the Crusades: A Select Bibliography of Publications in English
• Index