Northern Crusades

And I actually think that this pattern you can find even in the time of the Crusades.

Because when Europe went down to slaughter Muslims and Jews in Palestine, and they went home and did similar things to people in Europe, in the Baltic, the Baltic Crusades, where they, you know, this is, of course, forgotten, inflicted genocides on people in Prussia and other parts of the Baltic.

But this is an old historical pattern that was massively intensified during the high era of imperialism and that is coming back to haunt us now.

In the recent fabulous book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, they say that history moves in spirals.

To justify Sweden's desire to control Finland, the Swedish king persuaded the pope to authorize crusades into Finland.

Just like the Crusades into the Holy Land, the Northern Crusades were military campaigns authorized by the Pope, who is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, designed to gain control of territory through forced conversions and occupations.

Back then, the Pope wielded incredible political power.

If a ruler wanted legitimacy or established territory, they had to get permission from the Pope.

The Northern Crusades began in the late 12th century.

However, there have been Christian missionaries operating centuries before.

Sweden in particular engaged in two or three crusades.

Finland, having declared its independence of Russia, proposes to send to Washington an official mission to make application for American recognition of Finland as an independent republic So do you want to just pick up on who is what and what is where then? Because Finland, Russia, what's going on?

Well, I mean, how far do we want to go back? Do you want to go back to the Northern Crusades?

No.

Yeah, no, no, no, no. Yeah, so there's the Kingdom of Sweden, which is massive.

They were there in the First Crusade.

They were major participants in all four of the major ones in the Holy Land, and they were almost exclusively responsible for later Crusades in Baltic parts of Europe that converted the last pagans to Christianity in the 1300s.

Today's episode, I'm speaking to Thomas Williams, former curator at the British Museum, and author of God's Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades.

We discuss how Scandinavians went from being Christianity's most terrifying enemies to some of its most enthusiastic holy warriors within two months, how Norse King Harald Hardrada, who tried to conquer England on the eve of the Norman invasion in 1066, also served as a Byzantine mercenary across the Mediterranean and may have policed the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem 60 years before the First Crusade, and why Vladimir of Kiev, who in 988 had his choice of religions to convert to, he could have become Muslim or Catholic or Orthodox, chose Byzantine Christianity over Islam because he said, "Drinking is the joy of the Russes." We see how Norwegian King Sigurd fought his way through the Mediterranean six years after the First Crusade to help capture the major port city of Sidon and receive a splinter of the True Cross, and how it could have only been the Viking Christians to be able to conquer the Baltic north of Europe and convert them to Christianity.

We see that crusading gave the violence that had always defined Norse culture a new legitimacy and a new set of enemies, and they found a way to be Vikings and Christians at the same time.

And a lot of it is pretty profane, pretty salacious stuff, you know, the sort of things that, that people of all eras have wanted to write on the walls of, of buildings.

But there's one really extraordinary line in there, which translated, it comes out as, "Jerusalem farers broke into Orkneyinga, broke into this barrow." And by the date that these runes were written, has the, the much more specific meaning of crusaders.

So we have a really, really fascinating glimpse into a world where people from Iceland, Norway, the Northern Isles of Britain, were traveling these extraordinary distances to the Middle East and participating in the, the phenomenon we know as the Crusades.

The Albigensian Crusade had proven that the spiritual rewards and legal framework of a holy war could be effectively turned against enemies within Christendom.

The Northern Crusades would prove that the same model could be used to fuel a brutal, centuries-long war of colonial expansion and forced conversion against Europe's last remaining pagans.

The frontier was the swampy, densely forested landscape bordering the Baltic Sea, the home of a host of tribal peoples, the Wends, the Prussians, the Livonians, and the Lithuanians, who had for centuries resisted the advance of Christianity, fiercely guarding their ancient traditions and their sacred groves.

The conflict in this region began as a conventional border war, a long history of raids and counter-raids between the German and Danish Christian kingdoms and their pagan neighbors.

They had created something unique in history, the Ordensstaat, a sovereign theocratic state ruled by a monastic order of warrior monks.

It was a highly efficient, centralized, and perpetually militarized society whose primary reason for being was the continuation of the holy war against the last great pagan power in Europe, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Historians still debate whether the Northern Crusades were primarily a pious missionary enterprise aimed at saving souls or a brutal land-grabbing campaign of colonial conquest that was simply cloaked in the convenient language of a holy war.

In either case, the results were undeniable.

People have heard of the Crusades, and to them, the Crusades is when these barbarians came to the Levant.

Okay? But actually, there are the Northern Crusades.

The barbarians also went north to Russia.

It dates over a thousand year, their attempts, you know? And every other centuries, they get the urge to go, [laughs] you know, take over, and they're defeated.

The second incomplete game I'd like to talk about is my Sweden game.

I thought it'd be fun to play as Sweden in the 1178 start date and kind of finish the quote-unquote Northern Crusades, helping out with converting Lithuania and Finland and kind of that Eastern Baltic region to Catholicism.

There were some really fun points in that game, like the Pope actually... implored me to have a holy war against one of the Finnish duchies, which was really cool.

And I got my friend, the King Inora, to help me.