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Denmark and the Crusading Movement
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Carsten, Ane, Kurt, and John, Sveaborg, Helsinki 2000.
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Description of the project:
Denmark and the Crusading Movement -
The Integration of the Baltic region into Medieval Europe
Sponsored by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and based at the University of Southern Denmark 1998-2001
The original homepage of the project with calendar and activities can be viewed at www.sdu.dk/Hum/kvj/crusade/Crusade_home.html
The Integration of the Baltic region into Medieval Europe
Traditionally, crusades have been defined as the military attempts in the Middle Ages to conquer the Holy Land and thereby rule the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The crusading movement thus ended with the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, and later attempts to resuscitate it have therefore been dismissed not seriously meant or merely rhetorical.
A broader definition has long been known, but it was not until the 1970' that first British historians began to apply it generally, then in the 1980' it was discussed at conferences, and it has now become the most widely accepted. According to this definition, crusades were pilgrimages, a penitential act that assured indulgence for sins. It thus became theologically meritorious to fight provided it were against enemies of Christendom. This new definition has several implications. In the Middle Ages, there was no significant difference between crusades to the Holy Land and crusades in the Baltic against Prussians, Estonians or Lithuanians. The numerous attempts - before and after 1291 - at conducting crusades in the Baltic, in Spain, North Africa or against the Ottoman Turks must therefore be considered in close connection with the traditional ones to the Middle East because they all were papally initiated attempts to gain indulgence.
That crusading was a means to indulgence has been recognised throughout the twentieth century but the consequences of this definition have only slowly been appreciated in historical expositions. Not until the 1980' did it become it generally accepted by historians that in the Middle Ages crusading was not a peripheral and questionable activity but widely accepted, and indeed decisive in creating and unifying medieval Western European Latin culture and defining it in relation to infidels, pagans and schismatics to the north, east and south. Furthermore, the crusades were an international or supranational project on an unprecedented scale which necessitated the establishing of new institutions such as permanent diplomatic relations, systems for transference of money, and standardised administrative procedures cutting across local customs. As yet these aspects of crusading have only to a very limited extent been studied in relation to medieval Scandinavia. In addition, in the Middle Ages crusade became a concept comprising a variety of ethical considerations concerning warfare which might perhaps best be compared to nineteenth and twentieth century notions such as "civilisation" or "human rights": They were not the sole reason for making war, but on the other hand no major war could be waged without taking the concept into consideration and invoking it. In the case of Denmark this still applied as late as 1520 when king Christian II's conquest of Sweden was based on a papal crusading bull.
Where the crusades succeeded, the conquered territories were absorbed into the uniform Latin culture with its Latin liturgy, and Western administration was introduced. The social consequences of this have been thoroughly studied since World War II, e.g. in the case of the crusader states in the Middle East. Crusades also led to the establishing of border societies characterised by a linguistically, religiously and politically mixed culture whose dynamics - especially on the Iberian Peninsula - have been extensively studied since the 1960'. In areas where the crusades did not succeed, or which later were lost again, the result of the crusading movement seems to have been an exacerbated antagonism between for example Western Europe and Byzantium or between Christianity and Islam - it is symptomatic that several theories about jihad were not developed until the crusading period. A new issue in crusading studies is thus the preoccupation with the reciprocal influences between all the societies which were directly or indirectly affected by the crusading movement.
Crusading studies are therefore a research field of substantial and increasing importance internationally. To apply the insights and approaches of this research in the study of Nordic, Northern German and Baltic sources could not fail to provide a new understanding of the history of the Baltic region. Extraordinarily, the only comprehensive study which deals with Scandinavian participation in the crusades was published by the French scholar, Paul Riant, in 1865. It deals only with crusades to Jerusalem, but it remains the only possibility for the international scholarly world to include Scandinavia in its study of the crusades, and it is accordingly still used and referred to here in the 1990'. Since Riant, a great number of works have indeed been published on crusades against the Vends and on the Baltic crusades, but with few exceptions they are not compared with other crusades, and in only few cases have the authors been able to read Scandinavian languages: they have therefore been prevented from appraising detailed discussions of the sources and their position in Scandinavian historical research in general.
To make use of these possibilities in a profitable way would require a knowledge of languages, sources, and research environments to an extent that would be hard to find in one individual. We therefore propose the Danish Research Council for the Humanities to support a research team consisting of three scholars who share a common interest in the crusades but who have different academic background.
1) Dr. phil. John Lind's research is based on Russian medieval chronicles and documents, he reads Russian and Finnish/Estonian and has close relations with historians in Russia and Eastern European countries. He has studied Scandinavian crusades in the Baltic and their consequences for the notions of identity in the region, resulting in an acerbated antagonism between the two Christian faiths in the area.
2) Carsten Selch Jensen Ph.D. has based his research on a substantial number of unpublished, Low German documents from Lübeck; he has a good knowledge of North German archives and contacts with the region's historians. He has further studied Church history, urban history in the Baltic, and military history.
3) Kurt Villads Jensen Ph.D. has researched and edited Latin texts from Denmark, Italy and Spain and has a good knowledge of Southern European libraries and archives. He has also studied European crusades to the Middle East, Church history, the history of learning, and theories of war in the Middle Ages.
All three have a broad knowledge of Danish history in the high and later Middle Ages.
Scholarly aspects
We suggest a project that from a Danish perspective will study the history of the Baltic area c. 1100-1500 from two viewpoints: as part of the European crusading movement and as regional history. The project will lead to two specific results.
First, a study of the role of Denmark and the Baltic in the crusading movement in Europe in general and its ideological and military significance, including an analysis of all medieval wars in the Baltic with respect to their encompassment within a crusading concept, a study which is totally lacking today. This investigation will attempt to understand the area's medieval history against the background of a close comparison to parallel European phenomena on different levels, e.g. the relation between kings, church and magnates in different crusading countries, finance and crusades, ideology, and border control, the role of the Hanseatic towns and Italian cities in the conduct of war, geopolitical structures in the Baltic and the Mediterranean etc. This presentation will be authored in close collaboration by the three applicants and be published in a major international scholarly language to facilitate the inclusion of Scandinavia and the Baltic in comparative analyses.
Second, the project will result in three monographs on specific and significant aspects of the topic.
1) (John Lind) The consequences of the crusading movement for the target countries. In some areas, the crusades succeeded and the populace was integrated into the uniform Western culture, while in the Russian-orthodox area, which was also heavily influenced by crusading movement (as direct target for it and as competitor), the result was a profound alienation between the two faiths. Within both areas modern historical traditions have been established which are often very much influenced by contemporary concerns, be they nationalistic (e.g. one German-Baltic tradition) or Marxist, or a combination of the two. These traditions have evaluated the crusading movement very differently, and they have often tended to see Scandinavian crusades as a continuation of Viking expeditions to the same areas.
2) (Carsten Selch Jensen) North German and Baltic cities and the crusades c. 1200-1500. The Hanseatic towns have long been recognized as important ports for disembarkation and supply for the Baltic crusades, but their direct involvement in the crusading movement has never been studied. This project will firstly investigate whether their citizens themselves took part in the crusades, and if so what functions they had; secondly whether crusading ideology had any influence on the citizens' mentality especially as regards religious habits. A more thorough analysis will concentrate on Lübeck, Greifswald, Riga and Reval which in addition to being among the most important cities, have an appropriate geographical spread, and all had close connections to Denmark.
3) (Kurt Villads Jensen) Valdemarians and Afonsides c. 1150-1240. Under the dynastic founders Valdemar the Great in Denmark (1157-82) and Afonso Henriques in Portugal (1143-85), wars against, respectively, Vends and Moors became by papal decision crusades, and the ensuing expansion in the Baltic and on the Iberian Peninsula continued until the captivity of Valdemar the Victorious in 1223 and the death of Afonso II in the same year. There are obvious structural parallels between Denmark and Portugal as well as direct political connections (Valdemar's queen Berengaria was a sister to Afonso II). The project will compare the two areas both from within - how were the crusades organised and what was their function in strengthening the new dynasties - and from an external perspective - what was the papal crusading policy toward these two areas compared to that toward their neighbours (Sweden, Prussia, and the Teutonic Order; Aragonia, Castile and Leon, respectively) and toward crusades to Jerusalem.
Political aspects
Crusades were a multinational engagement with the expressed aim of creating peace, and they necessitated the mutual solving of conflicts and co-ordination between the involved nations in order to create what anachronistically might be called a common foreign policy. The political units were not national states but regions with ethnically and linguistically mixed populations, united under one political authority, with significant local administrative powers, but also for important fields subsumed under the sovereignty of a supranational institution, especially as regards Canon law. The similarities between medieval and modern Europe are striking. An investigation into the largest common project of medieval Europe, the crusades, might provide illuminating examples of earlier ideological, economical and governmental procedures in a culture with composite administrative and sovereign legislation.
Budget
The application covers a three year full-time research grant for each of the three applicants and overhead expenses for travel to archives and conferences, invitations to guest lecturers and setting up an international conference in Denmark.
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