The Baltic Crusade by William L. Urban (review)

BOOK REVIEWS693 isted before usus pauper became an issue, and their ???efGe?3????5 varied a good deal. The Spirituals were hardly a party untU serious persecution forged their unity after Olivi's death in 1298. Similarly, the Conventuals were created by the resistance of the Spirituals to the leadership's attempts to regularize the order's practice of poverty. They, too, coalesced only in the decade before the CouncU ofVienne. Olivi and Franciscan Poverty ends with a brief treatment of OUvi's apocalyptic views, providing a link with Olivi's Peaceable Kingdom. Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Franciscan poverty and late medieval reUgious thought. Thomas Turley Santa Clara University The Baltic Crusade. ByWiUiam L. Urban. Second edition, revised and enlarged. (Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center. 1994. Pp. v, 366.) In the two decades since the first edition of The Baltic Crusade first appeared (DeKaIb: Northern IUinois University Press, 1975) study of the eastern Baltic lands has undergone significant development. Professor Urban, one of the most active American scholars in the area of medieval Baltic studies, has produced a second edition that reflects some of the changes that have taken place. Urban sees this volume as providing an introduction to the Baltic Crusades "for industrious students and lay readers." The strength of the book is the discussion of the conflicting interests of the various parties involved in the crusade. Danish and German rulers struggled with the pagans and with each other to dominate the region. ReUgious orders quarreled with bishops and with each other to dominate the church that was being established. Merchants from various cities, seeing profits to be made in the east, fought with fellow Christians who interfered with their pursuit of profit. The crusade was not an homogeneous movement, moving efficiently to control the lands of the eastern Baltic. It was a quarreling, inconsistent movement whose constituent members had a series of conflicting goals and interests . As Urban points out, this enabled indigenous rulers to play one Christian group off against another in order to preserve their independence. One way in which this edition differs from its predecessor is that Urban has taken note of the work that has been done on the frontiers of Europe during the Middle Ages and the relationship of medieval expansion, in this case the crusades, to the post-1492 expansion of Europe overseas. He places the Baltic Crusade in the framework created by Robert Bartlett's The Medieval Frontier (Princeton, 1993) andJ. R. S. PhUlips's The Expansion ofMedievalEurope (Oxford , 1988). The Baltic Crusade no longer appears as an isolated phenomenon or as part ofsome eternal conflict between Teuton and Slav. This crusade is now 694BOOK REVIEWS understood in the broad context of religious, economic, and territorial expansion that has characterized European history from the tenth century to the present . Indeed,Urban points out in the final chapter, the problems that the German crusaders faced in the Baltic lands were simUar to those that Columbus and the Spanish were to face in the New World two centuries later. One unfortunate drawback of this new edition is that while there are more maps than in the original version,they are smaUer and more difficult to read. On the other hand, this edition has added fifteen plates Ulustrating castles and other aspects of the crusade. Although Urban has answered some of the criticisms of the first edition and has given more space to some issues not fully covered previously, this volume is not a complete revision of the earUer edition in the Ught of current research. Those interested in the Baltic crusades wUl stiU have to use Eric Christiansen's The Northern Crusades [London, 1980]. Furthermore, as the title of S. G. Rowell 's LithuaniaAscending (Cambridge, England, 1994) suggests, future research wiU emphasize the role of the indigenous peoples of the Baltic lands and wUl place less emphasis on the crusaders. James Muldoon Rutgers University, Camden Creative Women in Medieval andEarlyModern Italy:A Religious andArtistic Renaissance. Edited by E. Ann Matter andJohn Coakley. (PhUadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1994. Pp. xiv, 356. $36.95.) The fourteen essays gathered in this volume had their origin in...