Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150-1500 (review)

This book is all that an anthology should be. Fifteen experts write masterful essays on facets of the same topic. Though the authors come from Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, and Sweden as well as English-speaking countries, all the essays are presented in clear, nearly impeccable English. Though some chapters are by newly minted Ph.D.'s and others by gray beards, each is both fresh and mature. Each takes note of strong, sometimes chauvinistic positions taken by other historians, and seeks to transcend them. The authors exchanged views at the International Medieval Congress held in Leeds in 1998 and then refined their papers.

Senior scholar William Urban sets the widest context. He analyzes the frontier thesis used to explain expansion in the Americas and its possible applicability to North European and Lithuanian expansion in the Baltic region and beyond into Slavic lands. Urban distinguishes "borders" between established political units from "frontiers," which are indeterminate and often chaotic. He and other contributors also raise the question whether crusades in the Baltic were so religiously motivated, indulgence-driven, and papally authorized as those in the Holy Land, or whether secular ambitions predominated. Several authors ask whether conversions were superficial, leaving Baltic peasants to continue their pagan ways, or produced a deep change in their outlooks. Noting the paucity of confirming evidence, most authors here provide what they see as tentative, not conclusive, answers to such questions. But basic chronology gives a powerful starting point: Europeans colonized the Baltic region centuries before they dominated much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Taken together, the essays represent deep research into documents in Latin and many other tongues. Since many medieval sources stressed what Samuel P.Huntington calls the clash of civilizations—Catholic, Orthodox, and pagan—some chapters in this book ask whether the early sources exaggerated thisclash to please their political masters. Kurt Villads Jensen, introducting thisvolume, notes that the early sources can also be studied for signs of mutualcomprehension, even syncretism, between "them" and "us" in the Baltic region.

Among the book's many gem-like insights is chapter 7 by John H. Lind about the Russian word nemtsy, derived from nem—mute, as if nemtsycould not speak. Though this term became the Russian for Germans (Deutsche), it was applied even in the first millennium to representatives of the Frankish church and empire who opposed the liturgy in Slavonic (insisting that God could be venerated only in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin). Later it was applied to the whole Western church including Pope Gregory VII. The Orthodox insistence on using the vernacular antedated by many centuries that of the Protestant Reformation. Western imperialism and/or crusades, whatever the blend of religious and secular motives, led Russians over time to call all Western Europeans—even Swedes and Finns—nemtsy. As this happened, Russians no longer saw themselves as part of a universal church. Only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did Russians begin to distinguish different kinds of nemtsy, for example, shvedy (Swedes, though Russians also called Swedish soldiers nemtsy as late as 1700).

While today's political scientists would certainly benefit from learning about nemtsy and other gems in this work, the historians contributing to this volume might also profit from incorporating some of the analytic categories of twenty-first-century political science. Thus, Jensen lists as "principal agents" kings and princes, knightly orders, Baltic churces, the German emperor and the papacy, Baltic elites, and common people. All this could be clarified by placing what political scientists and complexity theorists call "actors" in a "levels-of-analysis" framework of individuals, societies, states, international system, transnational organizations, interacting in a biosphere that shapes and is shaped by them. One can then argue about which actors on which levels were most weighty at whichtimes and places. This would clarify, for example, the competitions between Danish kings, the bishop of Riga, the town's Hansa burgers, the Teutonic Order...