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  • Jerusalem in the North: Denmark and the Baltic Crusades, 1100–1522 by Ane L. Bysted et al
  • Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt
Jerusalem in the North: Denmark and the Baltic Crusades, 1100–1522. By Ane L. Bysted, Carsten Selch Jensen, Kurt Villads Jensen, and John H. Lind. [Outremer: Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East, Vol. 1.] (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. 2012. Pp. xiv, 393. €75,00. ISBN 978-2-503-52325-5.)

The subject of the present volume is the Danish involvement in the crusades in northeastern Europe that traditionally have been perceived to begin with the Wendish crusade of 1147 and to have continued with the Baltic crusades of the late-twelfth century and later. These were aimed at conquering and converting the lands on the eastern and southern coast of the Baltic Sea. The campaigns in northeastern Europe have been the subject of a number of scholarly works. Until recently the most notable book in English was arguably Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades (Minneapo-lis, 1980), but since the late 1990s a great deal of research has been published in English. There has, however, been very little research on the Danish involvement in the crusading movement since Paul Riant’s Expéditions et pèlerinages des Scandinaves en Terre Sainte au temps des croisades (Paris, 1865).That is not to say that twentieth-century historians working on the Danish Middle Ages completely ignored the crusades, but most scholars mentioned the Danish crusading activity only briefly and often ascribed it to local economic and political concerns, thus weakening the links between the Danish expeditions and the cross-European crusading movement.

That is convincingly challenged by the authors of the present volume, who highlight the exchange of ideas between the Danish realm and the rest of Latin Christendom as well as the complexity of the motivations of the crusaders. The volume, which is a translation of the Danish book Danske korstog—krig og mission i Østersøen (2nd ed., Copenhagen, 2004), opens with a brief historiographical survey. The remainder of the book is dedicated to a thorough discussion of the Baltic crusades and the Danish engagement in these campaigns, including themes such as the funding of the crusades, the [End Page 319] militarization of society, and the role of the military orders and the mendicants. It focuses on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—namely, the period up to the Treaty of Stensby (1238), which secured the Danish king control over northern Estonia (chapters II–XII). The authors go on to discuss the Danish rule of Estonia up to 1346 and the Danish crusades of the late Middle Ages (chapters XIII–XVIII).

The authors present numerous new interpretations that are the results of extensive source studies. Many of these will undoubtedly stimulate future discussions about the Danish involvement in the crusading movement—indeed, some have already attracted highly relevant criticism from other historians working on the Danish medieval material; among the disputed issues are the nature of the Confraternities of St. Knud and the character of the Danish campaigns against the Wends in the twelfth century. A key point is the matter of the definition of crusade. The authors briefly discuss the long-ranging debate on this issue (chapter I), but it is not made entirely clear where they stand on this matter. They take a very inclusive approach, in which a great number of expeditions are labeled as crusades and many medieval Danish developments and institutions are seen as related to crusading ideas. They include not only expeditions that are crusades in the “inclusivist” sense (“wars that were conducted with papal consent against the enemies of the church, which granted participants an indulgence for their sins,” p. 13) but also those campaigns and institutions that may have been related to ideas about holy war or defense of the faith, apparently favoring a “generalist” approach. The authors do not, however, address the way we may determine whether a campaign or institution indeed was influenced by such ideas. Nor do they argue for the fruitfulness of their approach, thus depriving the reader of what might have been a most interesting contribution to the debate about the understanding of crusades.

Nevertheless...

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