Abstract
This exciting anthology brings together a large group of both younger and established historians to explore the connections between Christianity and war in Scandinavia and East Central Europe, regions that were only Christianized in the period around the year 1000. The editors’ introduction sets the scene excellently, including highlighting interesting parallels between developments in pagan religion in Lithuania and in medieval Christianity. The rest of the book is divided into two parts. The first investigates the relationship between the institutional Church and warfare: Judit Gál, Gábor Barabás and Jacek Maciejewski explore the role of bishops in warfare and Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen that of the Dominican order in crusade preaching. Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen offers a fascinating reading of scenes of knightly combat found in Danish churches. He suggests that these should not be read as advertisement for crusades or aristocratic self-celebration, but rather as a means by which the Church recruited the knight as a symbol of the continuous struggle against sin.
The second part looks at ‘religion in war and its cultural expression’. Dušan Zupka, Radosław Kotecki and Carsten Selch Jensen, respectively, investigate rulers’ engagement with religious rituals in Hungary, Poland, Rus’ and Denmark. David Kalhous and Ludmila Luňáková use a comparative perspective to explore the rhetoric of warfare in historical writing. Bjørn Bandlien offers a fascinating reading of the role of religion in civil wars in Norway. Kristjan Kaljusaar explores ideas of martyrdom during the Crusades in Livonia, while Anti Selart offers a thought-provoking look at orthodox responses to the Crusades.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most striking impressions that this anthology leaves one with is how cautious and equivocal Christianity remained about the attractions of warfare, despite the crusades and inter-religious antagonism. Warfare was nevertheless, as the articles show in rich and convincing detail, heavily Christianized from conversion onwards: in Zupka's fascinating article, we hear how King (later saint) Stephen I of Hungary (d. 1038) on advice from his bishops and nobles asked the Holy Virgin Mary for aid and ordered fasts and prayers throughout his newly Christianized-realm. Such concerns were not just the stuff of hagiographical imagination. The editors introduce us to the remarkable letter sent by King Boris I of Bulgaria (d. 889) to Pope Nicholas I to ascertain whether it was still permissible for his newly Christianized army to march into battle under their traditional emblem, a horse's tail attached to a spear. The papal advice was henceforth to use the cross instead.
But this was not supposed to be a two-way street. It was all well and good that the imperfect secular world tried to adapt Christian ideals, or at least its imagery. Ecclesiastical authorities and, to some extent, ordinary believers were much less eager to admit the bloodstained realities of the battlefield into the holy places and categories. As Sini Kangas points out, even the crusading epic the Chanson d’Antioche, where Christ himself is made to foretell and praise the vengeance that the First Crusade would take on his enemies, shows Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy as reluctant to carry the Holy Lance into battle at Antioch; the rest of the clergy go into the fight only armed with prayer. Equally, the crusades, both those in the Middle East and in the North, ‘produced few saints’ (p. 69). Kaljusaar shows the tortuous – and sometimes unintentionally humorous – pains that writers associated with the Teutonic Order and the archbishopric of Riga went to in order to argue that their martyrs had not, as such, been fighting back when the heathens killed them. Bishop Berthold may have been riding ahead of an army, but the reason he ended up amid the pagan Livonian host was, according to Henry of Livonia, that he ‘lost control of his horse’, which carried the poor prelate to his martyrdom (p. 257).
These writers had good reason to be wary, and not just of lawyer-popes quoting Gratian's prohibition against priests engaging in violence. Bandlien references a telling instance where Alexander III had the temerity to inform Archbishop Øystein of Nidaros that a priest could not serve at the altar even though he had ‘“only” killed a heathen’ (p. 233). But there are hints that ambivalence about a Church too closely associated with violence was deeper and more widespread. Selart shares the revealing point that ‘the participation of the Latin clergy in wars was a common theme in Byzantine anti-Latin polemics’ (p. 269). Presumably, they felt this theme packed a punch.
It is not the least virtue of this anthology that the material is set out fully enough that one can find many paths of commonality and contrast between them. The richness of the individual contributions and especially the comparative approach taken by many authors leaves one eager and excited for more comparative work across medieval Scandinavia and East Central Europe.