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Northern Crusades
If there was any doubt about the nature of the crusading spirit and its restless
expansionist nature, its highly political side is vividly revealed in several other
Crusades of the period that were quite unrelated to Muslims. Simultaneously
with the Second Crusade, some fifty years after the First, a new outlet for the
crusading spirit was established within Europe itself. German tribes who did not
wish to heed the pope’s call to go to the Holy Lands were informed they could
fulfill their religious obligations with an expedition of conquest and conversion
against the few remaining pagan Slavic tribes in the Baltic.
The chief spokesman for the pope’s crusade plans, Bernard of Clairvaux,
proclaimed the need to battle the pagan Slavs until they were killed or converted.
But typically, the crusade was not limited to conversion of pagans. The Catholic
Teutonic Knights were eager to settle old ethnic and territorial scores with their
co-religionists in Catholic Poland. The Christian kingdoms of Denmark and
Sweden were also eager to extend their power south into the Baltic area. Even
Orthodox Christian Russia was targeted by them. As a result of these various
crusade campaigns,
the east Baltic world was transformed by military conquest: first the
Livs, Letts and Estonians, then the Prussian [Slavs] and the Finns
underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes
extermination by groups of Germans, Danes and Swedes.
The Second Crusade thus provided a religious justification for Germanic
forces to project their power and economic control east into the Baltic. Indeed,
Pope Eugene III in 1147 issued a papal bull (fatwa) ascribing equal spiritual
values and rewards to all those going on crusade, either to the Holy Land or
against pagan Slavs.
In 1242, a body of Catholic Teutonic Knights marched against the Russian
Orthodox Republic of Novgorod, near today’s St. Petersburg, but were defeated,
with a number of heavily armored Germanic knights plunging through the ice in
a battle on frozen Lake Ladoga. The event was perceived in popular Russian
culture as one of many God-given victories of Orthodoxy defending itself
against the evil forces of invading Catholicism—a deep theme in Russian
national thought. Thus, even in Europe we see the branches and offshoots of this
three-way geopolitical struggle among Islam, Western Christianity, and Eastern

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Orthodox Christianity.
Note throughout all of this that it was the pope who called for all of these
wars and campaigns over a nearly two-hundred-year period. The pope in effect
inspired, directed, and commanded the political and military actions of European
princes. We are hard put to find any parallel of purely religious authorities in
Islam directing the actions of Muslim armies. (Where the caliph commanded
power, especially in the first few Islamic centuries, he first and foremost wielded
secular power and was selected by quite secular means—power politics.)
Muslim ‘ulama may certainly have blessed Muslim military expeditions, but
they did not inspire them or direct them. Once again, we find state and church
intimately linked through the bulk of Christian history; far less so in Islam.

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