100 Burnamw. Reynolds Theaimof Reynolds

100 book reviews Burnam W. Reynolds The Prehistory of the Crusades. Missionary War and the Baltic Crusades. Blooms- bury, London/New York 2016, xii + 271 pp. isbn 9781441143891. £15.39; us$20.96. The aim of Reynolds’s book is to analyse and explain the origins (or “prehistory,” to use his terminology) of the Baltic Crusades. His starting point is that these events were an anomalous phenomenon within crusading, highlighting “the lack of Jerusalem as a target, no Muslim opponents, and the emphasis on conversion and mass baptism” as fundamental features (p. 2). This is a laudable objective; while historians of the crusades now largely subscribe to pluralist rather than exclusivist definitions, many non-specialists still tend to regard the martial Christianization of the Baltic region as part of the Drang nach Osten, rather than having any real connection with the institution developed by Pope Urban ii and his successors. The book is organised in three parts. The first (ch. 1–2) gives an overview of the Baltic Crusades and their peculiar characteristics; the second (ch. 3–4) considers their place within crusade studies; the third (ch. 5–10), attempts to analyse and explain the key features, notably the use of war as a missionary tool, forced conversion, baptism by treaty, and application of the terminology of pilgrimage to the Baltic region. So far, so good. It is explicitly stated that the book is intended for a broad audience (p. 7), which fully justifies the extensive use of source quotations in translation. The apparatus contains a glossary of people and terms, while each chapter ends with a number of “questions for discussion”; some of these are factual (e.g. “What is meant by the term reisen”), but the majority are philosophical and challenging (“What lessons might the Baltic experience teach us today?”). Indeed, one has the strong impression that it is the philosophy of history which is the author’s main interest, given that much of the discussion engages with the ideas and acts of figures as diverse as Augustine, Bismarck, Burckhardt, Clausewitz, Clovis, Columba, Columbanus, Constantine, Donatus, Gregory of Tours, Heine, Notker, Tertullian, and Bartolomé de Las Casas to name only a few, in addition to sources and scholars of the Baltic Crusades themselves. Given the book’s stated audience, this complex theoretical underpinning is insufficiently supported by description and basic analysis of events. The Baltic Crusades are—quite reasonably—identified as beginning with the campaign of Saxons, Danes, and Poles against the pagan Slavs beyond the Elbe in 1147. A quite full account of this and the subsequent Danish expansion along the southern Baltic coast in the later twelfth century is followed by discussion of the conquest and Christianization of Livonia in the period 1180–1300, and it is this last area which largely serves to substantiate the fundamental characteris- © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09701007 book reviews 101 tics of the Baltic Crusades, mainly with reference to the chronicle of Henry of Livonia and the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. By contrast, there is nothing on the conquest of Prussia, despite the existence of good translations of the chronicles of Peter von Dusburg and Nicolaus von Jeroschin, and analysis of the crusades against Lithuania is limited to fairly brief mentions of events such as the con- versions of the rulers Mindaugas and Jogaila and the battle of Tannenberg. One gains the impression that the division of campaigning into two major efforts (the sommer-reyse and winter-reyse) was a salient feature of the Livonian crusades, whereas it was largely institutionalized in the Teutonic Order state in Prussia. The extensive work of scholars such as Werner Paravicini, Axel Ehlers, and Stephen Rowell does not seem to have been used. One could possibly jus- tify such omissions on the grounds that the thrust of the investigation is on prehistory rather than the crusades themselves, yet one still wonders whether it is then really necessary to devote a significant part of a chapter to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The strongest part of the book deals with the origins of missionary war and baptism by treaty, where Reynolds makes a good case for a long tradition extending from the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kings, especially those who were converts themselves, to enthusiasm for crusading on the part of later Saxons, Danes, and indeed, Slavs. This discussion, however, would have been stronger if the author had looked more at the changing extent of German secular and religious authority among the Transalbingian Slavs before 1147 (especially in the Ottonian period), which was used as a justification for the reconstitution of abandoned bishoprics in Slavic territory. Other arguments are less convincing. Rather than accepting that the use of the terms peregrinatio and peregrini was simply an extension of terminology long accepted in connection with the Holy Land, Reynolds argues that “the Baltic peregrini are place pilgrims [sic] in that they are actually creating loca sanctorum that may then stand as pilgrimage sites for themselves as well as future travellers” (p. 154). While there was a long tradition of Christianizing pagan sites in the Celtic and Germanic worlds (advanced as part of the prehistory argument), it is difficult to find examples of this phenomenon in Livonia and Prussia, and the evidence for the construction of new Jerusalem chapels is limited to Livonia. The main problem with this book, then, is the mismatch between the ambi- tious aims and theoretical approach on the one hand, and the amount and accuracy of information and analysis provided for its readers on the other. There are problems of interpretation, particularly involving the chronicle of Henry of Livonia. The Dobrel mentioned in connection with an act of apostasy in Livonia in 1212 (p. 123) was the name of a pagan leader, not of a stronghold, and Reynolds evidently fails to notice that the supposed pagan battle cry, Church History and Religious Culture 97 (2017) 97–162.

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