Afterword: Art and Politics on the Borderland

The writing of this book was prompted by the endeavour to view the entire region as an integral whole, discarding the beliefs rooted in previ- ous historiography and highlighting visual sources and the cultural landscape. While at the outset of this study, the author was still visited by doubts about the potential of research based on visual sources when applied to political history, a feeling of certainty became prevalent when the analysis of Danish churches was followed by that of churches in , as patterns started to recur, and a revision of the material after defending my doctoral thesis only added to my optimism. In my dissertation, I had concentrated only on the island’s churches and drawn outward parallels proceeding from that, but in the present work the entire Baltic Sea region was to be addressed with equal deliberation – on the one hand, this demanded deep concentration on the analysed objects, and on the other hand the general supra-regional developments had to be kept in mind. This approach is time-consuming and can even be frustrating as it requires a steady focus on the buildings of each specific region, reconstruction of cultural landscapes of the period, as well as delving into the state of existing research written in several different languages. However, there comes a point when the sources open up for supra-regional interpretation. When addressing a single region, the risk of over-interpretation is consid- erable, as the arsenal of methods an art historian can use for the research of Romanesque churches is limited. Unlike the European churches of the High Middle Age, the Scandinavian and Livonian churches of this period are mentioned in few written sources, and there is a very limited number of objects suitable for dendrochronological analysis. The traditional methods of art history – style analysis and the iconographical analysis – may lead to over-interpretation, i.e. assigning overstated significance to certain charac- teristics. This is also the reason why visual sources are only marginally – if at all – used in research on political history. Analysis of visual sources has not been deemed sufficiently reliable. If, however, the same method is applied supra-regionally, proceeding from questions posed with meticulous clarity, and from the results pointing to the recurrence of patterns, this approach may yield valuable additional information. Admittedly, the author’s expectations have been justified. The research results have been surprising and enabled a fresh view on the period of the in the Eastern Baltic. The chapter on visual propaganda demonstrated how art and architecture were used by the Danish rulers as an instrument in establishing supremacy in the Baltic Sea region. In recent decades, Danish historians have increasingly

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004426177_007 Art and Politics on the Borderland 353 highlighted the central role of the Valdemar dynasty and the bishops support- ing them in the Baltic Sea crusades, but the visual sources show how the entire society was mentally prepared for a journey with redemption waiting at the end. A New Jerusalem was built in Scandinavia, and the crusade to was conducted under the banner of Christ. The existing historiography emphasises the status of Livonia as St. Mary’s Land, , consecrated to the Holy Virgin already in 1202, when Bishop Albert transferred the Cathedral and the convent from Üxküll to .1 In fact, however, Livonia was proclaimed Terra Mariana first at the Lateran Council of 1215. At the Council, Bishop Albert de- scribed the Holy Land of Jerusalem as the country of the Son, and Livonia as the land of the Mother.2 The building of round churches had passed its peak by that time, and on the gable of the portal of the Ribe Cathedral, it is St. Mary that hands the cross to the king. The relief was completed around 1218. When rereading the passage addressing the year 1202 in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia in the light of this knowledge, we can actually see that he speaks about the area inhabited by the Livs, not about the whole region on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Therefore, there is no reason to regard Livonia as Terra Mariana already at the start of the . Rather, we could claim that the German crusade was conducted under the banner of St. Mary, and the Danish Crusade under the banner of Christ. We can juxtapose this claim with the cult of another pair of saints: St. James and St. Olaf, who became respectively the German and the Danish patron saint on the road to Livonia and . The analysis of visual sources reveals with great clarity the biased under- tones of the existing historiography. The political situation of the 1220s is trans- posed upon an earlier period, and the crusade to the Eastern coast of the Baltic Sea is therefore seen as acute competition and conflicts between the Germans and the Danes. Instead, there should be more emphasis on their co-operation on the level that also characterised the German-Danish relations during the wars against the Wends. Naturally, tensions also occurred there over the di- vision of territories, but those were also jointly solved, as in fact there were family ties between Henry the Lion and Valdemar I. As research into the earlier and has traditionally been the hunting-ground of Germans and , who have viewed Livonia as a German colony, the picture they render of the events of the late 12th and the early 13th century has firm outlines, and only the tonality of col- ours inside these outlines can conceivably be changed. When, however, we focus on the development of Riga in the first decades of the 13th century, we

1 HCL VI: 3. 2 HCL XIX: 7.