17 Infidel Turks and Schismatic Russians in Late Medieval Livonia
Madis Maasing 17 Infidel Turks and Schismatic Russians in Late Medieval Livonia 17.1 Introduction At the beginning of the sixteenth century, political rhetoric in Livonia was shaped by the threat posed by an alien power: Following a significant deterio- ration in the relations between the Catholic Livonian territories and their mighty Eastern Orthodox neighbour – the Grand Duchy of Moscow – war broke out, lasting from 1501 to 1503, with renewed armed conflict remaining an immi- nent threat until 1509. During this period of confrontation, and afterwards, the Livonians (i.e., the political elite of Livonia) fulminated in their political writ- ings about the gruesome, schismatic, and even infidel Russians, who posed a threat not only to Livonia, but to Western Christendom in general. In the Holy Roman Empire and at the Roman Curia, these allegations were quite favoura- bly received. Arguably, the Livonians’ greatest success took the form of a papal provision for two financially profitable anti-Russian indulgence campaigns (1503–1510). For various political reasons, the motif of a permanent and general ‘Russian threat’ had ongoing currency in Livonia up until the Livonian War (1558–1583). Even after the collapse of the Livonian territories, the Russian threat motif continued to be quite effectively used by other adversaries of Mos- cow – e.g., Poland-Lithuania and Sweden. I will focus here first and foremost on what was behind the initial success of the Russian threat motif in Livonia, but I will also address why it persisted for as long as it did. A large part of its success was the fact that it drew upon a similar phenomenon – the ‘Turkish threat’,1 which played a significant role in the political rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, especially in south-eastern 1 This research was supported by the Estonian Research Council’s PUT 107 programme, “Me- dieval Livonia: European Periphery and its Centres (Twelfth–Sixteenth Centuries)”, and by the European Social Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalization Programme DoRa, which is carried out by Foundation Archimedes.
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