The Northern Crusades

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Summary: That Weird Medieval Mind
Review: As Christiansen notes early on, this extraordinary phase in Eastern European history has had little impact on popular memory. The only film to depict the Northern Crusades was Eisensteins 1937 classic, "Alexander Nevsky," a thinly-veiled piece of Soviet anti-German propaganda which portrayed the Teutonic Knights as cruel and hypocritical savages, destined for a deservingly bloody fate. Absent this kind of rank oversimplification, however, it is well-nigh impossible to find a single constituency with whom the modern observer might empathize. Of the Teutonic knights, one has to ask, how did a group of intelligent, ostensibly religious men take it upon themselves to visit extermination on so wide a scale? Not that the heathen Baltic peoples who they professed to "save" were particularly cuddly, either. As bizarre was the prolific, but genocidal St. Bridget of Sweden, whose many pamphlets encouraged Swedish and Teutonic crusaders to kill any pagan who refused instant baptism, on the grounds that the sooner their sinful lives were terminated, the better. This is a compelling history of the bizarre series of wars which introduced Christianity to Prussia and which forged the future of modern Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland.

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Summary: The Northern Crusades
Review: Fantastic, lucid and witty. Mr Eric Christiansen, a fellow at New College Oxford has drawn from years of experience and mountains of ability and as a result is nothing short of remarkable. As a student of history this book had great appeal however even to the untrained eye this book is worth a good read. It is well written but complicated in areas due Christiansen's stress on geographical orgins and expansion. It is a focused study and the reader does not get an overall historical list of the events of the northern crusades. Still considering his intellect and the detail of his other works and translations this is a plausible and readable attempt at a complex area of study

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Summary: Unknown crusades brought to light
Review: The crusades against northeastern Europe are far less known than the parallell Palestinian ones, although perhaps of far more historical importance. Between the 11th and 15th century the entire Baltic region grew from an unexplored semi-wilderness into a area of organized, settled states, a growth partly caused by the influx of Western crusaders and partly by the subsequent reaction against this.

Eric Christiansen tells the story of these important centuries without the bias towards one side or another which is typical for other works, particularly when descibing the Teutonic Knights, their conquest of Prussia and subsequent wars with Poland and the Novgorod Russiansand, and has succeeded in writing a book that is both informative and entertaining.

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Summary: A must read for those interested in the Baltic region.
Review: This book covers the Christianization of the Baltic region during the late middle ages. Christiansen does a very nice job assimilating the archaelogical and historical evidence, and then explaining it and telling a good "story" in a very readable fashion. This is a very complex area, and Christiansen has to deal with the collision of four different linguistic groups and cultural traditions: 1. The Christian West Germanic and North Germanic peoples, i.e., Saxons, Danes, Swedes, etc. 2. The pagan Baltic peoples such as the Latvians and Lithuanians. 3. The pagan Finnic peoples, including the Finns and Estonians, but also many tribes whose language and culture barely survives today, such as the Livonians, Ingrians, Karelians, etc. 4. The partially Christianized Slavic tribes.

There is very little published in English about this time and place in history. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the subject, or in the Baltic region in general, especially someone interested in a good overview as a start. As I've indicated, in spite of the complexity of the subject, it does read well.

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Summary: How the Baltic became a "Catholic lake"
Review: This is an excellent introduction to the history of the Teutonic Order and the various "crusades" they carried out around the Baltic. It also covers Swedish activity in Finland.

The author carefully avoids the nationalistic controversies which still plague the history of the region. The account is even-handed in its treatment of the Order, its strengths & failures, and of the native peoples who were crusaded against.

It is a fast read with a lively narrative. I can highly recommended the book.

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Summary: No need to read more....
Review: This was the only book I ever read on Crusades along the Baltic states and after reading this book, I realized that I really don't have to read too much more. This book proves to be very nicely written, well researched and clearly unbias in nature. The writing prose flows very nicely and I was pretty much engrossed by the subject, material and information the book provided. Since it covered a subject matter not well known in the United States, we can considered it as a blessing that there is such a book like this to enlightened us. For any military historians out there, this is a "must have" book for your library.