It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.”
Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring Christianity to the shores of the Baltic – a vast arc of still-pagan land sweeping east and north from the river Elbe in Saxony.
The first northern crusade had been authorised by Pope Eugenius in 1147 against the Wendish Slavs in what is now north-east Germany; it ended in failure. By the turn of the century, the papacy was ready to try again. There were attempts at peaceful proselytisation, but they weren’t entirely successful. When the Bishop of Riga put on a miracle play in the winter of 1205-6, the audience was so terrified by its representation of the battle between the army of Gideon and the Philistines that they tried to flee, fearing they would be murdered. But when it came to the use of force, the Sword Brothers were at the forefront.
The Sword Brothers had a mixed reputation: they were merely “rich merchants banned from Saxony for their crimes, who expected to live on their own without law or king”, one chronicle said. And it was true that, as with later European colonisations, commerce and Christianisation went hand in hand in the Baltic. But they had the advantage of German technological superiority over the indigenous Baltic peoples: in defence they built castles of stone; on the battlefield they had crossbows and heavy cavalry; and to sieges they brought terrifying ballistic weapons.
On the other hand, they struggled for a long time with the deep snow and ice of the Baltic winter, and even after, the conditions seemed to often overwhelm them.
On 16 February 1270, the feast of St Julian, for example, Otto von Lutterberg, the Master of the Livonian Knights led an army out on to the frozen sea between the mainland and the island of Muhu. A Lithuanian army had ravaged the prosperous island of Saaremaa and now wanted to return. Otto thought he had them trapped.
An earlier 13th-century chronicle has left a description of what a medieval army sounded like on the frozen sea: “ the waters there were hard as stone… As [the army] trod on the ice with their horses and vehicles, they made a noise like a great peal of thunder, with the clashing of arms, the shaking of the vehicles, and the movement and sound of men and horses”.
Details of the battle are only recorded in one contemporary source, known as the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle whose author has been described by one 20th-century expert as “at best a tiny talent”. The chronicler tells us that, seeing the Christian army, the Lithuanians drew their sleds, loaded with plunder, up into a defensive wall. Otto arranged his army with men led by the bishops of Dorpat and Leal on his left, and a vassal force under a “fine knight [with] the courage of a lion” named Seivereith from the lands around Tallinn.
But it was the Livonian Knights themselves in the centre who charged too soon. Their front line smashed against pagans sleds. “The heathens rejoiced and stabbed their horses to death,” the chronicler says. “There was a wild hacking and hewing on both sides, Christian and heathen, and the blood of men from both armies spilled onto the ice.” Most of the knights’ horses were cut down, and the men fought on on foot. The noise of battle, the ice acting as a vast sounding board, must have been terrible indeed.
The Lithuanians lost 1,600 men, the chronicle says, and the Christians 600 – including Otto. But it was the Christian army that retreated leaving the field, strewn with the dead and slippery with blood, to the pagans.
It would be over a century before the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, both Europe’s last pagan redoubt and its largest state, submitted to Christ in 1386 – and that was only to add Poland to its territories through the marriage of Grand Duke Jogaila with Jadwiga, the 12-year-old regnant Polish queen.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the February 2024 issue of History Today.
Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.
Mathew Lyons 
Leave a comment