Vikings vs. Pagans

Forget everything you know about the Vikings. Matt Lewis and Thomas Williams explore the forgotten era when Scandinavian warriors abandoned their pagan roots to become devout Christian crusaders. Armed with the Pope's sanction, these former raiders turned their legendary fury eastward, destroying four-headed pagan idols in the Baltic, launching bloody holy wars, and forging geopolitical divides that still echo across Europe today. MORE How to Live Like A Viking Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-live-like-a-viking/id1564113746?i=1000670118559 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DTRpIGPS9ygGa6pjodHnf?si=krf4oW6wRSabio-CjAWqoQ What Caused the Viking Age? Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-caused-the-viking-age/id1564113746?i=1000745912652 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0nMKYqEgXRSNhexUDEy2bI Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Watch Matt and Eleanor's film The Ascent to Power: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II now on History Hit TV. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:52Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:30Matt Lewis?

  The sea brave are coming. They ride the furrows of frozen waves on the backs of wooden dragons. They row restless towards sheer cliffs that rise as ramparts, spurred on by the grotesque faces of carved beasts at their prow. And their prize stands atop this rocky outcrop, washed on all sides by the sundering sea. It's a spiritual place, a sacred shrine where the ordinary commune with the divine, where earnest priests pray for harvest and meandering throngs celebrate ritual feasts. The dragon riders have come to pillage and raid, as they have for hundreds of years,

• 3:12Matt Lewis?

  on the silver-sanded coasts of England and France. These men are Vikings. But this time, their target is no church. Rather, it's the temple of the pagan god Svantivit, chief deity of the Rani, a Slavic tribe who live on the southern shores of the Baltic. The cult of Svantivit use a white horse as an oracle, conduct divine rituals with beer horns and honeycakes, and revere a giant statue of their god strung up in the temple's inner sanctum. It has four necks and four heads. And the Vikings have come to destroy it. There's something strange about this scene

• 3:55Matt Lewis?

  from the 12th century northern world. These aren't the pagan raiders we usually imagine when we think of the Vikings. Instead, these are Christian warriors fighting in the name of their new faith against the imagined evils of a paganism they themselves once subscribed to. Within just a few centuries, the people who once raided the monasteries of Christian Europe were now channeling those destructive impulses elsewhere, on crusades against the pagan peoples of the North and East. So how did this extraordinary transformation happen? And what happened when Viking warriors took their faith eastward, bringing the hammer of Christian crusade down upon their pagan neighbors? I'm Matt Lewis.

• 4:41Matt Lewis?

  This is Gone Medieval. And to help me answer those questions and uncover this forgotten chapter of Viking history, I'm joined by Thomas Williams, author of the new book Gods Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Thomas. It's great to have you with us.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Hi, Matt. It's great to be here.

• 4:59Matt Lewis?

  I think this is a topic I'm really looking forward to because, I mean, the title, the words say it all. We've got Vikings and they're not the pagans for once. And I think the tantalizing thing about that for us is that we so often think of the Vikings being the pagans. They're the ones doing the pillaging against Christians. But here you're talking about Vikings versus pagans. So I just wonder if you could start off by giving us a kind of just the big picture. Who are we talking about? When are we roughly in time? And where roughly in the world are we?

• 5:28Speaker 05

  So the word Viking comes with a great deal of baggage attached to it. And one of the main ways that it's thought about and has been really since the Victorian period is of this unreconstructed pagan barbarian who comes out of the North to terrorize monks and loot monasteries and drag people off into slavery and all the rest of it. We associate them very strongly in pop culture as well with the pagan pantheon, the Norse gods, Odin and Thor, and often attached to that all sorts of sinister rites and rituals and human sacrifice and all the rest of it, the whole barbarian package, really. And of course, that completely overlooks the fact that for a very large proportion of the Viking Age,

• 6:12Speaker 05

  a very large number of Vikings, as we think of them, or rather Scandinavians, I should say more precisely, were Christians, or at least Christian curious, you could say. They were not divorced from the rest of Europe. They were connected with it. They were interacting with it continuously. And they were deeply influenced by it. Sometimes that meant adopting Christianity wholesale and becoming Christians very enthusiastically, as we'll probably go on to see. Or whether it was some level of hostility, which is also something we can see from time to time. But it was very much knitted into their world for the whole duration of the Viking period. So the book is looking at the Viking phenomenon from a slightly different angle to the one that's traditionally approached from. So we tend to see it from a Western perspective,

• 6:57Speaker 05

  particularly a British perspective, where the Vikings are this pagan menace that comes out of the North, despoils monasteries. That carries on for 250 years or so. And then eventually, they all go away. And then the Norman conquest happens and everything becomes medieval after that. Knights and castles and everyone's Christian and Europe becomes a harmonious Christian family. If you look at it from Scandinavia, the picture is very, very different. What you see instead is a very dynamic outward migration. Lots of it was pretty violent and rapacious, but it certainly wasn't directed towards Christians in particular. It was directed east. It was directed west. It was directed south.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  And as I say, in the process of that motion, picked up a huge array of different cultural influences and religious influences and mutated and changed in all sorts of interesting ways. At the same time, from a Western Christian point of view, the North was seen to be different. It was recognized to be the habitation of people with a different worldview. And so it was a ripe target for missionaries and priests to go and do the conversion bit and try to expand the boundaries of Christendom into the North. So you have this two-way traffic of Viking activity going outwards and Christianity coming upwards. And that interaction, that fusion, and what happens with that and how those Christian energies then get redirected

• 8:25Speaker 05

  and how Christianity becomes more Viking and how the Vikings become more Christian is really what it's all about.

• 8:32Matt Lewis?

  I wonder why you think in the popular imagination, given that there is this porous nature in terms of both time and geography and religion and everything else, that the two are more closely joined than we've often allowed. Why do we so often separate the world into the Viking Age and then the medieval? As if there is this big hard line somewhere down in the middle where the Vikings suddenly evaporate and people start wearing plate armor?

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think a lot of it, I mean, it's quite timely in a way because obviously the Bay of Tapestry is currently in the British Museum. And that moment in time, that moment of the Norman conquest really is the defining historiographical turn in British history. And because British history has been so influential in determining how Western history in general has been framed, particularly in Anglophone countries, so the US and Australia, this huge imperial legacy of British education system. It's got an outsized importance globally in how we think about the division of these chronological timeframes. And it's very easy in a way for, particularly in England,

• 9:42Speaker 05

  for us to think about that pre-Norman world of the Anglo-Saxons as being defined by a struggle between the English, Alfred the Great and his successors with a Viking menace. And the very, very neat coincidence of Harold Hardrada's failed invasion in 1066 and William the Conqueror's successful invasion of England in 1066 means that we have a very, very tidy line in the sand where the Viking Age seems to stop dead with Harold Hardrada's corpse in Stamford Bridge. And then two weeks later, Battle of Hastings, Norman conquest, and suddenly everything is, we're in a different world.

• 10:19Matt Lewis?

  Everyone wakes up medieval.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, there is a truth in that, that everything from that point is changed. The Normans bring new technology of castle building. They start building more and more buildings and churches and abbeys in stone. The language becomes changed, at least at an elite level. So it's not a complete fantasy that we see it in that way, but it completely ignores what else is going on in the rest of the world and how Scandinavia changes at a different rate, the impact that that has and what happens to those Viking energies. Because it's not as though somebody sitting in a village in Norway hears about the failure of Harold Hardrada's invasion of England and thinks, oh, all right, well, that was a nice run. Well, it lasted.

• 11:04Matt Lewis?

  We're done.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Put the axes away and let's get Christian and get on with farming peacefully. That just doesn't happen. Doesn't happen like that at all.

• 11:14Matt Lewis?

  I'm retiring from being a Viking.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  And the religion piece is particularly interesting in that respect because if, as so often happens, we conflate being a Viking with being a pagan, well, we've got... Christian Vikings, probably from the word go, but certainly in an institutional sense, from the 10th century onwards. But you've still got Scandinavians practising pagan rituals in Sweden up until the 12th century. That chronology is very, very different to the traditional one that we're taught about the end of the Viking Age. And of course, then what happens in the East and what happens in the Baltic later on, and what happens in the Holy Land, this is a whole other dimension to this.

• 11:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to ask, I want to talk in a bit more detail about the kind of the Baltic crusades of the Vikings in a minute. But I wondered to what extent, before we get into the specifics of that, should we see what the Vikings do during these crusades, papal sanctioned crusades in the Baltics, as a continuation of what they were doing? It's the same kind of thing, but now it's just wrapped in this knightly idea and has a kind of religious core to it that it lacked before. But actually, what they're doing isn't that dissimilar. And it's not like it's places they haven't been before as well.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  No, exactly. I mean, there are certainly very, very strong threads of continuity that you can draw from the earliest periods, right the way through to the 13th, even to the 14th centuries. You know, there was that famous boat burial that is discovered at Saromar, which I think has been dated to the early 8th century, which is a sort of taken one of the earliest archaeological examples of what seems to be Viking activity. It's a load of Scandinavians buried in a boat, in a Baltic island, near what's now the Estonian coastline. But that dates from way before we even think about the Viking Age starting. Fast forward to Valdemar the Great's conquest of the island of Rügen in the Baltic, and onwards to Valdemar II, his son's conquest of Estonia. These are bigger in scale, and

• 13:07Speaker 05

  the intent behind them may be different. But the idea of going around the Baltic, attacking Slavic wends and Estonians, taking their stuff, that's been pretty familiar bread and butter activity for Scandinavians for centuries by this point. I mean, the big sort of set piece crusading moments from the later Baltic crusading period don't really fully characterise what's going on, because there's an awful lot of general raiding and pillaging that happens alongside that.

• 13:37Matt Lewis?

  You write in your book, you describe the bounds of Christendom being forcibly extended with a hammer that swung from the north, which is a very cool line. I like it. So how does this begin? How do we get to a place where the Vikings are now not only Christian, but pushing Christianity beyond the bounds of their own kingdoms?

• 13:55Speaker 05

  So to get to that point, you have to think about the broader crusading movement, I think. The big turning point is, of course, the events around the First Crusade. The Pope opened the Second, calls for the Crusade, famously at Clermont. Huge wave of Western Christian knights take up that call, the instigation, incidentally, of the Byzantine Emperor. That movement, that campaign, turns into what is probably fair to say unexpectedly successful, from their point of view, enterprise. It results in the capture of Jerusalem and sends shockwaves through the Islamic world, of course, but also through the Christian world and the rest of Europe. It wasn't something that anyone, I think, had anticipated happening

• 14:37Speaker 05

  quite so quickly and quite so dramatically. And for a lot of people, a lot of kings, Christian kings, including in Scandinavia, I think there's a slight sense of having missed the boat, because they didn't go. The King of Norway, the King of Denmark, weren't part of this expedition. Although, incidentally, one of the sons of the King of Denmark did go on the First Crusade, although it ended in disaster, because he and his contingent were wiped out in Anatolia on their way to try to meet up with the rest of the crusading army. But they're certainly aware of it. They're certainly aware of what's going on. And they feel, I think, that they would like to have been more involved. And that's one of the triggers for the wave of sort of crusading or pseudo crusading that you start to see coming out of Scandinavia, directed towards the Holy Land. The most famous example

• 15:22Speaker 05

  is Sigurd, the King of Norway, Sigurd the First, who leads a crusade by ship down the coast of Western Europe, through the Straits of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean, by the way, pillaging and sacking all kinds of places along the way in sort of true Viking style, until he arrives in the Holy Land, where he meets up with Baldwin, the King of Jerusalem, and they successfully capture the port city of Sidon, which is a major event. But it's after the First Crusade, beginning of the 12th century. And that's a sort of a high watermark, really, for Scandinavian crusading in the Holy Land itself. And there are other minor expeditions, and other kings go on pilgrimage and so on. But it quickly

• 16:02Speaker 05

  becomes apparent that actually, it's quite a long way to go. It's quite dangerous. It's extremely expensive. And actually, there are quite a lot of pagans in the Baltic, right on our doorstep, that might be easier to have a go at them.

• 16:18Matt Lewis?

  Try and get a job closer to home, with a bit less travel, less of a commute.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  Try and get a job closer to home, a sort of a, yes, a staycation, if you like, you know, we don't have to go all the way. And the thing that really gives this life is the crystallisation of the notion that, yes, the Holy Land is important and Jerusalem is significant, but the devil doesn't care about geography, human geography. And his minions are all over the place. And actually, maybe we're thinking about this all wrong. Maybe we're thinking that physical Jerusalem is, yes, significant pilgrimage place, but there's another Jerusalem. There's a Jerusalem of the mind, conceptual Jerusalem. And that's what we really need to be defending. And if we're defending that, then, well, we better

• 17:04Speaker 05

  think more carefully about where we're directing our energies. And this really hardens in the 12th century, around the time of the Second Crusade. The Second Crusade starts to get underway. Saint Bernard famously starts to conflate, well, actually, the pagan wends, they're just as bad as the Muslim infidels. And actually, well, we've got Muslims in Iberia as well. We could be fighting them. And maybe we need to fight the devil on many fronts, not just in the Holy Land. And he gives impetus to this notion, which is then codified by Pope Eugenius III in his famous book, Divini Dispensazione, which gives the same crusading privileges to people who are fighting the pagan wends in the Baltic as

• 17:45Speaker 05

  to those who are fighting in Jerusalem. And that opens the door, really, for Scandinavian kings to start crusading in earnest against their neighbours. And this is brilliant, because they've been fighting the Slavs and the Bolts in the Baltic since time immemorial. They love doing that. That's one of their favourite things. But this now gives them a legitimate reason to do it. And not just a legitimate reason, but a reason that also has spiritual benefits potentially, and huge reputational benefits.

• 18:12Matt Lewis?

  And it's not even just a reason, is it? It's an imperative, almost.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:15Matt Lewis?

  It's a requirement of Christianity to go out and spread Christianity. So they've almost got permission, the permission slip from the Pope to go and do this.

• 18:22Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly right. I think that's a good way of looking at it. And we have the sort of capital, the economic capital. You have the social and the reputational capital. And you can start to add to that spiritual capital. We can actually do objective good for our souls by fighting in the Baltic. You can add that to the money that we make. We can add that to the reputation that we can gain. And suddenly, the package is even more attractive. It also gives to the Scandinavian kings opportunities for extending their own territorial ambitions. And that's hugely appealing, because they've seen how this works in the Holy Land. They've seen their Norman cousins doing this in Sicily and in the Levant as well. So, yeah, this opens up a whole new chapter.

• 19:08Matt Lewis?

  You've mentioned the wends a couple of times. So I wonder if we get on to kind of whereabouts are the wends? Who are they? What do we know about them? And why are they a target for the Vikings?

• 19:17Speaker 05

  It's a little bit hard, because the wends aren't a unified group. They have these many different tribal agglomerations, which change over time. They build coalitions and fracture again. So it's very difficult to trace exactly what's going on. But it really encompasses a range of Slavic peoples who live in what's now the coastal region of northern Germany and Poland. But that's the essential sort of geography of where they sit. In terms of their religious organisation, the very famous example of it is on the island of Rügen, where their cult site, temple site at Arcona, becomes the real sort of prize target for the Danish crusading impulse. And that comes to fruition in the reign of

• 20:02Speaker 05

  Valdemar the Great, with Bishop Absalon, the axe wielding Bishop of Rosgilde, who tear down this temple. And the descriptions that are given by Adam of Bremen in his History of the Danes, describe this four-headed idol of Svantevid, their god Svantevid, who's cloistered in a temple that only the priests can access. And he's a war god. And they have a whole cadre of warrior priests. And there's a sacred horse that gives auguries about battles and fertility. And they have a stable of holy horses that are owned by the god, but they're sort of loaned out to the priests who sort of ride them. There's a holy cavalry. So there's an extremely detailed and evocative sense of this quite developed

• 20:45Speaker 05

  non-Christian martial culture that exists amongst, certainly amongst the inhabitants of Rügen, but by extrapolation, throughout the Windish areas as well.

• 20:55Matt Lewis?

  How does the Kingdom of Denmark then first make its move against them? Because we do get a kind of first official Danish crusade against the wends.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there is. And it's in concert with the Holy Roman Empire, whose border runs up against the wends in the east. And so you have this sort of frontier zone, where German, Saxon families are, they're in conflict with the pagans to their east. The Danes are suffering from raids, so the wends are raiding Denmark. It's a reciprocal problem, but it's obviously an uncomfortable one for the Danish king. So the idea of the crusade that comes in 1147 is very convenient for both these parties. And they make common cause, although they've got their own problems between themselves, they make common cause to launch a crusade

• 21:44Speaker 05

  into this Slavic area and try to deal with their political issues, using the crusade, I think, as a good cover to do that. Which isn't to say that nobody has any real sort of sincere religious convictions. But the language around it would imply that there's a lot more interest in the economic potential of taking over these lumps of the Baltic coastline than anything else. It doesn't go very well, frankly. That first Windish crusade is a bit of a flop. The Danes in particular come to grief. The wends attack their ships. A lot of them are lucky to get away. The Saxon armies potter around a bit, do some damage, but ultimately realise that we're not going to make the sort of progress that we want to make, and certainly not without incurring a lot of cost. So perhaps just call it quits.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  And so the whole thing ends without really a great deal changing, other than this extraordinary precedent being set, that you can prosecute these sorts of wars against pagans and do it with the full sanction and backing of the Church. That's the real watershed moment.

• 22:57Matt Lewis?

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• 23:41Matt Lewis?

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• 26:09Matt Lewis?

  And to what extent is that first kind of attempted crusade derailed by problems at home in Denmark? Because there's kind of rival leaders or rival claimants from Denmark who are both trying to lead that campaign. Does that knock it off course?

• 26:22Speaker 05

  No, again, in fact, I mean, this is another one of the sort of unexpected benefits of this crusading idea is that Denmark at this period has been absolutely riven with civil war, has been in turmoil for ages. The fact that a crusade happens is a nice excuse for the two rival claimants to actually stop fighting each other for five minutes. They make common cause and agree to set aside their dispute and prosecute this campaign against the wends together. Doesn't last, of course. As soon as they go home, they just back at each other's throats. But temporarily, it allows for that moment of cohesion. And again, you can start to see that as the beginnings of an idea that actually directing our energies

• 27:01Speaker 05

  outwards has political benefits back home, as well as being potentially useful for our souls and our wallets and all the rest of it.

• 27:11Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, the benefits are apparently endless. But all of that strife at home in Denmark, I just want to use the name that you have in your book for the blood feast that seems to bring an end to all of this, just because it sounds really not cool to be there, I guess, but it's a cool name.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  No, bad, yeah. The blood feast. I mean, the history around this is so fiendishly complicated because the rival claimants and the internecine feuding and the plots make it very, very difficult. I mean, suffice to say, I mean, you have a deeply contested succession by this point in Denmark. You end up with three rival claimants to the Danish throne. And the blood feast is an exercise in trying to eliminate the competition by inviting everybody around for a nice feast. All the claimants to the throne all come together for a nice feast, naively perhaps, assuming that this is all above board and everyone turns up. And it turns into a bloodbath. So it's all a plot and everybody gets killed,

• 28:06Speaker 05

  apart from Valdemar, who is the junior of the three claimants, and the perpetrator, who gets away. And this sets up the opportunity for Valdemar to then go on to become the unifying king of Denmark. And then the perpetrator is disposed of afterwards and hunted down and done in. But yes, blood feast. I mean, this is what fascinating thing that Scandinavian language, there are loads of these massacres that occur throughout Scandinavian history, and they have these wonderfully evocative names.

• 28:36Matt Lewis?

  So the Danes then do return their attention to the wends. And kind of 20 years after that first campaign, so getting towards the end of the 1160s, they do seem to achieve some success. How do they bring about kind of the fall of the wends? I guess I'm mainly thinking about the conquest of Rugen and Arcona?

• 28:53Speaker 05

  I mean, the how of it is an interesting question because there's nothing really sort of quantitatively different about what they do than things that have been tried before. It's just that I think that there's more determination possibly. I mean, actually, Valdemar gets a kind of a lucky break because the whole thing catches fire and the inhabitants all come out and say, oh, okay, with games up, basically. And it's not the siege of Jerusalem. You know, it's not a set piece siege of that magnitude. But because it's such an important cult site for the wends, at least for the Rali, who are the tribal group that inhabit that part of the coastline and the island of Rugen, it's a bit of a death blow. And so the guard is dragged out and chopped up. The idol of Svante is torn down and it breaks

• 29:36Speaker 05

  the kind of political will because from what we can tell about the Windish religious political system, the two are very tightly fused. So the priests wield huge political authority. And this very, very public breaking of their cult site and the destruction of the idols really seems to sort of undermine that pillar of Windish society. And it's very easy from that point onwards for Windish leaders to make accommodation with Christian kings because they don't have the same sort of ideological hangups about it, I think.

• 30:08Matt Lewis?

  And do we see then the kind of the pagan dominos begin to fall? Does Christianity begin to spread quite quickly through that region after the fall of Rugen and Arcona?

• 30:18Speaker 05

  It does in a sense. I mean, this particular phase of the history of the Christianization of the Baltic becomes incredibly complicated for a number of reasons. So we get a proliferation of detailed narrative history. So we know a lot more about the ins and outs and the detail of the campaign. So that makes telling the story very hard. But it also starts to involve a great number of other actors. So you've got the Holy Roman Empire is involved, the Polish Kingdom is involved, the Teutonic Knights are involved, particularly in Prussia, so a little further east than the area we've been discussing. And they really spearhead the Christianization of that arc of the Eastern Baltic from Poland around parts of the Baltic

• 30:58Speaker 05

  States all the way up to Estonia, becomes part of this massive eastward push by the Teutonic Knights to take over and Christianize that area of the Eastern Baltic. That's not the story that I'm telling in this book because it's something that happens in parallel with, but not directly involving for most of the time, the Scandinavian kingdoms. They have their own thing going on.

• 31:19Matt Lewis?

  Well, moving on from the wends, we then have the Scandinavians, the Danes in particular, looking at other areas. So when we get to say Estonia, so the capital of Estonia is Tallinn, which translates as the fortress of the Danes, which kind of suggests that the Danes were entangled in Estonian politics for a long time. When do they turn their crusading attentions to what is today Estonia?

• 31:41Speaker 05

  So we know that there's contact with the Estonians. There's evidence that the Danes and the Swedes were raiding the Estonian coastline up to the beginning of the 13th century. But again, something happens at the beginning of the 13th century when papal authorization is given to the King of Denmark to attack and convert the Estonians. There's a formal green light given. And under Valdemar II, the Danes put together an invasion fleet. They bring bishops. They take the whole concept of holy war across the Baltic and they arrive at the Estonian coastline. And they come to a place at the time called Linndanissa, which is the original name for this hill on the Estonian coast. And they don't really

• 32:26Speaker 05

  encounter any opposition. It was a huge fleet, massive army. They bring wends with them. Incidentally, there's a Windish contingent who are now subject to the Danish kings. They come along, they're now nominally Christian. They pitch up and there's no one there. So they marched to the top of Tombpea Hill, which is the hill which is now within the city of Tallinn where the castle is. There's an old fort there and they camp out and again, still no one there. Next day, an Estonian delegation arrives to say, oh, nice that you've come. Yes, of course, we'd love to become Christians. Very good. See you later. Of course, this was nonsense. The next day, the Estonian army turns up en masse and attacks the Christian camp. And at first, it looks like it's going to go pretty badly.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  The accounts of the battle describe it's a surprise attack. Everyone's thrown into confusion. The different parts of the Danish army are all running in different directions. There are some language barriers, but ultimately the Windish contingent recognise what's happening. They hold the line, manage to hold the Estonian assault for long enough that there are other components of the Danish army get their act together and eventually are able to rout the Estonians off the field and consolidate then their control over this little coastal enclave around this old hill fort at Lindanissa. That becomes Rival, the fortress of the Danes, which they construct as a sort of a staging

• 33:54Speaker 05

  post for the onward colonisation of Estonia. And that process continues throughout the first half of the 13th century with the input of the Sword Brothers, who are another German knightly order who get involved in the conquest of Estonia from the south. And there's a lot of friction between the Danes and the Sword Brothers, which we don't need to get into. But essentially, that battle, that Battle of Lindanissa, becomes the defining moment in the Danish conquest of Estonia. And Estonia becomes effectively a vassal state, a part of the Danish Empire. And it has a really outsized importance in Danish sort of national consciousness afterwards, because it's taken to be the moment at which the Danabrog, the flag of the Danes, which is still the national flag of Denmark now, the White Cross on the

• 34:39Speaker 05

  red field, descends from heaven to inspire the Danish army to victory. So there's a whole sort of mythology of Christian providence that's bound up with this moment of the conquest of Lindanissa and the establishment of Danish rule.

• 34:54Matt Lewis?

  And also defining the Danish identity and Danish national consciousness, you know, they're emerging as a Christian, expanding, empire-seeking force that is at least wanting to give the perception that they're backed by God, you know, their flag is falling from the sky.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And this all links back to the way that royal power and Christianity are fused in Western European thought. And it goes back to the legend of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge in the fourth century, who sees this image of the cross in the sky, according to his historians, which inspires him on to victory. So from this very, very early moment, the notion that Christian kingship, martial kingship, can be inspired by and driven by an idea of Christian providence is sort of baked in. And you see it almost literally replicated at this Battle of Lindanissa, in the way that it's later remembered at least, with the flag descending, the cross, the Christian

• 35:53Speaker 05

  king, the conversion of the pagans, the pushing back of Christendom to new frontiers. So this very, very powerful chain of understanding about what Christianity, martial Christianity can be and its relationship to religion is there all the way through.

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• 37:46Matt Lewis?

  We've talked a lot about Denmark and the Danes, but in Scandinavia, there is also Christian Sweden to consider. What are the Swedes up to during this period?

• 37:56Speaker 05

  The Swedes are the odd ones out, really. They complicate the narrative in a lot of different ways. And we've talked a bit about the Norwegian king doing his crusade to the Holy Land and the Danes getting involved and their activities in the Baltic. But the Swedes are interesting because one thing, they come to Christianity later, or rather, they come to it in a more complicated way. So there are Christian Swedes as early as there are Danish Swedes, but the institutionalisation of Christianity in Sweden is a much later phenomenon. The cohesion of Sweden as a kingdom in its current shape is also a later phenomenon. The two things are quite closely related. And one of the reasons for this, I think, is that Sweden gets distracted by the eastern dimension, the eastern trade, by which I

• 38:39Speaker 05

  mean the opportunity to travel beyond the Baltic into what is now Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and exploit the trade networks that run down towards the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, taking northern produce, things like furs, amber, wax, slaves, into these eastern markets and bringing back shed loads of silver, most of it Islamic dirhams, of which the quantity of silver minted in the Islamic world is astounding. So the richness of this trading network is really apparent in archaeology. And what this does for them is it brings them, firstly, it brings Swedish adventurers into contact with a whole range of other

• 39:20Speaker 05

  cultures and religious ideas and cultural understandings, not least the whole eastern Orthodox Byzantine world. But it also gives them a sort of structural advantage in being a pagan, when you're dealing with that kind of multiplicity of identities, because you don't have to commit too hard to one thing. You've got that flexibility to trade and negotiate across lots of different ethnic and religious divides. That, I think, makes the transition of Sweden to a Christian European nation a bit more complex, because there's a lot of different influences coming back. There are a lot of people going away and having experiences. Some of them don't return, some of them do other things. And

• 40:03Speaker 05

  so it's not really until the 12th century that you get a stable succession and a Christian dynasty that remains in place and starts to put down the kind of the infrastructure of European Christianity, you know, churches and parishes and monasteries and all the rest of it. So yeah, really, really interesting. When they do get it, though, they start to export it just as eagerly as the others do. So you start to see Swedes going on crusade in Finland. And that is a whole other dimension to this expansion of the Christian frontier.

• 40:34Matt Lewis?

  And eventually, I mean, it sounds like for the Scandinavians, crusading becomes a good excuse, I guess, justification for their desire to push their boundaries outwards. But eventually, they will come up against other Christians. And presumably, the further east they go, as they encounter the Rus in particular, they're encountering Orthodox Christianity, so a different kind of Christianity. But it's almost like, what happens when you run out of pagans to give you that space to flow into? Does this cause problems when they encounter Orthodox Christianity? Are they kind of looking for an excuse to fight them as well?

• 41:09Speaker 05

  What happens when you run out of pagans? They don't actually bother looking too hard for one. I mean, they, that happens quite straightforwardly. I mean, the thing is, in terms of the conflict with the Rus, there's a lot of complexity here, because the Rus themselves have a primordial relationship with Scandinavia. So the development and the creation of a sort of an economic system along these riverways, these trading routes, is inspired by and given life by the emergence of these Scandinavian traders, exploiting them. Which isn't to say that everybody living there was suddenly Scandinavian, far from it, but Scandinavians really galvanise the emergence of towns and of political systems

• 41:52Speaker 05

  in what's now Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. So for a long part of this period, there's a very close relationship, particularly between Sweden and Norway and the Kievan Rus dynasty. They shelter each other's political exiles. You have Scandinavians travelling to the court of the Grand Princes of Kiev to serve as warriors in their retinues and travelling through those territories to serve as mercenaries for the Byzantine Emperor. There's a very, very tightly knit sort of pipeline of Scandinavians moving through this region. And the Rus princes themselves see themselves as descendants of Scandinavians. They are the sense of Ruric, the sort of legendary founder of the Rus dynasty. So there's a family connection all

• 42:35Speaker 05

  the way through. What changes is that as Sweden becomes more Catholic, if you like, it becomes more recognisably a Western Christian power, at the same time, the Rus become more obviously an eastern ally of the Byzantine world. So there's a growing separation of self-identity that occurs over the long period that we're talking about.

• 43:01Matt Lewis?

  I mean, does that conflict, that encounter of Latin Christianity with Orthodox Christianity in the far North East of Europe, does that create a fault line that still exists today, doesn't it?

• 43:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's remarkable how closely it tracks the current geopolitical fault lines. It's also interesting how a lot of the drivers of the tension remain kind of similar. I mean, I don't want to stretch the similarities, but a lot of the tension between Sweden and Rus, for example, was over the control of resources. So there's an extractive economy that goes on in the north whereby both the princes in northwestern Rus and the Swedish kings are trying to extract furs from the boreal forest zone. And they do that basically with menaces, you know, they take tribute in inverted commas from the tribal people who live there. And inevitably, that creates a friction because both these powers are trying to impose

• 43:58Speaker 05

  their control over the same people in the same region. So this idea of resources and resource extraction being a key point of friction, I think, probably has some resonance, as does the control over maritime choke points. The only way in and out of the Baltic is down the Neva towards Lake Gladys and into Russia and on into that river network down to the Black Sea. So you can see the beginnings of these sorts of maritime rivalries emerging, the control over not just resources, but also the means of transporting resources. It's an economic and political problem, probably more than it is a religious and cultural one. But of course, the religious schism and the cultural divergence that occurs, you know,

• 44:41Speaker 05

  the Rus become a Slavic speaking people quite early, really harden that divide. They make it much sharper than it perhaps otherwise would have been. And it provides the rhetoric that both sides are able to then employ to bolster their sense of identity and to sharpen the line that's being drawn. And that line runs basically down the western flank of Finland and right along the western border of Estonia. And of course, it still does today. That border has changed, I will say, over the centuries that intervened, but it's remarkably stable. That line between the Western Christian and the Eastern Christian through the North East is pretty much where it was.

• 45:18Matt Lewis?

  And I think it's quite incredible that we can still see a cultural and political and ideological divide that was sort of established 800 years ago, and it's still sitting there today. You know, we think the world is much less defined by those kind of things today, but that line is still there 800 years later in perhaps less of an openly stark kind of two worlds colliding into each other way, but it still exists.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  It very much does. And in fact, the language and the symbols remain very, very similar. So the key figure for this, certainly in Russian terms, is Alexander Nevsky, the great battlefield saint of Russia, sort of immortalized by his victory at the river Neva. It's where he gets this name Nevsky, fighting against an army of Swedes who've turned up to pillage along this sort of border region. Now, probably that battle was inflated in its significance, but what's really, really striking is the way that the Rus wrote it up is in very, very powerful religious terms. So it's all seen through the prism of providential victory, the angel of the Lord, apparently

• 46:28Speaker 05

  the battlefield miracle whereby the angel comes down and slaughters loads of Swedes miraculously. And Alexander Nevsky himself becomes a saint, partly as a result of his triumph over these godless Westerners menacing his borders. So it's a really, really interesting example of how this crusading mindset in the West runs hard up against a hardening religious cultural identity in the East, and they start to reinforce each other. And that friction is still really alive because Alexander Nevsky remains an icon in modern Russia. You know, we see quite modern statues of him being erected now. I can't remember, there's one that's been put up near St Petersburg, I think it's in the last 10 years. So yeah, really remarkable.

• 47:11Matt Lewis?

  Well, this has been so interesting to hear about, kind of for most people, the ultimate pagans becoming almost the ultimate Christian crusaders and spreading the bounds of Christianity to almost create a world in the East of Europe that is still very much alive today. It's been absolutely incredible. So thank you so much for joining us, Thomas, and explaining all of that massively complex subject.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  It's been an absolute pleasure. There's a lot more that could be said, obviously, but.

• 47:37Matt Lewis?

  That's a good reason for people to go and read your book.

• 47:39Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, they must do that.

• 47:40Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. Thank you very much.

• 47:43Speaker 05

  Oh, thank you.

• 47:44Matt Lewis?

  I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you want to find out more about Vikings and the Crusades, then Thomas's new book, God's Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusades, is out now. Or go and listen to our episode on the last pagans from last year. To hear more from Thomas, you can also go back and search for our previous episode with him from 2022 titled Britain's Lost Kingdoms. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

• 48:27Matt Lewis?

  You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.