As well, this study investigates the involvement of the Pope and various religious preachers in the calling of the crusades against Denmark’s pagan neighbours in the Baltic and the spread of such crusade ideology throughout Scandinavia.Ĭhapters II and III focus on Denmark’s crusading actions against the pagan Wends, a Slavic people inhabiting the Wendland (Modern-day German-Polish border). The authors argue that crusading ideology played an impact on Denmark’s involvement in the crusades, with various Danish leaders taking up the cross for different reasons. The authors conclude that Denmark was an active participant in the crusades, either through ventures to the Near East or the Baltic region, setting up the rest of the book as a history of the development of the Danish crusading movement against the Wends, Prussians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and to a certain extent the Finns, described in vivid detail and explained within the general context of the expansion of the crusading ideal. According to the authors, the death of Prince Sven and his knights influenced other members of the Danish royal family to become involved in the crusading movement to the Holy Land. Led by Prince Sven of Denmark (c.1050-1097), all 1500 of the Danish knights perished in the ambush. In the introductory chapter, the authors trace the origins of the Danish crusading movement to the summer of 1097, when a large army of crusading knights from Denmark were attacked by a contingent of Turks near Ikonion. The two major questions posed by the authors in this study are whether Denmark participated in the crusading movement and for what reasons.

Brepols has now released an English translation based on the Danish second edition. The study Jerusalem in the North: Denmark and the Baltic Crusades, 1100-1522 is a worthy new addition to the expanding number of historical monographs on Scandinavia and its involvement in the crusading movement.Ĭoauthored by four leading Danish medievalists, this monograph was originally published in Danish in 2004, with a second edition and an Estonian translation being published in 20, respectively. Such collected works as Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500 (2001) and The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier (2009) provide an array of detailed and specified essays on the Baltic crusading movement, while a number of monographs, most importantly Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades (1980), have dealt with the history of the Crusades in Scandinavia in a broadly encompassing manner. The Baltic Crusades fall within the latter, and have slowly begun to form an increasingly significant niche within crusading historiography. The focus of many crusading scholars has been on those clashes between Catholic Western Europe and the Near East, while a select group of academics have devoted works to those crusading movements which originated and occurred inside Europe’s borders. The crusading movements have gained both academic and popular interest within the past decade as modern conflicts between the West and Middle East have become more prominent.

Within the past sixty years or so, the historiography of the crusades has grown at an astounding rate. Lind. Outremer: Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East 1. Book Review: Jerusalem in the North: Denmark and the Baltic Crusades, 1100-1522.

Crossbow crusade review