SHORTER NOTICES
581
Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology , ed. Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen
and Kurt Villads Jensen (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Soc., 2005; pp. 320 .
N.p.).
The ‘ markedly weak tradition of crusading studies in Scandinavia ’ is ascribed
by Villads Jensen to an unwitting collaboration of the Lutheran tenet that
all crusades were popish delusions with the pacifi st-humanist refusal to waste
time on any military enterprises. This blindness was reinforced by the con-
viction of most crusade historians (since Guibert of Nogent) that the only
real crusaders went to the Holy Land, and that the other Northern enterprises
were side-shows or spurious, so that even the Holy Wars of immediate con-
cern to Scandinavians were not of much interest. A new knight-hood of
Scandocrucigerent historians, encouraged by Tore Nyberg, is busy making up
for lost time, as this collection of 23 papers proves. Janus Møller Jensen rides
fi rst with a refutation of the idea that crusades were originally meant to be
pilgrimages or hybrid holy war-pilgrimages; the literature of the eleventh
century reformers persuades him that Urban proclaimed penitential war, and
that this concept was the link between all crusades, even if contaminated by
others. Nevertheless Nedkvitne observes that sagas reveal a variety of motives
for crusading by northerners rather than one penitential urge, and Kangas
discovers in all cross-bearers the need to prove faith ‘ not only by personal
suffering, but also by causing misery to others ’ as at Antioch and Jerusalem,
where the frenzied bloodlust was no regression into barbarism, but a deliberate
attempt to win salvation through violence. Unlike the Rhineland pogroms
of 1096, argues Heikkilä, which were seen by christian chroniclers as an
inducement to conversion germane to the crusade, and by Jewish sources as the
result of greed for undefended wealth rather than religious zeal. William of
Tyre’s narration of crusading events is shown by Lehtonen to be determined
not by reality but by a schoolman’s formula which explained events by the
operation of God, nature, fortune, and sinfulness in that order. Russian sources
for the life of Alexander Nevsky, hammer of the Teutonic Knights, are found
even less reliable by Isoaho: not contemporary and largely dependent on
classical and hagiographical stereotypes. Thomas Lindkvist fi nds the fame of St
Eric as the fi rst Swedish crusader to Finland and converter of the Finns a
refl ection of fi fteenth-century Scandinavian political posturing rather than
twelfth-century reality, and that would be a safe assumption were it not for
the critical acumen of John Lind who is ‘ puzzled ’ by recent approaches to the
crusades, in particular by Lindkvist’s refusal to accept the plain witness of the
sources that Swedish rulers and clerics waged war to impose christianity on
some Finns, however christian others may already have been. Lind blames the
theory of Swedish social development which does not allow Swedes to wage
war for religion rather than plunder before 1292. He also traces the effects of a
recent Nordic obsession with matters of
regnum
and
sacerdotium
in the
distortions and superfl uities of Diplomatarium Danicum , in which he fi nds
the crusades sidelined and internal confl ict over-emphasised in obedience to
the outlook of Skyum Nielsen, Hal Koch and Fenger, stout secularists. The
tendency to attribute the development of crusade indulgences, full remission
of sins, to papalist scheming is checked by Bysted’s inquiry, which shows that
after 1095 these were granted or promised by various authorities and did not
become a papal prerogative until Aquinas. On this theme Fonnesberg Schmidt
EHR, cxxi. 491 (April 2006)
