Thoughts on In Our Time's "Baltic Crusades" episode

Link to the episode

1. Why "Baltic Crusades" and not "Resistance to the Baltic Crusades"?

This might seem facetious, but the discussion does start with the perspective of "Christianity". Much criticism is made of the methods—albeit not of the proselytising goal—of crusade, but we are told a story about Catholic Christians. We get a picture of the state of Catholic Christianity right at the beginning, even though its history is much more familiar to the majority of listeners than that of the pagan Balts. Catholic Christians are presented as having agency and motivation, as having a history, while the pagans are timeless, featureless, passive. Even trade in the region is described as trade done by Christians, and nothing is said of Baltic participation in or exclusion from that trade, and if actions of pagans are described, it is usually accepting baptism. Aleks Pluskowski protests that "we're effectively dealing with the continuation of a culture over the last thousand or so years. Obviously not timeless, there had been lots of changes," but that is a merely academic point if the programme does not reflect this insight; he is given a mere three minutes (6:12-9:18) to describe the pre-Christian culture and history, and while he does give a sketch that is acceptable, it is extremely brief and unspecific (compare the somewhat extended discussion of Christian theology of war, for example).
Pluskowski notes that we largely have to rely on Christian portrayals, but says nothing about in what ways they are misleading, and does not mention the large quantities of folk songs that were later collected and are an important source for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European religion. Towards the end of the programme, it is said that pre-Christian practice survived on the fringes up until the early 19th century (33:15 and before), but nothing is said of its continuation under Christian leitkultur as folklore, or the influence it had on local Christian beliefs and practices.

What I would have focussed on is something that is mentioned only in the summing up:

Nora Berend (39:27-39:57): "I think the shorter-term consequences actually led to the development of a pagan state in Europe, which is quite interesting, that is Lithuania, which became a united realm and created, probably on the model of Christianity, a kind of pagan religion that was much more centralised. Although that was short-lived, I still think that's an interesting consequence."


Obviously, there is no question of the creation of a religion (at most of the invention of tradition within that religion), but the development of structures of state and religion to rival and resist Christian neighbors and invaders would have been a far more engaging topic. It would have been more challenging, too, as we are used to stories that end with "us" (Christianized Europeans) winning, and stories focussed on their opponents help us see the contingency of those victories; that even resistance that was ultimately futile was not fated to be futile.

2. Why is the word "colonialism" not used?

We hear that Lithuania retained sovereignty to some degree at least as part of Poland-Lithuania, but otherwise, surprisingly little about the fate of the peoples targeted by the crusades. The scale of warfare and killing does not become clear. It is mentioned that the native population, in some regions, becomes a minority to a German majority, but is this due to genocide, movement of populations, cultural assimilation? The disappearance or eradication of native Prussian culture and language under German colonial rule is not mentioned, only that "German culture dominated" (39:30), that there was a process of "Germanization" (40:00) and that the Teutonic order (who owned much of Prussia) became part of Germany. Again, the focus is on Christian institutions. Pluskowski mentions a "German heritage" (ca. 39:20) but fails to properly characterize this as the presence of German nobles ruling indigenous populations and German colonial settlers.
Just to prove that I'm not introducing the idea that this was colonialism: the German Wikipedia's page on the Teutonic Order has a section about Ostkolonisation, "colonisation of the East". As much as this is part of the history of religion in Europe, it is part of the history of German colonial activity in Europe that lasts until 1945.

3. Why the Protestant narrative?

Does it really do justice to the horror of a crusade to present it as a motivation or turning point in Christian development?

Melvyn Bragg (from 36:59): "Did the Church have second thoughts about what its crusade was bringing about?"
Martin Palmer: "(... The Council of Constance was) an attempt to do a reformation (...) a hundred years before the Reformation takes off itself, and issues that have been long simmering were brought to the fore, and one of these (was the criticism of crusaders) having actually attacked Christians, having failed to preach or to convert properly (... The crusaders) are at that point theologically... they just squeak through, but they know they're under threat."

Later, he continues that this helped to prepare "a huge shift away from the medieval Christian model, because frankly, it's beginning to creak" (41:13-41:20).

This portrayal of Protestantism as simply improving on Catholicism (as if Catholicism were a thing of the past), or of Catholic reformers being more proto-Protestant than Catholic, is simplistic; Protestantism did some things much worse than Catholicism. The evolutionist angle also risks justifying the crusades as part of a teleological movement of history, and projecting some sort of narrative of justice into the passing of time.

@apihtawikosisan I hate appeals to the future's view of its past.

The future will be as good or shitty as we make it.

— Autistic Asexual (@Foobs_Fooberman) 11. November 2016

All this in a year that has seen (in Germany, at least) much celebration of the Reformation as a force of progress and freedom, while Luther's extreme antisemitism and historical persecutions of Catholics and radical Protestants by other Protestants were ignored.

4. Why the triumphalist ending?

As the programme begins with the perspective "Christendom", so it ends with it (from 40:20). Somehow it seems to be intended as a positive conclusion that the crusades have "given Christendom a sense of its own integrity". As the sentence continues with "and it has also confronted this idea that you can use military force for religious purposes (...) and that really sows the seeds for a radical reassessment of Christianity that comes up in the Reformation", it feels to be intended as part of a process of positive change.

"For both Christians and Muslims, the most important pattern of spatial classification beyond the confines of narrow dynastic and territorial rule was the distinction between the realm of the true faith (res publica christiana, dār al-islām) and the pagan rest of the world. It was not before the fifteenth century, when the last Muslim rulershad been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula and the last Christian principalities of Southwest Asia had disappeared, that ‘Europe’ became a synonym for Christianity and the ‘East’ a synonym for the world of Islam." (Thomas Scheffler, "‘Fertile Crescent’, ‘Orient’, ‘Middle East’: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia" in: European Review of History—Revue européenne d’Histoire, Vol 10, No. 2, 2003, pp. 260-261)

For my part, I don't see the the conflation of Europe and Christendom as a positive development, and I certainly don't see it as a reality.