Radosław Kotecki, Carsten Selch Jensen and Stephen Bennett (eds)

Christianity and War in Medieval East Central Europe and Scandinavia

(Amsterdam: ARC Humanities Press, 2021), 310 pp.

Normally, thirteen is considered an unlucky number, and in the days of the CoViD-19 pandemic, luck would seem to be an important and all-too-scarce commodity for those engaged in research scholarship. Fortunately, though, the negatives of a pandemic and an unlucky number of chapters seem to have canceled each other out in this volume of thoughtful scholarship edited by Radosław Kotecki (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland), Carsten Selch Jensen (University of Copenhagen) and Stephen Bennett (Independent Scholar). From the first pages of the introduction, the volume makes clear that its aim is to prevent heavily researched and carefully defined yet still broadly applicable work on “a region that has been sometimes referred to as the ‘Younger Europe’ or ‘New Christianity.’” (2) Retaining some of the focus on the relationship between Christianity and war that has characterized previous volumes (inter alia) edited by Kotecki with a rotating team of colleagues, this volume aims to present material that might have not been as available to an Anglophone audience in previous generations. Closing the gap between recent developments in Polish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovakian, and Czech historiographies, the volume provides an important update to earlier conversations in English, French or German language scholarship. As a whole, the wider goal of the volume is to bring these regional histories into greater contact with other scholarly conversations about the intersection between Christianity and warfare; it achieves that goal.

The whole of the volume is divided into two major sections. The first explores the relationship between the institutional church and the prosecution of wars. Six major chapters investigate the militarized role of the archbishops of Split, Hungarian prelates involvement similar activities in the thirteenth century, the role of Nordic warrior-bishops, Dominican friars preaching Baltic holy wars, and mural painting in churches in the kingdom of Denmark. The second major section examines the ways in which cultural aspects of warfighting were given religious expression. Seven studies in this section delve into religious rituals to prepare for and support wars in Hungary, depictions of “Imperial Holy War” in Rus and Poland, literary imagery and imagination of warfighting in Central and Eastern Europe, the deployment of Bishop Absalon and King Valdemar as holy warriors in Saxo Grammaticus, the overlap of civil war and holy war discourses in Norway, battlefield martyrdom in Livonia in the thirteenth century, and orthodox responses to warfighting along shared frontiers. Taken as a whole, these thirteen studies, as the rich and detailed footnotes to each make clear, are distillations of important conversations among specialists, each providing a window into contemporary discussions, while remaining rooted in the exploration of a specific-enough topic to be useful as comparanda for specialists in other periods or regions.

The first section’s exploration of the institutional church is strong, on the whole, and shows that the role of the secular and monastic churches in the region was no smaller than it was in the regions of Southern and Western Europe in the same period and that the realities were just as complex on these “frontier regions” as they would be closer to the more traditionalist core of medieval European historiography. The first chapter, by Judit Gál, examines the role of the archbishops of Split, as the prelates balanced the competing influences of the Hungarian kingdom and the Byzantine Empire, and contrasts them with the Dalmatian bishops along the cost with whom they shared many commonalities. She notes, pertinently for the value of the volume, that the archbishops did engage in military activity, but did so as an effect of their service to the royal court. In the chapter that follows, Gábor Barabás offers an examination of the ways that bishops within the Kingdom of Hungary engaged with warfare both within and beyond the kingdom; as both crusades and civil wars shaped the fate of Hungary as a kingdom and the bishops generally favored the monarchy, Barabás argues that scholars cannot generally favor a narrative “about a unified clergy in relation to war and warfare” and instead need to attend to the idiosyncrasies of particular careers. (p.55) In her chapter, Sini Kangas offers a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of the literary value of the “warrior bishop” in northern crusade narratives, focusing on the practical and deliberate ambiguity present in the sources and the ways that constructive silences indicates the tension that authors experienced over the role played by and the cultural expectations of the clergy in the northern crusading theatre. For the fourth chapter, Jacek Maciejewski offers a meta-historical analysis, excavating the work of a fifteenth century chronicler (Jan Długosz) to show the ways that later chronicles managed the historical memory of twelfth and thirteenth century bishops in the wider umbrella of Poland, noting that his subject “considered it appropriate to preserve this memory [of heroic episcopal leadership, even in battle] for posterity, although the behaviour of some bishops might have been questionable” (p. 93) but added that Długosz highlighted “the prelates’ pastoral and priestly support for the army fighting against the pagans and their personal military leadership.” (p. 94) Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen offers the fifth chapter that examines the way that Dominican friars preached the crusade mission to the faithful in the wider province of Dacia (a Dominican name for Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway and some of the surrounding territory) and showed that there was considerable effort to convert by preaching rather than by military conquest in the region, despite prevailing narratives about territorial expansion within the purview of military orders and under royal banners. Where previous chapters had largely drawn on documentary evidence, Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen offers a different approach, reading mural painting in Denmark as another source for understanding how contemporaries saw the violence of religious frontiers. His work shows that as wall decoration of rural churches in Denmark began to depict, in greater detail and frequency, scenes of battle, war and martyrdom were linked to the greater valorization of conquering sin: “broad developments in the devotional culture of Europe first and foremost translated into affective imagery, but secondly into a shape that would make sense to the rural population, which was the primary public for these evocative images.” (p. 138) Broadly, the cluster of chapters offers an examination of the ways that religious officials engaged with warfighting and in doing so shows that one-size-fits-all narratives about the regions around the Baltic, the Balkans, or Scandinavia underserve the lived experiences and historical realities of the regions and their inhabitants.

The second section of the volume makes clear that uniformity for the sake of a “good narrative” works as poorly for the regions under study as it does for the rest of the medieval world. Ambiguity, textual agenda evinced by authors, and the role of complex political loyalties color all of the sources in question, and the scholars undertaking the work of these chapters make that much clear. In the first chapter of the second section, Dušan Zupka offers an examination of the religious rituals surrounding the process of warfighting in the kingdom of Hungary and sketches some of the ways that religious support was garnered for royal and aristocratic bellicosity. Especially valuable is Zupka’s concentration on the cult of saints as a local patronage project and the ways in which the liturgical support for the warfighting helped to shape the religiosity of conflicts in which the Árpád dynasty engaged. The subject of Radosław Kotecki’s chapter concerns the liturgical and hagiographic intervention of saints and angels in warfighting in Poland and Kievan Rus in the high middle ages, even going so far as to propose a hypothetical identification of a relic as part of the wider emphasis on divine intervention for military benefit. Carsten Selch Jensen’s work on the Gesta Dannorum, penned by Saxo Grammaticus, helps uncover the way that narrative authors might engage with the rhetoric and reality of warfighting, noting specifically that Saxo Grammaticus was “a man who knew how to write about war and warfare, dealing both with the practicalities of the common soldiers and the commanders, as well as with the theological framework legitimizing these wars—whether they were fought against inner political enemies or pagans raiding the Danish coastal regions.” (p. 206) In their co-authored chapter, David Kalhous and Ludmila Luňáková examined the tension generated by the contradictions between pacific rhetoric in clerical circles and the realities of warfighting undertaken by otherwise legitimate political authorities; put briefly, they showed that in a number of chronicles, “chroniclers sought legitimacy, once they described a war, but they also accepted it as a regular and legitimate part of life.” (p. 222) In the volume’s eleventh chapter, Bjørn Bandlien examines the ways that civil wars in Norwegian history manifest the same type of ambiguity—a word that appears in its forms frequently in the chapter—that runs as a theme throughout all of the studies in the volume. For Bandlien, “any claim to royal power had to be legitimized by having a just cause for war and by the claimant showing himself in some way as an imitator and standardbearer of St. Olav” (p. 243); this factor underscores both the sacrality of discourses about civil wars—via saintly intercession—and the ambiguity of the same, since multiple factors strove to make the same mutually-exclusive claims. In Kristjan Kaljusaar’s contribution, the Livonian crusading theatre becomes a central field in which to discuss crusade martyrdom and its role in fostering a sacralized topography, yet without the specific achievement of martyrdom: “No official martyrs were made on the battlefields of the Livonian Crusades, but in many contemporary minds, the Eastern Baltic lands nevertheless contained an essence that gave divine meaning to the deaths of Christian warriors who perished fighting the pagans there.” (p.262) Anti Selart’s chapter on Orthodox responses to the Baltic campaigns spotlights the response of the Eastern churches, especially those of Kievan Rus, demonstrates that the clerical establishment did not take an active role in warfighting, but instead left that to the warlords that dominated the political landscape; the chroniclers’ local focus made them more likely to comment on divine protection for a city than for divine sanction for another town’s conquest.

Overall, this edited volume presents a good set of studies that help provide a good “update” for scholars that might be unable to read the locally-produced material on which the authors of the chapters draw. The editorial care to present as much good scholarship is evident: the authors are, for the most part, “known entities” among scholars of crusades and holy war, and their reputation helps the volumes gaps seem like problems for another generation of graduate students. It would have, I think, been fruitful to see more material from the Balkan regions as a counterbalance to the strong Baltic and Scandinavian contingent. It might also, I think, have been beneficial to see some of the “Byzantine Commonwealth”—to borrow an outdated term—included. Still, edited volumes have page limits like any scholarly work and it is unfair to ask too much of a project that already does so much. Kotecki, Selch Jensen, and Bennett have presented a baker’s dozen chapters of good quality and the work of the scholars between its covers are deserving of the curiosity of those interested in the phenomenon of religious warfighting and militarized religiosity.

Kyle Lincoln
Southeastern Oklahoma State University