IBEN FONNESBERG-SCHMIDT. The Popes and the Baltic Crusades 1147-1254. (The Northern World, number 26.) Boston: Brill. 2007. Pp. xvi, 287. $134.00

Abstract

The crusade is a powerful metaphor in our times, often applied by agents of high-profile causes to justify their use of violence by claiming that there are such things as “just” wars. The problem is that any propaganda department of any belligerent party could tell you the same thing. It may be precisely this moral ambiguity that has drawn much scholarly attention to the original medieval crusades in recent years, whereby light has been shed also on the lesser-known Northerncrusades, directed against pagan peoples on the Baltic Rim in the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The latter began to be seriously studied in their broader European context only in the 1970s. The most recent contribution to the field is Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt's study of papal policy vis-à-vis the Baltic crusades from Eugene III to Innocent IV: in other words, from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century. In its most general guise, the book addresses the widespread misunderstanding that the faculties of the Catholic Church were always the same wherever they appeared. Hence the Northern crusades have tended to be regarded as rather formal procedures that found their final form with Pope Eugene's proclamation of the Second Crusade in 1147. Fonnesberg-Schmidt demonstrates that this was not so.