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Baltic Crusades

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the fight, led by orders such as the Teutonic Knights and supported by the popes, to convert pagans in what became known as the Baltic Crusades.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Baltic Crusades, the name given to a series of overlapping attempts to convert the pagans of North East Europe to Christianity at the point of the sword. From the 12th Century, Papal Bulls endorsed those who fought on the side of the Church, the best known now being the Teutonic Order which, thwarted in Jerusalem, founded a state on the edge of the Baltic, in Prussia. Some of the peoples in the region disappeared, either killed or assimilated, and the consequences for European history were profound.

With

Aleks Pluskowski
Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading

Nora Berend
Fellow of St Catharine's College and Reader in European History at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge

and

Martin Palmer
Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Available now

47 minutes

Last on

Thu 24 Nov 2016 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

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READING LIST:

S. J. Allen, Emilie Amt (ed.), The Crusades: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2003)

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 950 – 1350 (Allen Lane, 1993)

James A. Brundage (trans.), The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia (Columbia University Press, 2004)

Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (Penguin, 1997)

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Pimlico, 2004)

I Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades 1147–1254 (Brill, 2007)

Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World - Europe from 1100 to 1350 (Phoenix Giant, 1998)

Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity (Penguin, 2010)

R.I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Profile, 2014)

Alan V. Murray (ed.), Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150–1500 (Ashgate, 2001)

Alan V. Murray (ed.), The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier (Ashgate, 2009)

A. G. Pluskowski, The Archaeology of the Prussian Crusade: Holy War & Colonisation (Routledge, 2012)

S. C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-central Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

M. Tamm, L. Kaljundi and C. S. Jensen, Crusading and Chronicle: Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier (Ashgate, 2011)

S. R. Turnbull, Crusader Castles of the Teutonic Knights 1: The Red Brick Castles of Prussia 1230–1466 (Osprey, 2003)

S. R. Turnbull, Crusader Castles of the Teutonic Knights 2: The Stone Castles of Latvia and Estonia 1185-1560 (Osprey, 2004)

William Urban, The Livonian Crusade (Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 2004)

William Urban, The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (Greenhill Books, 2003)

William Urban, The Prussian Crusade (Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 2000)

William Urban, The Baltic Crusade (Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1994)

William Urban and Jerry Smith (trans.), The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle (Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 2001)

Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński, Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy 1100-1230 (Brepols, 2014)

Adam Zamoyski, Poland (William Collins, 2015)

Credits

Role Contributor
Presenter Melvyn Bragg
Interviewed Guest Aleks Pluskowski
Interviewed Guest Nora Berend
Interviewed Guest Martin Palmer
Producer Simon Tillotson

Broadcasts

  • Thu 24 Nov 2016 09:00
  • Thu 24 Nov 2016 21:30

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