Kurt Villads Jensen — Crusading in the Baltic

Описание: Kurt Villads Jensen reframes the Baltic Crusades by asking what made “holy war” thinkable and attractive in Northern Europe. He begins with crusading as penitential warfare—an innovation around 1100 that turned violence into a sanctioned act of penance—and argues that focusing only on battles and castles misses the deeper mental, technological, and economic conditions that enabled crusading expansion. Jensen proposes thinking in terms of “mental regimes”: early twelfth-century optimism after the capture of Jerusalem, followed by the shock of 1187 when Jerusalem fell to Saladin, which he describes as a moral and emotional catastrophe that helped redirect crusading energy toward the Baltic. He links this to practical change: new port cities, improved shipping and logistics, and military-religious orders that could sustain campaigns in Livonia, Prussia, and Finland. Finally, Jensen traces how Baltic crusading waned in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as political particularism strengthened, unions and kingdoms fractured, and the Reformation undermined papal authority to grant indulgences. The result is a Baltic history where theology, emotion, and infrastructure are not background, but central drivers of medieval warfare and state formation.

Kurt Villads Jensen is professor of medieval history at Stockholm University; his research includes the Baltic crusades, conversion, and the sacralisation of landscapes.

Key Topics
00:00 Crusade as penitential warfare and why it matters for the Baltic Crusades
02:49 “Mental regimes”: optimism, purpose, and the conditions that make war possible
04:47 1187 and the loss of Jerusalem as a “mental catastrophe” shaping Baltic expansion
06:59 Technology, logistics, and new port cities: the infrastructure of crusading
09:43 The end of crusading: particularism, unions in crisis, and the Reformation

The published anthology:
https://bokforlagetstolpe.com/en/book...

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