#women in the baltic crusades
““Swantepolk, duke of Pomerania, learning of the absence of the (Teutonic Order) brothers and the citizens of Elbing, proceeded there after gathering a great army to attack the fort and town. Seeing this, the women (of Elbing), laying aside feminine adornment, put on a male frame of mind, girded the sword upon the thigh, and ascended the battlements, comporting themselves so manfully for their defence that nowhere was the weakness of their sex apparent. Hence, the duke, thinking that the brothers and townsmen had returned, retreated in fear.Nor should you believe that this only happened here, but (also) many times in other places where in the absence of men the fortifications would have been endangered, if the boldness of the women had not put a resistance.”
Thus Peter of Dusburg, a priest of the military monastic Teutonic Order, depicts an attack on the order’s town of Elbing by the Duke of Pomerania (ally of the Prussian pagans) in 1245. Dusburg’s chronicle, completed in 1326, describes his order’s long crusade against the pagan Old Prussians and Lithuanians (…). Scholars believe Dusburg utilized reports from eyewitnesses and the order’s own oral tradition, since written sources can only be found for only a small part of Dusburg’s section III. The story of the “manly” women of Elbing does not appear in the known sources for his chronicles.
Of course, this leaves the problem of sheer invention by the chronicler to entertain and edify. There is no a priori reason to assume such stories must be invented. Elsewhere in medieval Europe, women did sometime take part in combat, even fighting with sword and lance. We will see that there are story of bellicose women much more factually told in the chronicles of the Teutonic Order and the Order of Sword Brothers in Livonia.
(…)
We have a much more matter-of-fact, first-hand account of women on the battlements in the Baltic wars by Henry of Livonia whose chronicle relating the exploits of the Livonian order of Sword brothers was finished in 1226-1227. (…) Indeed, he was active in the Livonian wars in what is now Latvia and Estonia from 1205 onwards and is thought to have been present at the attack on Riga in 1210 described here:
“Fishermen from all parts of the Daugava River fled to Riga, announcing that (the pagan Curonian) army was following them. The citizens and the brothers of the Order and the crossbowmen, although they were few in numbers with clerics and women all rushed to arms... some of us having brought small three pronged iron nails, scattered these on the road…”
(…)
For the chroniclers of the military orders conducting the Baltic crusade, women in heaven and on earth were not excluded from participation in battle. By definition, there could be no civilians, no bystanders in a war seen as an elemental struggle between God and demons. Women were physically weaker, but God or the Devil could give them strength to become virile at least in their own defense. Probably this partially reflects the reality of life in an area in which the main form of warfare was the raiding party which sought to kill or capture everyone in its path. Women grew up or moved in as colonists to a war zone, and perhaps on some occasion they became warlike. On Christianity’s norther frontier, or at least in the world of its chroniclers, women had equal opportunity to be brave and brutal.”
“”Nowhere was the fragility of their sex apparent”, Women warriors in the Baltic crusade chronicles”, Rasa Mazeika
