Estonian Crusade: The Middle Ages
Estonia remained one of the last corners of medieval Europe to be Christianized. In 1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against pagans in Northern Europe. The Northern Crusades from Northern Germany established the stronghold of Riga (in modern Latvia). With the help of the newly converted local tribes of Livs and Letts, the crusaders initiated raids into part of what is present-day Estonia in 1208. Estonian tribes fiercely resisted the attacks from Riga and occasionally themselves sacked territories controlled by the crusaders. In 1217 the German crusading order the Sword Brethren and their recently converted allies won a major battle in which the Estonian commander Lembitu was killed. The period of the several Northern Crusade battles in Estonia between 1208 and 1227 is also known as the period of the ancient Estonian fight for independence.
Read more about this topic: History Of Estonia
Famous quotes containing the words middle ages, middle and/or ages:
“The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.”
—Anzia Yezierska (1881?–1970)
“I never yet feared those men who set a place apart in the middle of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and swear oaths which they break.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)