From the middle of the twelfth century the cities of Bremen and Lübeck had established trading connections with Livonia. Following in the wake of the traders (1186) an Augustinian canon, Meinhard by name, preached Christianity under permission from a neighbouring Russian Prince, and he was made Bishop of Yrkill, on the Düna, under the Archbishop of Bremen. His successors, however, impatient at failure, organised a crusade from Germany. The third Bishop, Albert, took the recently founded trading centre Riga as his bishopric, and organised the knightly Order of the Brethren of the Sword (1202), to be under the control of the Bishop. He aimed at an united spiritual and temporal power in his own land, and in 1207 he accepted Livonia as a fief from King Philip of Suabia. But Albert's chief foes were those of his own household. The Knights of the Sword strove for independence and tried to establish themselves in Esthonia. Albert appointed his own nominee as Bishop there, who should act as a check upon the knights. Innocent III, however, gave the ecclesiastical supervision of Esthonia to the Danish Archbishop of Lund. But when the Danish King attempted to follow this up by asserting a political authority his forces were defeated by the Esthonians. German influences prevailed; Albert took Dorpat, made it the seat of a new bishopric, and organised the whole country ecclesiastically until his death in 1229; although it was not until 1255 that Riga became the Metropolitan of the Livonian and Prussian Churches. The Order of the Sword ceased to resist, and in 1237 it merged itself in the Teutonic Order in Prussia. The conversion of Livonia was followed by that of Semgallen in 1218, and finally the inhabitants of Courland, threatened on all sides, accepted baptism (1230) as the only alternative to slavery.
[Sidenote: Prussia.]
Between these lands and Pomerania lay the savage Prussians. Among them Bishop Adalbert of Prague, the Apostle of Bohemia, had ended his life by martyrdom in 997: and subsequent efforts, whether of bold missionaries or of victorious Polish Kings, equally failed. At length in 1207 some Cistercian monks from Poland obtained leave from Innocent III to make another attempt on Prussia. They were well received, and Christian of Oliva was consecrated bishop. But the rulers of neighbouring lands, notably Conrad, Duke of Masovia, which lay just to the south, schemed to turn these converted Prussians into political dependents, and Christian welcomed their armies as a means of hastening on the nominal change of religion. A crusade was set on foot; but the natives resisted with success, and began to destroy the monasteries established in the country. Consequently, in 1226 Duke Conrad invited some members of the Teutonic Order to help him. In 1230 came a large number of the knights, and a devastating war which lasted for more than fifty years (1230-83), ended in the nominal conversion of the remaining inhabitants.
During the war German colonists were placed upon the conquered lands and towns were founded—Königsberg (1256) in honour of Ottocar of Bohemia, who lent his aid for a time; Marienburg (1270), which became the headquarters of the Teutonic Order. Indeed, it was the Order which reaped the benefit of the conquest. In 1243 Innocent IV divided the country ecclesiastically into four bishoprics, which were placed afterwards under the Livonian Archbishop of Riga as their Metropolitan. One of these four—Ermland—freed itself both ecclesiastically from Riga and politically from the Teutonic knights, and placed itself directly under the Pope. The others were less fortunate, and the Order successfully resisted the joint efforts of the bishops and the Pope to place them in a similar position.
[Sidenote: Missions in Asia.]
The spread of Christianity among the tribes upon the Baltic coast, imperfect though it was, led to permanent results. In the second great field of missionary activity during this period the work of the Roman Church was more interesting than effective. It is difficult now to realise that in the fourteenth century emissaries from Rome had nominally organised large districts of Asia as part of the Christian Church. Nor was theirs the first announcement of the Gospel in those regions. Christians of the Nestorian or Chaldean faith could claim adherents from Persia across the Continent to the heart of China, and had even converted several Turkish tribes.
[Sidenote: Prester John.]
About the middle of the twelfth century the report reached Europe of the conversion as early as the beginning of the eleventh century of the Khan of the Karaït, a Tartar tribe, lying south of Lake Baikal, with its headquarters at Karakorum. The Syrian Christians, through whom the report came, misinterpreted his Mongolian title Ung-Khan as denoting a priest-king named John, and it was this distant Eastern potentate who came to be known in Europe as Presbyter Johannes or Prester John. It was the Syrian Christians who, in their desire to outvie the boastful arrogance of their Latin neighbours, together with many apochryphal tales invented a letter from this dignitary to some of the sovereigns of Europe, including the Pope. Equally fabulous seems to have been the report to Alexander III of a physician named Philip, that this shadowy personage desired reception into the Roman communion; for Alexander's answer apparently met with no response. In 1202 the tribe of the Karaïtes became the vassals of the great conqueror Ghenghiz Khan, who is said to have added to his wives the Christian daughter of the last Ung-Khan of the tribe. The kingdom of Prester John, however, lived on in fables, of which the best known relates how the Holy Grail, the cup consecrated by Christ at the Last Supper, had withdrawn from the sinful West and found refuge in this distant land.
[Sidenote: The Mongols in Europe.]
The conquests of Ghenghiz opened an entirely new chapter in the relations between Western Europe and the Mongols. Ghenghiz himself before his death in 1227 overran China, Central Asia, Persia, and penetrated as far west as the Dnieper. His successors entered Russia in 1237, conquered the Kipchaks about the Caspian Sea and pursued their fugitives into Central Europe, defeated the Poles, ravaged Saxony and Silesia, and overran Hungary (1240). It was fortunate for Europe that the death of the Great Khan in 1242 caused the Mongol leaders to withdraw their forces back to the East. The chief result of this Mongolian raid was that 10,000 Kharizmians fleeing before the Tartars entered the Egyptian service, and in 1244 captured Jerusalem for the Egyptian Sultan. At the time of the Tartar invasion the Papacy was vacant; but in 1243 Innocent IV was elected, and in 1245 at the Council of Lyons a crusade was mooted. But the renewal of the papal quarrel with Frederick II so far added to the general indifference that no crusade was possible. Louis IX of France alone forced his nobles to take the vow and fulfil it.