History of the Crusades

the Crusades Episode 233, the Baltic Crusades, the Baltic Crusades, the Prussian Crusade Part 10, Bishop Christian.

Hello again listeners and welcome to another year of crusading.

If you stretch your mind way back into the final weeks of 2017 you may recall that in our last episode

the Teutonic Knights along with a bunch of Crusaders from Lavonia, Estonia, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden and Denmark headed

eastwards into Russia on a crusade to Novgorod. The crusade was unsuccessful, with the Crusaders being

resoundingly defeated by the Russians, due mainly to the heroic efforts of Prince Alexander Nefsky of Novgorod.

Now the crusade to Novgorod occurred in the early years of the 1240s and you may be interested

and probably not surprised to learn that some pretty major events took place in Livonia, Estonia and Prussia in the late 1230s and early 1240s, which we need to catch up on.

So we need to catch up on. So we need to sit back, take a breath and take a bit of a look around us at the state of Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1230s and the early 1240s.

What you would be looking at if you did this was a chaotic, violent and complicated mess. Civil wars had broken out or were on the verge of breaking

out in Poland, the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark. The Papacy was also in conflict with the Holy Roman Empire,

which shouldn't surprise anyone, but this of course, added an extra layer of complication to the political

situation at the time.

Things were so messy and so complicated, fact that you could probably do an entire

podcast series on the internal strife and cutthroat politics taking place in Europe at this time. But we won't be going into a huge

amount of detail. We'll just deal with the conflicts as we need to within the context of the different Crusades taking

place.

If you would like some more detail, however, on what's going on in Poland at this time, I recommend that you head over to the history of

Poland podcast.

The podcast started last year with the reign of Meersko the first and the creator of the show

Trevor Gilbert has been doing a great job covering the events taking place in

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