CROSSING BOUNDARIES
Edited by Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson
Imagined Communities on
the Baltic Rim, from the Eleventh
to Fifteenth Centuries
Crossing Boundaries
Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies
The series from the Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
(TUCEMEMS) publishes monographs and collective volumes placed at the
intersection of disciplinary boundaries, introducing fresh connections between
established fields of study. The series especially welcomes research combining
or juxtaposing different kinds of primary sources and new methodological
solutions to deal with problems presented by them. Encouraged themes and
approaches include, but are not limited to, identity formation in medieval/early
modern communities, and the analysis of texts and other cultural products as a
communicative process comprising shared symbols and meanings.
Series Editor
Matti Peikola, University of Turku, Finland
Imagined Communities on the
Baltic Rim, from the Eleventh
to Fifteenth Centuries
Edited by
Wojtek Jezierski and Lars Hermanson
Amsterdam University Press
Cover illustration: St. Henry and St. Eric arriving to Finland on the ‘First Finnish Crusade’.
Fragment of the fifteenth-centtury sarcophagus of St. Henry in the church of Nousiainen,
Finland
Photograph: Kirsi Salonen
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
isbn
978 90 8964 983 6
e-isbn
978 90 4852 899 8 (pdf)
doi10.5117/9789089649836
nur684
© Wojtek Jezierski & Lars Hermanson / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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advised to contact the publisher.
Table of Contents
Editors’ Preface
9
Introduction 11
Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, from the Eleventh to
Fifteenth Centuries
Wojtek Jezierski*
Visions of Community
Imagining the Baltic
37
Discourses of Communion
59
Envisioning a Political Community
89
Mental Mapping in the Works of Adam of Bremen and Saxo
Grammaticus, Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries
Thomas Foerster*
Abbot William of Æbelholt and Saxo Grammaticus: Imagining the
Christian Danish Community, Early Thirteenth Century
Lars Hermanson*
Peasants and Swedish Men in Vernacular Rhyme Chronicles, Late
Fifteenth Century
Margaretha Nordquist*
Cultic and Missionary Communities
Communities of Devotion across the Boundaries
123
Risk Societies on the Frontier
155
Women and Religious Bonds on the Baltic Rim and in Central
Europe, Eleventh – Twelfth Centuries
Grzegorz Pac*
Missionary Emotional Communities in the Southern Baltic, Eleventh
– Thirteenth Centuries
Wojtek Jezierski*
Expanding Communities
191
An Imaginary Saint for an Imagined Community
223
Henry of Livonia on the Making of a Christian Colony, Early
Thirteenth Century
Linda Kaljundi*
St. Henry and the Creation of Christian Identity in Finland,
Thirteenth – Fifteenth Centuries
Tuomas Heikkilä*
Legal and Urban Communities
The Making of Legal Communities
255
Urban Community and Consensus
279
Urban Community and Social Unrest
307
Royal, Aristocratic, and Local Visions in Sweden and Gotland,
Thirteenth – Fourteenth Centuries
Thomas Lindkvist*
Brotherhood and Communalism in Medieval Novgorod
Pavel V. Lukin*
Semantics of Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Lübeck
Cordelia Heß*
The Baltic Rim: A View From Afar
Norway, Sweden, and Novgorod
331
Transient Borders
353
Scandinavian Perceptions of the Russians, Late Twelfth – Early
Fourteenth Centuries
Bjørn Bandlien*
The Baltic Viewed from Northern Iceland in the Mid-Fifteenth
Century
Hans Jacob Orning*
Figure 1 Place-names mentioned in the book
Editors’ Preface
This volume is a result of two joyful and rewarding workshops conducted
in the course of 2014, in Gothenburg (April) and Rome (December). The
not‑so-imagined community of authors gathered in this book is particularly
indebted to the critical comments by Barbara H. Rosenwein and Hans Jacob
Orning, which allowed the authors to revise and sharpen their arguments.
The editors would also like to thank Auður G. Magnúsdóttir (Department
of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg) for her assistance in organizing the workshop in Gothenburg. The Rome meeting which took place in
the spectacular Institutum Romanum Finlandiae was co-organized with
its director Tuomas Heikkilä, whose hospitality exceeded all expectations.
The book owes a particular debt of gratitude to Kirsi Salonen (TUCEMEMS,
University of Turku), whose Baltic expertise, unyielding scrupulousness,
and editorial proficiency greatly improved the quality of the manuscript
in terms of both content and form. Rich Potter (Department of Historical
Studies, University of Gothenburg) superbly assisted us with preparing the
maps and figures for the book. The authors as well as the editors are also
much obliged to the anonymous peer reviewers, who so positively recommended this volume for publication and whose abundant suggestions and
detailed comments substantially enhanced the overall value of our work.
Finally, the Amsterdam University Press editorial team – Simon Forde,
Tyler Cloherty, and Jaap Wagenaar in particular – have done a terrific job
in preparing this book for production. Thank you all.
The editors’ research time devoted to the making of this book, as well
as the funding of Barbara H. Rosenwein’s guest professorship in Gothenburg in the spring of 2014, were made possible by two munificent grants
from the Humanist Faculty of University of Gothenburg. Additionally, the
proofreading of English was funded thanks to the generous support of the
Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, as well as the Per Lindecrants’ Fond at the
Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg.
Wojtek Jezierski & Lars Hermanson
Gothenburg, May 2016
Introduction
Imagined Communities on the Baltic Rim, from the
Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries
Wojtek Jezierski*
Baltic – The Final Frontier
In the early 960s, an Andalusian slave merchant of possibly Sephardic or
Muslim origin by the name Ibrāhīm Ibn Ya’qūb al-Turtushi made his way
from his Cordovan caliphate to the northernmost edges of known Europe.1
On his journey he visited and was quite taken aback by the riches he saw in
the city of Prague; he was also an early witness of the Polish Duke Mieszko’s
(Mashaqqah) fetus state just before the duke himself put it on the map in
965. Ibn Ya’qūb also heard something of the berserk-like Burus (Prussians)
dwelling on the shores of the ‘Surrounding Sea’ (‘Oceanum’ in the Latin
rendition) and that the Russians crossed this sea on ships coming from the
east to attack them. To the west of the Prussians and north of Mieszko’s
country, also occupying the shores of the ‘Surrounding Sea’, lived the Velets
(Waltabah) whose greatest city, perhaps identifiable as Jumne on the island
of Wolin, was a mighty fortress with twelve gates.
The great value of Ibn Ya’qūb’s sometimes surprisingly accurate and
fascinating report – preserved in the eleventh-century Book of Highways
and Kingdoms (Kitāb al-Masālik wa’l-Mamālik) by Abu Abdullah al-Bakrī
* Wojtek Jezierski is Researcher in Medieval History at the Department of Historical Studies,
University of Gothenburg. He defended his PhD thesis: Total St Gall. Medieval Monastery as a
Disciplinary Institution (2010) at Stockholm University and published several articles on monastic
power relations, cloistral surveillance, and subject-formation in early medieval St Gall. He
was a post-doctoral researcher at the Deutsches Historisches Institut, Warschau 2011/2012. He
recently co-edited the volume Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order, c. 650-1350 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2015). His current research interests are the senses of danger & security among Baltic
missionaries as well as historical semantics of emotions, eleventh to thirteenth centuries.
Many thanks to Lars Hermanson, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Thomas Foerster for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this introduction.
1 Relacja Ibrāhīma Ibn Jakūba z podróży do krajów słowiańskich w przekazie al-Bekrīego,
ed. by Tadeusz Kowalski, Pomniki dziejowe Polski S.N., V. 1, Cracow: Wydawnictwa Komisji
Historycznej. Polska Akademia Umiejętności Bd. 84, 1946); Mishin, ‘Ibrahim ibn-Ya’qub atTurtushi’s’; Pleszczyński, The Birth of a Stereotype, pp. 14-24.
12 Wojtek Jezierski
– springs from the fact that its author stood outside the western Christian
tradition of imagining the waters of the ‘Surrounding Sea’ as an impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters. To be sure, the merchant was
confronted with a rudimentary form of such a fearsome phantasm of the
North when he talked to no other than Otto the Great (called Hutu in Abu
Abdullah’s rendition), whom he met in Magdeburg. Yet for all his superficial
fascination with rumours and myths of the distant Amazons which Otto
supposedly fed him, what interested Ibn Ya’qūb the most were the customs
and living conditions of his potential trade partners, that is, communities
he actually encountered: peoples, towns, kingdoms – a very merchant-like
point of view after all. He paid attention to their laws, settlements, types of
association and rule, disposition towards others, etc. Ibn Ya’qūb, as it were,
was making a discovery of the Baltic: the sea he saw, and subsequently the
whole region, would be named after Adam of Bremen’s proposition. It was a
discovery in the sense that its maker, truly coming from the outside, acted
beyond an ossified mind-set and took a look with fresh eyes.2
It is also clear from his report that Ibn Ya’qūb, or at least the later compiler
of his texts, reckoned that knowledge of a region did not come in some
master narrative fully condemning or lauding whole patches of the earth.
For him, knowledge circulated as an inherently fragmented commodity,
whose oddly shaped, sometimes incompatible pieces to some extent corresponded to the size of the communities one could learn about. Knowledge
was what one saw, found out via others, or heard from rumours. It was local
knowledge3 par excellence – it is no mere accident that in his account Ibn
Ya’qūb every so often raised the problem of languages spoken by a given
community. The ability to converse or the occasional unreserved indifference to communication (Prussians)4 set the limits of acquiring knowledge.
And what counted for a snoopy merchant were f irst and foremost
2 Obviously, Ibrāhīm Ibn Ya’qūb was neither the first nor the last to make the discovery and
describe the Baltic Rim as an interconnected region populated by many divergent communities.
A hundred years earlier a certain Ohthere of Hålogaland, a Viking seafarer visiting King Alfred’s
court whose account has been preserved in the king’s Old English Orosius, with his voyage
outlined the outer orbit of the Scandinavian Peninsula (Lund (ed.), Two voyagers). One could
say that the geographical scope of this book is contained by these two journeys, the earlier one
tracing its northwestern outskirts (with the exception of Iceland) and the latter exploring its
southeastern frontiers and offering glimpses into the heart of the region.
3Geertz, Local Knowledge.
4 Mishin, ‘Ibrahim ibn-Ya’qub at-Turtushi’s’, p. 188: ‘[The Burus] have their own language and
ignore the languages of the neighbouring peoples’; Relacja Ibrāhīma Ibn Jakūba, ed. by Kowalski,
Latin trans. by Marian Plezia, p. 147: ‘Sedes Burūs ad Oceanum. Hi linguam habent propriam
neque linguas suorum vicinorum norunt’.
Introduc tion
13
connections and connectivity, ‘spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form’, as Italo Calvino put it poetically.5 This form-seeking, that is,
what these communities narrated and imagined of themselves, Ibn Ya’qūb
regrettably did not always have access to. But the timing of his inquiring
gaze nonetheless coincided with a new interest in the communities inhabiting the coasts of the Baltic Sea – the same interest characterizing the pages
and intent of this book.
Questioning Communities
The purpose of this book is twofold. First, in twelve chapters and a final
commentary, it aims to explore the ways in which political, cultic, missionary, legal, urban, or cultural communities were envisioned and imagined on
the Baltic Rim between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The chapters
delve into the visions of particular communities existing on all shores of the
Baltic Sea as well as the visions of the Baltic Rim as a whole. This includes
both visions produced inside the Baltic region as well as the external, sometimes fantastic, or even utterly phantasmagorical views of this alter mundus
penned across the whole period (eleventh through fifteenth centuries).
Second, the book aims at a methodological and conceptual widening of the
sense in which we study medieval communities. This includes the types
of sources that can be mined for such examinations: historiography (both
Latin and vernacular), hagiography, correspondence, law, saga literature,
prayer books and calendars of the saints, administrative sources, etc.
Moreover, the book seeks to extend the palette of perspectives, concepts,
and types of questions with which we approach these sources – visions and
imaginations of communities, their perception of their common past or
present sense of communality, positioning vis-à-vis others, and emotions.
This composite purpose gives rise to the following broadly comprehended
questions featured in the chapters of this book:
– How were these communities imagined? What common visions did
they invoke?
– What kind of relationships connected them or, occasionally, tore them
apart?
– What role did affections and emotions play in these projections of the
past, present, and future?
5Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 68.
14 Wojtek Jezierski
– How were these imaginings culturally, politically, and religiously
deployed?
The idea for this book originated in a dissatisfaction with the fact that
the historiography of the Baltic Rim in the Middle Ages is traditionally
preoccupied with questions about large scale processes which ‘made’ the
region during this period: state-formation, urbanization, Christianization,
etc. Although it would be virtually impossible to ignore the significant
major insights delivered by these research traditions – traces of which are
clearly visible in the following pages – their acolytes have often departed
from a single aspect, process, or their own imagination of the Baltic Rim
to pursue the study. As a result, the way medieval people around the Baltic
Sea made sense of their own and others’ forms of life – what was the ‘native
anthropology’ of their social, political, cultural, and religious environment – was often ignored or simply escaped the great narrative frames
proposed by medievalists. Instead, this book’s perspective pays attention
to self-imaginations and generic local knowledge of both big and small
communities, which unavoidably emanate from the sources they produced.
And since such communal imaginations cannot be boiled down to a single
perspective or process, as a conceptual frame for our investigations we
picked the late Benedict Anderson’s spacious and adaptable idea of imagined
communities, which allows addressing a plethora of types of association
and modes of self-invention.
The two original workshops behind this book envisioned therefore a
pluralistic approach to the making of medieval communities.6 As acutely
pointed out by Barbara Rosenwein,7 there is a great intellectual affinity
between Anderson’s concept of imagined communities,8 her own emotional
communities,9 and Brian Stock’s textual communities10. After all, the affections and emotions connecting communities – given emotions’ inherently
communicative and sociable nature – needed to be materially mediated
and reproduced both synchronically and diachronically; as a result, texts
as well as groups or traditions of texts served as means in this process.
Considering the strong textual focus of this volume, the association between
these three concepts of communities is further strengthened with reference
6 Lutter, ‘Comparative Approaches’.
7 Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions’, p. 842; Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods’, pp. 11-12.
8Anderson, Imagined Communities.
9Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl, pp. 78-85.
10Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 88-92, 526.
Introduc tion
15
to Stanley Fish’s interpretive communities,11 or the idea that the meaning of
texts is neither inherent to texts themselves nor limited to authorial intent,
but rests with the communities, their cultural (political, religious, etc.)
assumptions and resultant modes of reading. We hope the book reflects this
pluralistic ambition of investigating many possible relations and relationships connecting small, middle-sized, and large communities with their
self-perception qua communities as the common denominator.
Medieval Imagined Communities
As indicated in the title, the conceptual frame chosen for this book has been
provided by the notion of imagined communities, which has been much
used in the context of nationalism studies – the original domain intended
for its application. As Anderson claims, the concept serves as a means of
describing and expounding how in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the newly designated nations, far exceeding the possibility of faceto-face self-apprehension, began imagining themselves and their members
as horizontal, limited, and sovereign communities. Despite the prevailing
objective social and geographic distance between the citizens, their selfimagining in the form of such horizontal communities forged the sense
of comradeship and solidarity united by a common past and future fate
as a nation. In other words, nations-imagined-as-communities have been
powerful political instruments in the hands of emergent nation-states.12
However, these all too obvious nineteenth-century nationalist connotations, the radically different, high and late medieval context of its
current application, and more than thirty years of academic patina require
a rethinking of the concept’s faculties for present purposes. Incidentally, it is
worth pointing out that the concept itself is still readily used by medievalists13 and has been of implicit or explicit inspiration to several recently
launched large research projects.14 The reason of this unabated interest
11Fish, Is There a Text in This Class.
12Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 5-7; Kiossev, ‘The Self-Colonizing Metaphor’.
13 Gingrich, Lutter, ‘Visions of Community’, p. 2; Pohl, ‘Comparing Communities’, pp. 29-30; see
the entire special issue of History and Anthropology, 26 (2015): Visions of Community: Comparative
Approaches to Medieval Forms of Identity in Europe and Asia, (Guest Editors) Andre Gingrich,
Christina Lutter; Goetz, Vorstellungsgeschichte.
14 See the Walter Pohl led Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region
and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE), a Sonderforschungsbereich at the
Vienna University: http://www.univie.ac.at/viscom/index_viscom.php?seite=project; and the
16 Wojtek Jezierski
in the concept may perhaps be its hermeneutical capaciousness and aggregative character, that is, its ability to subsume and integrate multiple
perspectives, which reflects the multiple styles in which communities can
and could be imagined. The question appears: what exactly did this book’s
medievalists retain from Benedict Anderson’s idea?
For current purposes, this high-minded nationalist diapason linked with
the notion of sovereignty can be subtracted from the concept and the sense
of the communal imaginaire, as the French would put it, can still appear
indispensable and worth exploring in any self-proclaimed high and late
medieval social entity populating the Baltic Rim.15 First, as many examples
discussed in this book show, even very small communities of prayer and
devotion, connecting royal houses and monasteries across Europe, or close
groups of missionaries writing missionary histories in different episcopal
palaces of northern Germany needed an imaginative and ideological
reminder to connect with their own past, with now dead members, or to
conceptualize the ties that bound their contemporary members. Quite
understandably, as this need grew, the larger the communities became. In
other words, in the Middle Ages the imagination of a community or a polity
was a compelling means to bridge the distance in both time and space
between its members: a phantasmatic prosthesis of immanence.
Second, Anderson makes it utterly clear that the imagined communities
are social constructions which nevertheless exert real power and have lasting effects on those subscribing to these imaginings. The crucial question
from his perspective – much the same as in this book – involves the style
and means of these imaginings, not the genuineness of the communities
they represented. The question of style regards both the different ways
communities imagined themselves and the material means through which
they did so. It made a profound difference in what way a given community
imagined itself – as a family; a band of brothers or friends; as a coherent
organism composed of consensually organized members, unified around
its current ruler, patron saint, or a group of aristocrats; as ideally egalitarian
or necessarily stratified, etc. It is also definitely worth studying the means
communities used to reproduce this sense of togetherness, whether single
texts and traditions of texts, rituals and performances, images of saints,
Andrzej Pleszczyński led Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval
Europe project at the Marie Curie University Lublin: http://europamedievalis.umcs.lublin.pl/
communities/?page_id=160.
15Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6: ‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial
villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’.
Introduc tion
17
prayers, recalling of actual or invented past and traditions, or creating real
and imagined spaces for the community to master and occupy (and from
which to exclude others).16
Third, just as they have their pasts, imagined communities also have
their futures. They are communities to come. In this sense, we can study
the destinies into which these visions propelled their group members, the
goals they presented. These were visions in the double sense of the word – as
representations of what was and projections of what was to be. Finally, this
prospective rather than affirmative facet of imagined communities begs
the question of how widespread were these convictions, though our sources
will not always fully answer it. Were these merely parchment postulations
penned by individuals or ideas cherished by dreaming elites? Or were they
actually imprinted in the heart of every group member? And finally, were
these projections actually intended to occlude the heterogeneity of the
groups they, perhaps too easily, envisioned as consensual?
Themes: Frontiers, Otherness, Consensus, and Conflict
Given the diversity of research traditions represented by the scholars in
this volume, and considering the vastness of the literature on the history
of all sorts of communities developing on the shores of the Baltic Sea in
the high and late Middle Ages, even a brief synthesis of this background
presents a near-impossible task, exceeding the scope of this short introduction. Instead, as a result of the adaptation of the Andersonian concept for
medievalist purposes, the chapters in this book can be sorted into several
themes anchored in wider research fields regarding the medieval Baltic Rim.
Perhaps the widest research tradition drawn upon in this book is that
of medieval frontier studies.17 As pointed out by Anderson, national and
nationalist imagined communities tend to think of themselves as necessarily
16 Compare: Anderson, Specters of Comparison, pp. 29-45.
17 Bartlett, MacKay, Medieval Frontier Societies; Murray (ed.), Crusade and Conversion; Murray (ed.), The Clash of Cultures; Lehtonen, Jensen (eds.), Medieval History Writing; Lind, Selch
Jensen, Jensen, Bysted, Jerusalem in the North; Abulafia, Berend (eds.), Medieval Frontiers; Tamm,
Kaljundi, Selch Jensen (eds.), Crusading and Chronicle Writing; Sooman, Donecker (eds.), The
“Baltic Frontier” Revisited; Drost, ‘Historische Grenzräume’; in the fashion of cultural geography:
Kleingärtner, Newf ield, Rossignol, Wehner (eds.), Landscapes and Societies; Dalewski (ed.),
Granica cywilizacji; incidentally, the Baltic Rim continues to be conceptualized as a frontier and
border zone in strictly contemporary historiography too, see for example: Hurd (ed.), Bordering
the Baltic; Götz (ed.), The Sea of Identities.
18 Wojtek Jezierski
limited, which stands in stark contrast to the missionary logic of perpetual
expansion, in our context pertaining chiefly to the spread of Christianity.18
In the period discussed here we can see these two chains of logic – selflimitation and growth – often at loggerheads with each other, but also
occasionally, being mediated between. In the most rudimentary sense
medievalists representing this view insist on perceiving the Baltic Rim as
a frontier region first discovered by Europe, then expanded and almost
literally ‘made’ through conquest, Christianization, and colonization.19
This ‘expansionist’ view is represented in this book, for instance, in
Thomas Foerster’s chapter discussing Adam of Bremen’s and Saxo Grammaticus’s colonizing views of the Baltic Sea, in Grzegorz Pac’s analysis of the
Baltic Rim’s and Central Europe’s integration through intermarriage, and
in Linda Kaljundi’s chapter on how the Christian community expanded in
Livonia in the early twelfth century. However, all these texts add further
nuance to the frontier perspective, actively arguing against the unilateral
views of ‘Europeanisation’, thus stressing the negotiated and inventive
character of inclusion and interchange between and within communities.
Foerster, for instance, stresses the need to consider Adam’s and Saxo’s southwestern visions as increasingly emancipated from the classical and patristic
views of the region, arguing that these authors’ ‘discovery’ of the Baltic
was essentially driven by their particular political agendas. Furthermore,
medieval frontiers were not merely spaces of separation or conflict. They
also constituted zones of cultural exchange where communal syncretism,
leading to fusions of religious traditions, rites, and identities, could thrive
successfully.20 Pac hence emphasizes the sophistication of marital networks
in the entire Baltic basin, which sometimes defied religious boundaries and
were often built without the clear sense of who civilized whom in these
relationships. Finally, Kaljundi underlines the Livonian Christians’ uneasy
position on the question of their own exclusiveness, the precarious position
of the neophytes, and the occasional culturally syncretic and transgressive
practices enabling this expansion.
The tension between expansion and self-limitation is also present in
the chapter on the making of law communities in high medieval Sweden.
18Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7.
19Bartlett, The Making of Europe; Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic; Staecker (ed.), The
Reception of Medieval Europe; Berend (ed.), Christianization and the Rise; see also: Scholz, Bohn,
Johansson (eds.), The Image of the Baltic.
20 Abulafia, ‘Introduction: Seven Types’; Berend, ‘Frontiers’, pp. 158-160; Mažeika, ‘Granting
Power’; in a wider perspective: North, ‘Raumkonstruktion durch künsterliche Kommunikation’,
pp. 53-55.
Introduc tion
19
Thomas Lindkvist notes how these two judicial tendencies, royal expansionism and regional self-exclusion, clashed in the course of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries in what could be called the state-formation process.21
On the other hand, Jezierski’s chapter explores the role of fear and horror
in the internal structuring of missionary communities between the ninth
and thirteenth centuries, but also the way emotions could be used to reach
out to the addressees of the apostolic concern. The chapter also shows
that the question of cultural and religious expansion in the Baltic exposed
those responsible for this transformation to some known dangers, as well
as produced new risks inherent in the very process of Christianization.22
The question of constructing and transgressing of frontiers and
boundaries relates to the field of studies on the medieval Baltic senses of
otherness and the way communities imagined themselves against other
communities.23 As the late Ernesto Laclau insisted, identities and communal
self-understanding are conceived thanks to the constitutive outsides, that
is, through references and relations to other communities.24 Almost every
chapter in this book touches upon the question of the representation of the
self vis-à-vis the other. Tuomas Heikkilä, for instance, analyses how the
thirteenth-century Legend of St Henry, the founding text for the Finnish
Christian community,25 used the image of the pagan threat to boost the
claims of the episcopal diocese of Turku (Åbo) and to justify its annexation
of Finland Proper. Chapters by Bjørn Bandlien and Hans Jacob Orning
predominantly deal with the question of how Baltic otherness was viewed
and mediated the sense of collective self on the northern outskirts of this
region, in Norway and Iceland. The cultural, religious, or political others
furnishing ‘our’ constitutive outside are also explicitly discussed in the
chapters by Foerster, Lindkvist, Kaljundi,26 and Jezierski.
21 Lindkvist, ‘Christianisation and State-Building’; Bagge, Lindkvist, and others, Statsutviklingen i Skandinavia.
22Beck, Risk Society.
23Scior, Das Eigene und das Fremde; Fraesdorff, Der barbarische Norden; Foerster, Vergleich
und Identität; Bandlien, Man or monster?; Janson, ‘Making Enemies’; Wood, ‘Where the Wild
Things Are’; Adams, Heß, ‘Encounters and Fantasies’.
24 Laclau, ‘Subject of Politics’, p. 147: ‘The reference to the other is very much present as constitutive of my own identity. There is no way that a particular group living in a wider community
can live a monadic existence – on the contrary, part of the definition of its own identity is the
construction of a complex and elaborated system of relations with other groups’; Derrida, Politics
of Friendship, pp. 152-153, 162-163.
25Heikkilä, Sankt Henrikslegenden.
26 See also: Kaljundi, Waiting for the Barbarians.
20 Wojtek Jezierski
It should be stressed that the question of otherness is by no means
limited to the external, absolute others of these communities. It includes
also the distinction vis-à-vis others within one’s close community. Hence
Margaretha Nordquist pointedly asks whether the aristocratic patrons
and possibly authors of The Sture Chronicles considered peasants to be full
members in the Swedish polity, despite the obvious coincidence of their
political interests against the Danish Crown, their main opponent. Heikkilä,
on the other hand, compellingly shows how the image of Lalli, St Henry’s
murderer, has grown so deeply into the image of the saint, that Lalli could
become Henry’s attribute or even, as depicted on the fifteenth-century
paintings in Härkeberga Church (Sweden), the attribute could entirely
emancipate itself from the saint.27
The visions of imagined communities directly or indirectly supplied answers to the most basic questions of power: who is to be governed by whom
(political subjectivity) and through what means? In this sense more often
than not they played into the hands of the powerful, justifying, legitimizing,
and naturalizing their position in the community.28 By projecting a sense
of an ever-present, unified, and consensual community, these imaginings smoothed over the potential cracks in a given polity. Pavel V. Lukin’s
chapter on the sense of brotherhood in medieval Novgorod is a good case
in point. In his exploration of the longue durée of the Novogorodians’ inner
brotherly affection, Lukin points to how this idea of Novgorod’s imagined
ideal community – in the high and late Middle Ages promoted mainly by
the archbishop and the ruling boyars – its historiography projected back to
the city’s earliest history and used as an interpretive frame for its dealings
with neighbouring cities (e.g. Pskov). And yet, despite the fact that this
top-down vision obviously supported the elites’ tight hold of the city, this
sense of affective brotherhood as well as the collective identification and
honour seem to have extended quite deeply into this urban community
and was occasionally used to reprimand its meanest members for conduct
not worthy of a Novgorodian.
Somewhat similarly, Lars Hermanson’s chapter studies the means of governance and the desired types of relations proposed for a harmonious polity
by two influential whisperers of the Danish mighty, Saxo Grammaticus
and Abbot William of Æbelholt. Hermanson points to the correspondence
27Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 163-165.
28 Paroń and others (eds.), Potestas et communitas; Orning, Hermanson, Esmark (eds.), Gaver,
ritualer, konflikter; Jezierski, Hermanson, Orning, Småberg (eds.), Rituals, Performatives, and
Political Order.
Introduc tion
21
between virtues, affections, and desirable types of personal and interpersonal conduct proposed by the two early thirteenth-century authors,
which could be employed as means of governance in a monastic community
and in the newly established Christian kingdom alike. It remains open,
however, how deeply the visions of these two pious counselors to the powerful reached into the communities they so much cared for, or if these ideas
actually fall on deaf ears.
Still, this top-down perspective on the imaginings of polities requires an
essential caveat: imagined communities do not necessarily always come as
visions dreamt by the dominant alone. As shown in Cordelia Heß’s chapter
on the fourteenth-century urban rebellions in northern Germany, such
consensual imaginings can be occasionally put into question, silently first
and publicly in due course, or even hijacked by the disenfranchised and used
to advance the latter’s political interests.29 Supporting her line of reasoning
on Homi Bhabha and Walter Benjamin, the author unveils an important
critique and correction to Anderson’s idea, who may have overemphasized
imagined communities’ resultant consensus and concord, which smoothed
over and stifled the disruptive heterogeneity inherent to the entities these
projections called into being. Heß’s chapter asks thus whose interests were
represented in fourteenth-century Mendicant historiographer Detmar’s
report of the popular rebellions in Lübeck in the wake of the Black Death.
Whose way of seeing do we get access to: the city council’s, which commissioned this report, the rebels’, or Detmar’s own? The author argues
persuasively that in the late Middle Ages political subjectivity and ability
to publicly represent one’s interests were no longer limited to the top strata
in society. In exceptional moments of danger, they could also be briefly
appropriated by members of the lower classes.
The Structure of the Book and the Individual Chapters
The chapters have been divided into four thematic, chronologically organized sections. In the opening section, Visions of Community, three scholars
– Foerster, Hermanson, and Nordquist – discuss high medieval visions of
the Baltic writ large; the Danish christianitas; and the vision of Swedish
polity in the late Middle Ages, respectively. Foerster’s chapter, taking cue
29Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 36-44, 108-135.
22 Wojtek Jezierski
from the studies on medieval spatialization and perception of space,30 is
devoted to Adam of Bremen’s and Saxo Grammaticus’s visions of the Baltic
Sea and can be read as a convenient extension of this introduction. The
chapter shows how the initial, mainly missionary-inspired, imaginary mappings31 of the Baltic Sea as a frontier zone opening on the northern fringes of
Germany were gradually pushed farther north and expanded. In the course
of the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries the Baltic Rim was
being intellectually transformed from a frightening, dangerous, and alien
space populated by fantastic monsters – the epitome of otherness – into an
explorable sphere of navigable waters, to be appropriated by the expanding
Kingdom of Denmark for its imperial posturing.32 An important conclusion
from Foerster’s chapter is that the Baltic was not so much discovered as
invented by the likes of Adam and Saxo, who conceptualized it as a region
with specific political goals in mind.
Hermanson’s chapter is an exploration of two early thirteenth-century
normative postulations about proper political culture for the Kingdom of
Denmark. Two men from the circle of Archbishop Absalon of Lund, Saxo
Grammaticus and Abbot William of Æbelholt, in their historiographic
work and correspondence respectively, devised correct and just ways to
rule the Danish christianitas. Hermanson, duly pointing to Saxo and William’s classical inspirations, dissects the correspondence between the inner
framework and the virtues these authors displayed for their close political
and monastic communities and the way imagined outer frameworks of the
kingdom and the Baltic christianitas, in itself a highly contested political
concept,33 should be governed. For both Saxo and William, the personal
( fides, amicitia,34 caritas, and strenuitas) was political, and as such was
necessary to safeguard right order in the realm.35
Next, Nordquist studies the late medieval vision of the implicitly wishedfor Swedish polity in The Sture Chronicles, a series of vernacular rhyme
chronicles composed at the behest of the Swedish regent Sten Sture the
30Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 190; see also the important volume: Drost, North
(eds.), Die Neuerfindung des Raumes.
31Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 170-178; Lilley, ‘Introduction: Mapping’; Melnikova,
‘The Baltic’.
32 A similar argument for the Mediterranean’s transition from a fearful to a navigable space
in the high Middle Ages has been made in: Russo, ‘Mediterranean Sea’; see also the exploration
of the Viking notions of thalassocracy in: Föller, ‘Die soziale Konstruktion’.
33Geelhaar, Christianitas.
34 Sigurðsson, Småberg (eds.), Friendship and Social Networks.
35Hermanson, Bärande band.
Introduc tion
23
Elder.36 This chapter comes close to Anderson’s original intention, as the
main thrust of the analysis focuses on the question: of whom did the imagined community of Swedes exactly consist? In Sweden of the Kalmar Union
(1397-1523)37 political loyalties seemed like a quickly inflating currency.
These authors – in their search for internal enemies and traitors, in their
exasperation over the Danes repeatedly injuring the honor of the Swedes,
in their squeamish and half-hearted attempts to properly deal with the
Swedish peasants’ standing – were actually reconsidering anew the problem
of political subjectivity for the Swedish realm. In this process of political
self-conceptualization, Nordquist argues, collectively experienced emotions
such as anger, shame, and grief played no minor role.
The second section, Cultic and Missionary Communities, opens with Pac’s
chapter on the communities of devotion on the southern fringes of the
Baltic Rim in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The author shows how the
newly baptized dynasties east of the Elbe emulated the western European
patterns of royal piety in seeking association with particular saints as well
as monastic communities of prayer, both across vast distances (in the Reich,
in Scandinavia, and in Rus’) and across religious divides (between western
and eastern Christianity). Central Europe seems to have been one of the
forces pulling the Baltic Rim into the continental gravitational sphere
through the integration of its elites into such imagined communities. Pac
pays particular attention to the role of women mediating these contacts
as bearers of socio-religious capital, and sees in this the source of these
connections’ fragility – the fact that these bonds, admittedly prestigious and
desirable, seldom extended over the lifespan of those establishing them.38
Jezierski’s chapter explores the missionary self-perception and selffashioning as risk societies in the works of Adam of Bremen, Helmold of
Bosau, and Henry of Livonia. Reaching back to the ninth-century formative
models of missionary sanctity (Anskar), one can show the social and communal implications of missionary fear and fearlessness, as well as the sense
36Nordquist, A Struggle for the Realm.
37 A personal union between Denmark, Sweden, Norway (including its dependencies: Iceland, Faroe Islands, and Greenland). The union was incepted in 1397 by Queen Margaret I of
Denmark who, through marital alliances, gathered the whole of Scandinavia under her rule to
outmaneuver the Hanseatic influences in the Baltic. In the course of the fifteenth century the
union was constantly torn apart by the conflict between centrifugal strivings of its subsequent
monarchs and the centripetal forces of the Swedish and Danish aristocracy. It was dissolved
with Gustav Vasa’s ascension to the Swedish throne in 1523.
38Pac, Kobiety w dynastii Piastów; Pac, ‘Kult świętych a problem granicy’; see also: Hermanson
& Magnúsdóttir, ‘Medeltidens genus’; Haastrup & Lind, ‘Dronning Margrete Fredkulla’.
24 Wojtek Jezierski
of risk – for these authors’ communities in the later period. The problem
of community-formation is primarily addressed on two levels, textual and
imagined. This double perspective allows for comparisons between several
serially connected authors using various emotionally underpinned means
– spatial, metaphorical, and historical – to position themselves vis-à-vis
the pagan threat.
As hinted above, Kaljundi’s chapter investigates how Henry of Livonia
envisioned the paths his Christian community was to take to expand in
the early thirteenth century and include the newly converted.39 Kaljundi
pays particular attention to public rituals, ceremonies, and elaborate
performances orchestrated by the Rigan Church and the Sword Brethren
to draw the neophytes into their sphere of influence. 40 The author also
points to inclusive emotional practices such as common mourning41 or
rejoicing, or postulations of brotherly affection between the colonizers
and newly baptized Livs and Letts, as powerful tools of proselytizing and
intercultural integration.
Finally, Heikkilä’s chapter focuses on the making of the Christian identity
vis-à-vis pagans through the veneration of Bishop Henry, the martyr saint
of Finland Proper. The author addresses the question of community on two
levels. He studies both the small textual community in and around the
bishopric of Turku, responsible for the composition and dissemination of
the Legend in the course of the Middle Ages, and the much larger imagined
community of the Finnish Christians these texts were meant to create.
Heikkilä also raises the problem of the interplay and dialogue between
these ‘canonic’ texts and their audiences. As a result, he finds traces of a
contemporary popular remembrance of St. Henry, which only surfaced in
the post-medieval period, suggesting that occasionally the community had
something to say in how it wished to be imagined.
The third section, Legal and Urban Communities, opens with Lindkvist’s
chapter studying three types of legal communities postulated in the law
codes that emerged in continental Sweden (Uppland and Västergötland)
and on the island of Gotland in the course of the thirteenth century. Lindkvist shows that in this period the making of the political communities
through law, a normative vision par excellence, could be imposed both in a
bottom-up and top-down manner and were coordinated by various political
39 Bombi, ‘Innocent III and the praedicatio’; Gli inizi del cristianesimo.
40 Hermanson, ‘Introduction: Rituals’.
41Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 297-301; more generally: Althoff, ‘Gefühle in der
öffentlichen Kommunikation’.
Introduc tion
25
actors to serve their purposes – society of wealthy peasants (Gotland),
local aristocracy (Västergötland), or joint venture of the kings, Church,
and emergent state aristocracy (Uppland). The author analyses the quaint
patina of invented historical traditions and pagan-Christian lineages42 used
to legitimize political claims these law codes put forward; he also pays
attention to the different styles in which these legal communities positioned
themselves against each other and external polities.
Lukin’s chapter presents the imagined community of brothers uniting
the city republic of Novgorod throughout the medieval period. As the author
argues, the ancient and early medieval idea of brotherly attachment 43 can
be considered as the ‘official’ ideology of the republic of Novgorod until
its annexation by Moscow in 1478. Importantly, this self-perception of
Novgorodians as brothers was not a mere imposition from above, but was
seemingly deeply rooted in the lower levels of this community and even
granted by Hanseatic merchants standing outside it. In his chapter Lukin
meticulously reconstructs the entire spectrum of the means used by the
ruling class and aspiring rulers of Novgorod to socially integrate the city’s
citizens throughout the Middle Ages: the assembly (veche), 44 feasts that
served as means of governance, 45 oaths, kisses put on the cross, the figure
of St. Sophia, and other symbols of unity.
Heß’s chapter explores the communal memory of a popular rebellion
that rolled out on the streets of Lübeck and was put down in writing by
Mendicant friar Detmar in the late 1380s. The outbreak of the Knochenhaueraufstand in 1385 gave the city’s council incentive to rethink the supposedly
consensual common past of the urban community they presided over.
However, rather than offering his patrons a conventional consolatory vision, this new interpretation of the city’s past and present penned by the
Franciscan strived to incorporate some of the demands of the commoners,
such as justice and righteousness (rechticheit). This new historiography
recognized also the rioters’ rights to be represented and visible both in
the public sphere of Lübeck and in the much closer confines of the city’s
‘official’ history, even if it set limits for this expression along the city’s
walls. Finally, Heß introduces a much welcome nuance in our view of the
sociopolitical effects of emotions and affections, which could occasionally
42 Hobsbawm, Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition; Pohl, ‘Introduction: Ethnicity, Religion
and Empire’; Banaszkiewicz, Podanie o Piaście i Popielu.
43 Oschema, ‘Das Motiv der Blutsbrüderschaft’; Pieniądz, Więzi braterskie.
44 Lukin, ‘Gorod i veche’.
45 Althoff, ‘Der frieden-, bündnis-, und gemeinschaftsstiftende Charakter’; Orning, ‘Festive
Governance’.
26 Wojtek Jezierski
appear in form as extremely short-lived communities of anger, gathered ad
hoc to voice popular discontent.
The last section of the book, The Baltic Rim: A View from Afar, takes a
definite north by northwest curve. In his chapter, Bandlien explores the
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century discourses of the Russian and Sámi
otherness produced on the western and northern fringes of the Baltic Rim,
that is, mainly in Norway and Sweden. Bandlien focuses on three types of
discourses, which existed almost simultaneously: literate clerical discourses
produced in the wake of the crusader movement emphasizing religious
distance, heresy, and absolute otherness; chivalric discourses delivered in
the Nordic chansons de geste picturing Russians as military adversaries; and
contextual, symbiosis-oriented discourses produced in situ in Finnmark
by the Norwegian, Russian, and Sámi merchants or emanating from the
cooperative administrative treaties between the Norwegian crown and
Novgorod. As a result, the author points to the overall ambivalent position
of the Russians in the Norwegian imaginary, but also takes notice of a
certain strategic liberty in the way contemporary political actors could
switch between these different discourses to better serve their purposes. 46
The second chapter in this section, written by Orning, pushes the cultural
perspective on the Baltic Rim yet farther northwest, to Iceland. Orning analyses a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript composed on the Möðruvellir farm
in Eyjafjörður in northern Iceland and the collection of sagas it incorporates.
Through a structuralist reading of the tensions between the Nordic centre
and its Russian periphery, Orning elucidates the ‘political unconscious’ of
the Icelandic ruling class. 47 Behind the sagas in this manuscript the author
finds the minds of Icelandic aristocrats whose political dreams of Gardarike
(Russia) populated by grotesque or threatening monsters were not trivial
storytelling but ‘serious entertainments’ which helped this elite to imagine
its own place on the political map of Scandinavia in the age of the Kalmar
Union.48 In the context of this book, Orning’s chapter closes in on the wider
problem of how early medieval authors’ imaginary monsters, thrown out the
front door in the high Middle Ages, returned through the Icelandic window
in the late medieval period. Considered together, Bandlien and Orning
contribute a crucial external view of the Baltic Rim and present the ways in
which, in the course of the high and late Middle Ages, the region gradually
became seen as a strong ideational and politically gravitational centre, as
46 Bandlien, ‘Trading with Muslims’; see also: Lind, ‘Consequences of the Baltic Crusades’.
47Jameson, The Political Unconscious.
48Scheel, Skandinavien und Byzanz, pp. 735-798.
Introduc tion
27
culturally constitutive as continental Europe was for the Baltic basin in
earlier periods. In other words, ‘the Baltic’ or ‘the Baltic Rim’ emerged as
a geopolitical region not only through its ‘discovery’, but also through the
appearance of an imaginary interface between its interior and exterior – all
the way from the Bremen schoolmaster to the Möðruvellir scribes.
Finally, Barbara H. Rosenwein’s afterword addresses the emotional
dimension of imagined communities in general and those analyzed here
in particular. By engaging with Anderson’s own implied and overt ideas of
what sorts of commitments saturated his imagined communities – beliefs,
affections, feelings, irrational convictions49 – Rosenwein also retraces larger
research problems linking the chapters of the present book. She can thus
further problematize the emotional aspect of medieval imaginaries in four
important facets: the deeply ambiguous sense of medieval brotherhood
and fidelity; the historical and transient character of emotions connecting
imagined communities, as well as their conflicting rather than consensual
affective bearing; the ‘twinned’ nature of such communities preoccupied
with defining in or out of certain groups.
As a whole, this book highlights the variety and complexity of different
sorts of relations, processes, and affections connecting or tearing apart
medieval communities, their self-imaginations inadvertently often dividing them against themselves and at the same time covering up for this
rupture. These ineradicable shortcomings of political, cultural, and religious
imagination – the everlasting presence of the difference within – was exactly what forced and enabled these imagined communities to transform,
expand, include others in their sphere, but also be integrated into larger
communal bodies, or even, eventually, cease to exist.50 Community held by
just one type of bond and insisting on its own immediacy, as Jean-Luc Nancy
asserted, would become inoperative.51 Wary of Ibn Ya’qūb’s intuition of the
inevitable fragmentation of information and the motley character of its
subject, the authors gathered here do not offer some definite, single master
key to the understanding of how communities populating the Baltic Rim
were made and unmade in the high and late Middle Ages. Rather, it is our
hope to contribute to the research field with both new insights and further
questions, but also with a stimulating conceptual bricolage which stresses
49Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 48-49, 425-438.
50Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 67-68; Glynos, Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation, pp. 15, 107, 159-160, 162-163, 173-177; Fish, ‘Change’, pp. 147-148; Fish, ‘Unger and Milton’,
pp. 422-423; Laclau, ‘Subject of Politics’, pp. 151-152.
51Nancy, The Inoperative Community.
28 Wojtek Jezierski
the scholarly significance of our main research objects – imagination and
fantasy.
* * *
Benedict R. O’G. Anderson passed away on December 13, 2015 in Malang,
Indonesia at the age of 79. Although this book as well as its title was inspired
by Anderson’s ideas, it would be both inappropriate and problematic to
consider it a memorial book. Nevertheless, for many scholars in this volume
the first reading of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism was an experience close to revelation. In this sense
our book is a testimony of what impact a great scholarly mind can make.
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