Religious Rites of War Beyond the Medieval West : Volume 1: Northern Europe and the Baltic

This is Volume One of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka. Contents 6 Figures and Maps 8 Abbreviations 10 Notes on Contributors 13 Introduction 18 Chapter 1 Religious Rites of War beyond the Medieval West: An Introduction 20 Chapter 2 Fighting on a Prayer: Liturgical and Physical Engagement of Sacralized Warfighting in High Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1000–1250 47 Northern Europe and the Baltic 86 Chapter 3 Battle Psalms and War Liturgy in the Medieval Gaelic World and Its Neighbors before 1200 88 Chapter 4 Religious Rites and Integrated Warfare in Civil War Era Norway (1130–1240) 134 Chapter 5 Religiosity and Religious Rituals in the Battle of Bannockburn, 1314 170 Chapter 6 Invocations by Knights for Supernatural Aid in the Sources of the Baltic Crusades, Medieval Poland and the Chansons of the Crusades 206 Chapter 7 Rituals of War as Religious Markers during the Early Crusades in Livonia and Estonia in the Light of Henry’s Chronicon Livoniae 248 Chapter 8 “Devotis oracionibus plusquam gladiis”: Rituals and Sacralization of Warfare in the Teutonic Order’s Prussian Lands 277 Index 314