ABSTRACT
Around 1180 Meinhard, a regular canon from the house of Segeberg near Lübeck, set up a mission among the pagans in Livonia.2 Faced with the resistance and apostasy of the Livs, he and his collaborators eventually decided to appeal to the Curia for support and military assistance, and their petitions led to a series of papally authorized crusades. These were not the first crusades that had been proclaimed in the Baltic region. In 1147 Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) had sanctioned a crusade against the pagan Slavs (known to the Germans as Wends) north of the Elbe and in the early 1170s Pope Alexander III (1159-81) had authorized a crusade in support of a new missionary project in Estonia.3 It was, however, only really with the crusades in defence of the Livonian mission that papally authorized crusades became a recurrent phenomenon in north-eastern Europe. As the missionary work in the Baltic expanded in the thirteenth century, the popes continued to endorse the mission and crusades there. But it was during the pontificate of Honorius III (1216-27) that papal ideas on the conversion of non-Christians underwent significant changes. This was to influence not only the relations between Rome and the missions in the Baltic region but also the papal policy concerning the crusades there.
