ABSTRACT
The Chronicle of Arnold, Abbot of the monastery of St John at Lübeck, is one of the most important and interesting contemporary sources for the history of Germany in the central Middle Ages. The early thirteenth century saw something of an efflorescence of historical writing in that kingdom, and especially in its monasteries, but of all the narrative texts written during that period Arnold’s chronicle is the most ambitious and sophisticated. While the main focus of his work was on northern Germany, and especially Holstein and eastern Saxony, our author was also deeply concerned with the Crusade, not least because of the deep shock induced by the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, which he discussed at length. Arnold’s chronicle is the principal source of our knowledge concerning the pilgrimage to Jerusalem of Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony in 1172 and of the German Crusade of 1197–8. He also provides an important account, albeit not as an eyewitness, of Frederick Barbarossa’s expedition to the Holy Land in 1189/90, and he furnished the first contemporary account of the Livonian Crusade at the beginning of the thirteenth century. While this last is relatively brief, it was written no later than 1210 and thus antedates the much better-known chronicle of Henry of Livonia by at least fifteen years. Given the extent of English-language scholarship on the Crusades, and increasingly on that movement in the Baltic region as well as in the eastern Mediterranean, it is, therefore, surprising that Arnold’s chronicle is not better known among the Anglophone scholarly community. But, in addition, his chronicle is a crucial contemporary source for the history of Staufen Germany. It provides the fullest contemporary account of the downfall of Henry the Lion in 1179–81 and of the disputes that wracked Saxony in the years immediately after that. There is much information about the problems within the German Church in the wake of the long papal schism caused by the double election of 1159. The chronicle is also a key source for the German civil war after the disputed election to the kingship in 1198, as well as for the relations between Germany and Denmark in the time of Waldemar the Great and his sons. For Arnold, writing in Lübeck at the foot of the Schleswig-Holstein isthmus, the kings of Denmark were just as much a factor in the politics of the region as were the German rulers, who only rarely intervened directly in the north. Furthermore, Arnold saw himself as continuing the work of the earlier chronicler of Holstein and the German-Slav frontier Helmold of Bosau. His chronicle therefore began its coverage in the year when Helmold’s work ceased, 1172. Given that Helmold’s chronicle has long been available in English translation, and is (rightly) seen as a crucial 2source for the advance of Christianity across the German frontier and along the Baltic during the twelfth century, a translation into English of the work of his successor is certainly overdue. 1
