Materiality, Memory and the Stedinger Crusade in Thirteenth-Century Germany

The crusade against the Stedinger farmers of northern Germany (1232-4) remains an understudied episode of medieval religious history, although the cultural memory of the Stedinger came to occupy a significant place in modern German culture, especially in the 1930s. The Stedinger were accused of heresy after a period of revolt against the archbishop of Bremen in the early thirteenth century and they were all but decimated by an army of crusaders from Holland and northern Germany at the battle of Altanesch in 1234.  As with many other crusades, the immediate aftermath of this war was characterized by both textual and material statements of success by the crusaders and the Church. Such statements served a number of purposes, the most important of which was to articulate and establish an official remembrance of the events. In the case of the Stedinger crusade, Cistercian monasteries were built in the region to serve as sites of memory for fallen crusaders and as permanent monuments to victory. At the same time, the spaces of worship used by the Stedinger themselves were appropriated and refashioned by a newly powerful archbishop of Bremen: the former Stedinger church of St Aegidius in Berne was renovated and expanded to demonstrate the subjugation of its previous worshippers. This paper will explore the role that materiality plays in the communication of memories about war. It considers the program of religious building around Bremen after 1234 in order to explore the intersections between memory formation, spatial colonization and religious authority. My overall suggestion is that medieval memory was physical and locational just as much as it was abstract and intellectual, and that a consideration of material manifestations of memory can offer insights into the spatial generation of religious and cultural meaning more broadly.