Stedinger Crusade

The Stedinger Crusade (1233–1234) was a Papally sanctioned war against the rebellious peasants of Stedingen.

The Stedinger were free farmers and subjects of the Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen. Grievances over taxes and property rights turned into full-scale revolt. When an attempt by the secular authorities to put down the revolt ended in defeat, the archbishop mobilized his church and the Papacy to have a crusade sanctioned against the rebels. In the first campaign, the small crusading army was defeated. In a follow-up campaign the next year, a much larger crusader army was victorious.

It is often grouped with the Drenther Crusade (1228–1232) and the Bosnian Crusade (1235–1241), other small-scale crusades against European Christians deemed heretical.

The Stedinger were the peasant inhabitants of the region between the Weser river and the lower Hunte river, opposite the village of Bremen. They eventually came to inhabit lands north of the Hunte riveras well. This marshy region was first cleared and settled only at the beginning of the twelfth century. The name Stedinger (or Stedinge in Latin documents) refers to the people, while the land is Stedingen (or in Latin terra Stedingorum, land of the Stedinger). The name derives from the German word Gestade, meaning coast or shore. Originally, in the early twelfth century, the Stedinger were known as Hollandi, that is, Hollanders, or simply rustici, farmers. When relations with their overlords soured, they were dismissively referred to as bestie or beasts.

Legally most of the Stedinger were subjects of the prince-archbishop of Bremen, the land being administered by his ministerials (serfs of knightly rank). Some were subjects of the count of Oldenburg north of the Hunte. By 1106 they had received permissions from Archbishop Frederick I conferring on them the right to freehold land and to found churches, as well as exempting them from some taxes. Collectively, these rights and privileges were known as the ius hollandicum or Hollandic right. By the early thirteenth century, the Stedinger formed a well-defined community called the universitas Stedingorum.

The grievances which led to open revolt were that the ius Hollandicum was not being respected. Specifically, the Stedinger complained that the archbishop was demanding more in tax than he was owed and that both he and the count intended to convert their freeholds into leases.

In 1204, the Stedinger north of the Hunte rebelled against the count of Oldenburg, burning two of his castles to the ground. Their revolt spread south of the Hunte, where the archbishop's ministerials were driven off. The peasants stopped paying taxes and tithes to the archbishop and attacked his castles intermittently from 1212 to 1214. When Gerhard II became archbishop in 1219, he immediately set to work restoring his authority in Stedingen. Just before Christmas 1229, he excommunicated the Stedingers for their continued refusal to pay taxes and tithes (in the words of the Chronica regia Coloniensis, "for their excesses", pro suis excessibus).

In December 1229, Gerhard joined forces with his brother, Hermann II of Lippe, and led a small force into Stedingen. They were defeated by the peasants on Christmas Day and Hermann was killed. In 1232, after 1 September, Gerhard established a house of Cistercian nuns in Lilienthal for the salvation of his brother, who died, so Gerhard said in the foundation charter, "for the liberation of the church of Bremen".