The northernmost archbishopric of medieval Germany, founded on the two missionary bishoprics of Bremen and Hamburg. In Bremen the first cathedral was built as early as 789, whereas the bishopric of Hamburg came into being in 831.
In 832 Pope Gregory IV turned Hamburg into an archbishopric and gave Archbishop Ansgar the task of Christianizing the Swedes, the Danes, and the western Slavs. In 847 Ansgar was expelled from Hamburg by the Danes, who raided and burned the town. He took refuge in Bremen and was able to take over the bishopric there, which was vacant.
Shortly afterward, Hamburg and Bremen were made into one joint archbishopric. Like the Christianization of the Scandinavians, the mission to the Slavic peoples east of the river Elbe was a central concern for the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, especially from the tenth century, when a missionary bishopric was founded at Oldenburg in Holstein and placed under the jurisdiction of Hamburg-Bremen.
It was not until the mid-twelfth century that the Christianization of the western Slavs met some lasting success after the so-called Wendish Crusade of1147 and the involvement of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, in the conquest of the Slavic lands. The old bishopric of Oldenburg was now moved to Lubeck and in 1160, together with two new bishoprics in Schwerin (originally in Mecklenburg) and Ratze-burg, formally subjected to Hamburg-Bremen by a new papal decision.
In the 1180s the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen also became engaged in the Christianization of the peoples of the eastern Baltic region through the work of Meinhard, a cleric from Segeberg in Holstein. For some time Meinhard had been committed to the work of preaching to and baptizing the pagan Livonians, with the support of the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. In 1186 Archbishop Hartwig II appointed Meinhard as first bishop of Livonia and made the new diocese part of the archbishopric. This arrangement lasted only until 1210, when the bishopric of Livonia (Riga) became exempt; later it was raised to the status of an archbishopric itself.
In the early 1230s the archbishop initiated a new series of crusades, this time against the population of the northwestern parts of the archbishopric, who were known as the Stedinger. Archbishop Gerhard II accused them of heresy and persuaded the pope to call for a crusade against them. It was, however, only after a series of hard-fought campaigns that the crusaders were finally able to defeat the Ste-dinger in 1234.
The engagement of the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bre-men in the crusading movement in general, particularly in the Baltic Crusades, continued over the years, inasmuch as clerics preached crusades, collected alms and crusade taxes, and also recruited crusaders within the boundaries of the archbishopric. The city of Lubeck, also located within the archbishopric, became the most important crusade harbor of the region, with seasonal shipments of crusaders to the eastern Baltic region.
-Carsten Selch Jensen
Bibliography
Glaeske, Gunter, Die Erzbischofe von Hamburg-Bremen als Reichfursten (937-1258) (Hildesheim: August Lax, 1962).
Petersohn, Jurgen, Dersudliche Ostseeraum im kirchlich-politischen Krdftespiel des Reichs, Polens und Ddnemarks vom 10. bis 13. Jahrhundert: Mission, Kirchenorganisation, Kulturpolitik (Koln: Bohlau, 1979).
Seegrun, Wolfgang, Das Erzbistum Hamburg in seinen dlteren Papsturkunden (Koln: Bohlau, 1976).
World History
