The Devil's Marsh: The Crusade That Destroyed the Free Peasants of the Lower Weser - Softcover

Burke, Rab

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798237187335

Verlag: Goldenback, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In the marshlands northwest of Bremen in the early thirteenth century, a community of orthodox Christian farmers had built one of the most remarkable autonomous societies in medieval Europe. For six generations, the Stedingers had drained the coastal bogs, constructed elaborate hydraulic systems, and governed themselves through communal institutions guaranteed by a century-old charter. They paid their tithes, attended their parish churches, and buried their dead in consecrated ground.

Then Archbishop Gerhard II decided he wanted their land.

What followed was a masterwork of institutional fraud. Unable to defeat the Stedingers in conventional warfare, the archiepiscopal administration accused the community of devil-worship - of kissing toads, desecrating the Eucharist, and attending nocturnal Luciferian assemblies. The charges were fabricated wholesale from a standardized inquisitorial template. Pope Gregory IX endorsed them without serious examination. Dominican preachers carried the crusade across Germany, Flanders, and Brabant. On 27 May 1234, at the Battle of Altenesch, a massive crusading host destroyed the Stedingen levy and massacred thousands of non-combatants. Eighteen months later, the surviving community was welcomed back into the Church with no mention of the devil-worship charges. They had served their purpose.

Rab Burke's meticulous and devastating narrative reconstructs this forgotten atrocity in full - exposing the mechanisms of institutional violence that turned a charter dispute into a holy war, and a free people into heretics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rab Burke grew up in County Clare on the western edge of Ireland, where the Atlantic horizon and the memory of dispossessed communities made the history of institutional power and popular resistance feel less like academic abstraction than lived inheritance. He has spent the better part of two decades reading in the archives of medieval religious history, canon law, and north German agrarian culture, drawn repeatedly to the cases where the gap between institutional record and human reality is widest and most revealing. The Stedinger Crusade found him, as the best historical subjects do, by refusing to let go once encountered. He lives on the west coast of Ireland, where he is at work on his next book in medieval European history.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Goldenback
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798237187335
• Einband: Paperback
• Anzahl der Seiten: 398
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar