Editing Livonian Chronicle of Henry (section)

==Background==
{{More citations needed section|date=July 2024}}
Papal calls for renewed [[Crusades|holy war]] at the end of the twelfth century inspired the disastrous [[Fourth Crusade]] that sacked [[Constantinople]] in 1204, as well as a series of simultaneous "[[Northern Crusades]]" (that have been less covered in English-language popular history) which were more successful in the long run. Before the crusades, the region of medieval [[Old Livonia|Livonia]] was a mixed outpost, a mostly "pagan" society where merchants from the [[Hanseatic League]] encountered merchants of [[Novgorod Republic|Novgorod]], and where the Christian [[Teutonic Order|Teutonic]], Scandinavian, and Slavic trade, culture, and religions all mingled within the local "pagan" Baltic and Finnic societies. The specific indigenous ethnic groups that intermingled and traded with the [[Saxons]], [[Danes]], [[Swedes]], [[Wends]], merchants from [[Lübeck]], Novgorod and [[Pskov]] there were the [[Estonians]],  [[Livonians]], [[Curonians]], [[Semigallians]], [[Selonians]], [[Latgalians]] (also known as [[Latvians|Letts]]), and [[Lithuanians]]. The Western merchants would trade silver, textiles, and other luxury goods for furs, beeswax, honey, leather, dried fish, and amber. Livonia had been an especially promising location in terms of resources, and [[Arnold of Lübeck]], in his ''[[Chronica Slavorum]]'' wrote that the land was "abundant in many riches" and was "fertile in fields, plentiful in pastures, irrigated by rivers", and "also sufficiently rich in fish and forested with trees".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Tamm |first1=Marek |title=How to justify a crusade? The conquest of Livonia and new crusade rhetoric in the early thirteenth century |journal=Journal of Medieval History |date=December 2013 |volume=39 |issue=4 |pages=431–455 |doi=10.1080/03044181.2013.833541 }}</ref>

Eventually, the Scandinavian rulers and German military knightly orders led by German [[prince-bishop]]s conquered and resettled the Baltic region, drawing it into Western orbit. ''The Livonian Chronicle of Henry'' was written during the first generation of conversion in Livonia when [[Albert of Buxhoeveden]] (later, Bishop of Riga) had authority over the land. The [[Teutonic Order]] continued to implement Christianity across Livonia after the [[Livonian Brothers of the Sword]], the crusading army established by Albert of Riga, was absorbed by them in 1237.