The Battle of Muhu was a military engagement fought between a force of Baltic and Germanic

crusaders The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were in ...

and pagan

Oeselians Oeselians ( la, Oesel, , sv, Ösel, da, Øsel, fi, Saarenmaa) is a term historically applied before the Northern Crusades up to the 13th century to people who were living on the island of Saaremaa or Oesel as it was known back then, an island ...

. The battle, fought in

Muhu Muhu (also called Muhumaa in Estonian), is an island in the West Estonian archipelago of the Baltic Sea. With an area of it is the third largest island belonging to Estonia, after Saaremaa and Hiiumaa. Together with neighbouring smaller is ...

Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...

, resulted in the crusaders storming and capturing a fortress held by the Oeselians.

History

In January 1227, when the sea had frozen hard, a large Crusader army was gathered after the call of the

Papal legate 300px, A woodcut showing Henry II of England greeting the pope's legate. A papal legate or apostolic legate (from the ancient Roman title ''legatus'') is a personal representative of the pope to foreign nations, or to some part of the Catholic ...

William of Modena William of Modena ( – 31 March 1251), also known as ''William of Sabina'', ''Guglielmo de Chartreaux'', ''Guglielmo de Savoy'', ''Guillelmus'', was an Italian clergyman and papal diplomat.

. According to the Chronicle of Livonia, 20,000 troops had set out for

from the estuary of

Pärnu River Pärnu () is the fourth largest city in Estonia. Situated in southwest Estonia, Pärnu is located south of the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and west of Estonia's second largest city, Tartu. The city sits off the coast of Pärnu Bay, an inlet o ...

and moved along the ice. Since the ice was said to have been very slippery, they reached the stronghold of Muhu on the ninth day. After seeing such a large force, the people of Muhu offered a truce and allowed themselves to be baptised. Most of the Germans didn't accept it and so they started besieging the stronghold. The first attack was fended off with rocks and spears. The besiegers threw rocks into the stronghold with bricoles, built a

turret Turret may refer to: * Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building * Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon * Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope * Mi ...

, and undermined the wall. On the sixth day the Livonian army managed to break into the stronghold, where a ferocious slaughter took place. The wealth of the settlement, horses and bovines were looted, and the stronghold itself was burned down.

References

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1227 in Europe

Muhu Parish