Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The way the Baltic region was viewed in Christian Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages was strongly characterised by the fact that it was the land of the last pagans. Beginning with the crusade against the Wends (Polabian Slavs) in 1147, attempts to convert them in the region took the form of the Northern Crusades, authorised by the Pope. The Teutonic Order became the driving force behind these crusades from the 13th to the 15th centuries, and secured support in Christian Europe, including France. The representation of the east Baltic region, on which this article focuses, was mainly related to these crusades. The author’s aim is to provide an overview of the attitude of the French-related nobility and intellectual elite towards the Christianisation of the Baltic from the tenth to the 15th centuries, with a special focus on Lithuania. In the first half of the 14th century, many crusaders from France and neighbouring countries backed the Teutonic Order’s struggle against Lithuania. These expeditions, mostly a derivative of the crusades in the Holy Land, were seen as the epitome of the chivalric lifestyle. This view changed slowly after Grand Duke Jogaila acceded to the Polish throne in 1386 and a year later baptised the grand duchy. With the evangelisation of Žemaitija (Samogitia) in 1417, Lithuania was definitely considered a part of Christendom.

After the conversion of Lithuania, Christian norms changed the old pagan traditions in society by adapting them to local customs. Although the blending of Christianity with old traditions in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) has already been studied by historians, previous research has not provided a clear picture of how it changed the institution of marriage. Marriage in the GDL has usually been studied based on an analysis of the institutions of matrimonial property (dowry, dower). This article focuses on the institution of marriage and the concept of the validity of marriage in the 16th-century GDL. The author investigates the secular laws of the GDL, which, despite being codified in the Statutes of Lithuania, preserved some local elements of the marriage custom, and individual secular court cases. The concept of the validity of marriage is analysed by exploring the meanings of the words венчание and шлюб and their evolution. These two Ruthenian concepts described the act of a valid (ecclesiastical) marriage in secular law. The author describes their establishment in the society of the GDL, before discussing their use. A content analysis of both concepts is performed by explaining how the terms were understood and used by the members of different estates (unfree people, peasants, nobility). This allows the author to show not only the regulation of a valid marriage in the norms of the Statutes of Lithuania, but also to reveal how the notion of the validity of marriage functioned in practice.

The paper deals with the relationship between Christianisation and the pastoral care in the first Christian Balt communities on the east Baltic coast during the period of the Crusades. It has to be noted that at the turn of and throughout the 13th century, Christian missions were influenced by the attitudes of the new religious movements of the 12th and 13th centuries proclaiming the ‘humanisation’ of the idea of God, and the efforts of the human soul to seek the ‘individualisation’ of salvation. Given these ideas, the paper analyses the forms in which Christianity spread in the Baltic communities, and the impact the inception of the Crusades had on these communities. The research proves that the spread of Christianity took place not only in a ‘theologised’ and therefore ‘difficult’ to understand form, but also in common, knightly (during the Crusades), and other forms of piety. These forms unfolded through the Christian missions and the pastoral care that were carried out in parallel, so that they functioned in the first Christian Balt communities in the 13th century.

The history of the medieval Baltic is dominated by the crusading movement of the 13th to 15th centuries. The crusades resulted in significant changes to the organisation, ownership and administration of the landscape, with a significant shift in patterns of land use. However, our understanding of the environmental impact of the crusades has been almost exclusively informed by written sources. This paper synthesises existing palynological evidence for medieval landscape transformation in the southeast and eastern Baltic, focusing on the ecological impact of the crusading movement, and considers some key questions, challenges and priorities for future research.

The subject of research is the sacral geography of the Dvina region (in northwest Belarus), the sacred lakes situated in this region, and place-legends about vanished churches relating to these lakes. The author bases his research on the analytical method, and interprets folkloric sources, historical facts and data collected during ethnographic field trips. The main conclusion of the article attests to the fact that place-legends about a vanished church (they relate to the majority of the lakes) indicate the sacrality of these bodies of water. In the past, sacrality might have contained two closely interrelated planes: an archaic one, which originated from pre-Christian times, and that of the Early Middle Ages, related to the baptism of the people of the Duchy of Polotsk.