Klaipėdos universitetas

More than a hundred years of fighting between the Teutonic Order and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania have left us with a considerable amount of narrative sources that allow researchers today to imagine the language of the Christians who fought against the pagans, and to understand their beliefs and propaganda measures. One little-studied question in this regard is how the Christian narrative tradition of the 14th century portrayed miracles and divine intervention during the struggle between the Teutonic Order and Lithuania. To address this question, the author of the article focuses on the chronicles of the Teutonic Order, which represented the idea of the Crusade to the Lithuanian lands, and therefore showed a strong need to emphasise the religious aspect of the whole military conflict. At the same time, however, she also draws on other surviving documents for comparison, including Lithuanian and Ruthenian narrative sources. The author argues that the accounts of miracles and divine intervention in sources from the Teutonic Order were influenced by the nature of the Order as a religious military corporation and the chroniclers’ need to explain the campaigns to Lithuania as a holy war. It was this need that led them to place a great emphasis on the depiction of divine intervention in the campaigns of the crusaders to help them.

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.

With the Christianisation of the Lithuanians in the Middle Ages, fundamental changes brought new Christian images of the Otherworld and entry to it. The image of souls being raised to heaven by angels is one of the images that emerged in the wake of changes in burial rituals. Based on Medieval historical sources, the article examines the image of the angel ascending to heaven that emerged in Balt and Finno-Ugric countries during their Christianisation. It explains how it is related to the Christian image of the Otherworld, and how it changed the pre-Christian Balt and Finno-Ugric mythical perception of the world beyond. It also explores the question of whether, in the Balt and Finno-Ugric mythical world-view, there may have been companions that conducted the soul in the Otherworld (psychopomps), which are seen as angels in Christianity. The research shows that in the earliest written sources describing ancient Balt and Finno-Ugric burials, there is no mention of spirits or deities acting as psychopomps, or of deities in charge of the deceased. The article argues that converts may have learned about angels raising souls to heaven because burial rituals and the concept of life after death changed in the course of Christianisation in Livonia and Prussia.

This article returns to the question of whether Christianity in Europe in the High Middle Ages necessarily precluded the cremation of corpses. The question is addressed focusing on the Livs, a West Finno-Ugric society, who lived in the east Baltic region, before they adopted Christianity and during the early period of Christianisation. The authors combine archaeological expertise with interpretations of historical sources to explore the late cremations of the Livs and, in particular, to analyse two female cremations from the cemetery at Ogresgala Čabas, located near the mouth of the River Daugava. Cremations dominated in the initial phase of Daugava Liv culture in the lower reaches of the Daugava in the second half of the tenth century before they were replaced by inhumations by the middle of the 11th century, especially in female graves. The article deals with the late cremations of the Livs from the late 11th to the 13th century, when they became very rare and took on a different form. Taking into account references to the practice of cremation in exceptional cases of deaths in foreign lands in written sources about the Livs, the article agrees with researchers who believe that not all cremated corpses should be immediately and unconditionally associated with paganism.

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.

Chronicles of the 13th-century Crusades in Livonia and Prussia are full of descriptions of the Catholic conquerors demanding hostages from local elites, but the fate of these hostages and the influence they may have had on the processes of religious conversion and societal change in the east Baltic has attracted little attention. This paper explores the lives of Livonian and Prussian hostages, and argues that they may have functioned as vessels of acculturation, who furthered the Christianisation and ‘Europeanisation’ of their homelands, and cemented new power relations and world-views.

The conditions and the environment of the mendicant religious orders (Dominicans, Franciscan Conventuals, Franciscan Observants, Carmelites, and Augustinians) in the holdings of the Teutonic Order in Prussia differed from those in Western Europe. In newly built castles and newly founded cities, German and Polish-speaking communities predominated; while Prussians, unfamiliar with the basics of Christianity, prevailed in rural territories. The network of parish churches declined towards the eastern and northern boundaries of the state. Therefore, the mendicant orders operated there on a different model. An examination of its characteristics is carried out by means of an analysis of the stages, development and dynamics of the settlement of mendicant orders in Prussia. An attempt is made to identify the organisation of their provision and the supporting milieu. Particular attention is paid to the impact of mendicant orders on the deepening of the faith of the local Prussian population in the eastern part of the Teutonic Order’s holdings.

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.