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.

This article examines a specific kind of sacrifice to the pagan Lithuanian and Prussian gods recorded in the written sources of the 16th and 17th centuries, sacrifices made in and by water. There is a total of just ten such records known. Both Lithuanian and Prussian tribes practiced this kind of sacrifice. It is noteworthy that sacrifices involving water were not made to a single deity, but rather to several different gods; that the kind of sacrifice varied and that the most diverse sorts of intentions were pursued in making the sacrifice.

The tradition of the European maritime culture is directly related to development of spiritual and mental horizons of the personality. The most prominent factors of the maritime development are as follows: Arabic origins of the maritime navigation and astrophysics; Greek mythology and philosophy raising sea symbols; maritime missions, which have been encouraged from the Judeo-Christian mentality and manifested on new geographic and ethnographic discoveries. The decisive role of this mentality appeared in formation of European states and institutional culture, in development of literacy and rising of universities from monastic libraries (X–XI c.) and first Portuguese maritime schools (XV c.). Aim of the research is a revelation of moments of a transcendental ideal of the European maritime self-concept as an important cultural leap. Tasks of the research are as follows: analysis of a pagan basis of the maritime self-concept, and discussion of a valuable direction of the Judeo-Christian maritime self-concept. The research type is theoretically descriptive. There were used such research methods: retrospective, comparative, heuristic analysis of scientific literature, interpretation, systemization and synthesis. Methodological attitude is neotomism that refers to the transcendental ideal of the European culture identity formation in long-term prospect.

This article presents burial rites of State of Lithuania in the 13th and 14th centuries, reveals its features and searches for the interaction between the burial rites and the development of the society. Burial rites are analyzed in a broad context of processes: the spreading of the cremation, the reformation of the religion, the unification of the material culture, the disappearance of regional differences and the establishment of the Lithuanian nation. Furthermore, the data of anthropology and genetics is examined. In the article, the burial rites of the 13th and 14th centuries are seen as an integral part of the evolution of State of Lithuania.

In his famous Annals, the 15th-century chronicler Jan Długosz provided a wealth of information on the way of life of the Lithuanians in pagan times, as well as in the period immediately following their conversion in 1387. In drawing attention to the consumption of material goods such as food, clothing and shelter, Długosz portrayed the pagan Lithuanians as a people who could not satisfy even their most basic material needs. After their conversion to Christianity, their faith nevertheless wavered for a long time, and so their needs were only met thanks to the help of the Polish king, Władysław II Jogaila (Jagiełło), whom the chronicler held up as the ‘apostle’ of Lithuania. Długosz’s description of the way of life of the Lithuanians is rich in theological themes, based on the Gospels and the writings of the Prophets. The author examines the reliability of Długosz’s account on the way of life of both pagan and converted Lithuanians.