ABSTRACT
Up to the present, the immigrant Western (predominantly German) clerics, soldiers and traders have been regarded as the main agents in the Baltic Crusades, while the native peoples of the eastern Baltic region have generally been considered as the objects of these events. This is equally true of Western scholars, as well as of those from the Baltic countries today. The history of Livonia has been associated with various myths and stereotypes, originating in the eighteenth and even more so, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When they think of the Middle Ages today, many people in Latvia or Estonia picture aggressive German invaders who enslaved the native peoples, turning them into a homogeneous, subordinate, inferior peasant underclass. This myth began to emerge among Baltic German writers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment who saw their mission in the struggle for the abolition or reform of serfdom among the Livonian peasants, which they considered to be slavery. They contrasted the German clerics, traders, townspeople, crusaders and knights of the Teutonic Order with the ‘innocent nature-children’: Latvians and Estonians. In a sense they regarded the Baltic local people as an embodiment of the ideal of the noble savage propounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1
