ABSTRACT
The incorporation of the northern Baltic lands into the Western Christian world was a long and complex process. The Christianization of Livonia started not from old Christian areas, but from places which had been mission territories themselves not long before, such as the archbishoprics of Hamburg-Bremen, Lund and Uppsala. The local peoples had no literate culture either before Christianization or for several centuries after it. It can be said that the local population had accepted Catholicism by the later Middle Ages, at least at a popular level. One can ask how the local peoples actually managed to remain heathen up to the thirteenth century. The quality and quantity of the resources and manpower of the crusaders remained modest enough to enable the local population to offer a long resistance, the problems in the West were too acute to pay these lands more attention, and the East was not yet so threatening.
