Introduction

The conquest and conversion of the lands on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea by Germans, Danes and Swedes from around 1150 to 1300 represented not only a confrontation between the Christianity of the conquerors and the diverse pagan beliefs of the native peoples. The crusaders, settlers, military orders and ecclesiastical authorities which established Christian control of Pomerania, Finland, Livonia and Prussia brought with them an alien culture, which was manifested in the arrival of diverse new institutions, artefacts and practices.1 The gulf in technological culture and capability between Westerners and the indigenous peoples was most dramatically illustrated by the actual process of conquest. Superior equipment, such as high-quality armour, crossbows, siege machinery and warhorses, and fortifications built at first from wood and later from stone or brick, gave the invaders a huge advantage in both offensive and defensive contexts that offset their numerical inferiority.2 A similar technological disparity can be seen at sea. Up to the time of the conquest certain maritime tribes among the Estonians and Curonians had been able to mount raids far across the Baltic Sea against the coast of Scandinavia, and even in the early thirteenth century they were able to attack Christian shipping and threaten the most important Christian settlement, Riga. Yet in the long run, the swift but small raiding ships of the

1 For general studies available in English on these events, see especially: Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1993); Nils Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic: The Reception of a Catholic World-System in the European North (AD 1075-1225) (Leiden, 2004); Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100-1525 (London, 1980), 2nd edn (London, 1997); Sven Ekdahl, ‘Crusades and Colonisation in the Baltic’, in Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, ed. Helen J. Nicholson (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 172-203; William Urban, The Baltic Crusade (DeKalb, 1975), 2nd edn (Chicago, 1994), as well as the select bibliography in the present volume.