ABSTRACT
According to the generally accepted view, Christianity was introduced to the native inhabitants of the eastern Baltic lands by force and remained relatively alien to them throughout the period of Catholic domination.1 Only after the Reformation, and especially during the United Brethren movement of the eighteenth century, did Christianity become more familiar to the Estonian and Latvian population.2 The concept of forced Christianization belongs to political history, and is popular with Baltic German and also Estonian and Latvian historiography. Relatively little is known about the attitudes of the local people towards Catholicism from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and the Christian religious life of the native population in this period has never been an independent topic of research.
