ABSTRACT
The southern shores of the Baltic Sea and the western part of the Baltic inland region became targets for Christian expansionism through Danish and especially German missionary and military activities from the middle of the twelfth century. By the late twelfth and increasingly in the early thirteenth century Christian expansionism progressed further east and north, targeting Livonia, an area largely covering present-day Latvia and Estonia. Just south of these areas, however, the strong inland state of Lithuania was a rare example of a pagan society which for a longer period was able to withstand attempts at Christianization, only submitting to Christianity in the final quarter of the fourteenth century.1
