ABSTRACT
Home to fierce pagan tribes, the lands east of the Baltic Sea – present-day Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Kaliningrad oblast (Prussia) – were up to the end of the fourteenth century physical frontiers of Christendom, ‘in paganorum frontaria’ (see Map 9.1).1 In a letter to King Valdemar II of Denmark which resulted in an expedition
1 Archbishop Frederick of Riga, in a complaint to the pope against the Teutonic Order in 1305, writes of the fortresses near Riga ‘in paganorum frontaria constitutum’ which when ceded to the pagans ‘a frontaria recesserunt’: A. Seraphim, Das Zeugenverhör des Franciscus de Moliano (1312) (Königsberg, 1912), 164. In English on the Baltic frontier, see O. Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York, 1952), 79-83, 110-14; cf. R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (London, 1993), 15-18 on ‘the last stronghold of native European paganism’, and 312 on Lithuania: ‘it is
* I would like to thank Mary Stevens, Vida Mockus and the rest of the librarians of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto who made this article possible by building such a comprehensive collection relating to East European history.
