ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how in the thirteenth century Livonia and North-Western Russia were a common area of politics, where the borders between confessions were not so significant as sometimes imagined. It deals with confessional relationships in the Baltic region at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the role of the papacy in Livonia. The chapter discusses policies toward the Russians as illustrated in the chronicle of Henry of Livonia. It explores the wars in the 1230s-1240s from the perspective of the internal conflicts in Livonia, Pskov and Novgorod, as well as papal plans for church union with Russia in the middle of the century. The chapter considers the turn of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when proximity to pagans and schismatics became an issue in disputes between the Livonian Order and its opponents at the Curia. It seems that co-operation in capturing Pskov had been co-ordinated only at the level of the local authorities in Livonia.
