ABSTRACT
The castle at Malbork, a small town in the Pomeranian province of North Poland situated on the River Nogat, a distributary of the lower Vistula, is the largest fortified structure built from brick in the world, encompassing an area of around 20 hectares (Figure 1.1). Painstakingly restored to its fourteenth-century appearance following its partial destruction during the Second World War, the castle is the largest of the 218 fortified structures constructed between the mid-thirteenth and early-fifteenth centuries within the boundaries of modern North Poland, the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast and south-western Lithuania. 1 These lands were known to medieval Europeans as Prussia, and in the thirteenth century they were inhabited by tribes who had rejected the message of Christianity and continued to venerate gods in woods, meadows and lakes.
