ABSTRACT
By the mid-eleventh century a political shape of Central Europe had emerged that to this day is largely recognizable in the terms of polities and historical regions, religions, and writing systems. The only exception is the Ottoman Empire that replaced the (East) Roman Empire (Romania) in Anatolia and the Balkans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In contrast to the situation a century earlier (Map 2), the technology of writing had already been present across entire Central Europe with the exception of the eastern Baltic littoral, that is, today’s Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. The area’s ethnic groups practiced their own indigenous forms of (non-scriptural, that is, not connected to some “holy book”) religion and statehood, and for the time being were able to withstand crusading attacks from the Catholic or Orthodox neighboring polities.
