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- [00:01]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis.
- [00:03]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're.
- [00:05]
Matt Lewis
Just popping up here to tell you some insider info.
- [00:08]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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- [00:14]
Matt Lewis
History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries such as my new.
- [00:21]
Dr. Francis Young
Series on everyone's favorite conquerors, the Normans.
- [00:25]
Matt Lewis
Or my recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.
- [00:29]
Dr. Francis Young
There's a new release to enjoy every week.
- [00:32]
Matt Lewis
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show Notes for this episode.
- [00:49]
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- [01:20]
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- [02:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Jennicka and welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from Kings to Popes to the Crusades, we delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. In February 1387, Joghila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, returned from a mission Abroad he had just married the Polish queen Jadwiga, making him the ruler of one of the largest and most powerful kingdoms in Europe. But such important unions came at a price. And for Joghila and his subjects, that price was their religion. At the end of the 14th century, Lithuania was home to some of the most staunch and stalwart Novartis non Christians in Europe. Their capital, Vilnius still boasted a roofless temple dedicated to the God Perkunis, where a sacred fire was kept, always burning, its smoke rising to the heavens. Surrounding the city was a sacred forest where animals, including grass snakes, said to be household guardians, were protected from harm. But all of that was about to change. Yogile had his fellow nobles baptized, the temple turned into a cathedral and the forest razed to the ground with its sacred snakes hunted down and killed. The Lithuanians were now Christians and the process of the conversion of Europe was complete.
- [04:34]
Dr. Francis Young
At least that's how the story goes.
- [04:38]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Of course, as historians always delight in saying, the real story is much more complicated than that. And to discuss those complexities today, I am joined by Dr. Francis Young, the author of the Silence of the the Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples. Francis, welcome to Gone Medieval.
- [05:04]
Matt Lewis
It's wonderful to be here.
- [05:06]
Dr. Francis Young
I am so excited to have you here because I absolutely loved your new book Zero Surprises here. The Eleanor and Joy's book about that starts in 14th century Eastern Europe. What a surprise. Couldn't believe it. But I think that this is such an incredibly interesting topic and it's the sort of thing that people kind of bring up a lot. You know, I think that everybody kind of likes to say, oh yes, the Baltic region, last to Christianize. Isn't that very interesting? And it's kind of the subject of rather a lot of romantic conjecture. I suppose the best place to start with any is a completely open ended question that we could debate for hours probably, but who do we consider the last pagans of medieval Europe?
- [05:52]
Matt Lewis
I think this P word that we're going to be using a lot, the pagan word, is quite a problem to use. I think it's. I have mixed feelings about it. You know, on the one hand it's a word that most people kind of readily understand what you're trying to get at when you use it, that you're talking about people who are following their ancestral religious traditions that predate the arrival of Christianity in northern Europe. So you know, to that extent it's okay, I think to use it. The difficulty of it is that it kind of glosses over all of the differences between these people and the totally different approaches they have towards, towards religion and the sacred. And finding who is the last, I think is really quite difficult because we encounter these versions of religion that are neither Christian nor pre Christian, these kind of bricolages or creoles of religion which contain elements of both and yet seem to be neither. So I'm going to be really lame in sort of not answering that first question, who were the last pagans? Because I think it's almost impossible to say.
- [07:04]
Dr. Francis Young
Say, I think that this is such. I. I love to get immediately into definition chat because this was a part that I really, really enjoyed from the introduction to your book was just a discussion of how we use, you know, the P word, how we use pagan, because fundamentally this is a Christian term for a bunch of people they don't like. Right. You know, this is. And it's this really kind of flattening word. I think people kind of understand what you're getting at. But what I always talk about is there's an illustrated 17th century manuscript that shows the Russians expanding into what is now Siberia and places like that. And they are up against, you know, the local peoples, the Tartars and things, and they wish to show them as pagans. So they've drawn like little statues that look like classical Greek statues. And I'm like, babe, I just don't think so. You know, that's not, that's not what's going on. But that is kind of like what's happening in the Christian imagination is that you're talking about Zeus or Hera or something like that. Whereas that's probably not what's happening on the ground.
- [08:09]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think this gets to the root of the problem. It's that when people in the late Middle Ages are approaching unchristianized peoples, let's use that as a sort of neutral term. They have frameworks of interpretation, they have expectations that they bring to the table. And one of those expectations is that all pagans are going to be like the Ephesians in the Book of Acts, you know, who desperately want to continue sacrificing to this enormous image of Diana. Or they expect that they will be like, you know, the Canaanites in the Old Testament who cling on to their Asherah poles and their rural shrines. Or they have a view which is. Yeah. Derived from their reading of the Greeks and Romans themselves. So, you know, they'll be like Cicero. And of course, none of these things are true. And I think this is a massive reason why Christianization falters and kind of reaches this impenetrable barrier in certain regions of northeastern Europe. And it's to do with the fact that the unchristianized peoples follow religious traditions, or perhaps we could even say spiritual traditions. I'm not sure religion is even the right word always, that are so different that there is no frame of reference for the missionaries. And if you've got no frame of reference for the religion you're encountering, how can you embark on the process of conversion?
- [09:38]
Dr. Francis Young
I mean, and that's exactly it, isn't it? It's a kind of one size fits all approach to several groups of people. You know, we were talking about, you know, everyone from the Sami to the Lithuanians and you know, there are the Finno Yurgic cultures up here. There's all kinds of different people hanging out in northeastern Europe who are probably following slightly different religions who are doing things differently. And it doesn't look a single thing like what was happening in the Mediterranean a thousand years ago.
- [10:11]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, these people are enormously diverse in terms of their ethnic origins, their languages, but also in terms of the ecosystems within which they live, the landscapes that they inhabit, the lifestyles that they have. So you've got the Sami people who are nomadic or semi nomadic reindeer herders. You've got the nomadic Nenets people up in the far north of what is today Russia. You've also got settled farming communities like the Estonians, who nevertheless have this intimate relationship with the forest which seems to be what we might call animistic. And we find the same thing along the Volga, close to the Urals, these remote regions of European Russia. And then we've got peoples like the Lithuanians and the Latvians and the Prussians who are perhaps a little bit more comprehensible to Christian missionaries because they outwardly or cosmetically resemble the sort of stereotyped pagans of antiquity. But even there all is not quite as it seems. And there is this colossal language barrier because these people are not only speaking languages that people don't know, but they also belong to linguistic groups that don't have a Christian population within them. So there isn't this kind of resource they can draw on of a missionary who speaks a version of that language or a related language, who can easily kind of then slip in to learning that language and communicating with those people.
- [11:41]
Dr. Francis Young
This is, you know, my problem even today in the year of our Lord 2025. Right. I absolutely lose all of my linguistic prowess when presented with Finno EURC of any description. Just like, nope, Absolutely not. That's not, that's not going to happen. So, you know, it's even worse, you know, if we're talking about sort of the 14th century or so. But I mean, so we have these really disparate groups of people. We have a kind of generalized geographical area of northeastern Europe. But I mean, is it really even possible for us to be attempting to identify who these last unchristianized people are? I mean, is this what we want to go with? Do we want to say unchristianized? Is that a better term? Or what are we, what. How do we want to call these people?
- [12:23]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I prefer the term unchristianized. And it's the term that I use most in my book Silence of the Gods, partly because it's a neutral term, or at least a more neutral term than pagan, because it glosses over the extent to which these people might have had contact with Christianity without adopting it. I think that's important to bear in mind that Christianity is always there in the background for these people. They're not completely uncontacted tribes. They do have a relationship with Christian powers and Christian missionaries and so forth, but they have not identified themselves, they have not culturally become part of the Christian world. And I think it also is a word that we can use that covers all of these peoples, regardless of their individual religious traditions. I think, yeah, the question you pose as to whether we can talk about all these peoples as a group is an absolutely legitimate one. But at the same time, I think it's a shame that we haven't talked about them together because for so long these people have only been studied by scholars, mostly from the regions and countries in the languages of those regions and countries which English speaking readers just are not going to encounter that scholarship. And so I think that there is a story to be told here about a collection of traditions that we should be recognizing in my view, as part of the religious history of Europe. You know, the religious history of Europe, we tend to think in the Middle Ages is all about Christianity, but there is more of a recognition now that it's also about Islam in Iberia, in the Balkans and elsewhere. And there is a recognition that Judaism is a massively important religion in late medieval Europe. But there is this other factor and that is this collection of traditions, I won't call it a single tradition in the far northeast of Europe, these traditions, which, although the numbers of people we might be talking about are very small compared to, you know, the numbers of people who are living in Constantinople or even living in Krakow or Wherever. But they are people whose existence deeply troubles the Christian world. So it doesn't matter that there aren't very many of them or that they live this nomadic existence far on the geographical and cultural margins of Europe. They do live within the realms of Christian kings. And that is something which is deeply troubling to the Christian world. It is an important story. It's an important element of Europe's religious past that needs to be recovered.
- [15:03]
Dr. Francis Young
I couldn't agree more. And, you know, also, obviously, as a huge enthusiast for English speakers taking better look at parts of Europe that we don't ordinarily consider. But, I mean, I think certainly within my studies, the Sami come up a lot because they are this existential threat as far as people are concerned. People are terrified of the Sami, and they are convinced that they have incredible magical powers and that they can curse ships. There's a much concern about ships being cursed by the Sami, that they can control wind, that they do all these harmful things. And so even though it's a really tiny group of people up in the furthest northern reaches of Europe, these are people who are being speculated about almost constantly and very specifically negatively as well.
- [15:49]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And I think that's something which you can see from the moment, really, that the Norse become Christian, the Sami become more threatening. You know, before Christianization, it does seem that there was some degree of religious interaction and even the exploitation of Sami practices by Norse settlers, you know, who were interested in this stuff. But with Christianization, people are trying to understand who the Sami are, what they're up to. But the only kind of interpretative framework that they've got, the only frame of reference for understanding what's going on, for example, in the trance of a Sami nuidy or shaman, is witchcraft. And this is really bad news for the Sami. It's because Sami religion doesn't resemble anything that Christian scholars would recognize as. As paganism. The only thing they can call it is witchcraft. And you see a similar thing, of course, happening in the New World. You know, when English settlers go to north america in the 16th and 17th centuries, they say, oh, you know, these native people, they don't have a religion, they just practice witchcraft. And it is tremendously damaging. You know, it's lethal to the Sami that they end up being stigmatized as a nation of witches. In fact, they're the only people in Europe who come to be stigmatized in this way as an entire nation of witches.
- [17:16]
Dr. Francis Young
I just find them so incredibly intriguing, and I suppose my heart goes out to them a little bit. Because everything that you read is just so terrible. But I mean, I've immediately diverted us to talking about the Sammy because I love them. This isn't kind of where the grand story that Christians like to tell about this sort of holdout area is that the last pagans, their words, not mine, who are converted are those who are in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. You know, and this is a huge amount of land, you know, from the 13th century onward. I mean, we're talking about it going from the Baltic all the way to the Black Sea. It's an absolutely huge amount of places. But can you try to sum up one of the largest patchwork states in late medieval Europe for us very quickly? I mean, what, what does the Grand Dungeon of Lithuania look like?
- [18:11]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is probably by area, the largest polity in late medieval Europe. It's absolutely enormous. As you say, it stretches from the Baltic right the way through to almost the shores of the Black Sea. Sometimes it's referred to as the intermarium because it's between these two seas. However, it is a very complex polity. It is ruled from Vilnius by the Grand Dukes who are ethnically Lithuanian and speak the Lithuanian language, and by their family members who have come over the course of centuries to dominate a series of East Slavic speaking principalities. These are former principalities of Kyivan Rus. They are located mostly in what today is Belarus and Ukraine and some parts of the far west of what's now Russia. But their religion is most definitely Orthodox. They are Orthodox Christians. And in fact, when members of the Grand Ducal family become rulers of these principalities, they invariably convert to Orthodoxy and become baptized and take on Orthodox Slavic names. And the dominant language of the Grand Duchy is what we might call today Belarusian or Ukrainian or East Slavic. You know, it's difficult to give these anachronistic terms, but yeah, it's complex because religiously its dominant religion is Orthodoxy, demographically speaking, but its official religion in terms of what the Grand Duke's practice is pagan. So in Vilnius there is a temple which is dedicated to the God Perknas, the thunder God, who is venerated in oak trees. Sacrifices are offered to Perknas, the Lithuanians themselves, who live, broadly speaking, in what is today the area of the Republic of Lithuania, although a bit more outside it as well. In what's now Belarus, they are also pagan. And in fact, in Vilnius you will find churches, you will find mosques, you will find synagogues, you will find Orthodox and Catholic churches, monasteries, Franciscan friars, Dominican friars who work for the grand duke writing down documents. And yet it is forbidden, on pain of death, for any of those clergy to preach to or convert the Lithuanians themselves. They can preach to their own communities. So you've got this extraordinary religious settlement unparalleled anywhere else in Europe. But the reason for it is largely political. The grand dukes find themselves sandwiched between great powers. So on the one hand, they've got Muscovy, which is Orthodox. They don't want to convert to Orthodoxy because that would put them within the sphere of influence of Muscovy. They don't want to convert to Catholicism because they have been engaged in an existential struggle for centuries with the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic military monastic order, who are intent on seizing control of Lithuanian lands and taking over Lithuania. So they don't want to convert to Catholicism. And so it's almost as though the balance of religious power within this disputed region is held by not converting to any religion and remaining pagan.
- [21:36]
Dr. Francis Young
I mean, I think that that is kind of really explicable to us now. You know, this idea that the thing that gives one power in a nationalistic sense is having a set of practices that are uniquely your own. You know, it's kind of a demarcation of social practice at the very least, you know, and that. And then you can say, all right, well, we're not going to join you, because we are something else entirely. Right? It's. And that is. It's almost modern in its conception there. You mentioned, very briefly, you know, what we know of some of the temples. Do we know very much about the kind of religious practice or ritual that they would have engaged in. In villainous.
- [22:15]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, we do know a bit about what was going on in Vilnius in the Grand Ducal cult. We don't know whether that was just peculiar to Vilnius, though, or whether it was more widely spread. And some scholars have suggested, actually that grand dukes like Didyminus, for example, may have effectively invented it as a sort of counterpart to Christianity. That seemed as impressive as Christianity as a way of maintaining this balance of power, but obviously drawing on their native traditions. And we know that there was this remarkable temple in Vilnius, which was a former cathedral, because at an earlier point in the 13th century, Mindaugas, another Lithuanian grand duke, had converted to Christianity and built a cathedral. Then he gets assassinated and the Lithuanians go back and so the roof is taken off the cathedral and it's turned into a temple and. And a massive altar is constructed in it with steps going up. This has been excavated in the 1980s, so we have Some idea of what was going on. And sacrifices are made there to Perknas. And we also have a place known as Svintaragis, which is the holy horn, which is on the rivers Vilna and Neris, which runs through Vilnius. And that is a place where the grand dukes are cremated. And cremation is tremendously important to the Lithuanians and all the Baltic peoples as a marker of difference. We are different from the Christians because we cremate our dead. They are cremated in these grand funerals with enormous amounts of wealth cremated with them, and then that will all be buried in a burial mound, effectively, and that becomes a place where their spirit is then venerated and ancestral feasts will be held to feed the spirit. So, yeah, we know a little bit about what was going on. We also know that there were holy groves and forests around Vilnius where the animals couldn't be killed, where the trees could not be cut down. So there were various taboos against that.
- [24:11]
Dr. Francis Young
Do you know, it's really hard not to be kind of team pre Christian, because all of this sounds incredibly cool. It's just so cool. Like, it's cool to have a sacred grove, man. It's. It's very cool to have a giant funeral party and feast. That in of itself becomes a problem, I think, when we're attempting to talk about these things, because it's so easy to romanticize in opposition, I suppose, to the Christianity that we're all steeped in and aware of. You know, it becomes so incredibly larger than life, which I think is amusing, because I think that Christian chroniclers would be horrified to hear me say that, and yet I'm saying it nonetheless.
- [24:50]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think we have to be careful, because a lot of these sources that describe Baltic religion, for example, are written down by crusaders, people in the Teutonic order whose entire raison d' etre was to destroy and discredit these people and portray them as the worst people imaginable. Or at a slightly later period, it's written down by Polish authors who were not as hostile as the Teutonic Knights, but they also are quite keen to show that Polish Catholicism has triumphed over this previous existing religion. What we notably lack is any Lithuanians who actually wrote about this themselves. There just isn't a source where a Lithuanian has written about it, which I find very upsetting. That there's just. No, we're always looking at the sources written by outsiders.
- [25:40]
Dr. Francis Young
It's just. It's one of the ongoing frustrations, I suppose, of medieval history generally. But, I mean, in Particular in this case. So you've mentioned this a couple of times. I want to kind of dig in a little bit more to the history of the attempts to crusade against these groups of people, because we've mentioned already the Teutonic Knights, they've been pretty involved in, I suppose, what we call the Northern Crusade up to this point. And this isn't a very friendly way of attempting to convert anyone, is it?
- [26:13]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, and actually I would say it's not best understood as an attempt to convert anyone. The thing about the Northern Crusades is that they have their own very distinctive aims and character. And right from the beginning, when you've got the Wendish Crusade, which is launched in the middle of the 12th century, it's a land grab basically, you know, it's about territory, it's about the subjugation of peoples who don't fit in to, you know, the pattern of, you know, those who are willing to be converted. And it's a last resort. So the Wendish Crusade, which is the first example of this, which is launched in 1144, that begins at the same time as crusade in the Levant is being relaunched. But essentially it's because missionaries to the Wends have failed to make headway. And so the Pope decides, well, if we've not been able to convert these people by the usual means, that is to say sending missionaries who will try and persuade people, try and learn their language, try and convince leaders, particularly convince elites to convert and thereby gain this kind of trickle down conversion that happens in so many countries like England for example. If that's failed, then the only thing we can do is to effectively seize this land and potentially purge it of these non Christian people. And so there is genocidal intent which is quite clearly and expressly stated in some of these early attempts at crusade. But there are also elements of self protection. So for example, when the Danish king decides that he's going to occupy the island of Saaremar in Estonia, that's the first kind of Christian intervention in the Baltic. Because Saaremar is full of pirates. It's basically the Vikings of the Baltic, they keep raiding Danish lands like the island of Bornholm. And so he decides, I'm going to establish a bridgehead here. But really it begins with the establishment of Riga. So what today is the capital of Latvia, a city which is established by merchants who want to control one of the major access points to the vast rivers that communicate with the interior of Kyivan Rus, or the remains of Kyivan Rus, you know, after the Mongols have Sort of swept through in the 13th century. And these are very important trading ports, they always are going to be because you can communicate with the interior, but you can also communicate with the Black Sea. And if you can communicate with the Black Sea, you've got access to Constantinople, the Golden Horn and all that. So, yeah, this is strategically and from a mercantile point of view is very important. And it's German settlers who want to establish Riga and they require protection. And so we have the arrival of the Livonian sword brethren in the beginning of the 13th century. But the big moment is when a Polish Duke, Conrad of Mazovia, invites a group known as the Teutonic Knights to defend his realm against the Baltic people who keep raiding, who are the Prussians in 1226. Now, I think it's important to make clear that Prussians in this case means a Baltic people who occupy the area that one day would be what we might think of Prussia, that is to say, German Prussia, that becomes the sort of core of later the German Empire. The German Prussians are sort of a German group of people who sort of stole the name of an earlier people, if you like. But the original Prussians, or sometimes they're called the Old Prussians, the original Prussians were bolts, they were pagans, they were very, very resistant to Christianity. They were very warlike and aggressive and they were determined that nobody else was going to occupy their lands. The Teutonic Knights originally were a Hospitaller order, so rather like The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, they had been, in theory, sort of glorified hospital porters in the Levant who ran a hospital for German knights who were injured in the Crusades. But they gradually became ever more militarized and bloated with donations and support. By the time that Conrad of Mazovia is in contact with the Teutonic Knights, they're already crusading. They're crusading in Hungary against the Cumans or the Polovtians, whatever you want to call them, this Turkic people who are also very resistant to Christianity and are trying to invade Hungary. So they are very eager to do this. They say, yeah, sure, yeah, we'll crusade against the Prussians. And as before, it's a land grab. So they want to set up their own kind of military monastic state. They have no interest whatsoever in converting the Prussians. And in fact, there is this inherent paradox between crusade and conversion, because if you crusade against someone, you are setting up a frontier, a hard frontier where they hate you, you hate them, you have no interest whatsoever in perceiving them as human. If you have no interest in perceiving them as human, you can't convert them because conversion requires change of heart. It requires persuading people to become Christians. And they don't want that. They don't want to give the Prussians rights. And so you end up with this kind of very oppressive situation in Prussia.
- [31:43]
Dr. Francis Young
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that is incredibly important because that doesn't help to chip away at the fact that these are groups of people who really see themselves as involved in a struggle for their own continued existence.
- [32:00]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And, and fundamentally we see this, we.
- [32:02]
Dr. Francis Young
See this in the documents. They're like, yeah, we, we got to get in there and clean out those pagans. Again, their words, not mine. And, you know, I, I think a great way of looking at the Teutonic Knights is kind of more as colonizers and less as crusaders to the area. I don't think that there's any other way of kind of dealing with them fundamentally. They do run up against some geographical challenges, I would say, in. In terms of their mission as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- [32:32]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, they certainly do. I mean, they effectively establish control over Prussia. So in terms of today's geography, Prussia is, broadly speaking, that exclave of Russia that we call the Kaliningrad Oblast, if you're looking at it at a modern map of Europe, but it's actually bigger than that. It includes bits of what are today Poland. And they've also got control, or rather a sister order has got control of Livonia, Livonia being basically Latvia and Estonia together, which is controlled by the Livonian Sword Brethren. But to give you an example of how things start to unravel, in 1236, there is an attempt by the Livonian Sword brethren to put down a revolt of the Semigalians, who are basically a group of Latvians. And this results in a battle where the Lithuanians join forces with the Latvians. The Battle of Derbe in 1236. And this is a total disaster for the Livonian Sword Brethren. They're actually wiped out. So the Grand Master is killed, all of the Livonian Sword brethren are killed, and the feud remain. They basically have to become a kind of subordinate branch of the Teutonic Order further south in Prussia, because that's the only way that they can carry on. And I think the geography here is really important because at that battle, the reason that the Grandmaster and the senior knights get cut down is that they are riding immensely heavy horses, the kind of heavy horses that in the 13th century are the only ones strong enough to carry a fully armored knight on horseback. And they are the, yeah, the heavy cavalry, basically. And the land in lots of these places is very boggy, very marshy. And so basically they just sink into the marsh. The Lithuanians and the Latvians, they've got these mobile groups of infantry who are on foot with these kind of light spears. And so they just massacre them like sort of stuck pigs in the marsh. And this happens again and again. So basically the Teutonic Knights, every summer they will go on a raid somewhere into Lithuania or Samgisha. And every summer the Lithuanians will sort of run away and they'll, you know, the Teutonic Knights will establish a fort and they often will bring foreign knights with them, you know, foreign volunteers, including quite a lot of volunteers from England and Scotland. They'll establish some stockade, you know, made of wood. But then as the weather gets worse, the Lithuanians will come back and they'll attack this stockade. And by this time all the knights are completely miserable and all want to go home and they'll just give up and either get massacred or run away. And the Lithuanians have got the territory back again. So it's kind of this hit and run asymmetric warfare where there's just no hope of them making any kind of permanent inroads into Lithuania. And of course, the Lithuanians have got this vast hinterland of these former Kyivan principalities that they have got the funds from so they can fund all these kind of military resistance, if you like, against the Teutonic Knights. So it's a stalemate.
- [36:03]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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- [37:17]
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- [38:34]
Dr. Francis Young
That this is a really fun one because it absolutely turns the Western European military prowess on its head, right? Because it does you no good to be on a giant war horse completely covered in mail. It's a terrible thing. What you need around here is a sledge and some reindeer and like, it's just, it's very funny just to kind of think about these guys kind of floundering. But we do eventually, despite the centuries effectively of this tit for tat back and forth guerrilla fighting, have a turning point that Christians like to crow about. That comes to us in 1387. Can you tell us a little bit about the official story, the official conversion?
- [39:22]
Matt Lewis
Well, it doesn't happen in the way that you might expect, given the story that we've had so far, because you might expect that, you know, one side or the other would prevail against the Teutonic Knights, against the Lithuanians, or vice versa. But in fact, it's a bit more complicated than that. By this point there is a Lithuanian Grand Duke whose name is your Gyla, and your Gyla finds that he is being pressed on both sides by Muscovy Orthodox Muscovy to the east and the Teutonic Knights as well to the west and he makes a fateful decision that the only way that Lithuania can really survive and the only way that he can survive is by making an alliance with the closest thing he can find to a neutral power. So a power which, you know, they hate the Teutonic Knights and they hate Muscovy, and those people are the Poles. Because it just so happens the King of Poland has died. He has left behind him Jadviga, his daughter, and she is an eligible spinster and looking for a husband. And the Polish nobility desperately want her to have a husband because they think that, you know, she can't rule properly if she doesn't have a husband. And so Yagyla basically says to the Poles, I will have myself baptized. I will have my entire nation baptized if I can marry Jadviga and become king of Poland in a union with Poland. And this is known as the Union of Krevo. Now, the Union of Krevo is very mysterious because we don't fully understand the nature of what was being agreed to. The wording is very ambiguous. Is it a purely dynastic union? Is it that your guy is only expecting to remain King of Poland for the duration of his life? You know, a bit like Philip of Spain remaining King of England for as long as, you know, he's married to Mary the First or something like that? But no, it's unclear. Or is this some kind of more intimate kind of union, political union between Poland and Lithuania? Well, that's not fully sorted out until 1569. But what matters for our story is that your guy has committed himself to one particular kind of monotheism. He has said, I'm going to be a Roman Catholic, but specifically a Polish kind of Roman Catholic. I am not going to accept any intervention by the Teutonic Knights. So he has himself baptized in Krakow. He gets married to Jadviga, and the two return to Lithuania, to Vilnius, in February 1387. Now, what happens here is that Yogaila holds a kind of set piece event, conversion event, modeled on those sort of public conversion events that you read about in earlier medieval history, where a king will accept the Christian faith and then invite his people to join him. You know, as a display of their loyalty to him, they will receive baptism. The way that they do this is that they get a bunch of Lithuanians. I mean, presumably this is only a few hundred people. You know, they're not talking vast numbers of people, and they are gathered into big squares of men and women. And then Polish priests who can't speak a word of Lithuanian, turn Up with these big Aspergilia, which are these big holy water shakers. And they walk up and down and they baptize everybody in a square group. You're all John, your name is John. All the women, your name is Catherine, you know, shaking the baptismal water over them. Meanwhile, these poor Lithuanians have no idea what's going on. But the reason they've turned up is that your Guyla has offered them all a white woolen robe, the robe of the newly baptized. If they accept baptism. Well, you're probably not going to say no to that. Free clothes. And so they've come down for free clothes. The temple of Perquines is cleansed, so the idol is taken away. The Franciscans who are already there, of course, they have a monastery in Vilnius. They take that as a trophy. And that building that was originally built as a cathedral by Mindaugas is turned back into a cathedral. We know that happens. And it is there to this day. It's still there somewhere, hidden within the neoclassical building which is Vilnius Cathedral. Absolutely remarkable building. Basically the cremation site. Venteragis is destroyed. The people are ordered by Jugaila to go and cut down some of the sacred trees to prove that the gods have no power to kill some of the sacred animals to prove that that taboo doesn't hold. And Yogaila himself actually has to preach the Christian faith because he's the only person there who can speak Lithuanian. Although by this time he's changed his name. So he's called Wladisaw II Jagielo. So he is king of Poland adopting a Polish name and he becomes the father of the so called Jagiellonian dynasty which rules Poland until the second half of the 16th century. So yeah, it's a set piece, I think the way we are to understand this, this is advertising, this is marketing. It does not represent a sincere or complete conversion of the Lithuanian people in any way, shape or form as subsequent events will show.
- [44:43]
Dr. Francis Young
I mean, that is, I think the crux of the matter, right? Because there's this tendency to wish to portray things like this as oh, and then, you know, on a dime, suddenly we're all Christian. You know, here's a group of people who probably don't even know what's going on. They're just like, hey, free clothes, you know, and also free wool clothes. That's not nothing, that's expensive, right? And then it's sort of like you're all Christian now and you're like, oh, okay, I don't know what that means, you know, it's sort of a deal. And. And I think there's this desire on our parts to say, well, it's. It's sort of all or nothing. Is this a sincere, sincere. Or is it political? Is this theater, or is this, you know, testament to a real desire to move forward? And I don't think that we can really tease those things apart here at all. I think, certainly for the grand majority of people who were baptized in this, they had no idea what was happening. And they're like, I was a great day out, a bit weird. They put the fire out. It's strange, you know?
- [45:43]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. I mean, I think Jugaila himself is sincere to the extent that he has fully understood. I mean, he's been living, you know, for nearly two years in Krakow. He's understood Christianity is a religion that upholds the power of kings and that he is fully invested in that. You know, whether he sincerely believes in Jesus or anything is beside the point, but, you know, he absolutely understands what Christianity is about and what it can give him. His cousin Vitartas, this guy who he's actually set to rule over Lithuania on his behalf. I don't think he has quite understood, you know, or doesn't see the point in the same way that you does. Witarthas has had himself baptized. He's actually been baptized three times, which in itself, I think shows he hasn't fully understood, but he is much more willing to compromise with local beliefs. So, for example, in the 1420s, so this is after the conversion of Samgishia, the westernmost province of Lithuania, which is the most pagan, the most resistant to any kind of rapprochement with Christianity. In the 1420s, a missionary, some random guy from Prague, goes up to try and convert the Samuraisians, and he's very zealous and, you know, wants to cut down every sacred tree and kill every sacred elk or whatever. And the local people, they go to Vitartas and they say, well, he can't cut down our sacred trees or our sacred groats because we haven't got any churches. And so how will we worship God except at our sacred trees and our sacred groves? And Vitartas says, yeah, all right, that's fair enough. You know, he's going over the top. I forbid you from cutting down the sacred trees and the sacred groves. Now, this is a guy who is, you know, publicly a Christian, but he's right in a way. You know, he's absolutely right that what the church has failed to do in Lithuania, they've done the kind of Big set piece trailer if you like, for Christianization. But they have failed to follow through on the hard work of building churches, training clergy so that they can actually speak the Lithuanian language and therefore catechise and communicate the Christian faith. And they just haven't got any kind of personnel who can establish parishes or diocese or any of the kind of the paraphernalia of late medieval Christianity. They want the result of everybody being Christian, but without putting in any of the effort. And so these people are saying, well, we're trying to do what you've asked us to do. We're trying to worship the Christian God Dievas, who happens also to be the name of the Baltic sky God. So that's convenient. We're trying to worship Dievas, but we're not quite sure. So we're just carrying on worshiping in our sacred groves and in our holy trees. So I think that gives you a sense that this is not a binary. This is not, you know, you're either Christian or pagan. And it's not a world where we can say, oh, there's Christianity on one side, there's paganism on the other. You cross from one team to the other. It's not like that at all.
- [49:10]
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- [50:40]
Dr. Francis Young
I mean, and I think that that is. This is a really, really important and interesting point that your book makes so. Well, it is that I think that we tend to think you're all or nothing. It's one or the other. And we have these real problems. I think also in terms of desiring to call any kind of folk tradition a pagan holdover. You know, there's so much of this where it's like as though religion that is non Christian is completely static, as though it's totally conservative. It never changes. Somebody doing Something in the 15th century would be exactly the same as someone was doing in the third century, which. Which is, you know, ridiculous. You know, things change all the time. And I think that there is a sort of desire here in terms of looking at the sacred groves continuing to exist as resistance, you know, as, oh, no, we are simply still so pagan in huge air quotes that we are not going to cut down these things where it's like, this is a practicality, these are material conditions that the Church didn't really look into. You know, with earlier conversion efforts, for example, you know, other times when people from Prague go and find some non Christians, you know, they show up and they build churches. They show up and they give out alms, shout out to Saint Adelbert of Prague and his mission to Pomerania. But, you know, they do these things that really change things for people. And here it's much more like, well, our work here is done and nothing has really actually been done because this is happening more at a royal level than the granular level where things need to change.
- [52:13]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that the fact that this happens at this moment in the history of the Western Church is probably significant. I think that when you look at the late 14th century, it's not necessarily the time you would select as the high point of Christian zeal within Latin Christendom. You know, the Crusades have died down, there is this complacency that's setting in of Christendom triumphant. And I think there is this sense that all that needs to be done is to bring these people within the sphere of influence of Christendom. And I think that's probably the best way to think of it insofar as from this moment onwards, any Lithuanian pagans are sort of potential Latin Christians. It's as though they have given their allegiance to Christendom. Latin Christendom. And that's the important thing. The important thing is that that has prevented them from being drawn into Orthodox Christendom and it's prevented them from being drawn into the sphere of the Crimean Tatars and the Muslim world. And so that basically just means they may still be pagans, but they are effectively, you know, Catholics by allegiance. And you'll get these visitations, you know, when bishops will travel around the Diocese of Vilnius, which. The Diocese of Vilnius includes most of what is now Lithuania and the entire country of Belarus as it is today. So a bit of an unmanageable diocese. They'll travel around this diocese, this ludicrous diocese, and people will say to them, yeah, yeah, I don't eat meat on Fridays. Yeah, absolutely. I've learned that I don't eat meat on Fridays. Yeah, I venerate the holy host. In fact, I've got one at home, I took it from church and I worship it as a God. You know, it's alongside my household deities. And so you get this kind of Christian esque religion. That's the word I use in my book, Christianesque, in the sense of people who have come into contact with Christianity, they have made an accommodation with Christianity, they have incorporated individual elements of Christianity into their worldview. For example, the consecrated host is holy. Jesus is a holy person. God the Father is a holy person. Mary is a holy person. The church is a source of power, the priest is a holy man, he can do magic. And yet there is no understanding there of, you know, the Christian God is the only God. The other gods aren't real. I should worship only the Christian God. I should go to church every Sunday and learn the catechism and understand the Bible, you know, all this sort of stuff that's non existent basically. And so what you've got is a kind of pre Christian religion that has incorporated by way of bricolage, all these kind of elements of Christianity into it, but without any understanding of the whole. That's why I talk about creole religions. The idea of a kind of a new religion that has been made from bits and pieces of two pre existing ones.
- [55:19]
Dr. Francis Young
I absolutely love when this happens. You know, we, we get kind of cool examples of this. For example, when the Vikings Christianize, you know, and you get these great sagas where people are Christians, but for whatever reason Thor is there, you know, we haven't quite got ready to get rid of the pantheon. We still like these guys. And, and I think that these things are so important because it shows us a bit more about how practice takes a while to catch up with theory, you know, and I'm, I have no doubt that were we to find a Latvian from this time, they would tell you that they were Christian. But it, it's not necessarily so that their practice would mirror, you know, what's happening in Rome, for example, that kind of thing.
- [56:03]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that one of the key differences when you look at Lithuania, that is to say the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, this vast territory, not what we think of as Lithuania today, which is quite A small country, this vast territory, there's no systematic attempt to convert it ever. There's no state driven, there's no elite driven, there's no royally driven campaign to convert. And that's a contrast with Sweden and Norway. So Sweden and Norway, you've got the Sami, who we already mentioned, who are living in the far north of Sweden and Norway. You know, extensive royal efforts, centrally driven, are mounted to try and convert these people. Likewise in Muscovy, what becomes Russia, you know, intense efforts driven by the tsar, that these Muslims must be converted, these animists must be converted, everybody must be Orthodox. You cannot be Russian unless you are Orthodox, all that sort of stuff, you know. In Spain, likewise, you know, when the Canary Islands are conquered in the 15th century, these people must be Catholic, otherwise they cannot be Spanish. And of course, what happens in the New World, but in Poland, Lithuania, which I think at this point we can start talking about Poland Lithuania with a hyphen, because you've got this sort of strange union between the two countries. There isn't anything like that. And it's to do with this peculiar political constitution of Poland Lithuania, which will become the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, that it doesn't have a centralized and effective royal authority. It just doesn't exist. The nobility, individual nobles who can be of quite low social rank and yet have noble status, they have a great deal of local power. There are these individual assemblies and parliaments and all sorts of kind of local traditions and privileges. And the only people who are interested in converting is not the secular authorities, who have no interest whatsoever, but the church. And the church is just not up to the job. You know, it's not until much later, at the end of the 16th century, that the Jesuit order come in that they actually start to make headway. But these earlier attempts, basically a bunch of Polish priests who don't want to be there, it is the worst job in the world. If you imagine that, you know, you could be enjoying a cozy canonry in Krakow and suddenly, you know, you're being sent to a bog in the middle of Lithuania where everybody's sacrificing to perkunas. I mean, there's no money in it, you know, there's no lifestyle, there's no remuneration. And this is again a period of the late medieval church when the church has become quite financially focused, you know, on cultivating the tithes of the people and all this kind of stuff. And that, that infrastructure, that ecclesiastical infrastructure, it does not exist. And so most of the clergy who are being sent out there are drunks and, you know, good for nothings. They're the last people, the kind of the rejects of the Polish church who are capable of carrying out this conversion.
- [59:08]
Dr. Francis Young
I just. It's kind of amusing too at this point. The church has so many issues, you know, across Europe. I mean, you got Hussites in Bohemia. What is the point of going up to the bog? I mean, there's. There's no tithes in it for you either. You know, it is the mission in theory, which they should be concerned with. But, you know, the church is a corporation as much as it is anything, really, you know, so. Yeah, look, I mean, to kind of try to bring this to more of a close, I guess there's. I've got a philosophical question for you. Is your book is called Silence of the Gods, but are the gods silenced? You know, I wouldn't say say that this is. This is kind of like a sweeping silencing that happens at least certainly not within the medieval purview of your work.
- [60:00]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I mean, I think the reason I chose that title was because there's so much we don't know. And it's not really the silence of the gods. It's the silence of the people who worshiped those gods that we're constantly confronted with. And so it serves as a metaphor, I suppose, for that silence, that human silence. Yeah. But you're absolutely right that this does not end in the middle age. This is not over. Absolutely not. It certainly doesn't end in 1387. In fact, we can find reports of essentially quite recognizable pre Christian practices, such as the worship of sacred trees in Lithuania going right up into the late 18th century. And I would argue that when it comes to Lithuania, it's not really until the partition of Poland, Lithuania, the final partition in 1795, when Lithuania becomes part of the Russian Empire, that the Lithuanians decide to go all in and identify with Catholicism. Because once your identity is threatened by an alien power which has a different religion, Russian Orthodoxy, and wants to russify you and turn you into something that you're not, you're going to go for the strongest cultural force, the strongest organization, the one organization that still survives from the former time, and that is the Catholic Church. And so when you look at, you know, the leaders of the Lithuanian national revival, leaders of resistance movements, very often they were Catholic priests. And Lithuanian Catholicism becomes this deeply kind of syncretic construction. When you look at Lithuanian Catholicism today, still so many elements that you can look at and say, oh yeah, I can see the sort of the pagan antecedents for that. And yet, I think by that point, Lithuania is all in on Catholicism because of that identity, very much like the Poles all in on Catholicism because it's become a mainstay of national identity. But in Lithuania, it happens very, very late. And likewise, when you look at the Sami, for example, example, by the 18th century, the Sami have started to internalize Christianity. In other words, they've started to see slightly deviant forms of Christianity, like sort of revivalist, charismatic forms of Christianity, as a better way of resisting colonialism than their own traditions, because their own traditions are being forgotten. You know, there's this kind of cultural attrition where over time, you will lose memory, you will lose cultural memory. But if somebody who is themselves from the Sami community introduces you to ecstatic forms of pietist Lutheranism that are different from the kind that the state is trying to push on you, then you might go with that new form of Christianity as your sort of center of identity rather than those disappearing traditions. But even so, I mean, when you look at Estonia, Estonia, for example, there never really is an identification with Christianity in Estonia. I mean, gradually, most people end up being either Orthodox or Lutheran or Catholic in Latgele, but there isn't really this kind of profound identification. And I think when you go to modern Estonia, you see that that religion doesn't really have the kind of place in Estonia that it does in many other countries of Europe where there's a national religion that's kind of bound up with the spirit of the people or whatever. Estonia, I think it's probably the easiest country in Europe to say that you're pagan because the Estonians were pagan for so long. And, you know, likewise, when you go to certain parts of Russia, which, sadly, I have not been to. I would love to, but, you know, circumstances being what they are, it's unlikely. But, you know, Mariel, for example, on the Volga, you've got this small kind of republic within the Russian Federation where they quite openly and officially identify as being pagans. And, you know, elements of that are a revival, elements of that are a recovery of identity, but elements of that genuinely have persisted, and they did, you know, manage to survive this kind of attempt at Russification.
- [64:07]
Dr. Francis Young
I think that this is a really important point and perhaps that we need to kind of grab on, since I've kept you here for so long. But I think that there is a kind of tendency, both because of the romanticization that we've had surrounding pagan religion, to say, okay, well, we need to look for some kind of antecedent some pure form, a pure form of paganism that existed or these traditions that have definitively survived, you know, as opposed to kind of our desire to say, oh yeah, but it's not really historically accurate. But I suppose if we look at it as a living religion, which it is for some of these people. Yeah, well, things do change, don't they? And we do invent new traditions all the time and we do create new ways of doing things. So there is, I think, this quite interesting new paganism that is happening that has some, you know, historical basis. But, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, things would have stayed static even without forced Christianization, you know, from the 14th century. I mean, my God, that's a really long time ago when you think about it.
- [65:18]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. As you say, there are thriving native faith movements as they're often known within many of these countries. So you've got Romova in Lithuania, you've got Devturi in Latvia, Marsuled in Estonia for example, and the Mariel traditional revival Neo Shamanism amongst the Sami. These are, you know, fascinating religious developments. And I'm fascinated by new religious movements. They are to a large extent kind of reconstructive. They're an attempt to almost reverse engineer folklore. So you kind of take the large body of folklore that was recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries and to pick out what you think from that folklore might probably be pagan and then screen out the stuff that's Christian. Now obviously that's a highly subjective process and there are individuals who were folklorists and scholars who kind of were involved in those movements and did that. And I think what you've created there is something which is going to appeal to a certain number of people, but probably won't ever have kind of majority appeal. But I think when you look at the broader cultures within these countries, there is a broad identification with the pre Christian worldview which doesn't require people to say, oh, you know, I'm a pagan, or you know, I'm a member of this revivalist organization and we all dress up and we perform rituals on a hill. Some people do, but not. But most people don't in most cases. It's just a sense that your identity is complex and it has overlapping elements. And some of those elements may be Christian and some of those elements may be pre Christian. I've spoken to Sami people, for example, in the far north of Norway who they would identify themselves as Lutheran Christians. And yet they have an understanding of the importance of the Sieidi. That is to say the Sami sacred site, that there are certain sites where when traveling through the landscape you would never leave litter, you would never camp, you would never light a fire there because they are a, a sacred site and they don't see that as being inconsistent with or in conflict with their identity as Christian. And I think most people have these overlapping identities and they're quite at ease with those overlapping identities. And it's the same with Lithuanians. You know, many Lithuanians will identify as Catholic or culturally Catholic, but have no problem with engaging in dances and rituals and things which are very much of a sort of pre Christian flavor in Lithuanian culture. So yeah, I think that the future is probably that both elements will remain the sort of the later Christian identification, but also these pre Christian identities. And that, yeah, they will remain part of a kind of a composite identity which is crucial in many cases to these countries because it is what defines them against what they were forced to be under Soviet occupation in the case of the Baltic States and how they preserved their identity under that occupation. But political freedom obviously does give the possibility of more objective evaluations of some of this history. And yeah, hopefully that's what I've managed to do is to kind of, you know, give an honest appraisal of what we can know historically about these religious traditions.
- [68:41]
Dr. Francis Young
Francis, I cannot thank you enough for having written a really excellent and engaging book on subject matter that I think is way too often overlooked, but also just so fun. My God, is this an interesting work and something that I really hope people pick up and read. And thank you so much for coming on today to talk about it.
- [69:03]
Matt Lewis
Well, thank you Eleanor. It's been lovely to talk to you.
- [69:05]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Thanks to Frances Young and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want to know more about attempts to Christianize the Baltics, why not check out our previous episode on the Teutonic Knights. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award winning original TV documentaries including my recent film Medieval Apocalypse and ad free podcasts by signing up@historyhit.com subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.
- [70:01]
Matt Lewis
Foreign.
- [70:07]
E Trade
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- [70:39]
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