Balts

Those who remained along the Middle Dnieper gave birth to the Slavic languages.

Fun fact, per Spinney, the Balts continued to sacrifice horses in rituals resembling the Ashvamedha of the Rig Veda all the way up through the 13th century AD.

And we'll dig more into that IE tradition next episode.

I mentioned that by 2500 BC, genetically quote-unquote pure Yamnaya still existed in some regions.

This notion that the West was grabbing countries is nonsense.

The Poles, the Balts, the Hungarians, they were pounding on us to get in.

We were responding to something demand-driven.

Hmm.

That is, it didn't have the US overturning the table, and it did have strong language in support of Ukraine, and the underlying basis for this good summit was the decision by European governments, most of them, to increase their defense spending.

The Poles and the Germans are the big European countries in the lead.

The Poles have been there for a while, and of course, the Finns, the Swedes, the Balts, they're already there.

But the fact that the Germans are rebuilding their military created a basically critical mass for those transatlanticists in the Trump administration to convince Trump to take that win Now, there are other voices in the Trump administration.

There is far more Greek and Roman literature, but it is very distant from us and much of it is impious.

The Balts practiced their native religion far more recently, but it is very poorly attested.

The Norse literary tradition thus has the most recency and the most quantity without sacrificing one or the other.

Do you want to say anything?

They're Poles.

They go on to become the Poles.

Then there's Balts.

There's the Rus, like East Slavs, right? Then we have the Sphere and the Geats, right? As I said, there were initially 13 tribes in Sweden.

How did the Polish-Lithuanian alliance defeat one of medieval Europe's most formidable military powers? Why did this battle become such a defining moment in Polish and Lithuanian history? And what happened to those two legendary swords? To help us answer those questions, I'm joined by Dr.

Alexander Pluskowski, professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Reading and author of The Black Cross, A History of the Baltic Crusades.

Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Alex.

Thanks for having me back.

What is a crusading order doing in the northeast of Europe?

Okay, so as you said, the Teutonic Order are a crusading order.

They're a German-speaking Catholic military institution, and they built their territorial state on the southern and eastern Baltic coast, and this took place over much of the 13th century.

They were actually invited to the region by the Polish Duke of Mazovia, Conrad, in, in 1230, and joined or started to lead the crusades against his neighbors, the pagan Prussians.

And by the way, when this doesn't work...

You know, when the Poles and the Balts and the Europeans stand up to them, they're going to go to their lackeys in the Balkans, Vucic of Serbia, Dudik of Republic Srpski, and stir up the mess in Bosnia and Kosovo and try to distract.

So I think it's more of a distraction game there.

I think what's going on, I think Taiwan and China could lead to some escalation, but not escalation into a kinetic scenario, but escalation into a cyber-enabled economic warfare where they try to break the societal resilience of China.

So this is another sort of piece of the puzzle here.

So months ago, CIA briefed the Poles, the Scandinavians, and the Balts and said, "We have intelligence that the Russians are gonna do something.

We don't know what it is.

It could be cyberattacks." They do that.

I've seen people in Latvia walking on the beach in winter, particularly after a storm, eyes down.

They are looking for something washed up on the shore that is older than the dinosaurs' extinction, older than the Baltic Sea itself, older than Latvia as a territory.

Today we're talking about amber, zintas, as it's known in Latvian.

The fossil that isn't quite a rock, isn't quite a jewel, yet has shaped trade routes, folklore, craft guilds and Latvian identity for thousands of years.

We'll explore how it was formed, where the Balts believed it came from, how it travelled from these shores to the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, and how it ended up pinned to the shoulder of traditional Latvian costumes.

And how to buy the real thing without getting stung.

A story about Baltic gold.

The Origins of Amber There was a big storm in Latvia at the weekend, and I'm walking along the beach at Mezirbe.

So we've talked about the Hanseatic League and the building blocks of German trade, but there's another medieval powerhouse that shaped the map of the East.

I'm thinking of the Teutonic Order, the Deutscher Orden, and their strange, brutal, and surprisingly enduring experiment in the Baltic.

The Crusader monks who ended up running Prussia.

That always seemed like such a twist.

Exactly.

They started in Acre during the Crusades.

But by the 13th century, they'd been invited to the Baltic frontier to fight pagan Prussians.

And they didn't just fight, they built a state.

Even where churches were being built and baptisms being performed, many communities continued practicing older forms of religion well into the modern period.

So, who are we talking about here? Broadly speaking, we're talking about the indigenous peoples of Europe's northern and eastern frontiers, groups who lived outside the political and cultural centers of medieval Christendom, from the Arctic Circle down through the Baltic coast and into the vast western interior of Russia.

This included peoples such as the Sami, the indigenous people of northern Feniscandia, today's Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula.

The Sami retained elements of their pre-Christian religion well into the 17th and 18th centuries.

Their religious specialists used drums and trance states to mediate between humans and the spirit world, sometimes called shamanism.

Sami cosmology was deeply tied to the land, and many continued their traditional sacrificial rites even after their nominal Christianization.

Next are the Baltic peoples, especially the Lithuanians, Latvians, and the Old Prussians.

Lithuania's elite technically converted to Christianity in 1387, but pre-Christian religion continued for generations.