Free The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen

would pass through their hands, and that the products of the whole surrounding region would come to their markets. It was a hegemony built on communications by a smaller nation of monopolists. Their wealth depended on the river boat and the sledge. So far, they had established no firm political control over the peoples living round them; but their hold on the eastern threshold made Novgorod potentially as dominant a force in the eastern Baltic as the Saxons and Poles on the southern shore.
    East of the Vistula a dense deciduous forest stretched most of the way from the Baltic coast to the west Russian uplands. In the Wendish woodlands, the going was difficult; here, for the most part, there was no way through at all. Layers of dead wood, luxuriant undergrowth, lakes, bogs and hills confined human settlement to the coastal strip and the valleys of the Vistula, Niemen and Dvina; and among the oaks, ash, elms, linden-trees and maples that hemmed in the cleared ground grazed the aurochs, the bison, the bear and the elk.
    This area, of some 400 miles from north to south, 300 from east to west, was the home of a group of peoples known nowadays as Balts. They seem to have arrived as the earliest westward migration of the Indo-European family, and by 1100 had lived there for at least 3000 years, during which they had lost ground outside the forest to later immigrants. Their languages were archaic, and are divided into an East and West Baltic group; their common civilization and religious belief make it possible to treat them as a unity similar to that of the West Slavs, but whether they considered themselves in this light is uncertain. From the earliest times, they had lived as separate peoples, occupying defined geographical limits. They were
    1 the Prussians, first named as such in the ninth century (by the ‘Bavarian geographer’), who lived between the Lower Vistula, the Narew, the Niemen and the Baltic coast;
    2 the Lithuanians, who lived north and east of the Niemen, within the watershed of its tributaries the Nevezis and the Viliya;
    3 the Latvian nations, who lived on the lower Dvina and were called Lettigallians north of the river and Semigallians and Selonians to the south (they are now known as Letts); and
    4 the Curonians (first named in the ninth century by Latin sources, and called Kurir by the Scandinavians), who lived on the peninsula between the Baltic and the Gulf of Riga, spoke a tongue akin to Lettish, but had become mixed with settlers of Fennic stock, and adopted some of their ways.
     
    These larger nations were associations of smaller groups, which may be termed tribes, and which were the effective political units until historical times. The tribe could mobilize as an army ( karya in Prussian, karias in Lithuanian) and assemble in a meeting ( wayde ); it had its own defensive refuge forts, and took collective responsibility for keeping its frontiers. Some tribes were remarkably ancient (Ptolemy mentioned two south-east Prussian tribes, the Galindians and Sudovians, in the second century AD, and they survived into the thirteenth century), but their ability to maintain their autonomy and manpower was evidently unequal. Some tribal armies had bigger forts and more effective war-leaders than others. Some combined, as did the Zemaiciai (Samogitians) and Aukstaiciai, who made up the Lithuanians. Some throve at the expense of their neighbours. Some lost land to outsiders – as the Pomesanians and Pogesanians of Prussia had been pushed back from the Vistula by the Poles before 1200, and the Letts of Jersika had been subjugated by the Russians. Tribes could combine in warfare, but there is no evidence that the whole collection of tribes we call a nation ever came together for a common purpose until after the twelfth century. The Prussian tribes never acted as one, perhaps because until the crusades any one or two were able to deal with outside aggression; the Lithuanians were welded together by the vigorous