Free The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen Page A

leadership of a line of rulers that came to power in the early thirteenth century. What gave the nations their identity before that was their exploitation of broadly homogeneous settlement areas, a common language and common religious cults. The discernible social developments of the period 1000–1200 – militarization, lordship, class-distinction, accumulation of heritable wealth – were not necessarily leading to greater cohesion or solidarity between the tribes. For example, the five ‘jurisdictions’ we find among the Curonians in the ninth century had become eight in the thirteenth century, and as late as 1219 the Lithuanians obeyed five great chiefs and sixteen lesser ones.
    Like the Slavs, the Balts were farmers, clearing land by burn-beating and tree-cutting, ploughing it both with wooden and with iron-tippedploughs, and raising crops on a two- or three-field rotation: mostly inferior wheat (spelt), rye and millet, but they knew about legumes, oats and barley. They harvested both with sickle and with scythe, raised cattle and horses, grew flax and wove linen. They had been settled in this region so long that they had little to learn about getting a living from it, and they had mastered the art of winning valuable commodities and foods from the surrounding forest and sea: from the forest, honey, wax and furs; from the sea, amber, the petrified resin of the fir-tree washed ashore along the coast of the Prussian peninsula of Samland. Since Neolithic times this substance had been exported to southern Europe and exchanged en route for Mediterranean artefacts; it remained for centuries the most profitable product of the Baltic. The exhaustion of rival deposits on the west coast of Jutland left the Prussians a monopoly, and Scandinavian merchants, also interested in furs and slaves, dealt with them, and even settled among them, at the ports of Truso and Wiskiauten in the period 700–900. During those years the Vikings may have secured the sort of lordship over some Prussians that they were to gain over Slavs and other Eastern peoples, but the evidence for this is slender, and King Alfred’s informant Wulfstan reported the Prussians to be a strong and independent nation. The Curonians appear to have been tributary to the Swedes in the ninth century, but, long before 1100, both they and the Prussians had emerged as redoubtable seafarers, trading and raiding on their own account, in vessels not unlike those of the Vikings.
    The leaders of the coastal Balts took to the sea; but all the Balt nations were strengthening their defences by building large earthworks topped by wooden walls and towers, and by accepting the authority of warlords. These leaders – ‘kings’, ‘captains’ and ‘dukes’ in foreign sources – were the organizers of the tribal aristocracy, the warriors who could equip themselves with horses and weapons, or knew how to use them. Such fighters, at least before 1200, probably consisted of most of the able-bodied men of the tribe, and must therefore have included small cultivators who would have been classed as unfree or unmilitary peasants among the Danes and Slavs; they went to war in clothes of linen and wool, their bodies protected by shields and helmets, and were familiar with both the stirrup and the spur. Their leaders decked themselves in more elaborate equipment, and enhanced their position by accumulating loot and slaves, but it would appear that in 1200 the building-up of largeprivate estates of land had not got very far among them. According to Wulfstan, the Balts of his day competed for a dead man’s wealth by horse-races after his death; in the thirteenth century landownership was vested in extended kin-groups rather than in individuals.
    Slave-ownership and accumulations of silver currency bars were the most important differentials of wealth; perhaps wives were as well. The Curonian chiefs appear from the archaeology of their graves to have enjoyed as high a standard of living as any