Free The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen Page B

other Northern social group at this period; they could certainly dispose of iron, precious metal, jewellery, women and manpower in as much profusion as the Scandinavian landlords whom they preyed on and bargained with, and the size of the great earthworks at Impiltis (12½ acres) and Apuole attest their military potential. The price for this prosperity was paid mostly by the peasants of Sweden and Curonia, who for fear of raids and captivity were unable to live along their fertile coastlands, and by the prisoners the Curonian chiefs imported for ransom, forced labour or trade.
    The Lettish chiefs maintained their hold on the Dvina valley by setting themselves up in similar huge fortifications, which served as settlements and trading-posts for their dependants; their remains can be seen at Lielupe, Tervete, Daugmale, Jersika and elsewhere. They had recently learned how to conserve fuel by using stone or clay stoves rather than open hearths, and the Dvina supplied them with a constant flow of customers for their wares, and of the silver, wool and weapons they took in exchange. There were Russian tribute-posts at Jersika and Kauguru (Kukenois, Kokenhusen), but the Letts were not Russified, and for the most part they held their own against all comers. It could be said of them, as Bartholomew the Englishman wrote of the Lithuanians in the 1230s, that they were
    stalworth men, strong werriours and fers. The glebe of the cuntrey… bereth wel corne and fruyte and is ful of mores and marys in many places, with ful many woodes, ryvers and waters and wylde beestes and tame; and is strengthede with woodes, mores and marys, and hath litel other strengthe but woodes, mores and marys. Therefore unneth that londe maye be assailed in summer, but on wynter, when waters and ryvers ben yfrore. 18
     
    This tendency to dig in, fight back and grow rich had not endeared the Balts to Christendom, or opened their country to Christian missions. Boleslaw the Terrible of Poland had sent St Adalbert of Prague to thePrussians in 997 and they had martyred him; Sweyn II of Denmark told Adam of Bremen that he had had a church built among the Curonians, but nothing more is heard of it. The cult of holy places, plants and animals, the cult of the dead ( veles ) and the cult of gods were the essential guarantees of the health, security, success and identity of the family, village and tribe, and the wise men and women who understood the rites were treated with the utmost respect. Festivals of fecundity, and funerals involving the sacrifice of horses and humans, were the high-points of the year, and the lesser domestic rituals were to survive in some areas down to the eighteenth century. And, just as the paganism of the West Slavs appears to have gained in vigour under assault from outside, so the paganism of the Balts was to reveal remarkable powers of development wherever it was saved from the first impact of the Church Militant by determined war-leaders. The sacrificial fire-place and four-headed pillar under the cathedral cemetery of Riga were not the end of the story.
    North of the Dvina valley, the country changes. First come the boggy highlands and rocky coasts of Estonia, where the oak, the ash and the elm no longer predominate, and pine grows thicker; ‘the glebe thereof bereth menelich corne’, wrote Bartholomew. ‘This lond is moyste with waters and pondes. There is plente of fyshe of the see, and of layes and pondes: there ben many flokkes of bestes.’ East of Lake Chud (Peipus, Peipsi), where the last swans nested, and then north, lies the great coniferous forest, drained by wide rivers in north-western Russia and threaded by a complicated pattern of bogs, lakes and streams in Finland. We approach the climatic frontier, where arable soils dwindle and the calendar defeats the farmer; flour is eked out with ground pine-bark, there are no bees and no orchards, hen’s eggs are a delicacy. Gathering, trapping and hunting play a much larger part in