Baltic Crusades

When the order established his rule in Prussia, Poland was a widely weak and fragmented country. This changed during the 14th century and especially after the Union with Lithuania. So both became competitors.

BTW, Wednesday derived from Wotan or exactly from an older wodnesdaeg.

I am not sure what you mean, of course is the christian belief, the european culture filled with pagan relicts. But different to the crusaders, who supported the roman-catholic confession, the Balts did not worship the mosaic god, the holy spirit and Jesus, but worshiped the Pruzzian gods. Their names are known by the reports of christian scholars, allthough not all reported are accepted as historic. Some of the pruzzian gods appear as well in other baltic religions.

The Baltic religion is independent from Mithra or its Roman version Mithras. And allthough there are some parallels and maybe even some influence on Christianity, both religions seem to have different origins.

a lot is not known and when, then mostly by christian scholars. Like other indo-european people they seem to have had three major gods, Perkunas, Patrimpo and Patollo. While Perkunas was probably the god of thunder, Patrimpo seem to have had relations with water. Patollo may have been the god of the dead. But that's all not very certain.

As far as I know there has been no evidence of this battle ever fought!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Ice

Regards,
Ron

Originally posted by opuslola As far as I know there has been no evidence of this battle ever fought! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Ice Regards, Ron

No, there is no doubt, that these battle was fought, just the size and the importance of these battle is questioned or at least discussed.

to participate in a crusade which was not as risky as the crusades in the near east.

I wouldn't say the Prussian crusade was less risky. I own a book "Państwo Zakonu Krzyżackiego w Prusach. Władza i Społeczeństwo." ("The State of the Teutonic Order in Prussia. The Authorities and the Society") and on one page authors of this book provide an estimate of how many Brother-Knights, highest-ranking members of the Order, were killed during the circa 55 years of the conquest of Prussia. If I remember correctly (late I will try to find this page - even though the book is 500 pages long so it won't be easy - and check it one more time), that number was 1300. And please note that the number of Brother-Knights never exceeded few hundreds at any given point in time, especially in that early period (1200s). The Order was able to eventually conquer Prussia largely thanks to help of crusaders from all of Europe, German states and Polish states. Another factor which enabled that was the network of strongholds and castles, which allowed them to control territory even when they were suffering defeats in battles.

The Order learned how to construct castles on an "industrial scale" already during its presence in the Holy Land. Later they practiced fortification-building also in Burzenland (even though King Andrew forbade them to construct with use of stone). King Andrew forbade them to construct of stone / brick, but they didn't observe that rule entirely (in some cases they broke that prohibition). This was one of reasons why they were expelled.


Edited by Domen - 08-Feb-2014 at 18:10

And there was me, thinking it was because they sang in harmonics!