The current featured article on Wikipedia is about Jogaila, a Polish-Lithuanian king of the mid-14th century. It says he was pagan, which shocked me. I had thought that Christianity had spread throughout Europe long before that, at least in some form. As I remember, it arrived in Russia (in the form we would call Russian Orthodox) in the late 900s. The article suggests that Catholicism was in Poland at the same time.
Why did it take so long for a Lithuanian king to be baptized?
More importantly, what “cult” did he worship? The only northern European “pagan” religions I know are the Celtic cult and Norse mythology, and my impression was that they had died out long before the 14th century.
I was under the impression that the Baltics were Christianised by the Hanseatic Germans (the Knights Templar?) well after 1000. Neo-pagan magazines I have read said that the Christian veneer in Lithuania isn’t too deep even now.
Here, a book for you. I’ve been meaning to buy it for about two or three years now, but like more than a few Cambridge University Press offerings the price always makes me hesitate and seek out alternative reading material. Maybe this Christmas…
Poland was Christianized in 966 AD. I remember, because our (Polish) Catholic Church made a big deal in 1966 about “a millenium of Christianity”. I assume that this means they had a Catholic King, and churches established. But paganism doesn’t all disappear at once. I’m sure there were holdouts in the countryside (“Pagan” comes from “paganus”, meaning “rustic”, precisely because the Old Religion lingered on in the country, and the urban areas were converted to Christianity first.) There are reports of “pagan” practices (although not necessarily consciously practiced as a religion) from remote areas into the 20th century.
The conversion of Poland to Christianity added a new eastern border to the Catholic empire but also acted as a hedge against the Holy Roman Empire’s imperialistic spread in the name of converting pagans. In fact, Prince Mieszko’s conversion to Catholicism (the 966 AD “Baptism of Poland”) was more of a protective measure by bringing Poland under the protection of the Church than it was any spiritual awakening.
However, the rural regions of Poland (i.e. almost all of it) remained pagan for a long time after. As well, Poland didn’t seem to have the same imperialistic ambitions as their western neighbors and never attempted to annex Lithuania by force under the guise of Christian conversion. The upshot being that Lithuania’s paganism remained fairly undisturbed for another couple hundred years until the joint Polish-Lithuanian union caused Lithuania to go Catholic.
What prevented the spread of Russian Orthodoxism from the east, I’m not sure. It probably just didn’t reach there in time.
I should note that this map calls Poland’s neighbor the “Kingdom of Germany” so I might have referred to it incorrectly (its name seems to change a lot from period to period). It’s been a while since I wrote my paper on the Baptism of Poland. Anyway, I refer to the folks just west of Poland who were under the reign of Emperor Otto at the time.
Even from the text of the article it seems clear that Romuva is not a religion with genuinely ancient roots but is just another of several attempts to “revive” pagan traditions.
At that time, constitutionally the H.R.E. was not only a true empire, as opposed to its later faineant role, but also a multinational one. Germany was a kingdom, already largely run by the markgrafs, landgraves, grand dukes, princes, and miscellaneous paraphenalia of a distributed-power state, but all of them owing formal vassalage to the King of the Germans. The Empire as well included Bohemia, Lombardy, and Burgundy, each with its own king, outside the abstract ‘Germany’ owing allegiance to the King of the Germans.
“Heathen” likewise means “of the countryside” (the heath). And I once saw in a documentary (a neopagan propaganda piece) that the traditional portrayal of witches wearing conical hats originally was a bit of Church propaganda to make witches/pagans look like ignorant old-fashioned hicks – conical hats having passed out of fashion in the cities about a hundred years before the image was introduced, but still holding out here and there in the countryside.
This topic made me pull out my copy of A Concise History of Poland (Jerzy Lukowski & Hubert Zawadzki) which added a little additional information. Regarding paganism in Poland, it’s noted that the Slavic pagans between the Elbe and the Oder rivers (the eastern quarter of modern Germany) were not truely brought under control and turned Christian until the mid-12th century.
About Lithuania itself, at the time of the Lithuanian-Polish union, Lithuania stretched from the Baltic to the Black sea but was increasingly unstable. Because of its growth into Orthodox lands, it’s suggested that the pagan ‘true’ Lithuanians making up the core of the empire were outnumbered seven to one by Orthodox people living in captured Lithuanian lands. Jogaila worried that the kingdom would crumble and his ability to rule would be overthrown by Rus’ Orthodoxy. To make matters worse, Lithuania had suffered from crippling Teutonic invasions over the last century. His marriage to the Polish Jadwiga was done for much the same reasons as the Polish Prince Mieszko married a Bohemian princess and adopted Christianity in 966 – Jogaila figured that embracing Latin Catholicism would be a defense against the Teutonic attacks and an alliance with Poland would be the best means of preserving Lithuania’s identity.
Interestingly, the adoption of Catholicism into Lithuania only applied to the Lithuanian pagans. The Orthodox subjects were under no onus to convert to Latin Christianity and were free to practice their own faith.
So, back to the original question, Lithuanian paganism remained as long as it did partially because of the conversion of Poland slowing down the HRE’s conversion-by-force of the Slavs and partially because Lithuania eventually became powerful enough to spread itself into Orthodox lands rather than the Orthodox conquering Lithuania. However the Polish ‘barrier’ against Catholic invasions couldn’t last forever and the inclusion of Orthodox lands into Lithuania slowly broke the pagan leadership apart. It just took a long time for it to happen.
Nope, the Teutonic Knights, I believe. If I remember correctly, Prussia was founded by this order and is the reason why that country had such a militaristic heritage. The Teutonic Knights generally kicked butt on their crusades. But sometimes the pagans won. One thing the pagans did when they did capture ground was to dig up bodies and burn them. This wasn’t out of vindictiveness. They believed that you had to burn the body or the persons spirit would walk the earth as a ghost.
A European knight didn’t even have to leave Europe to get credit as a Crusader; he could just go to Poland/Lithuania and kill heathen peasants with the Teutonic Knights. (And of course, in the early 13th century, there was the Albigensian Crusade; didn’t even have to leave France.)