Apuolė

← Encyclopedia

Eight kilometers east of Skuodas, in the far northwestern corner of Lithuania, the river Luoba meets a smaller stream called the Brukis, and on the tongue of high ground above their meeting a hill stands apart from the fields. Its sides are too steep and too regular to be the work of water alone. The crown is level, ringed by the worn line of an earthen bank, and from it the ground falls away on three sides to the wet meadows of the river. Below the modern village of the same name, the hill carries the marks of having been cut, banked, and crowned across many generations — a fortress raised in earth and timber, held by a people of the coast, and then left to the grass. The place is Apuolė, and it owns a distinction that belongs to no other point on the whole map of the Baltic lands: it is the first of them to be written down.

The hill, the people, and the war that named it

Apuolė is a hillfort — a piliakalnis, in the Lithuanian word for the dozens of such fortified hills that stand across the country — set on the upper terrace where the Luoba receives the Brukis stream, in the Skuodas district of the historic region of Žemaitija, the Samogitian lowland of the northwest. The fortified crown covers roughly six and a half thousand square meters and rises some ten meters above the surrounding ground; around it, on the gentler slopes and the terrace below, lay an open settlement that the protected monument reckons across more than three hundred thousand square meters of ancient living-ground. The defended hill and the town at its foot were a single thing: a stronghold and the community it sheltered, of a size that marks Apuolė as a center rather than a mere refuge.

The people who raised and held it were the Curonians, one of the Baltic peoples — the seafaring folk of the coast whose lands ran along the eastern shore of the sea through what is now western Lithuania and the Courland of Latvia, and who gave their name to that country and to the long sandspit of the Curonian shore. The fuller account of the Curonians as a people — their ships and their raiding, their reach across the Baltic, their long absorption into the kingdoms that came after — belongs with the Curonians themselves. What matters here is that Apuolė was one of their inland strongholds, a fortified hill of a maritime people set back from the open coast on a river that ran down toward the sea, in the country that the medieval Latin sources called Curonia or Couronia. The wooden fortifications of the hill have been dated by excavation as far back as the first century of the common era, which makes the defended site very old; the great phase of its life, and the moment that carried it into history, falls in the late Iron Age, in the ninth century.

That moment is a war. In the middle years of the ninth century a fleet came across the sea against the Curonians, and one of the strongholds it attacked was Apuolė. The campaign is dated to the year 853 — sometimes given as 854 — and it is known from a single source, written down far from the hill and for reasons of its own, in a Christian Latin life of a missionary saint. That source is the Vita Ansgarii, the Life of Saint Ansgar, composed between 869 and 876 by Rimbert, a monk who had been Ansgar’s companion and who succeeded him as archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. Ansgar was the apostle of the north, the missionary who carried Christianity to the Danes and the Swedes; Rimbert’s book is a saint’s life, written to commemorate him and to set out the providence of God working through the conversion of the heathen north. The siege of Apuolė enters that book not as a chapter of Baltic history but as an episode in a missionary story — and the distance, and the interest, of such a source must be held in view through everything it reports. Rimbert wrote a generation after the events, in a different land, in the service of a faith whose triumph his whole book is built to display.

What Rimbert relates is this. The Curonians, he says, had once been subject to the Swedes and had thrown off that subjection; the Danes attempted to bring them back and were beaten, losing half their force and the cargo of their ships. Then Olaf, king of the Swedes — Olof in the modern Swedish form — gathered a great army and a fleet and crossed to the country of the Curonians to do what the Danes had failed to do. His force came first to a town the chronicle calls Seeburg, which is identified with Grobiņa on the Latvian coast; it is said to have held seven thousand fighting men, and the Swedes stormed it, plundered it, and burned it. From there the army marched five days inland and came against the fortress the chronicle names Apulia — Apuolė — which it reckons at fifteen thousand armed men. The Swedes laid siege. For eight days, by Rimbert’s account, the two sides fought hard, the defenders holding their banks and the attackers unable to break in, until the besiegers grew weary and afraid and their spirit began to fail.

It is at this point that the story turns on the matter Rimbert cared about. The Swedes, he writes, cast lots to ask whether any of their own gods would aid them in the assault, and no god was willing. Among the army were men who had heard of the Christian faith — traders, in Rimbert’s telling, who knew something of the God preached at Birka — and they urged that lots be cast instead to ask the God of the Christians, and that a vow be made to him. The lots fell favorably; the army took heart, renewed the attack, and pressed the fortress so hard that the Curonians sued for terms. They offered, the chronicle says, all the gold and arms they had taken from the Danes the year before, and half a pound of silver for every man within the walls, and tribute and submission to the Swedish king, and they gave thirty hostages as surety. Olaf took the terms and the hostages and sailed home. Rimbert, writing the providence of his saint, reads the victory plainly: where the heathen gods failed, the Christian God gave the assault its success, and the lesson of the lots is the lesson of the book.

The hillfort of Apuolė in the Skuodas district, the defended crown and the scarped slope above the river meadows. Julius Kanarskas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The numbers should not be taken as a census. Seven thousand at Seeburg and fifteen thousand at Apuolė are the round, large figures of a chronicler reporting a great war he did not see, and the fortress as excavated, for all its size, did not hold a garrison of fifteen thousand men; the figures convey scale and danger, not arithmetic. The casting of lots, the failure of the old gods, the timely turn to the Christian God — these are the load-bearing elements of Rimbert’s purpose, and a critical reading must weigh them as the shaping of a missionary author rather than as a transcript of what the besiegers said on the eighth day. Yet beneath the hagiography the bones of an event stand firm. A Swedish fleet did campaign in the eastern Baltic in the ninth century; the Curonians were a power worth subjecting and worth the cost of subjecting; Seeburg and Apulia were real strongholds, the second of them the great inland fortress whose ramparts still ring the hill above the Luoba. Whatever Rimbert made of it, he was the first person ever to write the name of a Baltic place — and the place he named was this one.

The first-named place and what the ramparts hold

The significance of Apuolė rests on that single fact, and it is worth stating precisely. The Baltic peoples — the Curonians, the Lithuanians, the Old Prussians, the others — left no writing of their own from the pre-Christian centuries. They are among the latest peoples of Europe to enter literate history; the Lithuanian state itself did not take Christianity until 1387, and Samogitia, the very region in which Apuolė lies, not until 1413. For the long age before that, the Baltic lands are known to the written record only when an outsider had reason to write of them — a chronicler, a missionary, a merchant, a crusading order. The siege of 853 is the earliest such moment that can be fixed to a year, and the fortress the chronicle calls Apulia is therefore the earliest named place in all the Baltic country. Everything written of the Balts begins, in the strict chronological sense, with the name of this hill. The hillforts inland, the cremation cemeteries, the holy hills and groves of the religion — all of them were already old when Apuolė stepped out of the wordless past, and they remained wordless after; Apuolė is the threshold, the single point where the prehistory of a whole region first becomes, by one foreign hand, history.

To say so is to mark a distinction between two kinds of knowing, and Apuolė holds both. The 853 siege is text — and external, late, and interested text at that, a Christian source read across a thousand years and a missionary’s intention. The hill itself is something else: a body of earth and timber and buried metal, read by the spade. The two do not always meet neatly. The chronicle gives a year and a name and a tale of lots; the ground gives ramparts, post-holes, weapons, and the slow accumulation of a settlement’s centuries, but it does not give a year or a name or a tale. What the archaeology establishes is the reality and the scale of the place behind the chronicle’s word — a stronghold of the Curonian Iron Age, fortified in earth and wood, ringed and re-ringed across generations, with an open settlement spread below it. The siege is the chronicle’s; the fortress is the ground’s; and the standing of Apuolė depends on both at once, the named event laid against the dug evidence.

The defenses are the most legible thing the hill keeps. Apuolė is one of the larger and better-studied Curonian hillforts, and its earthen ramparts — the worn banks that still ring the level crown — are the visible remains of a timber-and-earth fortification system built up over a long life of the site. The steep natural slopes above the river did half the work; the raised banks, faced and topped with wooden works that have long since rotted away, did the rest, closing the crown into a defended enclosure. Within and around the ramparts the excavators recovered the ordinary and the telling stuff of a late Iron Age stronghold of the coast-facing Baltic world. Among the finds is a timber well preserved in the wet ground at the foot of the slope, its oak ring surviving where the water kept the wood from rot — the kind of waterlogged survival that lets a date and a building method be read directly from the timber. The weapons and the everyday gear of the settlement place Apuolė in the wider material world of the Curonians and their neighbors, a world of iron, trade, and the sea, the same world the chronicle glimpses from the outside when it counts the gold and silver the defenders gave up.

The religion of the people who held the hill is not, in the main, recoverable from the hill itself. Apuolė is a fortress and a settlement, not an excavated sanctuary, and the entry should not load onto its ramparts a cult that the ground has not yielded. What can be said is the general thing true of all the Baltic peoples: they raised almost no temples and worshiped instead at the hill, the grove, the stone, the fire, and the open sky, under powers that the comparative study of the religion knows well — the thunderer Perkūnas of the oak and the storm, kin in the deep Indo-European reckoning to the Norse Thor and the Vedic Indra without being any of them; the sun-goddess; the earth-mother who feeds the living and holds the dead. The Curonians lived inside that world, and a fortified hill above a river was, for such a people, never only a military thing. But the specific rites of Apuolė are not attested, and the honest account leaves them unspoken rather than invented. The one religious scene the sources actually give belongs, ironically, not to the defenders but to the attackers: it is the Swedes outside the walls who cast their lots and changed their god, and it is a Christian chronicler who chose to record it.

The recovery: reading the text against the ground

For most of its history Apuolė was a known name and an unread hill — remembered in the chronicle, pointed to on the ground, but not yet joined the one to the other. The joining is the work of the modern era, and it took two kinds of labor. The first was philological: the slow identification of the chronicle’s Apulia, and of its Seeburg, with real points on the map of the eastern Baltic, so that Rimbert’s missionary episode could be set down on actual ground. The reading of the Latin against the topography of the Curonian coast and its rivers fixed Apulia at the hillfort above the Luoba and Seeburg at Grobiņa on the Latvian shore, and turned a hagiographer’s tale into a locatable event. The second labor was the spade.

The systematic excavation of the Apuolė hillfort belongs to the years between the two world wars. The campaigns of 1928 through 1932, associated above all with the work of Eduards Volters and the Swedish archaeologist Birger Nerman, opened the hillfort and its settlement and recovered the fortification sequence, the structures, and the finds that established the site as a major monument of the Curonian Iron Age; further work followed in later decades, including a campaign in 1996. The Swedish interest was not accidental. Nerman came to Apuolė from the study of the Scandinavian presence in the eastern Baltic — Grobiņa, the chronicle’s Seeburg, had yielded clear evidence of a Scandinavian settlement — and Apuolė stood at the heart of the long scholarly argument over the ninth-century wars that Rimbert recorded: how far the Swedes had reached, what their hold on the Curonian coast amounted to, what the campaign of 853 really was. The hillfort is a fixed point in that debate, the named fortress where text and ground can be brought together and tested against each other.

The timber well preserved in the wet ground below the Apuolė hillfort, its oak surviving where the water held off decay. Julius Kanarskas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

That argument is not closed, and Apuolė sits inside several of its contests. The exact date wavers between 853 and 854 depending on how one reckons the chronology of Ansgar’s missions. The scale of the Swedish presence in Curonia — whether it amounted to anything like rule, or to raiding and tribute taken and lost — is debated, and the round figures of the chronicle cannot settle it. The very habit of calling the Curonians and their Baltic neighbors “Baltic Vikings,” for their ships and their raids, is a modern epithet that flattens as much as it illuminates, drawn by analogy to the Scandinavians whose chronicles happen to name them. What is not in contest is the standing of the place. Apuolė is a key monument of the Curonian Iron Age, its ramparts among the most studied of the Baltic hillforts; and it is, by the plain chronology of the sources, the first named place in the Baltic lands, the point where a whole region’s history begins on the page.

There is a particular justice, and a particular irony, in how that beginning came about. The first Baltic place to be written was named by an enemy, in the service of a faith that the Curonians did not hold, in a book about a saint who never went there, as a lesson about the power of the Christian God over the gods of the heathen. The Curonians themselves wrote nothing; their voice in the affair is silence, audible only as the gold and silver and the thirty hostages that the chronicle counts. To read Apuolė well is to hold the two registers apart and together: the missionary’s text, weighed for its distance and its purpose, and the hill it half-accidentally preserved a name for, dug and dated and ringed with its old banks above the Luoba. The fortress outlasted the war by centuries — it is named again, as uncultivated land, in a treaty of 1253 — and it outlasted the chronicle by far longer. Across the Baltic the same problem of the silent past and the speaking outsider runs through every great site: through the five-mound complex of Kernavė inland on the Neris, through the holy hill of Birutė on the coast at Palanga, through the conquered country of the Old Prussians to the southwest. Apuolė is where that long record opens — the first word, set down by a hand that meant something else by it.

→ Related: The Curonians · Kernave · Birute Hill · Rambynas Hill · The Old Prussians · The Yotvingians · Perkunas · Saule Goddess · Zemyna · Velnias · Laima · Thor · Odin · Zeus · Jupiter · Indra