The Curonians

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The eastern shore of the Baltic runs for hundreds of kilometers as a low coast of dunes and pine, of river-mouths and long sand-spits behind which the water lies in shallow lagoons. Amber washes up after the autumn storms. For the better part of a thousand years before the chronicles of the Christian north began to name them, a Baltic people lived along this shore, between the sea and the forest, and made their living from both. They were fishers and traders and builders of ships. They were also, when it suited them, raiders, and the Scandinavians who met them at sea remembered the meeting. In their own kindred of tongues they were the Kurši; in the Latin of the missionaries and the chroniclers they became the Couronians, the Curonians, and they have kept that name in the maps ever since.

Genealogy: a people of the amber shore

The Curonians were one of the Baltic peoples, kin in speech and in religion to the Lithuanians and the Latvians, to the Old Prussians of the southwest and the forest-dwelling Yotvingians of the deep interior. They settled along the western edge of the Baltic littoral, in what is now western Latvia and the coastal strip of western Lithuania — the region that still carries their name as Courland, Kurzeme in Latvian. Their territory was a coastland: the long shore of the sea, the spits and the lagoons, the lower courses of the rivers that drain the western uplands toward the Baltic. Archaeologists trace a recognizable Curonian culture across roughly the fifth to the sixteenth centuries of the common era, with its distinctive horizon emerging in the second half of the first millennium and reaching its fullest definition in the centuries of the Viking age (Wikipedia, Curonians).

Their speech was its own thing within the Baltic family — the Curonian language, set down in no document of its own and recovered only at a slant. Scholars have argued over where it belongs. Some place it on the East Baltic side, a tongue intermediate between Lithuanian and Latvian; others read it as a West Baltic language, akin to Old Prussian, that drew closer to the eastern branch through long contact. The evidence is indirect: the substrate it left in the western dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian, a scatter of place-names along the coast, a handful of recorded personal names of Curonian men, and loanwords carried into the neighboring speech — the Samogitian kuisis for a mosquito, zuikis for a hare, are counted among them. By the sixteenth century the language had gone silent, dissolved into the tongues of the larger nations that closed around it (Curonian language). The classification remains contested, and the silence of the record is the reason: a coastal people who wrote nothing of themselves can be reconstructed only through the graves they left, the words that outlived them, and the accounts of the strangers who came to fight or to trade.

That last category matters, because the Curonians are among the very few of the early Baltic peoples to enter written history at all, and they enter it through the eyes of others. Their land lay at the seam where the Baltic world met the Scandinavian one. Ships could cross from the islands of Gotland and Bornholm and from the Swedish mainland to the Curonian coast in a season’s sailing, and they did, in both directions and for more than one purpose. The Curonians traded with the north; they also raided it, and were raided in turn. It is in the Scandinavian and the Christian record of those encounters that the people of the amber shore first acquire a date.

The Baltic peoples around 1200, the Curonians (Cours) along the western seaboard between the Old Prussians to the southwest and the Latvian tribes to the north. MapMaster, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The seafarers of the eastern sea

What set the Curonians apart, in the telling of both the chroniclers and the archaeologists, was the sea. They lived by it. The graves return the gear of fishers and the ornaments of a people grown rich on trade; the chronicles return the memory of their war-fleets. The Scandinavian and the Christian sources agree, against their own interest, that the Curonians were a maritime power to be reckoned with in the age of the Northmen — warriors, sailors, and pirates, the contemporary accounts call them, drawn into wars and alliances with the Swedes, the Danes, and the seafaring men of the north (Wikipedia, Curonians). It is this reputation, much discussed by modern writers, that has earned them their modern epithet: the Baltic Vikings.

The phrase should be handled with care. It is a modern characterization, not a name the Curonians knew or would have used of themselves, and it carries the freight of a romantic comparison that flattens as much as it reveals. The Curonians were not Scandinavians; their religion, their speech, and their burial customs were Baltic. What the epithet does capture is something real in the record — that here, on the eastern shore, was a sea-going people who met the Vikings on the water on something like equal terms, who could mount a fleet and carry a war across open sea, and who appear in the Norse and the Latin sources as adversaries rather than victims. The label is best read as a measure of that standing, and as contested as any such modern reading must be.

The substance under the label is in the ground. The Curonian dead were burned. Cremation was the rite of the people for most of their attested history, and the cemeteries of the coast preserve the practice in detail: the body consumed on a pyre, the charred and melted remains of grave-goods left among the ash, the burnt bone gathered and laid out — sometimes poured into a coffin of regular size, with unburnt offerings set around it in the usual order, sometimes wrapped with the goods in cloth and placed in a small box with ornamental gifts (Wikipedia, Curonians). The richness of these furnished graves is itself a kind of document. The quantity of goods placed with the Curonian dead in the centuries of the later first millennium exceeds what the cemeteries of the neighboring peoples return — brooches in number, the ring-brooch and the penannular horseshoe-brooch that are nearly a Curonian signature, pins and pendants faced with white metal, the weapons of fighting men. A society with that much to bury was a society with rank in it, with wealth that moved along the trade-routes of the sea, and with craftsmen to work the metal that the trade brought in. The graves speak of stratification, of a coastal aristocracy of trade and war, in a way the chronicles never trouble to.

The coast was studded with hillforts, the great earthwork strongholds that are the standing monument of the Baltic peoples — refuge, seat of a chieftain, and citadel in one. The most famous of these on the Curonian shore is Apuolė, the fortress above the Luoba in what is now the northwest of Lithuania, and it is Apuolė that gives the Curonians, and indeed all the Baltic peoples, their first fixed point in recorded time. In the ninth century a Swedish fleet crossed the sea and laid siege to it. The siege is recorded in the Vita Ansgarii, the Life of Ansgar written by Rimbert, the missionary’s successor as archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, who died in 888 and composed the work in the years around 869 to 876. Rimbert tells of a Swedish expedition under a king named Olof against the Curonians, who had thrown off Swedish overlordship: the fleet fell first on a place the Latin calls Seeburg and then pressed on to the stronghold the manuscript names — the fortress identified with Apuolė — where the defenders held out for days before terms were reached. The event is conventionally dated to 853, sometimes given as 854, and it stands as the earliest datable episode in the whole of Baltic history (Apuolė hillfort).

The detail of the ramparts and the excavation belongs to the hillfort and its own account; what matters here is what the siege says about the people. The Swedes did not raid a defenseless coast. They came with a fleet against a fortified land that had recently refused them tribute, against a stronghold that could absorb a siege, and the campaign was costly enough to be remembered and written down by an outsider whose subject was not the Curonians at all but the conversion of the north. To be the adversary in another people’s holy biography is, in the ninth-century Baltic, a mark of weight. From this single fixed date the maritime history of the Curonians can be read backward and forward — a people already, by the middle of the ninth century, organized enough to defy a Scandinavian crown and strong enough to make the defiance stick for a season.

The Curonian Spit, the narrow dune-barrier between the lagoon and the open Baltic, one of several coastal features that preserve the Curonian name. Baltictrails, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The gods of the sky and the sea and the dead

The Curonians were pagan, in the proper sense that they kept the religion of their Baltic kindred until the Christian powers of the north brought it to an end. That religion is not preserved in any Curonian text — there is none — and it must be approached at the same triple distance as the faith of all the early Balts: through the hostile or interested chroniclers of the Christianizing Order and the bishops, who described what they meant to abolish; through the rich corpus of Lithuanian and Latvian folk-song, the dainos, collected only from the nineteenth century onward but carrying matter far older than its collection; and through the archaeology and the comparative science of language, which reaches the deepest layer of the Baltic past but speaks of it only in outline.

Within that world, the powers the Curonians honored were the powers their kinsmen honored. The thunder-god the Lithuanians called Perkūnas — kin in name and office to the Norse Thor, the sky-warrior who splits the oak and drives his combat across the heavens — stood at the head of the bright gods. The sun was a goddess, Saulė, who crosses the day-sky in her chariot and sails the night-sea below the world, the very sun whose rising and setting governed the rhythm of a coastal people whose lives ran by the water and the light. The earth was the mother who feeds the living and receives the dead. And the dead themselves were near: the cremation rite, the furnished grave, the care taken to send the burnt with their gear and their ornaments, all bespeak a people for whom the journey out of life was real and provisioned. The Latvian tradition kept the velī, the souls of the dead, as a presence to be honored at the turning of the year, and the same conviction stands behind the Curonian pyres. Theirs were the gods of the sky and the sea and the dead — the powers that govern a world of weather and water and the line between the living and what lies beneath.

It is necessary to say plainly how little of this can be assigned to the Curonians in particular rather than to the Baltic peoples in general. The named cult, the specific rite, the local holy place — these survive for the Lithuanians and the Latvians in the folk-song and the chronicle, and the Curonian share in them must be inferred from kinship and from the mute testimony of the graves. The cremation rite is theirs by direct evidence; the pantheon is theirs by descent. Where the record is silent it should be left silent, and not filled in. What can be said is that the Curonians belonged, body and soul, to the last pagan world of Europe, and that they kept it as long as they could against the powers that came to break it.

The crusade and the absorption

The powers came from the south and the sea together. From the close of the twelfth century the Christianizing of the eastern Baltic gathered into the long campaign that the chroniclers cast as a crusade — the bishops of Riga and the military orders pressing north and east along the coast, baptizing where they conquered and conquering where they could. The Curonians were among the peoples in the path of it, and they did not go quietly. In 1210 a Curonian fleet crossed to attack the new German town of Riga itself — a sea-borne assault on the citadel of the crusade, in the old maritime manner (Livonian Crusade). The campaigns against them ran on for decades. Through the middle of the thirteenth century the Order and the bishops pressed expedition after expedition into Curonian land, with raids and sieges and the forced baptism that followed conquest, until by the 1260s the resistance had been broken in the north. In 1266 Courland was partitioned between the Livonian Order and the Archbishop of Riga, and a peace treaty of 1267 set out the obligations and the rights of the defeated. The southernmost Curonian lands, beyond the reach of the Order, were drawn instead under the rule of the rising Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Britannica, Courland; Livonian Crusade).

The conquest should be named for what it was — the subjugation of a people, not the pacification of savages. The crusade-chroniclers wrote in the key of a holy war against the heathen, and that key still colors the inherited account; it is a frame to be examined rather than adopted. The Curonians who fought the Order were defending a coast, a religion, and a way of living on the sea that was older than the German towns. What followed the conquest was not extinction but slow absorption. The Curonians did not vanish; they were taken into the larger nations forming around them — into the Latvians in the north of their range, into the Lithuanians and the Samogitians in the south. Their language faded over the following centuries and was gone by the sixteenth, leaving its mark in the dialects that replaced it. Their distinct identity dissolved into the peoples it had helped to make.

Reception: the name on the map

The Curonians are recovered, like all the early Balts, at the meeting of three kinds of evidence, and the meeting is uneven. The written sources are external and few: Rimbert’s ninth-century Vita Ansgarii with its siege of Apuolė, the thirteenth-century crusade-chronicles of the Livonian wars, the scattered Norse and Latin notices of a sea-going adversary on the eastern shore. These are the testimony of strangers — missionaries, crusaders, the enemies and trading-partners of the people they describe — and they must be read across that distance, as the record of what outsiders troubled to set down about a people who set down nothing themselves. The archaeology is the deeper and the more impartial witness: the hillforts along the coast, the cremation cemeteries with their furnished and stratified graves, the brooches and the weapons and the white-metal ornament that map a maritime aristocracy of trade and war. And the comparative study of the Curonian language, reconstructed from substrate and place-name and loanword, fixes the people in the Baltic family even as it leaves their exact branch in dispute.

Two heritage sites hold the material memory. The hillfort at Apuolė keeps the place of the first siege and the first date. On the Latvian side, the archaeological ensemble at Grobiņa — flat cremation-graves and burial mounds on the banks of the Ālande near the sea, where Curonian burials lie beside burials of Scandinavian type — preserves the very seam between the Baltic and the Nordic worlds, and stands on the tentative list of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre as evidence of the long traffic between Curonian and Scandinavian on this coast (Grobiņa archaeological ensemble). Between the chronicles and the cemeteries, the seafaring people of the amber shore can be seen with some clarity for a maritime culture of the early medieval Baltic: rich, armed, organized, and engaged across the sea with the Scandinavian world on its own terms.

The longest afterlife is in the name. The people are gone, absorbed into the nations they helped to form, but the word Kurši survives across the map of the eastern Baltic. It is in Courland — Kurzeme — the western province of Latvia, and in the later Duchy of Courland that bore the name into the modern age. It is in the towns and the districts of the coast. And it is in the two great features that still hold the Curonian name before the open sea: the Curonian Spit, the long thread of dune that divides the lagoon from the Baltic, and the Curonian Lagoon behind it. The modern reading of the Curonians as the Baltic Vikings is itself a part of this afterlife — a phrase of the popular and the scholarly imagination alike, contested and seductive, that has fastened on the one Baltic people who answered the Northmen at sea. The Curonians left no account of themselves. They left a coast that carries their name, a fortress that gives their world its first date, and the graves of a people who lived by the sea and were buried in fire.

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