The Old Prussians

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Amber comes up out of the sand along that coast after a storm, and for a long time the people who gathered it were the only riches the rest of Europe knew them by. Roman writers had a word for the stuff and a vague notion of where it came from; a sixth-century official of the Ostrogothic court wrote to the Aesti, the amber-gatherers of the eastern shore, thanking them for a gift of it. The shore was the southeastern edge of the Baltic Sea, the country that would later be called Prussia. But the name belonged first to a people, not to a state, and not to the German kingdom that took the name when the people who had borne it were gone.

The Old Prussians — the Prūsai, the Pruzzi of the Latin chronicles — were a western Baltic nation, and they are not the Prussia of Frederick and Bismarck. They lived between the lower Vistula and the river Neman, on the lands that run east from the Vistula Lagoon toward the Curonian Lagoon, and they spoke a Baltic tongue close kin to Lithuanian and Latvian. The state that later wore their name was a German one, raised over their conquered country by the order of knights that had broken them. The people themselves were pagan when the kingdoms to their west and south had been Christian for centuries, and they were the subject, in the thirteenth century, of a crusade that ended their independence and, in time, their language and their name.

Genealogy

The land the chroniclers called Prussia was not one country but a cluster of them. Peter von Dusburg, the priest of the Teutonic Order who wrote the Chronicon terrae Prussiae around 1326, divided it into eleven lands held by ten peoples, and his list is the frame every later account inherits: Pomesania and Pogesania near the Vistula; Warmia, Natangia, and Sambia on the central coast; Bartia, Nadruvia, Scalovia inland and to the east; Galindia in the south and Sudovia in the southeast, the last shading into the country of the Yotvingians. These were not provinces of a kingdom. They were distinct lands, each with its own nobles and its own assemblies, bound by a common speech and a common religion and a common shore, but never gathered under one crown. That absence of a single ruler would matter when the war came.

The Prussians were farmers and stock-keepers, traders and warriors. Their wealth was the wealth of the coast — the amber that had been moving south along the river roads since the Bronze Age, traded for the silver and the bronze and the glass that turn up in their graves. They lived in scattered settlements and raised earth-and-timber strongholds on the hills, the same hillfort architecture that ran the length of the Baltic world from Sambia to the country of the Curonians and the Lithuanians inland. Their dead they burned, and the cremation cemeteries of their lands, with their horse-burials and their weapon-deposits, are now among the clearest things known about them — clearer, in many ways, than their gods.

For the Prussians belonged to the same religious world as the other Baltic peoples, the world in which the thunder-god the Prussians called Perkūns — kin to the Lithuanian Perkūnas, and like the Norse Thor a wielder of the storm — splits the oak and drives the powers of the world below across the sky; in which the chthonic lord the Lithuanians called Velnias holds the cattle and the wealth of the dark earth; in which the holy place was not a built temple but the hill, the grove, the stone, and above all the fire that was never let to go out. They raised few temples. They worshiped, as their kindred did, in the open — at the oak and the sacred spring, by the flame tended in the grove. This is the world the Prussians shared with the peoples around them, and it is the world their conquerors would describe, from the outside, in the only documents that survive.

The crusade and the conquest

The Prussians lived on a frontier, and they raided across it as their neighbors raided into their lands. Konrad I, the Polish duke of Masovia, harried by Prussian war-bands on his northern border, looked for help, and in the 1220s he found it in the Teutonic Order — the German order of crusading knights that had formed in the Holy Land and was looking for a new field. In 1230, under the grand master Hermann von Salza and with the duke’s grant of land at Kulm and the backing of a papal bull, the Order began the war that the records call the Prussian Crusade. It ran, with long and savage interruptions, for some half a century, until about 1283.

It must be read for what it was: a war of conquest and forced conversion waged against a people on their own land. The chronicles of the Order tell it as a holy war, a Christianizing mission against heathen darkness, and that frame has had a long life — but it is the frame of the conquerors, and the historian’s task is to read it rather than to repeat it. The Order built castles as it advanced, planting fortified strongpoints from which the surrounding country could be held and then settled; the line of those castles, with the German and Polish colonists drawn in behind them, is the spine of the conquest. The Prussian lands fell one by one over the first decades, and the first risings — through the 1240s — were beaten down.

Then, in 1260, the war on the wider Baltic frontier broke open. On the 13th of July at Durbe, in the country of the Curonians, the Samogitians and their allies destroyed a joint army of the Teutonic and Livonian knights — the heaviest single defeat the crusading orders suffered in that century. The news ran through the conquered lands like fire. Within weeks the Prussians rose in what is remembered as the Great Prussian Uprising, the lands throwing off the Order’s rule and turning on its garrisons. It was no brief revolt. It lasted from 1260 to 1274, fourteen years, and it came close to undoing the conquest. The risen lands had their own war-leaders; the fighting was bitter on both sides, with massacres and reprisals; the Order, reinforced from the Empire, ground the rebellion down land by land. By 1274 the great uprising was broken. Through the late 1270s and into the 1280s the knights mopped up the last holdouts in the eastern lands, and around 1283 the chroniclers reckon the conquest complete.

What followed was not the disappearance of the Prussians but their subjection. They were set under the Order’s lordship, their nobles drawn into its service where they submitted and dispossessed where they did not, their commons made the peasantry of a new colonial order. Over their country grew the German towns and the German farms, and the Order’s state — the thing that would, centuries later and by a long political accident, pass its borrowed name to the Hohenzollern kingdom. The conquered people did not vanish into that state at once. But they were now a subject population in their own land, and the long erosion had begun.

The gods through the chroniclers’ eyes

What is known of the Prussians’ religion comes almost entirely from people who were trying to destroy it, and that is the governing fact about it. The Balts left no scripture and no chronicle of their own; the pre-Christian Prussian world has no voice that is not relayed, late, by an outsider. So the sources fall into kinds, and a careful reader marks which kind any given claim rests on.

The fullest of the hostile witnesses is Peter von Dusburg. In his chronicle of around 1326 he set down what he claimed to know of the Prussian cult, and from him descends the famous picture: a central sanctuary he called Romove (Romowe), in the land of Nadruvia; a high priest he named the Krive (Kriwe-Kriwaito), whose authority he says ran over the Prussians and the Lithuanians and the Balts of Livonia alike; a sacred fire kept eternally burning; and a holy oak. Two centuries later the Prussian chronicler Simon Grunau elaborated the picture lavishly, fitting out Romove with an evergreen oak and a triad of idols — Patrimpas the god of spring and growth, Perkūns the thunderer, and Patollo (Pikulas) the grim god of the dead and the world below.

It is a vivid scene, and much of it is doubtful. Modern scholarship treats Romove and the Krive as in large part a chronicler’s construction. As the historian S. C. Rowell has argued, Dusburg may have invented the central sanctuary to make the Baltic religion legible to a Christian audience as a kind of counter-church — a pagan papacy with a pagan pope at a pagan Rome, the better to convey the scale of the heathen threat the Order existed to fight. The site has never been found, neither by the knights who held all of Nadruvia nor by archaeologists since. The picture of a single high priest commanding a hierarchy across all the Baltic lands sits badly with everything else known of a religion that had no church, no clergy in that sense, and no center. Grunau’s elaborations are later and less trustworthy still; the neat triad of Patrimpas, Perkūns, and Patollo, in particular, has the look of a chronicler’s tidy theology rather than a thing the Prussians would have recognized, and Patollo especially is best treated as a construct. The cult of the fire and the sacred oak and the grove is real and Baltic and amply paralleled among the kindred peoples — that much the hostile sources got right because it was hard to miss. The papal architecture built on top of it is another matter.

So the Prussian gods come down through the chroniclers of their conquerors, and the modern reader holds the picture at the distance from which it was drawn. Behind it stands the religion the Prussians actually shared with the Lithuanians and the Latvians: the thunderer of the oak, the sun and the earth, the lord of the world below — powers known far better from the living Baltic tradition and the comparative science than from anything the Order’s clerks set down.

Reception and afterlife

The Old Prussians are recovered today along three roads, and they meet at their vanishing point. The first is the chronicle of the conquest itself — Dusburg and the verse chronicle of Nicolaus von Jeroschin that Germanized him, the Order’s own record of how the country was taken — read now against the grain, as the testimony of one side of a war. The second is archaeology: the hillforts and the cremation cemeteries, the amber and the imports and the horse-graves, the material trace of a people who built in earth and timber and whose silence the spade can partly fill. The graves are eloquent in their way — the burned dead laid with their weapons and their ornaments, the horses interred beside their riders, the imported metalwork that marks the long reach of the amber trade. This evidence carries no theology with it; it cannot tell which god a grave-gift honored. But it stands on the far side of the chronicles’ interested account, and where the two can be set against each other — a fire-cult described by Dusburg, a burned offering found in the ground — the spade serves as a check on the clerk. The third road, and the most precious, is the wreckage of the language.

Old Prussian is a West Baltic tongue, and for most of its life it was unwritten. What survives is a handful of texts, every one of them produced by Germans for German purposes. There is the Elbing Vocabulary, a German–Prussian word-list of some 802 entries, copied around 1400 from an original of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century — a clerk’s practical glossary, and a window onto the everyday speech. And there are the three printed catechisms of the sixteenth century, made in the Reformation drive to bring Lutheran doctrine to the Prussian-speaking peasants in their own tongue. The first two, both of 1545, are slight — six pages each. The third, the Enchiridion of 1561, is the great one: a hundred and thirty-two pages, Luther’s Small Catechism rendered into Prussian by the German pastor Abel Will with the help of his Prussian-speaking assistant, the fullest record of the language that exists. It is a small irony that the longest text in a pagan people’s language should be a Lutheran catechism — the instrument of one conversion preserving, by accident, the speech of a people that an earlier conversion had set out to erase.

For the language did die. Through the centuries of German lordship and German settlement the Prussian-speakers shifted, in the west and south to German, in the east toward Lithuanian, until by the turn of the eighteenth century the tongue was no longer spoken — its last speakers thinned out, among other causes, by the famine and plague that swept East Prussia from 1709 to 1711. The linguicide is best stated plainly, without the melodrama that the subject invites. A West Baltic language, one of the most archaic Indo-European tongues, went out of daily use; what is left of it is the word-list and the catechisms and a scatter of names on the land, and from these the comparative linguists have reconstructed a grammar and a lexicon, so that the speech is studied even where it is no longer spoken.

The Prussians’ fate was shared, in its outline, by their neighbors. The forest-dwelling Yotvingians to their southeast were broken in the same crusading decades and effectively destroyed as a people; the seafaring Curonians of the coast to the north — the people in whose country Durbe was fought — were conquered too, and in time absorbed into the Latvian and Lithuanian nations that survived. The Old Prussians did not survive as a nation. They were conquered, converted, and at last absorbed, and their name was carried off by the German state that grew over their graves, so that for most of the world “Prussia” now means the conqueror and not the conquered. To recover the people under the name — the amber-traders of the eleven lands, the keepers of the sacred fire, the speakers of the tongue in the catechism — is to set the record the right way round.

The Baltic tribes about 1200 AD, on the eve of the Prussian Crusade; the western Balts, the Old Prussians among them, are shown in green. MapMaster, after Marija Gimbutas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

An Old Prussian warrior, in a 1584 engraving by the chronicler and cartographer Caspar Hennenberger — a late German image of a people already long conquered. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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