Features of peaceful contacts between Lithuanians and Germans in the 14th-century vortex of war

Abstract

The aim of this article is to make an enquiry into the peaceful contacts between the Lithuanians and the Germans, which were bound to take place against the backdrop of continual hostilities in the 14th century. Scholarship has made very much in terms of political history of this war (circumstances and results of military campaigns, their chronological sequence, participants, etc.), but, in our opinion, it has so far not devoted sufficient attention to the fact that even in those circumstances the pagan society of Lithuania was rather receptive to the military and non-military innovations that arrived in the wake of this war. The chronological limits of our paper lie largely in square with those of the chronicle of Wigand of Marburg (1311–1394), a chronicle which, along with that of Peter of Duisburg, supplies the bulk of evidence and spans a rather long period of time to allow us to see what spheres of interaction were most exposed to mutual contacts. In pursuing this aim, we have broken down the availbale material into what follows: a) talks and banquettes of Lithuanian grand dukes with Teutonic knights; b) knights serving at the grand-ducal court; c) German and Lithuanian deserters and d) the movement of military innovations in both directions. It became clear that peaceful contacts were quite intensive between the parties, but they involved only a very limited number of men: such contacts were maintained by Lithuanian dukes and their closest entourage and by the top military officers of the Teutonic Order (mainly grand master and marshal) and the commanders of frontier castles (Ragnit, e. g.). The contacts between them may be regarded as pragmatic in the sense that they were unavoidable in the midst of hostilities when talks on armistice and negotiations over the matters related to prisoners-of-war had to be on the order of the day. This zone of interaction produced a thin social stratum that must be regarded as the main go-between who brought news to one side about the other (they were spies, scouts, deserters and the like). It is also clear that contacts between the Lithuanian grand dukes and the knights were instrumental in stimulating the Lithuanians to adopt certain elements of knightly culture while they were still pagan (the second half of the 14th – first half of the 15th century).