In my site I wrote from 2017 in English, mainly about Geopolitics, but also some times about Management or Culture in general. Along the time I noticed a growing participation of anglo-saxon people, particularly of Americans, and a nice presence of Asiatic countries. So I decided to publish monthly not only a comment on current themes, but also a Chapter of my first historical novel written in 2024 for Italians and now translated in English: “The Crusader of Riga”, a key to better understand culture and problems of a strategic area for Western World, The Baltic Region.
The Crusader of Riga
PART ONE – YOUTH
1.1 A beautiful sunny day.
1100s Masovia was a duchy of Conrad, future Grand Duke of the entire Poland, in the central-eastern part of the country, along the right bank of the Vistula, with many peasant villages and beautiful cities. Its wealth originated from the great fertile plain, from the muddy river, and from the nature of its Slavic people, very hardworking and peaceful, organized in matriarchal forms. The only serious problem was the inhabitants of the Prussian coast, pagan Baltic people, who raided people and things in the border villages.
Today the Baltic sky shines, with its white clouds that almost touch each other when you raise your arms and the waters of the Vistula faithfully reflect it, yellowing it a bit. Peaceful smoke rises from the wood and straw houses of the Christianized Masovians, children play with geese among the houses, skilled craftsmen work wood and iron outdoors, while heifers rich in milk return from the green pastures that stretch as far as the eye can see towards the distant sea. But here is a different gleam on the horizon, helmets and weapons also reflect the sun, thought of by pagans as a god. A handful of Prussians with long blond hair, faces painted blue, in rough wool tunics, with dangling amulets, is approaching the village running and shouting names of pagan gods, Perkunas, Deivas, waving spears and long wavy swords, commanded by some riders with bows and arrows. The children run towards the houses, the women hug them and scream in fear, the men look for pitchforks and knives. They try to stop the pagans with sticks and lumberjack axes. Too late, the invaders have already entered the village and break down the doors of the poor houses trying to take everything away, men, women, children, animals, provisions painstakingly accumulated for the winter.
Whoever resists is killed immediately, women and children are kidnapped and loaded into the carts following the group, young people taken as future slaves. Some inhabitants manage to escape towards the river and the woods to the west. Like possessed people, the Prussians run and dance in the streets, while their riders set fire to the houses with torches lit in the hearths, singing pagan dirges. Pregnant women are disemboweled with swords and newborns fall dying in the grass, impaled on fences or thrown into the pyres. The wooden church is devastated in its poor belongings, Christian symbols profaned in every way, chalices, hosts, linens for the altars, everything is set to the stake. Especially the manuscripts that they consider dangerous magical objects, which transmit thoughts at a distance to other men.
But it is the two young Cistercian missionaries who are being hunted: here they are dragged out of the church for humiliation and public torture. Maximum violence of a few to discourage the reaction of the locals and any possible help from neighboring villages. Having cut their navels, the priests’ bowels are attached to a tree in the square and they are urged with spears to run around it until their bellies empty, and with them the little life that remains. The beautiful sky, the river and the warm sun remain indifferent and quietly watch these atrocious events, while the now deserted village burns and the triumphant Prussians return to their coastal swamps, from which they emerge like infernal demons in the fantasies of the Masovians.
They will return every month to hunt for Christians, slaves, women and provisions, devastating houses and churches, which they fear as a threat to their Baltic traditions. Other women and other children await them in the villages among the ponds and forests, worshipping their gods, the sky, the thunder, the sun, the moon, the trees, the snakes, the sacred rivers and lakes where the elves who protect them live. Conrad of Masovia will offer the lands of Chelmno (Kulm) along the middle course of the river to the military-monastic Order of the Teutonic Knights to get help against the Prussians and in 1198 Celestine III and then Innocent III will proclaim the Northern Crusade to attempt the conversion of all the Baltic peoples of the long coast from the mouths of the Vistula to those of the Daugava, over 200,000 square kilometers, almost as much as England, but with a quarter of the population, from the Prussians or Pruzzi, to the Curonians, to the Samogitians, to the Semigallians, to the Livonians, to the Latgallians, to the Estonians. All the Christian sovereigns of the Baltic will also participate in the Crusade, namely the Poles, the Swedes and the Danes, who will occupy part of Estonia. For almost two centuries it will be a struggle of all against all, Christians against pagans, the Baltic peoples among themselves, the Christians among their different nations, the Catholics against the Orthodox. The last battles will be in Lithuania, which will adopt Christianity in the 1200s with King Mindaugas, but will also deny it at the end of the 1300s.
Close to the Italian Renaissance, from 1200 to 1400 the Baltic Middle Ages rages, where violence calls for violence and men brutalize and degrade themselves, despite the noble spiritual intentions, which drown in the brutality of the behaviors and the harshness of the environment that witnesses these dramas. The Teutonic Knights, led by Hermann von Salza, abandon the Holy Land, attracted by the Baltic lands where they plan to found their Feudal State with greater autonomy, beyond the purpose of converting those peoples. In European courts where Christianity has been present for at least two centuries, there is a race among the less wealthy nobles, followed then by merchants and poor peasants to participate in the Northern Crusade, greedy for virgin lands, forests, lakes rich in fish and the great rivers that cross them. Generations of men and women will live as normal a life of continuous uncertainty and insecurity, which is accentuated in spring-summer when they go to war and calms down in the almost lethargic winter.
