History

In the 13th and 14th century, artisans and merchants used to build their homes in the safe neighbourhood of the main castle mounds. More numerous communities of artisans represented a new object in the social landscape because they were not typical in the earlier society of husbandmen and cattle raisers. Quarters inhabited by artisans and their families stretched next to the main political and administrative centres – the castles where dukes resided together with the people constituting their closest environment. Artisans worked to meet the demands of the ducal court. Supposedly, they would sell part of their products or exchange them for daily bread. […]

The noble estate enjoyed the most important position in the social hierarchy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The nobility, however, was far from homogenous. It consisted of aristocrats, (the magnates), as well as of middling and petty nobles who owned little or no land at all respectively. The importance and financial might of noble families and even particular individuals was constantly fluctuating. Many families went through a process of ascent and subsequent slide down or even oblivion. A considerable number of the noblemen were utterly poor. They sometimes could hardly afford their daily meals yet they still enjoyed all the privileges of the estate. Some of them – mostly vagabonds – would eventually cross the line and lose their symbols of the nobility. They would live on accidental income, sometimes illegal, and would very often end up in prisons or on the scaffold. Surviving interrogation documents reveal the paths that led them into the world of crime. What kind of life was it? […]

Women of the early modern period, even those from the privileged estates, could not enjoy full civil rights in their countries. Their activity was very often limited by the private space of her house and a woman was seen as a wife, mother and a housewife. Simultaneously, the modern period signified the beginning of core changes as the ideas of the day, particularly in relation to women’s position in the society, resonated throughout Europe, down to the farthermost corners of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. […]

Life in the Baltic lands in the middle ages was full of dangers. In the 13th century, the old rivalries between the local tribes were accompanied by fights against the Knights of the Cross, and the Knights of the Sword. By comparing the art of warfare practised by local tribes and alien Germans, one can notice considerable differences in technical issues, such as weaponry, fortifications, and strategies, as well as in warfare customs. In this respect, the Livonian Chronicle by Henry of Latvia is particularly telling. While Germans and other western Christians would adhere to the knightly rules of war in Livonia, local Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples acted very much like the barbarians did during the times of the Great Migration of the Nations. […]

The romantic attitude towards the pagan Lithuania, shaped in the 19th century, remains tenacious up to these days. Romantic authors, such as Teodor Narbutt and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski who wrote in Polish, saw the old Lithuania as a fairy tale country with an ideal state order and virtuous inhabitants. They were confident that the Lithuanian history of the 13th and 14h century was a period of “golden times”. This kind of standpoint made an essential impact on the leading figures of the Lithuanian national resurgence in the second half of the 19th century. They employed the visions of the pagan glory to wake the nation up considering the majority of people immature for high nationalist aspirations. […]

Alcohol, produced by fermenting liquids, has been known in many continents and cultures from as far back as the stone and bronze ages. The first knowledge of consumption of alcoholic beverages in the Balt lands, provided by the Anglo-Saxon traveller Wulfstan who visited the lower reaches of the Vistula River, date back to the end of the 9th century: “Kings and nobility drink mare milk, while the poor and slaves drink mead.” […]

Human sacrifice is attributable to the most forbidding customs of ancient tribes. Among Asian and European cultures, it permeated unevenly. The Greek myths speak of human sacrifice but historical sources provide no data of any actual practice of the kind. In the ancient Greece, it was considered an old yet no longer exercisable rite replaced by the sacrifice of animals. Although the gladiator fights point to the fact that the Romans enjoyed terrifying shows, neither can they be associated with the human sacrifice as a common feature of their customs. […]

Even in the times of gravest calamities and shortage, people did find time for games and other ways of making their everyday lives brighter, regardless of whether it was a ducal palace of a hut of a peasant family. In the 19th century, even the poorest peasants had simple wood-carved toys for their children. […]

The family in the 13th and 14th century Lithuania represented a unit in many senses, from economical and productive to social, organisational, and legal. The average family consisted of five or six people. The remains of a 14th century house in the lower town of Kernavė feature a plank-bed, made of several benches, up to three by 1.7 metres. Since the average human of the time was about 1.65 metres tall, the bed could accommodate the entire family of five to six people. On the other hand, the family also had a broader meaning, the one that covered two or three generations of relatives, such as fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, as well as unmarried brothers and sisters. […]