Introduction: Historical Background

When compared with centres of innovation and their surroundings, cultural processes have a slower course and longer duration in peripheries. This general rule is valid also for the Eastern Baltic: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the eastern peripheral region of Western Christianity on the border of the Orthodox world. Even as late as at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the lands east of the Baltic Sea formed a pagan area between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. Apart from the Saamis in Northern Fennoscandia and the Finno-Ugric peoples within Russia, the Eastern Baltic territories formed the last pagan region of Europe.

Estonia was Christianised by German and Danish crusaders in course of the violent conquest in 1208–1227, described in the Chronicle of Livonia, written by the missionary priest Henry/Henricus (HCL). Orthodox cross-pendants, certain changes in burial customs such as transition to west-orientation and the appearance of graves with no major grave goods indicate that there was some infiltration of Christian ideas and beliefs into Estonia before this time (Selirand 1979). But Christian structures, common for Western Europe, and a Christian society, arrived only after the conquest.

The Christianisation of Estonia meant introducing the ecclesiastical and political structures of Medieval Europe and caused great changes in society. As a result of the conquest the local elite lost its position. The historical landscape of Medieval and Post-medieval Estonia is characterised by a strong ethnosocial polarisation of society (Johansen 1963): on the one hand, the native, Estonianspeaking lower strata, and on the other, the German-speaking upper classes, including the clergy. The social status of a person was directly determined by their language: serfdom and labour-duty on manor fields were clearly connected with the native, ‘non-German’ ethnic background, while a precondition for belonging to the higher social strata was being ‘German’. This system of apartheid and ethnosocial segregation lasted until the early nineteenth century when serfdom was abolished. The conservative social system of medieval origin also caused the preservation of the medieval way of life and mentality. Only the great innovations of the nineteenth century – replacing serfdom by private farming and market economy, school education, newspapers in the local languages and the national awakening of the mid-nineteenth century – caused changes in thinking and mentality, designating a transition from ‘the long Middle Ages’ to modern society.