Environment, Colonization, and the Baltic Crusader States: Terra Sacra I ed. by Aleksander Pluskowski, and: Ecologies of Crusading, Colonization, and Religious Conversion in the Medieval Baltic: Terra Sacra II ed. by Aleksander Pluskowski (review)

Terra Sacra is the term coined to ‘emphasize the clash of sacred associations embedded in the landscapes of the eastern Baltic’ (p. 2), and with this orientation these two volumes squarely place medieval human theocratic expansionism into environmental, ecological, and social contexts. These books comprise the primary published output of a four-year research project, funded by the European Research Council, which set out to examine the broad environmental impact of the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century crusader states in the eastern Baltic region, and the societies created through successive phases of military conquest, colonization, and religious conversion. Much of this expansion was instigated under the military, Christian, Teutonic Order, which rose to authoritarian prominence prosecuting penitential wars (with papal sanction) against pagan Baltic tribes, after Christian eyes turned from the Byzantine east following the fall of Jerusalem.

The study traces the impact of the Christian theocratic regime on the regions that were to become known as Livonia and Prussia, and the regime’s establishment of a social system based around centralized defensive castle-convents holding authority over the wider landscape, exploiting synergies of technology with religion for the purpose of maintaining and expanding territorial control, and accruing and monopolizing the wealth of the land. The analyses in these volumes explore growth, establishment, and impact of specialized economies where lordships developed and operated specialist farms—arable cropping, dairy cattle, sheep—that served diversified markets, and in the course of the centuries, imposed marked and divergent impacts on local environments. The research identifies the importance of conventual castles at the core of the Christian expansion, with the establishment of towns encouraging the immigration of colonists, while environmental transformation is revealed as doubly significant for the colonized pagan Baltic tribes, as they held many aspects of the natural world as sacred: a natural world that was modified permanently as a result of the crusades.

This work is strongly interdisciplinary. It synthesizes and contextualizes a wide range of data sources across an array of disciplines: archaeology, history, and environmental and ecological sciences, all heavily supported with detailed and well-visualized data, and extensively illustrated with supporting maps, illustrations and photographs, both technical and descriptive. Environmental analyses of the characteristics of occupation and settlement activities are prominent throughout both volumes, deriving and closely examining geographic data for land use, vegetation, and animal use, integrated with archaeozoological, geoarchaeological, and archaeobotanical evidence.

The scope of this project was massive, and the comprehensive nature of these two volumes is due in part to the fact that very many people were involved in both the research and the writing, from a number of European countries. All up, the two volumes are composed of thirty-five chapters and five appendices, with close to fifty contributors. The research itself was overseen by a project team of twelve, of which the editor, Andrew Pluskowski (University of Reading), was the principal investigator, while the many project partners came from a wide range of universities and research institutions across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, with such a large undertaking it is only possible to provide a broad description of the contents of these two volumes, and this review is certainly unable to do justice to the scope and precision of scholarship that has been brought together here in this landmark work.

The first volume offers a series of comparisons of changes in the environment in the...