Lithuania: A History, Richard Butterwick, Hurst Publishers, £18.99

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Lost Pagan Peoples, Francis Young, Cambridge University Press, £25

In 1251, the Lithuanian Grand Duke Mindaugas converted to Christianity. Armed crusaders had recently arrived on the shores of the Baltic to Christianise its pagan peoples in what was more akin to a conquest than a religious mission. His conversion was prudent, but, on the face of it, it was hardly unique. He was just the latest in a long line of medieval European rulers who had shed their native polytheistic faith and joined the burgeoning world of Western Christendom.

What made Mindaugas special was precisely his failure to found a Christian polity. He was assassinated in 1263, and the political crisis that followed led to the rise of Traidenis, who was a follower of the native Lithuanian faith. He took the fight to the crusaders, winning a huge victory against them on a frozen stretch of the Baltic Sea in 1270. The death of pagan Europe would have to wait.

By the end of the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest states in Europe, stretching from the shores of the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. A non-Christian Baltic people now found itself ruling over millions of Orthodox Christians in what are today Belarus and Ukraine. It is the most astonishing example of the resilience of Europe’s pre-Christian, ‘pagan’ religions, which survived long after the last pagan ruler in Europe – Lithuania’s Jogaila – finally converted in 1386.

Two new books – Richard Butterwick’s Lithuania: A History and Francis Young’s Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Lost Pagan Peoples – help shed light on this underappreciated aspect of European history, the former a masterful guide through Lithuania’s journey from Europe’s last pagan state to the far smaller nation-state it is today, and the latter a fascinating exploration of the lingering paganism of peoples on the fringes of Christian Europe up to the 19th century.

That includes the Lithuanians, but also other Baltic peoples (Prussians, Latvians, Samogitians) as well as the Estonians, the Sámi of northern Scandinavia, and the isolated Finno-Ugric peoples swallowed up into the Russian Empire, such as Udmurts, Komi, and Chuvash.

These scattered peoples were united by little more than the relationship of their faith to the states and their dominant Christian cultures that ruled over them. A relationship that Young argues produced ‘creolized’ religions that were not quite the pagan faiths of old nor deviations from established Christianity, but rather diverse and unsystematised syntheses of pre-Christian polytheism and poorly understood or only half-remembered elements of Christianity.

Lithuania was a paradigmatic example. When Jogaila converted, he went much further than Mindaugas. Aided by many decades of Christian penetration into the Lithuanian elite (Jogaila’s own mother was Christian), he was committed to converting the Lithuanian nation itself. Sacred groves were felled, holy snakes put to the sword, sacred fires extinguished, and temples demolished.

Politically, this was the moment that Lithuania was truly integrated into the Christian world, mediated strongly through the Kingdom of Poland. Jogaila’s marriage to a Polish princess fused the two countries together in a union that would grow ever closer over the centuries. Indeed, the Polish language came to entirely displace Lithuanian as the mother tongue of the bulk of the Lithuanian nobility.

But as Butterwick explains, this did not mean a renouncing of Lithuanian identity. Instead, much like a ‘creolized’ religion survived among the masses, a ‘creolized’ political identity emerged which articulated pride in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a polity through a Polish language of rights and liberties.

The Polish-Lithuanian situation was not too different from Anglo-Scottish union. In both cases the king came from the lesser part, but his descendants along with the elites of the home country eventually adopted the language and – to a considerable degree – culture of the greater while still maintaining a strong sense of their own distinctiveness.

One fascinating example of how distinct Lithuanians remained, even if elites embraced Polish, was the attitude to lingering paganism. While Scandinavian princes persecuted Sámi shamanism in the 16th and 17th centuries as a supposed manifestation of witchcraft, educated Lithuanian humanists favourably compared their own native paganism with that of ancient Rome. There was no association of paganism and witchcraft in Lithuania, nor was there any official policy of converting those who remained un-christianised.

Seventeenth-century Lithuania, after all, had more pressing concerns. In the wake of the Thirty Years War, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth experienced a series of devastating invasions known as ‘the Deluge’. Already weak state authority was reduced to nothing for years. Most Polish historians understand this as the beginning of the end for the commonwealth, leading to its eventual partition by Prussia, Austria, and Russia in the late 18th century.

By that time, the efforts of the Jesuits and Franciscans to expunge the last remnants of pagan belief in Lithuania had borne fruit. The same was true in most other remaining pagan redoubts: Latvia, Estonia, Sápmi. Only in Russia did the mass forced conversions fail to wholly eradicate native polytheisms, with the 1897 census finding significant unbaptised minorities of Udmurts and Mari along the River Volga.

Though Lithuania could no longer be found on the map of Europe, it did not share the same faith as Lithuanian paganism. Butterwick’s narrative does not end with the partitions but forges ahead to explain how this vast and diverse pre-modern polity became the Lithuanian nation-state that exists today.

‘O Lithuania, my fatherland’, reads the first line of Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz from 1834. Mickiewicz was born in 1798 on the territory of the old grand duchy (where Belarus is today), but his work of romantic Polish nationalism mentioned Lithuania more times than Poland. Indeed, it is a relic of an era in which the two concepts were still fused together for Polish-speaking nobles, who looked back on the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a single whole remembered with longing pride.

Only slowly over the course of the 19th century did a different kind of Lithuanian nationalism emerge, one which saw the Lithuanian-speaking peasantry as the true bearers of national culture. They had to compete not just with their far more established Polish counterparts, but also with the full weight of the Russian Empire, which saw in the Belarusian peasants once part of Lithuania nothing but a ‘tribe’ of a great Russian nation.

This Lithuanian national movement had far more modest goals than the restoration of the Grand Duchy, however. Its adherents sought in the first instance to preserve and promote Lithuanian language and culture in the oppressive confines of the Russian Empire and the disadvantageous social status caused by the Polonisation of the native elite centuries before.

In the extraordinary circumstances of collapsing empires in the wake of the First World War, Lithuanian nationalists were able to achieve precisely that. But the small Lithuanian nation-state had a difficult 20th century, experiencing war, occupation, and forced integration into the Soviet Union before it was finally established itself as a lasting sovereign state in 1991.

Though Lithuanians and far-off pagans may seem marginal to European history, it is precisely the uniqueness of their stories and the historical situations they found themselves in that make for such fascinating reading. It is a reminder, perhaps, of just how kaleidoscopic history is when we view such familiar historical events and epochs as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the Second World War through the eyes of such unexpected observers.