Ideology and Holy Landscape in the Baltic Crusades

Gregory Leighton earned his PhD in History (2018) from Cardiff University, where he studied the Teutonic Order and crusading in Prussia and Livonia.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Landscape Imagery in the Texts Documenting the Baltic Crusades  Chapter 2: Literary Themes and Landscape Sacralization in the Written Evidence for the Baltic Crusades  Chapter 3: Mapping Landscape Sacralization during the Baltic Crusades, Thirteenth to Fourteenth Century  Chapter 4: Relics, Processions, and Sacred Landscape in the Baltic, Thirteenth to Fourteenth Century   Chapter 5: Space, Visual Culture, and Landscape Sacralization in the Baltic  Conclusion  Concordance of Places Appendix: Relics in the Baltic Region (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)  Bibliography

The dominance of English in scholarship sometimes leads to a regrettable blindness toward scholarship in other languages. Laudably therefore, Gregory Leighton does not shy away from including German and Polish scholarship. Such language skills are vital here, given the considerable research output in these languages. Leighton is thus able to offer an overall convincing analysis of the Teutonic Order’s ideology from c. 1201 to 1390, when the Order worked militarily to submit to Christianity the hitherto pagan peoples populating an area largely covering the modern states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus.[...]Leighton’s handling of a very large corpus of texts and physical remains is truly impressive. While his analyses in this book focus on establishing the Order as a self-conscious religious protagonist in the Baltic—using the maps to visualize the interconnectedness of the Order’s religious signposts—it might be worth considering an even deeper investigation into what the maps show—or don’t show: did the Order sacralize landscape as a part of conquest and conversion, or did the sacralization of landscape remain an inward “exercise” to strengthen the Order itself after military successes?