Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series) [Hardcover]

S. C. Rowell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 052145011X | ISBN-13: 978-0521450119 | Publication Date: June 24, 1994

From 1250 to 1795 Lithuania covered a vast area of eastern and central Europe. Until 1387 the country was pagan. How this huge state came to expand, defend itself against western European crusaders and play a conspicuous part in European life are the main subjects of this book. Chapters are devoted to the types of sources used, to the religion of the ancient Balts (and the discovery of a pagan temple in Vilnius in the late 1980s), and to Lithuanian relations and wars with Poland and the Germans. Under Grand Duke Gediminas, Lithuania came to control more of Russia than the prince of Moscow.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...[a] superb scholarly study....whose balanced narrative and analysis effectively portray the many vivid personalities and dramatic developments of this crucial period in the history of east central Europe. General and academic collections at all levels." Choice

"English (and in some respects the first time in any language), the rise of pagan Lithuania during the rule of Grand Duke Gediminas, with attention given also to the reigns of his predecessor Vytenis and successor Jaunutis." Choice

"It deserves careful attention from every serious student of medieval Russia and East Central Europe." Jean W. Sedlar, American Historical Review

"He [Rowell] has utilized the archives of ten different countries and an astounding array of published primary sources, Quellenforschungen, and specialized studies. He carefully introduces and re-introduces his cast of geographic, ethnic, institutional, and human characters, so that the reader does not get lost...Rowell has written a splendid book and has done so with erudition and zest....There is nothing at all like this book in any western language." International History Review

"This superb book is a major contribution to the history of east-central Europe in the Middle Ages, and to medieval history in general. It is an exceptionally welcome and original addition to a series of recent works about east-central Europe in the medieval period that are conceived in...English and that situate this region, and the countries and peoples that make it up, within a new and informed comparative perspective. In exceptionally clear and polished prose, it weaves together political, dynastic, economic, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical history to trace and explain the rise of the Jogaila dynasty to Christianity and the series of unions with Poland that followed in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The book...is, above all else, astonishingly learned." Piotr Górecki, Speculum

Book Description

From 1250 to 1795 Lithuania covered a vast area of eastern and central Europe. Until 1387 the country was pagan. How this huge state came to expand, defend itself against western European crusaders and play a conspicuous part in European life are the main subjects of this book.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 24, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 052145011X
• ISBN-13: 978-0521450119
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #928,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #32 in Books > History > Europe > Lithuania

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best English language study of the subject, July 7, 1999

By 

Glenn R. Urbanas (Richmond Hill, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series) (Hardcover)

This is an extraordinary scholarly work. It clarifies the obscurities and subtleties of the Lithuanian situation in the last decades of official paganism when the Lithuanian state rivaled in geographic extent and ethnic diversity the greatest European nations ever known. The book primarily covers the rise and reign of Gediminas, the grand duke who was most responsible for Lithuania's astonishing growth in the fourteenth century. The subject in English has been covered only in popular and inaccurate general histories by Lithuanians influenced by the politics and mythologizing of the nation's first independence period. The author wrote the book while serving as Professor at the Centre for West Lithuanian and Prussian History at the University of Klaipeda, and it represents the first fruit of Lithuania's second independence in this century. The chapters include information on the importance of the region's peculiar landscape, the economic situation, pagan beliefs and their diplomatic usefulness, the role of Lithuanian princesses in forming marital alliances with Rus'ian and Polish principalities, the exploits of Lithuanian arms in expanding the realm, Gediminas's brilliant campaign in conquering Western Ukraine, its Rus'ian allies against the growing threat of Muscowy, and the attempt to develope a Lithuanian Orthodox Church in Vilnius are fascinating. One can only hope that S. C. Rowell will publish a sequel on the next sixty years of Lithuanian history to include the rise of Gediminas's grandson, the controversial Jogaila Gediminaitis, who became King of Poland-Lithuania, the first federated state in Europe and the largest in its history, Christianized his pagan people, despite their notorious (and admirable) cultural conservatism, and managed, with the help of carefully nurtured alliances first developed by Gediminas, to defeat the Teutonic Order, the military superpower of the day, using a NATO style army, Oriental strategy and technology, and Lithuanian ambush tactics. This book lays the groundwork for understanding the roots of the Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland-Lithuania and its political and philosophical accomplishments, fondly referred to by the present Pope John-Paul in the text of his speech to the UN a few years ago. The book's extensive footnotes, maps, geneological charts, and huge bibliography, to say nothing of the densely informative text, make the book worthwhile to anyone seriously interested in East European history.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History is written by its survivors, December 31, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Seattle, Vilnius) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series) (Hardcover)

S. C. Rowell has written an excellent account of the rise of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a pagan empire within Europe that embraced such supposedly "modern" virtues as religious and ethnic tolerance, multiculturalism and multiconfessionalism, although Lithuania's leaders were all pagans who practiced something closer to Hinduism than Christianity, and this at a time when the rest of Europe was winding down from a series of failed cruscades in the Levant and winding up for the domestic cruscades and the Inquisition.

What Rowell fails to touch on is how the Lithuanians managed to defeat the Mongols, who ravaged almost everyone else who stood in their path. In doing so Lithuania gained an empire that stretched from Bessarabia and Bukovina in the south to Estonia and east to the suburbs of modern Moscow. Rowell claims the Lithuanian leadership played a careful and calculated, perhaps cynical game of diplomacy with her rivals in the east and west, Russia and Germany respectively. One wonders if the bane of independent small states and nations in this part of the world, "Spheres of Influence," wasn't started by the Lithuanians themselves in interaction with the Mongols.

The other thing that left me unsatisfied was the lack of clear reasons for the decline of the Lithuanian empire. Traditionally Lithuanians blame Jogaila, or Jagiello as he was known in Krakow, for selling out Lithuanian territorial gains to the Polish after he married their child queen Jadvyga. The truth may also point closer to home than is comfortable for most Lithuanians: perhaps Lithuanians simply learned early what the British and Russians learned much later (and the Americans have yet to really learn): empire costs its masters much more than it does its conquered (i.e. as in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song, they gave it away then).

In any case, Rowell has written an excellent book with fresh and original takes on the entire subject. By actaully living among the Lithuanians of today's Lithuania (he taught at Klaipeda and may still), he has avoided errors almost always taken as gospel in the history of Lithuania as written, ultimately, by a Poland which has never forgiven Lithuania for being an independent entity after Czarist Russia fell and both nations emerged again as something like equals. Strange turn of history it be that people in the west somehow imagine Poland's independence as built of sturdier stuff than Lithuania's, while both nations have undergone almost exactly the same history of conquest, domination and reemergence since their leaders formed the joint kingdom. If the Soviet Union has fallen, does that mean that its juridical rules haven't held good, or are they still binding, if only on academia in the west? That is to ask, is it true to say Soviet Poland was less Soviet than Soviet Lithuania, or is that only a distinction the apparatchiks in Moscow and American campuses are capable of making? Rowell makes you wonder...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare subject...and in English, too!, July 23, 2008

By 

Daisy J. (Irvington, NY United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series) (Hardcover)

As a Lithuanian-American, it's wonderful to finally find an account of my national history that is written in English. This is an academic book, so I find it easier to dip into it rather than read it from cover to cover, but the writing is generally clear and straightforward. For any first-generation Lithuanian-American who wants to remember what they learned long ago during Lithuanian Saturday school, this book is well worth the price.