Peoples & cultures¶
The peoples, social order and daily life of the Grand Duchy around 1382.
Labels. [Historical record] is attested in the sources or standard scholarship; [The saga’s invention] was made for this series.
A caution that governs this whole file. Much of what we „know“ about 14th-century Lithuanian paganism comes from enemies (Order chroniclers such as Peter von Dusburg and Wigand of Marburg), from later Christians (Długosz, the 16th-c. Lithuanian chronicles), or from 19th-c. Romantic reconstruction. Treat every pagan detail as half record, half rumour. That suits the saga’s rule that the folk are only ever half right (cosmology, epigraph).
Part A. The peoples¶
A.1 Aukštaičiai (Highlanders)¶
Who [Historical record]: The Lithuanians of the eastern core: Vilnius, Trakai, Kernavė, Ukmergė, the lake country. The Gediminid dynasty’s home people.
Language: Lithuanian, Aukštaitian dialects. Unwritten in 1382: the court writes in Ruthenian (east) and Latin (west), and Lithuanian is spoken but never put on parchment [Historical record]. The first Lithuanian books are 16th-century.
Faith: Pagan, publicly and officially, in 1382 [Historical record]. Princes‘ Orthodox wives keep churches in Vilnius, several Gediminids are baptised Orthodox, and Catholic friars minister to merchants. Lithuanian rulers tolerate all of it as long as it does not become politics (Gediminas’s letters make religious tolerance part of diplomacy [Historical record]).
Dress: Linen and wool; patterned woven belts; fur in winter. The elite blend Ruthenian and Western fashion (see C.7).
Food: Rye, barley, peas, dairy, pork, game, fish, honey (see C.6).
Status: The ruling people of an empire mostly made of others. A small warrior aristocracy (the bajorai) over a free and semi-free peasantry.
How others see them: To the Order, Litwini, „Saracens of the North“, obstinate idolaters, and also dangerous, brave, and (in Kęstutis’s case) honourable enemies (Order chroniclers praise his keeping of his word). To Ruthenians, rough pagan overlords who nevertheless protect Orthodoxy better than the Tatars did. To Poles, raiders who carried off whole villages in living memory.
Saga notes: Perkūno Rūstybė claims their warriors: oath and courage are his food. In Book I they are the people whose courtesy keeps the Pact alive. After 1387 they are the first to be baptised and the first to be haunted: their groves are nearest the capital, so their unfed dead rise first (the Unbinding, Cosmology §4.3).
A.2 Žemaičiai (Samogitians, the Lowlanders)¶
Who [Historical record]: The western Lithuanians, between the Nevėžis and the sea, ruled by elders (seniūnai, Germ. Ältesten) under the Trakai duke’s overlordship rather than by resident princes.
Language: Samogitian, a Lithuanian dialect group distinct enough to sound foreign to a Vilnius courtier [Historical record].
Faith: The most stubbornly pagan people in Europe. They destroyed the Sword Brothers at Saulė (1236) and the Order at Durbe (1260) [Historical record]. Baptised only in 1413–17, and sent their own delegation to the Council of Constance in 1416 to accuse the Order of using baptism as a pretext for conquest [Historical record].
The Samogitian question [Historical record]: Samogitia is the land bridge between the Order’s Prussia and Livonia. Every Lithuanian ruler in the saga, when cornered, sells it: Jogaila at Dovydiškės (1380) and the Dubysa (1382), Vytautas at Königsberg (1384) and Salynas (1398), Vytautas and Jogaila at Raciąž (1404). The Samogitians keep refusing to be sold, rising in 1401 and 1409. It is the saga’s purest grey tragedy: their own princes are the brokers of their conquest.
Dress and food: As A.1, poorer and more archaic. More fish and coastal goods near the sea.
How others see them: To the Order, the most bestial pagans of all, beyond negotiation. To Vilnius, loyal, useful and expendable. To themselves, the free people.
Saga notes: The Root-Mother protects them. Their land holds the Hidden Groves bought by Birutė (Cosmology §4.2), and Galminas is their priest (Book V). The Iron Saint hungers for them most. Kęstutis was „theirs“, which is why Samogitian loyalty to Vytautas is his to lose. Every time he signs Samogitia away, a grove should go quiet on the page.
A.3 The remnant Prussians (Prūsai)¶
Who [Historical record]: The West Baltic people conquered by the Order between 1230 and 1283, after the Great Prussian Uprising (1260–74). In 1382 they are a subject peasantry in their own country, with a minority of free Prussians who serve the Order.
Language: Old Prussian, a West Baltic language related to Lithuanian but not mutually intelligible. It survived as a peasant tongue into the 16th c. (catechisms of 1545 and 1561) and died out around 1700 [Historical record].
Faith: Officially Catholic. Pagan practice persisted in secret (16th-c. Order and Lutheran sources describe goat sacrifices, notably the Sudauerbüchlein) [Historical record].
Status: Most work under Prussian or German law as unfree or semi-free peasants. Some, the Witinge (Lith. vitingai), are free Prussian military servitors who hold land for service and act as the Order’s light cavalry, scouts and guides into Lithuania [Historical record].
How others see them: To the Germans, peasants of doubtful faith. To Lithuanians, lost kin and also traitors who guide the Reise. To themselves, it depends whom you ask.
Saga notes: The orphaned people of the Pact: their flame (Romuva) went out a century ago, and their unburned dead are among the oldest ravenous vėlės in the Dykra. A Witing guide who leads Order raids into Samogitia by day and leaves milk for the žaltys by night is the best embodiment of the saga’s grey. A Prussian Witing would be the ideal guide (or betrayer) for the Order’s Book I campaign (ch. 20).
A.4 Yotvingians and Sudovians (Jotvingiai, Sūduviai)¶
Who [Historical record]: A West Baltic people of the lands south of the Nemunas (Sudovia/Sūduva), conquered by the Order in 1277–83. Some were resettled into Samland by the Order (the Sudauer Winkel) [Historical record]; others fled into Lithuania. Their homeland became the deepest part of the Wildnis [Historical record].
Language: West Baltic (Yotvingian), extinct. It survives in place-names and a disputed 17th-c. word list.
Faith: Pagan until conquest. The remnant is half-Christian, half-nothing.
Status in 1382: Scattered families in the Dykra, in Lithuanian service, or as Order peasants in Samland. A people that has become a landscape.
Saga notes: The Dykra’s ghost-people. Their overgrown hillforts are its „old villages“. Eglė’s swamp-kin speak a language Vytautas almost understands, which could be Yotvingian [The saga’s invention]. The Root-Mother remembers them by name, and nobody else does.
A.5 Curonians (Kuršiai)¶
Who [Historical record]: A Baltic people of the coast from the Curonian Lagoon north into Courland. Conquered by the Livonian Order in the 1260s. The Palanga area is a Curonian–Samogitian borderland, and Birutė’s hill was a Curonian settlement and hillfort [Historical record].
Language: Curonian, a Baltic tongue between Lithuanian and Latvian, absorbed by both. The later Kursenieki fishermen of the Curonian Spit spoke a Latvian-based dialect.
Faith: Pagan, then nominally Christian under the Livonian Order; the coast stays semi-pagan.
Status: Fishermen, amber gatherers, coast-folk. The „Order’s“ Curonians in Courland live a short ride from the „free“ Samogitian ones at Palanga.
Saga notes: The Amber Queen’s people. The vaidilutės of the shore flame may have been Curonian-born [The saga’s invention], which makes Birutė a borderland woman, half of the sea. The servant girl „from the coastal village“ in ch. 11 is Curonian. The Order’s amber monopoly (C.10) falls on their cousins in Samland.
A.6 Ruthenians (Rusėnai; Rus‘, the Ruthenian lands)¶
Who [Historical record]: The East Slavic Orthodox majority of the Grand Duchy: Polotsk, Vitebsk, Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolia, Black Ruthenia, Siveria. The ancestors of today’s Belarusians and Ukrainians.
Language: East Slavic vernaculars. Writing uses Church Slavonic and the Ruthenian chancery language in Cyrillic. This is the GDL’s administrative language: charters, treaties with the east, and later the Lithuanian chronicles and statutes [Historical record].
Faith: Orthodox Christian, under the metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus‘. The metropolitan seat itself is contested between Lithuanian and Muscovite candidates (Cyprian is the key figure of the 1370s–80s). Folk practice keeps the old spirits: the domovoy, leshy and rusalki [Ethnographic].
Dress: Long kaftans; boots; fur hats; women with covered heads (married) and embroidered linen. The elite wear Byzantine-influenced silks.
Food: Rye and buckwheat, kvass, mead, fish fasts on Orthodox calendar days. The strict Orthodox fasts set the rhythm of the year.
Status: Not a conquered people in their own eyes. Their princes (Rurikid and Gediminid) are part of the ruling elite. Their boyars serve in the grand duke’s armies. Their towns have churches, monasteries, icons and literate clergy. Pagan Lithuania ruled them partly by leaving them alone: „we do not change the old, we do not bring in the new“ is a later formula attributed to GDL practice.
How others see them: To Lithuanians, the clerks, priests and craftsmen of the realm, and wives of princes: Algirdas’s two wives were Orthodox princesses, and Jogaila’s mother is Julijona of Tver [Historical record]. To Catholics (Poles, the Order), „schismatics“, barely better than pagans. To Moscow, kin who chose the wrong master.
Saga notes: The Vulture Forces largely pass them by. No purchased baptism (they were baptised four centuries ago), no crusade aimed at them. Their danger is the Steppe-Hunger at their southern edge and the Gold-Glutton in tribute and trade. Their spirits are not Lithuanian dvasios, but they obey the same rule of courtesy (Cosmology §2.3), which shows the old courtesy is wider than Lithuania. A Ruthenian chancery scribe at Jogaila’s court (who writes down what the pagans will not) makes a strong recurring point-of-view: the man who decides what history remembers.
A.7 Poles (Lenkai)¶
Who [Historical record]: The people of the Kingdom of Poland and the Masovian duchies.
Language: Polish; Latin for church, chancery and law.
Faith: Catholic, with a strong episcopate (Kraków, Gniezno). Old saints (Stanisław, Wojciech/Adalbert).
Dress: Western fashion filtered through Bohemia and Hungary (Louis of Hungary’s court): tight hose, short doublets for young men, long robes for the old and the clergy, mail and plate for knights.
Status in 1382: A kingless kingdom after September 1382, run by magnate clans (Toporczyk, Leliwa, Nałęcz, Grzymała) and bishops, deciding whom to marry the child queen to. Masovia is separate, poorer and closer to Lithuania by blood (Danutė, then Aleksandra) [Historical record].
How others see them: To Lithuanians, old raid targets: Lithuanian raids took Polish and Masovian captives by the thousand in the 13th–14th centuries [Historical record], and Lithuanian captive-villages of Poles existed. From 1385, partners of convenience. To the Order, rivals for Pomerania and Kulmerland.
Saga notes: The White Silence gathers around the 1385–86 bargain: a baptism bought with a crown. Poles themselves are not its servants. Jadwiga is its victim and later its anchor; Oleśnicki is the Gold-Glutton’s champion (outlines). Show decent Poles from the start (a Masovian priest at Danutė’s court; a Kraków knight at Grunwald), so that Book IV’s „the Poles stole the crown“ stays one faction’s crime, not a nation’s.
A.8 German Order brethren and settlers¶
Who [Historical record]: The Teutonic Order (Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum) is a military-religious order. Its brethren are knight-brothers (white mantle with black cross), priest-brothers, and sergeant or half-brothers (grey mantles, the Graumäntler). Most are recruited from the German lands of the Empire (Franconia, Thuringia, Swabia, the Rhineland), very rarely from Prussia itself. Under them are German settlers: towns under Kulm law (from the Kulmer Handfeste, 1233), German peasant villages, Hanseatic merchants.
Language: Middle High and Low German. Latin for liturgy and chancery. Knight-brothers are often barely literate; the chaplains write.
Faith: Catholic, of a militant devotional kind, centred on the Virgin Mary (Marienburg is her castle). Brethren take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and live by a Rule: fixed hours of prayer, common meals, silence at table, fasting, no private property, no hunting except wolves and bears [Historical record].
The Reise guests [Historical record]: Western knights come to Prussia for the summer or winter Reise to fight the „Saracens of the North“: English, French, Scots, Bohemians, Germans. Chaucer’s Knight „had reysed in Lettow“ (Lithuania) [Historical record]. Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, joins the 1390 siege of Vilnius [Historical record]. For them it is chivalric tourism with salvation attached.
Dress and arms: In the 1380s, mail and a coat of plates, a bascinet, gauntlets; the mantle over it. Crossbows in quantity. Big horses, heavy lances.
How others see them: To Lithuanians, kryžiuočiai („cross-men“), the iron enemy, and also the source of the best weapons, salt and silver, and of a refuge for every defeated Gediminid (Vytautas twice, Švitrigaila). To Poles, overmighty neighbours. To their own Prussian peasants, lords.
Saga notes: The Iron Saint feeds on the Reise (Cosmology §3.3). Brethren range from sincere ascetics (a sergeant-brother who nurses Lithuanian captives in the Order’s hospital) to career killers for whom the Rule is cover. Konrad Zöllner von Rotenstein (Book I’s Grand Master) is an administrator, not a monster. The Order is also a builder of towns, schools and hospitals [Historical record]. Never let the Iron Saint wear every white mantle.
A.9 Hanseatic merchants¶
Who [Historical record]: Merchants of the German Hanse, the league of trading towns (Lübeck, Visby, Riga, Danzig, Elbing, Thorn, Königsberg, Reval). Kontors at Novgorod (Peterhof), Bruges, London and Bergen.
Language: Middle Low German, the Baltic’s lingua franca of trade [Historical record].
Faith: Catholic, practical. A merchant in a pagan town needs a priest and a church, and gets them.
Trade: Out of Lithuania and Rus‘: furs, wax, honey, hides, timber, amber (from the Order’s monopoly), grain (Prussia). In: salt (Lüneburg and Biscay „bay salt“), Flemish and English cloth, metals and arms (when not embargoed), wine, herring, spices, silver [Historical record].
How others see them: To the Order, its tax base and allies (most Prussian towns are Hanse members). To Lithuanians, useful foreigners with too many scales. To Novgorod, rivals and partners.
Saga notes: The Gold-Glutton’s counting-houses (Cosmology §3.3). Hanulas, the Riga merchant who opens Vilnius to Jogaila (1382) [Historical record], is Henė’s first mask. Show a decent merchant too, one who smuggles salt to a starving Samogitian village because a debt is a debt. The Glutton feeds on the ledger, not the trader.
A.10 Tatars (Totoriai) [Books II–V]¶
Who [Historical record]: Turkic-speaking subjects of the Golden Horde (the Ulus of Jochi). After Vytautas’s steppe campaigns (from c. 1397) and Tokhtamysh’s exile in Lithuania, Tatar communities were settled in the GDL: given land for military service, allowed to keep their faith, later known as Lipka Tatars [Historical record].
Language: Kipchak Turkic. Later generations shift to Ruthenian and Polish while keeping Arabic-script religious books (kitabs).
Faith: Sunni Islam (the Horde converted under Özbeg in the 14th c.) over older steppe custom [Historical record].
Dress, food: Felt and leather, kaftans, horse-centred culture (mare’s milk kumis; horse meat). Settled Tatars adapt to the forest economy.
Status: Honoured military settlers under Vytautas, with a right to their own law in some matters, and mosques in later centuries.
How others see them: To Lithuanians, terrifying enemies at Blue Waters and Vorskla, and excellent allies at Grunwald [Historical record: Tatar contingents fought at Grunwald under Jalal al-Din]. To the Order, proof that Vytautas brings infidels against Christians, which became propaganda at Constance.
Saga notes: The Steppe-Hunger is not „the Tatars“. It feeds on conquest-without-end, and its most willing host in Book II is Vytautas. The Tatars settled in Lithuania are, if anything, its refugees. Tokhtamysh, a deposed khan seeking a home, is a mirror of Vytautas in 1382.
A.11 Karaims (Karaimai) [Books II–V]¶
Who [Historical record]: A Turkic-speaking people of Karaite Judaism brought from Crimea by Vytautas at the end of the 14th century (traditionally c. 1397–98; the exact year is not securely documented) and settled chiefly at Trakai, with other communities later (Lutsk, Halych, Biržai/Panevėžys) [Historical record].
Language: Karaim, Kipchak Turkic, written in Hebrew script; Hebrew in liturgy.
Faith: Karaite Judaism: scripture (the Tanakh) without the rabbinic Talmud. Their house of prayer is the kenesa [Historical record].
Status: Under ducal protection, with privileges (later charters). Tradition holds they served as guards of Trakai castle [Ethnographic/tradition]. In later centuries the Karaim street in Trakai has houses with three windows to the street (tradition), and they are famed for kibinai pastries (later).
Saga notes: Book II–IV’s Trakai garrison. Strangers who owe loyalty to one man, Vytautas, not to a church or a nation. [The saga’s invention, optional]: the Karaim guard captain is the only one who knows what burns in the island castle’s vault, and keeps silent because his own faith also keeps a lamp (do not go further than this parallel). Avoid exoticising them: they are soldiers, gardeners, scholars and householders.
A.12 Jews (Žydai) [Book II onward; possible earlier]¶
Who [Historical record]: Jewish communities in Brest, Grodno, Trakai, Lutsk and other towns. They came from the west (Ashkenazi, from German lands and Poland) and possibly earlier from the Byzantine and Kyivan east. Vytautas’s privilege to the Jews of Brest (1 July 1388) and to Grodno (1389) (with Trakai and Lutsk following, or Trakai first) is usually cited as the founding charter of Lithuanian Jewry. Its authenticity has been questioned [Historical record].
Language: Hebrew for scripture and learning; the vernaculars of their towns. Yiddish as a distinct Lithuanian Jewish tongue comes later.
Faith: Rabbinic Judaism.
Status: Under the grand duke’s direct protection. The privileges promise judicial autonomy in their own disputes, freedom to travel and trade, and protection of synagogue and cemetery, with severe penalties for violence against them [Historical record, as summarised by the privilege texts]. Occupations: trade, crafts, toll- and customs-farming, medicine, lending.
How others see them: Varies. Catholic clergy are hostile; the grand duke protective, for reasons of policy; townspeople both.
Saga notes (important): Never link Jews to the Gold-Glutton, to money-magic, or to blood or poison rumours. These are the real medieval libels that killed real people, and putting them in the saga’s mythic layer would endorse them. If a Jewish character appears, give him the saga’s ordinary greyness: a Brest physician who treats Ona’s fever, a Grodno toll-farmer who is honest and resented for it, a scholar who argues with a Karaim about texts. The grand duke’s protection is one of the decencies Vytautas actually achieved: let it count.
Part C. Daily life¶
C.1 Law and blood-feud¶
[Historical record] There is no written Lithuanian law until the First Statute (1529). In 1382 justice is customary, administered by the grand duke, princes and elders, with the duke as final judge. The statutes later preserve old principles: compensation for killing (head-money, galvapinigiai), graded by the victim’s status, and recognised private vengeance curbed by it.
[Ethnographic/Saga] Blood-feud between boyar kin-groups is a live threat: a killing obliges the kin to take vengeance or accept payment. Kęstutis’s murder is, in this frame, the ultimate unpaid blood-debt, and Vytautas’s whole life is the feud. The saga can treat the 1392 Ostrów settlement as head-money paid in land.
Ordeals and oaths decide what witnesses cannot. Treaties are secured by oaths plus hostages.
C.2 Oaths¶
[Historical record] In 1351 Kęstutis swore an oath to Louis of Hungary with a pagan rite, sacrificing an ox, promised baptism, and slipped away (chronology). Order and Rus‘ sources show pagan Lithuanians swearing treaties by their own gods and rites (details are scanty).
By earth (Žemyna): kneel and kiss the bare earth or take a handful into the mouth. Binding physically: the oath-breaker’s land rejects him (crops fail, horses balk at his threshold).
By Perkūnas: hand on an oak struck by lightning, or on a sword laid on the stone. Perkūnas punishes the breach in his own time (Skirgaila’s broken safe-conduct, 1382).
By fire (Gabija): swearing over the hearth; to break it is to have no fire that will light for you.
Christian oaths on relics and the Gospels arrive with baptism. [The saga’s invention] They bind nothing in the old cosmology, which is why the old gods regard Christian treaties as „unwitnessed“ and why the Order’s treaties feel unreal to pagans.
C.3 Hospitality: bread and salt¶
[Ethnographic] Welcoming a guest with bread and salt is a deep Baltic and Slavic custom, recorded richly in later centuries. Projecting it to 1382 is reasonable (ch. 1 uses it well).
Salt is precious: Lithuania has no salt of its own and imports it from Prussia, the Hanse and Galicia [Historical record]. Offering salt is offering wealth.
[The saga’s invention rule] Bread-and-salt makes the guest sacred for three days, and harming him breaks custom (the dvasios notice). The Krėva arrest and the 1384 burnings are both violations of hospitality, from opposite sides. This is the grey symmetry: Vytautas repays Skirgaila’s betrayal with his own.
C.4 Marriage and women’s power¶
[Historical record] Gediminid women are instruments and agents of diplomacy. Danutė (Anna) Kęstutaitė married Janusz I of Masovia. Rimgailė married into Masovia too. Algirdas’s daughters married into Rus‘ and Poland. Julijona of Tver (Jogaila’s mother) is a political force in the 1370s–80s. Ona (Vytautas’s wife) manages the Krėva escape, endures years as hostage, and later travels to Prussia as Vytautas’s envoy (c. 1400) [Historical record].
Pagan custom: Order and Christian writers accuse pagan Lithuanian nobles of polygyny. Treat it as possible but unproven; the saga need not use it.
Bride-taking: The Birutė legend (16th-c. chronicles) has Kęstutis take the Palanga priestess by force, because she was vowed to the flame [Historical record as legend]. [The saga’s invention] That violence is part of the Amber Debt. Keep it uncomfortable, not romantic.
Priestesses: Vaidilutės (flame-keepers) are an attested later tradition. Their vows of chastity and the penalties for breaking them are from late or hostile sources.
Models for the saga’s women:
Birutė: power by sacred office.
Ona: power by courage and management: the escape, the hostage years, diplomacy.
Danutė: power by marriage: the sister in a foreign court who can give tears but not troops.
Julijona: power by motherhood and faith: the Orthodox widow behind Jogaila’s throne.
Jadvyga: power by crown and sacrifice.
C.5 Death: cremation and burial¶
[Historical record] Pagan Lithuanian rulers were cremated. Kęstutis was burned in Vilnius in August 1382 with his horses, weapons, hounds and falcons, and with lynx and bear claws so that he could climb on Judgement Day (Długosz). Algirdas’s 1377 funeral is reported as a cremation with horses, though some Rus‘ sources claim he died Orthodox.
Ordinary Lithuanians in the 14th century used both cremation and inhumation. Samogitia kept cremation longest (into the 15th c.). Christians (Ruthenians, Catholics) bury.
[Historical record/Ethnographic] The dead are fed at autumn feasts (Vėlinės, the „souls‘ days“, later fused with All Souls). Food is left on the table, a place is set, the doors are opened.
[The saga’s invention, Cosmology §1] Fire is the fastest road to Dausos. An unburned pagan lingers as a vėlė. Every Order victory leaves unburned dead; every baptism ends a family’s cremations; the Unbinding is built from corpses that were buried instead of burned. The Order’s insistence on burial is, to pagans, an atrocity against the soul.
Pilėnai (1336) [Historical record, Order chronicles]: the defenders, under Margiris, burned themselves and their property rather than surrender. [The saga’s invention] A sacred memory: „the Pilėnai choice“. It is the place-name to invoke when a character chooses fire over the cross.
C.6 Food and drink¶
Staples [Historical record/archaeology]: rye (bread; sacred, never thrown away, a dropped crust is kissed [Ethnographic]), barley (groats, beer), oats, wheat for the elite, peas, beans, turnips, cabbage, onions, garlic, hemp and flax seed; dairy (curd cheese, butter, sour milk); pork, beef, mutton, poultry; game (venison, boar, wisent, beaver tail as a fast-day dish); fish (pike, bream, eel, salted herring imported via the Hanse); mushrooms and berries; honey.
Drink: alus (beer: everyday), midus (mead: festive, elite, ritual; famous abroad [Historical record]), gira (kvass-like), birch sap in spring [Ethnographic]; wine imported for church and high table.
Anachronism watch: no potatoes, tomatoes, maize, peppers, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, or New World turkey. Sugar is a rare imported spice. Lemons are a miracle. Cucumbers are doubtful for 1380s Lithuania. Beetroot soups belong to later centuries. Buckwheat is spreading in the east.
Feast rules [The saga’s invention + Ethnographic]: The first drops of every drink go to the earth (Žemyna). The first slice of bread goes to the hearth (Gabija). A guest is fed before he is questioned.
C.7 Clothing and arms¶
Common folk [Historical record/archaeology + Ethnographic]: linen shirts and wool overgarments (sermėga, rudinė), patterned woven belts (juostos: protective, gifted at weddings), leg-wraps and bast shoes (vyžos) or leather shoes, fur caps and sheepskins in winter. Married women cover their hair (linen headwraps, nuometas); maidens wear headbands or crowns [Ethnographic]. Bronze and silver jewellery; amber beads and amulets.
Boyars: Ruthenian-style kaftans and furs with Western touches; imported cloth (Flemish scarlet is a status marker); silver belts; good boots.
Arms, Lithuanian [Historical record]: mail shirts; conical or rounded helmets; lamellar and scale from the east; round shields and the large pavise (the „Lithuanian shield“ is a possible origin of the pavise); spears, javelins (the sulica type), axes, swords (often imported), bows and increasingly crossbows. Light, hardy horses (ancestors of the žemaitukai) that cross bog where Western chargers founder.
Arms, Order: see A.8. Bombards are new and few in the 1380s.
C.8 Housing¶
[Historical record/archaeology + Ethnographic] A Lithuanian homestead is timber, log-built:
troba / numas: the dwelling, often a smoke-hut without a chimney (the smoke finds the roof).
klėtis: storehouse and granary; the family’s valuables, the bride’s chest, summer sleeping for the young; [Ethnographic] a semi-sacred place.
jauja: the grain-drying and threshing barn, warm and dangerous (fires), a known haunt of spirits.
pirtis: the bath-house (sauna): steam, birch whisks, cold plunge. Used for washing, birth, healing and laying out the dead [Ethnographic]. [The saga’s invention] At night it belongs to the spirits; never bathe after dark, and leave water for the vėlės.
cattle sheds and a fenced yard; the žaltys under the threshold or behind the stove; the sacred corner (later the icon corner in Ruthenian houses).
Settlements cluster under hillforts (piliakalniai), which are refuges in raids. Towns are few: Vilnius, Kaunas, Trakai, Grodno; Ruthenian towns are older and larger.
Castles: most are wood and earth on hillforts; a handful are brick and stone (Vilnius, Trakai, Krėva, Medininkai, Lida, Kaunas before 1362). See the gazetteer.
C.9 Crafts and amber¶
Smiths are respected and feared. [Historical record] The 1261 Malalas gloss names a divine smith, Teliavelis, who forged the sun. [The saga’s invention] Smiths stand between Gabija’s fire and the Iron Saint’s iron, and a smith’s oath is double.
Amber [Historical record]: The Order holds an amber monopoly (the Bernsteinregal) on the Samland coast. Coastal people must hand over what they gather, under oath and harsh penalties, with gallows on the shore remembered in later centuries. The Order sells raw amber to the rosary-makers‘ guilds of Bruges and Lübeck (the Paternostermacher) [Historical record]. Saulė’s tears end up as Christian prayer beads. The irony writes itself; use it once, well.
At Palanga (outside the monopoly, in Samogitia) amber is gathered after storms, worked into beads and cone-shaped amulets, and offered to the sea [The saga’s invention + archaeology of amber ornaments].
Other crafts: weaving (belts, linen), pottery, bone and antler, leather and fur, beekeeping in tree-hives (drevininkai), carpentry (the whole world is wooden), boat-building on the rivers.
C.10 The economy¶
[Historical record] Exports: furs (squirrel by the hundred-thousand, marten, beaver, sable via the east), wax (one of the great exports: the Order and the Hanse pay well, and Lithuanian wax lights Western altars), honey, hides, timber, amber (via the Order).
Imports: salt (critical, and embargoable), cloth, iron and weapons (papal and Order bans on selling arms to pagans; smuggling is constant), silver, wine, spices.
Tribute of the Ruthenian lands: silver, furs and grain flow from Polotsk, Vitebsk, Kyiv and Volhynia to Vilnius. The empire pays for the pagan core, an uncomfortable truth for saga Lithuanians who see themselves as the persecuted ones.
Money [Historical record]: Lithuanian „longs“ (ilgieji): cast semicircular silver bars about 13 cm long, roughly 100–110 g (a half-mark standard, c. 104 g), chopped to the needed weight. One bar would buy roughly 15 sheep; a horse cost about a bar and a half (one popular source). Bars and hack-silver are being supplemented in the later 14th century by the first Lithuanian coins (small silver denars; attribution to particular rulers is debated). Prague groschen, Order schillings and Tatar dirhams circulate too.
Scene detail: A buyer snaps or chops a piece off a silver bar and weighs it on a folding balance. Every serious man carries scales. The sound of a chisel on silver is the sound of a deal (the Gold-Glutton’s music).
Ch. 2’s „Venetian wax“ as a luxury gift to Lithuania is coals to Newcastle: Lithuania exports wax. Either make it an intended insult (Vytautas can say so) or swap it for Venetian glass, Flemish scarlet, or perfumed candles (the perfume, not the wax, being the luxury).
C.11 War customs¶
The raid (žygis, Germ. Reise) [Historical record]: Lithuanian and Order warfare in the 14th century is mostly raiding: fast columns that burn crops, drive off cattle and take captives. Set battles are rare (Strėva 1348, Rudau 1370). Castles are besieged in great campaigns.
The Reise from the other side [Historical record + the saga’s invention]: Smoke on the horizon three villages away, then horns from the hillfort. Cattle driven into the bog islands; the old, women and children into the hillfort or the forest; grain buried; the žaltys left to guard the empty house. The column arrives, burns, takes whoever is slow, and is gone in a day. Two weeks later the winter kills more than the raid did. Write the Reise once from a Samogitian girl’s point of view and every Order scene after it will carry weight.
Captives and ransom [Historical record]: Captives are wealth. Nobles are ransomed; commoners are settled as labour (Lithuanians) or sold or settled (the Order also takes Lithuanian captives to Prussia as peasants). Exchange of prisoners is part of every truce.
Hostages: see Part B.
Sacrifice of captives [Order sources, partly propaganda]: Order chroniclers report Lithuanians burning captured knights in armour on their horses as offerings to the gods. [The saga’s invention] Treat it as real and rare: the old faith’s own atrocity. Do not make it routine, and do not omit it.
The Order’s side: forced baptisms, villages burned with people inside (attested in Lithuanian complaints, e.g. at Constance 1416 [Historical record]), the Ehrentisch feasts celebrating the year’s best killers. Also: truces honoured, prisoners exchanged, courtesy between Kęstutis and particular Order commanders [Historical record].
Signals of war [The saga’s invention/Ethnographic]: the war-arrow (karo strėlė) or a club passed from homestead to homestead to call the levy is attested in later Baltic custom. Beacon fires on hillforts.