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78 Mediterraneans
trade with cities much further to the west, above all Lübeck;
indeed, the main motor of urban growth in the Baltic Far East
was German trade and migration. Outside the towns, the fifteenth
century saw an intensification of control by landlords
over the peasantry of eastern Europe, which reduced the agricultural
workforce to a ‘second serfdom’, and ensured the continued
importance of the rye lands as a source of grain for the
Dutch and other consumers well into the seventeenth century. 2
In other words, this Mediterranean of the North remained a
lively economic theatre well into the early modern period.
Just as the other Mediterraneans saw alongside the expansion
of trade an intensification in cultural contacts across the water,
so too in this area we can observe a process of Christianization,
accompanied by human migration, that transformed the societies
of the coasts of the Mediterranean of the North: the
process begins, indeed, in the Viking age, with the Danish and
Norse settlement of northern England and the outer isles of
Great Britain, but rapidly the direction of cultural influences
reversed, as Norway’s rulers accepted the Christian faith and as
Christianity also spread into the Baltic region; 3 there, a certain
amount of competition between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity
occurred, though one area, Lithuania, proved very resistant
to formal Christianization, retaining a pagan elite until
the end of the fourteenth century. 4 This made Lithuania (which
came to rule over a vast area reaching almost from the North
Sea to the Black Sea) not a more but a less closed world: it was
home to Catholics and Orthodox, Jews and Muslims, as well as
a diversity of pagans. 5 In Finland, on the other hand, Swedish
2 W. Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of
the Polish Economy 1500–1800, trans. L. Garner (London, 1976); D. Kirby,
Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World 1492–1772
(London, 1990), 3–23.
3 G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London, 1951), 130–64.
4 On this process see the two volumes of collected essays published by the
Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche, Gli Inizi del Cristianesimo in Livonia-
Lettonia and La Cristianizzazione della Lituania (Vatican City, 1989); S. C.
Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe,
1295–1345 (Cambridge, 1994).
5 Cf. a similar scenario in Hungary: N. Berend, At the Gates of Christendom:
Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval Hungary, c.1000–c.1300 (Cambridge,
2001).