Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (61 page)

In the bedroom, the walls were covered in unmatching tiles. Half of the room was muddy blue, and the other half hospital green. No-one had made the tiles reach the ceiling, so several inches of unadorned cement lined the top of the walls. The beds lacked sheets and pillows. A small but vigorous cockroach was crawling across the floor.

Someone had ordered the construction of this hotel. Someone else had built it. Someone had placed the mismatching tiles on the walls, someone had installed the ill-fitting sink… someone had failed to make the beds. Many decisions had been made, but no-one had been responsible for the hotel room… It was just a place, created to fill the plan of a distant bureaucrat who would never see it and would never care.
²⁰

The region’s best asset is its climate. Apart from faraway Murmansk, this is Russia’s only section of northern coastline that is ice-free throughout the year. Twenty years ago, the USSR had six Baltic naval bases. Today’s Russia has only two: Kronstadt near St Petersburg and Baltiysk.

So far, Kaliningrad and its beleaguered enclave have failed to change their name. The city of Kalinin, in central Russia, has reverted to the ancient name of Tver, and the broad Kalininskaya Boulevard in central Moscow is the ‘Tverskaya’ again. The citizens of Leningrad voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to recover the city’s original identity of St Petersburg. So there is no shortage of precedents, but no consensus has emerged in the enclave about a new name. The front-runners in the 1990s were ‘Kantograd’ and ‘Korolovsk’. At present, the Russian slang-name of ‘Kyonig’ is said to have the edge. But cultural sensibilities are still heavily Sovietized, and rallies are still held to mark the Bolshevik Revolution.

As the second post-Soviet decade reached its end, the city held its breath to see if the stand-off over nuclear missiles could be defused. In 2008 hopes were sinking. The government of Poland had agreed in principle to admit the American ‘Shield’; and Russia’s new president, Dmitri Medvedyev, threatened to install short-range Iskander missiles in the enclave. Then in 2009 tensions relaxed. The incoming Obama administration in the United States curtailed the chances of the ‘Shield’ being built,
²¹
and the Iskanders were sent back. The signing of a new Russo-American START Treaty on 26 January 2011 promised a period of calm.

Nonetheless, the Kalingrad enclave remains a place of tangible unease. Some still blame external threats. ‘Russia is like a wolf,’ one Kaliningrader has said enigmatically, ‘a wolf that has been trapped by hunters.’
²²
So far no one has caught sight of the hunters; others underline internal shortcomings. On 2 February 2010 tens if not hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in central Kaliningrad to demand the removal not only of Governor Boos but also of Vladimir Putin. The placards targeted Putin’s
YedRo
or ‘United Russia’ Party; ‘
Partiya YedRo
’, the jingle read, ‘
pomoinoye vyedro
’ (‘United Russia [is] a bucket of filth’).
²³
The Kremlin ordered a high-level inquiry, but fresh demonstrations broke out exactly six months later. This time Governor Boos was immediately fired, and replaced by the local YedRo Secretary, Nikolay Tsukanov. Suddenly the air was thick again with ambitious plans. Visions of the Baltic Hong Kong resurfaced as the federal government proposed yet another ‘new economic status’ for the enclave. Governor Tsukanov proposed his home town of Gusev as a centre of expansion parallel to Kaliningrad. The Regional Development Agency announced multi-billion-rouble grants to accelerate stalled projects for a new seaport and a nuclear power station.
²⁴
Even the outlook for gay tourism was explored. Then, as if to go back to basics, a Russo-German scheme was unveiled at Zeleniogorsk to prepare an Open Air Museum of the Ancient Prussians.
²⁵

II

One thousand, two thousand years ago, the land that lies on the southern shore of Europe’s second inland sea was virtually
terra incognita
. If it was known beyond its own shores at all, it was as the ‘Amber Coast’, the source of the shimmering translucent gold-brown stones which were highly prized for jewellery in the ancient world. The native tribes who lived in the dark forests of the Baltic coastland had few contacts with outsiders. They lived from fishing, hunting and raiding their neighbours. They called themselves
Prusai
, or
Pruzzi
– a name that has been traced to an Indo-European root connected with water. Since they would have identified themselves above all with their natural surroundings, there is some basis for thinking of them as the ‘Water Tribes’ or the ‘Lakeland Folk’, or possibly, through the striking configuration of their coastline, as the ‘People of the Lagoons’.
²⁶

The
Prusai
thrived untouched by civilization until the thirteenth century AD. They were pagan, illiterate, pre-agricultural and, in the eyes of their neighbours, primitive predators. All the great events of early European history passed them by. Hoards of Roman coins, deriving no doubt from the amber trade, indicate that they must have been aware of the wider world,
²⁷
yet the Roman Empire rose and declined without altering their way of life. The invading Asiatic nomads rode across the open plains to the south, and the westward passage of Germanic, and later of Slavic tribes, did not penetrate their homeland. The empire of Charlemagne and his successors never reached them; nor did the religion of the Nazarenes, which gradually overtook the north European mainland in the tenth century and Scandinavia in the twelfth.

Apart from occasional and ambiguous references by early geographers, the first event to bring the
Prusai
into the historical record occurred in 997. In that year the Czech Prince Vojtech of Prague, a missionary bishop, took ship in the Vistula delta intending to convert them. Instead, he was murdered by his prospective flock. A search party ransomed his body, and brought it back as a holy relic to the newly founded Polish cathedral of Gniezno. Vojtech was better known by his baptismal name of Adalbert, and as St Adalbert of Prussia he was destined to become the heavenly patron of the land which had rejected him.
²⁸

The
Prusai
formed the westernmost grouping within a larger collection of Baltic peoples, including the Lithuanians and Latvians and who spoke related languages and followed similarly traditional ways of life. The names of their constituent tribes were recorded in Latin forms by the Catholic monks who first accumulated knowledge of the region. Already in the ninth century, the so-called Bavarian Geographer
*
had recorded the Latin name of
Borussia –
that is, the land of the
Prusai
– from which all modern variants of the country’s name are derived:
Prussia
(Latin and English),
Preussen
(German),
Prusse
(French) and
Prusy
(Polish). Five hundred years later, when the conquest of Borussia by Christian knights was in progress, the priest Peter Dusberger compiled a much fuller list of tribes. Among the Balto-Prussian ethnic group, he noted the Varmians, the Pomesanians, the Natangians, the Sambians, the Skalovians, the Nadruvians, the Bartians, the Sudovians and the Galindians. Each of them possessed their own territory within the expanse lying between the Vistula and Nemanus (Nieman) rivers. The first six on the list were settled on the coast, the others in the interior. There may have been others.

The geography of
Borussia
added greatly to its isolation. The coastal strip was bordered by a string of maritime lagoons, which had formed behind long sandy spits and which obstructed easy access to the rivers. The interior consisted largely of the vast lines of morainic stones which marked the stages of retreat of the last northern ice cap. The result was a tangle of fantastically shaped lakes interspersed by winding chains of pine-covered heights. There were no straightforward routes or trails, no safe refuges for intruders. Most of the ground was unsuitable for growing crops. The temptation to mount cattle-raids into the open country beyond the lakes, and to seize the produce of foreign barns, was great.

By the thirteenth century, however, the
Prusai
were effectively surrounded on all sides. The area to the west beyond the Vistula had been settled by Western Slavs, notably by the Kashubs, who formed part of the Duchy of Pomerania. To the south lay the Polish Duchy of Mazovia, centred on Warsaw, which during ‘the era of fragmentation’, was enjoying a state of semi-independence. To the east, beyond the Nieman, other Baltic groupings were embarking on adventures of their own that would lead to the states of Livonia and of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The principal motor of change in East Central Europe in that era was the arrival of the Mongol Horde. Streaming out of the Asian steppes, the Mongols destroyed Moscow in 1238, before wreaking death and pillage through what is now southern Poland and Hungary. The resultant insecurity encouraged two developments. One was the establishment of crusading orders to strengthen Christendom’s eastern borders. The other was the mobilization of German colonists to repopulate the devastated districts.

In its previous phase, Germanic colonization did not affect
Borussia
. After 1180, when the Slavonic duke of Pomerania, Boguslav III, had sworn fealty to the Holy Roman Empire, settlers from the latter crossed the River Oder and edged along the Pomeranian coast. After 1204, when one of the military orders, the Knights of the Sword (see p. 270n.), established a base at Riga in Livonia and when the Danes built their fort at Tallinn in Estonia, the Northern Crusades
*
were underway.
²⁹
But the
Prusai
, sandwiched between the advancing colonists on one side and the warring crusaders on the other, remained unscathed.

Such was the situation in the 1220s, when Conrad, duke of Mazovia, lost patience with the perpetual raiding of the
Prusai
. Earlier attempts to subdue them with the help a minor Polish crusading order, the Knights of Dobrzyn, had failed, so in exchange for a grant in fief of the district of Chełmno (Kulmerland) the duke called in an outfit of far greater capacity, inviting the Knights of the Teutonic Order to use their fief as a base for containing the
Prusai
. From what was said later, it seems Conrad envisaged nothing more than a local and limited operation. He would certainly not have anticipated that his guests would soon grow far more powerful than himself.
³⁰

The ‘Order of the Brothers of the Teutonic House of the Virgin Mary in Jerusalem’ had been founded in the previous century as one of several military organizations spawned by the crusader states of
Outremer
in the Holy Land devoted to converting ‘infidels’. It thrived through control of the port of Acre, but after the Saracen reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187 its knights increasingly gained a living as mercenaries in Greece, in Spain and then in Hungary. Yet its essential ethos and ambitions remained intact. The Teutonic Knights were looking for projects that would sustain a way of life devoted to fighting infidels but free from Europe’s feudal hierarchies.
³¹

The key figure in their schemes was Hermann von Salza (
c
. 1179–1239), who ruled the Order for thirty years as grand master, and who possessed connections both at the imperial court and at the Vatican. This was the time when the emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215–50), held sway in Sicily, and when his wars with the Papal States led to his excommunication (see p.
192
). Von Salza, whose career began as a knight in the Hohenstaufen entourage, acted as mediator in their disputes, and his familiarity with successive popes gave him a position which he exploited to great advantage. In essence, he contrived to place the Knights under direct papal patronage, and thereby to secure immunity from unconditional loyalty to the various secular rulers in whose lands they operated. The strategy failed in Hungary, whence the Order was expelled in 1225. In Mazovia, it worked to perfection.

Apart from anything else, Grand Master von Salza was an expert in legal trickery. Each stage of his scheming was supported by fine-sounding documents which gave the Order important rights without corresponding obligations. In 1226, the emperor’s Golden Bull of Rimini stated that the duke of Mazovia should equip the Order to fight the pagans, and that the conquered territory should be
Reichsfrei
, that is, beyond imperial jurisdiction. In 1230 the Treaty of Kruszwica, supposedly signed both by the Order and by the duke but leaving no later documentary trace, stated that Kulmerland was to be held by the Order in fief from Mazovia. In 1234, the self-contradictory Golden Bull of Rieti of Pope Gregory IX confirmed these arrangements, while also subjecting the Order exclusively to papal authority. Thus, having secured their foothold, the Knights felt that they possessed legal immunity. Any protests by the duke of Mazovia could be ignored. The emperor and the pope were far away, and the throne of Poland was vacant.