Balts

The Balts are the peoples of the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea who speak, or spoke, the Baltic languages, which form a branch of the Indo-European family. Today they are the Lithuanians and the Latvians, whose languages are the only surviving members of the group. In earlier centuries they also included the Old Prussians, Curonians, Yotvingians or Sudovians, Galindians and other western groups whose languages have since been lost, though their influence lives on in the modern nations.

The ancestors of the Balts were Indo-European-speaking communities settled between the lower Vistula, the south-eastern Baltic coast and the upper Daugava and Dnieper rivers. Studies of river names suggest that Baltic speech once reached much further east, perhaps towards the upper Volga and Oka, and the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas drew a broad prehistoric homeland on this basis in 1963. Other scholars, such as Endre Bojt, doubt that a single clear homeland can be identified. Linguists note that Baltic languages, Lithuanian above all, keep many archaic Indo-European features.

From the second to the fifth centuries CE the Baltic lands prospered. The amber trade linked the coast with the Roman world, and iron tools and bronze ornaments spread widely. As Roman power faded, groups moved: the Galindians are thought to have migrated east towards the Moscow region in the fourth century. From around 400 CE Slavic settlers began to press on the eastern Baltic lands, and from about 650 Swedish expansion reached the western coast. Over time the Balts divided into a western branch, including the Old Prussians, Curonians and Sudovians, and an eastern branch that gave rise to the Lithuanians and Latvians. By the sixth and seventh centuries the Latgalians had moved into northern Latvia, earlier home to Finnic peoples.

The Balts kept their own religion longer than almost anyone else in Europe, and this made them targets of the Northern Crusades. The Prussian Crusade, led by the Teutonic Knights from 1230, brought Prussia under the Teutonic Order by the end of the thirteenth century. Over the following centuries the Prussians were largely absorbed by German and Lithuanian speakers, and Old Prussian died out in the eighteenth century, though a small revival movement exists today. Further north, crusaders conquered Livonia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lithuania, by contrast, built a powerful state, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Its ruler Mindaugas was baptised around 1250 or 1251, but the country formally adopted Catholicism only after 1387 under Jogaila and Vytautas; Samogitia followed in 1413, after the Battle of Grunwald.

No written texts survive from the pagan Baltic religion, so it is known from hostile chronicles, folklore and comparative study. Folk songs preserve a rich mythology, including the sky god Dievas, the sun goddess Saule and divine twin sons of the god, figures that scholars compare with other Indo-European traditions. Baltic neopaganism has revived some of these beliefs in modern times.

Around 2.4 million Lithuanians live in Lithuania, with roughly two million more abroad, and about 1.19 million Latvians live in Latvia, according to the 2021 censuses. Most Lithuanians are Catholic, while many Latvians are not religious. Both countries restored their independence in 1990 and 1991, after almost five decades of Soviet rule, and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.

Our 700, 800, 900 and 1000 maps draw the region under the label "Baltic tribes", an approximate outline along the south-eastern Baltic coast covering today's Lithuania, Latvia and neighbouring lands. Within it lived many separate peoples rather than a single state.