Lithuania stayed pagan so long it became Europe's largest state first
While crusading knights were converting the Baltic by the sword, Lithuania's warrior rulers kept their old gods, cremating their grand dukes on pyres. By the 15th century this late-Christianised duchy stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the biggest state in Europe.
People arrived as the ice retreated, in the second half of the 10th millennium BC, as wandering hunters. Farming came late, only in the 3rd millennium BC, but amber was already being traded. The Lithuanians belong to the Balts, whose other branches, such as the Old Prussians and Yotvingians, were conquered and absorbed by the Teutonic Order; only Lithuanians and Latvians survive. Their remote homeland along the Neman River attracted few outsiders, and the language is prized for staying unusually close to its Indo-European roots.
The country's name first appears in writing in the Annals of Quedlinburg, dated 9 March 1009, the year the missionary Bruno of Querfurt baptised a ruler recorded as King Nethimer. For a time Lithuanians paid tribute to Kievan Rus', but by the late 12th century they were raiding deep into Ruthenia, ravaging Polotsk and Pskov in 1183. Some forty expeditions went out between 1201 and 1236, and in 1219 twenty-one chiefs signed a treaty with Galicia–Volhynia, seen as the first sign of the tribes uniting.
German crusading orders then pressed from the west. In 1236 the pope declared a crusade against Lithuania, and the Samogitians crushed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword at the Battle of Saule. Mindaugas, one of the senior dukes, forged the tribes into a state, agreed to baptism in 1251 and was crowned in 1253, the only king Lithuania ever had. After the Samogitians beat the Knights again at Durbe in 1260, they accepted his rule only if he dropped Christianity, and he complied. His policy of resisting the Order while expanding into Ruthenia set the pattern for centuries.
Union with Poland began at Krewo in 1385, and the Union of Lublin in 1569 created the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which vanished in the partitions of 1795. Under Russian rule Lithuanians rebelled in 1831 and 1863. Independence was declared on 16 February 1918, lost in the Second World War to Soviet and then Nazi occupation, and restored in 1990 to 1991; Lithuania joined NATO and the EU in 2004.
Source: History of Lithuania
