1336 Battle of Pilėnai
The people of the eastern Baltic were the last Europeans to be Christianized, clinging to their polytheism despite attempts by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches to evangelize them. The orders of the Northern Crusade – the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order – took it upon themselves to wage war against the pagans (and occasionally their Orthodox neighbours), enforce conversion, and spread Germanic hegemony. History records many notable battles fought by these western knights, the most famous of which was the Battle on the Ice memorialized by Sergei Eisenstein in his epic 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
(It’s a jolly little piece of Stalinist propaganda with a musical score by Prokofiev that I will deal with here in the future.)
The knights lost that fight, but on this day in 1336 they were triumphant in an attack on a pagan stronghold of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the hill fort at Pilėnai. A force of some 6,000, mostly German but also French and Austrian nobles and their detachments, approached the fort in which thousands of refugees had sought shelter. According to medieval chroniclers, the people panicked and resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured and enslaved. One elderly woman was said to have axed 100 people to death before killing herself. The commander of the defenders, Duke Margris, slew his own wife and guards before committing suicide.
The significance of the fight was its role in buttressing Lithuanian nationalism. The battle inspired epic poems, novels, operas, and historic re-enactments.