16 Hammel-Kiesow
the Baltic southern coast as “in large measure dead”4 prior to the Germans’
arrival. While some still held to this idea into the 1950s, more recent settle-
ment archaeology and numismatic examination, as well as fresh interpreta-
tions of written sources based upon a new line of questioning, have created
a new picture of the south Baltic coast as a multi-facetted cultural and eco-
nomic landscape. Settlement archeology determines or specifies the location,
origin, duration of settlement and habitation of early (sixth-tenth centuries)
and medieval (eleventh-twelfth centuries) trading centers. The evaluation of
discovered coinage provides hypotheses that help to plausibly reconstruct the
dynamics of the economic relations in the region between Western Europe
and Northwest Russia.5
The integration of the Baltic Region into Western and Central Europe begin-
ning in the eleventh century is now the object of interdisciplinary and inter-
national research, in which the recent view of the ‘discovered,’ ‘conquered,’
and ‘Christianized’ people, namely the indigenous population of the areas
surrounding the Baltic Sea, is presented from a different perspective under
the term ‘Europeanization’.6 In Hanseatic research before World War ii,
long-range merchants from Lower Germany, and in their wake the nobility,
farmers, and craftsmen, were the primary players in the incorporation of the
Northeast Baltic region into Western and Central European culture. However,
new approaches examine the entire Baltic Region, with one example being
the investigation of power-politics in the Nordic Kingdoms of Denmark and
Sweden and their role, as well as the Catholic Church’s role, in the mission to
the southern and eastern Baltic Regions.7 Researchers classify the integration
4 Fritz Rörig, Die Entstehung der Hanse und der Ostseeraum (Cologne: Hermann Böhlaus
Nachf., 1971; first published 1951/52), 564.
5 Christian Radtke, “Schleswig im vorlübischen Geld- und Warenverkehr zwischen westli-
chem Kontinent und Ostseeraum,” in Haithabu und die frühe Stadtentwicklung im nördli-
chen Europa, ed. Klaus Brandt, Michael Müller-Wille and Christian Radtke, Schriften des
Archäologischen Landesmuseums, vol. 8 (Neumünster: Wachholtz-Verlag, 2002), 379–429.
6 Nils Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic: The Reception of a Catholic World-System in the
European North (ad 1075–1225), The Northern World, vol. 15 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005).
7 Philip Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden 1130–1290, The Northern World, vol. 27
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007); William Urban, The Baltic Crusade (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 21994); Alan V. Murray, ed., Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier
1150–1500 (Aldershot et al.: Ashgate, 2001); Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic
Crusades 1147–1254, The Northern World, vol. 26 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007); Thomas
Lindkvist, “Crusades and Crusading Ideology in the Political History of Sweden, 1140–1500,”
in Alan V. Murray, ed., Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150–1500 (Aldershot
et al.: Ashgate, 2001), 119–130.