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:''"Prussians" redirects here. "Prussians" may also refer to citizens of the former German state of Prussia.''

The 'Old Prussians' or 'Baltic Prussians' ( or ''Prußen''; Latin: ''Pruteni''; ; ; ) were an ethnic group, made up of the Baltic tribes that inhabited the lands of the southeastern Baltic Sea in the area around the Vistula and Curonian Lagoons. They spoke a language now known as Old Prussian. During the 13th century, the Old Prussians were conquered by the Teutonic Knights, and gradually Germanized and Polonized over the following centuries. The former state of Prussia took its name from the Baltic Prussians, although it was led by Germans and not by the Old Prussians (who were marginalized and dispersed and whose language was extinct by the 17th century^[1]).
The land of the Old Prussians consisted approximately of central and southern East Prussia — the present-day Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship of Poland, the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, and the southern Klaipėda Region of Lithuania.^[2]

Contents

Etymology

Early history

Medieval history

See also

References

External links

Etymology

The names of the Prussian tribes all reflected the theme of landscape. Most of the names were based on water, an understandable convention in a land dotted with thousands of lakes, streams, and swamps (''see Masurian Lake District''). Indeed, that landscape caused the very partial isolation that preserved the Baltic language group. To the south, the terrain runs into the Pripet Marshes at the headwaters of the Dnieper River; these have been an effective barrier over the millennia.
The original pre-Baltic settlers generally named their settlements after the streams, lakes, seas, or forests by which they settled. The clan or tribal entities into which they were organized then took the name of the settlement. For example, ''Barta'', the home of the ''Barti'', is related to the name of the Bartis River in Lithuania, and such words as the Albanian ''berrak'' and Bulgarian ''bara'', both meaning "swamp". A ''
★ bor-'' root can be reconstructed, meaning "swamp", to come from the o-grade of Indo-European ''
★ bher-''; Indo-European has several ''
★ bher-'' roots, however, so the exact meaning and line of descent is unclear.
This root is perhaps the one used in the very name of ''Prusa'' (Prussia), for which an earlier ''Brus-'' is found in the map of the Bavarian Geographer. In Tacitus' ''Germania'', the Lugii Buri are mentioned living within the eastern range of the Germans. Lugi may descend from Pokorny's ''
★ leug-'' (2), "black, swamp" (Page 686), while ''Buri'' is perhaps the "Prussian" root.
The name of ''Pameddi'' (Pomesania) tribe is derived from the words ''pa'' ("by" or "near") and ''meddin'' ("forest") or ''meddu'' ("honey").^[3] Nadruviaand may be a compound of the words ''na'' ("by" or "on") and ''drawē'' ("wood") or ''na'' and the root ''
★ dhreu-'' ("flow" or "river"). The name of the Bartians, a Prussian tribe, and the name of the Bārta river in Latvia are possibly cognates.
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Claudius Ptolemy listed some ''Borusci'' living in European Sarmatia (in his ''Eighth Map of Europe''), which was separated from Germania by the ''Vistula Flumen''. His map is very confused in that region, but the Borusci seem further east than the Prussians, which would have been under the ''Gythones'' (Goths) at the mouth of the Vistula. The Aesti (Easterners) recorded by Tacitus were recorded later by Jordanes as part of the Gothic Empire.

Early history

Main articles: Origins of Prussia

At the beginning of Baltic history, the Old Prussians were bordered by the Vistula and the Neman Rivers with a southern depth to about Toruń, which was Prussian, and the line of the River Narew. The Kashubians were on the west, the Poles on the south, the Sudovians (sometimes considered a separate people, other times regarded as a Prussian tribe) on the east, the Scalovians on the north, and the Lithuanians on the northeast. The Sudovians began at about Suwałki.
The Prussians, like the other Balts of the times, were organized into a tribal structure. This structure is most fully attested in the ''Chronicon terrae Prussiae'' of Peter of Dusburg, a priest of the Teutonic Order. The work is dated to 1326. He lists eleven lands and ten tribes, which were named on a geographical basis. These were :
# Pomesania (German ''Pomesanien'', modern Lithuanian ''Pamedė'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Pameddi'')
# Varmia (German ''Ermland'' or ''Warmien'', modern Lithuanian ''Varmė'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Wārmi'')
# Pogesania (German ''Pogesanien'', modern Lithuanian ''Pagudė'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Paguddi'')
# Natangia (German ''Natangen'', modern Lithuanian ''Notanga'')
# Sambia (German ''Samland'', modern Lithuanian ''Semba''; see also Sambians)
# Nadruvia (German ''Nadrauen'', modern Lithuanian ''Nadruva'')
# Bartia (German ''Barten'', modern Lithuanian ''Barta'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Barta'')
# Skalovia (German ''Schalauen'', modern Lithuanian ''Skalva''; see also Skalvians)
# Sudovia (German ''Sudauen'', modern Lithuanian ''Sūduva'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Sūdawa''; see SudoviansYotvingians)
# Galindia (German ''Galindien'', modern Lithuanian ''Galinda'', with the reconstructed Prussian name ''Galinda'')
Peter noted that the eleventh land, Kulm, to the southwest of Pomesania, was nearly uninhabited. After the German conquest of Prussia, the country was divided along almost these exact lines, although the Germans added a twelfth land which they called ''Sassen'', centred at Tannenberg. Those names are not, perhaps, exhaustive. Many of the names appear in ancient and medieval sources, but the spelling and to some degree the morphology vary. Peter of Dusburg, for example, preferred Latin names, such as the Pomesani, Pogesani, Varmienses, etc.

Medieval history

The first definite mention of the Old Prussians in historical sources is in connection with Adalbert of Prague, who was slain in 997 during a missionary effort to Christianize the Prussians.^[4] In the 1220s, Duke Konrad I of Masovia sought external help in the conflict between the pagan Old Prussians and Roman Catholic Poland. Although the Old Prussians repelled the Order of Dobrzyń, they succumbed to the Order of the Teutonic Knights after a bloody conflict spanning several decades in the 13th century during the Northern Crusades. Many of the native Prussians who survived were resettled in Sambia. Frequent revolts, including a major rebellion in 1286, were defeated by the Teutonic Knights.
Baptised Prussians were educated at the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, while Germans and Dutch settlers colonized the lands of the native Old Prussians; Poles and Lithuanians also settled in southern and eastern Prussia, respectively. Significant pockets of Old Prussians were left in a matrix of Germans throughout Prussia (in what is now the Kaliningrad Oblast), and remained part of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights until 1525. They were gradually Germanized or Polonized, depending on which part of Prussia they lived in, beginning especially in the 15th century.
The monks and scholars of the Teutonic Order took an interest in the language spoken by the Prussians, and tried to record it. In addition, missionaries needed to communicate with the Prussians in order to convert them. Records of the Old Prussian language therefore survive; along with the little-known Galindian and the better-known Sudovian, these records are all that remain of the West Baltic language group. As might be expected, it is a very archaic Baltic, showing affinities with Proto-Germanic. The Old Prussian language seems to support the theory that a common Balto-Slavic language once existed.
The Teutonic Order was gradually defeated by the Polish-Lithuanian Union during the 15th century. In 1525 Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach secularized the Order's Prussian territories into the Protestant Duchy of Prussia, a vassal of Poland. The Old Prussians rose again in rebellion, but were defeated by the German authorities. During the Protestant Reformation, Lutheranism spread throughout the territories, officially in the Duchy of Prussia and unofficially in the Polish province of Royal Prussia, while Catholicism survived in Warmia. With Protestantism came the use of the vernacular in church services instead of Latin, so Albert had the Catechisms translated into Old Prussian.
Because of the assimilation of the Old Prussians by Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians, the Old Prussian language probably became extinct with the decimation of the rural population by the plague of 1701, but translations of the Bible, Old Prussian poems, and some other texts survived and have enabled scholars to reconstruct the language.

See also

★ Kashubian language

★ Slovincian language

★ Prussia

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica entry 'Old Prussian language'.
2. The territory was inhabited by Scalovians, a tribe related to Prussians, Curonians as well as Eastern Balts
3. ''Meddu'' can be traced to the Proto-Indo-European root ''
★ medhu-''.
4. Catholic Encyclopedia entry 'St. Adalbert'. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01127c.htm)

External links

★ M. Gimbutas book on the Balts, with maps

★ 1584 German map of Prussia

★ Northeast Prussia

★ Milestones of Baltic Prussian History

★ A map of Prussia showing Old Prussian placenames