Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[hvered]

A while back I read a book about Corland, a very strange nowhere sort of region that was administered by the Teutonic Order. I'm not even sure exactly where it was situated, somewhere within present-day Latvia, with access to the Baltic near Riga so presumably of strategic/commercial value. Trade rather than religious doctrine seems to have been their main concern.

The areas controlled by the Teutonic Order amount to a buffer zone between Russia and Europe, an east-west no man's-land or perhaps free trade zone. As founders of the Hanseatic League this would be mostly in their own interests but everyone else's too as indicated by their longevity. The Order may be officially defunct but not where the House of Hohenzollern is in the frame. The Hohenzollern dynasty ended in 1918 but still has a living representative in Michael, the deposed king of Romania.

[Romania's 'neutrality' notwithstanding, at the end of WWII Michael managed to get himself awarded "the highest degree (Chief Commander) of the Legion of Merit by U.S. President Harry S. Truman... and was also decorated with the Soviet Order of Victory by Joseph Stalin"]

[Mick Harper]

That's nothing. Ceaucescu stayed at Buck House.

[Boreades]

Probably a family reunion. What with the House of Windsor being descended from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

In turn, descended from the House of Wettin, which rose to power within the Holy Roman Empire.

[Mick Harper]

You mean Ceaucescu was of royal descent and not one of ten children of a sheepherding peasant as he claimed? The lying bastard.

[Boreades]

A while back I read a book about Corland, a very strange nowhere sort of region that was administered by the Teutonic Order. I'm not even sure exactly where it was situated, somewhere within present-day Latvia, with access to the Baltic near Riga ...

Posssibly Curonia?



Baltic tribes - circa 1200 AD



Baltic region after the Crusaders

[Mick Harper]

Here's a pub quiz question waiting to be asked:
What was the largest country in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century?
Answer: Lithuania.

[Boreades]

Or, where is Livonia?



Livonia in 1534

That map answers Hattie's question (Courland)

[Mick Harper]

1534 is an interesting date in this neck of the woods since it is where and when Copernicus was founding the modern world. The point being 'Who gets to claim him as their native son?' The current answer is the Poles but that's because a) the Germans are unpopular b) the Lithuanians are too small and c) all the other claimants have ceased to exist.

[Mick Harper]

Could we perhaps claim him as a Megalithic?

[Boreades]

Wikipedia has the same kind of "nothing to see here, move along please" text on Hattie's Courland.

In ancient times the Curonians, a pagan tribe, inhabited Courland. The Brethren of the Sword, a German military order, subdued the Curonians and converted them to Christianity in the first quarter of the 13th century. In 1237 the area passed into the rule of the Teutonic Knights owing to the amalgamation of this order with that of the Brethren of the Sword.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courland

The page on the Brethren of the Sword is more useful.

Albert, Bishop of Riga (or Prince-Bishop of Livonia), founded the Brotherhood in 1202 to aid the Bishopric of Livonia in the conversion of the pagan Livonians, Latgalians and Selonians living across the ancient trade routes from the Gulf of Riga eastwards.

Ah, that sounds familiar?