The Last Pagans of Europe, and the Revival

Lithuania was the last state in Europe to accept Christianity, formally in 1387 for the Lithuanian core and in the following generation for Samogitia, and it did so under a specific pressure. The Teutonic Order held a papal licence to make war on pagans, so remaining pagan meant permanent crusade. Grand Duke Jogaila's baptism came as part of the dynastic union with Poland.

Further north the sequence was earlier and harsher. The Livonian crusade of the thirteenth century subdued the Latvian and Estonian territories by conquest, and the Old Prussians were conquered by the Teutonic Order across the same period and eventually ceased to exist as a distinct people, their language dying out by the early eighteenth century with only catechisms and a few word lists surviving. Marija Gimbutas's survey of the archaeology traces the material culture behind those names.

Late conversion left an unusually rich folk inheritance, and the nineteenth century national movements built on it. In the twentieth century that inheritance was organised into modern religions, Dievturiba in Latvia from the 1920s and Romuva in Lithuania, both suppressed under Soviet rule and both active again today. Romuva's application for state recognition became the subject of a European Court of Human Rights judgment in 2021. These are contemporary movements working from the collected songs rather than unbroken transmissions, and they describe themselves in those terms.