Qualla: Battle of Saule

Battle of Saule: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rimantas Lazdynas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Saule means "the sun" in both Lithuanian and Latvian, and the goddess of the sun was a central figure in the pagan religion of the Baltic peoples. On 22 September 1236, on a swampy field somewhere south of the Daugava River, an army of pagan Samogitian and Semigallian warriors destroyed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword - the first Catholic military order established in the Baltic - and killed their grand master, Volkwin, along with somewhere between forty-eight and sixty knights. The order never recovered. Its remnants were absorbed into the Teutonic Order the next year. And the pagan Lithuanians who fought at Saule went on to build a state that would remain officially pagan for another hundred and fifty years, the last in Europe.

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Image: Rimantas Lazdynas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Saule: The order that came north

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Post of Lithuania, Public domain. The Livonian Brothers of the Sword had been founded in Riga in 1202, with papal blessing, to convert the pagan Baltic tribes by force - a smaller and less prestigious cousin to the Teutonic Knights and the Hospitallers. By the 1230s the order was struggling. Its finances were str...

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Image: Post of Lithuania | Public domain

Battle of Saule: Caught in the marsh

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Lazdynas at lt.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written within a few decades of the battle by a knight of the Teutonic Order, gave an account that has stayed remarkably honest about what happened. "More heathens arrived," it begins, in the moment when the crusader army had hoped to slip away in t...

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Image: Original uploader was Lazdynas at lt.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Saule: Where, and what it broke

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lazdynas at Lithuanian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Where Saule actually was is still debated. The medieval chronicler Hermann de Wartberge said only that it took place "in the land of Saule." The traditional candidates are Siauliai in northern Lithuania and the small town of Vecsaule near Bauska in southern Latvia - both have pla...

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Image: Lazdynas at Lithuanian Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Saule: Pagan kings, Christian neighbors

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rimantas Lazdynas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lithuania remained a pagan state until 1387, when Grand Duke Jogaila accepted Christianity in exchange for the Polish crown. For a century and a half after Saule, while the rest of Europe was Christian and the rest of pagan Europe had been crushed or converted, Lithuanian rulers ...

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Image: Rimantas Lazdynas | CC BY-SA 3.0