Colonizing the Landscape:

A Case Study of Medieval Livonia

Jüri Kivimäe
University of Toronto

Introducing Medieval Livonia

This paper presents some preliminary, unfinished results of rethinking and rereading
of the history of Medieval Livonia. Sébastien Rossignol’s kind invitation to join your
workshop offered me a pleasant opportunity to discuss some aspects of this problem with
colleagues from various disciplines.
The Eastern Baltic territories discussed in this paper are known under the code name
of Medieval Livonia (German Livland or Alt-Livland, Old-Livonia). Medieval Livonia, which
covers the territories of the modern Baltic States Estonia and Latvia, was once settled by
Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes and then conquered by the Teutonic Knights during the
Livonian and Baltic crusades in the early thirteenth century. The Livonian confederation of
small feudal states—bishoprics, possessions of the Livonian order –existed alongside the
powerful Hanseatic towns of Riga, Reval, and Dorpat until 1561, when Old-Livonia
collapsed in the Russo-Livonian War, and the territories were seized by Muscovy, Sweden,
Denmark and Poland-Lithuania. Being well demarcated chronologically and spatially,
Livonia offers promising opportunities for medievalists’ research. In recent years, new and
fresh publications have shown a growing interest in Livonian history.
There are several impulses which led me to the history of medieval landscape, and
particularly that of Medieval Livonia. When discussing with Gerhard Jaritz the availability of
medieval primary sources on the Eastern Baltic landscape, I was obliged to point out the
extreme scarcity of medieval picture images, illuminated manuscripts or maps of Livonia.
However, some comparative readings have resulted in very strong visions of medieval
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
2 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
landscape and this imaginary method may facilitate the approach to similar questions in the
Baltic. In his popular book The Living Rock (La pietra viva, 1988), Vito Fumagalli, a prolific
Italian medievalist, pointed out that “For centuries, the conventional view of the countryside
in the Middle Ages was that almost all of western Europe had reverted to wilderness at the
beginning of the period and had remained wild almost everywhere up to the eleventh
century,—and that significant change occurred only with the growth of the towns in the
twelfth century, when more land came under cultivation and the wilderness, forest,
woodland and marsh retreated.”
The second impulse to my thinking on the topic of medieval landscape came from
Herbert Heaton’s Economic History of Europe (1936), where he wrote that “In the tenth century
a squirrel could have traveled from Paris to Moscow jumping from tree to tree without ever
touching ground.” Jan de Vries called upon this intriguing image to convey the human
emptiness of the wooded fastness that then was northern Europe. He also mentioned that
already in the early fourteenth century the historians use to speak of “full” (populated)
Europe, in which from the top of any church tower one could see several other steeples,
each marking a concentration of population. One can conclude this general vision with an
additional remark with respect to the network of European church towers which in less than
two centuries has created an illusion of cultivated and civilized landscape.
Modern historical discourse is continuously in the process of testing new concepts,
asking new questions, and suggesting new historical explanations. New conceptual and
methodological approaches such as post-colonialism, Europeanization, and culture clash or
cultural exchange (French transferts culturel, German Kulturtransfer) have won increasing
popularity in the study of history. In recent years the implementation of these new (or
sometimes old and forgotten) ideas for the historical interpretation of Medieval Livonia has
won popularity among scholars in the Baltic countries. Specifically, that new attempts to
rethink the idea of Livonia have been undertaken not only in the discipline of history but
also in archeology, folklore, historical linguistics, historical geography etc.
Prior to continuing the discussion of medieval landscape and environmental history,
we should clarify whether and in what sense Livonian history can be interpreted in terms of
medieval colonialism and colonization. The colonial character of Medieval Livonia may
seem self-evident; however, ground-breaking research into these questions has yet to take
place. Three cautious questions shall illustrate my approach to the problem.

2
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
3 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
● What kind of practical use might be made of the concept of colonialism in the discourse
of Livonian history?
● Would this idea require the reevaluation of existing historiography and/or new research
on Livonian history altogether?
● Would the rethinking and rewriting of Livonian history result in a new, scholarly valid
explanation in terms of modern strategies of history-writing, or are we ‘re-inventing the
wheel’, while the seemingly new ideas quite often belie forgotten old ones?

Medieval colonization as an historiographical problem

I would first like to raise questions with respect to historiography: how and in what
functions has the colonial character of Medieval Livonia been verified in Baltic history
textbooks and other scholarly works? Heretofore Baltic (Latvian and Estonian) national and
Baltic German historiographies have applied the terms ‘colony, colonization, colonialism’
primarily to explain the birth of Medieval Livonia in the thirteenth century.
For Baltic German scholars, the founders of professional history-writing in the
region, investigation of the medieval period meant dealing with their ‘own’ historical past
and formed an important part of asserting their cultural identity. Therefore Baltic German
(national) historians introduced the respective terms overtly in late nineteenth century and
early twentieth century works, thus justifying the conquest and Christianization of
indigenous people with arguments like the ‘civilizing process’ of barbarian/non-Christian
people. Konstantin Höhlbaum published his longer article „Die Gründung der deutschen
Kolonie an der Düna“ already in 1873. Astaf v. Transehe Roseneck focused on the Gründung
der deutschen Colonie Livland and die drei Colonisationsgebiete (in the sense of three Baltic
provinces) in 1903. Leonid Arbusow discussed the colonial character of the Livonian upper
class, read the Baltic Germans, in his major work in 1919. However, in his apologetic essay
Kolonie und Mutterland (1940/41), Reinhard Wittram, the leading Baltic German scholar in the
1930s, denied the idea of colony, and claimed that – ‘Im Gefüge des alten deutschen Reichs war
Livland nicht eigentlich Kolonie’, because Livonia was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the
Livonian bishops were legally in status of imperial princes. Wittram argued that the
relationship between the Master of the Livonian order and the Grand Master of the
Teutonic Knights did not evidence a colonial character; Livonian towns enjoyed the

3
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
4 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
membership of the Hanseatic League, and there was actually constant communication
between Livonia and the Mutterland/Vaterland or Germany.
The first generation of Baltic professional historians of the 1920s and 1930s, whether
Estonians or Latvians, preferred to treat the phenomenon of colonization in the context of
crusades, conquest and violent Christianization. They criticized the German migratory
expansion eastwards, the so-called Drang nach Osten (Ostsiedlung) and Kulturträgertum as well as
the ‘German yoke.’ Furthermore, during the interwar period the powerful historical cliché of
the ‘700 years of slavery’ was firmly anchored in collective memory and remained a
component of anti-German sentiments of radical national groupings. Professor Hans
Kruus, the founder of the Estonian school of national history, tended to use the concept of
‘colonialism’ in his works in the 1930s (e.g. L’Esprit du Moyen Âge estonien, 1938); however, he
made no concessions to Baltic German ideology. Thus the general concept of national
history in confrontation with the old Baltic German historiography is deeply, even
genetically rooted in national resistance to the Germans throughout the centuries of
Estonian and Latvian history.

Concepts & definitions

In order to place colonization within the purview of medieval and particularly Baltic
research, one must first define ‘colonialism’. Jürgen Osterhammel (1997) has presented
some general definitions: ‘Colonization’ designates a process of territorial acquisition; ‘colony’
a particular type of sociopolitical organization, and ‘colonialism’ a system of domination. More
precisely, a colony is a new political organization created by invasion (conquest and/or
settlement colonization) but built on pre-colonial conditions. Its alien rulers are in sustained
dependence on a geographically remote ‘mother country’ or imperial center, which claims
exclusive rights of ‘possession’ of the colony (Osterhammel). By definition colonialism is a
relationship between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign
invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made
and implemented by colonial rulers, in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant
metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers
are convinced of their own superiority and of their ordained mandate of rule. Medievalists,
luckily, do not write history in order to fit definitions. If, as in the case of Livonia, the
colonized population is more or less identical with the medieval non-German peasantry, the

4
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
5 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
quest for cultural compromise or exchange seems to encompass the whole range of daily
communication between the colonized and the colonizers i.e. the Germans. Thus—or all
the more so—the conceptual framework of colonialism should be tested and verified in case
studies.
Medieval colonialism has striking analogies with nineteenth-century European
colonialism. But even some evident similarities between medieval and nineteenth-century or
twentieth-century colonialism should not be interpreted as the continuation of an old and
traditional Eurocentric ideology of expansion. It seems to me that we should understand
and deconstruct medieval colonialism as Ding an sich (thing-in-itself), find out its leading ideas
and principles and avoid transplanting explanatory models taken from modern history into
the ‘silent past’—the Middle Ages.
One also has to emphasize another increasingly popular but contested concept—
Europeanization,—which is sometimes used with the same connotations as colonization.
Surprisingly this term has no single precise or stable meaning (Olsen 2002). The most
general definition suggests European integration in all possible aspects—political, legal,
economic, cultural, and confessional. In his exemplary book The Making of Europe Roger
Bartlett writes of ‘the Europeanization of Europe’ (Bartlett 1993). Furthermore, a group of
scholars from Nordic countries worked for years on an international research project with
the acronym CCC—‘Culture Clash or Compromise? The Importance of Regional Strategies
in the Europeanization of the Baltic Rim Region 1100–1400 AD’. As the research group
leader Nils Blomkvist, asserted, this project investigated the great changes taking place on
the Baltic Rim from 1100 to 1400 which transformed the people living there into Europeans.
In the context of this project some leading Estonian archeologists such as Evald Tõnisson
formulated survey articles entitled “Estland und die Europäisierung: 11.-12. Jahrhundert”
etc. Both Blomkvist and Tõnisson argued that the beginning of Europeanization can be
traced back prior to the German-Danish conquest of the Baltic territories in the early
thirteenth century. These points both to a possible conclusion and a question: could
medieval colonization be conceived as a component of a general process of
Europeanization?

5
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
6 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
‘Colonists’ and the native peoples of Livonia
At this juncture it is indispensable to present some demographic evidence and
estimates for the region called Livonia. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, i.e. on the
eve of conquest the total number of native Latvians, Livs or the Livic/Livish people, and
Estonians had attained c. 265,000-308,000 people; the total population of Livonia by the
mid-sixteenth century was approximately 650,000–675,000, incl. the German ruling class as
minority, comprising c. 5–7% of total population. However, this knowledge is based on
estimations and interpolations only, because little exact data are available from medieval
sources. Thus the general multiethnic composition of the Livonian population included the
Letts or Latvians, Estonians, Livs, Germans, Finns, Swedes, Votes, Russians etc. The basic
divide was created by social order and not by the principle of ethnicity. Middle Low
German usus called all Latvians, Estonians, and Livs the ‘non-Germans’ (vndudesche,
Undeutsche), because the indigenous population belonged almost entirely to the peasantry,
which made up the lowest estate of the feudal hierarchy. The most specific demographic
feature, as well as the most important circumstance of Livonian history is that these
territories were never settled by German peasants, because the eastbound migratory
movement of German peasants was blocked in the thirteenth century by the Lithuanian
frontier (the few attempts at late immigration of German peasants failed). Rather, the
immigration of Germans to Livonia was enabled primarily through the maritime connection.
Under these circumstances the German immigrants to Livonia found themselves in a
precarious situation: in the thirteenth century the new colony in Riga and Reval brought
together the visitors (frequentantes) and the settlers (manentes) from Germany. The fluctuation
of the German population continued throughout the Middle Ages and beyond (Heinz von
zur Mühlen, 1985). Balthasar Russow’s ironic comment in his Chronicle of Livonia (1578)
perhaps reflects the real situation; he wrote that Livonia was such a land that all those who
came there from Germany and other countries, and who came to know the region and the
good life in it, were moved to say: “Livland-Blivland, Livonia, a place to stay.” These above-
named specific features require further investigation, but they had a clear impact on the
distinctive colonial character of Medieval Livonia.

6
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
7 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
Colonizing the landscape
Apart from the social and political history of Livonia, one has to pay serious
attention to the less investigated aspect of colonization—the ‘new landscape’ (Bartlett 1993).
The obvious growth of population during the Middle Ages clearly indicates ongoing internal
colonization in terms of the founding of new settlements (villages), occupying formerly
unsettled, less settled, or even deserted regions like coastal areas etc. This process can be
viewed in the aftermath of the Ostsiedlung as analyzed by Roger Bartlett, Charles Higounet, or
Jan M. Piskorski. The interpretation in these works may vary but their approach is still
inclined to the traditional field of Siedlungsgeschichte. During the thirteenth century the
migratory process and colonizing procedures of Livonia were quite obviously different. Paul
Johansen, a prolific Danish-Baltic medievalist, introduced the methodology of Rudolf
Kötzschke’s school of Siedlungsgeschichte (and Landesgeschichtsforschung) into rural history of
Estonia and Latvia. His seminal work Siedlung und Agrarwesen der Esten im Mittelalter (1925)
later led him to the conclusion that the structure and typology of the Estonian and Latvian
rural landscape (particularly the villages) remained basically stable for centuries. One must
also not forget the exception—the Swedish migration to the Western coast of Estonia in the
fourteenth century, which also used locatores, the so-called pathfinders, middlemen or
entrepreneurs as known from the works of Higounet and Bartlett.
The socio-economic interpretation of landscape as delineated by the discipline of
Siedlungsgeschichte tends to investigate only the cultural (or cultivated, civilized) landscape
(Kulturlandschaft). The dichotomy of medieval landscape also includes the marshes, enormous
forested areas, or—to use the medieval term—the wilderness. The frontier between the
cultural landscape and the wilderness (the world of wild animals, monsters etc.) was
ambiguous. Epidemic diseases like the Black Death, famine and climatic change (the impact
of the Little Ice Age) left behind deserted villages and areas (Wüstungen), thus increasing the
power of wilderness. The long lasting struggles to recapture the cultivated lands from the
wilderness offer an interesting observation—the single-peasant farms located outside of
villages and often in the forest, at the frontier to the wilderness were initially called mois/mõis
in Estonian and muiža in Latvian. In modern Estonian and Latvian usage these words
designate the manor, or manorial estate (Gutshof).
Livonian medieval texts do not explicitly identify the forest (Latin silva) with the
wilderness. The forest had great significance in old Estonian, Livish and Latvian folk

7
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
8 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
religion—forests and groves were home of various forest or tutelary spirits and demons.
Henry’s Chronicle of Livonia narrates a unique story of how the Catholic priests baptized
(1220) three villages within Vironia (North-East Estonia), where there was a mountain
(obviously Ebavere) and a most lovely forest, in which, the natives say, the great god of the
Oeselians, called Tharapita, was born and from which he flew to Oesel (Saaremaa). The
chronicler went on to write that “The other priest went and cut down the images and
likenesses which had been made there of their gods, and the natives wondered greatly that
blood did not flow …” There is more evidence on sacred forests, groves, trees, stones etc.
in medieval sources. As Philippe Buc puts it, the conversion of objects may clearly be seen
in Henry’s chronicle and in some other primary sources, but we may also interpret these
procedures—the destruction of the sacred places of the natives – as a kind of colonizing the
landscape.

Civilizing the landscape

Civilizing the landscape could be regarded as one component of colonizing the
landscape. The civilizing process presupposes a fundamental, most often also an irreversible
change, resulting in a new visual and material quality. It is perhaps easier to comprehend this
aspect of colonization if we add that in a real landscape this basic change is signified by
monuments and ensembles of signs. As concerns the outcome of the medieval civilizing
process, one can distinguish between four subcategories of monuments: towns, freestanding
fortifications (fortresses, castles, forts), churches and monasteries located outside towns, and
the buildings of manorial estates. The previous level of civilization of the landscape of
conquered Livonia is indicated by a predominating network of villages that is rural
settlement, which was in turn structurally tied to the forts of Latvians, Livs, and Estonians.
Despite efforts to interpret some settlement centres from pre-conquest times—such as
forts—as early towns, such explanatory attempts have not taken conceptual root. This allows
us to claim that in pre-conquest times in this region, there were really no towns that would
fit current definitions; the coming of towns is connected with the German-Danish conquest
and the colonization of the land. However, this is not to say that the creation and
development of Livonian cities was not closely bound up with preexisting settlements –
mainly the location of forts. But by no means in every case did a town spring up at the foot
(or at the former site) of every fort. Despite the continuity of settlement, the appearance of

8
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
9 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
towns on the village landscape of Livonia signalled something new—a new socioeconomic
and visual quality. Roger Bartlett has examined the nature and typology of the colonial town.
The fact that the three oldest Livonian towns—Riga, Tallinn and Tartu, bridgeheads of
colonial settlement, were manifestations of the needs of an eastward-expanding German
long-distance trade can be clearly be seen in their planning. These future Hanseatic towns
were designed in terms of a complex of marketplace, city community/parish, and church (or
churches). Either do we need to emphasize unduly that the construction techniques of the
developing colonial society preferred granite, limestone, or brick, and bound stone
constructions together with lime mortar. When considering the urbanization of medieval
Livonia in general, it is striking that the establishment of urban centres and places furnished
with German town charters fits largely in the period 1200–1350. The next round of
documents of urbanization falls into the second half of the sixteenth century. Even though
it is impossible to trace all the intermediate stages of town-building in this period of a
century and a half, the pace of urbanization is extremely swift, requiring extraordinarily large
material resources as well as an incredible amount of human labour power. However, at
least by the middle of the fourteenth century, it is possible to attest to the accomplishment in
Livonia of Vito Fumagalli’s vision: the sharp contrast between a stone city, with its multiple-
storied skyscrapers, and the background of a low-lying, village landscape.
The completing of the building of fortified locations or, conversely, the
abandonment of old fortified locations are in turn closely bound with processes of
urbanization. Archeologists have shown that many pre-conquest or conquest era forts (e.g.
Varbola, in Harjumaa, Estonia) remained in use as temporary settlements throughout the
thirteenth century, perhaps for even longer. However, only the (perhaps strategically) most
important fort hills, such as Rakvere, Viljandi, and Turaida—were elaborated in the
subsequent period into full stone fortifications.
The establishment of a network of Christian parish churches in Livonia was no less
significant. Dating the building of medieval churches is extremely complicated: the vision of
stone churches with tall steeples actually seems somewhat premature, as many churches were
first built as wooden chapels, and elaborating them into stone buildings could take centuries.
Nevertheless, architectural historians date the building of many churches in the thirteenth
century, and this can only further justify our amazement at the speed with which the new
colony was being covered by buildings. As we view this new religious landscape, let us not

9
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
10 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
forget the establishment of monasteries outside city walls in the thirteenth century, such as
Cistercian monasteries in Dünamünde (later Padise), and Kärkna (Valkena/Falkenau).
With the addition of manor buildings to this general picture, we could regard the
medieval civilizing of the landscape as complete. Unfortunately the process of enfiefment is
not in exact chronological correspondence with the establishment of permanent manor
buildings. The foundation and permanent settlement of many manorial centres was a long
process fraught with shifts and changes along the way. It has been suggested that vassals
first founded small stone forts for themselves in the vicinity of a hostile landscape of
villages. The construction of massive stone manor buildings is the achievement of later
centuries. Despite the uncertainty of dating, it is still possible to conclude that the significant
civilizing of the landscape of Livonia had its beginnings in the thirteenth century, and
actually continued until the end of the Middle Ages.

Naming and renaming the landscape

The functioning of the colonial society of medieval Livonia, its written and oral
communication, would have been impossible without the identification of locations on the
landscape. To orient oneself in a landscape requires knowledge of places and place names.
Already in the 1920s Paul Johansen emphasized the fact that the study of the history of
settlement presupposes study of place names (Ortsnamenkunde), but he also regarded this as
an extraordinarily difficult undertaking. His assessment makes sense, since the study of place
names requires of the historian not only knowledge of many languages, but also competence
in historical linguistics.
Henry’s Chronicle of Livonia contains a rich variety of evidence with regard to
Livonian, Latvian, and Estonian place names in use during the time of conquest and
Christianization. In the Latin text of Henry’s narrative, we can see that many toponyms
occur in the form in which local tribes used them, or at least in the form in which Henry was
able to transcribe them from oral tradition. Thus began the process of colonizing toponyms.
The largest ancient province was Viro or Viru in the Estonian dialect of the time, before it
became Vironia in Latin and later Wierland in German. Henry had far greater difficulties with
the Latin transcription of the Livish Üksküla (Latvian Ik ķile, later German Üxküll), which
he wrote down as Ykescola, as well as with the historical province of the Livs, which bears the
name Ydumea in the chronicle. Although today we might refer to this as semiotic conflict,

10
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
11 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
we are indeed grateful to Henry for passing on to us the legacy of a thirteenth century
onomastic database.
In 1929 Paul Johansen devoted a special study to German toponyms in Estonia, and
continued working on this subject in a 1951 study of folk etymology and toponymics. What
emerges from these studies is that intentional Germanization of toponyms by means of
translation is rare in Livonia. For example, the Latvian Gulbana, today Gulbene, was
translated and became Schwaneburg. As another example, Henry translated the Estonian
Otepää into Latin as Caput ursi, but what remained in use was the German-language
adaptation, Odenpäh.
However, during subsequent centuries, many place names were partially transformed
into German. Those German toponyms in Livonia with the endings -beck, -wolde, -holt, and -
husen are good illustrative examples. Of course, Germans who migrated in from northern
Germany, or particularly from Westphalia, brought along their own toponymic traditions,
which they also partially implemented as they familiarized themselves with their new
landscape. But change also took place in the opposite direction. Estonian and Livonian
place names ending with -kulle (village) or -vere, remained in continuous usage, though they
lost their last letter, resulting in Koskull, Patkull, Lemskull, or Kostiffer, Ebbafer, Pantifer, etc.
The result of language-mixing for place names is clearly apparent, but when looking
at the medieval colonial landscape one must also take into account the simultaneous
application of different systems of toponyms in what, after all, was a multilingual society.
Since written texts in Latvian and Estonian do not make their appearance until the end of
the medieval period, we mostly know place names as they were written down in German,
and this likewise reflecting the changes that took place in the course of colonizing the
landscape.

Conclusion: Legacy of Medieval Livonia—European integration via colonization

This brief discussion contains more scholarly guesses and questions than results of
serious and scrupulous research on the topic of medieval colonization of landscape. Yet it
seems that such an approach is inevitable if modern scholarly research is to be motivated to
gain a new explanation of the idea of Medieval Livonia, as distinct from the concepts, myths
and clichés of old Baltic German, and Estonian or Latvian national historiographies, and to
engage in more intensive communication with medieval studies in other academic realms.

11
 CONFERENCE “LANDSCAPES AND SOCIETIES
12 IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE”
J. KIVIMÄE, “COLONIZING THE LANDSCAPE”
This long-lasting project first necessitates the principle of ad fontes: one has to reread the
essential primary sources and to learn to listen to texts along with their silences. Hopefully,
combining the concept of colonization within the new research agenda of Europeanization
in the case of Medieval Livonia is an exciting idea that will stimulate both practical and
theoretical (comparative) research.

12