KING MINDAUGAS
1236 - 1263


Grand Duke Mindaugas

The State emblem "Vytis"
is believed to have been
already in use during
King Mindaugas reign.
Up to the 13th Century, Lithuania had no properly centralized government but was divided into local duchies or territories with each one ruled by a duke or prince (kunigaikštis) with their own army. Around 1219 the beginnings of a feudal state were emerging as five heads were selected to represent the 22 dukes. By the mid 1230s, Mindaugas emerged as one of the five heads and was good friends with the other four. He used his influence on his friends and persuaded them to unite their armies into one mighty force to fight their foes. Papal writings suggest that around 1236 he consolidated all the territories as well as parts of other Baltic countries and established the State of Lithuania with himself as head - Grand Duke (Didysis Kunigaikštis).
Their biggest enemy was the Order of the Teutonic Knights which was a monastic as well as a military organisation founded in Palestine during the Crusades. Its members were German Crusaders who had set out to fight the Infidels and when the Christians were driven out of Asia Minor, they set their sights on Europe and were entrenched in Prussia by 1226. They began to expand their territory to the shores of the Baltic Sea but were met with the well organised and powerful Lithuanian State which was determined to defend every inch of its territory.
At the time Lithuania was a pagan country. Lithuanians had enjoyed undivided possession of the shores of the Baltic Sea at least 2000 years before the Christian era. Their principal deity was the worship of nature, Perkunas (Thunder) and perpetual sacred fire which was cared for by vestal virgins (Vaidilutės).

King Mindaugas 1236-1263,
the first and only King of Lithuania

Queen Morta,
wife of King Mindaugas
The Order of the Tuetonic Knights in their attempts to conquer more and more land, proclaimed that they were fighting for the Christian world, and after every failure, the alarm was raised in the western countries that the pagan Lithuanians were a threat to all the Christians in Eastern Europe and that, if they were not stopped, they would over-run the whole continent.
Willing support for the Order arrived from all of Europe and numerous adventurous knights and even kings and princes with their armies arrived to fight for the Order’s cause. But their military enterprise failed. Not only did the Teutonic Order not succeed in conquering the whole of the Lithuanian country, they were not even able to annex that small part of it which lay between Prussia and Latvia both of which were colonies of the Order.
Duke Mindaugas became concerned about the onslaughts on the battlefield and tried to save Lithuania by diplomacy. As an initial step, he accepted Christianity in 1251, thereby depriving the Order of their only excuse for further invasion of his country. He was determined to avoid the same fate as the Prussians and hoped that by accepting Christianity, this would stop the Crusaders from enforcing the "true and proper faith" onto the heathen Lithuanians so he and his immediate family became Christians purely for political reasons.
Having been baptized and having established the Church in Lithuania, he was crowned by Pope Innocents IV on July 6, 1253 as the first King of Lithuania. His wife Morta was crowned Queen.
Mindaugas was an exceptional diplomat, statesman and a military genius who built political, economic and cultural bridges to modern Europe. It was during his reign that the country adopted Roman Catholicism.
But a number of the dukes of the principalities still held a strong hatred of the Tuetonic Order and resented King Mindaugas’ conversion of Lithuania to Christianity and he was assassinated by his nephew in 1263 - a decade after he was crowned. Upon his assassination, civil war erupted and the country returned to paganism.
Mindaugas was eventually succeeded by the Gediminas dynasty and it was under Vytautas the Great (1392-1430) that the Teutonic Knights were crushed for good. But by then, bit by bit the lesser dukes had accepted Christianity and by the end of Vytautas death in 1430 Lithuania was totally converted.


Courtesy of Anna Augūnas, Editor, LAPAS,
Brisbane Lithuanian Community Newsletter,
Email: augunas@optusnet.com.au