THE PRESENT COLLECTION of chapters offers an original scholarly view on the issue of cultures of war in medieval East Central Europe and Scandinavia. The authors focus on questions that can be discussed simultaneously in the context of two phenomena: war (or more broadly, any military activity) and Christian religion and culture. The problems presented in this way are neither narrow nor homogeneous. This is unsurprising when a vibrant sphere of relationships between two such crucial cultural and culture-forming factors in the Middle Ages becomes the primary objective of a study.

While the subject of the volume is broadly profiled, presenting the issue in a multiperspective manner, the essays have been narrowed down geographically to East Central, North, and North-Eastern Europe. It is a region that has been sometimes referred to as the “Younger Europe” or “New Christianity” after Professor Jerzy Kłoczowski. It centres on vast territories that only, in most cases, formed their Christian identities after the tenth century. Chronologically, the present collection concentrates on the period from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century with occasional glimpses into the earlier and later periods. However, the timeframe only partly corresponds to the epoch known in Western European scholarship as the High Middle Ages. Furthermore, focusing on the eleventh to thirteenth centuries is not to be considered as a further attempt at “adding,” “rethinking,” or “re-considering” the state of knowledge about the relationships of war and religion in the period often coined as the “classic medieval period,” “age of chivalry,” or “age of crusading” in the heartlands of medieval Europe. Instead the initiators of this volume felt the need to discuss the sparsely (though at the same time unequally) researched relationships between Christianity and war in the Eastern and North-Eastern parts of modern-day Europe. Moreover, to do so at the early stage of the influence of the new religion in these regions, distant as they were from the centres of Latin and Greek civilisations. Although Christianity had already begun to permeate these areas from at least the eighth century, its cultural impact became more pronounced in the regions only around 1000 or later.