Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic Vol1

A sort of a travel guide to the Medieval Baltic, circa 1456. This book is essentially an encyclopedia of a specific part of Central Europe in the Mid-15th Century., This is Volume 1 of 2. This book will take the reader into the misty primordial forests of pagan Lithuania, at a time when the Northern Crusades are still taking place with raids by the Teutonic Knights and counter-raids by the Lithuanians. The great Free Cities of Prussia, led by Danzig, are in the middle of a revolution against the Teutonic Order, and have formed an alliance with Poland. Their cities are self-administered, with a government under a charter originating in Lübeck, shared between dozens of other walled cities around Central and Northern Europe, including the nominal Polish capital, Kraków. The Kingdom of Poland operates here as a nobles Republic, a Commonwealth in which every member of the very large nobility, up to 1/5th of the population, has a vote and a veto. Their King is from a Lithuanian family, and his parents were pagans, who burned their enemies alive as sacrifices to the forest gods. King Casimir IV Jagiellon is however a prudent and wise leader, who governs by consensus, walking a fine line between the many competing interests in his vast land. Surrounding them are to the East the Golden and Crimean hordes of the Mongols, the ancient Russian City State of Novgorod, and the Mongol controlled but increasingly powerful Russian state of Muscovy. To their West Pomerania, led by the Griffin Dukes, and the Mark of Brandenburg, led by the ruthless noble, Frederick II "The Iron", the prince elector of Brandenburg. To the south, behind a ring of mountains, lay the heretic Kingdom of Bohemia, whose war-wagons had broken 5 Crusades, and whose Czech heretics fight as mercenaries on both sides of wars in Poland and Prussia. Further to the East, another rebellious community, the Zaporozhian Sich of the Cossacks, are runaway slaves become bandits. These skilled warriors were wild raiders who managed to be a thorn in the side of the Ottomans and the Mongols. Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic will take you into this world, and will show you the military, economic, and political organization of Central Europe in 1456. If you want to know what it was really like, this is your ticket to a land that is nothing like what you thought the middle ages were all about, and is far more interesting, nuanced and engaging than any fantasy genre you've ever explored.