Later this year, I plan to make a trip to Latvia. As I prepare to go, I am reminded that this corner of Europe, including what is now the Baltic states, was once a last outpost of European paganism. The last major European nation (leaving aside the Lapps of Scandinavia, and other peoples of the Balkans and elsewhere) to convert to Christianity was the Lithuanians, in 1386. At the time of the better known crusades directed towards the Holy Land, there were also other crusades which constituted coerced evangelistic missions to unconverted peoples. For example, one crusade was directed at the Albigensians, a religous movement, quite similar to earlier gnosticism, which had a large following in southern France. And then there were the Northern Crusades (also known as Baltic Crusades), directed at subduing and converting the pagan peoples of the Baltic. These lasted from the 1100s through until the 1500s. The area broadly corresponding to what are now the Baltic states and also north-east