Semigallians Erotic

The Semigallians were a Baltic people who farmed the flat, fertile country of what is now south-central Latvia and northern Lithuania from about the fifth century until the end of the thirteenth, when the Livonian Order finally broke them. The survivors were absorbed into the Latvians and Lithuanians, and the name survives as Zemgale, one of Latvia's four historic regions. They were the plainsmen of the eastern Baltic. While the Curonians worked the coast and the Latgalians held the lake country to the east, the Semigallians sat on the best arable soil in the region, along the Lielupe and Mūša rivers, and built their power on grain, horses and a line of timber hillforts: Tērvete, Mežotne, Dobele, Rakte, Sidabrė. Even the name is argued over: Latvian ears hear "land's end" in Zemgale, Lithuanian ears hear "the northern end" in Žiemgala. Their language was Eastern Baltic, a close cousin of Latvian and Lithuanian, known almost entirely from place names and a scattering of personal names in German and Latin chronicles. It had faded into Latvian by about 1500. Religion was Baltic paganism, and unlike several neighbors the Semigallians buried rather than burned their dead. In their flat cemeteries men and women lie with heads pointed in opposite directions, the men with spears, socketed axes and a broad single-edged fighting knife, the women with bronze neck-rings, spiral bracelets and chain ornaments. Trade ran down the Lielupe to a harbor the Germans called the Semigallian port, important enough that in 1200 the pope banned merchants from using it so that traffic would pass through the new German town of Riga.

They were never one state, only a set of districts under chiefs the chronicles call kings or dukes. Viestards of Tērvete played Riga and Lithuania against each other through the 1210s and 1220s before turning on the crusaders. In 1236 Semigallians and Samogitians destroyed the Sword Brothers at the Battle of Saule so completely that the order was folded into the Teutonic Knights. The last great leader, Nameisis, rose in 1279 after the Lithuanians beat the Order at Aizkraukle, retook Tērvete and marched on Riga, then withdrew to Lithuania when the war turned. Sidabrė fell around 1290, and chroniclers say the remaining Semigallians burned their own strongholds and walked south into Lithuania in the tens of thousands, a figure nobody trusts and a migration nobody doubts. Those who stayed became the Latvians of Zemgale, those who left the people of Lithuania's northern edge. Nameisis has a modern afterlife too: the braided silver Namejs ring Latvians wear as a national token is named for him, on the strength of a 1928 novel rather than any evidence he wore one.