Baltic Human-Animal Histories

Multispecies Relations in Baltic History

The Baltic region can be defined in a number of ways – it can designate the broader area neighbouring the Baltic Sea, the Eastern Baltic territories, or the three Baltic countries that exist today: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In this volume, the Eastern Baltic region is defined in a narrow way, meaning the territory of today’s Estonia and Latvia, which have had a shared history since medieval times. Their history is shaped by features that are typical to border areas: multiculturalism and ethnicity, numerous changes of power and domination, different and complicated forms of colonialism, various cultural influences and transfers. Lithuania became a part of this narrow definition of the Baltic region only at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it started to share some very comparable features with its history, as well as the identities of Latvia and Estonia.²⁰

Today, one of the most prominent shared features of the three Baltic countries concerns the myths about these peoples as nature’s nations.²¹ While this identity narrative emphasises the uniqueness of the Baltic relationship with nature, it nevertheless relies on the transnational importance of nature in nation-building and close entanglements with the German, Russian Imperial and Soviet traditions of thinking about the relations between nature and national identity. Moreover, the idea of a “natural” close relationship to nature is also closely related to the postcolonial character of Baltic identity, as the idea that Baltic peoples are closer to nature than to culture was first constructed among the colonial, German-speaking and Russian imperial elites, and only later adapted by the young Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²² While today, the myths about the Baltic nations’ close relations with the natural world are mostly constructed around the forest²³ (another indicator of close entanglements with German and Russian national identity where forest has been highly significant²⁴), earlier periods have also witnessed the prominence of various ideas about the importance of diverse close human–animal relations and animism in the culture and religion of the Baltic peoples.²⁵

This short introduction does not enable us to give any deeper overview of human–animal history in the Baltics, but it allows us to rationalise and periodise some of the most crucial developments, topics and characteristics. In the Eastern Baltic region, the beginning of entangled human–animal relations can be marked with the end of the Ice Age when these territories were first populated by human hunters and gatherers. While the idealisation of the pre-Christian and pre-colonial period is of paramount importance to the nineteenth-century and later constructions of Baltic peoples as nature’s nations, human–animal histories of the ancient period inevitably rely only on material sources, as there are no written sources produced in the Baltics prior to the Crusades in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Concerning the ancient period, archaeological evidence enables us to map the traces of the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period (around 3000–2500 BC), the domestication of animals, and other ways of consuming animals for food, such as fishing and hunting.²⁶ The representation of animals on different material objects suggests their diverse cultural and religious significance, but the interpretation of these figures nevertheless poses a challenge, as also explained in the chapter by Tõnno Jonuks. As we are focusing on direct entanglements between humans and animals and leaving aside the burning question of long-term developments, we are not delving here into the question of animal and insect extinction, which has been studied for example by analysing Baltic amber.²⁷

The history of medieval Livonia began when the territories of today’s Estonia and Latvia were conquered, converted and colonised as a result of the German and Danish crusades.²⁸ Due to diverse contacts, Christianity had already been known in the area before, but prior to the Crusades, these lands had remained outside of the Christian structures and networks of power. The German-speaking elites started to become dominant in the territory early on. No central power developed in Livonia, but the land remained divided between the bishoprics and the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, and was affected by frequent internal power struggles. Frontier identity remained central for medieval Livonia, as its leaders conceptualised these lands as the last bulwark of Western Christendom.

Next to reorganising society and building up new networks and institutions of power, conquest also meant the construction of a new, Christian identity for Livonia. In addition, the Crusades and colonisation had a deep impact on the local environment, transforming the landscape and exploiting natural resources for building new centres of power, developing agricultural production, etc.²⁹ The main animal force behind building up the new rule was horses. They became symbols of the supremacy of the new German-speaking elites in wars, as well as in trading, as explained by Juhan Kreem and Ivar Leimus in this volume. The social hierarchies influenced the patterns of consumption, especially of wild game, which from then on was predominantly reserved for the tables of the nobility and the city governments.³⁰ Christianisation also markedly changed the relations to fish. Around the monasteries and manors fish ponds were established, and new fish species spread. Christian religious beliefs and practices, especially fasting, increased fish consumption.³¹ Baltic fish specialties such as lamprey were exported to Central Europe using the Hanseatic trading companies and connections that were emblematic to medieval Livonia and its new urban culture.³²

Christianity transformed the ontological status and symbolic meaning of animals. According to the medieval Christian worldview, animals were of a lower status than humans.³³ At the same time, animals were associated with rich symbolic meanings, both negative and positive. Christian culture brought along the spread of animal imaginaries in clerical and secular visual culture, coats of arms and other symbols of the nobility, etc. On the one hand, medieval Christianity was characterised by a fascination toward fantastic animals. This is also reflected in animal representations depicted on the visual and material culture that has been preserved from medieval Livonia, discussed by Anu Mänd in this collection. On the other hand, wild beasts of the local forests, such as bears and wolves, became symbols of the pagan or the newly converted and potentially perfidious countryside and its inhabitants. Hence the association of the local peoples, Estonians, Latvians, and Livs, with nature (rather than culture), and the representations of their cult of nature – all of which became widely popular from the nineteenth century onwards – date back to the medieval period and originally often served the need to legitimise the Christianisation of these lands.³⁴

The medieval organisation of power was put to an end with the Livonian War (1558–1583), as the increasingly stronger early modern states, Sweden, Poland and Russia started to fight over the fragmented Livonia. As a result of the war, the Livonian territory was split between Poland and Sweden. Struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism resulted in religious and cultural competition (Lutheran Reformation had already been introduced to Livonia in the 1520s). The development of scholarly culture, and the establishment of the University of Tartu (1632) introduced to Livonia the early modern discourse of animals, discussed in the articles by Meelis Friedenthal and Kaarina Rein. Next to this, military conflicts and confessional rivalry resulted in numerous descriptions of the disbelief of the local peasantry³⁵, which was first and foremost associated with the cult of nature and animals. These early modern narratives formed the other significant layer of text that later fed into the idea of the Baltic peoples’ exceptionally close relations to nature. At the same time, the traffic moving in the opposite direction, the early modern and also later transmissions of local knowledge into the German-speaking learned culture have been largely forgotten (for example, the Baltic-German adaptations of Estonian or Latvian habits to forecast weather).

In the late medieval and early modern period, the socio-ethnic segregation between Germans and non-Germans grew bigger.³⁶ As the Estonian and Latvian peasants were gradually forced into serfdom,³⁷ comparisons with domestic animals and the local peasantry started to spread, creating a transnational discourse about the misery of the Livonian peasantry.³⁸ Abundant stories about werewolves reflected the cultural and social crisis, as explained in Stefan Donecker’s article. Numerous wars that had been accompanied by plague and other diseases, bad harvest, and hunger, had also left their mark on the local population and seriously decreased the number of inhabitants. At the same time, the tumultuous early modern centuries also saw German migration toward the Baltic provinces, one of the pull-factors being the propagation of the richness of wild game and foal in these regions.

After the Great Nordic War (1700–1721), and the annexation of Curonia (1795), the territories of today’s Latvia and Estonia became part of the Russian Empire. During all these major changes, the Baltic-German elites managed to ensure their political and social position. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the recovery of the manor economy, which relied on grain export and increasingly on the production of spirit for the Russian empire. From the perspective of environmental history, (pre)industrialisation put heavy pressure on local forests, as well as increased cattle farming. Keeping livestock was challenging due to diseases and wolves, but it was also crucial for farm economies, which strongly depended on the workforce of animals for agricultural labour and transportation, as well as needed their manure. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, various agricultural innovations (cultivation of potato and clover, cattle breeding, development of amelioration and technology) increased animal husbandry.³⁹ The growing demand for milk products enlarged the number of dairy cattle, as well as the overall economic significance of husbandry. In parallel, the socio-economic organisation behind agricultural production changed profoundly, as the early nineteenth century emancipation laws had put an end to serfdom, and the reforms of the 1850s–1860s finally gave the peasants the right to buy farmland, as well as improved their legal status and thereby started the social mobility of the peasantry, as well as the Estonian and Latvian national movement that began in the 1860s.

The roots of the emancipation of non-German peasantry were, however, much earlier, dating back to the Enlightenment. In order to criticise serfdom and to argue against the civilising narrative legitimising the German colonisation, the Enlightenment authors had constructed a positive image of the local pre-Christian religion, culture and society. At the end of the nineteenth century, their texts fed into the national romanticist conceptualisations of Estonian and Latvian culture. In parallel, popular Enlightenment began to increase, as well as shape and control the knowledge about the natural world.⁴⁰ Calendars, journals, newspapers, and text books in all local languages introduced not only local nature, but typically to the age of empires and colonies, tended to focus on the more exotic flora and fauna. Attitudes toward local farm animals were more and more strongly influenced by agricultural societies, which were first established among the Baltic-Germans and thereafter also among the Estonian and Latvian peasantry. On the academic level, the Baltic nobility participated in the race for developing life sciences in the Russian Empire, and were thereby closely related to exploration and colonisation of the empire’s vast territories in the far north, Siberia, Caucasus, and Far East. Although the scholars of the Baltic Provinces were particularly known for their work in plant systematics, their legacy also includes various studies of animals. A particular feature of the Russian exploration was its fascination with the polar regions, which was also motivated by the considerable economic value of the animals living in the cold habitat. Many of the Baltic explorers also became known for their discoveries near the poles.⁴¹ In parallel to this, the well-known Baltic naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer also initiated novel research on fisheries and overexploitation.⁴²

The manorial lifestyle cultivated other kinds of human–animal relations, and ways of cohabitation with animals. Hunting game became a privilege of the upper classes, and the number and quality of game, wild birds and fish in the Baltics was praised throughout the early modern times. Salmon was the everyday food for servants in Riga even in the nineteenth century, and in the seventeenth century craftsmen preferred to eat sausages and ham to the ordinary game meat. Taming wild animals and birds became popular during the Enlightenment. About the same time, exotic animals were brought to the Baltics by menageries, and from then on parrots, monkeys and guinea pigs spread among the upper classes in towns and the countryside. The first zoo in the Baltics was established in Riga in 1911. During the harsh time of the war in 1915 it is said that the animals of the zoo were eaten (at least this has been used as an argument in local propaganda).⁴³ In Estonia the first zoo was founded in Tallinn in 1939.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals in the cities became a serious problem. While wild animals in the cities were killed, the slaughter of fatstock got centralised. Smaller animals were killed in large numbers for the sake of science. Baltic-German scholars and Russian legislative authorities helped to initiate nature conservation, which in the case of today’s Estonia and Latvia first concerned the protection of migratory birds. Next to these well-known overwhelmingly male endeavours, however, the role of women and their societies in propagating animal rights has been largely forgotten, as shown by Ulrike Plath.