Reviewed by:

• Environment, Colonization, and the Baltic Crusader States: Terra Sacra I ed. by Aleksander Pluskowski, and: Ecologies of Crusading, Colonization, and Religious Conversion in the Medieval Baltic: Terra Sacra II ed. by Aleksander Pluskowski
• Roderick McDonald

Terra Sacra is the term coined to ‘emphasize the clash of sacred associations embedded in the landscapes of the eastern Baltic’ (p. 2), and with this orientation these two volumes squarely place medieval human theocratic expansionism into environmental, ecological, and social contexts. These books comprise the primary published output of a four-year research project, funded by the European Research Council, which set out to examine the broad environmental impact of the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century crusader states in the eastern Baltic region, and the societies created through successive phases of military conquest, colonization, and religious conversion. Much of this expansion was instigated under the military, Christian, Teutonic Order, which rose to authoritarian prominence prosecuting penitential wars (with papal sanction) against pagan Baltic tribes, after Christian eyes turned from the Byzantine east following the fall of Jerusalem.

The study traces the impact of the Christian theocratic regime on the regions that were to become known as Livonia and Prussia, and the regime’s establishment of a social system based around centralized defensive castle-convents holding authority over the wider landscape, exploiting synergies of technology with religion for the purpose of maintaining and expanding territorial control, and accruing and monopolizing the wealth of the land. The analyses in these volumes explore growth, establishment, and impact of specialized economies where lordships developed and operated specialist farms—arable cropping, dairy cattle, sheep—that served diversified markets, and in the course of the centuries, imposed [End Page 238] marked and divergent impacts on local environments. The research identifies the importance of conventual castles at the core of the Christian expansion, with the establishment of towns encouraging the immigration of colonists, while environmental transformation is revealed as doubly significant for the colonized pagan Baltic tribes, as they held many aspects of the natural world as sacred: a natural world that was modified permanently as a result of the crusades.

This work is strongly interdisciplinary. It synthesizes and contextualizes a wide range of data sources across an array of disciplines: archaeology, history, and environmental and ecological sciences, all heavily supported with detailed and well-visualized data, and extensively illustrated with supporting maps, illustrations and photographs, both technical and descriptive. Environmental analyses of the characteristics of occupation and settlement activities are prominent throughout both volumes, deriving and closely examining geographic data for land use, vegetation, and animal use, integrated with archaeozoological, geoarchaeological, and archaeobotanical evidence.

The scope of this project was massive, and the comprehensive nature of these two volumes is due in part to the fact that very many people were involved in both the research and the writing, from a number of European countries. All up, the two volumes are composed of thirty-five chapters and five appendices, with close to fifty contributors. The research itself was overseen by a project team of twelve, of which the editor, Andrew Pluskowski (University of Reading), was the principal investigator, while the many project partners came from a wide range of universities and research institutions across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, with such a large undertaking it is only possible to provide a broad description of the contents of these two volumes, and this review is certainly unable to do justice to the scope and precision of scholarship that has been brought together here in this landmark work.

The first volume offers a series of comparisons of changes in the environment in the...

审核人：

• 环境，殖民和波罗的海十字军国家：Terra Sacra I ed。由Aleksander Pluskowski撰写，以及：中世纪波罗的海的十字军东征，殖民化和宗教转变的生态学：Terra Sacra II编。通过Aleksander Pluskowski
• 罗德里克·麦克唐纳

特拉萨克拉这个名词是为了“强调嵌入在波罗的海东部景观中的神圣协会的冲突”（第2页）而创造的，在这两个方面的指导下，中世纪的人类神权扩张主义正直地置于环境，生态和社会环境中。这些书包括由欧洲研究理事会资助的为期四年的研究项目的主要成果，该项目的目的是研究波罗的海东部地区的十四世纪和十五世纪十字军国家及其社会的广泛环境影响。通过军事征服，殖民化和宗教转变的连续阶段创建。这种扩张的大部分是在军事，基督教，条顿骑士团的鼓动下发起的，该军团崛起为专制统治，对异教的波罗的海部落发起了pen悔战争（在罗马教皇的制裁下），

该研究追踪了基督教神权政权对后来被称为利沃尼亚和普鲁士的地区的影响，以及该政权建立了以集中防御城堡为基础的社会体系，在更广阔的土地上拥有权威，并利用技术的协同作用。宗教，目的是维持和扩大领土控制，并积累和垄断土地财富。在这些书中的分析探讨了专门经济体的成长，建立和影响，在这些经济体中，领主建立并经营着专门的农场，包括可耕种的作物，奶牛，绵羊，这些农场服务于多元化的市场，并且在几个世纪的过程中实行了这种制度[End Page 238]对本地环境的明显和不同的影响。该研究确定了传统城堡在基督教扩张的核心中的重要性，城镇的建立鼓励了殖民者的移民，而环境改造对于被殖民的异教徒波罗的海部落来说则具有双重意义，因为他们拥有自然保护的许多方面。神圣的世界：由于十字军东征而被永久修改的自然世界。

这项工作是跨学科的。它综合了各种学科的各种数据源，并将它们综合起来：考古学，历史学和环境与生态学，所有这些都得到详细而形象化的数据的大力支持，并通过辅助性的地图，插图和照片进行了广泛的说明，包括技术性的和描述性的。在这两卷书中都对占领和定居活动的特征进行了环境分析，得出并仔细检查了土地利用，植被和动物利用的地理数据，并结合了考古学，地质考古学和考古植物学证据。

这个项目的范围很大，而这两个卷的综合性质部分是由于来自许多欧洲国家的很多人都参与了研究和写作。总共两卷共计35章和5个附录，其中有近50位撰稿人。这项研究本身由一个由12人组成的项目小组负责监督，其中编辑安德鲁·普鲁斯考斯基（安德鲁·雷普斯科夫大学）（雷丁大学）是主要研究人员，而许多项目合作伙伴则来自拉脱维亚爱沙尼亚各地的众多大学和研究机构，立陶宛，波兰和英国。不幸的是，如此庞大的工作量只能对这两个书的内容进行广泛的描述，

第一卷提供了一系列环境变化的比较。