The Baltic Crusades: The Teutonic Knights and the Birth of Europe’s Most Dangerous Frontier

The Teutonic Knights. Pagan forests. Crusade-by-fire. And the medieval origin story behind modern Europe’s most volatile borderlands.

Antonia Senior and historian Roger Moorhouse explore the Baltic Crusades through Alexander Pluskowski’s Black Cross, tracing how the Teutonic Order reshaped the Baltic world — and how its legacy fed later nationalism, Prussian power, Soviet mythmaking, and even Nazi ideology.

From Alexander Nevsky’s Battle on the Ice to Grunwald/Tannenberg, this is medieval history with huge modern consequences.

Main Book Discussed

• Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades — Alexander Pluskowski

• Baltic: The Future of Europe — Oliver Moody

• Northern Shores: A History of the Baltic Sea and Its Peoples — Alan Palmer

• Forgotten Land: Searching for the Lost Province of East Prussia — Max Egremont

• Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 — Christopher Clark

  Stalin’s Apostles: The New History of the Cambridge Five — Antonia Senior

• When the Doves Disappeared — Sofi Oksanen

• Purge — Sofi Oksanen

• Dog Park — Sofi Oksanen