Old Prussians - Organization

Organization

At the beginning of Baltic history, the Old Prussians were bordered by the Vistula and the Memel – earlier Mimmel – river, which outside of Prussia is called Neman Rivers with a southern depth to about Thorn at the Vistula river, which was Prussian, and the line of the River Narew. The Kashubians and Pomeranians were on the west, the Poles on the south, the Sudovians (sometimes considered a separate people, other times regarded as a Prussian tribe) on the east and further south, the Scalovians on the north, and the Lithuanians on the northeast. The Sudovians began at about Suwałki.

At the end of the 1st century, Prussian settlements were probably divided into tribal domains, separated from one another by uninhabited areas of forest, swamp and marsh. A basic territorial community was perhaps called a laūks, a word attested in Old Prussian as "field". This word appears as a segment in Baltic settlement names, especially Curonian, and it is found in Old Prussian placenames such as Stablack, from stabs (stone) + laūks (field, thus stone field). The plural is not attested in Old Prussian, but the Lithuanian plural of laukas ("field") is laukai.

A laūks was formed by a group of farms, which shared economic interests and a desire for safety. The supreme power resided in general gatherings of all adult males, who discussed important matters concerning the community and elected the leader and chief; the leader was responsible for the supervision of the everyday matters, while the chief (the rikīs) was in charge of the road and watchtower building, and border defense, undertaken by vidivariers.

The term laūks must have included the fortifications, if any, and the social superstructure, but the village itself went by another name: kāims. The head of a household was the buttataws (literally, the house father, from buttan, meaning home, and taws, meaning father).

In the natural course of competition and heredity, some chiefs must have become very powerful, acquiring various laūks and kāims as subordinate entities. The Balts entered history in the early 2nd millennium BC and were organized into these larger social entities, one of which was termed a "duchy" by non-Baltic writers.

Because the Baltic tribes inhabiting Prussia never formed a common political and territorial organisation, they had no reason to adopt a common ethnic or national name. Instead they used the name of the region from which they came — Galindians, Sambians, Bartians, Nadrovians, Natangians, Scalovians, Sudovians, etc. It is not known when and how the first general names came into being. This lack of unity weakened them severely, similar to the condition of Germany during the Middle Ages.

The Prussian tribal structure is most fully attested in the Chronicon terrae Prussiae of Peter of Dusburg, a priest of the Teutonic Order. The work is dated to 1326. He lists eleven lands and ten tribes, which were named based on a geographical basis. These were:

The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan (in Anglo-Saxon) (English translation) describes a voyage by a Norseman called Wulfstan to the land of the Old Prussians, to the area around Elbing; he describes their funeral customs.