During the second half of the twelfth century, several interrelated chains of events transformed the eastern Baltic littoral thoroughly enough to produce what might be called a new order. The transformation, which involved western Europeans coming and staying in the littoral, did not take place overnight; in fact, it unfolded over a century and a half. To understand it properly, we have to step away from simplified models of what happened and consider the events in all their complexity. By the twelfth century, the peoples of the littoral had been familiar with strangers in their midst at least since the ninth century, when the Vikings were using the littoral waterways to travel east into the territories of the Rus'. Traders from the west and the east had come and gone, as had Christian missionaries from the lands of the Rus'. How these “others” had been incorporated into the worldview of the indigenous peoples we do not know, but the arrival of the German crusaders and traders could hardly have seemed like an unusual occurrence. Nor would their militancy have seemed extraordinary, at least initially. After all, the tribal societies of the littoral were themselves hardly peaceful and innocent farmers: for centuries they had raided and pillaged one another's territories, and taken captives and slaves. None of these forays had been manifestations of a determined expansionism, save perhaps those of the Lithuanians into adjacent eastern lands.