From 1250 to 1795 Lithuania covered a vast area of eastern and central Europe. Until 1387 the country was pagan. How this huge state came to expand, defend itself against western European crusaders and play a conspicuous part in European life are the main subjects of this book.

The emergence of pagan Lithuania is presented against the background of the political and religious crises of fourteenth-century Byzantine and Catholic Christendom. An attempt is made to show how the Lithuanians manipulated their position on the commercial, denominational and colonial frontier to maintain an expanding dominion in the face of Polish, Teutonic and Rus'ian opposition. It questions the mirage of the 'age of faith' as the 'age of totalitarian Christian Europe'.

The book has relevance to the expansion of the Church and Empire between the ninth and eleventh centuries. The rise of the new ruling elites in the fourteenth century familiar to French and English historians has its counterpart in Bohemia, Poland, Rus', and in Lithuania, although centralising forces were very weak, thus contributing to the strength of the later Polish-Lithuanian Republic of the Two Nations. Sources are used from across Europe, from Ireland and Spain to the Caucasus.

The use of 'literary', 'mythological' chronicles is analysed. Reliance on non-literary sources has also proved necessary. The lack of extensive Lithuanian documentation requires a focus on all sides of international affairs: a desideratum which is usually missing from western studies.