How Global was Medieval Prussia? An Analysis of the Barlaam and Josaphat Manuscript of the Teutonic Knights at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century

The history of the southern Baltic region (Prussia) from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries has only received increased attention from ‘Western’ scholars in the last three decades. It has remained peripheral within traditional ‘Western’ scholarship on the premodern world. As a result, we are still left with a wide variety of questions, especially concerning the place of this area in the broader medieval world. This article addresses two of these questions: to what extent did medieval contemporaries in Prussia know about their broader world, and the peoples within it? How were people from these regions, such as the Indian Subcontinent or Africa, depicted, understood and communicated? One answer lay in the literature produced by the knights in the Teutonic Order. In the context of the plethora of studies on race and globality in the premodern world, the Baltic region has of yet received minimal attention. However, an investigation into the rich sources available reveals the presence in the region of the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, a Christian version of the life of the Buddha and the first example of ‘global literature’ associated with the Middle Ages. By analysing the surviving examples in the region, this article will place the region of Prussia within the new concept of the Global Middle Ages and reveal the perception of the southern realms of the world in one of medieval Europe's furthest cultural outposts

Ancient history · Archaeology · Buddhism · Context (archaeology · Ethnology · Fifteenth · Gautama Buddha · Middle Ages · Scholarship · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Medieval European History and Architecture