Beschreibung
This book is one of he first to focus on Medieval and Early Modern state
formation on the north-eastern periphery of Europe. Researchers have
traditionally perceived an East-West conflict between Sweden and Novgorod
concerning the late medieval colonization of the northern forest areas,
but it seems that the East Fennoscandian boreal forest zone was not an
unpopulated area at that time, but was a landscape inhabited by
heterogeneous hunting and fishing populations and possessing another kind
of culture.
The ways of life of these populations can be observed by coordinating
various bodies of palaeoecological, palaeobotanic, genetic,
meteorological, folkloristic, philological and archaeological material.
The traditional written sources did not extend to this area, and its
nature is only reflected in the expansion and organization of the European
Christian culture and power, both Russian and Swedish. Also, the
increasing number of source documents, the growing population as reflected
in those written documents and the expansion of arable cultivation do not
indicate any real colonization but simply a change of the existing
economic system from a semi-nomadic hunting and fishing economy to a
field-based agriculture in response to the expansion of regular taxation
and state control. Seen from this perspective, the people who earlier were
invisible gradually become visible in the sources.
The East Fennoscandian boreal forest zone was a European periphery during
the Viking Age, but was connected to the European exchange of goods
through the same waterways that also brought the first Christian cultural
impact. The European economic crisis of the 14 th Century nevertheless
excluded the area from the late medieval process of state formation, and
it became an object of both Muscovite and Swedish interests only after the
end of the 15 th Century. This meant the formation of parishes, the
organization of an early local administration with regular taxation, the
permanent stationing of military forces, the establishment of a physical
border, and the assimilation of the local people into European culture,
accompanied by marginalization of the traditional forms of life.
Born 1957, Prof. of General History at the University of Joensuu,
Finland, and Fellow at the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä in
Finland and Petrozavodsk in Russia. He has especially published books and
articles on East-European medieval history and the history of Ancient
Rome.
