Amber is moved from northern Europe to the Mediterranean area from at least the sixteenth century BCE.

The breast ornament of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, who reigned in around 1333 BCE to 1324 BCE) contains large Baltic amber beads.

The quantity of amber in the Royal Tomb of Qatna, Syria, is unparalleled for known sites of the second millennium BCE in the Levant and the Ancient Near East.

The Baltic amber trade, which appears to have extended to the Mediterranean Sea, has been traced by archaeologists back to the Nordic Bronze Age; its major center is located in the region of Sambia.

This trade probably existed prior to the historical Trojan War in the thirteenth century BCE, as amber is one of the substances in which the palace of Menelaus at Sparta was said to be rich in Homer's The Iliad.

Heinrich Schliemann will find Baltic amber beads at Mycenae, as shown by spectroscopic investigation.

 

The Aesti (also Aestii or Aests) are an ancient (most probably Baltic) people first described by the Roman historian Tacitus in his treatise Germania (circa 98 CE).

Aestui, the land of the Aesti, according to Tacitus was located somewhere east of the Suiones (Swedes) and west of the Sitones (possibly the Kvens), on the Suebian (Baltic) Sea.

This and other evidence suggests that Aestui was in a region around the later East Prussia (now Kaliningrad Oblast).

Geographical and linguistic evidence suggests that the Aesti were, ethnologically, a Baltic people and possibly synonymous with the Brus/Prūsa or Old Prussians (i.e., not a Germanic people such as the modern Prussians or a Finno-Ugric people, such as the Estonians).

Tacitus almost certainly erred in implying that the Aesti were a hybrid Celtic-Germanic culture: he claimed that while the "Aestian nations" followed the "same customs and attire" as "the Suebians" (at the time a collective term for eastern Germanic peoples), their speech resembled that of the Britons (i.e., a Celtic language rather than the Germanic languages of the Suebii).

The placement of the Tacitean Aestii is based primarily on their association with amber, a popular luxury item during the life of Tacitus, with known sources at the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea.

The ancient writers, beginning with Tacitus, who is the first Roman author to mention the Aesti in his Germania, provide very little information on them.

Although Tacitus has never traveled to Magna Germania himself and only records information he had obtained from others, the short ethnographic excursus below is the most detailed ancient account of the Aestii that we have:

Upon the right of the Suebian Sea the Aestian nations reside, who use the same customs and attire with the Suebians; their language more resembles that of Britain.

They worship the Mother of the Gods.

As the characteristic of their national superstition, they wear the images of wild boars.

This alone serves them for arms, this is the safeguard of all, and by this every worshiper of the Goddess is secured even amidst his foes.

Rare among them is the use of weapons of iron, but frequent that of clubs.

In producing of grain and the other fruits of the earth, they labor with more assiduity and patience than is suitable to the usual laziness of Germans.

Nay, they even search the deep, and of all the rest are the only people who gather amber.

They call it glesum, and find it among the shallows and upon the very shore.

But, according to the ordinary incuriosity and ignorance of Barbarians, they have neither learned, nor do they inquire, what is its nature, or from what cause it is produced.

In truth it lay long neglected among the other gross discharges of the sea; till from our luxury, it gained a name and value.

To themselves it is of no use: they gather it rough, they expose it in pieces coarse and unpolished, and for it receive a price with wonder. (Germania, chapter XLV).

Tacitus' mention of a cult of the mother of the gods among the Aesti along the eastern Baltic coast does apply to the ancient Estonian and Baltic pagan religions.

He also refers to the Fenni living next to the Aesti—the Fenni being ancestors to the Finns or the Sámi would situate them closest to the Estonians.

Ultimately, Tacitus' use of Aesti could apply equally well to either a specific people or to a grouping of ethnically diverse peoples across a wider area.

The two groups of German "crusaders” that set forth, under papal approval, to Christianize the pagan Balts (very often by sending them to their deaths), have largely succeeded by 1230.

The Teutonic Knights now fully occupy the valley of the lower Vistula, courtesy of the Polish princes.

The Knights of the Sword occupy the valley of the lower Dvina River.

In 1255, the Teutonic Knights establish the city of Königsberg, naming it in honor of Ottokar II of Bohemia, situated on the Pregolya River near where it empties into the Vislinsky (Wislany) Lagoon of the Baltic Sea, on the foundations of a destroyed Sambian settlement known as Tvanksta. (Eventually a capital of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, the Duchy of Prussia, and the German province of East Prussia, the seaport is today the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.)

The Order of the Teutonic Knights, having moved to Transylvania in 1211 to help defend Hungary against the Cumans after Christian forces were defeated in the Middle East, had been expelled in 1225 after allegedly attempting to place themselves under papal instead of Hungarian sovereignty.

Following the Golden Bull of Rimini, which bestowed on the Order a special imperial privilege for the conquest and possession of Prussia, the Order’s Grand Master Hermann von Salza and Duke Konrad I of Mazovia had made a joint invasion of "Old Prussia" in 1226 to Christianize the Baltic Old Prussians in the Prussian Crusade.

 

 

Reinforcements arrive from the Rhineland in January 1262 , led by Wilhelm VII, Duke of Jülich, who had been obliged by Pope Alexander IV to fulfill his crusader duties in Prussia.

This army lifts the Siege of Königsberg but as soon as the army returns home, the Sambians resume the siege and are reinforced by Herkus Monte and his Natangians.

Herkus is subsequently injured and the Natangians retreat, leaving the Sambians unable to prevent supplies from reaching the castle and the siege eventually fails.

The Prussians are more successful in capturing castles deeper into the Prussian territory (with an exception of Wehlau, now Znamensk), and the Knights are left only with strongholds in Balga, Elbing, Chełmno, Toruń, and Königsberg.

The Prussian uprising of 1295 is limited to Natangia and Sambia and depends upon help from Vytenis, Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The rebels capture Bartenstein (Bartoszyce) by surprise and plunder as far as Königsberg, but are never a serious threat.

By this time the Prussian nobility is already baptized and pro-Teutonic to the extent that peasants kill them first before attacking the Knights.

This last attempt effectively ends the Prussian Crusade and the Knights concentrate on conquering Samogitia and Lithuania.

Lithuanian historians note that fierce resistance by the Prussians won time for the young Lithuanian state to mature and strengthen so it could withstand the hundred-year crusade, culminating in the 1410 Battle of Grunwald, with minimal territorial losses.

The Prussian lands will be repopulated by colonists from Germany, who after the sixteenth century will eventually outnumber the natives.

It is estimated that Prussians numbered one hundred thousand around 1400, and comprised about half of the total population in Prussia.

Subject to Germanization and assimilation, the Prussians will eventually become extinct sometime after the sixteenth century.

It is believed that the Prussian language became extinct sometime at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Königsberg, having become a major trading center, in 1340 joins the Hanseatic League.

It has developed into an important port for the southeastern Baltic region, trading goods throughout Prussia, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The chronicler Peter of Dusburg probably wrote his Chronicon terrae Prussiae in Königsberg from 1324–1330.

Albert of Prussia was born in Ansbach in Franconia as the third son of Frederick I, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach.

His mother is Sophia, daughter of Casimir IV Jagiellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, and his wife Elisabeth of Austria.

Raised for a career in the Church, he had spent some time at the court of Hermann IV of Hesse, Elector of Cologne, who had appointed him canon of the Cologne Cathedral.

Not only is he quite religious, he is also interested in mathematics and science, and sometimes is claimed to have contradicted the teachings of the Church in favor of scientific theories.

His career has been forwarded by the Church however and institutions of the Catholic clerics had supported his early advance.

Turning to a more active life, Albert had accompanied Emperor Maximilian I to Italy in 1508, and after his return spent some time in the Kingdom of Hungary.

When Duke Frederick of Saxony, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, died in December 1510, Albert had been chosen as his successor early in 1511 in the hope that his relationship to his maternal uncle Sigismund, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, would facilitate a settlement of the disputes over eastern Prussia, which has been held by the Order under Polish suzerainty since the Second Peace of Thorn (1466).

The new Grand Master, aware of his duties to the empire and to the papacy, had refused to submit to the crown of Poland.

As war over the Order's existence appears inevitable, Albert has made strenuous efforts to secure allies and carried on protracted negotiations with Emperor Maximilian.

The ill-feeling, influenced by the ravages of members of the Order in Poland, culminates in a war that begins in December 1519 and devastates Prussia.

King Sigismund, after some delay, had assented to Albert’s offer to convert the Teutonic Knights realm into a hereditary duchy, with the provision that Prussia should be treated as a Polish fiefdom; and after this arrangement had been confirmed by a treaty concluded at Kraków, Albert had pledged a personal oath to Sigismund I and was invested with the duchy for himself and his heirs on February 10, 1525.

The Estates of the land now met at Königsberg and take the oath of allegiance to the new duke, who uses his full powers to promote the doctrines of Luther.

This transition does not, however, take place without protest.

Summoned before the imperial court of justice, Albert refuses to appear and is proscribed, while the Order elects a new Grand Master, Walter von Cronberg, who receives Prussia as a fief at the imperial Diet of Augsburg.

As the German princes are experiencing the tumult of the Reformation, the German Peasants' War, and the wars against the Ottoman Turks, they do not enforce the ban on the duke, and agitation against him soon dies away.

The feeble-minded Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, had had no surviving male heirs; therefore, the Treatise of Warsaw in 1611 had allowed his son-in-law, Elector John Sigismund of the Hohenzollern branch in Brandenburg, to become the duke's legal successor.

The Thirty Years' War had broken out in 1618 and Albert Frederick died, with the duchy passing to John Sigismund, who himself died the following year.

John Sigismund's son, George William, is successfully invested with the duchy in 1623 by the king of Poland, Sigismund III Vasa, thus the personal union Brandenburg-Prussia is confirmed.

Many of the Prussian Junkers (the landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany) are opposed to rule by the House of Hohenzollern of Berlin and appeals to Sigismund III Vasa for redress, or even incorporation of Ducal Prussia into the Polish kingdom, although without success.

Because Brandenburg is a fief of the Holy Roman Empire and Ducal Prussia is a Polish fief, a cross-border real union is legally impossible.

However, De facto Brandenburg and Ducal Prussia are to be increasingly ruled as one, and colloquially referred to as Brandenburg-Prussia.