Mindaugas
Mindaugas was the only crowned king of Lithuania and unified it in the thirteenth century. He appears in the record around 1219 as one of twenty-one Lithuanian dukes signing a treaty with Volhynia, and by 1236 was described as the highest among them. He consolidated by force: he killed or exiled rivals including his own nephews and brothers-in-law, and seized their lands, which contemporaries described as murder and which produced a Lithuania that could act as a single state. The pressure that shaped his reign came from the Livonian Order and the Teutonic Knights, crusading orders authorised by the papacy to convert or destroy the last pagan people in Europe. His answer was diplomatic. In 1251 he accepted baptism, which removed the legal basis for a crusade against him, and in 1253 was crowned king with papal authorisation — placing Lithuania inside Christendom as a recognised kingdom rather than a target. The price was the cession of territory in Samogitia that he did not effectively control. The Samogitians ignored the arrangement and destroyed the Livonian Order at Durbe in 1260. Mindaugas broke with the order in 1261, and probably reverted to paganism, though the evidence for that is from hostile chroniclers. He was assassinated in 1263 by Daumantas of Nalšia, whose wife he had taken, together with his nephew Treniota. Lithuania returned to paganism for another century and a half and remained the last pagan state in Europe until 1387. The date of his coronation, 6 July 1253, is Lithuania's national day.
- Lived: 1203 CE – 1263 CE
- Nationality: Lithuanian
- Roles: king, ruler, head_of_state
