Summary What anxieties did medieval missionaries and crusaders face and what role did the sense of risk play in their community-building? To what extent did crusaders and Christian colonists empathize with the local populations they set out to conquer? Who were the hosts and who were the guests during the confrontations with the pagan societies on the Baltic Rim? And how were the uncertainties of the conversion process addressed in concrete encounters and in the accounts of Christian authors? This book explores emotional bonding as well as practices and discourses of hospitality as uncertain means of evangelization, interaction, and socialization across cultural divides on the Baltic Rim, c. 1000-1300. It focuses on interactions between local populations and missionary communities, as well as crusader frontier societies. By applying tools of historical anthropology to the study of host-guest relations, spaces of hospitality, emotional communities, and empathy on the fronts of Christianization, this book offers fresh insights and approaches to the manner in which missionaries and crusaders reflexively engaged with the groups targeted by Christianization in terms of practice, ethics, and identity. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface, Acknowledgments, List of Figures and Tables Chapter One. Introduction Chapter Two. Baltic Frontier Societies, Peripheral Visions, and Emotional Palimpsests Chapter Three. Fear in Missionary and Crusader Risk Societies, 10th-13th Centuries Chapter Four. Pagan Hosts, Missionary Guests, Spaces of Hospitality, 10th-12th Centuries Chapter Five. Hospitality and Its Discontents in Helmold of Bosau's Chronica Slavorum, 12th Century Chapter Six. Emotional Bonding and Trust during Sieges, 12th-13th Centuries Chapter Seven. Politics of Emotions and Empathy Walls in Livonia, 13th Century Chapter Eight. Hospitality and Formation of Identities in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, 13th Century Chapter Nine. Epilogue Bibliography Index