STUDIA IURIDICA TORUNIENSIA tom XXIV DATA WPŁYWU: 16 maja 2019 r. DATA AKCEPTACJI: 10 czerwca 2019 r. Andrzej Gaca Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń
[email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5051-3486 Baltic Slavs fighting at sea from the ninth to twelfth century. The phenomenon of over a hundred years of Slavic domination over the Baltic Sea http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/SIT.2019.003 The term “Dominion over the Baltic Sea” (Dominion maris Baltici) began to appear in Polish sources as early as in the 15th century. Initially, it was used primarily in the context of defending one’s own ports and coasts1. It should be remembered, however, that the phe- nomenon of defending one’s own coastal territories against Baltic tribes, or their maritime expansion in the form of pirate expeditions undertaken to plunder or seek to conquer areas on the other side 1 At the beginning of the previous century, Adam Szelągowski, a student of the eminent Polish historian Tadeusz Wojciechowski, claimed that the battle for the Dominion maris Baltici had begun already in the middle of the 13th century, i.e. from the establishment of the first commercial and political power on the Baltic Sea, which was the Hanseatic League. This struggle lasted continuously until the first half of the 18th century as a form of competition between the northern powers: Sweden and Denmark, Moscow and Sweden, Poland and Sweden and Moscow, id., Walka o Bałtyk (1544–1621), in: Sprawa północna w wiekach XVI i XVII, part 1, Lwów 1904, pp. IX–X.