Levin Jules F. The Slavic element in the Old Prussian Elbing vocabulary

Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1974. — xiv, 110 p. — (University of California publications in linguistics 77).The Prussian language belonged to the West branch of the Baltic language family, one of the most linguistically important subfamilies of Indo-European. Before the thirteenth century the Prussians inhabited the Baltic coast between the Vistula and the Nieman. The pagan Prussians had resisted pressures from the Germans and Slavs to convert to Christianity for over two hundred years, when in 1230 the Knights of the Teutonic Order received land from a Polish duke of Mazovia in return for assistance against Prussian border raids. In forty years, at the cost of much bloodshed, the Order succeeded in crushing Prussian resistance, and colonizing the entire country with German settlers. Within a century the Prussians were a minority in their own country, and when they disappeared completely in the seventeenth century, even their name was taken over by their conquerers.
Besides the Elbing Vocabulary, the Prussian language is attested in a 100-word vocabulary in Simon Grunau's Prussian Chronicle, two differing bilingual editions of Lutheran Catechisms, and a bilingual edition of Martin Luther's Enchiridion, all from the sixteenth century, as well as in various fragmentary traces such as place names and personal names.