The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages

Nora Berend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781409422457
• eBook ISBN: 9781351890083
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

This volume brings together a set of key studies on the history of medieval Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), along with others specially commissioned for the book or translated, and a new introduction. This region was both an area of immigration, and one of polities in expansion. Such expansion included the settlement and exploitation of previously empty lands as well as rulers' attempts to incorporate new territories under their rule, although these attempts did not always succeed. Often, German immigration has been prioritized in scholarship, and the medieval expansion of Central Europe has been equated with the expansion of Germans. Debates then focused on the positive or negative contribution of Germans to local life, and the consequences of their settlement. This perspective, however, distorts our understanding of medieval processes. On the one hand, Central Europe was not a passive recipient of immigrants. Local rulers and eventually nobles benefited from and encouraged immigration; they played an active role. On the other hand, German immigration was not a unified movement, and cannot be equated with a drang nach osten. Finally, not just Germans, but also various Romance-speaking and other immigrant groups settled in Central Europe. This volume, therefore, seeks to present a more complex picture of medieval expansion in Central Europe.

1
Medieval German Expansion in Bohemia and Poland

James Westfall Thompson

THE BOHEMIANS, or Czecho-Slovaks, and the Poles were the only nations of the northern Slavs during the Middle Ages who successfully maintained their national integrity and their national self-consciousness in the face of the enormous German pressure imposed upon them. All the other northern Slavonic tribes of Central Europe, sometimes known as the Elbean or Baltic Slavs, went to ruin like a broken cloud, leaving merely the débris of themselves in the conquered country between the Elbe and the Oder.

But it was not in the nature of things that even the Bohemians and the Poles could retain their ancient racial institutions uninfluenced by contact with Germany. So it came about in the fateful centuries between 800 and 1200 that their religion, their political institutions, their culture, their very blood (that of the Czechs more than that of the Poles), were potently influenced by German attrition and penetration. This permeation of things German, however, was not everywhere either quantitatively or qualitatively in the same proportion. In Silesia, German influence was overwhelming after the twelfth century. In Bohemia, where the process was slower and sometimes not without check or arrest, the spread of German influence continued until the Hussite wars. In Poland the degree of Germanization was never nearly so great as in Silesia and Bohemia. In them all, German colonization was of varying density in different parts of the country. Before the advent of Christianity—that is to say, before the tenth century—the most active German influence was that of commerce and trade.¹

The long rule of Boleslav I (929-67) is the true period of the formation of Bohemia, but there is no evidence that any German colonization then took place. The most positive German activity in the country at this time seems to have been commercial. These traders, however, really were not Germans, but Jews, who dealt in furs, salt, and especially slaves.

In 971 the Pope authorized the first Bohemian bishopric, that of Prague, which Otto I two years later caused to be erected, not, however, under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Regensburg, as that prelate had fondly hoped, but under the Archbishop of Mainz.³ The Emperor was too cautious to permit any political power to pass from Northern to Southern Germany, especially into such a feudal storm center as Bavaria notoriously was.⁴ The first bishop of Prague was a Saxon monk from the Benedictine monastery of St. John in Magdeburg, who had lived in Bohemia for a long time and spoke the Czech language. He was not installed until 975 and then the coronation took place at Brumpt in Alsace. At his installation later at Prague in the church of St. Vitus, we are told that the nobles and the priests chanted in German: "Christe keinado .... und die hailigen alle helfuent unse . . . .," while the common people merely shouted "Krleš."¹

Twenty years after this event the first monastery was founded in Bohemia, that of Brěvnov (993) near Prague. It was richly endowed by Boleslav II. The first monks, twelve in number, are said to have been brought from the mother-monastery of Benedictinism, Monte Cassino, by Bishop Adalbert of Prague, who himself had once been an inmate of it. In 999, just before his death, Boleslav II founded the second Benedictine house in Bohemia, that of St. John on the Ostrov, named from the circumstance that it was situated on an island (ostrov) in the Moldau near Davie, south of Prague. This one was filled with monks from Kloster Altaich in Bavaria. The earliest nunnery in Bohemia was that of St. George, established hard by the old chapel of St. George in Prague, the first abbess of which was Boleslav II's youngest daughter, Mlada-Marie.

German influence, with a little Italian admixture, now flowed deeply and rapidly into Bohemia. In addition to things ecclesiastical like relics, missals, manuscripts, etc., a great impulse seems to have been given to trade.² The household of the Duke was largely German; Emma, the wife of Boleslav II, was of German birth. The higher and court clergy were German born and German educated. The Duke's own brother, Strachkvas (Christian), was educated in the monastery of St. Emmeran in Regensburg. When Boleslav II was stricken with paralysis he was cared for by Thiddag, a medical monk from Corvey in Westphalia.³

It must not be assumed, however, that the political relations between Germany and Bohemia were amicable during these years. German civilization and Christianity were one thing, German domination quite another. In 976-77 Otto II made campaigns against Bohemia,¹ and from 985 to 987 there was war between the two states, the rebellion of Bohemia perhaps having been encouraged by the death of Dietrich of the Nordmark and Margrave Rikdag of Thuringia in 985, which relaxed German control of the middle border.² The effect was to clamp German overlordship and imposition of the tribute upon Bohemia more heavily than before.³

Boleslav II died in 999, and was succeeded by Boleslav III. An insurrection, led by his brother Spytihněv, soon drove him out, together with his mother Judith. It is evident that this rising was motivated by both anti-Christian and anti-German sentiment,⁴ combined with the resentment of some of the great families in Bohemia against the ducal house because of its rapidly growing political authority, and who leaned toward German ecclesiasticism as a counterbalance to its increase. One of the most influential of these clans was that of the Slavnik, which Boleslav disposed of by massacre in 995, save a single scion.

This sole survivor was Vojtěch, more famous in history as St. Adalbert (b. 956), the martyred saint of both the Bohemians and the Poles. Adalbert, as we may call him, had been intrusted by his family, who early embraced the Christian faith, to the care of Archbishop Adalbert of Magdeburg, whose name he adopted as his own. In 983 he received orders from Dithmar, bishop of Prague; and in the same year, when Dithmar died, the popular Christian voice in Prague chose Adalbert as the new bishop, in spite of his youth, and he was consecrated by the Archbishop of Mainz on June 29, 983. His asceticism, his intense religious emotionalism, his vigils, so early as this gave him a reputation for sanctity.

For six years, secretly opposed by the Bohemian Duke, Adalbert labored in a diocese still largely pagan. In 989 he went to Rome and asked for papal permission to resign his see and to enter the monastery of St. Boniface in Rome. John XV granted his request and he became a monk, together with his brother Gaudentius. But the German primate demanded Adalbert's return to Prague. Again, however, he quitted it for Rome, where he became the most intimate friend of Otto III. For the second time the Archbishop of Mainz demanded Adalbert's return to his abandoned diocese. Obedient to the command of Gregory V, he was preparing to go when news of the murder of his family by Boleslav arrested him. Instead he went to Poland, resolved to become a missionary among the wild pagan peoples bordering upon Poland. The Pope gave him an itinerant episcopal title (episcopus regionarius). No Christian priest had yet penetrated among the heathen Prussians, whose ferocity was notorious, and thither he and his brother went.¹

Duke Boleslav the Brave of Poland gave him a boat and a guard of thirty soldiers, and Adalbert floated down the Vistula River to Danzig, whence he went by sea to Samland. At Romowe, now Fischhausen, near Königsberg, he was murdered (April 23, 997). His two companions, having been spared for the moment, made their escape to Poland. Boleslav the Brave recovered Adalbert's remains and removed them to the church of Our Lady in Posen. Thither in the year 1000 came Otto III to do reverence to the memory of his friend.²

In Bohemia the insurrection of Spytihněv and the expulsion of Boleslav III and his mother Judith coincided with this event, and an imputation of paganism, or at least of pagan sympathies, rested upon the Bohemian Duke. Moreover, the anti-German nature of the movement was unmistakable. The Emperor took prompt action. Upon his return from Italy in 1004 a great flotilla of boats was collected at Merseburg to carry munitions and supplies, and a mixed army of Saxons, East Franks, Bavarians, invaded Bohemia via the upper Elbe River, which gave entrance into the heart of the country. Saaz, Vyšehrad, and finally Prague were taken. The rebel Bohemian Duke fled into the wilds of the Erzgebirge and disappeared from history. On its return the German army, in spite of fatigue and hunger, reconquered upper Lusatia from Poland.

The next two dukes of Bohemia, Jaromíř and Oldřich (1004-37), were mere puppets of the German crown. The Czech people still lacked sufficient coherence and compactness to resist German influence. In 1032 the Duke refused to come to Merseburg to do homage to Conrad II, but an expedition soon brought him to reason. Balked of expansion westward (for although Czechs and Bavarians clashed in the Boehmer Wald the German eastern frontier was too hard to be pierced), the Bohemian Duke turned instead upon Poland. Moravia, which Poland had seized from the Magyars, was his first conquest.¹

The anarchy of Poland after the expulsion of Kasimir was taken advantage of by Břetislav I (1037-55) to seize Silesia and Chrobatia from Poland and to conquer Cracow. But in addition to territory the Bohemian Duke was endeavoring to rehabilitate the stain of having persecuted Adalbert of Prague and indirectly of having superinduced his death among the heathen Prussians. Accordingly, in 1039, the body of Adalbert was forcibly removed by the Bohemians from Gnesen to Prague, where it was interred with magnificent honors. On the strength of his new evidence of zeal, Břetislav asked the Pope to elevate the see of Prague to an archbishopric. But Benedict IX, who was incensed at this bold piece of body-snatching, not only refused to do so, but imposed a penance upon the Bohemian Duke.²

Břetislav I is the first distinguished ruler of Bohemia, His conquest of Silesia and seizure of Chrobatia from Poland was the realization of that Greater Bohemia of which he and his people dreamed.¹ War always increases one-man power; and Bretislav I saw in successful war not only the means of gratifying Czech ambition, but also of suppressing the authority of those local leaders who inhibited his own power. On the other hand, the German kings looked with resentment and suspicion upon this enlargement of Bohemia, and it was their interest to prevent either the enlargement or the consolidation of the ducal power.

Probably it was this fear of Germany that led Břetislav I, in 1039, to make an alliance with King Peter of Hungary, for both states were apprehensive of the extension of German domination over them. But the experiment was a disastrous one. Emperor Henry III, who had just come to the German throne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors' Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Medieval German Expansion in Bohemia and Poland (selected excerpts)
• 2 The Settlement and Colonization of Europe (selected excerpts)
• 3 Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: The lands east of the Elbe and German colonization eastwards
• 4 The Expansion of Germany: Colonization and conquest in the east (selected excerpt)
• 5 German Town Foundations in Western Pomerania
• 6 Slavs and Germans
• 7 The German Settlement in Central and Eastern Europe during the High Middle Ages
• 8 The Medieval Colonization of Central Europe as a Problem of World History and Historiography
• 9 The Germans and the Implantation of German Law among the Bohemians and Moravians in the Middle Ages
• 10 At the Margin of Community: Germans in pre-Hussite Bohemia
• 11 Germans and Slavs in 13th-Century Bohemia: Some preliminary remarks on immigrants and law
• 12 Immigrants and Locals in Medieval Hungary: 11th—13th centuries
• 13 Foreign Knights and Clerks in Early Medieval Hungary
• 14 The Expansions of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages (1000-1490)
• 15 German Settlement in Poland (selected excerpt)
• 16 The Medieval 'Colonization of the East' in Polish Historiography
• 17 Foreign Colonization and Introduction of German Law in the 13th Century
• 18 Nationality Conflicts in the German-Slavic Borderland in the 13th—14th Centuries and their Social Scope
• 19 Economic and Political Institutions on the Polish-German Frontier in the Middle Ages: Action, reaction, interaction
• 20 Pomerania and Poland in the 10th to 12th Centuries: The expansion of the Piasts and shaping political, social and state relations in the seaside Slav communities
• Index