To generalize about the encounters of the Western Slavs with Christianity is hazardous in the extreme, in view of the many differences in stance and prospects between, say, the masters of Moravian hill-forts, inhabitants of emporia on the Baltic coast such as Wolin and Szczecin, and populations living further inland along the fertile valleys of rivers such as the Vistula. Much as their societies varied, so did rites, assumptions, and beliefs, and very few gods or customs commanded respect or veneration throughout the Slav lands.
One phenomenon known to most of them, though, was the material wealth,military prowess, and uniformity of cult observance of the Christians to their west and south. Christian political leaders did not present an unvaryingly united political front, and the more astute Slav potentates took advantage of this to extend and consolidate their own regimes. But they were all reacting,to a greater or lesser degree, to the corporate faith and force majeure looming over them. No full fathoming of their reactions can be attempted here.
Instead, we shall consider contrasting yet related instances: the situation of Slavs who found themselves facing resurgent imperium, once the Saxons had fended off the Hungarian raids of the earlier tenth century and themselves impinged on the populations east of the Elbe. Several Slav groupings in the border lands perforce came to terms and some chiefs adopted Christianity and sought privileged treatment on the strength of this. Further east, however,taking advantage of a remoter geographical location, trade routes, and political ties with the already-Christian Czechs, a Slav potentate gained dominance over many surrounding populations, using the Christian religion not only as an agent of dominion, but also to fend off the Christian Goliath to his west.
Polish Christianity, one must stress, was sui generis, and ideally it should be compared closely with that of the Czechs: the Czech-born Vojtech-Adalbert (d. 997) was the object of competitive veneration from Czechs and Poles alike.
But the Polish experience is no less significant for being distinctive: it bears comparison with that of the Bulgarians who likewise had to contend with an overmighty neighbor.
The pre-Christian western Slavs have left no more literary materials of their own than their counterparts to the south and east, and, as with the latter, our information about their sacral places and customs is filtered through unsympathetic churchmen’s lenses. Writers such as Thietmar of Merseburg and Adam of Bremen were dismissive of practices which they dubbed demonic and the product of ignorance. They sometimes imputed to pagan Slavs greater coherence of thought and cult organization than was in fact the case, fitting them into stereotypes derived from Scripture and from their own preconceptions as to what any religion worth combating comprised.Nonetheless, Slavs facing submission to stern Christian overlords clearly drew a connection between force, devotion to potent gods, and victory, as is suggested by the vigor with which they wrecked churches and altars during their rebellions. According to Thietmar, the rebellious Slavs’switch to“demonic”cults instead of Christ and St. Peter in 983“was hailed not only by the pagans but also by the Christians.” He describes the Liutizi parading behind idols of their gods as they joined forces with the Saxon army to fight the Christian Poles in 1005.Some chiefs sought a role as intermediaries, forming marriage ties with German-speaking marcher lords and almost certainly being baptized, for example, Pribislav of the Stodorane in the late tenth century. Others, such as Henry Borivoj of the Abodrites, had Christian names. They presumably hoped thereby to forge peaceful relationships and tap the benefits that the Christian God brought their neighbors. They did not, however, try to impose Christianity on their fellows and probably lacked the means to do so. Certain communities seem to have developed cults and rites of collective worship as alternative fulcrums of power, material and supernatural, to those of the Christian realm next door.
They devised hierarchies of priests replete with sanctuaries and rituals, most notoriously on the island of R¨ugen. It seems likely that these drew inspiration from the Christian church, although their origins are controversial.The cult of Sventovit at Arkona attests the advantages – above all, protection – which well-ordered worship was thought to earn for communities. In that sense,Christian writers’ insistence that their religion was setting the agenda for all humankind was not empty bluster.
One potentate whoearly spotted the trend and sought to turn it to his advantage was Mieszko (d. 992), lord of important strongholds in what became known as Greater Poland. Mieszko’s ancestry is traced back to a simple farmer, named Piast, by the chronicler Gallus Anonymous, and excavations have revealed fairly ancient origins for such strongholds as Giecz and Ostr´ow Lednicki. Nonetheless, dendrochronological evidence points to the destruction of many earth-and-woodstructures during the mid-tenth century,and this should almost certainly beascribed to the activities of Mieszko and perhaps his immediate predecessor.Some places over which the Piast dynasty (as it became known) gained dominion already had important shrines, notably Gniezno. Mieszko, however, did not rest on the aura of such sanctuaries. Around 966 he was baptized, at the same time as marrying Dobrava (d. 1014) and forming an alliance with her father, the Christian Bohemian prince Boleslav (d. 977).
Besides further enhancement of his status, Mieszko probably also hoped to render his new-found power acceptable to Otto of Saxony (936–73)–or at least not casually dissoluble. Otto’s victories over the Hungarians and then over Slav groupings led by the Abodrites in 955 showed his potential for subjugating the Slavs further east. The missionary archbishopric instituted in 968 at Magdeburg encompassed“all the people of the Slavs beyond the Elbe and the Saale, lately converted and to be converted to God.” Mieszko’s alignment with the Christian religion and church hierarchy is best understood against this background. Mieszko laid himself open to Christian priestcraft but seemingly maneuvered to have bishops assigned on his own terms: Jordan and later Unger were missionary bishops directly answerable to the papacy, rather than associates of the bishop of Prague or subordinate to mighty German sees.
Thus Mieszko could hope for, literally, the blessings of Christianity without institutional absorption within Christian imperium. Mieszko’s priorities are encapsulated in the Dagome Iudex, a brief eleventh-century note on a deed making over his main stronghold and all his possessions to St. Peter. This territorialized Mieszko’s aspirations, delineating areas he had yet to dominate;
only children by his second wife, the senatrix Oda, feature as fellow donors of the family concern. In other words, a polity defined on Mieszko’s terms was placed under the protection of St. Peter and his vicar on earth.
Not even this device could guarantee the succession of the younger sons against the sense of blood-right of Mieszko’s first-born, Boleslav I (992–1025).
And the standing of the polity remained contentious. An unforgivable act of Otto III (983–1002) was, in Thietmar’s eyes, to make a lord of Boleslav, who had been a tributary.Yet the episode which drew Thietmar’s ire was in many ways a vindication of the Piasts’harnessing of Christianity to“nation-building.”Otto III placed his own crown on Boleslav’s head before a gathering of nobles at Gniezno in 1000, declaring him“brother and partner in the empire.”At the same time he confirmed that Boleslav’s realm should havefive sees, all but one within 150 miles of Gniezno, headed by an archbishop at Gniezno. Otto joined Boleslav invenerating the relics of his own former mentor,Adalbert,beheaded by Prussians barely three years earlier. The missionary saint’s half-brother,Gaudentius-Radim (d. 1006/12/22), became the first archbishop, a living link between Boleslav’s church organization and sacred time.Otto III’s appreciation of Piast aspirations to self-determination died with him, but Adalbert’s relics,working “a thousand miracles,” attracted pilgrims to Gniezno. Palatia, halls with adjoining circular chapels,displayed the interlinking of prayer and rightful authority at several strongholds: Pozna´n, Przemy´sl, Giecz, and on a massive scale, the island of Ostr´ow Lednicki.Gniezno’s and Cracow’s churches seem to have been planned to form a cross, invoking Christ’s protection for entire towns. Besides the early stone churches built in Boleslav’s core lands between Gniezno and Pozna´n, other known churches and monasteries of the earlier eleventh century mostly studded the outer reaches of Piast dominion, for example, the monastery in honor offive missionary-martyrs at Miedzyrzecz.
Boleslav himself became a lay member of this monastery,where miracles were reported. His priorities recall those of Boris, whose sees reportedly“girdled” his realm.
Under Boleslav’s auspices, Lives of missionaries such as Adalbert and the five missionary-martyrs were written or revised, and soon after Boleslav’s death in 1025 his son and heir, Mieszko, received a copy of the Roman liturgy from his cousin, Mathilda of Swabia, together with a letter of exhortation: his father had used“iron”to make“barbarous and most ferocious peoples”heed the Lord’s Word; now the highly educated Mieszko could bring them spiritual enlightenment. Mieszko was not, however, destined to play Symeon to his father’s Boris. Challenged by his brothers and menaced by Rus and Germans,he fled, ousted by his elder brother Bezprym, who seems to have tapped currents of hostility to the church and to government exactions. Bezprym himself fell victim to them in 1032, and a pagan reaction ensued, assailing the new political culture. According to Gallus Anonymous, the people turned on “the bishops and priests of God, and some they treated to death by the sword, but others were deemed worthy of a viler death, by stoning.”The bishop of Wroclaw had to flee. The ramparts of the town’s royal stronghold were dismantled: a temple housing an idol took its place, a horse’s skull beneath the foundations.
This construction, datable to around 1033, marks a determined attempt to impose unchristian order, involving craftsmen. Concerted though these attempts to throw off the Christian yoke were, too many powerful outsiders had an interest in maintaining it, and Mieszko’s son Casimir restored Christian worship, with the aid of German soldiers,soon after a Czech expedition had abducted the relics of Adalbert and the five missionary-martyrs. For some time wild beasts made their homes in the cathedral ruins of Gniezno and Pozna´n, according to Gallus Anonymous, and the missionary drive by which earlier rulers had made their names faltered. But material aid came from the west, especially the Rhineland, and monasteries were built for the Benedictines at Mogilno, Lubi´n, and Tyniec.
Tyniec’s church stood over a wooden predecessor.The sculpted planks of Wroclaw’stempleweresawnoffnear the base,and by 1051 Bishop Hieronimus was the incumbent at Wroclaw, although probably not yet resident.
How far these foundations affected peasant society is very difficult to gauge. In the early twelfth century, the missionary bishop Otto came upon an open-air sanctuary at Wolin, and in Szczecin he saw several temples, one of which housed the god Triglav’s statue. With the support of Boleslav III, the Wry-mouth (1102–38), Otto staged mass baptisms and built churches.55 That outlying peoples such as the Pomeranians persisted with organized pagan rites is not so surprising. Latin churchmen frowned effectively upon the preChristianpracticeofheapingearthenbarrowsovergravesandthecustompersisted only in eastern areas such as Przemy´sl, where the Orthodox churchmen conducting worship were less disposed or able to banish barrows.56 Supervision of ritual carried out underground was harder, and cremation ashes continued to be buried in the same cemeteries as inhumations near Bialystok and elsewhere in the eastern regions, besides Pomerania.Cremation was in flagrant contravention of church rules. Other deviations are less clear-cut, for example the so-called “anti-vampire burials.” Starting around the time of the conversion in the late tenth century and increasing through the eleventh,these occurred mainly away from churchyards, and priestly eyes. The bodies lay face-down or on their sides, heads cut off, with stakes or knives driven through them. The aim seems to have been to prevent the dead from rising. It has plausibly been suggested that fears were fanned by enforced abandonment of cremation, and rather literal interpretations of doctrine on the resurrection of the dead.
