As you enter rural Northeastern Germany, you will quickly notice the way place names change. If you know your way around languages, you can also spot strange words in the local dialects. Village traditions are different. What you are seeing is the cultural footprint of the Wends, what you could call Germany’s lost civilisation. It is haunting and romantic, and easily misunderstood. Historians have been imposing all kinds of narratives on them, mostly posthumously, so almost anything that we read about them may or may not actually have happened. But what we hear about the year 983, on balance, probably did.
Unfortunately, it is rather had to tell in detail what actually did happen. There are few records outside the immediate neighbourhood, and since there are no Wendish chronicles, we must rely on the Latin writings of German-speaking clerics. They are biased witnesses. After all, the Wends spoke a Slavic language, they were pagans, and they acknowledged no king, or at least not in the manner these people thought proper. By their lights, they were benighted and evil.
Needless to say, the Slavic peoples of what is today Central Germany were not the demonic antagonists that the chroniclers painted them as. We know less about them than we would like to, and this has invited some fanciful interpretations over time. The best evidence supports the conclusion that they lived in small farming communities around fortified central settlements, that they had some kind of warrior aristocracy, practised some form of polytheistic worship, and were generally very much like their Germanic-speaking neighbours except for the last part.
Their neighbours to the West were the Saxons, newly part of the Empire and, rather shockingly, now providing the emperors for what had been a Frankish realm. The backstory to this is complicated, but very well explained elsewhere, most entertainingly by the excellent History of the Germans podcast. What had happened, in short, was that a newly, not necessarily happily, Christianised, very powerful monarchy had landed right next to the Slavic inhabitants and they had to deal with this problem. As far as the church hierarchy was concerned, they were next on the list for conversion, and that was not a comfortable place.
Relations between the Slavic polities and the Empire had existed for a while, not usually hostile. Charlemagne had enlisted the aid of pagan Slavs to subdue pagan Saxons. There were wars between Saxon and Slavic lords, but this was the tenth century, there were fights everywhere. This was no Cold War situation with two hostile parties glowering at each other over a fortified border. Many Slavic princes readily acknowledged Emperor Otto I as their overlord. What apparently was widely resented was the attempt by the Saxon lords to impose Christianisation.
We do not really know how it happened or who started it, but in 983, two bishoprics in Slavic lands, Havelberg and Brandenburg, disappeared, their cathedrals looted, the towns burned. A Slavic army crossed into Saxon territory and was only barely stopped in a heroic battle. Following this disaster, the territory of East Central Germany remained pagan for over a century. The secret to that success, it appears, was organisation. A number of smaller groups we often find it hard to pin down formed a larger confederation around assemblies of their notables and a shared cult centre called Radgosc, which roughly translates either as ‘the hospitable place’ or ‘the place of the council’. This did not include all Slavic groups even in the region. Some remained under the Emperor. Others were integrated into the Christian kingdoms of Poland and Moravia. In this piece of Germany, though, despite all efforts to subdue it, paganism remained alive even past the Wendish Crusade of the 1140s.
Later interpretations have viewed this as a clash of cultures between Germans and Slavs, the valiant resistance of proto-democratic tribes against encroaching feudal domination, or the last stand of the old pagan Gods against the steamroller of the Catholic church. Very likely none of these things are true, but archeology suggests there were some cultural differences that defined a distinct Slavic identity against Germanic speakers, and interestingly, one of them was millet.
Foxtail millet grows well in Central Europe, and we find evidence of it in Slavic settlements whenever we look for it. It is much rarer, though not unknown, among Germans. Fascinatingly, this association seems to hold true for centuries. Around 1600, the Mecklenburg clergyman Johannes Coler still associates millet with Wends and describes how to cook it:
Once I was travelling through the Wendish land (Wendische Land) when my host in a village served me yellow millet porridge in which a whole capon had been cooked for a midday meal. When the dish felt unfamiliar to me and also did not taste quite pleasing to me, but the host still often admonished me to eat, I was made to do something against my will, but I noted in my mind (in meine Sin), if I had wanted to have it (the capon) dressed, I would have left the millet porridge on its own and also have treated the capon differently. Then it would have tasted as good or better to me as it did to the Wendish farmer with the millet.
(…)
You can also cook millet porridge in a sack if you first leave the millet to soak (einquellet) in milk so that it softens, and afterwards set the milk by the fire on its own and make it boil. And when it is nicely boiling along (daher seydt) in the pot, you pour the soaked millet into the boiling milk and cover the pot firmly at the top. Wrap a sack around the pot on all sides many times (vielseitig umb den Topff umbher) so that the pot stays nicely warm. Thus the millet cooks fully, and it is then called: millet cooked in the sack.
A recipe like this – with or without the wrapping – is reasonably plausible even centuries earlier, and we know this kind of Grütze, often served with butter, cheese, or bacon, was a staple of rural cuisine in the region until the twentieth century. However, eating millet was not a hard delineator of cultures. Germans ate millet, which is how we have some written anecdotes and later recipes for turning millet porridge into decorative fried or roasted chunks like sliced polenta. We don’t know whether the wealthier among the Wendish tribes did this. They lived in a world where foraged foods, fish, and game were far more plentiful, so they may not have bothered.
A fascinating aspect of this story – however little we know for certain – is what it says about identity. It is unlikely the Slavic peoples that the Saxon emperors encountered felt they were ‘Wendish’. They certainly had an idea of who they were, but their groups were small and often at odds. It took a violent and sustained confrontation with a very different culture to give them a shared ethnic or national consciousness. Language alone may not have been enough – we know of several people who spoke both and even went by German and Slavic names simultaneously – but religion would easily have been. The people of the Elbe valley may not have been aware they shared a specific religious outlook initially, but the confrontation with the militant church quickly made it clear. This, after all, was not a matter of mild-mannered preachers coming to their villages to spread charity and perform healing miracles. The doctrine of Christ was backed by armoured horsemen and ensconced in fortified churches. You could absolutely not ignore them.
Faced with the peremptory demands of bishops and princes, even people who may have sympathised with the new faith probably reconsidered. The imperial church, supported by an enormous power structure and the arrogant certainty of simply being right, managed to unite people who had spent centuries fighting each other. No doubt the experience also motivated individual fighters on the battlefield – we might call it ‘radicalised’ today. At least it seems that once it started, the revolt quickly spread across the confederation, and once the rebels had set up their central temple of Radgosc, they stood up to several attempts to reconquer their lands.
Of course, there is no longer a temple at Radgosc. We do not even know where it originally was. Still, given the way Christian kings all around never stopped trying to subjugate them, the fact that an independent pagan community was able to hold out for almost two centuries in the middle of Christendom. As far as we know, this was not the achievement of an inspired leader, but the decision of the people to band together in the face of a looming threat to their lives and convictions. It was probably less democratic than Marxist historians wanted to imagine it in the twentieth century, but there is no reason to think of it as primitive. They built a structure to last, and it did, well beyond their lifetimes.
So when we imagine – assuming we trust the written sources that survive – the Wends meeting to eat and drink, debate politics, consult the horse oracle, or wait for the sacred boar to emerge and indicate a season of war or peace, we do well to recall how the arrogance of power can unify its victims, how it pushes them into developing identities and organisations in opposition to it, and that they sometimes win.