Polanen

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Traditional representation of the settlement areas of Slavic tribes around the year 1000.

According to traditional research, the Polans ( Latin Polani, Poleni, Paliani , Polish Polanie ) were a West Slavic tribe that had lived in Greater Poland since the 8th century , at the head of which the Piasts would have presided over the first historically verifiable rulership in today's Poland from the 960s . The name of the Poles as a people is traced back to the name of this tribe .

The more recent research now increasingly assumes that there was no Polanen tribe. Rather, the Saxon foreign name as Polanen was the result of the Piast rulership, which was completed around the year 1000, and not the original name of a personal association from which this development began at the end of the 9th century.

The Polans are to be distinguished from the East Slavic tribe of the Poljanen on the Dnieper around Kiev .

Surname

The meaning of the name "Polani" is mostly derived from the Slavic polje "field", "soil", ie "who live in the field" or something similar. A composition with Slavic po “am”, “bei” as in “Pomoranen” ( po more “at the sea”), “Polaben” ( po Labem “on the Elbe”), “Polasien” (“po lasie " "at the Forest"). The second component "la (n)" / "le (n)" would then be unclear. According to another, highly controversial view, the word is derived from polać or polewać for water and then referred to "the baptized".

history

From around the year 1000 the historiography of Eastern Franconia used the terms Polenia / Polonia for the Piastic dominion and polani / poleni for the people living there. Older Saxon or Slavic written sources that would call Polanen do not exist. Contrary to older assumptions of Polish historians , the goplanes listed in the Bavarian Geographer 's Table of Nations are not the Polans, and in particular there is no prescription.

The first guaranteed ruler of the Piasts, Mieszko I († May 25, 992), in the Saxon sources as "rex" (king), "dux" (duke, prince, military leader), "comes" (count ) or "marchio" (margrave), ruled, according to the vague ideas of the Saxon annalists and chroniclers, optionally over Ljachen , Vandal, Slavs or simply barbarians as subjects. His territory is alternately referred to as "Licicaviki", "civiatas Schinesghe", "Gnezdun civitas" or "Reign of the North". A Polanen tribe is not mentioned.

That changed with the news about his son and successor Bolesław Chrobry . Bolesław is referred to in the Vita sancti Adalberti episcopi Pragensis of Johannes Canaparius , created around 1000 - according to the more recent view it comes from Notker von Lüttich - as "dux Palaniorum". Bolesław bears the same title in an entry in the Hildesheim Annals for the year 1015. Thietmar von Merseburg also bears the tribal name in Bolesław's title, which he calls a "rector Polenorum" in his chronicle from 1012 to 1018 for the year 1003. In addition, he uses the area designation "Polenia" to the year 1002 to describe the origin of a "Wolodei a Polenia" ("Wolodej aus Polenia"), who was brought to power in 1002 in Bohemia . The area name "Polonia" had previously appeared in a hymn from the Reichenau monastery around the year 1001 .

The first Slavic source would be a denarius by Bolesław Chrobry, dated between 1003 and 1005. This bears the label "PRINCE [P] S POLONIE". Only then the resulting 1113-1118 in Kiev follows Nestorchronik with a legendary, but modern history of the Polans from the Poles (lendians):
"Slavs came and settled on the Vistula, and called themselves Poles, and called by these Poles the one Poljanen, other Poles Lusitzer , other Masovians , other Pomeranians . "

There are two different explanations for the origin of the tribal name in research. Both see a direct connection with the sensational journey of the East Franconian Emperor Otto III. to Gniezno in the year 1000. While the traditional view is that this made the previously unknown Slavic self-designation of the inhabitants of Greater Poland known as Polanen in the west, more recent research assumes that the Saxon chroniclers invented the name Polanen to describe the country and its people to be able to clearly determine.

literature

  • Eduard Mühle : The Piasts. Poland in the Middle Ages. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61137-7
  • Przemysław Urbańczyk: Before the Poles: problems of ethnic identification in Polish archeology of the Early Middle Ages. in: Walter Pohl, Matthias Mehofer (Eds.): Archeology of Identity - Archeology of Identity. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2010, pp. 203–209.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Overview of the controversy with Andrzej Pleszczynski: The Birth of a Stereotype: Polish Rulers and Their Country in German Writings C. 1000 AD Brill, Leiden 2011, ISBN 978-90-04-18554-8 , pp. 139-145.
  2. ↑ Eduard Mühle : The Piasts. Poland in the Middle Ages. (= CH Beck Knowledge. 2709). Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61137-7 , p. 14 f.
  3. ↑ Jerzy Strzelczyk : The importance of the establishment of the Archdiocese of Gniezno and the creation of a church organization for the formation of a “church cultural landscape”, in: “Settlement research. Archeology - History - Geography “Vol. 20, Bonn 2002, pp. 41–63 here p. 46; Christian Lübke : Eastern Europe. Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88680-760-6 , p. 32.
  4. ↑ Eduard Mühle : The Piasts. Poland in the Middle Ages. (= CH Beck Knowledge. 2709). Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61137-7 , p. 14.
  5. ↑ About Adalbert von Prag it says: Polania ergo tanti sepeliens floret martyryii pignora, see H. Kowalewicz: Sequentiae, Cantica medii aevi polono-latina. Volume 1, Warszawa 1964, p. 13.
  6. ↑ znaleziska.org
  7. ↑ Eduard Mühle : The Piasts. Poland in the Middle Ages. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61137-7 , p. 14; Johannes Fried : Gnesen, Aachen, Rome. Otto III. and the cult of St. Adalbert. Observations on the older Adalbert life. In: Michael Borgolte : Poland and Germany 1000 years ago. The Berlin conference on the "Gnesen Act". (= Europe in the Middle Ages. 5). Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-05-003749-0 , pp. 235-279; also Sebastian Brather : peoples, tribes and gentes. Archaeological Interpretations and Ethnic Identities. In: Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer (Hrsg.): Classical Antiquities - Classical Studies - Cultural Studies: Income and perspectives after 40 years Real Lexicon of Germanic Classical Studies. DeGruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-027360-1 , pp. 401-428, here p. 414; Sebastian Brather: Archeology of the Western Slavs. Settlement, economy and society in the early and high medieval East Central Europe , de Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2008 ( Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde , vol. 61) ISBN 978-3-11-020609-8 , p. 75.