Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ It was they who now moved into the area around Berlin.

      The Slavs were the latest newcomers to the lands which would later be known as Poland and Germany; by the seventh century they had spread over most of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Peloponnese and had crossed the Oder into the Elbe-Saale region and into what is now Germany. The border between Germans and Slavs was later confirmed in the 843 Treaty of Verdun: it ran along the river Elbe and down a boundary which cut north-west from Dresden to Magdeburg, past Hamburg and up to the North Sea.²⁰ The Slavs founded a number of cities along the border, including old Lübeck, Meissen and Leipzig, whose name was derived from the Slav word lipsk or linden tree.

      As the Slavs moved towards the Berlin area they found a vast, depopulated land with only a few Germans remaining scattered in small settlements. These stragglers were not massacred; on the contrary, archaeological evidence in over forty sites in Barnim and Teltow shows that the remaining Germans were assimilated into the new communities and that the Slavs even adopted some of the old Germanic place names like the river ‘Havel’ and the ‘Müggelsee’, which survive to this day.²¹ The great Theodor Fontane was one of the few nineteenth-century Germans to acknowledge Berlin’s debt to this much maligned people, and in the third part of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg describes how the myriad lakes, streams and hills of the Berlin area which end in ‘-itz’ like Wandlitz, ‘-ick’ as in Glienicke and ‘-ow’ like Teltow had in fact been named by the Slavs.²² Nineteenth-century Germans would have been shocked to learn that the capital was not named after the noble ‘bear’, but was old Elbe-Slav brl, meaning ‘swamp’ or ‘marsh’.²³ But long before Berlin existed there were dozens of Slavic settlements within the present city limits: Gatow and Glienicke, Steglitz and Marzahn were Slavic; Pankow was named for the Slavic word pania, meaning ‘flat moor’; pottery shards confirm the existence of a Slavic radial village in Babelsberg; Lützow (Charlottenburg) was founded in the fifth century, and even nearby Potsdam began as a Slavic stronghold. But by far the most important settlements for the future of Berlin were two gigantic fortresses which now lie only a U-Bahn ride away from one another on either side of the city, but which at one time represented the borders of two great territories: Köpenick to the south-east, and Spandau to the north-west.

      If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans admitted the presence of the Slavs at all they tended to dismiss them as coarse and unsophisticated – all they had built there was seen as uncivilized compared with superior Germanic culture. This was ahistorical, and had more to do with contemporary German politics than with ancient history. In reality the Slavic fortresses of Spandau and Köpenick were not only highly developed; they created an infrastructure which would prove crucial to the development of Berlin itself.

      Each fortress represented the boundary of a great Slavic principality and although the Slavs were collectively referred to by the Latin term Venedi – the Wends – there were two distinct groups in the regions.²⁴ Those who had settled on the river Havel were known as the Hevellians, rulers of the provintia heveldun. Their headquarters were at Brannabor (Brandenburg) but their second town was at Spandau, which was built in the 750s and which already contained around 250 people by the end of the century. The Slavs who settled around the Spree were known as the Sprewans and their province was called the provintia Zpriauuani; they were based around Mittenwalde and founded the villages of Mahlsdorf, Kaulsdorf, Pankow and Treptow. Their capital was Köpenick, itself founded on an old Neolithic site. The name was derived from the Slavic word for ‘settlement on an earth hill’ and, although protected by the Spree, the fort had a commanding view over the area. In 825 it was fortified with high oval wooden walls of about fifty metres in length complete with towers and palisades and gates.²⁵

      The first written evidence of such fortresses dates from the records of a 798 expedition by a Frisian fleet under Charlemagne which made its way up the tributaries of the Havel and saw typical Havellian fortresses there. An even more detailed record is found in one of the most extraordinary travel diaries in the history of central Europe, the eye-witness account written in 970 by the Jewish merchant Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab. Ibrahim was born in Muslim Spain and travelled north as an envoy for the caliph of Córdoba. Like so many masterpieces of the ancient world the diary was saved by an Arab scholar, in this case the eleventh-century Abu Obaid Abdallah al Bekri, who found it so impressive that he reproduced it in his Book of Ways and Lands. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab’s journey took him along the established trade routes through Prague and probably to Cracow, and then towards Mecklenburg, where it is thought he described the settlement at Schwerin.²⁶ He was struck by the large, secure Slavic fortresses with their high wooden walls strengthened by mounds of packed earth and protected by rivers so that one could only reach them on ‘a wooden bridge over the water’. Evidence shows that even the smaller fortresses at Potsdam, Treptow and Blankenburg were built on islands and were not merely defensive but housed carpenters, weavers, tanners, furriers and other tradesmen. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab noted that the Slavs ‘are especially energetic in agriculture’. The fortresses also provided a safe haven for the priestly hierarchy who kept the shrines for Dazbag, the god of the sun, Jarovit, the god of spring, and the fertility gods Rod and Rozanicy in their midst. Ibrahim also recognized that the Slavs were skilled merchants and that ‘their trade on land reaches to the Ruthenians and to Constantinople’. The fortresses of Spandau-Burgwall and Köpenick had grown powerful from their position on an important medieval east – west trade route which extended from the Rhine and Flanders through Magdeburg, on to Brennabor, over the Berlin area to Leubus and Posen and on to Kiev. Muslims and Jews were the most influential traders, regularly travelling from China to Africa and up the Caspian Sea and the Volga to the Baltic; trade with the Latin west was maintained primarily by Jewish merchants who, according to the early ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurradadhbeh, were highly sophisticated and could ‘speak Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from west to east and from east to west, by land and sea.’²⁷ The Jews were not the only merchants to visit the fortresses, however, and although the Slavs themselves used cloth as currency around 1,000 foreign coins of Arabian, German, English, Scandinavian, Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian origin have been found there. Even at this early date Spandau and Köpenick were filled with international dealers: Scandinavian traders had moved in by the ninth century and Arabian and Jewish traders predominated by the year 1000.²⁸ Dozens of products changed hands – from skins, honey, potash, wax, textiles, slate and weapons to jewellery from Kiev and salt from the Rhineland. Slaves were bought and sold; indeed the word ‘Slav’ was first given to the hapless victims captured in the east and then dragged across Europe to be sold in the markets around the Mediterranean. By ad 1000 the Slavs had created prosperous, stable communities on the banks of the Havel and the Spree. Like the Semnonen before them they might well have become the founders of modern Berlin. But Europe was about to undergo another herculean change. This time people would move in from the west. These warriors and settlers would be Christian.

      The spread of Christianity was one of the definitive movements in the creation of modern Europe. The advance began within the bounds of the Roman Empire during the first centuries ad; the first bishoprics were established in northern Europe by the fourth century – the bishop of Rheims, for example, was first mentioned in 314 – a process accelerated by the conversion of the legendary Frankish king Clovis.²⁹ For those outside the empire conversion was often brought about by force, and one of the most successful of these Christian warriors, the man who essentially created the Holy Roman Empire, was called Charles the Great or Charlemagne.³⁰

      Charlemagne was born in 742 and became king of the Frankish realm in 768. He was determined not only to resurrect the glory of Rome but to expand its boundaries, to spread Christianity as far as possible and to convert or eradicate the Saxon heathens. After establishing himself in his mighty castle at Aachen he spearheaded a campaign which would take him far into Germany. For eighteen years he waged a bloody war against the Saxons, putting down resistance and massacring those who opposed change. After the battle at Verden in the 782 war he had 4,500 Saxon hostages beheaded in cold blood.³¹ Not surprisingly, Saxon resistance was crushed by 804 and Charlemagne’s became СКАЧАТЬ