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

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СКАЧАТЬ to save souls – although it is clear that others were more tempted by the spoils of conquest. Nevertheless they all shared a common ideology so aptly summarized in the medieval Song of Roland: ‘Christians are right, pagans are wrong.’⁴⁵ The knights were truly international; according to the thirteenth-century account The Chronicle of Morea, Frankish knights settled in Greece, those who fought in Ireland and Wales were granted titles by the king of England, and even in the area around Berlin the Slavic princes, including the duke of Barnim and the Wedel lords of Uchtenhagen, recruited German knights to increase their own dynastic power.⁴⁶ Albert the Bear was merely one of many young noblemen trying to attract such men, and he was highly successful.

      Albert organized an extraordinary mission against the Slavs which combined a strong force with clever alliances with the Church, particularly with Bishop Anselm of Havelberg and the powerful Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, both of whom gave him the credibility and financial backing he needed to recruit men.⁴⁷ A typical appeal of 1108 read: ‘to the leading men of Westphalia, Lotharingia and Flanders to help conquer the territory of the Wends. These pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey and flour … So – Oh Saxons, Franconians, Lotharingians and Flemings, here you will be able both to save your souls and, if you will, to acquire very good land to settle.’⁴⁸ Albert soon had Polish, Danish, German, French and Flemish men under his command and in 1147, under the motto Tod oder Taufe (death or conversion), began to push his way into Brandenburg and south into the lands which officially came under the auspices of the archbishopric of Magdeburg. After years of bitter fighting he eventually reached the Oder and went beyond into Pomerania. But one of his greatest triumphs was the retaking of Brennabor – Brandenburg – which had been held by the Slavic Hevellians since 983.

      Brandenburg had become something of a symbol for the conquering Christian knights. They conveniently forgot that it had started as a Slavic village and were intent on revenge for that black day when the heathen had swept upon the town, murdering the Christians, smashing the Ottonian cathedral of Marienburg, setting up a shrine to the great three-headed monster Trigilaw and forcing the bishop to hide in the nearby monastery of Lietzkau. In 1150 Albert retook the town and imprisoned the Slavic prince Heinrich Pribislaw, forcing him to convert and making him promise that on his death bed he, Albert the Bear, should succeed him. Pribislaw died that year and was buried in the castle chapel and Albert seized the town. It was not a straightforward victory, however. The Slavic leader Jaxa von Köpenick, who had already converted to Christianity under pressure from the Polish bishopric at Leubus, felt that as Pribislaw’s nephew he and not Albert should have Brandenburg. Jaxa was a shrewd politician. He holds the distinction of being the first man to appear on a coin (a silver brakteat of 1150) minted in the Berlin area, which depicts him sitting in his fortress at Köpenick clutching a gigantic sword and wearing a helmet.⁴⁹ Jaxa gathered his own army, made up largely of Polish troops, and in 1154 retook Brandenburg. It took three more years of bloody fighting before Albert managed to wrest the city back from the Polish-backed Slavic prince in 1157. It was this final victory which Germans came to regard as the ‘Birthday of the Mark of Brandenburg’. Henry of Antwerp witnessed the celebration of 11 June and wrote in his Tractatus de captione urbis Brandenburg: ‘So, in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1157 the Margrave, by God’s mercy, took possession as victor of the city of Brandenburg and, entering it joyfully with a great retinue, raised his triumphal standard on high and gave due praises to God, who had given him victory over his enemies.’⁵⁰ Albert the Bear took the title Markgraf (margrave) and the city became the first capital of the Mark Brandenburg, the caput marchionatus Brandenburgensis.⁵¹ It was soon elevated to the status of residence city (where the ruler’s palace was located). For Albert, twenty-three years of fighting and diplomacy had been amply rewarded and he had transformed himself from a mere knight into a powerful German leader.

      The taking of Brandenburg broke the power of the Hevellian Slavic princes and it had a profound effect on the future of the Berlin area. Spandau became Albert’s property; the first Christian graves there date from 1150 and the first Ascanian governor, Albert’s son Margrave Otto II, was appointed in 1197. In 1241 Margrave Johann I took Köpenick from the Wettiner Markgraf von Meissen along with all the properties belonging to the Sprewans and built a new fortress which became a powerful administrative centre. Johann was a fierce fighter and extended his power far to the east, even seizing Gdansk from the Poles between 1266 and 1271, the first of many Polish – German conflicts over that city. By 1319 Albert’s Ascanian successors had extended their authority over territory stretching nearly 200 miles east of the Elbe. The land around Berlin had become an integral part of Germany.

      The high Middle Ages was a time of extraordinary transformation and resettlement across Europe, a period when untold numbers of people made their way to new regions often thousands of miles from their birthplaces.⁵² Settlers moved into the Celtic lands, along the Mediterranean and to the Oder; they moved from England to Ireland, from Saxony to Livonia, from Old Castile to Andalusia, and they transformed the Iberian peninsula from Muslim into Christian land. But of all the migrations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the Ostsiedlung, the Germanization of lands east of the Elbe, which was the most overwhelming; indeed it was so complete that by the end of the thirteenth century much of central and eastern Europe from Estonia to the Carpathians was inhabited by German farmers, merchants, miners, traders, churchmen and aristocrats, culminating in the conquest of Livonia by the Knights of the Sword of Livonia and of East Prussia by the Teutonic Knights. The newcomers transformed the east as comprehensively as the Normans did England after the invasion of 1066, and after generations many came to believe that the land which they now inhabited had ‘always’ been German.

      The first people to colonize an area were often representatives of the Church. The pagans were not always willing converts and pockets of heathenism remained for centuries. The missionary Boso, bishop of Merseburg, translated the Kyrie eleison into Slavonic so that it could be understood by them, but the Slavs ‘being sacrilegious, derisively changed it to ukrivolsa which was bad, since [in their language] it means “There is an alder-tree in the copse” ‘.⁵³ But changing the words of the Kyrie would not save the pagans, who faced a cultural revolution of epic proportions.

      The churches were far mightier than the pagans could have realized and were granted enormous expanses of land and immunity from royal interference so long as they collected taxes and remained loyal to the emperor. The Christianization of the territory was marked by the spread of churches, and many cities can trace their origins back to the foundation of a monastery or bishopric. Their influence was incalculable. It was they who brought a Roman-inspired model of civilization to the area; it was they who transformed the region from an oral to a written culture; it was they who brought western arts and letters to the east and who taught grammar and rhetoric, arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy and even practical subjects like the fortification of cities and the creation of markets. The transformation of the Mark Brandenburg into a part of the modern Europe began above all with the coming of the great religious orders.

      The first to appear were members of the Premonstratensian Order sent by St Norbert of Magdeburg. Named after their mother house Prémontré near Laon, the monks of the order saw it as their duty to go amongst the heathen and convert them by preaching, hearing confession and administering the sacraments. They were often the first Christians to come into contact with the remote Slavic peoples in the Mark Brandenburg but were joined in the thirteenth century by the Cistercians, an order named in 1098 after the abbey of Cîteaux in French Burgundy. The Cistercians were enormously successful precisely because they looked upon the conversion of the heathen Slavs as an extension of the Crusades – as a true Holy War. Some have argued that the most powerful man in the second half of the twelfth century was neither the pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor but the famous Cistercian Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, who had persuaded the pope to reward those Christians who fought in the north with the same indulgences and dispensations as were granted to the Crusaders СКАЧАТЬ