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

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СКАЧАТЬ Cistercians might have chosen lonely wooded spots for their monasteries but they were part of a highly sophisticated organization which controlled much of Europe. Each was part of an interdependent network of houses which stretched from Ireland to Norway to Poland and which promulgated everything from religious instruction to reading and writing. The Cistercians created this network by moving on to grants of territory, often in the region of 6,000 hufe – around 180,000 acres – where they would build a monastery and drain the land. After this they would plan out a village, complete with houses arranged symmetrically along a straight road and with fields divided into rectangular blocks. Many towns around Berlin owe their origins to the order, including Heiligengrabe, Chorin – which in 1273 built the first brick monastery of the Mark Brandenburg – and Lehnin, whose beautiful Ottonian church became the house monastery and burial site of the Ascanians and which was, for a time, the wealthiest town in the Mark.⁵⁵

      The Cistercians were not the only order to become powerful in the Mark Brandenburg: the Franciscans and the Dominicans were active, and the town of Angermünde grew around Franciscan monasteries which were in turn protected by the margraves of Brandenburg. Religious orders created a number of districts which still exist; in 1344, for example, the grand master of the Order of St John asked Johannes Reiche to create a settlement called Marienfelde in what is now part of Berlin; Reiche was given the estate in perpetuity on the understanding that he would govern in the name of the Church. It is a common misconception that the knights and the religious orders were intent on erasing the heathen from the land or, as one commentator put it, that they completed ‘the region’s first Holocaust’.⁵⁶ There is no doubt that the first wave of conversions was often brutal but the notion that the knights ‘waged something akin to a twentieth-century war of extermination’ is inaccurate: after the regions were conquered the rulers were prepared to grant the local people generous terms to live and work on their land – it made economic sense to do so.⁵⁷ This was particularly true of the Mark Brandenburg, where the Slavs were encouraged to stay and prosper as long as they converted to Christianity. Most Wends were permitted to retain their own language; indeed even Otto I had command of both the German and Slav languages. It was not uncommon for Slav and German nobles to intermarry, and families like the barons von Plotho from Kyritz can trace their ancestry back to Slavic Wendish princes while half the wives of the first sixteen marriages of Albert the Bear’s family were of Wendish descent.⁵⁸ Groups of Wends also moved into separate villages or Kietze, some of which, like Spreewald, survived into the twentieth century with their culture intact.⁵⁹ For Albert the main problem was not that his population was Slavic, but that it was too small. If the area was to prosper it needed settlers.

      Like other nobles and religious leaders Albert the Bear sent representatives called locatores to attract people to his lands. These settlers were not all Germans; indeed many thousands came from other more crowded parts of western Europe attracted by the freedom from the restrictions of feudalism already in place there. Albert’s men went ‘to Utrecht and the places near the Rhine, especially to those who live near the ocean and suffer the force of the sea, namely the men of Holland, Zeeland and Flanders, and brought a large number of these people whom he settled in the fortesses and towns of the Slavs’.⁶⁰ In his work Chronicle of the Slavs, written in the 1170s, Helmold of Bosau recorded how rulers took part in similar recruitment drives: Count Adolf II, who had conquered eastern Holstein in the 1140s, sent messengers to all the regions, ‘namely Flanders, Holland, Utrecht, Westphalia and Frisia, saying that whoever was oppressed by shortage of land to farm should come with their families and occupy this good and spacious land, which is fruitful, full of fish and meat, food for pasture’.⁶¹ The Flemish, Dutch and Franks were prized for their ability to drain the marshland, and many towns in the Mark Brandenburg owe their origins to them. The Flemish left their stamp in names like ‘Fläming’ and in village names like ‘Flemmingen’, named after the thirteenth-century bishop of Ermland, Henry Fleming of Flanders; the Danes gave their name to Dannenwalde, the Dutch named Neuholland, people from the lower Rhine settled Rheinsberg. Like those who colonized North America many centuries later the settlers were tough and hard working. They moved into woodland or swamps, cut down the forests, drained and cultivated the land, introduced the three-field system and the new heavy plough, and raised everything from fruit trees to vines to domestic animals. In the Cronical principum Saxonie Albert’s family was praised for its work in the area; having

      obtained the lands of Barnim, Teltow and many others from the Lord Barnim (of Pomerania) and purchased the Ukermark up to the River Weise … They built Berlin, Strausberg, Frankfurt, New Angermünde, Stolpe, Liebenwalde, Stargard, New Brandenburg and many other places, and thus, turning the wilderness into cultivated land, they had an abundance of goods of every kind.⁶²

      It has been estimated that the Ascanians brought over 200,000 people to the Mark between 1134 and 1320 alone. It was at this time that the trade routes which had passed over the sheltered fortresses of Köpenick and Spandau shifted slightly to cross the Spree at Berlin. With this, the city was born.

      The city of Berlin was founded sometime in the late twelfth century although there is no single reliable date. The question of ‘foundation’ is itself ambiguous as the city now contains the much older settlements of Spandau, Köpenick, Lützow (Charlottenburg) and Teltow. Neither did Berlin start as a single settlement but consisted of two separate entities called Berlin and Cölln, located on opposite banks of a narrow point on the river Spree.⁶³ Years later the East Germans would use this to try to justify the division of the city by the Wall, claiming that Berlin had ‘always’ been split in two. In reality it was not unusual to have two settlements co-existing and many towns of the Mark, including Potsdam and Brandenburg, started in this way, as did many other great European cities – Paris was originally divided into three parts, with the left bank starting as a Roman settlement; Prague began as two settlements, joined in the twelfth century by the Judith Bridge (replaced in the fourteenth century by Charles IV’s magnificent bridge); and Buda and Pest were only united a century ago.⁶⁴ In historical terms the two settlements at Berlin actually joined quite early.⁶⁵ But the most important factor in the prosperity of the twin town was its control of a vital crossing point on the Spree before it emptied into the river Havel, at a place where the flat and traversable Barnim and Teltow plateaux lay only five kilometres from one another.⁶⁶ The Slavs would have found the position too exposed and vulnerable but by the twelfth century the region was more secure and the very lakes and marshes which had once protected the Slavic fortresses were now seen as a hindrance to the movement of goods. From its earliest years Berlin grew strong on trade.

      Much has been written over the centuries to portray Berlin as a city which was somehow predestined to play a vital role first in Prussian and then in German politics. This was not the case. For centuries Berlin and Cölln remained small trading towns of minimal importance compared with dazzling contemporaries like Augsburg or Nuremberg. Berlin lay too far north to be on the great east – west route which ran along the Harz foreland and through Thuringia, and acted only as an optional stop for merchants travelling from Magdeburg and Brandenburg on their way to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Leubus and Kiev. The first significant change in Berlin’s fortunes came only with the increase of trade in the Baltic.⁶⁷

      The Germans had been trading in the Baltic before the year 1000 but it was their eastward expansion in the twelfth century which led to a dramatic increase in activity in the entire region. In 1241 an alliance was formed between Lübeck and Hamburg to protect the overland route from the Baltic to the North Sea, an agreement which formed the nucleus of the great Hanseatic League.⁶⁸ By 1370 seventy-seven cities, including all significant centres in northern Europe, were members, including Cologne and Brandenburg, Riga and Braunschweig, and trade extended all the way from London to Russia. Berlin joined much later and it was first mentioned only as a nominal member in 1359. Goods were moved in wooden ships known as ‘cogs’, which often measured over sixty feet in length; by 1368 around 700 such ships were sailing out of Lübeck harbour each year. The growth of the Baltic markets also promoted north – south trade and new routes now threaded their way over the Alps to Nuremberg and from there to Berlin СКАЧАТЬ