West Slavs

Lore & Background

In the Early Middle Ages, the name 'Wends' (probably derived from the Roman-era Veneti) may have applied to Slavic peoples. However, sources such as the Chronicle of Fredegar and Paul the Deacon are neither clear nor consistent in their ethnographic terminology, and whether 'Wends' or 'Veneti' refer to Slavic people, pre-Slavic people, or to a territory rather than a population, is a matter of scholarly debate. The early Slavic expansion reached Central Europe in the 7th century, and the West Slavic dialects diverged from common Slavic over the following centuries.

The West Slavic tribes settled on the eastern fringes of the Carolingian Empire, along the Limes Saxoniae. Prior to the Magyar invasion of Pannonia in the 890s, the West Slavic polity of Great Moravia spanned much of Central Europe, with its core in present-day Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. In the high medieval period, the West Slavic tribes were again pushed to the east by the incipient German Ostsiedlung, decisively so following the Wendish Crusade in the 12th century. The early Slavic expansion began in the 5th century, and by the 6th century the groups that would become the West, East, and South Slavic groups had probably become geographically separated.

One of the distinguishing features of the West Slavic tribes was manifested in the structure of the Pagan sanctuaries of the closed (long) type, while the East Slavic sanctuaries had a round (most often open) shape (see also: Peryn). Early modern historiographers, such as Penzel (1777) and Palacky (1827) have claimed Samo's Empire to be first independent Slavic state in history by taking Fredegar's Wendish account at face value. Curta (1997) argued that the text is not as straightforward: according to Fredegar, Wends were a gens, Sclavini merely a genus, and there was no 'Slavic' gens.

Reader's Guide

Various attempts have been made to group the West Slavs into subgroups according to various criteria, including geography, historical tribes, and linguistics. The Bavarian Geographer in 845 made a list of West Slavic tribes who lived in the areas of modern-day Poland, Czech Republic, Germany and Denmark. Linguistic grouping divides them into Lechitic (including Polans, Lendians, Silesians, Wends, Sorbs, Vistulans, Polabians, Obodrites, Slovincians, Kashubians, Gorals), Czech–Slovak (including Czechs, Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks), and Sorbian (Milceni/Upper Sorbs, Lusatian Sorbs/Lower Sorbs).

Did You Know?

• The Polabian language survived until the beginning of the 19th century in what is now the German state of Lower Saxony.
• The Wendish Crusade occurred in the 12th century (1147), not the 11th.