Suchergebnisse

Having described the countries of the "numerous peoples of the Slavs," the late twelfth-century chronicler Helmold of Bosau added, "If you consider Hungary as a part of Slavania, as some would suggest, because it does not differ by customs or by language, the area of the Slavic language extends so far that a proper estimate is quite lacking." These few words indicate how clearly local the chronicler's horizon was—the farther away from Wagria, the fuzzier his information. At the same time, though, Helmold made plain that the Slavic language was for him an essential element of what Slavania was. As a parish priest at the forefront of missionary and settlement activities, Helmold wrote a chronicle that is a unique source of information for intercultural interactions between Germans and Slavs during the high medieval colonization period.

The different written and archaeological sources give a very heterogeneous picture of the social and religious structures in Eastern Middle Europe. Recent developments in modern archaeological and historical research have shown new approaches to the analysis of elites. In every society there is a leading minority, who cumulates both wealth and prestige and is characterized by an elevated social rank, reputation and acceptance. An external marker of these elites is especially the superregional transfer of certain items, but also of the culturally encoded value systems. The present study asks whether this notion of cultural transfer, developed in the context of modern history, can be applied as well to the study of mutual influences between the elites of medieval Western and Eastern Middle Europe. It also raises the question if this terminology is equally useful for the analysis of written and material sources, and to what extent it might open a new perspective on the rich but as yet often unexplored history of the lands east of the Elbe river.