It is all about 'difference' in the end - perhaps and because this is how we identify things, ourselves, and others.
Saxons, Slavs and the Ostsiedlung
Ostsiedlung, literally east settling, is a term used for the German eastward expansion, in the medieval eastward migration and settlement of Germanic-speaking peoples from the Holy Roman Empire, especially its southern and western portions, into less-populated regions of Central Europe, parts of west Eastern Europe, and the Baltics.
The detail below of the larger map indicating the areas affected by the German eastward expansion shows the northern coastal areas where Stettin is situated.
The affected area roughly stretched from Estonia in the north all the way to Slovenia in the south and extended into Transylvania, modern day Romania in the east. In part, Ostsiedlung followed the territorial expansion of the Empire and the Teutonic Order.
Who were the Saxons? And, who were the Slavs?
The Saxons, Latin: Saxones, Old English: Seaxe named after the seax, a kind of knife, or from the Latin for stone, saxa, were a group of Germanic tribes first mentioned as living near the North Sea coast of what is now Germany (Old Saxony), in the late Roman Empire.
The Slavs were, and are, the West Slavs identified as the group of Slavic peoples who speak the West Slavic languages. They separated from the common Slavic group around the 7th century, and established independent polities in Central Europe by the 8th to 9th centuries. The West Slavic languages diversified into their established forms over the 10th to 14th centuries.
West Slavic speaking nations today include the Czechs, Kashubians, Poles, Silesians, Slovaks and Sorbs, and inhabit Central Europe stretching from the north of the Baltic Sea to the Sudetes and the Carpathian Mountains in the south, historically also across the Eastern Alps into the Apennine peninsula and the Balkan peninsula.
The West Slavic group can be divided into three subgroups: Lechitic, including Polish, Kashubian and extinct Polabian and Pomeranian languages, Lusatian (Sorbian) and Czecho-Slovak.
Culturally, West Slavs developed along the lines of other Western European nations due to affiliation with the Roman Empire and Western Christianity.
Thus, they experienced a cultural split with the other Slavic groups: while the East Slavs and part of South Slavs converted to Orthodox Christianity, thus being culturally influenced by the Byzantine Empire, all the West Slavs converted to Roman Catholicism, thus coming under the cultural influence of the Latin Church.
To the west of modern northern Germany there were physical boundaries that marked these frontiers in the form of the Limes Saxoniae a Latin phrase meaning "Limit of Saxony", and also known as the Limes Saxonicus or Sachsenwall ("Saxon Dyke"), was an unfortified limes or border between the Saxons and the Slavic Obotrites, established about 810 in present-day Schleswig-Holstein.
The Obotrites (Latin: Obotriti) or Obodrites (Polish: Obodrzyce meaning: at the waters), were a confederation of medieval West Slavic tribes within the territory of modern Mecklenburg and Holstein (see Polabian Slavs).
For decades, they were allies of Charlemagne in his wars against the Germanic Saxons and the Slavic Veleti.
Charlemagne's territorial domains and the Frankish Empire from 481 to 814
The Obotrites under Prince Thrasco defeated the Saxons in the Battle of Bornhöved (798). The still heathen Saxons were dispersed by the emperor, and the part of their former land in Holstein north of Elbe was awarded to the Obotrites in 804, as a reward for their victory. This however was soon reverted through an invasion of the Danes.
After Charlemagne had removed Saxons from some of their lands and given it to the Obotrites (who were allies of Charlemagne), he finally managed to conquer the Saxons in the Saxon Wars.
In 811 he signed the Treaty of Heiligen with the neighbouring Danes and may at the same time have reached a border agreement with the Polabian Slavs in the east. This Limes Saxoniae border should not be thought of as a fortified line, however, but rather a defined line running through the middle of the border zone, an area of bog and thick forest that was difficult to pass through. According to Adam of Bremen's description in the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum about 1075, it ran from the Elbe river near Boizenburg northwards along the Bille river to the mouth of the Schwentine at the Kiel Fjord and the Baltic Sea.
It was breached several times by the Slavic Obotrites (983 and 1086) and Mieszko II Lambert of Poland (1028 and 1030).
The Limes dissolved during the first phase of the Ostsiedlung, when Count Henry of Badewide campaigned in Wagrian lands in 1138/39 and the Slavic population was Germanized by German, mostly Saxon, settlers.
For German settlers Slavs who were non-Germanized Slavs would be seen as "other"!
Before and during the time of German settlement, late medieval Central and Eastern European societies underwent deep cultural changes in demography, religion, law and administration, agriculture, settlement numbers and structures. Thus Ostsiedlung is part of a process termed Ostkolonisation ("east colonization") or Hochmittelalterlicher Landesausbau ("high medieval land consolidation"), although these terms are sometimes used synonymously. Sometimes ethnic conflicts erupted between the newly arrived settlers and local populations and expulsions of native populations are also known of.
In several areas subject to the Ostsiedlung, the existing population was later discriminated against and pushed away from administration.
In general, expulsion and discrimination were incidental, mostly to be found west of the Oder/Neisse under the reign of German nobility, not so under the jurisdiction of Slav (Polish) nobility in Pomerania and Silesia.
In the 19th and 20th century, the Ostsiedlung was heavily exploited by German nationalists, including the Nazis, to press the territorial claims of Germany and to demonstrate supposed German superiority over non-Germanic peoples, whose cultural, urban and scientific achievements in that era were undermined, rejected or presented as German.
A similar tendency to revise history in national terms had become visible in those Central European states that regained their national independence following the post-First World War settlement of 1919, when much of the German and Austrian historical presence was ‘cleansed’, and/or reinterpreted, to conform to emerging nationalistic ideologies. Within the Nazi and National Socialist ideology, Himmler skillfully presented the eastern colonization project (Generalplan Ost) as a continuation and final completion of medieval Ostkolonisation, celebrated in the language of continuity, legacy, and colonial grandeur.
In 1945, after nearly 1000 years, the German ‘Ostkolonisation’ was pushed back to near its geographical position of the year 1000.
This required the displacement and migration of some 12 millions of German national civilians and ethnic Germans.
The Magdeburg rights and the Wendish towns
Wends, (German: Wenden, Winden, Danish: vendere, Swedish: vender, Polish: Wendowie) is an historical name for Slavs living near Germanic settlement areas. It does not refer to a homogeneous people, but to various peoples, tribes or groups depending on where and when it is used.
For German settlers in this region during the Middle Ages the term "Wends" often referred to West Slavs and Slovenes living within the Holy Roman Empire.
Polabian Slavic Tribes, green is uninhabited forested area
According to one theory, Germanic peoples first applied this name to the ancient Veneti, and then after the migration period they transferred it to their new neighbours, the Slavs. Hence the description of "Wendish towns" for the trading centres that had grown up along this northern coastal region, and that were, in due course, precursors of the Hansa towns that were to become part of the Hanseatic League.
For people living in the medieval Northern Holy Roman Empire, especially for the Saxons, a Wend (Wende) was a Slav living in the area west of the River Oder, an area later entitled Germania Slavica, settled by the Polabian Slav tribes in the north and by others, such as the Sorbs and the Milceni, in areas to the south.
Following the 8th century, the Frankish kings and their successors organised nearly all Wendish land into marches. This process later turned into the series of crusades. By the 12th century, all Wendish lands had become part of the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the Ostsiedlung, which reached its peak in the 12th to 14th centuries, this land was settled by Germans and reorganised.
Due to the process of assimilation following German settlement, many Slavs west of the Oder adopted the German culture and language. Only some rural communities which did not have a strong admixture with Germans and continued to use West Slavic languages were still termed Wends. With the gradual decline of the use of these local Slavic tongues, the term Wends slowly disappeared, too.
Magdeburg rights
Magdeburger Recht; also called Magdeburg Law were a set of town privileges first developed by Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (936–973) and based on the Flemish law, which regulated the degree of internal autonomy within cities and villages, granted by the local ruler.
Being a member of the Hanseatic League, Magdeburg thus was one of the most important trading centres, engaging in commerce with the Low countries (Flanders), the Baltic states, and other cities and towns in the interior (for example Braunschweig).
Named after this German Hanseatic city of Magdeburg, these town charters were perhaps the most important set of medieval laws in Central Europe thus far. They became the basis for the German town laws developed during many centuries in the Holy Roman Empire. Even more importantly, adopted and modified by numerous monarchs including the rulers of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, the laws were a milestone in urbanization of the entire region and prompted the development of thousands of villages and cities.
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