Download PDF | Paul Milliman - _The Slippery Memory of Men__ The Place of Pomerania in the Medieval Kingdom of Poland-Brill 2013.
337 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a great deal to a great many people and institutions, far more than I could ever hope to repay or fully acknowledge here. But, I will do my best, because I truly appreciate all the help I have received over the years.
First, I would like to thank all of the organizations that funded my research, travel, and language training. The Cornell Institute for European Studies provided FLAS fellowships to help me develop my Polish language skills. The History Department at Cornell provided funding for language training in Germany and research in Poland, as well as funding to start work on a first draft and revise the final draft of my dissertation.
I also want to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, whose grant of a Dissertation Fellowship in East European Studies afforded me the time to collect my thoughts and share my research on a topic unfamiliar to most scholars outside of East Central Europe. An additional grant from ACLS allowed me to travel to Poland to get feedback on my work from experts on this topic.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars provided invaluable resources for me to continue researching and revising, including a diligent research assistant, Jakub Olszowiec. At the University of Arizona I am deeply grateful to the Deans of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Head of the History Department, Kevin Gosner, who ensured that I would have the time and resources to finish revising this book.
I also want to thank all of the individuals who helped make this book possible. First I want to thank my former adviser at Cornell, Paul R. Hyams, both for his confidence in me and for his willingness to allow me to leave the friendly confines of Western Europe to pursue my own interests.
I also want to thank Susanne Pohl, David S. Powers, and E. Wayles Browne, from whom I also learned so much at Cornell, as well as my friend, Alizah Holstein, who showed me that it is possible to finish a dissertation. I am also grateful to all of the other outstanding teachers I have had over the years, in particular Stephanie Frank at Parkersburg Catholic High School. Thank you for your patience and guidance and for helping to make me both a better scholar and a better person.
This task was continued by all of the excellent teachers I had at Ohio Wesleyan University who made me want to become a professor and encouraged me to go to graduate school. To James Biehl, Jan Hallenbeck, Donald Lateiner, Mark Gingerich, Richard Spall, Cynthia Bland, Carol Neumann de Vegvar, and so many others, I want to say thank you.
I hope I can inspire my students as much as you inspired me. I was fortunate as an undergraduate to be able to work with real medieval manuscripts, and for this (as well as for her friendship and generosity) I want to thank Hilda Wick in Special Collections. I also want to thank all of the other librarians at OWU for allowing me to learn from you. Libraries are the centers of universities, and my experiences working with you deepened my commitment to scholarship.
I also want to thank the Interlibrary Loan staffs at Cornell and the University of Arizona for helping me track down articles from obscure Polish journals, as well as the wonderful librarians at the Wilson Center, the Library of Congress, and Polska Akademia Nauk Biblioteka Gdanska.
I am also grateful to Piotr Gorecki, Anna Adamska, and Emilia Jamroziak, all of whom took time to share their work with me and offer comments on my research. I am deeply grateful in particular to Paul Knoll, who paved the way for me. Without his research, the idea of studying medieval Poland would have been too daunting a task. His encouragement and guidance over the years have meant the world to me. I also want to thank Florin Curta for encouraging me to publish my book in this series. Wieslaw Sieradzan and Aleksandra Lenartowicz were kind enough to invite me to the international conference they organized on the trials between Poland and the Teutonic Knights in 2009 in Poland, where they were gracious hosts. I also want to thank Karol Polejowski and his family for sharing their home with me during one of my stays in Gdansk and also for obtaining research materials for me which are difficult, if not impossible, to find in the US.
I especially want to express my gratitude to my colleagues and friends in the History Department at the University of Arizona—Kevin Gosner (again), Susan Karant-Nunn, Steve Johnstone, Doug Weiner, Ute LotzHeumann, Alison Futrell, Martha Few, Susan Crane, and everyone else. I cannot imagine a more supportive and nurturing environment for junior faculty. I also want to thank everyone in the History Department at Lake Forest College for making me feel so welcome and helping me to transition from graduate student to professor during a one-term lectureship.
I also want to thank my students over the years at Cornell, Lake Forest, and Arizona, and in particular several graduate students in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies—Sean Clark, Paul Buehler, and Adam Duker. Teaching and research go hand-in-hand, and I was able to develop my skills as a scholar through working with all of you—docendo discimus. I also owe an enormous debt to my wonderful editors at Brill, Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder, for their help in guiding me through an unfamiliar process and for their seemingly inexhaustible patience.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my family, especially my wife and son. Kate and Bram, this book is dedicated to you. Thank you one and all for your generous support, careful guidance, and remarkable understanding. (Please forgive me if I have forgotten anyone here. I will make it up in the next book.)
INTRODUCTION
This book approaches the issue of medieval state formation by analyzing how the people living within two nascent states in the early fourteenth century—the kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat— understood their shared histories and how their memories of this past informed their sense of belonging to recently created political communities. It focuses on processes rather than structures, representations rather than manifestations.
The nuts and bolts of administration and lawyerly arguments about the state have a place in what follows, but the main topic of analysis is the rapid transformation of relations between Poles and the Teutonic Knights in the 1320s and 1330s. Within a generation, a century of cooperation between the Knights and Poles was forgotten, as both sides began to see their former allies as their eternal enemies. Talking about medieval states has its perils.
Many modernists scoff at the idea of medieval states, and medievalists also disagree about the applicability of this term to the Middle Ages.! Yet, far more dangerous than such academic disputes is what could be called ‘pernicious medievalism,’ i.e. the use of the distant past to justify modern atrocities. Although many scholars, most notably Joseph Strayer, have shown that state formation in the Middle Ages had a profound impact upon the development of modern states,” there have been several unfortunate side effects to this type of analysis, especially teleological concerns with tracing the origins of modern states and nations backward.?
These problems have been particularly striking in the historiography of East Central Europe, in which the traditional conceptual framework of a thousand-year-long Drang nach Osten lends itself to a preoccupation with scouring the source materials for anecdotal medieval evidence to explain modern ethnic and national conflicts.* The historical events in this ethnic, religious, and political borderland were not always characterized by conflict,> and as Benedykt Zientara cautions, even when conflicts did occur, they were certainly not based on the same concepts of contention that emerged in the modern era.°
Yet, keeping these caveats in mind, as a number of medievalists have pointed out, the hardening of identities and social and political boundaries is not entirely a modern phenomenon.’ In the late Middle Ages, people chose or were forced to choose to identify themselves according to linguistic, legal, cultural, historical, political, and biological categories that in some ways corresponded to modern notions of ‘ethnicity,’ or as some scholars would have it, ‘nationality’ (although the use of the latter term in a medieval context seems even more problematical because of the knee-jerk reaction of identifying modern nations with medieval ones).°
For this reason, one should bear in mind that this type of identity was also informed by chronologically and geographically specific factors, which need to be considered in order to avoid any facile comparisons between modern and medieval concepts of group identity formation.’ Because these processes played out primarily on the borderlands of Europe, however, the role of group identity is often omitted from traditional state-formation historiography. The methodological orientation of traditional studies of state formation lends itself to focusing on the ‘success stories’ of the Middle Ages, ie. sovereign, territorial nation-states (read England and France), thereby marginalizing the rest of Europe and minimizing the roles of competing structures of identity formation and variant paths to state formation.!°
In order to overcome these methodological obstacles in an attempt to shed some new light on what Robert Bartlett has called ‘the making of Europe’ in the Middle Ages, this book analyzes the formation of two states on the frontier of Latin Christendom. More specifically, it analyzes the history of a disputed borderland between these two states—the duchy of Pomerania—in order to analyze how this duchy was pushed from the political periphery into an ideologically central place within the historical consciousness of the populaces of the two emerging states that contended over it."
The difficulty with this approach is that this medieval borderland state, roughly corresponding to the areas of the ‘Polish Corridor’ and ‘Free City of Danzig / Gdansk’ that divided Germany during the interwar years, came to symbolize modern Polish-German conflict, and these later disputes inevitably had an impact on how scholars have viewed the medieval history of this region.”
Until relatively recently both Polish and German scholars approached the issue of Poland’s and the Teutonic Knights’ rights to Pomerania along nationalistic lines.!3 The reasons for this depended upon both the intellectual and the political currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the formation of a united Germany and the reemergence of Polish nationalism coincided with the creation of ‘scientific’ historiography in the nineteenth century." As a result, a historiographical conflict developed in which both sides scoured the archives to prove the historical validity of their claims to this land.
While this conflict widened our textual knowledge of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Pomeranian history, it also obfuscated our understanding of these texts by viewing the medieval documents through the lens of the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury conflicts. Polish and German scholars appeared as modern advocates of their respective states’ ‘historical rights’ to this land, employing documents which had either been unavailable to or deemed unimportant by fourteenth-century litigants to ‘prove’ their cases for their medieval compatriots. Assuming that the medieval disputants had the same ‘perfect knowledge’ of the past that they did, these modern historians accused the other side of presenting deliberately mendacious or tendentious arguments and inventing histories which bore no relation to history ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen.’ In the past few decades, however, both Polish and German scholars have taken a more objective approach to this topic, and the following analysis builds upon the contributions of these historians.
Yet, these modern historiographical biases perfectly illustrate one of the central issues that this book examines. The fact that this historiographical dispute over Pomerania lasted so long is also an indication of just how difficult this conflict was to judge in the Middle Ages. This was not simply a matter of the two sides spinning the facts to present the best possible case. This of course happened in the Middle Ages, just as it does today—there are (at least) two sides to every story. Sometimes this was the result of an intentional desire to make the past conform to the needs of the present, but this process of remembering and forgetting was not necessarily always mendacious or tendentious.
The two parties constructed their arguments from an imperfect history of the past. There was some selection inherent in the process of writing an accusation and a defense, but there was also an earlier stage of selection, a ‘natural selection’ of the social memory. This ‘structural amnesia’ buried the memories of some past events that no longer made sense in the present, while privileging other memories that might now seem irrelevant or insignificant to the modern historian. I will return to this issue of ‘social memory’ below. For now it suffices to say that just as in modern national (or nationalistic) historiography biases can be implicit or explicit, and the tension and interplay between these factors are of vital significance for understanding how the contemporary political situations in early fourteenth-century Pomerania, Poland, and Prussia helped to inform and transform these peoples’ remembrances of past events.
The title of this book comes from the introduction to a chronicle written in the mid-fourteenth century by the abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Oliwa, which had been founded by the dukes of Pomerania, was briefly controlled by the kings of Bohemia and Poland, and was at the time of the chronicle’s composition subject to the Teutonic Knights. The abbot tells his readers that he is writing his chronicle “because of the slippery memory of men” [propter lubricam hominum memoriam], which competed with his need to preserve the possessions and privileges granted to his monastery by contenders to the memory of the duchy of Pomerania. The modern disputes over Pomerania just add more layers to what had already become a contentious topic by the fourteenth century.
Before discussing the overall shape of this book and the methodology employed, the briefest of historical outlines is necessary to introduce the reader to a region that is most likely unfamiliar ground—the southern Baltic littoral. By the late twelfth century, the former kingdom of Poland had become a fragmented political landscape of small duchies ruled by various branches of the royal Piast dynasty. In this political borderland society, these Polish dukes cooperated or contended with each other or with the neighboring German, Slavic, and Baltic rulers as the situation demanded. In the region of Pomerania, where the Piasts exercised only nominal control, an independent duchy, ruled by native aristocrats, began to emerge.
In the 1220s, on the left bank of the Vistula River, one of these Pomeranian dukes, Swietopetk, began to build a state at the expense of the neighboring Polish dukes. At roughly the same time, the Teutonic Knights (a military order formed in the Holy Land in the late twelfth century) were settled in the region of Chelmno, on the right bank of the Vistula, by one of the Polish dukes, Konrad of Mazovia. Initially the Teutonic Knights were treated as any one of the other religious orders in the region. The Polish dukes made pious donations to the Knights, granting them large tracts of land, from which they could fund their crusade against the neighboring pagans. By the early fourteenth century, though, the historical memories of these two states had been entirely reversed.
The Pomeranian dukes, who had been presented in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Polish chronicles as apostates and predatory lords, were remembered as loyal subjects of an imagined kingdom of Poland, while the Teutonic Knights, who had been presented in thirteenth-century Polish chronicles as a shield of Latin Christendom, had become the eternal enemies of Poland, who had been illegally appropriating Polish lands for a century. How and why had these new historical traditions been constructed and accepted?
The nature of the documentary evidence concerning the reemergence of the kingdom of Poland at the turn of the fourteenth century provides a unique opportunity to analyze how people living within this state constructed and reconstructed their views of the past to fit their present circumstances. Most surviving records of the formation of historical consciousness in the Middle Ages preserve only the views of elites without any recognition of how their ideas were transmitted to, received by, and transformed within the communities whose voices they were supposed to represent. For medieval Poland, however, we have the opportunity to examine how communities within the Polish realm constructed their own views of their collective identity and history as well as how the views of these communities helped to inform the views of the elites who traditionally appropriated the role of preserving memories and propagating identities.
In 1320 and 1339, in the aftermath of two periods of conflict between Poland and the Ordensstaat, the papacy commissioned legates to conduct inquiries into the claims by the Polish kings that the Teutonic Knights had illegally appropriated lands belonging to Poland. The lengthy testimonies of over 150 witnesses from these two trials provide evidence about how representatives of different social and cultural groups in Poland (from peasants through the great ecclesiastical and secular magnates, men and women, Poles and Germans) thought about the history of Poland, particularly about the historical place of Pomerania within this state.!6
Although the witnesses were asked by the judges-delegate to respond to articles proposed by royal lawyers who presented the king’s version of history, the witnesses often took this opportunity to talk about whatever they felt relevant, sharing their personal memories of events or memories which had been passed on to them by family members, friends, lords, peasants, or other members of the various secular and ecclesiastical communities to which they belonged. They also presented reasons that went well beyond the scope of what they were asked—their own views on history, ethnicity, language, law, and custom, and what role these played in defining where and what the kingdom of Poland was.
Several historians have rightly criticized earlier scholars for using these testimonies anecdotally and injudiciously.!” Heeding their advice, I present a detailed analysis of the discourse of this trial testimony, as well as the contemporary chronicles and charters (which are of vital importance for understanding the Teutonic Knights’ side of the story, since they chose not to participate in the trials) to explore how the judges, disputants, and witnesses thought about identity, territoriality, and sovereignty. I also use studies of social memory to explain how and why the fourteenth-century memories of the borderland society of the thirteenth century were buried under recently created memories of ‘bordered lands,’'!* as hardened political and cultural identities began to coincide with rigidly defined secular and ecclesiastical borders.
In recent years Patrick Geary, Chris Wickham, Matthew Innes, and other medievalists have shown how useful sociological and psychological work on ‘social memory’ can be in helping us to understand medieval perceptions of the past.!® These studies of memory have shown that the acts of remembering and forgetting were active, complex processes, which were often contingent upon “particular, and to us seemingly trivial, circumstances of the moment.”2°
I want to emphasize that, following Matthew Innes, I am using the term ‘social memory’ as a category of knowledge that exists “beyond [and not in opposition to] formal historiographical writing.”2! I also want to make it clear that I am using the concept of social memory neither as an antonym nor as a synonym for ‘history.’2? Rather, I have been influenced by the discourse of social memory studies because it provides a methodology that attempts to understand the processes of historical consciousness beyond the confines of the traditional subjects of historiographical analysis, which is particularly useful in the case of witness testimony. The testimonies from the Polish-Teutonic Knights’ trials allow us to examine the production, transmission, and reception of knowledge in a way that is not possible simply by extrapolating from traditional historiographical accounts alone. Nevertheless, the fact that we have these charters and chronicles for comparison makes these testimonies even more valuable and helps us to better understand the complex processes that produced expressions of historical consciousness in various forms.
Some critics of social memory methodology have justly criticized the removal of the individual from the study of social memory.?3 In an essay addressing this issue, Jeffrey K. Olick has attempted a “rapprochement between individualist and collective approaches” to memory by differentiating ‘collective’ from ‘collected’ memory.?* In his schema, ‘collected memory’ is “the aggregated individual memories of members of a group,”25 whereas ‘collective memory’ refers to “public discourses about the past as wholes or to narratives and images of the past that speak in the name of collectivities.”*6
This point ably illustrates canon law concepts of proof and so makes social memory a particularly useful framework for analyzing these documents, because the judges were interested in both what an individual knew and what the community knew. They asked each witness for his own recollections of the past, but they also wanted to establish that this information was ‘common knowledge’ [publica vox et fama].
This, however, is not what we would think of today as ‘hearsay evidence.’ In fact, by the turn of the fourteenth century it was established that if a crime were ‘notorious,’ (which the royal procurators argued and the judges asked the witnesses about in 1320 and 1339), the judges were permitted “to proceed in a summary fashion in some parts of the process... [bound to preserve only] the summons to court (citatio) and a judgment (sententia).”*” Because the Knights refused to participate in the trials or to recognize the competency of the courts, the judges were at pains to establish the notoriety of their crimes, so they could proceed in their absence.
Some of the witnesses had legal training, and this influenced their understanding of these terms of art. For instance, Archdeacon Maciej of Plock (who had received a Master’s degree in Paris—one of three witnesses with a university degree),2® gave a very legalistic and revealing response to the judges’ question about the definition of notoriety: “this is notorious, because it requires no proof and because it is manifest to everyone.”29 Most of the witnesses, however, were not knowledgeable about canonical concepts of proof. Some tried to emphasize the validity of their beliefs by employing hyperbole.
One witness remarked that “the whole world knows,”29 while another stated that he heard it “not from 100, but from 1000, and it is said by everyone.”*! Still, the witnesses did not claim that there was common knowledge when they did not know that it existed. One witness said that “he did not know [common knowledge] to be expressed” about ten of the articles.?? In addition, although the majority of the witnesses did not know Latin, and so the lawyers’ arguments and judges’ questions had to be translated into Polish or German, it is apparent from their testimonies that they understood what common knowledge was, as it was expressed in a variety of ways and not as a generic statement crafted by the notaries.
The witnesses were aware that they were speaking not only for themselves, but also for the various communities to which they belonged. They were in a sense writing history, placing their personal experiences and those of their family and friends within the larger framework of the social and political communities to which they belonged. In A History of Polish Culture Bogdan Suchodolski somewhat dismissively states that in the early modern era “the history of Poland was ‘shrunk’ into household gossip.”33 The same could be said about late medieval Poland, but this is a very good thing for our purposes. As Jan Vansina persuasively argues, “Rumor is the process by which a collective historical consciousness is built.”34 ‘Gossip’ and ‘rumor’ might be pejorative terms today, things we are better off ignoring, but the historian of the Middle Ages cannot do so, because there is perhaps no better way to discover the development of widespread historical consciousness than to study publica vox et fama. In late medieval Europe this was acceptable as proof not only in a court of law, but also in the court of public opinion. The consensus of the community was proof enough: everyone knows this is true, so it is true.
Representations of the past, including both written and oral histories, were informed and transformed by each other. These memories were also influenced by the particular circumstances in which they were collected. The testimonies of the witnesses at the two trials were collected and written down within the framework of a particular political and legal discourse, as were the stories about the past collected and written down in chronicles. At the same time, these written accounts were retold and combined with new interpretations of the past to form new narratives. Even ‘official’ histories in the forms of chronicles, charters, and court documents were malleable and subject both to the machinations of disputants and the structural amnesia of the social memories of the societies represented by the disputants.°5
What we see in the witnesses’ testimonies is not such an expression of the ‘collective memory’ of the Polish regnum and ecclesia as the Polish kings would have perhaps liked, but rather the ‘collected memories’ of more than 150 individuals, each presenting his own ‘testimonial chronicle,’ his own interpretation of the ‘publica vox et fama’ that informed his historical, geographical, and political knowledge of the kingdom of Poland.
Through these testimonies we can observe and analyze the ‘making of polities’ (to use John Watts’ phrase)?’ in ways that traditional historiographical and legal sources simply do not permit. Rather than a polished, lawyerly reason of state argument, the witnesses present a warts-and-all representation of what living in a kingdom meant to people who were not yet fully cognizant of all the rights and responsibilities that this new form of political organization was based upon. These testimonies provide a snapshot of a society in transition from political fragmentation to political centralization. For modern researchers, the value of these testimonial productions of the state is, in fact, in the very diversity of the views expressed.
In the Middle Ages, as today, people belonged to numerous overlapping and sometimes conflicting social groups, which presented multiple identities to choose from or be cast into. I have tried to keep this in mind so as not to privilege political consciousness as the main indicator of identity. At the same time, though, one of the main aims of this study is to analyze the development of widespread political consciousness in an age in which its traditional conveyers (print and electronic media, public education, professional armies, etc.) were absent.?® Large, public ceremonies, like these trials or the intermittently convened assemblies of the great men of the realm, were the one form of mass communication that existed at this time. One of the main questions I seek to answer is how people from different social communities expressed their sense of belonging to a large-scale political community. Similarly, I explore why these people believed that they had a common identity and history not only among themselves, but also with people whom they had never met in lands most of them had never visited. In other words, what did it mean to be part of a kingdom, and how did these perceptions change in the two decades between the restoration of the kingdom of Poland in 1320 (a few months before the commencement of the first trial against the Teutonic Knights) and the second trial in 1339?
From a historiographical standpoint, I am working within a much larger tradition than the political history of the south Baltic littoral in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The early fourteenth century produced several important collections of witness testimonies, which historians have ably mined (or ‘excavated’ a la Le Roy Ladurie) for insights into how people in the Middle Ages (especially non-elites, whose voices are generally silenced in traditional historical documents) thought about religion and transgression, gender and sexuality, space and time, and the production and transmission of knowledge, among other topics. The most famous of these testimonies come from the records of the inquisitions of heretics in southern France (especially the Cathars)?9 and the trials against the Templars,*° although in recent years testimonies from canonization trials from throughout Europe*! and ‘proofs of age’ in England*? have also been analyzed in detail. The testimonies from the Polish-Teutonic Knights’ trials deserve the same sort of attention.
There are of course countless methodological problems with accepting testimonies at face value, whether they are based on publica vox et fama, witnessing the events, or reading about these events in official documents. Such testimonies are limited by the very aspect that makes them so fascinating for the historian—the need to historicize events and create a plausible narrative. Jan Vansina explains: “Memory typically selects certain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them according to expectation, previous knowledge, or the logic of ‘what must have happened,’ and fills in the gaps in perception.”43
Yet, despite these limitations (or perhaps because of them) these rich sources are valuable resources for helping historians understand early fourteenth-century mentalities. They provide us with a unique opportunity to analyze orality and literacy, memory and forgetting, how law is understood by non-professionals, the development of historical consciousness, group identity formation, territoriality, sovereignty, and a host of other topics of great interest to historians in general and medievalists in particular. Unfortunately, despite the fact that they are written in good Latin and have been available to scholars for more than a century, they remain unknown to most historians outside of Poland.
German historians before the Second World War tended to regard the trial records as historiographically worthless,*° while German scholars after 1945 have largely ignored these documents altogether.*® Paul W. Knoll used these sources in his magisterial The Rise of the Polish Monarchy,*” and Anna Adamska has analyzed these sources in her continuing work on literacy in the Middle Ages,*® but these and the work of French historian Sylvain Gouguenheim*® represent the extent of secondary sources available to non-Polish speakers, except for a handful of translated essays by Polish scholars.5° Conversely, these documents have been analyzed in great detail by a number of Polish historians, particularly Helena Chiopocka, Janusz Bieniak,5* and Wiestaw Sieradzan.*?
These excellent studies have served as able guides, but what I attempt below is something rather different from my predecessors. First, I have analyzed these sources within a larger European context, rather than just concentrating on developments within Poland. Also, whereas Polish historians have tended to focus either on one trial or on both the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century trials, I have chosen to concentrate exclusively on the two fourteenth-century trials to better analyze the dramatic changes in Poland within a single generation. I have also provided a detailed analysis of the Polish-Pomeranian-Prussian borderland of the thirteenth century based on contemporary charters and chronicles, which helps to place the events described in the trial records within their proper historical context.
The purpose of the analysis of this borderland society in the first part of the book is to evaluate the thirteenth-century evidence in order to situate this conflict within a historical framework of thirteenth-century relations between Poland and the Teutonic Knights. This does not mean that one should regard this section as the ‘real’ history against which to judge the memories which emerged in the early fourteenth century. Instead, one should view this section as a separate analysis of how the Teutonic Knights and their neighbors and benefactors sought to reposition themselves in the ever-changing world of the thirteenth-century political, religious, and social borderland that was the south Baltic littoral. In order to provide continuity with the second part of the book, I have chosen to examine this world through the prism of a series of disputes between the Teutonic Knights and their neighbors which were settled by papal legates. Yet, there are important differences between the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century trials.
First, the thirteenth-century documents are not nearly as detailed as those from the fourteenth century. In addition, the thirteenth-century litigants were forced to respond to ever-changing political circumstances, while the participants in the fourteenth-century trials had a chronological distance from events which allowed them to fit the earlier narratives of dispute into a broader historical framework. Yet, even though these events were far fresher in the minds of the thirteenthcentury disputants than those in the early fourteenth century, they were still open to contestation as both sides attempted to forge a history of the past conducive to their present goals and changing memories. This juxtaposition of the trials from these two centuries is intended to provide the historical background necessary to understand the profound changes that took place in relations between the Teutonic Knights and their neighbors and benefactors over the course of a century.
The first two chapters of this book analyze the competing state-formation activities of the dukes of Pomerania and the Teutonic Knights during the thirteenth century by examining a series of trials and mediated settlements, which ended two periods of conflict between these emerging states. This section situates Pomerania within an early thirteenth-century south Baltic littoral that was both a religious frontier and a political borderland of Slavic, Baltic, and German lordships, which contended with or cooperated with each other not on the basis of ethnicity, but rather as the situation demanded. When at the end of the thirteenth century, the last native duke of Pomerania died without a son, the surrounding German and Slavic lords fought to control not only the physical landscape of Pomerania, but also the memory of Pomerania’s historical place within their states. As noted above, the purpose of this section is not to provide a benchmark against which to judge the veracity of the memories of the fourteenth-century disputants, but rather to examine the history of this duchy beyond the competing modern teleologies of a German Drang nach. Osten or a Polish restoration of a unified kingdom in order to provide the historiographical distance necessary to analyze the fourteenth-century disputes.5*
The first chapter—A iugo principum Polonie, a iugo Theutonicorum: Pomerania and the South Baltic Frontier of Latin Christendom in the Early Thirteenth Century—examines how Duke Swietopeltk of Pomerania created an independent duchy by cultivating relationships with western translocal organizations (Cistercians, Dominicans, Liibeck merchants) as well as with the papacy in order to legitimize his revolt against his Polish overlords. At the turn of the thirteenth century the Vistula River served as a boundary demarcating the eastern frontier of Latin Christendom. Missionaries and merchants began flooding into this frontier in the first decades of the thirteenth century to reap the spiritual and economic bounties of this land. Swietopetk, whose duchy was located at the mouth of the Vistula and was therefore uniquely placed as a bridgehead for the incorporation of Prussia into Latin Christendom, positioned himself as a permanent crusader for the papacy and attempted to establish his main city of Gdansk (German: Danzig) as the entrepét for this region. However, when the frontier was pushed further east by the successes of one of the translocal organizations that Swietopetk had sponsored, the Teutonic Knights (who were also expanding into lands that Swietopetk thought of as his own), this bridgehead became a roadblock for the merchants and missionaries in Prussia. The duke of Pomerania, abandoned by his former allies, led an insurrection of the Prussian neophytes, which had important implications for both the Pomeranians and Prussians, as a series of papal legates recognized the authority of the Teutonic Knights to direct the Prussian mission, to the detriment of Swietopelk’s own state-formation activities.
The second chapter—Dealing with the Past and Planning for the Future: Contested Memories, Conflicted Loyalties, and the Partition and Donation of Pomerania in the Late Thirteenth Century—analyzes the ephemeral nature of political entities and alliances on the south Baltic littoral. In the series of internecine wars that broke out immediately after Swietopetk’s death, the duke’s two brothers and two sons scrambled to ally themselves with one or more of the surrounding predatory lordships. Although they tried to take advantage of the existing rivalries among their neighbors to strengthen their own positions, in the end, all of them had promised parts or the entirety of their lands to their allies. In the end, the Pyrrhic victor of this war—Swietopetk’s eldest son, Méciw6j—was left to deal with his neighbors’ competing claims on his newly acquired lands, as well as with the fact that because he did not have a son, he would have to choose and have the secular and ecclesiastical magnates of his duchy approve of an heir. These unfinished narratives of dispute would lay the foundation for the fourteenth-century claims to this duchy made by the Teutonic Knights and the kings of Poland. However, because both the fourteenth-century disputants and their modern advocates used these contending and contradictory claims to argue for either the Polish or German affiliation of this duchy, this chapter will analyze all of these agreements within their particular historical circumstances—a contentious, ethnically diverse borderland society in which the Pomeranian dukes appealed to both their German and Slavic neighbors for help.
The third chapter—The Restorations of the Kingdom of Poland and the Foundation of the Teutonic Ordensstaat at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century—serves as a bridge between the first two and last two chapters. It provides the historical background to an important transitional period in the history of East Central Europe. The turn of the fourteenth century saw not only the emergence of the Teutonic Ordensstaat and the restoration of the kingdom of Poland, but also the extinction of the ruling dynasties in the other powers of the region. The kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary and the mark of Brandenburg came to be ruled by dynasties that were intimately involved in the conflicts between the papacy and the empire concerning the right to supreme authority over Latin Christendom. Therefore, this chapter will present the history of the formation of the kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Ordensstaat at the turn of the fourteenth century and their military and legal conflicts during the first half of this century within a larger European context.
The final two chapters analyze the testimonies from more than 150 witnesses in the two trials between Poland and the Ordensstaat as well as letters, chronicles, and annals written by the secular and regular clergy in Poland, Prussia, and Pomerania. I employ the methodologies of social memory studies outlined above to analyze how the memories of coopera-tion between Poles and Germans in the Prussian mission were replaced by recently constructed memories of eternal enmity between these two peoples. This analysis of social memory is particularly useful in ensuring that the voice of the individual is not buried by a determinist discourse of state-sponsored historical consciousness, which is particularly important considering the disconnect that often existed between the judges’ questions, the witnesses’ testimonies, and the royal procurators’ arguments in the trials.
The fourth chapter—Immortalis Discordia: Eternal Enmity, Massacre, and Memorialization in the German-Polish Borderlands—analyzes the evolution of the story of the Teutonic Knights’ sack of the town of Gdansk during their conquest of Pomerania in 1308. In the three decades between the Knights’ conquest of Pomerania and the second trial between Poland and the Knights in 1339, new conflicts broke out between the disputants, which located the memory of the Gdansk massacre within a larger framework of a discourse of wrongs promulgated by both sides. Both parties presented themselves as the victims in these conflicts and both sides attempted to instrumentalize the memory of the past to legitimize their claims to disputed territories. However, within these various ‘official’ versions of the past, we can also discern how the emerging historical consciousness of the subjects of these two states made the broad outlines presented to them by their rulers conform to their own views of the past. Through a critical reading of these various histories, especially the witnesses’ testimonies, this chapter examines how the changing political circumstances of the three decades between the massacre and the 1339 trial affected the formation of social memory within these two states by exploring the tension and interplay between the crusading culture which united the two states as shields of Latin Christendom and an emerging ethnic and political enmity which divided them.
The fifth chapter— Pomerania between Poland and Prussia: Lordship, Ethnicity, Territoriality, and Memory —explores how memories of thirteenth-century Pomerania changed during the course of the early fourteenth century in response to the conflicts between the Teutonic Knights and Poland. As the thirteenth-century borderlands were transformed in the early fourteenth century through a complex process of remembering and forgetting into ‘bordered lands’ of strictly demarcated political boundaries, many people living in these borderlands came to understand that identity, like memory, was a slippery concept. As an increasingly statist discourse came to challenge the discourse of mission and crusade, these people were forced to choose sides as the shield of Latin Christendom fractured. This chapter also examines how the relationship had become so bitter by 1339 that the king of Poland sought to reclaim all of the lands ever given by Polish rulers to the Teutonic Knights. In their articles of dispute the royal procurators tried to present a version of history that legitimized this royal depiction of the past, but their attempt at ‘historiographical lawyering’ met with limited success, because the witnesses did not easily consume legal arguments based the concept of ‘ratio regni,’ the inalienability of the lands of the kingdom and the historical rights of the rulers of Poland to all of the lands of the ‘ancient’ Polish regnum.®° This chapter also analyzes the witnesses’ views of ethnicity and their political and geographical knowledge in more detail. Finally it analyzes the role of orality and literacy in memory and forgetting.
Even though these conflicts played out on the periphery of Europe, their records, particularly the witnesses’ testimonies, provide us with illuminating insights into the history of medieval mentalities regarding some of the most important developing ideologies of medieval European states. However, unlike the traditional studies of the emergence of medieval polities, which focus on lawyerly arguments and ‘canned’ histories written by propagandists, these testimonies provide us with the means to examine how both rank-and-file administrators and those who had no role in governance conceived of the state. By taking the discourse of medieval state formation away from the exclusive purview of lawyers and studying it if not from-the-bottom-up, then at least from-the-middle-out, we can see that royal propagandists’ clever theories were not always easily consumed by those who ran the state, much less by those they governed. Finally, I hope that these insights into the processes of state formation in medieval East Central Europe might also shed some new light on similar processes in the rest of medieval Europe and perhaps on the role of social memory in group identity formation today. In many ways, the turn of the fourteenth century was just as important for the ‘Europeanization of Europe’ as the turn of the twenty-first century, and in both periods this process takes place as much at Europe's frontiers as in its center.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق