We will now remove ourselves from the notoriously dreary and cold lands of the Polish Gods Jassa, Lado and Nia and travel North to the perennially freezing and wind-swept territories of the Curonian peninsula.

Here in the early 13th century, in what is today’s Latvia, the German monastic order of the brotherhood of something or other was enthusiastically initiating the local Livs, Letts and Estonians into the doctrine of the Christian faith and the reality of what happens to those who do not reciprocate the fervent knights’ whole-hearted belief in their Middle Eastern saviour.

We know of these events because traveling along with the German knights was a German priest who, while staying the background of the fighting, was able to pen some of these events down in his Livonian Chronicle.  Since the priest’s name was Henry (or, really, Heinrich), the chronicle became known as the Heinrici Cronicon Lyvoniae.  It was the first such chronicle dealing with the Latvians and Estonians though it was quickly followed by others.

While engaged in the pious tasks of pillaging and torturing in the name of their Lord and Master Josh von Bethleheim, these Shriners with an attitude came across a simple people who suffered many indignities at the hands of some of the local populace.  These simple people were known to the German crusaders as the Wends and, Henry tells us, they were an extremely impoverished people who had been kicked out of their prior abodes on the Venta river, then been driven out again by the Curonians, and straight into the arms of the waiting arms of the Crusaders.  Thereafter, the Wends, faced with some hostile Latvians, it seems threw in their lot with the Germans playing the role of early day Tlascalans to the Latvians’ Aztecs.

There are only two things remarkable about this story (unfortunately, in the context of the times, the brutality of the situation is not one of them).

The First Interesting Thing

One is that, in addition to giving their name to the town of Wenden, today’s Ventspils, and the river Venta, as per another and later Livland Chronicle, these Wends also gave Latvia its national flag when they appeared at the city gates under “a red banner cut through with white after the manner of the Wends” (see below in bold).  Specifically, and more poetically, let us quote a later chronicle, so inventively called the Livländische Reimchronik (9219 bis 9233):

Von Wenden was zû Rîge komen
zûr lantwer, als ich hân vernomen,
ein brûder und wol hundert man:
den wart daß mêre kunt getân.
die quâmen hovelîchen dar
mit einer banier rôtgevar,
daß was mit wîße durch gesniten
hûte nâch wendischen siten.
Wenden ist ein burc genant,
von den die banier wart bekant,
und ist in Letten lant gelegen,
dâ die vrowen rîtens pflegen
nâch den siten, als die man.
vor wâr ich ûch daß sagen kan,
die banier der Letten ist.“

BTW That is why it is called the REIMchronik – no great magic there.

What is interesting about this is that virtually all of the northern Slavic countries and cities at the time had a red-white motif in their flags and banners (including the flags of Poland and Bohemia) – and this was true whether they were within the realm of Brandenburg or of the Teutonic Order or of the Brothers of the Sword in Latvia.

The Other Interesting Thing

The other, seemingly, remarkable thing about these folks is their name.  Wenden.

Some authors have seized on it as a name indicative of the potential latter day Veneti.  In that telling, these Wends 1) were not Slavs 2) may have been the actual Veneti and 3) being in Latvia, were localized away from the area claimed by the Slavic autochtonic theorists of Poland and Bohemia.  A trifecta.

How silly this is, is easy to see but, unfortunately, for some it also has to be demonstrated.

As to item 3), it would seem that locating ancient Slavs away from the ancient haunts of the Veneti on the Vistula would be useful in bringing down the autochtonic theories.  However, locating ancient Veneti away from the ancient haunts of the Veneti should suggest only that, perhaps, one has not located the ancient Veneti after all (at least not if by that term is meant some form of a non-Slavic Veneti Restpopulation).

As to item 1) we have no basis for speculating whether the Wends of this story were or were not Slavs, Balts, Estonians or someone else entirely (almost – see below).  No record of their language is found anywhere. Nor would such a record be proof of their ethnicity were it ever to be found or be somehow extracted since it ought to be clear that, after living for years among the Balts, these people might well have changed their tongue to a Baltic one.

Further, as to item 2) above, these folks may well have been Slavs and also Venethi if by Slavs one understands descendants of some of the Venethi.  Consequently, item 2) proves nothing in and of itself to push the needle one way or another.

Having said all this, we cannot help but notice too that many of the German knights and missionaries telling the story (including most notably, Henry) arrived in Riga from areas in Saxony, a province of the Empire bordering on formerly Slavic lands which contained Slavic populations for years after their conquest by the Franks.  It would not stretch credulity to suppose that the chronicler of this episode, Henry, himself may have been chosen for this mission to the Far European East for his knowledge of and contacts with the local non-Germanic Wends of the Elbe-Saale area.

In any event, Saxon Germans had previously encountered Slavic Wends aplenty.  if they identified a Latvian tribe as “Wends” a simple explanation of the episode might be that these too were (Slavic) Wends.  We learn, after all, that they were persecuted and ejected by the local Baltic populations who may have perceived them as “different” (or, at least, as different enough).  Certainly Latvia is not far at all from Russia and a tribe of Russians may have wondered into areas they should not have wandered into.

We already know from prior blog entries that the Finnish name for Russia is Venäjä.  Let us now also mention that the Estonian word for Russia is Venemaa.  Consequently, the designation of these people as Wenden here could have been simply an indication of their Slavic identity.  In fact, we specifically know that the Estonians did come into contact with these Wends as the last we hear of the Wends in Henry’s Chronicle is that they are living together with the Swordbrethren knights (hmmmm….) in the town of Wenden and that the town is then stormed by marauding Estonians (do not worry, the knights, their mission being just, of course, prevail).

Incidentally, the Estonian name for the Lettgallian area around the town of Wenden is Vonnu and the Latvian name for the same area is… Cesis. Oh, have we forgotten to mention the Czech (Bohemian) flag?  Here it is (historically, same as Polish – the blue in the current version is a modern addition) in red with just enough of a tinge of white:

Finally, if one is genuinely looking for the ancestors of “a large and populous” people located on the Vistula in the 3rd/4th (?) century, it seems strange to latch onto a small Wendish tribe somewhere in Latvia in the 12th century but ignore or dismiss, often a priori, the large and populous Wendish tribes on the Vistula in the 6th century.  If one is genuinely looking…

We leave with some inconclusive musings on the matter by Johann Daniel Gruber who published the Livonian Chronicle of Henry’s in 1747 (Latin to German translation by Arndt).

It seems Gruber was influenced, inter alia,  by the views of the Italian adventurer Alessandro Guagnini and his (or, if you believe Guagnini (aka Gwagnin) stole the book from Stryjkowski who served under Guagnini, Stryjkowski’s) “A Description of Sarmatian Europe”.  Note Gruber calls both Letts and Wends “Slavs” so we have to take this with a grain of salt.  (We mention Guagnini/Stryjkowski only because we will return to him/them when discussing more about the Venethi).

***

For more on this topic, please see “Argument 6” from a later post (dealing with Schenker’s book which has the same dumb argument) which I also copy here with some cleanup:

Argument 6
Quantum Arguments

The last argument that Schenker makes is rather bizarre.  He uses the report of Henry of Livonia “who described a clearly non-Slavic tribe of the Vindi which lived in Courland and Livonia… [and whose people] may well be the descendants of the Baltic Veneti.”

Schenker’s statement is puzzling and one has to wonder how any thinking person could have made it.

First of all Schenker (whose citation practice leaves much to be desired) provides zero evidence to support his claim that this tribe was “clearly non-Slavic”.  There is nothing clear here because there is nothing here at all.  Schenker just asserts this.

For Schenker’s argument to hold, we would have to accept a number of very questionable hypotheses were true:

1. that the Veneti were different from the Balts (as reported by Heirich) but yet were not Slavs;
2. that these non-Slavic Veneti did in fact live near the Baltic;
3. that the same non-Slavic Veneti survived as a distinct people for about a millenium, all along avoiding any Germanization, Gothicization, Balticization or Slavicization;
4. that the continued existence of such a tribe went about unnoticed and unremarked on for the duration of the same millenium until one Heinrich of Lettland stumbled upon them in the first half of the 13th century;
5. that this Heinrich, a German crusader who must have been intimately aware of the practice of his people (and his presumably) calling the Slavs of his time Wenden, would have called some other non-Slavic tribe by that exact same name (!);
6. that Heinrich would have done so with respect to a tribe that he encountered in the Baltic-Slavic borderlands; and that
7. that Heinrich, a writer who conveyed much about the life of the local tribes, would have considered his use of such nomenclature for a “clearly non-Slavic” tribe to be something entirely unremarkable to the point of not observing upon the oddity of the existence of these “clearly non-Slavic” Wends to his readers.

Oh, and that these Wends’ “colours” were the same as those of the other Western Slavic tribes such as Poles or Czechs (as per the later Livländische Reimchronik we hear of  “a red banner cut through with white after the manner of the Wends.”).

Now, to make this kind of an argument is not only to strain the laws of historical probability but to leave them by the wayside entirely.  Here we really are in the world of quantum history and bad faith.

(p.s. otherwise, the book is ok but if we are to take a linguist’s word as to the relationship between the Veneti and the Slavs, we’ll go with Vasmer‘s).

Here is the link to the full post.

Copyright ©2014 jassa.org, All Rights Reserved