Bethenici Erotic

The Bethenici were a small West Slavic people of the early ninth century, living somewhere on the middle Elbe in what is now northeastern Germany, and they survive today only as a name in two Frankish documents. No community claims descent from them. They dissolved into the wider Slavic population of the Elbe lands, which in turn was absorbed, over the following centuries, into the German-speaking population of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg.

The whole written record fits in two lines. The annals of Charlemagne's court report that in 811 the emperor sent an army across the Elbe against the Linones and the Bethenici, at a moment when the tribes along the river were being pulled between Frankish power, the Danish king Godfred and the Slavic Wilzi confederation. A generation later the anonymous list known as the Bavarian Geographer groups them with the Smeldingi and the Morizani as holders of eleven civitates, the word Frankish clerks used for the timber-and-earth ring forts that anchored Slavic settlement east of the river. After that the name drops out of history. Their exact territory is still argued over. The pairing with the Linones, whose center was near Lenzen in the Prignitz, and with the Morizani near the Havel mouth, puts them somewhere along that stretch of the Elbe, but nobody has pinned them to a single site.

They spoke a Polabian dialect of the Lechitic branch of West Slavic, the same broad family as Polish, and close kin to the Polabian tongue that hung on in the Hanoverian Wendland until the eighteenth century, which is the best surviving hint of how they sounded. They were pagans. Christianity reached the Elbe Slavs by force and by stages: the Ottonian marches of the tenth century, the Slav uprising of 983 that threw the new bishoprics back across the river, and finally the Wendish Crusade of 1147 and the founding of the Margraviate of Brandenburg a decade later. By then the Bethenici had long since ceased to be a distinct group, and the people on their ground answered to other names, or simply to Wends, the catch-all Germans used for their Slavic neighbors.

Their legacy is diffuse but real. The village names of the region, thick with endings in -ow, -itz and -in, are Slavic, and the rural population of the Elbe borderlands carries a mixed Slavic and German ancestry that was never sorted out. The Bethenici stand for the many peoples of early medieval Europe who left nothing behind but a name copied by a monk who never met them.