Brizani Erotic

The Brizani were a West Slavic people who lived along the lower Havel River around Havelberg, in what is now northeastern Germany, from the early Middle Ages until the German conquest of the twelfth century. After that conquest they were slowly absorbed into the German-speaking population of Brandenburg. What made them a group was a place. Their name is usually traced to the Slavic word for a riverbank, so roughly the people of the shore. The wet, river-cut country where the Havel runs into the Elbe was the ground they held.

They were one of the smaller tribes of the Polabian Slavs, the peoples who settled between the Elbe and the Oder, and they are usually counted among the Lutici, a federation also known as the Veleti. They spoke a West Slavic dialect of the Lechitic group, closely related to the speech of their Polabian and Pomeranian neighbors and more distantly to Polish. The Brizani wrote none of it down. What survives is their name in Latin sources and a scatter of Slavic place names. Like the rest of the Lutici, they kept worshipping the old Slavic gods long after the rulers around them had been baptized. For the federation, refusing the church was as much about politics as belief: a church meant a bishop, and a bishop meant answering to a German king.

Their homeland sat on a contested frontier. Otto I founded a bishopric at Havelberg in the middle of the tenth century as part of a push to bring the Elbe Slavs under Saxon rule. In the great Slavic uprising of 983, the Lutici and their allies tore that order down. They destroyed the church establishments at Havelberg and Brandenburg and kept the region independent and pagan for well over a century and a half. The end came in stages: the Wendish Crusade of 1147, the founding of the Margraviate of Brandenburg under Albert the Bear, and a steady stream of German, Flemish and Dutch settlers who cleared land, founded towns and brought German law. Slavic speech along the Havel faded over the centuries that followed.

What they left behind is quiet but still visible. Village names ending in -itz and -ow across the Prignitz and the Havel country still have Slavic roots, and the earthwork ring forts of the period still stand in the landscape. The cathedral above Havelberg, consecrated in 1170, marks the order that replaced them. Nobody today remembers the Brizani as ancestors, but the people of the region descend partly from Slavs like them, mixed with the settlers who came after.