Hevelli Erotic

The Hevelli were a West Slavic tribe who lived along the middle Havel from roughly the eighth century to the twelfth, in the marsh and lake country west of what is now Berlin. They were conquered, converted, and then outnumbered by German settlers, and by about 1300 they had stopped being a separate people. What descends from them is the ordinary population of Havelland, Germanized long ago, plus a layer of place names most Brandenburgers use daily without hearing the Slavic in them. Their neighbors named them for the river. In Bohemian sources they are the Stodorans, and under that name comes their best remembered member: Drahomira, a Hevelli woman who married into the Bohemian ducal house and became the mother, and in the later legend the pagan villain, of Saint Wenceslas.

Water made them. The Havel is slow, braided, and full of islands, and the Hevelli built accordingly: ring forts of earth and timber on sand islands and spurs of dry ground, reached by causeway or boat and awkward to attack on horseback. The two that mattered were Brenna, on an island in the river, and Spandau at the mouth of the Spree. Their speech belonged to the Lechitic branch, the same one that produced Polish and Kashubian, and no one who spoke it ever wrote it down. It survives in Berlin, Potsdam, Köpenick, Teltow, Zossen and Havel itself, filtered through German scribes. They kept the Slavic gods, with a sanctuary inside the stronghold at Brenna, and for two centuries they treated Christianity as what it plainly was in their case: the religion of the army across the river.

The dates are specific and grim. In the winter of 928 to 929 Henry the Fowler crossed the frozen marshes, which had been the whole defense, and took Brenna. Around 940 a captive Hevelli prince named Tugumir, baptized in Saxony and sent home, seized the fortress by a trick and handed it to Otto I. A bishopric followed in 948. In 983 the Slavs of the Elbe rose, burned the whole apparatus out, and stayed independent and pagan for another century and a half. The end was quiet. Pribislav-Henry, the last Hevelli prince and a Christian, died in 1150 and left his lands to his godson Albert the Bear, who had to fight Jaxa of Köpenick for them and won in 1157. Brenna became Brandenburg, Brandenburg became a margraviate, and the margraviate became the core of Prussia. The tribe that lost gave the state its name.