Lendians Erotic

The Lendians were a West Slavic tribe of the Lechitic branch who lived from about the 7th to the 11th century on the borderland where southeastern Poland now meets western Ukraine, and who disappeared as a distinct people once the Piast dukes and the princes of Kiev had divided their land between them. What sets them apart among the early Slavic tribes is not their own testimony, since they left none, but the odd fact that everyone else kept naming Poles after them. The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII wrote them down as Lendzanenoi around 950. The ninth-century Bavarian Geographer credits the Lendizi with 98 strongholds. A Hebrew chronicle has Lz'njn, and the Kievan chroniclers say Lyakhs. That last name stuck and spread: the Hungarian word for a Pole is still lengyel, the Lithuanian lenkas, and older Ukrainian and Russian said Lach or Lyakh. A tribe that barely surfaces in the record gave its name to the whole Polish nation.

The name itself says how they lived. It comes from a Slavic root for cleared or burned-over ground, the kind of field made by felling and firing forest, so the Lendians were in effect the people of the clearings. Their country was the loess uplands and river valleys of the San, the Wisłok and the upper Bug, with fortified centers that grew into Sandomierz, Przemyśl and the cluster of gords the chroniclers called the Cherven Cities. Constantine notes that they, like the Krivichians, paid tribute to the Rus' and spent their winters cutting the dugout boats that were floated down to Kiev each spring for the trading run to Constantinople. That single line fixes their position: a forested, well-watered march between the Vistula and the Dnieper, valuable to both sides and firmly held by neither. They spoke a Lechitic dialect ancestral to the Lesser Polish speech of the same hills, and followed the ordinary Slavic paganism of the age until Christianity arrived from two directions at once, the Latin rite from the west and the Byzantine rite from Kiev.

The end was a tug of war. In 981 Vladimir of Kiev took the Cherven Cities from the Lyakhs, as the Primary Chronicle puts it. Bolesław the Brave took them back in 1018, and Yaroslav the Wise recovered them in 1031. After that no source speaks of Lendians as a people. Their western districts became the heart of Lesser Poland and their eastern ones the Ruthenian country around Przemyśl, so their descendants today are Poles on one side of the San and Ukrainians on the other, mostly unaware that the line between them once ran through a single tribe.