Lusici Erotic

The Lusici were a West Slavic tribe who lived in the marshy lowlands of Lower Lusatia, in what is now eastern Germany, from the early Middle Ages until the Saxons conquered them in the tenth century. The Lower Sorbs around Cottbus are among their descendants. The place name is their most lasting mark. Lusatia, called Lausitz in German and Łužyca in Lower Sorbian, was named for them, and the name is usually traced to a Slavic word for marsh or pool. That suits a country of wet meadows, alder thickets and slow rivers. Their land ran from the Black Elster east toward the Neisse, with the Spree and the maze of channels now called the Spreewald running through it. They were one tribe in the Sorbian union, one of the three large groups of Slavs living between the Elbe and the Oder. The Milceni lived to their south, and the Daleminzi, Nisani and Siusli lived farther west. The Lusici spoke an early form of Sorbian, a West Slavic language closely related to Polish and Czech, and Lower Sorbian is its closest living descendant. The Bavarian Geographer, a ninth-century list of peoples east of the Frankish realm, credits the Lunsizi with thirty strongholds. Archaeology backs this up: Lower Lusatia is dotted with the remains of round forts built of timber and earth, and the one at Raddusch has been rebuilt at full size. They followed the old Slavic religion, but almost nothing about their own gods or rites was written down.

Their independence ended under pressure from Saxony. King Henry I campaigned against them in 932, and in 963 Margrave Gero forced them to submit, which brought their land into the empire's eastern marches, with tribute and missionaries to follow. After that, Lusatia was fought over. Bolesław I of Poland seized it in 1002 and kept it under the Peace of Bautzen in 1018, and the empire took it back in 1031. German settlers arrived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and pushed Slavic speech out to the villages, where it survived long after the tribe itself had faded from the records. The name Lusatia later spread south to cover the old Milceni lands, which is why there is an Upper Lusatia today. The Lower Sorbs, mostly Lutheran since the Reformation, still keep their language going around Cottbus, which they call Chóśebuz. That region has bilingual signs and a Lower Sorbian secondary school, though the language is now seriously endangered.