Lutici Erotic

The Lutici were a federation of pagan West Slavic tribes who held the land between the Elbe and the Oder, in what is now northeastern Germany, from the late tenth century until the twelfth, when Saxon, Danish and Pomeranian conquest and German settlement swallowed them. No people bears the name today. Whatever descends from them is folded, unmarked, into the population of Mecklenburg and Vorpommern. What set them apart from their Slavic neighbors was not language or gods but politics. The Obotrites to the west and the Poles to the east had princes. The Lutici refused one. Four tribes, the Kessini, Circipani, Tollensians and Redarians, ran the federation through assemblies where decisions had to be unanimous, and Thietmar of Merseburg reported that a man who spoke against a settled verdict was beaten with rods, and one who resisted it afterward had his property burned or paid a fine scaled to his rank. Earlier writers call the same people Veleti or Wilzi, the confederation Charlemagne marched against in 789. The new name, probably from the Slavic word for fierce, appears with the uprising of 983, when they burned the mission bishoprics at Havelberg and Brandenburg and pushed the German frontier back to the Elbe for a century and a half.

Their center was Rethra, in Redarian country: a wooden temple inside a stronghold on a lake, its walls carved with gods, its chief idol Svarozhits, whom Adam of Bremen calls Radegast, and its priests casting lots and leading a sacred horse across crossed spears before any campaign. They were pagans who picked sides among Christians. From 1003 they marched with the German king Henry II against Christian Poland, their goddess carried on a standard, and when a Saxon threw a stone at her the king paid compensation. In 1056 they destroyed a Saxon army on the Elbe at Pritzlawa. A year later they turned on each other, Kessini and Circipani against Tollensians and Redarians, and the federation never acted as one again. Around 1068 a bishop of Halberstadt sacked Rethra and rode home on the temple horse. The site has never been found, and the bronze Prillwitz idols passed off as its relics in the eighteenth century were forgeries. The Wendish Crusade of 1147 and the campaigns of Henry the Lion and the Pomeranian dukes finished the job, and the tribal names drop out of the record. What remains is on the map: the Tollense river and lake, Kessin outside Rostock, the Peene country Latin writers called Circipania, and hundreds of village names ending in -ow and -in across a landscape that stayed Slavic-speaking for generations after it stopped being Lutician.