Milceni Erotic

The Milceni were a West Slavic people who settled the hill country and loess fields around what is now Bautzen, in eastern Saxony, from about the seventh century, and who lost their political independence to Saxon and then Bohemian rulers between the 930s and the eleventh century. They were not wiped out. Their descendants are the Upper Sorbs, a Slavic minority still living in the same villages, still speaking a Slavic language surrounded by German, and still calling Bautzen by its older name, Budyšin.

What made the Milceni legible to their neighbors was land and fortification rather than any name they used for themselves. A ninth-century Frankish list known as the Bavarian Geographer credited the Milzane with thirty civitates, which almost certainly meant ring forts: earth and timber enclosures on spurs above the Spree, each holding a cluster of farming settlements below it. Their country was called Milsko, and it sat in a tight neighborhood. The Lusici lay north across the heath, the Daleminzi west toward the Elbe, the Besunzane east near the Neisse, and Bohemia south over the mountains. Henry I made them tributary in 932, and the margraves of Meissen finished the work at the end of the century. After that Milsko changed hands repeatedly: Bolesław the Brave of Poland took it in 1002 and kept it under the Peace of Bautzen in 1018, the Empire recovered it in the 1030s, and by the 1070s it had passed to Bohemia, where it stayed for centuries.

Christianity arrived with the conquerors, imposed from the new diocese of Meissen on a population that had been burying its dead with Slavic rites, and it took generations to settle. That produced one of the stranger facts about the region: because the land answered to the Bohemian crown and to church landlords, a knot of Sorbian villages northwest of Bautzen stayed Catholic straight through the Reformation while Saxony around them turned Lutheran, and those villages remain the core of Catholic Sorbian life today. The name Milceni itself faded early. Lusatia was originally the country of the Lusici to the north, and only in the late Middle Ages did the label slide south over Milsko to become Upper Lusatia. What survived is quieter and more durable: Upper Sorbian, which grew out of the speech of this district and leans toward Czech where its Lower Sorbian cousin leans toward Polish, and a countryside where nearly every village still carries a Sorbian name beside its German one.