Rani Erotic

The Rani were a Slavic people who lived on Rügen, Germany's largest island, and on a strip of the facing Baltic mainland from the early Middle Ages until the Danish conquest of 1168. Afterward they were slowly absorbed into the German-speaking population of Pomerania, and their language was gone from the island by the early fifteenth century. What marked them out among the Wendish tribes of that coast was a temple. At Arkona, on the chalk cliffs of Rügen's northern tip, they kept the sanctuary of Svantevit, a four-headed god whose cult drew offerings from Slavs far beyond the island. After the Lutician shrine at Rethra was destroyed in the late eleventh century, Arkona became the last great pagan center of the Baltic Slavs, and the Rani who guarded it carried weight well beyond their numbers.

They spoke a dialect of the Lechitic branch of West Slavic, close to the speech of their Pomeranian and Polabian neighbors and more distantly related to Polish. They were sailors and raiders, and the Danish coasts felt it. Much of what is known about them comes from the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, a hostile but detailed witness. He describes a religion in which the high priest outranked the king. Svantevit had a white horse that only the priest could ride, and the way it stepped over rows of spears laid on the ground was read as an omen before a war. Each year at harvest the priest checked whether the mead in the horn held by the idol had sunk since the year before, and used that to forecast the next crop. Then he stood behind an enormous honey cake and asked the crowd whether they could see him, wishing aloud that next year they would not. The temple kept its own guard of three hundred horsemen. At Charenza, usually identified with modern Garz, more temples housed the many-faced gods Rugievit, Porevit and Porenut.

In 1168 King Valdemar I of Denmark and Bishop Absalon took Arkona, hacked the wooden idol apart and burned it. The Rani princes accepted baptism and Danish overlordship. Their dynasty ruled the Principality of Rügen for another century and a half and granted town rights to Stralsund in 1234. The last of the line, Wizlaw III, died in 1325. He wrote love songs in Middle Low German, which shows how far the court had turned from its Slavic roots. What remains of the Rani is mostly in the ground and on the map: place names across Rügen, Putbus and Garz among them, and the ramparts at Arkona, which the sea is steadily eating away.