The German Church and the Conversion of the Baltic Slavs
THE GERMAN CHURCH AND THE CONVERSION OF THE BALTIC SLAVS JAMES WESTFALL THOMPSON University of Chicago Several Byzantine historians' and an Arabian geographer2 described the eastern Slavs between the sixth and the tenth cen- turies.3 But the first attempt of a western writer to describe the western or Baltic Slavs, i.e., those in the Elbe basin and along the south coast of the Baltic Sea, was made by Adam of Bremen in the middle of the eleventh century.4 3 Procopius, De Bello Gothico, III, chap. 14; Constantine Porphyrogenitos, De Administrando Imperio, chaps. 37, 38; Mauricius, Ars Militaris, IX, chap. 3; XI, chap. 5. 2 Jacob, "Ein arabischer Berichterstatter aus dem io. Jahrhundert," Arabische Geographen,II. 3 For modem literature see Bury, History of the Eastern Roman Empire, chaps. xi, xii; Cambridge Mediaeval History, II, chap. xiv; Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrar- wesen, II, 141-64; Beazeley, Dawn of Modern Geography,II, 467-514; Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. J. B. Bury, igoo), VI, 543-44, with valuable bib- liography. 4 Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesia pontificum: Inestimably valuable as Adam of Bremen is, yet he is often vague and obscure, and his account of the Slavonic tribes between the Elbe and the Oder rivers, especially their geographical distribution, has given rise to extended controversy. According to Giesebrecht (Nordlandskunde, was pp. 157-66; Baltiscke Studien, VI, 192), Adam well informed. But the text of Adam of Bremen is notoriously corrupt and Giesebrecht accuses the scholiast of many blunders and alterations. After the great revolt of the Slavs of the lower Elbe in 983, he argues, the land between the Elbe and the Oder was shut off from Christian knowledge and commercial intercourse, so that ignorance and erroneous ideas of Slavonia naturally came to prevail among the Germans.
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