Three short mentions in foreign texts, a few dozen hillforts and a stronghold on the cathedral island of Głogów: that is all we have of the Dziadoszanie. A Bavarian monk credited them with twenty strongholds, and a Saxon bishop had an emperor welcomed at their border and an army destroyed in their land. This article separates what the sources and excavations yield from what later ages and modern interpretation have added.
The Dziadoszanie belong to the groups we know only through the eyes of others. In the early Middle Ages they lived in the north of present-day Lower Silesia, in the area between the Bóbr (German Bober) and the middle Oder, where Głogów, formerly Glogau, and Szprotawa, formerly Sprottau, stand today. They were West Slavs, part of the Slavic-speaking population between the Elbe and the Vistula from which Poles, Czechs, Sorbs and the now vanished Elbe Slavs later emerged. Whether they saw themselves as one people, and whether they had a single prince or many minor lords, we do not know.
Their name appears in three groups of sources, and each spells it differently. The so-called Bavarian Geographer, a list of peoples from the 9th century, gives Dadosesani. Thietmar of Merseburg, Saxon bishop and chronicler, writes Diedesisi in one place and Diadesisi in another, according to the German translation on Wikisource. A boundary description of the bishopric of Prague, preserved in a charter of Emperor Henry IV of 1086, lists Dedosize. Polish scholarship speaks of the Dziadoszanie or Dziadoszyce, older German literature of Dedosizen or Dadosanen. "Dziadoszanie" is therefore a modern scholarly name, not a word anyone in the 10th century would have pronounced in that form.
This situation shapes everything else. There is no text from the hand of the Dziadoszanie, no inscription and no legend that can safely be connected to them. Anyone writing about them assembles a picture from three short written passages, some excavations and a good deal of regional geography. We show where the pieces come from and where gaps are filled with conjecture.
Polish accounts often say the name goes back to the Slavic word děd, Polish dziad, "grandfather, ancestor." Regional texts like to turn this into a people of ancestor worshippers. That is too quick a step. Deriving the name from děd is linguistically plausible, but it says nothing about how the word entered the name. A personal name built on it is conceivable, with a group or place then named after its bearer. Slavic group names in -ici often denote the people or descendants of one man, names in -ane the inhabitants of a place or landscape. Which formation came first cannot be read with certainty from the Latin spellings. Dadosesani sounds more like the second type, Dedosize more like the first, and that is exactly why Polish scholarship uses both forms side by side.
What can be stated is this: the link with děd is a widespread linguistic interpretation. The inference of a special ancestor cult is an embellishment without evidence. Many societies in Europe venerated their ancestors, and a name alone proves no such thing.
The location hangs on a few threads. The first is Thietmar. He describes the journey of Emperor Otto III in the year 1000 to Gniezno, where the emperor wished to pray at the tomb of Saint Adalbert. According to Thietmar, Otto travelled by way of Zeitz and Meissen, crossed the territory of the Milceni in what is now Upper Lusatia, and was received by Duke Bolesław the Brave at the border of the district of Diedesisi, at a place called Ilua. The land therefore lay east of the Milceni, on the route from Meissen to Gniezno.
The second thread is the Prague boundary description. It lists the territories in the north that were to belong to the bishopric of Prague and ends with the words Pobarane, Dedosize usque ad mediam silvam, qua Milcianorum occurrunt termini: the Pobarane, the Dedosize as far as the middle of the forest where the borders of the Milceni meet them. Here too the Dedosize border the Milceni, separated by a forest. The charter dates from 1086 but claims an older state of affairs, which scholars usually connect with the founding of the bishopric of Prague in the 970s. How much of it truly reflects the situation around 973 and how much is Prague's 11th-century wishful claiming remains disputed.
The third thread is Thietmar's account of the campaign of 1015, to which we return below. Taken together, they point to an area between the Milceni in the west and the Oder in the east. The exact border is open. Polish scholarship usually places the core area on the middle Bóbr and lets it extend east to the Oder at Głogów. This extent is widely accepted but supported by no source that names Głogów and the Dziadoszanie together. There is also a contradiction: immediately before the Dedosize, the Prague charter names the Pobarane, whose name is usually connected with the Bóbr. If these Bobrzanie sat on the Bóbr, the land of the Dziadoszanie may move further east or north. Some accounts even consider that both names refer to the same group. A map with clean lines would be an invention at this point. To the west lay the Lusici of Lower Lusatia, one of the groups now grouped together under the name Sorbs.
The oldest mention appears in the Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii, the "Description of the strongholds and regions north of the Danube." Scholars call its unknown author the Bavarian Geographer. The list survives in a Munich manuscript. Bernhard Bischoff attributed it to a monk active on Reichenau between the 830s and the 850s; Aleksandr Nazarenko considers the 870s more likely. The text lists peoples and gives a number of civitates for each. In one row it names groups from later Silesia and Lusatia: Sleenzane civitates XV. Lunsizi civitates XXX. Dadosesani civitates XX. Milzane civitates XXX. The Ślężanie around Mount Ślęża south of Wrocław, the Lusici, the Dziadoszanie and the Milceni thus stand side by side, almost as they lie on the map.
What a civitas means here is a question of its own. The Latin word literally means a citizen body or a town. In the Bavarian Geographer it is widely taken to mean stronghold districts: small settlement pockets with a fortified centre, the hillfort. Whether the scribe had real counts or adopted round numbers from traders and envoys, nobody knows. Twenty is a strikingly neat figure. It is best read as an order of magnitude: a territory with many small centres, not a realm with a capital.
Archaeology has produced a pattern for this area that fits the list. Older Polish studies, on which the overviews rely, distinguish 31 smaller settlement pockets in the presumed territory of the Dziadoszanie, 17 of which had a hillfort. These figures go back to Zofia Hilczerówna and Anna Urbańska-Łosińska (1970) and to Jerzy Lodowski (1980); we know them only at second hand. The closeness between 17 hillforts in the ground and 20 civitates in the text is tempting but proves nothing. Not every hillfort is of the same age, and we do not know by what measure the Geographer counted.
Głogów is the most tangible case. The town lies at an old crossing of the Oder. On the cathedral island, Ostrów Tumski, excavations between 1963 and 1993 uncovered a stronghold with a timber-and-earth rampart, log buildings inside and a street paved with round timbers. According to the regional encyclopaedia of Głogów, the rampart was about 15 metres wide at its base and the stronghold covered about 0.7 hectares. A dendrochronological date, that is, a dating based on the tree rings of the timbers used, places its construction around 989. This is the stronghold of the Piasts, the first Polish ruling dynasty, not that of the Dziadoszanie. Regional scholarship places the older tribal stronghold elsewhere, near the mouth of the Barycz into the Oder. We have not seen an excavation report on it.
At Szprotawa the situation is even more open. In the town's Park Słowiański lies a plateau of a good four hectares, popularly called the Stronghold of Chrobry and known before 1945 as the Nonnenbuschberg. A test excavation by the Institute of Archaeology of the Polish Academy of Sciences under Mariusz Łesiuk in December 2008 yielded early medieval pottery. The site is thus classed as early medieval. Whether it is Thietmar's Ilua is a hypothesis popular locally. Earlier digs at other spots in the town produced nothing in 1996, and Iłowa has also been proposed as the location.
For Silesia the 10th century was a time of changing overlords. Bohemian dukes of the Přemyslid house reached north from Prague, and the Prague boundary description with its Dedosize is the most important evidence of that claim. Whether Bohemia actually governed here or merely took tribute, and whether the Dziadoszanie were included at all, cannot be said with certainty. Around 990 conflict broke out between the Polish duke Mieszko I and Boleslav II of Bohemia, at the end of which Silesia, in the prevailing view, belonged to the Piast sphere of power. That a new stronghold arose on Ostrów Tumski in exactly these years fits the picture. Still, the equation "dendro date 989 equals conquest" is no proof, because strongholds were built or renewed for other reasons as well.
With the transition to Piast rule, political independence ended, if it ever existed in a firm sense. Głogów became the seat of a castellany, a stronghold district administered by an official in the duke's name. The old settlement pockets lived on within the new system, now under foreign lords. Whether the people still thought of themselves as Dziadoszanie, the sources do not say. How this transition looked among the neighbours on the upper Oder is shown in the article on the Opolanie.
The most famous passage stands in the fourth book of Thietmar's chronicle. Around the turn of 999/1000, Otto III travelled to the tomb of Adalbert, the former bishop of Prague, who had been killed among the Prussians in 997. The visit to Gniezno, during which an archbishopric was founded there, is regarded as a turning point in Polish history. For the Dziadoszanie the passage matters for another reason: it names their land as the place where the Polish ruler received his imperial guest.
When he had then passed through the territory of the Milcini, Bolizlav […], as soon as he appeared at the borders of the district of Diedesisi, hurried to meet him with many signs of joy, having arranged his hospitality at a place named Ilua.Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicle, Book IV (ch. 28 in the Wikisource version); own English translation of the public-domain 19th-century German translation on Wikisource, omission marked; Latin text not checked
Thietmar wrote between 1012 and 1018, so he was not an eyewitness of the year 1000. He was well informed but partisan: Bolesław was a dangerous opponent to him, and he often judges him bitterly. The omission in the quotation concerns an aside in which Thietmar interprets the name Bolesław as "more glory" and remarks pointedly that the duke bore it not by merit. The word "borders" deserves attention. For Thietmar, the district of Diedesisi marks the start of the area where Bolesław acts as host. Whether the district was still a political unit of its own at that time or only a landscape name, the sentence does not reveal. How the Latin version names the area, whether as pagus or with another word, we have not checked in the original.
Fifteen years later the host had become an enemy. Between 1002 and 1018 Henry II and Bolesław the Brave fought repeated wars over Lusatia, the land of the Milceni and Bohemia. In the summer of 1015 Henry marched against Bolesław into the Oder region. On the way home, Thietmar writes in his seventh book, the army came into a district called Diadesisi and camped at a narrow spot where only a Zeidler lived, a forest beekeeper who harvested the honey of wild bees from tree hollows. Bolesław had sent foot soldiers ahead and dispatched an abbot named Tuni to the emperor with supposed peace proposals. Henry saw through the spy, held him until almost the whole army had crossed a body of water, and went on ahead. He left the rearguard to Archbishop Gero of Magdeburg, Margrave Gero and Count Palatine Burchard.
Then came the attack from the nearby forest, with a threefold war cry and archers running between the ranks. Twice the rearguard held, then it collapsed when it ran out of arrows. Thietmar counts Counts Gero and Folcmar and two hundred "of the finest knights" among the dead and gives 1 September as the day of the disaster. Bishop Eid of Meissen was later allowed, with Bolesław's permission, to bury the fallen. In passing, the scene reveals something about the land: forest, marsh and water determined the routes, and whoever knew the terrain had the advantage.
Where exactly the battle took place is disputed. Proposals include the area between Przemków and Szprotawa, Lubiechów near Ochla close to Zielona Góra, and the municipality of Gromadka. Thietmar gives no place name, only the district, a narrow spot and the water. In Szprotawa a memorial stone in Park Słowiański has recalled the battle in the land of the Dziadoszanie since 2019. It is a sign of present-day remembrance, not a find spot. The figure of two hundred dead comes from the losing side; some Polish historians consider the losses to have been considerably higher. Neither view can be proven.
Głogów itself appears in Thietmar's chronicle under the year 1010, when Henry II marched against Bolesław, and again in 1017, when the imperial army stood before the stronghold once more without taking it. The following year the two sides concluded the Peace of Bautzen. We took these details from overview literature and did not check them in the chronicle itself; accounts differ on whether there was a proper siege in 1017. Almost a century later, in 1109, Henry V besieged Głogów in vain. This is told by the chronicler known as Gallus Anonymus, a foreigner at the Polish court who wrote the first chronicle of Poland around 1115. For Gallus, Głogów is a stronghold of the Polish duke, and there is no mention of the Dziadoszanie.
By this point at the latest the tribal name has vanished from the narrative sources. Thietmar's account of 1015 is the last mention connected to contemporary events. The Prague charter of 1086 names the Dedosize once more, but it repeats an older boundary situation, whether genuine or claimed. After that, charters describe the region by strongholds and castellanies, no longer by tribes.
The name stayed alive in historical scholarship. Polish historians of the 19th and 20th centuries placed the Dziadoszanie in a series of "Silesian tribes," alongside the Ślężanie, Opolanie, Bobrzanie, Trzebowianie and Gołęszyce. Such lists are useful, but they are modern arrangements. Some of the names rest on a single source, and the borders between the groups are mostly inferred. The label "Polish tribe" also calls for caution: the Dziadoszanie lived before the Polish state came into being, and the fact that they were later absorbed into it does not make them Poles in the 9th century. Conversely, both German and Polish national historiography repeatedly enlisted early medieval groups for the territorial claims of their own day. Neither helps us understand the sources.
Locally, a memory of its own has formed. In Szprotawa a park and a memorial stone carry traces of the battle of 1015, and in Głogów town history and the local press tell of the city's Slavic founders. That is legitimate local heritage work. It should simply not be confused with the evidence, because some of the figures and lists of strongholds given there contradict one another, and not every one can be traced back to an excavation.
The case is a lesson in the source situation of east-central Europe before the year 1000. A name appears in a list in the 9th century, together with a number. A good hundred and fifty years later a Saxon chronicler mentions it twice, both times as the backdrop to events he actually cares about: an emperor's visit and the destruction of a rearguard. A Prague charter repeats it as a boundary marker in an ecclesiastical claim. In between lie hillforts, pottery and a stronghold on the cathedral island of Głogów that already belonged to the Piasts.
What can be said is nonetheless considerable. Between the Bóbr and the Oder, in the 9th and 10th centuries, lived a Slavic group that outsiders knew under a name of its own and to which a geographer attributed twenty stronghold districts. In 1000 their land was a border zone of the Polish duke, and in 1015 the scene of a war between him and the emperor. After that the name fades. How these people spoke, what they believed and what they called themselves, no source tells us. Naming that gap openly is more honest than any story that fills it.
The Slensanes · The Lebusians · The Milceni · The Opolans · The Czechs & Bohemians.
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