The Linones never wrote anything themselves, and almost every line about them concerns an army about to cross the Elbe. Even so, the sources allow a few readings: a country on the northern bank of the Elbe opposite the Höhbeck, a people pressed by Danes and Franks at once in 808, a list with seven strongholds, and a last entry in 877. This article goes through the evidence piece by piece, separates source from interpretation, and tests a claim that hums beneath many accounts: that the Linones played a part in the battle of Lenzen in 929.
Anyone who wants to know about the Linones meets a peculiarity of the record: not one source comes from their own hand. Everything we have was written by Frankish and Saxon chroniclers who reported campaigns, tribute demands and border questions. The Linones appear in them as a target, as rebels, as neighbours of other peoples, seldom as an acting community with a face of its own. We learn where an army marched, not how the people there lived.
That is no reason to stop here; it is the subject. With the Linones one can see how strongly modern accounts shape a whole picture from a few lines: a settlement area with firm borders, a central place, a relationship to the neighbours. What is attested and what research has added can be told apart fairly exactly. The written record runs from about 808 to 877, a little under seventy years. After that the name is lost; later, other names and other groupings are at work on the Elbe, among them the Wilzi and the Lutici (see Wilzen and Lutizen).
A note on method: we have seen the Latin sources only in excerpts and through databases, overview articles and English translations, not in the manuscripts or critical editions. Where a wording is quoted, the text says where it comes from. The list of sources at the end says honestly what was checked and what was not.
In the sources the Linones appear as Linones (Royal Annals), as Linai (Chronicle of Moissac) and as Linaa (Bavarian Geographer). Other spellings such as Hilinones, Lini or Linguones are added. The German form "Linonen" is a modern adaptation of the Latin name, not a transmitted self-designation.
What the name means is not settled. German Wikipedia offers as a possible derivation the Slavic word glina, "clay, loam", and thinks of rivers, streams and loamy lowlands. That is an interpretation. Whether "Linones" was a name the people used themselves or one that outsiders gave a group remains open. That would not be unusual: many tribal names of the Elbe Slavs are known only from Frankish pens, and the scribes wrote down what messengers and prisoners told them, not necessarily what the people concerned said about themselves.
An explanation one sometimes reads equates the name Linones with the name of the town Lenzen. The similarity is striking, but we found no source that explicitly argues it. The Wikipedia page on Lenzen (Elbe) does not explain the place name and does not link it to the Linones. We therefore treat it below as an open question.
The usual localisation, as summarised by German Wikipedia: in the 9th century the Linones lived in today's Westprignitz in north-west Brandenburg, on the northern bank of the Elbe. Their territory reached, on this account, from the area around Wehningen north of Dömitz to Lenzen. To the north the Elde forms a boundary; to the east a forest between Ture and Pritzwalk separates them from the Dossani; to the south another forest, the Rodahn, separates them from the Brizani around Havelberg, and crossing it is said to have taken two days. Research has assembled these details from various sources; they do not stand in a single line of a chronicler.
English Wikipedia puts it more simply: north and east of the Elbe, opposite the Höhbeck, in the region around Lenzen, south of Wilzi and Obodrites, north of the Hevelli, north-east of the Saxons. The Höhbeck is a ridge on the left, Saxon bank of the Elbe in today's Wendland, where the Franks had a fortification that was destroyed in 810 and rebuilt in 811. From the Frankish side the land of the Linones therefore lies exactly "across the river".
Archaeologically, German Wikipedia names the settlement centre between Grabow and Putlitz. Early Slavic ringforts are listed at Frehne, Pinnow, Mankmuß, Stavenow, Dallmin, Dambeck, Brunow, Wulfsahl, Marnitz and Muchow, among others. We took this list from Wikipedia and did not check it against excavation reports. For readers on the ground it is still a usable signpost: Slavic settlement in the Prignitz is today recognised mostly by place names and rampart remains.
It is not settled whether the Linones also lived on the left bank of the Elbe, in today's Lüchow-Dannenberg. Wikipedia names this explicitly as an open question.
The first secure mention stands in the Frankish Royal Annals (Annales regni Francorum) for the year 808. The work is a court-near chronicle of the Frankish realm that records campaigns, assemblies and embassies year by year. For 808 it reports that the Danish king Godfred had entered the land of the Obodrites with an army. Charlemagne sent his son Charles with Franks and Saxons to the Elbe to oppose Godfred should he attack Saxony. Godfred drove out the Obodrite leader Thrasco, had a rival, Godelaib, hanged by trickery and, the Annals say, made two thirds of the Obodrites tributary. In the English rendering on the De Re Militari site, the king's son Charles then threw a bridge across the Elbe and marched against "the Linones and Smeldingi", "who had also defected to king Godfred". He laid waste their fields and returned unharmed to Saxony.
Two things should be fixed. First, the Linones are not named as allies of the Franks or of the Obodrites but as defectors who had gone over to Godfred. The sentence often read, that Godfred "attacked" the Linones or that they were "vassals of the Obodrites", is not in the passage. Second, the text shows the Linones in a political situation where three powers meet: the Danish kingship under Godfred, the Frankish-Saxon realm, and the Obodrite federation, to which the Linones belonged at least at times or in whose sphere of influence they lay.
Whether the Franks really won in 808 is disputed on the sources. The Royal Annals report an unmolested return. The Annals of Lorsch (as reported by English Wikipedia) suggest instead a setback with heavy losses, and the Chronicle of Moissac confirms Frankish losses. English Wikipedia points to Johannes Fried, who assumes heavy losses on both sides. That the Danes afterwards asked for peace speaks, on this account, for the show of force having worked at least in part. Whoever tells 808 as a clean Frankish success follows the court chronicle; whoever consults the other annals gets a less tidy picture. It is a neat test of how court historiography works: it names results that fit the self-image of the realm.
… unum trans Albiam in Linones, qui et ipsos vastavit … castellum Hohbuoki superiori anno a Wilzis distructum in ripa Albiae fluminis restauravit.Annales regni Francorum for 811 (Latin excerpts from the text database of the Austrian Academy of Sciences' medieval project); own translation: "… one [of the three armies] across the Elbe against the Linones, and it laid waste to them too … it rebuilt the fortress of Höhbeck on the bank of the Elbe, destroyed the year before by the Wilzi." Only the quoted clauses were seen in the text; the context is shortened.
Soon after, the country of the Linones comes into view again. English Wikipedia reports that the Wilzi destroyed the Frankish fortress at the Höhbeck in 810 and that the Linones may have taken part. That is a conjecture; the passage in the Royal Annals, as far as we have seen it, names only the Wilzi. German Wikipedia calls the Wilzi allies of the Linones without giving a source for the alliance that we could verify.
In 811, after the spring assembly, Charlemagne sent out three armies, one of which crossed the Elbe against the Linones and ravaged them. The same army rebuilt the Höhbeck fortress destroyed the year before. That is the passage in the quotation above. Both parts stand close together in the Latin text, and that is telling: the fortification at the Höhbeck was evidently the anchor from which the Franks kept the opposite bank under pressure. The Chronicle of Moissac adds for the same year the devastation of the land of the Bechelenzi (after English Wikipedia, which cites Moissac itself via a thesis). Where exactly the Bechelenzi lived we could not establish.
German Wikipedia also says an attempt by Thrasco in 809 to subject the Linones to his rule again failed. The Royal Annals for 809, in the English translation we saw, do not mention the Linones. Only the Smeldingi appear there, whose greatest civitas Thrasco captured. The sentence about the Linones is therefore an inference from other sources and unconfirmed by us.
Probably the most important statement on the size and make-up of the Linones stands in the Bavarian Geographer (Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii). It is a short list of peoples and strongholds, transmitted in a 9th-century manuscript from Reichenau Abbey, now in Munich. The name "Bavarian Geographer" was coined by Jan Potocki in 1796; the manuscript was found in the Bavarian State Library in 1772 (after English Wikipedia). The dating varies: Bernhard Bischoff thought of the 830s to 850s, Aleksandr Nazarenko of the 870s, Henryk Łowmiański considered two parts of different age possible. The Wikipedia article on the Linones gives "around 845" as the most likely date of this list.
The entry reads, after English Wikipedia: Linaa est populus, qui habet civitates VII, the Linaa are a people who have seven civitates. By civitas the text probably means not a town in today's sense but a fortified district. That is the usual reading, but a reading. For comparison the list has the Nortabtrezi, that is the Obodrites, with 53 civitates, the Uuilci (Wilzi) with 95 and four regions, the Hehfeldi (Hevelli) with eight, and the Bethenici, Smeldingon and Morizani together with eleven. From this one reads that the Linones were a small group compared with the Obodrites. The word populus is notable: the author saw them as a people of their own, not just part of a larger one.
Against this stands a more recent scholarly view that German Wikipedia reports: perhaps the Linones were not a tribe with its own political order but the tribute-paying inhabitants of an Elbe region in which the Franks set up a simple administration. By the same account Rossignol allows the term "tribe" at most for the 9th century. This is a discussion about terms. It concerns all the Slavs on the Elbe, since "tribe" is a category that chroniclers and later scholars applied to groups whose inner order we hardly know.
After that the Linones appear three more times. In 838/839 they took part, according to English Wikipedia, in a general Slavic uprising; the Annals of St-Bertin (Annales Bertiniani) report that Louis the Pious sent a Saxon army against the Obodrites and Linones. In 858, according to the Annals of Fulda, Louis the German, more precisely his son Louis the Younger, moved against Obodrites and Linones. From this a close tie of the Linones to the Obodrites is inferred. That they were "absorbed" into the Obodrite federation in 839, as German Wikipedia writes, is by its own qualification derived, not documented; the same goes for an alliance in 858.
The last entry is for 877, again in the Annals of Fulda: the Linones refused the tribute they owed to the East Frankish ruler. Wikipedia says no more, and we have not seen the wording. What stands out is how uniform the scenes seem: an army, a river, a tribute. That is how chroniclers wrote about peoples they regarded as neighbours but not as part of the realm. A tribute is something other than rule; it can be a payment under pressure that one stops once the pressure eases.
In many accounts the fortress of Lenzen stands at the start of the Linones' history, and the battle of 929 counts as their great moment. The sources do not allow that. Widukind of Corvey, a monk who wrote his Res gestae Saxonicae (Deeds of the Saxons) around 967, tells in the first book (chapter 36) of the revolt of the Redarii, a sub-group of the Elbe Slavs. They had taken the Saxon fortress of Walsleben, whereupon King Henry I sent an army under the legate Bernhard and Count Thietmar against them. They were to besiege the stronghold "Lenzen", in the Latin text Lunkini. The Saxons won; fifty armoured horsemen in the flank are said to have decided it, the fleeing were cut off at the fortress, drowned in the lake or killed, and the captives were beheaded the next day.
We saw the chapter in Bachrach's English translation on the JASSA site, in short samples, and via Wikipedia on the battle of Lenzen. According to these, the chapter names Obodrites, Wilzi, Hevelli, Daleminzi, Bohemians and Redarii, but not the Linones. In German Wikipedia's article on the battle the Linones appear only as the people in whose land Lenzen lay; their role in the fight is not described. The date given there is 4 September 929.
That makes the position clear. Established: in 929 there was a battle at a fortress that Widukind calls Lunkini and that is equated with Lenzen. Not established: that the Linones fought there. Plausible: that the fortress lay in the area that scholarship attributes to the Linones and that the inhabitants of the surroundings lived through the events. An interpretation: that the word Lunkini is linguistically related to Linones. The fortress also appears as Lunzini (Latin) and Luczyn (Slavic); German Wikipedia on Lenzen gives these spellings and puts the fortress at the end of the first millennium. Archaeological evidence for this dating is not named there. That the Linones had their seat at Lenzen is written by German Wikipedia on the Linones, but it does not stand in the annals.
According to Wikipedia the fortress was again under Slavic control from 983. That falls in the time of the great Slavic uprising of 983, after which, in the usual account, the federation of the Lutici took shape. Of the Linones nothing is heard in this period.
Their relationship to the neighbours can be stated only in outline, and the outlines are drawn differently in the literature.
The Smeldingi (Smeldingi, in the Bavarian Geographer Smeldingon) are named together with the Linones in 808. According to German Wikipedia they lived north of the Linones in the area of the Plauer See. Both peoples stand side by side in the list, the Bethenici, Smeldingon and Morizani together with eleven strongholds. How close the kinship was, no text says; English Wikipedia expressly declines to say.
On the Wilzi there are two readings. English Wikipedia considers the Linones possibly a sub-group of the Wilzi; German calls the Wilzi allies. What is attested is only that both appear in the same years on the same Elbe, 810 and 811. Whoever simply counts the Linones among the Wilzi goes beyond what the sources bear.
The Obodrites appear beside the Linones in 808, 839 and 858. The Linones stood close to the federation or were at times dependent on it. Godfred made two thirds of the Obodrites tributary in 808, and the Linones went over to him, which means they did not see themselves bound to Thrasco's side.
The Hevelli (Hehfeldi in the list, with eight civitates) lived to the south around the Havel; according to the landscape details, a belt of forest separated the two areas. The Saxons, finally, stood on the other bank. For them the Linones were not an enemy in wartime but a border people from whom tribute was wanted and against whom one occasionally marched.
Once more, the layers. Established are the few passages in the annals and in the Bavarian Geographer. Plausible are the location in the Prignitz, the link to the Obodrites and the assignment of the ringforts between Grabow and Putlitz; they rest on combining several sources and finds. Interpreted are the name (glina), the term "tribe" and the equation Linones equals Lenzen. Told is the rest: the seat at Lenzen, the alliance with the Wilzi, or the role in 929. We found no legend about the Linones, and we do not invent one.
For readers interested in North German history, the case of the Linones is a good example of how the river worked. In the early 9th century the Elbe was the line where the Frankish realm ended, and at the same time the road along which armies, messengers and merchants travelled. To throw a bridge across it, as Charles the Younger did in 808, was a military feat and a political sign. The Höhbeck, which the Franks fortified several times, is still a visible point in the landscape near Gartow, looking out over the flat land of the Prignitz.
Of the Slavs who lived there, the language has long vanished, but their names remain: many place names in the Prignitz are of Slavic origin, even if the interpretation of individual names is often disputed. Whoever travels along the Elbe moves through a country whose early medieval inhabitants we know in part only through the reports of those who marched against them.
The reason the Linones appear in campaign reports can also be named: they lay at a point where three interests met. The Danes wanted tribute and influence on the Baltic coast, the Franks and Saxons wanted to hold the Elbe frontier, and the Obodrites tried to hold their federation together. A small people with seven fortified districts, as the Bavarian Geographer counts them, was caught between the millstones.
About the daily life of the Linones our sources say nothing. We know nothing of their gods, their crafts, their language beyond names, their princes. Whoever finds such things in books mostly takes them from descriptions of neighbouring Elbe Slavs or from archaeological generalisations. That may be right, but it is not a statement about the Linones.
What can be said is little and therefore exact: between 808 and 877 there was on the lower Elbe a community that contemporaries perceived as a people of its own, that was counted with seven fortified districts, that stood now with, now against Obodrites, Danes and Franks, and that withdrew from tribute in 877. Where its strongholds stood, the spade shows step by step. What it thought of itself, we do not know.
The motifs we laser-engrave on slate in our workshop from Nordic and Germanic tradition rest on a much better base of sources than those of the Linones. This article still belongs in the series, because it shows how to deal with thin evidence: read what is there and mark everything else. Our plates are made as laser-engraved slate by the family workshop in Alsdorf.
The Wilzi · The Liutizi · The Hevelli · The Brizani · The Abodrites.
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