Stand today at the harbour of Gdańsk and you see brick gables, cranes and the Motława. No sign tells you that around the year 1000 a fortified place already stood here, whose name first appears in the life of a martyr bishop. "Pomerelian" is not a word of the sources but a modern collective name for the people of Pomerelia. This article collects what the texts actually say about the land, separates it from later interpretation, and says openly where we could read only secondary literature.
No medieval text we know has people calling themselves "Pomerelians". The word is modern. It gathers the inhabitants of the land called Pommerellen in German, Pomorze Gdańskie ("Gdańsk Pomerania") or Pomorze Wschodnie ("Eastern Pomerania") in Polish. Pomerelia means "Little Pomerania". As a name for the land it is, according to Wikipedia, attested only late; the Pomerellian Handfeste of 1441, issued by the Teutonic Order's Grand Master Konrad von Erlichshausen, is the example given. The root behind it is older: Slavic po more ("by the sea") is a plausible derivation of the name Pomerania, but it is not proven.
The early chroniclers simply say "Pomorani", Pomeranians, and, as the literature reports, do not cleanly separate western Pomerania on the Oder from the eastern land on the Vistula. Anyone expecting a twelfth-century map with "Pomerelia" written on it will be disappointed. The distinction is a later ordering, made above all by historians who wanted to keep apart two realms with different fates: the Griffin dukes in the west, the dukes of Gdańsk in the east.
A few terms first. A duke (Latin dux) is in the charters the ruler of a land, though the title does not always mean the same thing; it can denote a largely independent prince or a governor. The Samborides are the dynasty that ruled Pomerelia from Gdańsk in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the name is a modern scholarly label derived from Duke Sambor, and some accounts speak of the Sobiesławice after the ancestor Subislaw. A stronghold in the early medieval east is rarely a stone building, usually a fortified place of timber and earth where lordship, craft and trade came together. A tribe in this article is not a state but a settlement community with a shared name.
What follows about location is reconstruction by modern scholars, not a statement of the sources. Pomerelia lay on the Baltic between the lower Vistula in the east and the land around Schlawe and Stolp (Sławno and Słupsk) in the west; to the south it bordered the Noteć (Netze) and thus the Piast land of Greater Poland. The heart of the country was formed by the Bay of Gdańsk, the mouth of the Vistula, a hilly hinterland of lakes, and the town whose stronghold stood on the river Motława.
The borders were never fixed. When Duke Swantopolk II took the land around Schlawe in 1238, he linked, according to the English Wikipedia, Gdańsk with Nakło and Bydgoszcz, and his rule reached far to the west; later Schlawe and Stolp passed to the Duchy of Pomerania. In the south-east, around Mewe (Gniew), the Teutonic Order appeared as a neighbour in 1282, when Mestwin II had to cede that area to it. Whoever draws a sharp line is therefore drawing one particular moment, usually the thirteenth century, and not "the" Pomerelia.
What the sources make clear is the importance of water. The Vistula was a trade route; tolls on the river became a point of dispute between the dukes and the Order in the thirteenth century (more on that below). The sea made Gdańsk a port. That the settlement pockets inland were small in scale remains an assumption; what is documented are individual strongholds and monasteries, hardly any villages.
Archaeology knows older cultures in the region whose names easily mislead. The Pomeranian culture (also called the face-urn culture) belongs to the early Iron Age and takes its name from the landscape, not from the Pomeranians who appear centuries later. It was followed by, among others, the Oksywie culture and the Wielbark culture. The Wielbark culture is often linked in research with the Goths whom Tacitus mentions at the mouth of the Vistula; we have separate articles on the Goths and the Gutones (Goths, Gutones). Whether every burial of these cultures is "Gothic" cannot be read from pottery; cultures are finds, not peoples.
How exactly the inhabitants of late antiquity became the Slavic-speaking population of the tenth century, whether through immigration, mixing or both, cannot at present be clearly demonstrated. Wikipedia summarises the finding thus: in the tenth century the land was predominantly Slavic, with a fluid border to the Baltic Prussians in the east. A name the people themselves bore is not handed down by the sources for this period.
The oldest written mention of Gdańsk stands in the life of Saint Adalbert of Prague. Adalbert was bishop of Prague, left Bohemia for the mission, and died in 997 in the land of the Prussians. On his way there, in the spring of 997, he came to Gdańsk. The life known as the Vita prior was written around 999 and is traditionally attributed to the monk John Canaparius; how secure that attribution is, we leave open. A later life was written by Bruno of Querfurt; it gives one detail about Adalbert's killer but, as far as we can see, does not help for Gdańsk.
He himself first went to the town of Gyddanyzc, which marks off the duke's very wide realms and touches the borders of the sea. There, as divine mercy favoured his arrival, great crowds of people were baptised.Vita prior of Saint Adalbert (c. 999), Karwasińska edition 1962, quoted here from Roman Sukač, "The Case of Gdańsk" (Linguistica Brunensia 2021); own translation. Latin: "Ipse uero adiit primo urbem Gyddanyzc, quam ducis latissima regna dirimentem maris confinia tagunt …". The printed form "tagunt" we read as "tangunt" (as in later versions); we have not seen the edition itself.
Two things stand out. First, the quoted sentence names no duke; the usual reading takes the Polish ruler, but that is an interpretation of the context. Second, the text says only that Gdańsk was a town (urbs) at the edge of the realm and that baptisms took place there. It does not say who the people were, what language they spoke, and it does not say that the town was founded in 997. It is the first surviving entry, nothing more. Thietmar of Merseburg, writing at about the same time, never names Gdańsk, according to Sukač.
The name itself is a question for linguists. Sukač lists later forms: Kdanzc (1148), Gdanzc (1188), Gdantz (1198), Danzk (1209), Gedanensis (1235) and Danzig (1292). There are many proposals for its origin: from a river "Gdania", from a Germanic "Gutiskandja", from the Danes, from a Slavic root gъd- ("wet"). Sukač regards the form as Slavic (*Gъd-an-ьskъ) and rejects the Germanic and Baltic explanations. That is a reasoned position in an open debate; Wikipedia notes that the derivation cannot be determined with certainty.
When Gdańsk came under Piast rule is uncertain. The English Wikipedia names Mieszko I, who is said to have annexed the place around 975 and fortified it in the 980s; wood finds yield tree-ring dates pointing to felling around 930. That would be older than any Piast rule. A settlement there existed early, then; whether it stood under a local lord or already under Polish influence cannot at present be clearly said.
The twelfth century is easier to grasp. The chronicler known as Gallus Anonymus wrote the Gesta principum Polonorum, the deeds of the Polish princes, between about 1112 and 1118; he was a monk without a secure name or origin who had come to Poland from abroad. In Book III he describes the wars of Bolesław III Wrymouth against the Pomeranians. We were able to read one passage in a nineteenth-century Polish translation (Komarnicki, 1873, on Wikisource): Bolesław entrusts the stronghold of Nakło on the Noteć to a Pomeranian kinsman named Świętopełk, who breaks the terms; a siege follows from Michaelmas to Christmas, and the next year Wyszogród falls first after eight days, then Nakło after a long siege. Important: this Świętopełk is not the later Duke Swantopolk II of Gdańsk but a man of an earlier generation. Whether and how Gallus describes Gdańsk itself, we have not checked.
According to the English Wikipedia, Bolesław III subdued Gdańsk Pomerania in the years 1115 to 1119; the rulers of Gdańsk and Stolp were replaced by Polish nobles. Other accounts say 1116. The range shows how thin the dating is. Ecclesiastically the land was assigned to the diocese of Włocławek (German Leslau), a suffragan of Gniezno, and a papal charter of 1148 mentions Gdańsk in this connection, as Wikipedia reports. We have not seen its wording. Bishop Otto of Bamberg, by contrast, whose missions of 1124/25 and 1128 concerned the Pomeranians, worked in the west, in the land around Stettin and Wolin; whoever makes him the apostle of Gdańsk transfers something (Pomeranians, Wolin).
After the death of Bolesław III in 1138 the Piast realm split into partitions, and the governors in Pomerelia gained independence. From them emerged the dynasty that research calls the Samborides. The first name we find securely in the literature is Subislaw (Polish Sobiesław I), attested according to the English Wikipedia as a prince in Gdańsk from the 1150s until 1177/79. His origin is unsettled: whether he belonged to the Piasts, the Griffins or a family of his own remains open; his ancestors were probably administrators installed by Bolesław III after the conquest. Wikipedia also calls the source situation for his life poor.
Secure enough is the founding of the Cistercian monastery of Oliva (Oliwa) near Gdańsk. The foundation act is dated to 18 March 1188 in Gdańsk, the monks came, according to Wikipedia, in 1186 from Kołbacz under their first abbot, the Dane Bernard Dithard; Sambor I is named as founder, while other accounts credit the father Subislaw. Here too the accounts contradict each other, and the question of the founder cannot be settled without the charters themselves. The monastery remained the spiritual centre of the land.
The sequence of dukes is just as confusing. Mestwin I (Polish Mściwoj) is listed in the German Wikipedia as a son of Subislaw and brother of Sambor I, with a reign until 1219 or 1220; other lists let Sambor I rule until 1205. Important evidence includes the endowment for the convent of Zuckau (probably 1209), the record of the assembly of Mąkolin in 1212 and the so-called Oliva tablets, which call him "pacificus", the peaceful. In 1210 the Danish king Valdemar II forced him, after a campaign against the Prussians, to swear a feudal oath in Gdańsk; according to the German Wikipedia Mestwin broke away again as early as 1211. With the end of Danish power after the battle of Bornhöved in 1227, Danish influence on the southern Baltic faded. This has nothing to do with Vikings any more, but it shows how closely the coast was entwined in the thirteenth century with Denmark, the Saxons and Lübeck.
The figure most accounts put at the centre is Swantopolk II (Polish Świętopełk, son of Mestwin I). The start of his rule is given differently: 1215, 1216/17, 1217 or 1220, depending on the account. It is certain that from 1227 he called himself dux and that he granted Gdańsk Lübeck law, a town charter modelled on Lübeck's. The date is put at about 1224 to 1227 depending on the source; the English Wikipedia on Gdańsk says "at the latest in 1263". According to that account he also brought Dominicans to Gdańsk.
One of the harshest accusations against him concerns 23 November 1227, the assembly of Gąsawa, at which the Polish high duke Leszek the White was murdered. The English Wikipedia attributes the ambush to Swantopolk, "perhaps also Władysław", without a source; the German Wikipedia says cautiously that he is said to have carried out the attack. This is an interpretation of the later tradition; we have not checked the wording of the contemporary chronicles, and Swantopolk's share is a matter of weighing in research.
As a politician he was nimble. In 1233/34, according to Wikipedia, he marched with other princes against the Pomesanians, a crusading enterprise during which Kwidzyn (Marienwerder) was refortified for the Order. From about 1230 the Order was his neighbour. At the same time he fought a war with his brothers: Sambor and Ratibor sought help first in Greater Poland, then from the Order. By 1242 at the latest he stood with the Prussians in their uprising, although he counted as a man of the Church; the Order's knights burned the monastery of Oliva in 1246 and plundered it in 1247 and 1252. A peace brokered by a papal legate, according to the English Wikipedia on 24 November 1248, obliged him to let the Order's people pass through his land and to stop levying tolls on the Vistula; the English Wikipedia on Pomerelia names the later Pope Urban IV as mediator of the treaty of Christburg in 1249 and gives 1253 for the Order's exemption from the Vistula dues. Here the dates diverge; we have not seen the primary charters. Swantopolk died on 11 January 1266.
Why the man who at first supported the Order later fought it, research answers with tolls, power interests and the quarrel among brothers. Whether a plan or merely opportunity lay behind it cannot be decided. Whoever turns him into a "pagan rebel" forgets that the sources know him as a Christian who promoted a monastery and allied with pagans.
After Swantopolk's death in 1266 his sons Wartislaw and Mestwin II shared the inheritance. In 1269 Mestwin made an alliance with the margraves of Brandenburg in the treaty of Arnswalde and, with their help, drove his brother out of Gdańsk in 1270/71. When the Brandenburgers did not withdraw in 1273, he called on the Polish duke Bolesław the Pious; the treaty of the Drage bridge returned Gdańsk to Mestwin, who swore the margraves a feudal oath for Schlawe and Stolp.
On 15 February 1282 Mestwin concluded the treaty of Kępno (German Kempen) with Przemysł II of Greater Poland. The instrument is known as a gift between living persons (donatio inter vivos): Przemysł was to inherit the land. Mestwin kept actual rule until he died on 25 December 1294. Besides this reading, the English Wikipedia mentions a second, under which the survivor was to inherit the other's land, and Brandenburg did not recognise the treaty. On 18 May 1282 Mestwin also had to cede the Mewe area to the Order. We have not read the text of the charter.
With Mestwin's death the line of the Samborides ended. Przemysł II took the land, was crowned king in 1295 and died in 1296. Then came Wenceslas II of Bohemia and, back in 1306, the Polish prince Władysław the Elbow-high; this sequence is given by the English Wikipedia. The princes changed faster than the administration.
In the summer of 1308 troops of Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg occupied the town of Gdańsk, and the Polish governor Bogusza withdrew into the stronghold. According to Wikipedia he called the Teutonic Order in Prussia to his aid on the advice of a Dominican prior. Land Master Heinrich von Plötzke sent troops; knights arrived in late summer. A break occurred between the Order and the Polish knights in the stronghold, the Poles left, and on the night of 12 to 13 November 1308 the Order's men forced their way into the town. That a bloodbath followed is undisputed; how many died is not.
According to Wikipedia the Order admitted killing 15 to 16 Pomerelian knights. The bull of Pope Clement V of 19 June 1310 speaks of "more than ten thousand" killed, a claim said to go back to accusations from Riga. Older German accounts put the figure at 60 to 100 and considered ten thousand impossible in a town of that size, estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Jasiński speaks of at least 60 and at most a few hundred, Śliwiński (2008) of 50 to 60 knights and over a thousand townspeople, others of 60 to 150. In Poland suits were brought against the Order in 1320/21 and 1339; the Order won both on appeal. The range shows that the number is a matter of source criticism.
In September 1309 Margrave Waldemar sold his claims to Pomerelia to the Order for 10,000 marks in the treaty of Soldin; Brandenburg kept Stolp, Schlawe, Rügenwalde and Bütow until 1317. The Order made Pomerelia part of its state and later moved its seat to Marienburg. In the treaty of Kalisz in 1343 Poland renounced the land but kept the title; in the Second Peace of Thorn in 1466 it came back. For the people living there this meant, according to the accounts, a settlement history with an influx of German-speaking townspeople; around 1400, according to the English Wikipedia, Poles and Kashubians still made up the larger part of the population. How the town of Gdańsk was linguistically composed is judged differently in research; as places of origin of merchants who settled in Gdańsk in the thirteenth century, the English Wikipedia names Lübeck and Bremen.
The naming situation is the real puzzle. Pomeranians (from Pomorani) is the name for the Slavic tribes between the Oder and the Vistula; the Pomerelians are their eastern part, and the Kashubians and Slovincians are population groups said to have emerged from it. That is the short version of the literature, and it conceals contradictions.
The name Cassubia did not at first denote Pomerelia. The German Wikipedia writes that it initially meant the land around Belgard on the Persante (Białogard); only in the sixteenth century, after Noffke (1988), did it pass to Pomerelia and the people living there. The earliest unambiguous attestation is disputed: the English Wikipedia names a letter of Pope Gregory IX of 19 March 1238 to Bogislaw I as "dux Cassubie", the German one the Chronica Poloniae Maioris (thirteenth century; Boguphal) with the form Caszubitae. Both are second-hand statements. More on the history of the Kashubians, the Slovincians and the language is in Kashubians and Slovincians.
Whoever sets "Pomerelian = Kashubian" transfers a later name to an earlier time. The people who lived in Gdańsk in the twelfth century, to our knowledge, called themselves neither that nor Pomerelians; whether they defined themselves by a group name at all cannot at present be clearly shown. The neighbours to the south and east, the Kuyavians, Masovians, Polans, Vistulans or Prussians, appear in other articles (Kuyavians, Masovians, Polans, Vistulans).
Of the faith, gods and daily life of the Pomerelians before Christianisation we know almost nothing certain. According to Wikipedia, Gallus Anonymus calls the Pomeranians a pagan people who converted only in the early twelfth century; he gives no names of gods, cult places or rites. The little that is told as Pomerelian religion comes from the west (Stettin, Wolin, Rügen) and does not automatically fit the mouth of the Vistula. Whoever names names here is inventing them.
We also do not know what the people called their language; that these were West Slavic dialects from which Kashubian and Slovincian later emerged is the majority view, but a reconstruction from later witnesses. And we do not know how many people lived in Gdańsk in the tenth century; estimates exist only for the thirteenth (about 2,000 at the time of the town charter, according to the English Wikipedia).
Established, as far as our sources reach, are the mention of Gyddanyzc around 999, the sequence of the dynasty from Subislaw to Mestwin II, the treaty of Kępno, the fall of Gdańsk in 1308 and the treaty of Soldin in 1309. Plausible, but without a charter in its wording, are the assumptions that the Piasts brought the place under control in the tenth century, that the conquest under Bolesław III took place between 1115 and 1119 and that the majority of the inhabitants spoke a Slavic language. Interpreted are the origin of the Samborides, Swantopolk's share in the murder at Gąsawa, the derivation of the name "Gdańsk", and everything that turns Kashubians and Pomerelians into a single continuous people. Wherever a sentence about Pomerelia stands, it is worth asking which of the three levels it belongs to.
The Pomeranians · The Kashubians · The Slovincians · The Kuyavians · The Polans.
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