Many books present the Pyritzans as a Pomeranian tribe of its own that already held seventy strongholds in the 9th century. The sources are narrower: a name reminiscent of Pyritz stands in one single list only, and even there the equation is disputed. Secure, by contrast, are a stronghold at Pyrzyce, a castle district in the 12th century and a mass baptism in June 1124. This article keeps these levels apart.
Pyrzyce, in German Pyritz, lies south-east of Szczecin (Stettin) in West Pomerania, in the area between the small rivers Ina (Ihna) and Płonia (Plöne). The people of this region are called Pyrzyczanie in Polish literature and Pyritzer in older German literature. The word can mean two things. It can name a group that understood itself as a tribe of its own, comparable to the Polans. Or it can simply mean "the people of the Pyritz castle district", that is, a designation after the place and its administration, as was usual in the Middle Ages for many castle districts.
Which of the two readings holds depends on a few sources. At the start stands a Latin list of peoples from the 9th century. Then come finds in the ground, which can be read more cautiously than some local history does. And then come the lives of Otto of Bamberg, which for the first time name Pyritz securely as a place in the year 1124. Whoever mixes these three levels soon ends up with a tribe that perhaps never existed in this form.
The area belongs to the wider context of the Pomeranians, the coastal Slavs between the Oder and the Vistula. Wolin and Szczecin are at home there too, about which we wrote in the article on Wolin. Pyritz lies somewhat further inland, at a place that played a special role in the mission of the 12th century.
The only early text drawn on as evidence for a Pyritz tribe is the so-called Bavarian Geographer. It is a terse Latin register of peoples and districts north of the Danube, transmitted in manuscript Clm 560 of the Bavarian State Library in Munich. The copy probably dates from the 10th century; the model is older. Until the 1980s the text was mostly dated to around 844; later research moved its origin to the second half of the 9th century, and for the first part a date around 889 to 892 is even considered. Author and place of origin are unknown.
This list contains an entry Prissani with the note "70 civitates". The word civitas does not mean a city in the modern sense in such lists. Scholars dispute whether fortified places or settlement districts are meant. Seventy is a high number, higher than for many other groups on the list, and for that very reason it has fired the imagination of early local historians.
Whoever connects the Prissani with Pyritz does so because of the similarity of the names. Polish literature reads Pyrzyczanie from it, and the English Wikipedia has an entry of its own, "Prissani", which places them in the lower Oder region around Pyrzyce. That entry concedes at the same time that the Bavarian Geographer is the only written mention of the tribe. The German Wikipedia article on the Bavarian Geographer is more explicit: the identification of the Prissani is doubtful. Three possibilities are named: the Prussians, the people of Pyritz, or a tribe named after the river San in eastern Poland, with Slavic pri meaning "by" or "at". A Lithuanian study by Diego Ardoino (2017), by contrast, links the Prissani with the Prussians and looks for them rather in Moravia; he too considers the link uncertain. And a Polish scholarly event of 2023 notes that older linguistics read the name as Pyrzyczanie, whereas newer interpretations understand it as "people of the coast".
A small side question deserves mention because it often turns up in local histories. The town website of Pyrzyce mentions 19th-century scholars who wanted to see the place already at "Viritium" on the map of Ptolemy. That is an interpretation, and, as the town site itself concedes, it is regarded as uncertain. The town site also interprets the name stem pir as an old Slavic word for wheat. That, too, is an interpretation and not evidence.
On the level of archaeology the situation is easier to grasp. In the south-eastern part of the present town area of Pyrzyce lies a stronghold rampart (Polish grodzisko), which Polish research regards as the main site of the region. For a long time work was limited to surface surveys and small test trenches. In 2022 a non-invasive survey followed, described as very promising, and in 2023 excavations were under way by the Szczecin branch of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences under Andrzej Janowski. The finds, above all pottery, point according to reports so far to use from the 10th to the end of the 13th century. Single sherds on the surface suggest a start as early as the 9th century; the reports themselves treat this as unconfirmed.
This is instructive for the question of the tribe. A stronghold of the 10th to 13th century is a find. It shows that a fortified place existed here which bound people together and later passed into ducal administration. Whether in the 9th century it belonged to a group with a name of its own, which the Bavarian Geographer lists as Prissani, it does not say. The organisers state as a hypothesis that the inhabitants of the area around the Ina and the Płonia were an early medieval community that could be equated with a tribe, and that this tribe might be the Prissani. That stands expressly in the subjunctive and belongs in the category of modern interpretation.
The picture the ground has drawn so far is that of a landscape with a fortified centre that later became a ducal castle district. More cannot be derived from the published reports; a final excavation publication we have not checked.
For the time between the Bavarian Geographer and the mission, written sources on Pyritz are almost entirely missing. What one reads are later summaries, and they contradict one another. The English Wikipedia on Pyrzyce says the area came into the emerging Polish state around 967 under Mieszko I. The entry on the Prissani, by contrast, says that Mieszko I and Bolesław Chrobry did subdue parts of Pomerania but not the lower Oder region; only Bolesław III Wrymouth conquered the area in 1121/22, together with the Duchy of Pomerania under Wartislaw I. Both statements stand in the same online encyclopedia and cannot both be right. We pass on the second because it fits the mission sources, and mark it as a statement from overview accounts.
Wartislaw I is the duke who appears in the lives as a key figure and whose family later formed the Pomeranian ducal house of the Griffins. According to the overviews, Christians had already grown up in his circle. The exact legal position of Pyritz towards the duke and the Polish overlord cannot be determined with certainty from the texts accessible to us. What is certain is only that the lives treat it as the "first land of Pomerania" when one comes from the south.
For Otto's journey we possess three biographies, written between roughly one and three decades after the events. The life by the anonymous monk of Prüfening Abbey near Regensburg is mostly regarded in current research as the oldest; the older English translation by Charles Robinson (1920), by contrast, considers it later than the other two and says it offers hardly anything new. Its dating is thus still a point of dispute today, and we do not commit ourselves. The monk Ebo wrote, according to Robinson's introduction, probably around 1151; he did not know Otto himself, but refers to Otto's companion Udalrich. Herbord, a monk at Michelsberg in Bamberg, wrote a dialogue around 1158 whose second book is largely independent and tells of the journey of 1124/25. He, too, never saw Otto.
That matters if one wants to take anything from the sources. All three texts are hagiographic: they want to show a saint, Otto was canonised in 1189, and that shapes what is told and how. At the same time they name places, routes and persons so concretely that research uses them as the most important testimony for Pomerania in the 12th century. For Pyritz we depend in what follows on Herbord, whom we read in Robinson's English version; Ebo and the Prüfening life we have not checked against the text on this point.
The commission came from Duke Bolesław III of Poland. According to the overview account Otto set out from Gniezno in spring 1124, accompanied by clergy from his diocese, servants and a Polish escort under Paweł, the castellan of Santok (Zantoch). At Santok, at the confluence of the Noteć and the Warta, he was probably received by Wartislaw. The English Wikipedia names 20 clergy and 60 armed men; we take that over as a statement from an overview account. The way led into the first Pomeranian territory beyond the border, and that was Pyritz.
On the third day he came to Piriscus, the first town of Pomerania, and exhorted the citizens to accept the faith.Herbord, Dialogus de vita Ottonis, Book II, ch. 5; paraphrase in own words after the English translation by C. H. Robinson (1920), not a verbatim quotation, wording to be checked against the Latin text before publication
According to Herbord the matter did not go smoothly. The citizens at first refused and forced the man of God to move on; they declared that they could not accept a new law without consulting their leaders. Later the travelling party camped before the stronghold "Pyrissa", and the duke left them to their own course there. On a pagan feast day some 4,000 men are said to have gathered in the camp. The bishop's envoys, among them Paulicius, urged haste and spoke to the assembled, and finally they decided together to accept the Christian faith. The bishop and his priests instructed the people for seven days, and a three-day fast was ordered. Three places for baptism were built, and the party stayed about twenty days on the spot.
A Polish conference report of 2023 points out that according to the biographers about 4,000 people were assembled, but the real decision fell in a council of elders and not in the crowd. That is a worthwhile observation, for it shows a political structure: the assembly had listeners, but the decision-makers were few. It fits a castle district in which leaders held the tie to the community, and it is no pointer to a tribal association with a constitution of its own. The reading remains our inference, not that of the sources.
How many people were actually baptised is unclear. In the introduction Robinson records for Ebo some 7,000 baptised after only twenty days of preparation, but notes in a footnote to Herbord that the Vita Ebonis at one point reads "about 500". The figures contradict each other, and we could not clarify which statement refers to which passage. Medieval numbers in mission reports are in any case estimates with a narrative purpose. We therefore state: there was a baptism on a larger scale; its number is not secure.
The English Wikipedia gives the dates: arrival at Pyritz on 8 June 1124, first baptisms on 18 or 19 June. Since these days do not readily fit the length of the journey in the lives, they stand here as a statement from an overview account, not as a finding. In Pyrzyce the 900th anniversary of the baptism of Pomerania was marked in connection with the 2023 conference; Otto is regarded as the town's patron, and a "Holy Well" (Święta Studnia) is said to commemorate the place of the mass baptism. Whether the well really corresponds to the baptismal place of that time is a tradition of the town, not an excavation fact.
One more detail from Herbord's account is worth noting. After the baptism Otto turned to the newly baptised and asked them to provide some of their children who could be trained as priests, men who spoke their own language and understood Latin, as Robinson renders it. Robinson also remarks that a training of native clergy is not attested afterwards. That is a pointer to the limits of the mission: it was quick, but thin. From the lives one can hardly infer how deeply faith really took root in Pyritz.
After 1124 Pyritz belonged to ducal Pomerania and became the seat of a castellany. The town's history page speaks of a castellany in the 12th and 13th centuries and later of a provincial advocacy (Polish wójtostwo krajowe). The word castellany denotes an administrative district around a castle, led by a ducal official, the castellan. For many regions of the Baltic area that is the form in which the 12th-century landscape can best be grasped. This is exactly the point that explains the designation "Pyritzans": a castle district needs inhabitants who are named after it.
The town in its later shape is a foundation of the 13th century. The town's history page places around 1230 to 1240 the layout of a new, oval town with two main streets and a central market beside the old stronghold, also settled by German colonists, and gives 1263 as the year when Duke Barnim I granted craft rights under Szczecin law. The German Wikipedia names Magdeburg town law for 1263 instead. Both statements stand side by side, and we could not compare them with the charter; they do not necessarily exclude each other, since craft privileges and town law differ. The English Wikipedia records a ducal mint since 1248. An Augustinian nunnery is named in 1256, the church of Our Lady of Sorrows is placed around 1260 in brick, a Franciscan monastery is attested in 1281, and by 1301 the wall ring with towers and gates was complete.
With the town a new language appears. The German settlement of the 13th century overlays the Slavic population, and the designation Pyritzer shifts from the castle people to the citizens of the town. How the Slavic population of the surrounding country developed is well documented elsewhere on the Pomeranian coast, for example among the Kashubians; for Pyritz our sources give no information, and we draw no link.
Whoever looks at the map understands why the place appears in the sources so early. To the south the way leads over Santok into the Warta-Noteć region, where the Poles had their base. West of the Oder lay the lands of the Lutici, in the north the coast with Szczecin and Wolin. Pyritz sat at the seam between the Polish sphere of influence and the Pomeranians. That was one reason for Bolesław III to have the mission begin exactly here, and it is an interpretation that fits the lives without standing in them in so many words. For the Lebusians, who sat further south on the Oder, this was also a zone of contact; more on them is in the article on the Lebusians.
Putting the findings together yields a sober picture. Secure is a stronghold at Pyrzyce that, by the pottery finds so far, was used from the 10th into the 13th century. Secure is a place Pyritz that appears in the lives of 1124 as the first station of the mission in Pomerania. Secure is a ducal castle district in the 12th and 13th centuries. A tribe called Pyritzans that called itself so is, by contrast, attested in no source. The name Prissani in the Bavarian Geographer may mean Pyritz, but may also designate quite different groups; scholars do not agree. Whoever says the Pyritzans were a tribe with seventy strongholds presents a hypothesis as fact.
A more cautious course is plausible but unproven: in the 9th or 10th century a fortified centre arose on the Ina and the Płonia. Whether its inhabitants bore a name that later appeared in the Bavarian Geographer remains open. In the 12th century at any rate the place was the centre of a castle district, and from there the designation Pyritzans can be explained securely.
The Pomeranians · Wolin & Jomsborg · The Rani (Rügen) · The Liutizi · The Lebusians.
All History & Finds articles →
The Quadi were a Germanic tribe with Suebic roots who moved to the middle Danube around the turn of the era – into …
Read more →Ralswiek lies on the Großer Jasmunder Bodden on the island of Rügen. From the 8th into the 10th century it was an …
Read more →