The Smeldingi become visible in almost a single moment of history: in 808, when they and the Linones break away from the Obodrite ruler and go over to the Danish king Godfred, and in 809, when their largest stronghold falls. After that the sources fall silent. This article lays the few attestations side by side, shows where archaeology helps and where it only allows interpretation, and says plainly that there are more questions than answers here.
Hardly any Elbe Slavic tribe is as thinly documented as the Smeldingi. By the state of research we could consult, their name appears in exactly five places: in the Royal Frankish Annals (Annales regni Francorum) for the years 808 and 809, in the chronicles of Moissac and Aniane for 809, and in a single entry of the so-called Bavarian Geographer. Not one sentence in which the Smeldingi speak for themselves, no ruler’s name, no cult, no custom survives. Anyone writing about them has to say so first, otherwise silence turns into a story that was never there.
A few terms first. The Royal Frankish Annals are a year-by-year chronicle kept at the Frankish court, recording the politics and campaigns of the realm; they write from the victors’ side and know their opponents only where they touch the empire. A civitas (plural civitates) is in early medieval Latin a fortified place or a stronghold district; the word does not say how big it was. A Burgwall is the archaeological remnant of a Slavic fortification, usually a ring rampart of timber, earth and sand. Tribute, finally, is a payment under pressure, which is not the same as lasting rule.
The Smeldingi belong to the wider world of the Elbe Slavs, more precisely to the borderland between the Obodrites to the north, the Wilzi to the east and the Saxon lands across the Elbe. Their direct neighbours, as far as the sources show, were the Linones. More on that below.
The first mention falls in the year 808 and belongs to a larger story in which the Smeldingi play only a supporting part. The Danish king Godfred (also Göttrik) had invaded Obodrite territory with an army. According to the annals he took several Slavic strongholds, made two thirds of the Obodrites his tributaries after earlier successes, and finally destroyed the trading place of Reric on the coast, taking its merchants with him. The Wilzi joined the Danish expedition out of old enmity towards the Obodrites. Charles the Younger, son of Charlemagne, stood ready with an army at the Elbe to protect Saxony. In this context stands the sentence at issue here.
Charles, however, had a bridge built over the Elbe and led the army he commanded across it against the Linones and Smeldingi, who had also defected to King Godfred. He ravaged their fields and returned to Saxony unharmed.Annales regni Francorum for the year 808, our own paraphrasing translation after the English rendering on De Re Militari (deremilitari.org) and the summary on augustana.net. The Latin verb fragment “ad Godofridum regem defecerant” (“had defected to King Godfred”) is attested there; we have not read the full Latin sentence in Kurze’s edition (1895, p. 125) ourselves.
Three things can be taken from this passage. First: the Smeldingi were perceived as a unit of their own that could be named beside the Linones. Second: they had previously been bound in some way to the Franks or their allies, otherwise there would be no “defection” (defecerant). Third: Charles did not take revenge on the Danes but on the smaller groups that had joined them. English-language scholarship, here the historian Melleno (2017), reads this as the Franks striking the weaker members rather than confronting the Danes directly.
Whether the operation was a success is not clear. The annals report that Charles returned unharmed. According to the English Wikipedia, which relies on Minois (2014), the Annals of Lorsch point to a setback with heavy losses. Melleno, by contrast, reads the action as a successful show of force, since the Danes afterwards asked for peace. We have not consulted the Lorsch annals ourselves. What one can learn is that even the outcome of the only major undertaking against the Smeldingi appears differently in the sources.
The next year the Obodrite struck back. The Obodrite ruler, called Thrasco or Drasco in the sources, ravaged Wilzi land with Saxon support and then, according to the annals in paraphrase, took the largest civitas of the Smeldingi. This is the only passage in which any place of the Smeldingi is mentioned at all, and it gives no name, only a rank: the largest. Thrasco fared badly. Still in 809, according to the annals, he was treacherously killed by Godfred’s men at the trading place of Reric.
The Chronicle of Moissac, a historical work from the south of France, tells the same event in its own version. According to the English rendering on the Jassa project’s site, Saxons across the Elbe, together with “our Wends”, destroyed the town “called Connoburg by the Semeldinc”. By “Wends” the editors mean mainly the Obodrites. The form “Semeldinc” is evidently a Latin rendering of the name, not its Slavic shape. The name Connoburg comes from here, and a long scholarly discussion hangs on it.
Anyone clinging to the word “destroyed” should note: the annals say “taken” (expugnat), Moissac says “destroyed”. Whether the stronghold was razed, merely occupied or rebuilt after its fall cannot be decided from the texts. The fate of the defeated is open too. According to the annals, Thrasco in this context forced defectors back into his alliance; nothing more is said about the consequences for the Smeldingi themselves.
The name Connoburg has occupied Mecklenburg regional scholarship since the nineteenth century. Georg Christian Friedrich Lisch looked for the stronghold in 1861 near Conow and Menkendorf because the place name resembles it. That is a similarity of names, no more. Archaeological dating later took this proposal out of the running: according to the German Wikipedia, which relies on Fred Ruchhöft (2008), the Menkendorf fortification was built no earlier than 900 and therefore cannot be the stronghold of 809. The historian Max Bathe even suggested in 1940 that “Connoburg” was not a stronghold name at all but a mistransmission of “Smeldingorum”, the Latin for “of the Smeldingi”. That is a conjecture that can be neither proved nor refuted.
Today the stronghold is mostly identified with the fortress-settlement complex of Friedrichsruhe north-west of Parchim, so the German Wikipedia with reference to Ruchhöft (2008) and Sebastian Messal (2013). The excavations there are indeed impressive. According to Messal’s preliminary report (2010), the site lay on a sandy rise in the Klinker-Raduhner lowland. Settlement begins in the mid to late eighth century, with reused timbers dated to about 739 to 757. Around the year 802, determined by tree rings, a great fortress was built; a ring rampart about 100 by 90 metres at its base followed in the 830s, extensions in the 850s, repairs around 888/889. The finds range from hacksilver with Arabic and Roman coins through at least 120 beads of glass, amber and semi-precious stones to a gilded strap end pointing to Moravia and an amber pendant in the shape of a Thor’s hammer. These are traces of an elite with far-reaching trade connections.
One has to look closely here. In this preliminary report Messal describes the site’s position at the northern edge of the Linones’ area and does not mention the Smeldingi. The identification with Connoburg therefore comes from the literature on the Smeldingi, not from the excavation report itself. And there is a tension worth stating: if the stronghold was taken or destroyed in 809, that ought to have left traces somewhere, yet the building phases of Friedrichsruhe, with a ring rampart in the 830s and repairs up to 889, apparently continue. Whether there is a burnt layer or a break around 809 did not emerge from the summaries we read. We therefore do not claim that Friedrichsruhe is Connoburg; we say it is the most frequently named candidate.
The second kind of source is entirely different. The Bavarian Geographer (Latin Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii) is a short list of peoples north of the Danube with the number of their civitates. It names no events, only names and numbers. Its dating is uncertain: Bernhard Bischoff thought of a monk at Reichenau Abbey in the 830s to 850s, Aleksandr Nazarenko considers the 870s more likely, and Henryk Łowmiański showed that the list may consist of two parts from different times and different authors.
There the Linones (“Linaa”) appear with seven civitates. Beside them stand the Bethenzi (“Bethenici”), the Smeldingi (“Smeldingon”) and the Morizani, for whom eleven strongholds are given together; the Obodrites appear with 53, the Hevelli with eight, the Wilzi with 95. According to scholars, the numbers for some tribes are exaggerated. How many of the eleven strongholds fall to the Smeldingi is not stated.
Even the reading is disputed. The traditional view, so the German Wikipedia with Ruchhöft (2008), assigns the eleven civitates to all three groups together. Christian Hanewinkel (2004) and Sébastien Rossignol (2011), by contrast, read the Morizani as a separate entry; they would then have the eleven strongholds alone and the Smeldingi would be left without a number of their own. We cannot decide which reading is right. Anyone who reads “the Smeldingi had eleven strongholds” in a text is looking at a claim the source does not support.
Their location can only be inferred from two hints: the neighbours in the Bavarian Geographer and the archaeological settlement map. The Geographer names the Smeldingi in company with Linones and Bethenzi, that is, in the area right of the Elbe. The German Wikipedia accordingly places them around Parchim in south-western Mecklenburg. As the article says explicitly, this placement rests on mapping archaeological finds (Ruchhöft 2008; Messal 2013) that show a closed early medieval settlement chamber on both sides of the Elde. That is the interpretation of a settlement area, not proof that the Smeldingi lived there. The sources give only: right of the Elbe, beside the Linones. A map that draws a Smeldingi border is always a reconstruction.
Occasionally one reads of the Plauer See as the Smeldingi’s home. That is not plucked from nowhere, since the Elde flows through the Plauer See and on to Parchim, and the two areas belong to the same river system. The Wikipedia article on the Smeldingi that we could consult, however, says Parchim, not the Plauer See, and we found no primary source naming a lake. We therefore speak of the area of the middle Elde.
The English Wikipedia also presents the thesis that the Smeldingi were a sub-group of the Hevelli and probably lived between the Elbe and the Havel (Melleno 2017; Stone 2016). That contradicts the placement on the Elde, which lies further west. We cannot resolve this contradiction; it shows how far opinions diverge when the evidence is so slim. More on the Hevelli in our Hevelli article.
The name is transmitted in several forms: Smeldingos (808), Smeldingorum (809), Semeldinc in Moissac and Smeldingon in the Bavarian Geographer. Whether it is a self-designation or a name given by others, we do not know. There are two proposals for its derivation, which do not exclude each other.
The first traces the name to Proto-Slavic *smola, “resin, pitch”, and places it beside the South Slavic Smolyani and the city of Smolensk (Jacobsson 1964; Komatina 2019, after the English Wikipedia). We have a separate article on the Smolyani (Smolyani), in which we expressly warn against deducing a migration from a similarity of names. The second, older proposal connects the name with the river Elde (Wigger 1860, after the German Wikipedia). Both are linguistic interpretations. There is no report that the Smeldingi named themselves after resin or a river. The editors of the Chronicle of Moissac also point to the similarity with the name “Semela”, an earlier prince of the Daleminzi; that is a hint at similarity of sound and no more.
The prehistory of the Smeldingi is reconstruction. According to the German Wikipedia with Hanewinkel (2004), they stood at first under Wilzi rule and came under Obodrite overlordship after Charlemagne’s campaign against the Wilzi in 789. According to the English Wikipedia with Melleno (2017), Smeldingi and Linones acknowledged Frankish overlordship before 808. The two versions do not exclude each other; they describe different levels, the local and the imperial. In the Frankish annals themselves we found no mention of the Smeldingi for 789. The link is therefore an inference from the later “defection”. More on the fighting from 789 to 812 in the article on the Wilzi.
After that the thread breaks off. The Smeldingi are not mentioned again in the Frankish sources after 809. What became of them, we do not know. Fred Ruchhöft (2008, after the German Wikipedia) traces their demise to a lack of capacity to form princely rule. That is an interpretation drawn from comparison with other tribes that had strong rulers, not from any report about the Smeldingi. They may have merged into neighbouring groups: the Linones, the Warnower, the Redarii or directly the Obodrites. So the literature (Ruchhöft 2008; Fritze 1981; Hanewinkel 2004), expressly as conjectures. A tribe can vanish from the sources without its people having vanished; what ends is the name on the parchment.
That we know so little has reasons one can name. The Royal Frankish Annals are interested in the frontier of the empire and in its opponents, not in the people behind it. Smaller groups appear when they touch the empire and disappear when they no longer do. The Smeldingi touched it exactly twice. The chronicles of Moissac and Aniane lie far away and know only what was told to them from Francia. The Bavarian Geographer only counts. And the written sources of the tenth to twelfth centuries, so productive for the Slavs living further north (Obodrites, Lutici), do not, as far as we saw, mention the Smeldingi any more. In Adam of Bremen and Helmold of Bosau we found no mention, nor in Einhard, and we did not check this systematically; anyone who needs this should verify it in the texts.
Archaeology remains productive at Friedrichsruhe and other excavations, but it cannot supply names. A Burgwall says that someone built timber there, weighed silver and wore beads. That these people called themselves Smeldingi follows from no potsherd. Ruchhöft and Messal compare the map pattern with the written source, and exactly this comparison remains an inference.
A find group such as the “Fresendorf group”, named in some accounts for the early Slavic pottery of a region, we did not find attested for the Smeldingi; we therefore do not cite it. Pottery groups denote archaeological forms, not tribes, and assigning vessel types to names from written sources is a problem of its own in research.
We do not know how many Smeldingi there were. We know neither a ruler nor a cult site nor the name of their largest stronghold. We do not know whether they called themselves “Smeldingi”, whether they saw themselves as a tribe of their own or only as part of a larger community, and we do not know what became of them after 809. Nor do we know for certain where they lived; Parchim and the Elde are the best-founded, but a reconstructed location.
Statements about their religion, dress or customs are transfers from other Slavic groups, most likely the Obodrites or Wilzi, about whom there is information. For the Smeldingi themselves none exists. This is the line at which we stop here.
Established is that there were Smeldingi in 808 and 809, that they lived near the Linones right of the Elbe, that in 808 they defected to Godfred and that their largest stronghold was taken in 809. Interpreted are their location around Parchim, the identification of Connoburg with Friedrichsruhe, the derivation of the name from “resin” or from the Elde, the number of their strongholds and the assignment to the Hevelli. Conjectured is that they merged into other groups and that they lacked princes. Anyone reading a sentence about the Smeldingi can check on which of these levels it stands. For everything beyond, the same applies as for every reconstruction of a name without a history: a name is a beginning.
Who were the Smeldingi? A West Slavic tribe that appears in the Frankish sources for 808 and 809 and is listed in the Bavarian Geographer. According to research it lived in the area of the middle Elde near Parchim in south-western Mecklenburg, right of the Elbe and beside the Linones. The sources give no more than these outlines.
Where did the Smeldingi live? The sources say only: right of the Elbe, beside Linones and Bethenzi. Find maps point to the area around Parchim and the Elde. The Plauer See lies on the same Elde but is not named in the article we consulted.
What happened in 808? The Danish king Godfred invaded Obodrite territory and destroyed Reric. Linones and Smeldingi went over to him. Charles the Younger built a bridge over the Elbe, ravaged their fields and, according to the annals, returned unharmed.
What happened in 809? The Obodrite Thrasco took the largest stronghold of the Smeldingi with Saxon help. The Chronicle of Moissac calls it Connoburg. Thrasco himself was killed at Reric the same year.
Where did Connoburg stand? That is unknown. The oldest proposal (Conow, Menkendorf) is refuted by dating; today Friedrichsruhe is mostly named. Max Bathe already considered the name a transmission error in 1940.
What became of the Smeldingi? We do not know. After 809 the name disappears. The literature considers merging into the Linones, Warnower, Redarii or Obodrites, expressly as a conjecture.
Is there evidence for the Smeldingi in Adam of Bremen, Helmold or Einhard? We found none there. That is a result of our research, not a guarantee.
The Linonen · The Abodrites · The Wilzi · Reric · The Warnabi.
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