Anyone looking in old sources for the people around Brandenburg an der Havel finds not one name but several: Hevelli in Widukind of Corvey, Stoderania in Thietmar of Merseburg, Havolane in modern literature. Behind all of them stands the same group of West Slavic settlers. This article sorts out the names, goes through the written evidence in order, and separates what the chroniclers actually write from what scholarship and later storytelling have made of it.
The Stodorani belonged to the West Slavs, that is, to those Slavic-speaking groups who settled the land between the Baltic, the Elbe and the Oder from the 6th and 7th centuries and whose neighbours to the west were the Saxons. Their core area lay on the middle Havel, around the stronghold of Brandenburg. German scholarship usually calls the people Hevelli; an overview of the Hevelli can be found in a separate article. Here the question is the one touched on only briefly there: how do the names relate to each other, and who designates whom?
Three name forms have to be distinguished. Hevelli (Latin Hevelli, German Heveller) is an outsider's name derived from the river Havel. Havolane is a scholarly coinage that renders the same river name in an Old Slavic form; no contemporary attestation of this form is known. Stodorani (Latin Stoderani, the land Stoderania) is the name usually understood as the people's own designation. All that is secure is that both names stand for the same territory in the sources. That Stodorani was the self-designation is an inference, not a statement of any source.
The river name Havel is old. It underlies all the Hevelli forms and is rendered Havola in Latin texts. The oldest attestations are not chronicles but lists and charters: the Bavarian Geographer, a terse register of peoples from the 9th century, names a people Hehfeldi with eight civitates, that is, fortified places or settlement districts. The Anglo-Saxon Orosius adaptation of the 890s knows Hæfeldan. The royal charters of Otto I speak of Heveldun, the Hevelli land. Whoever equates these forms with the later Hevelli follows linguistic probability; it is not proof, because the lists give names and no descriptions.
The name Stodorani appears later and in a different kind of source. The decisive evidence is Thietmar of Merseburg, who wrote his chronicle between 1012 and 1018. In book IV, chapter 29, he reports a campaign in the year 997 against Stoderania and adds that this land is also called the land of the Hevelli. A contemporary thus equates the two names. Helmold of Bosau, who described the Slavs on the Baltic in the 12th century, likewise uses the form Stoderani. What the name means is unresolved; there is no secure etymology, and any derivation would be speculation.
Two further testimonies reach back further but must be read with caution. The Arab geographer al-Masudi wrote around 943 to 946 about peoples in eastern Europe; scholarship interprets a form named there as Stodorani. Whether the identification holds is a philological question that could not be checked here against the original passage. The Prague chronicler Cosmas, who wrote around 1120, tells that Dragomíra, the mother of Saint Wenceslas, came from the land of Stodor and was married in 906 to the Bohemian duke Vratislav. That would be a very early sign of links between the Havel and Bohemia. But he is two centuries younger than what he narrates and thus bears the stamp of later tradition. As evidence for a marriage in 906 it is not enough; as a hint that the name Stodor was known in Prague in the 12th century, it suffices.
For the question of how closely the Stodorani were tied into their neighbours' politics, this remains a cautious picture: Bohemia to the south, the Sprevani to the south-east, the Lutici to the north and east, the Obodrites farther north-west. The Stodorani lay in between, with the Saxon realm to the west as an ever-growing counterpart.
The first great scene of the tradition is a winter campaign. Widukind of Corvey, a monk who wrote his "Deeds of the Saxons" (Res gestae Saxonicae) around 967/968, reports in book I, chapter 35, that King Henry I suddenly fell upon the Slavs called Hevelli and took their stronghold Brennaburg. The phrase with which he describes the success is short and drastic.
… cepit urbem quae dicitur Brennaburg fame ferro frigore – he took the city called Brennaburg by hunger, iron and cold.Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae Saxonicae I,35 (c. 967/968); Latin phrase after an online text edition, English rendering our own; wording not checked against the MGH edition
Nothing more stands there. That the frozen water maze of the Havel deprived the stronghold of its protection in winter and Henry's army crossed on the ice is a plausible interpretation by scholars, but not a word of Widukind's. The date, too, is inferred: 928/929 results from placing the event within Henry's reign, not from a year given in the text. In chapter 36 Widukind lists the Hevelli together with the Obodrites, Wilzi, Daleminzi, Bohemians and Redarii among the peoples who were thereafter tributary to the king. The name of the stronghold, Brennaburg, goes back by widespread opinion to a Slavic form meaning something like "protective forest," from which Brandenburg later arose; this too is a name interpretation and not a finding from the sources.
The second scene leads into the reign of Otto I. In book II, chapter 21, Widukind tells of Tugumir, a prince of the Hevelli who had been in Saxon captivity and, according to the chronicler, assured Otto of rule over his people in exchange for money and promises. Widukind speaks of betrayal of his own people. Before that, in chapter 20, he reports the murder of thirty Slavic princes at a banquet by Margrave Gero; the context shows how harsh conditions on the Elbe frontier were at the time.
The details one reads in the literature partly go beyond the text. The year around 940 is usually given for Tugumir's return. That he had his nephew, the last male relative, eliminated stands in Widukind's narrative, but it is a story from the pen of a Saxon monk who judged Tugumir's betrayal in moral terms. That Tugumir was already captured in 928/929 is inferred by scholars from context; Widukind does not say it that way. Gerd Althoff suspects that Tugumir and his sister became Christians only in captivity, whereas Herbert Ludat reckoned with an older Christian princely family. Whether the mother of William of Mainz, a son of Otto, was Tugumir's sister remains open. His year of death is also unknown; a Möllenbeck necrology gives 25 May as the day of commemoration. The dispute is old: for some Tugumir is a collaborator, for others a prince who bought his land peace through an alliance with the stronger party. The sources allow both readings.
With Otto I came the Church. The foundation of the bishoprics of Havelberg and Brandenburg is traditionally dated to 948; more recent work considers a later date around 965 for Brandenburg, and the authenticity of the foundation charters is an old point of dispute. In book II, chapter 22, Thietmar names Dudo as first bishop of Havelberg and Thietmar as first of Brandenburg. Both places lay beyond the Elbe in an area that until then had been ruled only loosely. Mission there was a political tool.
The balance tipped in the summer of 983. In book III, chapter 17, Thietmar describes how Margrave Dietrich's arrogance provoked the Slavs and they conspired; on 29 July 983 the revolt broke out, Havelberg was destroyed and the bishopric of Brandenburg was attacked. The great Slavic revolt, in which Stodorani, Lutici and Obodrites took part, almost entirely wiped out the young church organisation east of the Elbe. The bishop's title remained as a claim. How much of the mission had reached everyday life before 983 cannot be quantified. Of Slavic cults before and after the revolt almost only foreign pens report, not their own testimonies.
After 983 the dispute over the Brandenburg continued. Several sources report Saxon armies that regained the stronghold and lost it again; which details and dates of this hold is not uniform in the accounts. Thietmar's reference to the year 997 can be regarded as secure.
Emperor Otto III marched in 997 with an armed force into Stoderania, which is also called the land of the Hevelli; so Thietmar puts it, in paraphrase, in book IV, chapter 29. What matters is the double name: it is the evidence on which the equation rests. In book IV, chapter 58, Thietmar also mentions a "venerable lord Dobromir," whose daughter entered a marriage. Whether Dobromir was a Stodoranian prince is unresolved; some editions take him rather for a prince of the Milceni in Lusatia. Whoever makes him a Hevelli prince is guessing.
Little is transmitted from the 11th century. Only in the 12th century does the picture become denser again, above all through the "Tractatus de urbe Brandenburg," a text from the circle of the Brandenburg cathedral chapter in the 1170s. It is the main source for the final phase of Slavic princely rule and coloured by the other side, since it is an ecclesiastical text from the Ascanian era.
If one follows the Tractatus and the literature built on it, the stronghold stood at the beginning of the century temporarily under the influence of the Obodrite prince Henry of Alt-Lübeck. Afterwards a Christian prince, Meinfried, ruled; he was murdered in 1127. He was succeeded by Pribislav, who bore the name Henry as a Christian. He supported the Church, brought Premonstratensians to St Gotthardt in Brandenburg in 1144 and formed a close relationship with Albert the Bear, the Ascanian margrave of the North March. According to tradition Albert was godfather to his son Otto; the Zauche, the land south-west of Brandenburg, is said to have been transferred to him as a christening gift. That is a later narrative. A formal inheritance treaty is not transmitted; it must be inferred from the accounts of the succession. Scholarship also discusses what the title rex meant for Pribislav, a sub-king within the Empire or a Slavic prince. No children are known.
Pribislav-Henry died in 1150. His widow Petrissa handed the Brandenburg over to Albert. Jaxa of Köpenick, a relative of Pribislav, then took possession of the stronghold. In 1157 Albert took it back and from then on called himself Margrave of Brandenburg. The exact sequence from 1150 to 1157 is not always told the same way in the accounts; what is secure is the end point, namely that the March of Brandenburg stood under Ascanian rule from 1157. A Stodoranian principality became a German margraviate.
Written sources cover only a narrow strip. Archaeology supplements the picture. On the cathedral island of Brandenburg an der Havel the main stronghold of the Stodorani lies beneath later layers. Dendrochronological data, that is, tree-ring dates of building timbers, point according to the literature to traces of settlement as early as the 8th century; the stronghold itself is dated to the early 10th century (figure: 906, to be verified). Slavic strongholds of this kind are ring-rampart castles of timber, earth and clay, often on islands in the water. Agriculture was, according to scholarship, less developed than among other Elbe Slavs, while hunting and fishing played a larger role. These statements are interpretations from the statistics of finds and not head counts.
The question of the names can be summarised thus. There is no testimony that two different groups are meant; Thietmar expressly equates Stoderania with the land of the Hevelli. The name Hevelli goes back to the river and comes from outside. The name Stodorani appears in Thietmar, in Cosmas and in Helmold and is therefore understood as the native designation, without any source saying so explicitly. Whether "tribe" is the right word is a different matter: it is a modern ordering term whose usefulness scholarship has questioned for years. What is secure is a stronghold, a land, two names and a sequence of rulers who fade into the distance. Whatever goes beyond that is interpretation.
The word "Stodorani" can be engraved, but the people behind it have to be understood: they were farmers, fishers and princely families whose names we know almost only from the pens of their opponents.
The Hevelli · The Liutizi · The Abodrites · The Sorbs · The Rani (Rügen).
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