Much has been written about the town of Wolin, strikingly little about its people. Yet the Wolinians left a trail of their own in the sources: an entry in a ninth-century list of peoples, a battle in 967, resistance to a mission, and centuries of visits by Danish fleets. This article asks about the tribe, the land around the town and the people in it, and it keeps apart what a source says and what later scholarship has made of it.
Depending on the language, scholarship calls them Wolinianie (Polish), Wolinians, or in German Wolliner; in Latin they are Velunzani or Uelunzani, and in Widukind of Corvey Vuloini. The reference is to the Slavs of Wolin island and the adjoining mainland where the Oder reaches the Baltic. The name seems to hang on the place, not the other way round: Wolin is the island and the settlement, the Wolinians are "those of Wolin". What the place name itself means is uncertain; the usual explanations remain guesses.
This article works on a simple division of labour. The trading place, its graves, its harbour and the question of Jomsborg belong to the piece on Wolin. Here the subject is people and land. Who were the Wolinians? How large was their territory? Who did they belong with? Even the third question is harder than it sounds. Whether the Wolinians counted as Pomeranians or as Lutici is not settled in the literature; a Polish study of Wolin states outright that the affiliation is unclear. Anyone hoping for a tidy tribal border will be disappointed. The early medieval groups of the coast were not states with boundary posts but shifting communities, and outsiders often named them in lists and chronicles after their most conspicuous stronghold or landscape.
According to the survey literature the Wolinians were a comparatively small but densely settled people. The Polish historian Jan M. Piskorski reckons with one settlement per four square kilometres in the eleventh century (as cited in the English-language overview of the Wolinians; original not consulted). A Polish account gives some 1,200 square kilometres and seventy settlements. That figure evidently derives from the entry in the Bavarian Geographer, so it translates civitates into settlements and is an interpretation, not a find.
The earliest possible mention stands in the so-called Bavarian Geographer, a short list of peoples from the ninth century, preserved in a single Munich manuscript (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 560). In Henryk Łowmiański's numbering, entry 37 reads Uelunzani civitates LXX: the Velunzani, seventy civitates. Equating the Velunzani with the Wolinians is the usual step, but it is an equation; the text names no island and no river. It rests first of all on the similarity of the name.
The neighbours show how widely the numbers range. Just before come the Prissani, also with seventy civitates, before them the Lendizi with 98 and the Thafnezi with 257; after them follow the Bruzi, meaning Prussians, and far to the east Khazars and Ruzzi. By comparison the Silesians, Sleenzane, get fifteen. Seventy civitates sound like a people of weight, but the figures of the list cannot be taken literally. What a civitas means here is open. Widespread opinion takes it for a fortified district rather than a single rampart. Archaeology has not found seventy strongholds on Wolin and its surroundings; the number may express size, standing or simply the author's impression. That is a reading, not information from the source.
The date of the list is disputed as well. Bernhard Bischoff thought of a Reichenau monk in the 830s to 850s, Alexander Nazarenko found the 870s more probable, and Henryk Łowmiański pointed out that the list may consist of two parts of different age. The English overview of the Wolinians puts the entry "around 845"; that is one proposed date, not a secure one. The Bavarian Geographer offers nothing about trade, rulers or gods. It confirms only that someone in the Frankish world knew in the ninth century of a people at the mouth of the Oder and thought it worth counting.
The picture sharpens in Widukind of Corvey. In the third book of his Deeds of the Saxons (chapters 66 to 69) he tells of Wichmann the Younger, a Saxon nobleman who had fallen out with Emperor Otto I and operated as a war leader in the Slavic borderlands. In 967, according to Widukind, he joined the Slavs "called the Vuloini" (wording from the English translation on Jassa; we could not check the Latin). They intended to march against Mieszko, "the friend of the emperor". Mieszko asked his father-in-law, Boleslav of Bohemia, for help. In the battle Wichmann lost his life (whether in the fighting or shortly after is told differently in different accounts), and the chapter closes, in the translators' rendering, with the words "This was the end of Wichmann".
The date given in the scholarly tradition is 21 September 967, with some accounts wavering between the 21st and 22nd. The place is unknown. Modern accounts name Farther Pomerania, others guess at the neighbourhood of Santok; these are guesses. And not everything in popular texts goes back to Widukind. Figures such as four thousand men on the Polish side and five to six thousand on the other are modern estimates, not the source. Widukind gives no numbers.
For the Wolinians this means: in 967 they were strong enough to take the field with a Saxon adventurer against the Polish ruler, and they appear in a coalition with groups that scholarship assigns to the Veleti and later Lutici. That is exactly where the quarrel about their affiliation comes from. Whoever reads the Wolinians as part of the Lutici can lean on this alliance; whoever assigns them to the Pomeranians points to language and neighbourhood. Both are interpretation. On the Lutici see also Lutici and Wilzi; for the wider picture of the coastal peoples see Pomeranians.
Archaeology cannot name a tribe, but it shows how people lived. Wolin itself has been dug since the nineteenth century; Rudolf Virchow led the first investigations in 1871, German excavations followed in the 1930s, and from 1952 Władysław Filipowiak shaped the Polish campaigns. The settlement sequence is well laid out in a recent synthesis by Marian Rębkowski. According to it the settlement begins at the end of the eighth or the start of the ninth century as an open settlement with pits, probably at a river crossing. Imported Frisian combs and rock-crystal beads point to early long-distance trade. Between about 850 and 1100 comes a planned, densely built settlement. Around 1100 begins the phase of the "ducal place", after 1270 that of a chartered town under Lübeck law.
The size is some hectares: Rębkowski estimates two to six hectares for the ninth century, five to nine for the tenth. Along the Dziwna, the river arm, landing places and secondary settlements arose; the total length of the quays in the later tenth century is estimated at several hundred metres up to about a kilometre. In addition there is the Silver Hill, a satellite settlement north of the old town with silver hoards and traces of craft. Amber working is attested from the mid-tenth century at the latest, glass-bead making from the early tenth, antler working from the second half of the ninth. Phyllite for whetstones came in as raw material and was finished locally.
The dead lie in two places. On the Wzgórze Wisielców, the Gallows Hill, there is a barrow cemetery dated to the ninth century; around 1900 there were counted 93 mounds, and fewer survive today. The large flat cemetery on the Młynówka with cremations and inhumations was in use by the late tenth century at the latest and into the eleventh. Figures for the population circulate: one German-language account gives about 8,000 people in the tenth century, a Polish one some 9,000. Neither cites a source, and we treat both as unsupported estimates.
Here lies the reason the Wolinians count as a special tribe. In the 1070s Adam of Bremen describes the city of Jumne at the mouth of the Oder, which by the usual identification is Wolin. He writes that Slavs and many other peoples live there, Greeks and barbarians. Even Saxons may settle there on equal terms, provided they do not openly profess Christianity, for all are still caught in pagan error. As for morals and hospitality, no people could be found more honourable or kinder. Every article on Wolin knows this passage; for the tribe it is still instructive, because it describes the inhabitants, not the walls.
It is truly the largest of all the cities that Europe encloses. Slavs live in it together with many other peoples, Greeks and barbarians.Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum II, 22 (older numbering II, 19); own rendering after the English version by Tschan/Reuter, Latin wording not checked against the text
Rębkowski concludes from the finds that alongside the Slavs there lived culturally and ethnically different groups, probably merchants and craftsmen. His argument is the layout: the spatial order of the old town, he says, was alien to the Slavic milieu. Scandinavian finds number about a dozen, most of them of the eleventh century. Women's metal jewellery is almost entirely missing. That tells against the idea of a Viking colony and for what Adam describes: a trading place where Slavs formed the majority and foreigners lived as guests or craftsmen. It is an interpretation the find pattern suggests but does not prove. Rębkowski expressly rejects a link to Jomsborg. On the debate about the Jomsvikings see Jomsvikings; for a neighbour on the coast whose trading centre collapsed in the middle of the tenth century see Menzlin. That Menzlin's decline is connected with the waning of trade at Wolin is, in the scholarship, a hypothesis.
The source itself keeps a distance as well. Adam writes in Bremen, over a century after the fighting of 967, and according to scholarship he relies, among other things, on information from the Danish milieu. Anyone who makes him a source for "the Wolinians" is reading third-hand information. His description of the city as the "largest in Europe" is the judgement of a man who probably knew few cities.
The history of the Wolinians after 967 is above all a history of attacks from outside. According to accounts that lean on Filipowiak, in 1043 the Danish-Norwegian king Magnus the Good destroyed large parts of Wolin without taking the centre. In 1098 Wolin gave refuge to exiles from Denmark and stayed independent until a Danish campaign under Eric I followed. The reason a study by Guzikowski gives for the 1043 attack is a Wolinian raid on Hedeby that Magnus wanted to avenge (this link rests on Adam; we have not checked the passage ourselves). More on the other side in Hedeby and in the piece on the Vikings on the Baltic.
Around 1121/22 Bolesław III Wrymouth subdued Pomerania and with it the Wolinian land; the Pomeranian duke Wartislaw I became his vassal. The date stands in the survey accounts, but the details of the conquest are not transmitted. From then on there is hardly any talk of an independent tribe. In the twelfth century come the Danish attacks on Wolin that Saxo Grammaticus describes: 1170 and 1173, in other accounts also 1164, 1171, 1177 and 1184. The count varies from account to account, and we have not checked Saxo ourselves. What is certain is only that in those decades Wolin was repeatedly the target of Danish fleets and that the town nonetheless survived as a castle district into the thirteenth century.
The densest source on the Wolinians from the inside is the lives of Otto of Bamberg, the "Apostle of the Pomeranians". Two monks report, Ebo of Michelsberg and Herbord, each with his own view and his own purposes. Ebo calls Wolin together with Stettin "nobilissimae civitates", Herbord calls Wolin "civitas magna et fortis" (Herbord II, 24; Ebo III, 1; both passages after a study by Rębkowski, originals not consulted). Herbord's account also has Duke Wartislaw already holding a court in Wolin, although according to scholarship he really resided in nearby Kamień. The remnants of the tribal order thus existed beside a ducal administration.
Otto came twice: 1124/25 and 1128. For Wolin the two journeys do not give one consistent picture. A Polish study relying on the Prüfening life reports a hostile mood on the first visit: Otto was driven out, and a delegation declared that Wolin would follow Stettin's example. We have not checked this account against the sources; how far Ebo and Herbord tell the same remains to be clarified. The legendary version handed down by early modern chroniclers such as Kantzow describes Otto's flight into the ducal castle, the citizens' stone-throwing and the club-blow of a "Wend" who was later given the name Bogdal. That is later tradition, not a contemporary witness.
The framework, by contrast, is secure: after the mission the Wolinians built churches, among them the one dedicated to Saint Adalbert and George; Rębkowski names Michael and Adalbert/George for the 1120s and 1130s. On 14 October 1140 Pope Innocent II confirmed the Pomeranian bishopric with its seat at the Wolin church of Saint Adalbert; the first bishop was Adalbert, a Pole from Bolesław's circle. A market and an inn appear in the bull of 1140 and that of 1188. Around 1176 the seat moved to Cammin, which was a blow to Wolin. Whether the move marks the final loss of power or was simply a result of the destruction remains a matter of interpretation. A modern account also names a pagan uprising around 1125 said to have destroyed churches; we could not verify it in the lives. More on Otto's route via Pyritz and on Adam's description of the region in Adam of Bremen.
For the word "Gau" there is no contemporary evidence in the Wolinian land. The term comes from German-language scholarship and fits the east-Elbian conditions only roughly. The sources speak of peoples (Velunzani, Vuloini) and of strongholds or towns (civitas, urbs). The later Polish word kasztelania for the castle district denotes the ducal administrative unit of the twelfth century, not the tribe of the ninth. Tribe and castle district need not coincide. According to archaeology Kamień on the far side of the Dziwna may have been a political centre controlling Wolin; Rębkowski calls that expressly uncertain. Around 1100 several strongholds fell, among them Kamień and Mścięcino, and with Lubin a new stronghold arose on the Świna.
In popular retellings tribe, trading place and myth are often fused into a single story, from Viking base to the sunken city of Vineta. The sources keep them apart. The Bavarian Geographer knows a people and a number. Widukind knows an alliance and a battle. Adam knows a city. Herbord and Ebo know people who resist, bargain, accept baptism and doubt again.
Wolin lies between the Szczecin Lagoon and the open Baltic, separated from the mainland by the river arms Dziwna and Świna. The way from the trading place to the sea runs along the Dziwna and, at over thirty kilometres, is about two and a half times as long as the route along the Świna from the lagoon, which measures under twenty. At the same time the water level around 900 was probably one to one and a half metres lower than today, and the coastline was a different one. A landing stage in one excavation trench is dated to about 890 to 900. The habitat of the Wolinians was a coastal land in which ships and waterways determined the paths. Anyone reading Wolin as a Baltic place finds the connections in the Frisian combs, in the Danish raids and in the mobility of the traders.
The name "Wolinians" is also a reason for caution toward overly smooth pictures. The finds show craftsmen and traders, the sources show warriors; about farming and fishing the texts used here say little. The Wolinians were therefore no more a pure trading people than a pure seafaring-raider people. What they believed we know from the view of their missionaries. What they said about themselves has not come down.
Wolin & Jomsborg · The Pomeranians · The Pyritzans · The Liutizi · The Wilzi.
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