The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen

fleet of the wrong sort, its crews not trained in siege warfare, or equipped for a cavalry campaign. Other kings were wiser: his brother, Harold ‘the Soft’, and his Norwegian contemporary, Olaf ‘the Quiet’.
    Thirdly, there were more immediate military problems at home: the coasts and frontiers of Denmark were being regularly raided and despoiled by the Baltic Slavs. The Danes had become a Herrenvolk on the defensive.
    Of the three remaining groups of Northern peoples, the closest to the Scandinavian was the Slavonic, and in particular those West Slavs who occupied the coastlands and hinterland from the bay of Kiel to the Vistula, including the islands of Fehmarn, Poel, Rüigen, Usedom and Wollin. They were divided into a number of nations. From the Saxon and Danish frontiers to the Trave were settled the Wagrians, and from the Trave to the Warnow the Abotrites – two kindred peoples loosely united with the Polabians of the Elbe basin under one dominant dynasty. From the Warnow to Rügen, round the Oder mouths and up the Peene, was an unamalgamated group of tribes which was given the collective name of Liutizians or Wilzians – ‘terrible’ or ‘wolf’ people; the northernmost, on Rüigen and the coast facing, were the Rugians or Rani. The languages spoken by the Abotrites and Liutizians were somewhat different from those of their Sorb and Lusatian neighbours to the south, and are classified as the West Lechic; the East Lechic include the languages of the Poles and the nation which peopled the remainder of the West Slav coastland from the Oder eastwards to the Vistula – the Pomeranians, or ‘dwellers on the shore’, later differentiated towards Danzig by the names Pomerelian and Cassubian (‘shaggy-coatmen’).
    The Baltic Slavs were the most recent arrivals in the North. They had moved in from the south-east, and occupied areas left vacant by migrating Germans at various dates from the first to the sixth centuries. By the eighth their boundaries were stable, although the struggles for supremacy within each nation led to some adjustments later. Adam of Bremen recognized that they were related to the Bohemians and Poles, and could therefore be described as forming part of the population of the large Central and East European area he called Slavia. Latin writers called them Slavs, but distinguished them from the Poles, Russians and Czechs, whom we also call Slavs; Scandinavians and Germans called them Wends. At this period they differed in some respects from all their neighbours, but they also had much in common, and this deserves to be emphasized.
    For the Wends were mostly peasants, like the Scandinavians: tillers and herdsmen living in small villages and raising corn, flax, poultry andcattle, with fishing, bee-keeping and trapping as side-lines. The common unit of land value was the kuritz or ploughland (always uncus in Latin, as opposed to the mansus , or German Hufe ); the peasant paid a grain tax on this, and additional renders on any other kind of work he was engaged in. He appears in the early charters as a thrall, appendant to the unci he worked, or a contributor to the many payments owed by his village; and other evidence suggests that he was often a captured or purchased prisoner, held in hereditary servitude.
    As in Scandinavia, the agricultural surplus maintained a landowning class: either country magnates living in forest strongholds with their retainers, or communities of warriors and burghers settled in towns. Slav society was intensely militarized. It had developed in the ninth and tenth centuries under pressure, between the hammer of the Vikings and the anvil of the Reich, and for long periods the Abotrites and Wagrians had been obliged to pay tribute to Danish kings and German bishops and marcher lords. The dominant class that emerged had held on to its territories and peasants by learning from the enemy and exploiting its own people to maintain effective armies, fleets and fortifications.