Borderlands Empire: Contested space, cooperative governance, and the formation of medieval Germany from the tenth through the twelfth centuries

Abstract

This is a story of the borderlands that stretched east and west from the banks of the Elbe River in the tenth through the twelfth centuries. It is a story of meetings between pagan and Christian polities, of mutually settled landscapes, of deep entanglement, and of frequent conflict. At its core, however, it is a story of governance. It considers how the realm that emerged from the remnants of Carolingian East Francia and developed into what is commonly referred to as the Medieval German Empire managed the realities of diffuse and fragmented power that defined its internal makeup, as well as its relationship to the varied political units with which it shared the Elbian borderlands. It studies the internal modes of cooperative governance the Empire developed to forward its administrative objectives. It also explores how greatly that realm’s position on the Elbian borderlands, and the choices made by all of the power players in that space, including its pagan Slavic princes, shaped whether, how, and with what effectiveness those internal modes functioned. It then turns to the changes of the twelfth century, which a long tradition of scholarship has characterized as a period of German expansion across the Elbe, reevaluating what that expansion entailed and arguing that the modes and processes of cooperative governance upon which the Empire so deeply relied set conditions for how it unfolded and—importantly—for how Slavic princes east of the Elbe navigated their own, evolving relationships with the Medieval German Empire. That navigation was never simply responsive. As in every other moment of change in this shared space, all of the power players on the borderlands contributed to their reshaping, which, by the end of the twelfth century, was fast creating something quite new, indeed.