The Slavs in the 13th century German literature: Problems of perception

Abstract

The article shows that the perception of the Slavs appearing in German literature in the 13th century was dominated by two factors. The first of these was the ancient tradition, which considered all the peoples inhabiting areas of northern Europe to be Barbarians. With the takeover of the Roman empire tradition by the German rulers, the official German writings associated with the imperial court as a rule created by the clergy, treated all peoples of Central and Eastern Europe escaping the power of the Reich as worse than peoples inhabiting Western part of the continent. Sometimes, especially in the situation of political conflicts, this manner took on the character of hostility towards the Slavs. This kind of manner was foreign to the literature created by lay people, especially epic but also historiography, or quasi-encyclopedic works. In this case, the decisive factors were not antique but the empiricism of mutual contacts between Slavs and Germans, which were various and were in no way permanently hostile.