Wend was a shifting German label for many Slav neighbours
“Wends” never named a single people. Medieval Germans and Scandinavians applied it to assorted Slavs, from the Obotrites of the Baltic coast to the Slovenes of the Alps, and today only the Sorbs of Lusatia, in eastern Germany, remain as a recognised minority of Wendish origin.
The word may go back to the Veneti or Venedi that Pliny and Ptolemy placed on the Baltic, and it may survive in Finnish Venäjä, meaning Russia. Norse sources used Vender for the Slavs of the southern Baltic shore, while Saxons meant Slavs west of the Oder, in what became Germania Slavica. Southern Germans said Winde and left place-names such as Windischgraz, and until the mid-nineteenth century German speakers commonly called Slovenes Wenden.
The chronicle of Fredegar places Wends east of the Elbe beside the Saxons, who paid the Merovingians 500 cows a year and guarded that frontier. The migrants split into small tribes separated by forest; some merged into larger units such as the Obotrites of Holstein and Mecklenburg, or the Lutici alliance. In 983 many tribes rose against the Empire’s missions, colonies, and marches and succeeded, delaying German rule for generations.
Pressure from Germans, Danes, and Poles followed. A German force destroyed the temple at Rethra in 1068 or 1069, the Pomeranians were baptised in 1124 and 1128, and the Wendish Crusade came in 1147. In 1168 Bishop Absalon and King Valdemar the Great of Denmark took Arkona on Rügen and pulled down the statue of the god Svantevit. From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries German settlers poured in, and the Polabian language lingered only until around the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Traces remain. Swedish kings styled themselves kings of the Wends from 1540 to 1973, and Slavic endings such as -itz and -ow mark towns like Delitzsch, while even Leipzig and Berlin probably have Wendish names. The Sorbs keep their languages through the Domowina, and Stanislaw Tillich, Saxony’s premier from 2008 to 2017, is of Sorbian descent. In 1854 Lusatian Wends sailed on the Ben Nevis to found Serbin in central Texas.
Source: Wends
