Ambiguities of the Frontier: two Case Studies from Medieval Silesia

Abstract

The article develops my long-term interest in locating medieval Poland (and its specific localities, especially Silesia) in the conceptual context of Europe and its major subdivisions – specifically East Central (more recently called simply Central), Europe. The aim is to specify the various senses in which Poland, and the places and local regions comprising it, can be understood to have been a part of a «frontier». In 2008, «frontier», as a construct, was ambiguous – and in my view remains so today. On one level, this entire macroregion of Europe is viewed as part of a large European «frontier» zone, peripheral to an earlier and older European «core». Specific places within the macroregion present a complex of more localized «cores» and their own «frontiers». Most locally, the «frontier» is a terrain of highly specific phenomena, such as lordship, colonization, land use – and, related to all of them, conflict and trauma. Two examples from thirteenth-century Silesia – a conflict over tithe revenues between Duke Henry I and Bishop Lawrence of Wrocław, and episodes of expansion of settlement and lordship in the Henryków region – serve as a case study in these varied, multilayered meanings of the medieval «frontier».

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