Historic Countries Poland : Magdeburg Law

Barczewko / Alt-Wartenburg

A civic settlement in the ‘Great Wilderness’, founded and destroyed within a quarter of a century:

At the side of Lake Wadag, at the village of Barczewko/Alt-Wartenburg near Olsztyn (Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, north-eastern Poland), lie the walls of the first town of Wartenburg (Barczewko), destroyed during hostilities in 1354. Today’s Barczewo stands on the site of its re-establishment at a different location, since which time the remains of the first town have lain untouched in the earth. In recent years, this site has been the subject of a research project conducted by the universities of Gdańsk in Poland and Greifswald in Germany and funded primarily by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, with contributions from the University of Gdańsk, the municipality of Barczewo and the Historischer Verein für Ermland.

Fig. 1: Present-day view of the Barczewko town walls (photograph: Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz)

In comparison with other towns and cities once endowed with Magdeburg law, Barczewko/Alt-Wartenburg, located in the former Prince-Bishopric of Warmia and the Prussian territory of Galinden, makes a most modest impression. The town’s terrain, irregularly oval in form and originally surrounded by a moat and wall, lay on a spur providing the settlers with an area barely exceeding two hectares. Shortly before or around the year 1330, a small group of colonists, presumably originating largely from Silesia, settled there, in the wake of the establishment of a fortified castle nearby by the Warmian bishop Eberhard von Neiße (in office 1300/01 to 1326) in 1325. One might query the appropriateness of calling such a settlement a town; in this particular case, legal, social and architectural considerations emphatically justify the epithet.

In legal terms, Barczewko’s civic status is identifiable in contemporary written sources, such as the deed of 1337 which constituted its first mention as Wartberg Ciuitate; the document named the town’s two Schulzen (heads of the settler community) as two brothers, Johannes and Peter. The town’s municipal status rested on ‘charters of location’, known as Handfesten, which we know were issued for almost all Warmian municipalities in the fourteenth century. Barczewko’s Handfeste has not survived; it is likely to have perished in the flames of the original town’s destruction in 1354. We are, by contrast, aware of the content of the charters of location issued for its near-contemporary neighbouring municipalities, Guttstadt/Dobre Miasto (whose Handfeste was dated 1329), Rößel/Reszel (1337) and Seeburg/Jeziorany (1338). The provisions they contained, based on Chelmno law, are largely consistent with one another, differing only in respect of specific details. It therefore seems a safe assumption that Barczewko’s lost Handfeste would have been comparable in content. The civic character of these settlements, all of which were relatively small in size, appears unambiguously in particular features of their charters which contemporary Handfesten pertaining to villages did not include, such as the right to hold markets and erect fortifications, and in the types of public institutions the towns contained, especially the commercial centre (Mercatorium) and the public baths.

The civic institutions that found mention in the charters shaped the urban character of the structures evident in these small Warmian towns. Barczewko appears to have been no exception. By its destruction in 1354, it consisted in approximately two dozen half-timbered houses with cellars, situated along two parallel streets and a rectangular marketplace of around 40 by 60 metres, flanked on its southern side by the town’s largest building, the Mercatorium referred to above. Grouped around an inner courtyard containing, among other things, furnaces for craftspeople’s use, the three wings of this commercial facility served as stores and sales areas for wares produced in the town or purchased in the course of trade. Researchers have identified the location of the public baths as the town’s eastern edge; here, distinctive finds such as a large furnace and numerous clay drinking and pouring vessels point to the site’s erstwhile use. The choice of the baths’ position, at some remove from the marketplace and the surrounding houses, will have been connected to the fire risk presented by the regular heating required for their operation.

The town – which also had a parish church with a graveyard attached, located north-east of the marketplace – thus featured all components of an urban settlement: a marketplace with a mercantile centre serving administrative and economic needs and given pride of place in the town; a regular network of streets; fortification; a church and a graveyard; and a number of houses for the citizenry. These latter were built, like the rest of the settlement, largely of wood and clay and in the half-timbered style; nevertheless, their rectangular cellars, accessed via staircases and ramps, point distinctly to an urban manner of construction comparable to many of the buildings found in medieval towns and cities in the east of Central Europe. No settlement had previously existed at this place, and it is evident that a survey preceded its planning, which in turn preceded its construction.

Fig. 2: Reconstruction of Barczewko’s beginnings around the year 1330, land clearing and fortification is taking place and the first houses are coming into being (Leif Plith Lauritsen)

The structure of the town’s population is another factor distinguishing its civic character from the properties of a village. Finds at the site, including ploughs, hoes, hatchets, scythes and other agrarian implements, indicate that large numbers of Barczewko’s population were engaged in agriculture for at least part of their livelihoods; we might term these people ‘farmer-citizens’. These activities served exclusively to sustain the farmers and their families, in light of the fact that there were, at this time, no villages in the surrounding area whose farmers could secure its food supply. Alongside these farmer-burghers, Barczewko’s community encompassed all the crucial trades and crafts of the time, including fishermen, a butcher, miller, blacksmith, Bader (a barber-surgeon and master of the public baths), potter, carpenter, and so on. It was evidently incumbent upon the person assigned responsibility for establishing the town (Lokator) to take care, when selecting settlers for the new municipality, to ensure that representatives of all essential trades and crafts were among the group in order for the new town to form a functioning community. In the first two decades of its existence, Barczewko was located in the sparsely populated forested areas of the south-eastern Prussian lands, known at the time as the ‘Great Wilderness’. It was not long before the town on the edge of Lake Wadag had found incorporation into the Prussian lands’ network of trade and communications, a fact to which imported goods and products of quality urban craftsmanship bear witness. However, the existing towns and cities which might have been sources of traded goods – Ostróda 53 kilometres to the west, and Lidzbark Warmiński 35 kilometres to the north – were far away, and the roads that led to them were in poor condition. This circumstance required the population to produce the vast bulk of its requirements, in terms of crafted goods, by itself, and this in turn called for a highly organised division of labour within the community.

Fig. 3: Archaeological finds of utensils for routine use from the cellars of the destroyed town of Barczewko (Institute of Archeology and Ethnology, University of Gdańsk)

The pattern observable in Barczewko likewise occurs in other areas of Warmia and of the territory of the Teutonic Order; the settlement of part of a region proceeded by, first, erecting a fortified castle to secure the terrain (in this case, this castle was Wartenberg, built in 1325), then establishing a town as a future economic centre for the area, with agricultural villages and single farms following. Evidence indicates that the foundation of the first village in Barczewko’s environs took place in 1346, over fifteen years after the town came into being. This procedure required the first generation of citizens in this early phase of settlement to act as craftspeople and farmers simultaneously: an immensely strenuous undertaking which demanded great skill and a willingness to take risks up to and including – as Berczewko’s ultimate fate shows – the risk of total failure of the endeavour and indeed of the loss of one’s life.

It might seem inexplicable, in view of the toil and jeopardy the settlers could expect, that, time and time again, sufficient numbers of people were willing to embark upon the venture of founding a civic community under such conditions and far from existing civilisation. A key aspect of their motivation resided in the high degree of personal and economic liberty conferred upon the settlers with the rights enshrined in the new town’s civic charter. After the labours and perils of the pioneering phase, there was the prospect of a life in relative freedom and prosperity. Combined with the timeless appeal of new beginnings, this outlook appears to have tipped the balance for many settlers against the risk of financial failure, famine and violent attack. A popular proverb, of which numerous variations exist, promised ‘den ersten der Tod, den zweiten die Not, den dritten das Brot’ (death for the first [generation], suffering for the second, bread for the third). Sadly, the community of Barczewko was to experience the bitter fulfilment of this saying in its most extreme form.

Barczewko’s ruin came during the lifetime of its first generation of settlers. The colonists fell victim to the bloody conflict between the Teutonic Order and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania which overshadowed the region during the fourteenth century. In the winter of 1354, a Lithuanian army, led by the two grand dukes Kęstutis (who reigned between 1347 and 1382) and Algirdas (whose reign covered 1345–1377), attacked the young town, burning it to the ground and killing its entire population. The chronicles of Wigand of Marburg, a herald of the Teutonic Order, mention the event, and present-day archaeological research has provided striking evidence in support of the account, indicating that the town met its end in a catastrophic conflagration whose date we can consider confirmed by finds of coins and by the fact that all dendrochronological dating carried out on wood from the site’s former buildings yields dates prior to the year of the burning.

Fig. 4: Reconstruction of the situation on the day of Barczewko’s destruction in 1354 (Leif Plith Lauritsen)

The rebuilding of Barczewo/Wartenburg followed some years later at a site approximately six kilometres from the first, leaving the remains of the original town preserved under the ground as an exemplar of an embryonic Lokationsstadt. Had not the original, lonely site at Lake Wadag suffered the devastation of 1354, it would today be the location of a small provincial town whose history would be of interest to local enthusiasts at most. The unhappy event of its destruction has given rise to a form of ‘Pompeii effect’ in which the town’s buildings and artefacts, torn abruptly from daily use and left to themselves for the subsequent 660 years, are now objects of archaeological and historical research into municipal communities whose importance transcends the immediate region. The cellars of the houses burned down in 1354 contained clay vessels, all kinds of tools, silver coins and implements for routine use, often found as they had been on the day of the catastrophe. The violent end met by Berczewko is apparent in the crossbow bolts and arrowheads strewn around the scene and above all in the skeletons of the unfortunate townspeople, murdered and buried under their houses’ falling beams. Each house excavated adds to our knowledge of the town’s social and economic structures, and the two decades’ worth of graves in the former churchyard represent an invaluable genetic treasure-trove of information for the history of Warmia’s population in the fourteenth century’s second quarter.

Barczewko/Alt-Wartenburg serves as a representative case of the numerous small towns in the period of the eastern European settlements endowed with Magdeburg law or related civic codes between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Their civic character did not necessarily arise from the size of their population, but rather, and above all, from the legal, social, economic and urban characteristics attaching to them as outlined in this article.

By Felix Biermann, Christofer Herrmann and Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz

Wielkie Oczy

Wolsztyn

Żary

Wielopole Skrzyńskie

Wrocław

Planned City of the Silesian Dukes

The Silesian capital Wrocław is located on the Odra River, which had a significant influence on the structures of the medieval settlement. The natural, particularly richly developed water network was formed by several branches of the Odra River in its wide valley and three rivers flowing into it, as well as the numerous abandoned river courses. The waters changed their course in a natural way, creating several individual river islands. The most decisive factors for the early settlement development of the city of Wrocław were both the Cathedral Island and the Sand Island and the areas on the banks on both sides of the Odra River.

The transformation of Wrocław from an early, polycentric settlement complex into a legal city of the 13th century occurred within the framework of general developments in Central and Western Europe. The flourishing economic advancement of the West intensified long-distance trade and the exchange of information. A considerable increase in population led to a wave of emigration and consequently to population growth in the East. In Silesia, unlike other areas in Europe, this transformation process was peaceful. The new settlers from the West were experienced in trade, handicrafts and agriculture, which made them very welcome to the landlords. Due to this settlement process, new cities and villages were founded, which the landlords considered their own investments to promote the development of their domain (melioratio terrae nostrae). In Wrocław, such investors and promoters were the local princes of the Silesian Piast dynasty.

The influx of merchants and craftsmen from the West into many an East-Central European city had taken place even before the formation of municipalities in the legal sense. Some sources indicate that this was also the case in Wrocław. Until the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, the inhabitants of the craftsmen’s and market settlement on the left bank of the Odra River used St. Adalbert’s Church as their center. The construction of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in the newly settled part of the city seems to reflect the emergence of the new community in Wrocław at the beginning of the 13th century. In this regard, it can be likewise dared to claim that the first German-speaking settlers in Wrocław settled there. Individual written sources from this period mention residents with German-sounding names, such as Gerung(us). In 1214, the legal representative of the new city residents, the Schultheiss (sheriff or village mayor) Godinus (scultetus Godinus) was finally attested.

Jewish merchants settled on the western edge of the city and Walloon weavers in the east. The presence of ethnically foreign settlers in the first decades of the 13th century, however, did not mean any significant changes in the spatial and settlement structure. This did not occur until the 1330/40s, when a new, differently organized settlement area was established in a previously uninhabited area of the city – to the west of the older polycentric artisan and market settlements.

The center of the new part of the city was shaped by a quadrangular market square, about 180 by 200 meters in size, which in Wrocław is still called “The Ring” (Rynek). Around it, streets and plots for the bourgeois houses were marked out at regular intervals. Whether the evenly spaced city plan was directly related to a founding act is uncertain so far. Several legal grants for Wrocław have been handed down. In 1261, the last such legal act took place, when Duke Henry III of Silesia (ruled 1248–1266) and his brother Wladislaw, later Bishop of Salzburg (held office 1265–1270), bestowed Magdeburg law on Wrocław. The perimeter block development around the market was divided into lots 60 feet wide and 120 feet long. The citizens’ houses in the northern part of the city had a width of 40 feet. In some cases, the original lot size was adjusted due to brick houses built in the 13th century, but most lots were quickly altered on the occasion of inheritance divisions or sales. In the center of the square, the City Hall, the Cloth Hall and brick sales stalls were built over the decades.

The first Wrocław city wall encompassed an area of about 40 hectares. Inside the walls was the area originally allocated to the civic community, as well as the core of the old craftsmen’s and merchants’ settlement around the Church of St. Adalbert, where the princely land law was still in force. Outside the city walls remained a part of the area already settled before the foundation of the city, to which, therefore, the city law did not apply. The old settlement ad sanctum Adalbertum was dissolved after 1261. In its place, the evenly planned novum forum, the New Market, was erected. At that time, extensions of the town also took place, which led to its expansion to the south and west. Finally, in the first half of the 14th century, a second belt was built to fortify the whole of Wrocław.

Within the geometrically structured city, there were three rectangular marketplaces: the centrally located Ring, the Salt Market bordering the Ring from the southwest, and the more recent New Market. Archaeological research of the street network confirms their continuity from the late Middle Ages until today. The streets were initially paved with a solid wooden surface and gradually equipped with a stone pavement for stabilization. To expand Wrocław, the New Town was also laid out in 1263 to the east of the Old Town in a uniform structure. However, it did not have its own fortifications. The total area inhabited by Wrocław citizens at that time amounted to about 140 hectares. Outside the inhabited city were the Prince’s Castle on the Odra River and the ecclesiastical enclaves: Cathedral Island, Sand Island with Augustinian Abbey and north of it Elbing/Ołbin with the Premonstratensian Abbey.

Two parish churches existed in the early civic town: St. Mary Magdalene to the east of the market square and St. Elizabeth at its northwest corner. The situation of the mendicant orders in Wrocław was unique. Similar to Prague and Kraków, they came to the city even before the location or during the new layout. The Dominicans had taken over the already existing St. Adalbert’s Church in 1226. The Franciscans were granted a site for their monastery building near the Sand Bridge, which was probably located at the market of the older settlement.

The inflow of new inhabitants from Western and Central Europe and the resulting restructuring and reorganization of the urban community caused a general change in economic organization, civic building, material culture and lifestyle. The transformation of the city and the urban way of life took place over several decades, as evidenced in particular by archaeological sources. From the beginning of the 13th to the middle of the 14th century, the traditional building constructions – log construction as well as wattle and daub – were replaced by the western way of building, among others by the construction known as post-and-beam construction, which later developed as the Silesian variant of half-timbering. The first civic houses made of bricks are documented for the middle of the 13th century. About 100 years later, they had already become the dominant construction method. The living conditions had also changed: The introduction of tiled stoves at the end of the 13th century improved the heating situation. Later, artificial lighting found its way into the houses through the use of candlesticks and oil lamps.

The city’s water supply was initially provided by wells located on individual civic properties. Already at the beginning of the 14th century, the construction of waterworks was initiated. Until the 16th century, three “water arts” (waterworks) were built, which pumped water from the rivers Odra and Ohlau. They were connected with pipe systems made of wood or ceramics so that the water reached public and private wells through the streets. Sewage disposal and a proper sanitary condition of the town were secured by private cesspools on individual properties and by public gutters (sewage channels) in the streets.

The visual appearance of the city of Wrocław, its well-developed civic culture and the relatively high standard of living of its inhabitants were the results of the founding process under Magdeburg law. Even today, the cityscape created in the 13th century is still easily recognizable. The shape of the then marketplace has remained unchanged, although the buildings around it have undergone modifications. The City Hall still stands on the original site, but it was rebuilt several times in the late Gothic style in the late Middle Ages. Today it is the seat of the Historical Museum of the City of Wrocław. Next to it stand the cloth halls and general stores made of brick in their original form; they are still divided by three alleys. The market still fulfills the most important of its former functions. The seat of the city president and the city council is situated there. The square, as well as numerous cafes and restaurants, is a popular meeting place for residents and tourists in Wrocław. The chessboard-like plan of the streets of the Old Town has remained unchanged, as have the intervening blocks of houses. Brick walls from the 13th and 14th centuries have been preserved in many former citizens’ houses, especially in cellars and on the first floor, and serve as the interior decoration of restaurants and stores. Wrocław University is now located on the site of the former castle at the northern end of the Old Town.

Author: Jerzy Piekalski
(English translation: Uli Nickel)

Magdeburg Law

A building block of modern Europe

Barczewko / Alt-Wartenburg

Wielkie Oczy

Wolsztyn

Żary

Wielopole Skrzyńskie

Wrocław

Zator

Wieluń

Września

Zawichost