Old Prussian/Baltic/Polish architecture

[Peterski]

Burzenland looks topographically as a castle itself. It's an incredible place. I wonder if it was ever intended to take any of the Cuman areas. Not sure if medieval knights were suitable to at all fight in a steppe environment.

Yes it was intended to fight against the Cumans. Hungarian king invited the Teutonic Order to help him against the Cumans (just like later Konrad of Mazovia wanted help against the Prussians).

Medieval Europeans (including Russians too) fought many battles in a steppe environment, so... they could.

[rothaer]

(...) Granted as a fief by Konrad of Mazovia = Chełmno Land.

His nice German first name made me look up what he at all was. His ancestry is a little bit unexpected, it's 1/4 Polish, 1/4 German, 1/4 Czech and 1/4 Serb (sic!).

[Peterski]

BTW - East Kashubia [northern part of the Polish Corridor as of ca. 1918] is not an attractive land for farming. Maybe this is why German peasants didn't want to go there? [or some went, but got assimilated by Kashubs or died out / left the area]. You are assuming that they would in different political conditions?

And why German peasants didn't want to go to Livonia?

[rothaer]

BTW - East Kashubia [northern part of the Polish Corridor as of ca. 1918] is not an attractive land for farming. Maybe this is why German peasants didn't want to go there? [or some went, but got assimilated by Kashubs or died out / left the area]. You are assuming that they would in different political conditions?

And why German peasants didn't want to go to Livonia?

I think they were sparse and got assimilated. You have a number of German surnames indicating that. (My examples are admittedly anekdotal, but nevertheless: The author of my touristic Kashubia guide is Jaroslaw Ellwart and also the family of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_..._Bach-Zelewski family - according to German Wikipidia - spoke Polish and Kashubian at home.)
I think German settlers preferred what was closest to their origin and maybe even - if possible - border German settled land - if you have comparable conditions. As you know also the land of Stolp was not yet densly settled with Germans so likely that would have been the next step in settling. Then Kashubia (or the whole of Pomerelia).

I guess they did not go to Livonia because there was so much more close areas that could be settled. The German Ostsiedlung essentially lost it's power and halted with the great plague at abt. 1350. In 1500 the Teutonic Order did not find any German settlers for (later) Masuria, so they agreed to Masovian and later also to Lithuanian settlers.

[Roy]

Polish? where?
zis is Slavic (Soviet)

It was built on the original site of Königsberg Castle.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_..._(Kaliningrad)

Very delicate, brutalist architecture from Soviet Russia. I love it!

[Roy]

His nice German first name made me look up what he at all was. His ancestry is a little bit unexpected, it's 1/4 Polish, 1/4 German, 1/4 Czech and 1/4 Serb (sic!).

Konrad is a quite popular name in Poland btw.

[Peterski]

A Poland, untouched by Germans

Untouched, really?

In Polish schools they teach that all of Poland - only except for Masovia - was affected by the Ostsiedlung. But they also teach that Germans who settled in areas that remained under control of the Polish Kingdom reconsolidated by Casimir III, were all Polonized - this happened e.g. in Malopolska.

That's why it surprised me when I first got into genetics and it turned out Polish average is closer to East Slavic than to Czech.

But I now made this experiiment with my PL_Malopolska (Lesser Poland) average, using K36 data.

It shows that there is Celto-Germanic admixture in PL_Malopolska - do you think all of it is Pre-Medieval (Ancient / Iron Age)?

I used the following pops:

Ukraine - all regions available (except for Tatars etc., only Slavic regions)
Germany - Sachsen, Thuringia, Sachsen-Anhalt, Franconia [Lower, Upper]
Slovakia - Carpathian Rusyns (representing possible "southern influences")

[distances look high because it is K36]



^^^
And if I remove West Ukrainians and use only Central and Eastern (from Kiev Oblast to the east):
[as Western Ukrainians have some Celto-Germanic and recent Polish admixtures, as you know]

(I also removed Slovakian Rusyns in this run)



I used only those selected regions for Germans because they came to Malopolska supposedly from:



^^^
It seems that Germans who came to Malopolska were already East German autosomally (mixed with Slavs in that Saale River area). If the Saale River origin theory is wrong and instead they came from South Silesia & Upper Lausitz, then they should have been even more Slavic.

It is thought that the name Gorlice (a Walddeutsche town in Malopolska) comes from Görlitz in Upper Lusatia.

PS:

Podkarpackie also received German settlers, even more.

=====

^^^
So to sum up, if Pomerelia was never occupied by the Teutonic knights, then no matter how many Germans would have settled there, they would have been Polonized within a century or two - just like it happened in Lesser Poland and other areas that were reconsolidated under Polish Crown by King Casimir III. At least this is the most likely scenario. So Kashubs and Poles from Pomerelia would simply be autosomally more Germanic-shifted in such a scenario.

Maybe as western-shifted as Czechs (but more northern and without southern components).

[Peterski]

So, a colonizing German peasant without a German ruler supporting his colonization, is like a body without a head.

A body without a head coordinating it, can do nothing on its own.

This is probably why German settlers never Germanized any territory that was not ruled by German ruling classes.

In Lower Silesia and Western Pomerania there was a replacement of Slavic ruling classes by German ruling classes.

Also the Church in Silesia and Pomerania was German-dominated.

Princely dynasties were Slavic, but Slavic dukes often married German princesses. And then, they slowly died out.

And in this context they could well instead have colonised the Eastern parts of later Provinz Pommern (your beloved Stolp and Lauenburg-Bütow) and Pomerelia.

I think they could not do that as long as the area was under Polish rule.

Let's look at Lebork / Lauenburg for example - in year 1751 in Lebork County, at that time still Polish-ruled, among the nobility (szlachta) were 162 Polish families and 80 non-Polish families (most or maybe even all of them German I suppose but the source I used doesn't specify). As long as Polish nobility was more numerous than German, I don't think you could Germanize that area, even if you brought hundreds of German peasants. But let's go to year 1862 - in this year among Lauenburg nobility there were 91 German families and only 12 Polish-descended families remained, but partly already Germanized.

Of course that rapid German takeover of nobility could only happen due to the fact that Poland lost Lebork in 1771 / 1772.

It looks like Polish szlachta was deprived of their noble status (decline from 162 to 12 families) and German remained stable (80 to 91).

BTW, in Lebork and Bytow counties Catholicism survived during the Reformation also thanks to Polish rule in that territory.

In neighbouring Stolp / Slupsk county Catholicism did not survive (or at least the number of Catholics there was tiny).

I think they were sparse and got assimilated. You have a number of German surnames indicating that. (My examples are admittedly anekdotal, but nevertheless: The author of my touristic Kashubia guide is Jaroslaw Ellwart

In one genetic study they had a sample of n=204 Kashubs and as many as 25% of them (n=51) had German surnames.

However, when they compared the frequencies of Y-DNA haplogroups of Kashubians with Slavic surnames vs. Kashubians with German surnames, they concluded that there is no statistical difference. Weird, isn't it? What they suggested is that German surnames among Kashubians do not indicate actual German ancestry, but that perhaps they were assigned to them by German authorities (kind of like a lot of Ashkenazi Jews have German surnames for the same reason). On Polish history forum some users claimed that it is improbable and that having a German surname should indicate a German ancestor.

Could geneticists be wrong when they found no statistical differences in haplogroups of Slavic vs. Germanic surnames?

BTW, my surname Meller ancestors (maternal grandfather's side) also have a Slavic Y-DNA haplogroup.

Which of course does not exclude the possibility that they were East Germans, since a lot of East Germans have R1a.

Those R1a Mellers could even be Old Prussians (for example Tolkien family also have R1a and are from East Prussia).

I should check if my Meller's subclade is more Slavic or more Baltic (at this point it seems more Slavic).

A Poland, untouched by Germans, would have been rather backward and much weaker.

As I wrote in previous posts, the only part of Poland untouched by the Ostsiedlung was Mazovia. And while we can indeed call Mazovia "rather backward" (if "different" or "less similar to Western Europe" always means backward?), the 2nd part - calling it much weaker - is absolutely not applicable. Actually in terms of military strength it was probably the strongest region of Poland [it had the highest percent of knights* among the population - in later centuries they became szlachta]. Mazovian peasants were also very expansive and vigorous - they colonized your Masuria (it started already in the 1400s or sooner, the Teutonic Order only approved fait accompli when they agreed to Mazovian colonization - they agreed to something which had already taken place because Mazovians were spontaneously moving into the Grosse Wildnis area, without waiting for anyone's permission). They also colonized what is now Podlaskie. And then they began migrating into Belarus and Lithuania, contributing to the formation of Polish minorities there. They even migrated to the south into Red Ruthenia, contributing to Poles in what later became East Galicia (or Eastern Lesser Poland as some Poles called it).

*In Mazovia knights/szlachta (including their families) were 23% of the population.

[rothaer]

However, when they compared the frequencies of Y-DNA haplogroups of Kashubians with Slavic surnames vs. Kashubians with German surnames, they concluded that there is no statistical difference. Weird, isn't it? What they suggested is that German surnames among Kashubians do not indicate actual German ancestry, but that perhaps they were assigned to them by German authorities (kind of like a lot of Ashkenazi Jews have German surnames for the same reason). On Polish history forum some users claimed that it is improbable and that having a German surname should indicate a German ancestor.

Could geneticists be wrong when they found no statistical differences in haplogroups of Slavic vs. Germanic surnames?

Interesting.

My answer is this: Both is correct and if we consider what exactly we are talking about, there is no contradiction.

Ancestry research has many times shown that German settlers to a big degree came from nearby. As for Kashubia this means German Pomerania (province Pommern, Pommern-Stettin). German surnames got fixated there roughly at 1400 AD. So if a German-speaker was a miller, he could have got the name Möller. There was no administrational force to do so. People did simply chose (or get) names out of the language that they and their environment spoke (what else?). This means that a German surname definitely indicates a patrilinear German ancestry per 1400 AD (except for instance in Estonia, where German surnames were chosen by Estoinias comparably recently out of a fashion, but there was nothing like that in Poland). But it refers to the ethnicity at the time of the fixating of the surnames. Of course Germans per 1400 AD could be patrilinearily Slavic per 1250 AD f. i.

Very well the "old ancestry" (Germanic-Slavic mixture proportion) could be roughly the same same for ethnic German (per 1400 AD) Pomeranians and for ethnic Kashubian (per 1400 AD) Pomeranians.

The Y DNA results support that and furthermore they are in line with the experience that German settlers often simply came from nearby (in this case from German Pomerania).

[Peterski]

Very well the "old ancestry" (Germanic-Slavic mixture proportion) could be roughly the same same for ethnic German (per 1400 AD) Pomeranians and for ethnic Kashubian (per 1400 AD) Pomeranians.

But look at autosomal results (K36 data or G25 if you have any) of Kashubians and of Pommern Germans. They are not similar at all, Kashubians are much more Slavic. Check also the correlation maps by LM, I'm sure Pommern and Kashubia always or nearly always have different shades of colour for the same customer. So the mixture proportion was not similar. And in terms of Y-DNA Kashubians are in great majority (around 2/3) R1a, while German Pomeranians from Robert Gabel's project have much less of R1a.

So maybe the geneticists' conclusion was correct.

names out of the language that they and their environment spoke (what else?)

^^^ Maybe the official language of the region, administrative language etc., played a role?

Or e.g. if a noble who owned a village was a German, he gave his peasants German names?

Even if he had Kashubian/Polish peasants in that village.