The Polabians were a tribe of Western Slavs who lived east of the Lower Elbe River near the Baltic Sea in present-day northern Germany. Identified as the Wends by the Franks, they moved into territories vacated by Germanics several centuries before, by the seventh century C. E. Germanic groups remaining there may have joined the first Slavs to enter their region, judging by distinctions between the culture that developed there and that of most Slavs elsewhere. Among their neighbors were the Slavic Obodrites and Veletians.
In the eighth century to defend against these tribes Charlemagne, king of the Franks and emperor of the West, established a borderland entity known as the Saxon Mark. In the ninth and 10th centuries Polabians became allied with the Czechs though the royal marriages of Ludmilla and Drahomir. The Polabians rebelled against the Germans under Henry I, who died fighting them and other Slavs in 936. By the end of the 10th century the Germans had been driven out of the Polabian and Obodrite territories, which remained united under rule by the POLANIANS until the late 11th century, when they were under German hegemony, still maintaining a degree of independence, however. In 1160 Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, finalized the subjugation of the Slavic tribes in the region, after which German settlers and missionaries settled there (see Germans: nationality). In 1169 the Danish commander Absalon rooted out the Polabian island stronghold of Rugen during his campaign against Polabian pirates in the Baltic.
The Polabian dialect of West Slavic endured into the 18 th century. On the basis of the dialect, the name Polabians or Polabs or Polabian Slavs is now commonly applied to all the Slavs east of the Elbe and its tributary the Saale and west of the Oder (the name Polabian means along the Elbe).
World History
