Keywords

The story goes that two monks … came from … Bohemia into the city of Rethra. Because they publicly proclaimed the Word of God there, they were tried in a council of the pagans first by diverse tortures, as they had desired, and finally beheaded for the sake of Christ. Their names indeed, although unknown to men, are, as we truly believe, recorded in heaven.1

Thus did Adam of Bremen in his Gesta describe the fate of two monks who reached the cult center of the Redarians (Redars) on the Baltic coast in northern Germany at some point in the eleventh century. The cruel irony of their fate was perhaps lost on Adam, however. Rethra was likely synonymous with the pagan center of Riedegost, whose onomastic etymology is usually interpreted as “happy/glad to receive guests.”2 For the two missionary guests, this space of pagan hospitality par excellence turned out to be a killing ground.

As stated in the introduction to this volume, practices of hospitality have a threshold quality, which articulates the tensions between charitable welcoming and (hostile) rejection of arriving strangers. This tension tends to be resolved by means of securitization, often both on the part of guests and hosts. A neglected aspect of the connection between host–guest relations and safety measures is the question of spaces in which such meetings occurred, particularly their uncertain, sometimes contradictory nature, as is apparent in the example from Rethra. The aim of this chapter, which studies confrontations between missionary guests and pagan host communities on the Baltic Rim from the late tenth to mid-twelfth centuries, is to uncover the spatial dynamics and intercultural aspects of host–guest relations in missionary contexts. The questions guiding the following study are: how were spaces of hospitality produced and negotiated through such meetings? How was the arrival of this special type of Christian stranger and guest contained in terms of power relations and security measures? How did these interactions involve hospitable and hostile attitudes? And: what impact did the different features and functions of spaces of hospitality have on the (self-)identifications of the hosts and guests?

Although the processes of missionary activity, conversion, and Christianization of the Baltic Rim have been studied from countless viewpoints, the topic of host–guest relations as a way of shaping intercultural meetings and spaces remains understudied. So far, it has been explored in individual geographical and textual contexts, such as Livonia or Wagria,3 or through mapping the geography of “barbarian,” pre-Christian notions of hospitality. The latter type of studies, which often rely on external Christian accounts, provides the necessary background about the general customs and means of hospitality, and the pagan beliefs behind them.4 Such studies, however, tend to be written in an ethnographic tone, which favors the normative, charitable dimensions of host–guest relations in typical situations, and which clearly distinguishes such means of interaction from open hostility. In this chapter, I show that this standpoint is difficult to sustain because such claims are made at the expense of hospitality’s ambiguous, conflictual, and strategic aspects, which came to the fore during intercultural confrontations between missionary guests and pagan host communities. Despite the widespread conviction among the contemporaries, often shared by scholars, that the distinction between hospitable and hostile conduct was well-delineated and absolute, in reality there existed a continuum between these attitudes towards strangers.5

Conceptually, I follow Dan Bulley’s definition of hospitality as “a spatial relational practice with affective dimensions” and “it is this combination of the spatial and affective which makes hospitality a complex interplay of ethics and power relations.”6 As far as the method is concerned, I focus on spatiality of host–guest relations and the role played by power and identity-formation in such spatial developments. Here, too, I follow Bulley, for whom hospitality “is the means by which particular spaces are brought into being as ‘homes,’ as embodying an ethos, a way of being: an ethics. Practices of hospitality carve out spaces as mine rather than yours, as places of belonging and non-belonging, and then manage and enforce their internal and external boundaries and behaviours.”7 Furthermore, spaces of hospitality and the links between such spaces and their users, i.e. hosts and guests, are also characterized with the same ambivalence, inbetweenness, and deep-seated relationality as hospitality itself.8 To grasp these spatial aspects, the method proposed here focuses on the symbolic structuring mechanisms and the functional and political concatenations of the collectively produced spaces of hospitality. These were spaces, which shaped—and were shaped by—the identities of their producers and the power relations between them.9

These questions, concepts, and methods are applied to examples of hagiographic and historiographic texts about missionaries who proselytized on the southern Baltic Rim, such as St. Adalbert of Prague (c.956–997) or St. Otto of Bamberg (c.1060–1139) and about less well-known figures like the two Bohemian monks.10 It is an undeniably anecdotal and biased type of evidence, but my ambition is not to showcase a representative map of all conceivable types of spaces of hospitality. Rather, by focusing on critical case studies, I can offer some hopefully generalizable insights about the way in which the spatial mechanics of host–guest relations and their situational ambiguity shaped the articulation of religiopolitical thresholds on the missionary Baltic Rim; such interactions were performed in concrete confrontations, which made the relations of hospitality between missionary guests and pagan hosts a highly uncertain intercultural process.11 In exploring these problems, it is precisely the cultural bias and symbolic violence informing the sources about these confrontations that are of interest.

As for the outline, each of the five cases of spaces of hospitality—assembly, kitchen, harborage, antechamber, and asylum—explores and expands upon one or several spatio-thematic dimensions. The investigation of each space of hospitality focuses on one central case of a missionary guest confronting a pagan host community on the coasts of the Baltic Sea, with some aspects filled in with evidence from other examples.

Assembly: St. Adalbert, 997

The central and well-explored institution of pagan hospitality in Slavic and Germanic contexts is the sacred peace of the pagan assemblies, which protected the arriving guests.12 Yet, as we saw in the opening example, due to this public sanction and the strongly political character of these religions, Christian worship performed by missionaries was commonly viewed by their hosts as an open challenge, one for which the strangers sometimes had to pay with their lives. It is from the tension between these two imperatives—pagan hosts’ protection of guests and protection of their own public space—that the conditional character and ambiguity of hospitality seem to stem.

This tension and contradiction is clearly visible in St. Adalbert of Prague’s failed attempt to convert the Prussians in the spring of 997. We know of this thanks to St. Adalbert’s earliest hagiographies (the Vita prior [VP] by Johannes Canaparius, written c.999, and the Vita altera [VA] by Bruno of Querfurt, written in two versions c.1004–1008), based on eyewitness accounts by the missionary’s companions, Benedict and Gaudentius.13 For the sake of clarity, it is useful to offer a brief synopsis of St. Adalbert’s final fate and then retrace the steps in greater detail in order to focus on the spatial aspects of his failed mission. Having secured his apostolic license to preach to the pagans and having received backing from the Polish Duke Bolesław I the Brave (r. 992–1025), the self-exiled bishop of Prague, along with his two followers, first arrived at the port city of Gdańsk on the Baltic coast. After they successfully preached and baptized the local pagans, the missionaries continued eastward along the coast to more remote Prussian (or perhaps Pomerelian) tribes. The first contact was hostile: upon their arrival they were beaten up on the peripheries of an unknown community. Subsequently, the missionary guests were confronted by and debated with the locals at the assembly, only to be expelled to the peripheries again. After five days, the missionaries were attacked by a group of Prussians yet again; St. Adalbert was killed while his companions were allowed to escape to tell this story.14

The sources have a great deal to tell us about the spatiality of this mission and about the protective hospitality of pagan assemblies, including the ways it did or did not radiate to the outer layers of the Prussian ecumene. To reiterate their movements: the three men arrived in Prussia from Gdańsk by boat, which they left on the shore, and soon came to a little island on an unknown river. “But there came the owners of that place [“loci possessores”] and kicked them out with blows.”15 They escaped to the other side of the river. “When evening came, the owner of that property [“dominus uillę”] had … Adalbert brought to the village. The … crowd gathered from all sides and stood by watching … what would happen to him.”16 In this central, public setting, Adalbert identified himself as the apostle and bishop of the Prussians. He stated that the aim of his journey was to convert them and make them abandon their idols. Importantly, St. Adalbert’s also alluded to the military protection of his mission by Duke Bolesław I.17 Yet, “they, by now quite outraged, raised a terrible row shouting blasphemous words at him, and threatened to kill him.”18 The rejection of the strangers also became clear in the speech supposedly delivered by one of the Prussians:

“Only a quick departure may give you some hope to stay alive; if you stay here even a little longer, you will not escape a certain death! This entire realm, to which we stand as gateway, and we ourselves obey one common law and have one single way of life [“communis lex imperat et unus uiuendi”]! But you, who have a different law, unknown to us, will lose your heads tomorrow if you do not go away tonight!” That very night they were put in a small vessel [“nauiculam”] and, going back, they stayed for five days in some village.19

To pause here: in contrast to Canaparius, who portrayed the identity of the three men as sanctus Adalbertus and his fratres, Bruno presented them as guests or strangers (hospites) in the region.20 From the point of view on hospitality as a phenomenon that ranged between the rejection and reception of strangers, the speech of the Prussians, regardless of its fabricated character, represented a full rejection of the guests, thereby articulating hospitality as a spatial-affective practice. It was an aggressive statement, which declared the Prussian territory as “our” region or home with its own laws and values. Although the pagans’ aggression was a common motif in missionary texts, this was conceivably a typical reaction among pagan tribes confronted with the prospect of regime change.21 The arrival of St. Adalbert and his companions thus produced a space of hospitality at the assembly, which in Bruno’s version was the local market (mercatum).22 The confrontation triggered the local community’s securitizing reaction, which in turn assigned roles to the participants as hosts and guest. However, one should mention that on the outer periphery of this space of hospitality there loomed large the absent presence of the Polish duke in Gniezno who was the guests’ protector, which counterbalanced the power of the pagan center where this confrontation took place.23

Still, given the assembly space’s central political role, the hagiographers accentuated this meeting as a clash of two legal orders and culturally irreconcilable ways of life (regnum, communis lex, unus ordo uiuendi). Though this scene is a Christian interpretation of pagan attitudes, it corresponds not only with comparative ritualistic interpretations of similar conversion narratives,24 but also with the ideas about hospitality’s power dimensions. To follow Émile Benveniste’s etymological argument, hospitality is a practice of establishing the host as “the one precisely, ‘the very one’ i.e. the master and the dominant part in a host–guest relation.”25 What is at stake on the threshold of hospitality are thus the identities of the participants and, consequently, the legal orders and cosmologies behind them.26 These cosmic frames are particularly visible in Bruno’s version of the Prussian’s speech to Adalbert: “Because of people like you … the earth will no longer yield its crops [Genesis 4:12], the trees will not bear fruit, new animals will not be born, the old will die. Get outside our borders immediately!”27 In the pagans’ eyes—as envisioned by the two authors—the guests disregarded their subordinate position. They were not just trespassers but invaders who endangered the hosts’ existential security, and against whom the community had to be protected.

After this, the fate of the missionaries appears to have been sealed, though this is only the effect of the retrospective viewpoint of the authors.28 In fact, the sequence of events suggests that the hosts first deescalated the situation and simply expelled the Christian guests by putting them on a boat. The second, fatal attack by the Prussians happened outside the gravitational center of their ecumene, without the violence-inhibiting function of the assembly.29 According to Bruno’s account, the killer was a pagan priest who intended to avenge his brother who had been killed by the Poles, suggesting that the murder was the result of personal vengeance, rather than of a communal decision. Regardless of the actual motivations, in that final stage a short-lasting space of hostility emerged between the hospes and the hostes.30 Like before, this space could not be shared, nor could the invaders’ presence be tolerated. The solution, however, was no longer expulsion, but the murder of the leader of the strangers, St. Adalbert.

Kitchen: Bruno of Querfurt, 1009

The ambiguity of hospitality and of the space in which the confrontations between missionaries and pagans took place also comes to the surface in the Historia de predicacione episcopi Brunonis. This laconic report of Bruno of Querfurt’s (c.974–1009) martyrdom and mission to the Prussians is an eyewitness account of Wipert, one of Bruno’s companions, who was blinded and set free by the pagans.31

After the missionaries entered the country (patria) of the pagans, they were put before their king, Nethimer, where Bishop Bruno celebrated mass for the people gathered there. But the king interrupted: “We have the gods whom we venerate and in whom we believe. We do not want to follow your words.” Hearing this, Bruno ordered that the figures of the pagan gods be brought forward, and he then threw them into the fire whereby the flames devoured (Ignis uero accepit et deuorauit) them. In response, the king had a great fire built up and ordered that the bishop be thrown into it. “If the fire burns and devours him [“Si illum ignis comburit et deuorat”], you all will know that his teaching is in vain, but if something else happens we will start believing in this God all the more quickly.” What followed was an ordeal: the bishop, clothed in the episcopal vestments, set his throne in the middle of the fire and spent the duration of seven psalms sung by his companions within the flames. Bruno came out unscathed, and the king instantly converted to Christianity, together with 300 other men.32

Incidentally, this was not the first time Bruno and, presumably, Wipert were confronted with an enraged crowd like this. A year earlier, in 1008, after he spent a month in Kievan Rus’ with Vladimir the Great (r. 980–1015), Bruno and his followers tried to convert the Pechenegs on the shores of the Black Sea (inhabiting the region between the Ural Mountains and the Volga River). When they entered the enemy territory (terra inimicorum), they traveled safely; but on the journey’s third day, the missionaries were nearly killed, although they were ultimately left unharmed. After two days, as they reached a more populous but hostile region (occurrentibus nobis hostibus), Bruno and his followers were taken in front of the assembly.

and we and our horses were whipped. An innumerable crowd came together, with cruel eyes, and they raised a horrible noise: a thousand threatened to cut us to pieces with axes and with drawn swords held over our necks. We were tormented until nightfall, and dragged this way and that, until the leading men of the region, who seized us by force from their hands [i.e. those of our tormentors], having heard our ideas, since they were judicious, knew that we had entered their land to do good.33

After these initial setbacks, Bruno and his companions continued to proselytize among the Pechenegs for five months, and only then did they journey, via Poland, to the Prussians on the Baltic coast.34

Notwithstanding that Bruno’s triumph in Prussia turned sour right away, as the unexpected arrival of the brother of King Nethimer saw the order given to kill the missionaries and blind Wipert, a question arises: what does this ordeal by fire mean from the point of view of hospitality? What kind of space does it produce? It is my contention that this whole scene can be likened to a sort of cook-off between the hosting king and the missionary guest. Even though the author of the account does not explicitly use the vocabulary of host–guest relations, the ambiguity implicit in such relations can help us account for this confrontation. According to Lewis and Short, the root of the Latin word hostis, stranger—which evolved into meaning enemy—was Sanskrit ghas-, ghásati: to consume, eat, and destroy. This link to food also takes us to the root of hospes (host), which is pa- (cf. pater) and pasco: to feed. On this reading, the host is the person responsible (the master) for feeding the guest/stranger—with a risk that the latter turns out to be an enemy.35

Though etymology is rarely a satisfactory explanation on its own, the connection spelled out here is a good starting point from which to clarify the scene from Wipert’s testimony. The arriving strangers clearly sought to transform the local masters, i.e. the hosts of the meeting, by converting them and destroying their deities. The old gods were to be devoured, consumed by flames. Though Wipert does not explicitly refer to this, we know from other theaters of Christianization that missionaries sometimes used pagan figurines as fuel for the preparation of food. For instance, in Szczecin in 1124, Otto of Bamberg, wanting to erase the local cult of Triglav, gave out the wood from the destroyed temple to the converted locals so they could use it as fuel for cooking.36 Seen together, these two examples demonstrate that the invading missionary guests not only toppled and replaced the local religiopolitical order, but they also effectively consumed the pagan gods and had the converts do the same.

Although Wipert’s story did not make the link between consumption, theophagy, and hospitality overt, it is the fact that the bishop also ended up in the fire that suggests there is a reason to posit this ritualistic-culinary interpretation. Just as the pagan gods were devoured by the fire, so too would Bruno be devoured by flames, as Nethimer insisted. The consuming flames worked as an ordeal, a test of the efficacy of the two rival religious orders, a motif commonly found in conversion narratives and serving as a catalyst of conversion.37 What we see here is a very different type of space of hospitality: a sacrificial kitchen, or a reversed potlatch whose participants, instead of destroying their possessions, throw each other into the fire.38 The flames symbolically achieve two opposing goals simultaneously: on the one hand, they devour and destroy the representatives (idols) of the old religion; and, on the other, they cook and pre-digest the representative (Bruno) of the new one, thus making his teaching more edible for the new believers.39 As a result, this logic of sacrifice through the fire, around which the hosts and guests gather, establishes a compensatory and ambiguous equivalence between the old gods and the priest of the new one. According to Benveniste, this type of compensatory equivalence is visible in the notion of hostia, which belongs to the same etymological family as hospes, hostis, and hospitalitas: “its real sense is ‘the victim which serves to appease the anger of the gods.’”40 Regardless of the chronological gap between the senses of hostia reconstructed by Benveniste and those found in the missionary sources studied here, this notion has some explanatory value when it comes to the meeting of 1009.

It is crucial to remember that Wipert followed Bruno for at least a couple of years, and that the latter had developed a set of ideas about missionary sacrifice and the similarity of martyrs to hostiae. These ideas can be found in his writings, and he likely shared them to his companions.41 For instance, in his Vita secunda of St. Adalbert, Bruno hit back at the idea presented in the first hagiography, namely that the killing of the Prague bishop was a pagan sacrifice by the Prussians. Instead, on Bruno’s reading, St. Adalbert became a venerated communion (mactata hostia, from macto, -are: honor, sacrifice, slaughter), sacrificed for the sins of the Christians to intercede with God. In other words, what was at stake in this debate was a fundamental transformation of St. Adalbert’s identity as a martyr through a logic of the compensatory equivalence between hosts, hostiae, and guests—a transformation that Bruno was hoping to achieve himself through his own mission.42

Summing up, the seemingly plain and straightforwardly simple account of Bruno’s ordeal and the confrontation between the pagan hosts and the missionary guests is structured by the sacrificial dimension of hospitality. Here in this kitchen of hospitality, the identities and social orders of the participants were produced and devoured. The initially troubled but successful reception of the Christian strangers in 1009 nonetheless soon turned into their ultimate rejection and martyrdom. Ironically, the missionary guests died from the hands of those members of the pagan host community who had not participated in the original cook-off.

Harborage: Bernhard the Spaniard, 1122

Probably in 1122, a certain Bernhard, a Spanish bishop and hermit, arrived to the Baltic harbor of Wolin in Pomerania with the aim of converting the Pomeranians, although the region had already been under the influence of Christian Polish and German rulers since at least the early eleventh century.43 By the time Otto of Bamberg commenced the full-scale conversion of the region in the 1120s, of which Bernhard’s mission was a forerunner, there were some small Christian communities living in Pomerania, which was generally still seen as a pagan territory.44

Bernhard arrived to Wolin together with a guide and an interpreter, he also had received Duke Bolesław III the Wrymouth’s (r. 1102–1138) permission to preach there.45 The moment he entered the city, however, the inhabitants interrogated him about his identity and intentions. “He declared that he was the servant of the true God … and had been sent by Him in order that he might lead them from the error of idolatry into the way of truth.” The Wolinians reacted with predictable resentment: “‘We will not receive you nor listen to you. … If then you have any regard for your life, return as quickly as possible to the place from which you came!’”46 Bernhard, however, decided to prove his point with an ordeal by fire akin to Bruno’s:

Set fire to some house that has collapsed through old age and is not of use to anyone, and throw me into the midst: if, when the house has been consumed by the flames, I shall come out from the fire uninjured, then know that I have been sent by Him to whose rule fire and every created thing is subject, and whom all the elements serve.47

Baffled, the leaders of the inhabitants (sacerdotes et seniores plebis) debated among themselves the threat posed by the missionary guest and its wider ramifications in a manner that can be interpreted as a securitizing response for their community:

This is a foolish and desperate person who … seeks death and goes of his own accord to meet it. We are beset by his villainy, which seeks to exact vengeance because he has been rejected by us, and to involve us in his own destruction. For if one house is set on fire, the destruction of the whole city must follow.48

The Wolinians’ self-protective decision was neither to listen nor receive Bernhard, nor to do him any harm. Again, the space of the assembly mitigated violence. In this case, the caution of the hosts was motivated by the memory of St. Adalbert’s murder over a century earlier, whose perpetrators, the Prussians, suffered heavily in the wake of Polish retaliation. Though it seems unlikely that the memory of the Prague bishop’s martyrdom was circulating among the Pomeranians, this de-escalating exchange can be interpreted as a signal that the Wolinians were making decisions in the light of the recent military expeditions of Bolesław III, and were conscious of the threat of revenge.49 Rather than killing Bernhard, their instinct was to push him back by putting him on a boat again and sending him to the sea.

Suddenly, grabbing an axe, Bernhard attacked the holy of the holies of the Wolinians, a column raised in commemoration of the mythical founder of the city, Julius Caesar. “The pagans would not permit this, and rushing upon him with great anger, struck him in a cruel fashion and left him half dead.”50 Bernhard still raised himself up and resumed his preaching again. Eventually, the pagan priest grew tired of the whole situation and dragged him from the crowds:

they placed him with his monk and interpreter on his own boat, saying, “If you have so great a desire to preach, preach to the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air, and beware that you presume not to cross the boundary of our land, for there is not a single person who will receive you.”51

After this Bernhard returned to Poland.

The main problem that the Wolinian hosts had with Bernhard was the state in which he arrived and the discrepancy between his destitute condition and the glorious message he preached. True to his eremitic calling, he approached the city “barefoot and in a despicable garment.”52 The primary frame through which his pagan hosts saw him was materialistic, however: “‘How can we believe that you are the messenger of the supreme God? Whereas He is full of glory and endowed with all wealth, you are despicable and are so poor that you cannot even provide shoes for your feet.’”53 For them, he was clearly in utter need, “‘for it is only to relieve your poverty that you have come hither.’”54 Even among themselves, the pagan leaders explained Bernhard’s insanity and desperation by referring to his “excessive poverty.”55 The deliberations of the Pomeranians are matched by the report from his mission, which Bernhard delivered to Duke Bolesław III in Gniezno:

They are animals and are altogether ignorant of spiritual gifts [“spiritualium donorum”], and so they judge a man only by his outward appearance. They rejected me on the ground of my poverty, but if some influential preacher, whose honour and wealth they would respect, were to go to them, I expect that they would of their own accord submit to the yoke of Christ.56

Otto’s hagiographers contrasted Bernhard’s mendicant missionary strategy with what the Spaniard later himself advised to Otto of Bamberg: to blind the Pomeranians with ostentatious wealth and not to make oneself dependent on the pagan hosts’ gifts, but rather to be generous to them. Such an approach was apparently better suited to the animal-like nature of the people they were dealing with.57

Bernhard’s example is representative of a larger tradition of missioning. In his works, Bruno of Querfurt proposed a similar, if not even more radical tactic: missionaries should learn the local languages, stop shaving their heads and beards, change their rich clerical vestments—which their pagan hosts found horrifying—to shabby cloths and live off the work of their hands, like the Apostles. “Having become like them, we could live with them with greater familiarity, talk to them and live with them.”58 What he recommended to his followers was cohabitation and not just a brief intercultural encounter. By mimicking the identity of their hosts, the missionary guests would move into the pagan communities and convert them from within.

In contrast, the missionary strategy based on Bernhard’s later advice to Otto of Bamberg attributed to the pagan hosts a view that the rivalry between their domestic gods and the new Christian God was directly measurable by the prosperity of their advocates. For instance, after his arrival to Szczecin, Otto regularly paraded the city’s streets in his snow-white pontifical vestments and frequented the city’s most public spaces, such as the market, and was accompanied by his similarly vested followers, making sure the inhabitants took good notice of their wealth.59 The evangelical ideals of poverty represented by the Spanish bishop were in conflict with local views and thus made for a poor tool of conversion.60 Further, these contradictions led to conflicting perspectives and feelings of ambiguity towards the character of Bernhard. By giving himself to the Wolinians as a negative gift—a burden—he was putting them in debt. For his hosts, he was a pauper who turned Wolin into a space of hospitality equivalent to a harborage and its inhabitants into almoners. Even if in his own view, he was a humble guest and his hosts were poor in spiritual gifts, in their view he wanted to control them with the gift of himself.61

From the perspective of this volume, it is hard not to notice that the concerns about the poor economic status of arriving strangers expressed by host communities and the latter’s tendency to frame the aliens as a sustenance and security issue seem like a transhistorical problem. An arriving stranger often tends to be perceived as an unprovoked and hence undeserved burden on the hosts. The perspective of host communities and the type of relationship that emerges from such a confrontation is captured by the concept of intolerable dependency proposed by Judith Butler. The relationship of hospitality was thus an ethico-political bind, which rendered a stranger’s position ambivalent in the eyes of the host, which is particularly visible in our contemporary distinctions between desirable and undesirable or unwanted migrants.62 This unsolicited, anger-provoking bind and associated dependency could become intolerable and lead to the refusal of sheltering guests. In Bernhard’s case, his perceived economic reliance on the Wolinians was further exacerbated by his physical threats against their central sacred object, politically imperiling their religiopolitical order, and materially endangering the livelihood and homes of his hosts: i.e., all the objects and spaces from which they derived their master identity as hosts. He thus had to be expelled.

Antechamber: St. Otto of Bamberg, 1124–1125, 1128

So far, all the examples of spaces of hospitality have showcased missionaries directly addressing the centers of their pagan hosts’ communal lives and their assemblies. This reflects the main model of Christianization in the Baltic Sea region, which started with the pagan elites in front of their community.63 Although the three hagiographies of St. Otto of Bamberg show that the bishop employed the same tactics in his conversion of the Pomeranians, they also show how he sometimes approached the centers of the pagan host communities in an indirect and protracted way. Just like in the case of St. Adalbert’s vitae, juxtaposing the different perspectives of the three accounts of Otto’s mission—the Prüfeninger Vita (VP, composed c.1140–1146), the Vita by Ebo of Michelsberg (Ebo, composed c.1151–1159), and the Dialogus by Herbord of Michelsberg (Herbord, c.1159)—against each other will be instrumental in arriving at the competing spatial practices and ambiguous mechanisms of hospitality in this and the following section.64

Probably in the spring of 1124, as Otto’s expedition approached Pyrzyce (German: Pyritz, located in north-western Poland) late at night, the missionary and his party observed a loud pagan feast taking place in the city. The bishop realized it would not be “advantageous or wise as unexpected guests to approach a crowd of excited people that night,” and spent the night hidden in the vicinity.65 The next morning, Otto carefully reached out to the elders through go-betweens, and negotiated for his reception and the conditions of conversion of the inhabitants, assuring them that he neither needed nor expected any gifts from them. The pagans “conducted them … to the place reserved for visitors [‘ad hospicii locum’], which was a large space at the entrance to the camp … and here they put up their tents while the barbarians kindly and gently assisted and made themselves in every way useful.”66 In this external space of hospitality, the bishop and his entourage stayed for three weeks to prepare for the mass baptisms.67

This incremental approach was repeated on other occasions, in both welcoming and in hostile circumstances. In Wolin, the missionaries “spread their tents in front of the town and remained there for seven days,” daily nagging the inhabitants with questions of whether they would convert. Eventually the Wolinians said their decision would be conditioned on that made by the Szczecinians.68 Similarly, during his second Pomeranian mission in 1128, in which Otto and his companions entered the region from the west (via Germany), one of their targets was Demmin in Mecklenburg. As one of the hagiographers notes, the prefect of the town “received us in a friendly manner and said that he would treat the others as his guests, and at the same time, he pointed out an open space for us to occupy in an old castle near the town,” where the expedition put up its tents.69 To put it in Georg Simmel’s terms, these missionary guests were not “the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather the man who comes today and stays tomorrow.”70 And, in this case, they were the guests who sought to fundamentally transform their hosts.

An initial distancing and gradual preparation of the hosts for the unexpected guests/strangers (insolitos hospites) arrival from a nearby location is a spatial leitmotif in Otto’s missionary strategy. By occupying the antechambers of pagan communities, Otto’s strategy relates to Simmel’s idea about the ambiguity of the stranger, whereby the host’s interaction with an unfamiliar guest designates a contradictory spatial relationship. For the host, the relation with a stranger/guest is not one of “distance and disinterest,” but rather “a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement.”71 The type of stranger—represented by Otto and his entourage—was culturally and religiously distant, but physically near. Looking out from the inside of Demmin, Wolin, Pyrzyce, or Szczecin, the missionaries occupied an ambiguous space of hospitality, right outside the door of their home, on the threshold, where the other’s “proximity is remote” and his “distance is close.”72

Conversely, from the perspective of the missionary guests looking from the outside in, the ambiguity and hazards associated with these antechambers were noticeable too. The risk was not just physical—the potential of the hosts becoming suddenly hostile. There was spiritual danger as well. This aspect can be seen in an episode from Havelberg (in Sachsen-Anhalt) where Otto’s expedition had stopped before Demmin. On the day of their arrival, the apostate inhabitants placed flags around the city to celebrate the pagan god Gerovit. “When the man of God perceived this, he … refused to enter the walls of the town, but waited in front of the gate and, having summoned Widikind [Witikindus], the ruler of the place asked him why he permitted this idolatry to be practiced.”73 The pagan sacrum in the city was a symbolic danger for the missionary guests and made the space inhospitable to them. The antechambers outside pagan centers provided only relative (spiritual) safety for the guests.74

The last point touches on the issue of power when it comes to those antechambers. As seen in the Wolin case, for the pagan hosts the places of hospice, where they put their Christian guests‚ were the source and locations of an unwelcome but unavoidable distress. For the missionaries, on the other hand, these spaces served as bases from which they tried to project their evangelical message to the political elites in the center. Yet, the relationship between these outer spaces of hospitality and the centers of pagan host communities was highly volatile, which is clear when we examine the case of Wolin from 1124 more closely.

Otto and his companions came to Wolin from Kamień Pomorski on boats led by local guides, who advised the missionaries to enter the city at night. The logic was that if he approached the Wolinians incrementally, he would have a better chance at coaxing them to support his cause. The missionaries thus secretly made their way into the city, directly into the duke’s stronghold, which was surrounded with a ban serving as an asylum for guests, a unique space of hospitality. When the inhabitants discovered the missionaries at dawn, they were enraged and expelled the encroaching guests from the city by denying them asylum, despite Duke Wartislaw’s (Warcisław, c.1091/1092–1135) wishes. Worse yet, on the missionaries’ way out across the bridges of Wolin, Otto was attacked by one of the pagans, but was saved by his companions. Finally, the guests “went then across the lake and broke down the bridge behind us, for fear lest the people should attack us again.” There, on the opposite bank of the Dziwna River, they stayed for fifteen days waiting for their hosts to change their mind.75

During those two weeks, the missionary guests sought to assuage their hosts by means of indirect influence (per ambages), so characteristic for antechambers. As noted by Carl Schmitt, antechamber and the center develop particular avenues and dialectics of communication, here expressed through gift-giving, negotiations, building and tearing down of physical and symbolic bridges, and threats and violence. The missionaries’ interpreters went back and forth communicating with a more amicable and cooperative portion of the Wolinian leaders. Every now and then the negotiating elders came out too. They blamed the “stupid … section of the people” and presented the guests with an opportunity to slowly drive a wedge between the hosts. The bishop praised and exhorted the elders, but also threatened that he would call upon Duke Bolesław to avenge the insults he had received with a brutal intervention, which could be averted only through their speedy conversion.76 While the hosts needed to hurry, the guests could afford to wait, which marked the status differential between them.77 Here, too, the Polish duke constituted the outermost orbit of this space of hospitality, suggesting that the Wolin antechamber was open to two political contexts simultaneously: Pomeranian and Polish. Put differently, the emergence of this space of hospitality created uncertainty about the political structure of Wolin and established an alternative power center outside the city.78 From the vantage of the missionary guests, these two weeks divided the members of the host community into friends and enemies. Ultimately, the Wolinians ceded their decision regarding conversion to Szczecin.79 As a guest, Otto was too powerful for them to master—they trusted that more dominant hosts would give him a proper reception: namely, by killing him.

Asylum: St. Otto of Bamberg, 1124

As mentioned above, upon the arrival of Otto’s expedition to Wolin in 1124, where they were escorted by the Pomeranian Duke Wartislav, the missionary guests used the privilege of protection of the duke’s court—a physical space of hospitality surrounded by a ban (Herbord: “lex talis erat, ut quolibet hoste persequente securus ibi consisteret et illesus”; Ebo: “Mos autem est … ut princeps terre in singulis castris propriam sedem et mansionem habeat, in quam quicumque fugerit, tutum ab inimicis asylum possidet.”). According to Otto’s hagiographers, all cities in Pomerania recognized this ancient custom: anyone granted refuge (hospicium) in the duke’s house was protected from any hostility.80 The limits of such hospitality were very unclear, however. Following the Prüfeninger Vita, the bishop of Bamberg was exposed to danger the moment he started preaching in public.81 Following Ebo’s account, by the time the Wolinians had noticed the missionary guests’ presence, they sensed that the Christians abused the privilege of asylum to overthrow their ancient, divinely instituted laws, which were the source of the Wolinians’ master identity. This was sufficient cause to expel the unwelcome strangers from the duke’s mansion.82 Finally, in Herbord’s version, the Wolinians first subjected the guests to an interpellation, an act of forced self-identification, which took place against the backdrop of the hosts’ identities, the duke’s power, and the quasi-legal framework of asylum.83 As a result, the identity of the missionary guests became stretched to the full scope of the polysemy behind the notion of hostis: simultaneously, the missionaries were the duke’s guests and his subjects’ enemies. Assaulted by the inhabitants, the missionaries fled the duke’s court, briefly barricading themselves in some building in the city (supposedly a bathhouse), whose walls the Wolinians tore down in short order but let the missionaries escape the city.84

This example shows that the institutions, customs, and norms of hospitality—often depicted by Christian authors as central to pagan communal life—seldom operated in an automatic fashion.85 They were instead conditional and dependent on the power relations in specific circumstances. In 1124, it took very little for the enraged hosts in Wolin to ignore the obligations and sacred provisions of the ban and asylum towards these specific guests who were seen as enemies. To put this in spatial terms, the supposedly strict divide between the protective asylum of hospitality and the hostility looming outside was, in fact, often highly permeable. Otto and his companions learned this lesson the hard way when the Wolinians attacked the courtyard and later tore down the bathhouse’s wall, thereby showing both physically and figuratively how little distance there actually was between spaces of hostility and hospitality.86

The second point addresses, again, the power differentials within the host community in Wolin. According to Karol Modzelewski, it seems that in many European contexts, the obligations of hospitality and the protection of strangers were initially a collective responsibility of entire pagan tribes and communities.87 Over time, political leaders took over these prerogatives—an arrangement clearly visible in the Pomeranian example. Sometimes, however, a duke’s free wish to give protection to someone did not align with popular sentiment. This was definitely so in Wartislaw’s case, who was already afraid to practice Christianity publicly among his pagan subjects.88 As far as giving hospitality and protection to strangers (or declarations of them as enemies) are concerned, it seems that little was set in stone. Instead, there was a tension between the ruler’s potestas vis-à-vis the communal authority as embodied in popular action.89 This sacred, ancient custom of asylum in Pomerania turned out to be not so sacred after all; it was a practice based on a brittle agreement, open for renegotiation in the face of concrete conflicts about who was to securitize the host community, and from what.

These two types of ambiguity—one concerning the spatial limits between hostility and hospitality, and the other concerning the indeterminate locus of authority where the power to withhold or offer welcome in Wolin actually lay—relate to Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the institutional and linguistic ambiguity of the ban and the undecided status and identity of people subjected to it:

The semantic ambiguity … [of] “banned” in Romance languages [was such that it] originally meant both “at the mercy of” and “out of free will, freely”, both “excluded, banned” and “open to all, free”. The ban is the force of simultaneous attraction and repulsion that ties together the two poles of sovereign exception: bare life and power, homo sacer and the sovereign.90

This semantic ambiguity applied also to the linguistic—Germanic and Slavic—crossroads in Pomerania.91 In this respect, for Otto of Bamberg, the asylum space in Wolin offered the chance to assume the identity he hoped for: that of a martyr and a saint, a specifically Christian version of the figure of homo sacer. On his way out of the city, the bishop was simultaneously formally protected by the duke’s ban and actually banished by the people, open for anyone to kill.92 As Herbord notes, when they were besieged in the bathhouse, the bishop said he desired to receive a blow in the name of Christ. After leaving the building, and before the missionaries destroyed the bridge behind them, Otto received three near-lethal blows from some furious Wolinians, but his companions’ bodies shielded him from receiving the fatal blow. As they safely recovered on the other side of the river, Otto complained that their defense stopped him from gaining the palm of martyrdom, to which one of his followers answered: “Let it suffice, master, that to us you appeared to receive it,” though the bishop nevertheless regretted that this prize was stolen from him.93

Even though this entire episode is a rhetorical construct, and despite the fact that Herbord’s text was one voice in a debate about Otto’s sanctity, this scene reveals the crucial problem explored here: the bewildering way in which questions of identity were articulated in spaces of hospitality. Here, the ambiguity is related to the quasi-martyr status of Otto. In contrast to Bruno of Querfurt or St. Adalbert, however, the bishop of Bamberg did not experience the transformation of his identity through martyrdom in Pomerania in 1124. Still, in the world of the text and in the minds of his readers, Otto enjoyed for a moment two incompatible identities—that of a missionary bishop and that of a holy man—which his canonization fused together and formally recognized in 1189.

Concluding Remarks

When Adam of Bremen praised the natural hospitality of the inhabitants of the North—to reference the example that opened this volume’s introduction—he was likely alluding to the baseline precepts and customary conduct towards guests, provided they showed proper deference towards their pagan hosts. If the lives of all missionary guests in pagan communities terminated as abruptly and bloodily as those of the two Bohemian monks in Rethra, such praise would make little sense. For Adam, such natural hospitality was a channel through which the Christian message could be communicated to the pagans and which provided a safeguard against hostility.94 This chapter, on the other hand, has focused on exceptionally dramatic cases of host–guest relations, often taking place during the initial stages of conversion, which undermined those communities’ traditional norms. Exactly because of their extraordinary character, these encounters reveal so much about the ambiguity and violent dimensions of host–guest relations, which likely remained inactive in usual circumstances. Still, this sketch of spaces of hospitality offers an opportunity for teasing out some wider conclusions about the relation of hospitality to practices of securitization and spatialization on the Baltic Rim.

First, the relations between pagan hosts and missionary guests very often came down to the balance of power within the ongoing conflicts between the parties. Such extreme, potentially regime-changing hospitality called for extraordinary means of securitization. In the course of these confrontations, the roles, identities, and positions of authority were produced from which the hosts—individual and previously sanctioned, or collective and spontaneously emerging—took responsibility for securitizing the community vis-à-vis the arriving guests. These subjective positions were not stable, however. Usually, the lines between hosts/guests and friends/enemies were drawn clearly, as the initial examples have shown; but on rare occasions, they seemed very thin indeed, almost non-existent in fact. Depending on the circumstances, some groups or individuals within host communities moved closer or farther away from their compatriots or guests, served as go-betweens, switched sides, etc. What enabled this movement could perhaps be attributed to hospitality’s generally processual and uncertain character, which provided for the articulation of the situationally bound identities of the participants.

Second, the spatiality of hospitality seems to have been characterized by an ambiguous and dislocatory potential. For sure, a great deal of the host–guest relations studied here relied on customary preexisting and controllable spatial and institutional infrastructures: mediators and gateways, the protective ban of the assemblies, marketplaces, ports, asylums, and places outside cities allocated to arriving guests. Beside these fixed locations, however, many less structured spaces of hospitality can be identified. They emerged ad hoc, were improvised, claimed and denied, generously granted or assertively usurped, physically fought over, etc. Such permanent and provisional spaces often proved to be movable, changing their welcoming or rejecting nature with shifts in location or in the tone of the relationship between the parties. In terms of size, these spaces were also very stretchable. They could contract and become restricted to the brief face-to-face encounters in the here-and-now of the participants, clearly delimited (an island, a marketplace, a duke’s court, a temple, peripheries of a city), or they could expand their orbits, sometimes even encompassing distant rulers within their bounds.

Although it is impossible to say to what extent the historical actors studied here were conscious of the uncertain and ambiguous character of hospitality, they actively, if unwittingly, produced these very qualities through their spatial practices by testing and pushing the limits of host–guest relations in Baltic missionary contexts. To some degree, uncertainty and ambiguity stemmed from the interference between and amplification of the symbolic overlaps and multiple functions and aspects of spaces of hospitality, which exceeded any regulations, customs, or anyone’s capacity to fully control them. It seems that in the age of Christianization in the Baltic Rim, the negotiated thresholds and contested spaces of hospitality functioned both as unavoidable traps and as necessary passages.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Adam of Bremen: lib. III, c. 19 (18), scholion 71, 352–352; Tschan (2002: 131).

  2. 2.

    Rosik (2020: 212–226), Gieysztor (1982: 127–134), and Strzelczyk (1970: 450–451). Riedegost can also spelled as Radigast, Radogost, Radogoszcz, or Radogošč, all derived from the deity Redigast. It is important to note that alternative explanations as to the meaning of this place name interpret it as “hosting the council/assembly.” Thietmar of Merseburg: lib. VI, cc. 23 (17)-25 (18), 266–271.

  3. 3.

    Jezierski (2015, 2020).

  4. 4.

    Hellmuth (1984), Modzelewski (2015), Kujawiński (2004), and Perron (2009).

  5. 5.

    Derrida (2000), Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000), and Bourdieu (1977: 191–193).

  6. 6.

    Bulley (2017: 7).

  7. 7.

    Bulley (2017: 4), Bourdieu (1990: 271–283), and Appadurai (2013: 121–123).

  8. 8.

    Friese (2004) and Giesen (2012).

  9. 9.

    Lefebvre (1991: 71), Glasze (2009), and Franklin (2021: 86).

  10. 10.

    These missionary guests do not fall neatly under the category of the Simmelian, ideal–typical “objective strangers,” i.e. those who have had no prior contact with their host communities (Simmel 1971: 145–146). The regions and host communities they traveled to had been previously visited by Christian merchants and other missionaries, and were sometimes partially inhabited by Christians; cf. Kujawiński (2004: 19).

  11. 11.

    Jaspert (2007: 56–65).

  12. 12.

    Modzelewski (2015: 94, 293–330), Bartlett (2007: 60–61), Gelting (2007: 73–79), and Berend et al. (2013: 112–137).

  13. 13.

    Banaszkiewicz (2014: 292–314), Sosnowski (2013b: 20–83), and Labuda (2004: 220–226).

  14. 14.

    Wood (2001: 210–211) and Słupecki (2009, 2013).

  15. 15.

    Canaparius: c. 28, 170–171; Johannes Canaparius’s authorship of the ‘Passio Sancti Adalberti Martiris Christi,’ commonly known as Vita prior, has been cast into doubt by Sosnowski (2013b); for the purposes of this study, however, the issue of authorship is irrelevant.

  16. 16.

    Canaparius: c. 28, 170–171; Kujawiński (2004: 21–22).

  17. 17.

    Banaszkiewicz (2014: 298–302).

  18. 18.

    Canaparius: c. 28, 172–173.

  19. 19.

    Canaparius: c. 28, 172–173.

  20. 20.

    Bruno VA: c. 24, 102–103: ‘Ibi aliquos dies steterunt et fama volans paganorum auribus adduxit habere se hospites ex alio orbe ignoto habitu et inaudito cultu.’ c. 25, 106–107: ‘bonos hospites […] ad aures hospitum’; c. 30, 110–111: ‘requiem hospitum turbant.’

  21. 21.

    Sosnowski (2013a), Rosik (2010b: 151–159), and Wood (2013: 10–15).

  22. 22.

    Bruno VA: c. 25, 104; Banaszkiewicz (2018: 13–27).

  23. 23.

    Banaszkiewicz (2014: 299–300).

  24. 24.

    von Padberg (1995: 105–113).

  25. 25.

    Benveniste (2016: 73–74).

  26. 26.

    Derrida (2000: 4–5) and Bourdieu (1990: 228–233).

  27. 27.

    Bruno VA: c. 25, 106–107.

  28. 28.

    Canaparius: cc. 28–30, 170–181.

  29. 29.

    Modzelewski (2005: 41–49) and Boroń (1999).

  30. 30.

    Bruno VA: c. 30, 110–112: ‘requiem hospitum turbant […] hostes agnoscunt.’

  31. 31.

    Wood (2018: 11–26).

  32. 32.

    Wipert: 70–73; Kujawiński (2004: 35–36).

  33. 33.

    Bruno Epistola: 99–100; tr. Wood (2010: 252–253).

  34. 34.

    Wood (2001: 236–239) and Fałkowski (2010: 179–207).

  35. 35.

    ‘Hostis,’ ‘hospes’ in Lewis and Short (1969: 866–867); ‘Hospes’ in TLL: 3019–3031; ‘Gast,’ in Kluge (2011: 334) and Minkinnen (2007: 53–60).

  36. 36.

    VP: lib. II, c. 12, 158–161; Herbord: lib. II, c. 31, 396–397; Rosik (2010a: 287) and Modzelewski (2015: 373–374).

  37. 37.

    von Padberg (1995: 126–129, 263–294) and Kujawiński (2004: 44–46).

  38. 38.

    Detienne and Vernant (1983) and Mauss (1990: 6–7, 13, 81).

  39. 39.

    Rosik (2010a: 397–398), Kujawiński (2004: 44–45), Levi-Strauss (1969: 81–108), Detienne and Vernant (1983), and Sahlins (1983).

  40. 40.

    Benveniste (2016: 66–67).

  41. 41.

    Bruno VQF: cc. 7, 13, 26, 31; Figurski (2012) and Wood (2010).

  42. 42.

    Bruno VA: c. 34, 116–117; Figurski (2012: 76–78) and Jezierski (2015: 148–149; 2019: 246–247; 2020: 423–424).

  43. 43.

    Rosik (2010a: 160).

  44. 44.

    Rosik (2018) and Rębkowski (2019).

  45. 45.

    Ebo: lib II, c. 1, 212–213.

  46. 46.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215; Robinson (1920: 21).

  47. 47.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214; Robinson (1920: 21).

  48. 48.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215; Robinson (1920: 21).

  49. 49.

    Rosik (2010a, b: 163).

  50. 50.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 216–217: Robinson (1920: 20–21).

  51. 51.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 216–217; Robinson (1920: 22).

  52. 52.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215.

  53. 53.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215; Robinson (1920: 20–21).

  54. 54.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215; Robinson (1920: 21).

  55. 55.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 1, 214–215: Robinson (1920: 21).

  56. 56.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 2, 216–217: Robinson (1920: 22).

  57. 57.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 2, 216–217; Rosik (2010a: 163–167), Boroń (2009: 33–35), and Kujawiński (2004: 40–43).

  58. 58.

    Bruno VQF: c. 10, 246–249; Bruno VA: c. 26, 106–107.

  59. 59.

    VP: lib. II, c. 8, 154; Herbord: lib. II, c. 26, 384; Bartlett (1985) and von Padberg (2003: 117–120).

  60. 60.

    Kujawiński (2004: 35–43).

  61. 61.

    Graeber (2014: 65–74), Mauss (1990), Simmel (1971: 170–172, 175–176), Barnett (2005: 12–14), and Franklin (2021: 86–87).

  62. 62.

    Butler (2020: 96–98), Randeria and Karagiannis (2020), and Simmel (1971: 164–166).

  63. 63.

    Kujawiński (2004: 31–33, 52–55), von Padberg (2003: 95–102; 1995: 219–226), and Bartlett (1985).

  64. 64.

    Rosik (2010a: 47–56).

  65. 65.

    Herbord: lib. II, c. 14, 358–359; Robinson (1920: 42) and Rosik (2010a: 211–221).

  66. 66.

    Herbord: lib. II, c. 14, 362–363; Robinson (1920: 44).

  67. 67.

    Herbord: lib. II, cc. 15–18, 362–363; according to Ebo, Otto remained in Pyrzyce for just two weeks, see Ebo: lib. II, c. 5, 226–227.

  68. 68.

    Ebo: lib. II, c. 7, 228–229.

  69. 69.

    Herbord: lib. III, c. 1, 418–419; Rosik (2010a: 400–404).

  70. 70.

    Simmel (1971: 143).

  71. 71.

    Simmel (1971: 143–149) and Barnett (2005: 5–6, 10–12).

  72. 72.

    Simmel (1971: 143–144), Friese (2004: 68), and Benveniste (2016: 254–255).

  73. 73.

    Ebo: lib. III, c. 3, 244–247; Robinson (1920: 116–117).

  74. 74.

    Rosik (2010a: 393–396) and Kujawiński (2004: 46–51).

  75. 75.

    Herbord: lib. II, cc. 24–25, 378–385; Robinson (1920: 64); According to Ebo: lib. II, c. 7, 228–229, this sojourn on the opposite bank—a sort of antechamber of hospitality—only lasted for seven days.

  76. 76.

    Herbord: lib. II, c. 25, 384–385; Graeber (2014: 73–74).

  77. 77.

    Puff (2019: 27–30) and Bourdieu (2000: 221–231).

  78. 78.

    Schmitt (1994: 17–20), Puff (2019), and Rosik (2010a: 250–251).

  79. 79.

    Rosik (2010a: 250–253).

  80. 80.

    VP: lib II, c. 5, 150–151; Ebo: lib II, c. 7, 228–229; Herbord: lib. II, c. 24, 380–381; Modzelewski (2015: 305–306, 309–310).

  81. 81.

    VP: lib II, c. 5, 150–151.

  82. 82.

    Ebo: lib II, c. VII, 228–229; Rosik (2010a: 246–247).

  83. 83.

    Herbord: lib. II, c. 24, 380–381; Althusser (2001: 106–109, 114–115) and Butler (1997: 106–109, 114–115).

  84. 84.

    Herbord: lib. II, c. 24, 380–381.

  85. 85.

    Modzelewski (2015: 26–41).

  86. 86.

    Agamben (1998: 111).

  87. 87.

    Modzelewski (2015: 26–41, 356).

  88. 88.

    Rosik (2010a: 198–204).

  89. 89.

    Agamben (2005: 74–88) and Smith (2020).

  90. 90.

    Agamben (1998: 110).

  91. 91.

    Modzelewski (2015: 297–298).

  92. 92.

    Agamben (1998: 71–111), Jezierski (2008: 163–164), and Behrman (2020: 1–67).

  93. 93.

    Herbord: lib. II, cc. 24–25, 380–385; Robinson (1920: 64).

  94. 94.

    Adam of Bremen: lib. IV, c. 21, 462–465.