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Archiver > HERBARZ > 2001-03 > 0985272259


From: "Leon Stevens" <>
Subject: Re: Gear at Grunwald
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 09:44:19 -0500


We've BEEN in the "realm of semantics" since you launched into your exposition of Indo-European. Whether a linguistic branch is classified as a dialect or not, is purely arbitrary and more often political, as with nearly identical so-called Serbian and Croatian, which "languages" are more scientifically described as "Ekavian," "Ijekavian," "Ikavian," "Kajkavian," and "Cakavian." As much as you may wish to paint Grudnwald as a romantic scene from Camelot or the Legend of Roland, the archaeological evidence simply isn't there to support it. I occasionally lapse into romantic reveries myself, but eventually return to reality, hang my saber back on the wall, and continue with my laundry.

>>> <> 03/21/01 09:54PM >>>
>The "break up" as you call it, of Common Slavic is as yet incomplete. It's still possible for a Pole to carry on simple conversation with a Czech, with each speaking, as it were, his own language.

I fear we are entering the realm of semantics here. That the two West
Slavonic languages, Czech and Polish are mutually intelligible is
beside the point. each has consistently substitutes a sound of its
own for the presumed common West Slavic form. West Slavonic
consistently substitutes its own forms for certain Common slavic
forms. If a case is to be made for regarding Czech and Polish as
dialects I have not seen it made; rather it is usually noted that the
Slavonic languages diverge les than those of most other indo-european
groups because of the relatively recent date of their separation. The
demotion of two of europe's literary languages to dialects of each
other or of a now extinct West Slavonic would not, I suspect, be
greeted with rejoicing in Warsaw or Prague. If each "is speaking, as
it were, his own language" they are not, as it were, speaking the same
language any more let alone the Common Slavic from which the common
ancestral tongue of West Slav Czechs and Poles is believed to have
evolved.

>The royal court is not the same as the great masses of rural nobility.

That much is obvious but it begs two questions: Were the great masses
of the Polish rural nobility, in the sense of a levee en masse? As
Hans Delbruck convincingly argued nearly a century ago now, Medieval
armies of the huge size reported by the Chroniclers are in themselves
improbable given the logistical capabilities of the age and,
crucially, are contradicted wherever actual records exist; as in the
Burgundian armies of the Swiss Wars - reported by contemporaries as
vast hordes far outnumbering the Swiss Confederates but shown by their
muster rolls to have been few in number by Early Modern standards. In
the late C15 the Catholic population alone of Poland may have been
equal to that of contemporary England (see Colin McEvedy,The Penguin
Atlas of Modern History, p.22 . ISBN 0 14 0708.41 3). Given the
wide-ranging campaigns of Jagiellonian Poland, from the Baltic to the
Danube, the bulk of the banners of Grunwald are more likely to have
resembled the retinues of retainers of England's Wars (which were of
equivalent size to those normally conjectured for the
Polish-Lithuanian forces at Grunwald in 1410) than a cudgel wielding
rabble led by country squires.
The second question, and one that must be clearly disentangled, is
whether the less than complete panoply of the lesser lights of the
Polish Kingdom's forces were clad in the same style as their poorer
armed fellows to the West or rather like their Eastern brethren in
Masovia and beyond?
The religious art of the period seems to indicate the former but I
am open to persuasion if contradictary evidence can be found.
Re the Matejko painting, both questions are largely moot because
there even the highest of Poland's dignitaries are shown in a
"Sarmatian " panoply.

> Even the poorest Mazovian nobles were versed in Latin..

I did not, of course mean by Latin Christendom the area of the use of
the Latin language but that European culture which evolved from the
collapse of the Western Roman Empire, as distinct from that which took
its lead from Byzantium. As the evidence shows, Masovia was
influenced by both East and West as one expect from the simple fact of
its location.

>Iconography of the period you describe was crafted largely by Western immigrant craftsmen and we have no way of gaging their objectivity of representation.

We are back in a circular argument: If we cannot gauge the accuracy
of the art of the period, how can you know that it is inaccurate? If
the art was made by immigrant Western craftsmen, why did they
accurately represent C13th Masovian and Kujavian dukes in scale armour
of Russo-Lithuanian type and yet lavish caparisons, helms and all the
other Western amenities upon those Dukes of Silesia and Kings Poland?

> their "charges" are pure Eastern tamgi.

The charges presumably predate the inception of Heraldry anywhere.
The importance of the clans in Polish society preserved their
identifying marks. As late as Grunwald, two of the Polish banners
were raised by clans (Gryf and Jelita).Such marks may well have
existed among the Germans until their clans were reduced to
irrelevence under the Carolingians long before the advent of heraldry.
The Vandal mosaic from Carthage might argue for such an hypothesis
whether indigenous or from Alanic influence. Thus predating heraldry
itself, the presence of these charges does not have any bearing on the
Western or Eastern nature of Polish military society.
Regards,
John (Rohde).



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