Acknowledgements
The problems discussed on the pages of this work preoccupied me already when I was a student of history of Eastern Europe and Slavic Studies and a participant in a project funded by the German Research Society (DFG) entitled Glossar zur frühmittelalterlichen Geschichte im östlichen Europa, carried out at that time at the University of Münster. Therefore, I would like to pay honour to the memory of two of my teachers from those years – namely, Frank Kämpfer (1938–2010) and Gerhard Birkfellner (1941–2011). Their lectures and seminars aroused my lasting interest in the subject-matter in question; their tolerant and open-minded attitudes, demanding and obliging at the same time, as part of their care of the doctoral student, laid the foundations for my future work on the topic.
I resumed the work more than thirty years afterward, which I owe, in the first place, to Detlef Felken of the C.H. Beck Verlag. A few years ago, it was him who encouraged me to write a popular-scientific essay entitled Die Slawen, which came out in 2017, paving the way for a more considerable effort. The other encouragement came from Michael Borgolte, who in 2015 invited me to deliver a lecture at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities that would situate the Slavs in the world of the Middle Ages, and then made sure that the outcome be published. Both publications incited, in turn, the Warsaw-based Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (PWN) publishing house to propose to me to write a larger, textbook-type study in Polish on Slavs in the Middle Ages. Had it not been for those three concrete incentives, I would not have elaborated on the topic in the form finally adopted.
While working on this study, I enjoyed support, again, from Kornelia Hubrich-Mühle; her apt criticism and, at times, indispensable encouragement accelerated the writing process. Thanks to generous funding by the Krieble Delmas Foundation, New York, and the hospitality of the Institute for Advanced Study, I was fortunate to write a large portion of this book in the inspiring atmosphere of the IAS in Princeton benefitting from inspiring talks with my peers present there at the time. I should like to express my thanks to all of them but especially to Patrick Geary.
I owe special thanks to Anne Kluger (Münster), Sébastien Rossignol (St. John’s), Ludwig Steindorff (Kiel), and Martin Wihoda (Brno), who have read the German manuscript of this study, in whole or in part, and offered expert comments. The same is true for Przemysław Urbańczyk (Warsaw), who commented on the Polish version, making valuable recommendations and corrections. I willingly accepted all their helpful remarks, suggested corrections, and arguments (wherever I could agree with them). Special thanks are due to Florin Curta who already read the German manuscript and encouraged me to undertake an English translation and who – together with Dušan Zupka – accepted the outcome for publication in their Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450 (ECEE). I welcomed this opportunity to update the bibliography and to correct some minor errors of the German edition, considering Florin Curta’s and the anonymous peer-reviewers’ valuable suggestions. However, any shortcomings detectable in this book are of course my exclusive responsibility. Ines Ellertmann, Matthias Cichon, Hannah Kemper, and Luca Vazgeć, my student assistants in Münster, helped in adapting the footnotes and bibliography to the series’ format. Luca Vazgeć also completed the indices with the printed pages numbers. Alessandra Giliberto of Brill Publishers is asked to accept my thanks for her seamless preparation of the book for print. Tobias Kniep of the Münster Institute for Comparative Urban Reserach provided the necessary technical support in drawing the maps. Last but not least my sincere thanks extend to Tristan Korecki (Warsaw) for an excellent translation of the text (from its Polish version) into English. This translation was generously funded by the Department of Eastern European and East-Central European History at the Historical Institute of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.