Abstract
The texts attempts to answer the questions raised by the Editors of «Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana» in their questionnaire, focusing on the Western Slavdom. The main assumptions of the paper is that there is no definition of Slavic tribe that would correspond directly with the past reality. Due to the scarcity of sources we are condemned to use some conventionalized terms instead and that is how the term «tribe» functions for the Western Slavdom: as de facto synonym of the notions of «ethnos» or «people». Therefore, almost every social group which had some common name that could have been comprehended as an ethnonym only apart from the huge dynastic polities which finally evolved into early states may be called a «tribe» in the present Polish, Czech or German scholarship. In the paper, attempts were made also to divide the Western Slavdom into four distinctive zones representing various patterns of ethnopolitical structures: the «limes» zone (filled with gentes comparable to other gentile peoples of late Antiquity and early Middle Ages), the interior (dominated probably by some segmentary societies being not very active in warfare and trade and for a long time remaining «invisible» for the sources as ethnopolitical structures), the maritime area (early active in trade and warfare but not divided as far as we know into peoples/tribes) and the transition zone between the «limes» and interior areas (embracing both Lusatias and the left-bank Silesia).
Highlights
The questions raised by the Editors of «Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana», concerning the character of early medieval Slavic tribes, are extremely important and the method of a questionnaire seems very adequate to revive and boost the scholarly discussion on that crucial topic
Do you use the term «tribe» in your work when dealing with early medieval Slavic societies? If you do, please tell us in what contexts and with what purpose you prefer to use the term
One cannot deny that quite different sorts of communities, organized in various way — tribes sensu strictiori, chiefdoms, ethnarchies (e. g., the Stodorans or Obodrites, ruled by their dynasties of dukes) or even some tribe-like creations of early states, would correspond with the very low conditions of such a broad definition
Summary
The questions raised by the Editors of «Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana», concerning the character of early medieval Slavic tribes, are extremely important and the method of a questionnaire seems very adequate to revive and boost the scholarly discussion on that crucial topic. There is, no other choice left for today than to use the term «tribe» in metaphorical sense, because the chronicles and charters of the early Middle Ages extremely rarely enable us to state anything more about the entities called in the historiographies «tribes» and in the sources themselves — mostly just by thir names.
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