The Chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg

Summary

The Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (975–1018) was one of the principal historians of the Holy Roman Empire. His Chronicon was written between 1009 and 1018, and Book I, from which the following extracts are taken, gives an account of the expansion of Germanic power into the Slav lands of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, providing a frontier history as it records the ebb and flow of the possession of these territories under Christian and non-Christian rule. As a frontier churchman, Thietmar was concerned to refute what he maintained was the Slav belief that ‘everything finishes at the point of mortal death’, and to uphold and prove Christian belief in the existence of life after death. The stories that follow have as their core feature a notion of the spirits of the deceased forming a kind of parallel society to the living, even if in the defence of their territory the dead do not always behave in the spiritually uplifting manner of spirits in some other accounts of Miracula. The burning to death of the hapless priest of Deventer in the second story is the obvious example, and this account of the cruel behaviour of the deceased may have been influenced by ideas of the vengeful dead persisting from pre-Christian Germanic and Scandinavian society (see Part Three). The stories also have a strong millennial undercurrent, reflecting perhaps the readiness of Thietmar's generation, whose lives bridged the tenth and eleventh centuries (and who therefore had to brace themselves for the approach of the year 1000) to accord significance to such perturbations of the natural order as the gathering of ghostly spirits or an outbreak of unearthly sounds to indicate the imminence of death.

The Ghostly Gatherings

Book I, Chap. VII

So that none of the faithful in Christ should doubt the future resurrection of the dead, but should eagerly desire the joys of blessed immortality, I will recount what I have discovered happened in the town of Walsleben after it was rebuilt following its destruction by the Slavs. The priest of the church was in the habit of going at dawn to sing matins in the church, but one day, passing the cemetery, he saw a great multitude offering prayers at the entrance to the holy chapel. Standing his ground, he prepared himself by making the sign of the holy cross, and then made his way apprehensively through the crowd.