Die Neißeprovinz als Kleingau?

Eine Erwiderung zum Beitrag von Walter Wenzel über „Die provincia Nice“

Abstract

A Small Slavonic Region called Nice? A reply to Walter Wenzel´s paper about “The provincia Nice”. – The present essay on the early-medieval settlement areas at the River Neiße/Nysa Łużycka in Lower Lusatia, deals with the issue of the provincia Nice, a name which appears among the toponyms of the region and has been the subject of a joined study together with Ernst Eichler. The only written evidence documenting Nice is the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg. Its localization is unknown, and all attempts to localize it remained as yet unconvincing. The proposition of the aforementioned study is, that this name may be referring to the only known settlement area at the lower Neiße river which went by the name Selpuli, thus assuming that Nice was effectively a quasi- synonym for Selpuli. Walter Wenzel contradicted this and localized Nice in a smaller area around the present-day town of Forst. For his reconstruction he used place names, archaeological findings and personal names. In this article all of his arguments are revisited (parts 2–4) and, as a result it is found, that not all of them can be accounted for as indicative of an early medieval settlement. Therefore Wenzel’s theory yields no evidence which would invalidate the proposition that Nice geographically coincides with Selpuli. Finally (parts 5 and 6) this assumption is discussed in the context of settlement geography, including a short analysis about the use of the terms pagus and provincia in Thietmars chronicle.