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Biography

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Gottschalk (also rendered Godescalc or Godescalcus) was a prince of the Obotrites, a West Slavic tribal confederacy occupying the lands of present-day Mecklenburg and eastern Holstein. He belonged to the Nakonid line and was the son of Udo (Pribignev), an Obotrite ruler who had accepted baptism. As a youth he was sent to receive a Christian education at the Benedictine monastery of Saint Michael in Lüneburg. When his father was murdered by a Saxon in 1028, Gottschalk left the monastery, gathered Polabian Slavs, and carried out retaliatory raids into Saxon territory. He was captured by Bernard II, Duke of Saxony, and for a time his ancestral position passed to Ratibor, a prince of the Polabians.

After leaving Saxon captivity, Gottschalk entered the service of King Cnut the Great and took part in that king’s campaigns in Denmark and England. He remained attached to the Danish royal milieu after Cnut’s death. In 1043, following the fall of Ratibor and his sons in fighting with the Danes and Saxons, Gottschalk returned to the Slavic lands with Danish backing and established himself as prince of the Obotrites. His restoration opened a generation of relatively firm Nakonid rule along the lower Elbe and the Baltic shore of the Wends, in alliance with Denmark and with the Saxon dukes.

As prince he was a determined promoter of Latin Christianity among his people. He cooperated with the Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, especially under Archbishop Adalbert, and encouraged the planting of churches and monastic houses in his domains. Episcopal organization was strengthened or revived at centres such as Oldenburg in Holstein, Ratzeburg, and Mecklenburg, where Bishop John later served. Eleventh-century Saxon writers, above all Adam of Bremen, depicted Gottschalk as a ruler of unusual piety who sought to make the Obotrite confederacy a stable Christian principality, even though pagan custom remained strong among large parts of the population.

Gottschalk married a daughter of King Sweyn II Estridsen of Denmark, commonly identified in later sources as Sigrid. He had at least two sons, Budivoj and Henry, who subsequently contended for leadership among the Obotrites. In 1066 a widespread pagan revolt broke out among the Wends, fed by hostility to Christian institutions, to Saxon influence, and to the weakening of Gottschalk’s external patrons. Chroniclers report that he was killed at Lenzen on 7 June 1066; his wife and sons fled to the Danish court. Bishop John of Mecklenburg and many clergy were also put to death, John being ritually killed at the pagan sanctuary of Rethra. Pagan chiefs then dominated the region until Henry later restored a Christian Nakonid principality. Gottschalk came to be venerated as a martyr, and his feast has been observed on 7 June in Catholic hagiographic tradition as that of a princely witness of the eleventh-century mission to the Slavs.

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