Gottschalk (Obotrite prince)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Gottschalk" Obotrite prince – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (June 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Готшалк]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Готшалк}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. This article has an unclear citation style. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation and footnoting. (December 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Gottschalk, sometimes rendered as Godescalc (Latin: Godescalcus; died 7 June 1066),^[1] was a prince of the Obotrite confederacy from 1043 to 1066. He established a Polabian Slavic kingdom on the Elbe (in the area of present-day northeastern Germany) in the mid-11th century. His object in life seems to have been to collect the scattered tribes of the Slavs into one kingdom, and to make that kingdom Christian.^[2]

"A pious and god-fearing man",^{[3][page needed]} Gottschalk effected the Christianisation of the Slavic tribes of the Elbe. He organised missions of German priests and founded monasteries at Oldenburg, Mecklenburg,^[4] Ratzeburg, Lübeck, and Lenzen, erecting the first three into dioceses. He himself often accompanied the missionaries on their work and augmented their message with his own explanations and instructions. In all this, he was supported by the efforts of Adalbert, Archbishop of Hamburg. However, the Obotrite nobility and peasantry largely remained pagan.^{[citation needed]}