Siege of Gana

The siege of Gana was a twenty-day siege by a German army led by King Henry the Fowler against a Slavic Glomacze fortification, that took place in early 929 at the fort of Gana, named so after the nearby Jahna river.

In early 929, King Henry led a campaign along his realm's eastern frontier against a multitude of Slavic forts. After capturing his first target at Brandenburg, he seized several more Slavic forts in the area and constructed German ones to establish and secure German control over the territory. A powerful Glomacze fort at Gana near modern-day Hof/Stauchitz was Henry's second primary target of the campaign. Henry's army took the fort after expending at least 110,000 man-hours of labour filling in a section of the ditch that protected it. Upon conquest of the stronghold, the Glomacze garrison was exterminated on Henry's orders and the young boys and girls in the fort were enslaved to Henry's milites professional soldiers.

The siege and the subsequent establishment of a German fort at Meissen guaranteed permanent German dominance along the middle Elbe river and led to the creation of the Marca Geronis to maintain the conquests. The siege at Gana, combined with the large number of sieges in the rest of Henry's 929 campaign, show the considerable resources that could be mobilized by the German kingdom for extended warfare to conquer, control and annex territory.^[2]