Abstract
The objective of the article has been to verify whether around Vartislav IV, the WolgastDuke, appeared new knights and under what circumstances. The significance of thatquestion is essential in the context of research on the migrations of knights in the MiddleAges in West Pomerania. Thomas Kantzow, a 16th-century chronicler indicated that themost important knight families at the close of the Middle Ages, came from their ancestorswho had appeared in West Pomeranian under the reign of Barnim I (1233–1278).The question is whether the chronicler was right or not. That is why the knights who hadbeen witnesses in the documents issued by Vartislav IV were distinguished as a separategroup; it was a group of 181 knights. 105 of them came from the families whose representativeshad already served under the previous duke, Bogusław IV, Vartislav’s father.The other 76 were milites novi; i.e. they constituted a significant number. Yet, a thoroughanalysis of the circumstances under which they appeared around Vartislav IV proves thatat that time an inflow of foreign knights into the Wolgast Duchy was nearly stopped.It turned out that almost everybody who had been qualified as a new knight was a witnessonly in a document issued by the Duke outside the Wolgast Duchy. There were just twocases (Eckhard Buddo and Eckhard Dewitz) who had actually migrated into the WolgastDuchy.
