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EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 307 modern Dresden. But on the whole towns did not develop much until the thirteenth century. When they did, the Slavs were allowed only in certain streets and in certain occupa- tions. Germans, on the other hand, were attracted by offers of personal freedom, exemption in large measure from tolls and other vexatious dues, and by grants of partial self-gov- ernment. The result was that especially in Mecklenburg and Brandenburg the country was thoroughly Germanized. Slavic traditions and folk-lore disappeared even among the common people, and in the eighteenth century more persons speaking a Slavic dialect could be found in German territory west than east of the Elbe. In Mecklenburg, however, a Slavic prince who had been allowed to rule as a vassal of Henry the Lion became the founder of the present reigning houses in both Duchies of Mecklenburg. In the southeast, in the Mark of Austria and in parts of the Duchies of Carinthia and Styria there had been some German colonization since the close of the tenth Further century, but the movement was at its height ^a^ion there in the late twelfth and the thirteenth cen- eastward turies. In the northeast after the twelfth century German expansion went on beyond the Oder farther east in Pome- rania, Silesia, and Prussia. The Slavic princes themselves, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland, often called in the superior German laborers as settlers; and the frequent marriage alliances of the same Slavic princes with daughters of the German nobility facili- tated the spread of Christianity. The new religious orders of the twelfth century were prominent in the colonization of the northeast. Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensians, was from Coloniza- 1126 to 1 1 34 Archbishop of Magdeburg, the Jjjj 1 ^ and ecclesiastical metropolis nearest to that frontier, military In the later decades of the twelfth century the or ers Cistercians played the greatest part, and their monastic settlements sometimes advanced to regions where the power of German lords had not yet penetrated. In the thirteenth century came the military and crusading orders,