The Draheim starosty comprised a strip of land approximately 20 km long, situated between Hinterpommern, the Neumark and Greater Poland. In older literature, the area is also referred to as the Tempelburg region, after the only town within the boundaries of this starosty.

This sparsely populated region had already been the subject of dispute between Pomerania and Poland for more than a century before it was first mentioned in historical sources. In this border region, which to the west also included the Neumark, a whole series of religious orders were active between the 12th and 14th centuries: In 1286, the Polish Duke Przemysław II summoned the Knights Templar to this area; the name of the settlement Tempelburg/Czaplinek – which was later, presumably in the first half of the 14th century, granted town status – derives from their presence, which lasted only a few years. As early as 1296, the Margraves of Brandenburg had laid claim to suzerainty over this settlement of the Order of the Templars. Even after the Order was dissolved in 1312, the Brandenburgers did not initially transfer this land – as demanded by Pope Clement V (reign 1305–1314) – to the Order of St John, which was therefore only able to gradually take possession of it. However, the land between Drage and Küddow remained in a state of unrest in the decades that followed. In 1368, Margrave Otto the Lazy of Brandenburg (1341/42–1379) had ceded his feudal claim to King Casimir I the Great (Kazimierz III Wielki) of Poland (1310–1370). During these years, severe border feuds broke out between the Pomeranian dukes and Polish noble families, in particular the Czarnkowskis, in the course of which Tempelburg Castle and the small Johannisburg near Machlin/Machliny were destroyed. This left the Order of St John with only the strategically important Draheim Castle, which remained the only fortification in the region until the 18th century.

The Order of St John’s rule came to an end in chaos at the beginning of the 15th century: After Polish and German nobles had raided and captured Draheim in 1407, they launched raids from there on the important east-west route, which ran via Tempelburg into the territory of the Teutonic Order; this also disrupted the trade route between the salt works at Kolberg/Kołobrzeg and Poland. The Neumark town of Dramburg/Drawsko Pomorskie, situated on that trade route, put an end to these activities in 1422 when its troops stormed Draheim Castle and drove out its Polish garrison. However, when the people of Dramburg refused to hand over Draheim to the Polish Crown following the Peace of Melnosee/Mełno, concluded in the same year, the German Order intervened and transferred the castle and its lands definitively to the Polish Crown. The Draheim Starosty – as part of the German Krone district (Powiat) (still referred to in Polish and Brandenburg-Prussian sources of the time as Wałcz, Crone or Arnscrone ) – the north-westernmost tip of the Polish state, de jure until the First Partition of Poland in 1772 or, more precisely, until the Treaty of Warsaw in 1773.

Direct Polish rule, however, had already come to an end with the Treaty of Bromberg/Bydgoszcz in 1657, when the pledge of the crown estate to the Electorate of Brandenburg was formalised. Brandenburg was, however, only able to assume this pledge-based rule in 1668, after some delay. Until 1726, Draheim was administered as a so-called ‘Schatullamt’ directly by the Chamber in Berlin on behalf of the Brandenburg Elector – and, from 1701, on behalf of the Prussian King – through a bailiff stationed at Draheim Castle; thereafter, like other districts, it was leased out as a domain.

If one considers the history of the wars and the accompanying devastation in the 17th century, the distinctiveness of the Polish Starostei of Draheim compared with the rest of Hinterpommern becomes very clear: even before the Thirty Years’ War reached Pomerania, Poland was at war with Sweden. Whilst the Thirty Years’ War then culminated in Western Pomerania with the imperial-Swedish battles of 1637–1638 and in Hinterpommern with the so-called Krockow invasion of 1643, hostilities in Poland had already come to an end. In contrast, during the early phase of the Swedish–Polish War of 1655–1660, Pomerania suffered little apart from being used as a transit route for Swedish troops – though Draheim Fortress was one of the first Polish fortifications to be captured and occupied by the Swedes under Arvid Wittenberg (1606–1667) in 1655. This phenomenon recurred during the Prussian–Russian conflicts of the Seven Years’ War, when, for example, the Catholic clergyman in Tempelburg claimed Polish sovereignty over his church and himself in order to be spared from Russian plundering. For the inhabitants of Draheim and the neighbouring areas of the New Mark and Pomerania, these overlapping strands of events provided an opportunity to take an active stance – the border was fluid, and the people living in its vicinity knew how to turn this circumstance to their advantage.

Draheim’s special status within the Prussian state – and thus also the office’s direct subordination to Berlin – did not come to an end until after 1773. However, the ‘rebelliousness’ of its inhabitants, as perceived by the Prussian authorities, can still be observed time and again in the sources in the decades that followed. Finally, in 1817, Draheim, together with the surrounding Neumark exclaves – which had originally been Polish and later became part of West Prussia – was definitively incorporated into the Pomeranian district of Neustettin/Szczecinek, which belonged to the administrative region of Köslin/Koszalin. In 1938, as part of an administrative reform within the Prussian state, the entire Neustettin district was transferred to the newly created administrative district of Grenzmark Posen-Westpreußen, with its seat in Schneidemühl/Piła within the province of Pomerania.

In addition to the customary right of redemption attached to any pledge, the Treaty of Bromberg required Brandenburg to guarantee that the position of the Catholic Church in the Draheim starosty was inviolable. Like large sections of the population in Poland, the inhabitants of the Draheim starosty had converted to the Protestant faith in the 16th century. In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, in 1625, Starost Johann Czarnkowski, who had converted to Catholicism (c. 1590–1641), who had converted to Catholicism, expelled the Protestant preachers from Tempelburg and placed all the churches in the Draheim starosty back under the authority of the Bishop of Poznań. For the next 100 years, the situation was such that, although almost all the inhabitants of the Starosty were Protestant, they had no church buildings at their disposal and were required to contribute to the upkeep of the Catholic clergyman in Tempelburg. Only in the castle at Alt Draheim was there a Reformed castle chapel during the Brandenburg period.

The intensive settlement of this border region took place in the period leading up to the Thirty Years’ War. Peasants from Pomerania and the Neumark, often fleeing the pressure of spreading serfdom in their homelands, were settled by Polish magnates in this sparsely populated area during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Their legal status, often underpinned by the privileges of free village reeves, was clearly better than in their regions of origin. However, as defence farmers, they were also responsible for the active protection of this border region.

It was only after the integration of the Draheim starosty into the Pomeranian district of Neustettin that the first noble families can be traced in the Draheim district – originally free of nobility – for example with the sale in 1818 of the estate then known as ‘Adlig Draheim’. It was here that the wealthy von Schmiterlöw family, originally ennobled in Swedish Pomerania and Sweden, settled in the 19th century. This also explains why this family’s coat of arms (together with that of the von Arnim family, who also acquired estates here in the 19th century, including Heinrichsdorf/Siemczyno, which had formerly belonged to the von der Goltz family, ) was placed alongside that of the town of Tempelburg in one of the four windows in the Neustettin District Council Chamber when the new building housing the state and local district administration was occupied in June 1902.

• Ernst Bahr: The Draheim Starostei between 1565 and 1632. In: Baltische Studien (New Series) 57 (1971), pp. 27–42.
• Ernst Bahr, Roderich Schmidt: Old Draheim. In: Helge bei der Wieden, Roderich Schmidt (eds.): Handbook of Historical Sites in Germany. Mecklenburg/Pomerania. Stuttgart 1996 (Kröners Taschenausgabe 315), pp. 147ff.
• Ernst Bahr, Klaus Conrad: Tempelburg. In: Helge bei der Wieden, Roderich Schmidt (eds.): Handbook of Historical Sites in Germany. Volume 12: Mecklenburg/Pomerania. Stuttgart 1996 (Kröners Taschenausgabe 315), pp. 300ff.
• Fritz Bahr: Church History of the Draheim Region. In: Papers on the Church History of Pomerania, Volumes 4, 5 and 7. Munich, Stettin 1929–1931. (also a theological dissertation, Greifswald 1929; research in the Church History of Pomerania 1. Stettin 1931).
• Hans-Joachim Falk: The Flight and Expulsions from the German East, Illustrated by a Pomeranian District (Neustettin) (Doctoral thesis, Hamburg 1952). Edited by Heinz Jonas. Woltersdorf 1995 (Eyewitness accounts documenting the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Central Europe, Pomerania, Neustettin district, Ostdokumente 2, Nos. 139 and 140, Federal Archives, Koblenz, and further reports).
• Hellmuth Heyden: A History of the Church in Pomerania. Cologne-Braunsfeld 1957 (Eastern Europe and the German East, Series 3, Volumes 5.1 and 5.2).
• Winfried Irgang: Documents and Regesta on the History of the Order of the Templars within the Diocese of Cammin and the Ecclesiastical Province of Gniezno. Revised from the version by Helmut Lüpke. Cologne, Vienna 1987 (Publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania, Series IV: Sources on Pomeranian History 10).
• Julius Kohte (ed.): The Architectural and Artistic Monuments of the Province of Pomerania. Part Three: The Köslin Administrative District. Volume III: The districts of Schivelbein, Dramburg, Neustettin, Bublitz and Rummelsburg. Stettin 1934, pp. 72–74, pp. 80ff., pp. 94–97.
• Michael Lissok, Haik Thomas Porada: The Former Draheim Starostei and the Town of Tempelburg – Joint Seminar by Students from Greifswald and Stettin in March 2002. In: Pomerania – Culture and History 40 (2002), No. 2, pp. 2–9.
• Helmut Lüpke: The Tempelburg Region – A Historical and Geographical Study. In: Baltic Studies (New Series) 35 (1933), pp. 43–97.
• Christoph Motsch: Border Society and the Early Modern State. The Starostei of Draheim between Hinterpommern, the Neumark and Greater Poland (1575–1805). Göttingen 2001 (Publications of the Max Planck Institute for History 164).
• Karl Roelcke: On the South-Eastern Corner of Pomerania – A Retrospective on 25 Years of Life and Work in the Town and District of Neustettin. Neustettin 1926 (reprinted by Woltersdorf 1995).

Haik Thomas Porada: Draheim (Starostei). In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2014. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32543 (as at 17 August 2021).