by Will Durant
From the fifth to the twelfth century Byzantine civilization led Christian Europe in administration, diplomacy, revenue, manners, culture, and art. Probably never before had there been a society so splendidly adorned, or a religion so sensuously colorful. Like every other civilization, it rested on the backs of serfs or slaves, and the gold and marble of its shrines and palaces were the transmuted sweat of workers toiling on or in the earth. Like every other culture of its time, it was cruel; the same man who knelt before the image of the Virgin could slaughter the children of Maurice before their father’s eyes. There was something shallow about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering a mass of popular superstition, fanaticism, and literate ignorance; * and half the culture was devoted to perpetuating that ignorance. No science, no philosophy, was allowed to develop in conflict with that ignorance; and for a thousand years no addition was made by a Greek civilization to man’s knowledge of the world. No work of Byzantine literature has caught the imagination of mankind, or won the suffrages of time. Oppressed by the fullness of its heritage, imprisoned in the theological labyrinths in which dying Greece had lost the Christianity of Christ, the medieval Greek mind could not rise to a mature and realistic view of man and the world; it broke Christianity in half over a vowel, and again over a word, and shattered the Eastern Roman Empire by seeing treason in every heresy.
The marvel remains that this civilization lasted so long. What hidden resources, or inner vitality, enabled it to survive the victories of Persia in Syria, the loss of Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and Spain to the Moslems? Perhaps the same religious faith that weakened defense by relying upon relics and miracles gave some order and discipline to a people perennially patient, however periodically turbulent, and surrounded emperor and state with an aura of sanctity that frightened change. The bureaucracy, collectively immortal, gave continuity and stability through all wars and revolutions, kept internal peace, regulated the economy, and gathered in the taxes that permitted the Empire to expand again almost to its Justinian amplitude. Though the possessions of the caliphs were vaster than the Byzantine, their revenues were probably less; and the looseness of Moslem government, the inadequacy of its communications and its administrative machinery, allowed the Abbasid dominion to disintegrate in three centuries, while the Byzantine Empire endured through a millennium.
Byzantine civilization performed three vital functions. For a thousand years it stood as a bulwark of Europe against Persia and Eastern Islam. It faithfully cherished and fully transmitted—until plundered by the Crusaders in 1204—the recopied texts that handed down the literature, science, and philosophy of ancient Greece. Monks fleeing Iconoclast emperors brought Greek manuscripts to South Italy, and restored there a knowledge of Greek letters; Greek professors, shunning Moslem and Crusader alike, left Constantinople, sometimes settled in Italy, and served as carriers of the classic germ; so year by year Italy rediscovered Greece, until men drank themselves drunk at the fountain of intellectual freedom. And finally, it was Byzantium that won Bulgars and Slavs from barbarism to Christianity, and brought the immeasurable force of the Slavic body and soul into the life and destiny of Europe.
VI. THE BALKANS: 558–1057
For only a few hundred miles north of Constantinople were troubled oceans of men disdainful of letters and half in love with war. The Hun tide had hardly ebbed when a new people of kindred blood, the Avars, moved from Turkestan through southern Russia (558), enslaved masses of Slavs, raided Germany to the Elbe (562), drove the Lombards into Italy (568), and so ravaged the Balkans that the Latin-speaking population there was almost wiped out. For a time the power of the Avars reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In 626 they besieged and almost captured Constantinople; their failure began their decline; in 805 they were conquered by Charlemagne; and gradually they were absorbed by the Bulgars and the Slavs.
The Bulgars, originally a mixture of Hun, Ugrian, and Turkish blood, had formed part of the Hun empire in Russia. After Attila’s death one branch established a kingdom—“Old Bulgaria”—along the Volga around the modern Kazan; their capital, Bolgar, was enriched by the river trade, and prospered till it was destroyed by the Tatars in the thirteenth century. In the fifth century another branch migrated southwest to the valley of the Don; one tribe of these, the Utigurs, crossed the Danube (679), founded a second Bulgarian kingdom in the ancient Moesia, enslaved the Slavs there, adopted their language and institutions, and were ultimately absorbed into the Slavic stock. The new state reached its zenith under the Khagan or Khan (Chief) Krum (802), a man of barbarian courage and civilized cunning. He invaded Macedonia—a province of the Eastern Empire—captured 1100 pounds of gold, and burned the town of Sardica, now, as Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital.
The Emperor Nicephorus bettered the instruction by burning Pliska, Krum’s capital (811), but Krum trapped and destroyed the Greek army in a mountain pass, slew Nicephorus, and made the imperial skull his drinking cup. In 813 he besieged Constantinople, fired its suburbs, and devastated Thrace, rehearsing the events of 1913. He was preparing another attack when he burst a blood vessel and died. His son Omurtag made peace with the Greeks, who yielded to him half of Thrace. Under Khan Boris (852-88) Bulgaria adopted Christianity. Boris himself, after a long reign, entered a monastery; emerged four years later to depose his elder son Vladimir and enthrone his younger son Simeon; lived till 907, and was canonized as the first of Bulgaria’s national saints. Simeon (893–927) became one of the great kings of his time; he extended his rule to Serbia and the Adriatic, called himself “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Bulgars and Greeks,” and repeatedly made war against Byzantium; but he tried to civilize his people with translated Greek literature, and to beautify his Danubian capital with Greek art. A contemporary describes Preslav as “a marvel to behold,” full of “high palaces and churches” richly adorned; in the thirteenth century it was the largest city in the Balkans; some scanty ruins remain. After Simeon’s death Bulgaria was weakened with civil strife. Bogomil heretics converted half the peasantry to pacifism and communism; Serbia recovered its independence in 931; the Emperor John Tzimisces reconquered eastern Bulgaria for the Greek Empire in 972; Basil II conquered western Bulgaria in 1014; and Bulgaria became again (1018–1186) a province of Byzantium.
Meanwhile that harassed Empire had received a visit (934-42) from a new barbarian horde. The Magyars, like the Bulgars, were probably derived from those tribes, loosely named Ugri or Igurs (whence ogre), who wandered on the western confines of China; they too had, through long association, a strong infusion of Hun and Turkish blood; they spoke a tongue closely related to those of the Finns and the Samoyeds. In the ninth century they migrated from the Ural-Caspian steppes to the lands adjoining the Don, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea. There they lived by tilling the soil in summer, fishing in winter, and at all seasons capturing and selling Slavs as slaves to the Greeks. After some sixty years in the Ukraine they again moved westward. Europe was then at nadir; no strong government existed west of Constantinople; no united army stood in the way. In 889 the Magyars overran Bessarabia and Moldavia; in 895, under their chieftain Arpad, they began their permanent conquest of Hungary; in 899 they poured over the Alps into Italy, burned Pavia and all its forty-three churches, massacred the inhabitants, and for an entire year ravaged the peninsula. They conquered Pannonia, raided Bavaria (900–7), devastated Carinthia (901), took Moravia (906), plundered Saxony, Thuringia, Swabia (913), southern Germany, and Alsace (917), and overwhelmed the Germans on the Lech, a tributary of the Danube (924). All Europe trembled and prayed, for these invaders were still pagan, and all Christendom seemed doomed. But in 933 the Magyars were defeated at Gotha, and their advance was stayed. In 943 they again invaded Italy; in 955 they pillaged Burgundy. At last in that year the united armies of Germany, under Otto I, won a decisive victory on the Lechfeld, or valley of the Lech, near Augsburg; and Lurope, having in one terrible century (841–955) fought the Normans in the north, the Moslems in the south, and the Magyars in the east, cou
ld breathe among its ruins.
The Magyars, subdued, made Europe more secure by accepting Christianity (975). Prince Geza feared the absorption of Hungary into the reexpanding Byzantine Empire; he chose Latin Christianity to win peace in the West, and married his son Stephen to Gisela, daughter of Henry II, Duke of Bavaria. Stephen I (997-1038) became Hungary’s patron saint and greatest king; he organized the Magyars on the lines of German feudalism, and accentuated the religious basis of the new society by accepting the kingdom and crown of Hungary from Pope Sylvester II (1000). Benedictine monks flocked in, built monasteries and villages, and introduced Western techniques of agriculture and industry. So, after a century of war, Hungary passed from barbarism to civilization; and when Queen Gisela presented a cross to a German friend it was already a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art.
The earliest known home of the Slavs was a marshy region of Russia enclosed by Kiev, Mohilev, and Brest-Litovsk. They were of Indo-European stock, and spoke languages related to German and Persian. Periodically overrun by nomad hordes, often enslaved, always oppressed and poor, they grew patient and strong through endless hardships; and the fertility of their women overcame the high mortality born of famine, disease, and chronic war. They lived in caves or mud huts; hunted, herded, fished, and tended bees; sold honey, wax, and skins; and slowly resigned themselves to settled tillage. Themselves hunted even into hardly accessible marshes and forests, brutally captured and callously sold, they adopted the morals of their time, and bartered men for goods. Inhabiting a cold and damp terrain, they warmed themselves with strong liquor; they found Christianity preferable to Mohammedanism, which forbade alcoholic drinks.34 Drunkenness, uncleanliness, cruelty, and a passion for pillage were their outstanding faults; thrift, caution, and imagination hovered in them between virtue and vice; but also they were good-natured, hospitable, sociable, and loved games, dances, music, and song. The chieftains were polygamous, the poor monogamous, the women—bought or captured for marriage—were anomalously faithful and obedient.35 The patriarchal families were loosely organized in clans, and these in tribes. The clans may have owned property in common in their early pastoral stage;36 but the growth of agriculture—in which different degrees of energy and ability, on diverse soils, produced unequal results—generated private or family property. Frequently divided by migration and fraternal war, the Slavs developed a variety of Slavonic languages: Polish, Wendish, Czech, and Slovak in the west; Slovene, Serbo-Croat, and Bulgarian in the south; Great Russian, White Russian, and Little Russian (Ruthenian and Ukrainian) in the east; nearly all of these, however, have remained intelligible to the speakers of any one of them. Pan-Slavism of speech and customs, along with space, resources, and a vitality born of hard conditions, rigorous selection, and simple food, made the spreading power of the Slavs.
As the German tribes moved south and west in their migrations into Italy and Gaul, an area of low population pressure was left behind them in north and central Germany; drawn into this vacuum, and prodded by the invading Huns, the Slavs expanded westward across the Vistula even to the Elbe; in these lands they became the Wends, Poles, Czechs, Vlachs, and Slovaks of later history. Towards the end of the sixth century a torrent of Slav immigration flooded rural Greece. The cities closed their gates against it, but a strong Slavonic infusion entered the Hellenic blood. About 640 two kindred Slav tribes, the Srbi and the Chrobati, repeopled Pannonia and Illyricum. The Serbs accepted Greek, the Croats Roman, Christianity; this religious division, crossing ethnic and linguistic unity, weakened the nation against its neighbors, and Serbia fluctuated between independence and subjection to Byzantium or Bulgaria. In 989 the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, having defeated and captured the Serbian John Vladimir, gave him his daughter Kossara in marriage, and allowed him to return to Zita, his capital, as a vassal prince; this is the theme of the oldest Serb novel, Vladimir and Kossara, written in the thirteenth century. The coastal cities of the ancient Dalmatia—Zara, Spalato, Ragusa—retained their Latin language and culture; the remainder of Serbia became Slav. Prince Voislav freed Serbia in 1042; but in the twelfth century it again acknowledged the suzerainty of Byzantium.
When, at the end of the eighth century, this amazing migration of the Slavs was complete, all central Europe, the Balkans, and Russia were a Slavic sea beating upon the borders of Constantinople, Greece, and Germany.
VII. THE BIRTH OF RUSSIA: 509–1054
The Slavs were but the latest of many peoples who rejoiced in the rich soil, spacious steppes, and many navigable rivers of Russia, and mourned the miasmic marshes and forbidding forests, and the absence of natural barriers to hostile invasion, summer’s heat, or winter’s cold. On its least inhospitable coasts—the western and northern fringes of the Black Sea—the Greeks had founded a score of towns—Olbia, Tanais, Theodosia, Panticapeum (Kerch) …—as early as the seventh century B.C.; and had engaged in trade and war with the Scythians of the hinterland. These natives, probably of Iranian origin, imbibed some civilization from the Persians and the Greeks, and even produced a philosopher—Anacharsis (600 B.C.)—who came to Athens and argued with Solon.
During the second century B.C. another Iranian tribe, the Sarmatians, conquered and displaced the Scythians; and amid this turmoil the Greek colonies decayed. In the second century A.D. the Goths entered from the west, and established the Ostrogothic kingdom; about 375 this was overthrown by the Huns; and thereafter, for centuries, the southern plains of Russia saw hardly any civilization, but rather a succession of nomad hordes—Bulgars, Avars, Slavs, Khazars, Magyars, Patzinaks, Cumans, and Mongols. The Khazars were of Turkish origin; in the seventh century they expanded through the Caucasus into south Russia, established an orderly dominion from the Dnieper to the Caspian Sea, and built a capital, Itil, at a mouth of the Volga near the present Astrakhan. Their kings and upper classes accepted the Jewish religion; hemmed in between a Moslem and a Christian empire, they probably preferred to displease both equally rather than one dangerously; at the same time they gave full freedom to the varied creeds of the people. Seven courts administered justice—two for Moslems, two for Christians, two for Jews, one for heathens; an appeal was allowed from the last five to the Moslem courts, whose administration of justice was at that time considered best.37 Encouraged by this enlightened policy, merchants of various faiths gathered in the Khazar towns; a lively trade developed there between the Baltic and the Caspian Seas, and Itil, in the eighth century, was one of the great commercial cities of the world. In the ninth century Khazaria was overrun by Turkish nomads; the government could no longer protect its trade channels from brigandage and piracy; and in the tenth century the Khazar kingdom melted away into the ethnic chaos from which it had taken form.
Into that motley multitude of south and central Russia in the sixth century came a migration of Slavic tribes from the Carpathian Mountains. They settled the valleys of the Dnieper and the Don, and reached out more thinly to Lake Ilmen in the north. For centuries they multiplied, year by year clearing the forests, draining the swamps, eliminating wild beasts, creating the Ukraine. They spread over the plains in a movement of human fertility rivaled only by the Hindus and the Chinese. All through known history they have been on the march—into the Caucasus and Turkestan, into the Urals and Siberia; this process of colonization goes on today, and the Slav ocean every year enters new ethnic bays.
Early in the ninth century an apparently negligible attack came upon Slavdom from the northwest. The Scandinavian Vikings could spare men and energy from their assaults upon Scotland, Iceland, Ireland, England, Germany, France, and Spain to send into northern Russia bands of one or two hundred men to prey upon the communities of Balts, Finns, and Slavs, and then return with their booty. To protect their robberies with law and order, these Vaeringjar or Varangians (“followers”—of a chieftain) established fortified posts on their routes, and gradually they settled down as a ruling Scandinavian minority of armed merchants among a subject peasantry. Some towns hired them as guardians of social order an
d security; apparently the guardians converted their wages into tribute, and became the masters of their employers.38 By the middle of the ninth century they governed Novgorod (“new fort”) and had extended their rule as far south as Kiev. The routes and settlements they controlled were loosely bound into a commercial and political empire called Ros or Rus, a term of much disputed derivation. The great rivers that traversed the land connected—through canals and short overland hauls—the Baltic and Black Seas, and invited a southward expansion of Varangian trade and power; soon these fearless merchant-warriors were selling their goods or services in Constantinople itself. Conversely, as commerce grew more regular on the Dnieper, the Volkhov, and the Western Dvina, Moslem merchants came up from Baghdad and Byzantium and traded spices, wines, silks, and gems for furs, amber, honey, wax, and slaves; hence the great number of Islamic and Byzantine coins found along these rivers, and even in Scandinavia. As Moslem control of the eastern Mediterranean blocked the flow of European products through French and Italian outlets to Levantine ports, Marseille, Genoa, and Pisa declined in the ninth and tenth centuries, while in Russia towns like Novgorod, Smolensk, Chernigov, Kiev, and Rostov flourished through Scandinavian, Slavic, Moslem, and Byzantine trade.