Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  But if the nature of Empire after Rome was in one sense almost predictable, the usual dose of historical accident also played its part. Thinking about the patterns of transformation in the round, then what you might have expected to see was fringe pieces of Roman territory falling into the hands of ever more ambitious and aggressive frontier dynasts as, over time, economic and political change increased the power at their disposal and slowly eroded the initial power advantage that had allowed the Empire to establish such widespread dominion in the first place. Indeed, such a sequence of events did begin to unfold in the Roman period. In the third century, Transylvanian Dacia and lands between the Carpathians and the Danube had to be ceded to the Goths and other new powers of the Empire’s east European periphery, while in the west Alamanni took possession of the abandoned Agri Decumates. In the fourth century, in similar vein, a particularly aggressive king of the Alamanni such as Chnodomarius could extend his control to the western side of the Rhine valley, and Salian Franks made moves on land west of the lower Rhine frontier. At this point, imperial power was still strong enough to keep such ambitions in check, but the tendency is clear enough.

  Instead of following anything like this scenario, however, the rise and fall of Hunnic power generated an unprecedented degree of politically motivated migration, which caused a sudden and unpredictable relocation on to Roman soil of militarily powerful groups from parts of its inner and outer peripheries. The first crisis of 375–80 saw Goths, Sarmatians and Taifali enter Roman territory from the inner periphery beyond the Lower Danube frontier region, to be followed in 405–8 by some of their Middle and Upper Danubian counterparts: the Sueves (if they were Marcomanni and Quadi) and Burgundians. Amongst groups from the outer periphery caught up in the same events we can number Alans, different groups of whom entered imperial territory both in 375–80 and again in 405–8, accompanied in the later crisis by Hasding and Siling Vandals, who hovered somewhere between the inner and outer peripheries – their territories were not that far from the frontier, but we know of no diplomatic relations between them and the Empire before the convulsions of the Hunnic era.64 These migrations caused the western Empire to suffer sudden and catastrophic losses of tax base in its heartlands, which in turn precipitated the total and equally rapid collapse of its military and political systems.

  Instead of a new supraregional power emerging gradually in northern Europe as competitive dynasts slowly built up their domain, biting off chunks of imperial territory while outfacing their peers beyond the frontier, the intervention of the Huns dramatically altered both the timing of the process and, at least in part, its nature. In the fourth century, the far boundary of Rome’s outer periphery, dominated by largely Germanic-speaking groups and characterized by very particular kinds of material-cultural systems, stretched over a vast expanse of territory. In the sixth century, after the migrations of the Hunnic era and the associated collapse of the Przeworsk, Wielbark and Cernjachov systems, the old patterns of material culture could no longer be found east of the Elbe or outside of the Middle Danube basin. Nor is there any sign in the historical sources of the substantial political structures that had previously existed there in the Roman period. West Roman imperial collapse was thus accompanied by a huge reduction in the extent of Germanic-dominated Europe, and the unification of most of what remained under Frankish hegemony. Both the speed of Roman collapse and the dramatic shrinking of Germanic Europe resulted from migratory processes unleashed by the Huns. In overall terms, this amounts to a dramatic sea change in European history.

  When measuring the total effect of the Roman Empire and its fall upon patterns of European development, then, we are faced with some paradoxical conclusions. First, in the Roman period proper – up to, say, 350 AD – interaction with the Empire helped spread more developed political structures and more complex patterns of economic interaction across broad tranches of the European landscape. I have no idea whether this was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing overall for human history. The march of civilization is not at all easy to measure. What I am confident about, however, is that it was a phenomenon of huge importance. But, second, the collapse of the Empire dramatically reduced the geographical extent of more developed Europe, as migratory processes – partly predatory in nature, partly more negative in motivation – sucked armed and politically organized groups south and west across the map. The fact that the new Frankish superpower was a weaker type of state to some extent reduced the old differential between developed and non-developed Europe that had existed in the Roman period. Nevertheless, by the sixth century, more developed Europe – counting both Empire and periphery – now encompassed a much smaller area, following the concertina-like effects of Roman imperial collapse.

  In the longer term, however, this second factor would prove much less important than the breaking of Mediterranean domination across western Eurasia. The Franks started this process by building the first imperial power that northern Europe had ever seen. It was completed by the rise of Islam, which turned east Rome into the satellite state of Byzantium and broke the political and even, eventually, the cultural unity of the Mediterranean. This freed northern Europe from the long-standing patterns of political interference that had marked the ancient world order. The fall of the Roman Empire saw the birth pains of Europe because Germanic and Arab expansion between them destroyed the domination of the Mediterranean over its northern hinterland. By the end of the millennium, developed Europe and the club of Christian monarchical states would run not just to the Elbe, as 500 AD, but all the way east to the Volga. The interaction of migration and development that created this further astonishing transformation of the European landscape provides the subject matter of the remaining chapters.

  8

  THE CREATION OF SLAVIC EUROPE

  ONE OF THE GREAT LANGUAGE GROUPS of modern Europe, Slavic-speakers currently comprise nearly 270 million individuals, and primarily Slavic-speaking countries account for something like half of the European landmass. This last point, at least, was substantially true by the end of the first millennium AD. Already in the year 900, Slavic-speakers dominated vast tracts of the European landscape east of the River Elbe and even some more limited territories west of it, in the Bohemian basin and around the River Saale. The eastern extent of Slavic control at this date is not completely clear, but it certainly extended to much of European Russia – as far east as the River Volga and as far north as Lake Ilmen. Slavic-speakers also dominated much of the Balkan peninsula (Map 16).

  But such a massively Slavic Europe was only a recent creation. In the Roman period, Europe as far east as the River Vistula, the best part of five hundred kilometres further east than the western boundary of later Slavic-dominated territory on the Elbe, had been dominated by Germanic-speakers. In the same period, the Balkans were part of the Roman Empire, home to ethnically disparate populations who spoke Latin and Greek as well as a variety of indigenous dialects and languages. River names (hydronyms) also indicate that much of central European Russia had at one point been dominated by the speakers of Baltic, not Slavic, languages, while its northern zones were in the hands of Finnish populations (Map 16). Even more startling, there is no mention of ‘Slavs’ in any Roman source – Greek or Latin – written before the deposition of the last western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476, and this despite the fact that the knowledge of some Roman geographers ranged widely over northern and eastern Europe. If little discussed in anglophone circles, the rise of Slavic Europe is one of the biggest stories of the entire first millennium. Where did it come from and what role did migration play in its creation?

  IN SEARCH OF THE SLAVS

  For all its historical importance, the creation of Slavic Europe is extremely difficult to reconstruct. Some of the reasons for this are straightforward, others a touch more exotic. First and foremost, we have no contemporary account of the process from any Slavic author. Literacy eventually came to the Slavic world with conversion to Christianity. But it was only in mid-ninth-ce
ntury Moravia (see page 518), where we began, that the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius created the first written version of a Slavic language to translate the Bible. In the centuries that followed, even Latin and Greek literacy remained largely restricted to religious contexts, and it was not until the early twelfth century that the Slavic world started to generate its own accounts of the past: the Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia (written from c.1120), the Gallus Anonymus in Poland (c.1115), and the Russian Primary Chronicle in Kiev (or Tale of Bygone Years, 1116). Nearly half a millennium separates these first Slavic accounts of Slavic history from the period when Slavic domination was becoming established over vast tracts of the European landscape. The focus of these texts was also on the much more immediate history of the states in which they were composed, and of their ruling dynasties, with references to any deeper past few and far between. Hence all of our more or less contemporary information on the rise of the Slavs is provided by east Roman or Byzantine authors in the east, and post-Roman (largely Frankish and Italian) authors in the west. In all of these texts, Graeco-Roman conceptions of the ‘barbarian’ were alive and kicking. The extent to which any particular report can be relied upon, or represents an ideologically loaded construction of reality brought into line with the preconceived expectations of author and audience, is thus always an open question.

  This problem fades into relative insignificance, however, next to a more basic one. Even our outsiders did not write very much about the Slavs. East Roman sources tell something of the Slavicization of the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries, western sources add the odd snippet about the western spread of Slavs along the line of the Carpathians and into the foothills of the Alps, and Viking-era sources provide some insight into the final push of Slavic groups northeastwards towards Lake Ilmen. But the Slavicization of large swathes of northern Europe between the Rivers Elbe and Volga is covered by no historical documentation whatsoever. It would be very nice to have the problem of worrying about the extent to which sources are presenting their own construction rather than reality, but for the most part we can’t even take the discussion that far. So deficient is the coverage provided by the written sources that the creation of Slavic Europe has to be studied as virtually a prehistoric subject, using almost entirely archaeological evidence.

  Pride and Prejudice

  Once again we are indebted to the two scholarly generations after the Second World War that saw such a huge investment in archaeological investigation in eastern bloc countries. When I first went to Poland, there were about two thousand undergraduates at the Institute of Archaeology in Warsaw alone, each of whom had to be involved in three digs to qualify for their degree. There were several other archaeological institutes in the country besides, and the pattern was similar right across the former Soviet bloc. Consequently, vast amounts of material became available for the study of prehistoric Europe, not least the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries that were so crucial to the rise of the Slavs. In particular, Central and East European archaeologists have successfully identified a specific material-culture assemblage that occurs often enough at broadly the right times and places for a plausible association to be made between it and at least some Slavic groups of the critical period. These ‘Korchak’-type remains – and closely related ‘Penkovka’ materials – consist of simple assemblages of pottery, in the form largely of handmade cooking pots, associated with settlements of huts, usually numbering not more than about ten in a cluster, which were partly sunk into the ground and whose design incorporated an oven, often built of stones, in one corner. Occasionally, small cremation cemeteries have been found alongside the settlements, where human remains were interred in simple handmade urns. All this reflects small-scale agricultural communities, practising mixed agricultural regimes of a broadly self-sufficient kind using some iron tools. As you would expect, they are generally found in areas where fertile land was easily available, in terraces just above the flood plains of nearby rivers. Korchak remains are also remarkable for the more or less complete absence of foreign imports and fancy metalwork of any kind, indigenous or imported.1

  If a broad association of Korchak remains with some early Slavs seems secure enough, these materials are nonetheless deeply problematic. One immediate issue is chronology. Korchak remains lack the kind of metalwork and more sophisticated pottery whose stylistic changes over time can provide broad dating guides. Germanic remains from the first half of the millennium can usually be located to within a twenty-five-year period, Korchak materials by themselves only to within a two-hundred-year span between about 500 and 700 AD. More technical dating methods, such as carbon-14 or dendrochronology, can be used for greater precision wherever wood or carbon is available, but these are much more expensive and, as yet, are available only for a relatively small number of sites.

  An even bigger issue is how precisely we should understand the relationship between Korchak remains and the early Slavs. Exactly how close and how exclusive was the association? Did all Slavic-speaking communities of c.500 live the kind of life that generated Korchak remains? And were Korchak-type remains generated only by Slavic-speaking populations? Some Slavs certainly lived a Korchak type of life, but that does not necessarily mean that all did. Inversely, there is absolutely no reason a priori why a variety of languages might not have been spoken in the kinds of simple farming communities that generated Korchak remains.2

  Furthermore, early Slavic history has long been complicated by other problems. The nature of these problems emerges clearly from a map of the different original homelands that have been proposed for the Slavs over the last century or so (Map 17). As even a quick glance shows you, these are many and varied, stretching as far west as Bohemia in one version and as far east as the River Don in another. There is, moreover, a deeper pattern underlying these disagreements. First, there has been a marked tendency for scholars to identify original Slavic homelands that coincide with their own place of origin. Running briefly across Map 17, Borkovsky, who identified Bohemia as the Slav homeland, was a Czech; Kostrzewski, who went for Poland, was a Pole; Korosec, who plumped for Pannonia, was a Yugoslav (northern former Yugoslavia encompassed part of old Roman Pannonia); while Tretiakov and Rybakov, who opted for areas further east, were Soviet scholars. There are, of course, exceptions. Kazimierz Godlowski, who argued the case for the outer rim of the Carpathians on the basis of a thorough and dispassionate review of all the evidence unearthed since the Second World War, was a Pole, and I don’t believe that his own Romanian origins have anything to do with Florin Curta’s more recent championing of the zone between the Carpathians and the Danube.

  Overall, however, the impact of nationalist rivalries – actually from two different ideological eras – could not be clearer. As you might expect, inter-Slavic rivalry was a marked feature of the nationalist era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Slavic intellectuals were jockeying for position and favour within their own national circles by attempting to tie the earliest Slavs to their own homelands. It was a particularly hot potato in Polish–Russian relations, given the Poles’ subordinate position within the Russian Empire up to the end of the First World War. Perhaps more surprisingly, the same old rivalries persisted into the Soviet era. In classic Marxist dogma, as mentioned earlier, any kind of consciousness apart from class-consciousness is by definition ‘false’ – that is, an ideology generated by an elite to control the masses. You wouldn’t have expected the Soviet intellectual establishment to have been much bothered about where exactly a ‘false’ Slavic ethnic consciousness first emerged, but one of its many paradoxes was the way in which the Soviet era stitched Marxism and nationalism together into a seamless robe. The (at that stage) seemingly obvious fact that destiny had chosen the Slavs to be the first people to bring the new Marxist world order to fruition merely added extra spice to the old national rivalries, and the consequences could be brutal. Before the 1980s, Polish scholars who doubted that Slavic-speakers had always been indige
nous to the area between the Oder and the Vistula – that is, the territory of the post-1945 Polish state – were punished for their views.3

  Sometimes, these competing visions of Slavic history were designed to fight off outsiders. Gustav Kossinna, as we saw in Chapter 1, was ready to mobilize a supposed Germanic past to justify the territorial claims of the modern German state; and in part, Kostrzewski, a student of Kossinna’s methods, was replying in kind. His argument that the heartland of the new Polish state – as reconstituted after the First World War – had always been occupied by Slavic-speakers was directed not only against Russian pretensions but also against Kossinna. Making the argument stick posed some tricky intellectual problems. Tacitus’ Germania records that Germanic-speaking groups – particularly the historically prominent Goths – had occupied territories as far east as the River Vistula in the first century AD. On the face of it, this was difficult to reconcile with the theory of an ancient and continuous Slavic occupation of the same area. Kostrzewski argued, however, that Goths and other Germanic-speakers were no more than a thin layer of population on top of a ‘submerged’ Slavic-speaking majority. To make his case, Kostrzewski’s work set out to trace the history of this majority back through time from the early Middle Ages into the early Roman period (via the Przeworsk culture) and even back to c.1000 BC (via the so-called Pomeranian and Lusatian cultures).4