Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Where the pollen gives out, we are forced back on indications of a more general kind. Some again suggest we should not underestimate the demographic component of Slavicization. In Procopius’ account, the unfortunate Heruli evicted from the Middle Danube in 512 (Chapter 5) initially passed north through Slavic territory and then into ‘empty lands’ before eventually finding their way to Scandinavia. The empty area ought to be north-central Europe, somewhere beyond the Moravian Gap, and, on the face of it this seems to indicate a major population decline in that region, since pretty much everywhere between the Moravian gap and Scandinavia had been substantially populated in the Roman period. There is also good reason to think that the migration process would have prompted a considerable population increase among the immigrant Slavs. One limit on human population is the availability of food supplies. When more food is produced, more children survive, there is better resistance to disease, and couples are often allowed to marry younger, with the outcome that populations can increase surprisingly quickly if extra food supplies are available in abundance. In the case of the Slavs there are no figures, but plenty of reason to think that the overall demographic effect would have been large. For one thing, migration brought Slavic-speakers out of the Russian forest zone and on to the generally better soils of central Europe. In addition, Korchak and Penkovka farmers quickly adopted the more efficient type of plough in use in the Roman world and its peripheries by 400 AD, abandoning their original scratch ploughs. The new ploughs allowed them to turn the soil over so that weeds rotted back into it, allowing fertility to be both increased and maintained and making for much higher yields. Even if we cannot put figures on it, we must reckon with migration having generated a substantial population increase among Slavic-speakers, with obvious knock-on effects for their capacity to colonize new lands in central Europe. Not all Slavs will have scored the threefold personal increase in population achieved by the Frankish merchant Samo, who produced twenty-two sons and fifteen daughters with just a little help, of course, from his twelve wives, but population increase was a genuine phenomenon.50

  At the same time, other indications reinforce the pollen evidence from Rügen and Saaleland. The Sukow-Dziedzice system, covering much of what is now Poland, has thrown up much pottery of standard Korchak types, but, as we have seen, its remains are really distinctive for their strikingly wide range of pot-types. In addition to the standard Korchak cooking pots (which tend towards wider-mouthed, more open forms than the Korchak norm), Sukow-Dziedzice sites customarily throw up a wide range of plain medium-sized jars, globular bowls and jar-bowls. Much of the non-Korchak pottery looks in fact like handmade versions of the kind of wheel-made pottery that was being made in the same region by Przeworsk potters in the final century or so of Germanic domination. These resemblances could have been generated by Korchak potters coming across Przeworsk ceramics in abandoned settlements, but this kind of imitation is not found anywhere else. Much more likely, we are looking at the results of an interaction between Korchak Slavs and an indigenous post-Przeworsk population that was still living in situ.51

  The range of available evidence – some specific, some more general – makes it clear that the demographic significance of Germanic culture collapse and Slavic immigration is not simple to predict. A substantial peasant population remained at work in at least some parts of old Germanic Europe, despite the population movements of the fourth to the sixth century. The Bohemian evidence suggests, however, that we may have to reckon with a general thinning-out of the indigenous population, which, as the pollen diagrams show, could even lead in places to the wholesale abandonment of farming: a pattern that is found in many of the fringes of the Roman Empire in the period after its collapse.52 When you also add to the picture that the Slavic-speaking populations involved in the migratory process would have been increasing in numbers as they applied more-developed farming techniques to better soils, then it does seem that Slavic immigration must be considered a major demographic event, even if it did not everywhere, or even often, take the form of recolonizing abandoned territories.

  It is now such a mantra in some circles that migration never happened in the first millennium on a large enough scale to have a major demographic (as opposed to political or cultural) impact, that it is worth dwelling on this point a little further. It is certainly true, when dealing with hierarchically stratified societies, that the kind of culture collapse associated with the disappearance of a social elite need not represent much of a population exodus. As we saw earlier, according to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, the arrival of Slavs in the Peloponnese prompted the total evacuation of its native Greek population. When the Slavs around Patras revolted in the early ninth century, however, there was a native Greek-speaking population living alongside them. Possibly, the Greek-speakers had all returned from Calabria in the meantime, but this seems unlikely. And logistically, the sea-borne evacuation of an entire region would have been impossible, given the kind of shipping available. In parallel circumstances in the west, only wealthy members of the landowning class, those with some movable wealth, tended to flee.

  That similar patterns surely prevailed in the Peloponnese, despite the Chronicle’s report to the contrary, is suggested by reactions elsewhere in the Balkans to the build-up of Slavic pressure. Another admittedly late chronicle source, though one usually taken to be drawing on much earlier information, reports that Salona in the northwest fell to the Slavs when panic swept through the city following the discovery that its notables had been moving their goods on to ships in the harbour. In similar vein, Constantine Porphyryogenitus reports that the inhabitants of Ragusa still remembered that their city had been founded by immigrants fleeing from Pitaura. It goes on to list them by name: Gregory, Asclepius, Victorinus, Vitalius, Valentinian the archdeacon and Valentinian the father of Stephen the protospatharius. A protospatharius was a high-ranking court dignitary, which, together with the mention of an archdeacon, makes this sound like the exodus of a small group of notables – presumably also with their households and retainers – rather than the mass transfer of an entire population.53 Culture collapse and elite migration in a Roman context, therefore, probably only involved a small percentage of the population, and it is likely that immigrant Slavs within the Balkans were always closely coexisting with a substantial indigenous population.

  The socioeconomic patterns of Germanic Europe in the late Roman period, however, were very different. Despite the major transformations of the previous four centuries, it remained nothing like so hierarchically stratified as late Roman or early Byzantine society. New Germanic elites did emerge between the first and fourth century AD, but still represented a much larger percentage of the total population than the tiny landowning class which dominated the Roman world. As we saw in Chapter 2, everything suggests that we must think in terms of social and political power shared between a fairly broad oligarchy of freemen, not a small aristocracy. And participation in the Völkerwanderung, likewise, was not limited just to this dominant oligarchy. At least two social strata of warriors appear in some of the intrusive groups alongside an unspecified number of slaves, adding up, on occasion, to groups of ten thousand-plus fighting men, together with women and children.54 The emigration of this kind of social elite, with its many adherents, would have an entirely different effect upon a region from that of a few Roman notables and their households. None of this denies, however, that much of north-central Europe remained home to an indigenous population at the time of Slavic migratory expansion.

  So how does the evidence suggest that we should characterize relations between native and immigrant populations, both here and elsewhere, such as the Balkans and European Russia, where Slavic-speakers came into contact with indigenous societies?

  One recent approach to the problem has started with the Strategicon’s report firmly in mind, and taken the argument further on the strength of some general observations about the material-cultural effects of the rise of Slavic domination in central and eastern Europ
e. Its most striking effect was the replacement (at least in the areas affected by Germanic culture collapse) of the bigger and the more complex with the smaller and simpler, in pretty much every aspect of life from pottery technology to settlement size. This simplification, it is argued, wasn’t just an incidental effect of population elements from the woods of eastern Europe – who had very simple lifestyles anyway – taking over large parts of the landscape, but a key reason for their success. What we’re observing, in this view, is not so much the takeover of a Slavic population as the spread of an attractive cultural model, energetically seized upon by non-militarized indigenous peasant populations of central Europe left over after the old elites had departed south and west for Roman territory. In effect, the Slavs are recast as the champions of an alternative lifestyle, early medieval hippy travellers who found widespread support, unlike their later counterparts in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s. As Procopius reports, vigorously egalitarian and dramatic, if primitive, ideologies prevailed among the Slavs of his day, and this, it has been argued, was very attractive to peasants who had been labouring hard to provide surpluses which the militarized elites of Germanic central Europe had previously exploited.55 This model is really describing Slavicization as a process of non-elite transfer and cultural emulation, where a few immigrants, but above all a way of life, spread across large parts of central Europe on being adopted by a substantial indigenous population. How well does this model fit the available data?

  At least in some places, the incoming Slavic migrants did treat the indigenous population more generously than would appear to have been the case, for instance, in Anglo-Saxon England. There was certainly some assimilation. The Strategicon does suggest that some early Slavic groups were remarkably ‘open’ in terms of their group identity, being willing, as we have seen, to accept prisoners as full and equal members of their own society. This is remarkable. Many societies are willing to take in outsiders, but it is more usual for the latter to have to adopt, at least initially, relatively inferior social positions. Full equality was clearly not an offer being made, for instance, by Germanic groups of the ‘Migration Period’. These came out of the migration process with their well-entrenched social distinctions between the two statuses of warrior and slaves intact – top status had clearly not been on offer to all the new recruits they had picked up on the way. With little, seemingly, in the way of original social hierarchies to protect, however, a willingness to attract recruits seems to have been of higher priority to some early Slavic groups, who erected no substantial barriers to the admission of outsiders. Beyond the Strategicon, we have no narrative descriptions of this process in action, but it finds some confirmation in the Samo story. Here was an outsider, a Frankish merchant, who showed the right qualities and ended up as a figure of authority among the Sorbs and other Slavs of the Avar/Frankish frontier region.56

  The absorption of outsiders surely also operated at less exalted social levels. The population increase generated by better farming methods does not seem remotely enough to account for the immense areas of the European landscape that had come to be dominated by Slavs from c.800 AD. This even remains the case if you also suppose, which I tend to, that the Slavic language family had evolved before the middle of the first millennium AD, and that, consequently, Slavic-speakers were more broadly dispersed in c.500 AD than identifying them exclusively with Korchak remains would suggest. The creation of an almost entirely Slavic Europe from the Elbe to the Volga does seem, therefore, to call for a large element of population absorption. This of course would provide the historical context in which Slavic-speakers acquired more advanced farming technologies from their neighbours, and, in the case of the Sukow-Dziedzice system, more developed ceramic repertoires.57 This is not to advocate a return to old nationalist ideas of indigenous ‘submerged Slavs’ between the Oder and the Vistula triumphantly re-emerging from Germanic domination. Far from it: frankly, we have no idea what linguistic and cultural identity the leftover peasantry of this region are likely to have had after Germanic culture collapse – but presumably Germanic, if anything, since they had been under Germanic domination for several hundred years. But whatever it was, their longer-term trajectory was to be absorbed into the evolving norms of a Slavic cultural context. Such a large-scale absorption, it is worth underlining, is perfectly in line with modern studies of ethnicity, which make it clear that, according to circumstance, groups erect stronger or weaker barriers around themselves. The early Slavs – or some of them at least – would be an example of a group erecting only a very porous frontier between themselves and outsiders, and this, of course, is what the report of Maurice’s Strategicon suggests. It is also worth pointing out that this is a unique comment, not a topos trundled out every time Roman authors discuss barbarians.

  That said, however, it is extremely important not just to jump from this evidence to the conclusion that the Slavs took over huge expanses of Europe more or less peacefully. In the former East German Republic in the Soviet era, it was ideologically highly desirable to find cases of Slavs living peacefully alongside a native Germanic-speaking population, and the evidence was manipulated accordingly. During these years a corpus of sites was identified where, so the claim went, Germans and Slavs had lived peacefully side by side for some time. Two were in Berlin (Berlin-Marzahn and Berlin-Hellersdorf), the others spread more widely, Dessau-Mosigkau and Tornow being the most prominent.

  The collapse of the Berlin Wall has prompted important revisions. That late Germanic and early Slavic materials had been found on the same sites in these instances was clear enough, but, under reinvestigation, the case for simultaneous occupation has failed to stand up. At Berlin-Hellersdorf, the Germanic and Slavic moments of occupation were separated from one another by a layer of deposited sediment. On the face of it, this denied simultaneous Slavic and Germanic occupation, and carbon-14 datings made since 1989 have confirmed the point. At Berlin-Marzahn, similarly, carbon-14 dates for the Germanic-period materials range from 240 to 400 AD, those for the Slavic from 660 to 780 AD. In this case, the carbon-14 datings merely confirmed an earlier dendrochronological date of the eighth century for some wood from the Slavic phase. Looking to prove coexistence, the original excavator considered this dendrochronological date too ‘unlikely’ to be worth publishing.58 The later Slavic expansion in north-western Russia, as we have seen, looks too contested, likewise, for immigrant/native relations in that context to be characterized as fundamentally peaceful. Not all the evidence for peaceful interaction is flawed, but neither is it the only type of interaction documented in our sources.

  In the longer term, as the cultural and linguistic transformation that came over central and eastern Europe in the second half of the millennium makes clear, Slavic-speakers became a dominating force right across this landscape. Slavic society may have been open to outsiders, but open to outsiders who were willing to join it and become Slavs in every sense of the word. The world created by Slavic immigration shows no sign of migrants and natives happily agreeing to differ over lifestyles. On the contrary, it generated a monolithic cultural form in which the Slavic contribution was dominant. The Slavs did not just insert themselves into the society of central Europe at the head of structures that already existed, so we are not looking here at some variant of a Norman Conquest model of elite transfer. What they did was redefine social norms along lines dictated by themselves. In other words, longer-term Slavicization was a bit like Romanization: the generation of an all-encompassing new socioeconomic and political order, with powerful cultural overtones, which became the only game in town. In the end, affected populations had no real choice about whether to join in or not, and Slavic became the predominant language right across this huge territory.

  You have to wonder, too, how long Slavic societies remained so open to outsiders joining it on equal terms. Certainly by c.800 AD, as we will explore in more detail in Chapter 10, some of these new societies were becoming more stratified, with a distinctly predatory attitude
to prisoners. By this date, prisoners were no longer being absorbed as equals but recycled into a highly profitable slave trade. The absence, before the ninth century, of real material cultural differentiation clearly reflecting the existence of an elite might lead you to think that the closing of Slavic society to outsiders was a relatively late phenomenon. But, as we have seen before, elites can exist without consumer goods. Having servile dependants to do all the back-breaking work of farming, while you eat more and enjoy more leisure, can give ‘elite’ real meaning, even when you don’t possess lots of shiny goods.

  It is also important to remember that although the first historically documented Slavs operated in small social groups – some of them very small – this did not make them all notably peaceful. Smallish groups of Slavs raided the Roman Balkans almost continuously from the mid-sixth century, and quickly acquired a warlike reputation. Some of the prisoners who fell into their hands received conspicuously ungenerous treatment. The fifteen thousand Roman prisoners impaled outside the city of Topirus in 549, or those others killed in 594 when their Slavic captors were surrounded, would have found the Strategicon’s comments about Slavic generosity towards captives less than convincing.59 The more organized Slavic groups of Serbs and Croats, if we may trust the De Administrando Imperio, were probably even more formidable, since they were capable of throwing off Avar domination. When thinking about the Slavicization of Europe, then, it is important to see that Slavic expansion was occurring at a point where Slavic society was itself already in the throes of major transformations. One of the results were armed groups of great military competence, and it is extremely unlikely, where these kinds of groups were operating, that Slavicization was being carried forward solely by processes of peaceful absorption.