Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  In Scandinavia too, in the aftermath of a chaotic Viking century, matters were moving in a similar direction. From the mid-tenth century, a powerful state structure began to emerge, based on Jutland and the Danish islands and dominated by successive members of the Jelling dynasty, named after the place from which they originated. Originally pagan, the dynasty converted to Christianity in the person of Harold Bluetooth, and while maintaining a larger naval capacity than its continental Slavic counterparts it too was soon putting up castles and cathedrals, and likewise alternately squabbling with or receiving favours from different Holy Roman emperors. Intermarriages between the Danish and Slavic, particularly the Polish, dynasties soon followed, and they were all part of the same broader diplomatic and cultural orbit.3

  As we saw in the last chapter, moreover, Scandinavian expansion had flowed as much eastwards as westwards, and one of its chief outcomes in this sphere was the Rurikid-dominated Rus state, centred on Kiev. This dynasty held on to its ancestral paganism for a little longer than its western counterparts, and, reflecting the particularities of its origins, took a bit longer to get round to castles and cathedrals. Not, though, that much longer: Prince Vladimir converted his state definitively to Christianity in the late 980s, and shortly after the year 1000 constructed in Kiev the famous Tithe Church dedicated to the Mother of God. Built of brick and stone, it measured twenty-seven metres by eighteen, and could boast three aisles, three apses and a cupola: the greatest structure yet seen so far east and north in the European landscape.4

  The last two hundred years of the first millennium thus saw new political powers of considerable stature spring up right across central and eastern Europe, in some of the areas that had belonged to the most underdeveloped parts of the western Eurasian landscape. With their emergence, Europe finally took on something of the shape that it has broadly retained down to the present: a network of not entirely dissimilar and culturally interconnected political societies clustering at the western end of the great Eurasian landmass. But what, precisely, was the nature of these new entities, and how had they come into being? What, too, was the nature of their relationship to the patterns of Slavic and Scandinavian expansion we have been examining in the last two chapters. Did they just mean that you ended up with Slavic dynasties in some parts of old barbarian Europe and Scandinavians in another, or was migration central to the whole process of state formation?

  POLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT

  As is often the case with the first millennium, it is easier to ask questions than answer them, and for all the usual reasons, though by the end of the period the situation as regards sources is a huge improvement on the era of Slavic expansion. Literacy eventually came to the Slavic world, as we have just seen, with the conversion to Christianity of Moravia in the mid-ninth century. But written Slavic did not acquire any non-religious purposes in this era, and in the centuries either side of the year 1000 even Latin and Greek remained largely restricted to religious uses within the new states. It was not until the early twelfth century that chroniclers around the courts of the new dynasties started to generate homegrown accounts of the past: Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia, the Gallus Anonymus in Poland and the Russian Primary Chronicle in Kievan Russia. These texts do contain some useful information, but all had at least partly celebratory purposes vis-à-vis their intended dynastic audience and patrons, and their memories of the ninth and tenth centuries tend to verge on the mythical.5

  Of necessity, then, we are again often forced back on historical texts produced by outsiders: the western and southern European states with whom our new states quickly came into contact. This material poses the usual problems of reliability, although they are, in fact, less pressing than those we faced with Roman writers. For one thing, there is much more information. The Viking revolution in Baltic transportation brought Scandinavia into a much closer relationship with literate Europe, while Moravia, Poland and Bohemia were all its close neighbours. And much more was being written in literate Europe, in any case, thanks to the renewed emphasis on literacy that sprang out of the ninth-century Carolingian renaissance. The Emperor Charlemagne had made determined efforts to improve standards of literacy as part of his broader project of Church reform, and literacy continued to increase after Carolingian imperial collapse. When you also throw into the mix the fact that Islamic Arabic authors transmit some important information from another direction entirely, then you can immediately see why we are better endowed.6

  A second point is nearly as important as the first. Within pretty short order, all our new entities converted to Christianity. This did not mean that their relations with more developed Europe, from whom they had acquired the religion, proceeded henceforth without conflict. Far from it; but the fact that they adopted Christianity did mean that they could not be viewed as barbarian ‘outsiders’ in the same unrelenting fashion that classical authors had adopted towards all non-Romans. In 1002, shortly after his Polish progress, Otto III went on another journey, this time to meet his maker. Sonless, he was succeeded by his cousin Henry II, whose arrival on the throne inaugurated over a decade of warfare between the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish state. Much of this is lovingly chronicled for us by Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, but his narrative is striking for its lack of any real demonization of the Poles, despite the ferocity of much of the fighting. That this was at least in part due to the Poles’ Christianity shows up in Thietmar’s criticism of Henry for employing still-pagan Elbe Slavs as allies against the Poles.7

  In addition, the new Scando-Slavic states constitute yet another subject area that has benefited hugely from the Soviet archaeological bonanza of the postwar years. Originally, of course, the usual distorting agendas were firmly in play, but so much information became available that they were fast losing their credibility even before the Berlin Wall came down. And, in overall terms, the Communist years brought into the scholarly domain a vast amount of information that would not otherwise have come to light. All in all, then, both texts and archaeology provide a great deal of information about our new dynasties and the political structures they erected. What does all this material allow us to say about how these new states worked?

  State and Periphery

  Like their earlier counterparts on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, these new entities in some ways fell short of modern conceptions of the word ‘state’. The largely Germanic-dominated polities of the Roman frontier zone had been limited in their capacity to undertake centrally organized action. Politically, they were confederative, which meant that their overall rulers had to coexist with other ‘kings’, who retained real power, if usually perhaps within one locality rather than over the group as a whole. They were also limited in the quantity of resources – human and economic – that they could redirect for centrally designated purposes. Royal retinues numbered only in the few hundreds, even if the groups as a whole could field total military forces of ten thousand-plus. They have likewise left us few signs of any capacity to erect and maintain fortifications or other types of monument. Nor were these entities particularly large, although Roman counteraction was partly to blame for this, and the realm of the Gothic Tervingi, further east, covered a substantial area from the Danube to the Dniester. On all these counts, the new political entities of northern and eastern Europe in the late first millennium were much more impressive.

  Geographically, the new states of the ninth and tenth centuries were huge. The Rus state ran from Kiev to Novgorod in a north–south direction, and east–west from the Dnieper to the Volga. All told, this amounted to a staggering million square kilometres, or near enough. The other states, too, were much bigger than their late Roman counterparts. Bohemia was the most contained, but this name is more than a little misleading since the kingdom usually encompassed most of what is now Slovakia as well (Moravia in ninth- and tenth-century parlance) – a much bigger area than that dominated by any Roman client state. The Piast dynasty of Poland, likewise, customarily governed lands all the way from
the Oder to Volhynia and Galicia beyond the River Vistula, again an unimaginably large territory in mid-first-millennium terms. Even Denmark was bigger than modern preconceptions would lead you to think. The Jelling dynasty quickly put together Denmark and the largest of the adjacent islands (Öland, Skåne and Sjaelland), but also made their presence felt in nearly all of the most fertile lands of southern Norway, particularly around Oslo Fjord and in what is now western Sweden. True to the best Viking traditions and proper first-millennium logistics, water united these different components, giving Harold Bluetooth and his son and grandson, Svein and Cnut, a large enough power base from which to conquer the populous and prosperous Anglo-Saxon kingdom in twenty years of warfare from the mid-990s.8

  The disparity in profile between these entities and standard client states of the Roman period becomes even more marked if you look at governmental capacity: the kinds of powers they had available and the institutions they used to activate them. Archaeologically, the most striking legacy of these later states consists of castles. These new political authorities were capable of erecting by the score. By the year 1000, the Piast dynasty had dotted its domains with no less than fifty. The Premyslids, likewise, used garrisoned forts to control their central areas. In this, the tenth-century dynasties were following firmly in the footsteps of their ninth-century Moravian predecessors. Piast and Premyslid fortifications were constructed largely in wood (in case ‘castle’ brings to mind something anachronistically grand, along the lines of Edward I’s constructions in Wales), but the Moravians had quickly learned to build in stone, and for good reason. One of our chroniclers notes the dismay felt by Carolingian forces in 869 when they suddenly found themselves faced with the ‘insurmountable’ – probably stone – fortifications of Rastiz (perhaps Stare Mesto now in the Czech Republic). On previous campaigns, they had been able to burn their way through Moravian obstacles, but not any more. The Moravians also used fortified centres to control landscapes. Their key political centre of Nitra was surrounded by a ring of forts: Devin, Novi Voj, Kolyka and Bratislava.

  Individual population centres in Kievan Russia, likewise, were fully fortified, but here the archaeology provides us with a more striking echo of Rurikid power. Running south and east from Kiev for over a hundred kilometres are the ‘Snake Walls’: ramparts originally three and a half to four metres high, reinforced with a twelve-metre outside ditch. These were constructed in the very early eleventh century (so it’s not really cheating to include them in a book that notionally stops at the year 1000) to counter the threat posed by the Pechenegs, the latest nomads to crash into the adjacent steppe north of the Black Sea. And if the new Slavic dynasties were the past masters of castle construction, the habit at least partly rubbed off on to the Scandinavians. One of the most exciting finds of postwar Danish archaeology was a series of fortified power centres datable, thanks to dendrochronology, to the reign of Harold Bluetooth. Named ‘Trelleborg fortresses’ after the first of them to be excavated, they vary in size but are all beautifully circular monuments with a symmetrical arrangement of large halls within. Otherwise, being an entity whose constituent parts were linked much more by water than by land routes, its ruling Jelling dynasty was less obsessed with castle-building. Nonetheless, the list of late first-millennium monuments impressively underlines the capacity of these new states to engage in concerted construction. The most any Roman client state could manage was to put the odd wall round a king’s hillfort in the case of the Alamanni, or try to repair an existing line of Roman fortifications in the case of the Tervingi, and even this much stretched group loyalty to breaking point. It is also unclear whether what were basically single fortified dwellings, such as those put up among the Alamanni, reflect the public power of a state or state-like entity – as both the regularity and the mass of late first-millennium construction do – or the clout of a particularly important individual.9

  The capacity of these new states to raise and maintain troops was equally impressive. It had to be, of course, since to build multiple castles and not garrison them would have been a charmingly pointless exercise. We have no detailed evidence for Moravia, although the concerted efforts of various Carolingian rulers to dominate the territory, together with their ultimate failure, are eloquent testimony to the overall military power of the first of the new states. In the case of Poland the evidence is more specific. First, one of the Arab geographers tells us that a Piast king was capable of maintaining an armed retinue of three thousand armoured knights, paid for out of personal funds. The figure may be questionable, but not the nature of the force, since Boleslaw Chrobry had promised to aid the Emperor, whenever needed, with three hundred ‘armoured men’ as part of the archbishopric deal in the year 1000.

  The key word in the original Latin is loricati, lorica being Latin for ‘coat of mail’. The rise to military predominance of soldiers equipped in this expensive manner – the mailcoat being the single most costly item of contemporary military equipment – was a revolutionary development of the late first millennium. The fact that the Piast retinue was so equipped emphasizes that they were fully up to date. And the promise to send three hundred men when asked is compatible with a total retinue size in the thousands, as Ibn Fadlan reports, since no one would ever agree to send anything like their full force to a foreign war. Equally important, this retinue was only one part of the Piast war machine, which rested on a military obligation imposed more broadly on at least some categories of the wider population. Again, the early eleventh-century sources don’t give us the full rundown, but in the campaigns against Otto’s successor Henry I we see a Piast army of many thousands which was capable of operating in detached divisions towards a common aim – as in 1003, when a force of three thousand men represented only one out of four Polish divisions engaged in the defensive holding effort against Henry’s imperial might. What hits you about all this is the cost. Germanic retinues of the late Roman period numbered only in the few hundreds, and the indications we have suggest that coats of mail were at that point restricted only to a small elite. The Piasts reportedly maintained retinues on ten times this scale and were able to equip them fully with all the latest hardware. We have no contemporary documentation on how the money was raised, but later arrangements give some idea. Areas under Piast control were administered from the nearest castle, and, of the revenues gathered, one-third went to the castle commander, presumably in part to maintain his garrison forces, and two-thirds to the king. There were other, perhaps more important, sources of revenue too, but it is likely enough that the ancestor of this later system was already in place to help the Piasts maintain their forces.10

  The observable patterns of military power in the other states are similar. They had to be. The Piasts, Premyslids and Rurikids regularly fought one another, the military balance swinging, depending on circumstances (usually which of the states was in the middle of a dynastic crisis), first one way and then the other. This cyclical pattern would not have been possible had not all three been able to deploy military forces that were roughly equal in size and nature. As part of their treaty obligations with the Byzantine Empire, the Kievan Rus agreed to send to the Emperor, when asked, a military force several thousand strong. This was large enough to play a crucial role in keeping the Emperor Basil II on the throne in the face of a major revolt, and again underlines the overall scale of Kievan Rus forces, since this expeditionary force would have represented only a part of the total available. Again, these forces were composed partly of specialist retinues, who figure at many points in our narrative sources, and partly of contingents drawn from the major settlements of the realm. We have no figure for the size of retinues, but the RPC gives some detail on two of the territorial contingents. One from Novgorod figures strongly in a civil war of 1015, a second from Chernigov in another of 1068. Both are said to have numbered three thousand men. Retinues likewise appear in our early Bohemian sources, a more general military obligation only in later documents. But, again, I’m confident that retinues alon
e would never have been sufficient for the rulers of Bohemia to compete so successfully on the international stage.11

  The Jelling dynasty was rarely involved in these interdynastic struggles, but it did have to fend off the hostile attentions of successive emperors, and, as we have seen, was perfectly capable of sustained aggressive warfare against the Anglo-Saxon kingdom under Svein (986/7–1014) and Cnut. Exactly how they did so is controversial. Did they use retinue and mercenary soldiers and/or forces levied under a more general military obligation to the state? In thirteenth-century Danish documentation, the levied force is called the leding, and in that century could produce for the king a fleet of notionally one thousand ships, each manned by forty warriors. At issue is whether any kind of direct ancestor of the leding system was used by Svein and Cnut, in addition to the mercenaries (lithsmen), whom they certainly also employed. In my view, it is extremely likely that they did. Assessing and mobilizing a military obligation is one of the basic powers of any ruler, and it’s hard to see that the Jelling dynasty’s power could have amounted to much if they were not able to do this in at least some of the territories they controlled. It is also suggested by some of the more detailed evidence. The more or less contemporary Encomium of Queen Emma, wife successively to Aethelred the Unready and Svein’s son Cnut, records that, in gathering his expeditionary force, Svein ordered that it should contain ‘no slave, no freedman, no low born’. This sounds like a general mobilization order, and certainly overseas Scandinavian societies, such as those created in the Scottish islands during the Viking period, quickly organized with clearly defined military obligations.12