The power of these central political structures was not limited to the waging of war. We’ve already met Vladimir’s Tithe Church in Kiev. Not only was this the Empire State Building of its day – at least as far as the Dnieper region was concerned – but it was just one part of a larger palace complex built by Vladimir on the Starokievskaia Hill. Two-storeyed stone halls, each over forty metres long, were built to the south, west and possibly also the north-west of the church. All were floored with glazed ceramic tiles whose design included the eagle, one of the oldest symbols of empire, and decorated with mosaics and paintings. Nor was this much grander than the best the rest had to offer. The grandest of the Christian basilicas discovered in Great Moravia was constructed at and covered an area of four hundred square metres, making it very similar in scale to the Tithe Church, although little is known of its decoration. This was one of twenty-five stone-built churches known to have been constructed in ninth-century Moravia, and there were probably many others of wood. Denmark and Bohemia, similarly, quickly acquired a stock of more and less impressive churches, not least their chief cathedrals at, respectively, Roskilde and Prague. As befits so early an independent archbishopric, however, the Piasts trumped their rivals in the religious arms race. The cathedral at Poznan was a monstrous three-aisled basilica covering no less than one thousand square metres, while the tomb of Adalbert at Gniezno was adorned by Boleslaw Chrobry with a solid gold cross said to have been three times his own body weight. It has been estimated that there were, in addition, another thirty to forty churches constructed across the Piasts’ Great Polish heartland by the time of Boleslaw’s death in 1025.13
The capacity of these new states to make things happen also extended to communications. Odd bits and pieces of relevant evidence turn up in the narrative sources: the construction of bridges and roads, for instance, features in the RPC. More generally, in the earliest monastic documents from Poland and Bohemia, labour dues owed for bridges and roads feature as royal rights which were never given up when a piece of land was handed over to the Church. The land’s labour force, in other words, would periodically be turned out to work on the highways at the ruler’s command. Some of what this meant in practice has been elucidated by Danish archaeologists. Another of their great postwar treasures is the Ravning Edge Bridge, dated conclusively, again by dendrochronology, to the reign of Harold Bluetooth. This was a kilometre long, part causeway, part raised bridge over a particularly soggy bit of central Jutland. It required four hundred separate sections and the small matter of seventeen hundred posts to complete. Not exactly the Golden Gate, it was still a magnificent piece of determined construction, typical of the kinds of enterprise required to make the boggier parts of the North European Plain reasonably amenable to land transport.14
Looked at under these different headings – and I have chosen only a few examples – the new states of northern and eastern Europe appear potent indeed. They enjoyed considerable powers over their constituent population. More elite elements could be made to turn out and fight, the poorer to build roadways, palaces, churches and fortifications. Economic resources could also be mobilized to support rulers and their extensive retinues, not to mention an associated Christian priesthood, which was growing apace under princely sponsorship. There is not the slightest doubt that their achievements dwarf the political structures that emerged on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, there were still some important ways in which the new states remained profoundly limited.
For one thing, they operated with little in the way of administration or written record-keeping, even if writing played a slightly more important role among them than in Rome’s client states of the fourth century. International treaties were on occasion committed to paper. The RPC includes the texts of two trade treaties made in 911 and 944 between the rulers of Kiev and the Byzantine Empire. All the internal evidence indicates that these texts are authentic, but the Chronicle was put together two hundred years later. The Papal Archives, likewise, contain a short but fascinating text known as the Dagome Iudex. A summary of it was copied into a register of Pope Gregory VII in about 1080 AD. Examined closely – the author mistakenly thought that the original was talking about Sardinia! – it turned out to be the last mortal remains of a late first-millennium international manoeuvre whereby in 991 the Piast ruler Miesco I (father of Boleslaw Chrobry) granted some kind of highly notional overlordship over his kingdom to the Pope in return for persuasive lobbying with the Emperor. In this case, the Polish original disappeared at some point; but clearly some of the diplomatic backdrop to Otto’s progress of the year 1000 was conducted on paper.15
Literacy also played some role in the management of internal resources, but within the period covered by this study, only a marginal one. The oldest written records of land grants from Bohemia date to about the year 1000. They detail royal land grants to favoured monasteries, and provide some insight into how kings shared their existing rights over people and their labour with the new religious foundations. But even in Bohemia such texts are few and far between at this date, and in most of the other new states it is the later eleventh century before such grants took a written form, the twelfth in Kievan Russia. As the physical monuments surviving from these states imply, these early documents show that rulers had well-established rights to produce and services, and like early Anglo-Saxon England these states were capable of assessing the economic potential of populations and landscapes and of recording the fulfilment of the obligations thereby derived, but its scarcity suggests that not much of this was happening on paper.
This picture is confirmed by the other kind of written document to survive from the early years of these states: formal codes of law. From before the year 1000, evidence for the distribution of rules and regulations in written form come only from Church contexts. Among the materials translated into the first written form of Slavic by Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, for instance, were two Byzantine texts of Church law: the Nomokanon. Canon law texts in written form put in a similarly early appearance in Bohemia: surviving examples date to the second half of the tenth century. But despite convincing mentions of specific royal edicts in the chronicle texts, and the surviving physical manifestations of rulers’ capacities to enforce them, these states produced no codifications of written royal orders dating to this era. The first secular law books from Poland and Russia date from the thirteenth century, and even these look more like codifications of existing custom than monuments to royal power; and prevailing practice, even this late, seems to have left much real legal power in the hands of more local authorities. Again, comparisons with western Europe help put matters into perspective. Church legal texts came to Anglo-Saxon England with the missionaries at the start of the seventh century, but it was not until the tenth that royal law-making started to take a consistently written form, and the later twelfth and the thirteenth that the English monarchy instituted the complex legal bureaucracy and record-keeping required both to make, and to make it possible for, people to bring their cases to centrally organized law courts.16
Bureaucratic underdevelopment, however, is not the main reason for regarding these new entities as only a limited form of state organization. Looking at the overall narrative of their collective histories in the period 950 to 1050, what’s really striking is their capacity to trade vast tracts of land between themselves, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Take, for instance, Moravia – broadly what is now Slovakia. This fell under Bohemian Premyslid control in the time of Boleslav I (929/35–967/72), then under Polish control under Boleslaw Chrobry in 1003, back to Premyslid in 1013, Piast again in 1017 and Premyslid again two years later. Moravia saw the fastest-moving game of Pass the East European Parcel, but other territories had analogous histories. Silesia and Wroclaw were under Premyslid control in the mid-tenth century, passed to the Piast Miesco I in 989/90, back to the Premyslids in 1038, and were only definitively ceded to the Piasts in return for an annual payment of two hundred and thirty kilos of silver and fourteen of gol
d in 1054. Cracow in southern Poland suffered from a similar Piast/Premyslid identity crisis. What is now south-eastern Poland, from the Upper Bug to the Carpathians, was similarly swapped, but this time between the Piasts and the Rurikids. Under Rurikid control from the time of Vladimir in 981, it swapped back to the Piasts in 1018, then back again to the Rurikid Yaroslav the Wise in the 1030s.
Similar patterns are observable, if on a slightly different scale, in the outlying regions of Jelling territory. Southern Norway around the Oslo Fjord was always contested with rival lords established further west: first Olaf Tryggvasson in the 990s, then the dynasty of Olaf Haraldsson from whom medieval kings of Norway were destined to descend. The west coast of what is now Sweden, likewise, was eventually wrested from Jelling control by kings of Sweden based further east.17 What all this makes clear is that it is anachronistic to think of these states as possessing clearly defined territorial boundaries. Over much of central and eastern Europe, the lordship of any particular dynasty was a highly contingent phenomenon.
At the same time, each of our dynasties’ landed possessions comprised a much more intensively governed core, over which rulers were able to maintain a consistent authority and which rarely, if ever, passed into the hands of dynastic rivals. The heartland of the Piasts was Great Poland, the territory centred on Gniezno between the Rivers Oder, Warthe and Vistula that Otto III visited in the year 1000. Its extent is clearly marked out by the spread of tenth-century Piast castles (Map 20). Premyslid rule in Bohemia, likewise, had the region around Prague as its core, a zone again defined by the spread of early Premyslid strongholds. Kievan Russia had a double core, as we saw in the last chapter: Novgorod in the north, the Middle Dnieper around Kiev in the south. Even in the much smaller Denmark, the Jelling dynasty ruled Jutland and the major islands much more directly and with a firmer grip than the larger region that at different moments found itself incorporated into Cnut’s Baltic Empire. In the worst Premyslid dynastic crisis of all, in 1003/4, Piast Polish garrisons came as far as Prague, but this was only the briefest of phenomena, as was a parallel Bohemian annexation of Gniezno in 1038. Otherwise, these central areas were securely under the authority of their respective dynasties, and we clearly need to think of these states in terms of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’: core territories subject to permanent, more intensive control, and peripheral ones that were liable to fall under the control of others as the power of individual dynasts waxed and waned.
This is a common early medieval pattern, typical of entities that rely less on bureaucratic structures for their cohesion and more on the power and charisma of individual monarchs. The latter was classically expressed by regular patterns of itineration, with the ruler making the circuit of his kingdom, consuming food renders with his attendant military retinues and involving himself personally, as he went, in the needs and desires of his greater subjects. This kind of personal government worked perfectly well in small kingdoms, but characteristically generated patterns of core and periphery when geographical scale increased, to the extent that it’s a broad rule of thumb that an early medieval ruler really governed only where he regularly travelled. All our evidence suggests itineration was the key mechanism of government in the new entities of northern and eastern Europe. The main economic right of the ruler referred to in the earliest Bohemian and Polish texts, for instance, consisted of food renders – the basic means by which an itinerant ruler fed himself and his entourage. For logistic reasons, food renders were always consumed close to source rather than transported to one designated royal centre. The larger Piast and Premyslid castles presumably served as the local collection centres for food renders.18
Kievan Russia had different origins, a circuit of political itineration not being central to the original Scandinavian merchants’ gathering of furs, slaves and other trade goods, even if these did tend to be gathered on winter circuits. By the later tenth century, however, itineration and a more regular pattern of early medieval government were being established. When all of the necessary logistic structure was put in place is unclear. The RPC records, however, that, apart from avenging herself upon the Derevlians for killing her husband, Igor’s widow Olga (c.890–969, regent 945–c.963) did much to establish towns, trading posts and hunting grounds in their territories, both much further to the north around Novgorod and further south around the River Dnieper and its tributary the Desna. Hunting was the main royal entertainment, and the main occupation of rulers’ retinues on most afternoons. The will of Vladimir Monomachus tells us that he used to go hunting a hundred times a year. The establishment of royal hunting preserves, therefore, was – in a bizarre way – an important moment in instituting a regular cycle of government. I suspect that Olga’s actions extended over a much wider area the kinds of institutions of rule and support that were already in place closer to the main governmental centre in Kiev.19
Danish kings of the Jelling dynasty, likewise, eventually became itinerant, and some of their early constructions, such as the Ravning Edge Bridge, were clearly all about making land travel more efficient, quite possibly with royal itineration in mind. It’s hard to see what else the Trelleborg fortresses were for, if not for a monarch’s itinerations. When first discovered, they were identified as purpose-built bases for the military forces of Svein and Cnut, who undertook the conquest of England. Their real date is actually too early for this, however, since they were constructed under Harold Bluetooth, Svein’s father. Nor could their regular layout have served any straightforward military purpose, as has often been noted. On closer examination, the deceptively identical interior buildings actually served a wide variety of purposes: some were equipped with fireplaces as residences or for entertaining, others served as storage sheds and yet others for craftsmen such as blacksmiths and even goldsmiths.20 The likeliest answer to the puzzle, in my view, is that they were built to extend Harold Bluetooth’s capacity to express practical political power by itineration, an interesting moment in the territorialization of the Jelling dynasty’s control.
The new states of northern and eastern Europe present us, then, with something of a paradox. Capable of highly impressive acts of government and of building power structures over huge geographical areas, they were at the same time fragile. Bureaucratically underdeveloped, they could govern only relatively small areas with full intensity, and larger peripheral areas were always liable to be lost to rival powers in moments of dynastic crisis. The rule of the itinerant dynasts provides most of the explanation for their at first sight paradoxical nature, but still leaves unanswered questions. Where had these dynasties come from, and how did they build up their power bases in the first place?
Dynasty
The year is 995, the place eastern Bohemia at the confluence of the Libice and Elbe Rivers on the morning of St Wenceslas Day. But there’s nothing cool, crisp or even about it, since Wenceslas Day falls on 28 September. Nor are we anywhere near the forest fence or St Agnes’ fountain. We’re with a group of men standing quietly outside the wooden castle of Libice, headquarters of the powerful Slavnik family, currently led by Sobibor, son of Slavnik. Four of his seven brothers are inside the compound, though he himself is on a visit to the Emperor in Germany. The quiet is broken by shouts and violence, orchestrated by Boleslav II, current head of the other powerful Bohemian dynasty the Premyslids, and nephew of Good King Wenceslas himself. The action is swift and decisive. At its close, the compound and castle are burned out, the Slavnik males and their retainers destroyed. Slavnik power had been eliminated once and for all in what was arguably the most efficient hit of all time: certainly on a par with that February morning in 1929 when six members of Bugs Moran’s North Side German/Irish gang were lined up against a garage wall – along with an unfortunate mechanic who happened to be in the wrong place – and gunned down by footsoldiers of the South Side Italian gang. The only thing missing in 995 was any pretence of an alibi. Unlike Al Capone, Boleslav II didn’t bother to arrange a holiday; in any case, there were no packages to Florida cu
rrently available.21
Not only is it a great story, but the St. Wenceslas Day massacre represents the culmination of the political process behind the emergence of Premyslid-dominated Bohemia. Thanks to its position close to the Frankish imperial frontier and its own precocious literary tradition, which gives us two clusters of home-grown texts from the tenth century (one surrounding Wenceslas in the 930s, the other Adalbert at the back end of the century), Bohemia also provides the best-documented case study of dynastic emergence. It also gets us in the right frame of mind for thinking more generally about the emergence of all the new dynasties of central and eastern Europe. There were some important differences of detail in the political processes involved, clearly, but there was also enough in common for Bohemia to provide us with a general model of how the new game of dynasty was being played right across central and eastern Europe.
From the historical sources, one dimension of the story is easy enough to tell, and pretty well known. As it emerged from the Avar Empire following its destruction at the hands of Charlemagne in the years after 800, Bohemia was subdivided into a number of separate political units with their own leaders (called duces in Frankish sources, but with the general meaning of ‘leader’ rather than something as grand and hereditary as the modern English ‘duke’ implies). The ninth-and tenth-century sources give us a series of snapshots, which between them strongly imply that the Premyslids emerged from a Darwinian process whereby these different ducal lines eliminated each other, until only one remained.
The first snapshot comes from 845, when fourteen duces from Bohemia presented themselves for baptism at the Easter court of the Frankish King Louis the German. Fourteen ‘leaders’ strongly implies that each ruled only a relatively small area, but ducal numbers quickly declined. In 872 only five Bohemian princes turned up at the court of Louis the German, and by 895 there were only two. Part of this picture of ducal decline may be historiographical accident. I am not convinced that the sources are full enough, for instance, for us to be certain that there were only two pre-eminent leaders left in the game as early as 895. This would imply that Premyslids and Slavniks then managed a century of coexistence before their final showdown, and this seems unlikely. But the basic picture is clear enough. State formation in Bohemia was the result of a political process – played out over pretty much two hundred years from Charlemagne’s destruction of the Avar Empire – which saw one ducal line eliminating its peers to bring an ever larger core region under its control. As with similar processes affecting Germanic groups earlier in the millennium, each stage need not have been as violent as the St Wenceslas Day massacre. Some of the other, originally peer, families may have been willing to accept demotion rather than demolition. Nonetheless, there is every reason to suppose that violence regularly punctuated the process.22
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