Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  As the literate religion of the developed imperial world, backed by all the ideological cachet that perceived success imparts by association, Christianity usually ‘won’ in the culture clashes of the early Middle Ages: in much the same way, I suspect, that Levi’s and McDonald’s have been adopted the world over because of their association with the winning world brand that is America. Just occasionally, though, exposure to Christianity generated a violent and opposite backlash (as sometimes does American success in the modern world). We came across one example earlier, when the leadership of the fourth-century Gothic Tervingi started to persecute Christians because they associated the religion with Roman hegemony. Another couple of examples of the same phenomenon can be observed six hundred years later. An overt anti-Christian ideology was central, for instance, to the revolt of the Elbe Slavs against Ottonian rule after 983, when churches and monasteries were robbed and burned and even dead bishops exhumed, despoiled and insulted. Given that the Church was an instrument of colonial exploitation in these marcher lands, the degree of anger is perhaps not surprising. A slightly different, ruler-directed anti-Christianity had also surfaced in Russia at more or less the same time. Although Igor’s widow Olga had converted to Christianity under Byzantine influence and was perhaps baptized on a visit to Constantinople in 957, two of her sons, Sviatoslav and Vladimir, ruling successively after her death, positively championed the claims of non-Christian religion against their mother’s choice. Here the issue would appear to have been more cultural than practical, since no colonial Byzantine Church structure had yet reared its ugly head in Kiev.60

  What’s fascinating about these examples of aggressive anti-Christianity, however, is that even to begin to compete with the Christian challenge, the nature of prevailing non-Christian religion had itself to change. To unite his many and varied peoples against Christian influence, Vladimir did not outlaw all their different gods, but he did elevate Perun, an old Baltic and Slavic god of thunder and lightning, into a supreme god, and force his subjects to pay homage. Vladimir was pulling together Scandinavians, Slavic-speakers, Finnic-speakers and goodness knows who else, so any impulse towards an anti-Christian religious unity was bound to involve picking one from the no doubt wide range of cults being followed within his highly disparate following. And even among the culturally much more homogeneous Elbe Slavs, anti-Christianity involved major religious change. Again, it was not that all other cults were outlawed, but the new confederation of the Liutizi was held together now by common adherence to one overarching cult, that of Rethra. Dues were owed by everyone to the god’s priests and temples, and Rethra was consulted before any and every act of war and presented with a tithe of any spoils. We don’t know a huge amount about Slavic paganism before conversion, but as this need to generate a new overarching cult to fight off Christianity confirms, everything suggests that there was a wide variety of cults, each sociopolitical grouping – ‘tribe’ – having its own.61

  Against this backdrop, Christianity offered another powerful attraction to dynasts seeking to unite the unprecedentedly large territories under their control. The huge variety of non-Christian cults with which they were faced was part of a cultural structure belonging to the previous and long-established political order. An attractive feature of Christianity in this context was its licensed intolerance: the refusal to accept the validity of any other religious cult. Adopting Christianity permitted a ruler to stamp out pre-existing cultic practices, whether or not he yet had enough Christian priests around to substitute for them a fully functioning Christian Church. As such, it allowed him to break down one of the main cultural barriers that might otherwise have restricted his attempts to create a new political order. Alongside the other more ‘positive’ attractions, Christianity brought with it an entitlement to destroy existing religious structures, which made it the perfect ideological accompaniment to a process of political unification.

  PEERS AND PERIPHERIES

  The new states that appeared in northern and eastern Europe towards the end of the first millennium were the products of long and complex processes of transformation, some of whose roots went back a very long way. The migratory expansions of the late fifth and sixth centuries kick-started the appearance of substantive social differentiation among Europe’s Slavic-speakers. The Avar Empire then seems to have established a new kind of hereditary leadership amongst those Slavic groups subject to its dominion, and the new states of the ninth and tenth centuries were able greatly to increase food production and population levels in parts of what had been barbarian Europe’s least developed region. At least some of these transformations may have resulted in larger sociopolitical units, built largely on consent, individuals accepting the burdens inherent in being part of a larger mass of humanity for the economic and political security that such allegiances offered. This much, at least, is indicated by the kinds of hillfort being erected up to the year 800, which look essentially communal in inspiration, refuges born of common need, not fortifications built at the orders of some grandee.

  Thus far, the process of state formation is reasonably compatible with the models for social change that are sometimes given the jargon heading ‘peer polity interaction’. What this means, translated from the original Martian, is that you’re looking at a world where change is brought about through a gradual process of competition between social units that are more or less of the same size and power.62 This evolutionary process was rapidly overtaken, however, in the last two centuries of our period by a series of dramatic developments for which the catalyst was increasingly complex contacts with the outside world. First, Charlemagne destroyed the Avar Empire, letting loose a power struggle among its dependent subjects. And while this struggle was being fought out, new trade networks, combined with military and diplomatic ties, brought a vast amount of new wealth into eastern and northern Europe, not least in the form of precious metals. Cornering the market in this wealth then allowed the most successful dynasties to arm themselves to a degree far beyond any yet seen in the region, and to spread their domination suddenly and by force.

  Within this two-stage process, your key move, as a participating dynast, was to establish yourself in a position – geographic and/or economic – from which to maximize profits from the new wealth flowing up and down the international trade networks. Of the four dynasties that flourished so dramatically in the last two centuries of the millennium (not counting the shorter-lived Moravians), three, certainly, emerged in perfect positions to benefit. Prague, home of the Premyslids, was a major entrepôt in the overland slave routes established across central Europe. The Rurikids were intimately involved in the slave and fur trades, while hints in the Arab sources and a suspiciously high density of Arab coin finds indicate that the Piasts, too, had their fingers firmly in the pie. The same may well have been true of the Moravian ruling line, since the routes intersecting at Prague also ran through their heartlands, but for this there is no explicit evidence. Within mainland largely Slavic Europe, there is a strong correlation between a type-A position in the trade networks and successful state formation.

  The biggest mystery in this respect is perhaps the Jelling dynasty of Denmark, for whose involvement in the new commercial set-up we have no specific evidence. State formation in Jutland and its attendant islands had much deeper roots than its counterparts in northern and eastern Europe. Given that there was some kind of state there in the pre-Viking period, state formation in Denmark may have been about reactivating something that had never quite died, and was hence less dependent on cornering new wealth so as to build military capacity. It can be argued, however, that the fate of the Jelling dynasty too was intimately bound up with the international trade networks. About the time that Sviatoslav, Grand Prince of the Rus, launched his aggressive campaigns east towards the Volga in the 960s, silver stopped flowing northwards into Scandinavia, although it continued into Russia. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, as with their assaults on Constantinople, the Riurikids’ wars here were l
inked at least in part to market share, designed, amongst other things, to cut Scandinavian traders out of the Volga route. After the brief hiatus, Scandinavian merchants clearly found a new route to the south, and the silver began flowing again for a decade or so. Then, in the 980s, the flows of Muslim silver into the Baltic came to a definitive halt.

  It is precisely at this point that Scandinavian raiders started to trouble western European waters again, particularly the prosperous Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Ethelred the Unready, from whom the Scandinavians consistently demanded silver coins and bullion. We owe our detailed knowledge of Ethelred’s coinage to these tenth-century Vikings, in fact, since tens of thousands of them survive in Scandinavian contexts. This pattern suggests that the drying-up of Muslim silver, arguably the result of Rurikid intervention on the Volga, led northern Scandinavians to look for alternative sources, and the Jelling dynasty put itself at the head of this enterprise. In doing so, it avoided the fate of the Godfrid dynasty in the first half of the ninth century, whose established power base was undermined by the first flows of Viking-era wealth back to the Baltic. More pointedly, the fact that the Jelling dynasty led the new western attacks also suggests that its power was dependent in some way on the Muslim silver flows that had just been cut off. This came probably from the income from tolls, but also from direct trading of tribute goods for its own benefit, just like the Rurikids.63 If so, the Danish dynasty was not so different from our other tenth-century success stories.

  Other forms of contact with imperial Europe were also important to dynastic success. Exploiting imperial aggression, unless – like the Elbe Slavs – you were too close to it, was an excellent mechanism for generating internal consent if your dynasty was able to offer effective leadership. New military technologies, economic advances, imperial Christianity, not to mention wealth derived from raiding richer, neighbouring imperial lands – all of these were forms of interaction with imperial Europe that drove the engine of state formation, and provided a crucial catalyst for the transformation of largely Slavic-dominated eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. And, of course, even the beginnings of social stratification in the sixth century, and the importing of better ploughing techniques, can be traced to an earlier round of such contacts. In analytical jargon, a centre–periphery model – where you’re dealing with partners to an exchange who are substantially unequal in power – better fits the data from the late first millennium than ‘peer polity interaction’, and two particular characteristics of this second model need to be stressed. First, the interactions encompassed a wide range of different contacts. This is not a model, as some earlier varieties tended to be, predicated on economic exchange – trade – alone. Political, ideological, even technological contacts all played a role, and all pushed sociopolitical change in broadly the same direction. Second, as with the Germani earlier in the millennium, non-imperial Europe should be cast as anything but passive receptors of imperial gifts. Quite the opposite: northern and eastern European populations, or elements among them, were active agents in all these exchanges, seeking to maximize their beneficial impacts and minimize drawbacks.64

  It remains, finally, to think a bit further about the role of migration in this unfolding drama. Compared with the generation, say, of the western successor states to the Roman Empire in the fifth century, migration played only a small part in the final stages of state formation in northern and eastern Europe. Of the five state structures explored, only one – that of the Rurikids – took on its distinctive shape because of the intervention of immigrants, and even there, as we have seen, Scandinavian immigrants arrived only in relatively small numbers. It is hard to see Novgorod and Kiev becoming interlinked, even loosely, without the decisive intervention of Scandinavian traders and their determination to take cuts from each other’s operations. But there were not enough of them to dominate even the military forces of the new state, which drew on Slavs, Finns and everyone else besides. This was migration operating on a much smaller scale, even, than in those Roman successor states created by partial elite replacement. And the Danish, Polish, Bohemian and Moravian states were all created from entirely indigenous population groups. Indeed, the migration element would seem to be smaller even than that involved in the appearance of larger Germanic powers on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries AD.

  In that first revolution among Europe’s barbarians in late antiquity, migration sometimes played a larger role, and sometimes a smaller one, and always sat alongside processes of socioeconomic and political transformation. But there was usually some kind of population transfer, characteristically in the direction of the Roman frontier, where wealth-producing contacts with the developed Mediterranean world could be maximized. The Slavic era began with an analogous pattern of migration in the late fifth and sixth centuries, as Slavic-speakers moved into contact with the east Roman Empire and found ways of prospering from that proximity, which set off a profound transformation of their own societies. But when state formation accelerated so dramatically in the ninth and tenth centuries, this kind of migration pattern is conspicuous only by its absence. The new Slavic and Scandinavian states formed where they stood, with no drift towards the magnetic pole of more developed imperial Europe.

  This leaves us with one final problem to explore as this study of barbarian Europe comes to its conclusion. Why was it that long-established patterns of migration, so common in the first two-thirds of the millennium, ceased to operate in its last centuries?

  11

  THE END OF MIGRATION AND THE BIRTH OF EUROPE

  IN THE MID-890S, the latest nomad menace burst into the heart of Europe. Following in the footsteps of Huns and Avars, the Magyars shifted their centre of operations from the northern shores of the Black Sea to the Great Hungarian Plain. For the most part, the results were everything that past experience of nomad powers would lead you to expect:

  [The Magyars] laid waste the whole of Italy, so that after they had killed many bishops the Italians tried to fight against them and twenty thousand men fell in one battle on one day. They came back by the same way by which they had come, and returned home after destroying a great part of Pannonia. They sent ambassadors treacherously to the Bavarians offering peace so that they could spy out the land. Which, alas!, first brought evil and loss not seen in all previous times to the Bavarian kingdom. For the Magyars came unexpectedly in force with a great army across the River Enns and invaded the kingdom of Bavaria with war, so that in a single day they laid waste by killing and destroying everything with fire and sword an area fifty miles long and fifty miles broad.1

  The populations of the Great Hungarian Plain and surrounding regions, not least Great Moravia centred in Slovakia, were quickly subdued, and an orgy of equine-powered aggression saw Magyar raiding parties sweep through northern Italy and southern France with a ferocity not seen since the time of Attila, while full-scale Magyar armies defeated their East Frankish counterparts three times within the first decade of the tenth century.

  But one element in the usual mix of nomad pastimes is missing from the Magyars’ European tour. Five hundred years before, the two pulses of Hunnic movement westwards – first on to the northern shores of the Black Sea in the 370s, and then on to the Great Hungarian Plain a generation later – had thrown semi-subdued, largely Germanic-speaking clients of the Roman Empire across its frontiers in extremely large numbers. Two hundred years later, the arrival of the Avars west of the Carpathians would prompt the departure of the Lombards for Italy and a widespread dispersal of Slavic-speakers in every direction: south into the Balkans, west as far as the Elbe, north towards the Baltic, and even eastwards, it seems, into the Russian heartland. Destructive as it was in so many ways, the arrival of the Magyars generated no documented population movements whatsoever (apart, of course, from those of the Magyars themselves). Why not? The answer lies in the dynamic interaction between migration and development which had played itself out across the European landscape ove
r the previous thousand years.

  MIGRATION

  The absence of any secondary migration associated with the Magyars is all the more surprising because it is one of the central findings of this study that, contrary to some recent trends in scholarship on the period, migration must be taken seriously as a major theme of the first millennium. This trend has not eliminated migration entirely from accounts of first-millennium history, but certainly incorporates a powerful tendency to downplay its importance. In some quarters even the word itself is avoided wherever possible, because ‘migration’ is associated with the simplistic deus ex machina of the ‘invasion hypothesis’ model of explanation, which was so prevalent up until the early 1960s. In this view, migration meant the arrival of a large mixed group of humanity – a ‘complete’ population: men and women, old and young – who expelled the sitting tenants of a landscape and took it over, changing its material cultural profile more or less overnight. This model was massively overused, and trapped the developing discipline of archaeology into migrato-centric models that crippled creativity. Besides, as many archaeologists have since pointed out, the model didn’t really explain anything anyway, because it never properly addressed the issue of why large groups of human beings might have behaved in such a fashion. This being so, it has been both reasonable and natural for subsequent archaeologists to concentrate upon other possible reasons for material cultural change. And these are legion. Everything from religious conversion to agricultural innovation and social development can have profound effects upon material cultural profiles. A highly suspicious attitude towards migration has also crossed the boundaries between disciplines. Some early medieval historians are now also so convinced that nothing like the old invasion hypothesis could ever have happened, that they are happy to suppose that historical sources must be misleading whenever they seem to be reporting possibly analogous phenomena.