The Birth of Europe
East Roman wealth and Avar interference marked only the beginning of a much broader development process, which unfolded right across the vast area of Slavic-dominated Europe in the second half of the millennium. By the tenth century, this had produced the first state-like dynastic structures that much of northern and eastern Europe had ever seen. These new entities still operated with major limitations by the year 1000, distinct patterns of centre and periphery being discernible across the vast territories notionally under their control. A governmental mechanism based on itineration was not capable of governing such large territories with even intensity, and this shows up in their regular propensity to swap control of very large intermediate territorial zones between them. Nonetheless, these states were capable of centrally organized activities that are straightforwardly impressive. Much bigger in geographical scale than the Germanic client states that emerged on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were also capable of greater acts of power. They built more and bigger buildings, supported larger, better-equipped, and more professional armies, and quickly adopted some of the cultural norms of more developed, imperial Europe: above all the Christian religion.
Everything suggests that the transformative mechanisms that produced these new entities were similar in nature to those that had generated the larger Germanic client states of the fourth-century Roman periphery. In both cases, a whole range of new contacts – via trading, raiding, and diplomacy – led to unprecedented flows of wealth into the non-imperial societies. The internal struggle to control these flows of wealth then led to both militarization and the emergence of pre-eminent dynasts, who eventually used their domination of this wealth to generate permanent military machines that could institutionalize their authority by destroying and/or intimidating pre-existing, more local authority structures. As a result, potential rivals were steadily eliminated and power was increasingly centralized.
But if the basic processes were the same, the second half of the millennium saw the Slavic world develop further and faster than its largely Germanic counterpart had done in the first. The explanation for this disparity in part lies in the broader range of stimuli operating in barbarian Europe after 500 AD. Western parts of the Slavic world established a full range of economic, military and diplomatic contacts with a sequence of Frankish imperial powers in western Europe. At the same time, two hundred years of Avar imperial domination at the heart of central Europe had important effects on a broader Slavic clientele, as did interaction with a further, if lesser, European imperial power: the Byzantine Empire. Equally, if not more important, more distant parts of the largely Slavic-dominated barbaricum were interacting with a fourth and still greater imperial power in the form of the Islamic Caliphate. There is no sign of any large-scale trade networks in either slaves or furs operating out of central and eastern Europe to feed Near Eastern as well as Mediterranean sources of demand in the first half of the millennium, so these later networks represented flows of wealth with no precedent in the Roman era. And to judge both by the staggering numbers of Islamic silver coins that survive and their correlation with the core areas of the new Slavic states, there is every reason to suppose this extra-European imperial stimulus played a major role in the transformation of Slavic Europe.
The other obvious explanation for the faster development of Slavic Europe is the impact of the new military technologies of the last two centuries of the millennium – notably armoured knights and castles – which made it much easier for those dynasts who could establish control over the new wealth flows to intimidate potential opponents. For even if the new states all encompassed less intensively governed peripheries, the power that they could exercise in dynastic core territories is (horribly) impressive. The brutal power inherent in the destruction of old tribal strongholds and their replacement with new dynastic ones – in both Bohemia and Poland – emerges strikingly from the dramatic archaeological evidence that has become available in recent years. Dynastic power is equally apparent in the movement of subdued populations into core zones of the new states, and their general economic organization, illustrated this time by a combination of archaeological evidence and the earliest strata of documentary evidence preserved from the new states.
The nature and overall significance of these processes of development could hardly be clearer, and their consequences were myriad. In broadest terms, the most important of these might well be the first emergence of Europe as a functioning entity. By the tenth century, networks of economic, political and cultural contact were stretching right across the territory between the Atlantic and the Volga, and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. This turned what had previously been a highly fragmented landscape, marked by massive disparities of development and widespread non-connection at the birth of Christ, into a zone united by significant levels of interaction. Europe is a unit not of physical but of human geography, and by the year 1000 interaction between human populations all the way from the Atlantic to the Volga was for the first time sufficiently intense to give the term some real meaning. Trade networks, religious culture, modes of government, even patterns of arable exploitation: all were generating noticeable commonalities right across the European landscape by the end of the millennium.
For the purposes of this study, however, the processes of development are more immediately important for the role they played in bringing to an end the kind of conditions that had generated the large-scale often predatory forms of migration – whether in the concentrated pulse form of the Völkerwanderungen or the more usual flows of increasing momentum – which had been a periodic feature of first-millennium Europe. Inequalities of development across the European landmass had not completely disappeared, but they had been greatly reduced. Essentially, the new trade networks, combined with more general agricultural expansion (the latter still very much a work in progress), meant that politically organized power structures in central and eastern Europe were now able to access wealth in large quantities in their existing locations. Agricultural and broader economic development also meant that they were busy entrenching themselves in some entirely new ways in some specific geographical zones of operation, at least in their core territories.
As a result, the kinds of positive stimulation that had periodically prompted large-group migration had been structurally removed, or at least massively eroded. Migration was never an easy or universally prevalent option in first-millennium Europe, but rather a strategy that was sometimes adopted when the gains were worth the stress of mounting expeditions into only partly known territory with no absolute guarantees of success. Once social elites could access wealth without the extra insecurity of relocation, they became much less likely to resort to that strategy. And, of course, the less they did so in practice, the less they were ever likely to, as previously ingrained migration habits unwound both among themselves, and among the broader population under their control as more intense patterns of arable farming were generating more permanent patterns of cultivation. Overall, both elites and broader populations within barbarian Europe were becoming much more firmly rooted in particular localities, and, as a result, were much less likely to respond by migration even when faced with powerful stimuli that might in other circumstances have led them to shift location.
This, to my mind is the underlying explanation of the particular problem with which this chapter began. Where many Goths and other Germani (though certainly not all) responded to the Hunnic menace, and the Slavs to its Avar counterpart, by seeking new homes elsewhere, the arrival of the nomadic Magyars on the Great Hungarian Plain engendered no known secondary migration. The actions, nature and eventual fate of the Moravian state encapsulate the difference. Rather than run away, the Moravians stood and fought the Magyars, just like the armies of Frankish imperial Europe. They lost (as, initially, did many of their Frankish counterparts), but the fact that the Moravians stayed put reflects the deeper roots they had sunk in their own particular locality, and the fundam
entally different nature of political power in barbarian Europe as it had developed by the end of the first millennium. Earlier, the prevailing limitations of agricultural technique in barbarian Europe generated a broad local mobility, and large disparities in levels of wealth and development had encouraged the more adventurous periodically to attempt to take over some more attractive corner of the landscape, closer, usually, to imperial sources of wealth. The Moravians, by contrast, built castles and churches in stone, on the back of wealth generated by more intense agricultural regimes and wider exchange networks. With so much invested where they stood, it was not going to be easy to shift their centre of operations. The same was true of the other new dynasties of the late first millennium too. All were much more firmly fixed in particular localities than their earlier counterparts, both because of developing agricultural technique and because trade networks made other types of wealth available well beyond the imperial borderlands. In overall terms, processes of development had both eliminated the massive inequalities that had previously made long-distance, large-group migration a reasonably common option for Europe’s barbarians, and rooted central and east European populations more deeply in particular landscapes.
Not, of course, that any of this really spelled the end of migration. Some human beings are always on the move in search of greater prosperity or better conditions of life, and European history from the tenth century onwards is still marked by migration on a periodically massive scale. From late in the first millennium onwards, however, medieval migration generally took one of two characteristic forms. On the one hand, we see knight-based elite transfers. The Norman Conquest is a particularly large-scale and successful example of this phenomenon. Much more usual were bands of one or two hundred well-armed men looking to establish small principalities for themselves by ousting sitting elites and/or establishing their rights to draw economic support from a dependent labour force. The productive rootedness of peasantry and the empowering effect of new military technologies were key factors in dictating the characteristics of this particular migratory form. Castles and armour allowed them to establish a form of local domination based on quite small numbers of men that was extremely hard to shift. The other common form of migration was the deliberate recruitment of peasantry to work the land, with lords offering attractive tenurial terms to provide the incentive, and employing agents to run recruiting campaigns. Again, new patterns of development were of crucial importance here, since the extra agricultural productivity of the new arable farming technologies being put into practice in the late first millennium made it highly desirable for the masters of the landscape to secure sufficient labour to maximize agricultural outputs. Though they had come a long way, the new Slavic states still lagged behind western and southern Europe in levels of economic development. They therefore figured among the chief customers for the new peasant labour being mobilized from more developed parts of Europe where higher population levels reduced opportunities for ambitious peasants to get more land on better terms. As a result, hundreds of thousands of peasants from west-central Europe would be attracted eastwards by the offer of land on much better terms than could be secured at home, and the Slavicization of much of old Germanic Europe that had occurred in the early Middle Ages was partly reversed by an influx of Germanic-speaking peasants.18
NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMPIRES?
Both of these later medieval forms of migration are very well evidenced, operating, as they did, in an era when literacy was intensifying across most of Europe, so their importance within developing European history cannot be contested in the way that that of their earlier counterparts of the first millennium has come to be. The prevalence of these different forms in a later era, however, is no objection to the broader argument of this book, that larger-scale, socially more broadly based predatory forms of migration than knight-based expansion had played a hugely important role in the making of Europe in the first millennium. The later migratory forms were entirely appropriate to the economic and political conditions prevailing across the Europe of the central Middle Ages. The kinds of large-scale predatory migration flow studied in this book – essentially combining peasants and elites within the same migrating groups, where the later Middle Ages saw them move separately – were equally appropriate to their own area. In the first millennium, highly disparate patterns of development then combined with a lack of agricultural rootedness and relatively low agricultural outputs. This meant that the economy of barbarian Europe could support only very few military specialists, so that it was necessary and possible for ambitious leaders to put together large and hence necessarily broad-based expeditions to secure wealth-generating positions on the fringes of more developed, imperial Europe. This in turn generated forms of migration that were different from those operating in the central Middle Ages, and different again from those we are used to in the modern world. Migration in the first millennium looks thus not because our sources were infected with a distorting cultural reflex, but because prevailing circumstances contrasted in some key ways from those operating subsequently. They entirely conform to the basic principles of modern migration, however, in that direction of movement and form of the migration unit were both largely dictated by prevailing patterns of development.
In short, there is every reason to respond to the limitations of the old invasion-hypothesis model not by rejecting migration as an important explanatory factor in first-millennium history, but by bringing a series of more complex migration models back into the picture. Deployed in more analytic fashion, migration ceases to be a catch-all, simplistic alternative to ‘more complex’ lines of explanation focusing on social, economic and political change. Understood properly, and this is the central message screaming out from the comparative literature, migration is not a separate and competing form of explanation to social and economic transformation, but the complementary other side of the same coin. Patterns of migration are dictated by prevailing economic and political conditions, and another dimension in fact of their evolution; they both reflects existing inequalities, and sometimes even help to equalize them, and it is only when viewed from this perspective that the real significance of migratory phenomena can begin to emerge. A further line of thought that follows from this is that prehistorians should perhaps not be too quick to reject predatory migration either as a periodic contributor to the shaping of Europe’s deeper past. If the argument is correct that the predatory forms of migration observable periodically in the first millennium were generated by a reasonable degree of geographical proximity between zones of highly disparate levels of development, combined with the existence of societies where those who farmed also fought and were not deeply rooted in one particular patch of soil, then these are conditions which are likely to have existed in many other ancient contexts too, and periodic predatory migration could reasonably be expected as one natural consequence.
That is no more than a side issue for this study, however, and thinking about the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium in overall terms, there is no doubt that development played a profoundly more important role in the process than migration. Old narratives had this the other way round, emphasizing the arrival of named peoples at their assigned places across the map of Europe at different points within the millennium, until all the modern nations were in place. In this view, movement and arrival were the events of key historical importance, and what happened subsequently was so much detail. This was deeply mistaken. Much more important than these occasional moments of arrival, many of which led precisely nowhere, were the dynamic interactions between the imperial powers of more developed Europe and the barbarians on their doorstep: Germanic, largely, in the first half of the millennium, then Slavic, largely, in the second. It was these interactions, not acts of migration, that were ultimately responsible for generating the new social, economic and political structures which brought former barbarian Europe much more to resemble its imperial counterpart by the end of the millennium. This is not to say that
these transformations were inherently a good thing, or that there was something inherently better about imperial Europe, but the evidence leads directly to the conclusion that it was new connections with imperial Europe, and the responses to those new connections on the part of elements within barbarian societies, that ultimately demolished the staggering disparities in development that had existed at the birth of Christ. This in a nutshell is the second major argument I have been attempting to make. Not everywhere in Europe was Christian and full of states built around castles, knights and a productive peasantry by the year 1000, but this was true to an extent that would have astonished Tacitus in the first century AD. He thought that eastern Europe was home to creatures with ‘human faces and features, but the bodies and limbs of beasts’; in his terms, barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer.19
Migration had played a role – sometimes a very major one – in this unfolding story. Especially if you take the definition of mass or significant migration offered in the comparative literature – and I have found this extremely helpful – migration can be understood as central to the action at various key points in the millennium. Perhaps above all, the Hunnic ‘accident’ threw enough more organized Germanic groupings on to Roman soil in a short enough space of time both to undermine the central Roman state and to generate a massive collapse in the old power structures of barbarian central Europe. This in turn allowed for an extraordinary Slavic diaspora whose cultural effects – the widespread Slavicization of central and eastern Europe – remain a central feature of the European landmass to this day. These are hardly minor phenomena. Even so, migration should generally be given only a secondary position behind social, economic and political transformation when explaining how it was that barbarian Europe evolved into non-existence in the course of the millennium. For one thing, aside from particular and unusual moments like the Hunnic or Avar accidents, patterns of migration were entirely dictated by and secondary to patterns of development. It was only when nomadic intruders added a much stronger shade of politically motivated migration into the picture that the relationship was reversed, and migration started to dictate patterns of development, undermining both the west Roman state and Germanic Europe in one fell swoop.
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