The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  Bohemia, the core of the Czech lands, was closer to Francia than was Moravia, but was protected and given geographical identity by thickly forested mountains to the west, which have in fact been a political border more or less without a break from the seventh century to the present day. This region, too, shows a steady increase in hill-fort strongholds in the ninth century, implying increased social stratification, and then a move towards unification under Moravian patronage by Boivoj I (d. c. 890). This early Czech polity crystallized around Prague in the early tenth century, and hesitantly (with several changes of direction) accepted Latin Christianity, especially under Václav I (921-c. 930, ‘Good King Wenceslas’) and his brother and murderer Boleslav I (c. 930-72). Boleslav’s power extended into Moravia and modern southern Poland too, although it broke up again under his heirs, largely because of aristocratic resistance, in this case to the (temporary) benefit of the Poles. Václav was forced to accept East Frankish hegemony, which led to his death, whereas Boleslav resisted it. Either way, however, Bohemia was marked by a Latin ecclesiastical politics and by intermittent recognition of Ottonian-Salian overlordship.

  To the north of Bohemia, the next polity to form was that of the Poles. The territory occupied by modern Poland had many tribes, as elsewhere in the Sclavenian (we can now say Slav) lands; the peoples of central Poland around Gniezno and Pozna were not particularly special among them. But under Mieszko I (c. 962-92) they rapidly achieved a dominance which extended up to the Baltic. This was a more sudden shift towards political aggregation than in Moravia or Bohemia. The abandonment of many of the ninth-century tribal strongholds of the future Polish lands in the late tenth century shows a sharp change in the structure of political power; Mieszko and his heirs, the Piast dynasty, built new ones. Mieszko was keen to ally with the Ottonians and their Saxon dukes and marquises, who were less of a threat than in Bohemia, as his power-base was set back from the areas of tenth-century Saxon conquest; he accepted Christianity in 966, with a bishop in Pozna in 968. This alliance continued in the era of the western Slav revolt against the Saxons in 983 and onwards; by then it was a cover for further Piast political expansion, and under Bolesław Chrobry, ‘the Brave’ (992- 1025), Piast power extended into Bohemia, eastwards towards Rus, and by the 1000s was explicitly directed against the marches of Saxony. As in Moravia and Bohemia, this hegemony did not last, and the Piast polity was already in trouble by the 1030s, although Mieszko’s dynasty continued until the fourteenth century, by which time Poland was a more coherent and long-lasting kingdom.

  Each of these three, Moravia, Bohemia and Piast Poland, probably expanded too fast for their fairly simple political infrastructures, essentially based on tribute to the ruler and his druzhina, to cope. They were notably less stable than the otherwise similar Rus polity; it is likely that the Turkic models the Rus followed were more successful, but it also may be that stresses and dangers to political authority were greater in the western Sclavenian/Slav lands, given the Frankish threat there. The establishment of church hierarchies would nonetheless add eventually, after 1000, to the infrastructural resources available to these rulers, and so would more elaborate networks of political dependence, and the establishment of privately owned landed estates as the basis of aristocratic and royal or princely wealth, all of these developments being influenced by Frankish (we can now say German) example. It is significant that later attempts at unification in the eleventh century were more successful, both in Bohemia and (more uncertainly) in Poland. It is only then, in fact, that Bohemia and Poland can really be separated out at all; ‘Poland’, in particular, was invented by the Piasts out of a network of tribal groups with no natural boundaries separating them off from their neighbours.

  The slow development of stable hierarchies was a common feature of the Slav world by 1000, and it extended to Hungary too, with Isztván (Stephen) I (997-1038) in the role of Mieszko and Vladimir as a Chris tianizer and organizer. Leaders turned into lords, chieftains into princes or kings, strongholds into towns, tribute into rent. We saw this process earlier in the western Germanic lands and in Anglo-Saxon England, and it was matched in the tenth and eleventh centuries by slower but parallel developments in Denmark and Norway too. These hierarchies and governmental systems were generally influenced, often quite heavily, by neighbours, whether Byzantine, Frankish or Turkic. They were often a direct response to Byzantine or Frankish threat, as in Moravia and Bohemia, in Bulgaria, and in part also in Denmark; we can also add here Celtic-speaking Brittany, whose mid-ninth-century independent kings, notably Salomon (857-74), clearly used Frankish techniques of government, until the kingdom went under as a result of Viking raids. But they were often also a more internal, even if often quite sudden, development, the work of ambitious political leaders riding on a tide of military success inside territories less menaced from outside, and stabilizing power using external models as a follow-on from that, as in Rus, in Poland, and, in the Germanic world, in Mercia and perhaps in Norway.

  It can be added, finally, that in some places, in Bohemia and Poland, and also in Norway, this political aggregation was also resisted, at least when territorial expansion ran into difficulties: either by other leading families, or by smaller tribes reluctant to lose their own identity and traditions. In Poland, indeed, the 1030s saw a resurgence of tribal identity, and the abandonment of Christianity in some areas. This resurgence had already been presaged by the Slav revolt in the 980s, in which the Liutizi, a tribal confederation on the Baltic coast around the mouth of the Oder, threw off Saxon tribute-taking, church landowning, and all elements of Christianization. Thietmar of Merseburg indignantly recounts details of their pagan cults, and also describes their reliance on assembly politics and their avoidance of single rulers; this is significant, for by now it represented a resistance not only to Saxon rule but also to the developing hierarchies of the Slav lands themselves. Such a resistance has parallels in Iceland, as we have seen, but Iceland was safely far away in the north Atlantic; the Liutizi were under threat from both sides, from both Saxony and Poland. All the same, the Baltic coast remained a zone of relatively weak political institutions into the central Middle Ages.

  The Scandinavian and Sclavenian/Slav lands were Christianized late, and our information about them derives from either Frankish/Byzantine sources or from archaeology; a survey of them has to be a rather external construct, from scattered evidence. The Celtic-speaking lands of Britain and Ireland were different from this; they were solidly Christian well before 800, when we can take up their history here, and they have their own documentation, although this is scarce for Scotland. They show parallels, all the same, to the sorts of development we have been looking at here, in particular with regard to Brittany.

  In Chapter 7 we left the Welsh with four major kingdoms in 800, but with very simple politico-administrative structures, based on small-scale wars, a feasting culture linking kings to their entourages, and the taking of (probably fairly restricted) tributes from dependants and from subject territories. In the next two centuries this basic pattern continued, but with developments that went in two, opposite, directions.

  The first is the evidence we have for political aggregation. The Welsh seem by now to have seen themselves as a conceptual unity, the Cymry, however politically divided. The Great Prophecy of Britain, Armes Prydein Vawr, a south Welsh text dating to around 930, prophesies the uniting of the Welsh and the expulsion of the English with great enthusiasm: ‘The Cymry will prevail through battle, well equipped, unanimous, one in word and faith’, and, with the help of the Irish, Scots and Dublin Vikings, will reunite Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall under their rule. This sense of identity was a cultural one (it has parallels with the Angli of Bede and the all-English church hierarchy of Theodore of Tarsus), but it can be widely found in our sources. The Welsh probably gained definition because of the English danger, and indeed they generally saw themselves as being entitled to the whole of Britain, from most of which they had been unjustly expelled: eleventh-centu
ry Welsh prose literature, however fantastic in format, routinely centres itself around kings of ‘this island’, ‘the island of Britain’.

  Hence or otherwise, from the ninth century we find kings with rather more extensive territorial ambitions than before. Rhodri Mawr, ‘the Great’ (844-77), was the mould-breaker: based in Gwynedd in the north-west, long the most influential kingdom, he took over Powys in the east in 855 and Ceredigion in 872, thus coming to rule half of Wales, and raided extensively in the south. Although he was exiled to Ireland after defeat by the Vikings in 877, and was killed by the English a year later, his hegemony continued under his sons, led by Anarawd (d. 916). Anarawd’s nephew Hywel Dda, ‘the Good’, ap Cadell (d. 950), married into the dynasty of Dyfed in the south-west and in 904 was recognized as king there; he fought his Gwynedd cousins thereafter, and in 942-50 took over their lands, thus controlling three-quarters of Wales. This hegemony was probably re-established by his grandson Maredudd ab Owain in 986-99, and certainly in 1055-63 by a later king of Gwynedd, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, whose father had married Maredudd’s daughter (Welsh genealogical legitimacy accepted female-line succession more easily than that of either England or Ireland). Gruffudd also subjected south-eastern Wales, hitherto independent of the Rhodri dynasty, in 1055, so for eight years was the first Welsh king of all Wales - and the only one ever, apart from Henry VII.

  A storyline can thus be (and has been) created of steady national unification, only spoilt by the English (Harold Godwineson destroyed Gruffudd ap Llywelyn’s hegemony in 1063) and, later, the Normans. This increasing royal power could be said to be reinforced by law; Welsh law, although only surviving in thirteenth-century and later texts, systematically attaches itself to Hywel Dda as a legislator, a tradition which may well be in some way authentic (though the content of the law is certainly later) - Hywel spent time in the English royal court, and could well have picked up ideas from, for instance, Æthelstan. Our church documentation, too, shows a few signs of a greater coherence of rulership by the end of the tenth century, with local military service, perhaps more systematic tribute-taking, judicial rights, from which churches such as the south-eastern bishopric of Llandaff sought to gain exemptions. The Welsh might then match the Danes, Bohemians and Bulgars as a people learning techniques of rule from the example of a much more powerful and dangerous neighbour, although one of these techniques was not, of course, the Christian church, for Wales had always been Christian.

  All the same, this greater coherence had not got very far by 1000 (or 1063); and it was matched by opposite tendencies. One is that the wider hegemonies listed above were all very short; no king after Rhodri Mawr passed his conquests to his heirs, and most hegemonic rulers spent their lives fighting to maintain their power. Another is the interference of outside forces. For all the anti-Englishness of the Armes Prydein, kings of its writer’s era were routinely subject to the king of England and paid him tribute; that was one of the reasons for the poet’s anger, and also for Hywel Dda’s presence in the English court. English kings from Alfred to Edgar (though not Æthelred II or Cnut) expected it. The Vikings sometimes took tribute, too; although Rhodri Mawr’s fall was a chance event, Viking coastal raids were regular, and there is some evidence for a full-blown hegemony by the Norse rulers of Dublin or the Isle of Man over parts of Gwynedd in the late tenth and early eleventh century. A third development is a growing incoherence in the titles of rulers; quite unlike the trends in the Scandinavian and Slav worlds, fewer rulers are called rex in Latin sources after 950 or so, and a greater array of terms appear in Welsh texts from then on; the tendency of Welsh rulers to call themselves ‘princes’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was beginning here, although the greatest rulers, like Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, could certainly still use (or be ascribed) the title of ‘king’.

  This shift away from royal titles is not a sign of Welsh subjection. Rather, it marks confusion: as Welsh polities became larger, they did not become markedly more stable and better organized. Kings and their retinue (teulu) remained at the centre of kingdoms; there were also mercenaries, but few local officials. Justice, even if more tightly organized, was still for the most part in the hands of local elders and notables, with, it would seem, more of an input from local churches than from most kings (much of our knowledge of the righting of wrongs comes from ecclesiastical narratives of churches and their saints, calling kings themselves to account for their misdeeds). Given a general lack of infrastructure, the growing claims to wide but temporary hegemonies after 850 or so were a cause, not of centralization and pacification, but of instability. In this sense Wales did not fit the Danish model; this would only come later, in strategically much more difficult times, after around 1200, when the princes of Gwynedd borrowed consistently from English practice.

  Scotland had a larger core kingdom, Alba, taken over in the 840s by Cinaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth I) as we saw at the end of Chapter 7, and extending throughout most of the Scottish mainland from the Firth of Forth northwards. We know the names of its kings, all descendants of Kenneth except one (Macbeth, 1040-57), though fighting it out in Irish fashion across two or three rival lines. Its heart was the old Pictish kingdom (the name ‘Alba’ only appears in 900), but from the 890s or so we can see more and more signs of Irish culture and Irish church organization, and the Pictish language seems to have fallen out of use. The kings of Alba did not control the whole of modern Scotland, however. The islands and far north were all by now under Scandinavian rule, and the Orkneys and Shetlands (with Caithness) were wholly Scan dinavianized; the jarls of Orkney were from the tenth century serious players, notably Sigurd ‘the Stout’ (d. 1014), and his son Thorfinn ‘the Mighty’ (d. 1065), who ruled south to the Isle of Man. South of the Forth and Clyde, there were Welsh and English polities too, the Welsh kings of Strathclyde in the Glasgow region and the south-west, and the kings of Northumbria, later lords of Bamburgh, in Lothian. These ceded ground to the Scottish kings, however; Scotland stably included Lothian after perhaps the 970s - the 1010s at the latest - and the kings of Strathclyde are not certainly heard of after 1018. By then, the mainland kingdom of Scotland was largely formed, the work of influential and long-lived kings like Constantine II (900-943), Kenneth II (971-95) and Malcolm II (1005-34).

  Here, too, however, we must be cautious. We know almost nothing of the inner workings of the Scottish kingdom. Its northern third, Moray, certainly had semi-independent ‘mormaers’ (sometimes also called ‘kings of Alba’ in Irish sources) with their own dynasty - Macbeth was one of them, in fact. Mormaers appear elsewhere as local aristocrats and military leaders, too; it cannot be said how autonomous or how dynastic (or how Pictish) they were, but it would be unwise to assume full royal control over them. The early Scottish kingdom was very large by Irish (or indeed Welsh) standards, and also by and large internally stable, notwithstanding succession disputes; but it is hard not to feel that the near-total absence of documentation for it betrays a relative evanescence of royal authority. Again, more coherent political power structures belonged to a much later period, in this case the twelfth century, and were associated with a conscious policy of acceptance of English (or ‘Norman’) influence and even settlement: the Danish or Bohemian model again, although this time attached to a secure political system which had already achieved its basic territorial expansion.

  Of these Celtic-speaking political systems, Ireland is the best documented - in fact, in many ways it is the best-documented society in this chapter - but that does not make it straightforward to read. Here, the network of tribal hierarchies, unstable, but at least unstable according to recognizable political rules in each of the five provinces of Ireland, was beginning to come apart by the eighth century, thanks to more ambitious kings (as described in Chapter 7), and here the impact of the Vikings was to pull it further apart. Eighth-century kings were beginning to attack the major centres of wealth and power that the greater monasteries had become; over-kings were beginning to take the dependence of lesser kings for gra
nted as a permanent part of their political base (in Latin annals, after 750 some lesser kings are beginning to be called dux rather than rex). In some areas, too, successful kingdoms were not just demanding tribute and hostages from lesser kingdoms, but appropriating their territory, as the Uí Briúin Bréifne did as they spread east and north from their base in southern Co. Leitrim into Co. Cavan in the late eighth century, or as the Déis Tuaiscirt (later called Dál Cais) did as they spread north from eastern Co. Limerick to eastern Co. Clare a generation earlier. These were both minor kingdoms, operating outside the main political networks of the Uí Néill of western Ulster and Meath and the Éoganachta of Munster, and the scale of their expansion was pretty small, but they show that the tribal kingdom map of Ireland was not written in stone.