Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  MIGRATION AND SLAVIC EUROPE

  As a response to inequalities of wealth and development, in its complex interplay of economic and political motivations, and in the determinative influence upon its various outcomes exercised by surrounding political structures, Slavic migration flows of the later fifth century and beyond worked themselves out in ways that are analogous to their more modern counterparts. Some of these migration units consisted of ‘whole’ population groups of men, women and children of all ages, like some of those we have already encountered in the Germanic world. These kinds of unit, as we have seen before, reflect the particularities of first-millennium conditions and are comparatively rare in the modern world. But, in general terms, the comparison works. The nature and direction of Slavic migration flows are in accord with the deeper principles behind modern flows. There are also some particular ways in which Slavic migration strongly resembles better-documented population flows of more recent eras.

  It is commonly the case that a few individuals, often younger males, make the first moves into a new area. From these, knowledge of the new opportunities gradually spreads back across the broader population. Slavic raids into the Balkans in the sixth century, the precursor to full settlment after 610, in a sense functioned in this fashion. The young men conducting these raids built up a good knowledge of the routes and possibilities of the region through (sometimes bitter) experience, and this knowledge informed the full-scale migrations of the seventh century. The new and better-grounded chronology for the western spread of Korchak migrants through upland central Europe shows, likewise, that this process of migration took much longer than used to be thought. This means, amongst other things, that participating groups had plenty of time to build up an active knowledge of the next destination in between moves, and this must have been crucial to the process. In modern examples, an active body of (not necessarily accurate) information about the point of destination plays a hugely important role in both stimulating and channelling migration flows. Just as the pattern whereby many of the longer-distance fifth-century Germanic migrants moved in discrete ‘jumps’, with lengthy breaks in between, must in part be attributed to the need to build up information, so the same seems true of Slavic groups of the sixth and seventh centuries.68

  Fully in line with modern migration flows, too, is the fact that the same Slavic population groups seem to have participated in not just one, but several moves spread out over a number of generations. As modern studies stress, a migration habit is something that builds up within a given population. When friends and relatives migrate, or are remembered to have done so in the past, this increases the likelihood that migration will be adopted as a life strategy by other members of the same population group. The Slavic migration profile fits this pattern perfectly. The – probable – original move into Moldavia and Wallachia in the late fifth and the early sixth century was followed two or three generations later by a further move by the descendants of many of these original migrants on to the territory of the east Roman Balkans. In the meantime, successive generations were also moving both east and west into Ukraine and the uplands of central Europe, and then both of these strands threw out ribbons of northern expansion as well, all of this taking several generations to unfold. Migration clearly became a well-entrenched life strategy among many Slavic populations, so that, as knowledge of the surrounding districts grew, new migrants were ready to intrude themselves there, with previous successful outcomes adding their own momentum to their migration habit.

  A propensity to adopt movement as a life strategy, moreover, was probably pre-programmed into the first Slavic migrants of the later fifth century by the limitations of their agricultural technology. Whoever they were exactly, we know that the first Slavs originated somewhere north of the Carpathians and east of the Vistula. While firmly agriculturalists rather than nomads in any real sense of the word, the populations of this region lacked the farming technology before 500 AD to maintain the fertility of their fields for any length of time, and hence tended to shift settlement site every generation or so. This was still true for a century or more into the second half of the millennium. Recent excavations of the early Slavic village of Dulcinea in Wallachia have shown that this settlement of ten to fifteen houses shifted its site on several occasions in response to the need to open up new arable fields. Like the Germani of the early Roman period who renegotiated small-scale mobility into larger-scale migration, the fact that Slavic-speaking farmers were not so rigidly tied to a particular piece of land surely made them readier to respond to the new opportunities created by the implosion of the old largely Germanic-dominated peripheries of the Roman Empire.69 This involved movement in a new direction and on a much larger scale, but these were already mobile populations well equipped for the challenge.

  Whether Slavic expansion also generated a significant amount of return migration, an ever-present epiphenomenon of modern population flows, is, however, unclear. Apart from raiders returning home after successful expeditions, no return migration is mentioned in any of our historical sources. On the other hand, the archaeological evidence for Korchak expansion north and eastwards from the Carpathians into Russia and northern Ukraine in the seventh century and beyond might represent an analogous process, if the initial impetus towards Slavic migration had come from this direction. Return migration is usually generated by the impact of the emotional and other costs of transporting yourself to a new environment, as well as by any failure to succeed at the point of destination. In this case, the rise of Avar power, with all the demands it made upon the subordinated Slavic populations, as much as any inherent love of the east European forests, might have prompted Korchak migrants to change direction. But this is highly speculative, and there are other possibilities. The more advanced agricultural techniques picked up from the developed world, combined with their new military capacities, alternatively, might have given those Slavic groups who had initially moved into the sub-Carpathian region a strategic advantage over what had originally been their peer populations of European Russia, which then allowed them to expand over time at the latter’s expense.

  Transport logistics, finally, do not seem to have played much of a role in shaping Slavic migration. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons they had no seas to cross, although when raiding the Roman Balkans major rivers such as the Danube or the Save could be problematic. As mentioned earlier, in 550/1 three thousand Slavic raiders each had to pay the Gepids a gold coin to be ferried out of Roman territory, but this may reflect a need for speed rather than a basic inability to handle water. In the early 610s, Slavs used dugouts to great effect to raid around the coast of Greece, and a fleet of similar boats was employed, if to no military effect, during the Avar-led siege of Constantinople in 626. The great European river systems probably posed no major problems to migrating Slavs, therefore, especially since, lacking much in the way of material possessions, they seem to have moved without the huge baggage trains that accompanied their Germanic counterparts of the fifth century. At least, no source ever reports that the Slavs used wagons, and this was certainly true of Slavic raiders, who were able to move independently of the Roman road network in the Balkans in a way that the Goths of a Theoderic or an Alaric could not. Whether this was also true of the larger Slavic units who settled in the vicinity of Thessalonica is unclear, but it is perhaps implied by the main line of advance westward through the central European uplands chosen by Korchak groups, where wagons would have been a liability.70

  It is just possible, indeed, that we should view the whole phenomenon of Korchak-type assemblages as a kind of migration strategy. The usual view of their characteristic combination of sunken huts and plain pottery has been to stress their technological simplicity and, by extension, the relative backwardness of Europe’s first documented Slavic-speakers. Recently, however, it has been pointed out that, even if simple, these materials are all well made and would have performed their functions verey effectively. More particularly, it has been suggested that Korchak assembl
ages represent a pared-down version of contemporary Slavic material culture designed precisely to facilitate movement. The point about Slavic material culture being thoroughly fit for purpose is surely well taken, and a reasonable counterpoint to any tendency to dismiss the historical significance of its bearers. Given the general lifestyle of the European Russian populations from which the Slavs emerged, though, there may be a more straightforward explanation of overall Korchak simplicity: namely, that it reflects the starting point from which subsequent Slavic material complexity developed, rather than a particular form of material culture geared towards migration. But if contemporary and obviously related Slavic sites of greater complexity than the Korchak norm should come to light, the case will obviously acquire greater force.71

  Any discussion of Slavic migration keeps encountering the limitations of the available source materials. The processes that unfolded from the later fifth century and which underlay the eventual spread of named Slavic groups right across the landscape of European Russia by the end of the millennium are largely hidden from us. Much of the action further west is similarly obscure, especially the human history that underlay the spread of the Sukow-Dziedzice system north and west from central Poland. Even the Slavic occupation of the Balkans, comparatively well documented as it is, poses many puzzles. How exactly did Serbs and Croats overthrow Avar dominion, and what was the precise original nature of these groups? In some areas, we can reasonably hope for further enlightenment. No new historical sources are likely to be discovered, but more archaeological materials will be found, and interpreted in a more sophisticated way. At some point, therefore, we will probably have a clearer idea of the extent to which Slavic migration operated in demographically sparse, as well as politically fragmented, landscapes, and of the extent of any surviving Germanic- or other-speaking indigenous populations in the areas affected. The chronology in particular of the Sukow-Dziedzice system will surely also become much more certain.

  For the present, it is the complexity of the overall Slavic migration process that should be stressed: it took a variety of forms, and unfolded at different times and in different places. In some contexts, small population units generated movement patterns resembling those predicted by the wave-of-advance model, although the Korchak passage through upland central Europe was perhaps not so random. In others, the same kind of original flow then seems to have increased in momentum, as resistance increased and the migrants (like their Gothic, Boer and Viking analogues) were forced to reorganize themselves and move in larger groups. This, at least, is what the larger walled settlement units characteristic of Slavic spread into the more north-easterly reaches of the Great European Plain suggest. Elsewhere, still larger units several thousand strong seem to have operated together in smaller versions of the modified invasion hypothesis that we have already observed among Germanic migrants, particularly when the larger units formed on the fringes of the east Roman Balkans in the later sixth century then started to annex land within it in the seventh. The wave-of-advance-like variants seem to correlate with more voluntary, economically motivated displacement, although the political context was always crucial to their success; the larger-scale ‘tribal’ movements look less voluntary, more politically motivated.

  The other point to stress is that, whatever the size of the migration unit involved, we are dealing with Slavic-speaking migrants who became a dominant cultural force over vast regions of central and eastern Europe. As the size of Slavic Europe makes clear, Slavic migrants were extremely effective at establishing their dominance, and already in the sixth century were known for military effectiveness. Slavicization certainly had its more voluntary component, at least in its early stages, since some Slavic groups were open to indigenous populations willing to adopt the new cultural forms. But it is very unlikely that we can really view the early Slavs as the most successful hippies Europe has ever known. They may have lacked circuses, togas, Latin poetry and central heating, but they were as successful in imposing a new social order across central and eastern Europe as the Romans had been to the west and south. Their military effectiveness makes it extremely improbable that this came about just because indigenous populations thought it would be great to become a Slav.

  A generally less pacific view of the early Slavs is also strongly suggested, to my mind, by the nature of the first Slavic states that eventually emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the processes of further transformation that brought them into being. The expansion of the sixth to the ninth centuries was very much part of the same story, and to a great extent the original Slavic migrations and eventual Slavic state formation were generated by the same forces. But the latter can be fully understood only as part of a much wider transformation of northern and eastern Europe, which also manifested itself in the expansionary Scandinavian explosion of the Viking era. Before turning to the processes of Slavic state formation, then, we need to explore this last great indigenous migratory impulse from within first-millennium Europe. And while its link with Slavic state formation means that Norse expansion south and east across the Baltic is in some senses our prime focus, this can itself be understood only in the context of the wider Scandinavian diaspora.

  9

  VIKING DIASPORAS

  To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales.

  SO, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,1 and it’s enough to make your hair stand on end. With detailed instructions like this, how could you fail to hit the target? All you need is the ability to recognize whether the visibility is very good or not around Shetland, and if not (as it often isn’t), to guess at the island’s whereabouts; an instinctive grasp of the height of the Faroes; and knowledge of how to sail in a straight line using the stars in between. Add to that a deep knowledge of the fauna of the seas around Iceland, the luck not to be blown off course by the notoriously wild Atlantic winds (or the ability to reorient yourself, once you have been), and there you are. And all this in a small open boat made of wood, under sail power, with no radios (and no lifeboat services should you have had one). Given all this, the fact that the Viking who found the eastern seaboard of America did so while looking for Greenland becomes much less surprising. Late in the first millennium, the North Atlantic was clearly full of courageous, skilful, lost Scandinavians blundering around ‘discovering’ things.

  For all these difficulties, between 800 and 1000 AD Scandinavians took to water of different depths with great gusto. Aside from their very well-known voyages of discovery in the North Atlantic, they were also exploring the river routes of western Europe, central Europe and European Russia in boats of all shapes and sizes, and for a wide variety of purposes. In these centuries waterborne Vikings exploded out of the narrow confines of their native Baltic to trade, raid, settle and form political communities all the way from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains. The societies they encountered in the course of these journeys, and their own, were completely transformed in the process. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss the Viking period in general, but to explore the extent to which Scandinavian migration featured in its different phases, and compare its forms, motivations and effects both with modern examples and with the other early medieval case studies examined in this book.

  VIKINGS AND THE WEST2

  In western Europe, Viking raiding began with a vengeance in the late eighth century. The first really spectacular act of Viking destruction came in 793: the sacking of the famous island monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast of Britain on 8 June (which just happens to be my birthday). Within two years, the raiders had worked their way around the north coast of Scotland and down through the western isles, where they sacked an Irish monastery on Rathlin. Th
ese acts of destruction were carried out, it seems, largely by Norwegians, led to the northern coasts of the British Isles by a natural combination of winds and currents. The prevailing easterlies of springtime carried the Norwegian raiders across the North Sea to Shetland, Orkney and north-eastern Scotland. This involved braving the open sea between the coasts of Norway and Shetland, initially out of sight of the land. This was a major undertaking, but not an overwhelming one. Going from Bergen in western Norway to Shetland took no longer than coasting round southern Scandinavia through the Skagerrak and into the Baltic. And once you had reached Shetland, everything else could be done without losing sight of land. Scotland was within easy reach, and straightforward coastal routes then led the Norwegian raiders round its north coast to the Hebrides, the Irish Sea, western Britain, and Ireland itself. Then – very conveniently if they had no wish to stay longer – the prevailing winds of autumn in the North Sea, being by contrast, westerlies, took them home again. If seasonal winds and currents were reversed, we might now be writing about medieval Scottish invasions of Norway.3

  At the same time as northern Britain and Ireland were coming under attack, there was also trouble along the coasts either side of the English Channel. Sometime between 786 and 802 (the incident cannot be placed more definitely because of the vagaries of the dating system employed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), in what is possibly the first recorded raid of the Viking period, three ships containing Northmen landed at Portland on the south coast of Britain. The local royal official wanted to take them to his king, but they killed him; it has been argued that he mistook them for traders. The ships were from Horthaland in Norway. Other evidence of trouble is less direct, but clear enough. As early 792, Offa, King of Mercia and overlord of England south of the Humber, allowed a coastal monastery in Kent to prepare a place of refuge for itself further inland, safe inside the still-standing Roman walls of the city of Canterbury. Preparations were also made south of the Channel. In 800, the Emperor Charlemagne strengthened his defences at the mouth of the River Seine. Viking raiders had already sailed much further afield. The previous year, they had made their way round the coast of Brittany to attack the island monastery of Noirmoutier at the mouth of the River Loire in western France. Ten years later, the Emperor decided to establish fleets at Ghent and Boulogne, their purpose again the suppression of sea-borne raids.4