Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  As far as we can tell, similar dynastic games underlay the creation of the two of our other new states that emerged from the wreck of the Avar Empire: Great Moravia and Poland. Great Moravia was the first to appear, in the middle decades of the ninth century. Carolingian sources for c.800–20 mention in passing a whole series of regionally based small-scale political leaders at the head of their own groupings, as Avar dominion in central Europe unwound. One called Vojnomir supported the Franks against the Avars, a certain Manomir appears briefly, while a major revolt against Carolingian rule was led by Ljudevit. The sources are nothing like full enough for us to attempt a political narrative of how these different dynasties combined and eliminated one another to produce the much larger power that was Great Moravia. But that they did is clear enough and, again, we are given the odd snapshot. The first really prominent Moravian ruler, perhaps the real founder of dynastic pre-eminence, was called Mojmir, and Carolingian sources record what was clearly a highly significant moment in the 830s (the incident can be dated no more tightly than 833–6) when he drove a rival prince, Pribina, out of Nitra in Slovakia to bring a broader region under his direct control. Using this greater power base, the dynasty continued to extend its control, as and when it could. Carolingian power kept its westerly ambitions in check through most of the ninth century, but as that Empire waned in the early 890s the Moravians extracted the right to exercise hegemony over Bohemia. From then on, a still more exciting range of ambitions might have been open to this ruling line, had not its career been cut decisively short from 896 by the arrival of the nomadic Magyars as a major force in central Europe.23

  If we had nothing but the available historical sources, the emergence of Piast Poland would be particularly mysterious. The Piast state suddenly jumps into Ottonian narrative sources in the 960s, already fully formed under the control of the Piast Miesco I. With a heartland west of the Vistula, beyond the immediate border region between the Elbe and the Oder, the new Polish state was simply too far away from imperial dominions for our chronicle sources to observe its growing pains. Not even the Anonymous Bavarian Geographer knew the political layout of lands so far to the east. Thanks to the wonders of dendro-chronolgy, however, archaeological evidence – which is usually so much better at observing long-term development than the immediately political – has in this case brilliantly illuminated at least the final stages of the rise of the Piasts. Because the dynasty built its castles of wood – as pretty much everyone else in Europe was still doing in the first half of the tenth century – it has become possible, within just the last decade, to date their construction precisely. The results are revolutionary.

  The emergence of the first Polish state used to be construed as a long, slow process of political consolidation, which gradually brought ever larger areas together under the control of a single dynasty. Long-term developments, as we shall examine in a moment, were certainly of critical importance to create the necessary conditions, but the archaeology has shown with striking clarity that the last stage of the Piast rise to power was sudden and violent. Piast castle construction clusters in the second quarter of the tenth century, demonstrating that the dynasty expanded its control over broader areas of Great Poland very quickly, from an originally narrow base (Map 20). More than that, in many of these localities Piast castles replaced a much larger kind of fortified centre, often dating back to the eighth century, many of which seem to have been destroyed exactly at the moment of Piast construction. The conclusion seems inescapable. The creation of Piast Poland, the entity that suddenly bursts into our histories in the mid-tenth century, involved the destruction of long-standing local societies and the imposition of Piast military garrisons upon them. How many of these local societies were ‘tribes’, for want of a better word – the kind of unit listed in the Bavarian Geographer for more westerly regions of the Slavic world – is unclear, as is how they were distributed across the landscape.24 Just like Great Moravia and Bohemia, then, the new Polish state emerged by violent dynastic self-assertion, as the Piasts eliminated their rivals at the heads of those other, older political units.

  Much is also obscure about the rise of the Riurikids. As we saw in the last chapter, the Russian Primary Chronicle (RPC) is both too Kiev-focused and too much composed from the hindsight of achieved Riurikid domination to provide a straightforward route into the complexities of early Rus history. Nor – at this stage at least – is the archaeological picture so arrestingly precise as that for Piast Poland. Nonetheless, the basic outlines of Scandinavian intrusion into Russia are clear enough, and hence too the key political developments that made possible the Rurikid state.

  Amongst its other problems, as we saw, the RPC provides a thoroughly unconvincing account of both the date and circumstances by which political power came to be transferred to Kiev from Gorodishche in the north. The Chronicle both places the transfer a generation too early and seems to be hiding dynastic discontinuity or at least disruption in its odd and seemingly sanitized account of the relationship between Oleg, the first major political figure associated with Kiev, and Igor, Riurik’s son and heir. The story also presents Oleg as gathering an army in the north and taking control of the Middle Dnieper by force. Yet it closes by saying that, at the conclusion of these operations, an annual tribute of three hundred grivny was imposed by Oleg on Novgorod in return for peace. This, the Chronicle notes, was paid until the death of Prince Yaroslav in 1054, which is late enough to fall virtually within living memory of the compiler of the Chronicle in the early twelfth century. So the payment is presumably historical. But why would a ruler who came from the north to conquer in the south, as the story has it, end up imposing a tribute on the north?

  There are two other big problems besides. First, the trade treaties with Byzantium confirm that, well into the tenth century, non-Riurikid Scandinavians ruled their own Russian settlements with a great deal of independent power, since they had to be represented individually in the negotiations. Second, before the end of the tenth century the Chronicle preserves only a very simplified version of Riurikid dynastic history. From that point on, the transmission of power from one generation to the next always involved many contenders and civil war, but before that date, even though we know that the early princes were multiply polygamous (as indeed were their successors), the Chronicle mentions only one son at each moment of succession and nothing but a smooth transition of power.

  None of this is credible. The 944 trade treaty with Byzantium tells us that Igor had two nephews important enough to rate a separate mention. There is no record of them or their subsequent fate in the rest of the Chronicle, and it’s hard to resist the conclusion that history has been edited to give an impression of secure and smooth Rurikid dominance. Likewise, the Oleg story: was he a collateral relative of Riurik who first conquered Kiev and then imposed his rule on the north? Or was he a complete outsider who perhaps married into the dynasty so as in some way to legitimize his rule after the fact? And how, then, did power pass from him to Riurik’s son Igor? It is also hard to believe that Oleg didn’t have heirs of his own, so what happened to them? The politics of early tenth-century Russia were clearly much messier than the Chronicle would have us believe, with independent Viking leaders and a self-assertive dynasty all jockeying violently for position.

  The full details of these internal political struggles will for ever escape us, but the kind of world we should be envisaging is clear. At this stage, as one commentator has evocatively called it, it was not so much a state as a ‘glorified Hudson Bay company’, composed of essentially independent trading operations located at various centres along the main river routes, loosely linked together by having to pay protection money to the most powerful among them. They acted in concert only in certain circumstances, such as when using their collective muscle to extract advantageous trade terms from the Byzantines, and no doubt also to engage in a little price-fixing. The Rus state began life, therefore, as a hierarchically organized umbrella organization for these mercha
nts, no doubt established originally by force. Even so, the original merchant adventurers, or their descendants, were left with considerable powers and independence, and as late as 944 still ran their own localities.25

  By the eleventh century, however, this stratum of independent non-Riurikid rulers in their own settlements had disappeared. By this date, the preferred solution to the dynastic mayhem which characteristically accompanied transfers of power between different Rurikid generations took the form of giving their own centre of power to each eligible contender. This was already happening by the year 1000, the Chronicle providing us with an exhaustive list of the twelve cities that were granted by Vladimir to his twelve sons, the products of five of his more official liaisons. How many other children he had generated from the 300 concubines he kept at Vyshgorod, the three hundred at Belgorod and the two hundred at Berestovoe is not recorded. At some point in the tenth century, then, the independent power of the descendants of the founding merchant princes had been curtailed, turning their formerly self-governing settlements into dynastic appanages. In fact, this was probably a steady process, which played itself out over a lengthy period. Oleg’s suppression of Askold and Dir, to the extent that this story might be taken as historical example, provides us with an early instance of this kind of action. The RPC also records some later instances of exactly the same thing. In the civil war between Sviatoslav’s two sons Yaropolk and Vladimir, new merchant settlements continued to be founded. Two Scandinavian leaders by the names of Rogvolod (Ragnvaldr) and Tury established their own trading centres at Polotsk and Turov. Their subsequent fate is not recorded, but both centres were among the twelve distributed in the next generation to the various sons of Vladimir, by which time their founders had clearly lost out. As part of the same civil war, another such locally dominant line, apparently a family established for a much longer period, that of Sveinald, also met its demise.26 The full story of the suppression of the independent merchant lines is hidden from us, but it clearly happened, and it represented the final stage in the evolution of mercantile settlements into a fully fledged political union. Although the unique origins of the Rus state meant that the Rurikids began as one set of merchant princes among several – rather than as the leaders of one regional tribal group among several, as was the case with the Piasts and Premyslids – nonetheless violent dynastic self-assertion was central to the process of state formation.

  The same was true of the last of these new states, Denmark, although here, too, the process differed substantially from that unfolding in the Avar successor states. In the small settlement of Jelling in central Jutland stands a not very substantial church and two huge mounds: the northern one 65 metres in diameter and 8 metres high, the southerly 77 by 11. Within the northern mound there is a wood-lined chamber dated by dendrochronology to 958, which was nearly the last resting place of King Gorm. Gorm’s son and heir Harold Bluetooth originally buried him there, but transferred the body to the church when he himself converted to Christianity, probably around 965. Like the Mormons, Harold was taking no chances that his ancestors might be deprived of the joys of his new religion. Apart from shifting the corpse, he also erected a fabulous runestone whose inscription is still there to be read: ‘Harold had these monuments erected in memory of Gorm his father and Thyre his mother, that Harold who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and Christianized the Danes.’

  The case of Denmark differs substantially from the other states, by providing a timely warning against the assumption that political developments always move in a straight line. As we have seen, a powerful centralizing political structure had existed in southern Jutland before the Viking Age, from at least the mid-eighth century when the Danevirke was first constructed. But this monarchy was destroyed by flows of new Viking wealth into Scandinavia. Wealth translated pretty much directly into warriors, and warriors into power, so that new wealth in sufficient quantities could not but generate political revolution. The old monarchy fell because so many ‘kings’ could now buy in so much military muscle that political stability evaporated.27

  By the mid-tenth century, there are further signs of substantial change. For one thing, there seem to have been fewer kings. Viking-period sources demonstrate that a multiplicity of royals had existed in ninth-century Scandinavia. Apart from the one extended, or possibly two, separate dynastic lines found competing for power in southern Jutland (Godfrid, Haraldr and their descendants), there were more independent kings in the Vestfold west of the Oslo Fjord in Norway in the ninth century, and on the island of Bornholm. Birka and Sweden, further east, likewise, also had kings. A large number of other kings also appeared in western waters in the Great Army period, from the 860s onwards, and these must all have had their origins in some particular corner of Scandinavia. By my reckoning about a dozen of them are named, at different points: not enough to suggest that ‘king’ was a status that just anyone might claim, especially as we also meet men of slightly lesser status – jarls – who held back from claiming to be royalty. From the time of Harold Bluetooth, by contrast, the historical narrative throws up other ‘kings’ consistently in Sweden only, and occasionally in Norway. It would appear, therefore, that the word had undergone a change of meaning (as it did in other cultural contexts, too) from something like ‘person from an extremely important family’ to ‘ruler of a substantial territory’, the normal meaning of the word today.28

  That said, the Jelling dynasty did seemingly build up its power by bringing under its control disparate territories that had had their own leaderships in the chaos of the later ninth century. It may have been the dynasty’s success, of course, that brought about the substantive change of meaning in the word ‘king’. Gorm’s wife Thyre is called in another inscription ‘the pride of Denmark’. It has been convincingly argued, on the basis of contemporary usage, that in c.900 the ‘mark’ element in ‘Denmark’ meant ‘regions bordering the Danish kingdom’; in other words, somewhere other than the main centres of the Danish monarchy – perhaps northern Jutland or the southern Baltic islands. Like our other dynasties, therefore, despite the substantial differences in historical context, the political activities of the Jelling dynasty were fundamentally accumulative – putting together regions that had previously been independent. This process was begun by Gorm and carried on by subsequent members of the dynasty. Harold Bluetooth added control of southern Norway to the dynasty’s portfolio of assets after the battle of Limfjord, but ruled it indirectly through the Jarls of Lade. Svein and Cnut maintained this hegemony through most of their reigns, and at times dominated the west coast of what is now Sweden as well. Even so, the heritage of old independence did not disappear overnight. From the narratives of Danish history in the eleventh century, it emerges very clearly that Jutland and the islands of Fyn and Sjaelland were still functioning on occasion as separatist power centres.29

  The political processes behind all these new states, therefore, were similar. In each case, one dynastic line was able to demote or eliminate a peer group of geographically proximate rivals to bring a larger region under its control. The vagaries of this process further explain the propensity of the states it created to swap intervening areas amongst themselves. Given that all these areas were originally independent, it is easy to see why some of them might maintain a capacity for autonomous political activity long after they first accepted a new dynasty’s domination, especially in a context where itineration and personal charisma rather than developed bureaucratic structures were being used to govern them. But while full of arresting stories and individuals of striking charisma, political narratives of achieved dynastic ambition do not remotely begin to tell the full story of state formation in the north and east at the end of the first millennium. History is littered with ambitious individuals trying to build their power and thereby eclipse every rival. In most cases, however, such ambition does not lead to new and impressively powerful state structures. Apart from looking at narratives of personal ambition, then, we also need to think about the broad
er structural transformations that made it possible for entirely ordinary ambitions to achieve such unusual outcomes.

  State-building

  Many of these changes were similar to those that had generated the larger political structures on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the first half of the millennium. Taking the long view, social and economic transformations of the most profound kind were structurally critical to the process of state formation in northern and eastern Europe. This is most obviously true of the Slavic-speaking world, but to a considerable extent applies to Scandinavia as well.

  Up to the mid-first millennium, Slav or Slavic-dominated societies were characterized by little in the way of obvious social inequality. Whatever their exact geographical origins, the Slavic-speaking groups who burst on to the fringes of the Mediterranean in the sixth century had clearly emerged from the undeveloped, heavily wooded regions of eastern Europe, where settlements were small – no more than hamlets – and whose Iron Age farmers were operating at little above subsistence level and with few material markers of differing social status. This state of affairs had already begun to change radically in the sixth century, as a direct result of the migratory processes that brought some Slavic-speakers into a direct relationship with the more developed Mediterranean. From this, an unprecedented flow of wealth – the profits, more or less equally, of raiding, military service and diplomatic subsidy – quickly generated inequalities around which new social structures began to form. These showed themselves initially after c.575 in the rise of a new class of military leader, controlling quite substantial areas and groups several thousand strong – even if there is also some reason to think that other elements within Slavic society, represented by Korchak remains, retained older, more egalitarian social forms and were even using alternative kinds of migration, and in different directions away from the east Roman frontier, as a means to preserve them.30