Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The new Slavic states of the ninth and tenth centuries were constructed on a marked accentuation of these initial inequalities. This shows up most obviously in the existence of military retinues: that classic vehicle of social and political power, which had played such an important role in the transformation of the Germanic world. Presumably the new Slavic leaders of the sixth century had their henchmen, but large permanent retinues do not figure in any of the historical sources as a major force, military or social. The contrast with the ninth and tenth centuries is striking. The Arab geographers report that Miesco of Poland maintained a personal force of three thousand warriors – and this is just one account among many, stressing the importance of retinues at this time. In Bohemia, the fourteen dukes presenting themselves for baptism in 845 did so ‘with their men’, and the early Bohemian texts associated with Wenceslas refer both to his retinue and to that of his brother, Boleslav I. Frankish texts, similarly, mention the ‘men’ of both Mojmir and his nephew Zwentibald among the Moravians, and retinues were just as important in Russia. Again, Arab geographers pick out the four hundred men of the dominant Rus prince in the north in c.900, and retinues appear as important political pressure groups for several of the early kings in the narratives of the RPC. It was the need to satisfy the demands of his ‘men’, for instance, that led Igor to increase the tribute he customarily imposed upon the Derevlians. He may have regretted giving in, since, as we have seen, it led to his death at the hands of the aggrieved taxpayers. And as we saw among the Germani around the Roman Empire, the rise of permanent military retinues greatly increased the capacity of rulers both to bring rival dynasts into line and to enforce a range of obligations (such as army and labour services) upon the broader population. As such, it obviously played a critical role in the process of state formation, not least – again as among the Germani – in creating a much stronger dynastic component to power at the top. There is no sign among even the late sixth-century Slavs that power was in any sense hereditary, even if particular individuals could build up striking power bases.31 But by the ninth and tenth centuries, dynasties dominated politics, and hereditary power was the order of the day.

  But retinues were only one aspect of a broader process of social change. Part of the problem in understanding this bigger picture as fully as one would like to stems from uncertainties about its starting point. The idea of a highly egalitarian Slavic world in c.500 AD is strongly entrenched in both the scholarly literature and more popular mythology. It underlies the ‘happy hippy’ vision of Slavicization, and finds real support particularly from east Roman sources which note that sixth-century Slavic society was marked by a lack of structured social differentiation, as well as being unusually willing to take on prisoners as free and equal members. But such visions of Slavic equality need to be tempered with some caution. To echo a point made earlier in the case of the Germani, there are entirely non-material ways in which higher status can be all too real – if those enjoying it had to work less hard, enjoyed more food, and if their word counted for more when it came to settling disputes within the group.32

  But even if we factor in a less egalitarian starting point for the evolution of Slavic society from c.500 (and as we have seen, any preexisting egalitarianism was being undermined rapidly at this point by the twin processes of migration and development), much had clearly changed by the tenth century. Not only was political leadership now hereditary and its clout more wide-reaching thanks to its permanent military retinues, but Slavic society as a whole was marked by the evolution of clearly differentiated, and therefore presumably also hereditary, hierarchically arranged social categories.

  At the bottom of the social scale, unfree population groups now played a prominent role in all our late first-millennium Slavic and Scandinavian societies. The slave trade was a major phenomenon of central and eastern Europe from the eighth century onwards. Likewise, as the new state structures evolved, a major component of their economic makeup (as we shall explore in more detail in a moment) became the unfree ‘service village’. Given the available sources, it is not entirely clear whether the populations of these villages enjoyed a higher status than the slaves who were often exported – perhaps a status akin to those of the permanent ‘freed’ (better, ‘semi-free’) populations we encountered in the Germanic world. Either way, a large part of Slavic humanity had clearly been permanently relegated to hereditary lesser status (or statuses, if slaves and service villagers need to be distinguished) by the tenth century. However you model Slavic society in c.500 AD, the extent of change here can hardly be overemphasized.

  Equally permanent at the other end of the social scale was a class of high-status individuals, often styled optimates in our sources. These men are recorded, for instance, attending assemblies in Bohemia to give their approval to their choice of Adalbert the Slavnik as Bishop of Prague in 982, and feature as the rulers of their own settlements under overall Rurikid rule in Russia (some of them independent enough to send their own ambassadors to Constantinople when the trade treaties were negotiated). Certain individuals with the same kind of high status also appear in the train of the King of Poland in the early eleventh century, and were presumably the kind of men Polish and other kings customarily offered hospitality to as they feasted their way round their kingdoms. Their existence a century earlier in Moravia is possibly also reflected archaeologically in the five so-called princely dwellings found in the hundred-hectare outer area at , although these could have belonged to junior members of the ruling dynasty. The evidence suggests that this group coalesced out of originally three component elements. First, there were the close supporters of the new dynasty from within their home group. These were reinforced, second, by the elites of originally independent units (whether of Slavo-Scandinavian trading enterprises in Russia or ‘tribal’ units in Bohemia, Moravia and Poland), who accepted the new dynasty’s domination; and, third, junior members of the ruling line. Before and even after they accepted Christianity, polygamy was usual – which made such junior royals a correspondingly numerous group, especially with a ruler like Vladimir who, as we know, numbered his concubines in the hundreds. Over time, the three became indistinguishable, between them eventually providing the nobility of the fully fledged kingdoms.

  As in the earlier Germanic world, there was also an extensive free class operating in between the nobility and the unfree. They appear in some of the written legal sources from all the major kingdoms, except Moravia, which didn’t last long enough to have any. Based on parallels with the rest of late first-millennium Europe, this group probably provided the bulk of military forces deployed by these kingdoms, beyond the specialist military retinues of the rulers. Elsewhere, it was customary for unfree populations to perform lower-status functions, such as providing the labour with which many of the striking monuments of these kingdoms were presumably constructed. Military service, by contrast, was higher-status, despite its obvious dangers.33

  Even if you don’t believe in an entirely egalitarian sixth century, Slavic society underwent a total restructuring between the years 500 and 1000. The sixth-century Slavic world evolved leaders who rose and fell in their own lifetimes, with no markedly hereditary element to their power. There is also no sign of a hereditary nobility, or of permanently unfree population groups. This might still have been true of at least some Slavic groups in the seventh century. The fact that a Frankish merchant, a complete outsider, like Samo, could still at this date be elected overall leader among a multiplicity of other Slavic duces would seem to indicate that such men were not sitting on top of a strongly hierarchical or hereditary social pyramid. But this had changed by the tenth century, and, equally important, the new states of the later period could never have appeared without these intervening transformations. Heritable dynastic power, the social and military clout of retainers and nobles, and a differentiated population who could be forced and/or persuaded to undertake necessary functions such as providing food and labour or military service: all of these were ke
y elements of the new state structures, and none had existed in the sixth century.

  The question of when the different elements of the restructuring had happened is very difficult to answer. The likeliest answer, as is so often the case, would appear to be mixed. Some of the change looks on balance to have had long roots. When it emerged from Avar control after Charlemagne’s campaigns of the 790s, central European Slavic society already had the capacity to throw up powerful princes. Within a couple of decades, the chronicle sources give us a cluster of leaders – Voinomir, Manomir and Liudevit – capable of mobilizing significant military power for a variety of ends. This degree of control seems unlikely to have sprung up overnight and had probably been generated during the Avar period. This is also suggested by the fact that in both Moravia and Bohemia we find leaders – duces – with well-entrenched hereditary power over particular localities as early as the mid-ninth century. On the other hand, this observation needs to be balanced by the fact that most of the hillforts built in the Slavic world up to the ninth century appear to have been communally generated places of refuge. On excavation they characteristically lack any sign of an elite dwelling (often any permanent dwellings at all) or any other sign that the guiding hand of some great man was behind the project.34 If a class of hereditary leader had emerged by c.800, then, it is important not to overestimate the extent of its social power.

  Equally important, state-building had powerfully transformative social effects. Most obviously, the increasing wealth of particular dynasties led to the generation of retinues of increasing size and power. At the same time, much of the nascent nobility of the new states was a by-product of dynastic self-assertion, whether from the promotion of supporters and junior relatives, or the demotion of previously independent regional leaders. Castle-building in Bohemia, Moravia and Poland also involved the destruction of the old communal refuge-type hillforts and their replacement with new dynastic castles. And while the slave trade had certainly begun in the eighth century, it gathered pace dramatically in the ninth and tenth. Both of these latter developments probably played a major role in increasing the number of the unfree in the population (if not, perhaps, in initially generating them). My own best guess, therefore, would be that a longer, slower process of evolution had generated a body of hereditary group leaders by c.800 AD, but that the process of state formation after the collapse of the Avar Empire further revolutionized the situation.

  How much of this broad model of social transformation is applicable to Denmark is a different question. State formation in Denmark differed substantially that in other cases, because there it was a question of state re-formation. A state-like structure comparable to the Slavic and Scando-Slavic ones already existed in southern Jutland and the islands from the eighth century, before being destroyed by the new wealth introduced into Scandinavia in the Viking period. As this would suggest and the sources confirm, Scandinavian society entered the last two centuries of the millennium with more entrenched social inequalities than was true of the Slavic world. Viking-period sources show us kings, jarls, freemen and unfree (thralls) already fully in existence. This makes good sense, not only because state-like structures already existed there but also because Scandinavia, or Denmark at the very least, had been part of the Germanic world (if belonging to its outer rather than inner periphery), interacting with the Roman Empire in the first half of the millennium, and had participated – as flows of Roman goods and bog deposits of weapons indicate – in some of the earlier processes of sociopolitical transformation. State formation in Denmark in the later ninth and the tenth century was probably much more a story of the promotion and demotion of existing power blocks and the dynasties at their heads, than of the fundamental social change that was central to the process among neighbouring Slavs.35

  Social revolution, part cause and part effect, was absolutely necessary, therefore, to state formation at this time, at least in Slavic lands. But social change on this scale is never possible without parallel economic restructuring, and, again, there is plenty of evidence of this from contemporary central and eastern Europe. As with the social transformations, some of this preceded the formation of states and was a necessary precondition for their existence. Further change was then instituted by states themselves.

  The hardest to document in a precise way is the development of the agricultural economy: food production. Not least, of course, is the fact that Slavic-speakers had come to dominate such a huge territory, with such a vast range of environments, that farming did not and could not have developed everywhere along a single trajectory. Nonetheless, the evidence indicates strongly, if at this point still rather generally, that farming outputs increased dramatically. At different speeds in different contexts, a revolution was under way that was bringing more land into production and instituting more productive farming practices, both in terms of the technologies employed and the management of land fertility. Most obviously, there was a substantial amount of forest clearance in central and eastern Europe in the second half of the millennium. In those parts of Poland with the right kind of lakes for taking pollen cores, the ratio of grass and tree to cereal pollen declined dramatically in these centuries from 3:1 to much more like 1:1, suggesting a doubling in the amount of cultivated land. This result can’t be simply applied to the whole of Slavic Europe. I would expect the degree of change to have been less, for instance, as you moved north and east. Nonetheless, even within Mother Russia, the spread of Slavic-type cultures in northerly and easterly directions was closely associated with the spread of full-scale agriculture in the wooded steppe and reasonably temperate forest zones of the East European Plain. The phenomenon of general agricultural expansion is clear enough, then, even if it is impossible to put figures and dates on its impact in particular localities.36

  The spread of more efficient farming techniques, too, is easy enough to document in outline. Initial contacts between Slavic-speakers and the Mediterranean world led some Slavs to adopt more efficient ploughs, types that turned the soil over so that rotting weeds and crop residues released their nutrients back into it. This increased both the yields that could be expected and the length of time particular fields might be cultivated. Further improvements had not yet worked themselves out fully by the time these states came into existence in the ninth and tenth centuries. The height of medieval sophistication in arable production, for instance, was the manor. Its advantages lay in the fact that it was a self-contained, integrated production unit with a large labour force, where farming strategies could be centrally directed towards greatest efficiency, particularly when it came to crop rotation for maintaining fertility, and costs (particularly of ploughing equipment) could be pooled and minimized. It was also an instrument for brutal social control, but that’s another story. For present purposes, the point is that arable production in central and eastern Europe became fully manorialized only from the eleventh century onwards – after the new states had come into being. This finding came as a nasty shock for doctrinaire Marxists, since these were all supposed to be ‘feudal’ states, whose development was only made possible by mano-rializing agriculture, but the chronology is secure enough. Even if manorialization was still only nascent in the ninth and tenth centuries, however, we do have evidence that some key preparatory changes were under way. In particular, the amount of rye found in pollen cores in the second half of our period increases steadily. The use of rye, sown in the autumn rather than the spring, is associated with moves towards three-crop rather than two-crop rotation schemes. Three-crop schemes both increased the amount of land under cultivation at any one time (two-thirds rather than just a half) and preserved better fertility. This development perhaps also underlies the observation of the Arab geographers that Slavic populations gathered not one but two harvests each year.37 There were important further developments yet to come, but much more food was being produced in central and eastern Europe by the year 1000 than had been the case five hundred years earlier.

  This was critical to sta
te formation in a number of ways. Until food surpluses were generated in substantial quantities, it was quite impossible (as was also the case with the Germanic world in the first half of the millennium) for leaders to maintain large specialist military retinues and other functionaries not engaged in primary agricultural production. Without economic surpluses, likewise, it was impossible for social differentiation to become entrenched. More food also meant more people,38 and state formation could probably never have happened as it did without this increased population. It provided all the extra manpower required for ambitious construction projects. More important, but harder to measure in concrete terms, increasing the population density in central and eastern Europe increased substantially the competition for available resources. The need to belong to a group in order to flourish has always been a powerful reason why individuals are willing to accept the costs that usually accompany group membership. Put simply, one reason why peasants – or some of them – were willing to pay food renders and do labour service for rising dynasts was that they offered sufficient military organization to guarantee safe land retention in return.39