Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  But much more changed in barbarian Europe between 500 and 1000 than the appearance of more people producing more food. Other economic developments were just as important to state-building, or nearly so. Military retinues, for instance, needed arms and armour, and, as we have seen, the new rulers of the tenth century controlled substantial reserves of precious metals (witness the gold cross erected by Boleslaw Chrobry over Adalbert’s tomb) as well as all the other resources, apart from the mere physical labour, required to erect, decorate and furnish prestige projects such as the cathedrals and palace complexes that are such a marked feature of the period. In part, the rulers’ capacity to do so arose from some general processes of economic development affecting the whole of central and eastern Europe at this time, processes beyond their control. In part, it was fostered by particular policies adopted by the dynasts themselves.

  The biggest non-agricultural economic phenomenon in these years was the rise of an international trade network in furs and slaves. Some of its western axes began to operate in the seventh century, but it was in the eighth that it stretched into the Baltic, and the early ninth before it exploded more generally across eastern Europe. We’ve already encountered the role of waterborne Scandinavians in making this network’s longer-distance connections work, and its central role in the whole Viking phenomenon. Consequently, the period saw a huge outflow of raw materials – largely people and furs – from northern and eastern Europe, and a flood, in return, of due payment. Large quantities of Byzantine silks were presumably one part of this, but few traces of these materials survive in our written sources, and none archaeologically. Beautifully finished silks were the main item Byzantium had to offer in exchange for imported items. What the archaeological record has produced in vast quantities, however, is silver coinage, above all from the Muslim world but from western Europe as well. These coins survive in quite astonishing quantities: as we saw in Chapter 9, over 220,000 Muslim coins in hoards of five or more according to recent estimates. This is all the more impressive given that silver has never been without value. The coins that survive are probably no more than the tip of a silver iceberg that has been reworked many times in the intervening centuries.

  Kings, of course, were hugely interested in such massive flows of wealth. Not least, they could milk it for tolls, offering merchants safe places for making their exchanges and charging fees in return. Right at the beginning of the ninth century, the then King of pre-collapse Denmark, Godfrid, forced merchants who’d previously operated on Slavic territory at the trading centre called Reric to move to his newly built trading station at Hedeby in southern Jutland. The move is recorded in a contemporary source, and has found archaeological confirmation. The dendrochronology dates of early timbers recovered from Hedeby show that, as the text reports, it was built in c. 810 when Godfrid was at the height of his powers. The king’s interests here can only have been financial. Prague, likewise, one of the key centres of the Premyslid dynasty of Bohemia, was also, as the Muslim geographers report, a major entrepôt in the slave trade. The tolls must greatly have swelled the coffers of the dynasty, and the trade’s importance was such that one of the reasons given for Wenceslas’ killing is that he was attempting to outlaw it.

  Kiev, too, new home of the Rurikids in the tenth century, was a trading entrepôt of huge importance. Byzantine and Russian sources both confirm that it was the starting point for the Rus trade fleets that came to Constantinople every spring from the early tenth century onwards. And by the early eleventh, Thietmar of Merseburg tells us, the city boasted no fewer than eight markets. Only in the case of Poland do we lack explicit textual evidence of its participation in the new international trade networks, but this can only be an accident of (non-)survival. The territory of the Piasts has thrown up such a density of Muslim silver coin finds that there is no doubt that its population was in some way involved in the new trading networks.40 So all of our new dynasties effectively tapped in to the new wealth being generated.

  Nor was their role confined merely to taking tolls. They also sometimes interfered actively to reshape, as it were, the networks and maximize their own profits. This is easiest to demonstrate in the case of the Rurikids. In the tenth century the dynasty mounted collective military action on two occasions, in 911 and 944, to force the Byzantine authorities in Constantinople to grant Rus traders increasingly favourable trade terms, including the stipulation that they would get free bed and board inside the city for a month while conducting business. Not surprisingly, given the origins of Scandinavian interest in Russia, the treaties show us that members of the Rurikid dynasty (and not just its current head) were themselves active traders, so they had every reason to want to increase activity and market share. But I would not jump to the conclusion that this was an enterprise limited to the Rurikids. Byzantine–Rus trade connections just happen to be comparatively well documented, and it seems to me entirely likely, although undocumented, that other dynasts took an equally active interest in developing international trade links along the particular lines that best suited them.41

  Even though we don’t know as much about this as we would like to, a good case can be made that all these dynasties took a proactive role in organizing the economies of at least their dynastic heartlands. The picture has emerged from a mix of historical sources and archaeological investigation. Looked at archaeologically, the tenth-century dynastic heartlands of Poland and Bohemia are striking for the relative density of their populations. Once again, this observation is based upon detailed knowledge of pottery chronologies, whose spread gives you a reasonable guide to the existence of settlements. The evidence suggests that this population density was not an accident, but the outcome of deliberate interference. As the archaeology has shown, a key moment in the rise of both Premyslid and Piast dynasties came when they destroyed the defended centres associated with the old sociopolitical structures, or ‘tribes’, and replaced them with their own chain of castles, in the later ninth and the earlier tenth century respectively. This process, it seems, was accompanied by the deliberate transfer of at least some of the subdued population groups to the dynasty’s heartland. Some transfers are mentioned in our sources. The RPC, for instance, associates Prince Vladimir in the late tenth century with a mass transfer of various population groups – Slavs, Krivichi, Chud and Viatichi – to different places along the River Desna. Here, persuasion rather than force may have provided sufficient incentive for the move. In other cases – Poland and Bohemia – all we have is the archaeological reflection of the effects of such a process in the sudden creation of an unusually dense population cluster, but early texts (all gifts to monasteries) from both these kingdoms (and, indeed, from Russia too) make clear the purpose of these resettlements. The classic economic form to emerge from these early texts is the ‘service village’, already mentioned. These unfree villagers were required to fulfil particular economic functions for the king, such as bee-keeping or horse-breeding, in addition to providing standard food renders. The fact that they were unfree strongly suggests their origins lay in forced resettlements.42

  Kings – or kings and their advisers – were economically alert enough, therefore, to maximize the exploitation of their dynastic heartlands. The way this was done suggests that they were operating in a world where there was little in the way of a functioning market economy in agricultural goods, since instead of simply being able to purchase the required items, specialist tasks had to be assigned to particular settlements. This is not surprising. The same was true of the ninth-century Carolingians who were still using service villages in certain areas, and is in line with both the coinage evidence and the fact that peasants owed the king food renders rather than cash taxes. North and eastern Europe was still at the time an economy lacking small change. Muslim silver coins were plentiful enough, but these were of much too high value to do your everyday shopping with. Use one of them at the baker’s and you’d come home with a few sackfuls of bread, which would have gone stale long before you ate it. Likew
ise, although kings generally preferred cash taxes because they were infinitely more flexible, they could demand them only when the possibility existed for peasants to sell on any surplus production to merchants.

  All of this adds another dimension, of course, to the tendency of these late first-millennium states to operate with a distinct centre–periphery dichotomy. Not only was this an accidental offshoot of the logistic limitations of itineration, but it reflected something more fundamental about the states’ construction. Thanks to the policies of the triumphant dynasties, core and periphery were also distinct in population density and economic organization. In the case of the Kievan Rus state, because of the peculiarities of its origins, the process of core creation had an additional importance. Up to the mid-tenth century, the Riurikid dynasty displayed a distinct capacity to shift its centre of operations about. It first came to prominence in the north with an initial seat, it seems, at Gorodishche (old Novgorod) before transferring, as we have seen, south to Kiev on the River Dnieper in the late ninth century, when Oleg came south with his army.

  The reasoning behind this transfer requires more than a little puzzling out. At first sight, it seems an odd move, since Gorodishche, as noted earlier, was better placed for controlling trade flows along the Volga to the Muslim world, which was a far richer trade route than its counterpart along the Dnieper to Constantinople. Kiev, however, had other advantages. Situated on the wooded steppe, Kiev was excellently placed to dominate the surrounding regions of what is now Ukraine, which had become home in the seventh and eighth centuries to a large Slavic agricultural population. This was organized into units with their own substantial political structures before the arrival of any Scandinavians. The Polian dominated the area immediately around Kiev, the other groups in the vicinity being the Derevlians, Severians, Radimichi and Dregovichi (Map 19). While less well placed in purely trade terms, Kiev offered Scandinavian dynastic wannabes far more in the way of exploitable human and economic resources. Already in the time of Oleg, the RPC tells us, the Grand Prince’s army consisted not just of Scandinavians, but of Slavic- and Finnic-speakers. For the Grand Prince, who wanted to be much more than a merchant prince, Ukraine had much more to offer than the north. Even so, the Riurikids were not quite yet ready to give up the gypsy life. Oleg’s son and heir Sviatoslav engaged in wide-ranging campaigns, as far east as the Volga and south all the way to the Caucasus. The RPC reports that, just before his death, he was contemplating relocating the capital of the dynasty a third time – to the Danube. The work of Sviatoslav’s son and eventual heir Vladimir, in generating a much stronger economic core in and around Kiev along the Desna, had the particular effect of rooting the Riurikid state once and for all in its Ukrainian heartlands.43

  There is, of course, much else we’d like to know about how state-building intersected with the economic development unfolding in the later first millennium. One huge gap is the lack of detailed information about iron-mining and steelworking. The kinds of armies deployed by the new dynasts imposed a huge demand for these items, but there is no good information on how this was satisfied. Nonetheless, the big picture is clear enough in outline. State-building would have been impossible without a number of pre-existing social and economic transformations of fundamental importance: the generation of a much more productive agriculture, the substantial population increase that followed on from this, a huge increase in the amount of movable wealth, and the more developed social hierarchies that formed around its unequal distribution.

  But if these huge changes provided the necessary backdrop, the dynasts were themselves responsible for further social and economic developments of profound importance. On the trading front, they not only milked the new international networks for all the tolls they could get, but actively extended them, as and when they could. At home, likewise, agricultural production in the core areas of their kingdoms was maximized. None of these processes was complete by the year 1000. Not only was agricultural production reorganized on a manorial basis from the eleventh century, but the grandsons and great-grandsons of the dynasts would also famously employ recruiting agents to bolster output still further by making hundreds of thousands of German peasants offers they could not refuse to move eastwards.44 Even if all this was still work in progress by 1000, we have arrived at a partial answer to our question. Normal dynastic ambition produced entirely abnormal results during this period because deeply rooted social and economic transformation meant that the dynasts were pushing at a door that was already opening.

  But this, at best, is still only half an answer. Dynastic ambition provided the activating mechanism for state formation; being both cause and effect of the political revolution we have been observing, massive social and economic transformation was its necessary backdrop. But what underlay those initial social and economic transformations that gave such free range to dynastic wannabes to remake the map of central and eastern Europe?

  THE RISE OF THE STATE

  In Soviet days, everything was so simple. From the fifth century onwards, often living alongside an existing population, egalitarian Slavs took possession of the landscape of what would become Slavic Europe. Then followed a long, slow process of internal social and economic evolution over the next four to five hundred years, until classes formed around manorial estate-based agriculture and the first states appeared, based on the unequal distribution of control of the agricultural means of production. This always looked more like a Marxist fairytale than anything to do with historical reality, and all the more recent work has only emphasized what a dramatic story state formation actually was. In many places, even initial Slavicization occurred maybe a hundred and fifty years later than used to be thought, manorialized agriculture followed state formation rather than preceding it, and archaeology has brought to light a sudden and violent final stage, where rising dynasts used military muscle rather than long-term socioeconomic evolution to destroy one sociopolitical order and replace it with their own. What we have to explain, all this emphasizes, is why in the ninth and tenth centuries dynasties were suddenly able to grasp the reins of power with so much vigour. Just as with the appearance of larger political structures in the Germanic world in the first half of the millennium, a key role was played by an increasingly dense network of contacts that grew up between Slavic Europe and its more developed imperial neighbours.

  Empire Games

  In central Europe, the Slavic world was in direct contact with two successive imperial states: the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the Ottonians in the tenth. Neither was as robust as their Roman predecessor, but each was more than powerful enough in their heyday for their military and diplomatic priorities to have major consequences for neighbouring Slavic and Scandinavian societies. Just as in the Roman period, the most immediate type of contact between Carolingians and Ottonians and their neighbours was imperial aggression. Both these late first-millennium empires built their internal political coherence around the distribution of gifts to local elites, who not only ran their localities but also provided emperors with military muscle.

  But Carolingian and Ottonian emperors lacked not only the huge financial reservoir that control of the developed Mediterranean world had brought their Roman counterpart, but also any thoroughgoing powers of taxation even over such lands as they did control. As a result, their gifts to local elites often took the form of non-renewable assets such as land from the royal fisc, which generated a tendency for these empires to fragment from within, as power built up in local hands. The only thing that could square this circle was expansion, providing rulers with an alternative form of renewable wealth to large-scale taxation, and allowing them to reward local elites and maintain their own power at the same time. If anything, therefore, the maintenance of central power was actually predicated more upon expansion in both of these later empires than was the case even with Rome, and both preyed upon their neighbours as and when they could. In the ninety years separating the accession to power of Charles Martel in 715 an
d the later years of his grandson the Emperor Charlemagne, Carolingian armies were predatorily active in the field for all but five of them. In the first half of the tenth century, likewise, a steady Drang nach Osten on the part of what was originally the ruling ducal dynasty of Saxony was a key reason why Henry I and his son Otto I were able to beat off all comers and turn themselves into the Carolingians’ imperial heirs.45

  Predatory expansion always produced pillage, but its real benefit was more structured, long-term exploitation. Even territories not fully subdued were part of the story. From the time of Henry I, Bohemia had to pay an annual tribute, and after 950 owed military support to the dynasty. For about a decade from the mid-960s, likewise, Miesco I of Poland was cast in the role of tributary. For territories more thoroughly under the imperial thumb, the weight of exploitation was correspondingly heavy. Successful campaigns against the so-called Elbe Slavs (small-scale groups who lived broadly between the Rivers Elbe and Oder (Map 14) in the first half of the tenth century) allowed the Ottonians to establish nine major collection centres (called ‘towns’, urbes – or burgwards in our sources) east of the Elbe. These received what the charters euphemistically call ‘annual gifts’ from the Slavs, some of the proceeds of which were divided between the Ottonians’ two favourite ecclesiastics, the Archbishops of Magdeburg and Meissen. It is the charters granted these sees by Otto that document the arrangement. Nor was it just ecclesiastical institutions that benefited from the flow of the new wealth. Frontier commands in what can only be called this colonial situation – called ‘marches’ – were in huge demand among Otto’s magnates because of the opportunities for enrichment they offered. Their distribution was even the source of ferocious feuds within magnate families, when one branch received a nice juicy plum but another did not. Most famously, this was the origin of the bad blood between two brothers, Herrman and Wichman Billung. Herrman got the key appointment and was for ever loyal to Otto; jealousy led Wichmann throughout his long and bitter life into the camp of any opposition to Otto, whatever the issue.46