It is not the effects of expansionary policies upon the empires that we’re primarily interested in, however, but how the exploited populations responded to this asset-stripping. They reacted exactly as you might expect, attempting to resist imperial expansion outright, and/or to minimize its effects when total resistance was impossible. In particular – and this is why imperial exploitation is so relevant to political consolidation, the subject matter of this chapter – uniting several originally independent, small-scale political units into a smaller number of large ones was one of the most effective strategies available to those seeking to fend off unwanted imperial attention.
The best example is provided by what proved in the long term to be a failed state formation: the Elbe Slavs again. As we’ve just seen, they felt the full weight of Ottonian imperialism. In 983, however, taking advantage of the dynasty’s difficulties elsewhere, they rose in massive and – in the short term – successful rebellion. Their resentment against Ottonian rule, and especially against the Church institutions that had been profiting so substantially from their exploitation, manifested itself in a series of atrocities against churches and churchmen that are lovingly chronicled in our Christian sources. What’s particularly striking about this revolt, though, is the element of political restructuring that was central to its success. When the Elbe Slavs fell under Ottonian domination, they comprised a group of small-scale political societies. The success of the revolt, however, was predicated on the generation of a new alliance among them, manifest in the new label ‘Liutizi’ which our sources start to give them in its immediate aftermath. The Liutizi were not a new people, but old ones reorganized. As their counterparts among the Germani on the fringes of the Roman Empire had come to appreciate so long ago, so had the Elbe Slavs learned from bitter experience that hanging around in larger numbers made it possible more effectively to resist imperial aggression.47
Nor, when any initial phase of expansion and conquest was over, was it necessarily any easier to have such imperial neighbours. The reign of Otto III was marked by a spell of excellent relations between himself and both the Bohemians and the Poles, culminating in the Emperor’s progress to the tomb of Adalbert. After Otto’s death, however, imperial policy changed dramatically. He left no son, and from the accession of his cousin Henry I in 1003 there followed some twenty years of pretty continuous warfare between the Empire and the Piast state, in which the new Emperor was happy to use the pagan Elbe Slavs as allies against his erstwhile Christian brothers. Henry, of course, had his reasons, but this kind of inconsistency in policy reflected the fact that populations beyond the Elbe were viewed as substantially second-class citizens, which meant that the desire to exploit them was always likely to be perceived as legitimate and hence to reassert itself. This underlying attitude was not informed by such a thoroughgoing, denigrating ideology as that of the Romans, whose entirely coherent, and equally unpleasant, vision of ‘barbarians’ allowed them to be treated like beasts, if that was convenient. The Poles and Bohemians were partly protected by being Christian. It was no accident that it was the pagans of the Elbe and Baltic regions, in later centuries, who would eventually feel the full brutal weight of an ideologically self-righteous form of imperialism: the so-called Northern Crusades which saw Christian Teutonic knights, amongst others, burn and kill their way north and east. Nonetheless, even Christian Slavic states suffered from second-class status, and could never be sure that the instinctive imperial desire to profit from the exploitation of outsiders might not reassert itself at their expense.48 And, in fact, the diplomacy of the ninth and tenth centuries throws up many examples of the same kind of change in imperial policy that the Poles suffered from in the early eleventh.
In the later eighth century, for instance, when Charlemagne was engaged in his long and tortuous conquest of Saxony, one particular group of Elbe Slavs, the Abodrites, were key allies. Established on the Saxons’ eastern border, where the Carolingians were attacking from the south and west, the Abodrites provided an extremely useful second front, and Charlemagne was duly grateful for their support. In return he gave them extra territory, direct military and diplomatic support and trading privileges. Once Saxony had been absorbed into the Empire, and particularly when it became the seat of Empire, the Abrodites found themselves surplus to strategic requirements. Instead of useful allies, they started to look like potential subjects, and imperial policy swung 180 degrees. Even when they were not being conquered outright, aggressive diplomacy became the order of the day, reaching its culmination in a murderous banquet organized by one frontier commander, the Margrave Gero, at which thirty of their leading men were assassinated. This dwarfs the dinner-party assassinations even of the Roman era, which were regular events but usually took out only one leader at a time. The uncertainty of life on the edge of the Empire was central to the experiences of successive rulers of the Moravians in the next century, too. Take the early years of King Zwentibald. He first came to power with the help of the east Carolingians in 870; then, in just three years, as imperial policies shifted, found himself imprisoned for several months before we finally see him raiding Bavaria in retaliation for his treatment.49 It was living close to a powerful Empire but holding – in the view of a large section of its citizenry – second-class status that laid you particularly open to these kinds of dangerous changes of policy. It was always possible for some faction within the Empire’s ruling circle to make political capital for itself by championing a harder – and more profitable – line towards you.
Examples could be multiplied, but there’s no point. What’s interesting here is the overall effect of imperial predation on the societies at the sharp end. The Elbe Slavs’ revolt provides a particularly arresting example of well-founded resentment in action, but the effects were similar elsewhere. The natural suspicion of the Moravian dynasty, for instance, shows up in the religious sphere. Along with many of our new dynasties, the new ruling line quickly decided to opt for Christian conversion. Rather than simply accepting it from the Carolingians, however, they explored every other possible avenue, famously importing the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, with papal blessing, in 863. This was done in the teeth of sustained Carolingian resentment, however, and shows very clearly the suspicion in which the Empire and all its doings were held. Eventually, after Methodius’ death, the Moravians were forced into religious line and his remaining disciples expelled in favour of Frankish clergy in 885, but the expectation of imperial exploitation remained, manifest not least in the incident of 882 with which this study began, when Zwentibald the Duke of the Moravians and his men captured the Frankish Counts Werinhar and Wezzilo and cut off their tongues, right hands, and genitals.
They were out for revenge because of the way Engelschalk had treated them when he had been in charge of the same frontier region, and were trying to prevent Engelschalk’s sons from seizing their father’s old job. The Moravians had an entirely coherent agenda here, and their revenge was very symbolic. I am obviously not privy to the mindset of your average ninth-century Moravian, but this was clearly a case, in the best Mafia tradition, of mutilation with a message. My best guess would be that cutting off the right hand and tongue emphasized that neither deed nor word could be trusted, while removing the genitals expressed the hope that this line would have no further progeny. Taken to these lengths, natural resentment against imperial military and diplomatic aggression could become a building block, both practical and ideological, by which new dynasties could extract consent for their rule. Becoming part of a larger entity always involved taking on obligations of service, but these might be acceptable if, as a result, the worst effects of predation were fended off. And although the Elbe Slavs and the Moravians provide the most explicit instances, there is every reason to suppose that imperial predation had the same effect in all of the border states: Poland, Bohemia and Denmark as well.
If this, what you might call ‘negative benefit’, was the main effect of military and diplomatic contact with Empir
e on the capacity of our dynasties to build their state structures, there were also more positive ones. On occasion, when imperial policy was in your favour, there were great photo opportunities. Otto III’s great progress to the tomb of Adalbert was a stupendous international occasion, and Boleslaw Chrobry, like many a modern leader at a summit meeting, must have been extremely happy to have his subjects see how highly he was regarded by the reigning Emperor. On the other hand, of course, it may just have been the sight of that massive cross of solid gold hanging over the tomb that set calculators whirring in the brains of some of the Emperor’s entourage as they worked out exactly how much wealth might be won from a successful war against the Piasts (leading eventually to twenty years of warfare, but that’s another story).
Not, of course, that the violence ran only in one direction. Just like their imperial contemporaries, these new dynasts had to win political support from their magnates to rule effectively, with gift-giving just as much the order of the day east of the Elbe as west of it. Their marriage policies, if anything, made the problem worse. Under the influence of Christianity, they did begin the move from outright polygamy to serial monogamy, but multiple wives and plentiful offspring were the rule – if not quite on the scale of the seventh-century Samo, who ended up with twelve wives and thirty-seven children. This marital profligacy meant that succession disputes and dynastic infighting were extremely common. Yaroslav the Wise, son of Vladimir, for instance, secured his power in 1018 only after a lengthy civil war against his half-brother Sviatopolk that saw many ups and downs and the deaths of at least three other brothers and half-brothers. And Vladimir himself had had to fight a similar war in the 970s against his half-brother Yaropolk, with similar numbers of dynastic casualties. These kinds of wars could be won only by mobilizing a wide range of support among magnates and retinues, which required wealth distribution on a considerable scale. And, just as was the case in the Roman period, leading successful raids on to the richer and more developed soil of an imperial neighbour was an extremely effective mechanism when it came to securing that perfect gift without bankrupting yourself. Accounts of the counter-raids of the Elbe Slavs, not surprisingly, focus on their propensity for smash-and-grab, but the same was true, in only a slightly more structured way, of all our other frontier dynasties. Each outbreak of trouble with the Moravians in the ninth century, or the Bohemians and Poles in the tenth, was accompanied by its due measure of wealth liberation.50
Aside from wealth and prestige, close contact with an imperial neighbour also helped secure the power of new dynasties in some more precise ways. Two leap out of the source material. First, the tenth-century Slavic states were entirely up to date in their modes of warfare, possessing armoured knights aplenty. This had not been the case before 800 AD. In the ninth century, even Saxon contingents within east Frankish, Carolingian armies at first took the form only of infantry and light cavalry. The heavily armed, mailed Saxon cavalry of the Ottonian period emerged only in the late ninth and the early tenth century, as the Saxons finally caught up with the times. Against this backdrop, it is very striking that tenth-century Bohemian and Polish armies also boasted at least some heavy armoured cavalry. We know little, if anything about Slavic warfare before 800, but it’s a pretty fair bet that if even the Saxons didn’t have the latest military hardware at that point, then neither did the Slavs. So where did knowledge of it, and access to it, come from over the next hundred years? The likeliest answer is that it actually came from the Empire, slipping eastwards over the Elbe. Already in 805, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, the Emperor Charlemagne attempted to limit trade with the Slavic world to a number of designated points along the Elbe frontier, including Bardowick, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Hallstadt, Forchheim, Regensburg and Lorch, not least because he professed himself worried about arms shipments. This immediately makes you think that arms were flowing pretty freely across the frontier, since even imperial states of the first millennium lacked the bureaucratic machinery to maintain effective border controls. Obviously, the idea of state-of-the-art Carolingian hardware was highly attractive for Slavic groups who might have to fight off Frankish armies, but such imports also had important internal political effects. Not for nothing did early modern European populations associate standing armies with royal autocracy. Acquiring the kind of military equipment that made his forces militarily dominant also put a nascent dynast in the perfect position to face down internal rivals and suppress dissent. Importing imperial military technology, therefore, directly advanced the process of state formation in the periphery.51
With this in mind, the economic organization of the core areas of these new states is also interesting. As we have seen, all quickly evolved a loose pattern of great estates, where particular service villages fulfilled specialist functions in addition to providing basic food supplies. This mode of organization was also prevalent in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, particularly in its less economically developed reaches east of the Rhine. This was, perhaps, just a sensible way to ensure vital products in pre-market-economic conditions, and arrived at entirely independently east of the Elbe. There must be at least some chance, however, that we are looking here at further, slightly more unexpected fruits of close contact between Empire and periphery.
Compared with the Roman period, what’s missing from this cocktail of contacts is the kind of diplomatic manipulation in which Roman emperors excelled, systematically promoting particular dynasts by rearranging prevailing political geographies in their favour because they seemed to promise the best hope of medium-term frontier security. Carolingian and Ottonian emperors did at times promote their particular favourites, such as the Abodrites, but there is no sign in the sources that they attempted consistently to interfere with the political structures of their neighbours. There is a good chance, however, that the diplomatic agendas of a different Empire may have played an important role in the earlier stages of these processes of transformation. Moravia, Bohemia and, to an extent, Poland, can all be seen as successor states to the Avar Empire destroyed by Charlemagne just before the year 800. We don’t know a huge amount about the internal running of the Avar Empire, but what there is would suggest that it functioned very much along the lines of that of the Huns. Certainly, like the Huns, the Avars operated an unequal confederation where the military power of their originally nomadic core was mobilized to hold a range of initially unwilling subjects to an Avar political allegiance. There was a range of more and less favoured statuses that subjects might occupy within this overall pattern. The most interesting snapshot of its operations that we have describes how one group, descendants many of them of Roman prisoners, achieved free (as opposed to slave) status, and were granted thereby their own group leader. This does sound like the Hun Empire too, and would suggest that, lacking any complex government machinery, the Avars tended to rule their subjects through trusted allied princes. If so, it is very likely that Avar rule will have cemented further the power of the kind of leaders who were appearing anyway in some Slavic groups by c.600, as they began to control the flows of new wealth coming across the east Roman frontier in particular. This combination – of sixth-century development reinforced by subsequent Avar diplomatic manipulation – is the likeliest explanation, in my view, of why the collapse of Avar rule was marked by the swift appearance of a series of Slavic leaders of seemingly substantial and established authority.52
Overall, military and diplomatic contact between these new states and the adjacent Empire thus took many forms. Imperial attentions were in general predatory, resulting in a huge groundswell of aggression flowing across from the imperial side of the frontier. This was matched, when conditions were right, by a countervailing tendency on the part of the new states, or factions within them, to raid the rich assets available west of the Elbe. So much is only what you might expect, but both phenomena had a strong tendency to advance state formation, giving nascent dynasts ideological cement or just plain cash to employ in advancing the process. Alongside these major them
es of contact went some subthemes that also pushed the process forward: exports of military and other technologies, and occasional moments when benevolent imperial attention advanced the capital of particular dynasts.
Looking at the broader patterns of development from the ninth century onwards, two other points are worth making. First, as regards the two effects of proximity to an empire, the ‘negative benefit’ – using its aggression as ideological cement for your own state formation – and the ‘positive benefit’ – being able to raid it as a source of ready funds – a comparison of the fate of the Elbe Slavs with the Piast and Premyslid states suggests that the former was the more important. While the Elbe Slavs were in the better position for raiding, being situated right on the imperial frontier, and indulged in it aplenty, this also meant that it was too easy for the Empire to get at them in return. And, of course, the whole point about an imperial power is that, when it put its mind to it, and other factors were not interfering, it was that much more powerful than any surrounding states. There could only be one victor, therefore, in a head-to-head collision between the Empire and the Elbe Slavs. Poland was significantly further away, insulated geographically from immediate imperial aggression, while the upland basin of Bohemia enjoyed the stratigraphic protection of the Bohemian Forest, the Ore and the Krkonoše Mountains. By itself, then, ready access to raiding was not a sufficient basis for state formation. It was a useful additional resource, but only if you could survive imperial counterattack and use to your benefit all the resentment that this would generate.
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