The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  The Slavs present more of a problem than the Scandinavians. They came to cover a vast region of central and eastern Europe, but when and how they came there is hardly documented, either historically or archaeologically. Furthermore their origin has been an ideological football for rival national communities, in most of the zones of the most fervent (and most violent) nationalist disagreement in Europe across the last century. Here, more than elsewhere, we have to make distinctions: between the distribution of people called Sklavnoi/Sclaveni/Sclavi or variants by both Greek and Latin authors; the distribution of common archaeological culture-elements across the zone stretching from the Elbe in the west to the Dniepr in the east and the lower Danube in the south; and the distribution of people speaking early versions of Slavic languages. These three are not the same, however often they have been intermingled. In particular, what languages people spoke in most parts of eastern and central Europe is effectively irrecoverable before the ninth century or so. But language, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, is in any case no guide to identity in our period, and is the least important of these three categories. It is best simply to see Slavic speakers as only one section, although a substantial one, of a set of small-scale communities of settled agriculturalists in the wide territories from the Baltic to the Danube, and moving southwards into the Byzantine Balkans. Nearby groups will have spoken other languages, Germanic, Romance (in parts of Romania and elsewhere), Greek (in the southern Balkans), Baltic (in Belarus and northwards), Finnic (in north-western Russia), and others again, without necessarily being very different the one from the other in material terms.

  What can be said, on the other hand, is that from the sixth century a distinct set of related archaeological characteristics can be found increasingly widely in this large region. These included villages of a few houses each, single-roomed houses with partly sunken floors and a stone oven or hearth, simple handmade ceramics (these however have parallels in other small-scale early medieval societies), bow fibulae and head-dresses for women, a tendency to cremation burials, and a relative absence of signs of social differentiation. The lands in which these broad common elements (with substantial local variation) are found steadily became more extensive; in parts of the Elbe valley, for example, villages with sunken-floored houses are first found in the late sixth or seventh centuries, and in many places they succeed settlements with cemeteries more similar to those in Frankish/Saxon/Aleman areas. It is likely that the communities which lived like this had weak social and political hierarchies; this fits the absence of strong archaeological differentiation, and also the persistent stress by east Roman/Byzantine writers of the sixth century and later on the weakness of political leadership among the Sklavnoi living on the Balkan frontier of this culture-area. This doubtless means that they operated in very small political-social groups or tribes, and we know some (though only some) of their multifarious and ever-changing names. As with the Germani north of the Roman empire in the fourth century and earlier (see above, Chapter 2), only external observers, far from well informed, saw them as a whole; a common ‘Slavic’ identity did not ever exist, either in the early Middle Ages or later, and local tribal loyalties were in our period what guided them. What links them all together is simply the network of the common material culture just described. On the other hand, these small groups were not militarily or politically ineffective, as their expansion shows. In the west, they may have been moving into relatively underpopulated areas, until by the seventh century they were on the fringes of the Merovingian world; in the south, however, they took over a good part of the Balkans from the Byzantine state itself after 600, as we saw in Chapter 11.

  These peoples are simply called ‘Slavs’ by most scholars. This, however, seems to me as problematic as calling the Germanic-speaking, or, more widely, ‘barbarian’, peoples of the fifth century ‘Germans’: these are later terms, which introduce concepts of language and identity that are anachronistic in this period. As in previous chapters, I here use the term ‘Sclavenian’ to cover all of the lands of the material culture discussed in the previous paragraph. This reflects the fact that both Franks and Byzantines did indeed know their neighbours collectively as Sclaveni, even if not all the Sclavenian communities as defined here would have necessarily been called by such a term even by the Franks and Byzantines, and even though none of the Sclavenians would have used the term themselves. Slavic languages did however spread across most - never all - of this wide culture-area in the end, of course. Already in the early ninth century Einhard claimed that the peoples on the Carolingian borders ‘almost all speak a similar language’, presumably Slavic; by the tenth century we can be surer that Slavic languages were a common feature of the culture-area, and for this period and later I use the term ‘Slav’ more freely. (‘Slavic’ will only be used for the language-group. Slavic languages, particularly in the south and east, are also often called ‘Slavonic’, but that term is used here only for the liturgy introduced by missionaries from Byzantium.)

  The Sclavenians remained a large set of tiny polities into the eighth century, and often beyond. The zoupaniai on the Adriatic coast mentioned by Constantine VII in the mid-tenth century, some by now crystallized into Croatia though some not, had hardly more than a score of villages each, or indeed less. Tribes of this kind formed temporary alliances to make military attacks, as with the five separate named groups who besieged Thessaloniki in the 610s, much as Germanic tribes had done in the late Roman empire. Their rulers seem to have been chieftains at best, maybe only ‘big men’ or local leaders/patrons, like Icelandic goðar, subsisting on small-scale tributes. By the later eighth century, particularly in what is now eastern Germany, Poland and western Ukraine, strongholds begin to appear in the archaeology, with earth and timber ramparts, indicating more elaborate organizational hierarchies, although not necessarily larger-scale, or with permanent leaders. This fragmented political structure made Sclavenian society vulnerable once Frankish power developed in what is now central and southern Germany in the later sixth century, and even more so when Pippin III and Charlemagne revived Frankish aggression in the eighth, pushing their borders up to the edge of the Sclavenian culture-area right across Europe, from the Abodrites on the Baltic coast to the Carantani on the Adriatic. Although the Carolingian Franks never attempted permanent conquests of Sclavenian groups, they raided constantly; it was in the Carolingian period that the word sclavus became a new word for ‘slave’, and slave trading, to the Arab world in particular, became a major economic feature of the ninth century - it underpinned the prosperity of the Adriatic’s new major seaport, Venice, as we shall see in Chapter 22. At the same time as this, the Byzantines re-formed their own power structures, and, from the mid-eighth century, began to make inroads on the Sclavenian communities of the central and southern Balkans. Faced with these new threats, if the Sclavenians did not organize themselves more effectively, they would be in serious trouble. They did so in two ways: by accepting external overlords, and by reorganizing themselves internally in the direction of stronger political structures, often under the influence of their Byzantine and Carolingian neighbours and enemies. Let us look at these in turn.

  There had always been the possibility of wider hegemonies in the Sclavenian world, usually established by Turkic-speaking nomadic groups coming west from central Asia into the south Russian/Ukrainian steppe lands and then, sometimes, into the Danube basin, who could be militarily very effective for short periods. As we have seen, the Huns were the first in the period of this book, at a time when Gothic tribal groups predominated in this part of Europe; in the sixth and early seventh century, it was the turn of the Avars, who had a wide domination over Sclavenian tribes in the Balkans, and who besieged Constantinople in loose alliance with the Persians in 626. This Avar power was, like that of the Huns, temporary, and already by the mid-seventh century it was restricted to the core Avar territory, the Pannonian plain, modern Hungary. In the eastern Balkans it was replaced by that of the longest lasting of
these Turkic groups, the Bulgars, whose hegemony south of the Danube began in 680 and developed into a permanent state in the ninth century. As we saw in Chapters 11 and 13, the Bulgars borrowed political practices wholesale from the Byzantines; Constantinople was very close to them, so this was relatively easy, and, if they did not do so, the resurgent Byzantines would be bound to undermine their power. This did indeed happen in the end, with Basil II’s conquest in 1014-18; but Bulgar survival until then (and revival two centuries later) was in great part due to direct imitation of their stronger neighbours. Their Sclavenian subjects were presumably happy for the Bulgar khagans (after c. 913, tsars) to do this; it was preferable to external attack, rapine and enslavement.

  Non-Turkic hegemonies occurred as well. The first and briefest was that of Samo, the Frankish merchant who united some west Sclavenian groups roughly in the area of the modern Czech Republic for a generation in the seventh century in the face of both the Avars and Dagobert I and his heirs. Samo’s power disappeared after his death, and it is not even really certain where his base was (his people are called Wends in Frankish sources, but this is almost as generic a word as Sclavenus); but it is clear that his hegemony was largely a reaction to Frankish danger, and it is significant that even a temporary larger-scale political structure in the west of the Sclavenian lands was the work of a foreigner, at least in this early period. The Hungarians need recognition in this respect, too, as the next major nomadic group to reach Pannonia, in the 890s, for they were Uralic-speaking, not Turkic, although in many respects they replicated Avar hegemony for a long time. They were more long-lasting as a cultural presence than the other external ruling groups discussed here, however, for when they settled down in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and began to organize a political system along Bohemian/Polish (and thus, by extension, Frankish) lines, they continued to speak a Uralic, not a Slavic, language, and still do.

  By far the most successful non-Turkic hegemony in the long run was that of the Rus. They began as Swedish merchant groups settled in the river valleys behind modern St Petersburg, and their trading settlements have been found at, above all, Staraya Ladoga in the eighth century and Gorodishche in the ninth (the latter, after the mid-tenth century, replaced by nearby Novgorod), with artisanal goods similar to those of sites like Birka. These Swedish settlers must have been the communities referred to in the Annals of Saint-Bertin for 839, and by Byzantine sources of the next century, as Rhos; the Saint-Bertin annalist also called the Rhos Swedes, and ‘Swede’ in Estonian, the nearest Finnic language, is Root’si. They specialized in the fur trade, taking advantage of the presence of valuable fur-bearing animals in the Russian forests, and were middlemen, along with the Bulgar merchant settlements on the Volga, for an increasingly important trade in fur and, soon, slaves along the great rivers of Russia to Iran and what is now Uzbekistan, in return for Islamic silver coins, which can be found in substantial quantities in Sweden. They had a chacanus in 839, that is, a khagan, a standard Turkic word for ruler, and thus some local political organization, presumably already including a hegemony over some of the local tribes (who were probably Finnic-speaking in this area). The Rus were ambitious; it is not clear when they turned their buying of furs into a tribute of furs from an increasingly large tract of forest land, but this was probably well under way when they launched an unsuccessful but extremely daring surprise attack on Constantinople itself - a long way from these northern rivers - in 860. They also extended their hegemony southwards into Slavic-speaking areas (east was blocked by the Volga Bulgars), first to Gnëzdovo (close to modern Smolensk) and then, by 900 or so, to Kiev, further south down the Dniepr on the river route to Byzantium, with which they signed very profitable trading treaties in the tenth century.

  It is as rulers of Kiev that named kagani or knyaz‘i, generally translated ‘princes’, of the Rus first begin to be reliably documented in the tenth century, in contemporary Byzantine and Frankish sources, as also in the perhaps late eleventh-century, and certainly early twelfth-, Russian Primary Chronicle: Igor (d. c. 945), who attacked Constantinople again in 941; his widow Ol’ga, ruling for her son Svyatoslav (c. 945-65); Svyatoslav as an adult ruler (c. 965-72); and his most successful son, Vladimir (c. 978-1015). By then, they ruled from Novgorod to the edge of the Ukrainian steppes, and were attacking eastwards to the Bulgars on the Volga, southwards to the Khazars on the Don and into Balkan Bulgaria, and westwards to Polotsk (where Vladimir removed a rival Scandinavian, Rogvolod) and in the direction of what is now Poland. Vladimir died in control of a very large area, around the size of Ottonian East Francia, although including a far smaller population, for the area was and is mostly forest, except for settlements along the rivers. And this hegemony, unlike most others just discussed, remained stable. Vladimir’s numerous heirs maintained an exclusive family dominance over this core Russian territory until the Mongol invasion of 1237-40; no matter how many principalities they created and fought over, no non-family-member ruled anywhere in the Russian lands after Rogvolod until the Mongol Batu. The dominance of Igor’s family indeed went back to the earliest period they are documented, for Ol‘ga’s long rule as kniagina, only nominally associated with her son, seems to have been uncontested and effective, indicating an unchallenged dynastic stability - out of all the female rulers of different kinds in tenth-century Europe, from Marozia through Theophanu to Æthelflæd, Ol’ga may well have been the most powerful.

  There cannot have been many Scandinavians in most of the territory of Rus: outside the northern trading towns, only some of the immediate entourage of the tenth-century princes had Scandinavian names, and after Igor (Ingvar) and Ol‘ga (Helga) the princes themselves used East Slavic, that is, Old Russian/Ukrainian, names. All our evidence indicates that East Slavic was the dominant language in Kiev, and it steadily spread northwards; by the time of our earliest birchbark letters and documents, found by archaeologists in excavation levels starting in the eleventh century, it was dominant even in Novgorod. The Scandinavian elements in Rus probably simply consisted of the tightness and ambition of the ruling dynasty, which acted as a catalyst for a wider territorial crystallization. The core techniques of rule over that territory, by contrast, seem essentially to have been taken over from contemporary Turkic hegemonies, the Volga Bulgars and the main seventh- to tenth-century rulers over the southern steppes, the Khazars: the title khagan was borrowed from either the Bulgars or the Khazars, and the basic pattern of rule over dependent Finnic- and Slavic-speaking tribes, the extraction of tribute, was also a long-standing Turkic tradition; aristocratic or royal landownership of a type recognizable in western Europe was only a much later medieval development. The construction of an extensive network of long-distance defensive ramparts in the Kiev region under Vladimir (something which shows his control of local manpower) has Bulgarian parallels, too. The systematic foundation of large fortified towns as regional political centres from the late tenth century, which earned Rus the name of Garðaríki, the ‘land of towns’, in some Scandi navian texts, seems however to have had Sclavenian antecedents, as implied by the western Sclavenian fortresses already mentioned. So may have been the druzhina or military entourage that every rival prince had and which acted as the basic underpinning of all princely power, although such entourages were common features of all such societies, and had plenty of Germanic and Turkic parallels. But, of course, once the Rus polity developed past a simple military hegemony, it would inevitably draw more on the social structures of the main body of the population, which was increasingly clearly Sclavenian/Slav. This it did ever more steadily henceforth.

  It can finally be added that, towards the end of our period, yet another political resource was added to the Kievan principality, Byzantine Christianity. The Rus, after their initial raids southwards, were more fully accepted into the Byzantine diplomatic network. As we saw in Chapter 13, it is entirely likely that Svyatoslav’s attacks on Bulgaria in 967 were initially encouraged by Constantinople; Vladimir’s troops were, furthermo
re, essential to Basil II’s political success in 989. This was the setting for a religious shift as well. The Khazars had Jewish rulers; this already provided a model for taking on a new faith, but it is likely that the Rus felt they needed a different religion from the Khazars, and they were anyway close enough to the Byzantines politically for Orthodoxy to be a logical next step. Ol‘ga had been personally converted in Constantinople around 955; Vladimir, for his part, formally accepted Christianity for his whole people in about 988. The conversion process was very slow to extend outside the court, but this moment of acceptance allowed the institutions of the church, and a Christian imagery of legitimate rulership, to take root in Rus and steadily to spread. The churches of Kiev were impressive, and the early eleventh-century building of St Sophia, built by Byzantine craftsmen, still stands as the largest and most completely decorated Byzantine church of that century. Administrative and artisanal traditions were borrowed from Constantinople and developed in Kiev, too. The Rus took on these Byzantine influences without any of the dangers the Bulgars faced, as they were too far away for Constantinople to take them over, and they could thus be as creative as they liked with them. This hybrid power, Turkic, Sclavenian and Byzantine, with a dash of Scandinavian, maintained an essential stability from now on, as eastern Europe’s most effective political player.

  The western Sclavenian peoples did not have these external hegemonies, but in the ninth and tenth centuries they too, on the basis of internal developments, began to organize themselves into rather larger political groupings than had existed hitherto. The first of these was Moravia, the major sparring-partner of the East Franks in the ninth century, as we saw in Chapter 16; the Moravians are first referred to in the 820s, and three generations of powerful rulers, Mojmír (c. 830-46), Rastislav (846-70) and Sviatopluk or Zwentibald (870-94), extended their power widely in what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and further afield still. Where their political centre was has been debated recently, with arguments proposed, on the basis of Constantine VII’s ethnographic writing and the wars described in the Annals of Fulda, for a core Moravian principality located as far south as Sirmium, in modern northern Serbia. But the concentration of large ninth-century fortified settlements in modern Moravia (the eastern part of the Czech Republic), notably Stare Mesto and Mikulice, with gold and silver finds and a more complex production of iron and pottery, is a fairly clear sign of a strong political power and of developed social hierarchies, so this traditional location for ninth-century Moravia continues to seem the most plausible. The material basis of Moravian power was a development out of the smaller-scale stronghold societies of the previous century, with autonomy made possible by now by the end of the last vestiges of Avar hegemony. All the same, the impetus for this level of political aggregation must have been the Frankish threat, which presumably legitimized more stable and ambitious political hierarchies. Frankish emulation led also to the adoption of Latin Christianity from the 830s onwards, apart from a brief flutter in 863-85 with Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodios; see Chapter 13. The Moravian principality could well have developed into an organized state along Carolingian lines, however hostile it was to Carolingian political influence, just as, in the Byzantine orbit, did Bulgaria. It is increasingly clear that the same is true of the smaller Croat duchy/principality which developed in the 820s or so on the Dalmatian coast in modern south Croatia, this time under direct Carolingian patronage; ninth-century Croat material culture, notably more complex than earlier, as in Moravia, shows a strong influence of Frankish metal-working and Italian stone-carving techniques, and a handful of Latin documents from the 840s onwards show Italian influence even over concepts of landowning, as well as Carolingian-style court officials. The Hungarians destroyed Moravian power between 894 and 905, but the Croat principality continued, and Tomislav (c. 910-29) was even recognized as rex, king, by Pope John X in 925.