The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

  The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

  The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

  Chapter 2

  The Advent of the Slavs

  Whereas trade and cultural exchange largely defined the relations of the ancient Greeks with the peoples of the Ukrainian steppes in the last centuries BC, the Romans of the first centuries AD had no choice but to mix trade with war. Their relations with the peoples of the steppes became primarily warlike in the fourth century, with the beginning of a period called the “barbarian invasions” in older historiography and now known as the period of migrations. It saw a major movement of peoples and tribes from Eurasia and eastern Europe toward the center and west of Europe that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire under pressure from the “barbarians” in the second half of the fifth century. Although weakened, the eastern part of the empire, known in historiography as Byzantium, managed to survive the onslaught of the steppe nomads and accompanying agriculturalists from the north. It continued to exist until the mid-fifteenth century.

  Ukraine played an important role in the drama of the migrations. Some of the key actors in the invasions that led to the fall of the Roman Empire lived in or passed through its territory. Among them were the Goths and Huns, the latter led by their king, Attila “the Hun.” In the Pontic steppes, the migrations ended the lengthy era in which the region was controlled by nomadic tribes of Iranian origin, including the Scythians and Sarmatians. The Goths were of German stock, while the Huns, whom most scholars believe to have originated in the steppes of Mongolia, came into the region accompanied by numerous Central Asian tribes. By the mid-sixth century, the Huns were gone, replaced by tribes speaking Turkic dialects.

  All the above-mentioned actors in the story of the migrations came to Ukraine, ruled its steppes, stayed for a while, and eventually left. One group, however, once brought to the surface by the upheaval of the migrations, refused to leave the scene. These were the Slavs, a conglomerate of tribes defined in linguistic and cultural terms and represented in various political formations. The Indo-European origins of their languages suggest that they came to Europe from the east sometime between the seventh and third millennia BC and thus settled in eastern Europe long before Herodotus first described the region and its inhabitants. Claiming the forested areas north of the Pontic steppes as their home, they remained invisible to Mediterranean authors throughout most of their early history.

  The Slavs first came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

  Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

  Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

  Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

  Who were these new allies of the Byzantine Empire? What did they look like? How did they fight? What did they believe in? Procopius wrote more than once that the Antes and the Sclaveni shared a common language, religion, and customs. We can thus attribute his rather detailed description of the Slavic way of life to both groups. According to Procopius, the Slavs were seminomadic, living “in pitiful hovels that they set up far apart from one another.” They constantly changed their dwelling places. The Slavic warriors were “exceptionally tall and stalwart men.” Procopius had the following to say about their looks: “Their bodies and hair are neither very fair nor blond, nor indeed do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in color.” The Slavs lived a “hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts . . . and . . . [were] continually and at all times covered with filth; however, they [were] in n
o respect base or evildoers, but they preserve[d] the Hunnic character in all its simplicity.”

  Although covered with filth, the Slavs entered history under the banner of democracy. “For these nations,” wrote Procopius, “the Sclaveni and the Antes, are not ruled by one man, but they have lived from of old under a democracy, and consequently everything that involves their welfare, whether for good or for ill, is referred to the people.” They preferred to fight their battles half naked, but, unlike the medieval Scots in Mel Gibson’s Hollywood blockbuster Braveheart, were more modest when it came to their private parts. “When they enter battle,” wrote Procopius, “the majority of them go against their enemy on foot, carrying little shields and javelins in their hands, but they never wear corselets. Indeed, some of them do not wear even a shirt or a cloak, but, gathering their trews [trousers] up as far as their private parts, they enter into battle with their opponents.”

  Additional information on the Slavic way of making war comes from the Byzantine Strategikon, written around the year 600 and attributed to the emperor Mauricius. The author describes in some detail the Slavs who crossed the Danube frontier and settled in the Balkans. He found them hospitable to travelers but freewheeling and reluctant to honor treaties or abide by majority opinion. In their homeland north of the Danube, they built their dwellings in forests along rivers and in marshy areas difficult of access to invaders. Their favorite tactic was the ambush. They preferred not to fight in open fields and did not favor regular military formations. Their weapons were short spears, wooden bows, and short arrows, some of them tipped with poison. They made slaves of their prisoners, but the period of enslavement was limited to a certain term.

  Procopius had some interesting things to say also about Slavic religion. The Slavs were anything but monotheists. “They believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him cattle and all other victims,” he wrote. While honoring one principal god, however, the Slavs by no means renounced their old habits of worshipping nature and offering sacrifices. As Procopius wrote, “They reverence . . . both rivers and nymphs and some other spirits, and they sacrifice to all these also, and they make their divinations in connection with these sacrifices.” The Byzantine author found surprising not the Slavs’ habit of making sacrifices to their gods, a tradition that they had in common with the pre-Christian Romans, but their failure to accept the Christian religion, as other imperial subjects had done long before. “They neither know it nor do they in any wise admit that it has any power among men,” wrote Procopius with some amazement, if not disappointment, “but whenever death stands close before them, either stricken with sickness or beginning a war, they make a promise that, if they escape, they will straightway make a sacrifice to the god in return for their life; and if they escape, they sacrifice just what they have promised, and consider that their safety has been bought with this same sacrifice.”

  What Procopius and other Byzantine authors tell us about the Slavs finds some corroboration in Ukrainian archeological data. The Antes are usually associated with the Penkivka archeological culture, named after a settlement in Ukraine. The bearers of that culture lived in the sixth, seventh, and early eighth centuries in the Ukrainian forest-steppe zone, between the Dniester and Dnieper Rivers, settling both banks of the Dnieper. That area would include the territories assigned by Jordanes to the Antes. Like the Antes and Sclaveni of Procopius, the Penkivka tribes lived in simple dwellings dug into the ground. They, too, often changed their dwelling places. Settlements were inhabited, deserted, and resettled, suggesting that their inhabitants practiced an itinerant form of agriculture. Archeology also tells us (and Procopius does not) that the Penkivka tribes had fortified towns that served as headquarters of local rulers and centers of administrative and military power.

  The period in which the Slavs played an independent role in the region ended in the early seventh century, when the incursion of the Avars, a conglomerate of Turkic-speaking tribes from the northern Caspian steppes, destroyed the Antes’ polity.

  The Avars left bad memories in the region, some of which lasted into the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Christian Kyivan monks wrote parts of a historical record that later became known as the Primary Chronicle, or the Tale of Bygone Years. Its initial section was based on local legends combined with Byzantine sources. According to the Primary Chronicle, the Avars “made war upon the Slavs and harassed the Dulebians, who were themselves Slavs”—a reference to a Slavic tribe that lived along the Buh River. “They even did violence to the Dulebian women,” wrote the chronicler. “When an Avar made a journey, he did not cause either a horse or a steer to be harnessed but gave command instead that three or four or five women should be yoked to his cart and be made to draw him. Such behavior was punished by divine wrath. “The Avars were large of stature and proud of spirit, and God destroyed them,” continues the chronicler. “They all perished, and not one Avar survived. There is to this day a proverb in Rus’ that runs, ‘They perished like the Avars.’”

  The Avars gave way as rulers of the Pontic steppes to the Bulgars and then to the Khazars, who brought the era of migrations to a close and established relative peace in the region by the end of the seventh century. The Khazars left much better memories among the Avars’ former subjects in the Ukrainian steppes. “Then the Khazars came upon them as they lived in the hills and forests,” wrote a Kyivan chronicler, referring to the Dnieper Slavs, “and demanded tribute from them.” According to the chronicler, the locals, previously subject to a Slavic tribe known as the Derevlianians (forest people), paid the tribute with swords—a sign of defiance and a promise of future revenge. Apart from retelling this legend, which exonerated the Kyivans who had agreed to pay tribute to the Khazars, the Kyivan chronicler showed little animosity toward the invaders.

  The Khazars had limited control over the forest-steppe borderland; the Dnieper more or less bounded their dominance in the forest zones. The Turkic Khazar elite, interested in peace and trade, was open to foreign influences. The Khazars welcomed a Christian mission to their country and even accepted Judaism, giving rise to a legend about the Khazarian origins of eastern European Jewry. The geographic core of the polity created by the Khazars was in the lower Volga and Don regions, its main centers being Itil on the Volga and Sarkel on the Don. The Khazar elite amassed its wealth by controlling trade routes, of which the Volga route to the Persian Empire and the Arab lands was by far the most important. Initially, it overshadowed the Dnieper route to the Byzantine Empire.

  In the 620s the Khazars concluded a treaty with the Byzantine Empire, which by then had reestablished its presence on the northern Black Sea shore. Olbia, taken over by the Goths back in the fourth century, was lost forever, but the Byzantine commanders secured a piece of land on the southern shore of the Crimea, protected from the peninsula’s steppes by a range of mountains. There, in Chersonesus, the administrative center of Byzantium’s Crimean possessions came into being. The principal towns were garrisoned in the times of Emperor Justinian, and the empire enlisted the Crimean Goths—a splinter group that stayed in the region after their brethren had moved westward, first to central Europe and then all the way to the Iberian Peninsula—to protect the imperial possessions. Imperial engineers helped the Goths fortify their cave towns high in the Crimean mountains. The Khazars became allies of the Byzantines against the Persians and Arabs, trying to maintain the trade routes to the richest market on earth—that of Constantinople.

  What do we know about the Slavs living in Ukraine when the Khazars controlled its eastern and central parts? More than about earlier periods, but not much more. Here our main and sometimes only source of information is the narrative of much later Kyivan chroniclers. Archeology tells us that Kyiv, which became the Khazars’ westernmost outpost in the Ukrainian forest region, came into existence some time before the turn of the sixth century. But it is the chronicle that provides a sense of why the place was so impor
tant and why it was chosen for settlement. A local legend associated the establishment of Kyiv with the river crossing nearby. The inhabitants maintained that the town had been founded by their local ruler, Kyi, whose two brothers gave their names to its hills, while the river flowing through Kyiv into the Dnieper was named after their sister, Lybid. A statue of these four founders of the city stands on the riverbank and is now one of the main landmarks of the Ukrainian capital.

  The Kyivan chronicler counted twelve Slavic tribes west of the Carpathians. In the north their settlements extended as far as Lake Ladoga, near present-day St. Petersburg; in the east, to the upper Volga and Oka Rivers; in the south, to the lower reaches of the Dniester and the middle Dnieper region. These Slavs were the predecessors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians. Linguists define them as Eastern Slavs on the basis of dialectal differences that began to develop in the sixth century, setting them apart from the Western Slavs—the predecessors of today’s Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks—as well as the South Slavs, who include Serbs, Croats, and other Slavic peoples of the former Yugoslavia.

  Seven of the twelve tribes listed by the Kyiv chronicler resided in what is now Ukraine, along the rivers Dnieper, Dniester, Buh, Prypiat, Desna, and Sozh. Only some of those tribes were under Khazar control. While their overlords and politics were different, their customs and mores seem to have been the same as, or fairly similar to, those of their neighbors. This, at least, is the impression conveyed by the Kyivan chronicler, who also happened to be a Christian monk. He considered members of all tribes other than his own to be savages. “They lived in the forest like any wild beast and ate every unclean thing,” wrote the chronicler, who looked down on his pagan predecessors and contemporaries.