by Colin Wells
Bulgaria had pushed itself into the Byzantine consciousness on its own, as a powerful neighbor and rival, before entering Byzantium's cultural orbit. Serbia was a Byzantine creature from the start. As an identifiable political entity, Serbia owed its very origins to Byzantium—and to Byzantium's need for a willing ally against the emerging might of the Bulgar state.
“The prince of Serbia has from the beginning, that is ever since the reign of Heraclius the emperor, been in servitude and submission to the emperor of the Romans, and was never subject to the prince of Bulgaria.” So writes Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, spreading, as he often does, a gauzy layer of imperial fantasy over what historians can only hope is a foundation of truth. Serbia instead begins to take shape in the decades after the terrifying reign of the Bulgar khan Krum in the early ninth century, as Byzantine diplomats and agents arrived and got to work with their purses and their promises.
Perhaps to counter Byzantine infiltration, the Bulgars invaded Serb territory in the 840s, but were driven out by the Serb ruler Vlastimir after several years of heavy fighting. Although Vlastimir expanded Serb lands, as was customary with the Slavs he divided his dominions among his three children. The resulting feud between the three branches of this ruling family helped ensure that for the time being Serbia remained a pawn in the contest between Byzantium and Bulgaria that reached its first crescendo in the time of Symeon.
Serbia Enters the Byzantine Commonwealth
Serbia came under Bulgarian control during Symeon's rule, but after his death the Serbs won independence. They were led by a descendant of Vlastimir, Caslav, who had been born in Bulgaria and spent most of his life as a hostage there before escaping back to Serbia to lead the revolt. The exact date of Caslav's escape and the revolt aren't known, but it all probably happened within a few years of Symeon's death. Caslav ruled for three more decades, remaining a loyal Byzantine ally for all ofthat time.
For this reason, scholars assume that Byzantine influences spread in Serbia during Caslav's rule. Many Serb refugees had fled to Byzantine territory during the wars with Symeon and the Bulgarian occupation, and they now returned, perhaps bringing Christianity and other Byzantine ways with them. But little is known for sure, and we should keep in mind that, unlike Bulgaria, Serbia was not yet a cohesive nation but still a fluid ethnic confederation. Caslav's Serbian state, whose borders aren't known, was only one of several. Others included Zachumliya, Duklja (Dioclea), Trebinja, and later Raska, which by the twelfth century would become the most important center of Serb power.
It was from Raska that the Serbs began expanding in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, struggling, like the Bulgarians earlier, to prove themselves and their identity against Byzantium even as they were drawn ever more tightly into its cultural orbit. By this time the Byzantine emperors considered the Serbs to be their subjects. Serb rulers, called grand zhupans, held power at the emperor's pleasure, and when they revolted—which they did with some regularity—they were seen as treacherous mutineers. This was dramatically illustrated in 1172, when the emperor Manuel Comnenus defeated the grand zhupan Stefan Nemanja. Stefan was brought before the emperor bareheaded and barefoot, with a rope around his neck, to proffer his sword and prostrate himself at the emperor's feet.
Such demonstrations make good theater, but this one failed to take. A few years later, the emperor was dead, the empire fell into dissarray, and Stefan returned to the offensive, conquering or annexing considerable Byzantine territory in the Balkans. Eventually, the Byzantines defeated him all over again, but this time they placated him by marrying him into the imperial family and giving him the high rank of sebastocrator. Privilege served better than humiliation, with the result that Stefan and Serbia now became full-fledged members of the Orthodox Byzantine Commonwealth.
When Stefan abdicated in 1196, he took monastic vows, entering an Orthodox monastery he had founded at Studenica. Shortly afterward, he joined his son Sava, also a monk, on Mt. Athos, in an old monastery called Hilandar that the two had refounded as a Serbian establishment.
Mt. Athos
Mt. Athos—the Holy Mountain, as it is still called—was the center of Orthodox monasticism long before Stefan's day. Athos is the easternmost of the three fingers that grope southward into the Aegean from the Chalkidike peninsula, between Thessalonica and the river Strymon in northern Greece. About thirty miles in length and five or six miles wide in most places, with a mountainous spine running down the middle, the rocky, hilly strip of land is joined to the Chalkidike by a slender isthmus just over a mile wide. Through this isthmus, Herodotus tells us, the Persian king Xerxes cut a canal in order to avoid taking his ships around the dangerous headlands during his abortive invasion of Greece in the fifth century BC. The canal's remains can still be seen. The mountain itself lies at the promontory's far tip, its white marble peak jutting sharply from the sea to some 6,000 feet above sea level.
This astonishingly beautiful and rugged landscape is dotted with twenty ancient monasteries, less than half of the forty-six that existed around the year 1000, Athos’ medieval heyday. Most hug the coast, where they cling determinedly to the hillsides or squat in the fragrant valleys, surrounded by carefully tended olive groves, gardens, and orchards.
Today, Athos is a semiautonomous religious community governed by the church and controlled by Greece's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Entry requires a special internal visa from the ministry (which to my great frustration was on strike when I visited Greece, so be warned). Tradition dictates that no women are allowed there, though lapses involving Vlach shepherds and their families were recorded around 1100. Generally, however, even donkeys, chickens, goats, and other livestock have been restricted to the males of the species. Eggs and milk have thus been imported in the past, though some of these restrictions have been relaxed in recent years.
The first monastery, called the Great Lavra, was founded near the tip of Athos in 963, though it's thought that eremetic (from the Greek eremetikos, “of the desert,” which also gives us hermit) monks had begun arriving on the promontory perhaps a century earlier. While the monks of this first establishment were Greek, they were rapidly joined by Orthodox from other lands, and especially by Slavs, who came in great numbers during the twelfth century.
By 1200 or so, there were monasteries for Orthodox Armenians, Georgians, and Italians, as well as Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. The Russians took over the Panteleemon monastery, the Bulgarians moved into Zographou, and later in the century the Serbs refounded Hilandar, which would become especially famous. In these and other monasteries, the monks carried out the tasks of translating Byzantine theological and liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic. From Athos the texts would be distributed to other monasteries throughout the Byzantine Commonwealth.
St. Sava and the Glory of Medieval Serbia
Through Hilandar, and especially through the work of the brilliant Sava, Serbs came to constitute a leading presence at Mt. Athos. Stefan Nemanja had won much territory for Serbia and founded an important ruling dynasty, but his farthest-reaching contribution to Serbian culture was in fathering Sava. Both would later be canonized as Orthodox saints. It was Sava who played the biggest part in giving medieval Serbia its heavily Byzantine flavor.
A man of widely diverse abilities and interests, Sava had started life as a provincial governor under his father before fleeing to Athos, where he escaped his father's wrath at his desertion by joining the Russian monastery of Panteleemon and then the Greek one of Vatopedi. Later, the sources claim, it was Sava's influence that prompted the old warrior to don a monk's robes himself.
On his father's death Sava took over at Hilandar, working the Byzantine imperial establishment hard to obtain full autonomy and a secure income for the monastery. Hilandar was a great success, soon harboring close to a hundred monks, and assuming a vital place in Serbia's cultural and religious life. Sava himself became an influential figure on the Holy Mountain, acting as patron to a dozen other monasteries as well as to Hil
andar. Yet, we're told by his hagiographers, it was the life of quiet contemplation that drew him most strongly, and he spent long periods in ascetic prayer in a special meditation room called a hesychasterion.
In 1204 the Latins took Constantinople, and a few years later they seized Athos. Sava made his way to Studenica, where he deposited his father's remains. He spent the next eight years as abbot there, often occupied with trying to control the bickering and malfeasance of his older brothers, but also writing works honoring their newly canonized father and founding new monasteries. The most important of these was Zica. Richly decorated by Byzantine artists, its church soon emerged as Serbia's leading place of worship.
In 1219, Sava was consecrated first archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church by the Byzantine patriarch. After guiding his church through the perilous waters of papal encroachment, and twice making pilgrimages to Crusader-occupied Jerusalem, Sava died while visiting the Bulgarian capital of Turnovo in 1236. His body was laid to rest in a Serbian church founded earlier by the royal family at Mileseva, where a wall portrait survives of Sava that may have been painted from life in the 1220s.
Saint, mystic, pilgrim, warrior, and hero of many epic poems, Sava stood in popular imagination as Serbia's most inspiring national figure during the long Turkish occupation. The strength of his cult—even local Turkish Muslims venerated St. Sava—led Ottoman authorities to burn Sava's coffin in 1594.
Serbian art reached glorious heights in the decades after Sava's death. It's best exemplified in the majestic frescoes at the monastery church of Sopocani, which were done in the 1260s. Within decades, the Serbian artists’ distinctive touch was lost, as Byzantine styles and influences from the Paleologan Renaissance won out.
Yet, in the mid-fourteenth century, even as its artistic originality declined, medieval Serbia reached its greatest military and political strength, during the reign of Stefan Dushan. His determined attempts to claim the Byzantine throne very much recall those of the Bulgarian tsar Symeon more than four centuries earlier. Just as Symeon had dreamed of establishing a Byzantine-Bulgarian empire with himself as emperor in Constantinople, so did Stefan Dushan now attempt to seat himself at the helm of a Byzantine-Serbian empire, taking advantage of the civil strife that wracked the empire in these years. Though unsuccessful in pressing his claim to be “emperor of the Serbs and Romans,” he modeled his court and administration on those in Constantinople and Byzantinized Serbia's civil administration and law codes.
From the height of its strength, Serbia abruptly crumbled after Dushan's death as the Ottomans swiftly advanced into the Balkans, winning battles at the Maritsa River in 1371 and at Kosovo Polye, the “field of blackbirds,” in 1389. This last battle, in which both the sultan Murad and the Serbian prince Lazar perished, marked the beginning of Serbian vassalage to the Turks, and for that reason took on an epic quality in later legend. Like the Byzantines, the Serbs enjoyed a brief respite after Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, but by 1459 all of Serbia was under direct Turkish occupation. Serbs still look back to the reign of Stefan Dushan as their golden age.
*Hungary's ethnic history is unusually complex, blending Slavic influences with non-Slavic ones including that of the Magyars. Under strong Byzantine influence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Hungary ultimately swung to the West.
Chapter Thirteen
The Rise of Kiev
radition holds that the Rus raiders who so terrified the inhabitants of Constantinople in 860 came from Kiev, the wealthy trading city on the Dnieper River in southern Russia that was the political center of the first Russian civilization, Kievan Rus. This idea is based largely on the earliest Russian account of this period, the Primary Chronicle. The Primary Chronicle tells how the various Slavic and other peoples in what is now northern Russia and the Ukraine invited a Scandinavian people called the Varangian Rus to rule over them. “Our land is great and rich,” they said, “but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.”
From the start, the story goes, the Slavs and their new overlords coveted Constantinople's shimmering magnificence. To the Slavs, the Byzantine capital was Tsargrad, the “city of emperors;” to the Varangians, it was Micklegard, the “great city.” While moving to Constantinople with their families, two Varangian brothers named Askold and Dir stopped in Kiev, a “small city on a hill” by the Dnieper River. Askold and Dir stayed in Kiev and took it over, using it as a base for their attack on Constantinople in 860. The besieging fleet was wrecked by a storm that arose from nowhere when the emperor Michael and the patriarch Photius dipped “the vestments of the Virgin” in the sea.
Among the original Varangians had been a prince called Rurik, who became ruler of Novgorod in the north and progenitor of the future tsars of Russia up to 1568. Rurik's descendant Oleg overthrew and killed Askold and Dir, becoming ruler of Kiev. Under Oleg, Kiev extended its rule over other Rus population centers, taking its place as the Rus capital, “the mother of Russian cities.”
Based on this account, the traditional interpretation has Kiev being founded sometime before the mid-ninth century. The city prospers, opening up the famous trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” along the Dnieper River to the Black Sea. This is the route that the Primary Chronicle depicts Askold and Dir as intending to take in emigrating to Tsargrad with their families. Kiev also attacks Byzantium from time to time, as in 860, but meanwhile Byzantine cultural influences are filtering back up the Dnieper. Kiev ultimately converts to Orthodox Christianity near the end of the tenth century.
Flattering as it was to Byzantium, for a long time this traditional interpretation was quite agreeable to modern Byzantinists. However, the Primary Chronicle has proved rather unreliable. It was compiled from various earlier sources, some of them oral, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Its compilers were Orthodox monks in Kiev looking backward from the era when Kiev's greatness had begun to fade. More recent scholars have concluded that the compilers had reason to exaggerate both Kiev's antiquity and its role in the founding of Rus power, in order to offer a more “appropriate” version of Kiev's origins.
The Early Rus
New archeological evidence has left the scholars little choice, although the myth of Kiev's antiquity has died hard. Some books on Russian history from as recently as the late 1990s continue to assert that the attack of 860 came from Kiev. Yet, the new discoveries (along with the reinterpretation of old ones) have revealed conclusively that in 860 Kiev was nothing more than a primitive village of a few wooden huts, indistinguishable from other villages around it. There is certainly no evidence of voluminous trade with Byzantium going back to the mid-ninth century or before. It would have been a flat impossibility for a fleet of some two hundred vessels to originate there, sail down the Dnieper, and besiege Constantinople. The attack had to come from another Rus center.
There's no shortage of candidates. During the ninth century, the Varangian Rus—bold Viking traders who ventured across the frigid waters of the Baltic—established a string of trading posts along the forested rivers of northern Russia. Archeologists may have exploded the myth of the Dnieper route between the early Rus and Byzantium, but they have found ample evidence of commerce between the early Rus and the other two civilizations on their flanks, those of Western Europe and the Islamic world. Both the Franks and the Arabs, it turns out, got a head start on the Byzantines in trading with the adventurous Rus.
Not the Dnieper but the Don and especially the Volga appear to have been the most important water routes from the early Rus to southern wealth. Both were well situated for trade with Islamic lands. Like the Dnieper, the Don ultimately gives onto the Black Sea, but farther east, through the Sea of Azov. The Volga gives onto the Caspian Sea, down which merchants could sail in the direction of the overland route to Baghdad. Navigable into their upper reaches, both rivers are accessible by a series of short portages from the Baltic Sea. Furthermore, they swing close to each other near the bottom, allow
ing boatmen to switch from one river (and thus one sea) to the other by another manageable portage.
By the 830s, we begin to hear of the Rus in the literary sources. The Frankish Annals of St. Bertin records a Byzantine embassy arriving at the court of the emperor Louis the Pious in 839. With the Byzantines was a group of travelers carrying a letter to Louis from the Byzantine emperor, who asked Louis to help the strangers return home. Their way home from Byzantium was blocked by some “barbarous and savage peoples of exceeding ferocity” whom the travelers had encountered on their outward journey. The letter said further that the strangers had identified themselves as “Rhos,” and when Louis inquired further he found that “they were of the people of the Swedes.”
It was long thought that these travelers had originated in Kiev, but since, as is now known, Kiev didn't exist at the time, recent scholars favor a trading post near the future Novgorod. The savages who blocked them were probably the Magyars, who would soon (as a result of Symeon's ploy, described earlier) give way to the Petchenegs north of the Black Sea and move into Hungary.
Despite the appearance of the Rus at the Byzantine court, there is little or no archeological evidence of trade between them and the Byzantines at this time. Instead, all the evidence—such as plentiful silver Arab coin hoards on the Volga and the Don—points to strong ties between the Rus and the Islamic world.
The Foundation of Kiev
Around the year 900, however, the Varangian Rus found themselves blocked. To the east, their well-established route down the Volga to Baghdad was suddenly obstructed by a band of nomadic incomers, the Volga Bulgars, who demanded a cut of the profits from the lucrative Volga trade.∗ To the west, Rus traders on the Danube were subjected to similar pressures from those whose lands they passed through, mostly in the form of tariffs and tolls. This left them one option for expansion: south. That meant the Dnieper— as well as more extensive contacts with the Slavs who lived along its northern shores.
