Empires and Barbarians (103 page)

More or less immediately after the collapse of Germanic Europe, however, Slavic-speakers started to emerge from the low-speed zone to take an increasingly important role in recorded narratives of broader European history. By about 500
AD
, they had moved south and east of the Carpathians into direct contact with the east Roman frontier, and were beginning to raid across it. Their capacity to do so may have been the result of preceding interactions with Goths and others of the more organized groups of the Germanic periphery to the Roman Empire, which pass more or less unmentioned in our historical sources.
¹⁶
Be that as it may, the new contacts with the east Roman Empire massively accelerated any nascent processes of development already operating among those Slavic groups involved, as raiding and
diplomatic subsidies brought in unprecedented quantities of movable wealth, and stimulated among them both militarization and the formation of larger political structures, both of which allowed profits from the new relationship with Constantinopolitan territories to be maximized. All this ran parallel to some of the kinds of transformation seen in the Germanic world in the early Roman period, and, following the collapse of Germanic Europe, Slavic-speakers had already emerged by 550 as the main barbarian ‘other’ confronting east Rome’s civilization in south-eastern Europe.

At this point, a second nomadic ‘accident’ bent existing processes of development substantially out of shape, and acted as a crucial catalyst in the further transformation of barbarian Europe. Like the Huns, the Avars swiftly built a powerful military coalition in central Europe, one of whose main effects was to siphon off still larger amounts of Mediterranean-generated wealth into now largely Slavic-dominated central Europe. This, of course, further stimulated the competition for control of that wealth, which had already been producing a new kind of military kingship in the Slavic world even before the Avars appeared. Equally important, and just like the Huns, the Avars lacked the governmental capacity to rule their large number of subject groups directly, operating instead through a series of intermediate leaders drawn in part from those subject groups. We lack much in the way of detailed information, but there is every reason to suppose that this would have had the political effect of cementing the social power of chosen subordinates, further pushing at least their Slavic subjects in the direction of political consolidation.
¹⁷
The third major effect of the Avars was both to prompt and to enable a wider Slavic diaspora, as some Slavic groups moved further afield to escape the burden of Avar domination. Large-scale Slavic settlement in the former east Roman Balkans – as opposed to mere raiding – only became possible when the Avar Empire (in combination with the Persian and then Arab conquests) destroyed Constantinople’s military superiority in the region. But at least some of these Slavs were as much negatively motivated by a desire to escape Avar domination as they were by a positive desire to move on to Roman territory. Elsewhere we lack historical narratives, but the same desire to escape Avar domination surely played a substantial role in the widespread further dispersals of Slavic groups from c.550 onwards: westwards towards the Elbe, northwards to the Baltic, and even eastwards into
the heart of Russia and Ukraine. It remains unclear to what extent this eastern expansion represented the first intrusion of Slavic-speakers into western Russia, or whether we are really looking at the expansion of particular groups of Slavic-speakers who had been made more politically organized and militarily potent through their interactions with the East Romans and Avars, and were thus able to assert their dominance over fellow Slavic-speakers who had not participated in the same process.

Either way, the process of Slavicization – the establishment of the dominance of Slavic-speaking groups across vast areas of central and eastern Europe – again combined processes of migration and development in intimate embrace. Interaction with the Roman Empire’s more developed economy generated new wealth flows which prompted political consolidation and militarization among at least some Slavs. But the groups who benefited from this new wealth were only able to do so because they had already physically moved into a tighter Roman orbit after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire, presumably in order to make precisely these kinds of gain. The sociopolitical revolution they experienced as a consequence then pre-prepared them, especially under the extra stimulus provided by the Avars, to spread their domination by further migration across broad swathes of central and eastern Europe. Some of this certainly involved the absorption of the clearly numerous indigenous populations that had survived the processes of Germanic collapse. Some of that absorption will have been peaceful, as some east Roman sources suggest, but at the same time many Slavic groups were becoming increasingly militarized, and the results of Slavicization were strikingly monolithic. If some Slavic groups, particularly of the Korchak type, remained peaceful small-scale farmers up to the year 600 and beyond, many others were undergoing rapid transformation as new wealth brought social differentiation and militarization. Much of the subsequent Slavicization of Europe was clearly brought about by the armed and dangerous Slavs, not the Korchak farmers – not least in those parts of Russia where Slavic domination was advanced by communities of a few hundred pushing one fortified settlement after another into clearly hostile territory.

East Roman wealth and Avar interference marked only the beginning of a much broader development process, which unfolded right across the vast area of Slavic-dominated Europe in the second half of the millennium. By the tenth century, this had produced the first state-like dynastic structures that much of northern and eastern Europe had ever seen. These new entities still operated with major limitations by the year 1000, distinct patterns of centre and periphery being discernible across the vast territories notionally under their control. A governmental mechanism based on itineration was not capable of governing such large territories with even intensity, and this shows up in their regular propensity to swap control of very large intermediate territorial zones between them. Nonetheless, these states were capable of centrally organized activities that are straightforwardly impressive. Much bigger in geographical scale than the Germanic client states that emerged on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were also capable of greater acts of power. They built more and bigger buildings, supported larger, better-equipped, and more professional armies, and quickly adopted some of the cultural norms of more developed, imperial Europe: above all the Christian religion.

Everything suggests that the transformative mechanisms that produced these new entities were similar in nature to those that had generated the larger Germanic client states of the fourth-century Roman periphery. In both cases, a whole range of new contacts – via trading, raiding, and diplomacy – led to unprecedented flows of wealth into the non-imperial societies. The internal struggle to control these flows of wealth then led to both militarization and the emergence of pre-eminent dynasts, who eventually used their domination of this wealth to generate permanent military machines that could institutionalize their authority by destroying and/or intimidating pre-existing, more local authority structures. As a result, potential rivals were steadily eliminated and power was increasingly centralized.

But if the basic processes were the same, the second half of the millennium saw the Slavic world develop further and faster than its largely Germanic counterpart had done in the first. The explanation for this disparity in part lies in the broader range of stimuli operating in barbarian Europe after 500
AD
. Western parts of the Slavic world
established a full range of economic, military and diplomatic contacts with a sequence of Frankish imperial powers in western Europe. At the same time, two hundred years of Avar imperial domination at the heart of central Europe had important effects on a broader Slavic clientele, as did interaction with a further, if lesser, European imperial power: the Byzantine Empire. Equally, if not more important, more distant parts of the largely Slavic-dominated barbaricum were interacting with a fourth and still greater imperial power in the form of the Islamic Caliphate. There is no sign of any large-scale trade networks in either slaves or furs operating out of central and eastern Europe to feed Near Eastern as well as Mediterranean sources of demand in the first half of the millennium, so these later networks represented flows of wealth with no precedent in the Roman era. And to judge both by the staggering numbers of Islamic silver coins that survive and their correlation with the core areas of the new Slavic states, there is every reason to suppose this extra-European imperial stimulus played a major role in the transformation of Slavic Europe.

The other obvious explanation for the faster development of Slavic Europe is the impact of the new military technologies of the last two centuries of the millennium – notably armoured knights and castles – which made it much easier for those dynasts who could establish control over the new wealth flows to intimidate potential opponents. For even if the new states all encompassed less intensively governed peripheries, the power that they could exercise in dynastic core territories is (horribly) impressive. The brutal power inherent in the destruction of old tribal strongholds and their replacement with new dynastic ones – in both Bohemia and Poland – emerges strikingly from the dramatic archaeological evidence that has become available in recent years. Dynastic power is equally apparent in the movement of subdued populations into core zones of the new states, and their general economic organization, illustrated this time by a combination of archaeological evidence and the earliest strata of documentary evidence preserved from the new states.

The nature and overall significance of these processes of development could hardly be clearer, and their consequences were myriad. In broadest terms, the most important of these might well be the first emergence of Europe as a functioning entity. By the tenth century, networks of economic, political and cultural contact were stretching right across the territory between the Atlantic and the Volga, and from
the Baltic to the Mediterranean. This turned what had previously been a highly fragmented landscape, marked by massive disparities of development and widespread non-connection at the birth of Christ, into a zone united by significant levels of interaction. Europe is a unit not of physical but of human geography, and by the year 1000 interaction between human populations all the way from the Atlantic to the Volga was for the first time sufficiently intense to give the term some real meaning. Trade networks, religious culture, modes of government, even patterns of arable exploitation: all were generating noticeable commonalities right across the European landscape by the end of the millennium.

For the purposes of this study, however, the processes of development are more immediately important for the role they played in bringing to an end the kind of conditions that had generated the large-scale often predatory forms of migration – whether in the concentrated pulse form of the
Völkerwanderungen
or the more usual flows of increasing momentum – which had been a periodic feature of first-millennium Europe. Inequalities of development across the European landmass had not completely disappeared, but they had been greatly reduced. Essentially, the new trade networks, combined with more general agricultural expansion (the latter still very much a work in progress), meant that politically organized power structures in central and eastern Europe were now able to access wealth in large quantities in their existing locations. Agricultural and broader economic development also meant that they were busy entrenching themselves in some entirely new ways in some specific geographical zones of operation, at least in their core territories.

As a result, the kinds of positive stimulation that had periodically prompted large-group migration had been structurally removed, or at least massively eroded. Migration was never an easy or universally prevalent option in first-millennium Europe, but rather a strategy that was sometimes adopted when the gains were worth the stress of mounting expeditions into only partly known territory with no absolute guarantees of success. Once social elites could access wealth without the extra insecurity of relocation, they became much less likely to resort to that strategy. And, of course, the less they did so in practice, the less they were ever likely to, as previously ingrained migration habits unwound both among themselves, and among the broader population under their control as more intense patterns of
arable farming were generating more permanent patterns of cultivation. Overall, both elites and broader populations within barbarian Europe were becoming much more firmly rooted in particular localities, and, as a result, were much less likely to respond by migration even when faced with powerful stimuli that might in other circumstances have led them to shift location.

This, to my mind is the underlying explanation of the particular problem with which this chapter began. Where many Goths and other Germani (though certainly not all) responded to the Hunnic menace, and the Slavs to its Avar counterpart, by seeking new homes elsewhere, the arrival of the nomadic Magyars on the Great Hungarian Plain engendered no known secondary migration. The actions, nature and eventual fate of the Moravian state encapsulate the difference. Rather than run away, the Moravians stood and fought the Magyars, just like the armies of Frankish imperial Europe. They lost (as, initially, did many of their Frankish counterparts), but the fact that the Moravians stayed put reflects the deeper roots they had sunk in their own particular locality, and the fundamentally different nature of political power in barbarian Europe as it had developed by the end of the first millennium. Earlier, the prevailing limitations of agricultural technique in barbarian Europe generated a broad local mobility, and large disparities in levels of wealth and development had encouraged the more adventurous periodically to attempt to take over some more attractive corner of the landscape, closer, usually, to imperial sources of wealth. The Moravians, by contrast, built castles and churches in stone, on the back of wealth generated by more intense agricultural regimes and wider exchange networks. With so much invested where they stood, it was not going to be easy to shift their centre of operations. The same was true of the other new dynasties of the late first millennium too. All were much more firmly fixed in particular localities than their earlier counterparts, both because of developing agricultural technique and because trade networks made other types of wealth available well beyond the imperial borderlands. In overall terms, processes of development had both eliminated the massive inequalities that had previously made long-distance, large-group migration a reasonably common option for Europe’s barbarians, and rooted central and east European populations more deeply in particular landscapes.