Empires and Barbarians (73 page)

For European Russia, the only evidence we have for the migration process is again archaeological and hence, by its nature, indirect. But some of the settlement patterns, like those from Korchak Europe, are again highly suggestive of the type of social unit engaging in the expansionary process, and hence shed at least some light on that process itself. Take, for instance, the Borshevo-era hilltop site at Novotroitskoe in the Psiol valley in northern Ukraine. Here, the steep sides of the hill form natural defences, and the excavators found clustered together about fifty sunken-floored huts dating from the eighth and ninth centuries. This indicates that the total population of the settlement must have been just a few hundred people. The choice and nature of the site itself are enough to suggest that prevailing conditions were far from peaceful, as does the end of this initial period of its occupation, when it was apparently destroyed by raiders. Novotroitskoe is not an isolated example. Romny-Borshevo settlements were customarily situated in highly defensible situations on hilltops or
in swamps, often walled, and they generally hosted a similarly dense clustering of population.

All this suggests two things. Most obviously, the progress of Slavic-speakers over this landscape was far from uncontested. You go to the trouble of building this type of settlement only if you need to, and its eventual fate does suggest that it was necessary. Second, and this follows from the first observation, Slavic expansion in this region was probably being conducted by groups big enough to build and maintain settlements of this type. If expansion was contested, small groups could not just pitch up in a new area. They had to come with sufficient strength to construct a settlement in which they could protect themselves and their families.

Despite the lack of historical description, therefore, it seems that the migration units operating from the eighth century in north-western Russia were considerably larger than those that had earlier spread Korchak culture and its variants across the central European uplands and east of the Carpathians into southern Russia and Ukraine. Their defended settlements stand in marked contrast to the small undefended ones of the Korchak, Penkovka and even Kolochin systems of the sixth and seventh centuries, emphasizing the degree to which the later centuries marked a new era in the nature of Slavic expansion. We are still looking here at an expansion that began with something akin to a wave of advance rather than the sudden occupation of an entire landscape, but it evolved over time, until larger social units were eventually moving into contested areas. Overall, Slavic expansion into European Russia may well have taken a form we’ve seen in other contexts, ancient and modern, where a flow of small-scale social units builds up momentum and is forced to reorganize itself into larger groups when it eventually encounters serious opposition, as the Goths and others did in the third century, the Vikings in the ninth and the Boers in the nineteenth.
⁴⁷

The range of evidence available for the nature and scale of Slavic migration flows bears not the remotest resemblance to anything you might consider an ideal data set. But this is all part of the fun of early medieval history, and in any case, it is still sufficient to show that Slavic expansion took a variety of forms, as we would anyway have to suppose given the wide variety of contexts it encompassed. At one end of the spectrum we have the transfer of replica Korchak-type settlements from the foothills of the Carpathians across wide tracts of
central and eastern Europe from the Elbe to Ukraine. In the Romny-Borshevo era further to the north and east, by contrast, more substantial settlements were the norm, constructed by Slavic population units several hundred strong. Different again was the movement of entire ‘tribes’ into the former Roman Balkans in the seventh century, where the groups may have been up to ten thousand strong, if it is correct to think of them as the kind of unit run by an Ardagastes or a Perigastes taking to the road. With so few sources, the details of all this could be argued over endlessly, and there is a large margin for error. But the Slavicization of Europe clearly involved a wide range of migratory activity, with unit sizes extending from family groupings at one extreme to social units in the thousands at the other.

Composed around the year 600
AD
, the east Roman military treatise often attributed to the Emperor Maurice (582–602) includes a fascinating comment on the approach of some early Slavic groups to prisoners taken on their raids:

They do not keep those who are in captivity among them in perpetual slavery, as do other nations. But they set a definite period of time for them and then give them the choice either, if they so desire, to return to their own homes with a small recompense or to remain there as free men and friends.
⁴⁸

This immediately raises the basic intellectual problem involved in trying to understand the astonishing rise to prominence of Slavic-speakers all the way from the Elbe to the Volga in the early Middle Ages. On the one hand, there is no one who supposes that this could have happened without an element of migration: actual Slavic-speakers on the move across the landscape. On the other, old culture-historical, quasi-nationalist visions of the Slavs as a ‘people’, a single population group that started from one geographical point and then went forth to multiply over vast tracts of the European landscape, are not credible. In similar vein, although they did add up in aggregate to substantial population movements, the earlier, largely Germanic migrations of the fourth to the sixth century were certainly not large enough to create entirely empty landscapes in the vast tracts of Europe that were
affected by Germanic culture collapse. Most of these areas reappear in Carolingian sources under new, Slavic, management, but the original Slavic migrants were mostly interacting with an indigenous population. The two key issues we need to explore, therefore, are, first, just how big a demographic event was Slavic migration itself; and, second, what kinds of relationship did incoming Slavs form with the indigenous populations they found at their various points of destination?

Comprehensive information is not available, but there is good reason to suppose that incoming Slavs did encounter a substantially reduced population in areas affected by Germanic culture collapse, and even, in a few localities, some entirely abandoned landscapes. For just a few areas, general settlement surveys are available. In Bohemia, for instance, there seems to have been a substantial decline in population in the late Roman period. Twenty-four major find-spots (mostly cemeteries) are known from the early Roman period, but this declines to just fourteen in late antiquity. Slavic immigrants into Bohemia encountered not an empty landscape, therefore, but certainly a smaller population than the region had previously carried. Elsewhere, pollen diagrams provide further insights. Pollen is carried in the wind and, on landing, will sink to the bottom of standing water. A core can then be extracted from the bottom, particularly of lakes, allowing changes in the varieties of pollen deposited over time to be charted. Continuous activity from an indigenous farming population shows up as an undisturbed pollen sequence, with no great rise in tree or grass pollen, and no major change in the range of cereals being produced. Pollen diagrams are unavailable for much of eastern Europe, but they do indicate that in some places a substantial indigenous pre-Slavic population was not displaced. Samples from the Baltic island of Rügen and from Saaleland show more or less total continuity from the Roman into the Slavic periods, even though both passed into Slavic control at some point before 800
AD
. But in other areas, a different picture has emerged. In large parts of Mecklenburg in the former DDR, the pollen diagrams indicate great disruption to established farming patterns in the same period. Here, at least, it would seem, Slavic-era immigrants more or less started farming the landscape again from scratch. Similar evidence for disruption and forest regeneration has also emerged from Biskupin in modern Poland.
⁴⁹

Where the pollen gives out, we are forced back on indications of a more general kind. Some again suggest we should not underestimate
the demographic component of Slavicization. In Procopius’ account, the unfortunate Heruli evicted from the Middle Danube in 512 (
Chapter 5
) initially passed north through Slavic territory and then into ‘empty lands’ before eventually finding their way to Scandinavia. The empty area ought to be north-central Europe, somewhere beyond the Moravian Gap, and, on the face of it this seems to indicate a major population decline in that region, since pretty much everywhere between the Moravian gap and Scandinavia had been substantially populated in the Roman period. There is also good reason to think that the migration process would have prompted a considerable population increase among the immigrant Slavs. One limit on human population is the availability of food supplies. When more food is produced, more children survive, there is better resistance to disease, and couples are often allowed to marry younger, with the outcome that populations can increase surprisingly quickly if extra food supplies are available in abundance. In the case of the Slavs there are no figures, but plenty of reason to think that the overall demographic effect would have been large. For one thing, migration brought Slavic-speakers out of the Russian forest zone and on to the generally better soils of central Europe. In addition, Korchak and Penkovka farmers quickly adopted the more efficient type of plough in use in the Roman world and its peripheries by 400
AD
, abandoning their original scratch ploughs. The new ploughs allowed them to turn the soil over so that weeds rotted back into it, allowing fertility to be both increased and maintained and making for much higher yields. Even if we cannot put figures on it, we must reckon with migration having generated a substantial population increase among Slavic-speakers, with obvious knock-on effects for their capacity to colonize new lands in central Europe. Not all Slavs will have scored the threefold personal increase in population achieved by the Frankish merchant Samo, who produced twenty-two sons and fifteen daughters with just a little help, of course, from his twelve wives, but population increase was a genuine phenomenon.
⁵⁰

At the same time, other indications reinforce the pollen evidence from Rügen and Saaleland. The Sukow-Dziedzice system, covering much of what is now Poland, has thrown up much pottery of standard Korchak types, but, as we have seen, its remains are really distinctive for their strikingly wide range of pot-types. In addition to the standard Korchak cooking pots (which tend towards wider-mouthed, more open
forms than the Korchak norm), Sukow-Dziedzice sites customarily throw up a wide range of plain medium-sized jars, globular bowls and jar-bowls. Much of the non-Korchak pottery looks in fact like handmade versions of the kind of wheel-made pottery that was being made in the same region by Przeworsk potters in the final century or so of Germanic domination. These resemblances could have been generated by Korchak potters coming across Przeworsk ceramics in abandoned settlements, but this kind of imitation is not found anywhere else. Much more likely, we are looking at the results of an interaction between Korchak Slavs and an indigenous post-Przeworsk population that was still living in situ.
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The range of available evidence – some specific, some more general – makes it clear that the demographic significance of Germanic culture collapse and Slavic immigration is not simple to predict. A substantial peasant population remained at work in at least some parts of old Germanic Europe, despite the population movements of the fourth to the sixth century. The Bohemian evidence suggests, however, that we may have to reckon with a general thinning-out of the indigenous population, which, as the pollen diagrams show, could even lead in places to the wholesale abandonment of farming: a pattern that is found in many of the fringes of the Roman Empire in the period after its collapse.
⁵²
When you also add to the picture that the Slavic-speaking populations involved in the migratory process would have been increasing in numbers as they applied more-developed farming techniques to better soils, then it does seem that Slavic immigration must be considered a major demographic event, even if it did not everywhere, or even often, take the form of recolonizing abandoned territories.

It is now such a mantra in some circles that migration never happened in the first millennium on a large enough scale to have a major demographic (as opposed to political or cultural) impact, that it is worth dwelling on this point a little further. It is certainly true, when dealing with hierarchically stratified societies, that the kind of culture collapse associated with the disappearance of a social elite need not represent much of a population exodus. As we saw earlier, according to the
Chronicle of Monemvasia
, the arrival of Slavs in the Peloponnese prompted the total evacuation of its native Greek population. When the Slavs around Patras revolted in the early ninth century, however, there was a native Greek-speaking population living alongside them.
Possibly, the Greek-speakers had all returned from Calabria in the meantime, but this seems unlikely. And logistically, the sea-borne evacuation of an entire region would have been impossible, given the kind of shipping available. In parallel circumstances in the west, only wealthy members of the landowning class, those with some movable wealth, tended to flee.

That similar patterns surely prevailed in the Peloponnese, despite the
Chronicle
’s report to the contrary, is suggested by reactions elsewhere in the Balkans to the build-up of Slavic pressure. Another admittedly late chronicle source, though one usually taken to be drawing on much earlier information, reports that Salona in the northwest fell to the Slavs when panic swept through the city following the discovery that its notables had been moving their goods on to ships in the harbour. In similar vein, Constantine Porphyryogenitus reports that the inhabitants of Ragusa still remembered that their city had been founded by immigrants fleeing from Pitaura. It goes on to list them by name: Gregory, Asclepius, Victorinus, Vitalius, Valentinian the archdeacon and Valentinian the father of Stephen the
protospatharius
. A
protospatharius
was a high-ranking court dignitary, which, together with the mention of an archdeacon, makes this sound like the exodus of a small group of notables – presumably also with their households and retainers – rather than the mass transfer of an entire population.
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Culture collapse and elite migration in a Roman context, therefore, probably only involved a small percentage of the population, and it is likely that immigrant Slavs within the Balkans were always closely coexisting with a substantial indigenous population.