Empires and Barbarians (89 page)

The Jelling dynasty was rarely involved in these interdynastic struggles, but it did have to fend off the hostile attentions of successive emperors, and, as we have seen, was perfectly capable of sustained aggressive warfare against the Anglo-Saxon kingdom under Svein (986/7–1014) and Cnut. Exactly how they did so is controversial. Did they use retinue and mercenary soldiers and/or forces levied under a more general military obligation to the state? In thirteenth-century Danish documentation, the levied force is called the
leding
, and in that century could produce for the king a fleet of notionally one thousand ships, each manned by forty warriors. At issue is whether any kind of direct ancestor of the
leding
system was used by Svein and Cnut, in addition to the mercenaries (lithsmen), whom they certainly also employed. In my view, it is extremely likely that they did. Assessing and mobilizing a military obligation is one of the basic powers of any ruler, and it’s hard to see that the Jelling dynasty’s power could have amounted to much if they were not able to do this in at least some of the territories they controlled. It is also suggested by some of the more detailed evidence. The more or less contemporary
Encomium of Queen Emma
, wife successively to Aethelred the Unready and Svein’s son Cnut, records that, in gathering his expeditionary force, Svein ordered that it should contain ‘no slave, no freedman, no low born’. This sounds like a general mobilization order, and certainly overseas Scandinavian societies, such as those created in the Scottish islands during the Viking period, quickly organized with clearly defined military obligations.
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The power of these central political structures was not limited to the waging of war. We’ve already met Vladimir’s Tithe Church in Kiev. Not only was this the Empire State Building of its day – at least as far as the Dnieper region was concerned – but it was just one part
of a larger palace complex built by Vladimir on the Starokievskaia Hill. Two-storeyed stone halls, each over forty metres long, were built to the south, west and possibly also the north-west of the church. All were floored with glazed ceramic tiles whose design included the eagle, one of the oldest symbols of empire, and decorated with mosaics and paintings. Nor was this much grander than the best the rest had to offer. The grandest of the Christian basilicas discovered in Great Moravia was constructed at
and covered an area of four hundred square metres, making it very similar in scale to the Tithe Church, although little is known of its decoration. This was one of twenty-five stone-built churches known to have been constructed in ninth-century Moravia, and there were probably many others of wood. Denmark and Bohemia, similarly, quickly acquired a stock of more and less impressive churches, not least their chief cathedrals at, respectively, Roskilde and Prague. As befits so early an independent archbishopric, however, the Piasts trumped their rivals in the religious arms race. The cathedral at Poznan was a monstrous three-aisled basilica covering no less than one thousand square metres, while the tomb of Adalbert at Gniezno was adorned by Boleslaw Chrobry with a solid gold cross said to have been three times his own body weight. It has been estimated that there were, in addition, another thirty to forty churches constructed across the Piasts’ Great Polish heartland by the time of Boleslaw’s death in 1025.
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The capacity of these new states to make things happen also extended to communications. Odd bits and pieces of relevant evidence turn up in the narrative sources: the construction of bridges and roads, for instance, features in the
RPC
. More generally, in the earliest monastic documents from Poland and Bohemia, labour dues owed for bridges and roads feature as royal rights which were never given up when a piece of land was handed over to the Church. The land’s labour force, in other words, would periodically be turned out to work on the highways at the ruler’s command. Some of what this meant in practice has been elucidated by Danish archaeologists. Another of their great postwar treasures is the Ravning Edge Bridge, dated conclusively, again by dendrochronology, to the reign of Harold Bluetooth. This was a kilometre long, part causeway, part raised bridge over a particularly soggy bit of central Jutland. It required four hundred separate sections and the small matter of seventeen hundred posts to complete. Not exactly the Golden Gate, it was still a magnificent piece
of determined construction, typical of the kinds of enterprise required to make the boggier parts of the North European Plain reasonably amenable to land transport.
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Looked at under these different headings – and I have chosen only a few examples – the new states of northern and eastern Europe appear potent indeed. They enjoyed considerable powers over their constituent population. More elite elements could be made to turn out and fight, the poorer to build roadways, palaces, churches and fortifications. Economic resources could also be mobilized to support rulers and their extensive retinues, not to mention an associated Christian priesthood, which was growing apace under princely sponsorship. There is not the slightest doubt that their achievements dwarf the political structures that emerged on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, there were still some important ways in which the new states remained profoundly limited.

For one thing, they operated with little in the way of administration or written record-keeping, even if writing played a slightly more important role among them than in Rome’s client states of the fourth century. International treaties were on occasion committed to paper. The
RPC
includes the texts of two trade treaties made in 911 and 944 between the rulers of Kiev and the Byzantine Empire. All the internal evidence indicates that these texts are authentic, but the
Chronicle
was put together two hundred years later. The Papal Archives, likewise, contain a short but fascinating text known as the
Dagome Iudex
. A summary of it was copied into a register of Pope Gregory VII in about 1080
AD
. Examined closely – the author mistakenly thought that the original was talking about Sardinia! – it turned out to be the last mortal remains of a late first-millennium international manoeuvre whereby in 991 the Piast ruler Miesco I (father of Boleslaw Chrobry) granted some kind of highly notional overlordship over his kingdom to the Pope in return for persuasive lobbying with the Emperor. In this case, the Polish original disappeared at some point; but clearly some of the diplomatic backdrop to Otto’s progress of the year 1000 was conducted on paper.
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Literacy also played some role in the management of internal resources, but within the period covered by this study, only a marginal one. The oldest written records of land grants from Bohemia date to about the year 1000. They detail royal land grants to favoured monasteries, and provide some insight into how kings shared their
existing rights over people and their labour with the new religious foundations. But even in Bohemia such texts are few and far between at this date, and in most of the other new states it is the later eleventh century before such grants took a written form, the twelfth in Kievan Russia. As the physical monuments surviving from these states imply, these early documents show that rulers had well-established rights to produce and services, and like early Anglo-Saxon England these states were capable of assessing the economic potential of populations and landscapes and of recording the fulfilment of the obligations thereby derived, but its scarcity suggests that not much of this was happening on paper.

This picture is confirmed by the other kind of written document to survive from the early years of these states: formal codes of law. From before the year 1000, evidence for the distribution of rules and regulations in written form come only from Church contexts. Among the materials translated into the first written form of Slavic by Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, for instance, were two Byzantine texts of Church law: the
Nomokanon
. Canon law texts in written form put in a similarly early appearance in Bohemia: surviving examples date to the second half of the tenth century. But despite convincing mentions of specific royal edicts in the chronicle texts, and the surviving physical manifestations of rulers’ capacities to enforce them, these states produced no codifications of written royal orders dating to this era. The first secular law books from Poland and Russia date from the thirteenth century, and even these look more like codifications of existing custom than monuments to royal power; and prevailing practice, even this late, seems to have left much real legal power in the hands of more local authorities. Again, comparisons with western Europe help put matters into perspective. Church legal texts came to Anglo-Saxon England with the missionaries at the start of the seventh century, but it was not until the tenth that royal law-making started to take a consistently written form, and the later twelfth and the thirteenth that the English monarchy instituted the complex legal bureaucracy and record-keeping required both to make, and to make it possible for, people to bring their cases to centrally organized law courts.
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Bureaucratic underdevelopment, however, is not the main reason for regarding these new entities as only a limited form of state organization. Looking at the overall narrative of their collective histories in the period 950 to 1050, what’s really striking is their capacity to
trade vast tracts of land between themselves, seemingly at the drop of a hat. Take, for instance, Moravia – broadly what is now Slovakia. This fell under Bohemian Premyslid control in the time of Boleslav I (929/35–967/72), then under Polish control under Boleslaw Chrobry in 1003, back to Premyslid in 1013, Piast again in 1017 and Premyslid again two years later. Moravia saw the fastest-moving game of Pass the East European Parcel, but other territories had analogous histories. Silesia and Wroclaw were under Premyslid control in the mid-tenth century, passed to the Piast Miesco I in 989/90, back to the Premyslids in 1038, and were only definitively ceded to the Piasts in return for an annual payment of two hundred and thirty kilos of silver and fourteen of gold in 1054. Cracow in southern Poland suffered from a similar Piast/Premyslid identity crisis. What is now south-eastern Poland, from the Upper Bug to the Carpathians, was similarly swapped, but this time between the Piasts and the Rurikids. Under Rurikid control from the time of Vladimir in 981, it swapped back to the Piasts in 1018, then back again to the Rurikid Yaroslav the Wise in the 1030s.

Similar patterns are observable, if on a slightly different scale, in the outlying regions of Jelling territory. Southern Norway around the Oslo Fjord was always contested with rival lords established further west: first Olaf Tryggvasson in the 990s, then the dynasty of Olaf Haraldsson from whom medieval kings of Norway were destined to descend. The west coast of what is now Sweden, likewise, was eventually wrested from Jelling control by kings of Sweden based further east.
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What all this makes clear is that it is anachronistic to think of these states as possessing clearly defined territorial boundaries. Over much of central and eastern Europe, the lordship of any particular dynasty was a highly contingent phenomenon.

At the same time, each of our dynasties’ landed possessions comprised a much more intensively governed core, over which rulers were able to maintain a consistent authority and which rarely, if ever, passed into the hands of dynastic rivals. The heartland of the Piasts was Great Poland, the territory centred on Gniezno between the Rivers Oder, Warthe and Vistula that Otto III visited in the year 1000. Its extent is clearly marked out by the spread of tenth-century Piast castles (
Map 20
). Premyslid rule in Bohemia, likewise, had the region around Prague as its core, a zone again defined by the spread of early Premyslid strongholds. Kievan Russia had a double core, as we saw in the last chapter: Novgorod in the north, the Middle Dnieper around
Kiev in the south. Even in the much smaller Denmark, the Jelling dynasty ruled Jutland and the major islands much more directly and with a firmer grip than the larger region that at different moments found itself incorporated into Cnut’s Baltic Empire. In the worst Premyslid dynastic crisis of all, in 1003/4, Piast Polish garrisons came as far as Prague, but this was only the briefest of phenomena, as was a parallel Bohemian annexation of Gniezno in 1038. Otherwise, these central areas were securely under the authority of their respective dynasties, and we clearly need to think of these states in terms of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’: core territories subject to permanent, more intensive control, and peripheral ones that were liable to fall under the control of others as the power of individual dynasts waxed and waned.

This is a common early medieval pattern, typical of entities that rely less on bureaucratic structures for their cohesion and more on the power and charisma of individual monarchs. The latter was classically expressed by regular patterns of itineration, with the ruler making the circuit of his kingdom, consuming food renders with his attendant military retinues and involving himself personally, as he went, in the needs and desires of his greater subjects. This kind of personal government worked perfectly well in small kingdoms, but characteristically generated patterns of core and periphery when geographical scale increased, to the extent that it’s a broad rule of thumb that an early medieval ruler really governed only where he regularly travelled. All our evidence suggests itineration was the key mechanism of government in the new entities of northern and eastern Europe. The main economic right of the ruler referred to in the earliest Bohemian and Polish texts, for instance, consisted of food renders – the basic means by which an itinerant ruler fed himself and his entourage. For logistic reasons, food renders were always consumed close to source rather than transported to one designated royal centre. The larger Piast and Premyslid castles presumably served as the local collection centres for food renders.
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