Empires and Barbarians (95 page)

If this, what you might call ‘negative benefit’, was the main effect
of military and diplomatic contact with Empire on the capacity of our dynasties to build their state structures, there were also more positive ones. On occasion, when imperial policy was in your favour, there were great photo opportunities. Otto III’s great progress to the tomb of Adalbert was a stupendous international occasion, and Boleslaw Chrobry, like many a modern leader at a summit meeting, must have been extremely happy to have his subjects see how highly he was regarded by the reigning Emperor. On the other hand, of course, it may just have been the sight of that massive cross of solid gold hanging over the tomb that set calculators whirring in the brains of some of the Emperor’s entourage as they worked out exactly how much wealth might be won from a successful war against the Piasts (leading eventually to twenty years of warfare, but that’s another story).

Not, of course, that the violence ran only in one direction. Just like their imperial contemporaries, these new dynasts had to win political support from their magnates to rule effectively, with gift-giving just as much the order of the day east of the Elbe as west of it. Their marriage policies, if anything, made the problem worse. Under the influence of Christianity, they did begin the move from outright polygamy to serial monogamy, but multiple wives and plentiful offspring were the rule – if not quite on the scale of the seventh-century Samo, who ended up with twelve wives and thirty-seven children. This marital profligacy meant that succession disputes and dynastic infighting were extremely common. Yaroslav the Wise, son of Vladimir, for instance, secured his power in 1018 only after a lengthy civil war against his half-brother Sviatopolk that saw many ups and downs and the deaths of at least three other brothers and half-brothers. And Vladimir himself had had to fight a similar war in the 970s against his half-brother Yaropolk, with similar numbers of dynastic casualties. These kinds of wars could be won only by mobilizing a wide range of support among magnates and retinues, which required wealth distribution on a considerable scale. And, just as was the case in the Roman period, leading successful raids on to the richer and more developed soil of an imperial neighbour was an extremely effective mechanism when it came to securing that perfect gift without bankrupting yourself. Accounts of the counter-raids of the Elbe Slavs, not surprisingly, focus on their propensity for smash-and-grab, but the same was true, in only a slightly more structured way, of all our other frontier
dynasties. Each outbreak of trouble with the Moravians in the ninth century, or the Bohemians and Poles in the tenth, was accompanied by its due measure of wealth liberation.
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Aside from wealth and prestige, close contact with an imperial neighbour also helped secure the power of new dynasties in some more precise ways. Two leap out of the source material. First, the tenth-century Slavic states were entirely up to date in their modes of warfare, possessing armoured knights aplenty. This had not been the case before 800
AD
. In the ninth century, even Saxon contingents within east Frankish, Carolingian armies at first took the form only of infantry and light cavalry. The heavily armed, mailed Saxon cavalry of the Ottonian period emerged only in the late ninth and the early tenth century, as the Saxons finally caught up with the times. Against this backdrop, it is very striking that tenth-century Bohemian and Polish armies also boasted at least some heavy armoured cavalry. We know little, if anything about Slavic warfare before 800, but it’s a pretty fair bet that if even the Saxons didn’t have the latest military hardware at that point, then neither did the Slavs. So where did knowledge of it, and access to it, come from over the next hundred years? The likeliest answer is that it actually came from the Empire, slipping eastwards over the Elbe. Already in 805, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, the Emperor Charlemagne attempted to limit trade with the Slavic world to a number of designated points along the Elbe frontier, including Bardowick, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Hallstadt, Forchheim, Regensburg and Lorch, not least because he professed himself worried about arms shipments. This immediately makes you think that arms were flowing pretty freely across the frontier, since even imperial states of the first millennium lacked the bureaucratic machinery to maintain effective border controls. Obviously, the idea of state-of-the-art Carolingian hardware was highly attractive for Slavic groups who might have to fight off Frankish armies, but such imports also had important internal political effects. Not for nothing did early modern European populations associate standing armies with royal autocracy. Acquiring the kind of military equipment that made his forces militarily dominant also put a nascent dynast in the perfect position to face down internal rivals and suppress dissent. Importing imperial military technology, therefore, directly advanced the process of state formation in the periphery.
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With this in mind, the economic organization of the core areas
of these new states is also interesting. As we have seen, all quickly evolved a loose pattern of great estates, where particular service villages fulfilled specialist functions in addition to providing basic food supplies. This mode of organization was also prevalent in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, particularly in its less economically developed reaches east of the Rhine. This was, perhaps, just a sensible way to ensure vital products in pre-market-economic conditions, and arrived at entirely independently east of the Elbe. There must be at least some chance, however, that we are looking here at further, slightly more unexpected fruits of close contact between Empire and periphery.

Compared with the Roman period, what’s missing from this cocktail of contacts is the kind of diplomatic manipulation in which Roman emperors excelled, systematically promoting particular dynasts by rearranging prevailing political geographies in their favour because they seemed to promise the best hope of medium-term frontier security. Carolingian and Ottonian emperors did at times promote their particular favourites, such as the Abodrites, but there is no sign in the sources that they attempted consistently to interfere with the political structures of their neighbours. There is a good chance, however, that the diplomatic agendas of a different Empire may have played an important role in the earlier stages of these processes of transformation. Moravia, Bohemia and, to an extent, Poland, can all be seen as successor states to the Avar Empire destroyed by Charlemagne just before the year 800. We don’t know a huge amount about the internal running of the Avar Empire, but what there is would suggest that it functioned very much along the lines of that of the Huns. Certainly, like the Huns, the Avars operated an unequal confederation where the military power of their originally nomadic core was mobilized to hold a range of initially unwilling subjects to an Avar political allegiance. There was a range of more and less favoured statuses that subjects might occupy within this overall pattern. The most interesting snapshot of its operations that we have describes how one group, descendants many of them of Roman prisoners, achieved free (as opposed to slave) status, and were granted thereby their own group leader. This does sound like the Hun Empire too, and would suggest that, lacking any complex government machinery, the Avars tended to rule their subjects through trusted allied princes. If so, it is very likely that Avar rule will have cemented further the power of the
kind of leaders who were appearing anyway in some Slavic groups by c.600, as they began to control the flows of new wealth coming across the east Roman frontier in particular. This combination – of sixth-century development reinforced by subsequent Avar diplomatic manipulation – is the likeliest explanation, in my view, of why the collapse of Avar rule was marked by the swift appearance of a series of Slavic leaders of seemingly substantial and established authority.
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Overall, military and diplomatic contact between these new states and the adjacent Empire thus took many forms. Imperial attentions were in general predatory, resulting in a huge groundswell of aggression flowing across from the imperial side of the frontier. This was matched, when conditions were right, by a countervailing tendency on the part of the new states, or factions within them, to raid the rich assets available west of the Elbe. So much is only what you might expect, but both phenomena had a strong tendency to advance state formation, giving nascent dynasts ideological cement or just plain cash to employ in advancing the process. Alongside these major themes of contact went some subthemes that also pushed the process forward: exports of military and other technologies, and occasional moments when benevolent imperial attention advanced the capital of particular dynasts.

Looking at the broader patterns of development from the ninth century onwards, two other points are worth making. First, as regards the two effects of proximity to an empire, the ‘negative benefit’ – using its aggression as ideological cement for your own state formation – and the ‘positive benefit’ – being able to raid it as a source of ready funds – a comparison of the fate of the Elbe Slavs with the Piast and Premyslid states suggests that the former was the more important. While the Elbe Slavs were in the better position for raiding, being situated right on the imperial frontier, and indulged in it aplenty, this also meant that it was too easy for the Empire to get at them in return. And, of course, the whole point about an imperial power is that, when it put its mind to it, and other factors were not interfering, it was that much more powerful than any surrounding states. There could only be one victor, therefore, in a head-to-head collision between the Empire and the Elbe Slavs. Poland was significantly further away, insulated geographically from immediate imperial aggression, while the upland basin of Bohemia enjoyed the stratigraphic protection of the Bohemian Forest, the Ore and the Krkonoše Mountains. By itself,
then, ready access to raiding was not a sufficient basis for state formation. It was a useful additional resource, but only if you could survive imperial counterattack and use to your benefit all the resentment that this would generate.

Second, these different types of contact, both positive and negative, pushed the target societies in the same direction in the longer term – providing, that is, you were in a position to survive attempted imperial conquest. The unifying force of the struggle to survive, the effects of occasional imperial approbation, the flows of raided funds, exports of military hardware and administrative acumen: all strongly facilitated the ability of nascent dynasts to advance towards regional domination. Nor was this pro-dynastic effect limited just to military and diplomatic interaction.

It is clear that for their state-building operations to be successful, the dynasts needed the consent of some of the population groups caught up in the process. In the cases of Moravia, Bohemia and Poland, at least, the new dynasts initially rose to prominence within their own local grouping, or ‘tribe’, and were then able to win consent for their wider regional ambitions, depending, presumably, on the degree of success they had already achieved. Even when the larger state structures had come into being, rulers still needed that consent, certainly from the
optimates
of the core heartland, and probably also from a wider free class, if we are right in seeing such a social grouping as playing a major role in Slavic society at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, other dimensions of state-building were based on the exercise of brute force. Not least, extending power beyond your original group involved destroying the hillfort refuges of nearby populations and resettling many of them in your own core areas. Large and well-equipped military retinues were a key component in the new state structures, and it is hard to conceive of these shock forces not playing a major role in the destruction of the old political order and accompanying population displacements.

What all this highlights is the overwhelming importance of the dynasts’ ability to accumulate wealth in unprecedented concentrations. Military retinues used up huge amounts of it. Obviously, they required
feeding, lots of feeding. All the comparative evidence on warrior retinues, and some specifically relating to the new states, suggests that being fed on a heroic scale was a basic expectation. This was not just a matter of greed. They tended to spend mornings hitting large bits of wood with double-weight swords (to build skill and muscle strength) and engaging in mind-expanding activities, all of which used up a lot of calories. Feeding the brutes, however, was not the half of it. As we have seen, a striking feature of the retinues of these new kingdoms is their state-of-the-art arms and armour, especially the defensive armour, which was massively expensive, whether bought – as one suspects it was in the first instance, given the Thionville capitulary – from Frankish gun-runners or produced at home, as it eventually must have been. It was the military potential of the retinues that allowed the rapid, violent expansion that is so characteristic of Premyslid, Piast and even Moravian state formation. But creating them required huge amounts of cash. The obvious questions, therefore, are where did it all come from, and how did the dynasts manage to get their hands on it?

Looking at central and eastern Europe between 800 and 1000, far and away the most likely answer is that they were drawing funds from the new international trade networks in furs and slaves. Again, there are some similarities between this phenomenon and the processes that earlier transformed the largely Germanic societies on the fringes of the Roman Empire. There, the Roman standing armies were a constant source of demand for agricultural products and for labour of all kinds, whether in the form of extra soldiers or just as slaves. As we have noted, the steady flow of payments back across the frontier then helped create the new social structures that underpinned the larger Germanic confederations in the later Roman period. There are, however, some key differences between the two contexts. First and foremost, there is the size of the operation. The fur and slave trades of the later period operated on a much greater geographical and monetary scale than any Roman counterpart. Slaves, of course, were always expensive items, but the fur trade, unmentioned in sources from the first half of the millennium, was much more valuable than any Roman trade. Also, there is no sign that slaves were coming from as far north and east during Roman times. I am not inclined to think it accidental, therefore, that the operations of the later trade networks should have left more trace in our sources, both historical and archaeological, than any of the earlier commerce.