Empires and Barbarians (96 page)

Second, and one of the reasons why the scale was so much larger, the late first-millennium network operated with multiple sources of imperial demand for its high-value goods. Demand seems to have originated in western Europe, with goods even from northern Russia being shipped there from the mid-eighth century. The trading station at Staraia Ladoga came into being a couple of generations before any Muslim connection had been established. This makes perfect sense, since increasing demand in western Europe at this point coincides with the rise of the Carolingian dynasty. But an Islamic dimension soon came into play. Not long after 800, Muslim silver coins started to flow north in vast numbers, part of the trade having now been diverted to a second set of customers, the elites of the Abbasid Empire. This was the greatest state of its age, and so demand from there soon dwarfed the west’s, to judge at least by the amount of Muslim silver that ended up in the Baltic region. The Muslim connection was not broken even when the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed in the early tenth century, since a great successor state quickly arose under the control of the Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran whose silver mines made them fabulously wealthy. Sometime in the mid- to late ninth century, finally, Constantinople came into the picture. Much less wealthy than the Muslim world, it was nonetheless a distinct third centre of elite demand.
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The relative proliferation of sources also allows us to explore the operations of this trading network in more detail than was possible for its Roman-era counterparts. We have already come across some of the major waterborne routes that Scandinavian adventurers opened up in the ninth century: particularly, down the Volga and its tributaries to the Muslim world, and down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea to Constantinople. There were also land routes running through central Europe into the west, on which Prague was a major staging post. We can also, importantly, say something about where the slaves were generally being captured. The Arab geographers report that the Rus raided westwards for their victims, while the ‘western Slavs’ raided eastwards. Confirmation of this picture is provided by the distribution of the Muslim silver coins that came back north in return for all the slaves and furs. Striking concentrations emerge. Two are where you might expect: along the Volga and its tributaries, and in Scandinavia. A third, however, lay between the Oder and the Vistula, right in the heartland of the Piast state. Even more arresting is the complete absence of coins in the immense tracts of territory east of the Vistula
and north and west of the Dnieper. Pretty straightforwardly, then, the coin distributions confirm the reports of the Arab geographers. The areas without coins are precisely those from which the slaves were being extracted, caught between the rock of the Rus and hard place of the west Slavs.
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This suggests some further thoughts about how, precisely, the new dynasts were making money out of these international networks. All were busy extracting tolls, but the Rurikids, as we have seen, were doing much more than that. Active participants in the networks, they were also to be found developing markets, not just taxing them. And given that much of what was being traded was actually slaves, there might well have been an intimate link between the evolution of the new networks and those eminently important military retinues. Violence and terror are the order of the day with slave trading, not just because individuals resist capture, but also because the cowed and terrified are that much easier to transport. I remember as an undergraduate picking up the standard textbook on medieval slavery and glancing through it in an idle way because it was written in French and the subject was not absolutely central to that week’s work. But my attention was attracted by a map that appeared to have a series of battle sites marked by the usual crossed-swords symbol. This seemed odd. On closer inspection, the symbols were not crossed swords, but scissors, and the legend read ‘
points de castration
’. This does not need translation. Nor did women fare much better. The Arab geographers certainly enjoyed the barbarous nature of the northern societies they were describing and deliberately underlined the total ghastliness of the Rus slave traders. Ibn Fadlan describes them as the filthiest of God’s creatures, emphasizing the unpleasantness of their personal hygiene habits. He also refers only to females and children among the slaves being sold down the Volga, taking a voyeur’s delight, too, in how much sex went on between the slavers and their victims.

It’s hard to know quite what to make of this. The literary accounts could make you think that the trade with the Islamic world was entirely in women, but I don’t know whether to believe this or not. Perhaps the huge distances involved meant that shipping males was just too dangerous, since, although moving on water, the potential refuge of riverbanks was never that far away, unlike in the later Atlantic slave trade. I don’t have any doubt, however, that sexual exploitation was a major feature of the action. It always is, in the
case of women and slavery, and you have to wonder where Vladimir obtained the three hundred concubines he kept at Vyshgorod, the three hundred at Belgorod and the two hundred at Berestovoe.
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The real point, though, is that highly trained, well-equipped military retinues were an excellent tool not only for state-building, but for capturing slaves as well. Some of the raiding was done by intermediaries, but the Rus did a fair amount of their own dirty work, and there is every reason to suppose that this was also true of the west Slavs, probably the retainers of both Piasts and Premyslids. As we have seen, many Muslim coins have turned up on Piast territory, and their lands were conveniently near to the areas from which both texts and the absence of coins tell us that slaves were being taken. To my mind, it is not too much of a stretch to suppose that, like their Rurikid peers, the Piasts built up the military capacity of their retinues not only from toll revenues but also by actively participating in the international slave trade.

The point about the new trading connections is not just that they generated new wealth. At least as revolutionary as the wealth itself was the multiplier effect stemming from the fact that new power structures evolved to maximize and control the direction of the flow. Just as in modern globalization, new connections generated big-time winners but also decided losers. The biggest winners were the new dynasties and their chief supporters: the leading men behind them and their military retinues. The chief losers were of course the slave-producing populations, but also the ascendant dynasts’ near-neighbours, who lost their independence and became the occupants of the unfree service villages. And, again like today’s globalization, the new interconnections between the more and the less developed were not just economic. Ideas, too, crossed the frontier, and here also the transformative effect of the new contacts was extremely powerful.

The most important set of ideas to bridge the gap in these centuries was undoubtedly, as has long been recognized, the Christian religion. Christianity had been formally adopted by rulers across most of Scandinavia and central and eastern Europe by the year 1000. The Piast dynasty converted in the 970s, the Danes under Harold Bluetooth at more or less the same time, the Premyslids a generation or so earlier, and the Rurikids half a generation later under Vladimir. The Moravians, of course, had picked up Christianity in the mid-ninth century. For all its triumphant progress among them, however,
the new dynasts of non-imperial Europe found one dimension of their new religion potentially problematic. From the person of Charlemagne onwards, although it was not then a new idea, the imperial title carried the connotation that its possessor wielded the highest authority, having been personally chosen by God to rule in His stead on earth. To accept Christianity, therefore, was implicitly to recognize the legitimacy of imperial overlordship, and this naturally made the dynasts hesitate. There was also the practical consideration, if you didn’t have an entirely independent ecclesiastical province, that part of any revenues generated (by tithes, for instance) for religious purposes in your domain would in practice pass outside of your control, since they were owed to the archiepiscopal see. Archbishops also, at least notionally, had a strong say in the appointment of bishops, so an ‘imperial’ archbishop could interfere with the choice of bishops within your territory.

These potential problems certainly got in the way of the Moravian dynasty’s acceptance of Christianity. They tried to resolve them by getting their Christianity via a combination of the papacy and Byzantium, rather than the all too adjacent Franks. It was perhaps for similar reasons that Anglo-Saxon missionaries, not the nearby imperial churchmen, played a key role in the early stages of Christianization in Scandinavia. In the long run, however, nearby imperial patronage usually proved too hard to resist, and the best option was to accept your Christianity from that quarter, but – like Poland – extract the right to your own archbishop, thus insulating yourself from the worst hazards.
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But why accept Christianity at all? We have already met one obvious benefit. Accepting the religious orientation of rich, imperial, developed Europe was an important move if you wanted to escape the category of ‘barbarian’ and win admittance to the club of Christian nations. Even if you then faced possible problems of imperial hegemony – or the claims of it, at least – this was probably still a better option than remaining in the barbarian category, where no holds would be barred whenever it seemed a good idea to some influential faction within the Empire’s structures to look to profit at your expense. This, of course, was the problem that led to the longer-term demise of the Elbe Slavs, even if, at the start of the eleventh century, they briefly benefited from Henry I’s desire to curb Piast power. It has also long been canonical to identify a series of specific
advantages for ambitious dynasts in adopting Christianity when it came to the internal administration of their realms.

These fall into three broad categories. First, conversion to Christianity brought kings and rulers a degree of ideological promotion. It was a commonly accepted Christian idea in the first millennium that no ruler could win power without God’s will. Converting to Christianity thus allowed rulers to claim to be God-chosen, putting ideological blue water between themselves and their nearest rivals. This was potentially useful in the political context, most career-minded dynasts having risen only recently above a pack of peers, and mostly by brute force. Second, Christianity was a religion of the Book: all its basic texts, the commentaries on them, and the practical rules that had evolved over the centuries to organize its operations, came in written form. Christian churchmen as a whole, therefore, operated at a higher degree of literacy than the average even elite population of early medieval Europe. Clerics could thus make useful royal servants, and in all the cases we know about came to be employed as such by their converted rulers. In the longer term, it would in fact be the literacy of churchmen that would make it possible to sustain more bureaucratic forms of administration – particularly useful when it came to assessing and raising tax in the form of cash. Third, and this flows on naturally from the second, Christianity was a high-maintenance religion. Buildings, books, full-time clergymen: all this was very expensive. So the institution of Christianity always involved establishing new taxes – by the late first millennium, often in the form of tithes – by which the religion’s activities could be funded. Everything suggests that kings kept some of these revenues for their own purposes, sometimes directly by appropriating part of the tithe, sometimes indirectly. The indirect method worked well because kings often kept the right to appoint leading churchmen such as bishops and abbots, could then appoint their personal supporters to these positions, and thus be sure of their financial and other compliance.
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I’ve always been suspicious of this list. Claims, for instance, always have to be tested. Just because converted rulers claimed extra respect by styling themselves as God-chosen, this doesn’t mean that anyone actually gave it to them, and in most documented cases conversion made precious little difference to prevailing political cultures. Post-conversion kings were just as likely to be opposed, deposed and murdered as their pre-conversion predecessors. It was particularly
rich, for instance, that Boleslav II chose to take out the Slavniks on St Wenceslas day. It was surely deliberate, and you might be tempted to think that doing it on the name day of the Premyslids’ royal saint gave the act a kind of legitimacy, notwithstanding its brutality. But Boleslav II was the son and heir of Boleslav I, Wenceslas’ brother, murderer and replacement, so maybe the line of Boleslav I just liked to kill its rivals in late September, with the choice of day a reminder to all potential rivals of how they had always dealt with them. The second area of proposed advantage, likewise, was far too long-term to have been in the forefront of any converted dynast’s calculations. Given that the time lag between Christian conversion and the appearance of a convincingly developed literate administration in the well-documented Anglo-Saxon case, for instance, was several centuries, it does seem unlikely that initial converts were much seduced by visions of a potential revolution in government.
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Of the advantages generally seen in conversion, therefore, only the third seems to carry much weight, and this, like escaping barbarian status, was a real factor in the minds of dynastic converts of the ninth and tenth centuries. By then, the forms of Christian taxation were so well established in imperial Europe that extending them to a new area was an entirely straightforward move, and one that held considerable potential advantages for kings.
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I strongly suspect, however, that both of these advantages paled into relative insignificance next to another dimension of conversion that is not so often discussed. Its importance emerges, slightly paradoxically, from contexts in which the new religion was actively resisted.