Europe: A History (50 page)
In that sixth century, the barbarian conquests were consolidated despite the brief reassertion of the Empire under Justinian (see below). The Visigothic kingdom flourished in Spain, unlike its predecessor in southern Gaul. Under Leovigild, who made his capital at Toledo, it absorbed the Suevian realm. The Ostrogothic kingdom, which included several of the Danubian provinces as well as Italy, was taken over by the last of the east Germanic tribes to migrate, the Lombards. The Lombards, or Langobardi, ‘Long Beards’, had spent the century since the dispersal of Huns mastering the Gepids and the Avars beyond the Danube. But in 568 they turned south, and established a new hegemony centred on Pavia. Henceforth, the Italian peninsula was to be contested between the Lombards, the Byzantines in the south, and the ever-growing power of the Franks. The Franks, in fact, were expanding in all possible directions. They displaced a party of Saxons which had established itself on the northern coast of Gaul. On their eastern marches they were pressing on the main body of Saxons, and on the Thuringians. It was the Franks who contained the Avars in the Bavarian Gap, and then sent Germanic colonists to their
Ostland
or ‘Austria’ on the middle Danube. It was the resultant collapse of the Avars in the Danube basin which paved the way for the advances of the Slavs.
The western Slavs marched across the plain, up the Elbe, and up the Danube. The Wends or Sorbs of Lusatia, to the west of the Oder, and the Kashubs of Pomerania are still extant. Czech tribes took over Bohemia, the Slovaks the southern slopes of the Carpathians. These were the founders of the Great Moravian Empire which flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Poles, or
Polanie
, the ‘people of the open plains’ first appeared on the Warta, an eastern tributary of the Oder. Related tribes occupied virtually the whole of the Vistula basin.
Plynie Wisla, plynie
Po polskiej krainie,
Po polskiej krainie,
I dopóki plynie
Polska nie zaginie,
Polska nie zaginie.
(Flows the Vistula, flows | Across the Polish land, | Across the Polish land, | So long as she keeps flowing, | Poland still shall stand, | Poland still shall stand.)
The eastern Slavs gradually moved north and east from the Dnieper into Baltic and Finnic territory, and into the forests of the upper Volga. Their centrifugal movements created divergences that underlay the later division between Ruthenians and Russians. If the Poles sang of the Vistula, the Russians were to sing of the Volga, which was to become their ‘native mother’.
The southern Slavs invaded the Empire in the sixth century, crossing the Danube in many places. In 540 they laid siege to Constantinople. They were to slavicize Illyria, Bulgaria, Macedonia [
MAKEDON
], and most of mainland Greece. The Croats, a people first mentioned in what is now southern Poland, colonized the upper Sava and the Dalmatian coast. Another group which settled on the upper Drava became known as Slovenes. The Serbs took over the region at the confluence of the Drava, the Sava, and the Danube.
The dynamism of the migrant tribes had serious implications for all their neighbours. Where the preceding population was not overwhelmed or absorbed, it was frequently shunted into motion. In the West, the Celts were swamped in Gaul and corralled in Britain. Only the Irish were secure from invasion. A Celtic people from Ireland, the Scots, migrated to the highlands of Caledonia and, by subjugating the native Picts, laid the foundations of Gaelic Scotland. In the same period, a migration of Celts from Cornwall laid the foundations of Celtic Brittany. Elsewhere, the Celtic Britons were pushed back by the Anglo-Saxons into the fastnesses of Wales.
In the East, in one of the darkest periods of the Dark Ages, the confusion in the Danube basin was not resolved for almost three centuries. The Slavs still evaded literary sources, and their struggles with the Avars and with the Germanic outposts are not well documented. The last piece of the jigsaw did not fall into place until the irruption of the nomadic Magyars in the ninth century (see p. 296). On the Pontine steppes, a jumble of peoples passed under the hegemony of yet another tribe of Asian adventurers—the Khazars. They in their turn submitted in the early seventh century to the overlordship of a Turkic dynasty from the North Caucasus. Though Indo-European Slavs were present within the jumble, they would not begin to form the dominant element until the founding of the Kievan state in the ninth century, [
KHAZARIA
]
The effect of the migrations on the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the Peninsula was profound. They radically changed the ethnic mix of the population in several
countries, and in some parts introduced completely fresh ingredients. If in
AD
400 the population of the Peninsula had been clearly divided between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’, by 600 or 700 it was inhabited by a far more complex mix of semi-barbarized ex-Romans and semi-romanized ex-barbarians.
KHAZARIA
O
F
all the transient realms of the European plain, none has aroused more controversy than that of the Khazars. Yet from
AD
c
.630, when it was taken over by the Turkic dynasty of Ashihna, to 970, when it was conquered by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev, it played a vital role in the contacts between East and West.
The administrative organization of Khazaria reflected the variety of its subject peoples. The Khazar
kagan
or khan ruled over three principal provinces, seven dependent kingdoms, and seven tributary tribes. The chief province, Kwalis, was centred on the twin cities of Amol-Atil on the Lower Volga (the site of the future Tsaritsyn). Semender en the River Terek had been the dynasty’s earlier refuge after their expulsion from Turkestan. Sarkel was centred on the River Don, west of the Volga bend. It was ruled from a stone city of the same name built by ninth-century Byzantine engineers.
Of the dependent kingdoms, by far the most important was Khotzir in Crimea, the Khazars’ new headquarters. It had succeeded the realm of the Goths, who in turn had conquered the ancient Hellenistic ‘Kingdom of the Bosphorus’. [
CHERSONESOS
] It was ruled from Phullai, modern Planerskoe, on the coast; and it possessed a strong Jewish community active in the Black Sea trade. Other dependencies included Hun on the River Sulak (home of Attila’s descendants), Onogur on the Kama, Turkoi or Levedia on the Donets (home of the future Magyars), and three divisions of the Volga Bulgars. Of the tributary tribes in the northern forest zone, three were ethnically Slavic, three Finnic, and one unidentified.
Khazaria was famed for its commerce and for its religious tolerance. It was the traditional supplier of Slav slaves to the Mediterranean market (see p. 257); and in the tenth century an overland trade route began to develop along the line of Regensburg-Vienna-Cracow-Kiev-Atil.
Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and pagan religions all flourished under their own communal judges. The Khazar army was largely drawn from Iranian Muslims from the eastern province; and in 737 the Khan himself adopted Islam. But some time soon afterwards his successors converted to Judaism and made it the state religion. This conversion, surprisingly, finds no echo in contemporary Byzantine, Arabic, or Jewish sources; but it was already known to the monk Druthmar of Aquitaine, writing at Corvey in Westphalia in 864:
For in the lands of Gog and Magog, who are a Hunnish race and call themselves Gazari, there is one tribe, a very belligerent one… and all of them profess the Jewish faith.
1
During the period of Arab expansion in the seventh to ninth centuries, Khazaria generally allied itself with Byzantium against the Arabs. During
the Viking era, Scandinavians opened up the Baltic-Dnieper route, mastered Kiev, and possibly took over the khanate as a whole, [
RUS’
]
Jewish historians have naturally shown immense interest in Khazaria’s conversion to Judaism. Judah Halevi (1075–1141), writing in Toledo, idealized the Khazar Khan as a hero of the faith. The Karaites of Crimea called the Khazars
mamzer
, meaning ‘bastard’ or ‘false Jews’. But the Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich (1785–1874) claimed that the Khazars had been Karaites. Arthur Koestler, writing in the 1970s, claimed that migrant Jewish Khazars begat the main body of Ashkenazy Jewry in Central Europe.
2
The Khazar puzzle is still not fully solved.
Yet Khazaria lives on. In Greece, children do not wait at Christmas time for Santa Claus bringing gifts from Lapland. They wait for St Basil, coming from Khazaria.
In Spain, for example, the romanized Celto-Iberians received a significant injection of Germanics—with important Moorish and Jewish layers to follow. In Gaul, the Gallo-Romans received a stronger but uneven Germanic overlay—heavy in the north-east, light in the south-west. In Italy, too, the latinized Celto-Italics and Greeks imbibed a strong Germanic element, that was predominant in the north. In Britain, the Romano-British population was either absorbed or displaced, leaving two distinct communities—Celtic in the west, Germanic in the east, centre, and south. Caledonia (Scotland) was divided between the Germanic lowlanders and the Celtic highlanders. In Germany, the balance between west Germanic and east Germanic tribes shifted decisively in the former’s favour, since most of the latter had migrated. The Slavonic peoples took decisive control not only of the largest sector of the northern plain but also of the Balkans. Within the new Slavonic homelands, however, many non-Slavonic peoples, including the Vlachs, remained.
*
Ethnic changes were inevitably reflected in language. The vulgar Latin which had been the lingua franca of the late Western Empire, was gradually broken down into a bevy of bowdlerized neo-latinate idioms—from Portuguese to Romanian. Latin
pater
drifted towards
padre
in Spanish and Italian, towards
père
in French, towards
tata
in Romanian.
The linguistic transitions were very slow. In the case of French, the vulgar Latin vernacular
romanz
of Gaul passed through three distinct phases—(eighth century), Old French (eleventh), Middle French (fourteenth)—before a recognizable variety of modern French was achieved. New grammar and new word-forms evolved as the old Latin declensions, conjugations, and inflexions were dropped.
Bonum, bonam, bonas
moved towards
bon, bonne, bonnes. Rex
became
le roi; amat
changed to
aime, regina
to
la reine
. The earliest text in ‘Romance’, the Strasbourg Oath, dates from 843—by which time the kings of France had stopped speaking Germanic Frankish altogether. Britain was one of several ex-Roman provinces where Latin was completely wiped out.
Greek persisted in the Eastern Empire, both as the official language and in many places, especially in Asia Minor, as the vernacular. But several areas, including the Peloponnese, were for a period wholly or partly slavicized. One should be wary of oversimplification. But the thesis advanced by the Bavarian scholar, Jakub Fallmerayer (1790–1861), in
Ueber die Entstehung der Neugriechen
(1835), merits attention. Fallmerayer’s work, which caused deep trauma amidst the Greeks of his day, argued that the Greek nation of modern times was largely descended from hellenized Albanians and Slavs, ‘with hardly a drop of true Greek blood in their veins’. This may have been an exaggeration; but it is less absurd than the notion that every modern Greek is a direct ethnic descendant of the inhabitants of ancient Greece. No modern European nation can lay reasonable claim to undiluted ‘ethnic purity’. [
MAKEDON
]
The dispersal of the Slavs encouraged the evolution of the three main Slavonic linguistic groups, and the well-springs of a dozen Slavonic languages. (See Appendix III, p. 1233.)
By the eighth century, therefore, the ethnic settlement of the Peninsula was beginning to achieve a lasting pattern. The eighth century, indeed, was the point when important social crystallizations occurred. Yet five more major migrations had to happen before all the basic population of the future Europe was complete. One of these five later migrant groups, the Vikings, were sea-raiders (see p. 293). Two more, the Magyars and the Mongols, were nomads (see pp. 296–8). Two others, the Moors and the Turks, were warriors of a new religion (see pp. 253, 386). Europe was conceived from the most diverse elements, and her birth was painfully protracted.
The Empire: From Rome to Byzantium, 330–867
From 330 onwards, ruled from the Bosporus, the Roman Empire changed its character. The
Romanitas
, the ‘Latinity’, of the empire was inevitably reduced. But political priorities shifted as well: henceforth the heartland lay not in Italy but in the Balkans and in Asia Minor. The provinces which lay nearest to the emperors’ concerns were not Gaul or Spain or Africa, but Egypt, Syria, even Armenia. Increasingly, the frontier to be defended at all costs lay not on the Rhine but on the lower Danube and the Pontic shore. Recognizing the shift, most historians
drop the title of ‘Roman Empire’ in favour of ‘Byzantine Empire’. The emperors and their subjects, however, continued to think of themselves as ‘Romans’. Constantine had no intention of abandoning anything but a decayed capital city. The growing divergence of East and West was so slow that it was virtually imperceptible to contemporaries. For them, it was far less impressive than the sturdy strands of continuity.
What is more, there is no general consensus about the point where ‘Rome’ was truly supplanted by ‘Byzantium’. In its origins, the split can be traced back to Octavius and Mark Antony, whose rivalry had briefly divided the Roman world for the first time. In which case the gradual emergence of Byzantium, and the supremacy of the East, might be seen as belated compensation for the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Diocletian, who deliberately chose the Eastern half of the Empire for himself, has been proposed as ‘the first Byzantine Emperor’. Other obvious contenders for the title would be Constantine, founder of Constantinople, Justinian, and Heraclius. At the other extreme, some historians might withhold the ‘Byzantine’ label until the Empire’s last links with the West were severed. In which case one would be talking of the ninth century, or even of the eleventh, when the Greek Church of the East finally parted company with the Latin Church of Rome. In this view, ‘Byzantium’ is not the foil to the Rome of late antiquity but rather to the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ of the Middle Ages.
