Download PDF | Florin Curta, Roman Kovalev (eds.) - The Other Europe in the Middle Ages_ Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans-Brill (2008).
503 Pages
PREFACE
Most papers in this book were originally presented in three special sessions at the 40th and 42nd editions of the International Congress on Medieval Studies held at Kalamazoo in 2005 and 2007, respectively. The aim of these sessions was to provide a fresh perspective on Eastern Europe during the early Middle Ages, one that would draw strongly on the experience of researchers from that region working on Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars. To that end, the session organizer drew on the knowledge and expertise of a number of specialists from Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Austria, and Poland, in addition to Germany and the United States.
Papers at the Kalamazoo Congress drew attention to the interaction between societies in the early medieval Eastern and Western Europe. One pointer to that was dress, as revealed by both archaeological excavations and examination of manuscript illuminations. Burial assemblages in western Hungary, but also in northeastern Bulgaria produced a number of artifacts for which good analogies exist only in Merovingian and Carolingian-era assemblages. “Avar” or “Bulgar” dress was a combination of elements of various origins, which was viewed as “exotic” enough to be marked as special in ninth- and tenth-century manuscript illuminations.
Constructing the image of the Other was no doubt based more on preconceived ideas than on actual experience with the ways of life and customs of the Other(s). But the Kalamazoo papers suggested that something more important may have taken place in the early Middle Ages: dress depended upon the social and political context, and Avar and Bulgar envoys to different courts employed different ways of dressing to convey different messages about their identity, as well as that of their rulers. The “exotic” appearance of what was otherwise called the “nomadic component” of Avar and Bulgar culture served not only for a self-definition towards outsiders, but also as a source of self-identification and (re-) “invention of traditions.” Mid-eleventh-century anonymous apocrypha written in Byzantine Bulgaria in Old Church Slavonic propagated a bright vision of the Bulgarian past, portraying the reigns of Boris, Symeon, and Peter as the glorious days long gone. Moreover, Boris appears as “Michael Qagan,” a ruler with a Christian baptismal name, but with a pre-Christian title operating as a symbol of a non-Byzantine form of group identity.
Several original papers resulting from this multinational collaboration were presented for inclusion into this volume: Tivadar Vida, Orsolya Heinrich-Tamaska, Peter Stadler, and Tsvetelin Stepanov. In order to fill some lacunae, but also to draw attention to some of the most important topics of current research on the “other Europe’, additional articles were commissioned from Péter Somogyi, Uwe Fiedler, Bartlomiej Szymon Szmoniewski, Valeri Iotov, Veselina Vachkova, Dimitri Korobeinikov, and Victor Spinei.
Engaging in this kind of interdisciplinary and multinational research has been an arduous task. However, its rewards amply offset the difficulties in communication that existed at times. It was, undoubtedly, a most exhilarating experience from which I emerged richer in knowledge and more hopeful. I take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks to all contributors.
They have all been remarkably cooperative in the process, making editorial revisions, meeting deadlines, and making suggestions to improve the book. I hope that the participants who made the three Kalamazoo sessions so stimulating and memorable will share my pleasure in making the fresh insights contained in these papers accessible to a wider public.
In the process of bringing together the various contributions included in this book, I was fortunate to receive the assistance of several institutions and individuals. First of all, I gratefully acknowledge the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, the organizer of the Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, for its continuous support of congress sessions dedicated to medieval Eastern Europe.
I also thank Dumbarton Oaks and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for providing generous hospitality during the academic year 2006/2007and allowing me to concentrate my efforts on finalizing this work. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to several people who, at different points, helped me with the many tasks associated with the preparation of this book. I am particularly grateful to Roman Kovalev (College of New Jersey) and Peter B. Golden (Rutgers University) for their assistance and support.
INTRODUCTION
Florin Curta
“A stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech.” So wrote Jordanes in the mid-sixth century about the Huns.’ About thirty years later, John of Ephesus was no more complimenting about the Avars, “the filthy race of long-haired barbarians.” Four centuries later, Emperor Nicephorus II Phokas expressed his contempt for Peter, Emperor of Bulgaria, in similar terms.
According to Leo the Deacon, Nicephorus saw Peter as nothing but a princeling clad in leather skins ruling over a Scythian people, poor and unclean.’ In the 1200s, the Russian Primary Chronicle called the Cumans “godless Ishmaelites” and explained that Moab and Ammon, the sons whom Lot begat from incest with his daughters, were the ancestors of, among others, the Bulgars, which would explain the uncleanness of that race.* Sometime later, at the opposite side of the European continent, Matthew Paris described the 1241 invasion of the Mongols in words strikingly similar to those employed by Jordanes for his description of the Huns: “the men are inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men.”®
While these accounts have a lot in common, their authors also share a conspicuous ignorance about their subject matter: none of them has actually seen the people described in such unfavorable terms. Medieval chroniclers were certainly not alone in making up stories about the peoples of Eastern Europe. To most inhabitants of medieval Western Europe, these peoples were literally beyond the pale. The same is true about early twenty-first century American students studying the history of medieval Europe. If they learn anything about Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans, it is that they were beyond the horizon of European history.
The Avars were a “great horde attacking Constantinople,’ an “Asiatic people related to the Huns” and a “nomad confederacy.’* Similarly, the Khazars lived in Central Asia, while the Bulgars were just “another wave of invaders from Asia.”’ To be sure, specialists in the field had no small contribution to the conceptual separation of the Other from the history of the European continent.
In an otherwise excellent synthesis on the history of the nomads of medieval Eurasia, Peter B. Golden writes the following about Hungarians in medieval Hungary: “With their conversion to Christianity and assimilation into the ‘Respublica Christiana; these ancient Inner Asian traditions were effaced over time [emphasis added].”* Istvan Vasary’s recent book on Cumans and Tatars in the twelfth- to fourteenth-century Balkans insists on calling both peoples “oriental conquerors [emphasis added],” while at the same time acknowledging at several points that the Cumans and Tatars involved in Balkan affairs came from the neighboring steppe north of the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, not from the “Orient.”
Whatever their involvement, direct or indirect, in the creation of an East European form of Orientalism, in the sense captured by Edward Said’s critique,'° archaeologists, especially in Hungary, have already begun to question the obsessive preoccupation with the “Orient” and the “steppe” that was so typical for traditional approaches to the history of Avars, Bulgars, or Khazars. As Hungary and Bulgaria have now joined the European Union, Avar and Bulgar archaeology has moved away from the Steppenfixierung of the old school, whose research agenda was often driven by questions formulated by Turkologists.'’
Instead of yurts and horse gear, archaeologists have now turned to “Germanic” assemblages from western Hungary, especially from around the southwestern end of the Balaton Lake, which could be dated to the Avar age and thus testify to the continuing relations with Western Europe at a time for which most historians assume that such relations did not exist. Elsewhere, while interest in the “Orient” and the steppe has remained relatively strong among historians, archaeologists have begun to develop new models of interpretation primarily based on comparison with contemporary phenomena in Western Europe.’
During the last few years, the “Europe of the Other,’ a topic rarely, if ever discussed by historians of the Middle Ages, has gradually turned into the “other Europe,’ an object of study in its own terms and with a very rich research history. In Eastern Europe, renewed interest in “Europe” (as opposed to the “Orient”) has also led to a fundamental questioning of the meaning of the evidence and of key concepts in the discipline, such as nomadism.'* Both historians and archaeologists appear to be altering the ways in which they conceive of the meaning of their objects of analysis, but in many cases these developments have seldom been communicated beyond the discipline in which they were originally defined.
Historians and archaeologists have become isolated, as the latter have considerably moved away from the culture-historical paradigm, which has established ethnicity as the main concern of study for the discipline of medieval archaeology in Eastern Europe. Similarly, most historians of the European Middle Ages, especially those writing in English, have lost touch with their archaeological colleagues working in Eastern Europe and currently express little or no interest in the study of the “steppe empires” in general and even less interest in Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans, whom they still perceive as non-Europeans.
The present volume of essays is devoted to this double challenge of (re-)definition and disciplinary dialogue. The title chosen here uses a metaphor of geographical inspiration to encompass the complexities of the subject. The metaphor stands metonymically for the peoples involved, mainly because it is hoped that this will find easier acceptance in situations where no single set of defining criteria matches the historically recorded phenomena on the ground. The “other Europe” is both Eastern Europe and the “Europe of the Other.” No claims are made for comprehensive coverage in either geographical or chronological terms.
The essays in this volume deploy a wide assortment of new data, most of it unavailable a decade or so ago, in order to reveal new facets and alternative interpretations of the history and archaeology of the East European “nomads.” Methodologically, the approaches various authors take to the evidence and their use of that evidence differ from earlier studies of either nomadism or medieval Eastern Europe. In many ways, the authors of these papers problematize the debate and point to the complexity of cultural change and the nature of identity in the Avar qaganate, Bulgaria, or Desht-i-Kipchak. Tivadar Vida concentrates on the construction of a non-Avar (“Germanic”) identity through the dress of men and women buried in relatively large cemeteries of the Early Avar age excavated in western Hungary.
To do this, he focuses on a number of remarkable analogies between belt sets found in Hungarian cemeteries and in burial assemblages in Western Europe dated to the Early Merovingian II phase. Even more remarkable are the parallels to be established between female fashions in those two regions of the Continent, especially the practice of wearing a long strap hanging from the waist and adorned with multiple mounts. Vida argues that instead of a unidirectional influence, the archaeological evidence points to a common source for that practice, most likely originating in Byzantium.
Rich burials of local aristocrats excavated in Keszthely bespeak the connections established by pre-Avar-age elites with the Empire, which continued uninterrupted after the Avar conquest of the Carpathian Basin, at least until the 630s. Until that date, a relatively strong group of population maintained not only its internal social organization, but a sense of Christian identity, the hallmark of which was the three-aisled basilica erected in the middle of the Late Roman fort at Keszthely-Fenékpuszta. That a Christian group survived the Avar conquest and even prospered under Avar rule is a remarkable conclusion, given the stereotype emerging during the Carolingian age and surviving in historiography to the present day, according to which Avars were barbarians primarily because of their marked hostility towards the Church.
Such evidence in the source material points to a situation in which the Avar rulers recognized that cultural uniformity was not of primary, or even any, importance. What was crucial, though, was the political control of the “multicultural society” of the Early Avar qaganate.
A similar theme is pursued by Peter Stadler in a paper based on the enormous quantity of published material collected in his image database Montelius. Rather than seeing the process of cultural change, in the aftermath of the Avar conquest of the Carpathian Basin, as a simple mirror of historical change, Stadler raises the issue of a chronology of the Avar-age based on independent dating methods, such as radiocarbon.
His conclusions, namely that the Middle Avar age is basically a fifty-year long period in the middle of the seventh century, has great implications for the radical cultural changes to which archaeologists point to explain the onset of the Late Avar period. With the assistance of the Winserion software he created to analyze the large volume of data in his image database Montelius, Stadler attempts to delineate cultural clusters on the map of the Carpathian Basin. What he finds in the material record is a situation in which the use of material culture may be interpreted as an attempt to build ethnic boundaries. Individual members of local communities were buried in certain ways and together with certain grave goods not only because of “local customs,’ but as a form of regional, perhaps ethnic identity.
What Stadler calls “Germanic” or “Slavic” may or may not overlap with the linguistic definition of such human groups. The much more important thing is the contrast that he draws between the melting-pot picture of the Early Avar age and the remarkable cultural uniformity of the Late Avar period. Thus Stadler replaces any notion of a direct link between material culture and ethnic identity with a much more sophisticated discussion of the power configurations at different moments in his chronology of the Avar age. Inevitably with all interpretations based on archaeological chronologies, the historical interpretation is itself subject to discussion. But in order to draw on concepts used in modern theoretical approaches to ethnicity, we should abandon the simplistic association between pots and people, which has become the hallmark of the culture-historical paradigm in archaeology, as well as agnostic positions verging on nihilism recently advocated, among others, by Sebastian Brather.*
Following on from Stadler’s discussion of chronology, Péter Somogyi undercuts the simplistic notion of associating minting dates of coins found in burial assemblages with the ruling years of the issuing emperors. He finds no support in the numismatic evidence for the assumption widely spread among Hungarian archaeologists, namely that later Byzantine coins struck for seventh-century emperors of the Heraclian dynasty entered the Carpathian Basin together with an alleged migration of Bulgars (Onogurs) from the steppes north of the Black Sea. Instead, Somogyi notices a dramatic change in the quantity and quality of the coins entering Avaria, which were struck after ca. 650. In contrast to the payment of subsidies (or tribute) in gold, which defined the Byzantine-Avar relations up to 626, late seventh-century gold coins found in Avaria must be interpreted as evidence of gift giving, most likely imperial bribes meant to hire Avar military assistance against the Bulgars.
Somogyi rejects the idea that the interruption of the flow of gold into Avaria was a function of the alleged economic crisis of the Byzantine Empire. Instead, like Stadler, he points to the oscillations of the political and military relations, which were the main drive behind the “gift economy” employed by Byzantine emperors in order to secure (at a relatively low cost) the borders of their empire.’°
Chronology and the implications of re-dating monuments and sites are at the fore of Uwe Fiedler’s survey of the archaeological evidence and of the state of current research on pre-Christian Bulgaria. He shows how it is difficult, if not impossible to generalize on the basis of the archaeological evidence about the growth of the early medieval state. He identifies separate settlement areas for the Bulgars and the Slavs, with particular emphasis on specific burial customs, but he also notes that there is considerable regional variation that hinders us from drawing any clear-cut boundaries between settlement areas. However, it is clear that the pattern of variation cannot be established on geographical grounds alone: a Bulgar “core” in the northeastern region of present-day Bulgaria was surrounded by a Slavic “periphery.”
Fiedler’s discussion of the ditches marking the boundaries of both territory and power opens up the medieval landscape as a cultural artefact that can be used to express ideals of power representation, not simply to the local subjects of the Bulgar ruler, but also to visitors from further afield. However, the Bulgar dikes form only part of the picture: the remarkable results of excavations in Pliska could equally be utilized to map out the growth of royal power in early medieval Bulgaria. Fiedler’s conclusion is further enhanced by the analysis of Bulgar inscriptions, of the Madara Horseman, and of fortifications.
Often the Avars have been presented as primarily pastoralists with technological traditions very different from those in existence in the rest of medieval Europe. This has caused many archaeologists and historians to see the sheer quantity of bronze casts produced during the Late Avar age as exceptional, with no antecedents in the first century of Avar history. Such views are fundamentally questioned by Orsolya HeinrichTamaska in her paper on Avar-age metalworking technologies in the Carpathian Basin. She points out that Avar archaeology has failed to see the potential of the analysis of metalworking technologies, such as surface elaboration, glazing, and inlay techniques in connection with Byzantine and Merovingian traditions.
From her analysis of Early Avar niello, damascening, and stone or glass inserting, Heinrich-Tamaska puts forward a powerful argument for the existence within Avaria of highly skilled craftsmen, capable of associating sophisticated stylistic messages and complicated or “high tech” procedures. Such procedures, often neglected in the past in favor of a stylistic analysis of artifacts, needs to be placed in a contemporary context. Moreover, Avar-age metalworking technologies may offer a model of how chaines opératoires and linked ornamental patterns may be used to identify forms of social behaviour.
Bartlomiej Szymon Szmoniewski’s paper likewise offers a less conventional approach, in this case to the metalwork found in sixth- to seventh-century hoards of bronze and silver from Ukraine, examining the symbolism behind images of animals and humans on mounts possibly used to decorate the saddle. As means of expressing social ranking within communities of the so-called Pen’kivka culture, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motifs displayed on artifacts included in hoards of bronze and silver may have served to reinforce hierarchies seriously undermined by the political and military instability of the period following the disintegration of Great Bulgaria and the rise of the Khazars. Szmoniewski’s account throws into relief the role the new style of decorating high-status artifacts with a combination of animal and human images may have had in communicating claims to power and privilege.
The significance of the Avar material in the “stirrup controversy” forms the subject of my own essay. An examination of the complex historiographic debate surrounding Lynn White's book, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) reveals that at stake was the introduction of the stirrup in the early eighth century believed to have triggered profound changes in medieval warfare, which were ultimately responsible for the rise of feudalism. Several problems emerge from acknowledging a revised chronology of the earliest stirrups of the Avar age in combination with an attentive analysis of the Strategikon, a military treatise written shortly before 600, which contains the first written mention of stirrups.
This leads into the question of the nature of the diffusion process responsible for the adoption, if only on a modest scale, of Avar-age stirrups in Merovingian Europe. While warning against a too hasty association of stirrups and mounted shock combat, my paper nevertheless emphasizes that the archaeological record of Early Avarage burial assemblages strongly suggests that stirrups were symbolically associated to a class of “professional” warriors, who were often accompanied in death by their warhorses.
A similar mechanism may have been at work in the diffusion of the so-called “Hungarian sabers” discussed inValeri Iotov’s short note in chapter 8. The number of such sabers so far found in Bulgaria precludes the interpretation of these weapons simply as an index fossil of the Magyar raids into Bulgaria during the early regnal years of Symeon (893-927). Instead, Iotov suggests that the weapon was quickly adopted by Bulgar warriors and possibly produced in Bulgaria. It remains unclear, though, what exactly was the process responsible for the cultural contact between Bulgar warriors and the horsemen in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea.
The problematic relations between Bulgaria and the steppe north of the Caspian Sea controlled by the Khazars are highlighted in Veselina Vachkova’s paper with reference to the position both areas had within the Byzantine concept of the inhabited world. The context here, Vachkova argues, is not that of geography, but of the geopolitical notion of an oikoumene centered upon the city of Constantinople. The protection of the New Rome required that special attention be paid to the Danube frontier of the Empire across which several “Scythian” nations had come, who had attacked Constantinople.
The precise positions assigned within this geopolitical concept to Bulgaria and Khazaria, respectively, may explain the specific ideologies by which local elites justified their attitudes towards the Empire. Using Gilbert Dagron’s definition of the “Byzantine civilization,” Vachkova argues that “Bulgaria copied the Byzantine model, excepting the Greek language; it used the Slavonic language, ignoring the Slavonic inheritance; it put forward claims for the western crown and also for being a Second or New Rome.” By the same token, Khazaria “did not mind being the New Israel, but never developed the idea of a sacred New Jerusalem; it adopted Judaism, but not the Talmudic theology; the Khazar ruler declared himself a successor to David and Solomon,’ while still maintaining the old, Turkic forms of power representation.
The question of the relations between Bulgaria and the political “traditions of the steppe” is also placed in the foreground of Tsvetelin Stepanov’s analysis of the concept of khagan (qagan) in early medieval Bulgaria. Although the title was never used by Bulgar rulers during the pre-Christian period, it is attributed to Boris in a number of later texts, most prominently in late eleventh-century Bulgarian apocalyptic texts. In fact what Stepanov finds is that the use of the title of qagan to refer to Bulgarian rulers in the past was a way to link Bulgarians as Chosen People to eschatological expectations. He concludes that at the origin of this peculiar concept was a Bulgarian adaptation, perhaps in the eleventh century, of the Apocalypse of Methodius of Pathara.
A major problem, already raised earlier and a theme running through many of the papers, is how individuals present their identity and how that identity is read by the wider community. This problem is raised in his chapter by Dimitri Korobeinikov, discussing the negotiation of Kipchak (Cuman) identity in Mamluk Egypt. The official name of that state was dawla al-turkiyya (the State of the Turks) and a sense of Cuman identity was maintained among the Mamluks to the point that the biography of Sultan Baybars, as preserved in such contemporary sources as Ibn Shaddad (whose text survives in Ibn Taghribirdi) highlighted his birth and childhood in Desht-i-Kipchak, as well as enslavement and subsequent travels to Bulgaria and the Near East. Korobeinikov points out that the way in which Baybars’s story encapsulates the tragic fate of many Cumans in the aftermath of the battle at Kalka and the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe. The story can further be seen as a vehicle for the preservation in Mamluk Egypt of a collective memory broadly reflecting a sense of Cuman identity.
No sense of Cuman identity may be found in historical accounts pertaining to the creation of the Cuman Bishopric, as Victor Spinei shows in the last chapter of the book. The basis for creating such a bishopric on the southeastern border of the Kingdom of Hungary was both the papal hopes to convert the Cumans and the desire of the Hungarian kings to occupy a number of territories to the east and northeast of the Carpathian Mountains. It is clear from the evidence presented by Spinei that at the same time as some Cuman communities requested to be baptized by the archbishop of Esztergom, the internecine strife within the Cuman lands on the Lower Danube and north of the Black Sea reached an unprecedented level of violence. Similarly dangerous divisions were created by the advance of the Mongols, who skillfully took advantage of the conflicts between various Cuman tribes. The linkage between Catholic proselytism and Hungarian expansion to the east of the Carpathian Mountains can also be shown by fourteenth-century papal attempts to revive the Cuman Bishopric as the Bishopric of Milcovia.
Spinei notes the absence of any significant archaeological evidence of the presence of Cumans (or of any other population) within the territory of the Cuman bishopric. But this should not be read as a problem of archaeological research agenda. Instead, Spinei’s conclusion is that the hilly, densely forested landscape of the Cuman Bishopric was not very favorable to the pastoralist economy of Cuman communities. There were after all, “not that many Cumans in the Cuman Bishopric, a conclusion supported by written, archaeological, and linguistic (place name) evidence.”
The approaches that contributors to this volume have taken are varied. Some have adopted a survey mode, while others have preferred a more thematic approach, either by examining particular aspects or by examining issues from a more comparative, methodological, or theoretical standpoint. As a consequence, the goal of this volume has been to provide not authoritative answers, but a range of perspectives with which to highlight the rich diversity of issues and ideas underlying a complex yet critical subject. In exposing new areas for research, it is often reconciling the different interpretations indicated by different categories of evidence that provides the greatest challenges. By bringing together a variety of specialists in a single volume, I hope to have taken a first step towards a new understanding of some of the more significant ways in which the study of medieval Eastern Europe has recently changed and why it will most likely continue to do so.
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