Download PDF | (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450_ 72) Florin Curta - The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe-Brill (2021).
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Acknowledgements
My research into the “long 6th century” in Eastern Europe began more than a decade ago as I taught a graduate seminar on economy and society in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages at the University of Florida.
I would like to thank the students for helping me understand how incorporating the evidence of Eastern Europe (both inside and outside the Empire) could drastically change the conclusions reached by most historians whose works we read in that class. I also owe thanks to Alan Stahl (Princeton University) and Lee Mordechai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for inviting me to the FLAME project (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy), the purpose of which is to reconstruct the economy of Western Afro-Eurasia between 325 and 725 on the basis of an enormous number of coin finds.
Participation in the first FLAME conference (Princeton University, April 2016) and in a FLAME session organized for the 53rd International Congress son Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo (May 2018) provided many ideas about how to cast my arguments more meaningfully.
Over the years, at other scholarly gatherings or during short visits to Europe, I had the good fortune to discuss various aspects of this study with a number of historians and archaeologists working on the same or similar topics. Among them I should especially cite Audroné Bliujiené, Adam Bollék, Jaroslav Jitik, Ioan C. Opris, Andrew Poulter, Alexander Sarantis, and Tivadar Vida.
The book is unquestionably better for the comments and criticisms I have received from scholars who read chapters or served as interlocutors in discussions about my research. In particular, I would like to thank my former student, Andrei Gandila for encouragement and insights. Many thanks to Francesco dall’Aglio, Danijel Dzino, and Andrei Soficaru for taking the time to read various sections of the manuscript. Some of those scholars disagree with my interpretations, and many gave me good advice that I did not heed, and to them, I offer particular thanks for their forbearance.
My greatest debt remains always to Lucia, the light of my life.
Introduction
There has recently been a great deal of scholarly attention on Eastern Europe. Historians of the modern era have turned the region into a vagina nationum: the greatest mass migration in history and even the “making of the free world” are directly related to Eastern Europe.! Historians of the Middle Ages writing in English have discovered that East Central Europe was a region of transfer, a contact zone.” A number of guides and companions are now available for those interested in research in the medieval history of the region or of its several constituent parts.’
There is a greater preoccupation with including Eastern Europe into the history of the Continent, if not of Eurasia. Moreover, there is now a book series entirely dedicated to the history of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.* In spite of occasional qualms, therefore, these are exciting times for the study of medieval Eastern Europe.®
Missing from this promising picture is any comparable interest in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The debates about the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages have not so far incorporated the eastern and southeastern parts of the European continent. There is no room for Eastern Europe either in the Pirenne thesis or in any of its many reiterations.
Despite the recent publication of books and chapter-length studies dedicated to the Balkan Peninsula and the adjacent regions beyond the rivers Danube and Sava, no attempt has been made to reach synthesis at a macro-scale, and no effort to compare and contrast the situation in Southeastern Europe with other parts of the Mediterranean world between 400 and 700.® Historians studying Eastern Europe struggle with periodization when attempting to match the order of events in Western Europe: when do the Middle Ages begin (and end)?
To some, the withdrawal of the Roman armies in the early 7th century provides a convenient marker, but many scholars prefer to begin with the coming of the barbarians, especially the Slavs, ca. 500.” With no event to fall in place conveniently like a curtain at the end of Antiquity, some historians have chosen AD 568, the year in which the Avars defeated the Gepids and the Lombard migrated to Italy, as the “dawn of the Dark Ages.’ This, the argument goes, put an end to the history of the Gepids and of all other “Germanic” polities in the Carpathian Basin.
Gone was the traditional system of alliances on which the Roman policies towards barbarians have been based, as the Avar newcomers set relations with the Empire on a completely different footing. To some, the year 568 serves therefore as the East European equivalent of 476.8
As important as the emigration of the Lombards may be for the medieval history of Italy, the year 568 is not an ideal point at which to begin an investigation into the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages in East Central and Eastern Europe. For it is evident that despite defeat, the Gepids survived under Avar rule, while the establishment of the Avar qaganate initially had little impact on the neighboring regions.
Moreover, while the political developments involving the Avars, especially their relations with the Empire, have been covered in written records, the transformations taking place at that same time inside the Carpathian Basin, as well as in the neighboring Balkans have already started in the pre-Avar period.
To describe and explain those transformations, no attempt has been made to employ the conceptual tools applying to West European history. Nor has there been any attempt to test the model of the “transformation of the Roman world” on the eastern part of the European continent, not even on the Balkans, a region that is conspicuously absent from Chris Wickham’s book on Europe and the Mediterranean between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.9
In that book, Wickham selected four specific issues as crucial: the form of the state (with particular emphasis on fiscality), the aristocracy, the peasantry, and the networks of exchange. His arguments were cast within the broader debate between “continuitists” and “catastrophists” in regard to the transformation of the Roman world.
His conclusion was that the transfer of resources from the empire to “feudalism” took place because of the rise of the aristocracy. In other words, the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages is a matter of social change dominated by aristocratic needs and aspirations.
This book is meant to test that model, but goes much farther. In doing so, it focuses on a vast area of the European continent situated between the lands of modern Russia beyond the Arctic Circle to the north and Greece to the south, and between the Czech lands to the west and the Ural Mountains to the east.
Leaving aside the almost complete neglect of this considerable part (two thirds) of the European continent in the scholarly literature dealing with Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, such a vast span of territory offers great opportunities for comparison.!© The chronological interval considered in this book covers a little less than two centuries (ca. 500 to ca. 680), which explains the title (“the /ong sixth century”).
This interval has been chosen for a variety of reasons, the most important of which has to do with the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. By the end of the 5th century, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Hunnic polity, the Roman power was restored in the northern Balkans, which again brought the frontier of the Empire on the river Danube.
The last century of Roman power in the Peninsula thus opened, and with it, anumber of transformations that mark this area as different from all others around the Mediterranean that have been in the focus of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Moreover, after the withdrawal of the Roman troops and administration from the peninsula (with the exception of the coastal regions), the Balkans experienced a demographic collapse, with large tracts of land left without any inhabitants." The late antique cities and forts were abandoned and the population moved elsewhere, either as refugees into the coastal areas still under Roman control, or as prisoners of war within the Avar gaganate. No newcomers appear to have taken their places.
There was no “Slavic tide” covering the Balkans after ca. 620. This situation in the Balkan Peninsula is therefore radically different from that of the other two peninsulas in southern Europe (Italian and Iberian), but not unlike the situation in Britain at the beginning of the 5th century. However, while in Britain both the population and the political developments have stabilized by 700, in the Balkans, the arrival of the Bulgars ca. 680 marked a new period of turmoil. Discontinuity s therefore a key phenomenon for the understanding of the early medieval developments in the central and northern parts of the peninsula.!?
This is also true for the opposite end of the vast area under consideration in this book, but a century earlier. During the 6th century, a very large part of East Central Europe, particularly northeastern Germany and Poland, were largely depopulated. Around 700, however, the first signs of new settlements appear, which have been associated with the migration of the Slavs from the south and southeast.!2 While the population vacuum in the northern part of Central Europe has largely been discussed in relation to the migration to the British Isles, in East Central Europe, the last century considered in this book (ca. 580 to ca. 680) is regarded as a key period for the establishment of the economic and social structures believed to mark the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Farther to the east, the beginning and ending dates of the interval considered in this book are equally significant from a historical point of view. The last phase of the cemeteries with lavishly furnished graves in the Riazan’-Oka region to the southeast from present-day Moscow is dated to the second half of the 6th and the first half of the 7th century, while that of the equally rich cemeteries in the Perm region of the Ural mountains (the so-called Nevolino culture) begins around 500.
The settlements of both the Vanvizdino culture in the northeastern parts of Eastern Europe (the present-day Komi Republic) and of the Imen’kovo culture in the Middle Volga region flourished during the “long sixth century.” By 700, the political landscape of Eastern Europe has been radically modified in terms of the establishment of three powerful, similar states—the Avar qaganate in Central Europe, early medieval Bulgaria in the Balkans, and Khazaria in the steppe lands north of the Black and Caspian seas.* To ca. 680 can also be dated the earliest emporia established on the southern and southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea (e.g., Grobina in present-day Latvia). Less than a century later, the Scandinavians responsible for the establishment of that type of settlement engaged the entire eastern part of the Continent into an enormous commercial network linking the markets in the Muslim world in the south to northern Europe.!®
From an economic and social point of view, the “long sixth century” is therefore a crucial period in the history of Eastern Europe. However, the evidence pertaining to that history is primarily archaeological, as beyond the Balkans and the neighboring territories to the north of the river Danube, much of Eastern Europe was not on the radar of the written sources pertaining to the 6th and 7th centuries.
As a consequence, there have been no attempt to write an economic and social history of this region of the continent, since few historians inclined to do so could keep up with the rapidly accumulating evidence, and equally challenging interpretations of the archaeological material.
Taking up that task, for the first time, this book is based on an in-depth analysis of the archaeological data combined with a critical approach to the written sources. In an effort to write “thick descriptions” of the variety and ingenuity of human creativity, I was inspired by the idea of seeking out the details of the way in which “people, in historically specific contexts, used, manipulated and confronted both texts and objects.”!”
1 Written Sources
Literary sources produced in Eastern Europe are rare, but precious. The Miracles of St. Demetrius, a collection of homilies offered as a hymn of thanksgiving to God for His gift to the city, offers precious insights into the life of Thessalonica between ca. 580 and ca. 680.
The first 15 miracles which the saint performed for the benefit of his city and its inhabitants are central to as many sermons written by Archbishop John of Thessalonica during the first decade of Heraclius’ reign (610-620). Six other miracles form Book 11 of the Miracles, which was written by an unknown author at some point during the last two decades of the 7th century. In addition to the coverage of several attacks on the city by Avars and Slavs, the Miracles offer glimpses into the changes that took place during the 6th and 7th century in one of the most important cities in the Empire.
In that respect, and despite its preoccupation with miracles and miraculous deeds, the collection is invaluable for its information on the food supplies for Thessalonica during peacetime, as well as under siege; for the city’s harbor and its trade connections with the outside world; and for the social, political and administrative structures in the 7th century.!* No other source for the Balkans and the neighboring regions to the north was written in the region, but the author of a military treatise known as the Strategikon was most likely an experienced officer who had undoubtedly participated in the campaigns that Emperor Maurice launched in the 590s against the Avars and the Sclavenes. He had first-hand knowledge of Avar tactics and of Slavic settlements, warfare, and society. Long attributed to a certain Maurice because of the mention of that name in three manuscripts dated to the first half of the uth century, the Strategikon was most likely written at some point during the last ten years of the reign of Maurice (592-602) by one of his namesakes.!9
The sources written in Greek outside the region occasionally mention people, places, or events, but rarely provide prolonged discussion. The most notable exception is Wars, one of the most important works that Procopius of Caesarea finished writing in 551. Although he rarely mentions his sources, Procopius was well informed on military events on many fronts, including the Balkans and the lands beyond the rivers Danube and Sava, to the north. However, except the regions in the immediate vicinity of Constantinople, he hardly knew the Balkan area other than from maps. Procopius’ views of the barbarians—Lombards, Herules, Gepids, Sclavenes, Antes, Utigurs, and Cutrigurs—is a function of his general concept of God’s empire surrounded by “allies.” He espoused a mixture of scorn and learned curiosity for the territories beyond the borders of the Empire, and often employed ancient tropes for their description and antiquated names for the peoples inhabiting them during his lifetime.
His astutely veiled criticism of Justinian and his policies makes it difficult sometimes to decide what to make of the spin he put on some events, or how to interpret some of his stories about barbarians.?° Despite the seemingly abundant information, the fact is that the picture of economic and social developments is all too often partial or incomplete. Specific details are left unmentioned, apparently on purpose; episodes are modeled after scenes of the neo-Attic comedy or descriptions of judicial torture; and geography is adapted to the polemical needs of the author.”!
Writing his History in the 560s, Agathias of Myrina obtained information about affairs north of the Lower Danube from military reports probably originating in the neighboring province of Scythia Minor.?* More information about the “Huns” in the steppe lands around the Kerch Strait, which are based on Roman reports from Bosporus, appears in the chronicle of John Malalas written, perhaps in Constantinople, a few years after Agathias’ History.?% Of Constantinopolitan, either archival or oral origin is also the information provided by Menander the Guardsman and John of Ephesus on Avars and Slavs.?4 By contrast, Theophylact Simocatta’s coverage of events in the Lower Danube region during the last decade of the 6th and the first years of the 7th century is based on a campaign diary written by a participant in Emperor Maurice’s campaigns against Avars and Slavs, which explains the relatively large number of similarities with the recommendations of the Strategikon.?°
A handful of 6th century imperial edicts provide useful nuggets of information on the economic and social situation in the Balkans, while a passage in John Lydus’ On Powers contains a brief description of the new administrative unit of the quaestura exercitus. Snippets of information about the situation in Istria, the steppe lands north of the Black Sea or the (north)western border of the Avar qaganate appear in sources written in Latin, such as Cassiodorus’ Variae, Jordanes’ Getica, and the so-called Chronicle of Fredegar.”®
There are not sufficient sources for 6th and 7th centuries in order to reconstruct a complete political map of the time. It is possible to infer something from the existing sources only for political developments taking place either within the Balkan provinces of the Empire, or within a relatively short distance from its northern frontier. The following summary of the political events is simply meant to provide a background for the discussion of economic and social developments in the following chapters.”
2 Synopsis of Political History
Barbarian raids were the most prominent feature of 6th-century imperial politics in the Balkans. There is hardly any year within the first half of that century without a mention of raids by people whom early Byzantine authors, writing in the tradition of classical historiography, regarded as barbarians, without much concern for accurate or objective ethnographic description. For example, during the first decades of the century, most raids were attributed to the “Huns,” a generic term that historians such as Comes Marcellinus, Jordanes, and Procopius used for horsemen from the steppe lands. At times, however, Bulgars (first mentioned in 480) and Cutrigurs are also mentioned, even along with the Huns, first allied with the Romans, then against them. Before 540, most raids targeted the eastern Balkans, especially Thrace and Moesia Inferior, an indication that they must have originated in the northwestern region of the Black Sea, not far from the line of the Lower Danube. Marauding expeditions were the work of one or several chieftains working together, such as those intercepted, defeated and killed in 539 after devastating Scythia Minor and Moesia Inferior. Despite all efforts, often surprisingly successful, directed towards intercepting and crushing marauding parties, “Hunnic” horsemen were at the same time recruited for Justinian’s wars in Italy, most likely because of their extraordinary mobility. It was indeed mobility that enabled other Hunnic marauders of 539 to reach the western Balkans and even the outskirts of Constantinople. It was in fact in response to such marauding activities that Justinian began his project of fortifying the Balkans and the Danube frontier on a scale without any precedent.” It is remarkable in that respect that there is no mutiny of Roman troops in the political history of the Balkans between Vitalian’s rebellion against Emperor Anastasius (513) and Phocas’s revolt against Maurice (602).9
In the Carpathian Basin, the imperial government chose a different strategy. Ever since the Gepid occupation of Sirmium during the Gothic war in Italy, the Gepids had become the second most important problem in the northern Balkans, after the “Huns,” with whom they formed an alliance in 535 in order to raid Moesia. During the Gothic war, the Gepids were allied with the Franks and constantly threatened the Roman line of defense in the northern Balkans. They were led by petty kings who ruled over most of the eastern part of the Carpathian Basin. Some of them, however, ruled from Sirmium, and others may have been their subordinates. Shortly before 500, Thrapstila was “king” of Sirmium, followed at his death by his son, Thrasaric. Cunimund, who ruled between 560 and 567, also resided in Sirmium, together with the Arian bishop of the Gepids.*° In the mid-6th century, the Gepids were in conflict with their western neighbors, the Lombards. The Lombards had moved into the Middle Danube region from the north at some point during the early 6th century. Much like their Gepid counterparts, the Lombard kings maintained relations with distant potentates. Wacho, the king who ruled in the 520s and 530s, had close ties to the Merovingian rulers in Reims. His eldest daughter, Walderada, became the wife of Theudebert’s son, Theudebald (547-555). Auduin, the Lombard king who ruled from 547/548 to 560/565, married Rodelinda, the daughter of last Thuringian king.*!
Annoyed by Gepid depredations and by the impossibility of dislodging the Gepid king from Sirmium, Justinian agreed to give the Lombards the annual subsidies until then paid to the Gepids. In exchange, the Lombards became a permanent threat both to Sirmium and to the neighboring Gepid settlements. The Gepids were defeated by an allied Lombard-Roman force, and then again, in 551 or 552, by Lombards alone.3* During the Lombard-Gepid conflict, a “no man’s land” functioned as a political and military frontier region, which only political refugees could occasionally cross. For example, shortly after the Lombards and the Gepids agreed to a truce in 549, a candidate to the Lombard throne named Hildigis fled to the Gepids, followed by a multi-ethnic retinue, which he later took with him to Italy, where he joined the army of the Ostrogothic king Totila,33 By that time, however, the greatest danger for the Roman system of defense in the Balkans did not come either from Gepid or from Lombard renegades.
In 545, a great throng of Sclavenes crossed the river Danube, plundered the adjoining country and enslaved a large number of Romans. Judging by the testimony of Procopius of Caesarea, those Sclavenes lived on, and not too far from the left bank of the Danube. Their raids, particularly in the early 550s, when the Sclavenes reached as far south as Thessalonica and Dyrrachium (now Durrés, in Albania), were devastating. However, no Slavic raids are mentioned between 551 and 578, which suggests that Justinian’s program of fortification in the Balkans, which must have come into being by the mid-6th century, was quite effective. When resuming in the 570s, the raids of the Sclavenes involved much larger numbers of warriors, often under the leadership of just one chief, such as a certain Ardagastus, who led a raid in 585 that went as far as the outskirts of Constantinople. Another 5,000 Sclavene warriors stormed the walls of Thessalonica in the early 580s.34+ Only the campaigns that Emperor Maurice launched in 592 into the Sclavene territories north of the river Danube eventually put a stop on the devastations perpetrated by the Sclavene warriors in the Balkans.*® Slavic raiding activity resumed during Heraclius’ reign, but the first indications of Slavic settlement in the hinterland of Thessalonica cannot be dated before 670.°6
The Slavic raids of the late 6th century were often associated, at least in the minds of the Byzantine authors, with Avar attacks on key points of Justinian’s system of defense. The Avars first appeared in the steppe north of the Caucasus Mountains, whence they sent an embassy to Emperor Justinian in 558. They quickly reduced to submission all the peoples of the steppe lands and then made a surprise attack on the Franks. Allied with Alboin, the king of the Lombards, they defeated the Gepids, and forced their former allies to emigrate to Italy.3” From the Carpathian Basin, the Avars constantly raided the Balkan provinces, as far as Constantinople and Greece, managed to capture some of the key fortifications of the Roman system of defense, and extorted enormous amounts of imperial gold nominally paid as stipends. In 578, in order to win favor with the new emperor Tiberius 11, the qagan of the Avars named Baian responded to the emperor’s request for military assistance in his attempt to curb Slavic raids into the Balkans. No less than 60,000 horsemen are said to have been transported on Roman ships down the river Danube, from the Iron Gates to Scythia Minor, where they crossed the river into Sclavene territory, which they laid waste. One year later, however, Baian began the threeyear siege of Sirmium (which fell in 582), and the annual stipends paid to the Avars increased steadily from 80,000 to 150,000 gold coins over a period of 30 years. During the 580s and 590s, as the imperial armies were engaged in war on other fronts, the troops remaining in the Balkans were no match for the Avars. Singidunum (now Belgrade, Serbia) was twice taken and plundered, first in 584, when the army of the qagan moved swiftly across the Balkans from northern Serbia to the Black Sea coast. A year later, the Avars sacked a number of forts along the Danube frontier from Bononia (now Vidin, Bulgaria) to Tropaeum Traiani (now Adamclisi, Romania). The war continued in 586, when the Avars inflicted anumber of demoralizing defeats on the imperial armies. An army said to have been of 100,000 Sclavenes and other barbarians obeying the orders of the qagan appeared under the walls of Thessalonica on September 22, 586, but could not take the city under the protection of St. Demetrius.?° When, in 592, the Roman defenses around the passes across the eastern Stara Planina range of mountains were left unmanned, the Avars invaded the Black Sea coast region and in only five days reached Drizipera (now Biiyiikkaristiran near Liileburgaz, in Turkey). Near Heraclea, they encountered the Roman army, which they attacked by night, and the remaining Roman forces locked themselves up inside the walls of Tzurullon (Corlu, Turkey), only a dozen miles away from the Long Walls defending the capital city of the Empire.*9
However, beginning with the mid-590s, the Romans went on offensive. Until Maurice's fall in 602, with some interruptions, Roman armies incessantly waged war in the territories north of the Danube River, sometimes against the Slavs, other times against the Avars. Among several generals, Priscus distinguished himself through a very aggressive approach. In 595, his troops crossed the Danube in the Iron Gates sector, and two years later crossed again and defeated a much superior Avar force in a series of encounters, killing almost the entire Avar army and the qagan’s four sons at its command. When, in 601, the Avars were desperately attempting to recuperate their control of the Iron Gates region, the commander in chief was not the qagan, but a general named Apsich. He organized a quick campaign into the Lower Danube region, but large numbers of his troops defected to the Romans, an indication of the precarious situation in which the power of the gagan was in the aftermath of Priscus’ successful campaigns.
For a long time, historians have associated the rebellion that broke out in 602 against Maurice among the troops on the Danube frontier under the command of a centurion named Phocas with the crumbling of the Roman defense in the Balkans and a general invasion of the peninsula by Slavs and Avars.*° In reality, the Roman troops were still waging war successfully both on the Avars and on the Slavs when Emperor Maurice's order to his army to pass the winter in Sclavene territory sparked the mutiny that would eventually bring Phocas to the imperial throne. Moreover, after overthrowing Maurice in 602, the army returned to the Danube front and continued to wage war against Slavs and Avars. No evidence exists either of Avar or of Slavic raids during the reign of Phocas, but marauding expeditions restarted during the first years of Heraclius’ reign (610-641). By 620, occupation on most, if not all forts in the northern and central Balkans completely ceased, as the emperor withdrew all troops from the Balkans to meet the dangers on the eastern frontier. Taking advantage of the vacuum of power thus created, the Slavs, together with the Avars attacked Thessalonica again. Although the city resisted, in an attempt to appease the Avars, Heraclius raised the stipends to 200,000 gold coins and gave his own son as hostage.*! The Avars, however, put Constantinople under siege in 626, in cooperation with the Persian armies on the other side of the Straits. The attack that the Slavs under Avar command launched on their canoes in the Golden Horn waters met the superior forces of the Byzantine fleet. The military failure grew quickly from debacle into disaster.4* Conflicts between Avars and Sclavenes seem to have resulted from the failed siege, and the subsequent decades witnessed some of the worst political and, possibly, social convulsions in the history of the Avar qaganate. In the early 630s, civil war broke inside the qaganate between an Avar and a Bulgar “party.” The exact reasons for the conflict are not known, but it must have been associated with the considerable blow to the prestige of the ruling qagan that was brought by his defeat under the walls of Constantinople. The serious crisis opened by the civil war led to the migration to Bavaria of 9,000 Bulgar families, no doubt supporters of the losing party. They were slaughtered at the order of the Frankish King Dagobert, and only 700 families managed to escape to a certain duke of the Wends named Walluc, who probably ruled in what is now Austrian Carinthia and northern Slovenia.*? Other, more belligerent Wends—the preferred name for Slavs on the western fringes of the qaganate—had by then established a powerful polity farther to the north or northwest. Their leader was a Frankish merchant named Samo, who ruled over the Wends for 35 years, and managed to defeat King Dagobert himself.4+
The troubles at the center of the Avar power reverberated also in the East European steppe lands. A Bulgar lord named Kubrat rose against the Avars, established a powerful polity on both sides of the Sea of Azov, and allied himself with Emperor Heraclius.*° Shortly after his death, that polity was rapidly conquered by the Khazars, who began building their own empire in the steppe lands. A group of Bulgars from those lands meanwhile migrated to the Lower Danube region, ca. 670. From there, the Bulgars began raiding those parts of the eastern Balkans that were still under Byzantine control. Initially, because of the concomitant attacks of the Arabs who besieged Constantinople between 674 and 678, Emperor Constantine Iv tried to ensure good relations with the new barbarians at the Empire’s northern frontier. However, shortly after his victory over the Arabs, he organized an expedition against the Bulgars, during which the Byzantine fleet blocked any passage across the Danube from north to south. The campaign went awry when the emperor decided to return to Mesembria (now Nesebar, Bulgaria) together with his retinue and a part of the fleet. A rumor spread that the emperor was fleeing, and in the debacle, the Bulgars led by Asparukh crossed the Danube and reached the Black Sea coast near Varna. Following their victory of 680/1, they remained in the newly conquered lands (Dobrudja and what is now northeastern Bulgaria), subdued the local Slavic populations and began building a new polity, early medieval Bulgaria.*¢
3 Archaeological Sources and the Problems of Their Interpretation
Much more abundant than the textual evidence for the history of Eastern Europe as a whole is that from material sources. As in Chersonesus, archaeological excavations in Athens, Corinth, and Salona began in the igth century, but research specifically directed towards Late Antiquity cannot be dated before the 1920s and the 1930s.*” Initially, the focus was on basilicas and fortifications, but an early interest in economic issues and social structures was already apparent in the Soviet excavations in the Crimea. In Bulgaria, such concerns became apparent in the 1970s and 1980s primarily in relation to military sites on the right bank of the Danube River.** The timing of such concerns is not accidental.
In most parts of Eastern Europe, the rise of (early) medieval archaeology coincides with, and was ultimately caused by the imposition of the Communist regimes under Soviet aegis, if not control. As a consequence, archaeology was organized along the lines of the Soviet school of “material culture history” and received a degree of institutional support that it had never experienced before. Considerable long-term investments with no parallels anywhere else in Europe made possible large-scale explorations of several key sites, some of which resulted in total excavation, following the principles first championed by the Soviet school of archaeology.*® The earliest horizontal excavations of medieval settlements were published in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.°° By directing the attention of archaeologists to the lives of ordinary people, the Marxist paradigm encouraged the development of settlement archaeology (as opposed to the excavation of cemeteries which had until then been the almost exclusive focus of research). The result of that shift in emphasis was the large-scale excavation of 6th- to 7th-century villages such as Popina (Bulgaria), Dunatjvaros (Hungary), and Brezno (Czechoslovakia).5! Similarly large-scale excavations, some of which continued after 1989, have brought to light some of the largest settlements known from 6th- to 7th-century Europe.” The analysis of finds from those excavations formed the basis for the first attempts to write economic and social history (almost exclusively) on the basis of archaeological data.°3 The growth in the 1960s and 1970s of cemetery archaeology, especially in Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union, led to a quick increase in the volume of data, to such an extent that entire chronological gaps in the knowledge of the early Middle Ages have been virtually eliminated by 1990 primarily because of archaeological research. Some of those cemeteries are very large (e.g., Zamardi, in Hungary, with over 2,000 burials), others have several barrows (e.g., Baliulai, in Lithuania, with 16 burial mounds), some with multiple burials each (e.g., elongated barrow 6 in Résna-Saare, in Estonia, with seven separate cremations).5+
For the last 50 years or so, archaeology has been instrumental in “writing history” for entire periods or areas that are otherwise poorly covered in the written sources, if at all. For example, only archaeological excavations have shed light on the social and economic organization of those parts of East Central Europe (Moravia, Lower Austria and western Hungary), which was occupied in the 6th century by the Lombards.®> Nothing is known from the written sources about the northwestern part of present-day Russia during the 6th century, but there are several cemetery and settlement sites dated to that period and much can be said about social organization and economic structures based just on that kind of evidence.5® Only archaeological excavations and, more recently, numismatics have provided information about the sudden involvement of the taiga region of Eastern Europe in long-distance trade networks across Eurasia.5”
Archaeological sources, however, are not without their own problems. In the absence of wooden remains (of the appropriate species of trees, and with a sufficient number of rings for dendrochronological analysis), dating is often a serious problem. The recent surge in the use of radiocarbon analysis has only partially alleviated that problem, for standard deviations cover an interval of 60 years for any calibrated dating results. Bayesian statistics may be used to obtain explicit estimates, but for that one needs multiple results from a large number of samples.5° By contrast, dendrochronology has a great impact on research, because of the ability to assign precise dates (down to a particular season or even month of the year) to timber structures. This has changed radically the understanding both of settlement chronology and of the impact of climate change.*?
That many more ordinary settlements than high-status sites have been excavated is undoubtedly because of the primarily Marxist orientation of the earlier decades of archaeological research, especially the 1950s and the 1960s. On the other hand, the prevailing understanding of archaeology as a historical discipline favored the cultural-historical approach, which led to an obsessive preoccupation with ethnicity and the rapid politicization of the archaeological research. For along time, almost every archaeological site in the European part of the Soviet Union was attributed to the Slavs, a stance revived in Putin's Russia.©° Conversely, 6th- to 7th-century settlements in southern and eastern Romania, though excavated in large numbers and, in some cases, comprehensively, were never recognized as “Slavic,” because that would have contradicted the supposedly anti-Soviet stance of Nicolae Ceausescu and his insistence that the early medieval migratory populations (especially the Slavs) were responsible for Romania’s lagging behind the West in the 2oth century in matters of the general development of productive forces and civilization. Many finds in Slovakia were wrongly dated (deliberately) to avoid their interpretation as evidence that the early Slavs came to that region together with the Avars, who were perceived as ancestors or just predecessors of modern Hungarians.®?
While distancing itself from a cultural-historical approach and ethnic interpretations, this book is also steering away from evolutionary ecology, with its emphasis on how humans cope with the environment, and a preoccupation with the impact of climate change on economic and social developments. Instead, the emphasis is on practice and on human agency.®
The way of living in a landscape is therefore conceptualized as a result of human problem solving, a form of land use or a subsistence strategy. On the other hand, the centrality of production and consumption makes it possible to focus on the household or the community level in an attempt to understand the emergence of material wealth-based inequality.6* From that perspective, technology has social significance. The emphasis on micro-, instead of macro-level is a good antidote against the identification, description, and classification of any particular (static) social organization of a period or a place. Social complexity is treated as transformation, with the recognition of the local contingencies and the historical nature of the process.
The meaning of material culture is contingent and contextually dependent, but material culture does not necessarily reflect social reality. Indeed, it was often used to mask or to obscure that reality. If, like a text, material culture requires interpretation, one needs to start from the premise that material culture is a social, not an individual phenomenon. The primary importance of material culture, therefore, is not its practical function, but its symbolic value as part of the social construction of reality. In that respect, material culture is subject to multiple transformations in form and meaning content; it forms a communicative medium in, for, and of social practice. The approach adopted in this book may therefore be described as “processual-plus.’®
4 Book Structure and Scope
The book has four unequal parts dedicated to the historiography of the problem and the geography of the region, the “Roman orbit,” the world (far) beyond it, and the specific trends of the economic and social developments in Eastern Europe. Chapter 1 offers a critical review of Chris Wickham’s model of the “transformation of the Roman world,’ with a special emphasis on the “peasant mode of production” and the way in which the model accounts for parts of Balkan Peninsula now in Greece. Chapter 2 is an introduction to the historiography of medieval Eastern Europe and to the geography of that part of the Continent. The emphasis on landscape modification is
meant to highlight the minimal impact of the former on the economic and social developments of the period under consideration in this book. By contrast, the discussion of proxy data pertaining to climate change and of their interpretation serves as a caveat against environmental determinism.
Research in this particular field is still in its infancy, and conclusions drawn at a local or even regional level cannot apply to the whole of Eastern Europe. Different parts of the Continent experienced the climate change taking place in the late 5th or early 6th century in different ways. No one-to-one correlation can so far be established between climate change and the economic and social shifts taking place in Eastern and East Central Europe during the “long sixth century.”
The following seven chapters (3 to 9) are dedicated to those shifts inside the Balkan Peninsula, Crimea, and the adjacent regions along the Middle and Lower Danube and in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea. The main goal of those chapters is to highlight changes taking place within territories directly ruled by Romans (the Balkan Crimean peninsulas), or occupied by barbarian clients, allies or enemies of the Empire (the Carpathian Basin, the lands north of the Lower Danube, and the steppe lands north of the Black Sea). Two regions are covered in pairs of separate chapters—the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Basin. In the case of the former, chapter 3 deals with the last century of Roman power (500 to ca. 620), while chapter 4 is dedicated to the situation in the Balkans following the withdrawal of the Roman army and administration (620 to ca. 680). In the case of the Carpathian Basin, chapter 6 deals with the Roman clients (Gepids and Lombards), while chapter 7 is dedicated to the first century of Avar power (570 to ca. 680).
Each chapter of the section entitled “The Roman orbit” uses five themes—property, subsistence economy, crafts, forms of exchange, and social change—to explore regional diversity and to highlight specific developments. The same set of themes are also used as guidelines for the next six chapters (10 to 15) of the section entitled “Far away from the Empire.” Each one of them focuses on a region of East Central and Eastern Europe, from Poland and the Baltic lands to the west to the taiga belt next to the Ural Mountains to the east, running through the forest-steppe and forest belts, as well as through the central parts of presentday Russia.
As all those regions were outside the radar of the written sources in the 6th and 7th centuries, there is a much greater emphasis on the archaeological data and their interpretation in the light of the five themes employed for the section dedicated to the Roman orbit. The main purpose of the 13 chapters (3 to15) in the middle of the book is therefore to provide a basis for comparison.
The five themes guiding the analysis of the historical and archaeological information are the focus of the last section of the book entitled “Specific trends.” Each chapter in this section is dedicated to one of the themes and is based on a comparative analysis of the data presented in the previous chapter within the theoretical framework of economic anthropology.
Concepts are introduced, such as swidden cultivation, embedded production, attached specialists, wealth finance, and third-type transfers, in order to explain the specific developments and the contrasts identified between regions. Various strands of evidence are then brought together in the conclusion, which addresses the issue of whether the model of the “transformation of the Roman world” can apply to Eastern Europe.
The resulting, overall picture is different from both the standard Marxist interpretation, which was the rule in most countries in Eastern Europe until 1989, and the neo-Marxist model of analysis offered by Chris Wickham for Europe and the Mediterranean between ca. 400 and ca. 800.
Traditional Marxists saw a transition from a slave-owning to a feudal mode of production in those territories that had belonged to the Roman Empire, or the imposition of the so-called “tributary” or Asian mode of production outside the formerly Roman lands. In both, the collapse of the Roman Empire—as a state and an instrument of exploitation—was a crucial argument. Chris Wickham, on the other hand, put a great emphasis on the continuing power of the state, when describing the “Mediterranean world-system” fueled not by commercial enterprise, but by fiscality and the enormous demands of commodities such as wine, grain and oil generated by Rome and Constantinople.
Outside the Empire, in such remote places as Denmark and Ireland, the change was in fact a transformation of small-scale “tribal” states into larger kingdoms. Crucial for my decision to move away from both models is the incontrovertible evidence of discontinuity, as well as the survival of urban settlements on the southern rim of the region (the northern coast of the Black Sea, and the coastal areas of the Balkan Peninsula).
Exactly how the urban aristocracy was able to survive in those coastal centers, and even to maintain a certain degree of social distinction manifested in such lofty titles as proteuontes and archontes is illustrated by the second book of the Miracles of St. Demetrius. The extraordinary richness of finds from the cemetery excavated in the early 20th century on the Hospital Street in Kerch’ is the archaeological correlate of those social claims to prominence.®®
While there is considerable evidence for rural communities in Eastern Europe around 600, there is also evidence of powerful aristocracies outside and far away from the cities surviving in the coastal regions. The rich burials in the Ufa region of present-day Bashkortostan, the burial mounds in eastern Lithuania, as well as the formidably furnished, warrior graves in Sambia and in Avar-age Hungary are a clear testimony that in Eastern Europe, much like in the rest of the Continent during the 6th and 7th centuries, considerable social differences were maintained in ranked societies. At the same time, a number of archaeological phenomena in Eastern Europe that could hastily be linked to “peasant-mode” societies have no equivalent in the rest of the continent. There is simply nothing in the whole of Europe like the 7th-century, agricultural settlement in Roztoky, near Prague, with its over 300 sunken-floored buildings.®’
Nor is there any analogue for the later settlements of specialized production—blacksmithing in Zamardi, non-ferrous metallurgy in Iur’evskaia Gorka, or pottery production in Kantserka.®* The “peasant-mode’ societies of Eastern Europe, if that is what they were, seem to have been much more complex than Wickham’s model would suggest.
Such features are in contrast, on the other hand, with the evidence of communal burial in the so-called long barrows of northwestern Russia and southeastern Estonia, or the communal centers of craft production and probably feasting, such a Hacki and Szeligi in Poland, or Zymne in Ukraine.® In Eastern Europe, there are multiple degrees of shade between the “worlds of the villa on the one hand and the castle on the other.””° There is also plenty of archaeological evidence for the understanding of the role of exchange networks in the period of transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages.
Long-distance exchanges were not necessarily commercial around AD 600, although the persistence of commercial exchanges even beyond that date, and well into the 7th century, cannot be denied for the Black Sea area.”! Bow fibulae, weapons, and stirrups may have traveled across Eastern Europe by means of non-commercial exchanges, which imply an interpretation of the social level of development of the communities engaged in such exchanges, which is different from that favored for the analysis of the distribution of exotica in other parts of Europe.”? This book will emphasize the great role that wealth finance played not only in the circulation of ideas and ornamental patterns, but also in establishing networks of alliances and communication.
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