Download PDF | Victor Spinei - The Romanians and the Turkic Nomads North of the Danube Delta from the Tenth to the Mid-Thirteenth Century-Brill (2009).
565 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The hardly reconcilable confrontation between sedentary agricultural communities and nomadic pastoralists is a quite well known aspect in the history of mankind. The antagonism between the two types of societies has been caused by the incompatibility between two systems of subsistence, and that antagonism manifested itself in many ways, in various parts of the world. ‘The Carpathian-Danubian area particularly favoured the development of sedentary life, throughout the millennia, but, at various times, nomadic pastoralists of the steppes also found this area favourable to their own way of life.
The author of the present volume aims to investigate the relationships between Romanians and nomadic Turkic groups in the southern half of Moldavia, north of the Danube Delta, between the tenth century and the great Mongol invasion of 1241-1242. Due to the basic features of its landscape, the above-mentioned area, which includes a vast plain, became the main political stage of the Romanian ethnic space, a stage on which local communities had to cope with the pressures of successive intrusions of nomadic ‘Turks, attracted by the rich pastures north of the Lower Danube. Other areas inhabited by Romanians (with the exception of the Baragan plain and Dobrudja) were significantly less affected by Turkic invasions and occupations than southern Moldavia.
The geographic area at issue includes the southern half of Moldavia, within its medieval boundaries: the Carpathians in the west, the Milcov, the Putna, the Siret, the Danube and the Black Sea in the south, and the Dniester in the east.
My approach does not follow the beaten tracks, nor does it represent a total breakthrough. The chosen topic has not been neglected by historiographers; on the contrary, it has been dealt with in outstanding works, and it has enjoyed scientific attention. With no intention of enumerating all the significant contributions in the field, or of assessing them, mention must be made of the works of Ilie Gherghel,' Ioan Ferent,” Nicolae
Iorga,’ Petre Diaconu* and Ion Chirtoaga.° Those works highlighted the various levels of knowledge specific to the periods in which they were written. The problem of the Romanian-Turkic relations is also reflected in synthetic works on Romanian medieval history, as well as in other studies that will be mentioned below. In trying to define the place of ‘Turkic nomads in the complicated context of medieval events, and, implicitly, in trying to achieve a clearer vision of the specific character of the relations between those nomads and the Romanians, the works on ‘Turkic history published by the following authors can prove to be of much help: Vasilii Grigorovich Vasilievskii,° Piotr V. Golubovskii,’ Joseph Marquart,’ D. Rassovsky (D. A. Rasovskii),? Svetlana Aleksandrovna Pletneva,'? German Alekseevich Fedorov-Davydov,'' Omeljan Pritsak,'? Peter G. Golden,'? Andrei Olegovich Dobroliubskii,'* Jean-Paul Roux,'® Andras Paloczi Horvath,'® Igor O. Kniaz’kii,'’ Petro Petrovich Tolochko,'® Istvan Vasary,'’ etc. Besides appearing in individual volumes,’ the issues of the evolution of later nomad Turkic tribes in eastern and south-eastern Europe have been approached in numerous collected volumes on various topics. Outstanding among those are, by their amplitude and diversity of subjects, the first two volumes of an extensive work devoted to the history and civilization of ‘Turkic peoples, a work that is co-ordinated by ‘Turkish historians and benefits from the collaboration of renowned specialists from all over the world.?!
The investigation of the many-sided contacts between the sedentary inhabitants and the nomads in southern Moldavia during the tenth-thirteenth centuries may encounter serious difficulties, due to the vague and fragmentary way in which those contacts were recorded in documents of those times. The scarcity and ambiguity of those sources made it necessary to resort to collateral historical information and to interdisciplinary data. Much emphasis has been placed upon the insertion of relevant documents, especially those which were unpublished or rarely discussed in connection with the history of the eastern Carpathian space. In that respect, the territory under consideration has many essential aspects that have not been adequately explored and clarified. The access to the past and to credible reconstructions 1s unconceivable without a clarification of specific aspects, certainly not of all, but at least of those that had substantial consequences.
No claims are made here for an exhaustive research on the chosen topic. In some directions the knowledge is limited; also, the space allotted here would not be enough even for a presentation of what is known. ‘To imagine that one could give credible answers to all the controversial problems implied here and that nothing has escaped attention would merely be sinking into an abyss of vanities. The level of research 1s still underdeveloped in some fields; therefore my conclusions are just working assumptions, which are liable to suffer further modifications. The goal is to open discussions even on problems that have not yet been elucidated, and which, consequently, may lead to quite different interpretations. I take such diversity of opinions as granted, and try to stimulate a further development of ideas. In general, I will avoid ostentatious polemic gestures, but will uphold my own opinion, in opposition to theories I suspect of having wrongly interpreted the idea of bona fide, or of having tendentiously presented historical realities.
Along general lines, this volume follows the structure of a book published in Iasi in 1985.” There are, however, several important differences. I have left out lengthy passages on the specific features of the geographical background, as well as the descriptions of Turkic funerary complexes. Many new paragraphs have been added, in order to enrich the text published more than two decades ago.
The additions were possible due to my research in several national libraries, or in some belonging to reputed institutes and universities such as those in Berlin (Eurasten-Abteilung des Deutschen Archiologischen Instituts, Institut fiir Prihistorische Archdologie/Freie Universitat), Frankfurt am Main (Romisch-Germanische Kommuission des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Unwersitat), Konstanz (Unwersitét), London (School of Onental and African Studies, School of Slavonic and East European Studies/University College London), Mainz (Rémisch-Germanisches Kentralmuseum), Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Historicum/Ludwig-Maximilians-Unwersitat, Monumenta Germaniae Historica), Stockholm (Kungliga Biblioteket, Vitterhetsakademiens Bibliotek), Vienna (Institut fiir Mittelalterforschung, Institut fiir Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek), Washington, D.C. (Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Library of Congress), etc. The books and copies I have received from foreign colleagues, such as Uwe Fiedler (Berlin), Irma G. Konovalova (Moscow), Anton Cusa (Evry) and others, felicitously filled up bibliographic gaps. I have also been able to use a rich archaeological material discovered and published lately in Romania, Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.
The illustrative part of the volume consists of representations of archaeological items that are significant both for the Romanian medieval society and for the Turkic nomads. Many of the vessels and objects have not been published until now; they come from archaeological diggings led by the present author (Baiceni, Barlad, Barlalesti, Danesti, GrivitaVaslui, Iasi, Pahnesti, etc.), or from the collections of some museums and archaeological institutes in Romania (Barlad, Botosani, Focsani, Tasi, Tecuci, Vaslui, etc.), the Republic of Moldova (Kishinev/ Chisinau), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa), and Russia (Moscow, Leningrad/Sankt Petersburg). The drawings were done by Waltraud Delibas, Emilia Drumea and Romeo Ionescu of the Institute of Archaeology in Iasi, and by Aneta Corciova of the Department of Archaeology of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi. I owe the computer typeset to Carmen Hriscu and Mariana Petcu and the illustration scanning to DianaMariuca Vornicu of the Department of Archaeology of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University and Catalin Hriban of the Moldavian Historical Museum of Iasi.
My special thanks go to Professor Florin Curta, general editor of the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, to Julian Deahl, senior acquisitions editor, and to Ellen Girmscheid and Marcella Mulder, editors at the prestigious Brill publishing house, for their keen interest in the material of the present book, and for their priceless support to the printing of it.
Iasi, April 2008
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