Download PDF | John V. A. Fine - The Early Medieval Balkans_ A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century-University of Michigan Press (1991).
367 Pages
Preface
This book is a general survey of early medieval Balkan history. Geographically it covers the region that now is included in the states of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia), Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. What are now Slovenia and Rumania are treated only peripherally. The book covers the period from the arrival of the Slavs in the second half of the sixth and early seventh centuries up to the 1180s. A second volume will continue the story from this point to the Turkish conquest, a process carried out over the late fourteenth and through much of the fifteenth centuries. This book is, to the best of my knowledge, the first of its kind in any language. There are many works devoted to the history of the Byzantine Empire (which encompassed much of the Balkans). However, these works have stressed the history of Byzantium and its institutions; when the Slavic regions were not imperial provinces these works have treated the Slavic states only from the point of view of foreign relations.
The various Balkan nations have produced a wide assortment of histories of their own individual states (or of regions within those states) in the Middle Ages, and foreign historians have also produced monographic surveys of specific regions (e.g., of Bulgaria, Serbia, or Croatia in the Middle Ages). However, no work has yet dealt with the various medieval Balkan peoples as a whole. Such a work seems necessary, particularly for this early period when much of the area was in a state of flux and the protostates' borders did not coincide with later state boundaries. Since the early medieval period was an era of both national and state formation, a study that treats the region as a whole may better trace and explain developments than a study focused on only one area.
This is particularly to the point, since the regions that have usually been chosen for study by historians have been defined by what came later, namely by being included in a subsequent national state. The early medieval period is a critical one for Balkan history. Enor-mous demographic changes occurred. If we exclude the Greeks, living in Thrace and Greece, the Albanians, and the Vlachs, scattered in various mountainous regions of the Balkans, the population of the classical Balkans disappeared in the sixth and seventh centuries to be replaced (partially by assimilation) by new ethnic groups which invaded and took over the Balkans: the Turkic Bulgars and the Slavic groups which produced the Serbo-Croatians and the Bulgaro-Macedonians. In the period that followed, these new arrivals developed into identifiable nationalities, each acquiring an ethnic awareness which has survived to the present.
Moreover, the first states created by each of these peoples (which of course greatly cqntributed to the development of each group's ethnic awareness) also appeared in the early medieval period. Finally, during this period all these peoples were officially converted to Christianity. Though many of the peasants retained so many pagan beliefs that we might consider them semipagans and only nominal Christians, nevertheless the rulers and their people considered themselves Christians, and churches and a church hierarchy were established throughout their lands. Furthermore, during this period it was determined which regions were to end up under the religious jurisdiction of Constantinople (and later under that of independent national Orthodox churches) and which were to end up under Rome.
Thus when the split in the church came to affect the Balkans, a gradual process occurring over a long period of time, which peoples were to be Eastern Orthodox and which Roman Catholic had already been settled. This differentiation, which has lasted to the present, has had a great impact on the history of the Balkans up to our own day. Only Bosnia proved to be an exception. Though in the early medieval period it was nominally under Rome, it had so weak a church organization that Catholicism was not firmly established. Thus, despite its nominal Catholicism, it was more of a no-man's-land between faiths than Catholic; hence it is not surprising that it had a unique religious history in the later Middle Ages when it was to produce its own independent and somewhat heretical church. From that period to the present Bosnia has been an area of mixed faiths. This work is to large extent a political history with a good dose of church history. Needless to say, this emphasis follows the emphasis of the surviving sources. I would have liked to treat at greater length social and economic matters.
However, we have so few sources on these questions that broader or more detailed treatment is impossible. When documents like The Farmer's Law have survived, I have dealt with them at some length. However, for other matters or other peri-ods-though sweeping generalizations about the activities of various social classes are often seen-! have limited myself to more narrow conclusions that can be supported by the sources. I have very little sympathy for "what must have been" or for conclusions about other lands based on what was occurring in the Byzantine Empire at the same time. I also see little value in works that fill in the blanks on the basis of the belief that societies pass through certain ordered stages.
The story told here of various people, movements, and eventsincluding some major ones-differs from that found in previous scholarship, because the sources simply do not support many statements made in existing historical works. Thus it is important for historians to take each statement of fact found in these works and seek its source. By this means many items, which turn out to have no reliable source, can be removed. At this moment historians of the medieval Balkans should concern themselves primarily with determining what did happen, and it is as important to remove myths and fictions as it is to uncover new facts. Since this has been one of my main aims, this work has fewer broad generalizations than most survey histories. Until the facts can be established, these generalizations are not warranted, for trends based on hypotheses really are not trends. It is important to more or less forget all the myths and tales which generations of Balkan school children have been brought up on-many of which have a nationalistic origin, showing the heroic past of a people ever struggling to assert its nationality, and provide justification for preserving or changing modern borders-and turn back to the sources with a critical eye. On the sources depends all that we can know of the medieval Balkans. Yet, because many sources are tendentious or uninformed, the historian cannot simply take them at face value but must devote much of his attention to scrutinizing them closely. It immediately becomes apparent that our sources on the whole are poor. The narrative sources were chiefly written by foreigners, often at a considerable distance from events, or by patriotic locals centuries later on the basis of oral traditions and documents of varying reliability, many of which no longer survive.
Thus, frequently we do not know what a later author's source was. And even when we can identify what it must have been, the lack of the original document often makes it difficult to determine its reliability. Although there exists a considerable number of other documents, such as letters and charters, these rarely give us the details and explanations we would like; thus we are constantly faced with a scarcity of source material. However, such a lack is no justification to fill in the blanks with fiction and then, as has so often happened in the past, to serve up this mixtureof fact and fiction as history. There is nothing shameful in admitting that we do not know things. Only when we admit our ignorance will it become clear which areas have the greatest need for further study.
Then we can turn to these areas and problems with fresh minds and possibly uncover some new facts about them. If we cannot find further material, which will frequently be the case, then we must be satisfied that there are some things which we may never know. Though this work is primarily aimed for the general reader and college student, I hope specialists will also find much in it to interest them. But, keeping in mind my general audience, I have kept notes to a minimum and have included only a brief bibliography of the most basic works. Unfortunately many of these are in foreign languages, since the literature in English is sparse. Furthermore, because of the nature of the field-the scarcity of sources encouraging a great variety of scholarly hypotheses-it has been necessary to include a certain number of discussions about the interpretations of scholars and about the sources these interpretations rest on. Some readers may feel that for a general book I have included an excess of scholarly names and views in the text itself, especially when, as is sometimes the case, I subsequently take contrary positions.
In almost all cases, however, when I present the views of a scholar-this is particularly true of the views of Zlatarski on Bulgaria-only to argue against them, these views have become "facts" in almost all the literature on the subject. Thus my readers may well have already come across them as facts; and if this book, as may be the case, is a reader's first taste of the medieval Balkans, still if he or she reads further about the Balkans, he or she will surely come across them. It is thus necessary to call attention to the existence of differences of opinion, point out that views other than my own exist, and justify the position which I have taken. Moreover, if attention were not called to these differences in views, readers finding one interpretation in my work and a differing interpretation presented as "fact" in a second work might well become confused. On the whole the names which I bring into the text are giants in the field (like Dujcev, Dvornik, N. Klaic, Ostrogorsky, Zlatarski), whose names should become known to my read~rs, for their work has had enormous impact on the historiography of the societies they have studied. Moreover, such excursuses have their positive side.
They present the reader with unsolved riddles, showing that medieval Balkan history is an exciting field, where much important work still remains to be done. They also show the nature of the sources upon which certain historical conclusions have been based and demonstrate how, at times, broad conclusions have been erected on little or no evidence. In this way they serve to correct past errors or point out that something frequently stated as a fact is really only a theory. Such discussions, by making readers reflect on the actual evidence standing behind assertions made by historians, may not only instill in readers a healthy scepticism about statements found in works on the medieval Balkans, but will serve in general to cultivate readers, who will be more critical of all the nonfiction which they read. This book is to a large extent based upon the lectures for the first half of my course on the medieval Balkans which I have been giving over the past ten years at the University of Michigan. I owe a debt to my students' responses to these lectures; their comments and questions have compelled me constantly to rethink and clarify my thoughts. Thankfully, this book can be spared their major criticism: that I speak too fast.
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