Download PDF | Florin Curta - The Making of the Slavs_ History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c.500-700-Cambridge University Press (2001).
494 Pages
This book offers a new approach to the problem of Slavic ethnicity in southeastern Europe between c. 500 and c. 700, from the perspective of current anthropological theories. The conceptual emphasis here is on the relation between material culture and ethnicity. The author demonstrates that the history of the Sclavenes and the Antes begins only at around AD 500. He also points to the significance of the archaeological evidence, which suggests that specific artifacts may have been used as identity markers. This evidence also indicates the role of local leaders in building group boundaries and in leading successful raids across the Danube. The names of many powerful leaders appear in written sources, some being styled “kings.”Because of these military and political developments, Byzantine authors began employing names such as Sclavenes and Antes in order to make sense of the process of group identification that was taking place north of the Danube frontier. Slavic ethnicity is therefore shown to be a Byzantine invention.
Florin Curta is Assistant Professor of Medieval History, University of Florida
INTRODUCTION
Mein Freund, das ist Asien! Es sollte mich wundern, es sollte mich höchlichst wundern, wenn da nicht Wendisch-Slawisch-Sarmatisches im Spiele gewesen wäre. (Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg) To many, Eastern Europe is nearly synonymous with Slavic Europe. The equation is certainly not new. To Hegel, the “East of Europe” was the house of the “great Sclavonic nation,” a body of peoples which “has not appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that Reason has assumed in the World”.1 If necessary, Europe may be divided into western and eastern zones along a number of lines, according to numerous criteria. Historians, however, often work with more than one set of criteria.
The debate about the nature of Eastern Europe sprang up in Western historiography in the days of the Cold War, but despite Oskar Halecki’s efforts explicitly to address the question of a specific chronology and history of Eastern Europe, many preferred to write the history of Slavic Europe, rather than that of Eastern Europe.2 Today, scholarly interest in Eastern Europe focuses especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period of nationalism. The medieval history of the area is given comparatively less attention, which often amounts to slightly more than total neglect. For most students in medieval studies, Eastern Europe is marginal and East European topics simply exotica. One reason for this historiographical reticence may be the uneasiness to treat the medieval history of the Slavs as (Western) European history. Like Settembrini, the Italian humanist of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, many still point to the ambiguity of those Slavs, whom the eighteenthcentury philosophes already viewed as “Oriental” barbarians.3 When Slavs come up in works on the medieval history of Europe, they are usually the marginalized, the victims, or the stubborn pagans.
In a recent and brilliant book on the “making of Europe,”the Slavs, like the Irish, appear only as the object of conquest and colonization, which shaped medieval Europe. Like many others in more recent times, the episodic role of the Slavs in the history of Europe is restricted to that of victims of the “occidentation,” the shift towards the ways and norms of Romano-Germanic civilization.4 The conceptual division of Europe leaves the Slavs out of the main “core”of European history, though not too far from its advancing frontiers of “progress” and “civilization.” Who were those enigmatic Slavs? What made them so difficult to represent by the traditional means of Western historiography? If Europe itself was “made” by its conquerors and settlers, who made the Slavs? What were the historical conditions in which this ethnic name was first used and for what purpose? How was a Slavic ethnicity formed and under what circumstances did the Slavs come into being? Above all, this book aims to answer some of these questions. What binds together its many individual arguments is an attempt to explore the nature and construction of the Slavic ethnic identity in the light of the current anthropological research on ethnicity.
Two kinds of sources are considered for this approach: written and archaeological. This book is in fact a combined product of archaeological experience, mostly gained during field work in Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and Germany, and work with written sources, particularly with those in Greek. I have conducted exhaustive research on most of the topics surveyed in those chapters which deal with the archaeological evidence. Field work in Sighis¸oara (–) and Târgs¸or (–) greatly contributed to the stance taken in this book. A study on the Romanian archaeological literature on the subject and two studies of “Slavic” bow fibulae were published separately.5 A third line of research grew out of a project developed for the American Numismatic Society Summer Seminar in New York ().6 With this variety of sources, I was able to observe the history of the area during the sixth and seventh centuries from a diversity of viewpoints. Defining this area proved, however, more difficult.
Instead of the traditional approach, that of opposing the barbarian Slavs to the civilization of the early Byzantine Empire, I preferred to look at the Danube limes as a complex interface. Understanding transformation on the Danube frontier required understanding of almost everything happening both north and south of that frontier. Geographically, the scope of inquiry is limited to the area comprised between the Carpathian basin, to the west, and the Middle Dnieper region, to the east. To the south, the entire Balkan peninsula is taken into consideration in the discussion of the sixth-century Danube limes and of the Slavic migration. The northern limit was the most difficult to establish, because of both the lack of written sources and a very complicated network of dissemination of “Slavic” brooch patterns, which required familiarity with the archaeological material of sixth- and seventh-century cemeteries in Mazuria. The lens of my research, however, was set both south and east of the Carpathian mountains, in the Lower Danube region, an area now divided between Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. My intention with this book is to fashion a plausible synthesis out of quite heterogeneous materials.
Its conclusion is in sharp contradiction with most other works on this topic and may appear therefore as argumentative, if not outright revisionist. Instead of a great flood of Slavs coming out of the Pripet marshes, I envisage a form of group identity, which could arguably be called ethnicity and emerged in response to Justinian’s implementation of a building project on the Danube frontier and in the Balkans. The Slavs, in other words, did not come from the north, but became Slavs only in contact with the Roman frontier. Contemporary sources mentioning Sclavenes and Antes, probably in an attempt to make sense of the process of group identification taking place north of the Danube limes, stressed the role of “kings” and chiefs, which may have played an important role in this process. The first chapter presents the Forschungsstand. The historiography of the subject is vast and its survey shows why and how a particular approach to the history of the early Slavs was favored by linguistically minded historians and archaeologists. This chapter also explores the impact on the historical research of the “politics of culture,” in particular of those used for the construction of nations as “imagined communities.” The historiography of the early Slavs is also the story of how the academic discourse used the past to shape the national present.
The chapter is also intended to familiarize the reader with the anthropological model of ethnicity. The relation between material culture and ethnicity is examined, with a particular emphasis on the notion of style. Chapters and deal with written sources. Chapter examines issues of chronology and origin of the data transmitted by these sources, while Chapter focuses on the chronology of Slavic raids. Chapter considers the archaeological evidence pertaining to the sixth-century Danube limes as well as to its Balkan hinterland. Special attention is paid to the implementation of Justinian’s building program and to its role in the subsequent history of the Balkans, particularly the withdrawal of the Roman armies in the seventh century.
A separate section of this chapter deals with the evidence of sixth- and seventh-century hoards of Byzantine coins in Eastern Europe, which were often used to map the migration of the Slavs. A new interpretation is advanced, which is based on the examination of the age-structure of hoards. Chapter presents the archaeological evidence pertaining to the presence of Gepids, Lombards, Avars, and Cutrigurs in the region north of the Danube river. Special emphasis is laid on the role of specific artifacts, such as bow fibulae, in the construction of group identity and the signification of social differentiation. The archaeological evidence examined in Chapter refers, by contrast, to assemblages found in the region where sixth- and seventh-century sources locate the Sclavenes and the Antes. Issues of dating and use of material culture for marking ethnic boundaries are stressed in this chapter.
The forms of political power present in the contemporary Slavic society and described by contemporary sources are discussed in Chapter . Various strands of evidence emphasized in individual chapters are then brought into a final conclusion in the last chapter. As apparent from this brief presentation of the contents, there is more than one meaning associated with the word ‘Slav.’ Most often, it denotes two, arguably separate, groups mentioned in sixth-century sources, the Sclavenes and the Antes. At the origin of the English ethnic name ‘Slav’ is an abbreviated form of ‘Sclavene,’ Latin Sclavus. When Slavs appear instead of Sclavenes and Antes, it is usually, but not always, in reference to the traditional historiographical interpretation, which tended to lump these two groups under one single denomination, on the often implicit assumption that the Slavs were the initial root from which sprung all Slavic-speaking nations of later times.
Single quotation marks are employed to set off a specific, technical, or, sometimes, specious use of ethnic names (e.g., Slavs, Sclavenes, or Antes) or of their derivatives, either by medieval authors or by modern scholars. Where necessary, the particular use of these names is followed by the original Greek or Latin. With the exception of cases in which the common English spelling was preferred, the transliteration of personal and place names follows a modified version of the Library of Congress system. The geographical terminology, particularly in the case of archaeological sites, closely follows the language in use today in a given area. Again, commonly accepted English equivalents are excepted from this rule. For example, “Chernivtsi” and “Chis¸ina˘u” are always favored over “Cerna˘ut¸i” or “Kishinew,” but “Kiev” and “Bucharest” are preferred to “Kyïv” and “Bucures¸ti.” Since most dates are from the medieval period, “” is not used unless necessary in context. In cases where assigned dates are imprecise, as with the numismatic evidence examined in Chapter , they are given in the form / to indicate either one year or the other.
The statistical analyses presented in Chapters , , and were produced using three different softwares. For the simple “descriptive”statistics used in Chapter , I employed graphed tables written in Borland Paradox, version for Windows .. More complex analyses, such as cluster, correspondence analysis, or seriation, were tested on a multivariate analysis package called MV-NUTSHELL, which was developed by Richard Wright, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney (Australia). The actual scattergrams and histograms in this book were, however, produced using the Bonn Archaeological Statistics package (BASP), version . for Windows, written in Borland Object Pascal for Windows by Irwin Scollar from the Unkelbach Valley Software Works in Remagen (Germany). Although the final results were eventually not included in the book for various technical reasons, the study of pottery shape described in Chapter enormously benefited from estimations of vessel volume from profile illustrations using the Senior-Birnie Pot Volume Program developed by Louise M. Senior and Dunbar P. Birnie from the University of Arizona, Tucson.7
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