Empires and Barbarians (2 page)

I
N THE SUMMER OF AD
882, close to the Hungarian Plain where the River Danube flows between the Alps and the Carpathians, Zwenti-bald, Duke of the Moravians, and his men captured Werinhar, ‘the middle of the three sons of Engelschalk, and their relative Count Wezzilo, and cut off their right hands, their tongues, and – horrible to relate – their genitals, so that not a trace of [the genitals] could be seen’. Two aspects of this incident stand out against the broader backdrop of European history in the first millennium
AD
.

First, the Moravians were Slavic-speakers. Moravia lay north of the Danube largely in the territory of what is now Slovakia, and from a modern perspective it seems unremarkable to find Slavic-speakers dominating this part of central Europe. They still do. But at the start of the first millennium and for all of the next five hundred years, Slovakia, and much else around it, was controlled by Germanic-speakers. Where had the Slavic-speaking Moravians come from?

Second, the incident itself. Despite the fact that we hear about it only from a non-Moravian, Frankish commentator, and despite the appalling mutilations, our source is not unsympathetic to the Slavs. The Moravians took such drastic action, we are told, out of a mixture of pre-emptive strike and revenge. Revenge because of the way in which Werinhar’s father Engelschalk and his uncle William had treated them when the two had earlier been in joint charge of the Frankish side of the same frontier. But pre-emption too, because they were trying to prevent Engelschalk’s sons from seizing their father’s old job from a new appointee. If certainly ferocious, the Moravians were not motiveless barbarians, therefore, and even a Frankish commentator could recognize a defined and coherent agenda behind the brutality. They wanted their part of the frontier to be run in a way acceptable to them. Archaeological evidence helps put this demand in perspective. Moravia was the first Slavic state of any size and cohesion to appear in the late first millennium, and its physical remains are impressive. At
, its capital, excavators uncovered a series of massive stone-built enclosures and the remains of a fabulous cathedral covering an area of 400 square metres: as big as anything being constructed anywhere else, even in areas of Europe supposedly more advanced at this date.
¹
Again, all this is hugely arresting when set against a bigger first-millennium picture. Not only was Moravia run by Germanic-speakers at the birth of Christ, but these populations customarily organized themselves only in small chiefdoms, and never built anything more substantial than slightly larger – as opposed to slightly smaller – wooden huts.

A frontier incident of the late ninth century thus beautifully captures the problem that lies at the heart of this book: the fundamental transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium
AD
. ‘Barbarian’ is being used here and throughout this book in a very specific sense, one which incorporates only part of the meaning of the original Greek
barbaros
. For Greeks first and then imperial Romans, ‘barbarian’ carried huge connotations of inferiority, in everything from morals to table manners. It meant the opposite, the ‘other’, the mirror image of the civilized imperial Mediterranean which the Roman Empire united. It is in a limited sense, denuded of its moral connotations, that I am using the word. Barbarian Europe for this study is the non-Roman, non-imperial world of the east and north. For all the Mediterranean’s astonishing sophistication in everything from philosophy to engineering, it was also a world happy to feed people to wild animals in the name of entertainment, so I would anyway have no idea of how even to begin comparing imperial with non-imperial Europe in moral terms.

When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and
never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world order in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland.

Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean’s cultural patterns – not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone – were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organization were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European land-mass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.

The overall significance of this massive shift of power shows up in just how many of the histories of modern European countries trace themselves back, if at a pinch, to a new political community which came into existence at some point in the mid- and later first millennium. Sometimes the pinch is pretty severe, but it would be absolutely impossible for most of Europe’s nations to think of stretching their sagas back further, to the birth of Christ and beyond. In a very profound sense, the political and cultural transformations of the first millennium really did witness the birth pains of modern Europe. For Europe is fundamentally not so much a geographic as a cultural, economic and political phenomenon. In geographical terms, it is just the western portion of the great Eurasian landmass. What gives Europe its real historical identity is the generation of societies that were all interacting with one another in political, economic and cultural terms on a large enough scale to have certain significant similarities in common, and the first emergence of real similarity was one direct consequence of the transformation of barbarian Europe in the first millennium.

For the very reason that it marks such a crucial point of both national and regional emergence, this period has long attracted the attention both of academics and of the general public. Versions of the narrative sweeps in which the ancestral national communities were thought to have emerged have generally been taught at school, and since the institution of general public education there can be few modern Europeans who have not some familiarity with at least the outlines of their own national sagas. It is precisely at this point, however, that the plot starts to thicken.

Until very recently, both scholarly and popular understandings of the period tended to feature a starring role in the story for immigrants of various kinds who cropped up in different places at different stages of the millennium. In its middle years, Germanic-speaking immigrants destroyed the Roman Empire and, in the process, generated one set of ancestral states. They were succeeded by more Germans and, above all, Slavs, whose activities put many more pieces of the European national jigsaw in place. Still more immigrants from Scandinavia and the steppe, towards the end of the period, completed the puzzle. Quarrels over details were fierce, but no one had any doubt that the mass migration of men and women, old and young, had played a critical role in the unfolding saga of Europe’s creation.

In the last generation or so, scholarly consensus around these big ideas has broken down because they have been shown to have been far too simple. No new overview has emerged, but the overall effect of a wide variety of work has been massively to downgrade the role of migration in the emergence of at least some of those distant first-millennium ancestors of the modern nations of Europe. It is now often argued, for instance, that only a few people, if any, moved in the course of what used to be understood as mass migrations. Whereas whole large social groups used to be thought of as having regularly shifted around the map of first-millennium Europe, a picture has been painted more recently of few people actually moving, and many gathering behind the cultural banners of those who did move, thus acquiring a new group identity in the process. Much more important than any migration to the reordering of barbarian Europe in the thousand years after the birth of Christ, this work implies, were its internal economic, social and political transformations.

The fundamental aim of
Emperors and Barbarians
is to provide that missing overview of European emergence: one which takes full
account of all the positive aspects of the revisionist thinking, while avoiding its traps. As the Moravian anecdote forcibly reminds us, state formation in previously undeveloped, barbarian Europe – the growth of larger and more coherent political entities – is at least as big a part of the first-millennium story as migration, if not bigger. It was the appearance, by its conclusion, of entities like Moravia right across the north European political landscape that made it no longer possible for a Mediterranean-based state to exercise supraregional hegemony, as the Roman Empire had done a thousand years before. Nonetheless, it is important not to jump too quickly into a world view of ever-changing identities and few migrants. The way forward, this study will argue, is not to reject migration, sometimes even of quite large groups of people, but to analyse its varying patterns in the context of all the transformations then unfolding in barbarian Europe.

Overall, this book has still wider ambitions than trying to put certain large-scale migrations back on the menu of important first-millennium phenomena, setting them passively alongside the other transformations. It will argue instead that it is possible to identify a kind of unified field theory behind the broader transformation of barbarian Europe. Looked at closely, the processes bound up both in state formation and in the precise migratory forms operating in the first millennium are best understood not as two different types of transformation, but as alternative responses to the same set of stimuli. Both must be understood as responses to the massive inequalities between more and less developed parts of Europe with which the millennium began. And both, in my view, were instrumental in undermining those inequalities. Migration and state formation are closely related phenomena, which between them destroyed the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination and set in place the building blocks of modern Europe.

I
N
A
PRIL
1994,
ABOUT
two hundred and fifty thousand people fled from Rwanda in East-Central Africa into neighbouring Tanzania. The following July a staggering one million people followed them into Zaire. They were all running away from a wave of horrific killing which had been set off by probably the most unpleasantly successful assassination of modern times. On 6 April that year, Presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi were killed when their plane crashed as it attempted to land at Rwanda’s capital, silencing the two leading moderate voices of the region at one stroke. Other moderate voices in the government, bureaucracy and judiciary of Rwanda were silenced with equal dispatch, and the killing began, not only in the towns but in the countryside as well. The UN estimates that one hundred thousand people were massacred in the month of April alone, and probably about a million altogether. The only escape lay in flight, and in both April and July, men, women and children fled for their lives. Most of the refugees’ possessions were left behind, and with them secure access to good-quality food and water. The results were predictable. Within the first month of the July flight to Zaire 50,000 of the refugees had died, and altogether somewhere close to 100,000 – one tenth – would succumb to cholera and dysentery.

Rwanda is only the most dramatic of many recent examples of migration as a response to political crisis. Only slightly later, 750,000 Kosovan Albanians fled to neighbouring countries in a similar response to escalating violence. But large-scale flight from danger is only one cause of migration. More numerous are all the people who use movement to a ‘richer’ country as a strategy for improving the quality of their lives. This phenomenon is found right around the globe. Two hundred thousand people out of a total of three and a half million left the Irish Republic in the 1980s, largely for destinations in economically more dynamic areas of Europe, though many of them have since
returned as the Irish economy has boomed, with Ireland itself becoming a major destination for migrant labour. And economic migration is even more prevalent where living standards are poorer. Of different sub-Saharan populations, fifteen million are currently to be found in the Middle East, fifteen million in South and South-East Asia, another fifteen million in North America and thirteen million in Western Europe. The causes of this staggering phenomenon – the numbers are so large as to be virtually unimaginable – lie in massive inequalities of wealth. The average income in Bangladesh, for instance, is one-hundredth of that prevailing in Japan. This means that a Bangladeshi who can get work in Japan at only half the average Japanese wage will earn in only two weeks the equivalent of two years’ income in Bangladesh. Political violence and economic inequality combine to make migration – in its many forms – one of the big stories of the modern world.