Empires and Barbarians (68 page)

I am not convinced, either, that Curta is right to be so dismissive of Jordanes. By definition, since we don’t have Jordanes’ own account of his working methods or any real means of cross-checking, the idea that he invented the link to the Venedi on the basis of Tacitus can only be hypothesis. It is not demonstrable fact, and there are some telling points against it. Jordanes started life as the military secretary of an east Roman commander stationed on the Danube frontier at the very same time that Slavic attacks were intensifying. He also provides – again, presumably, drawing on his own knowledge – very precise
information on the resettlement south of the Lower Danube frontier line of various population fragments from the wreck of Attila’s Empire. This underlines his knowledge of the region, and makes it far from implausible that he had authentic information on what the Slavs of this region themselves understood of their origins. In fact, Jordanes may well also provide the earliest historical reference to a Slavic group in action, making passing reference to a war of the Gothic king Vinitharius against the Antae. Jordanes is chronologically confused here. He thought that Vinitharius lived in the later fourth century, but he was in fact one of those warband leaders that Valamer defeated to create the Amal-led Ostrogoths, probably after the death of Attila. But Jordanes certainly places this war before the Amal-led Goths moved west of the Carpathians to the Great Hungarian Plain, so this does fit with a picture of Slavic-speaking Antae operating on the eastern fringes of the Carpathians in the fifth century. It is also the case that the term ‘Wends’ – deriving from the old Roman label Venedi – was used from the seventh century onwards by many early medieval western European populations of their new Slavic neighbours; and migration, as we shall see, was a characteristic of documented Slavic-speaking populations from the sixth century onwards. Large numbers of Sclavenes and Antae of Moldavia and Wallachia would end up in the Balkans from the early seventh century, and already in the sixth, other Slavs can be documented moving west through the central European uplands. Given that, as we have seen so often before, real migration habits build up in population groups, this does add further weight to the suggestion that the first Slavic groups found north of the Lower Danube frontier in the early sixth century had moved into the region in the recent past. All this is certainly enough to make Curta’s dismissal of Jordanes at best inconclusive, and to my mind it is likely that, for once, the historian actually knew what he was talking about.
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But there is also a bigger point here. From about the year 500, as we shall examine more closely in a moment, a huge expansion process unfolded that would make Slavic-speakers the dominant force across vast tracts of the European landscape from the Elbe to the Volga. This process is not well documented, but it does seem inconceivable that all this can have derived from an original population group confined just to Moldavia and Wallachia. Even if you do discount Jordanes on the Venedi and accept that Sclavenes and Antae emerged where they are first mentioned, this still leaves you with the overall phenomenon
of Slavicization to explain. Putting tree names to one side, the linguistic evidence provides two broader points of reference.

First, the modern Slavic language groups (east, west and south) are remarkable for how close they have remained to one another: so close in fact that they are mutually comprehensible. Everything suggests that this closeness results not from processes of linguistic convergence in the recent past, but from the fact that they split apart from one another at a comparatively late date. Second, Slavic languages as a whole are most closely related to those of Europe’s Baltic-speakers, whom hydronyms show to have been much more widely distributed over eastern Europe in the past than is the case today (
Map 16
). As we saw with the Anglo-Saxons in England, the names of larger rivers seem to have a fossil-like capacity to survive major cultural transformations. Not so long before the split between the various branches of Slavic, therefore, we must envisage a previous split between Slavic-speakers and Baltic-speakers. They had previously shared the one, older set of closely related Indo-European dialects.
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Seen in equally broad terms, the archaeological evidence paints a very similar picture. The only possible progenitors of the still extremely simple farming lifestyles visible in Korchak and closely related remains of c.500 are the subsistence-farming communities of Europe east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians in the Roman period. Both sets of evidence tell the same story. The broader Slavic-speaking population of Europe clearly emerged from somewhere among eastern Europe’s non-Germanic-speaking population. Even if Jordanes was making up the link between the Sclavenes and the Antae (which I strongly doubt), the likelihood is that he was correct.

Where linguistic evidence can give us very little help, however, is with chronology. We know the Slavic language family emerged relatively recently, but what does that mean? Some experts argue that the split with Baltic-speakers began only in the middle of the first millennium
AD
, at the precise moment when Slavic-speakers begin to appear in
our sources. Others would place it much earlier – by maybe even a thousand or more years. This difference of opinion matters when it comes to trying to understand the Slavicization of Europe which unfolded after c.500
AD
. If we should be envisaging very few Slavic-speakers at that date because the linguistic split was just beginning, so that Europe’s Slavic-speakers may have amounted to no more than the Sclavenes and Antae of Korchak and Penkovka fame, then the broad Slavic domination of Europe achieved by c.900
AD
has to be accounted for from an extremely restricted demographic base. If, on the contrary, the Slavic linguistic family had emerged much earlier, the Sclavenes and Antae might only be two particular subgroups from within a far larger Slavic-speaking population. At this point, there is no way to be certain, but most of the experts would place the emergence of the Slavic language family much further back in time than the mid-first millennium
AD
, and it does make much better sense of the broader evidence for Slavic expansion to suppose that Slavic-speakers were not just restricted to Moldavia and Wallachia at that point.
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Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind both possibilities when trying to comprehend the explosion of Slavic dominance along its three main trajectories: south into the Balkans, west and north to the Elbe and Baltic, and east and north to the Volga and the fringes of the Arctic tundra.

For Slavic expansion into the Balkans, there is a relatively full selection of broadly contemporary east Roman and Byzantine historical sources. Until recent archaeological materials came online, they provided much the earliest body of information of any quality about early Slavic history. As a result, and this always happens when too many clever people have been studying a limited amount of information for too long, the subject area came to resemble a famous chess match, each intellectual gambit with its well-rehearsed counter. We have no need, fortunately, to become entangled in these set-pieces, since the broader outlines of Slavic expansion into the Balkans are clear enough.

As we have just seen, Slavic raiding into the Balkans increased in scope and ambition towards the middle of the sixth century. In 547/8, a large raiding party spread south-west from the Danube through Illyricum as far south as the major Adriatic port of Epidamnos
(Dyrrhachium). Procopius reports that these raiders captured many strongholds, a phenomenon not previously witnessed. The success encouraged further attacks. The next year, three thousand Slavs crossed the Danube and advanced on the River Hebrus. There they defeated some local Roman forces and captured the fairly major settlement of Topirus, by luring the city’s garrison into an ambush. Some thirteen thousand male inhabitants are said to have been killed in the subsequent sack, with many women and children taken prisoner. The year 550 then saw an unprecedentedly large force move south past Naissus, with the highly ambitious aim of capturing Thessalonica, the heavily fortified regional capital of the western Balkans. Eventually the raiders turned aside, moving through the mountains into Dalmatia and scattering in front of the major Roman army that was on its way north through the Balkans to complete the conquest of Ostrogothic Italy. When the army had passed, the raiders doubled back to the western Balkans, defeating a second, improvised Roman force at Hadrianople. Following this victory, the raiders spread to within a day’s march of the imperial capital of Constantinople itself.
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There is no good evidence, though, that any of these Slavs were actually settling on a permanent or semi-permanent basis inside the imperial frontier at this point. The Antae were granted the old Roman fortress of Turris by treaty in 540, but this was north of the Danube and the whole point of the arrangement was to block further raiding on the part of the Sclavenes. Some Slavic place names, perhaps, figure in lists Procopius supplies of Balkan forts repaired or built by the Emperor Justinian (527–65), but, if so, the fact they are attached to forts might suggest that they were the outcome of authorized settlements of Slavic recruits into the Roman army rather than any proper migration as such. In any case, Slavs were not operating in sufficient force in these years to attempt a formal conquest of any part of the Balkans, or to capture major centres such as Thessalonica.
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The overall situation was radically transformed from about 570, however, by the rise of the Avar Empire.

The Avars figure so strongly in what follows that they require some introduction. They were the next major wave of originally nomadic horse warriors, after the Huns, to sweep off the Great Eurasian Steppe and build an empire in central Europe. Thankfully we know rather more about them than about the Huns. The Avars spoke a Turkic language and had previously starred as the dominant force
behind a major nomadic confederation on the fringes of China. In the earlier sixth century they had lost this position to a rival force, the so-called Western Turks, and arrived on the outskirts of Europe as political refugees, announcing themselves with an embassy that appeared at Justinian’s court in 558. The Emperor saw them as a new pawn in the great diplomatic game of divide and rule by which he sought to prevent really serious trouble in his north-eastern approaches. This, however, proved hopelessly over-optimistic. Not content with the role assigned them, the Avars quickly created an imperial power block of real menace. Attaching Bulgar nomads to their train, by 570 they had relocated to the Great Hungarian Plain, the old stomping ground of Attila, where they added Gepids to a growing list of conquered subject peoples. Their arrival also prompted the Lombards to leave for safer Italian domains on the other side of the Alps.
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If all this wasn’t enough, the arrival of the Avars also marks a watershed in Slavic history.

Like many of their Middle and Lower Danubian neighbours, the Slavs of the Carpathian region found themselves targets of aggressive Avar ambition. The Antae seem to have suffered particularly at their hands in a punishing campaign of 604, which destroyed their political independence. On one level, the rise of the Avars meant that some Slavic groups now sought to move south of the Danube permanently, to escape their domination. In this area, massive Avar attacks on the east Roman Empire, particularly widespread in the 570s and 580s and again in the 610s, also provided such Slavic groups with much greater opportunity to pursue these ambitions free from Roman counterattack. At the same time, the Constantinopolitan authorities were having to defend their eastern territories in Syria, Palestine and Egypt against Persian and then Arab assault. The latter were a much richer source of tax revenues than the war-torn Balkans and always received – naturally enough – a higher priority.

The new era announced itself in the 580s. The Emperor Maurice (582–602) was embroiled in a major war with the Persian Empire in the Near East, which sucked most mobile Roman forces away from the Balkans and allowed the Avars to launch a series of severe and wide-ranging attacks in Thrace. At the same time, Sclavenes mounted successive highly destructive campaigns in Thrace and Illyricum, the first really threatening assault upon Thessalonica, regional capital of Illyricum, occurring in 586. In the same year, ‘the fifth year of the
Emperor Maurice’, one of the famous texts, the
Chronicle of Monemvasia
, even reports that Slavs took over all the Peloponnese except for an eastern coastal strip that remained in east Roman hands. According to the
Chronicle
, this caused a mass evacuation of ‘all the Greeks’ from the captured zones: the citizens of Patras went to Rhegia in Calabria (southern Italy), those of Argos to the island of Urok, the Corinthians to Aegina, the Spartans to both Sicily and to Monemvasia itself, a rocky, defensible peninsula in the southern Peloponnese.

The terminal Slavicization of the Peloponnese, however, did not happen so early. The
Chronicle of Monemvasia
is a late text and, although preserving some authentic information, it kaleidoscopes the process of Slavic settlement. In the 590s, with the Persian War successfully won, Maurice was able to counterattack in the Balkans. Diplomatically, he paid the Antae to attack the raiding Sclavenes, while his armies inflicted major defeats on the main Avar host in 593–5 and again from 599. In 602, his forces were even operating north of the Lower Danube, mounting a series of pre-emptive strikes which destroyed some whole Slavic groups. Letters of Pope Gregory I from the same period demonstrate that Church structures were restored in Illyricum generally, and in the Peloponnese in particular. While they certainly occurred, therefore, initial Slavic settlements of the 580s were swallowed up by Maurice’s counterattacks.
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