Empires and Barbarians (69 page)

But this wasn’t the end of the story. From 604, repeating the pattern of the 580s, Maurice’s successors Phocas and Heraclius found themselves embroiled in a war with Persia, which by the early 610s was going diabolically badly, with control lost of pretty much the whole of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Every military resource available had to be turned eastwards, opening the way to further Avar and Slav attacks on an unprecedented scale. In 614, disaster struck. Thessalonica avoided capture by a whisker. Salona, on the other hand, the largest Roman centre on the Dalmatian coast, fell into Avar and Slav hands, along with many of the Empire’s key cities in the northern Balkans, such as Naissus and Serdica. The action then spread as far south as the Peloponnese, when – amongst other things – Slavic raiders took to coastal waters in vast flotillas of dugout canoes. Constantinople itself eventually came under threat in a week-long Avar siege in 626. Alongside this military assault, Slavic settlement was gathering momentum.
¹⁹

Heraclius eventually won his war with Persia, but was immediately
faced with the rise of militant Arab Islam. In contrast to the 590s, there was no opportunity this time to repair any of the damage done to the fabric of Roman life in the Balkans. Consequently, the disasters of 614 marked the definitive collapse of the Danube frontier of the old east Roman Empire, and paved the way for Slavic settlement across most of the Balkans: all the way from the Dobrudja in the north-east to the Peloponnese in the south-west. It is impossible to reconstruct a detailed narrative of this settlement process, but a series of vignettes, provided by various sources, leave us in no doubt as to its scale. In Macedonia in the northern Balkans, the
Miracles of St Demetrius
shows that large-scale Slavic settlement in the region of the Strymon River around Thessalonica was well established by the mid-seventh century. From one of its episodes it emerges that several Slavic groups were settled in the vicinity of the city by about 670, a point confirmed by later events. In the late 680s, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II was able, if temporarily, to take the offensive in Macedonia, subduing the Slavic tribes of the region and restoring central imperial control. As part of the process he transferred reportedly as many as thirty thousand Slavs to Asia Minor. The reports also find some archaeological reflection. Seventh-century Macedonia and adjacent areas to the north did not see the spread of fully formed Korchak-type cultural systems across their landscapes, but many isolated discoveries of Korchak materials have been made in cemeteries and find-spots across Serbia and Croatia – Bakar Muntjac, Osijek, Stinjevac, Vinkovci.
²⁰

Further east, in Thrace, Slavic settlement is equally well attested. When the first Bulgar state was established north of the Haemus Mountains in c.680, seven Slavic tribes already inhabited the region. They were resettled in an arc in the uplands around what became the Bulgar heartlands on the Danubian plain. Here the pattern of archaeological remains is different from that in Macedonia. Isolated Slavic ceramics, mixed with indigenous materials, have been discovered in sixth-century levels in cemeteries and rural zones around some of the fortresses of the frontier region, particularly Durostorum and Bononia. But excavations in northern Bulgaria have also uncovered sites such as Popina, where Korchak-type materials appear with no admixture of foreign imports. This and related sites used to be dated to the sixth century, but have now been shown to be later, postdating the definitive collapse of the Danube frontier in 614, which clearly marked the beginning of full-scale Slavic settlement in this part of the Balkans too.
In archaeological as well as historical terms, the situation was then transformed by the arrival of the originally nomadic and Turkic-speaking Bulgars, but these further developments sat on the back of an earlier, large-scale Slavic settlement.
²¹

Literary and archaeological evidence also attests to a substantial Slavic presence further south, right in the heart of what is now Greece and the Peloponnese. The
Miracles of St Demetrius
mention in passing more Slavs, the Belegezitae, established near Thessaly and Demetrias. Later texts specifically mention other Slavs in the Peloponnese, not least the Milingas and Ezeritae in the vicinity of Patras, who in the early ninth century revolted against the tribute payments imposed upon them by a (slightly) resurgent Byzantine state. The archaeological echoes of this Slavic presence more closely resembled those of Macedonia in the north-west Balkans than those in Thrace in the north-east. Just a few, relatively isolated, finds of Korchak materials have been made, with no sign that the immigrant Slavs imported with them a complete material-cultural system. And some of the materials that used to be attributed to them probably had other origins anyway. A cemetery at Olympia, for instance, turned up twelve armed cremation burials of individuals interred in Korchak-type funerary urns. These are in all probability east Roman soldiers, if perhaps of Slavic origin, rather than independent immigrant Slavs. More convincing Slavic ceramics have been found at Argos, Messina and Demetrius, and Greece as a whole, like the rest of the Balkans, has thrown up a selection of the ‘fingered’ style of
fibula
brooch which was often, but not exclusively, sported by Slavs in the early medieval period. There are other possible explanations for this relative lack of Slavic materials. Above all, the first classical archaeologists, who were completely uninterested in medieval remains, ravaged most of the major Greek sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and simply threw anything post-classical away. Nonetheless, it does appear that, again, the advance of Slavic groups into Greece proper did not generate entire Korchak-type material-cultural systems.
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By the mid-seventh century, Slavic settlement was already affecting more or less the entire Balkans, but this is perhaps not yet the full story. According to one source, the north-west Balkans saw a further distinct wave of Slavic settlement. The
De Administrando Imperio
of Constantine Porphyryogenitus records that a first wave of undifferentiated Slavs originally settled in the lands now largely divided between
Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia as Avar subjects, at the time when Avar rule was establishing itself in central Europe (from c.560 onwards). They were followed somewhat later, but still in the time of Heraclius (610–41), by two, more-organized, Slavic groupings – the Serbs and Croats – who arrived from the north to expel most of the Avars from that region (causing the others to submit) and establish their own rule instead, over Serbia and Dalmatia respectively. In the case of the Croats, the
De Administrando
preserves two versions of the story, one obviously Byzantine, the other Croat. These vary – as you might predict – on whether the Croats were invited to the Balkans or acted on their own initiative, and whether or not they promised to acknowledge Byzantine overlordship as a condition of settlement.

The stories are famous, but it is difficult to know what to make of them. Serb and Croat nationalists have long cherished them as the origin stories of their ‘peoples’, arriving as fully formed units in the Balkans landscape. The problems they pose, however, are obvious. By virtue of being unique, they lack corroboration. They also occur in a comparatively late source, the
De Administrando
being a mid-tenth-century text, and their telling has a distinctly legendary tone: the Croats are led south by a family of five brothers. Not surprisingly, they have often been rejected outright. On the other hand, tenth-century Arab sources confirm the existence of other Serbs and Croats north of the Carpathians at that point, and there is nothing inherently impossible in the general action outlined. If it is accepted that they possess a kernel of truth, the stories suggest that some more organized Slavic groups asserted their independence from Avar rule by moving south into the Balkans and establishing some kind of a relationship with the Byzantine state before the death of Heraclius. Indeed, the northern Serbs (or Sorbs) themselves threw off Avar domination – if perhaps temporarily – in alliance with an ex-Frankish merchant, Samo, in about 630; that is, precisely in the reign of Heraclius. This was, in fact, a moment of general crisis for the Avar Empire following its huge defeat at the siege of Constantinople in 626, and the consequent loss of prestige for its ruling Khagan. Substantial numbers of its Bulgar subjects also escaped Avar domination by fleeing into Italy at this point, so that the idea that other Slavic groups were doing the same, either with or without a Byzantine invitation, is perfectly plausible.
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But if this much is plausible, the seventh-century Serbs and Croats
were not whole peoples responsible for the complete repopulation of these parts of the Balkans. As we have seen, the better-documented instances of first-millennium migration have never thrown up a case of total demographic replacement: some indigenous population elements always survive. And there is in fact a possible extra twist to this story. The group names ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’, together with some of the personal names reported of their leaders, might derive from Iranian rather than from the Slavic language group. It has been suggested, therefore, that both groups may have originally been dominated by cores of Iranian nomads.
²⁴
This is not inherently impossible. It could have come about, for instance, by Slavic groups established in the northern Black Sea region becoming part of a military confederation dominated by Iranian nomads. There is not the slightest shred of narrative evidence to support such a view, but this is how nomads like the Huns tended to operate on the fringes of Europe. That the Serbs and Croats asserted their independence at Avar expense in the reign of Heraclius, perhaps around 630 when their Empire was in crisis, and that the Byzantines used them as part of a broader strategy for limiting Avar power in the Balkans, all seems likely enough. Whether we should envisage them as already entirely Slavic at this point, or as a structured confederation with distinct groups of Iranian-speaking nomads at their cores, is entirely unclear. It is also unclear whether their arrival represented a further major wave of Slavic immigration into the north-western Balkans, or whether they functioned essentially as an organizing element for Slavic groups already present there but formerly subject to Avar domination. If the latter, this would make them not unlike the Bulgars of the eastern Balkans.
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Slavic expansion into central Europe between the Elbe and the Vistula was equally thorough. The key proof text is a short and unpretentious document of staggering historical importance: the so-called
Anonymous Bavarian Geographer
. Dating from the 820s, it was written by an anonymous geographer working somewhere in Bavaria. It surveys and names the Frankish Empire’s neighbours between the Rivers Elbe and Oder, and even attempts to give some indication of their relative power, each unit being given a rating in terms of the numbers
of ‘cities’ (
civitates
) that it comprised (
Map 18
). What these cities may have looked like is a point we will return to in
Chapter 1
. The central point is that all of these units have Slavic names. We know from other sources that some Slavic-speakers had even penetrated west of the Elbe at certain points before the rise of the Carolingians, but these immigrants were never numerous enough in these regions to challenge the dominance of Germanic-speaking Saxons and Thuringians. The
Anonymous
gives out pretty much at the River Oder, and knowledge of areas still further to the east, between the Oder and the Vistula, was perhaps not yet common in Carolingian Europe of the early ninth century.
²⁶

A fuller picture of the extent of Slavic domination in central Europe had to wait until the Ottonian era of the tenth century, when the third of the Frankish imperial dynasties stretched its tendrils of dominion eastwards from the Elbe. In 962, a nascent Polish state suddenly appears in the historical record, providing unimpeachable evidence of Slavic domination of its territories between the Oder and the Vistula as well, with Arab sources confirming the point. From the mid-tenth century at the latest, then, all of north-central Europe between the Elbe and the Vistula was now the domain of Slavic-speakers. Indeed, the fact that historical documentation for lands east of the Oder is available only for the tenth century surely shouldn’t be taken to mean that Poland was Slavicized later than Bohemia or Moravia. What we’re looking at are the dates when interaction between these lands and western European imperial power gathered momentum, not the moment when they first came to be occupied by Slavs. The overall revolution in north-central Europe effected by Slavic expansion is plain to see. In the first half of the millennium, all this territory between the Elbe and the Vistula had been dominated by Germanic-speakers.
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But if Carolingian and Arab sources between them document the total Slavicization of central Europe by c.900
AD
, they provide little insight into the chronology or nature of the historical processes responsible for it. With the end of the western Empire in 476, historical light on north-central Europe – fitful at best, in the Roman period – is pretty much extinguished for the next three hundred years. All that the written sources preserve are a few vignettes that shed a little light on spreading Slavic domination through the uplands of central Europe: the extension of the Carpathians westwards to meet the Alps. The first
refers to events of the year 512, when, as we saw in
Chapter 5
, the unfortunate Heruli began their long march to Scandinavia. According to Procopius, they first passed ‘through the land of the Slavs’. Most likely the Heruli left the Middle Danube by the valley of the River Morava, the main natural route north out of the Great Hungarian Plain. If so, Slavs were already then established in what is now Slovakia. This conclusion is supported by a second incident, of 543. In that year, a Lombard prince named Hildegesius attacked east Roman forces with six thousand warriors, most of whom were again Slavs. Since the Lombards were still living at that point in the Middle Danube, before the arrival of the Avars, it seems probable that he recruited his Slavs from the edges of that region – the Morava valley again, or somewhere nearby. Our third marker dates to the end of the sixth century, when Bavarian militias had to fight off Slavic attacks in both 593 and 595. So within half a century of the Hildegesius incident, Slavic groups are documented another 250 kilometres to the west, on the fringes of Bavaria.