Empires and Barbarians (72 page)

In the absence of historical sources of good quality, the scale of the population units involved in Slavic migration is particularly difficult to estimate. The only decent-looking figures refer to sixth-century raiding parties, who consistently came in groups of a few thousand. On one occasion, a mixed group of 1,600 Huns, Antae and Sclavenes burst on to east Roman territory; on another, 3,000 Slavic raiders had to pay the Gepids a gold coin apiece to be ferried to safety. Hildegesius’ mixed warband of Gepids and Slavs comprised 6,000 men, and a reportedly ‘elite’ force of 5,000 Slavs made a surprise attempt to storm the defences of Thessalonica in 598.
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These figures are reasonably consistent, but they refer to a different kind of activity from the expansionary migration that affected the Balkans in the seventh century and the Carpathians and central European uplands in the sixth. It is not likely that the same kinds of social group were responsible for both activities.

As its various contexts indicate – ranging from central Europe in the sixth century to Lake Ilmen in the ninth – there were so many different processes involved in the creation of Slavic Europe that it is worth confining the discussion initially to sixth- and seventh-century central Europe and the Balkans, where we have at least some historical documentation. But even just within these spheres, two completely different kinds of outcome are visible in archaeological terms. In some contexts – particularly in the foothills of the Carpathians, Moravia, Bohemia, the Elbe–Saale region, and western and southern Ukraine in the sixth century, together with parts of Thrace shortly after 600
AD
– the upshot was the more or less complete transfer to a new area of a Korchak-type material culture in all its measurable expressions: lifestyle, technology and social patterns. The only thing that varies between these areas is the shape of some of the pottery. A very different archaeological result is found in many other areas that we know to have been Slavic-dominated, but where recovered archaeological assemblages have produced only isolated Korchak elements in what is overall a much more varied body of material. This pattern prevailed over much of the former Roman Balkans and much of the North European Plain west of the Vistula from the seventh century, where investigation has thrown up only a few Korchak-type ceramics, not the whole system transferred to a new area. Any account of Slavic expansion must account for both of these consequences.

Despite the lack of narrative sources, the translation of whole Korchak-type socioeconomic systems into entirely new landscapes is suggestive of a particular kind of migration process. The standard settlement unit – therefore, presumably, also the socioeconomic one – prevailing in these areas was small. Korchak hamlets typically consist of groupings of no more than ten to twenty small dwellings, each clearly designed for nuclear families. On reflection, these hamlets also provide an indication of the maximum size of the basic migration unit involved in areas that have produced a ‘pure’ Korchak result. Korchak Europe was clearly created by the spread of such units outwards from the foothills of the Carpathians, and they were moving either as ready-made communities of this kind (the maximum view) or possibly in even smaller groups that came together only at their destination. Korchak dwellings look large enough for about five people, so we’re looking here at migration units of no more than fifty to a hundred. Comparing this phenomenon with the different migration
forms we have so far encountered, the likeliest process to have produced it was something along the lines of expansion by wave of advance (see page 22). In about one hundred and fifty years, as we have seen, Korchak remains spread from the fringes of the Carpathians to the Lower Elbe, while retaining much of their basic cultural form. The extended chronology of these remains makes clear that this group of Europe’s Slavic-speakers was more conservative than once thought. Older chronologies confined Korchak settlements to the fifth and the earlier sixth century, but we now know that some groups maintained this lifestyle for two centuries or more, spreading slowly in small groups across the European landscape.
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One caveat, though, needs to be added. As generally conceived, wave of advance is a model of random movement, whereby the buildup of population at one point leads subgroups from that settlement to move on in the next generation to the nearest available piece of suitable land. One application of this model to the spread of Europe’s first farming populations suggested that the mathematics of such a process dictate that a population spreading over a landscape by this means might make an aggregate advance of around a kilometre a year. But Korchak Slavs went from the fringes of the Carpathians to the Elbe–Saale region, a distance of around 900 kilometres, in only a hundred and fifty years. This is a sufficiently faster rate to suggest that some of the assumptions normally inherent in the wave-of-advance model did not apply in this case. One possible explanation is that Slavic movement – like the spread of Frankish settlers in northern Gaul – was not random. A Byzantine military treatise called
The Strategicon of Maurice
reports that some Slavs preferred to inhabit wooded uplands rather than more open plains, and the ribbon of Korchak sites through upland central Europe might be taken as some confirmation of this statement. If true, the choice of destination for each new Korchak generation was limited to similar and particular environments, and in fact this does all make a kind of sense. Most of the open plains of Europe were dominated by larger political powers (whether Byzantines, Franks or Avars), so if you wanted to live independently in the kind of small community characteristic of the Korchak world, lowlands were not an option. For Korchak Slavs, migration was a means to carry on traditional lifestyles, including a very small scale of social organization, quite probably at a time of population expansion.
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Seventh-century Slavic settlement in the Balkans, by contrast, was
undertaken by considerably larger units: tribes, for want of a better word. Around Thessalonica, a series of larger named Slavic groups were already settled in the valley of the River Strymon in the middle years of the seventh century. Our source here, the
Miracles of St Demetrius
, also tells us that another Slavic group mentioned earlier, the Belegezitae, held land somewhere further south. Further south in the Peloponnese, likewise, named Slavic groups existed in the early ninth century – the Milingas and the Ezeritae. The same pattern is also found in ninth-century Slavic Bohemia, and the wider regions covered by the
Anonymous Bavarian Geographer
. In these central European cases, and possibly also the Peloponnese, the larger named groups probably did not migrate as whole units into the regions where the literary sources later find them, but were later evolutionary creations within that landscape from a much more fragmented, wave-of-advance type of migration. Bohemia, at least, was originally settled by Slavic migrants generating a ‘pure’ Korchak outcome, so that its more organized structure in the ninth century was apparently a later development. It does not seem possible, however, to explain the size and organization of the seventh-century Belegezitae or the other groups settled around Thessalonica as the products of a post-migration process. These areas have produced no evidence of an initial Korchak outcome, and the historical evidence for the tribes’ existence dates from shortly after the initial migration. The text of the
Miracles
is contemporary and local, recording an incident of c.670, while the settlement itself, as we’ve just seen, cannot have happened before the 610s. In this case, the time lag, barely two generations, seems insufficient for a whole new sociopolitical order to have emerged from a flow of extended family units.
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So how should we envisage these larger groups? Historical sources consistently describe the early Slavs as living in small sociopolitical units, but how small was small? Some were very small. The Korchak system was probably being transported about the European landscape in the sixth and seventh centuries by social units less than a hundred strong. As an important recent study has rightly stressed, however, other parts of the Slavic-speaking world underwent a major sociopolitical revolution in the sixth century. In the many pages of his histories devoted to a wide range of Slavic activities in the period c.530–60, our east Roman historian Procopius names no individual Slavic leaders at all. In the last quarter of the sixth century, however,
the pattern suddenly changes. In a number of different east Roman sources various Slavic leaders appear, with enough circumstantial detail to show that we are dealing with substantial political figures. The territory ruled by a certain Musocius, for instance, took three days to cross, suggesting that it covered somewhere between 100 and 150 kilometres. The rule of another leader, Ardagastus, was solid enough, likewise, to survive for the best part of a decade between 585 and 593. Perigastes had enough forces under his command to kill a thousand east Roman soldiers, while another named figure, Dabritas, was confident enough of his military strength to kill the diplomatic envoys of the Avar Khagan, boasting with the suave masculine charm typical of the period: ‘What man has been born, what man is warmed by the rays of the sun who shall make our might his subject? Others do not conquer our land, we conquer theirs.’

Territories extending over a hundred kilometres, even with relatively low population densities, indicate social units of several thousand individuals, and this is confirmed by the one plausible overall figure to survive. After east Roman assault destroyed the domain of Ardagastus, a quarrel broke out between the Romans and the Avars over who should have control of the prisoners. It was eventually decided in the Avars’ favour, and the Romans duly handed over five thousand individuals. This figure is consistent with the new Slavic kings of the late sixth century commanding populations of something like ten thousand, but not several tens of thousands. And while not huge, we are clearly talking here of an entirely different order of magnitude from the kind of social units involved in spreading Korchak culture further north. And if we can estimate from the Ardagastus incident a rough figure for the larger Slavic groups that had coalesced on the fringes of east Roman territory by c.600, this would suggest that the four groups settled in the region of Thessalonica comprised between them several tens of thousands of Slavic immigrants. For what it’s worth, this also fits with Byzantine reports that a later pacification of the area, in the 680s, involved transferring thirty thousand Slavs to Asia Minor.
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Serbs and Croats might represent yet a third type of migrant group caught up in the Slavic diaspora of the sixth and seventh centuries. There is obviously a huge margin for error built into the tenth-century traditions retold by Constantine Porphyryogenitus, but if there is any truth to them at all, the Serbs and Croats were breakaways from the
Avar Empire which had previously used them in a military capacity. Avar campaigns between 570 and 620 were many and varied, and this would provide a plausible context for a further bout of sociopolitical evolution among those Slavs caught up in this latest nomad war machine to establish itself in central Europe, sufficient to produce this third type of Slavic migrant group that was either large enough or militarily specialized enough to throw off Avar domination. It might be the same kind of force as the five thousand militarily ‘elite’ Slavs who launched a surprise attack on Thessalonica. If so, Serb and Croat migration might have taken the form of a kind of elite transfer, with a militarily effective force breaking out of the Avar Empire and establishing its own niche in the Balkans.
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This is speculative, but well within the bounds of possibility, and we do have independent contemporary evidence that the evolution of Slavic society was throwing up military specialists at this time. At the very least, it underlines exactly how many and varied were the migratory processes that get lumped together retrospectively to account for the ‘Slavicization of Europe’.

A comparison of the historical and archaeological evidence thus sets up a seeming paradox. Those regions of Europe that saw the complete transfer of a Korchak-type material-cultural system also witnessed a Slavic migration process involving only very small social units. On the other hand, the historical evidence for much larger Slavic social units on the move (whether ‘tribal’ or military specialists – if such, indeed, were the Serbs and Croats) relates to those areas where archaeologists have not uncovered any large-scale transfer of ‘complete’ Korchak-type socioeconomic systems. This is at first sight surprising. The larger the migration unit, you might suppose, the greater its capacity to import and maintain its own distinctive way of life. When you think about it, though, the larger Slavic social units were actually very recent creations, generated by processes of rapid sociopolitical and economic development that were unfolding among those Slavs closest to the Roman frontier or who became caught up in the Avar Empire. We will return to these processes in
Chapter 10
, but there is every reason to suppose that much of the momentum behind them was generated by a dynamic interaction between the groups involved and the opportunities and dangers that came their way from an unprecedented proximity to the bigger and materially rich east Roman and Avar Empires. In other words, it was precisely the larger Slavic groups rather than the small-scale farmers of the Korchak world
who would have been more open to the kinds of influences and processes that would have caused their patterns of material culture to evolve away from older Korchak-type norms.

Because of the lack of information, there is no point in spending much time on the issue, but it is worth reflecting on what all this suggests about the kind of Slavic migration units which were operating in those contexts that are entirely undocumented in the surviving historical sources: north-central Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and European Russia in the eighth and ninth. In central Europe, between the Vistula and the Elbe, archaeologists have revealed a third kind of outcome. The Sukow-Dziedzice culture certainly saw the absorption by incoming Slavs of some existing patterns of indigenous material culture, notably its repertoire of pottery. But the Mogilany culture, which started the process of Slavicization, is really a Korchak variant, and even the Sukow-Dziedzice culture, in its earliest levels, did not depart far from these norms. In its original ‘islands’ (
Map 18
), settlement originally came in the form of small open villages, similar in size to the Korchak norm, but the buildings were usually above ground rather than sunken huts. Although they absorbed more of native culture than elsewhere, the original Slavic migration units probably differed little in size from those that created Korchak Europe. Why they should have departed from Korchak norms as far as they did, is a question we will return to in a moment.