Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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Scandinavia 523

functioned in an overt context, depicting a pre-Christian symbolic universe

and a shared Germanic identity among the elite. The ﬁfth, sixth and seventh

centuries were to a great extent characterised by contact between the various

parts of Europe, from Italy in the south to Norway in the north. A universe of

shared experience was created, in sharp contrast to the segmented and divided

Europe that some researchers have wanted to identify from the historical

sources.

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chapter 19

THE SLAVS

Zbigniew Kobyli

nski

In his Secret History, the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea states that

after Justinian (527–565) had come to the throne, the Huns and Slavs (Sclavenoi

and Antes) had attacked Illyria and the whole of Thrace on an almost annual

basis, hitting everything from the Ionian Gulf nearly to the gates of Byzantium

itself. Greece and Chersones (in Thrace) were badly affected, and the invaders

were oppressing the inhabitants of these territories.

Who werethese mysterious

Slavic people who had arrived so suddenly on the scene, and created a threat

to the Byzantine Empire, breaking through the Danubian frontiers, and in

arelatively short time settling half of Europe from the lower reaches of the

Elbe and the Baltic in the north, down as far as the Adriatic in the south?

The earliest description of the Slavs comes from De Bellis, another work of

Procopius, which was written just before the middle of the sixth century. He

portrays them as unusually tall and strong, of dark skin and reddish hair,leading

arugged and primitive style of life and constantly covered in dirt, living in

squalid huts which were isolated from one another, and often changing their

place of abode.

According to Procopius, the Slavs were not ruled by a single

man, but for a long time they had lived in a democracy. They believed in

one god, the creator of lightning, who was the only ruler of everything, and

they made sacriﬁces to him of oxen and other animals. They went into battle

on foot, straight at the enemy, and in their hands they had small shields and

spears, but they did not wear armour. The information which Procopius gives

us is supplemented somewhat later (at the end of the sixth or beginning of

the seventh century) by the writer known as Pseudo-Maurice who in his work

Strategikon describes the Slavs, again calling them Sclavenoi and Antes, as a

very numerous people but one that lived in a disorganised, undisciplined and

leaderless manner, not allowing themselves to be enslaved or conquered. The

Slavs were resistant to hardship, able to bear both heat and cold, and rain,

Procopius, Secret History (Historia arcana) xviii.20.

Procopius, Wars vii.14, 22–30.

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200

200 400 600 km

400 miles

I C

BLACK SEA

UKRAINE

IC S

NORICAN

ALPS

Sea of

Azov

BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Prague

Kiev

Constantinople

Belgrade

ITALY

Map 14 The Slavs: geographical context

lacking clothing and other necessities of life. They had their homes in the

forests, by rivers, swamps and wetlands which could be penetrated only with

difﬁculty.

Where was the homeland of the Slavs, where their ethnogenesis took place

and whence they set out on their migration? This problem remains the subject

of discussion among historians and archaeologists, despite intensive study of the

subject since at least the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Various arguments

(linguistic, historical, archaeological and ethnographical) have been used in

Strategikon ix.3.1; xi.4.1–45.

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this discussion and the origin of the Slavs has been placed by different authors

in different regions of Europe, from areas on the Elbe in the west to the Ural

Mountains in the east, and from the source of the Dnepr in the north to the

Danube and the Balkans in the south.

The problem of the location of the so-called ‘homeland’ of the Slavs has

evoked (and still evokes) heated scientiﬁc discussions, which are reﬂected in the

vast literature on the subject. Disagreement results not just from the different

types of information utilised by different scholars or from the different ways of

thinking about the issues involved, but also from the strong political inﬂuences

which, until recently, determined how the problem of the origin of the Slavs was

seen. History and archaeology were often used in central Europe in arguments

justifying modern political frontiers or the need to change them by territorial

annexation. Autochthonous theories on the local origin of the Slavs appeared

in several regions in different periods, most often as a reaction against conquest,

or loss of independence, for example in the nineteenth century in the Balkans

as a reaction against Ottoman rule, or in Bohemia as a reaction against the

Austro-Hungarian hegemony. The strongest reaction arose in the period after

the Second World War as the natural result of Nazi Pangermanism. At the

beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century in a period of European uniﬁcation

when historical arguments have ceased to have meaning for the justiﬁcation of

frontiers, which are now disappearing, we can perhaps see the problem of the

origin of the Slavs more objectively and without emotion.

Up to now, discussion on the origin of the Slavs has given great weight

to linguistic arguments. The basic hypothesis of the linguists is the existence

of a common Proto-Slavic language, which later, in the period of the Slavic

migrations, became differentiated into discrete languages and dialects. The

appearance of the Proto-Slavic language was supposed to have been preceded

by the existence of a Balto-Slavic linguistic community. Linguists seeking the

original homeland of the Slavs have attempted to deﬁne the chronology of

these processes on the basis of philological arguments, and to identify the

place of origin of the Proto-Slavic language. While unusually strong rela-

tionships between the Slavic and Baltic languages seem clear, for some this

seems to mean the existence of a Balto-Slavic linguistic community as early

as the second millennium bc.Others see the relationship between the two

languages as evidence for the territorial proximity of the two peoples and

argue for the late disintegration of that linguistic community, which only just

preceded the migrations of the Slavs. Linguists have been unable to agree,

even approximately, on the region within which the Proto-Slavic language

was thought to have arisen. This is despite the repeated attempts that have

been made to resolve the question on the basis of place-names, and the names

of rivers over wide areas of Europe, as well as to deﬁne the homeland on

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The Slavs 527

the basis of the names of plants, animals and geographical terms known to

them.

The name ‘Slav’ does not appear in antique written sources before the period

of their migrations and thus the analysis of the historical texts does not have

much to add to this discussion. Even so, attempts have been made to identify

as Slavs the ethnonyms known from the works of Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy

or Tacitus. Special attention has been paid here to identifying the place of

settlement of the Venedi/Venethi, who have been associated with the Slavs.

In analysing the information on these people transmitted to us by Pliny the

Elder from the end of the ﬁrst century ad and by Ptolemy of Alexandria of

the second century ad,ithas been suggested that the Venedi inhabited huge

areas of central Europe to the east of the Oder and south of the Baltic. Other

scholars, however, have tried to show that these ancient authors in fact speak

of two different peoples: the Venedi living in a small region on the Baltic

coast and the Venethi, who occupied great areas of central and eastern Europe.

In turn Tacitus, writing at the end of the ﬁrst century, located the Venethi

somewhere in the wooded steppe and forest zones of eastern Europe, east of

the Suebi (Sueves), between the Peucini (who should be located on the Black

Sea steppe) and the Fenni, occupying the north-eastern borders of Europe.

Tacitus’ Venethi occupied the same territory that the Stavanoi did in Ptolemy’s

text, the latter being identiﬁed with the Slavs. The neighbours of the Stavanoi

were the Sarmatian Alans, located on the Black Sea steppe, and the Galindians

and Sudovians (Baltic tribes on the Baltic sea coast). There they occupied great

areas of the central European lowlands.

Referring to a much later period (the ﬁrst half of the sixth century ad), Jor-

danes in his Getica located the Venethi (divided into the Sclaveni and Antes)

in the region north of the Carpathian Mountains, between the upper Vis-

tula and the middle Dnepr and the upper Danube.

Such a location of the

Venethi (identiﬁed with the Slavs) is not in disagreement with Tacitus’ infor-

mation on the Venethi and that of Ptolemy on the Stavanoi, but it requires

the acceptance of the thesis that the Venethi and Venedi were indeed two dif-

ferent peoples. The seventh-century work known as the Ravenna Cosmography

localises the original homeland of the Slavs in the land of Scythia, suggesting

by this the steppe-lands of eastern Europe. This information, while not very

accurate, nevertheless agrees with what the sources say about the homelands

of the Venethi and Stavanoi, suggesting the origin of the Slavs in the region

of the Ukraine. These scraps of information given by the written sources are,

however, far too enigmatic to form the basis for the proposition of unequivocal

conclusions.

Jordanes, Getica iv.34–6.

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In the face of such uncertainty archaeology seems to offer the best chance of

locating the original homelands of the Slavs, although the relationships between

the archaeologically investigated remains of material culture and ethnicity are

still unclear. It is easy mistakenly to associate so-called archaeological cultures

(and thus the area in which there appears a speciﬁc type, or deﬁnable group

of types, of artefacts) with the tribal territories of peoples known from later

written sources. In the archaeological literature attempts have been made to

assign a Slavic or Proto-Slavic ethnicity to different archaeological cultures

from quite different periods. For a long time such an ethnicity was assigned

to the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Lusatian Culture occurring in the

area of modern Poland and to all successive archaeological cultures in the same

area of central Europe. Since the 1980s increasing popularity has been gained

by an opposing theory, which suggests that we should assign the settlement of

the territories of modern Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia and Ukraine to Germanic

rather than Slavic tribes, at the end of the so-called period of Roman inﬂuences

(mid-ﬁfth century ad).

It has been shown by archaeologists that at the close of the ﬁrst half of the

ﬁrst millennium ad, and across the territory of a large part of central and eastern

Europe, there occurred the widespread breakdown and disappearance of the

cultural and settlement systems which had, over the preceding few centuries,

formed a speciﬁc cultural province. The latter had included the whole of

Barbaricum from the territories of the Goths on the Black Sea and Sea of

Azov to the settlement areas of various tribes in the Elbe valley. The col-

lapse and disappearance of the existing structures affected successive terri-

tories from the Ukraine and Moldavia in the east where it happened ﬁrst

(at the turn of the fourth and ﬁfth centuries), through south-east, southern

and into western Poland (during the ﬁrst half of the ﬁfth century), central

Poland (end of the ﬁfth century or beginning of the sixth century), Polish

Pomerania (in the ﬁrst quarter of the sixth century), and last, up to the

line of the Elbe and Saale (end of the sixth century). In these areas we

see the gradual appearance of more or less numerous cultural assemblages,

which represent a completely new cultural model. Extensive settlements

with post-built ground-level wooden buildings, with separate craft areas and

radial organisation around an empty space, and with differentiated struc-

tures of presumably ritual function, all of which was typical for the previ-

ous period, disappear. The huge manufacturing centres of iron and ceram-

ics cease functioning. The large cemeteries containing rich graves furnished

with weapons and ornaments also disappear. In their place appears a simple

egalitarian material culture with small square sunken-ﬂoored wooden build-

ings, with hand-made ceramics and devoid of ornamental metalwork. These

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The Slavs 529

phenomena may be explained, in the opinion of the majority of investigators,

by the replacement of previously existing populations by the Slavs.

If we agree with such an interpretation of the archaeological sources, in

searching for the original homelands of the Slavs we should ﬁrst of all turn to

the western Ukraine. Here in the valleys of the upper Boh, Dnestr and Prut

rivers the ﬁrst square sunken-ﬂoored huts with stone corner-ovens appear at the

beginning of the ﬁfth century, or maybe even at the end of the fourth century.

Their ﬁlls contain pieces of simple hand-made egg-shaped pottery vessels.

These ﬁnds form the indicators of the so-called Prague Culture, associated with

the Slavs and later spreading to the north-west and south-west. An intriguing

phenomenon is the fact that the oldest Slavic cultural elements appear within

the area of the so-called Chernyakhov Culture, which most archaeologists

agree was a material culture which reﬂected the existence of a multi-ethnic

Gothic state on the Black Sea. What is more, these Slavic traits appear in their

classic form, which is later duplicated over large areas of central, eastern and

southern Europe. This means that the creation of the Slavic cultural model

and the development of the elements of material culture which later formed

the ethnic identiﬁcation features thus occurred within a foreign, multiethnic

cultural environment, no doubt as a result of the need for self-identiﬁcation

in order to manifest their differentiation from other groups.

Whence and why did the Slavs come to the territories along the Dnestr and

Prut? It is most probable that the Slavs or their predecessors lived at the end of

antiquity in the forest zone on the upper and middle Dnepr, at this point not

yet having an express awareness of their ethnic differentiation. Here, they were

representedto the second century ad,bythe Zarubintsy Cultureand later (from

the third to the ﬁfth centuries) by the Kiev Culture. At the end of the fourth

and beginning of the ﬁfth centuries these stagnating cultures underwent poorly

understood cultural changes which led to their greater cultural uniﬁcation and

pressure on their southern neighbours on the Black Sea steppe, undergoing

political stimulation from the stormy events surrounding the fall of the state of

Ermanricafter the Hunattack of 375 ad.Itmay be assumed that in the process of

the ethnogenesis of the branch of the Slavs emerging against this background

in the basins of the Dnestr and Prut, other ethnic groups (Germanic and

Sarmatian) which inhabited these territories also took part.

Taking advantage of the weakening of the Gothic state as a result of the

Hun invasions, another branch of the Proto-Slavic population of the upper and

middle Dnepr moved down that river to the south and south-east. Interaction

with the existing populations represented by the Chernyakhov Culture gave

rise to the Penkovka Culture related to the Prague Culture and represented by

the appearance in the ﬁfth century of square huts with stone ovens in the corner.

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The historical reﬂection of these movements may be Jordanes’ reference to the

armed struggles between Vinitharius and the Antes.

The latter, to judge by the

naming of their leader Boz as ‘king’, would seem to have attempted to form

their own ‘state’ organisation on the fringes of or even within the boundaries of

the Gothic state. Proto-Slav groups remaining in their original homelands in

the valleys of the upper and middle Dnepr were represented by material culture

assemblages described by archaeologists as the Kolochin Culture, which was a

transformation of the old Kiev Culture. Thus three archaeological cultures, the

Penkovka, Prague and Kolochin Cultures, occupied an extensive area from the

Dnepr valley in the east to the eastern Carpathians in the west, denoting

the area occupied by the Slavic ethnic group in the ﬁfth and at the beginning

of the sixth centuries. It is not out of the question that the Sclavinoi and Antes,

the Slav tribes named by Jordanes and Procopius, may be related to the Prague

and Penkovka archaeological cultures respectively. It was from these territories

that during the sixth century the Slav migrations set out in two major directions,

along the eastern arc of the Carpathians, to the north-west and south-west.

There may also have been a westward migration of the Kolochin Culture

into eastern and central Poland, though this is as yet poorly documented

archaeologically.

The question of rapid population growth among the Slavs is often discussed

in the literature. These people, starting from the Ukraine, were in a relatively

short time able to colonise huge areas of Europe, but without causing clear

signs of a depopulation of their homelands. The fertility of the Black Soils

of the Ukraine in conjunction with the assimilation of members of other

ethnic groups caused a population explosion, which allowed them to settle

a series of territories in succession. Pseudo-Maurice in his Strategikon notes

that it was with ease that the Slavs accepted into their ranks prisoners from

other tribes.

Here it should be noted that the apparently poor and rather

unimpressive cultural model of the Slavs, based on home-grown produce and

domestic-scale crafts, could have had a magnetic attraction for various groups

of people disorientated by the collapse of the great political organisations on

the fringes of the Roman Empire. While the Germans had formed ‘client

states’, to a large extent dependent on exchange with the Roman Empire or

military service in the imperial army, the Slavs were totally independent of

Rome, and when they crossed the frontiers, unlike the Germans, they did not

wish to become part of its political and economic structures. They did not wish

to exploit the inhabitants in the same way as the nomads, but sought lands

for settlement useful for the development of agriculture. In this manner they

undoubtedly absorbed the local inhabitants who underwent Slavicisation. It is

Jordanes, Getica xlviii.246–8.

Strategikon xi.4.4–5.

The Slavs 531

in this process that we should seek the explanation of the phenomenon of the

rapid growth of the Slav population.

Slavic expansion to the north-west passed along the eastern edge of the

Carpathians through southern Poland towards the Vistula valley, along which

they moved further to the west, at the beginning of the sixth century reaching

the vicinity of modern Cracow. They penetrated as far as the source of the

Vistula, according to Jordanes, and likewise in the sixth century they moved

to the north in the direction of the fertile soils in central Poland (the region

of Kuyavia), which they could also reach along the Bug river. Nevertheless,

at the beginning of the sixth century the whole area of Silesia and central

and western Poland remained outside the area of settlement of the Slavs. This

seems to be indicated by Procopius when he writes of the migration of the

Heruli who, after being defeated by the Lombards in 509,probably in 512

passed through all the tribes of the Sclavenoi and then, after passing through a

considerable area of empty countryside, reached the lands of the Warni (in the

middle reaches of the Elbe), and thence to Denmark where they boarded boats

to Thule (Scandinavia).

The empty countryside must have been Silesia. This

region must have still been deserted in 566–567 when, as Gregory of Tours tells

us, the Avar expedition against the Franks, which passed through the southern

territories of Poland, suffered from a lack of supplies, which seems to suggest

that they travelled through deserted territories.

Already in the sixth century, however, typical Slav settlements with square

sunken-ﬂoored huts with corner-ovens appear on the middle Oder and Neisse,

and at the beginning of the seventh century (or perhaps, according to the latest

dendrochronological dates, by the middle of the century at the latest) we ﬁnd

them on the middle Elbe. The settlement of Slavs in these territories was made

possible by their desertion by Germanic tribes. In 531 the kingdom of the

Thuringians was conquered by a coalition of Franks and Saxons; in 568 groups

of Thuringians and Saxons joined the Lombards venturing on the conquest of

Italy; and in 595 the Merovingians destroyed the state of the Warni on the Saale,

the last independent Germanic state in this area of Europe. By this means by the

second half of the sixth century a political and perhaps settlement vacuum had

formed in the valleys of the Elbe and Saale, which could be ﬁlled by the Slavs.

Archaeological evidence of the contacts between the Slavs and the Germans

suggests a direct relationship between the abandonment of their settlements

by the Germans and the arrival of the Slavs at the end of the sixth century

and the assimilation of the remaining indigenous inhabitants. The presence

of the Slavs on the Baltic by the end of the sixth century is attested by the

Procopius, Wars vi.15.1–4.Onthis episode, see also Hedeager, chapter 18 above.

Gregory, Hist. iv.29.

532 zbigniew kobyli

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History of Theophylact Simocatta, who mentions two prisoners captured by

the Byzantine army about 591 who were supposed to have come from the coast

of the ‘Western Sea’.

From the chronicle of Fredegar we learn that the Serbs

(Surbii) under the leadership of Dervan joined the tribal union known in the

literature as the ‘state of Samo’ in 632/3, although they had for long been part

of the Frankish hegemony. After 632 the Slavs, known as Wends, says Fredegar,

took part in armed attacks on the territory of the Merovingians west of the

Saale and probably annexed part of these regions for some time.

It is unclear

whether the oldest phase of Slavic settlement in the Elbe region spread from the

north ﬂanks of the Carpathians and Sudeten Mountains (i.e. through southern

Poland), or from the south, through Bohemia, where one may suspect their

settlement already by the mid-sixth century. Here also, as on the Elbe, there

was direct contact and cohabitation of the Slavs with the remaining German

population. By the middle of the sixth century a few groups of Slavs penetrated

southwards from Bohemia into the area of modern northern Austria.

A speciﬁc phenomenon associated with the penetration of the Slavs is the

appearance at the beginning of the seventh century of the ﬁrst defended set-

tlements (strongholds), the oldest example of which known from the written

sources may be the Wogastisburg, which Samo defended against the Franks.

Apart from their military role, these sites probably fulﬁlled a ceremonial and

cult function. Their genesis should probably be sought in the stronghold-

temples dated to the fourth and ﬁfth centuries in the region of the upper

Dnepr. In a later period the construction of strongholds by the Slavs in the

regions of modern Poland, eastern Germany and Bohemia became a typical

form of settlement. They probably formed the centres (or marked borders)

of so-called ‘small tribes’ ruled by leaders who are referred to in the written

sources as archontes, hegemones or etnarchai.Such ‘small tribes’ continued to

exist separately until the tenth century, when the ﬁrst stable Slavic state organ-

isms in this zone emerged. According to recent theories the mechanism of this

process was military conquest, and the role of the princely retinue in the rise

of state organisations in this region seems to be crucial.

The second main direction of expansion of the Slavs, which brought them

into the orbit of the Byzantine Empire, probably came from the region of

the oldest Slav settlement in western Ukraine. They moved through Moldavia

along the eastern arc of the Carpathians to the lower Danube in the south, and

then west along the north bank of that river. According to Procopius,

the ﬁrst

Slav attack on Byzantium took place in the time of Justin I, most probably in

Theophylact Simocatta, Historiae vi.2.10–16.

Fredegar, Chron. iv.68.Onthe situation in eastern Austrasia see also Fouracre, chapter 14 above.

Procopius, Wars vii.40.