Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe by Peter Heather

Author:Peter Heather [Heather, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Europe, Culture Diffusion - Europe - History, Culture Diffusion, Ancient, Europe - History - 476-1492, Anthropology, Cultural, Rome, Medieval, Rome - History - Empire, Europe - History - to 476, Migrations of Nations, 284-476, Civilization
ISBN: 9780199735600
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

8

THE CREATION OF SLAVIC EUROPE

ONE OF THE GREAT LANGUAGE GROUPS of modern Europe, Slavic-speakers currently comprise nearly 270 million individuals, and primarily Slavic-speaking countries account for something like half of the European landmass. This last point, at least, was substantially true by the end of the first millennium AD. Already in the year 900, Slavic-speakers dominated vast tracts of the European landscape east of the River Elbe and even some more limited territories west of it, in the Bohemian basin and around the River Saale. The eastern extent of Slavic control at this date is not completely clear, but it certainly extended to much of European Russia – as far east as the River Volga and as far north as Lake Ilmen. Slavic-speakers also dominated much of the Balkan peninsula (Map 16).

But such a massively Slavic Europe was only a recent creation. In the Roman period, Europe as far east as the River Vistula, the best part of five hundred kilometres further east than the western boundary of later Slavic-dominated territory on the Elbe, had been dominated by Germanic-speakers. In the same period, the Balkans were part of the Roman Empire, home to ethnically disparate populations who spoke Latin and Greek as well as a variety of indigenous dialects and languages. River names (hydronyms) also indicate that much of central European Russia had at one point been dominated by the speakers of Baltic, not Slavic, languages, while its northern zones were in the hands of Finnish populations (Map 16). Even more startling, there is no mention of ‘Slavs’ in any Roman source – Greek or Latin – written before the deposition of the last western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476, and this despite the fact that the knowledge of some Roman geographers ranged widely over northern and eastern Europe. If little discussed in anglophone circles, the rise of Slavic Europe is one of the biggest stories of the entire first millennium. Where did it come from and what role did migration play in its creation?

IN SEARCH OF THE SLAVS

For all its historical importance, the creation of Slavic Europe is extremely difficult to reconstruct. Some of the reasons for this are straightforward, others a touch more exotic. First and foremost, we have no contemporary account of the process from any Slavic author. Literacy eventually came to the Slavic world with conversion to Christianity. But it was only in mid-ninth-century Moravia (see page 518), where we began, that the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius created the first written version of a Slavic language to translate the Bible. In the centuries that followed, even Latin and Greek literacy remained largely restricted to religious contexts, and it was not until the early twelfth century that the Slavic world started to generate its own accounts of the past: the Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia (written from c.1120), the Gallus Anonymus in Poland (c.1115), and the Russian Primary Chronicle in Kiev (or Tale of Bygone Years, 1116). Nearly half a millennium separates these

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