From the outer foothills of the Carpathian system in the late fifth century, Slavic groups spread decisively south into the Balkans in the seventh, after a period of aggressive raiding that had lasted through most of the sixth. Other Slavic-speaking groups were at the same time spreading into southern Poland (the Mogilany group of the early sixth century) and westwards along the northern foothills of the Carpathians, reaching Moravia sometime in the first half of the sixth century, Bohemia in the second, and the confluences of the Havel, Saale and Elbe in the early seventh. A second line of advance also reached the Elbe perhaps only a little later, having spread north and west from the Vistula, but, as we have seen, the internal chronology of the Sukow-Dziedzice system remains vague. Dynamic sixth-century Slavic expansion towards the west was fully matched in Ukraine on the other side of the Carpathians, where both the Korchak and the closely related Penkovka systems spread over large areas in the sixth century. Even this much expansion, however, does not explain the dominance of Slavic-speaking groups across large areas of previously Baltic-speaking regions visible by the tenth century. The spread subsequently of the Luka Raikovetskaia and Volyntsevo systems over and beyond Korchak and Penkovka areas may reflect this, but, as we have seen, that story may be much more complicated than the simple linear progression of material cultures might suggest.
Without historical evidence, it is impossible to know how dispersed Slavic-speakers already were in eastern Europe in c.500 AD. The geographical range of the action and the number of different forms it took does suggest, though, that there must have been substantially more Slavic-speakers at this point than just the Sclavenes and Antae of Moldavia and Wallachia, but this still makes Slavic expansion, particularly into European Russia, highly problematic. The spread of the Penkovka, Luka Raikovetskaia and Volyntsevo systems over different parts of the East European Plain really could represent either the initial Slavicization of these territories, or the triumph of one particular group of Slavic-speakers over their peers. Even more fundamentally, none of this does more than sketch in the barest outlines of Slavic expansion.
By what means did Slavic-speakers spread their domination over such a large part of the European landscape, and what caused this fundamental revolution in European history?
Trying to understand the human history behind the creation of Slavic Europe is even more difficult than exploring the migratory activities of the Germanic groups caught up in the fall of the Roman Empire, for two main reasons. First and foremost, the historical evidence has yet more holes in it. The second reason would apply anyway, even if the literary evidence were fuller. The appearance of Sclavenes and Antae in the sub-Carpathian region by c.500 AD represented one huge revolution in itself, in that Slavic-speakers are not previously documented in this area. But other Slavic-speakers then spread over a vast range of times and places to create Slavic Europe as it stood at the end of the first millennium: Moravia, Bohemia and Ukraine in the sixth century, the Balkans in the seventh, the Russian forest zone as late as the eighth and ninth, and north-central Europe sometime in between. It is inconceivable that expansionary activities that were dispersed so widely in time and space could all have taken a single form.
Flows of Migration
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 598.41 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.42
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.43
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.44
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.45
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.46 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.
For European Russia, the only evidence we have for the migration process is again archaeological and hence, by its nature, indirect. But some of the settlement patterns, like those from Korchak Europe, are again highly suggestive of the type of social unit engaging in the expansionary process, and hence shed at least some light on that process itself. Take, for instance, the Borshevo-era hilltop site at Novotroitskoe in the Psiol valley in northern Ukraine. Here, the steep sides of the hill form natural defences, and the excavators found clustered together about fifty sunken-floored huts dating from the eighth and ninth centuries. This indicates that the total population of the settlement must have been just a few hundred people. The choice and nature of the site itself are enough to suggest that prevailing conditions were far from peaceful, as does the end of this initial period of its occupation, when it was apparently destroyed by raiders. Novotroitskoe is not an isolated example. Romny-Borshevo settlements were customarily situated in highly defensible situations on hilltops or in swamps, often walled, and they generally hosted a similarly dense clustering of population.
All this suggests two things. Most obviously, the progress of Slavic-speakers over this landscape was far from uncontested. You go to the trouble of building this type of settlement only if you need to, and its eventual fate does suggest that it was necessary. Second, and this follows from the first observation, Slavic expansion in this region was probably being conducted by groups big enough to build and maintain settlements of this type. If expansion was contested, small groups could not just pitch up in a new area. They had to come with sufficient strength to construct a settlement in which they could protect themselves and their families.
Despite the lack of historical description, therefore, it seems that the migration units operating from the eighth century in north-western Russia were considerably larger than those that had earlier spread Korchak culture and its variants across the central European uplands and east of the Carpathians into southern Russia and Ukraine. Their defended settlements stand in marked contrast to the small undefended ones of the Korchak, Penkovka and even Kolochin systems of the sixth and seventh centuries, emphasizing the degree to which the later centuries marked a new era in the nature of Slavic expansion. We are still looking here at an expansion that began with something akin to a wave of advance rather than the sudden occupation of an entire landscape, but it evolved over time, until larger social units were eventually moving into contested areas. Overall, Slavic expansion into European Russia may well have taken a form we’ve seen in other contexts, ancient and modern, where a flow of small-scale social units builds up momentum and is forced to reorganize itself into larger groups when it eventually encounters serious opposition, as the Goths and others did in the third century, the Vikings in the ninth and the Boers in the nineteenth.47
The range of evidence available for the nature and scale of Slavic migration flows bears not the remotest resemblance to anything you might consider an ideal data set. But this is all part of the fun of early medieval history, and in any case, it is still sufficient to show that Slavic expansion took a variety of forms, as we would anyway have to suppose given the wide variety of contexts it encompassed. At one end of the spectrum we have the transfer of replica Korchak-type settlements from the foothills of the Carpathians across wide tracts of central and eastern Europe from the Elbe to Ukraine. In the Romny-Borshevo era further to the north and east, by contrast, more substantial settlements were the norm, constructed by Slavic population units several hundred strong. Different again was the movement of entire ‘tribes’ into the former Roman Balkans in the seventh century, where the groups may have been up to ten thousand strong, if it is correct to think of them as the kind of unit run by an Ardagastes or a Perigastes taking to the road. With so few sources, the details of all this could be argued over endlessly, and there is a large margin for error. But the Slavicization of Europe clearly involved a wide range of migratory activity, with unit sizes extending from family groupings at one extreme to social units in the thousands at the other.
Immigrant and Native
Composed around the year 600 AD, the east Roman military treatise often attributed to the Emperor Maurice (582–602) includes a fascinating comment on the approach of some early Slavic groups to prisoners taken on their raids:
They do not keep those who are in captivity among them in perpetual slavery, as do other nations. But they set a definite period of time for them and then give them the choice either, if they so desire, to return to their own homes with a small recompense or to remain there as free men and friends.48
This immediately raises the basic intellectual problem involved in trying to understand the astonishing rise to prominence of Slavic-speakers all the way from the Elbe to the Volga in the early Middle Ages. On the one hand, there is no one who supposes that this could have happened without an element of migration: actual Slavic-speakers on the move across the landscape. On the other, old culture-historical, quasi-nationalist visions of the Slavs as a ‘people’, a single population group that started from one geographical point and then went forth to multiply over vast tracts of the European landscape, are not credible. In similar vein, although they did add up in aggregate to substantial population movements, the earlier, largely Germanic migrations of the fourth to the sixth century were certainly not large enough to create entirely empty landscapes in the vast tracts of Europe that were affected by Germanic culture collapse. Most of these areas reappear in Carolingian sources under new, Slavic, management, but the original Slavic migrants were mostly interacting with an indigenous population. The two key issues we need to explore, therefore, are, first, just how big a demographic event was Slavic migration itself; and, second, what kinds of relationship did incoming Slavs form with the indigenous populations they found at their various points of destination?
Comprehensive information is not available, but there is good reason to suppose that incoming Slavs did encounter a substantially reduced population in areas affected by Germanic culture collapse, and even, in a few localities, some entirely abandoned landscapes. For just a few areas, general settlement surveys are available. In Bohemia, for instance, there seems to have been a substantial decline in population in the late Roman period. Twenty-four major find-spots (mostly cemeteries) are known from the early Roman period, but this declines to just fourteen in late antiquity. Slavic immigrants into Bohemia encountered not an empty landscape, therefore, but certainly a smaller population than the region had previously carried. Elsewhere, pollen diagrams provide further insights. Pollen is carried in the wind and, on landing, will sink to the bottom of standing water. A core can then be extracted from the bottom, particularly of lakes, allowing changes in the varieties of pollen deposited over time to be charted. Continuous activity from an indigenous farming population shows up as an undisturbed pollen sequence, with no great rise in tree or grass pollen, and no major change in the range of cereals being produced. Pollen diagrams are unavailable for much of eastern Europe, but they do indicate that in some places a substantial indigenous pre-Slavic population was not displaced. Samples from the Baltic island of Rügen and from Saaleland show more or less total continuity from the Roman into the Slavic periods, even though both passed into Slavic control at some point before 800 AD. But in other areas, a different picture has emerged. In large parts of Mecklenburg in the former DDR, the pollen diagrams indicate great disruption to established farming patterns in the same period. Here, at least, it would seem, Slavic-era immigrants more or less started farming the landscape again from scratch. Similar evidence for disruption and forest regeneration has also emerged from Biskupin in modern Poland.49
Where the pollen gives out, we are forced back on indications of a more general kind. Some again suggest we should not underestimate the demographic component of Slavicization. In Procopius’ account, the unfortunate Heruli evicted from the Middle Danube in 512 (Chapter 5) initially passed north through Slavic territory and then into ‘empty lands’ before eventually finding their way to Scandinavia. The empty area ought to be north-central Europe, somewhere beyond the Moravian Gap, and, on the face of it this seems to indicate a major population decline in that region, since pretty much everywhere between the Moravian gap and Scandinavia had been substantially populated in the Roman period. There is also good reason to think that the migration process would have prompted a considerable population increase among the immigrant Slavs. One limit on human population is the availability of food supplies. When more food is produced, more children survive, there is better resistance to disease, and couples are often allowed to marry younger, with the outcome that populations can increase surprisingly quickly if extra food supplies are available in abundance. In the case of the Slavs there are no figures, but plenty of reason to think that the overall demographic effect would have been large. For one thing, migration brought Slavic-speakers out of the Russian forest zone and on to the generally better soils of central Europe. In addition, Korchak and Penkovka farmers quickly adopted the more efficient type of plough in use in the Roman world and its peripheries by 400 AD, abandoning their original scratch ploughs. The new ploughs allowed them to turn the soil over so that weeds rotted back into it, allowing fertility to be both increased and maintained and making for much higher yields. Even if we cannot put figures on it, we must reckon with migration having generated a substantial population increase among Slavic-speakers, with obvious knock-on effects for their capacity to colonize new lands in central Europe. Not all Slavs will have scored the threefold personal increase in population achieved by the Frankish merchant Samo, who produced twenty-two sons and fifteen daughters with just a little help, of course, from his twelve wives, but population increase was a genuine phenomenon.50
At the same time, other indications reinforce the pollen evidence from Rügen and Saaleland. The Sukow-Dziedzice system, covering much of what is now Poland, has thrown up much pottery of standard Korchak types, but, as we have seen, its remains are really distinctive for their strikingly wide range of pot-types. In addition to the standard Korchak cooking pots (which tend towards wider-mouthed, more open forms than the Korchak norm), Sukow-Dziedzice sites customarily throw up a wide range of plain medium-sized jars, globular bowls and jar-bowls. Much of the non-Korchak pottery looks in fact like handmade versions of the kind of wheel-made pottery that was being made in the same region by Przeworsk potters in the final century or so of Germanic domination. These resemblances could have been generated by Korchak potters coming across Przeworsk ceramics in abandoned settlements, but this kind of imitation is not found anywhere else. Much more likely, we are looking at the results of an interaction between Korchak Slavs and an indigenous post-Przeworsk population that was still living in situ.51
The range of available evidence – some specific, some more general – makes it clear that the demographic significance of Germanic culture collapse and Slavic immigration is not simple to predict. A substantial peasant population remained at work in at least some parts of old Germanic Europe, despite the population movements of the fourth to the sixth century. The Bohemian evidence suggests, however, that we may have to reckon with a general thinning-out of the indigenous population, which, as the pollen diagrams show, could even lead in places to the wholesale abandonment of farming: a pattern that is found in many of the fringes of the Roman Empire in the period after its collapse.52 When you also add to the picture that the Slavic-speaking populations involved in the migratory process would have been increasing in numbers as they applied more-developed farming techniques to better soils, then it does seem that Slavic immigration must be considered a major demographic event, even if it did not everywhere, or even often, take the form of recolonizing abandoned territories.
It is now such a mantra in some circles that migration never happened in the first millennium on a large enough scale to have a major demographic (as opposed to political or cultural) impact, that it is worth dwelling on this point a little further. It is certainly true, when dealing with hierarchically stratified societies, that the kind of culture collapse associated with the disappearance of a social elite need not represent much of a population exodus. As we saw earlier, according to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, the arrival of Slavs in the Peloponnese prompted the total evacuation of its native Greek population. When the Slavs around Patras revolted in the early ninth century, however, there was a native Greek-speaking population living alongside them. Possibly, the Greek-speakers had all returned from Calabria in the meantime, but this seems unlikely. And logistically, the sea-borne evacuation of an entire region would have been impossible, given the kind of shipping available. In parallel circumstances in the west, only wealthy members of the landowning class, those with some movable wealth, tended to flee.
That similar patterns surely prevailed in the Peloponnese, despite the Chronicle’s report to the contrary, is suggested by reactions elsewhere in the Balkans to the build-up of Slavic pressure. Another admittedly late chronicle source, though one usually taken to be drawing on much earlier information, reports that Salona in the northwest fell to the Slavs when panic swept through the city following the discovery that its notables had been moving their goods on to ships in the harbour. In similar vein, Constantine Porphyryogenitus reports that the inhabitants of Ragusa still remembered that their city had been founded by immigrants fleeing from Pitaura. It goes on to list them by name: Gregory, Asclepius, Victorinus, Vitalius, Valentinian the archdeacon and Valentinian the father of Stephen the protospatharius. A protospatharius was a high-ranking court dignitary, which, together with the mention of an archdeacon, makes this sound like the exodus of a small group of notables – presumably also with their households and retainers – rather than the mass transfer of an entire population.53 Culture collapse and elite migration in a Roman context, therefore, probably only involved a small percentage of the population, and it is likely that immigrant Slavs within the Balkans were always closely coexisting with a substantial indigenous population.
The socioeconomic patterns of Germanic Europe in the late Roman period, however, were very different. Despite the major transformations of the previous four centuries, it remained nothing like so hierarchically stratified as late Roman or early Byzantine society. New Germanic elites did emerge between the first and fourth century AD, but still represented a much larger percentage of the total population than the tiny landowning class which dominated the Roman world. As we saw in Chapter 2, everything suggests that we must think in terms of social and political power shared between a fairly broad oligarchy of freemen, not a small aristocracy. And participation in the Völkerwanderung, likewise, was not limited just to this dominant oligarchy. At least two social strata of warriors appear in some of the intrusive groups alongside an unspecified number of slaves, adding up, on occasion, to groups of ten thousand-plus fighting men, together with women and children.54 The emigration of this kind of social elite, with its many adherents, would have an entirely different effect upon a region from that of a few Roman notables and their households. None of this denies, however, that much of north-central Europe remained home to an indigenous population at the time of Slavic migratory expansion.
So how does the evidence suggest that we should characterize relations between native and immigrant populations, both here and elsewhere, such as the Balkans and European Russia, where Slavic-speakers came into contact with indigenous societies?
One recent approach to the problem has started with the Strategicon’s report firmly in mind, and taken the argument further on the strength of some general observations about the material-cultural effects of the rise of Slavic domination in central and eastern Europe. Its most striking effect was the replacement (at least in the areas affected by Germanic culture collapse) of the bigger and the more complex with the smaller and simpler, in pretty much every aspect of life from pottery technology to settlement size. This simplification, it is argued, wasn’t just an incidental effect of population elements from the woods of eastern Europe – who had very simple lifestyles anyway – taking over large parts of the landscape, but a key reason for their success. What we’re observing, in this view, is not so much the takeover of a Slavic population as the spread of an attractive cultural model, energetically seized upon by non-militarized indigenous peasant populations of central Europe left over after the old elites had departed south and west for Roman territory. In effect, the Slavs are recast as the champions of an alternative lifestyle, early medieval hippy travellers who found widespread support, unlike their later counterparts in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s. As Procopius reports, vigorously egalitarian and dramatic, if primitive, ideologies prevailed among the Slavs of his day, and this, it has been argued, was very attractive to peasants who had been labouring hard to provide surpluses which the militarized elites of Germanic central Europe had previously exploited.55This model is really describing Slavicization as a process of non-elite transfer and cultural emulation, where a few immigrants, but above all a way of life, spread across large parts of central Europe on being adopted by a substantial indigenous population. How well does this model fit the available data?
At least in some places, the incoming Slavic migrants did treat the indigenous population more generously than would appear to have been the case, for instance, in Anglo-Saxon England. There was certainly some assimilation. The Strategicon does suggest that some early Slavic groups were remarkably ‘open’ in terms of their group identity, being willing, as we have seen, to accept prisoners as full and equal members of their own society. This is remarkable. Many societies are willing to take in outsiders, but it is more usual for the latter to have to adopt, at least initially, relatively inferior social positions. Full equality was clearly not an offer being made, for instance, by Germanic groups of the ‘Migration Period’. These came out of the migration process with their well-entrenched social distinctions between the two statuses of warrior and slaves intact – top status had clearly not been on offer to all the new recruits they had picked up on the way. With little, seemingly, in the way of original social hierarchies to protect, however, a willingness to attract recruits seems to have been of higher priority to some early Slavic groups, who erected no substantial barriers to the admission of outsiders. Beyond the Strategicon, we have no narrative descriptions of this process in action, but it finds some confirmation in the Samo story. Here was an outsider, a Frankish merchant, who showed the right qualities and ended up as a figure of authority among the Sorbs and other Slavs of the Avar/Frankish frontier region.56
The absorption of outsiders surely also operated at less exalted social levels. The population increase generated by better farming methods does not seem remotely enough to account for the immense areas of the European landscape that had come to be dominated by Slavs from c.800 AD. This even remains the case if you also suppose, which I tend to, that the Slavic language family had evolved before the middle of the first millennium AD, and that, consequently, Slavic-speakers were more broadly dispersed in c.500 AD than identifying them exclusively with Korchak remains would suggest. The creation of an almost entirely Slavic Europe from the Elbe to the Volga does seem, therefore, to call for a large element of population absorption. This of course would provide the historical context in which Slavic-speakers acquired more advanced farming technologies from their neighbours, and, in the case of the Sukow-Dziedzice system, more developed ceramic repertoires.57 This is not to advocate a return to old nationalist ideas of indigenous ‘submerged Slavs’ between the Oder and the Vistula triumphantly re-emerging from Germanic domination. Far from it: frankly, we have no idea what linguistic and cultural identity the leftover peasantry of this region are likely to have had after Germanic culture collapse – but presumably Germanic, if anything, since they had been under Germanic domination for several hundred years. But whatever it was, their longer-term trajectory was to be absorbed into the evolving norms of a Slavic cultural context. Such a large-scale absorption, it is worth underlining, is perfectly in line with modern studies of ethnicity, which make it clear that, according to circumstance, groups erect stronger or weaker barriers around themselves. The early Slavs – or some of them at least – would be an example of a group erecting only a very porous frontier between themselves and outsiders, and this, of course, is what the report of Maurice’s Strategicon suggests. It is also worth pointing out that this is a unique comment, not a topos trundled out every time Roman authors discuss barbarians.
That said, however, it is extremely important not just to jump from this evidence to the conclusion that the Slavs took over huge expanses of Europe more or less peacefully. In the former East German Republic in the Soviet era, it was ideologically highly desirable to find cases of Slavs living peacefully alongside a native Germanic-speaking population, and the evidence was manipulated accordingly. During these years a corpus of sites was identified where, so the claim went, Germans and Slavs had lived peacefully side by side for some time. Two were in Berlin (Berlin-Marzahn and Berlin-Hellersdorf), the others spread more widely, Dessau-Mosigkau and Tornow being the most prominent.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall has prompted important revisions. That late Germanic and early Slavic materials had been found on the same sites in these instances was clear enough, but, under reinvestigation, the case for simultaneous occupation has failed to stand up. At Berlin-Hellersdorf, the Germanic and Slavic moments of occupation were separated from one another by a layer of deposited sediment. On the face of it, this denied simultaneous Slavic and Germanic occupation, and carbon-14 datings made since 1989 have confirmed the point. At Berlin-Marzahn, similarly, carbon-14 dates for the Germanic-period materials range from 240 to 400 AD, those for the Slavic from 660 to 780 AD. In this case, the carbon-14 datings merely confirmed an earlier dendrochronological date of the eighth century for some wood from the Slavic phase. Looking to prove coexistence, the original excavator considered this dendrochronological date too ‘unlikely’ to be worth publishing.58 The later Slavic expansion in north-western Russia, as we have seen, looks too contested, likewise, for immigrant/native relations in that context to be characterized as fundamentally peaceful. Not all the evidence for peaceful interaction is flawed, but neither is it the only type of interaction documented in our sources.
In the longer term, as the cultural and linguistic transformation that came over central and eastern Europe in the second half of the millennium makes clear, Slavic-speakers became a dominating force right across this landscape. Slavic society may have been open to outsiders, but open to outsiders who were willing to join it and become Slavs in every sense of the word. The world created by Slavic immigration shows no sign of migrants and natives happily agreeing to differ over lifestyles. On the contrary, it generated a monolithic cultural form in which the Slavic contribution was dominant. The Slavs did not just insert themselves into the society of central Europe at the head of structures that already existed, so we are not looking here at some variant of a Norman Conquest model of elite transfer. What they did was redefine social norms along lines dictated by themselves. In other words, longer-term Slavicization was a bit like Romanization: the generation of an all-encompassing new socioeconomic and political order, with powerful cultural overtones, which became the only game in town. In the end, affected populations had no real choice about whether to join in or not, and Slavic became the predominant language right across this huge territory.
You have to wonder, too, how long Slavic societies remained so open to outsiders joining it on equal terms. Certainly by c.800 AD, as we will explore in more detail in Chapter 10, some of these new societies were becoming more stratified, with a distinctly predatory attitude to prisoners. By this date, prisoners were no longer being absorbed as equals but recycled into a highly profitable slave trade. The absence, before the ninth century, of real material cultural differentiation clearly reflecting the existence of an elite might lead you to think that the closing of Slavic society to outsiders was a relatively late phenomenon. But, as we have seen before, elites can exist without consumer goods. Having servile dependants to do all the back-breaking work of farming, while you eat more and enjoy more leisure, can give ‘elite’ real meaning, even when you don’t possess lots of shiny goods.
It is also important to remember that although the first historically documented Slavs operated in small social groups – some of them very small – this did not make them all notably peaceful. Smallish groups of Slavs raided the Roman Balkans almost continuously from the mid-sixth century, and quickly acquired a warlike reputation. Some of the prisoners who fell into their hands received conspicuously ungenerous treatment. The fifteen thousand Roman prisoners impaled outside the city of Topirus in 549, or those others killed in 594 when their Slavic captors were surrounded, would have found the Strategicon’s comments about Slavic generosity towards captives less than convincing.59 The more organized Slavic groups of Serbs and Croats, if we may trust theDe Administrando Imperio, were probably even more formidable, since they were capable of throwing off Avar domination. When thinking about the Slavicization of Europe, then, it is important to see that Slavic expansion was occurring at a point where Slavic society was itself already in the throes of major transformations. One of the results were armed groups of great military competence, and it is extremely unlikely, where these kinds of groups were operating, that Slavicization was being carried forward solely by processes of peaceful absorption.
While accepting that the Strategicon’s account of ethnic openness did apply to some of them, an overly romantic vision of the early Slavs must be avoided. Slavic expansion was carried forward by a range of groups of very different kinds and with different motivations, and it is likely that they responded to the indigenous populations they encountered in a variety of ways. In some parts of north-central Europe, Slavic immigration generated the recolonization of lands left empty by Germanic migrants of theVölkerwanderung era, or the primary exploitation of upland wooded agricultural niches that had previously not proved attractive. Where indigenous populations survived, but not much in the way of state structures, by contrast, Slavic immigration probably amounted to a kind of ‘elite re-creation’, somewhat along the lines of what happened in early Anglo-Saxon England or north-eastern Gaul. Here new immigrant–native amalgams were eventually generated. But, even if some Slavic groups were particularly open to outsiders, and overall the process was maybe more peaceful than anything seen in Gaul or England, the immigrants did come to dominate – in thoroughly monolithic fashion – the new societies created.60
Overall, and despite the lack of figures, there is no doubt that, in the qualitative terms used in modern comparative studies, Slavic expansion must count as an example of mass migration. Politically and culturally, the shock is overwhelmingly clear at the receiving end of the migration flow. Most of the Balkan peninsula, central Europe as far west as the Elbe, much of Ukraine and a huge region of western Russia came to be dominated by Slavic-speakers in the three or four centuries after 500 AD. This was new. Many of these territories had previously been dominated by Germanic- and Baltic-speakers, or formed part of the east Roman Empire. It could be objected – given the gaps in the evidence – that Slavic expansion was much more of a slow process than a genuine ‘shock’. And there is something in this argument. Germanic culture collapse indicates that in some of the areas affected by the extension of Slavic power, a first major shock had already happened before the Slavs arrived. Even taking a minimalist view of this phenomenon, the disappearance of a sociopolitical elite and several hundred years’ worth of continuous material-cultural tradition was no insignificant event, and certainly paved the way for Slavic expansion in the form of very small migration units. Elsewhere, however, the creation of Slavic power was both sudden, and the product of violent self-assertion. Up to the 610s, east Roman forces had just about held the Danube line against their Slavic antagonists, preventing raiding from turning into settlement. It was at that point that the frontier collapsed, and large-scale settlement quickly followed. And as the fortified settlements of the Romny-Borshevo era also emphasize, there is no reason to suppose that the Balkans was the only area in which Slavic expansion was a hotly contested phenomenon, requiring larger and more aggressive migration units.
The migration process also administered a huge shock – measured in terms of economic and sociopolitical dislocation – for at least some of the Slavs themselves. Our knowledge of the Slavs before their diaspora is limited, except for the fact that they originated somewhere in the eastern stretches of the Great European Plain. As we have seen, the general character of Korchak-type systems bears witness to populations practising a very simple form of mixed farming, with few material possessions, and this broadly corresponds to descriptions of early Slavic society in east Roman literary sources, which again stress its poverty, simplicity and relatively egalitarian nature. Migration eventually changed all this, if at different speeds for different Slavic-speaking groups. One population element affected from a very early date was the specialist warrior class which quickly emerged in the foothills of the Carpathians to take advantage of the raiding opportunities provided by their new proximity to the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire. In the longer term, these changes were to spread much more widely through Slav-dominated lands.61 But if there is no real doubt that Slavic expansion must be considered a mass migration, why did it happen at all, and why did its processes unfold as they did?
Migration, Development and the Slavs
With Slavic expansion encompassing so many types of migration unit, functioning in so many contexts, we should not be surprised that a wide range of motivations operated within them. Some Slavs were on the move for largely voluntary and economic motives. This is true most obviously of the Slavic raiders of the Roman Balkans in the sixth century, whose activities were entirely concerned with siphoning off part of the movable wealth available there. Raiding was one method of doing this, but Slavic auxiliary troops are also found in Roman employ in these years – another means to the same end. The Antae, in particular, seem to have benefited from becoming licensed Roman allies from the 530s. In broad terms, it was the initial moves of the Sclavenes and Antae into Moldavia and Wallachia south and east of the Carpathians that brought them close enough to the east Roman Empire to make these different kinds of money-making activity possible. There is no reason to think that this wasn’t one of the aims behind the original move.
The material benefits accruing to certain elements, at least, within the Slavic world from all the migratory activity of the fifth to the eighth century are also obvious if you compare the Slavic material culture at the beginning with that of the end of the era. More sophisticated metalwork, including some in precious metals, a greater range of material goods, and even some differentiated housing – all appeared in these years to the benefit particularly of the warrior classes, who became able to take advantage of the new opportunities that were now available as a consequence of their greater proximity to developed Europe. Obviously, this is to reconstruct motivation not on the basis of direct evidence but from actions and their consequences, but it seems reasonable nonetheless.62 It also means that Slavic migration – or some of it – falls into a pattern we have encountered before, whereby groups from a less developed periphery moved into contact with imperial Europe or its immediate hinterland, where new opportunities for gathering wealth existed in abundance. It would also put Slavic migration firmly in line with one of the essential conclusions of modern migration studies: inequalities of wealth and development provide one fundamental stimulus to migration.
But as Slavic expansion unfolded, the integration of outermost periphery and imperial Europe reached a new intensity. Slavic-speakers originated somewhere within the very simple farming societies that spread east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians in the first half of the millennium, as we have seen, whether or not you believe Jordanes’ account of them as an offshoot of the Venedi. At that point, they were part of a world that had never come into serious contact with the Roman Empire, even though it lasted for half a millennium. This prompts an extremely important question. If it is fair enough to think of the Slavs as wanting to move out of the periphery in order to expand their wealth-grabbing opportunities, as the historical and archaeological evidence broadly suggests, we still need to explain why this started to happen in the later fifth and sixth centuries, and not before. There had been countless other chances for them to make these kinds of wealth-generating moves over the preceding five hundred years, and yet they didn’t. Why did this process start to unfold when it did?
The likeliest answer to this, in my view, has two dimensions. The first is straightforward, bringing us back to the revolution generated by the rise and fall of the Huns on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Arguments will continue over the demographic scale of the Germanic migrations, but their political impact on the previously Germanic-dominated periphery of the Roman world is incontrovertible. The result of two waves of invasion, in 376–80 and 405–8, followed by the knock-on effects of the struggle for control of the Middle Danube after Attila’s death, was, as we have seen, dramatically to reduce the number of Germanic-dominated power blocks operating in central and eastern Europe and the amount of territory that they controlled. Whatever its wider demographic significance, Germanic culture collapse certainly reflected the disappearance from central and eastern Europe of militarily effective, larger-scale political structures. This played a key role in making possible subsequent Slavic expansion into the Roman periphery, because it eliminated many of the intermediate Germanic powers that had previously monopolized the profitable positions to be had just beyond the imperial frontier. Slavic-speakers could now move into that periphery because the organized, armed groups were out of the way.
The point is worth developing just a little further. To benefit from the money-making advantages brought by proximity to the Roman frontier, Slavic groups had to transform themselves into more structured entities with greater military potential. This was, of course, a two-way process, since the movable wealth extracted from the Empire in turn provided the new Slavic leaders of the late sixth century with the powers of patronage they required to be successful. The degree of reorganization that would have been required in the Roman period, when ambitious incoming Slavs would have been competing with the already well-organized, largely Germanic client states who then occupied the frontier zone, would have been much greater, and hence that much more difficult to bring about. Such reorganization would also have had to happen out in the forests of the eastern stretches of the Great European Plain before the Slavic groups concerned could have begun to move into a profitable slot in the periphery. Otherwise, they would not have been able to compete with the sitting Germanic tenants. It is hard to imagine any leader finding sufficient resources in these localities in the first half of the millennium to muster enough followers to mount an effective challenge. The rise and fall of the Hunnic Empire created a relative power vacuum north of the Lower Danube frontier, which allowed the smaller armed Slavic groups to move in.
The second dimension is more hypothetical, but follows on from this. If the initial crystallization zone of those Slavs who were to come into contact with the Roman Balkans in the sixth century has been correctly identified as Polesie, or certainly the foothills of the Carpathians, in the fourth century, it fell within the confines of the largely Gothic-dominated Cernjachov system (Chapter 3). This would suggest that their initial transformation arose as a response to that Gothic domination, as part of a process of reformation designed to throw off or at least minimize its worst effects. Like the Hunnic or Avar Empires, the Cernjachov system presumably demanded of indigenous subject peoples that they provide economic support in the form of food supplies, and possibly also military manpower. In this context, it is perhaps significant that the first appearance of any Slavic-speaking group in a late antique historical narrative is in the context of conflict with some Goths. Jordanes reports that one of the great victories of the Gothic leader Vinitharius, who ruled in the mid-fifth century, was over some Antae:
When [Vinitharius] attacked them, he was beaten in the first encounter. Thereafter he did valiantly and, as a terrible example, crucified their king, named Boz, together with his sons and seventy nobles, and left their bodies hanging to double the fear of those who had surrendered.63
One example can’t prove that a whole process was under way, but the pattern here is suggestive. As is so often the case with modern examples too, even what appears to be economically motivated migration has significant political dimensions. Without the political changes generated by the Huns, even the new militarily improved Slavic-speaking communities would have had difficulty in acquiring the new economic opportunities of a frontier position that came their way so much more easily once their former Germanic overlords were out of the way.
Moving beyond the first half of the sixth century, the balance between economic and political motives varied substantially between different elements of the Slavic migration flows. The motivation behind the spread of Korchak-type, extended familial settlements across the central European uplands can probably be partly explained in terms of population growth, generated not just by the absorption of outsiders but also by the increased availability of food supplies. But even Korchak-type expansion may have had its political dimension. For one thing, Korchak drift must have been greatly facilitated by the struggles that drove Goths, Heruli, Sueves, Rugi and others out of the Middle Danube region and sucked the Lombards south into it from Bohemia and beyond (Chapter 5). These conflicts were under way in the later fifth and the earlier sixth century, precisely when Korchak Slavic-speakers were spreading westwards from the Carpathians, and must have eased their takeover of Moravia and Bohemia. There may also have been a second political dimension to the motivations of Korchak groups. As we have seen, these migrants, moving as small-scale farming communities, need to be distinguished from the larger and more militarized Slavic entities that were simultaneously evolving further east and south through direct contact with the east Roman Empire. Given this, the Korchak-type migrants may also have been on the move so as to avoid being sucked into the orbits of these new and more powerful Slavic polities. Post-nationalist perspectives apply to Slavs too. You cannot assume a strong sense of community between different Slavic populations just because they all spoke related languages, and the Korchak-type migrants were making very different life choices from their cousins, preoccupied as they were with thoughts of Roman wealth. One incentive behind those choices could have been to avoid the latter’s unwelcome and predatory attentions.
The rise of Avar power also added its own momentum to the Slavic migratory process. The Avar Empire operated in broadly similar ways to its Hunnic predecessor, in that its power depended upon subordinated allied groups who provided it with military manpower and economic support. It was, in short, a hegemony, established by military conquest and maintained by intimidation. East Roman historical sources preserve numerous instances of the determined efforts of Avar Khagans not to lose face even in defeat, since any sign of weakness was always a signal for some of their more disaffected subjects to rebel. The historian Menander preserves one particularly beautiful example, in which an Avar leader whose siege of Singidunum (modern Belgrade) was failing asked for a large gift from the city’s commander, so that he could retreat with his honour intact. Even more dramatically, in 626 when the Avars’ last stratagem for the capture of Constantinople failed and their Slavic footsoldiers began to run away, the Avars began to kill them.64
The militarizing Slavs of the Carpathian region thus made potentially useful subjects for the Avars, who quickly attached some of them to their train. In pursuit of this aim, the Avars were willing to be employed by the Roman state to attack Slavic groups in the early 570s and 580s, and at one point were even ferried down the Danube in Roman ships to attack some Slavs who were causing trouble on the frontier (probably in the Banat region and Wallachia) southwest and south respectively of the Carpathians. Slavic groups were not generally brought into this new nomad Empire by peaceful negotiation, and enjoyed, if that’s the right word, thoroughly ambivalent relations with their Avar masters. On the one hand, as we have already seen, there is a real sense in which the Avar war machine (with Persian and Arab assistance) blew a hole in the east Roman defences of the Balkans, and made possible the large-scale Slavic settlement there of the seventh century. On the other, Avar domination was itself something that many Slavic groups wanted to avoid – or to throw off, having once fallen foul of it. The Serbs and Croats who settled in the Balkans reportedly did precisely this, as we have seen, as did the Sorbs further west under the leadership of Samo. Fredegar, our source for this incident, is explicit as to the causes of revolt:
Whenever the [Avars] took the field against another people, they stayed encamped in battle array while the [Slavs] did the fighting . . . Every year the [Avars] wintered with the Slavs, sleeping with their wives and daughters, and in addition the Slavs paid tribute and endured many other burdens.65
Avar domination thus provided yet more reasons for Slavic groups to move out of the Carpathian and Middle Danubian regions. First, while the initial spread of Korchak-type communities clearly had other origins, having begun before the Avars became a factor, their further spread from Bohemia towards the Saale and beyond the Elbe after the mid-sixth century will have had the extra motivation of seeking to avoid absorption into the exploitative Avar Empire. This may well have prompted the spread of Slavic-speakers northwards into Poland at more or less the same time.66 Second, Avars were responsible for the spread of the larger ‘tribal’ Slavic communities into the Balkans after 610, which would have been impossible if the former had not destroyed Roman frontier security. But these were the same Slavs who had been alternately fighting and serving the Avars over the previous fifty years, so there is every reason to suppose that they also wanted to put themselves, not to mention their wives and children, out of the latter’s reach. Third, again like the Huns, the Avars resettled some subject peoples around their core dominions on the Great Hungarian Plain. Historical sources document them doing this, amongst others, with Bulgars and Gepids, and with communities of Roman prisoners taken from the Balkans. The archaeological evidence also suggests that they were doing the same with those Slavic groups that they particularly dominated.67
Motivation and context thus go a long way towards explaining the variety of migratory process observable among the Slavs. That Slavic expansion was carried forward sometimes by larger groups and sometimes by smaller, sometimes peacefully and sometimes much more aggressively, should not disconcert us. Sometimes the prevailing motivation was political, sometimes economic. Which of these dominated in the case of the expansion out on to the East European Plain from the seventh century onwards is impossible to say in the absence of historical accounts of the action and of its political contexts. The groups who moved east of the Dnieper in the later period quickly began to profit from the fur and slave trades which began to build up in this region from the eighth century, as we shall see in Chapter 10, but whether this was the reason that brought them into those lands, or an accidental consequence of the move, is impossible to say.