In Soviet days, everything was so simple. From the fifth century onwards, often living alongside an existing population, egalitarian Slavs took possession of the landscape of what would become Slavic Europe. Then followed a long, slow process of internal social and economic evolution over the next four to five hundred years, until classes formed around manorial estate-based agriculture and the first states appeared, based on the unequal distribution of control of the agricultural means of production. This always looked more like a Marxist fairytale than anything to do with historical reality, and all the more recent work has only emphasized what a dramatic story state formation actually was. In many places, even initial Slavicization occurred maybe a hundred and fifty years later than used to be thought, manorialized agriculture followed state formation rather than preceding it, and archaeology has brought to light a sudden and violent final stage, where rising dynasts used military muscle rather than long-term socioeconomic evolution to destroy one sociopolitical order and replace it with their own. What we have to explain, all this emphasizes, is why in the ninth and tenth centuries dynasties were suddenly able to grasp the reins of power with so much vigour. Just as with the appearance of larger political structures in the Germanic world in the first half of the millennium, a key role was played by an increasingly dense network of contacts that grew up between Slavic Europe and its more developed imperial neighbours.
Empire Games
In central Europe, the Slavic world was in direct contact with two successive imperial states: the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the Ottonians in the tenth. Neither was as robust as their Roman predecessor, but each was more than powerful enough in their heyday for their military and diplomatic priorities to have major consequences for neighbouring Slavic and Scandinavian societies. Just as in the Roman period, the most immediate type of contact between Carolingians and Ottonians and their neighbours was imperial aggression. Both these late first-millennium empires built their internal political coherence around the distribution of gifts to local elites, who not only ran their localities but also provided emperors with military muscle.
But Carolingian and Ottonian emperors lacked not only the huge financial reservoir that control of the developed Mediterranean world had brought their Roman counterpart, but also any thoroughgoing powers of taxation even over such lands as they did control. As a result, their gifts to local elites often took the form of non-renewable assets such as land from the royal fisc, which generated a tendency for these empires to fragment from within, as power built up in local hands. The only thing that could square this circle was expansion, providing rulers with an alternative form of renewable wealth to large-scale taxation, and allowing them to reward local elites and maintain their own power at the same time. If anything, therefore, the maintenance of central power was actually predicated more upon expansion in both of these later empires than was the case even with Rome, and both preyed upon their neighbours as and when they could. In the ninety years separating the accession to power of Charles Martel in 715 and the later years of his grandson the Emperor Charlemagne, Carolingian armies were predatorily active in the field for all but five of them. In the first half of the tenth century, likewise, a steady Drang nach Osten on the part of what was originally the ruling ducal dynasty of Saxony was a key reason why Henry I and his son Otto I were able to beat off all comers and turn themselves into the Carolingians’ imperial heirs.45
Predatory expansion always produced pillage, but its real benefit was more structured, long-term exploitation. Even territories not fully subdued were part of the story. From the time of Henry I, Bohemia had to pay an annual tribute, and after 950 owed military support to the dynasty. For about a decade from the mid-960s, likewise, Miesco I of Poland was cast in the role of tributary. For territories more thoroughly under the imperial thumb, the weight of exploitation was correspondingly heavy. Successful campaigns against the so-called Elbe Slavs (small-scale groups who lived broadly between the Rivers Elbe and Oder (Map 14) in the first half of the tenth century) allowed the Ottonians to establish nine major collection centres (called ‘towns’, urbes – or burgwards in our sources) east of the Elbe. These received what the charters euphemistically call ‘annual gifts’ from the Slavs, some of the proceeds of which were divided between the Ottonians’ two favourite ecclesiastics, the Archbishops of Magdeburg and Meissen. It is the charters granted these sees by Otto that document the arrangement. Nor was it just ecclesiastical institutions that benefited from the flow of the new wealth. Frontier commands in what can only be called this colonial situation – called ‘marches’ – were in huge demand among Otto’s magnates because of the opportunities for enrichment they offered. Their distribution was even the source of ferocious feuds within magnate families, when one branch received a nice juicy plum but another did not. Most famously, this was the origin of the bad blood between two brothers, Herrman and Wichman Billung. Herrman got the key appointment and was for ever loyal to Otto; jealousy led Wichmann throughout his long and bitter life into the camp of any opposition to Otto, whatever the issue.46
It is not the effects of expansionary policies upon the empires that we’re primarily interested in, however, but how the exploited populations responded to this asset-stripping. They reacted exactly as you might expect, attempting to resist imperial expansion outright, and/or to minimize its effects when total resistance was impossible. In particular – and this is why imperial exploitation is so relevant to political consolidation, the subject matter of this chapter – uniting several originally independent, small-scale political units into a smaller number of large ones was one of the most effective strategies available to those seeking to fend off unwanted imperial attention.
The best example is provided by what proved in the long term to be a failed state formation: the Elbe Slavs again. As we’ve just seen, they felt the full weight of Ottonian imperialism. In 983, however, taking advantage of the dynasty’s difficulties elsewhere, they rose in massive and – in the short term – successful rebellion. Their resentment against Ottonian rule, and especially against the Church institutions that had been profiting so substantially from their exploitation, manifested itself in a series of atrocities against churches and churchmen that are lovingly chronicled in our Christian sources. What’s particularly striking about this revolt, though, is the element of political restructuring that was central to its success. When the Elbe Slavs fell under Ottonian domination, they comprised a group of small-scale political societies. The success of the revolt, however, was predicated on the generation of a new alliance among them, manifest in the new label ‘Liutizi’ which our sources start to give them in its immediate aftermath. The Liutizi were not a new people, but old ones reorganized. As their counterparts among the Germani on the fringes of the Roman Empire had come to appreciate so long ago, so had the Elbe Slavs learned from bitter experience that hanging around in larger numbers made it possible more effectively to resist imperial aggression.47
Nor, when any initial phase of expansion and conquest was over, was it necessarily any easier to have such imperial neighbours. The reign of Otto III was marked by a spell of excellent relations between himself and both the Bohemians and the Poles, culminating in the Emperor’s progress to the tomb of Adalbert. After Otto’s death, however, imperial policy changed dramatically. He left no son, and from the accession of his cousin Henry I in 1003 there followed some twenty years of pretty continuous warfare between the Empire and the Piast state, in which the new Emperor was happy to use the pagan Elbe Slavs as allies against his erstwhile Christian brothers. Henry, of course, had his reasons, but this kind of inconsistency in policy reflected the fact that populations beyond the Elbe were viewed as substantially second-class citizens, which meant that the desire to exploit them was always likely to be perceived as legitimate and hence to reassert itself. This underlying attitude was not informed by such a thoroughgoing, denigrating ideology as that of the Romans, whose entirely coherent, and equally unpleasant, vision of ‘barbarians’ allowed them to be treated like beasts, if that was convenient. The Poles and Bohemians were partly protected by being Christian. It was no accident that it was the pagans of the Elbe and Baltic regions, in later centuries, who would eventually feel the full brutal weight of an ideologically self-righteous form of imperialism: the so-called Northern Crusades which saw Christian Teutonic knights, amongst others, burn and kill their way north and east. Nonetheless, even Christian Slavic states suffered from second-class status, and could never be sure that the instinctive imperial desire to profit from the exploitation of outsiders might not reassert itself at their expense.48 And, in fact, the diplomacy of the ninth and tenth centuries throws up many examples of the same kind of change in imperial policy that the Poles suffered from in the early eleventh.
In the later eighth century, for instance, when Charlemagne was engaged in his long and tortuous conquest of Saxony, one particular group of Elbe Slavs, the Abodrites, were key allies. Established on the Saxons’ eastern border, where the Carolingians were attacking from the south and west, the Abodrites provided an extremely useful second front, and Charlemagne was duly grateful for their support. In return he gave them extra territory, direct military and diplomatic support and trading privileges. Once Saxony had been absorbed into the Empire, and particularly when it became the seat of Empire, the Abrodites found themselves surplus to strategic requirements. Instead of useful allies, they started to look like potential subjects, and imperial policy swung 180 degrees. Even when they were not being conquered outright, aggressive diplomacy became the order of the day, reaching its culmination in a murderous banquet organized by one frontier commander, the Margrave Gero, at which thirty of their leading men were assassinated. This dwarfs the dinner-party assassinations even of the Roman era, which were regular events but usually took out only one leader at a time. The uncertainty of life on the edge of the Empire was central to the experiences of successive rulers of the Moravians in the next century, too. Take the early years of King Zwentibald. He first came to power with the help of the east Carolingians in 870; then, in just three years, as imperial policies shifted, found himself imprisoned for several months before we finally see him raiding Bavaria in retaliation for his treatment.49 It was living close to a powerful Empire but holding – in the view of a large section of its citizenry – second-class status that laid you particularly open to these kinds of dangerous changes of policy. It was always possible for some faction within the Empire’s ruling circle to make political capital for itself by championing a harder – and more profitable – line towards you.
Examples could be multiplied, but there’s no point. What’s interesting here is the overall effect of imperial predation on the societies at the sharp end. The Elbe Slavs’ revolt provides a particularly arresting example of well-founded resentment in action, but the effects were similar elsewhere. The natural suspicion of the Moravian dynasty, for instance, shows up in the religious sphere. Along with many of our new dynasties, the new ruling line quickly decided to opt for Christian conversion. Rather than simply accepting it from the Carolingians, however, they explored every other possible avenue, famously importing the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, with papal blessing, in 863. This was done in the teeth of sustained Carolingian resentment, however, and shows very clearly the suspicion in which the Empire and all its doings were held. Eventually, after Methodius’ death, the Moravians were forced into religious line and his remaining disciples expelled in favour of Frankish clergy in 885, but the expectation of imperial exploitation remained, manifest not least in the incident of 882 with which this study began, when Zwentibald the Duke of the Moravians and his men captured the Frankish Counts Werinhar and Wezzilo and cut off their tongues, right hands, and genitals.
They were out for revenge because of the way Engelschalk had treated them when he had been in charge of the same frontier region, and were trying to prevent Engelschalk’s sons from seizing their father’s old job. The Moravians had an entirely coherent agenda here, and their revenge was very symbolic. I am obviously not privy to the mindset of your average ninth-century Moravian, but this was clearly a case, in the best Mafia tradition, of mutilation with a message. My best guess would be that cutting off the right hand and tongue emphasized that neither deed nor word could be trusted, while removing the genitals expressed the hope that this line would have no further progeny. Taken to these lengths, natural resentment against imperial military and diplomatic aggression could become a building block, both practical and ideological, by which new dynasties could extract consent for their rule. Becoming part of a larger entity always involved taking on obligations of service, but these might be acceptable if, as a result, the worst effects of predation were fended off. And although the Elbe Slavs and the Moravians provide the most explicit instances, there is every reason to suppose that imperial predation had the same effect in all of the border states: Poland, Bohemia and Denmark as well.
If this, what you might call ‘negative benefit’, was the main effect of military and diplomatic contact with Empire on the capacity of our dynasties to build their state structures, there were also more positive ones. On occasion, when imperial policy was in your favour, there were great photo opportunities. Otto III’s great progress to the tomb of Adalbert was a stupendous international occasion, and Boleslaw Chrobry, like many a modern leader at a summit meeting, must have been extremely happy to have his subjects see how highly he was regarded by the reigning Emperor. On the other hand, of course, it may just have been the sight of that massive cross of solid gold hanging over the tomb that set calculators whirring in the brains of some of the Emperor’s entourage as they worked out exactly how much wealth might be won from a successful war against the Piasts (leading eventually to twenty years of warfare, but that’s another story).
Not, of course, that the violence ran only in one direction. Just like their imperial contemporaries, these new dynasts had to win political support from their magnates to rule effectively, with gift-giving just as much the order of the day east of the Elbe as west of it. Their marriage policies, if anything, made the problem worse. Under the influence of Christianity, they did begin the move from outright polygamy to serial monogamy, but multiple wives and plentiful offspring were the rule – if not quite on the scale of the seventh-century Samo, who ended up with twelve wives and thirty-seven children. This marital profligacy meant that succession disputes and dynastic infighting were extremely common. Yaroslav the Wise, son of Vladimir, for instance, secured his power in 1018 only after a lengthy civil war against his half-brother Sviatopolk that saw many ups and downs and the deaths of at least three other brothers and half-brothers. And Vladimir himself had had to fight a similar war in the 970s against his half-brother Yaropolk, with similar numbers of dynastic casualties. These kinds of wars could be won only by mobilizing a wide range of support among magnates and retinues, which required wealth distribution on a considerable scale. And, just as was the case in the Roman period, leading successful raids on to the richer and more developed soil of an imperial neighbour was an extremely effective mechanism when it came to securing that perfect gift without bankrupting yourself. Accounts of the counter-raids of the Elbe Slavs, not surprisingly, focus on their propensity for smash-and-grab, but the same was true, in only a slightly more structured way, of all our other frontier dynasties. Each outbreak of trouble with the Moravians in the ninth century, or the Bohemians and Poles in the tenth, was accompanied by its due measure of wealth liberation.50
Aside from wealth and prestige, close contact with an imperial neighbour also helped secure the power of new dynasties in some more precise ways. Two leap out of the source material. First, the tenth-century Slavic states were entirely up to date in their modes of warfare, possessing armoured knights aplenty. This had not been the case before 800 AD. In the ninth century, even Saxon contingents within east Frankish, Carolingian armies at first took the form only of infantry and light cavalry. The heavily armed, mailed Saxon cavalry of the Ottonian period emerged only in the late ninth and the early tenth century, as the Saxons finally caught up with the times. Against this backdrop, it is very striking that tenth-century Bohemian and Polish armies also boasted at least some heavy armoured cavalry. We know little, if anything about Slavic warfare before 800, but it’s a pretty fair bet that if even the Saxons didn’t have the latest military hardware at that point, then neither did the Slavs. So where did knowledge of it, and access to it, come from over the next hundred years? The likeliest answer is that it actually came from the Empire, slipping eastwards over the Elbe. Already in 805, in a capitulary issued at Thionville, the Emperor Charlemagne attempted to limit trade with the Slavic world to a number of designated points along the Elbe frontier, including Bardowick, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Hallstadt, Forchheim, Regensburg and Lorch, not least because he professed himself worried about arms shipments. This immediately makes you think that arms were flowing pretty freely across the frontier, since even imperial states of the first millennium lacked the bureaucratic machinery to maintain effective border controls. Obviously, the idea of state-of-the-art Carolingian hardware was highly attractive for Slavic groups who might have to fight off Frankish armies, but such imports also had important internal political effects. Not for nothing did early modern European populations associate standing armies with royal autocracy. Acquiring the kind of military equipment that made his forces militarily dominant also put a nascent dynast in the perfect position to face down internal rivals and suppress dissent. Importing imperial military technology, therefore, directly advanced the process of state formation in the periphery.51
With this in mind, the economic organization of the core areas of these new states is also interesting. As we have seen, all quickly evolved a loose pattern of great estates, where particular service villages fulfilled specialist functions in addition to providing basic food supplies. This mode of organization was also prevalent in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, particularly in its less economically developed reaches east of the Rhine. This was, perhaps, just a sensible way to ensure vital products in pre-market-economic conditions, and arrived at entirely independently east of the Elbe. There must be at least some chance, however, that we are looking here at further, slightly more unexpected fruits of close contact between Empire and periphery.
Compared with the Roman period, what’s missing from this cocktail of contacts is the kind of diplomatic manipulation in which Roman emperors excelled, systematically promoting particular dynasts by rearranging prevailing political geographies in their favour because they seemed to promise the best hope of medium-term frontier security. Carolingian and Ottonian emperors did at times promote their particular favourites, such as the Abodrites, but there is no sign in the sources that they attempted consistently to interfere with the political structures of their neighbours. There is a good chance, however, that the diplomatic agendas of a different Empire may have played an important role in the earlier stages of these processes of transformation. Moravia, Bohemia and, to an extent, Poland, can all be seen as successor states to the Avar Empire destroyed by Charlemagne just before the year 800. We don’t know a huge amount about the internal running of the Avar Empire, but what there is would suggest that it functioned very much along the lines of that of the Huns. Certainly, like the Huns, the Avars operated an unequal confederation where the military power of their originally nomadic core was mobilized to hold a range of initially unwilling subjects to an Avar political allegiance. There was a range of more and less favoured statuses that subjects might occupy within this overall pattern. The most interesting snapshot of its operations that we have describes how one group, descendants many of them of Roman prisoners, achieved free (as opposed to slave) status, and were granted thereby their own group leader. This does sound like the Hun Empire too, and would suggest that, lacking any complex government machinery, the Avars tended to rule their subjects through trusted allied princes. If so, it is very likely that Avar rule will have cemented further the power of the kind of leaders who were appearing anyway in some Slavic groups by c.600, as they began to control the flows of new wealth coming across the east Roman frontier in particular. This combination – of sixth-century development reinforced by subsequent Avar diplomatic manipulation – is the likeliest explanation, in my view, of why the collapse of Avar rule was marked by the swift appearance of a series of Slavic leaders of seemingly substantial and established authority.52
Overall, military and diplomatic contact between these new states and the adjacent Empire thus took many forms. Imperial attentions were in general predatory, resulting in a huge groundswell of aggression flowing across from the imperial side of the frontier. This was matched, when conditions were right, by a countervailing tendency on the part of the new states, or factions within them, to raid the rich assets available west of the Elbe. So much is only what you might expect, but both phenomena had a strong tendency to advance state formation, giving nascent dynasts ideological cement or just plain cash to employ in advancing the process. Alongside these major themes of contact went some subthemes that also pushed the process forward: exports of military and other technologies, and occasional moments when benevolent imperial attention advanced the capital of particular dynasts.
Looking at the broader patterns of development from the ninth century onwards, two other points are worth making. First, as regards the two effects of proximity to an empire, the ‘negative benefit’ – using its aggression as ideological cement for your own state formation – and the ‘positive benefit’ – being able to raid it as a source of ready funds – a comparison of the fate of the Elbe Slavs with the Piast and Premyslid states suggests that the former was the more important. While the Elbe Slavs were in the better position for raiding, being situated right on the imperial frontier, and indulged in it aplenty, this also meant that it was too easy for the Empire to get at them in return. And, of course, the whole point about an imperial power is that, when it put its mind to it, and other factors were not interfering, it was that much more powerful than any surrounding states. There could only be one victor, therefore, in a head-to-head collision between the Empire and the Elbe Slavs. Poland was significantly further away, insulated geographically from immediate imperial aggression, while the upland basin of Bohemia enjoyed the stratigraphic protection of the Bohemian Forest, the Ore and the Krkonoše Mountains. By itself, then, ready access to raiding was not a sufficient basis for state formation. It was a useful additional resource, but only if you could survive imperial counterattack and use to your benefit all the resentment that this would generate.
Second, these different types of contact, both positive and negative, pushed the target societies in the same direction in the longer term – providing, that is, you were in a position to survive attempted imperial conquest. The unifying force of the struggle to survive, the effects of occasional imperial approbation, the flows of raided funds, exports of military hardware and administrative acumen: all strongly facilitated the ability of nascent dynasts to advance towards regional domination. Nor was this pro-dynastic effect limited just to military and diplomatic interaction.
Globalization
It is clear that for their state-building operations to be successful, the dynasts needed the consent of some of the population groups caught up in the process. In the cases of Moravia, Bohemia and Poland, at least, the new dynasts initially rose to prominence within their own local grouping, or ‘tribe’, and were then able to win consent for their wider regional ambitions, depending, presumably, on the degree of success they had already achieved. Even when the larger state structures had come into being, rulers still needed that consent, certainly from the optimates of the core heartland, and probably also from a wider free class, if we are right in seeing such a social grouping as playing a major role in Slavic society at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, other dimensions of state-building were based on the exercise of brute force. Not least, extending power beyond your original group involved destroying the hillfort refuges of nearby populations and resettling many of them in your own core areas. Large and well-equipped military retinues were a key component in the new state structures, and it is hard to conceive of these shock forces not playing a major role in the destruction of the old political order and accompanying population displacements.
What all this highlights is the overwhelming importance of the dynasts’ ability to accumulate wealth in unprecedented concentrations. Military retinues used up huge amounts of it. Obviously, they required feeding, lots of feeding. All the comparative evidence on warrior retinues, and some specifically relating to the new states, suggests that being fed on a heroic scale was a basic expectation. This was not just a matter of greed. They tended to spend mornings hitting large bits of wood with double-weight swords (to build skill and muscle strength) and engaging in mind-expanding activities, all of which used up a lot of calories. Feeding the brutes, however, was not the half of it. As we have seen, a striking feature of the retinues of these new kingdoms is their state-of-the-art arms and armour, especially the defensive armour, which was massively expensive, whether bought – as one suspects it was in the first instance, given the Thionville capitulary – from Frankish gun-runners or produced at home, as it eventually must have been. It was the military potential of the retinues that allowed the rapid, violent expansion that is so characteristic of Premyslid, Piast and even Moravian state formation. But creating them required huge amounts of cash. The obvious questions, therefore, are where did it all come from, and how did the dynasts manage to get their hands on it?
Looking at central and eastern Europe between 800 and 1000, far and away the most likely answer is that they were drawing funds from the new international trade networks in furs and slaves. Again, there are some similarities between this phenomenon and the processes that earlier transformed the largely Germanic societies on the fringes of the Roman Empire. There, the Roman standing armies were a constant source of demand for agricultural products and for labour of all kinds, whether in the form of extra soldiers or just as slaves. As we have noted, the steady flow of payments back across the frontier then helped create the new social structures that underpinned the larger Germanic confederations in the later Roman period. There are, however, some key differences between the two contexts. First and foremost, there is the size of the operation. The fur and slave trades of the later period operated on a much greater geographical and monetary scale than any Roman counterpart. Slaves, of course, were always expensive items, but the fur trade, unmentioned in sources from the first half of the millennium, was much more valuable than any Roman trade. Also, there is no sign that slaves were coming from as far north and east during Roman times. I am not inclined to think it accidental, therefore, that the operations of the later trade networks should have left more trace in our sources, both historical and archaeological, than any of the earlier commerce.
Second, and one of the reasons why the scale was so much larger, the late first-millennium network operated with multiple sources of imperial demand for its high-value goods. Demand seems to have originated in western Europe, with goods even from northern Russia being shipped there from the mid-eighth century. The trading station at Staraia Ladoga came into being a couple of generations before any Muslim connection had been established. This makes perfect sense, since increasing demand in western Europe at this point coincides with the rise of the Carolingian dynasty. But an Islamic dimension soon came into play. Not long after 800, Muslim silver coins started to flow north in vast numbers, part of the trade having now been diverted to a second set of customers, the elites of the Abbasid Empire. This was the greatest state of its age, and so demand from there soon dwarfed the west’s, to judge at least by the amount of Muslim silver that ended up in the Baltic region. The Muslim connection was not broken even when the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed in the early tenth century, since a great successor state quickly arose under the control of the Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran whose silver mines made them fabulously wealthy. Sometime in the mid- to late ninth century, finally, Constantinople came into the picture. Much less wealthy than the Muslim world, it was nonetheless a distinct third centre of elite demand.53
The relative proliferation of sources also allows us to explore the operations of this trading network in more detail than was possible for its Roman-era counterparts. We have already come across some of the major waterborne routes that Scandinavian adventurers opened up in the ninth century: particularly, down the Volga and its tributaries to the Muslim world, and down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea to Constantinople. There were also land routes running through central Europe into the west, on which Prague was a major staging post. We can also, importantly, say something about where the slaves were generally being captured. The Arab geographers report that the Rus raided westwards for their victims, while the ‘western Slavs’ raided eastwards. Confirmation of this picture is provided by the distribution of the Muslim silver coins that came back north in return for all the slaves and furs. Striking concentrations emerge. Two are where you might expect: along the Volga and its tributaries, and in Scandinavia. A third, however, lay between the Oder and the Vistula, right in the heartland of the Piast state. Even more arresting is the complete absence of coins in the immense tracts of territory east of the Vistula and north and west of the Dnieper. Pretty straightforwardly, then, the coin distributions confirm the reports of the Arab geographers. The areas without coins are precisely those from which the slaves were being extracted, caught between the rock of the Rus and hard place of the west Slavs.54
This suggests some further thoughts about how, precisely, the new dynasts were making money out of these international networks. All were busy extracting tolls, but the Rurikids, as we have seen, were doing much more than that. Active participants in the networks, they were also to be found developing markets, not just taxing them. And given that much of what was being traded was actually slaves, there might well have been an intimate link between the evolution of the new networks and those eminently important military retinues. Violence and terror are the order of the day with slave trading, not just because individuals resist capture, but also because the cowed and terrified are that much easier to transport. I remember as an undergraduate picking up the standard textbook on medieval slavery and glancing through it in an idle way because it was written in French and the subject was not absolutely central to that week’s work. But my attention was attracted by a map that appeared to have a series of battle sites marked by the usual crossed-swords symbol. This seemed odd. On closer inspection, the symbols were not crossed swords, but scissors, and the legend read ‘points de castration’. This does not need translation. Nor did women fare much better. The Arab geographers certainly enjoyed the barbarous nature of the northern societies they were describing and deliberately underlined the total ghastliness of the Rus slave traders. Ibn Fadlan describes them as the filthiest of God’s creatures, emphasizing the unpleasantness of their personal hygiene habits. He also refers only to females and children among the slaves being sold down the Volga, taking a voyeur’s delight, too, in how much sex went on between the slavers and their victims.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of this. The literary accounts could make you think that the trade with the Islamic world was entirely in women, but I don’t know whether to believe this or not. Perhaps the huge distances involved meant that shipping males was just too dangerous, since, although moving on water, the potential refuge of riverbanks was never that far away, unlike in the later Atlantic slave trade. I don’t have any doubt, however, that sexual exploitation was a major feature of the action. It always is, in the case of women and slavery, and you have to wonder where Vladimir obtained the three hundred concubines he kept at Vyshgorod, the three hundred at Belgorod and the two hundred at Berestovoe.55
The real point, though, is that highly trained, well-equipped military retinues were an excellent tool not only for state-building, but for capturing slaves as well. Some of the raiding was done by intermediaries, but the Rus did a fair amount of their own dirty work, and there is every reason to suppose that this was also true of the west Slavs, probably the retainers of both Piasts and Premyslids. As we have seen, many Muslim coins have turned up on Piast territory, and their lands were conveniently near to the areas from which both texts and the absence of coins tell us that slaves were being taken. To my mind, it is not too much of a stretch to suppose that, like their Rurikid peers, the Piasts built up the military capacity of their retinues not only from toll revenues but also by actively participating in the international slave trade.
The point about the new trading connections is not just that they generated new wealth. At least as revolutionary as the wealth itself was the multiplier effect stemming from the fact that new power structures evolved to maximize and control the direction of the flow. Just as in modern globalization, new connections generated big-time winners but also decided losers. The biggest winners were the new dynasties and their chief supporters: the leading men behind them and their military retinues. The chief losers were of course the slave-producing populations, but also the ascendant dynasts’ near-neighbours, who lost their independence and became the occupants of the unfree service villages. And, again like today’s globalization, the new interconnections between the more and the less developed were not just economic. Ideas, too, crossed the frontier, and here also the transformative effect of the new contacts was extremely powerful.
The most important set of ideas to bridge the gap in these centuries was undoubtedly, as has long been recognized, the Christian religion. Christianity had been formally adopted by rulers across most of Scandinavia and central and eastern Europe by the year 1000. The Piast dynasty converted in the 970s, the Danes under Harold Bluetooth at more or less the same time, the Premyslids a generation or so earlier, and the Rurikids half a generation later under Vladimir. The Moravians, of course, had picked up Christianity in the mid-ninth century. For all its triumphant progress among them, however, the new dynasts of non-imperial Europe found one dimension of their new religion potentially problematic. From the person of Charlemagne onwards, although it was not then a new idea, the imperial title carried the connotation that its possessor wielded the highest authority, having been personally chosen by God to rule in His stead on earth. To accept Christianity, therefore, was implicitly to recognize the legitimacy of imperial overlordship, and this naturally made the dynasts hesitate. There was also the practical consideration, if you didn’t have an entirely independent ecclesiastical province, that part of any revenues generated (by tithes, for instance) for religious purposes in your domain would in practice pass outside of your control, since they were owed to the archiepiscopal see. Archbishops also, at least notionally, had a strong say in the appointment of bishops, so an ‘imperial’ archbishop could interfere with the choice of bishops within your territory.
These potential problems certainly got in the way of the Moravian dynasty’s acceptance of Christianity. They tried to resolve them by getting their Christianity via a combination of the papacy and Byzantium, rather than the all too adjacent Franks. It was perhaps for similar reasons that Anglo-Saxon missionaries, not the nearby imperial churchmen, played a key role in the early stages of Christianization in Scandinavia. In the long run, however, nearby imperial patronage usually proved too hard to resist, and the best option was to accept your Christianity from that quarter, but – like Poland – extract the right to your own archbishop, thus insulating yourself from the worst hazards.56
But why accept Christianity at all? We have already met one obvious benefit. Accepting the religious orientation of rich, imperial, developed Europe was an important move if you wanted to escape the category of ‘barbarian’ and win admittance to the club of Christian nations. Even if you then faced possible problems of imperial hegemony – or the claims of it, at least – this was probably still a better option than remaining in the barbarian category, where no holds would be barred whenever it seemed a good idea to some influential faction within the Empire’s structures to look to profit at your expense. This, of course, was the problem that led to the longer-term demise of the Elbe Slavs, even if, at the start of the eleventh century, they briefly benefited from Henry I’s desire to curb Piast power. It has also long been canonical to identify a series of specific advantages for ambitious dynasts in adopting Christianity when it came to the internal administration of their realms.
These fall into three broad categories. First, conversion to Christianity brought kings and rulers a degree of ideological promotion. It was a commonly accepted Christian idea in the first millennium that no ruler could win power without God’s will. Converting to Christianity thus allowed rulers to claim to be God-chosen, putting ideological blue water between themselves and their nearest rivals. This was potentially useful in the political context, most career-minded dynasts having risen only recently above a pack of peers, and mostly by brute force. Second, Christianity was a religion of the Book: all its basic texts, the commentaries on them, and the practical rules that had evolved over the centuries to organize its operations, came in written form. Christian churchmen as a whole, therefore, operated at a higher degree of literacy than the average even elite population of early medieval Europe. Clerics could thus make useful royal servants, and in all the cases we know about came to be employed as such by their converted rulers. In the longer term, it would in fact be the literacy of churchmen that would make it possible to sustain more bureaucratic forms of administration – particularly useful when it came to assessing and raising tax in the form of cash. Third, and this flows on naturally from the second, Christianity was a high-maintenance religion. Buildings, books, full-time clergymen: all this was very expensive. So the institution of Christianity always involved establishing new taxes – by the late first millennium, often in the form of tithes – by which the religion’s activities could be funded. Everything suggests that kings kept some of these revenues for their own purposes, sometimes directly by appropriating part of the tithe, sometimes indirectly. The indirect method worked well because kings often kept the right to appoint leading churchmen such as bishops and abbots, could then appoint their personal supporters to these positions, and thus be sure of their financial and other compliance.57
I’ve always been suspicious of this list. Claims, for instance, always have to be tested. Just because converted rulers claimed extra respect by styling themselves as God-chosen, this doesn’t mean that anyone actually gave it to them, and in most documented cases conversion made precious little difference to prevailing political cultures. Post-conversion kings were just as likely to be opposed, deposed and murdered as their pre-conversion predecessors. It was particularly rich, for instance, that Boleslav II chose to take out the Slavniks on St Wenceslas day. It was surely deliberate, and you might be tempted to think that doing it on the name day of the Premyslids’ royal saint gave the act a kind of legitimacy, notwithstanding its brutality. But Boleslav II was the son and heir of Boleslav I, Wenceslas’ brother, murderer and replacement, so maybe the line of Boleslav I just liked to kill its rivals in late September, with the choice of day a reminder to all potential rivals of how they had always dealt with them. The second area of proposed advantage, likewise, was far too long-term to have been in the forefront of any converted dynast’s calculations. Given that the time lag between Christian conversion and the appearance of a convincingly developed literate administration in the well-documented Anglo-Saxon case, for instance, was several centuries, it does seem unlikely that initial converts were much seduced by visions of a potential revolution in government.58
Of the advantages generally seen in conversion, therefore, only the third seems to carry much weight, and this, like escaping barbarian status, was a real factor in the minds of dynastic converts of the ninth and tenth centuries. By then, the forms of Christian taxation were so well established in imperial Europe that extending them to a new area was an entirely straightforward move, and one that held considerable potential advantages for kings.59 I strongly suspect, however, that both of these advantages paled into relative insignificance next to another dimension of conversion that is not so often discussed. Its importance emerges, slightly paradoxically, from contexts in which the new religion was actively resisted.
As the literate religion of the developed imperial world, backed by all the ideological cachet that perceived success imparts by association, Christianity usually ‘won’ in the culture clashes of the early Middle Ages: in much the same way, I suspect, that Levi’s and McDonald’s have been adopted the world over because of their association with the winning world brand that is America. Just occasionally, though, exposure to Christianity generated a violent and opposite backlash (as sometimes does American success in the modern world). We came across one example earlier, when the leadership of the fourth-century Gothic Tervingi started to persecute Christians because they associated the religion with Roman hegemony. Another couple of examples of the same phenomenon can be observed six hundred years later. An overt anti-Christian ideology was central, for instance, to the revolt of the Elbe Slavs against Ottonian rule after 983, when churches and monasteries were robbed and burned and even dead bishops exhumed, despoiled and insulted. Given that the Church was an instrument of colonial exploitation in these marcher lands, the degree of anger is perhaps not surprising. A slightly different, ruler-directed anti-Christianity had also surfaced in Russia at more or less the same time. Although Igor’s widow Olga had converted to Christianity under Byzantine influence and was perhaps baptized on a visit to Constantinople in 957, two of her sons, Sviatoslav and Vladimir, ruling successively after her death, positively championed the claims of non-Christian religion against their mother’s choice. Here the issue would appear to have been more cultural than practical, since no colonial Byzantine Church structure had yet reared its ugly head in Kiev.60
What’s fascinating about these examples of aggressive anti-Christianity, however, is that even to begin to compete with the Christian challenge, the nature of prevailing non-Christian religion had itself to change. To unite his many and varied peoples against Christian influence, Vladimir did not outlaw all their different gods, but he did elevate Perun, an old Baltic and Slavic god of thunder and lightning, into a supreme god, and force his subjects to pay homage. Vladimir was pulling together Scandinavians, Slavic-speakers, Finnic-speakers and goodness knows who else, so any impulse towards an anti-Christian religious unity was bound to involve picking one from the no doubt wide range of cults being followed within his highly disparate following. And even among the culturally much more homogeneous Elbe Slavs, anti-Christianity involved major religious change. Again, it was not that all other cults were outlawed, but the new confederation of the Liutizi was held together now by common adherence to one overarching cult, that of Rethra. Dues were owed by everyone to the god’s priests and temples, and Rethra was consulted before any and every act of war and presented with a tithe of any spoils. We don’t know a huge amount about Slavic paganism before conversion, but as this need to generate a new overarching cult to fight off Christianity confirms, everything suggests that there was a wide variety of cults, each sociopolitical grouping – ‘tribe’ – having its own.61
Against this backdrop, Christianity offered another powerful attraction to dynasts seeking to unite the unprecedentedly large territories under their control. The huge variety of non-Christian cults with which they were faced was part of a cultural structure belonging to the previous and long-established political order. An attractive feature of Christianity in this context was its licensed intolerance: the refusal to accept the validity of any other religious cult. Adopting Christianity permitted a ruler to stamp out pre-existing cultic practices, whether or not he yet had enough Christian priests around to substitute for them a fully functioning Christian Church. As such, it allowed him to break down one of the main cultural barriers that might otherwise have restricted his attempts to create a new political order. Alongside the other more ‘positive’ attractions, Christianity brought with it an entitlement to destroy existing religious structures, which made it the perfect ideological accompaniment to a process of political unification.