Comparative studies provide two basic points of orientation when thinking about the likely causes of any observable migration flow. First, it is overwhelmingly likely that a substantial difference in levels of economic development between adjacent areas will generate a flow between the two, from the less-developed towards its richer neighbour. What ‘adjacent’ means will vary enormously in different eras according to what transport is available, and a situation that would otherwise generate a ‘natural’ flow of people may be interfered with by political structures at either end, or by the availability of information. All things being equal, however, a flow of population will be one result of different levels of development, the result of Homo sapiens sapiens’ inherent tendency to use movement as a strategy for maximization. The second point is equally basic. In the vast majority of cases, the precise motivation of any individual migrant will be a complex mixture of free-will and constraint, of economic and political motives. There are exceptions, not least when political refugees are driven forward by fear of imminent death, but most migrants are motivated by some combination of all four factors. Taken together, what both of these observations stress above all is that migration will almost always need to be understood against prevailing patterns of economic and political development. Taking this approach, in my view, provides satisfactory explanations for both the general geographical ‘shape’ of first-millennium migration, and the seemingly odd nature of its characteristic migration units.
Migration in Roman Europe
At the start of the first millennium, the most highly developed region of Europe – in both economic and political terms – was the circle of the Mediterranean united under Roman domination, to which the largely La Tène landscapes of the south and west had recently been added. La Tène Europe featured developed agricultural regimes whose surpluses could support relatively dense populations, together with considerable production and exchange in other sectors of the economy. The Romans did not only conquer La Tène populations as they moved north, but it is a fact – and not an accidental one – that their conquests ran out of steam more or less at the outer fringes of La Tène Europe. The reason was simple: beyond that zone, the profits of conquest ceased to be worth the costs. Beyond La Tène Europe lay the territories of the largely Germanic-speaking post-Jastorf world. There was a large degree of variation in economic patterns across this zone, not least because some of its populations had been in substantial engagement with their La Tène neighbours for a considerable period. In general terms, however, political units were smaller in scale here than those of La Tène Europe, even before the latter was incorporated into the Roman Empire, and agricultural productivity was lower. General population density was therefore less, and there are fewer signs either of non-agricultural production and exchange, or of marked differences of wealth (at least as expressed in material cultural terms). Beyond Jastorf Europe, the northern and eastern reaches of the European landscape were still host to Iron Age farming populations (as far as ecological conditions permitted), but they operated still less productive agricultural regimes, their settlements were smaller and even more short-lived, and they possessed little in the way of material cultural goods.
Faced with this distinctly three-speed Europe (Map 1), comparative migration studies would lead you to expect flows of population from its less developed regions to the more developed (i.e. in broadly southerly and westerly directions). And in the Roman period – the first three centuries AD – this is essentially what occurred. The economic and sociopolitical structures of more developed Roman Europe sucked in population from its less developed neighbours in a variety of forms, particularly from adjacent, largely Germanic-dominated post-Jastorf Europe. Many individuals entered the Empire as voluntary recruits for Roman armies on the one hand, or involuntary slaves for a variety of economic purposes on the other. These population flows are well known and require no further comment here. But the larger and more contentious Germanic population flows of the second and third centuries also fall into line with this pattern, in the general sense that they too moved broadly south and west towards more developed Europe. A full understanding of their particular history, however, also requires an understanding of how a broader set of interactions with the Roman Empire had in the meantime been transforming the three-speed pattern which prevailed at the birth of Christ.
For one thing, the military and political structures of the Roman Empire fundamentally explain the geographically asymmetrical outcome of Germanic expansion in these years. The forces behind the expansion seem to have been operating very generally in Germanic-dominated central Europe, but the resulting population flows had much more dramatic effects in the south-east, and particularly north of the Black Sea, than in the south-west. Where Germanic immigrants took over no more than the Agri Decumates in the south-west, further east Dacia was abandoned and political structures north of the Black Sea were entirely remade. There may have been some difference in the scale of the migratory flows in operation in each direction, but this, too, was reflective of the more fundamental cause of the different scale of outcome. Flows south and east were operating against the clients of Rome’s inner frontier zone, rather than directly against the military power of the Empire itself. As a result, the likelihood of success was that much greater than in the south-west, where the Empire’s military power had to be tackled directly.
Why the successful leaders of these expansion flows were generally willing to settle for outcomes that left them largely on the fringes of Empire, instead of pressing on permanently across the frontier, also comes down in part to the longer-term effects of interaction with the Roman world in the first two centuries AD. The operations of trading mechanisms – both in longer-distance luxury goods and shorter-distance largely agricultural products – opportunities for raiding richer Roman territories, and the Empire’s own propensity for bolstering the power of its clients with diplomatic subsidies all meant that in the first two centuries of the Empire’s existence new wealth built up at the courts of Germanic kings in the immediate vicinity of the frontier. Three-speed Europe thus developed a fourth gear in the form of an inner zone of clients whose wealth outstripped those of their former peers in what now became the outer periphery of post-Jastorf Europe. Not only was it militarily much less dangerous for the leaders of Germanic expansion to restrict their operations to areas beyond the imperial frontier, but two centuries of interaction with the Empire, and the subsequent accumulations of wealth, had made the frontier zone an attractive target for predatory expansion in its own right. Before these processes had unfolded, there would have been little point for ambitious Germanic warlords in moving, say, from northern central Europe to southern central Europe, or from north of the Carpathians to the south-east, since the potential material gains for such efforts would have been minimal.
Understanding the action of the later second and third centuries in this way also explains the apparently odd form taken by at least some of the units participating in these migration flows. The first recorded attempt from the outer periphery to tap into the new wealth building up closer to the imperial frontier took the form of a raid. As the power of King Vannius of the Bohemian-based Marcomanni weakened in his dotage, an ousted political rival was able to organize a warband from central Poland (and possibly northern Poland too) to ransack the movable wealth around his court, much of it the proceeds of diplomatic subsidies and his cut from the activities of Roman merchants. Although I cannot prove it, I would be willing to bet that this was but one example of a far from uncommon phenomenon. Hit-and-run raids were not, however, the most effective way to tap into all the new wealth accumulating in the immediate hinterland of the Empire. For entirely structural reasons to do with trade, Roman diplomatic methods and even ease of raiding Roman territory, the best opportunities to benefit from the new wealth-generating interactions with the Roman Empire were all limited geographically to the immediate frontier zone, and any greater ambitions towards wealth acquisition among groups and leaders in the outer periphery required their permanent relocation towards the frontier. It is therefore hardly surprising that raiding gave way to migration in the second and third centuries as more ambitious leaders and followings from the outer periphery looked to win control of the new Rome-centred wealth flows operating in barbarian Europe.
But by the end of the first century AD, there was no potentially lucrative spot along the frontier that was not already occupied by a warlord of some kind, and no sitting tenants were likely to surrender their highly advantageous position without a fight. Any permanent relocation towards Rome’s frontier therefore necessarily required the destruction of existing political structures, and this explains why the second- and third-century migration flows eventually encompassed substantial military forces numbered in the thousands, rather than warbands of just one or two hundred men. Warbands might raid effectively enough, but their power was insufficient to remake an entire political structure, so that ambitious wannabes from the outer periphery had no choice but to recruit larger expeditionary forces to achieve their aims.
It is worth pausing to consider this pattern of migratory expansion in the light of more recent and better-documented examples. This kind of intentional, predatory intrusion on the part of thousands of armed individuals is not generally seen in the modern world, and this is sometimes put forward as an objection to supposing that it ever occurred in the past. Half of the answer to this objection is that, though not common, this kind of activity has indeed been seen in the relatively modern world: it is exactly the same basic kind of migratory pattern observable among the Boers of the Great Trek. In that case, the intrusive units could be smaller because the Boers enjoyed a massive advantage in firepower over their Zulu and Matabele opponents. In the second and third centuries, any technological advantage was probably more likely to have lain with the groups of the inner periphery being targeted, since they may well have been buying Roman weaponry, so that the intrusive forces from the outer periphery had to be more or less as large as those deployed by the sitting kings of the frontier region.
The other half of the answer comes from thinking about precisely why modern migratory flows, even if cumulatively large, tend to operate on the basis of small individual migration units of just a few people at a time. They do so because the migration-unit size is dictated by the way in which modern migrants seek to access wealth from the more-developed economies to which they have been attracted. In the modern context, wealth is accessed by individual immigrants finding employment in the industrial or service sectors of an economy, which is well-paid at least from the relative perspective of the immigrant him-or herself. The underlying principle here is not that migration-unit sizes are always likely to be small, but, rather, that they will be appropriate to the means by which the wealth of the more developed economy is going to be accessed. All the economies of first-millennium Europe were essentially agricultural, and extremely low-tech. As a result, even in the developing periphery of the Roman Empire, they did not offer many even relatively well-paid jobs for individual migrants, except for a few who could attach themselves to the military followings of frontier kings. For those with ambitions to unlock the wealth of this world on a much larger scale, coming as an individual immigrant, or merely within a small group, was a pointless exercise. In such a context, you had to arrive with enough force to defeat the sitting tenant, and prompt the Empire to identify you now as its preferred trading and diplomatic partner on your particular sector of the frontier. Although this kind of migrant group is not commonly seen in the modern world, therefore, it actually accords with the fundamental principles behind all observed migration flows. Large-scale predatory intrusion was as appropriate to wealth acquisition via migration in the first millennium, as individual movement is now.
Levels of development also explain the other fundamental oddity of these second- and third-century population flows: that many of the warriors were accompanied by women and children. Germanic-dominated Europe of the early centuries AD was a world of low-tech, small-scale farms producing only limited food surpluses. As a result, the economy could not support large warrior retinues; the kind of food renders available even to fourth-century kings could support only one or two hundred men. Again like the Boers, therefore, the kind of larger military expeditions that were required to take over a revenue-producing corner of the Roman frontier could never have been mounted using just the small numbers of military specialists that existed in the Germanic world. Recruits were required from a broader cross-section of society, many of whom already had dependants. These participants would obviously not have wanted to leave their dependants behind in the long term – aside, perhaps, from a few of the younger teenage ones – but even to have left them in the short term, while the expedition reached a hopefully successful conclusion, would have been to expose them to substantial risks. In context again, therefore, it was only natural for Germanic expeditionary forces of more than one or two hundred men to be accompanied by numerous familial dependants.12 There were a few women even on the Boer scouting expeditions, but the larger trekking parties were always mixed, and the women, in fact, were far from bystanders when it came to fighting; they loaded the flintlock rifles and even shot them when necessary. Germanic women of the second century had no rifles to load, but they no doubt had their own key roles to play, even on substantially military expeditions. Although the recorded nature of these Germanic migration flows looks odd, both in size and composition, in the light of some of the comparative literature, it does accord with the fundamental principles behind observed migratory behaviour, once due allowance is made for differences between the first and third millennia.
Völkerwanderung and Beyond
The evolving patterns of development and migration unfolding in the Roman era came to a head in the so-called Völkerwanderung. In the later fourth and fifth centuries, documented European history is marked by the appearance of a whole series of migrant groups comprising 10,000 or more warriors and a large number of dependants, which were powerful enough to survive direct confrontation with the military and political structures of the Roman imperial state. Seen in the broadest of terms, these extraordinary pulses of large-group migration were produced by the intersection, at a critical moment, of a number of related lines of development. First, by the mid- to late fourth century, processes of economic and political development among the Germani had reached a point where political structures had sufficient strength to hold together such enormous groups of warriors and their dependants within a reasonably solid edifice. But, second, these structures had been generated by the expansionary processes of the second and third centuries, and were close enough in time to those events to retain a tradition of migration that could be mobilized when circumstances were appropriate or demanded it. And, third, perhaps the other side of the same coin, their economic structures were not yet so rooted in the arable cultivation of any particular landscape that it was impossible for them to conceive of shifting their centre of operations to another locality.
Viewed against the backdrop of long-term development in the Germanic world, and particularly against the more immediate events of the third-century crisis, the existence and activities of these very large migrant groups are certainly explicable, but that should not take away from the extraordinary nature of the action. For, though larger and more cohesive than their counterparts of the first century, none of the groups that initially emerged from the imperial periphery was in itself large enough to confront the Roman Empire with success, and yet the aggregate outcome of their collective activities, as we have seen, was the destruction of the west Roman state. This highly unpredictable outcome was itself the result of further intersections between contingent historical events and longer-term patterns of development.
First, it took the unintentional stimulus provided by the Huns to get sufficient numbers of these largely Germanic groups from beyond Rome’s Rhine and Danube frontiers moving on to Roman soil at broadly the same time to make it impossible for the Roman state merely to destroy them. Had these groups – even given that they were larger and more cohesive – arrived separately on Roman territory, the result would eventually have been their destruction, and there were still far too many of them to organize any unified plan for the Empire’s destruction. The key element missing from the Germanic world of the imperial periphery, as opposed to its Arab counterpart, was the lack of a Muhammad to provide an alternative and unifying ideology to that of the Roman state. But, second, once established on Roman soil, the processes of political amalgamation that had been unfolding over the long term beyond the frontier reached a relatively swift climax. This key point was missed in much of the traditional nationalist historiography. By insisting on treating the groups who eventually founded successor states to the western Roman Empire as ancient and unchanging ‘peoples’,13 this historiography missed the fact that most of them were explicitly documented as new coalitions which formed on Roman territory out of several groups – usually three or four – and who had been independent of one another beyond the frontier. Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Merovingian Franks, the Vandal–Alan coalition – all represented a further step-change in the organization of barbarian political structures, and it was this further evolution which really produced groups that were large enough (deploying now 20,000 warriors and more) to destroy the western Empire.14
Contingent as much of this was – there is no sign that there would have been such an influx on to Roman soil without the intrusion of the Huns – one dimension of the action was far from accidental. The new and much larger political formations that became the basis of the successor states could not have come into being on the far side of the frontier. The level of economic development prevalent in the periphery of the Empire in the fourth century did not produce sufficient surplus to allow political leaderships enough patronage to integrate so many followers in that context. Only when the economy of the Empire could be tapped directly for extra wealth, and when the Roman state was providing extra political stimulation towards unification in the form of a real outside threat, was there a sufficient economic and political basis for these larger entities to come into existence. Political structures were the product of, and limited by, prevailing levels of development, and the new state-forming groups could not have emerged in a purely barbarian context.15
But if there is a real sense in which the Völkerwanderung can be seen as the culmination of Roman-era patterns of development in barbaricum, its outcomes nonetheless revolutionized broader patterns of development across Europe as a whole. To start with, the new states that emerged on former Roman territory made imperial Europe considerably less imperial. The epicentre of supraregional power in western Europe shifted decisively north around the year 500, the second half of the millennium being marked not by Mediterranean-based imperial power, but a series of broadly Frankish dynasties whose prominence was based on economic and demographic assets located north of the Alps between the Atlantic and the Elbe. Again, this can be seen as a culmination of trends of development set in place in the Roman period. The fact that the new imperial power of western Europe should be based on a combination of a chunk of former Roman territory with a substantial part of its ex-periphery is a clear sign of how profoundly that periphery had been transformed by its interaction with Roman power in the preceding centuries. At the birth of Christ, this landscape on either side of the Rhine could never have supported an imperial power, not being remotely wealthy or populous enough, but Roman-era development on both banks of the river radically transformed this situation. At the same time, the political structures of post-Roman Frankish-dominated western Europe, particularly the militarization of its landed elites, meant that this new imperial state was different in kind to its Roman predecessor. Lacking the power to tax agricultural production systematically, it was a less dominant and less self-sufficient kind of entity, which required the profits of expansion to provide its rulers with enough patronage to integrate its constituent landowners. And when broader circumstances did not allow for expansion, fragmentation followed, with power quickly seeping away from the centre to the peripheral localities. Periods of great central authority and external aggression – the hallmarks of empire – thus alternated with others of disunity in the second half of the millennium, where Roman imperialism had previously presented a more consistently cohesive face. There is a real sense in which the pre-existing inequalities of the first half of the millennium were in part eroded from the top, as it were, by the fact that imperial Europe became less consistently imperial.
More fundamentally, and also more interesting given that it has been so much less discussed, is the effect of the Völkerwanderung upon barbarian Europe. By the sixth century, Germanic-dominated Europe as it had stood in the Roman era had almost completely collapsed. Where, up to the fourth century, similar socioeconomic and political structures had prevailed over a huge territory from the Rhine to the Vistula in the north and to the River Don at their fullest extent in the south, by c.550 AD, their direct descendants were essentially restricted to lands west of the Elbe, with an outlying pocket on the Great Hungarian Plain, which was about to be terminated by the arrival of the Avars (Map 15). The Völkerwanderung had played a central role in this revolution, though not by actually emptying these landscapes of all their inhabitants. Settlement did completely disappear in some restricted localities, but, even making maximum assumptions, the exodus from Germanic Europe from the fourth to the sixth century was not on a large enough scale to denude central and eastern Europe of its entire population. What the Völkerwanderung clearly did do, however, was empty much of the old inner and outer peripheries of the Empire of the armed and organized, socially elite groupings which had previously run them. From the perspective of barbarian Europe, the period saw not just the collapse of the Roman Empire, but also the collapse of the larger state-like structures and organizations of its periphery, the vast majority of which relocated themselves, in the course of the migrations, on to parts of just the old inner periphery – between the Rhine and the Elbe, and the Great Hungarian Plain – and actual, largely western Roman territory.
This first extraordinary revolution in barbarian Europe marked a caesura in over half a millennium of broadly continuous development over large parts of central and eastern Europe. It also allowed a second and equally dramatic transformation. In the aftermath of Germanic collapse, population groups from the third zone of Europe as it stood at the start of the Roman era started to develop, for the first time as far as we can see, substantial political, economic and cultural interactions with the rest of Europe. The Romans had some kind of knowledge of the Venedi who inhabited that part of Europe’s low-speed zone closest to them. Tacitus in the first century knew that they were out there, beyond the Vistula and the Carpathians; Ptolemy a couple of generations later could add the names of a few of their broader social groupings. But, remarkably, there is no evidence at all that these populations were sucked into the political events of the first half of the millennium in any shape or form. Venedi mounted no known raids into Roman territory, find no mention in narratives of the Marcomannic War or the third-century crisis, and do not even seem to have participated in the structures of Attila’s Empire, which incorporated so many of the other population groups of central and eastern Europe. Nor do the distribution maps of Roman imports suggest that these European population groups from east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians played a major role in any of the trade networks stretching out into barbaricum in the Roman era, though some of the routes surely passed through their territories.
More or less immediately after the collapse of Germanic Europe, however, Slavic-speakers started to emerge from the low-speed zone to take an increasingly important role in recorded narratives of broader European history. By about 500 AD, they had moved south and east of the Carpathians into direct contact with the east Roman frontier, and were beginning to raid across it. Their capacity to do so may have been the result of preceding interactions with Goths and others of the more organized groups of the Germanic periphery to the Roman Empire, which pass more or less unmentioned in our historical sources.16 Be that as it may, the new contacts with the east Roman Empire massively accelerated any nascent processes of development already operating among those Slavic groups involved, as raiding and diplomatic subsidies brought in unprecedented quantities of movable wealth, and stimulated among them both militarization and the formation of larger political structures, both of which allowed profits from the new relationship with Constantinopolitan territories to be maximized. All this ran parallel to some of the kinds of transformation seen in the Germanic world in the early Roman period, and, following the collapse of Germanic Europe, Slavic-speakers had already emerged by 550 as the main barbarian ‘other’ confronting east Rome’s civilization in south-eastern Europe.
At this point, a second nomadic ‘accident’ bent existing processes of development substantially out of shape, and acted as a crucial catalyst in the further transformation of barbarian Europe. Like the Huns, the Avars swiftly built a powerful military coalition in central Europe, one of whose main effects was to siphon off still larger amounts of Mediterranean-generated wealth into now largely Slavic-dominated central Europe. This, of course, further stimulated the competition for control of that wealth, which had already been producing a new kind of military kingship in the Slavic world even before the Avars appeared. Equally important, and just like the Huns, the Avars lacked the governmental capacity to rule their large number of subject groups directly, operating instead through a series of intermediate leaders drawn in part from those subject groups. We lack much in the way of detailed information, but there is every reason to suppose that this would have had the political effect of cementing the social power of chosen subordinates, further pushing at least their Slavic subjects in the direction of political consolidation.17 The third major effect of the Avars was both to prompt and to enable a wider Slavic diaspora, as some Slavic groups moved further afield to escape the burden of Avar domination. Large-scale Slavic settlement in the former east Roman Balkans – as opposed to mere raiding – only became possible when the Avar Empire (in combination with the Persian and then Arab conquests) destroyed Constantinople’s military superiority in the region. But at least some of these Slavs were as much negatively motivated by a desire to escape Avar domination as they were by a positive desire to move on to Roman territory. Elsewhere we lack historical narratives, but the same desire to escape Avar domination surely played a substantial role in the widespread further dispersals of Slavic groups from c.550 onwards: westwards towards the Elbe, northwards to the Baltic, and even eastwards into the heart of Russia and Ukraine. It remains unclear to what extent this eastern expansion represented the first intrusion of Slavic-speakers into western Russia, or whether we are really looking at the expansion of particular groups of Slavic-speakers who had been made more politically organized and militarily potent through their interactions with the East Romans and Avars, and were thus able to assert their dominance over fellow Slavic-speakers who had not participated in the same process.
Either way, the process of Slavicization – the establishment of the dominance of Slavic-speaking groups across vast areas of central and eastern Europe – again combined processes of migration and development in intimate embrace. Interaction with the Roman Empire’s more developed economy generated new wealth flows which prompted political consolidation and militarization among at least some Slavs. But the groups who benefited from this new wealth were only able to do so because they had already physically moved into a tighter Roman orbit after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire, presumably in order to make precisely these kinds of gain. The sociopolitical revolution they experienced as a consequence then pre-prepared them, especially under the extra stimulus provided by the Avars, to spread their domination by further migration across broad swathes of central and eastern Europe. Some of this certainly involved the absorption of the clearly numerous indigenous populations that had survived the processes of Germanic collapse. Some of that absorption will have been peaceful, as some east Roman sources suggest, but at the same time many Slavic groups were becoming increasingly militarized, and the results of Slavicization were strikingly monolithic. If some Slavic groups, particularly of the Korchak type, remained peaceful small-scale farmers up to the year 600 and beyond, many others were undergoing rapid transformation as new wealth brought social differentiation and militarization. Much of the subsequent Slavicization of Europe was clearly brought about by the armed and dangerous Slavs, not the Korchak farmers – not least in those parts of Russia where Slavic domination was advanced by communities of a few hundred pushing one fortified settlement after another into clearly hostile territory.
The Birth of Europe
East Roman wealth and Avar interference marked only the beginning of a much broader development process, which unfolded right across the vast area of Slavic-dominated Europe in the second half of the millennium. By the tenth century, this had produced the first state-like dynastic structures that much of northern and eastern Europe had ever seen. These new entities still operated with major limitations by the year 1000, distinct patterns of centre and periphery being discernible across the vast territories notionally under their control. A governmental mechanism based on itineration was not capable of governing such large territories with even intensity, and this shows up in their regular propensity to swap control of very large intermediate territorial zones between them. Nonetheless, these states were capable of centrally organized activities that are straightforwardly impressive. Much bigger in geographical scale than the Germanic client states that emerged on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were also capable of greater acts of power. They built more and bigger buildings, supported larger, better-equipped, and more professional armies, and quickly adopted some of the cultural norms of more developed, imperial Europe: above all the Christian religion.
Everything suggests that the transformative mechanisms that produced these new entities were similar in nature to those that had generated the larger Germanic client states of the fourth-century Roman periphery. In both cases, a whole range of new contacts – via trading, raiding, and diplomacy – led to unprecedented flows of wealth into the non-imperial societies. The internal struggle to control these flows of wealth then led to both militarization and the emergence of pre-eminent dynasts, who eventually used their domination of this wealth to generate permanent military machines that could institutionalize their authority by destroying and/or intimidating pre-existing, more local authority structures. As a result, potential rivals were steadily eliminated and power was increasingly centralized.
But if the basic processes were the same, the second half of the millennium saw the Slavic world develop further and faster than its largely Germanic counterpart had done in the first. The explanation for this disparity in part lies in the broader range of stimuli operating in barbarian Europe after 500 AD. Western parts of the Slavic world established a full range of economic, military and diplomatic contacts with a sequence of Frankish imperial powers in western Europe. At the same time, two hundred years of Avar imperial domination at the heart of central Europe had important effects on a broader Slavic clientele, as did interaction with a further, if lesser, European imperial power: the Byzantine Empire. Equally, if not more important, more distant parts of the largely Slavic-dominated barbaricum were interacting with a fourth and still greater imperial power in the form of the Islamic Caliphate. There is no sign of any large-scale trade networks in either slaves or furs operating out of central and eastern Europe to feed Near Eastern as well as Mediterranean sources of demand in the first half of the millennium, so these later networks represented flows of wealth with no precedent in the Roman era. And to judge both by the staggering numbers of Islamic silver coins that survive and their correlation with the core areas of the new Slavic states, there is every reason to suppose this extra-European imperial stimulus played a major role in the transformation of Slavic Europe.
The other obvious explanation for the faster development of Slavic Europe is the impact of the new military technologies of the last two centuries of the millennium – notably armoured knights and castles – which made it much easier for those dynasts who could establish control over the new wealth flows to intimidate potential opponents. For even if the new states all encompassed less intensively governed peripheries, the power that they could exercise in dynastic core territories is (horribly) impressive. The brutal power inherent in the destruction of old tribal strongholds and their replacement with new dynastic ones – in both Bohemia and Poland – emerges strikingly from the dramatic archaeological evidence that has become available in recent years. Dynastic power is equally apparent in the movement of subdued populations into core zones of the new states, and their general economic organization, illustrated this time by a combination of archaeological evidence and the earliest strata of documentary evidence preserved from the new states.
The nature and overall significance of these processes of development could hardly be clearer, and their consequences were myriad. In broadest terms, the most important of these might well be the first emergence of Europe as a functioning entity. By the tenth century, networks of economic, political and cultural contact were stretching right across the territory between the Atlantic and the Volga, and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. This turned what had previously been a highly fragmented landscape, marked by massive disparities of development and widespread non-connection at the birth of Christ, into a zone united by significant levels of interaction. Europe is a unit not of physical but of human geography, and by the year 1000 interaction between human populations all the way from the Atlantic to the Volga was for the first time sufficiently intense to give the term some real meaning. Trade networks, religious culture, modes of government, even patterns of arable exploitation: all were generating noticeable commonalities right across the European landscape by the end of the millennium.
For the purposes of this study, however, the processes of development are more immediately important for the role they played in bringing to an end the kind of conditions that had generated the large-scale often predatory forms of migration – whether in the concentrated pulse form of the Völkerwanderungen or the more usual flows of increasing momentum – which had been a periodic feature of first-millennium Europe. Inequalities of development across the European landmass had not completely disappeared, but they had been greatly reduced. Essentially, the new trade networks, combined with more general agricultural expansion (the latter still very much a work in progress), meant that politically organized power structures in central and eastern Europe were now able to access wealth in large quantities in their existing locations. Agricultural and broader economic development also meant that they were busy entrenching themselves in some entirely new ways in some specific geographical zones of operation, at least in their core territories.
As a result, the kinds of positive stimulation that had periodically prompted large-group migration had been structurally removed, or at least massively eroded. Migration was never an easy or universally prevalent option in first-millennium Europe, but rather a strategy that was sometimes adopted when the gains were worth the stress of mounting expeditions into only partly known territory with no absolute guarantees of success. Once social elites could access wealth without the extra insecurity of relocation, they became much less likely to resort to that strategy. And, of course, the less they did so in practice, the less they were ever likely to, as previously ingrained migration habits unwound both among themselves, and among the broader population under their control as more intense patterns of arable farming were generating more permanent patterns of cultivation. Overall, both elites and broader populations within barbarian Europe were becoming much more firmly rooted in particular localities, and, as a result, were much less likely to respond by migration even when faced with powerful stimuli that might in other circumstances have led them to shift location.
This, to my mind is the underlying explanation of the particular problem with which this chapter began. Where many Goths and other Germani (though certainly not all) responded to the Hunnic menace, and the Slavs to its Avar counterpart, by seeking new homes elsewhere, the arrival of the nomadic Magyars on the Great Hungarian Plain engendered no known secondary migration. The actions, nature and eventual fate of the Moravian state encapsulate the difference. Rather than run away, the Moravians stood and fought the Magyars, just like the armies of Frankish imperial Europe. They lost (as, initially, did many of their Frankish counterparts), but the fact that the Moravians stayed put reflects the deeper roots they had sunk in their own particular locality, and the fundamentally different nature of political power in barbarian Europe as it had developed by the end of the first millennium. Earlier, the prevailing limitations of agricultural technique in barbarian Europe generated a broad local mobility, and large disparities in levels of wealth and development had encouraged the more adventurous periodically to attempt to take over some more attractive corner of the landscape, closer, usually, to imperial sources of wealth. The Moravians, by contrast, built castles and churches in stone, on the back of wealth generated by more intense agricultural regimes and wider exchange networks. With so much invested where they stood, it was not going to be easy to shift their centre of operations. The same was true of the other new dynasties of the late first millennium too. All were much more firmly fixed in particular localities than their earlier counterparts, both because of developing agricultural technique and because trade networks made other types of wealth available well beyond the imperial borderlands. In overall terms, processes of development had both eliminated the massive inequalities that had previously made long-distance, large-group migration a reasonably common option for Europe’s barbarians, and rooted central and east European populations more deeply in particular landscapes.
Not, of course, that any of this really spelled the end of migration. Some human beings are always on the move in search of greater prosperity or better conditions of life, and European history from the tenth century onwards is still marked by migration on a periodically massive scale. From late in the first millennium onwards, however, medieval migration generally took one of two characteristic forms. On the one hand, we see knight-based elite transfers. The Norman Conquest is a particularly large-scale and successful example of this phenomenon. Much more usual were bands of one or two hundred well-armed men looking to establish small principalities for themselves by ousting sitting elites and/or establishing their rights to draw economic support from a dependent labour force. The productive rootedness of peasantry and the empowering effect of new military technologies were key factors in dictating the characteristics of this particular migratory form. Castles and armour allowed them to establish a form of local domination based on quite small numbers of men that was extremely hard to shift. The other common form of migration was the deliberate recruitment of peasantry to work the land, with lords offering attractive tenurial terms to provide the incentive, and employing agents to run recruiting campaigns. Again, new patterns of development were of crucial importance here, since the extra agricultural productivity of the new arable farming technologies being put into practice in the late first millennium made it highly desirable for the masters of the landscape to secure sufficient labour to maximize agricultural outputs. Though they had come a long way, the new Slavic states still lagged behind western and southern Europe in levels of economic development. They therefore figured among the chief customers for the new peasant labour being mobilized from more developed parts of Europe where higher population levels reduced opportunities for ambitious peasants to get more land on better terms. As a result, hundreds of thousands of peasants from west-central Europe would be attracted eastwards by the offer of land on much better terms than could be secured at home, and the Slavicization of much of old Germanic Europe that had occurred in the early Middle Ages was partly reversed by an influx of Germanic-speaking peasants.18