Empires and Barbarians (90 page)

Kievan Russia had different origins, a circuit of political itineration not being central to the original Scandinavian merchants’ gathering of furs, slaves and other trade goods, even if these did tend to be gathered on winter circuits. By the later tenth century, however, itineration and a more regular pattern of early medieval government were being established. When all of the necessary logistic structure was put in place is unclear. The
RPC
records, however, that, apart from avenging
herself upon the Derevlians for killing her husband, Igor’s widow Olga (c.890–969, regent 945–c.963) did much to establish towns, trading posts and hunting grounds in their territories, both much further to the north around Novgorod and further south around the River Dnieper and its tributary the Desna. Hunting was the main royal entertainment, and the main occupation of rulers’ retinues on most afternoons. The will of Vladimir Monomachus tells us that he used to go hunting a hundred times a year. The establishment of royal hunting preserves, therefore, was – in a bizarre way – an important moment in instituting a regular cycle of government. I suspect that Olga’s actions extended over a much wider area the kinds of institutions of rule and support that were already in place closer to the main governmental centre in Kiev.
¹⁹

Danish kings of the Jelling dynasty, likewise, eventually became itinerant, and some of their early constructions, such as the Ravning Edge Bridge, were clearly all about making land travel more efficient, quite possibly with royal itineration in mind. It’s hard to see what else the Trelleborg fortresses were for, if not for a monarch’s itinerations. When first discovered, they were identified as purpose-built bases for the military forces of Svein and Cnut, who undertook the conquest of England. Their real date is actually too early for this, however, since they were constructed under Harold Bluetooth, Svein’s father. Nor could their regular layout have served any straightforward military purpose, as has often been noted. On closer examination, the deceptively identical interior buildings actually served a wide variety of purposes: some were equipped with fireplaces as residences or for entertaining, others served as storage sheds and yet others for craftsmen such as blacksmiths and even goldsmiths.
²⁰
The likeliest answer to the puzzle, in my view, is that they were built to extend Harold Bluetooth’s capacity to express practical political power by itineration, an interesting moment in the territorialization of the Jelling dynasty’s control.

The new states of northern and eastern Europe present us, then, with something of a paradox. Capable of highly impressive acts of government and of building power structures over huge geographical areas, they were at the same time fragile. Bureaucratically underdeveloped, they could govern only relatively small areas with full intensity, and larger peripheral areas were always liable to be lost to rival powers in moments of dynastic crisis. The rule of the itinerant dynasts provides
most of the explanation for their at first sight paradoxical nature, but still leaves unanswered questions. Where had these dynasties come from, and how did they build up their power bases in the first place?

The year is 995, the place eastern Bohemia at the confluence of the Libice and Elbe Rivers on the morning of St Wenceslas Day. But there’s nothing cool, crisp or even about it, since Wenceslas Day falls on 28 September. Nor are we anywhere near the forest fence or St Agnes’ fountain. We’re with a group of men standing quietly outside the wooden castle of Libice, headquarters of the powerful Slavnik family, currently led by Sobibor, son of Slavnik. Four of his seven brothers are inside the compound, though he himself is on a visit to the Emperor in Germany. The quiet is broken by shouts and violence, orchestrated by Boleslav II, current head of the other powerful Bohemian dynasty the Premyslids, and nephew of Good King Wenceslas himself. The action is swift and decisive. At its close, the compound and castle are burned out, the Slavnik males and their retainers destroyed. Slavnik power had been eliminated once and for all in what was arguably the most efficient hit of all time: certainly on a par with that February morning in 1929 when six members of Bugs Moran’s North Side German/Irish gang were lined up against a garage wall – along with an unfortunate mechanic who happened to be in the wrong place – and gunned down by footsoldiers of the South Side Italian gang. The only thing missing in 995 was any pretence of an alibi. Unlike Al Capone, Boleslav II didn’t bother to arrange a holiday; in any case, there were no packages to Florida currently available.
²¹

Not only is it a great story, but the St. Wenceslas Day massacre represents the culmination of the political process behind the emergence of Premyslid-dominated Bohemia. Thanks to its position close to the Frankish imperial frontier and its own precocious literary tradition, which gives us two clusters of home-grown texts from the tenth century (one surrounding Wenceslas in the 930s, the other Adalbert at the back end of the century), Bohemia also provides the best-documented case study of dynastic emergence. It also gets us in the right frame of mind for thinking more generally about the emergence of all the new dynasties of central and eastern Europe.
There were some important differences of detail in the political processes involved, clearly, but there was also enough in common for Bohemia to provide us with a general model of how the new game of dynasty was being played right across central and eastern Europe.

From the historical sources, one dimension of the story is easy enough to tell, and pretty well known. As it emerged from the Avar Empire following its destruction at the hands of Charlemagne in the years after 800, Bohemia was subdivided into a number of separate political units with their own leaders (called
duces
in Frankish sources, but with the general meaning of ‘leader’ rather than something as grand and hereditary as the modern English ‘duke’ implies). The ninth-and tenth-century sources give us a series of snapshots, which between them strongly imply that the Premyslids emerged from a Darwinian process whereby these different ducal lines eliminated each other, until only one remained.

The first snapshot comes from 845, when fourteen
duces
from Bohemia presented themselves for baptism at the Easter court of the Frankish King Louis the German. Fourteen ‘leaders’ strongly implies that each ruled only a relatively small area, but ducal numbers quickly declined. In 872 only five Bohemian princes turned up at the court of Louis the German, and by 895 there were only two. Part of this picture of ducal decline may be historiographical accident. I am not convinced that the sources are full enough, for instance, for us to be certain that there were only two pre-eminent leaders left in the game as early as 895. This would imply that Premyslids and Slavniks then managed a century of coexistence before their final showdown, and this seems unlikely. But the basic picture is clear enough. State formation in Bohemia was the result of a political process – played out over pretty much two hundred years from Charlemagne’s destruction of the Avar Empire – which saw one ducal line eliminating its peers to bring an ever larger core region under its control. As with similar processes affecting Germanic groups earlier in the millennium, each stage need not have been as violent as the St Wenceslas Day massacre. Some of the other, originally peer, families may have been willing to accept demotion rather than demolition. Nonetheless, there is every reason to suppose that violence regularly punctuated the process.
²²

As far as we can tell, similar dynastic games underlay the creation of the two of our other new states that emerged from the wreck of the Avar Empire: Great Moravia and Poland. Great Moravia was the
first to appear, in the middle decades of the ninth century. Carolingian sources for c.800–20 mention in passing a whole series of regionally based small-scale political leaders at the head of their own groupings, as Avar dominion in central Europe unwound. One called Vojnomir supported the Franks against the Avars, a certain Manomir appears briefly, while a major revolt against Carolingian rule was led by Ljudevit. The sources are nothing like full enough for us to attempt a political narrative of how these different dynasties combined and eliminated one another to produce the much larger power that was Great Moravia. But that they did is clear enough and, again, we are given the odd snapshot. The first really prominent Moravian ruler, perhaps the real founder of dynastic pre-eminence, was called Mojmir, and Carolingian sources record what was clearly a highly significant moment in the 830s (the incident can be dated no more tightly than 833–6) when he drove a rival prince, Pribina, out of Nitra in Slovakia to bring a broader region under his direct control. Using this greater power base, the dynasty continued to extend its control, as and when it could. Carolingian power kept its westerly ambitions in check through most of the ninth century, but as that Empire waned in the early 890s the Moravians extracted the right to exercise hegemony over Bohemia. From then on, a still more exciting range of ambitions might have been open to this ruling line, had not its career been cut decisively short from 896 by the arrival of the nomadic Magyars as a major force in central Europe.
²³

If we had nothing but the available historical sources, the emergence of Piast Poland would be particularly mysterious. The Piast state suddenly jumps into Ottonian narrative sources in the 960s, already fully formed under the control of the Piast Miesco I. With a heartland west of the Vistula, beyond the immediate border region between the Elbe and the Oder, the new Polish state was simply too far away from imperial dominions for our chronicle sources to observe its growing pains. Not even the
Anonymous Bavarian Geographer
knew the political layout of lands so far to the east. Thanks to the wonders of dendro-chronolgy, however, archaeological evidence – which is usually so much better at observing long-term development than the immediately political – has in this case brilliantly illuminated at least the final stages of the rise of the Piasts. Because the dynasty built its castles of wood – as pretty much everyone else in Europe was still doing in the first half of the tenth century – it has become possible, within just the last
decade, to date their construction precisely. The results are revolutionary.

The emergence of the first Polish state used to be construed as a long, slow process of political consolidation, which gradually brought ever larger areas together under the control of a single dynasty. Long-term developments, as we shall examine in a moment, were certainly of critical importance to create the necessary conditions, but the archaeology has shown with striking clarity that the last stage of the Piast rise to power was sudden and violent. Piast castle construction clusters in the second quarter of the tenth century, demonstrating that the dynasty expanded its control over broader areas of Great Poland very quickly, from an originally narrow base (
Map 20
). More than that, in many of these localities Piast castles replaced a much larger kind of fortified centre, often dating back to the eighth century, many of which seem to have been destroyed exactly at the moment of Piast construction. The conclusion seems inescapable. The creation of Piast Poland, the entity that suddenly bursts into our histories in the mid-tenth century, involved the destruction of long-standing local societies and the imposition of Piast military garrisons upon them. How many of these local societies were ‘tribes’, for want of a better word – the kind of unit listed in the
Bavarian Geographer
for more westerly regions of the Slavic world – is unclear, as is how they were distributed across the landscape.
²⁴
Just like Great Moravia and Bohemia, then, the new Polish state emerged by violent dynastic self-assertion, as the Piasts eliminated their rivals at the heads of those other, older political units.

Much is also obscure about the rise of the Riurikids. As we saw in the last chapter, the
Russian Primary Chronicle
(
RPC
) is both too Kiev-focused and too much composed from the hindsight of achieved Riurikid domination to provide a straightforward route into the complexities of early Rus history. Nor – at this stage at least – is the archaeological picture so arrestingly precise as that for Piast Poland. Nonetheless, the basic outlines of Scandinavian intrusion into Russia are clear enough, and hence too the key political developments that made possible the Rurikid state.

Amongst its other problems, as we saw, the
RPC
provides a thoroughly unconvincing account of both the date and circumstances by which political power came to be transferred to Kiev from Gorodishche in the north. The
Chronicle
both places the transfer a generation too early and seems to be hiding dynastic discontinuity or at least
disruption in its odd and seemingly sanitized account of the relationship between Oleg, the first major political figure associated with Kiev, and Igor, Riurik’s son and heir. The story also presents Oleg as gathering an army in the north and taking control of the Middle Dnieper by force. Yet it closes by saying that, at the conclusion of these operations, an annual tribute of three hundred
grivny
was imposed by Oleg on Novgorod in return for peace. This, the
Chronicle
notes, was paid until the death of Prince Yaroslav in 1054, which is late enough to fall virtually within living memory of the compiler of the
Chronicle
in the early twelfth century. So the payment is presumably historical. But why would a ruler who came from the north to conquer in the south, as the story has it, end up imposing a tribute on the north?

There are two other big problems besides. First, the trade treaties with Byzantium confirm that, well into the tenth century, non-Riurikid Scandinavians ruled their own Russian settlements with a great deal of independent power, since they had to be represented individually in the negotiations. Second, before the end of the tenth century the
Chronicle
preserves only a very simplified version of Riurikid dynastic history. From that point on, the transmission of power from one generation to the next always involved many contenders and civil war, but before that date, even though we know that the early princes were multiply polygamous (as indeed were their successors), the
Chronicle
mentions only one son at each moment of succession and nothing but a smooth transition of power.