Before the Avars various nomadic and Germanic peoples were their
masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were
sharply distinguished—even after becoming Slavised—from the subjected
Slav mass.
masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were
sharply distinguished—even after becoming Slavised—from the subjected
Slav mass.
Cambridge Medieval History - v2 - Rise of the Saracens and Foundation of the Western Empire
The first known of
their Germanic conquerors were the Bastarnae who, coming from the
lower Oder, were in the third century B. C. already in occupation of the
Slav lands north of the Carpathians as far as the mouth of the Danube.
According to Polybius and Dio Cassius they were a numerous, daring,
bibulous people of powerful stature and terrifying appearance who knew
neither agriculture nor navigation, and disdained cattle-rearing because
they cared only for warlike pursuits. On their expeditions their wives
and children followed the army in wagons, and their horsemen fought
with foot-soldiers among them. They fell into various clans and divisions
under little kings (reguli), one of whom stood at the head as leader of
the war-band. But a numerous people without agriculture and cattle-
rearing cannot live only on plunder and cannot live alone in a land;
it needs another more numerous people of serfs, among whom it settles
as a dominating class. But north of the Carpathians such a people
could only be the Slavs. Thus arose the oldest known Slavo-Germanic
State. The second Germanic people from whose influence the Slavs
could not escape was the ferocious Heruli situated by the Black Sea
east of the Goths and the Don, for the same weapons and the same
burial customs are found among them as among the Slavs. The third
people were the Goths.
According to the oldest Gothic tradition (given by Jordanes) King
Ermanarich (died 373) overcame the Slavs (Veneti) "who, notwith-
standing that they were despised as warriors, nevertheless being strong
in numbers attempted at first a stout resistance. 11 His great-nephew
## p. 431 (#463) ############################################
Slavs in German Slavery 431
Vinithar attacked the South-Russian Slavs, the Antae, and after one
reverse overcame first them and then the Huns, who had come to their
help, in two battles, but fell in the third. It is certainly strange that
a tribe of the Slavs, who were despised as warriors not only by the
Germans but also by the Byzantines, could defeat even in one battle
a German leader before whom the Huns themselves recoiled. Still, it
is a fact that the Antae were successful warriors, and later in the sixth
century possessed the whole region from the Dniester to the Don, which
was formerly held by the Goths. It is astonishing that the Byzantine
sources of the sixth century distinguish the Antae from all the
remaining Slavs, but at the same time emphasise the fact that they
spoke the same language. And the name"Avrat is not Slavonic. The
military superiority of the Antae is, as Kunik has shewn, to be traced
back to a non-Slavonic conquering folk, the Antae, who overcame certain
Slav stocks and ruled them long and powerfully as a superior warlike
class1. This folk then became Slavised, and, as was the case with many
such despotisms both German and nomadic, it too fell apart into small
States, which however still negotiated common concerns in general
meetings, and proceeded as one body in external affairs. We hear the
same of the Bastarnae. In the tenth and eleventh centuries we find in
the former abodes of the Antae of the Pontus steppe the Slavonic
Tiwertzi and Ulichi whose names are equally non-Slavonic. How
could they have maintained themselves against the nomads here where
they were daily exposed to the inroads of all the Asiatic hordes, if they
were pure Slavs without a Germanic or Altaian warrior-stratum?
Still less could the Slavs resist the pressure of foreign conquerors
after the Scandinavian Vikings had renewed their attacks. Leaving
their families behind them, these appeared at first in small bands of
one to two hundred men as well-organised followers (vaeringjar) of a
sea-king, and always returned home after selling their plunder. At
important points on their route they established trading stations, and
in the course of time these became fortified settlements surrounded by
a subjected Finnish, Baltic, or Slavonic population. Hence a regulated
government was developed, no longer exclusively resting on plunder.
From the word vaeringjar came the name of a people Varangians,
Bdpayyot. The Varangians gradually extended their sway over the whole
of Russia—over Kiev about the year 855—covered it with originally
independent towns (gurSdr)1, and finally formed these little States into
a single empire of the Ros* (Russians). In brief, trading Scandinavian
1 On the other hand, cf. HruiSevgkyj, i. pp. 175 ff. , 577 ff.
2 Hence Russia was called by the Scandinavians Gartariki, i. e. the kingdom of
many forts.
8 This name too is Swedish, for which Esthonian has Rats. In Old Swedish
Rof>er, Ko|>in is the name of a strip of coast in Sweden. Ro)>smenn = rower,
seafarer, and this word, like Varangians, became the name of a people.
## p. 432 (#464) ############################################
432 Slavs in Mounted-nomad Slavery
sea-robbers got possession of the Russian network of waterways, over-
came the Finns and Slavs, and the Scandinavian dynasty of the house
of Rurik (= Old Norse: Hroerekr) created the powerful Russian State.
As in the North Germano-Slavic, so in the South Nomado-Slavic
States were formed. A nomadic milk-feeding horde dominated a
Slavic vegetarian peasant class. A similar state of affairs lasted till
yesterday in Ferghana, the former Khanate of Khokand, where the
vegetarian Tadjiks languished from the earliest times in the basest
nomadic servitude. The same thing can be also traced back far into
ancient times in East Europe on the western border of the steppe
zone. So we find it as early as Ephorus (fourth century B. C. ).
A horde of Sarmatae, the Iazygians, migrated into Central Hungary
where (c. a. d. 337) the serfs of the Sarmatae, the Sarmatae Limigantes,
revolted against their lords, the Sarmatae Arcaragantes or Sarmatae
Liberi, and repulsed them1. Here we have a similar double stratum to
that which Ephorus mentions, and because the Tabula Peutingeriana
(about the third century a. d. ) mentions the Venedi Sarmatae and
the Lupiones Sarmatae next to the pure nomadic wagon-inhabiting
Sarmatae Hamaxobii, Sarmatae Vagi, many assume that these serfs of
the Sarmatae, the Limigantes, were Slavs'. The oldest explicit informa-
tion concerning a Nomado-Slavic State on the lower Danube is to be
found in Pseudo-Caesarius of Nazianzus of the sixth—probably even the
fourth—century a. d. , viz. that of the galactophagous Phisonitae or
Danubians (Phison according to Marquart is equivalent to Dunn/Am)
and the vegetarian Slavs*.
The best account we have is of the similar Avaro-Slavk State. The
dominating Avar nomad class was absorbed as a nation and language
by the subjugated Slavs, but even after the destruction of the Avar
Empire it survived socially with Slav names, as is shewn by the remark-
able passage in the Arabian geographer of the ninth century: "The
seat of their prince lies in the middle of the Slav land. . . . This prince
possesses mares, whose milk. . . is his only food'. '" As mare-milkers he
and the dominating class were mounted nomads and, as the date proves,
of Avar origin. This information alone destroys our former conceptions
of the character of the Slav States north of the middle Danube and the
Carpathians, and compels us to assume that nomadic States extended far
into the territory of the Baits and even as far as the Baltic. The sea-
farer Wulfstan at the end of the ninth century says of the Eastland
(Prussia, east of the mouth of the Vistula): "Their king and the richest
men drink mares' milk but the poor and the slaves drink mead8. '"
1 Mullenhoff, n. p. 377. s Niederk, n. pp. 127 ff.
3 Mullenhoff, u. p. 367. Peisker, Beziehungen, 125 [311].
4 Harkavy, p. 266. Marquart, p. 468; Tumanskii, p. 136, where the passage
runs: The food of their princes is milk.
6 Alfred the Great, by T. Bosworth, p. 22. Adam of Bremen (§ 138) says that
## p. 433 (#465) ############################################
The Robber-peoples around 433
Naturally the activity of the nomads was not uniform over this
immense region; it was greater at their base, the steppe, among the
South Russian Slavs, of whom in 952 the Emperor Constantine Porphy-
rogenitus says that they reared no horses, oxen or sheep—and consequently
must have been vegetarians—although at that time they had already
been for a century under the powerful sway of Scandinavian Ros.
Thus we see how Slavdom was influenced on all sides by plundering
peoples. All so-called Slav States of which we have sufficient informa-
tion turn out to be either Germanic or Altaian foundations. And unless we
do violence to all German,Byzantine,and Oriental evidence of the political
and military incapacity of the Slavs, we must not represent the remaining
Slav States as of Slav origin merely because there is no express statement
of their Germanic or Altaian origin. The strongest proof of this is the
remarkable fact that all titles of rank in Slavic (except voyevoda, duke)
are partly from Germanic, partly from Altaian sources.
Between Germanic and Altaic oppressors the Slavs were crushed for /
centuries; and yet they became the most numerous people of Europe
because of the enormous size of their territory and because their tyrants
were neither numerous nor united. The robbers could not follow the in-
dividual Slavs into the forest thickets and the marshes, so that from them
thewastes left by massacre were peopled anew. Besides this, the impetuosity
of the two robber-peoples periodically languished. We know this of the
Vikings from their activity in Europe. England, France, Spain, Italy
suffered terribly from them, but for long intervals they were quiet, and
after a single defeat the enemy often did not return for a long time.
Their might was also broken from time to time in their own land, and
then the afflicted peoples enjoyed a healing respite. This was less the
case with Russia, where a few dozen robbers won decisive victories
and where the Northmen only had no serious opponents but their like.
It was the same with the mounted nomad. His first appearance
was terrible beyond description; but his fury exhausted itself on the
numerous battle-fields, and when his ranks were thinned he had to call
out his Slav serfs to fight on his behalf. Thus he led masses of Slavs into
the steppe where they revived and increased until once again a new and
vigorous wild horde forced its way in from Asia and repeated the
destruction.
The primitive German was as savage in war as the mounted nomad,
but far superior in character and capacity for civilisation. The German
with one leap into civilisation so to speak from a plunderer becomes a
founder of brilliant and well-ordered States, bringing to high perfection
the intellectual goods which he has borrowed. On the other hand the
the ancient Prussians ate horse-flesh, and drank the milk of their mares (kumiz) to
intoxication. Helmold (twelfth century) (Chronica Slavorum, i. i. ) gives similar
information.
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XIV. 28
## p. 434 (#466) ############################################
434 German and Altaian Slavery
lightest breath of civilisation absolutely ruins the mounted nomad. This
enormous contrast shewed itself also in the kind of slavery. The mounted
nomad treated the subjugated peoples like the beasts of the forest which
are hunted and harried for amusement and mere delight in killing.
Himself void of all capacity for civilisation, he stifles all germs of civi-
lisation found among his subjects, outraging their sense of justice by his
lawlessness and licence, and the race itself by the violation of their
women. The German on the other hand treated his serf as a useful
domestic animal which is destroyed only in anger and never wantonly.
He enjoyed a certain autonomy, remaining unmolested after the per-
formance of definite duties. Even the Scandinavian pirates, according
to the Arabian geographer, handled their serfs "well" (from an Oriental
point of view)1. It is then no wonder that the Slavs, incapable of
resisting the terrible plundering raids and powerless to give themselves
political organisation, preferred to submit voluntarily to the dominion
of the pirates.
Concerning this the oldest Russian chronicler Pseudo-Nestor states
(under the year 859): "[The Slavs] drove the Varangians over the sea,
and. . . began to govern themselves, and there was no justice among them,
and clan rose against clan, and there was internal strife between them
And they said to each other: Let us seek for a prince who can reign
over us and judge what is right. And they went over the sea to the
Varangians, to Russ, for so were these Varangians called. . . . [They] said
to Russ: Our land is large and rich, but there is no order in it; come
ye and rule and reign over us. And three brothers were with their
whole clan, and they took with them all the Russ, and they came at
first to the Sloviens and built the town of Ladoga, and the eldest
Rurik settled in Ladoga. . . . And the Russian land got its name from
these Varangians8. "
The misery of the Slavs was the salvation of the West. The energy
of the Altaians was exhausted in Eastern Europe, and Germany and
France behind the Slavic breakwater were able freely to develop their
civilisation. Had they possessed such steppes as Hungary or South
Russia, there is no reason to suppose that they would have fared any
better than the Slavs.
The compact Slav. settlement of the countries east of the Elbe and
south of the Danube took place between the sixth and seventh centuries.
In their occupation of the German mother-countries between the Elbe
and the Vistula two phases are to be distinguished—one pre-Avar and the
1 This assertion is correct, for (according to the oldest law-book—Russkaya
Pravda) the Slav peasants (smerdi) under the dominion of the Ros actually were per-
sonally free.
2 Thomsen, pp. 13 ff. These Germanic Russ are to be distinguished from the
modern Slavonic Russians.
## p. 435 (#467) ############################################
Expansion of the Slavs in Old Germania 435
other with the force of the Avars behind it. In the first the Slavs
reached and perhaps crossed the Riesengebirge, and perhaps already got
as far as the middle and lower Oder. In the records of the Germans no
trace of it is found, because from the beginning of the fifth, and indeed
for the greater part from the end of the third century a. d. , the country
westward to the Oder and southward to the Riesengebirge was abandoned
by its old German inhabitants. The oldest evidence of this is the name
Silesia, from the mountain Sle^z1 (Zobtenberg) and the river Sleza (little
Lohe). Styz (originally Silengti) leads letter for letter to SUing, Sleza to
SUingia, consequently to the German XtKvyyai, who according to Ptolemy
lived just here. The Slavs must have found Silingians still there and have
taken this name from them either before or soon after 406, when they
crossed the Rhine and made their way with the Vandals and Sueves to
Spain. It must be admitted that the Slavs found everywhere scattered
remnants of the Germans, because they merely adapted the German
names Oder, Elbe (Albi), Moldau (Walth ahva), etc. to their own mouths
(Odra, Labe, Vltuva). For certain times and in certain districts there
was a mixed population, and it is to be particularly noticed that even in
the sixth century the Germans, who had long withdrawn to the South',
did not admit that the East as far as the Vistula had definitely passed
to the Slavs. It had not been conquered from them—only occupied by
loose bands of settlers.
From the third to the fifth century the hurricanes of war stirred up
by the Goths and the Huns between the Carpathians, the Pontus, and the
Danube raged over and around the Slavs. We hear not a word of their
share in the fight. Not before the seventh decade of the sixth century
did the advance of the Avars to the Elbe disclose the great change which
had silently come to pass.
The Avars, like the Huns, must have needed an enormous number of
dependent Slavs. The territory by the Pontus left vacant by the with-
drawal of the Goths, Heruli, etc. was occupied by Slavs, naturally as serfs
to the Huns. The subjugation of the Germans was disastrous to the
Huns; they threw off the yoke after Attila's death, and the Hunnish
Empire perished, Hungary became German and the Huns withdrew into
the Pontus steppe. This steppe was directly afterwards in the hands of
Bulgar hordes who controlled numerous Slav tribes. Here between the
Dniester and Dnieper in the first half of the sixth century lived the
Antae, " the bravest of the Slavs," who constantly joined in the Bulgar
plundering raids in the East Roman Empire. In 558 Justinian was
successful in instigating against them both the Avars who had suddenly
emerged from the Asiatic background. The Avars demanded territory
of Justinian but refused the offer of Lower Pannonia—which they would
have had to wrest from the fierce Heruli and Lombards—and remained
in the Dobrudja, contenting themselves with a yearly tribute for their
ch. xiv. 28—2
## p. 436 (#468) ############################################
436 Expansion of the Avars
defeat of the Bulgars and Antae. But when Justinian's successor dis-
continued the tribute, the Dobrudja was no longer of any value to them.
They then turned towards the north-west and suddenly appeared in the
Eastern territories of the Frankish kingdom on the Elbe. They could
not make their way thither through Hungary as it was occupied by the
powerful Gepidae, and thus they had to go through North-Carpathian
Slavland and through Bohemia. They must therefore first have subdued
these lands. Their base of operations against the Franks in Thuringia is
to be sought in Bohemia, where they found excellent summer-pastures in
the mountain ring and good winter-quarters in the plains for their herds.
It would be misunderstanding the entire nature of the mounted nomads,
and of the Avars in particular, to regard these wars with Sigebert
the king of the Franks as mere plundering expeditions. In the latter the
nomads never confronted the enemy, but went round his positions with
marvellous speed, and then charged behind his back. They confronted
him or sought him out only when they had to defend their own land.
In the first campaign they were defeated, but they won the second,
and the consequence was that the North Sueves evacuated the oldest
German land between the Elbe and the Oder. Nevertheless, Baian, the
Avar Khagan, made peace with Sigebert, as he was attracted elsewhere:
the Lombard king Alboin in Pannonia was preparing to wrest Italy
from the East Romans, and in order to protect his rear he united
himself with Baian against the Gepidae in Hungary and Transylvania.
The kingdom of the Gepidae was destroyed, the Lombards made
their way to Italy, and in 568 the Avars were complete masters of
Hungary with its steppe on the Danube and Theiss so excellent for
nomads.
The evacuation of Old Germany by the North Sueves, the destruction of
the kingdom of the Gepidae, and the withdrawal of the Lombards to Italy
—three co-related events—mark an epoch in the history of the world,
for the entire East was abandoned by the Germans to the Avars and their
followers the Slavs1. Once more the map of Europe was suddenly
changed, and from the steppes of Hungary the Avars became the terror
of all their neighbours. But they did not give up the territories won
from the Germans between the Oder and the Elbe, Saale, Main, Regnitz,
Nab, for—as we shall see—a horde of the Avars wintered yearly on the
Main and Regnitz till about the year 603, and the Khagan resettled the
waste German land as far as the Baltic with Slavs brought there from
the first, North-Carpathian, Avar kingdom.
The existence of this first Avar-Slavonic kingdom is proved by the
account which the Arabian geographer of the second quarter of the ninth
century (before the conquest of Hungary by the Magyars) gives of the
mare-milking and therefore Altaic Great King, whose realm lay in the
territory of the Slavonic Dvlyebs or Volynyans south-west of Polesie,
1 Mullenhoff, n. pp. 101 ff. Authorities in Zeuss, Die Deutschen, pp. 731 f.
## p. 437 (#469) ############################################
Transplantation of Slavs in Old Germania 437
the very people who according to Pseudo-Nestor had been formerly kept
in servitude by the Avars. Bordering on the steppes as they did, they
were from the earliest times a prey to the inhabitants of the steppes.
Before the Avars various nomadic and Germanic peoples were their
masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were
sharply distinguished—even after becoming Slavised—from the subjected
Slav mass. The king was called in Slavic knez (from k&n$g&), Germanic
kuninga. Further among the Sorb-Serbs the class of the vicazi-vitezi
"knights" (from vit$g&), that is, German vikings; and the numerous
Polish nobility has the German title szlachta.
Out of this Germano-Altaio-Slavonic mixture of the Dulyebi-
Volynyane and other Slavonic peoples north of the Carpathians, Baian
created for himself an almost inexhaustible reservoir of men whom he
formed into barriers against the Germans1 on his western frontiers.
He transplanted a part of the Dulyebi-Volynyane to Pannonia (where
later was the Comitatus Dudleipa), another to South Bohemia (the later
countries of Doudleby and Volyn), a third to the distant north (the island
of Wollin) at the mouth of the Oder. Similarly he tore apart the
North-Carpathian Croats (Khr'vati) of the upper Vistula and placed them
partly in the Elbe and Saale, where several villages bear their name,
partly in Carantania (pagus Crauuti), partly to Pannonia and Dalmatia,
where later independent Croatian States arose; the North-Carpathian
Serbs (Serbi) partly on the Saale and the Elbe (later the mighty Sorbs),
partly where to-day they are independent in Servia and Montenegro.
The Slav nations of to-day are therefore not original but a gradual
crystallisation since the sixth century into linguistic units out of the
peoples transplanted by the Avars—a process already completed by the
tenth century2.
1 Transplanting of entire nations was customary with the nomads. Thus the
Scythians transplanted many peoples, among them "Assyrians" to the Pontus in
Asia Minor, and "Medes" to the Don. In a similar way the Avars transplanted
Macedonian Slavs to Pannonia, and the Bulgars, after the destruction of the Avar
kingdom by Charles the Great, populated North and South Hungary with Slavs
whom they had captured by regular man-hunts in Macedonia. The Mongols too took
large numbers of Russians, etc. to Hungary, which they had half depopulated, and
these too they destroyed before their own withdrawal thence.
* No traces of an earlier intermixture are to be observed in the individual Slav
languages. Even in the tenth century the Nortabtrezi of Mecklenburg spoke a
different dialect from the Osterabtrezi of South Hungary, and the Sorbs on the Saale
and Elbe from the Serbs on the Drina. The Nortabtrezi belong with the Sorbs to the
Elbe-Slavonic, the Osterabtrezi with the Serbs to the South-Slavonic language-group,
and all the Slavonic languages form one unbroken chain of languages connected by
transitionary dialects. Hence many Slavists declare that the duplication of these
folk-names is accidental, and that the Slavs in their original home were divided
into the same peoples as at present, who spread unmixed in all directions. But in
our time it is recognised how quickly fragments of a people adopt the language of
their environment, and the historical arguments against a radiating expansion of
the Slavs are admitted by other Slavists.
CH. XIV.
## p. 438 (#470) ############################################
438 Limits of the Avar power
Baian's purpose was probably that of settling the most warlike
branches, viz. those dominated by Germans, in the strategically most
important places. Thus we see why, for example, the Sorb-Serbs who
were controlled by vikings were split up.
The limits of the Avar power are marked by the abode of the Obo-
dritzi in Mecklenburg, the Volynyans at the mouth of the Oder, the
Dregovichi in Polesie and in Macedonia, the Milengi in Morea, the
Severyans east of the Dnieper and in Moesia, the Serbs and Croats on
the Adriatic and on the Saale. Thus the Avar power at one time or
another extended from the Baltic to the southern extremity of Greece,
from East Tyrol to the river Donetz in Russia, doubtless with very
unequal intensity and unequal duration. Only one will, that of the
Khagan, could carry through so vast a change—the transplanting of one
and the same people partly to the Baltic, partly to the Adriatic, Ionic,
and Aegean Seas.
The Khagan could not leave his Slavs without supervision, and
therefore he had to maintain among them a standing Avar garrison
with wives and children. But the Avars were a nomad people who
only camped among the Slavonic peasantry in winter—more than half
the year—and during the summer grazed the higher positions and heaths,
of course leaving behind a guard over the Slavs, while their army went
to battle and plunder1.
The Slavised Avar nomads long survived the Avar Empire in many
Slav lands, and even in the twelfth century we are told by Herbord of
the Baltic Slavs of the Island of Rtigen (Slav. Ruiana): "The men's
occupation is either hunting or fishing or cattle rearing. For therein
consists their entire wealth as husbandry is only scanty there. " Here
the nomads had to do without mountain summer-pastures.
Concerning the relation of the Avars to the Slavs," Fredegar" states
that from the earliest times the Wends [here in particular are meant the
Slavs of the upper Main and its tributary the Regnitz north and east
of Nuremberg] were used by the Huns [Avars] as befulci, that is, when
the Huns took the field against any people the Wends had to fight in
1 Theophylactus, vi. 2, states (a. d. 591): Three captives were brought before the
Emperor Maurice having neither swords nor any other weapon, but only citharas
with them. Being questioned they answered that they were Slavs from the coast of
the northern ocean [Baltic Sea], whither the Khagan sent envoys with presents to
ask for auxiliaries. They brought back as answer to the Khagan that he could
expect no help from such a distance—they themselves had been fifteen months ou
the journey—and their people were absolutely peaceable. They played on the
zither because they were unacquainted with weapons, their land produced no iron and
therefore they lived there still and peacefully, and as the war trumpet was not
understood there they played on the zither. These were obviously spies, but the
fiction of their entire harmlessness could only deceive the Emperor when the story
of the Khagan's embassy to the Baltic Slavs appeared natural. The whole mysti-
fication produced the widespread story of the dove-like nature of the Slavs.
## p. 439 (#471) ############################################
The Slavs placed on the German Border 439
front. If they won the Huns advanced to make booty; but if they were
defeated they rallied with the support of the Huns. Without these
befitlci the Avars, who were speedy on their marvellously trained horses
but helpless and defenceless on foot, could have done little against trained
infantry. They therefore had to call out countless, because wretchedly
armed, masses of Slav foot-soldiers who, with certain death at the hands
of their goaders behind them, charged forward in despair1. On the other
hand the Avar cavalry formed an incomparable mail-armed force with
sword, bow and pickaxe, and even the horses of the leaders were protected
by armour. However the Avars were not in themselves numerous enough
to supply the necessary reserves for their enormous empire, and with the
expansion of their dominion the need for new masses of cavalry grew.
This need was supplied by constant reinforcements from other Altaian
hordes out of the steppe. Among them the most numerous were the
Bulgars. The Khagan's victorious flag, and the prospect of booty,
worked irresistibly upon the plundering sons of the steppe.
By the transplantation of Slav peoples to the western borders of his
robber-State the Khagan meant to keep in check his neighbours, the
Saxons on the lower Elbe, the Franks on the Saale, the Bavarians on
the Nab and upper Danube, the Lombards in Italy, while he himself,
with his rear protected, was free for plundering raids on the East Roman
Empire, in which he employed enormous masses of Slavs as befitlci. He
had no intention of conquering even a part of the Roman Empire and
settling it with Slavs, for this was not to his interest; he had land in
abundance and he needed the Slavs fer his own colonising purposes. He
therefore left them the East Roman to pay tribute, and his plundering
supplied him further. Nevertheless his procedure was uneconomical. The
greater number of the East Romans were partly exterminated and partly
carried into slavery. The vacuum thus created was permanently occupied
by the Slavs who finally spread almost over the entire Balkan peninsula
and even reached Asia Minor. Very exhaustive information about these
Avaro-Slavic plundering raids is given in the sources, but it is not
definitely known when the Slavs permanently settled there; certainly
the greater part not before 602.
In this previously Roman territory the dominating Avar and Bulgar
nomad class merged with the Slavonic peasantry into a national organism,
and powerful military States of Slav speech arose: but the real holders of
power were not the Slavs but the Slavised Altaians, and it is a delusion to
think that the Slavs themselves, the Croats, Serbs, (new-) Bulgars, Macedo-
Slavs became fit for war in the Avaro-Bulgar school. They remained a
peasant folk living—partly to this day—alongside of a nomad shepherd
1 The Mongols in Hungary in 1241 availed themselves of the same aid, driving
the captives before them into the fight and against the fortresses, cutting down
at once all who recoiled. They did not however put themselves willingly in
danger.
CH. XIV.
,-
## p. 440 (#472) ############################################
440 The Balkan Peninsula. The Roumanians
class. The domination of the nomads appears most clearly among
the Bulgarian Slavs who to-day are named after their nomadic masters
the Altaian Bulgars. After the destruction of the Avar kingdom by
Charles the Great, the Bulgarian kingdom extended from the Balkans to
the Moravian Carpathians. The Serbs and Croats also founded mighty
States. In the Middle Ages the Slavs of Dalmatia were dreaded pirates,
and even the tiny Slav peoples of Macedonia and Greece kept the Romans
occupied with many wars. But even at the beginning of the seventh
century the commercial town of Saloniki obtained grain from the Thes-
salian Slavs. Led by the Avars, the Slavs pressed into the Peloponnesus,
and the report was long believed that the Avars occupied the Pelo-
ponnesus for 218 years so that no Roman durst enter it1. According to
Constantine Porphyrogenitus the Croats of the tenth century could put
60,000 horsemen and 100,000 foot into the field. But as the Slavs were
a foot people, such a very strong cavalry must refer to the Avar and
Bulgar ruling class, which at that time stood out clearly from the
Slav peasantry in Dalmatia; and to this day the name of the Khagan
Baian denotes to the Croat the highest state official, the Ban, Banns (in
Constantine: ySoavos), just as the name of Charles the Great—Karl—
denotes to all Slavs Krai, the king. The Old Servian State also had
a strong body of cavalry, in connexion with which it must be noted that
numerous nomadic Roumanians with horses and sheep, but without
agriculture and ox-rearing, were, and still are, to be found in Servia and
the other Balkan countries.
The Roumanians, Slavonic Vlasi, Vlakhs, are Romanised Altaians,
probably Avars and Bulgars, for a still older nomad people could not
have survived the wild Bulgar-Avaro-Slavonic storms which raged for
a century over the Balkan peninsula. Like all mounted nomads the
Bulgars and Avars were intent on cattle robbery (baranta), and so the
indigenous wandering herdsmen specially suffered, for herds of sheep are
not quick-footed enough to be hidden in time from mounted robbers.
With the loss of his herds the wandering herdsman inevitably perishes as
he cannot acquire new herds, and the acquisition of single animals would
be of no use to him. The vegetarian peasant can better secure himself
since he does not depend on cattle but on the soil, which the robber
cannot destroy, and seed-grain is more easy to obtain than a herd of
cattle.
The nomadic Vlakhs lived along with the peasant peoples of the
Balkan peninsula and gradually adopted their language and became
denationalised for a second time. They further attained to their highest
prosperity as wandering herdsmen in Turkish times, after the fall of the
Slav States effaced the customs barriers with a tithe on the import and
export of sheep and horses; the herdsmen could thus graze summer and
1 For the literature v. Niederle, Staroiitnosti, n. p. 210.
## p. 441 (#473) ############################################
The Roumanians living with the Slavs 441
winter wherever was convenient for them. We know most about the Old
Servian State, where the Vlakhs constituted an important element and
a rich source of income for the sovereign and the other landlords. By
them the larger mountain pastures were made the most of and indeed
devastated and disforested by the reckless grazing-off of the new growth,
by the searing of the grass to freshen the pasturage, and by the peeling
of young beech-trees as a substitute for honey to sweeten milk foods1.
They provided the State with excellent horses, of small stature but
hardy, and good cavalry for the army. They managed also the com-
merce, for it had to be a caravan trade with pack-horses, because most
of the mountain ranges run parallel with the sea and were then impassable
for wagons. The Vlakhs themselves traded in wool, skins and the famous
Vlakhish cheese which had to have a definite weight for Ragusa, and even
served as a substitute for money. In return they chiefly brought sea-
salt. By this trading the Vlakhs acquired knowledge of the world, and
became far superior in experience and shrewdness to the boorish Slav
peasant. They grazed the mountain pastures (planina) to the height of
3000 ft. , from the end of April to the middle of September, and then
slowly made their way, often taking two months, to winter on the coasts
on account of the mild snowless climate and the salt which splendidly
nourishes the sheep. They lived chiefly on milk and cheese. Their
chief enemy was the ice when it locked up the grass in early spring.
Thousands of sheep then starved and the richest man might become a
beggar in a few days. As they had no fixed settlements, they could not
easily be enslaved by the landlords, and after payment of the grazing-tax
they enjoyed freedom of movement without restraint. They themselves
were a heavy burden for the peasantry, especially through their destruc-
tion of the cornfields. Thus peasants and herdsmen were in opposition,
there was no intermarriage between them, and the State had to regulate
the wandering people and to protect the peasants with draconic laws.
The Emperor Dushan's law-book of 1349 states: "Where a Vlakh or an
Albanian camps in a village district, there another who comes after him
shall not camp; if he camps there by force, he shall pay the fighting-fine
(100 hyperpyres, that is fifty gold ducats) besides the value of what he
has grazed off". '" Even the Ragusans in Dalmatia, although they were
entirely dependent for their trade with the interior on the Vlakh caravans,
complained bitterly of the mischief they did when they wintered in
Ragusan territories, and finally forbade them to winter there.
All the more must the Avar nomads have oppressed the subjugated
Slav peasantry, for here the Avar was master, and the peasant was without
rights and protection. The Avar tribes as wandering herdsmen amongst
1 Roumanian herdsman life described by Ponqueville, Voyage, 11. pp. 208 ff. , 2nd
ed- pp. 382 ff. Jirecek, Das Furxtentum Bu/garien, pp. 181 ff. —The almost universal
bareness of the soil on the chalk mountains is much more due to the wandering
herdsmen than to the Venetian demand for timber for shipbuilding.
## p. 442 (#474) ############################################
442 Avars with the Slavs
the West Slavs could not graze their herds in connected winter-quarters
as in the steppes, because the snow lies deeper and longer in central
Europe. Neither had they there, as in Dalmatia, mild coasts rich in
salt and free from snow—the best imaginable winter-pasture—and so
they had to break up and live scattered in the Slav villages where the
peasantry had to store up grain and hay for them during the summer
and convert even the villages into suitable cattle-pens. This is pointed
to by the very small Slavonic round villages with one single exit, which
are common in Bohemia and as far as the Baltic, and which still preserve
the character of closable cattle-pens1.
Compared with the Slavs, the Avar oppressors were very few in
number, and could not therefore always master them. Now and then
these became restive, and refused obedience. The Khagan, occupied in
many distant places, did not always find leisure to chastise them, and
thus many Slav tribes gained their liberty.
There were, however, differences among the Avars themselves, who
were only held together by the iron hand of the Khagan. They were
but a mixed multitude. Where there was a prospect of rich booty they
followed him joyfully, but where no treasure allured them—e. g. in 602
against the poor but warlike Antae—they simply refused obedience and
deserted to the Romans. According to " Mauricius" such desertion was
a common event, and it helps to explain why the Khagan did not repeat
his victorious marches against the Frankish kingdom till the year 596a.
Avar hordes were indeed very loosely held together, and some fell
away and established small States on the old basis of Slav servitude.
The dissolution began as early as 608 in consequence of the successful
revolution of a part of the north-west Slavs and the formation of a Slav
union under Samo. By this the Avar hordes distributed among the
Elbe Slavs between Bohemia and the Baltic were permanently cut off
from the main horde in Hungary.
After the dissolution of the great Avar State the Avars and the
Bulgars themselves remained as a noble class, which finally became
Slavised and nationally absorbed in the subjected peasantry. In
Dalmatia as late as the tenth century the Avars were still sharply dis-
tinguished from the Croats. The mare-milking grand-prince north of
the Carpathians in the ninth century may indeed already have become
Slav, but by origin he must have been Avar. Strange was the fate of a
Bulgar horde which later than 641 fled to Dagobert. The Bavarians
1 Illustrated by Meitzen, Siedlung, i. p. 52, n. pp. 259, 362, 450-6, 485, Atlas 87
and explanatory map.
2 This irruption of the Avars into Thuringia in 596 was due to outside pressure, for
since 593 the Avar Slavs in what is now Roumania had been hard pressed by the
Romans, and even the Avars' own territory in the Hungarian steppe was threatened.
Something very pressing in the north-west of the Avar State must have therefore
occurred to compel the Khagan to abandon the south-east and to leave the Slavs
there to themselves.
>
## p. 443 (#475) ############################################
Dissolution of the Avar Empire. The Zupans 443
massacred them and only seven hundred escaped with their families
under Alciocus into the Marca Winidorum (Carantania), where they
lived many years with the Slav prince Walluc. This Alciocus must be
identical with the Alzeco who with his entire army—evidently stragglers
from Hungary—came peaceably to Italy and received from the Lombard
king Grimoald (662-672) extensive waste territory in the Abruzzi
mountains north-east of Naples. Although these Bulgars learnt vulgar
Latin, at the time of Paulus Diaconus they still retained their mother
tongue intact. This is natural, for only when they wintered in Apulia
did they find it necessary to use the vulgar Latin of the peasants, while
in the summer-pastures on the mountains they were by themselves. It
is therefore quite conceivable that their descendants did not forget their
original language till much later.
The organisation of the South and West Slavs in the centuries that
followed is also Avar and Bulgarian. A number of titles of rank of the
Altaians, Bulgars, Avars, Chazars and other West and East Turks (in
Chinese Turkestan), Utigurs and Mongols, have survived, and many of
these were borrowed early from Iranians and particularly Persians.
Many of these titles, some peculiar to the Altaians, some borrowed by
them from Iranians, are to be found among the Slavs. At the head of
an Altaian empire was the Khagan (East Turks, Avars, Chazars, etc. )
or Khan (Bulgars, Cumans, etc. ), and as successors of the Chazar Khagans
as conquerors of the Russian Slavs, the first princes of the Scandinavian
Varangians-Russ bore the title Kogan (in Arabian sources khaqan Ros).
The Turkish title boyla (Magnate) is found in Bulgar-Slavic and
Russian (bolyarin). The common Slav word for " Sir," gospodar, came
from Altaic, where it is a Persian loan-word—Middle Persian gospand-
dar, "owner of sheep"—the Altaian masters of the Slavs were indeed
shepherds; hence the change in the significance of the word. Of the
remaining titles which have come from Altaian into Slav the most
important are hipan (pronounced zhoopan) and pan (the latter coming
from gUpanU). Both are to be found in the forms tywirav and Koiravos
in inscriptions on monuments which the Bulgar khan Omurtag (814-831)
had erected to his deceased high officials who bore these titles. Both
are obviously Persian loan-words in Altaian, although the original
Persian words cannot be restored. The second (Jcopan) occurs among
the Patzinaks (xottov) also, but zupan was common to several Altaian
peoples in various pronunciations. An important historic criterion is
offered by the fact that certain titles of rank are pronounced yabgu,
yugur (Avar), yopan (Avar) in Eastern Turkish, but in western
dialects jabgu, %ovpyov (Bulg. ), frvrrdv (Bulg. ). Among the Slavs whom
the Avar khagan Baian had settled on the west front of his Empire, we
find on the Elbe and Saale, and then in the Alps and on the Adriatic,
zupans; but in the centre on the Danube in the district of Linz, a
iopan (pronounced yopan) Physso is mentioned in the year 777. This
## p. 444 (#476) ############################################
444 Zupans and Zupa
means that Baian placed the right wing of his west front against the
Saxons and Franks, and the left wing against the Lombards, under
Bulgarian zupans, but the centre against the Bavarians, under Avar
yopans. How important it was for Baian to settle his western front
against the Germans with warlike elements can be seen from the appear-
ance of a second warrior class, that of the Germanic vikings, among the
Sorbs on the Saale {vicazi), and among the Serbo-Croatians in Illyria
(vitezi). But it is also possible that before the invasion of the Avars
this Slav folk dominated by vikings had been subjected by a Bulgarian
horde, who set themselves over them as zupans, somewhere in their
home in Transcarpathia, and were then dismembered by Baian, and
transplanted together with his zupans and vikings to distant regions.
Before the time of Bulgars and Avars there were still no zupans
among the Slavs with whom the Byzantines came into contact, but
Germanic rlkses, and not till the year 952 is there a statement by Con-
stantine Porphyrogenitus, "These peoples, Croats, Serbs, have no princes
(op^oj/Ta? ) but zupans as a kind of elders (fovn-avot/? yipovra^) just as
the other Slav lands have. 11 In 965 Ibrahim ibn Ia'qub says exactly the
same of the "Awbaba11 [of Wollin] dwelling on the Baltic at the other
end of the Slav world, though he does not actually use the word hipan.
Among the Alpine Slavs (Slovenes) neighbouring on the Croats in
South Styria we also meet with a very numerous zupan class in
the fifteenth century under which the common peasantry were
placed. Among the Servians the "zoupanoi gerontes" mentioned by
Constantine were the princes of the individual clans, and one of them
made himself grand-zupan (archon, archezoupanos, megas zoupanos,
magnus comes) of the whole people. Similarly, the independent princes of
the Elbe Slavs (not yet subjugated by the Germans) were named by the
chroniclers duces, principes, sehiores, promiscuously; Ibrahim calls them
the elders. After the German subjugation the seniores = eldesten = supani
of the Elbe Slavs, namely the Sorbs in the modern kingdom of Saxony,
were still the highest class of the Slav population, having their posses-
sions in fief, being under feudal law, dispensing justice, and only pledged
to serve their lord in war on horseback; thus they came nearer to the
German nobility than to the other Slav peasantry. In Mecklenburg,
the land of the Obodritzi, the feudal village magistrates—the former
zupans—were expressly reckoned among the vassals of the country.
It cannot therefore be doubted that the zupans of the Elbe Slavs
also were principes, dornini, landlords before their subjugation.
With zupan is connected zupa (Slav, zupa, Lat. suppa), that is the
district under a zupan, which among the Serbs was a principality, but
among the Slovenes of Lower Styria at the time of the German dominion
zupa denoted only a village district. Here the zupans finally dwindled
to village-chiefs, and then the word signified their office, officium suppae
or the zupan estate. The great Servian tribal-ifwpa and the little
## p. 445 (#477) ############################################
The Zupa. The Alpine Slavs (Slovenes) 445
Slovenish xillage-zupa formed in a certain sense an economic whole, in that
all dwellers in the zupa-district possessed right of pasture; consequently
the zupa was here an undivided grazing-district throughout which
the agricultural rotation proceeded as long as there were no permanent
fields, and as long as the cornfields opened by clearing or the burning of
a piece of forest and again abandoned after their exhaustion became
derelict and once more forest-land. In consequence of this general right
of use by the inhabitants the word zupa in Servia became personified,
and signified also the whole of the inhabitants entitled to the right of
pasture—and formally of clearing too—the compastores, conterranei, so
to speak. So long as the Avars were lords in the land, and so long as
they remained wandering herdsmen, the requirements of their pasturing
and their tyranny were decisive; the enslaved Slav peasantry could place
their fields only where it suited their masters, and there could be no idea
of a peasant right of clearing. In the Balkan peninsula the nomad
shepherds wintered with their herds on sunny snowless sea shores, and
for this reason in Dalmatia the word zupa denotes a sunny land where
snow does not fall or where it melts rapidly. Some such districts—
standing winter-quarters of the nomads—finally retained the word as
their name. Among the Carinthian, Bohemian, and Polish Slavs we
find no such zupans and no such zupan, for here peasant dynasties
arose through peasant revolutions and the zupans had to give way.
But the name itself remained, or was borrowed anew from neighbouring
Slavs, and htpan in Bohemia signified a high state official, and zupa on
the one hand is beneficium, and on the other the office connected
with it. The members of the highest Bohemian and Polish nobility
had the title pan (originally gupari). This word has no connexion
with zupan, but arose from a title kopan attested by a Bulgarian
inscription as before mentioned.
The Avars and Bulgars naturally tolerated no other dominus among
the directly dominated Slavs, they were themselves the zupans, and as
zupans remained as domini after the break-up of the Avar Empire,
and indeed among the Sorbs and Alpine Slavs, and here and there
were very numerous, so that they are to be considered as the Avar and
Bulgar dominating class Slavised by the lapse of time, and no longer
nationally different from the subject people.
From the conglomeration of Slavs planted by the Avars in the
Eastern Alps was formed the people of the Slovenes (Carantani). They
extended from the Adriatic Sea to the Danube, and from East Tyrol
deep into Hungary. As they had the Avar main horde at hand on the
Danube and the Theiss, they were most deeply enslaved. Alter the/
destruction of the Avar kingdom by Charles the Great their social)
organisation appears greatly changed. In Lower Styria south of Cilli
as late as the fifteenth century they were under an uncommonly numerous
hereditary zupan class, and even in the smallest hamlet there were one,
## p. 446 (#478) ############################################
446 Social History of the Slovenes
two, three, or four zupans. On the other hand, south of this in some
districts of Carniola and north of the Drave in Lower Styria (in the
dominium of Arnfels) there was no such zupan class at all. There (in
Carniola) the village-presidents (also called zupans) were chosen, but
only village-magistrates—likewise called zupans—appointed for a fixed
period of time, by the village peasantry, here (in the Arnfels dominium)
they were nominated for a certain time by the landlord. In what is
now Eastern Carinthia too there was no zupan class; the land was
ruled by a peasant duke.
In the various doomsday books (Urbar) we find all the villages
belonging to the landlord concerned with a definite statement of
the number of the peasant estates, and the enrolled zupans with all
the dues and services.
their Germanic conquerors were the Bastarnae who, coming from the
lower Oder, were in the third century B. C. already in occupation of the
Slav lands north of the Carpathians as far as the mouth of the Danube.
According to Polybius and Dio Cassius they were a numerous, daring,
bibulous people of powerful stature and terrifying appearance who knew
neither agriculture nor navigation, and disdained cattle-rearing because
they cared only for warlike pursuits. On their expeditions their wives
and children followed the army in wagons, and their horsemen fought
with foot-soldiers among them. They fell into various clans and divisions
under little kings (reguli), one of whom stood at the head as leader of
the war-band. But a numerous people without agriculture and cattle-
rearing cannot live only on plunder and cannot live alone in a land;
it needs another more numerous people of serfs, among whom it settles
as a dominating class. But north of the Carpathians such a people
could only be the Slavs. Thus arose the oldest known Slavo-Germanic
State. The second Germanic people from whose influence the Slavs
could not escape was the ferocious Heruli situated by the Black Sea
east of the Goths and the Don, for the same weapons and the same
burial customs are found among them as among the Slavs. The third
people were the Goths.
According to the oldest Gothic tradition (given by Jordanes) King
Ermanarich (died 373) overcame the Slavs (Veneti) "who, notwith-
standing that they were despised as warriors, nevertheless being strong
in numbers attempted at first a stout resistance. 11 His great-nephew
## p. 431 (#463) ############################################
Slavs in German Slavery 431
Vinithar attacked the South-Russian Slavs, the Antae, and after one
reverse overcame first them and then the Huns, who had come to their
help, in two battles, but fell in the third. It is certainly strange that
a tribe of the Slavs, who were despised as warriors not only by the
Germans but also by the Byzantines, could defeat even in one battle
a German leader before whom the Huns themselves recoiled. Still, it
is a fact that the Antae were successful warriors, and later in the sixth
century possessed the whole region from the Dniester to the Don, which
was formerly held by the Goths. It is astonishing that the Byzantine
sources of the sixth century distinguish the Antae from all the
remaining Slavs, but at the same time emphasise the fact that they
spoke the same language. And the name"Avrat is not Slavonic. The
military superiority of the Antae is, as Kunik has shewn, to be traced
back to a non-Slavonic conquering folk, the Antae, who overcame certain
Slav stocks and ruled them long and powerfully as a superior warlike
class1. This folk then became Slavised, and, as was the case with many
such despotisms both German and nomadic, it too fell apart into small
States, which however still negotiated common concerns in general
meetings, and proceeded as one body in external affairs. We hear the
same of the Bastarnae. In the tenth and eleventh centuries we find in
the former abodes of the Antae of the Pontus steppe the Slavonic
Tiwertzi and Ulichi whose names are equally non-Slavonic. How
could they have maintained themselves against the nomads here where
they were daily exposed to the inroads of all the Asiatic hordes, if they
were pure Slavs without a Germanic or Altaian warrior-stratum?
Still less could the Slavs resist the pressure of foreign conquerors
after the Scandinavian Vikings had renewed their attacks. Leaving
their families behind them, these appeared at first in small bands of
one to two hundred men as well-organised followers (vaeringjar) of a
sea-king, and always returned home after selling their plunder. At
important points on their route they established trading stations, and
in the course of time these became fortified settlements surrounded by
a subjected Finnish, Baltic, or Slavonic population. Hence a regulated
government was developed, no longer exclusively resting on plunder.
From the word vaeringjar came the name of a people Varangians,
Bdpayyot. The Varangians gradually extended their sway over the whole
of Russia—over Kiev about the year 855—covered it with originally
independent towns (gurSdr)1, and finally formed these little States into
a single empire of the Ros* (Russians). In brief, trading Scandinavian
1 On the other hand, cf. HruiSevgkyj, i. pp. 175 ff. , 577 ff.
2 Hence Russia was called by the Scandinavians Gartariki, i. e. the kingdom of
many forts.
8 This name too is Swedish, for which Esthonian has Rats. In Old Swedish
Rof>er, Ko|>in is the name of a strip of coast in Sweden. Ro)>smenn = rower,
seafarer, and this word, like Varangians, became the name of a people.
## p. 432 (#464) ############################################
432 Slavs in Mounted-nomad Slavery
sea-robbers got possession of the Russian network of waterways, over-
came the Finns and Slavs, and the Scandinavian dynasty of the house
of Rurik (= Old Norse: Hroerekr) created the powerful Russian State.
As in the North Germano-Slavic, so in the South Nomado-Slavic
States were formed. A nomadic milk-feeding horde dominated a
Slavic vegetarian peasant class. A similar state of affairs lasted till
yesterday in Ferghana, the former Khanate of Khokand, where the
vegetarian Tadjiks languished from the earliest times in the basest
nomadic servitude. The same thing can be also traced back far into
ancient times in East Europe on the western border of the steppe
zone. So we find it as early as Ephorus (fourth century B. C. ).
A horde of Sarmatae, the Iazygians, migrated into Central Hungary
where (c. a. d. 337) the serfs of the Sarmatae, the Sarmatae Limigantes,
revolted against their lords, the Sarmatae Arcaragantes or Sarmatae
Liberi, and repulsed them1. Here we have a similar double stratum to
that which Ephorus mentions, and because the Tabula Peutingeriana
(about the third century a. d. ) mentions the Venedi Sarmatae and
the Lupiones Sarmatae next to the pure nomadic wagon-inhabiting
Sarmatae Hamaxobii, Sarmatae Vagi, many assume that these serfs of
the Sarmatae, the Limigantes, were Slavs'. The oldest explicit informa-
tion concerning a Nomado-Slavic State on the lower Danube is to be
found in Pseudo-Caesarius of Nazianzus of the sixth—probably even the
fourth—century a. d. , viz. that of the galactophagous Phisonitae or
Danubians (Phison according to Marquart is equivalent to Dunn/Am)
and the vegetarian Slavs*.
The best account we have is of the similar Avaro-Slavk State. The
dominating Avar nomad class was absorbed as a nation and language
by the subjugated Slavs, but even after the destruction of the Avar
Empire it survived socially with Slav names, as is shewn by the remark-
able passage in the Arabian geographer of the ninth century: "The
seat of their prince lies in the middle of the Slav land. . . . This prince
possesses mares, whose milk. . . is his only food'. '" As mare-milkers he
and the dominating class were mounted nomads and, as the date proves,
of Avar origin. This information alone destroys our former conceptions
of the character of the Slav States north of the middle Danube and the
Carpathians, and compels us to assume that nomadic States extended far
into the territory of the Baits and even as far as the Baltic. The sea-
farer Wulfstan at the end of the ninth century says of the Eastland
(Prussia, east of the mouth of the Vistula): "Their king and the richest
men drink mares' milk but the poor and the slaves drink mead8. '"
1 Mullenhoff, n. p. 377. s Niederk, n. pp. 127 ff.
3 Mullenhoff, u. p. 367. Peisker, Beziehungen, 125 [311].
4 Harkavy, p. 266. Marquart, p. 468; Tumanskii, p. 136, where the passage
runs: The food of their princes is milk.
6 Alfred the Great, by T. Bosworth, p. 22. Adam of Bremen (§ 138) says that
## p. 433 (#465) ############################################
The Robber-peoples around 433
Naturally the activity of the nomads was not uniform over this
immense region; it was greater at their base, the steppe, among the
South Russian Slavs, of whom in 952 the Emperor Constantine Porphy-
rogenitus says that they reared no horses, oxen or sheep—and consequently
must have been vegetarians—although at that time they had already
been for a century under the powerful sway of Scandinavian Ros.
Thus we see how Slavdom was influenced on all sides by plundering
peoples. All so-called Slav States of which we have sufficient informa-
tion turn out to be either Germanic or Altaian foundations. And unless we
do violence to all German,Byzantine,and Oriental evidence of the political
and military incapacity of the Slavs, we must not represent the remaining
Slav States as of Slav origin merely because there is no express statement
of their Germanic or Altaian origin. The strongest proof of this is the
remarkable fact that all titles of rank in Slavic (except voyevoda, duke)
are partly from Germanic, partly from Altaian sources.
Between Germanic and Altaic oppressors the Slavs were crushed for /
centuries; and yet they became the most numerous people of Europe
because of the enormous size of their territory and because their tyrants
were neither numerous nor united. The robbers could not follow the in-
dividual Slavs into the forest thickets and the marshes, so that from them
thewastes left by massacre were peopled anew. Besides this, the impetuosity
of the two robber-peoples periodically languished. We know this of the
Vikings from their activity in Europe. England, France, Spain, Italy
suffered terribly from them, but for long intervals they were quiet, and
after a single defeat the enemy often did not return for a long time.
Their might was also broken from time to time in their own land, and
then the afflicted peoples enjoyed a healing respite. This was less the
case with Russia, where a few dozen robbers won decisive victories
and where the Northmen only had no serious opponents but their like.
It was the same with the mounted nomad. His first appearance
was terrible beyond description; but his fury exhausted itself on the
numerous battle-fields, and when his ranks were thinned he had to call
out his Slav serfs to fight on his behalf. Thus he led masses of Slavs into
the steppe where they revived and increased until once again a new and
vigorous wild horde forced its way in from Asia and repeated the
destruction.
The primitive German was as savage in war as the mounted nomad,
but far superior in character and capacity for civilisation. The German
with one leap into civilisation so to speak from a plunderer becomes a
founder of brilliant and well-ordered States, bringing to high perfection
the intellectual goods which he has borrowed. On the other hand the
the ancient Prussians ate horse-flesh, and drank the milk of their mares (kumiz) to
intoxication. Helmold (twelfth century) (Chronica Slavorum, i. i. ) gives similar
information.
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XIV. 28
## p. 434 (#466) ############################################
434 German and Altaian Slavery
lightest breath of civilisation absolutely ruins the mounted nomad. This
enormous contrast shewed itself also in the kind of slavery. The mounted
nomad treated the subjugated peoples like the beasts of the forest which
are hunted and harried for amusement and mere delight in killing.
Himself void of all capacity for civilisation, he stifles all germs of civi-
lisation found among his subjects, outraging their sense of justice by his
lawlessness and licence, and the race itself by the violation of their
women. The German on the other hand treated his serf as a useful
domestic animal which is destroyed only in anger and never wantonly.
He enjoyed a certain autonomy, remaining unmolested after the per-
formance of definite duties. Even the Scandinavian pirates, according
to the Arabian geographer, handled their serfs "well" (from an Oriental
point of view)1. It is then no wonder that the Slavs, incapable of
resisting the terrible plundering raids and powerless to give themselves
political organisation, preferred to submit voluntarily to the dominion
of the pirates.
Concerning this the oldest Russian chronicler Pseudo-Nestor states
(under the year 859): "[The Slavs] drove the Varangians over the sea,
and. . . began to govern themselves, and there was no justice among them,
and clan rose against clan, and there was internal strife between them
And they said to each other: Let us seek for a prince who can reign
over us and judge what is right. And they went over the sea to the
Varangians, to Russ, for so were these Varangians called. . . . [They] said
to Russ: Our land is large and rich, but there is no order in it; come
ye and rule and reign over us. And three brothers were with their
whole clan, and they took with them all the Russ, and they came at
first to the Sloviens and built the town of Ladoga, and the eldest
Rurik settled in Ladoga. . . . And the Russian land got its name from
these Varangians8. "
The misery of the Slavs was the salvation of the West. The energy
of the Altaians was exhausted in Eastern Europe, and Germany and
France behind the Slavic breakwater were able freely to develop their
civilisation. Had they possessed such steppes as Hungary or South
Russia, there is no reason to suppose that they would have fared any
better than the Slavs.
The compact Slav. settlement of the countries east of the Elbe and
south of the Danube took place between the sixth and seventh centuries.
In their occupation of the German mother-countries between the Elbe
and the Vistula two phases are to be distinguished—one pre-Avar and the
1 This assertion is correct, for (according to the oldest law-book—Russkaya
Pravda) the Slav peasants (smerdi) under the dominion of the Ros actually were per-
sonally free.
2 Thomsen, pp. 13 ff. These Germanic Russ are to be distinguished from the
modern Slavonic Russians.
## p. 435 (#467) ############################################
Expansion of the Slavs in Old Germania 435
other with the force of the Avars behind it. In the first the Slavs
reached and perhaps crossed the Riesengebirge, and perhaps already got
as far as the middle and lower Oder. In the records of the Germans no
trace of it is found, because from the beginning of the fifth, and indeed
for the greater part from the end of the third century a. d. , the country
westward to the Oder and southward to the Riesengebirge was abandoned
by its old German inhabitants. The oldest evidence of this is the name
Silesia, from the mountain Sle^z1 (Zobtenberg) and the river Sleza (little
Lohe). Styz (originally Silengti) leads letter for letter to SUing, Sleza to
SUingia, consequently to the German XtKvyyai, who according to Ptolemy
lived just here. The Slavs must have found Silingians still there and have
taken this name from them either before or soon after 406, when they
crossed the Rhine and made their way with the Vandals and Sueves to
Spain. It must be admitted that the Slavs found everywhere scattered
remnants of the Germans, because they merely adapted the German
names Oder, Elbe (Albi), Moldau (Walth ahva), etc. to their own mouths
(Odra, Labe, Vltuva). For certain times and in certain districts there
was a mixed population, and it is to be particularly noticed that even in
the sixth century the Germans, who had long withdrawn to the South',
did not admit that the East as far as the Vistula had definitely passed
to the Slavs. It had not been conquered from them—only occupied by
loose bands of settlers.
From the third to the fifth century the hurricanes of war stirred up
by the Goths and the Huns between the Carpathians, the Pontus, and the
Danube raged over and around the Slavs. We hear not a word of their
share in the fight. Not before the seventh decade of the sixth century
did the advance of the Avars to the Elbe disclose the great change which
had silently come to pass.
The Avars, like the Huns, must have needed an enormous number of
dependent Slavs. The territory by the Pontus left vacant by the with-
drawal of the Goths, Heruli, etc. was occupied by Slavs, naturally as serfs
to the Huns. The subjugation of the Germans was disastrous to the
Huns; they threw off the yoke after Attila's death, and the Hunnish
Empire perished, Hungary became German and the Huns withdrew into
the Pontus steppe. This steppe was directly afterwards in the hands of
Bulgar hordes who controlled numerous Slav tribes. Here between the
Dniester and Dnieper in the first half of the sixth century lived the
Antae, " the bravest of the Slavs," who constantly joined in the Bulgar
plundering raids in the East Roman Empire. In 558 Justinian was
successful in instigating against them both the Avars who had suddenly
emerged from the Asiatic background. The Avars demanded territory
of Justinian but refused the offer of Lower Pannonia—which they would
have had to wrest from the fierce Heruli and Lombards—and remained
in the Dobrudja, contenting themselves with a yearly tribute for their
ch. xiv. 28—2
## p. 436 (#468) ############################################
436 Expansion of the Avars
defeat of the Bulgars and Antae. But when Justinian's successor dis-
continued the tribute, the Dobrudja was no longer of any value to them.
They then turned towards the north-west and suddenly appeared in the
Eastern territories of the Frankish kingdom on the Elbe. They could
not make their way thither through Hungary as it was occupied by the
powerful Gepidae, and thus they had to go through North-Carpathian
Slavland and through Bohemia. They must therefore first have subdued
these lands. Their base of operations against the Franks in Thuringia is
to be sought in Bohemia, where they found excellent summer-pastures in
the mountain ring and good winter-quarters in the plains for their herds.
It would be misunderstanding the entire nature of the mounted nomads,
and of the Avars in particular, to regard these wars with Sigebert
the king of the Franks as mere plundering expeditions. In the latter the
nomads never confronted the enemy, but went round his positions with
marvellous speed, and then charged behind his back. They confronted
him or sought him out only when they had to defend their own land.
In the first campaign they were defeated, but they won the second,
and the consequence was that the North Sueves evacuated the oldest
German land between the Elbe and the Oder. Nevertheless, Baian, the
Avar Khagan, made peace with Sigebert, as he was attracted elsewhere:
the Lombard king Alboin in Pannonia was preparing to wrest Italy
from the East Romans, and in order to protect his rear he united
himself with Baian against the Gepidae in Hungary and Transylvania.
The kingdom of the Gepidae was destroyed, the Lombards made
their way to Italy, and in 568 the Avars were complete masters of
Hungary with its steppe on the Danube and Theiss so excellent for
nomads.
The evacuation of Old Germany by the North Sueves, the destruction of
the kingdom of the Gepidae, and the withdrawal of the Lombards to Italy
—three co-related events—mark an epoch in the history of the world,
for the entire East was abandoned by the Germans to the Avars and their
followers the Slavs1. Once more the map of Europe was suddenly
changed, and from the steppes of Hungary the Avars became the terror
of all their neighbours. But they did not give up the territories won
from the Germans between the Oder and the Elbe, Saale, Main, Regnitz,
Nab, for—as we shall see—a horde of the Avars wintered yearly on the
Main and Regnitz till about the year 603, and the Khagan resettled the
waste German land as far as the Baltic with Slavs brought there from
the first, North-Carpathian, Avar kingdom.
The existence of this first Avar-Slavonic kingdom is proved by the
account which the Arabian geographer of the second quarter of the ninth
century (before the conquest of Hungary by the Magyars) gives of the
mare-milking and therefore Altaic Great King, whose realm lay in the
territory of the Slavonic Dvlyebs or Volynyans south-west of Polesie,
1 Mullenhoff, n. pp. 101 ff. Authorities in Zeuss, Die Deutschen, pp. 731 f.
## p. 437 (#469) ############################################
Transplantation of Slavs in Old Germania 437
the very people who according to Pseudo-Nestor had been formerly kept
in servitude by the Avars. Bordering on the steppes as they did, they
were from the earliest times a prey to the inhabitants of the steppes.
Before the Avars various nomadic and Germanic peoples were their
masters; and these peoples left behind warlike elements which were
sharply distinguished—even after becoming Slavised—from the subjected
Slav mass. The king was called in Slavic knez (from k&n$g&), Germanic
kuninga. Further among the Sorb-Serbs the class of the vicazi-vitezi
"knights" (from vit$g&), that is, German vikings; and the numerous
Polish nobility has the German title szlachta.
Out of this Germano-Altaio-Slavonic mixture of the Dulyebi-
Volynyane and other Slavonic peoples north of the Carpathians, Baian
created for himself an almost inexhaustible reservoir of men whom he
formed into barriers against the Germans1 on his western frontiers.
He transplanted a part of the Dulyebi-Volynyane to Pannonia (where
later was the Comitatus Dudleipa), another to South Bohemia (the later
countries of Doudleby and Volyn), a third to the distant north (the island
of Wollin) at the mouth of the Oder. Similarly he tore apart the
North-Carpathian Croats (Khr'vati) of the upper Vistula and placed them
partly in the Elbe and Saale, where several villages bear their name,
partly in Carantania (pagus Crauuti), partly to Pannonia and Dalmatia,
where later independent Croatian States arose; the North-Carpathian
Serbs (Serbi) partly on the Saale and the Elbe (later the mighty Sorbs),
partly where to-day they are independent in Servia and Montenegro.
The Slav nations of to-day are therefore not original but a gradual
crystallisation since the sixth century into linguistic units out of the
peoples transplanted by the Avars—a process already completed by the
tenth century2.
1 Transplanting of entire nations was customary with the nomads. Thus the
Scythians transplanted many peoples, among them "Assyrians" to the Pontus in
Asia Minor, and "Medes" to the Don. In a similar way the Avars transplanted
Macedonian Slavs to Pannonia, and the Bulgars, after the destruction of the Avar
kingdom by Charles the Great, populated North and South Hungary with Slavs
whom they had captured by regular man-hunts in Macedonia. The Mongols too took
large numbers of Russians, etc. to Hungary, which they had half depopulated, and
these too they destroyed before their own withdrawal thence.
* No traces of an earlier intermixture are to be observed in the individual Slav
languages. Even in the tenth century the Nortabtrezi of Mecklenburg spoke a
different dialect from the Osterabtrezi of South Hungary, and the Sorbs on the Saale
and Elbe from the Serbs on the Drina. The Nortabtrezi belong with the Sorbs to the
Elbe-Slavonic, the Osterabtrezi with the Serbs to the South-Slavonic language-group,
and all the Slavonic languages form one unbroken chain of languages connected by
transitionary dialects. Hence many Slavists declare that the duplication of these
folk-names is accidental, and that the Slavs in their original home were divided
into the same peoples as at present, who spread unmixed in all directions. But in
our time it is recognised how quickly fragments of a people adopt the language of
their environment, and the historical arguments against a radiating expansion of
the Slavs are admitted by other Slavists.
CH. XIV.
## p. 438 (#470) ############################################
438 Limits of the Avar power
Baian's purpose was probably that of settling the most warlike
branches, viz. those dominated by Germans, in the strategically most
important places. Thus we see why, for example, the Sorb-Serbs who
were controlled by vikings were split up.
The limits of the Avar power are marked by the abode of the Obo-
dritzi in Mecklenburg, the Volynyans at the mouth of the Oder, the
Dregovichi in Polesie and in Macedonia, the Milengi in Morea, the
Severyans east of the Dnieper and in Moesia, the Serbs and Croats on
the Adriatic and on the Saale. Thus the Avar power at one time or
another extended from the Baltic to the southern extremity of Greece,
from East Tyrol to the river Donetz in Russia, doubtless with very
unequal intensity and unequal duration. Only one will, that of the
Khagan, could carry through so vast a change—the transplanting of one
and the same people partly to the Baltic, partly to the Adriatic, Ionic,
and Aegean Seas.
The Khagan could not leave his Slavs without supervision, and
therefore he had to maintain among them a standing Avar garrison
with wives and children. But the Avars were a nomad people who
only camped among the Slavonic peasantry in winter—more than half
the year—and during the summer grazed the higher positions and heaths,
of course leaving behind a guard over the Slavs, while their army went
to battle and plunder1.
The Slavised Avar nomads long survived the Avar Empire in many
Slav lands, and even in the twelfth century we are told by Herbord of
the Baltic Slavs of the Island of Rtigen (Slav. Ruiana): "The men's
occupation is either hunting or fishing or cattle rearing. For therein
consists their entire wealth as husbandry is only scanty there. " Here
the nomads had to do without mountain summer-pastures.
Concerning the relation of the Avars to the Slavs," Fredegar" states
that from the earliest times the Wends [here in particular are meant the
Slavs of the upper Main and its tributary the Regnitz north and east
of Nuremberg] were used by the Huns [Avars] as befulci, that is, when
the Huns took the field against any people the Wends had to fight in
1 Theophylactus, vi. 2, states (a. d. 591): Three captives were brought before the
Emperor Maurice having neither swords nor any other weapon, but only citharas
with them. Being questioned they answered that they were Slavs from the coast of
the northern ocean [Baltic Sea], whither the Khagan sent envoys with presents to
ask for auxiliaries. They brought back as answer to the Khagan that he could
expect no help from such a distance—they themselves had been fifteen months ou
the journey—and their people were absolutely peaceable. They played on the
zither because they were unacquainted with weapons, their land produced no iron and
therefore they lived there still and peacefully, and as the war trumpet was not
understood there they played on the zither. These were obviously spies, but the
fiction of their entire harmlessness could only deceive the Emperor when the story
of the Khagan's embassy to the Baltic Slavs appeared natural. The whole mysti-
fication produced the widespread story of the dove-like nature of the Slavs.
## p. 439 (#471) ############################################
The Slavs placed on the German Border 439
front. If they won the Huns advanced to make booty; but if they were
defeated they rallied with the support of the Huns. Without these
befitlci the Avars, who were speedy on their marvellously trained horses
but helpless and defenceless on foot, could have done little against trained
infantry. They therefore had to call out countless, because wretchedly
armed, masses of Slav foot-soldiers who, with certain death at the hands
of their goaders behind them, charged forward in despair1. On the other
hand the Avar cavalry formed an incomparable mail-armed force with
sword, bow and pickaxe, and even the horses of the leaders were protected
by armour. However the Avars were not in themselves numerous enough
to supply the necessary reserves for their enormous empire, and with the
expansion of their dominion the need for new masses of cavalry grew.
This need was supplied by constant reinforcements from other Altaian
hordes out of the steppe. Among them the most numerous were the
Bulgars. The Khagan's victorious flag, and the prospect of booty,
worked irresistibly upon the plundering sons of the steppe.
By the transplantation of Slav peoples to the western borders of his
robber-State the Khagan meant to keep in check his neighbours, the
Saxons on the lower Elbe, the Franks on the Saale, the Bavarians on
the Nab and upper Danube, the Lombards in Italy, while he himself,
with his rear protected, was free for plundering raids on the East Roman
Empire, in which he employed enormous masses of Slavs as befitlci. He
had no intention of conquering even a part of the Roman Empire and
settling it with Slavs, for this was not to his interest; he had land in
abundance and he needed the Slavs fer his own colonising purposes. He
therefore left them the East Roman to pay tribute, and his plundering
supplied him further. Nevertheless his procedure was uneconomical. The
greater number of the East Romans were partly exterminated and partly
carried into slavery. The vacuum thus created was permanently occupied
by the Slavs who finally spread almost over the entire Balkan peninsula
and even reached Asia Minor. Very exhaustive information about these
Avaro-Slavic plundering raids is given in the sources, but it is not
definitely known when the Slavs permanently settled there; certainly
the greater part not before 602.
In this previously Roman territory the dominating Avar and Bulgar
nomad class merged with the Slavonic peasantry into a national organism,
and powerful military States of Slav speech arose: but the real holders of
power were not the Slavs but the Slavised Altaians, and it is a delusion to
think that the Slavs themselves, the Croats, Serbs, (new-) Bulgars, Macedo-
Slavs became fit for war in the Avaro-Bulgar school. They remained a
peasant folk living—partly to this day—alongside of a nomad shepherd
1 The Mongols in Hungary in 1241 availed themselves of the same aid, driving
the captives before them into the fight and against the fortresses, cutting down
at once all who recoiled. They did not however put themselves willingly in
danger.
CH. XIV.
,-
## p. 440 (#472) ############################################
440 The Balkan Peninsula. The Roumanians
class. The domination of the nomads appears most clearly among
the Bulgarian Slavs who to-day are named after their nomadic masters
the Altaian Bulgars. After the destruction of the Avar kingdom by
Charles the Great, the Bulgarian kingdom extended from the Balkans to
the Moravian Carpathians. The Serbs and Croats also founded mighty
States. In the Middle Ages the Slavs of Dalmatia were dreaded pirates,
and even the tiny Slav peoples of Macedonia and Greece kept the Romans
occupied with many wars. But even at the beginning of the seventh
century the commercial town of Saloniki obtained grain from the Thes-
salian Slavs. Led by the Avars, the Slavs pressed into the Peloponnesus,
and the report was long believed that the Avars occupied the Pelo-
ponnesus for 218 years so that no Roman durst enter it1. According to
Constantine Porphyrogenitus the Croats of the tenth century could put
60,000 horsemen and 100,000 foot into the field. But as the Slavs were
a foot people, such a very strong cavalry must refer to the Avar and
Bulgar ruling class, which at that time stood out clearly from the
Slav peasantry in Dalmatia; and to this day the name of the Khagan
Baian denotes to the Croat the highest state official, the Ban, Banns (in
Constantine: ySoavos), just as the name of Charles the Great—Karl—
denotes to all Slavs Krai, the king. The Old Servian State also had
a strong body of cavalry, in connexion with which it must be noted that
numerous nomadic Roumanians with horses and sheep, but without
agriculture and ox-rearing, were, and still are, to be found in Servia and
the other Balkan countries.
The Roumanians, Slavonic Vlasi, Vlakhs, are Romanised Altaians,
probably Avars and Bulgars, for a still older nomad people could not
have survived the wild Bulgar-Avaro-Slavonic storms which raged for
a century over the Balkan peninsula. Like all mounted nomads the
Bulgars and Avars were intent on cattle robbery (baranta), and so the
indigenous wandering herdsmen specially suffered, for herds of sheep are
not quick-footed enough to be hidden in time from mounted robbers.
With the loss of his herds the wandering herdsman inevitably perishes as
he cannot acquire new herds, and the acquisition of single animals would
be of no use to him. The vegetarian peasant can better secure himself
since he does not depend on cattle but on the soil, which the robber
cannot destroy, and seed-grain is more easy to obtain than a herd of
cattle.
The nomadic Vlakhs lived along with the peasant peoples of the
Balkan peninsula and gradually adopted their language and became
denationalised for a second time. They further attained to their highest
prosperity as wandering herdsmen in Turkish times, after the fall of the
Slav States effaced the customs barriers with a tithe on the import and
export of sheep and horses; the herdsmen could thus graze summer and
1 For the literature v. Niederle, Staroiitnosti, n. p. 210.
## p. 441 (#473) ############################################
The Roumanians living with the Slavs 441
winter wherever was convenient for them. We know most about the Old
Servian State, where the Vlakhs constituted an important element and
a rich source of income for the sovereign and the other landlords. By
them the larger mountain pastures were made the most of and indeed
devastated and disforested by the reckless grazing-off of the new growth,
by the searing of the grass to freshen the pasturage, and by the peeling
of young beech-trees as a substitute for honey to sweeten milk foods1.
They provided the State with excellent horses, of small stature but
hardy, and good cavalry for the army. They managed also the com-
merce, for it had to be a caravan trade with pack-horses, because most
of the mountain ranges run parallel with the sea and were then impassable
for wagons. The Vlakhs themselves traded in wool, skins and the famous
Vlakhish cheese which had to have a definite weight for Ragusa, and even
served as a substitute for money. In return they chiefly brought sea-
salt. By this trading the Vlakhs acquired knowledge of the world, and
became far superior in experience and shrewdness to the boorish Slav
peasant. They grazed the mountain pastures (planina) to the height of
3000 ft. , from the end of April to the middle of September, and then
slowly made their way, often taking two months, to winter on the coasts
on account of the mild snowless climate and the salt which splendidly
nourishes the sheep. They lived chiefly on milk and cheese. Their
chief enemy was the ice when it locked up the grass in early spring.
Thousands of sheep then starved and the richest man might become a
beggar in a few days. As they had no fixed settlements, they could not
easily be enslaved by the landlords, and after payment of the grazing-tax
they enjoyed freedom of movement without restraint. They themselves
were a heavy burden for the peasantry, especially through their destruc-
tion of the cornfields. Thus peasants and herdsmen were in opposition,
there was no intermarriage between them, and the State had to regulate
the wandering people and to protect the peasants with draconic laws.
The Emperor Dushan's law-book of 1349 states: "Where a Vlakh or an
Albanian camps in a village district, there another who comes after him
shall not camp; if he camps there by force, he shall pay the fighting-fine
(100 hyperpyres, that is fifty gold ducats) besides the value of what he
has grazed off". '" Even the Ragusans in Dalmatia, although they were
entirely dependent for their trade with the interior on the Vlakh caravans,
complained bitterly of the mischief they did when they wintered in
Ragusan territories, and finally forbade them to winter there.
All the more must the Avar nomads have oppressed the subjugated
Slav peasantry, for here the Avar was master, and the peasant was without
rights and protection. The Avar tribes as wandering herdsmen amongst
1 Roumanian herdsman life described by Ponqueville, Voyage, 11. pp. 208 ff. , 2nd
ed- pp. 382 ff. Jirecek, Das Furxtentum Bu/garien, pp. 181 ff. —The almost universal
bareness of the soil on the chalk mountains is much more due to the wandering
herdsmen than to the Venetian demand for timber for shipbuilding.
## p. 442 (#474) ############################################
442 Avars with the Slavs
the West Slavs could not graze their herds in connected winter-quarters
as in the steppes, because the snow lies deeper and longer in central
Europe. Neither had they there, as in Dalmatia, mild coasts rich in
salt and free from snow—the best imaginable winter-pasture—and so
they had to break up and live scattered in the Slav villages where the
peasantry had to store up grain and hay for them during the summer
and convert even the villages into suitable cattle-pens. This is pointed
to by the very small Slavonic round villages with one single exit, which
are common in Bohemia and as far as the Baltic, and which still preserve
the character of closable cattle-pens1.
Compared with the Slavs, the Avar oppressors were very few in
number, and could not therefore always master them. Now and then
these became restive, and refused obedience. The Khagan, occupied in
many distant places, did not always find leisure to chastise them, and
thus many Slav tribes gained their liberty.
There were, however, differences among the Avars themselves, who
were only held together by the iron hand of the Khagan. They were
but a mixed multitude. Where there was a prospect of rich booty they
followed him joyfully, but where no treasure allured them—e. g. in 602
against the poor but warlike Antae—they simply refused obedience and
deserted to the Romans. According to " Mauricius" such desertion was
a common event, and it helps to explain why the Khagan did not repeat
his victorious marches against the Frankish kingdom till the year 596a.
Avar hordes were indeed very loosely held together, and some fell
away and established small States on the old basis of Slav servitude.
The dissolution began as early as 608 in consequence of the successful
revolution of a part of the north-west Slavs and the formation of a Slav
union under Samo. By this the Avar hordes distributed among the
Elbe Slavs between Bohemia and the Baltic were permanently cut off
from the main horde in Hungary.
After the dissolution of the great Avar State the Avars and the
Bulgars themselves remained as a noble class, which finally became
Slavised and nationally absorbed in the subjected peasantry. In
Dalmatia as late as the tenth century the Avars were still sharply dis-
tinguished from the Croats. The mare-milking grand-prince north of
the Carpathians in the ninth century may indeed already have become
Slav, but by origin he must have been Avar. Strange was the fate of a
Bulgar horde which later than 641 fled to Dagobert. The Bavarians
1 Illustrated by Meitzen, Siedlung, i. p. 52, n. pp. 259, 362, 450-6, 485, Atlas 87
and explanatory map.
2 This irruption of the Avars into Thuringia in 596 was due to outside pressure, for
since 593 the Avar Slavs in what is now Roumania had been hard pressed by the
Romans, and even the Avars' own territory in the Hungarian steppe was threatened.
Something very pressing in the north-west of the Avar State must have therefore
occurred to compel the Khagan to abandon the south-east and to leave the Slavs
there to themselves.
>
## p. 443 (#475) ############################################
Dissolution of the Avar Empire. The Zupans 443
massacred them and only seven hundred escaped with their families
under Alciocus into the Marca Winidorum (Carantania), where they
lived many years with the Slav prince Walluc. This Alciocus must be
identical with the Alzeco who with his entire army—evidently stragglers
from Hungary—came peaceably to Italy and received from the Lombard
king Grimoald (662-672) extensive waste territory in the Abruzzi
mountains north-east of Naples. Although these Bulgars learnt vulgar
Latin, at the time of Paulus Diaconus they still retained their mother
tongue intact. This is natural, for only when they wintered in Apulia
did they find it necessary to use the vulgar Latin of the peasants, while
in the summer-pastures on the mountains they were by themselves. It
is therefore quite conceivable that their descendants did not forget their
original language till much later.
The organisation of the South and West Slavs in the centuries that
followed is also Avar and Bulgarian. A number of titles of rank of the
Altaians, Bulgars, Avars, Chazars and other West and East Turks (in
Chinese Turkestan), Utigurs and Mongols, have survived, and many of
these were borrowed early from Iranians and particularly Persians.
Many of these titles, some peculiar to the Altaians, some borrowed by
them from Iranians, are to be found among the Slavs. At the head of
an Altaian empire was the Khagan (East Turks, Avars, Chazars, etc. )
or Khan (Bulgars, Cumans, etc. ), and as successors of the Chazar Khagans
as conquerors of the Russian Slavs, the first princes of the Scandinavian
Varangians-Russ bore the title Kogan (in Arabian sources khaqan Ros).
The Turkish title boyla (Magnate) is found in Bulgar-Slavic and
Russian (bolyarin). The common Slav word for " Sir," gospodar, came
from Altaic, where it is a Persian loan-word—Middle Persian gospand-
dar, "owner of sheep"—the Altaian masters of the Slavs were indeed
shepherds; hence the change in the significance of the word. Of the
remaining titles which have come from Altaian into Slav the most
important are hipan (pronounced zhoopan) and pan (the latter coming
from gUpanU). Both are to be found in the forms tywirav and Koiravos
in inscriptions on monuments which the Bulgar khan Omurtag (814-831)
had erected to his deceased high officials who bore these titles. Both
are obviously Persian loan-words in Altaian, although the original
Persian words cannot be restored. The second (Jcopan) occurs among
the Patzinaks (xottov) also, but zupan was common to several Altaian
peoples in various pronunciations. An important historic criterion is
offered by the fact that certain titles of rank are pronounced yabgu,
yugur (Avar), yopan (Avar) in Eastern Turkish, but in western
dialects jabgu, %ovpyov (Bulg. ), frvrrdv (Bulg. ). Among the Slavs whom
the Avar khagan Baian had settled on the west front of his Empire, we
find on the Elbe and Saale, and then in the Alps and on the Adriatic,
zupans; but in the centre on the Danube in the district of Linz, a
iopan (pronounced yopan) Physso is mentioned in the year 777. This
## p. 444 (#476) ############################################
444 Zupans and Zupa
means that Baian placed the right wing of his west front against the
Saxons and Franks, and the left wing against the Lombards, under
Bulgarian zupans, but the centre against the Bavarians, under Avar
yopans. How important it was for Baian to settle his western front
against the Germans with warlike elements can be seen from the appear-
ance of a second warrior class, that of the Germanic vikings, among the
Sorbs on the Saale {vicazi), and among the Serbo-Croatians in Illyria
(vitezi). But it is also possible that before the invasion of the Avars
this Slav folk dominated by vikings had been subjected by a Bulgarian
horde, who set themselves over them as zupans, somewhere in their
home in Transcarpathia, and were then dismembered by Baian, and
transplanted together with his zupans and vikings to distant regions.
Before the time of Bulgars and Avars there were still no zupans
among the Slavs with whom the Byzantines came into contact, but
Germanic rlkses, and not till the year 952 is there a statement by Con-
stantine Porphyrogenitus, "These peoples, Croats, Serbs, have no princes
(op^oj/Ta? ) but zupans as a kind of elders (fovn-avot/? yipovra^) just as
the other Slav lands have. 11 In 965 Ibrahim ibn Ia'qub says exactly the
same of the "Awbaba11 [of Wollin] dwelling on the Baltic at the other
end of the Slav world, though he does not actually use the word hipan.
Among the Alpine Slavs (Slovenes) neighbouring on the Croats in
South Styria we also meet with a very numerous zupan class in
the fifteenth century under which the common peasantry were
placed. Among the Servians the "zoupanoi gerontes" mentioned by
Constantine were the princes of the individual clans, and one of them
made himself grand-zupan (archon, archezoupanos, megas zoupanos,
magnus comes) of the whole people. Similarly, the independent princes of
the Elbe Slavs (not yet subjugated by the Germans) were named by the
chroniclers duces, principes, sehiores, promiscuously; Ibrahim calls them
the elders. After the German subjugation the seniores = eldesten = supani
of the Elbe Slavs, namely the Sorbs in the modern kingdom of Saxony,
were still the highest class of the Slav population, having their posses-
sions in fief, being under feudal law, dispensing justice, and only pledged
to serve their lord in war on horseback; thus they came nearer to the
German nobility than to the other Slav peasantry. In Mecklenburg,
the land of the Obodritzi, the feudal village magistrates—the former
zupans—were expressly reckoned among the vassals of the country.
It cannot therefore be doubted that the zupans of the Elbe Slavs
also were principes, dornini, landlords before their subjugation.
With zupan is connected zupa (Slav, zupa, Lat. suppa), that is the
district under a zupan, which among the Serbs was a principality, but
among the Slovenes of Lower Styria at the time of the German dominion
zupa denoted only a village district. Here the zupans finally dwindled
to village-chiefs, and then the word signified their office, officium suppae
or the zupan estate. The great Servian tribal-ifwpa and the little
## p. 445 (#477) ############################################
The Zupa. The Alpine Slavs (Slovenes) 445
Slovenish xillage-zupa formed in a certain sense an economic whole, in that
all dwellers in the zupa-district possessed right of pasture; consequently
the zupa was here an undivided grazing-district throughout which
the agricultural rotation proceeded as long as there were no permanent
fields, and as long as the cornfields opened by clearing or the burning of
a piece of forest and again abandoned after their exhaustion became
derelict and once more forest-land. In consequence of this general right
of use by the inhabitants the word zupa in Servia became personified,
and signified also the whole of the inhabitants entitled to the right of
pasture—and formally of clearing too—the compastores, conterranei, so
to speak. So long as the Avars were lords in the land, and so long as
they remained wandering herdsmen, the requirements of their pasturing
and their tyranny were decisive; the enslaved Slav peasantry could place
their fields only where it suited their masters, and there could be no idea
of a peasant right of clearing. In the Balkan peninsula the nomad
shepherds wintered with their herds on sunny snowless sea shores, and
for this reason in Dalmatia the word zupa denotes a sunny land where
snow does not fall or where it melts rapidly. Some such districts—
standing winter-quarters of the nomads—finally retained the word as
their name. Among the Carinthian, Bohemian, and Polish Slavs we
find no such zupans and no such zupan, for here peasant dynasties
arose through peasant revolutions and the zupans had to give way.
But the name itself remained, or was borrowed anew from neighbouring
Slavs, and htpan in Bohemia signified a high state official, and zupa on
the one hand is beneficium, and on the other the office connected
with it. The members of the highest Bohemian and Polish nobility
had the title pan (originally gupari). This word has no connexion
with zupan, but arose from a title kopan attested by a Bulgarian
inscription as before mentioned.
The Avars and Bulgars naturally tolerated no other dominus among
the directly dominated Slavs, they were themselves the zupans, and as
zupans remained as domini after the break-up of the Avar Empire,
and indeed among the Sorbs and Alpine Slavs, and here and there
were very numerous, so that they are to be considered as the Avar and
Bulgar dominating class Slavised by the lapse of time, and no longer
nationally different from the subject people.
From the conglomeration of Slavs planted by the Avars in the
Eastern Alps was formed the people of the Slovenes (Carantani). They
extended from the Adriatic Sea to the Danube, and from East Tyrol
deep into Hungary. As they had the Avar main horde at hand on the
Danube and the Theiss, they were most deeply enslaved. Alter the/
destruction of the Avar kingdom by Charles the Great their social)
organisation appears greatly changed. In Lower Styria south of Cilli
as late as the fifteenth century they were under an uncommonly numerous
hereditary zupan class, and even in the smallest hamlet there were one,
## p. 446 (#478) ############################################
446 Social History of the Slovenes
two, three, or four zupans. On the other hand, south of this in some
districts of Carniola and north of the Drave in Lower Styria (in the
dominium of Arnfels) there was no such zupan class at all. There (in
Carniola) the village-presidents (also called zupans) were chosen, but
only village-magistrates—likewise called zupans—appointed for a fixed
period of time, by the village peasantry, here (in the Arnfels dominium)
they were nominated for a certain time by the landlord. In what is
now Eastern Carinthia too there was no zupan class; the land was
ruled by a peasant duke.
In the various doomsday books (Urbar) we find all the villages
belonging to the landlord concerned with a definite statement of
the number of the peasant estates, and the enrolled zupans with all
the dues and services.
