THE migrations of the Celtic and Germanic tribes lasted through several generations and were paralleled by those of the Slavs: but while Celts and Germans were early brought into touch with the cultures of old and new Rome, the Slavs were brought late into these civilizing contacts. When they eventually settled in central and eastern Europe they acquired their share of the Greco-Roman heritage mainly from Byzantium: they were, eventually, to be her heirs. For Europe and for the future their massive settlement, their nascent states, and the form of their civilization were to be of the greatest importance.
For the prehistory and early history of the Slavs our information rests on archaeological and linguistic evidence, and incidental passages in Greek and Latin historians and geographers: the Slavs had no writing, and therefore no account of their own origins, before their conversion to Christianity. It would appear that in the first 400 years of the Christian era the Slav peoples were living in the area bounded by the Carpathians in the south, the middle Dnieper in the east, the Beresina and Bulgarian lakes in the north, and a vague line between the Vistula and the Oder in the west. What was Poland from 1923 to 1939 seems to have been the area where the Slavs lived longest: perhaps since their differentiation from the Baits in prehistoric times. But of this their earliest annalists were ignorant: the eleventh-century writer of the Russian Primary Chronicle could only say that for many years the Slavs lived beside the Danube, ‘where the Hungarian and Bulgarian lands now lie’.
As to their name: the Slavs called themselves Slovene, and the Germans called them Vendi, Venethi or Wends. The Greeks called the southern Slavs Sklabénoi or Slavs, and the eastern Slavs Antes or Antai, though these last may well have been an Iranian tribe who made themselves masters of the Slavs of south-west Russia. Jordanes (fl. c. 550), indeed, writing of the Goths, describes the Slavs as the same people as the Baltic Venedae (Wends): ‘From the source of the Vistula river immense areas are occupied by the population of the Venethae, who, though their appellations may change in various clans and districts, are mainly called Sclaveni and Antae.’ Any identification of these Slav Wendi or Venethae with the Venethae of Venetia is, however, very dubious: there were Slav settlements at the head of the Adriatic from about A.D. 550, but the Germans called the Slavs Wendi or Venethae long before that. The Serbs and Sorbs were also Slavs: a ninth-century Latin writer, describing the cities and regions on the north bank of the Danube, speaks of the land of the Seruiani, ‘which is so great a realm that from it, as their tradition relates, all the tribes of the Slavs are sprung’.
The Slav language itself is Indo-European, and the early location of the Slavs between the Baltic and the Carpathians is attested by its many resemblances to the Baltic group of that speech family: Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian. In very early times, however, the Slavs spread to the basin of the Pripet, which flows eastward and joins the Dnieper north of Kiev: they were for long exposed to the repeated impacts of alien peoples from Asia. They spread northwards to the source of the Dnieper and the rivers that flow into Lake Ladoga and the eastern end of the Baltic, but their route southwards to the Black Sea was for long blocked successively by the Scythians, the Goths and the Huns.
Thus, instead of early contacts with the Greco-Roman civilization of the Roman empire, the Slavs were for many centuries in contact with quite another culture: that of the northern nomads (see pp. 21–27). The belt of Eurasian steppes runs north of the deserts and the mountains from Manchuria to the Carpathians: it passes north of the Altai mountains and the Himalayas, north of the Aral sea, the Caspian and the Euxine. It is cut by the valleys of the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper, the Bug, and the Dniester, all flowing down from the north into inland seas, and it extends into the great southward bend of the Danube, and across to the Carpathians. The extension of this steppe belt explains why the earliest races in command of the south and centre of modern ‘Russia’ were not the Slavs, but the Tatar nomads: or populations dominated by the nomads.
Back in prehistory, the bronze age Cimmerians of south Russia had been conquered and replaced by the Scythians, fierce, horse-riding, predatory tribes who brought with them the use of iron for swords and tools: they came from Kasakstan and were the first Eurasian nomads from the east of whom we have real knowledge. Herodotus used the word Scythians loosely for almost any barbarians north of the Euxine, but ‘the true Scythians’, he said, were the nomads. This is supported by the selection for portrayal in their metal work of predominantly wild animals and beasts of prey: the panther, tiger, deer, as well as the horse and bull. The Scythians traded with the Greek towns of the Bosphorus and the Euxine, dominated the Ukraine and advanced up the Volga. Among the tribes encircling them to the north-east were the Iranian Sarmatians, and by the third century b.c. these new nomads had displaced the Scythians and pushed across the Don. The hegemony of the tribes of central Russia passed also from the Scythians to the Sarmatians and it was the Sarmatians who opposed the Romans on the Danube in the fourth century A.D. They had, by then, advanced along the steppes into Hungary. Already in the third century, however, certain Gothic tribes from the Baltic and the Pripet had established themselves north of the Euxine (see p. 26): Ermanaric was king of the Ostrogoths c. 350–370, and Sarmatian power was in decay, even in the Crimea and round the Sea of Azov. With Ermanaric there appear to have settled certain Slav tribes, and the connexion of Goths and Slavs in south Russia lasted some two centuries. The end of the Sarmatian era came, however, not with the Gothic encroachments, but with the fifth-century attack of the Huns: they attacked the Alans, the most easterly of the Sarmatian tribes first, and accomplished through first the establishment and then the downfall of the Hunnic khanate a general movement and re-diffusion of Sarmatians, Slavs, and Goths. The Slavs moved gradually into central and south Russia (as well as into the Balkans), but there were layers of nomad population there before them, and this Eurasian element in the population, the remnants of Scythians, Sarmatians and Avars, was to be increased by the settlement of Bulgarian tribes, the Kutriguri and the Utiguri, round the Sea of Azov. The massive Slav (Antic) settlement over central and southern Russia meant the predominance of a mainly Indo-European population over a mainly Tatar one, to whom some of the Slavs had earlier been agricultural serfs; it substituted the rule of an agricultural and trading people for that of the nomads.
To Procopius and other Byzantine writers of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries the Slavs seemed a kindly, hospitable people, who treated prisoners of war well, but who were very little civilized. They lived as much by hunting and fishing as by agriculture: they were fair-haired, tall and hardy. They had little military skill, fought without fortifications, and retreated into the great forests when endangered. It seems clear that the primitive Slav group was a rural community united largely by common descent and, when the migratory period was over, possessing fields and woodlands in common. Tribal complexes with remote ties of kinship might number several thousands, but the Slav village was normally small. The houses were log cabins, disposed in line along either sides of the way, or grouped around a central space. The villagers practised a simple, semi-nomadic agriculture and cattle raising: they had a reasonable knowledge of metal working, weaving and the making of pots. The early Slav vocabulary shows they had barley, wheat, rye and oats, and such fruit as apples, pears and plums; but they had a long, cold, continental winter and for their dress used mainly furs. Civilization came to them late. Not only were they without immediate contacts with east or west Rome, but the cold climate, undrained marshes and unfelled forests made the economic margin of life small.
The primary reason of the great Slav expansion to the west and south was the evacuation of Germany by many Teutonic tribes (the Suevi, Vandals, Rugians, Salian Franks, Heruls) in the first half of the fifth century, and the pressing after them of other Teutonic tribes (the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Langobardi); a partial vacuum was thus created in eastern Germany and central Europe and into this the Slavs were attracted. Pressure on them from the Baits, Finns, Huns, Avars and Khazars also helped to move them, and a great part in Slav expansion was played by the fact that Huns, Avars, and nomadic Iranians (Jazuges, Roxolani, Alans), and possibly Antae, Croats and Serbs, took subjected Slavonic tribes with them in their westward advance. In the northwest, they pressed beyond the base of the Danish peninsula, where the Obodrites settled, and lived in small communities along the Elbe from Magdeburg to Hamburg and beyond to Fulda and Erfurt. But here the Germanic population was already equal to the food supply, and the main Slavonic push was made to the south and the east.
The Czechs who settled in Bohemia and Moravia were only one of a score of Slav tribes. The tribes who were the ancestors of the Slovaks settled in northern Hungary south of the northern ridge of the Carpathians, in the valleys of the Hron (Gran), Nitra, Vâh (Waag), and the upper basin of the Tisza (Theiss). It is now believed that in this region of Hungary not all the Marcomanni had departed for Bavaria before the coming of the Slavs: archaeology shows no sudden break between the Teutonic and Slavonic remains. What happened to the Teutonic Quadi of Moravia is not known: many of them may have been subdued and absorbed by the Slavonic invaders.
In the sixth century the Slavs pressed into the Balkans, the Croats and Serbs penetrating Istria and Dalmatia, and other Slav tribes Illyricum. The whole problem of the origin of the Croats and Serbs and their advent to the Balkans has been confused by the statement of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who puts it in the days of Heraclius, obviously much too late. It seems that among the innumerable small tribes who took part in the invasion of the sixth and seventh centuries were those called Croats and Serbs. They, like the Czech tribes in Bohemia, probably gradually established some sort of hegemony over the other Slav tribes in their neighbourhood and ultimately gave their name to the whole group. In any case, the southern Slavs by 527 had crossed the Danube in some numbers; in Justinian’s reign they were pillaging within the frontiers of the Byzantine provinces; they joined the tribes pressing forward to Constantinople in 559.
Conquest of the Slavs by the Avars then followed: the Avars took Belgrade (Singidunum) in 582, and henceforward, till Charlemagne conquered them, the Avars appear as the overlords of the Slavs. By 597 Avars and Slavs (the Slavs in far greater numbers but the Avars as a conquering caste) had pressed down to the outskirts of Thessalonica, the second greatest city in the Byzantine empire; but in 601, after defeat by the imperial army, a peace fixed the Danube again as the frontier line between the Greeks and Avar-ruled Slavs. Such repulse could not, however, be maintained: the revolts in Phokas’ reign compelled him to withdraw all Greek troops from the Danube frontier, and the Slavs and Avars poured again into the provinces of Moesia, that lay south of the great southern bend of the Danube: into Dacia and Thrace, that lay to the south again: and into Macedonia, with Thessalonica as its great seaport. On her the Slavs crowded their attack.
Meanwhile, to the west of the Balkans, the Slavs of Pannonia had poured into Istria and Dalmatia, the hinterland of the Adriatic. They took Salona in 536 and other old Latin towns and the old Latin hierarchy went down before them; though a Christian remnant in the population still looked across the Adriatic for help from Rome. Among these Dalmatian Slavs the Croats established their ascendency; they may have originated as a Sarmatian tribe in south Russia, but they had long lived among the Slav tribes of Bohemia and Silesia. The Adriatic coast south of Istria became especially associated with their name.
The great Slav-Avar push southwards culminated in the siege of Constantinople in 626, in the failure of which the Avars suffered more than the Slavs. The Avar supremacy was already weakened, though the Byzantines could not push either Avars or Slavs out of the Balkan provinces altogether. In 623 some of the western and south-western tribes had thrown off the Avar yoke under the leadership of one Samo, who according to the pseudo-Fredegar was a Frankish merchant who ruled a Slav confederation for some thirty years, and kept at bay not only the Avars but also Dagobert, the Frankish king. His lead was followed by the Slavs of the Danube valley, also under the leadership of a foreigner, a baptized Bulgar chief named Kuvrat. In 650 the Avars were confined to western Hungary, where they remained, so weakened as to be comparatively innocuous, until their last remnants were conquered by Charlemagne and his sons (see p. 371). The Avar hegemony among the Slavs was in fact replaced by that of the Bulgars, a Turco-Tatar tribe who had come into the Balkans from the steppe country, fought indeed under Heraclius’ leadership in the siege of the capital in 626, and then settled among and afforded leadership to the Moesian Slavs. The Danube as the northern frontier of the Byzantine empire was now permanently lost and the Slavonic flood overwhelmed, for a time, even the greater part of the Peloponnese.
The gradual Slav advance southwards, in small bands, continued all through the seventh century: their numbers were great and continually reinforced by fresh tribes from beyond the Danube. They had no supra-tribal organization, till the Moesian Slavs found it under the Bulgarian khan Asperuch [Isperich]; he and his horde taught their Slav subjects the use of fortification against the Byzantines: they had themselves learned it from Greek prisoners of war. By 813 they had brought the Thracian Slavs under their rule as well as the Moesian. Though the Bulgars themselves were small in number, and soon Slavised in language, they were numerous enough to form in Bulgaria the military and official class; by the ninth century the original race difference had disappeared and the Bulgars were reckoned a Slav people. In what had once been ‘Greece’, however, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus and the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, Byzantine supremacy was gradually restored, and the Slav population Hellenized: though the Slav language was still spoken in Macedonia, and specially round Thessalonica.
Comparing the areas settled by these south-western Slavs with their modern territorial names, it would seem that by about 900 the Slavs of the Slovene linguistic group held Austria, Styria and Carinthia (then collectively known as Carentania), and present-day Slovenia down to Grado (then known as Carniola). From about 800 onwards this area was subject, directly or indirectly, to the Franks, and the Carentanian part was by 900 in process of being Germanized. Secondly, Slavs of a Croatian type of speech held Upper and Lower Pannonia, now known as western Hungary (the area between the lower Drava and lower Sava), together with Illyricum and Dalmatia as far south as Cetinje. The northern part of this Croatian area was a client state of the eastern Carolingians; but ‘Dalmatian Croatia’ threw off the Frankish yoke in the latter part of Louis the Pious’ reign, and under an independent line of Slav princes developed into the Croatian land of the tenth century. By the treaty of 810 between Charlemagne and Nice-phoras the Greeks retained some of the islands and coastal towns. Thirdly, present-day Serbia, Bosnia, Hercegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia (and, till Asperuch’s invasion, Bulgaria) were inhabited by many separate tribes whose Slavonic dialects shaded off from old Serbian in the west to old Bulgarian in the east. Before 900 they had achieved little unity.
By the mid-ninth century, the Slav populations had largely completed their settlements, and can be grouped as western, southern and eastern. Outside this grouping, the Slav population of the Baltic regions had as yet formed no states. The forefathers of the Poles, a Slav tribe referred to in the Russian Primary Chronicle as the Polyanians or Lyakhs, were relatively few in number and lived in the Oder basin and the Vistula basin west of modern Warsaw: there was as yet no ‘Poland’. But there was certainly the beginnings of political life in Little Poland (round Cracow) much earlier than the ninth century: the Cracow annals have memories of a series of ‘bishops’ who well may have been clergy instituted by Methodius in the mid-ninth century (see p. 497). But south of these unfederated Slav tribes the western Slavs included the Czech and other Slav tribes of Bohemia, to be conquered for a time by Charlemagne, Louis the German and Carloman and won for the Latin church, the Slovaks, and the Slovenes of Carniola and Istria: the Moravian Slavs of the middle Danube were also threatened for a time with Frankish penetration, religious and political, but from such influence Byzantine policy saved them. The southern Slavs are sometimes reckoned to include those settled in Istria, and, normally, the Croats of southwest Hungary, Slavonia and Dalmatia: these, the wars of Charlemagne made subject for a time to the count of Friuli. Their princes did homage to Louis the Pious in 814, but several revolts against the Franks followed and subjection was uneasy. Besides these Slavs of the Adriatic coast lands there were the more numerous Serbs and Slavized Bulgars occupying the Balkan lands between the great bend of the Danube and the old Hellas.
The eastern Slavs had been numerically a large group, who had early passed from the Pripet basin and the western slopes of the Carpathians to the Dnieper just north of Kiev, where the river Desna flowed into the Dnieper from the north-east. Expansion was easy along this waterway to the headwaters of the Volga and the Don, and also up the Dnieper, by an easy portage, to the headwaters of the western Dvina, which flows into the Gulf of Riga. The rivers opened an easy system of communications in all directions, but the steppes between the Don and the Dnieper exposed the east Slavs themselves to various waves of attack from the Turco-Tatar races. The Avars had been such: but by the eighth century they were being pressed westwards by the Khazars. These blocked the way of the eastern Slavs (the future Russians) to the sea of Azov and the Black Sea by their empire which centred on the Volga, a unique waterway. The Khazars traded with the Arabs of Baghdad, exchanging with the city of the caliphs the furs of the north and slaves for her luxurious textiles, jewellery and sword blades. The Khazars traded with Jews, Arabs, Slavs and Greeks, and were the chief carriers between the interior of modern Russia, the Black Sea, and the camel routes to the Caspian, Baghdad and India. The great Khazar towns of Itil at the mouth of the Volga, Sarbel on the Don (as well as the Bulgar town of Bulgar on the upper Volga) played a vital part in the civilization of the future Russia; it seems probable that their trading connexions with the Swedes began very early, earlier than the Kiev chronicler indicates.
The trade with Asia had once, in the days of the Roman empire, passed to the Mediterranean: but now in the ninth century its passage to western Europe was blocked by Arab pirate fleets. The great Slav state of Russia grew out of a diversion of part of the eastern trade up the Russian rivers to the Baltic, whence it was passed on to western Europe: but the creators of the diversion were not the Slavs themselves but the Scandinavian boat builders and sailors. Sweden appears at this time to have been known to the Finns as Roslagen, and when the northmen from Sweden came down, it would appear, under Rurik 1 from the Bay of Finland and Lake Ladoga and settled in Novgorod as their rulers, the Finns turned the invaders’ Scandinavian place-name into Ruotsi. The Arabs called the northmen ‘Rus’ and the Byzantines called them ‘Rhos’. These Scandinavian merchants or raiders were not numerous: it would appear that the Slav inhabitants of the Don and Volga valleys had already, under Khazar influence, reached some level of political and economic development. Nor were the Scandinavians all Swedes: for the two followers of Rurik who sailed down the Dnieper and first settled in Kiev (according to the Kiev chronicle) were Norse Varyags (Varangians); Oleg, the son of Rurik, followed them some twenty years later. Kiev was, from this time, the capital of a ‘Russian’ state. The Rhos in their long, swift boats were able by 865 to sail down the Dnieper, through the lands of the Khazars, and ravage the shores of the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. They attacked Constantinople itself (see p. 493) in 860 and later: but even more important than the alarm they inspired as pirates was the trade they established with the great city. They opened a commercial waterway linking the north with the Black Sea and the world of Byzantine culture. They saw the stone-built Byzantine cities and villas, the carved capitals, the stone fortifications; they met Byzantine merchants and at times received Byzantine envoys, dressed according to their rank and always well-supplied with honorific gifts and large sums for diplomatic presents. They saw, on their voyages to the Black Sea, Christian churches, their icons and their carved reliquaries; Christianity was the religion of this rich, learned, civilized, splendid empire. Before there was any question of alliance or the reception of baptism, they had an apprehension of the Byzantine, Christian culture.
The conversion of the Slav races to Christianity was, nevertheless, a landmark not only in their own, but in European history, for it brought them fully into the orbit of Greco-Roman culture and the Christian religion. It was only unfortunate for the Slavs that already in the ninth century, the century of their conversion, the single imperium had been divided, in practice at any rate, between the Byzantines and the Franks. The Latin Christians and the popes were, in fact, under the secular jurisdiction of the Frankish empire: the Greek Christians of the basileus. While most of the Slavs were converted eventually to Greek Christianity, those in the west were taught by Frankish, Bavarian, Irish and Italian missionaries and professed Latin Christianity. In the century of their first conversion the eastern and western churches were still undivided, even the Photian schism being short.
Latin Christianity was taught in the ninth century to the Slovenes of Carniola and Istria, the Moravian Slavs, and the Croats of Dalmatia who were subject to the count of Friuli. Frankish missionaries from Salzburg worked in Moravia, while the priests of the Latin patriarchate of Aquileia preached in Istria and among the Dalmatian Croats. Moravia, a large region lying beyond the eastern frontier of the Frankish empire and with fluctuating boundaries, embraced a large number of Slav tribes once ruled by the Avars: it stretched from the Carpathians in the north, over the basins of the middle Danube and Tisza, and to the south of the Danube. The Magyars were later, perhaps between 890 and 910, to overrun the greater part of Moravia, conquering the Slav population as once the Avars in the same region had conquered the Latin provincials; north of Magyar Hungary a relic of the ninth-century Moravia was cut off by this Magyar wedge, and survived as the province of Moravia, to the south-east of Bohemia.
As to the Slavs of Dalmatia: a remarkable symbiosis of Slavs and Latins resulted from the Slav settlements, while in Moravia both Byzantines and Latins were to make rival attempts to introduce their own religion and culture. It is now realized that the civilizing conversion of the Slavs in the Balkans was to be of great importance for the future of Europe, for the split between the eastern and western cultures was in fact to come in the Balkans, at a line drawn down the eastern frontier of the Dalmatian Croats and Serbs: ‘the gate between east and west stands forever on this Croatian frontier’. It is Professor Novak’s, Professor Dvornik’s and other Byzantinists’ view that, if an independent Slav empire, using the Slav vernacular for its liturgy, could have been allowed to develop from Greater Moravia, this third empire would have been a bridge between east and west, the Slavs would have had a reasonably early share in the Greco-Roman heritage, schism between Rome and Constantinople might have been avoided, and Europe strengthened in its defence against Islam. Before the emperor Leo Ill’s subtraction of Illyricum from the jurisdiction of the papacy, emperor and pope worked together for the conversion of the Slavs: afterwards, the question of these subtracted provinces embittered the relations between Byzantines and Latins, and their missionaries worked in rivalry: sometimes in hostility.
As to Dalmatia: as early as 599 pope Gregory I heard of and grieved over the inroads of the Slavs, and their destruction of the many old Roman settlements on the Dalmatian coast. Heraclius requested pope John IV (640–642) to send missionaries to convert the Croats and Serbs: Illyricum was in the Roman jurisdiction and relations between pope and emperor were good. Both knew that the sees of the Illyrian bishops who had attended the council of Grado in 579 had been destroyed; Sirmium, in Pannonia, had been an important see: Salona had been the metropolitan see of Dalmatia. Pope John, in answer to Heraclius’ request, sent the abbot Martin to buy Christian slaves in Dalmatia and bring them to Rome, together with the relics from the ruined churches. A limited success attended these missionary efforts: some sees were revived, including Ragusa (Dubrovnik), some intermarriage took place between Slavs and Romans in the towns of Croatia, some understanding was gained of the Slav language: economic and social relations gradually improved. The see of Salona was revived, and c. 750 transferred to the old palace of Diocletian at Spalato (Split). The liturgy used was Latin, for the Slav language was as yet without an alphabet and unwritable at any length. Some Slav sounds were difficult to write in a Greek or Latin script, though the Slavs themselves used runes for their as yet infrequent inscriptions. Whereas the Germanic barbarians who had once conquered the west had been few, and the provincials who imparted the Greco-Roman culture many: in the Balkans, the Slav conquerors were very numerous and the civilized, conquered population few: assimilation was slow.
The rate was quickened with Charlemagne’s conquest of Istria and northern Dalmatia: in the ninth century the Franks dominated Dalmatia: bishop John of Ravenna restored the old Latin hierarchy in the north, and the Latin language came into use in Croatia, both for public documents and private letters. Later in the ninth century, when Constantine-Cyril and Methodius had introduced a Slav alphabet into Moravia, whence its use had spread to Croatia and Dalmatia, two scripts were used: the Caroline script from the scriptorium of the monks of Benevento for Latin manuscripts, and the glagolitic or the Cyrillic scripts (see p. 495) for manuscripts in the Slav tongue. In economic life too there was interchange of goods between Slavs, Italians and Franks, an interchange which affected even the Dalmatian hinterlands through Dubrovnik, which became a focus of Slav culture, and from which many manuscripts have survived. While the earliest of these documents are in Latin, those slightly later are in Latin with a Slav signature and those later still completely in Slav. From the scriptoria of Benevento and Monte Cassino the Slavs learned the art of illumination, and from their own Latin background, and from Italy, the classical styles and art-forms. They took over the achievements of antiquity, attaining in some arts a noble harmony of the old and the new; they achieved, that is, a mixed Slav-Latin art parallel to the mixed Anglian-Celtic-Byzantine art of Northumbria in the eighth century. The importance of Split and Dubrovnik as foci of Slav influence was due partly to papal uneasiness at the possible extension of the jurisdiction of Salzburg through the work of Frankish missionaries, supported as it was by the heavy weight of secular authority: Rome therefore created for the Slavs an independent see, by raising Split to metropolitan rank. The Latin liturgy was used in the see, now under the spiritual authority of the pope and the secular jurisdiction of Constantinople.
At the height of the ninth-century renaissance, the court at Constantinople was seeking to extend Byzantine influence by the conversion of her barbarian neighbours and invaders, as well as by diplomacy; the most famous of the missionaries sent out were among her leading scholars, Constantine ‘the philosopher’ and Methodius his brother, both of them friends and protégés of Photius and Bardas. The function of the Byzantine emperor had always been conceived of as apostolic, and, now that the worst bitterness of the iconoclast struggle had been allayed, both emperor and patriarch were ready to support missionary effort. Even before the sending of formal missions for conversion, the relations of barbarians with Byzantium had led to acquaintance with Christianity, not only through the reception of diplomatic missions, but by contact with Byzantine priests, merchants and prisoners of war: a port like Thessalonica had churches, a cathedral, schools, and many Christians of Slav origin. Prince Rastislav of Moravia, the khan of Bulgaria, the khan of the Khazars, the Russians of Kiev, had all heard of the great caesar of Constantinople (the Russians called his city Tsargrad) and the religion of his court.
The first mission of the Photian renaissance went to the distant Khazars. In 860 a Russian fleet had raided Byzantium, and the danger had been sufficient to show the advisability of making these new enemies fellow Christians and allies. Photius’ mind was already turned to the Crimea, as appears in one of his letters; as was that of his disciple and successor, Nicholas Mysticus, later. With the Khazars of the lower reaches of the Dnieper, imperial relations were friendly: for Justinian II and Constantine V had already married daughters of their khan: but the Jews, who had numerous colonies in the Crimea, were also trying to win the khan to their faith and alliance. A letter from the khan, received about 860, however, gave the emperor his chance: the letter said that, while the khan and most of his subjects were pagan, they were in contact with three great religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and were undecided which to accept: would the emperor send the khan a Christian scholar, who could expound the Christian faith before the Jews and Saracens? In answer, a mission as much diplomatic as missionary was sent and led by the brothers Constantine and Methodius.
Bardas’ choice of these scholars, the sons of a probably Greek drungarios of Thessalonica, was natural, from their ability to speak Slav: the Khazars ruled over several Slav tribes. Constantine had gone high in the civil service and had a great reputation for learning; Methodius, now a monk, had been the Byzantine governor of a Slav province. Constantine, moreover, had already been sent on a diplomatic mission c. 851 to the Arab Mutawakkil, to discuss with his scholars the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The brothers landed at Cherson, in the Crimea, and there Constantine, according to his legend (the account of his life to be read at night office of his feast day), found a psalter and the gospels ‘in the Russian language’: with the help of a native, he was enabled to read them. Unless the passage is apocryphal, it must refer to some writing in the runic script, which was in use at the time, though hardly for so long a book as the gospels or else to some gospel book in Syriac or Armenian, reaching the Khazars as the property of a foreign priest or merchant. It was in a script hitherto unknown to Constantine, but he deciphered it with the help of some dweller in the peninsula. The language of the Magyars, however, many of whom lived at the time in the neighbourhood of Cherson, was too much for Constantine, for they ‘howled like wolves’. In his journey to the Khazars he found, however, a Christian village: the Khazars and the Rhos also had found some such on the Crimea and the northern coasts of the Black Sea, and a Christian remnant survived. Constantine held his debate with the Jews and Saracens: the khan wrote politely about him to the emperor and sent back with him 200 Byzantine prisoners of war: but was actually won over later by the Jews, and with his subjects accepted Judaism. Such acceptance involved no political tutelage, as would the acceptance of Greek Christianity, or Islam. Arab sources confirm the account of Constantine’s mission and debate.
The next request for Christian teachers came from Rastislav, prince of Moravia, and marks the first attempt (Samo’s principality apart) to set up a Slav state, independent of either the eastern or western empire, along the slopes of the Carpathians: in Greater Moravia as distinguished from the later, diminished, Moravia. This request for teachers, not surprising in view of the need of political support against the Franks, reached Bardas and Photius in 862. The Byzantine palace had had as yet no relations with the Moravians; it would have been preferable to win over their Slav neighbours, the Bulgars, to alliance, conversion and possibly allegiance, but the Byzantine leaders realised that it would be useful, meanwhile, to convert the more distant Moravians, whom the Franks had been trying for some time to win over. Nor was the motive of the mission merely diplomatic: the conversion of pagans to Christianity had always been one of the imperial responsibilities.
Rastislav at this time was the virtual chief of all the Slav tribes, north to the Carpathians and Bohemia as well as south to Belgrade, and he desired independence for the Slavs. Conversion by the Frankish, the German, bishops might lead to complete loss of independence. Rastislav turned therefore to the tsar of Constantinople; he had some knowledge of the Byzantines, for an old Roman trade route, still frequented, had run from Byzantium, through Adrianople and Nish, to Belgrade; it also continued by way of Carnuntum, up the Morava through the Oder gap to the Baltic: it was part of the amber route of prehistoric times and went straight through Rastislav’s dominions. The Venetians also traded with the Slavs of the Danubian plain. Byzantine money found its way into Moravia, and some knowledge of Greek Christianity. Rastislav may have known the more liberal attitude of the Greek church to the use of the vernacular in her liturgy compared with that of the Latins; the Frankish missionaries in his countries used the Latin mass, and apparently could not even explain the faith in the Slav languages: he asked the emperor to send him from Byzantium teachers who understood the Slav tongue. The Life of Methodius states that Rastislav had made the same request to Rome first, saying that he desired a bishop: the pope, however, had apparently no Slav teachers to send.
The emperor Michael then told Constantine to undertake the mission: ‘You must go, for no one but you can accomplish the work’: to which Constantine replied that he would go, but he must first have a writing suitable to the Slav tongue. The emperor answered that his father, his grandfather and many others had sought such a writing, but it did not exist: God, however, always supplied necessities to his servants! Constantine then went away and composed the glagolitic alphabet: a fine phonetic instrument with forty letters, twenty-one apparently following Greek models and the others representing Slav sounds, either by oriental letters or a combination of Byzantine and runic signs. The emperor bade him take with him his brother, the abbot Methodius, and the two set out, bringing with them certain passages from the gospels which the philosopher had already at Constantinople translated and written in Slavonic. They received Photius’ blessing before starting with a caravan of priests, monks, craftsmen and traders, along the old Roman road to the Danubian plain. They were welcomed by Rastislav in the spring of 863, presented the emperor’s letter and presents and began their teaching; but both their presence and their ability to teach in Slavonic were at once resented by the Frankish missionaries. Constantine and his brother celebrated mass in Slavonic, using the passages from the Slav gospels they had prepared: they completed their Slav gospels in Moravia. They preached in Slavonic: they translated liturgy and office into Slavonic and used them: they prepared to educate a Slav clergy. Constantine contended with the Latin clergy, who argued that God had chosen three languages only for the lawful rendering of the divine praise to God, Hebrew, Greek and Latin: he called them ‘Pilate’s pupils’, because Pilate had had the inscription over the cross written in these three tongues. But though Constantine used and defended the use of Slavonic for the mass, he used the Latin rite to which his Moravian converts were accustomed.
The brothers stayed three years in this, the first, Moravian mission (864–867) and then travelled, by way of Venice, to Rome, where charges had been preferred against them. Recourse to the pope was natural, for he had the right to control their Frankish opponents; moreover, like all Byzantines, they accepted the primacy of the Roman church. Nicholas I, whose relations with Photius were bad, who had, indeed, excommunicated him, was just dead; news of the palace revolution (23 September 867), the murder of the emperor Michael and fall of Photius, had not yet reached Rome. Nicholas died on 13 November 867, and was succeeded by Hadrian II. Not only was a favourable reception of Constantine and Methodius doubtful through their connexion with Photius, but it was complicated by the negotiations of Boris of Bulgaria with the holy see for the establishment of a Latin church in Bulgaria (see p. 411). The Illyrican jurisdiction had never been returned by the Greek emperor to the pope: and Rome naturally desired, in its place, the conversion of Moravia and Bulgaria by Latin priests, and the establishment of new hierarchies under her own authority. She was opposed, however, to the setting up of Frankish-Latin hierarchies, which would extend Frankish secular influence into the Balkans.
Hadrian II therefore inquired into the character, learning and practices of the two brothers, finding them to be holy and learned men. He was well-disposed to them, moreover, as they brought to him the relics supposedly those of his great predecessor, St Clement of Rome. It was difficult, however, to accede to their desire to use a ‘barbarous’ language in the liturgy, a very different matter from the use of Greek, which was perfectly familiar at Rome. Byzantine pilgrims came to Rome, and there was a permanent colony of Byzantines there and several Byzantine churches. The need, however, to confirm Latin authority in Moravia, especially as Boris withdrew the expected invitation to set up a hierarchy in Bulgaria, outweighed the novelty of approving the liturgical use of Slavonic. Hadrian II formally approved the work of Constantine and Methodius and their methods; Constantine became a monk, and received the honourable name of Cyril: monastic profession was necessary in the Greek church before ordination to the episcopate. Constantine-Cyril, however, died in a Greek monastery at Rome in February 869; he was buried in the church of St Clement, whose relics he believed himself to have found among the Khazars, and brought with him to Rome. Constantine’s death and the precarious position of Rastislav, now at war with Louis the German, decided Hadrian to send back Methodius to Moravia only as a simple priest. When, however, Rastislav was defeated by the Franks and Bulgaria accepted missionaries and an archbishop from Byzantium, Hadrian’s successor, John VIII, made a bid to retain the Roman influence in Greater Moravia. Methodius was still working in southern Moravia and John created him (arch)bishop of Pannonia, apparently without an urban centre as his sedes episcopi (c. 870): he also made him papal legate for all the Slav races. Certain limitations, however, were enjoined on the liturgical use of Slavonic.
Rastislav’s defeat by the Franks restored the German clergy to Moravia, but the dispersed Slav teachers and their pupils in other Slav lands continued the use of the vernacular for teaching and the liturgy. ‘Glagolitism’, the movement for a vernacular liturgy, remained through the centuries, and especially among the Dalmatian Slavs, a permanent religious factor, though the original glagolitic alphabet gave way, under the influence of the Beneventan script, to the Cyrillic. This second Slav alphabet was used by all the Slavs and became the foundation of the Russian alphabet.
While Moravia returned to Latin Christianity, her neighbour Bulgaria soon adopted both the Byzantine alliance and the teaching of Methodius and his helpers. Bulgaria had long been a dangerous neighbour to the Byzantines, inflicting upon them defeats and humiliations. Constantine V had fought many campaigns against them, dying at the beginnmg of one of them in 775. Charlemagne s destruction of the Avar empire in 796 had allowed the Bulgars to spread from Bessarabia into Pannonia. When Nicephoras attacked the khan Krum in 807, a terrible war followed: the Byzantines took the Bulgarian capital in one campaign, and reoccupied it in 811, but were defeated in the Balkan mountains as they returned for the winter: Nicephoras was killed and his skull used as a drinking cup by Krum: the Bulgars then ravaged Thrace unchecked. Leo IV defeated the Bulgars at Mesembria in 813, and Krum’s son and successor, Omurtag, signed a thirty years’ peace with the Byzantines in 815–16, and respected the treaty. The Bulgars now had peace and learned some Byzantine arts: Omurtag built a fine palace at Pliska, another on the Danube and a third, a fortress palace at Preslav, 100 years later the capital of Bulgaria. Greek was used for Omurtag’s inscriptions: and civilization and Christianity made their appearance in Bulgaria, though Christianity was suspect.
The thirty years’ peace with the Bulgars expired in 845–6 and was not renewed. The Bulgars even invaded Macedonia, took Philippopolis and threatened Thessalonica: but the exploits of Krum could not be repeated. Bulgaria had now to reckon with the warlike Franks as well as the Byzantines. The Bulgars made peace with the regent Theodora, and when the tsar Boris succeeded in 852, peace was maintained: and even so, it was becoming clear that Bulgaria would have to choose between a Frankish and a Byzantine alliance. The Frankish prince, Louis the German, desiring to encircle Rastislav of Moravia, made alliances with the Bulgars in 845, 852 and 862; but in 863 he attacked Bulgaria, and the Byzantines, who had been approached for an alliance, sent a Greek force to her aid.
Boris decided therefore to throw in his lot with Byzantium. He came to Constantinople for baptism (864), was given the name Michael and received from the font by the emperor himself. Photius made the newly baptized a homily of welcome. Boris, however, found that his godfather expected too much subordination from Bulgaria: he therefore wrote to pope Nicholas I asking for a Latin bishop and priests, and Rome sent a mission under Formosus; but after 869 Boris aligned himself, after all, with Byzantium, and it was in Bulgaria that the dispersed Moravian missionaries found their fruit. The Slav pupils of Methodius also penetrated north into Bohemia and the adjacent lands: some of the Czechs were now first converted to Greek Christianity and a vernacular liturgy, though most remained pagan. The Slav rite never had a more than insecure hold on Bohemia, though it lingered on, with interruptions, in St Prokop’s monastery at Sâzava till the eleventh century. The conversion of the Bohemians was pre-eminently an achievement of the German clergy, who were encouraged, but not introduced, by Wenceslas, duke of Bohemia. He was martyred on 28 September 929, but medieval Bohemia, like the Dalmatian Slavs, retained Latin Christianity. Nevertheless, the Czechs venerated the memory of Methodius and their first instructors in Christianity.
In Bulgaria, the pope had hoped to establish a Latin church through the help of Boris, and he expected the support of the patriarch Ignatius, whom he had recognized in the council of February 870. Ignatius, however, proved as much the defender of Byzantine claims as Photius had been. He consecrated an archbishop for Bulgaria with ten Greek bishops under him: the Latin clergy had to withdraw.
A period of advancing civilization and extension of the Bulgarian frontiers followed, both to the west, and to the north of the Danube up to Poland. Slavs and Bulgars had long been one people with one language; the old struggles of the monarchy with the Bulgarian nobles, the boïars, had ended in favour of the tsar. The Bulgars were now civilized, Christian, and the rulers of wide territories, and Boris desired to rule a Slav empire which should control the Balkans and be the equal of the eastern and western empires. After a long reign, he withdrew to a monastery in 893, living on till 907, and dying a saint.
The tsar Symeon (893–927), Boris’s son, aimed also at leadership of the Slavs in the Balkans, and with apparently more chance of success than the earlier state of Moravia, though her territories had been even wider, and she might have drawn the Czechs also into a single Slav empire. Bulgaria, however, was more centralized. Symeon had been for many years in his youth a hostage at Byzantium: he had studied Demosthenes and Aristotle and become, as they said of him, ‘half a Greek’. He desired even to conquer Constantinople, and in 894, on the occasion of an injury done to his merchants by the removal of their market from Constantinople to Thessalonica, he declared war. The Byzantines and Slavs began a hundred year struggle for the dominance of the Balkans. The emperor Leo VI had an Asiatic war on his hands, and, to counter Symeon, invited the Magyars into eastern Europe: they first defeated Symeon and then themselves suffered defeat. But while Magyar encroachments disturbed Symeon, Arab successes alarmed Leo, and in 904 a treaty was signed fixing the Bulgarian frontier far to the south in Macedonia, and ceding to her supremacy over several Slav tribes. In his long reign, Symeon possessed himself of Thrace, and in 924 he all but succeeded in taking Constantinople: his victories and the splendour of his capital and his court have led to a comparison of his work for the Slavs to that of Charlemagne for the Franks.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
See S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, ‘The Russian Primary Chronicle’, in The Med. Acad, of America, no. 60, 1953: G. Vernadsky, A History of Russia, Yale Univ. Press, 1951 ed.: S. H. Cross, Slavic Civilisation through the Ages, 1948: F. Dvornik, Les Slaves, Byzance et Rome au IXe siècle, 1926, and The Making of Central and Eastern Europe, 1949: A. A. Vasiliev, The Russian Attack on Constantinople, 1946: S. Runciman, A History of the First Bulgarian Empire, 1930: G. Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, 451–1204, 1947.