The Slavic Peoples of Eastern Europe

Introduction

The Slavic peoples of early medieval eastern Europe present a paradox to the historian: they are the most numerous ethnic group in Europe, and yet the earliest centuries of their recorded history are the most obscure. By 600, Slavic peoples had moved from the forest zone north of the Black Sea into the Balkans, central Europe, and the upper reaches of the Baltic; by 1000, they were organized into the great Christian kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Bohemia, Moravia (reduced to a fragment of its former self), Poland, and Rus. The cultural and political foundations of the Slavic world were laid in those four centuries, and they are the subject of this article.

The Slavs Before the Migrations

The Slavic homeland, in the centuries before the great migrations of the sixth century, was a broad zone of forest and forest-steppe east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians and the Black Sea. The Slavs were a people of villages, not cities; their economy was based on slash-and-burn agriculture, animal husbandry, and beekeeping; their social organization was clan-based, with larger units (plemi, “tribes”) coming together in loose confederations. They were farmers, not sailors; they were not, in the period of their expansion, organized into the great kingships and confederations that characterized the Goths, the Huns, or the Avars.

The earliest historical sources to mention the Slavs are Greek and Latin, beginning with the sixth-century writers Procopius, Menander, and Jordanes. They describe the Slavs as a populous people, ruled by many small chiefs, living in marshy and forested country, and prone to sudden migrations. The Slavs themselves, not having a written tradition in the pre-migration period, have left no contemporary sources. The first Slavic texts are the translations of the Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century, by which time the Slavic world had been transformed.

The Great Migrations of the Sixth Century

The Slavic expansion of the sixth century was, in part, a response to the movements of the Huns, the Avars, and the Germanic peoples. The Huns of Attila, the Ostrogoths moving to Italy, the Lombards moving to Italy, and the Gepids moving to the middle Danube all left a power vacuum in the Pannonian basin and the Balkans. Slavic peoples moved into this vacuum, gradually and in many small waves, and by the late sixth century the Byzantine Balkans were under serious Slavic pressure. The Roman provincial cities of the Balkans — Thessalonica, Adrianople, Naissus, Serdica, Stobi — were attacked or overrun; the Slavic presence in the southern Balkans became so deep that the Byzantine chronicler Theophylact Simocatta could describe the western Balkans as the land of the Slavs.

A second great Slavic movement was the westward expansion into central Europe, which carried Slavic peoples into Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Saxony, and the Elbe-Sal basin. This expansion was, in its scale, even more consequential than the movement into the Balkans, for it put Slavic speakers in the heart of central Europe, where they would remain for the rest of the Middle Ages. The movement, like the southern one, was gradual; it was not until the eighth and ninth centuries, when the Franks under Charlemagne began their conquests east of the Rhine, that the central European Slavs would encounter an organized western power.

The Avars and the Early Slavic Polities

The Slavic expansion into the Balkans was associated, in some cases, with the Avars, the central Asian nomads who had moved into the Pannonian basin in the late sixth century. The Avars ruled a powerful khaganate that dominated the Pannonian Slavs and others, and that raided Byzantine territory until it was destroyed by the Frankish emperor Charlemagne in the 790s. The Avar khaganate was the first post-Roman state in the region, and the Slavic populations under its rule may have acquired, from the Avars, some of the political forms and aristocratic practices that would later characterize the Slavic kingdoms.

The earliest Slavic polities of which we have direct knowledge were the principalities of the Balkans, the largest of which were the Seven Slavic tribes of Byzantine sources, who occupied the territory between the Danube and the Balkan mountains in the seventh and eighth centuries. The knez (prince) and the zhupan (district chief) were the principal political officers; the veche, an assembly of free men, had a role in the political life of the community. These political forms were flexible enough to be the basis of the larger polities that emerged from the eighth century onward.

The Christianization of the Slavic World

The conversion of the Slavic peoples to Christianity, in the ninth and tenth centuries, is the central event of Slavic medieval history. It produced not only the religious transformation of the Slavic peoples but also the literary cultures of Old Church Slavonic, the Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts, the Slavic church organizations, and the political alliances of the new Christian kingdoms.

The missions to the Slavs were of two kinds. In the Balkans, and especially in Bulgaria, the Christian mission came from the Byzantine empire and the church of Constantinople. The Bulgars, a Turkic people who had moved from central Asia into the middle Danube in the seventh century and then south of the Danube in the late seventh century, were the first Slavic-speaking rulers to convert: their leader, Khan Boris I, accepted baptism in 864 and in subsequent decades presided over a long process of conversion. The Bulgarian church, organized on the Byzantine model, accepted the liturgy and the theology of Constantinople but insisted on a measure of ecclesiastical independence that would, in 927, be recognized in the form of a Bulgarian patriarchate.

The second, and more controversial, of the Slavic missions was the work of the brothers Cyril and Methodius and their followers. Originally sent by the Byzantine emperor to Moravia, the brothers were expelled from Moravia in 886 by a coalition of Frankish and local ecclesiastical opponents, and their disciples took refuge in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria they developed the Old Church Slavonic literary tradition, translated the bible and the liturgy into Slavic, and used a script (Glagolitic, soon replaced by Cyrillic) that they had devised for the purpose. The new Slavic literary culture, the first writing system for a Slavic language, would be the foundation of Slavic literary and religious life for centuries.

The Christianization of the western Slavs, including the Bohemians, the Moravians, the Poles, and the Hungarians, was the work of the Frankish and the German churches. The missionaries of the Regensburg and Passau dioceses, and later the archbishopric of Magdeburg (founded 968), converted Bohemia, Poland, and the Slavic lands east of the Elbe. The Christianization of Hungary, accomplished in the late tenth century under King Stephen I (c. 975–1038), brought the Magyars into the Latin Christian world and put Hungary on the western side of the religious divide that would later shape the history of central Europe.

The Kingdom of Rus

The last of the great Slavic polities of the early Middle Ages was the kingdom of Rus, organized along the great river routes of the Dnieper and the Volga. The Rus state was, in its origins, a Scandinavian commercial network that had used the river routes to trade Byzantine goods for furs, slaves, and silver from the forest and steppe zone. By the late ninth century, the Scandinavian Rurik dynasty, which had come to dominate the great emporia of Novgorod, Kiev, and the upper Volga, had begun to establish a political order based on the Slavic and Finno-Ugric populations of the region.

The conversion of the Rus prince Vladimir of Kiev in 988, traditionally dated to his acceptance of Byzantine Christianity and his marriage to a Byzantine princess, was the political event that gave the Rus state a religious identity. The new Rus church, organized on the Byzantine model, used Slavonic as its liturgical language, and the Cyrillic script was gradually adopted. The Christianization of the Rus tied the largest of the eastern Slavic polities to the Byzantine world, and the relationship between Rus and Constantinople, in politics, religion, and culture, would be one of the most consequential of the medieval world.

The Rus state was, however, more of a federation than a unified kingdom. The principalities of Kiev, Novgorod, Chernigov, and others were governed by branches of the Rurik dynasty, and they were often at war with each other. The Pechenegs, the Cumans, and other steppe peoples raided the southern frontier. By the twelfth century, the political unity of the Rus realm was breaking down; the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century would complete the destruction. The cultural and religious legacy of the Christianization of 988, however, was to last: the Russian Orthodox church, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the cultural orientation of the Russian-speaking world toward Byzantium and the eastern Mediterranean were the long-term products of the conversion of Vladimir.

Slavic Language and Culture

The Slavic languages form a well-defined branch of the Indo-European family, divided into three subgroups: West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and the extinct Polabian), East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn), and South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene). All of them descend, by way of the common Slavic of the early Middle Ages, from a reconstructed Proto-Slavic that, although it has not been directly attested, can be reconstructed by the comparative method.

The early medieval Slavic literary language, Old Church Slavonic, was based on the South Slavic dialect of the region around Thessalonica, where Cyril and Methodius had worked. It is preserved in a substantial body of religious, legal, and historical texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries: the Codex Zographensis, the Codex Marianus, the Codex Suprasliensis, the Sava’s Book, the Codex Assemanianus, and the Miroslav Gospel. Old Church Slavonic is the literary ancestor of the modern Slavic literary languages, and is still used, in a revised form, as the liturgical language of the Orthodox Slavic churches.