“In the temple stood a huge image,
far overtopping all human stature, marvellous for ifs four heads
facing the breast and two the back. Moreover, of those in front
as well as of those behind, one looked leftwards and the
rightwards. In the right band it held a horn wrought of
metals, which the priest who was versed in ifs rites
used to Jill every year with new wine,
in order to foresee the crops of the next season
from the disposition of the liquor.”
Saxo Grammaticus
Gesta Danorum
description of the god Svantevit at Arkona
About 1200
More unanswered questions hang over the Slavs than over any of the other peoples covered by this book. Their material culture overlaps at so man y points with that of their neighbors that it is sometimes difficult to assert categorically that an object is indubitably and exclusively Slav. Their place of origin may be located between the rivers Vistula and Dnjeper, their migration routes were varied and the area they came to occupy extended from Greece in the south to the Baltic in the north and to the River Main in the west. Nor did they at any time enjoy political or social unity. The best criterion would be linguistic, since there is certainly a language or group of languages, that can be called Slav; but it was not written down until the ninth century, and even after that, documents are meager.
Yet the vital importance of the Slavs in the formation of eastern Europe has never been disputed. Moving in from the great plains at the end of the Bronze Age, they divided into groups that the linguists define as: the eastern Slavs, who became the ancestors of the Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians; the western Slavs, from whom spring the Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks and Poles; and the southern Slavs, the Serbs, Croats and Bulgarians. The northern Slavs, with whom this chapter is concerned, belong mainly to the western branch. Each of these groups, however, retained much that was common to them all. And as the medium of contact between many disparate cultures - Germanic, Norse, Illyrian, Iranian, Byzantine - they were collectively the most important, if the most mysterious, of the groups determining the make-up of the post-Roman world.
The island of Rügen lies off the southern Baltic coast, due north of Berlin. Its many peninsulas and inlets make it ideal as a trading station. For the Slavs it was the gate to Scandinavia, for the western Scandinavians one stage of the route that could take them to Byzantium. Here have been found, at Hiddensee, one of the richest of Scandinavian treasures; at Altenkirchen, carved stones representing Slav gods; at Ralswiek, the remains of jetties and boats; and at Arkona, a promontory on the extreme north side, was once the most famous of Slav temples. The description by Saxo Grammaticus, quoted at the top of this page, belongs to the early thirteenth century, but the temple had been destroyed by the Danish king Waldemar nearly a century before. Arkona today is a place of slightly sinister beauty. The great rampart built by the Slavs to defend their citadel is still easily recognizable. Behind it, now destroyed by the sea, was the site of the temple of the god Svantevit. His huge idol occupied an inner room hung with purple rugs.
THE NORTHERN SLAVS
THE FALL of the Roman Empire and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms in the fifth century AD mark the beginning of a new era in European history. It was not only the south and west of Europe that was affected; even outside the Empire, in eastern, central and northern Europe, the economic, social and cultural consequences of these events were far reaching. One of the groups to attain prominence as a result was the Slavs.
The Slavs, as a distinct linguistic and cultural division of the Indo-European family, seem to have crystallized as far back as the Neolithic, probably in the north European plain between the Vistula and the Dnjeper. In the east they were in contact with nomadic steppe tribes, who, among other things, transmitted a strong Iranian element to the Slav language. In the west, close relation with the coastal tribes of the Baltic had existed from remote times, and by the last centuries BC we find Slavs living as neighbors to Germanic peoples. The Germans called them 'Wends', a name also given to the east central European Veneto-Illyrian tribes. Tacitus, in the Germania (late first century), our earliest documented reference, calls them 'Venedi'.
In the first centuries AD some of the Germanic tribes moving south, for example the Goths and the Burgundians, encountered Slavs. There were skirmishes along the Vistula and occasionally in the area the east, between the Vistula and the Dnjeper. Some Slav tribes seem to have attached themselves to the Ostrogothic kingdom, or came under its sway. Others were in close touch with the Roman provinces on the middle and lower Danube and in Dacia. These relations were of considerable importance for economic consequences developments in the region of the Vistula and in the eastern foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Roman industrial and craft traditions were transmitted from the provinces both indirectly, by way of the neighboring Slav tribes who adopted Roman methods of manufacture, and directly by skilled craftsmen from the provinces who came to the Slav heartlands either as refugees or as captives. In some places formal economic centers developed. Around Crakow on the upper Vistula, for instance, a centre of industrial pottery production grew up in the second century. The iron mines at Swiętokrzyskie Góry, which involved under-ground mining, were also worked. These mines supplied large tracts of the area in east central Europe covered by what is known as the Przeworsk culture, and there are even some indications that iron from Swiętokrzyskie Góry reached the Roman Empire. An analysis of traded objects in central and eastern Europe has shown how many goods of Roman or provincial Roman origin were acquired by some of the Slav tribes. Seen in this light, the Przeworsk culture, which is at least partially Slav, belongs to the margin of the Roman world. Roman influence can be traced not only in the fairly obvious areas of metalwork, pottery and jewellery, but also in agriculture: the common introduction of rye cultivation among the Slavs and the use of iron tools, including the iron-shod plough in some areas, were decisive innovations.
These contacts with the developed Roman world were of great importance to the history of the Slavs in two respects. Social and economic advances and consequent increased production potential within the tribes, led to a rapid growth of population in the fourth to sixth centuries. And this in turn was the main cause of the Slav migrations and expansion from the fifth century onwards. The Roman provinces acted as a magnet to which new bands of warriors and tribal groups were constantly attracted. Slav incursions into the Balkan provinces began early in the sixth century. These were followed in the mid-sixth century by more substantial Slav settlement south of the Danube on the territory of the east Roman Empire. This opened a new corridor to Mediterranean culture, and in the centuries that followed cultural and economic impulses originating in this area were transmitted as far as the Slav tribes on the Baltic coast. The Mediterranean coloring thus given to Slav culture is of great importance in considering the part played by these tribes in the history of the southern Baltic.
Slav tribes reached the south coast of the Baltic at different rimes and under different conditions. From the fifth and sixth centuries onwards dense Slav settlement was established between the mouth of the Vistula and the Bay of Kiel, at times even stretching as far as the lower Elbe. This was the territory of the western Slavs, who can be divided into four main groups. Further west lived the Obodrites, an umbrella term for Obodrites proper, Wagrians, Polabs and Warnoi; the Poles, of the region of Gniezno and Poznan, were to play an important role in the history of the Baltic peoples, as the kingdom which emerged between the Oder and the Vistula in the tenth century was based on this tribe. The Wilti settled east of the Obodrite territory as far as the Oder; the Woliners at the mouth of the Oder, and the Pomeranians, so called because of their coastal settlements (pomorzane = seaside inhabitants), further east still. At times the Rugians or Rügen Slavs, the inhabitants of the island of Rügen, were a major factor in the western Baltic. The Venerable Bede in the eighth century knew of this tribe and names them alongside the Danes and the Huns. By that date the Rugians had presumably already come into contact with Willibrord's Anglo-Saxon mission.
Whereas the western Slavs occupied a long stretch of the Baltic shore as early as the sixth century, the eastern Slavs only reached the eastern side of the Gulf of Finland in the eighth and ninth centuries. During this little-known migratory and colonizing movement the Ilmen Slavs emerged as an identifiable group through a process of assimilation of tribes of Finno-Ugrian extraction. Important routes to central Asia and the Near East passed through their territory. Both the Volga and the Dnjeper routes began here, on the lower Neva, Lake Ladoga, and the Volkhov and Ilmen rivers. Staraja Ladoga, Beloezero and finally Novgorod became the dominant centers on this Continental trade and circulation route. The Krivichi created another point of access to the Baltic for the eastern Slavs by their general expansion towards Lake Peipus and by the foundation of Isborsk and Pskov.
Since rime immemorial Baltic tribes, of which the Prussians, the Lithuanians and the Letts were the most important, had inhabited the area between the lower Vistula and the western Dvina. Finno-Ugrian tribes such as the Livonians, the Estonians and the Votes had settled to the north of the Dvina. These tribes would have preferred to adopt an isolationist policy, but for various poorly understood reasons they were unable to defend their territories in the south and south-east against the expanding Slavs. The Krivichi dominated such geographically crucial areas as the Smolensk region and the vicinity of Lake Peipus until the ninth and tenth centuries and at times even annexed them. This ethnic pattern which emerged during the early Middle Ages has remained fundamentally the same until the present day.
3- The way from Varangians to the Greeks
6- The north-western Slavs and the Germans