Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (6 page)

And yet the horse was also the Avars’ Achilles’ heel. Due to important differences in their digestive systems, horses often find it much more difficult to survive drought than cattle do. Horses fail to digest—and therefore they excrete—up to 75 percent of the protein they eat. By contrast, cattle excrete as little as 25 percent of the protein they consume. Thus, when all there was to eat was dried-out, low-protein grass, cattle had a marked advantage over horses.

The high-protein wastage rate that horses suffer from is a result of the design of their digestive system. Both cows and horses have what are essentially fermentation vats inside them to convert plant protein into a usable source of energy. But the horse’s fermentation vat is less useful because it is located at a point where the food that passes through has already been digested. By contrast, the cow’s fermentation vat is located at a point where the food has not yet been digested.

In the cow, most plant protein is broken down by bacterial action inside the organ known as the rumen. It is the only way in which the bulk of the plant protein can be utilized, because much of it is locked up in the cell walls of the plant. The freshly broken-down protein then passes into the cow’s duodenum, where it is broken down further into amino acids. These in turn pass into the small intestine, where they are absorbed into the bloodstream and used to make muscle, produce milk, repair damaged tissue, and nourish fetuses. The horse, however, has its fermentation vat located in its hind gut—well after the food has already passed through the duodenum and the small intestine. The horse therefore does not produce large quantities of amino acids and does not absorb large quantities of protein through its intestine walls. Instead, the plant protein it eats is broken down by bacterial action in an almost totally useless location, and all the animal succeeds in doing is depositing extremely nitrogen-rich excrement. This is good for the soil, but not of much short-term benefit to the horse.

In normal climatic conditions, plant protein is so plentiful that neither horses nor cows need to retain all the protein they eat. But in drought conditions, when plant protein is rarer, while living grass contains around 15 percent protein, dead grass has only 4 percent; this makes a high protein absorption rate key to survival. The cow’s much more efficient protein extraction system succeeds in retaining three times the amount of protein as the comparatively useless horse system.

Although horses are obviously of greater military use than cattle, their poorer survival ability in times of prolonged drought or severe winters put their Avar owners at a terrible disadvantage vis-à-vis the Turks. Even one hard winter coupled with an ultradry summer could kill large numbers of Avar horses.
⁶
Two or three successive bad years could create terrible suffering. In the drought of the late 530s, mares would have been unable to suckle their young, and what should have been the next generation would have died off. A few months later, the starving adult animals would have started to die. Robbed of their sources of milk, cheese, and yogurt, the Avars would have had to eat the carcasses of their dead horses.

As hard winters and drought continued into the second and third years of the catastrophe, families would have begun to starve to death. Unable to find their own food, unable to barter food from others (horses had been their wealth), unable to raid effectively, unable to defend themselves adequately without healthy horses, the Avars’ time had run out. Although the worst of the drought was probably over by the mid-540s, the economic and geopolitical damage had been done.

First the Turks snubbed the now much-weakened Avars, their official overlords, by establishing direct diplomatic links with the imperial government of northern China in 545. Then, in 551, the Turks virtually saved the Avars from destruction by rebel tribes. And in the following year, the Turks pushed for political equality with their Avar masters by demanding that the Avar ruler give the Turkic
kagan
(king) one of his daughters as a wife. The proud Avar leader refused, and the Turks used his refusal as a pretext for overthrowing Avar rule.

Thousands of Avars were slaughtered or enslaved. Their leader, Anagui,
⁷
committed suicide, presumably to avoid the humiliation and ritual execution that would have befallen him if he had been captured by the Turks. The Turks believed that as kings were divinely appointed individuals, their blood must never be allowed to touch the earth, so had they found him alive, he would have been strangled with a silk cord.

Lesser members of the royal clan, however, were almost certainly captured. It is known that some captives were retained (or sold) as slaves.
⁸
Some—especially the more important—would have been executed in traditional steppe fashion, their bodies ripped asunder between two young trees. Those Avars who survived fled into exile and began a three-thousand-mile trek westward toward Europe.
⁹

There are no eyewitness descriptions of the great journey to the west, but the archaeological and historical record pertaining to later steppe migrations provides a reasonable indication of what it must have been like. Thousands of men, women, and children made the journey—mostly on horseback. The entire caravan would have been more than a mile long. Each family’s possessions, including their round felt tents (known as yurts), would have been carried on large covered wagons pulled by oxen. The caravan may also have included large numbers of spare horses and flocks of sheep.
¹⁰

The most likely route the Avars took from Mongolia to Europe was a relatively northerly one, avoiding the Dzungaria and other central Asian deserts. After following the course of the Irtysh River for some six hundred miles, the Avar refugee caravan would then have cut across what is now northern Kazakhstan, skirting the northern shores of the Caspian Sea into the fertile grasslands to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. Here they encountered and conquered a local tribal group called the Kutrigurs. Their numbers were also swollen by a kindred people—a partially proto-Mongolian and partially Hunnic group called the Hepthalites, or White Huns.

The Avar horde, now with many of its Kutrigur Hun vassals and Hepthalite allies, then proceeded northwest into what is now the Ukraine, where they conquered the Ukranian Slavs (the Antes). Next, the constantly expanding Avar folk migration (now including some Slav as well as Kutrigur and other contingents) rolled on. They then paused to demand land (unsuccessfully) from the Roman imperial authorities. Having failed at this stage to gain entry to the empire, they moved west around the northern tip of the Carpathian Mountains into what is now Hungary, where they subjugated the local population, the Gepids. (See Chapter 4.)

By 568 the Avars had created a new empire, every bit as impressive as the one they had ruled in Mongolia sixteen years and three thousand miles away. It consisted of eastern Hungary, western Romania, Slovenia, Moravia, Bohemia, eastern Germany, and the western Ukraine. It covered approximately a million square miles, from what is now Germany in the west to the river Volga in the east, from the Baltic in the north to the frontier of the Roman Empire in the south.

P
erhaps the most historically significant of the Avars’ vassals were the Slavs, who themselves were relative newcomers to much of eastern Europe. Together, these two barbarian peoples helped transform the world.

T H E  A V A R
D I M E N S I O N

“T
hey are treacherous, foul, untrustworthy and possessed by an insatiable desire for riches.” These “scoundrels” are “very experienced in military matters” and “prefer to prevail over their enemies not so much by force as by deceit, surprise attacks and the cutting of supply lines.”

Thus wrote the Roman emperor Maurice, in the late sixth century, in a detailed army manual describing in precise and far from complimentary terms the hordes of Mongolian Avars who had migrated across Asia and begun to cause major problems for his empire.¹

The same climatic problems that had triggered the chain of events leading to the arrival of the Avars appear to have already led to increased pressure on the Roman Empire by the Slavs. And, as described in Chapter 1, since 541 there had been several major outbreaks of bubonic plague, which cumulatively had reduced the empire’s population substantially.

Maurice was in many ways a highly competent ruler. Yet the combination of the Avars, the Slavs, and other problems, all ultimately triggered by the climatic events of the 530s, eventually led to a people’s revolution that changed Roman and world history forever. How did the empire lose control?

I
n 536–537 the climatic problems that were affecting so many other parts of the world seem also to have hit the Slavs, an agricultural people who lived in Poland and the western half of the Ukraine and who had, since the 520s, also settled in parts of Romania.

It is known from imperial edicts that in 537 the food situation was dire in the neighboring Roman provinces—Moesia Secunda (northeast Bulgaria) and Scythia (southeast Romania)—and the agricultural problems without doubt extended over the border into Slav territory.

The situation was so bad that in 536 or 537 the Slavs poured over the Danube frontier and were reported by the Roman historian Procopius as having “plundered the adjoining country and enslaved a very great number of Romans.”

It is almost impossible to believe that the only direction the Slavs took was into Roman territory. Hunger and the search for food would have forced them to expand into any adjacent area in which native resistance was weak. It is more than likely, therefore, that it was at this juncture that the Slavs started also to expand westward, up the Danube and through the strategic Iron Gate Pass, into what is now Slovenia.

From the Roman Empire’s point of view, the years 536 and 537 marked the beginning of major Slav invasions of imperial territory. The episode seems to have ushered in a period of increased Slav political instability and aggression. Around 545—as the empire was recovering from the first bout of the plague—another invasion was launched by the Slavs.

“At about this time,” wrote Procopius, “an army of Slavs crossed the River Danube and spread desolation throughout the whole of Illyricum [now the former Yugoslavia] as far as Epidamnus [Durres in Albania], killing or enslaving all who came in their way, young and old alike, and plundering their property.”

Then, in 550, the Slavs poured over the frontier yet again, this time capturing a Roman commander and seizing a major Roman town. The captured commander—a man called Asbadus, who had been one of the emperor’s personal bodyguards—was first tortured by the Slavs (who removed strips of skin from his back) and was then burned alive.² The Slavs rampaged throughout Illyria and Thrace so violently that “the whole land came to be everywhere filled with unburied corpses.”

Procopius wrote in lurid detail of just how barbaric the invaders were: “Now they killed their victims, not with sword nor spear, nor in any other accustomed manner, but by planting very firmly in the earth stakes which they had made exceedingly sharp, and seating the poor wretches upon these with great violence, driving the point of the stake between the buttocks and forcing it up into the intestines.

“These barbarians also had a way of planting four thick stakes very deep in the ground, and after binding the feet and hands of the captives to those stakes, they would then assiduously beat them over the head with clubs, killing them like dogs or snakes or any other animal.”³

Procopius also describes how, in what seems to have been some sort of sacrificial rite, some prisoners—together with cattle and sheep—were locked inside huts that were then torched.

Finally, the Slavs attacked the town of Topirus (modern Corlu in European Turkey) and slaughtered all the male inhabitants. Procopius recorded how the barbarians overwhelmed the town’s defenders “by the multitude of their missiles and forced them to abandon the battlements, whereupon they [the Slavs] placed ladders against the fortifications and so captured the city by storm.

“Then they slew all the men immediately, to the number of 15,000, took all the valuables as plunder and reduced the children and women to slavery.”

In
A
.
D
. 558–559 a fresh Slav invasion was launched. But on this occasion the causes, nature, and scale of the attack were quite different. It was the first occasion on which the Avars’ migration from Mongolia began to have an effect—albeit an indirect one—on the Roman Empire.

As we saw in Chapter 3, a barbarian people, the Kutrigur Huns, who had lived in southeastern Ukraine, had been attacked and pushed west in the mid-550s by the hordes of refugee Avars who had been forced out of Mongolia following the climatic disasters of the 530s. These Kutrigur Huns then came into contact with the Slavs and, under Kutrigur leadership and pressure, the two groups staged a massive invasion of the empire.

The Kutrigurs and Slavs split into three groups. One invaded Greece and got as far as the famous Pass of Thermopylae—the same strategic bottleneck where the Persians had been held at bay a thousand years earlier. A second headed toward another strategic thoroughfare—the narrow straits of the Dardanelles, the least guarded of the crossing points to Asia Minor. And the third headed for Constantinople, the administrative heart of the empire itself. There was much destruction in the countryside, but the towns and cities—including Constaninople—held out and survived this particular barbarian tide.