Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (5 page)

There is a particularly hysteria-edged frieze in the Western Bohemia Museum in Plzeň by V. Saff, carved in 1900, imagining the arrival of the ancient Czechs in a forest, torturing and killing their enemies, tying them to trees, strangling them. In the usual proto-Art-Nouveau style, the sculptor follows through on an ethnographic hunch that surprising numbers of the tribal womenfolk would be in their late teens and free of clothing. The sadism of the carving is oddly reckless and preserves the nationalist mania of its period: urging the Czechs to stop sitting around reading newspapers and sipping herbal liqueurs and instead to embrace the burly virtues of their forebears. In practice we do not of course have any sense at all of what these ancient Czechs were like and Saff may not be entirely wrong about their savagery: although occasions on which women with amazing breasts swung around a severed human head by its top-knot were probably infrequent.

Romanian nationalists cleverly trumped everybody by claiming descent from the Romans, inhabitants of the old province of Dacia. This messed up all the Slav groups and the Hungarians, who had between them established a fairly clear
AD
600–900 arrival date. A feature of several Romanian towns is a copy of the Roman statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by their adopted wolf mother. This bizarre gift was handed out by Mussolini in the early 1920s to suggest none too subtly that his own new empire had a racial ally, a fellow Child of Rome. There will be plenty more of this sort of stuff as the book progresses, but I hope it is already clear to every reader just how freakish and peculiar history’s uses have been in the region.

But as was the case for everybody else, it seems in fact the Romanians arrived from elsewhere – probably from the more Latinized areas south of the Danube, modern Serbia or Croatia, which would explain why so rough and marginal an area of the old Roman Empire as Dacia should have kept its Latin flavour in an otherwise drastically changed region: it didn’t. This unwelcome result should make all the rival nationalist historians throw up their hands in jokey horror, call it quits and have a non-ethnically specific drink together. If the Romanians have a mystic heartland that turns out actually to belong to another country then we may as well all just go home.

To take too strong an interest in this subject is to set out on the high road to madness. The extreme mobility of all these tribes is bewildering and the almost total lack of written records for centuries does not help. The overall picture seems to be a retreat by Germanic tribes into the west and the arrival of Slavic tribes, seemingly from a start-point in what is now eastern Poland, mixed in with further post-Hun invaders from various steppe tribes, from the Avars to the Magyars. Indeed, in a despairing variant, the elites of the original Croats and Serbs may have been speaking an Iranian language, which is the point where I think anybody sensible just gives up. Arrows drawn on maps build up into an astonishing spaghetti of population movement, charted through pot-fragments, house-post remnants and casual, perhaps frivolously made-up comments written down by poorly informed monks living centuries later and far away. The net result of these migrations can clearly be seen today. The ancestors of the Czechs settled in a region protected by a crescent of mountains (the Iron Mountains and the Bohemian Forest Mountains) that happened to shield them from German and Frankish predation. Their fellow Slavs in the north and south, the Saxons and the Carantanians, were destroyed by invading Germans and the survivors converted into German-speaking Christians, bequeathing only the names Saxony and Carinthia. Further east and south the early Moravians, Slovakians, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Bulgars, Poles, Ruthenes, Croats and Serbs spread out (and in themselves had numerous further subdivisions which have since been erased), generally under Avar overlordship.

The Avars were fast-moving Asian nomads of a kind wearyingly familiar to anyone trying to settle down and earn an honest living in Central Europe. We know almost nothing about them at all. They hit a high point when they besieged Constantinople in 626, but they were driven off by the Byzantines and settled in a broad swath from Bohemia to Bulgaria. The Avar khaganate in many ways exemplifies why the Dark Ages are so irritating – the Avars can be seen in tiny glimpses in chronicles or in a handful of surviving, utterly context-free decorative objects and yet for two centuries they were the main overlords directing Slav settlement in Central Europe. An Avar ambassador met Charlemagne at his court on the Rhine in 790 and agreed the border between the Frankish Empire and the Avar Empire, but this was clearly just a truce and the Franks defeated the Avars in a cataclysmic battle notable for the heaps of treasure handed out to Charlemagne’s friends, a substantial shift of gold from the east to the long-denuded west. There is a final reference to the Avars in a chronicle in 822 but then the name simply disappears from the record. I would love to have some sense of what that Avar ambassador speaking with Charlemagne actually looked like – we don’t even know what language he would have used or how he dressed. The Avars could have as readily been from Mars – and ultimately they vanished, dissolving into the Slavic population.

By the ninth century key elements in Central Europe were now in place. The evanescent Great Moravia was a Slavic confederation which managed to be both profoundly important and frustratingly vague – it is not even clear what lands it ruled, although it is fairly certain it did include modern Moravia and Slovakia and probably a circle of lands around that core. Czech nationalists have endlessly argued over this. It lasted only a few decades, but was culturally crucial as the home first of the beautiful and strange Glagolitic script which would render
SIMON
, for example, as something like

(the M seems particularly lovely in its general unsustainability) and then, thanks to the tireless Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, as the home of the first Slavic script – an alphabetic decision which has ever since decisively carved out a different zone, both in itself and as a signifier for allegiance to Orthodoxy. Indeed the missionary work of this period in shifting a large block of Europe towards Constantinople and out of Rome’s reach created a fault line with implications into the present.

Each attempt to settle down and create a lasting dynastic state and even a little economic growth was thwarted by the sheer motility of these Eurasian bands. There may not have been a large European population yet (the nearest approach to a town being simply a large armed camp or a cluster of buildings around a fortress) but those that were there remained willing to travel great distances and take great risks. Two threats prevented Central European coalescence, one from the west and one from the east.

Wandering peoples

Passau, on the Bavarian–Austrian border, is a town of such absurd scenic grandeur and geophysical significance that it seems a shame to find its streets lined only with little shops selling devotional trinkets and bird-whistles – the inhabitants should be cut from some more heroic cloth. Passau’s fame stems from its location on a spit of land which at its tapered point joins together two monstrous rivers, the Danube and the Inn, the former all the way from a squashy meadow in Swabia, the latter from the Alps. There is also a third river, the extremely less impressive Ilz, which dribbles down from the north – making Passau ‘the city of three rivers’. The great significance of the Ilz is that it comes down from the watershed of the forests on the edge of the Bohemian Forest Mountains to the north, just as the Inn comes down from the Swiss Alps, with the Danube itself heading straight west–east along the northern side of the Alps. This combination of converging waters shows there is a gap in the mountains, and it was from here that German-speaking Europe extruded into the Slavic lands to the east.

Bavaria, of which Passau is now the easternmost point, is one of those strange semi-kingdoms that has throughout its history come close to being a real and independent state but has always been subsumed or subverted. It has some of the same advantages of countries such as England or France in having a number of thorny borders. England’s sea coasts and France’s sea coasts and mountains have given their rulers a militarily happy situation and it has not been an accident that both these countries have been so hard to invade. This is entirely unlike most Central European states, which have been obliged militarily to turn round and round like a dizzy dog trying to defend its drinking bowl. Bavaria had coherence because of its impenetrable southern mountains and reasonably chunky eastern ones. It emerged from the Dark Ages as a well-run, Germanic, naturally wealthy place under the rule of the Agilolfing family. In the eighth century Bavaria stretched much further east than Passau and German-speaking colonists debouched into Tirol and Salzburg.

As so often in Bavaria’s history, the country’s wealth and security attracted envious eyes. On the face of it a safe distance away, Charlemagne on the Lower Rhine, a Frankish chieftain, had re-established through a sheer act of the imagination a direct link between himself and the Roman Empire that had collapsed in the west over three centuries before. His ambition, his court’s pomp, wealth and learning, and his military success proclaimed the end of the Dark Ages and a new direction for Europe. Instead of being a shattered jigsaw of petty chieftainships and dubious Asiatic overlords, Europe would revive as a new Roman Empire re-founded with Charlemagne as emperor. The Bavarians and the Franks had fought each other a number of times, but in an astounding decade from 785 Charlemagne completed the conquest of the Saxons in the north, deposed the long-serving ruler of Bavaria, Tassilo, in the south and then destroyed the Avar Khaganate.

The snuffing-out of the Agilolfing family in Bavaria and the absorption of the whole region into Charlemagne’s empire created a fresh eastward dynamic. Massacring, Germanizing and Christianizing their way east, the Franks created new marches and duchies, pushing back the Slavs so that by the mid-ninth century something not dissimilar to the modern language map existed, with much of Austria in Germanic hands. But before the linguistic patchwork settled into place there was one more, thoroughly startling intrusion.

The Magyars were not the last of the new arrivals in an already crowded and chaotic neighbourhood, but they were certainly one of the most spectacular. Chased out of their home in the Khazar khaganate the Magyars shifted ever further west until they hurtled into Europe with their innovative cavalry skills and entirely unrelated language. They caused mayhem, defeating the Bavarian and East Frank armies sent against them and raiding deep into France and Italy before finally and decisively being stopped in their tracks by the Emperor Otto I at the Battle of the Lech in 955.

The final Magyar raids have a somewhat nostalgic air to them – as though the older warriors could not resist calls to put the old band back together again. After being chased away by Otto I they abandoned raiding western Europe but continued to carve out an ever-larger territory for themselves, reinforced by fresh arrivals from Central Asia including many of their former enemies, the enjoyably named Pechenegs.

As usual with these groups it is impossible now to unpick the true circumstances of their arrival. Everyone has an automatic picture of streams of wagons filled with seer elders, opulent wives, lisping daughters and young sons practising with wooden swords on their own tiny ponies. This is at odds with the patently rather male-only, rugby-match atmosphere of the Magyar raids themselves. We will never know, for example, what balance of the settled population managed to escape: were those unable to move fast enough killed or just enslaved? Did the Magyar men massacre the Slav and Avar men they found and take over their surviving families? Identity shifts very rapidly. In the late nineteenth century many Germans, Jews, Slovaks and others became Hungarians, changing language and religion across two generations with the same ease that other members of the same groups emigrated and became Americans. Clearly a much more local and wholly illiterate society could be blended in different combinations (particularly when imposed by terrible violence) with great speed. The chances of anybody today being a ‘pure’ example of any specific medieval ‘race’ must be close to zero, quite aside from the category being patently meaningless.

The Magyar defeat at the Lech proved absolutely decisive for the shape of Europe. The retreating Magyar army tried to attack the Bohemian Slavs but were again defeated, headed back along the Danube and then stuck there. Germans and Magyars found a demarcation line east of Vienna and the two groups clicked together like a seatbelt, separating the northern Slavs (Bohemians, Moravians, Poles) from the southern Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs), and inventing what became Austria and Hungary. And then, in a stroke of genius, the Magyar prince Géza converted to Christianity in around 972. This was a purely political gesture, but nonetheless Magyars began genuinely to convert in large numbers and therefore put themselves out of bounds for the traditional Frankish anti-pagan campaigning season. Géza’s decision to plump for Rome rather than Constantinople was another of those small decisions with deep consequences, tying Hungary to the west and giving its entire culture a different shape and flavour from its eastern and southern neighbours.