The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450)

503 Pages·2008·7.1 MB·English

by  Florin Curta

Th e Other Europe in the Middle Ages
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East Central and Eastern
Europe in the Middle Ages,
450–1450
General Editor
Florin Curta
VOLUME 2
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Th e Other Europe
in the Middle Ages
Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans
Edited by
Florin Curta
with the assistance of Roman Kovalev
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008
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Cover illustration: A mask-on-horse pendant from Vratsa.
Courtesy of the History Museum in Vratsa.
Th is book is printed on acid-free paper.
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 1872-8103
ISBN 978 90 04 16389 8
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-
cal, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the
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Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to
Th e Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910,
Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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To the memory of Petre Diaconu (1924–2007)
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CONTENTS
Preface .................................................................................................. ix
Introduction ........................................................................................ 1
Florin Curta
Confl ict and coexistence: the local population of the Carpathian
Basin under Avar rule (sixth to seventh century) .......................... 13
Tivadar Vida
Avar chronology revisited, and the question of ethnicity in the
Avar qaganate ...................................................................................... 47
Peter Stadler
New remarks on the fl ow of Byzantine coins in Avaria and
Walachia during the second half of the seventh century .............. 83
Péter Somogyi
Bulgars in the Lower Danube region. A survey of the
archaeological evidence and of the state of current research ....... 151
Uwe Fiedler
Avar-age metalworking technologies in the Carpathian Basin
(sixth to eighth century) .................................................................... 237
Orsolya Heinrich-Tamaska
Two worlds, one hoard: what do metal fi nds from the forest-
steppe belt speak about? .................................................................... 263
Bartłomiej Szymon Szmoniewski
Th e earliest Avar-age stirrups, or the “stirrup controversy”
revisited ............................................................................................... 297
Florin Curta
A note on the “Hungarian sabers” of medieval Bulgaria .............. 327
Valeri Iotov
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viii contents
Danube Bulgaria and Khazaria as part of the Byzantine
oikoumene ............................................................................................ 339
Veselina Vachkova
From ‘steppe’ to Christian empire and back: Bulgaria between
800 and 1100 ....................................................................................... 363
Tsvetelin Stepanov
A broken mirror: the Kıpçak world in the thirteenth century ..... 379
Dimitri Korobeinikov
Th e Cuman bishopric—genesis and evolution ............................... 413
Victor Spinei
References ........................................................................................... 457
List of contributors ............................................................................. 483
Index .................................................................................................... 485
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PREFACE
Most papers in this book were originally presented in three special ses-
sions at the 40th and 42nd editions of the International Congress on
Medieval Studies held at Kalamazoo in 2005 and 2007, respectively.
Th e aim of these sessions was to provide a fresh perspective on East-
ern Europe during the early Middle Ages, one that would draw strongly
on the experience of researchers from that region working on Avars,
Bulgars, and Khazars. To that end, the session organizer drew on the
knowledge and expertise of a number of specialists from Bulgaria, Hun-
gary, Romania, Austria, and Poland, in addition to Germany and the
United States.
Papers at the Kalamazoo Congress drew attention to the interaction
between societies in the early medieval Eastern and Western Europe.
One pointer to that was dress, as revealed by both archaeological exca-
vations and examination of manuscript illuminations. Burial assem-
blages in western Hungary, but also in northeastern Bulgaria produced a
number of artifacts for which good analogies exist only in Merovingian
and Carolingian-era assemblages. “Avar” or “Bulgar” dress was a com-
bination of elements of various origins, which was viewed as “exotic”
enough to be marked as special in ninth- and tenth-century manuscript
illuminations. Constructing the image of the Other was no doubt based
more on preconceived ideas than on actual experience with the ways of
life and customs of the Other(s). But the Kalamazoo papers suggested
that something more important may have taken place in the early Mid-
dle Ages: dress depended upon the social and political context, and Avar
and Bulgar envoys to diff erent courts employed diff erent ways of dress-
ing to convey diff erent messages about their identity, as well as that of
their rulers. Th e “exotic” appearance of what was otherwise called the
“nomadic component” of Avar and Bulgar culture served not only for
a self-defi nition towards outsiders, but also as a source of self-identifi -
cation and (re-)“invention of traditions.” Mid-eleventh-century anony-
mous apocrypha written in Byzantine Bulgaria in Old Church Slavonic
propagated a bright vision of the Bulgarian past, portraying the reigns
of Boris, Symeon, and Peter as the glorious days long gone. Moreover,
Boris appears as “Michael Qagan,” a ruler with a Christian baptismal
name, but with a pre-Christian title operating as a symbol of a non-Byz-
antine form of group identity.
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