The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century

367 Pages·1991·7.269 MB·English

by  John V. A. Fine

THE EARLY
MEDIEVAL BALKANS
A Critical Survey from the Sixth
to the Late Tvvelfth Century
JOHN V. A. FINE, Jr.
THE EARLY MEDlEYA L BALKANS

The Early
Medieval
Balkans
A Critical Survey
from the Sixth to the
Late Twelfth Century
JOHN V. A. FINE, JR.
Ann Arbor
The University of Michigan Press
First paperback edition 1991
Copyright© by the University of Michigan 1983
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
2000 1999 11 10 9
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of
the publisher.
A CJP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fine, John Van Antwerp.
The early medieval Balklands.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Balkan Peninsula-History. I. Title.
DR39.F56 1983 949.6 82-8452
ISBN 0-472-08149-7 (pbk.) AACR2
To Gena, Sasha, and Paul

Preface
This book is a general survey of early medieval Balkan history. Geo
graphically it covers the region that now is included in the states of
Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia),
Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. What are now Slovenia and Rumania
are treated only peripherally. The book covers the period from the
arrival of the Slavs in the second half of the sixth and early seventh
centuries up to the 1180s. A second volume will continue the story
from this point to the Turkish conquest, a process carried out over the
late fourteenth and through much of the fifteenth centuries.
This book is, to the best of my knowledge, the first of its kind in
any language. There are many works devoted to the history of the
Byzantine Empire (which encompassed much of the Balkans). How
ever, these works have stressed the history of Byzantium and its insti
tutions; when the Slavic regions were not imperial provinces these
works have treated the Slavic states only from the point of view of
foreign relations. The various Balkan nations have produced a wide
assortment of histories of their own individual states (or of regions
within those states) in the Middle Ages, and foreign historians have
also produced monographic surveys of specific regions (e.g., of Bul
garia, Serbia, or Croatia in the Middle Ages). However, no work has
yet dealt with the various medieval Balkan peoples as a whole. Such a
work seems necessary, particularly for this early period when much of
the area was in a state of flux and the protostates' borders did not
coincide with later state boundaries. Since the early medieval period
was an era of both national and state formation, a study that treats the
region as a whole may better trace and explain developments than a
study focused on only one area. This is particularly to the point, since
the regions that have usually been chosen for study by historians have
been defined by what came later, namely by being included in a subse
quent national state.
The early medieval period is a critical one for Balkan history. Enor-
vm Early Medieval Balkans
mous demographic changes occurred. If we exclude the Greeks, living
in Thrace and Greece, the Albanians, and the Vlachs, scattered in
various mountainous regions of the Balkans, the population of the clas
sical Balkans disappeared in the sixth and seventh centuries to be re
placed (partially by assimilation) by new ethnic groups which invaded
and took over the Balkans: the Turkic Bulgars and the Slavic groups
which produced the Serbo-Croatians and the Bulgaro-Macedonians.
In the period that followed, these new arrivals developed into
identifiable nationalities, each acquiring an ethnic awareness which has
survived to the present. Moreover, the first states created by each of
these peoples (which of course greatly cqntributed to the development
of each group's ethnic awareness) also appeared in the early medieval
period.
Finally, during this period all these peoples were officially con
verted to Christianity. Though many of the peasants retained so many
pagan beliefs that we might consider them semipagans and only nomi
nal Christians, nevertheless the rulers and their people considered
themselves Christians, and churches and a church hierarchy were es
tablished throughout their lands. Furthermore, during this period it
was determined which regions were to end up under the religious
jurisdiction of Constantinople (and later under that of independent
national Orthodox churches) and which were to end up under Rome.
Thus when the split in the church came to affect the Balkans, a gradual
process occurring over a long period of time, which peoples were to be
Eastern Orthodox and which Roman Catholic had already been set
tled. This differentiation, which has lasted to the present, has had a
great impact on the history of the Balkans up to our own day.
Only Bosnia proved to be an exception. Though in the early medi
eval period it was nominally under Rome, it had so weak a church
organization that Catholicism was not firmly established. Thus, despite
its nominal Catholicism, it was more of a no-man's-land between faiths
than Catholic; hence it is not surprising that it had a unique religious
history in the later Middle Ages when it was to produce its own inde
pendent and somewhat heretical church. From that period to the pres
ent Bosnia has been an area of mixed faiths.
This work is to large extent a political history with a good dose of
church history. Needless to say, this emphasis follows the emphasis of
the surviving sources. I would have liked to treat at greater length
social and economic matters. However, we have so few sources on
these questions that broader or more detailed treatment is impossible.
When documents like The Farmer's Law have survived, I have dealt
with them at some length. However, for other matters or other peri-
Preface ix
ods-though sweeping generalizations about the activities of various
social classes are often seen-! have limited myself to more narrow
conclusions that can be supported by the sources. I have very little
sympathy for "what must have been" or for conclusions about other
lands based on what was occurring in the Byzantine Empire at the
same time. I also see little value in works that fill in the blanks on the
basis of the belief that societies pass through certain ordered stages.
The story told here of various people, movements, and events
including some major ones-differs from that found in previous schol
arship, because the sources simply do not support many statements
made in existing historical works. Thus it is important for historians to
take each statement of fact found in these works and seek its source.
By this means many items, which turn out to have no reliable source,
can be removed. At this moment historians of the medieval Balkans
should concern themselves primarily with determining what did hap
pen, and it is as important to remove myths and fictions as it is to
uncover new facts. Since this has been one of my main aims, this work
has fewer broad generalizations than most survey histories. Until the
facts can be established, these generalizations are not warranted, for
trends based on hypotheses really are not trends. It is important to
more or less forget all the myths and tales which generations of Balkan
school children have been brought up on-many of which have a na
tionalistic origin, showing the heroic past of a people ever struggling to
assert its nationality, and provide justification for preserving or chang
ing modern borders-and turn back to the sources with a critical eye.
On the sources depends all that we can know of the medieval Balkans.
Yet, because many sources are tendentious or uninformed, the histo
rian cannot simply take them at face value but must devote much of his
attention to scrutinizing them closely.
It immediately becomes apparent that our sources on the whole
are poor. The narrative sources were chiefly written by foreigners,
often at a considerable distance from events, or by patriotic locals
centuries later on the basis of oral traditions and documents of varying
reliability, many of which no longer survive. Thus, frequently we do
not know what a later author's source was. And even when we can
identify what it must have been, the lack of the original document
often makes it difficult to determine its reliability. Although there
exists a considerable number of other documents, such as letters and
charters, these rarely give us the details and explanations we would
like; thus we are constantly faced with a scarcity of source material.
However, such a lack is no justification to fill in the blanks with fiction
and then, as has so often happened in the past, to serve up this mixture