Begins

Eastern Europe Begins

Part 1 of my Eastern Europe series

(~5000 words, reading time: ~15-20 minutes)

“Asia begins at the Landstrasse"

[the road leading east from Vienna]

Klemens von Metternich

In a series of posts, I would like to present Eastern Europe to general audiences. At the end this series, I hope, the reader will agree that this is a fascinating part of the world that can probably teach us many things about our shared human experience, especially on how to avoid that shared human experience all going to shit.

Why care?

Take some of the most brutal wars in modern history and see if you find a common theme: The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), The War of the 6th Coalition (incl. the Russian Patriotic War, 1812-1814), World War 1 (1914-1918), and World War 2 (1939-1945).

As a hint I tell you that the first shots of each war were fired in Bohemia (today’s Czechia), Silesia (now part of Poland), Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), Serbia, and Poland. By the title, you can probably find what I’m after: each of these began in Eastern Europe. If you’ve not been living under a rock in 2022, then you know Eastern Europe is not done yet: a major war is still being fought and its effects are felt throughout the world. In some ways, the stakes are higher than they ever have been. And in the sequence of toppling dominos that turns regular imperial ambition into bloodshed on a global scale again and again, one is certainly outsiders' ignorance of the matters of Eastern Europe; something that people like Putin have always been happy to take advantage of. Something that we can actually do something about -- and hence this series.

In this post, I talk about Eastern Europe’s geography, its people, how its economy got started, and just the necessary amount of medieval history, roughly between the years 500 and 1200. But before that, some personal story to set the mood.

Eastern Europe as I lived it

I was born in Budapest in a country called the Republic of Hungary, a democratic country. When my parents met the year before, it was still known as the Hungarian People’s Republic, ruled by a one-party system led by the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, itself a puppet of the Soviet regime. When I was 1 year old, the last elements of the Russian army, that had been occupying the country for 45 years, have left. When I was 5 years old, my family moved into a newly built apartment building on an abandoned Russian army base. If I wanted to be dramatic, I might say that I literally grew up playing amidst the rubble that was left of foreign imperial ambitions in Hungary.

Transition to a market economy led to a massive recession. My barren playgrounds were shared with hobos who just wanted to be left alone and sniffing addicts who shouted very loudly whenever they weren’t wearing nylon on their face that smelled intoxicatingly good. As I went through elementary school, more and more of the rubble was cleared, more apartment buildings sprung up, more families moved in. The hollow scary barracks were replaced by actual playgrounds. The hobos moved on. One barracks was turned into a theatre and a community center. What must have been the base’s sports center became a shitty football club with a shittier pub next to it: it was in this smoke-filled hole where I spat out my first beer at age 11.

When I was 12, I started high school in the best school of the country which was completely free for my parents. I commuted over an hour by myself every morning riding Hungarian-made Ikarus buses and a Soviet-made Metrovagonmash underground train. Teenage Peter had no idea of this, but the same metros had driven in the tunnels of Moscow, Kyiv, Warsaw, Prague, Minsk, Sofia and the same buses had run in literally thousands of cities all across the Eastern Block. The ticket was cheap, the service crude, but frequent and reliable.

When I was 13, Hungary joined the EU. Again, teenage Peter had no idea of the significance of this, but it sounded modern, cool, and promising. At 18 I started university: again, completely free. After I turned 23, I left for Western Europe. Freedom of movement within the EU meant that I could pretty much go wherever I wanted on the continent without ever needing a permit or a visa. I did my masters in Munich, Germany, my PhD in Maastricht, Netherlands (though I lived across the border in Veldwezelt City, Belgium), then two postdocs in Grenoble and Toulouse, France. If you time-traveled to see my parents in their twenties and told them such a thing would be possible for their kid, they probably would not have believed you. If you did the same thing with my grandparents, they would probably tell you to shut up and take cover.

Then, the optimism started to fade. These past 13 years, Hungary began drifting back towards authoritarianism. Instead of a model of democratization, Hungary provided the model of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe, elements of it eagerly mimicked by many others. Instead of offering new opportunities, young people are having their heads filled with newer and newer threats, real or imagined. Instead of a model of market capitalization, the economy is run by appointed oligarchs, and the rotten influence of the Kremlin is present in ways it hasn’t been for a lifetime. My lifetime, specifically.

Chances are, if you were born in the 80s and 90s somewhere between Burgas and Tallin, between Szczecin and Mariupol, then some, maybe many features of this story will seem familiar to you. Grey, crappy, but robust and efficient apartment buildings, high quality education with no tuition, vast public transit where rich and poor intermingle in ways they don’t really do elsewhere, and the hope to “catch up with the West”. Not just economically, but also culturally (whatever that means). The euphoria of the early 90s followed by the messy efforts of cleaning up the ruins of the Soviet collapse. The bright hopes of the early 2000s where anything seemed possible and the gradually darkening years of the 2010s.

Most of this is probably a bit alien to a Western reader. Out of cultural differences, a peculiar informational environment (#dezinformatsiya), and plain ignorance, Eastern Europe still feels unknown and unknowable. This is a problem, Not just an Eastern European problem, but a world problem. Ignorance fuels wars and the wars that start here have been world wars even as far back as the 18th century. Just ask the Maori volunteers of the British Army blown to pieces by the Germans in Belgium, what they knew of Austro-Hungarian royals getting shot by a Serb assassin in Bosnia.

This series won’t put the finger on why we are where we are, where things have gone wrong, and how to fix them. This series will try to tell the story of Eastern Europe. There will be kingdoms and empires, fertile plains, empty steppes, ore-rich mountain ranges, bustling trade ports, toiling farmers, conquerors “great” and infamous, and conquered, struggling and forgotten. Most of all, a story of peoples who, while often taking the center stages of history for important episodes, by and large remain on the periphery, little known to outsiders and easily ignored, misunderstood, or taken advantage of by the main players. Often to their own peril.

Definition and geography

First let me define ‘Eastern Europe’. In this series, Eastern Europe is defined as the states of the former Eastern Bloc. For simplicity and convenience, I will exclude East Germany and the states in the Caucasus: East Germany is now part of the ‘West’, while I don’t feel I have enough systematic knowledge of the Caucasian states to write about them. The countries and territories included in my definition are Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Russia is tricky. By geography and culture, it should be included but history chartered a course for it that is very different than all the rest. It is both in and out of Eastern Europe in some ways. Much of what I write will apply to them, but most will apply to my narrow definition more. Many people such as Russians, minority ethnic groups of Russia, Caucasians, Turks, Greeks, and Finns might feel a cultural and historic closeness to my narrow Eastern Europe, and rightly so. They will appear in my story a lot. Yet, the protagonists of the story will just be the peoples of the modern states I listed above.

Throughout this piece, I use the capitalized form ‘West’ in its usual sense, that is, Europe west of the former Iron Curtain (plus East Germany) and the Anglosphere. Those who feel that this distinction between ‘East’ vs ‘West’ is erroneous, outdated, or morally wrong are hereby acknowledged. Those who criticize that countries such as Greece and Finland or any others don’t fit into my classification of Europe are likewise recognized. Finally, the exceptionally geographically gifted individuals who would remark that Austria is actually more to the east than Czechia hereby receive their due special commendation.

Which is right on cue for me to talk about Eastern Europe’s geography.

Geography

Geographically, Eastern Europe comprises two parts: north and south. The two are separated by the Carpathians and the Sudetes on the border of Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. The north is flat and looks like a funnel, narrowest at the western border, where Poland meets Germany today, and opening up to the vast plains of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. This plain, the Eastern European Plain, is segmented by many rivers. On the map, I’ve highlighted two of them, the Dnipro/Dnieper and the Daugava/Western Dvina that almost look like they want to close the funnel from the other side; next to the Daugava are some lakes on the border of today’s Estonia and Latvia, that look like they want to help close the funnel, plus a jillion more on the Finnish border, separating it from Eastern Europe.

The southern half is mountainous with the Sudetes hugging the river basins of the Vltava and the Elbe, today’s Czechia, the Carpathians hugging the Danube and Tisza basin with Hungary at its center, while the Wallachian Plain is wedged between the Southern Carpathians, the Black Sea, and the Balkan Mountains separating Romania from Bulgaria. The rest is the jagged peaks and crowded valleys of the Dinaric Alps running along the Mediterranean coast in a rough triangle shape pointing towards Venice and ending at the Turkish and Greek borders, the dominant geographic feature of Albania and the post-Yugoslav states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia.

So, while Southern Europe is isolated and protected by the Pyrenees and the Alps, and Northern Europe lies beyond the North and Baltic seas, Eastern Europe is an open door for migrations and invasions. That funnel in the north means that all those people will arrive in the same place: the territory of modern Germany. Should tribes decide to migrate west for whatever reason, that’s where they’ll meet. To build a kingdom or state here that withstands outside invasions, one must make sure to control the chokepoint at the western end of the funnel. Guarding the eastern end of the funnel effectively is much more difficult, which lead to a lot of wars and a lot of dynamism of borders.

The south is much more segmented. A kingdom or a state can defend itself very effectively by guarding the mountain passes as well as the chokepoints between the mountain ranges. The most important is the gap between the Alps and the Carpathians, where the Danube enters the Carpathian Basin at the old city of Prešporok, now called Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Austria, Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia all meet here. The other main one is between the Southern tip of the Carpathians and the Balkan Mountains, “the Iron Gates” of the Danube, where modern Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia meet. State borders here were much less dynamic.

The second feature to highlight are rivers. Rivers are important for communication, agriculture, and trade. The northern half of Eastern Europe has rivers connecting the inland parts with the Baltic, the Black, and the Caspian Seas and the world beyond like highways. These rivers are great help for border protection and power projection too; to make full use of them, the land-bridge between the upper Dnipro and Daugava are the key, near the two old cities of Smolensk, now in Russia, and Vitebsk, now in Belarus. Rule this land-bridge and you control access to all highways as well as the connection between the Baltic and the Black Seas. In the south, there is only the Danube, the one river highway linking all of it to the Black Sea and the rest of the world’s trade goods. Many of the great old cities of Eastern Europe such as Belgrade, Krakow, Novgorod, Prague, and Riga started out as trade hubs on strategically important rivers with one city that dwarfed all the others in its golden age: Kyiv.

People

Eastern Europe is home to many people of various origins. By language group they are Paleo-Balkan, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Germanic, Turkic, Latin, Romani, Hellenic, all mixing and mutually influencing one another. The groups vary greatly not just by language but by number: there are many Eastern Slavs and much fewer Paleo-Balkan Albanians. Their significance also varies: some people had a big role in a narrow period of history, such as the Huns, a nomadic group of uncertain origin who played a major role during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, only to disappear entirely. Others stayed on the relative margins and persisted, such as the Finno-Ugric Estonians.

The people of most modern states trace their ancestry and identity to one of the above language groups and thus hold claim to the lands they inhabit by the fact that their ethno-linguistic ancestors had “originally” settled there. Predictably, many of these claims are overlapping. To solidify their claims, the decision makers of the 19th century cherry-picked folk tales and medieval chronicles commissioned by noble houses, took them at face value, and elevated them into school curricula. To the children raised on these stories, the tales were second only to religion in terms of importance and sanctity. These tales seeped into romantic art and inspired a vast amount of pseudohistory. Pseudohistory gave more material for school curricula and more art until the feedback loop created the modern fiction that is nationalism.

Of course, none of this is unique to Eastern Europe. What is a bit different though, compared to e.g., Western Europe is that the amount of knowledge that actual historians have of the origins and early history of these people is scant. Most Eastern Europeans adopted writing much later than having settled to their lands. Thus, original sources of the migrations were written centuries after the events they claim to depict. Contemporary accounts come from the outside, from Roman, Frankish, or Arab sources. Finding out the exact amount of truth-content of any origin story is extremely difficult. Drawing inferences on who has historical claim based on them is a very stupid idea.

By all this preamble I mean to say that whenever someone attempts to write about Eastern European history of the early Middle Ages, people’s feelings will be hurt and accusations of nationalistic bias or hidden agendas will be thrown around. Even when tempers are calmed, hard facts and complete stories are super hard to find. What we have are isolated data points, each of them ambiguous and hotly contested. Despite this, I’ll try to give a brief run-down of who’s who and how they got where they are as best I know.

When my story starts, around the year 500, most of Western Europe is populated by Germans and the Latinized people of the former Western Roman Empire; also ruled over by various Germanic chiefs. The ruling class of the former Roman region of Gallia are called Franks; they would fill the power vacuum of Western Europe that the fall of the Western Roman Empire had left. The Franks adopted Christianity from their Latin subjects and would eventually conquer and subjugate Germany proper, then commit genocide convert them too to Christianity.

To the east of this are the many Slavic tribes who are first talked about in the 6th century. The Western Slavs established themselves across a large territory ranging from what is today northern Germany to the Danube. They were then wrecked and conquered by the Avars, another nomadic group of uncertain origin, who moved into the fertile Carpathian Basin and aggressively decreased its population in the 6th century. In the late 8th century, the Avars were themselves defeated by the Franks with the help of some more nomads, the Bulgars. The Franks annexed and destroyed most West Slavic tribes, pushing (back?) the linguistic border between Germanic and Slavic languages east to where it is today: the border of Germany and Poland. Of these conquered West Slavs, only the Sorbians remain, they number in the tens of thousands in today’s Germany.

One exception was the people in the Vltava basin, who pushed back against the Franks and the Avars and had formed a kingdom back in the 7th century. They could never really be pacified and again achieved temporary independence from the Franks in the 9th century. They adopted Christianity, standardized their language (though the alphabet proposed by two Eastern Roman missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, didn’t stick) and formed a state on their own terms, called Moravia. The Franks, however, didn’t give up, and they enlisted yet another group of nomads, the Magyars, to destroy them. The two would split Moravia between them in the late 9th-early 10th century. The western half, home of the Czechs and Moravians, remained under loose German overlordship with episodes of de facto independence until the 20th century as the Kingdom of Bohemia, while the eastern parts, home of the people who would become the Slovaks, came under Magyar rule.

The second exception were the Western Slavs “of the plains”, i.e. the pole, who were too far to be conquered. They copied the Bohemians’ homework, adopted their style of feudal government, converted to Christianity, and formed the powerful and independent Kingdom of Poland: one of the major players in the centuries to come.

To the south in the Eastern Roman Empire are Latins, Dacians, Thracians, and Illyrians, the linguistic ancestors of today’s Romanians (more Latin) and Albanians (more Paleo-Balkan). The region, however, was sparsely populated after the Goths’ and the Huns’ raids destroyed most of the countryside, leaving only the small walled cities. The South Slavs were allowed to settle in the Dinaric Alps and the Balkan Mountains. This migration was mostly peaceful until it wasn’t: again, the Avars of the 7th century pushed more Slavs from the Carpathian Basin further south in ever greater numbers. Two prominent latecomer tribes, the Croats and the Serbs would eventually reach de facto, then full independence from the Eastern Romans. The Croats were later subjugated by the Magyars until, again, the 20th century while the Serbs formed their own kingdom. Some South Slavs to the west, the Slovenes, came to be ruled by the Franks and would remain under German rule until, you guessed it, the 20th century.

In (probably?) the 7th century, the Turkic Bulgars were evicted from their home north of the Black Sea. They settled in the Wallachian basin, right next to the Southern Slavs. They created a chiefdom that would rule over most of Southeast Europe as the Bulgarian(-Macedonian) Empire by the mid-9th century. They were powerful at a time and had a hand in eradicating the Avars, but were weakened by wars against the Franks, the Eastern Romans, and the Magyars and came to be fully assimilated into the much more numerous Slavic population of the lands they ruled. The now Slavic Bulgarians made a deal with the Eastern Romans where they adopted Eastern Christianity but, to stave off Roman influence, they also copied the Bohemians’ homework in creating their own language. With modifications, they adopted the alphabet the two missionaries had proposed to the Bohemians, which became the Cyrillic alphabet. This would later spread to most Southern and Eastern Slavic kingdoms and is still in use today. In this transformative time, the Croats were temporarily subjugated by the Franks and would therefore become Catholic and adopt the Latin alphabet -- something that the Magyar rule later solidified. This cultural divergence among the South Slavs will be important later.

The largest ethnic group, and the ones who are most often in the news nowadays, are the Eastern Slavs. During the Slavic migrations of the 6th century, this third group went north-east to settle what is now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia’s core lands, living side by side with Finno-Ugric tribes to the north (the antecedents of modern Finns, Karelians, Samis, and Estonians) Baltic ones to the west (the ancestors of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Prussians), nomadic Turkic ones to the south, (Bulgars, Avars (maybe Turkic?), Khazars (Jewish Turkic), and Pechenegs), as well as some Greek trading colonies along the Black Sea coast. For a while, the Slavs wandered the vast expanse of the Eastern European plain subsisting on burn-and-slash agriculture, staying in small-scale societies, and remaining in a state of relative flux.

Everything changed when the Scandinavian Varangians (the Greek name for Vikings) attacked in the 9th century. First, they came as raiders and traders, but they stayed as conquerors and ruled as chiefs and petty kings. Just as their brethren did in Normandy (France), Frisia (the Netherlands), and the Danelaw (England), they established a small ruling and warrior class over the majority “indigenous” population. Through their expertise in navigating rivers, their rule expanded the significance of river trade routes, connecting the Baltic and the Black Seas. Northeastern Europe, which had been a relative blind spot for trade before this, became connected to Eastern Roman and Arab trade ports in the south as well as the Scandinavian and North Sea ports in the west.

With the Vikings’ arrival, life changed as well. Via the Black Sea trade routes, Eastern Roman culture and religion, as well as the South Slavs’ alphabet, spread to the Eastern Slavs. Fixed trade posts sprang up that then became cities for warlords to fight wars of conquest over. The tribes became feudal kingdoms that later became one kingdom. This kingdom and the people in it were named after the Finnic term for Sweden, where the “rowing men”, came from: the Rus. Eventually, the Viking ruling elite assimilated into the majority population of Slavs, but the medieval Kingdom of the Rus’ (as in the plural of ‘Rus’) remained a multiethnic, multireligious, multicentric, fluid, and powerful polity.

The last group to arrive in Eastern Europe and survive were the Magyars (the Hungarian name for, well, Hungarians). The Hungarians were Finno-Ugric in origin but left their cousins back in the Urals who would migrate West to become the Finns and Estonians. They came to the shores of the Black Sea and hung out a lot with the Khazars and other Turkic tribes, completely adopting their lifestyle, meaning that they fought on horseback as raiders and mercenaries for whoever could pay them against whoever could not. After the Franks and the Bulgars destroyed the Avars in the Carpathian Basin and their temporary home was devastated by the Turkic Peshenegs, the Hungarians fled to gloriously conquered the Carpathian Basin, subjugating what was left of the Slavs and Avars there. Unlike the Huns, the Avars, and the Turkic Bulgars who all met their fate there, the Hungarians stayed alive and independent after beating back a major Frankish invasion in the early 10th century. To stop future attempts, they joined the Christianity club and adopted a form of Frankish feudalism.

The Hungarians’ arrival marks the end of the age of migrations. Some more Turkic groups came and went, Peshenegs and Cumans in particular, but would be destroyed or assimilated. Another group would arrive in the next episode and change things drastically.

The trade and the traded: The early Eastern European economy

To grossly oversimplify, during the age of migrations, Eastern Europe’s single most important export was slaves. The trading of slaves basically kick-started the kingdoms I listed above.

Enslavement and trade of all kinds of "barbarians" have been around since Roman times and has never really gone away during the Middle Ages. What changed was the destination of slaves. The feudal kingdoms of Western Europe had no use for them: serfs were abundant and did the job just fine. Instead, slaves were purchased by the Eastern Roman Empire and especially the Islamic world in ridiculous quantities.

Eastern Europe was a great place to obtain slaves because most of the population was pagan until the 11th century: Christians weren’t supposed to trade other Christians, Muslims weren’t supposed to trade other Muslims, but both groups were more than happy to trade in pagans, mostly Slavs. While Slavs weren’t the only ethnic group traded, they were so well represented that the ethnonym ended up becoming the Latin and Arab words for slave, ‘sclavus’ and ‘saqaliba’. The English word ‘slave’ is a descendant of the Latin term.

The flow of Eastern European slaves into the Islamic world declined as the Eastern European kingdoms solidified and converted to Christianity but didn’t stop until the 19th century. Eastern European slave women populated the harems of beys and sultans and the brothels of the metropolises of the Islamic world well into the 1800s, while men were often castrated and served in armies, households, or as administrators. The feudal kingdoms of both Western and Eastern Europe were built upon the juicy trade surplus gained from trading the people of Eastern Europe.

As slavery is a “hot” topic in today’s politics, I feel obliged to note that the use, rights, and the quality of life of slaves varied greatly across time and space. White slavery in the Islamic world is difficult to compare with African slavery of America. The fate of white slaves in the Islamic world was different even from that of black slaves in the same time and place: for reasons either on the supply or the demand side, white slaves were valued higher than black. There exist records that claim a white woman would sell for 3-5 times the price of a black woman and up to 40 times the price of black men who were mostly used as laborers. The price of a white man would vary, depending on whether he was castrated (Islamic law forbids the mutilation of slaves but Viking, Greek, Latin, and Frankish traders were happy to oblige) and whether he had skills useful for administration, entertainment, art, or craftmanship.

By the early 13th century, most of Eastern Europe had adopted feudalism. The settled life brought more varied economic production. The kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary made their wealth from mining silver, gold, and salt and grew pretty rich and powerful. Poland tapped into the growing Hanseatic trade of the Baltic Sea, along with the still pagan Baltic peoples. The decentralizing and constantly beleaguered Rus’ ruled over the river highways in the east, becoming rich when the Eastern Roman Empire had goods to sell and growing poorer when the Romans themselves began to struggle. The nomads of the steppes eked out a living by trying to hug the Black Sea coast to supply slaves to the Greek trade ports of the Black Sea. Bulgaria and Serbia also established themselves as semi-stable kingdoms with occasional control over segments of the Danube River as well as trade ports in the Black, Aegean, and Adriatic Seas.

While it may not sound much, this time marks a high point in Eastern European history. Its kingdoms were rich and stable, its population booming, its cultures flourishing: most of the tales, the "origin stories" that ended up becoming the foundations of nationalist myths were written down at this period of time. In the next post, I will tell the story of how it all went to shit.

February 4, 2023.

Notes:

• An earlier version asserted that the etymological root of the word 'barbarian' is the Latin word for 'beard', which is almost certainly false. Credible sources claim that it derives from the ancient Greek word for 'foreigner' (whose speech sounded like 'bar-bar' to them). I thank Anastas Tenev for spotting this.

Comments and questions should be addressed to peter.bayer7@gmail.com.