A PLEA for a DIFFERENT VIEW of ANCIENT SLOVENE HISTORY The

CHAPTER FOUR

A PLEA FOR A DIFFERENT VIEW OF ANCIENT SLOVENE HISTORY

Th e basic notions the Slovenes have about their history associate its beginnings – if we disregard theories of indigenousness – with the set- tlement of the Slavs or, simply, the Slovenes, and Carantania. Th ese notions started to take form in the period when their formation as a nation started in the late 18th century. Th is was of course no coinci- dence, because the formation of a new, national view of history was an essential element of their nation building. Establishing a national history stretching back to the time of King Samo and the Carantanian princes, the Slovenes gained one of their principal identity anchors, as well as a vital means for becoming a legitimate nation and for their emancipation, integration and, last but not least, diff erentiation from other nations.1 Anton Tomaž Linhart, who stands at the very beginning of Slovene national historiography in the late 18th century, outlined the basic framework for understanding Slovenia’s past and it remained unchanged for two hundred years, until nearly the end of the 20th century.2 Conceptually, he drew on the then spreading (and later prevailing, but as we now today realise, erroneous) perception that equated language communities with ethnic communities.3 Th e notion that linguistics

1 See Štih 2005, 107 ff . 2 For a comprehensive view on Linhart, see Svetina 2005. For Linhart as a historian, see Štih 2005a, 291 ff .; Kramberger 2007, 139 ff . See also the brief, but accurate judge- ment of Linhart in Hösler 2006, 98 ff ., especially 101. 3 See e.g. Untermann 1985, 146: “Insbesondere weiß man heute, wie problematisch der Begriff ‘Volk’ wird, wenn man ihn nicht aus historischen Quellen gewinnt, also nichts über soziale Organisation und politische Aktivität erfährt, sondern ihn durch sprachliche Merkmale oder durch Waff en, Gräber, Häuser und Gebrauchsgegenstände bestimmen soll.”; 154: “Sprache ist nicht notwendig Korrelat ethnischer Individualität, weder im positiven Sinne – daß jedem ‘Ethnos’ eine unverwechselbare Sprache eigen ist – noch negativ – daß zwei verschieden Sprachen notwendigerweise als Symptome für zwei voneinander verschiedene Völker angesehen werden dürfen. Ebensowenig ist Sprachveränderung notwendig mit ethnischer Veränderung gleichzusetzen.” An individual ethnic community is not necessarily a linguistic and/or cultural community as well, and this means that it is necessary and possible to identify ethnic identity based on other criteria and phenomena. See in this sense allready Wenskus 1967, 32. 72 chapter four was the clue revealing the very beginnings of the history of individual modern nations had far-reaching consequences for the reception of European history and its retrograde nationalisation, because the thus created “pseudo-peoples of linguistics”4 were perceived as real, historical entities.5 Based on these ideas, Linhart was able to extend the national history of the Slovenes far back into the Early Middle Ages, including Slavic Carantania, due to the linguistic continuity that links modern Slovene to the language of the Alpine Slavs in accordance with the scientifi c fi ndings of his time. Linhart and his concept thus saw the Slovenes as a clearly diff erentiated, historical, ethnic, linguistic and cultural community with an undisputed continuity, diff erent from all other communities, already in the Early Middle Ages. It was this concept, placing the elements of language and ethnology in the forefront, which granted the Slovenes their own history in the same period whitch other European nations considered as their cradle. Neither Linhart, nor any one of his followers seems to have understood that this was simply a retrograde nationalisation of history, projecting the history of the Slovenes backward to a period when the Slovenes did not yet exist as a special ethnic community, and neither as a special language community.6

4 Mühlmann 1985, 15. 5 On the philological method, its signifi cance for historical notions and national- ism, see Koppelmann 1956, 29 ff .; Geary 2002, 39 ff .; Brather 2004, 89 ff .; Curta 2004, 127 ff .; Wiwjorra 2006, 37 ff . For criticism of such understanding and the necessity to distinguish between early medieval ethnic and language communities, see in general: Wenskus 1961, 87 ff ., 133 ff .; Pohl 1998, 22 ff . For the Slovene case, see Štih 2006a, 26 ff., especially 37 ff . 6 On the huge problems linguists face in their attempts to defi ne and distinguish the language spoken by the Slavs between the Danube and the Adriatic Sea as a special Alpine Slavic or Old Slavic language, where no clear answers have yet been found, see most recently Holzer 2007, 27 ff . (and the quoted bibliography). Th e surprising uniformity of this Slavic language is not just something established by modern linguistics (see e.g. Popowska-Taborska 2005), but was reported already by contemporary histo- riographical accounts. In the late 8th century, Paul the Deacon writes that Radoald, the son of the Lombard duke Gisulf from Cividale talked with hostile Slavs, who had sailed to Siponto in Apulia around 642, in their own language (Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum IV 44). Raduald must have learned Slavic either in Cividale or in Pannonia where he was taken into Avar captivity as a boy (and from where he soon escaped with his brothers), but in Siponto he spoke to Slavs who had sailed from Dalmatia. A similar reference to the uniformity of the Slavic language (of the Macedonian and Moravian Slavs) is in Vita Methodii c. 5: “And it happened in those days that the Slavic princes Rastislav and Svetopolk sent envoys from Moravia to Emperor Michael /…/ the Emperor then said to the philosopher Constantine: ‘Th e two of you are Salonicans, all the Salonicans speak pure Slavic’.” In the north, Adam of Bremen points out the uniformity of the Slavic language among the “Western” Slavs in