Publications Without, However, Aspiring to Completeness. Paul

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Publications Without, However, Aspiring to Completeness. Paul Jonathan Shepard publications without, however, aspiring to completeness. Paul Stephenson has provided a valuable review-article of secondary literature published in a western language on the history of the early Hungarians, while his book on Byzantium’s Balkan frontier sets the activities of Hungarians in the tenth century within the broader context of imperial Byzantine diplomacy, emergent Balkan polities and the needs of nomads. Stephenson and Tóth, building on the earlier work of Macartney and Göckenjan, point to the strong probability that the lands east of the Tisza were occupied by the De administrando’s Kavars (Kabaroi). These, in turn, may be associated with the “Khalisioi”/Kaliz, a grouping of Khazar provenance known from later Hungarian sources to have occupied the valley of the Tisza in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Constantine VII could well have drawn heavily on Kavar informants for his contemporary data about the Hungarians’ lands, and the De administrando’s generous coverage of this grouping in comparison with the other units of Hungarians becomes the more understandable. In addition, a number of scholars have independently reached the conclusion that imperial attention to, knowledge about, and policy towards a region or people fluctuated drastically in accordance with the empire’s ever- changing needs and apprehensions of perils. Stephenson’s book shows how adaptable Byzantine administrative arrangements were after the defeat of the Rus and the Bulgarians in 971. Comparable flexibility was applied to the northern borderlands after final victory over the Bulgarians had been won in 1018, and in the territories reconquered from the eastern Muslims in the 960s and 970s. Groupings of combat-ready “barbarians” could become pivotal to imperial schemes virtually overnight, as my own studies on interrelationships between Byzantium, the Khazars, the Rus’ and the Pechenegs have led me to conclude. From the later ninth century onwards the Hungarians, whether living in the Black Sea steppes or to the west of the Carpathians, were of great potential value to Byzantium as allies against the Bulgarians. This probably accounts for the composition and storing in imperial archives of a number of written reports about them, particularly after their migration to their new abode in the 890s. A generation later, perhaps after a slight lull in Byzantino-Hungarian exchanges, the Hungarians emerged as a serious nuisance, if not major threat, to the empire’s European provinces. Accordingly, fresh data about them, and potential counterforces to them, needed to be marshalled. Coping with the Hungarians may well have become a speciality of Theophanes the Chamberlain in the 930s and 940s. Our study was not primarily concerned with the problems of the whereabouts and socio-political organization of the Hungarians during the ninth century, and its propositions do not seem invalidated by more recent publications on the subject. That the Hungarians dominated the Black Sea 98 Byzantine Writers on the Hungarians in the ninth and tenth Centuries steppes from the 830s, if not slightly earlier, is no longer in serious doubt, and it seems likely that groups of them were migrating across the Carpathians in the direction of the Danubian basin well before 896. The nature of their relations with the Khazars and the Byzantines during this period might well repay further investigation. Constantine Zuckerman has pointed out the evidence suggestive of serious tensions and conflict between the Hungarians and the Khazars. The most plausible scenario is one of fluctuating phases of Khazar hegemony and Hungarian subordination, defiance and outright hostilities. The period, or periods, of the Hungarians’ active military collaboration with the Khazars may have been quite brief. The intensity of these two peoples’ interrelationship over a couple of generations could account for the presence in the Hungarian language of a number of Turkic terms denoting political authority and law. However, this is not the only possible explanation for the presence of Turkic words such as kündü or kende in Hungarian, and there are grounds for reappraising the whole phenomenon of the Hungarians’ sudden emergence in historical sources relating to the second third of the ninth century. Angela Marcantonio has adduced philological considerations, supported by thorough statistical analysis, to question whether the language spoken by the early Hungarians need have any “genetic” connexion with that spoken by inhabitants of the Urals. There appear to be no compelling philological grounds for supposing the Ural mountains to have been an original “homeland,” the region where the Hungarians coalesced into a people having their own distinctive language, akin to that of the Finns and to Ob-Ugric. The archaeological evidence supporting this supposition would seem to be inconclusive, at best. Specialists in the formation of languages across Eurasia are unlikely to reach agreement on these issues in the near future and the general historian is not best-placed to arbitrate. But one may note that Marcantonio’s dissociation of the Hungarians from an Uralic heritage fits well enough with the consistent designation of the Hungarians as “Turks” by Leo VI and by other Byzantine writers of the late ninth and tenth centuries. Moreover Constantine VII’s remark that the Hungarians could speak the language of the Khazars would raise fewer eyebrows if the Hungarians had come into being as a distinctive grouping somewhere to the east of the Khazars, in the steppes. There would be no need to posit communication between the Khazars and Hungarians at the imperial palace “in some sort of patois,” as is done in the text below (p. 104–5). Rather, one might take the speculation a little further and suppose that the Hungarians began to have close dealings with the Khazars not long after their formation as a confederate grouping, perhaps while this process was under way. * * * 99 Jonathan Shepard We do not possess many narrative accounts about the “people” (or “peoples”) whom Byzantine writers usually called Tourkoi, in their coverage of the ninth and tenth centuries. This is not so surprising: generally, foreign groupings were only deemed worthy of discursive mention if they appeared to be threatening Constantinople itself. The number of major incursions by the Hungarians recorded by Byzantine chronicles is small: three between 934 and 958 (inclusive) and an unspecified quantity of indeterminate size during the 960s, culminating in the participation by Hungarians in Prince Sviatoslav’s seizure of the Lower Danube in 969–71. The first and third of the major expeditions are said to have approached the capital city, but the Hungarians did not camp before the walls, in the manner of the Bulgars. Moreover, their incursions into Byzantine territory occurred within quite a short period, little more than a generation, if we believe the categoric statement of works deriving from or related to the now-lost principal chronicle, Symeon the Logothete’s, that “the first expedition (prote ekstrateia)” took place in 934. One must, of course, allow for the possibility that Hungarian raids on the provinces went unreported by Constantinople-based chronicles, but one of the two explicit references to Hungarian incursions in Saints’ Lives seem to denote an episode already known from the chronicles. This is the statement in the Life of St. Luke the Younger that Luke withdrew to the island of Ampelon (modern Ampelos) “while the Turks [i.e.. Hungarians] were overrunning Hellas,” indicating that Hungarian raiders were feared as far south as the Gulf of Corinth, where the island is located. The passage containing this reference is clearly set within the chronological limits of the early 940s and it most probably alludes to the 943 invasion and its aftermath. At first sight this might appear also to be the case with the prophecy about a Hungarian attack ascribed to St. Basil the Younger by his Life in approximately the same period: St. Basil died in March 944. According to the Life, a group of monks pondered why God had allowed “these most abominable peoples” to “continually swirl over us Christians like a cloud of dust” and lay waste “the western regions.” St. Basil then announced to them that he could see in a vision “the most abominable Hungarians trying to cross the river Danube [and being] drowned in its currents.” Allegedly, within four days a report arrived at the imperial court from the strategos of Macedonia confirming exactly what the saint had foreseen. However, closer reading of the text suggests that these raiders were on their way to attack Byzantine territory and never actually reached it. St. Basil’s vision was of “the things happening in Hungary (en Ouggria).” So this could hardly be the invasion of 943. The Life of Basil does also speak of the Hungarians “ravaging the western regions every day on account of our sins,” and this could be taken to mean that the provinces were undergoing minor raids notwithstanding the chronicles’ declarations that effective peace-terms were 100 Byzantine Writers on the Hungarians in the ninth and tenth Centuries negotiated in 934 and 943. But the Life of Basil the Younger is a tendentious work, which some scholars have likened to a work of fiction, and in any case the surge of raiding which it implies falls within the mid-tenth century limits of Hungarian confrontation with Byzantium demarcated by the main chronicles. Turning to the non-narrative Byzantine sources, one may note two salient features of their coverage of the Hungarians. Firstly, they are fairly extensive–– considerably more so than are the narratives. Secondly, they are focused on events (or alleged events) and individuals of a period well before the hostilities of the mid-tenth century. In fact much of their material relates to the ninth century or the opening years of the tenth. This is the case not only with the Tactica of Emperor Leo VI (composed mainly in the mid-890s) but also with the De administrando imperio of Constantine VII, composed c.
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