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FRANKS, NORTHMEN, AND SLAVS: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe CURSOR MUNDI Editorial Board all members of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Christopher Baswell, General Editor Blair Sullivan, Executive Editor William Bodiford Peter Cowe Teofilo Ruiz Giulia Sissa Zrinka Stahuljak Advisory Board Michael D. Bailey Iowa State University István Bejczy Nijmegen Florin Curta University of Florida Elizabeth Freeman University of Tasmania Yitzhak Hen Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Geraldine Heng University of Texas at Austin Lauren Kassell Pembroke College, Cambridge David Lines University of Warwick Cary Nederman Texas A&M VOLUME 5 FRANKS, NORTHMEN, AND SLAVS: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe edited by Ildar H. Garipzanov, Patrick J. Geary, and Przemysław Urbańczyk FH British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data © 2008, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2008/0095/42 ISBN: 978-2-503-52615-7 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Abbreviations vii List of Maps ix Introduction: Gentes, Gentile Identity, and State Formation in 1 Early Medieval Europe ILDAR H. GARIPZANOV, PATRICK J. GEARY, AND PRZEMYSŁAW URBAŃCZYK Part One. Franks: Identities in the Migration and Carolingian Periods 1. Ethnicity, Group Identity, and Social Status in the Migration 17 Period PETER J. HEATHER 2. Omnes Franci: Identifications and Identities of the Early Medieval 51 Franks HELMUT REIMITZ 3. Frankish Identity in Charlemagne’s Empire 71 JANET L. NELSON Part Two. Northmen: Identities and State Formation in Scandinavia 4. People and Land in Early Scandinavia 87 STEFAN BRINK 5. Frontier Identities: Carolingian Frontier and the gens Danorum 113 ILDAR H. GARIPZANOV 6. Division and Unity in Medieval Norway 145 SVERRE BAGGE Part Three. Slavs: Identities and State Formation in the Slavic World 7. The Primary Chronicle’s ‘Ethnography’ Revisited: Slavs and 169 Varangians in the Middle Dnieper Region and the Origin of the Rus’ State OLEKSIY P. TOLOCHKO 8. Christianity and Paganism as Elements of Gentile Identities to 189 the East of the Elbe and Saale Rivers CHRISTIAN LÜBKE 9. Slavic and Christian Identities During Transition to the Polish 205 Statehood PRZEMYSŁAW URBAŃCZYK 10. Identities in Early Medieval Dalmatia (Seventh–Eleventh Centuries) 223 NEVAN BUDAK 11. Slovenian Gentile Identity: From Samo to the Fürstenstein 243 PATRICK J. GEARY Index ABBREVIATIONS Annales regni Francorum Annales regni Francorum et annales q. d. Einhardi, ed. by Georg H. Pertz and Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG, 6 (Hannover: Hahn, 1895) CD Codex diplomaticus regni Croatiae, Dalmatiae et Slavoniae, I, ed. by Jakov Stipišić and Miljen Šamšalović (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1967) HN Historia Norwegie, ed. by Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica AA Auctores Antiquissimi SRG Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum SRG ns Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum nova series SRM Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum SS Scriptores (in folio) On Barbarian Identity On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Andrew Gillett, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002) Strategies of Distinction Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, ed. by Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, The Transformation of the Roman World, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1998) MAPS Map 1, p. 69. Charlemagne’s Empire Map 2, p. 91. Prehistoric People in Scandinavia Map 3, p. 97. Prehistoric Provinces in Scandinavia Map 4, p. 127. Ninth-Century South Scandinavia (after The Old English Orosius) Map 5, p. 143 The Law Provinces of Twelfth-Century Norway (based on Norges historie, ed. by Knut Myckland, XV, fig. 20 Map 6, p. 174. Peoples and Tribes of Kievan Rus’ (after Ihor Sevcenko, Ukraine Between East and West. Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1996)) Map 7, p. 175. Colonization of Eastern Europe (after Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukarine-Rus’, I: From Prehistory to the Eleventh Century (Edmonton, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1997)) Map 8, p. 176. Archaeological Cultures in the Middle Dnieper Valley (after Etnokulturnaia karta territorii Ukrainskoi SSR v I tysiacheletii nashei ery (Kiev, 1985), fig. 20) Map 9, p. 212. A Map of the Pre-Piast ‘Tribes’ (after Jerzy Wyrozumski, Dzieje Polski piastowskiej (VIII wiek–1370) (Cracow: Fogra, 1999), fig. 15) Map 10, p. 230. Early Medieval Croatia, Byzantine Dalmatia, and Carinthia INTRODUCTION: GENTES, GENTILE IDENTITY, AND STATE FORMATION IN EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE Ildar H. Garipzanov, Patrick J. Geary, and Przemysław Urbańczyk n recent decades, historians attempting to understand the transition from the world of late Antiquity with its unitary imperial system to the medieval IEurope of separate kingdoms have become increasingly concerned with the role of early medieval gentes, or peoples, in the end of the former and the constitution of the latter. Much of the original impetus for new thinking about ethnic identities in the Migration Period came from anthropologists studying contemporary social and cultural identity formation and mobilization.1 Eschewing older understandings of ‘gentile’ or ‘ethnic’ identity as coherent, homogeneous social and cultural groups sharing a common ancestry, language, and customs, studies have more recently provided growing evidence for the constructed, subjective, nature of gentile/ethnic identity and its representation in written sources.2 Consequently gentes have been increasingly viewed as situational constructs fostered by ‘political ethnicity’,3 as the phenomena of 1 The collection of essays edited by Fredrik Barth in 1969, and his introduction to that volume in particular, has been especially influential in undermining the traditional approach: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Ethnic Difference, ed. by Fredrick Barth (Boston: Little Brown, 1969). For a more general introduction to current approaches to ethnic groups in anthropology see Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London: Sage, 1997). 2 In this volume the term ‘gentile’ will be used mostly in the sense that derives from classical Latin and is accepted in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989): ‘of or pertaining to a gens or gentes’. 3 Patrick J. Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 113 (1983), 15–26 (pp. 16 2 Ildar H. Garipzanov, Patrick J. Geary, and Przemysław Urbańczyk social psychology,4 as the result of contemporary ethnic discourses,5 or as literary constructs of late classical and early medieval Latin authors.6 The scholars supporting an opposite, and more traditional, approach — the one suggesting that a gentile identity binding together the members of a gens was an inherited, objective category, powerful enough to define and limit human behaviour, and that it cannot be reduced to the matter of political or discursive constructs7 — are today a minority. One of the main problems with the latter ‘primordial’ interpretation is that it is very difficult to define the mechanisms that could have maintained ‘gentile’ identities on a less rational level. In the 1960–90s, the Viennese School, led by Reinhard Wenskus and later by Herwig Wolfram, advanced the thesis that it was a narrow noble elite (Traditionskern) that was the carrier of gentile identity.8 This thesis has been repeatedly questioned in recent decades; and Walter Goffart and his pupils in Toronto have been especially vocal in this criticism.9 By now, the Traditionskern theory has lost much of its appeal among North American and European scholars — although it still exercises certain influence in Scandinavian academia.10 In recent years, Wolfram has clearly and 24). See also idem., Aristocracy in Provence: The Rhône Basin at the Dawn of the Carolingian Age (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1985), p. 114. 4 Falko Daim, ‘Archeology, Ethnicity and the Structures of Identification: The Example of the Avars, Carantanians and Moravians in the Eighth Century’, in Strategies of Distinction, pp. 71–93 (pp. 76 and 92–93). 5 Walter Pohl, ‘Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity’, in Strategies of Distinction, pp. 17–69 (pp. 61–69). 6 Walter Goffart, Narrators of Barbarian History (AD 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Walter Goffart, ‘Jordanes’s Getica and the Disputed Authenticity of Gothic Origins from Scandinavia’, Speculum, 80 (2005), 379–98; and Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially chapter 2, ‘Imagining Peoples in Antiquity’, pp. 41–62. 7 Peter J. Heather, ‘Signs of Ethnic Identity: Disappearing and Reappearing Tribes’, in Strategies of Distinction, pp. 95–111 (pp. 109–10). 8 See especially Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen gentes (Cologne: Böhlau, 1961); and Herwig Wolfram, Geschichte der Goten: Von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts: