The Slavs of Eastern Europe

Who were these raiders and what was the land of Rus? To answer the question and to understand the nature of what be­came the most powerful medieval kingdom in Eastern Europe we must return to the story of the Slavs.

Certain Slavs settled also on the Dniepr, and were likewise called Poliani who lived on the plain. Still others were named Derev- Iani because they lived in the forest. Some also lived between the Pripet and the Dvina (rivers) and were known as Drego- vichi. Other tribes resided along the Dvina and were called Polotsi on account of a small stream called the Polota which flows into the Dvina. The Slovenians also dwelt about Lake Ilmen and were known by their characteristic name. They built a city called Novgorod. Still others had their homes along the Desna, the Sem, and the Sula, and were called Severiani. Thus the Slavic race was divided, and its language was known as Slavic.⁴

Most Slavic settlements were along waterways of what was then a deep primeval forest. The basic socioeconomic units continued to be the clans, which made up a tribe. “Families” were fairly large due to the traditional practice of polygamy, with men taking several wives depending on their means for providing dowries.

Some customs, however, varied with the different tribes. The Kyiv Primary Chronicle finds the customs of the Poliani especiallypraiseworthy, these being the author Nestor^,s tribe.

These Slavic tribes preserved their own customs, the law of their forefathers, and their traditions, each observing its own usages (practices). For the Poliani retained the mild and peaceful cus­toms of their ancestors, and showed respect for their daughters- in-law and their sisters, as well as for their mothers and fathers. For their mothers-in-law and their brothers-in-law they also en­tertained great reverence. They observed a fixed custom, under which the groom’s brother did not fetch the bride, but she was brought to the bridegroom in the evening, and on the next morn­ing her dowry was turned over.

Other forest tribes who were still pagan and at odds with the Poliani did not get such a favorable review.

The Derevlani, on the other hand, existed in bestial fashion, and lived like cattle. Theykilled one another, ate every impure thing, and there was no marriage among them but instead they seized upon the maidens by capture. The Radimichi, the Viatichi, and the Severiani had the same customs. They lived in the forest like any wild beast and ate any unclean thing. They spoke obscenely before their fathers and their daughters-in-law. There were no marriages among them, but simply festivals among the villages. When the people gathered for games, for dancing, and for all other devilish amusements, the men on these occasions carried off wives for themselves, and each took any woman with whom he had arrived at an understanding.

Given that women outnumbered the men due to constant warfare this was probably a reasonable arrangement. Nestor s bias was also due to the fact that the forest tribes were still pagan and practiced traditional customs, one of them being the spring meetings of the tribal clans where boys and girls got to know each other and formed couples. Such locations can still be rec­ognized by Slavic names with the root “liub” meaning “love.” Due to their isolation, the dwellers of the forests had a lower cultural development than their southern prairie neighbors which would persist for several centuries.

An absence Ofpersonalhygiene, however, was not one of the shortcomings of the forest dwellers. Due to a lack of salt in the marshy boreal forest, soap would certainly be known to them as the disagreeable byproduct of seasoning boiling soups and stews with ashes. Cleanliness was also maintained by the use of the “bania” (sauna). A shallow pit would be dug inside a wooden log and lined with large boulders, which were heated by a bonfire. Water was then poured on the hot rocks to create steam, which would fill the log structure and provoke intense sweating. The “bania” was also offered to guests as a part of the hospitality practiced by the Slavs, and served as a cleansing ritual before some religious ceremonies. In the summer it would probably also offer a relief from the itching caused by mos­quitoes which inhabited the marshes in great swarms. The prac­tice is described in the KyivPrimary Chronicle, hypothetically recounted by St. Andrew on his legendary visit to Kyiv and the Slav lands.

He then reached the Slovenians where Novgorod is now situated. He saw these people existing according to their customs, and on observing how they bathed and scrubbed themselves, he won­dered at them. He went thence among the Varangians and came to Rome where he recounted what he had learned and observed. “ Wondrous to relate” said he, T saw the land of the Slavs and while I was among them I noticed their wooden bathhouses.

They warm them to extreme heat then undress and after anointing themselves with an acid liquid (?) they take young branches and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench them­selves with cold water and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and though tormented by none they ac­tually inflict such voluntary torture upon themselves. Indeed, they make of the act not a mere washing, but a veritable tor­ment.” When his listeners learned of this fact, they marveled. But Andrew, after his stay in Rome, returned to Sinope (Asia Minor).

The practice is confirmed by a similar interesting account given by Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a IOth CenturyJewish traveler from Tortosa, Spain.

The lands of the Slavs are the coldest of all lands. The greatest cold is when there is full moon at night and the days are cloud­less. Then frost increases and ice increases. The ground hardens like a stone and when people breathe out, there forms on their beards a coat of ice as if it were glass. They have no baths but they use log cabins in which gaps are stuffed with something that ap­pears on their trees and looks like seaweed—they call it “mix” (“moch,” or moss in Slavic). In one corner they put up a stone stove and above it they open up a hole to let the smoke from the stove escape. When the stove is good and hot they close up the opening and close the door of the hut. Inside are vessels with water and they pour out of them water onto the hot stove and steam comes from it. Each has in his hand a tuft of grass with which they make air circulate and draw it to themselves. Then their pores open up, and the unneeded substances from their bodies come out.⁵

As a guest, ibn Yaqub was no doubt treated gently, with tufts of grass.

The economy of the early Slavs was based on hunting and gathering, with fish an important part of the diet. Limited agri­culture was also practiced in the southern regions where the forest ended and the prairie began, to stretch for hundreds of kilometers to the Black Sea and the Crimean Peninsula.

It is from here that the Slav tribes had burst upon the East­ern Roman Empire. The settlements of the Sclavini tribes before they were apparently driven west by the arid conditions of the 5th and 6th centuries have been unearthed in northwest­ern Ukraine dating to this period, the so-called Korchak Culture. Typical iron fibulae known to be Slavic are found in burials which contain cremated bones. Burials are of two types—low mound barrows and flat graves, each forming small cemeteries. Excavated sites have been found with typically Slavic Prague-Korchak pottery at Korchak and Zhitomir in Ukraine some 200 kilometers west of Kyiv. These are the sites of the Sclavini settlements which are found across central and Eastern Europe from the Elbe River in Germany to the Dnipro River in central Ukraine.

The excavations at Korchakprovide a description of a typ­ical Slavic settlement. It was built on a terrace of the Teteriv River and consisted of semi-subterranean square houses located randomly in an area of about IOO meters by 50 meters. Twelve excavated houses, which were dug about 1 meter into the ground, had typical large stone Slavic ovens in one corner. Sim­ilar communities which were probably inhabited by a single clan have also been excavated further to the west in Ukraine and eastern Poland, indicating the Slav s probable route to the Danube and the Baltic Sea.

The second group of Slavic settlements in the Ukrainian prairies, roughly of the same period is the so-called Penkivka culture of the Antes tribes. Although distinct from the Korchak culture, it is similar and is mainly distributed to the south of the Korchak-Zhitomir settlements. A series of hoards have been found in the southern Ukrainian prairies, for example at Mar- tynivka on the Ros River, a western tributary of the Dnipro be­tween today s Kaniv and Cherkasy. The hoard consisted of about IOO silver ornaments, mainly adornments for female cos­tumes, and most certainly originated as booty from Slavic raids on the Eastern Roman Empire. The hoard was found in a set­tlement cluster in 1907 and today is housed in Kyiv and the British Museum. It contained two silver vases with Imperial staples authenticating purity, as well as wire ornaments, plaques of metal in the shape of lions, horse harnesses, and belt fittings. Similar objects which occur across eastern and central Europe all the way to Italy could also have originated from trade with nomadic tribes. This is confirmed by typical Sarmatian tamga imprints on the harnesses and belt fittings. To date, more than 60 Penkivka sites have been excavated in Ukraine scattered be­tween the Ros River and Zaporozhe, the southern Buh River, and the area between the Buh and the Dnister rivers. The Kor- chak and Penkivka early Slavic pottery confirms the reported presence of both Sclavini and Antes tribes in the area. Although the settlements are reported to be “numerous,” judging from the excavations they were not highly populated, each containing no more than 10-12 small sunken houses varying in size be­tween 12 and 20 square yards.⁸ Theywere Usuallyunprotected but were often located on hilltops close to small rivers, no doubt due to the regular flooding which occurs on the prairies. A few settlements, however, were well fortified, such as the prominent site at Pastyrske near the town of Cherkasy on the Dnipro River. Built on a previous Scythian/Sarmation site, it formed a circular enclosure of some 60 yards in diameter, with a series of internal subdivisions. Thus even if an enemy broke through the outer defenses he would still find defended positions inside. It was a major crafts and manufacturing center, yielding a hoard of or­naments and other metal artifacts of the Martynivka-Penkivka type. We know this from the fragments of furnaces and numer­ous tools found in what was a blacksmiths shop, such as ham­mers, anvils, and tongues. Based on Slavic pottery and a Justin­ian coin, the site could have been inhabited as early as the beginning of the 6th century.

Many other burials containing hoards of silver and bronze objects have been found on the Pontic Steppes to the north of the Black Sea. A well-known excavation was carried out at Male Pereshchepino, where 68 perforated coins were found appar­ently belonging to a ceremonial (or a marriage) belt. The eth­nicity of the inhabitants has at times been disputed and the difficulty has been to identify which assemblages belonged to settled Slavs and which had been deposited by the steppe no­mads. Clearly, total discrimination is not possible using artifacts only, due to the raiding and trading that was going on at the time. It has been possible to identify a sharp contrast in the 6th-7th century distribution and composition of the assem­blages: all non-burial hoards were found in the Slav forest­steppe zone while burials were confined to the steppe region of the nomads. For some unexplained reason following out­dated German historiography, a recent author has attempted to erase all known presence of Slavs in the area. Some of the critique of past findings is based on statistical multivariate analy­sis—hierarchical clustering and correspondence analysis—but we are unable to learn much from the statistical models. The exercise is a common example of authors attempting to use computerized mathematical models but who are not well versed in such methods.⁹ We can certainly conclude that the Penkivka settlements emerged from previous Slavic cultures such as the Zarubinets and its successor the Kyiv culture. Centered around the middle and upper Dnipro River in what is today north­central Ukraine and Belarus, the Kyiv culture existed at the same time as the Cherniakhiv settlements to the south. It was in turn replaced by the so-called Kolochin settlements sometime in the first half of the 6th century which stretched from the fringe of the forest zone (just north of Kyiv) to the northeast along the Desna and Seym rivers. The Kolochin cul­ture would provide the springboard for future Slavic settlements east of the Dnipro River, and was the first to become involved in the Islamic silver trade.