This book is the fifth of a total of six in Historiography and Identity, which emanates from the research project ‘Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Island and Buddhism (400–1600 ce)’, at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The main aim of the project has been to develop a critical methodology for studying the role of historiography in identity formation from antiquity to the late Middle Ages. This edited volume takes us to the ‘new peoples’ at the northern and eastern fringes of the post-Roman and post-Carolingian world. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, these peoples had become part of Christian Europe after a complex history of external conquest (Vikings, Huns, Avars, Hungarians) and internal expansion (Slavs). As expressed in the introduction, ‘what was at stake was constructing identities that had no clear precedent’ (p. 9). The book sets out to trace various strategies of identity construction in these areas, acknowledging that such processes were not straightforward, and that ethnicity can be a problematic and disputed issue in a modernist discourse.
The book is divided into five parts, each devoted to a particular region. In the first part, on Scandinavia, Ian Wood discusses how Adam of Bremen partly took an outsider perspective on the Christianisation of Scandinavia, but partly also adopted an insider viewpoint through his main informant King Svend Estridsen of Denmark. Sverre Bagge shows how the main chroniclers of Denmark and Norway – Saxo and Snorri Sturluson – in spite of differences in language and outlook, were both concerned with linking the past of royal dynasties to Roman models. In a related way, Doneker and Fraundorfer investigate how Henry of Livonia used biblical models in order to establish a parallel for the conversion of Livonia. In a particularly illuminating essay, Rosalind Bonté contrasts the top-down conversion of the Orkneys in the Orkneyinga saga with the bottom-up process demonstrated by archaeologists. She explains this discrepancy by using the saga’s thirteenth-century provenance in Iceland, where contrasting Orkney’s external, forced conversion with Iceland’s internal and peaceful conversion served to emphasise that Iceland was a unique and independent nation.
The second part focuses on Bohemia and Poland. Pavlína Rychterová and Jan Hasil both discuss Bohemian identity using Cosmas of Prague’s chronicle as the main source, the former by comparing it to the Legenda Christiani, the latter by tracing the development of spatial centres in Cosmas from mythology to contemporaneity. Gallus Anonymous, as a source to legitimacy of the Piast dynasty, is the topic of the next two articles. Zbigniew Dalewski focuses on how Gallus highlighted solo monarchy at the expense of shared rule, Jacek Banaszkiewicz on how Gallus used the biblical motif of an impressed visitor to the ruler (here Emperor Otto iii’s visit to Boleslaw i in 1000) to confer external glory on the Piasts. Helmold of Bosau is used as a source for the identity of the Slavs around the Elbe by Jan Klápste. The protracted Slavic resistance to conversion forms a contrast to the Bohemian, Polish and Rus cases where Christianity had a unifying effect both religiously and politically. Klapste explains this difference with reference to the Elbe Slavs’ proximity to the power centre, which made Helmold emphasise the diversity and heterogeneity of Slavic religious beliefs.
The third section explores the Hungarians. As perceived successors of the Huns and the Scythians, they were often envisaged as ‘the other’ in relation to Christian Europe. However, this image should be qualified. Maximilian Diesenberger takes a situation of crisis within the Carolingian Empire in the early 900s as a starting point for demonstrating how the Hungarians were depicted as a threat in order to encourage loyalty in the realm. László Veszprémy shows how the image of barbarian pagans was countered by a contrasting image of these ancestors as worthy, honourable men who laid the foundation of a multi-ethnic Hungarian state. Dániel Bagi discusses how two Hungarian chroniclers (Master P. and Simon Kéza) framed the past in very different ways in response to contemporary considerations in the early and late thirteenth century respectively.
The fourth section turns to the Balkans and the Adriatic. Neven Budak and Peter Stih analyse how Split reacted to threats from Venice by describing its past in continuity from the Romans. In a related way, Francesco Borri demonstrates that the Venetian historian John Deacon drew on a multitude of historical resources to frame Venice as an entity with a long and honourable history. Serbia’s precarious existence at the margins of the Byzantine Empire forms the topic of Aleksandar Uzelac’s fascinating exposé of how Serbia’s alleged founder, Stefan Nemanja, was depicted by his two sons in very different genres.
Finally, the disputed Primary chronicle and the establishment of Rus is treated by two scholars with different viewpoints. Donald Ostrowski considers the chronicle to have two authors due to a break in the story line in the year 1053. Oleksiy Tolochko conversely holds the chronicle to have been written by Abbot Sylvester of St Michael’s in Kyiv in close collaboration with King Volodimer Monomakh in connection with the erection of the cathedral of St Michael to store the relics of SS Boris and Gleb. Moreover, he show this to be part of a programme of creating a Slav identity coterminous with Rus. This endeavour was part of a conscious effort whereby Sylvester first ‘converted the observable ethnographic groups of the contemporaneous population … into historical “tribes”’ (p. 460) and then introduced the new Christian identity as a unity transgressing tribal differences. In Tolochko’s words: ‘“Ethnicity” turns out to be a sign of heathen ways and this remains in the pagan past. The “Christian Rus” emerged as one unified nation, created by the fact of baptism’ (p. 462).
How constructed identities were in the Middle Ages could hardly be expressed more clearly. Yet this does not mean that identities were haphazard or unimportant. The lesson from this volume is, on the contrary, how important identity formation was to medieval polities, and to what length chroniclers went to demonstrate that present identities were firmly rooted in the past. Along this journey, the reader is repeatedly reminded of how little such constructions are related to the real historical pasts. This of course serves as a reminder that medieval historiography should be approached with a good portion of scepticism when it comes to taking their alleged historical accounts at face value, but it also shows – which is the primary goal and asset of this anthology – how important these historical works were in constructing and establishing identities. In a suggestive conclusion, Walter Pohl discusses further how acutely actual and relevant such endeavours are in our contemporary world, where national identities loom so large and are at times abused for political purposes. First, Pohl draws attention to the many and complex factors that were used in order to create medieval identities, where the people, institutions, landscape, neighbours and the Church all played important but varying roles depending on context. Second, he insists that medieval narratives present ‘much more open forms of identifications’ (p. 479) than we often expect; ‘they do not create simple, affirmative standards for what it means to be Czech, Hungarian or Rus’ (p. 481). Thus, this book should serve as a reminder of how complex identity formation is, and that identities are often more open-ended than modern, national discourses sometimes will have us believe.
