Slaves and Slavs
- Thread starter daft
- Start date
True, but to be fair, it's probably a lot easier to get a rough steer on the number of men in a huge block of infantry when you're watching them from a hill than it is to work out how many enemy are coming towards you when you're dug in in a woodblock and they're just popping up between the trees. In modern warfare it's not unusual for a hideously outnumbered side only to realise the odds against which it just successfully endured when the smoke clears and the clearance patrols realise quite how many bodies are in the killing areas. Then there was Goose Green, in which the darkness and our aggression managed to fool the enemy into not realising that they outnumbered us by many times, allowing us to intimidate them into surrendering - which they would almost certainly not have done had they realised the odds. Likewise I doubt there was often a question of counting muzzle flashes at 800 yards or so - I imagine that often in ancient warfare people actually missed each other, either seeing a crowd of people or nobody at all at long distances.
That said, there was probably a great deal less use of cover and darkness in ancient warfare - there's one episode in Tacitus where he pointedly refuses to give the dispositions of a night battle, because nobody at the time, let alone a historian, would have a clue what was going on: the implication being that most of the time you would avoid situations like that. Certainly, one of the main reasons that we go in for night fighting in the modern world is that well-trained professional armies know that it's difficult and practice it a great deal, and can rely on being better at it than practically anybody else. So if you're a Roman officer or observer standing on a hill, looking at a battlefield in which both sides are arrayed in full in quite close order, it's probably not all that difficult to get a vague idea of how many enemy there - especially if you have a reasonably accurate idea of how many men are on your own side, and you can then use the relative sizes as a guide. That said, I can't imagine that it often turned out so perfectly, and most historians ended up hearing things at second or third hand - to say nothing of the obvious reasons for which people might have for exaggerating the numbers in a great victory or embarrassing defeat. It should be noted that in Greek the word for 'ten thousand' (English myriad) is interchangeable for 'lots', and the historians often come out with numbers of barbarians in armies which are significantly higher than the maximum possible populations of the areas from which they allegedly came!
That said, there was probably a great deal less use of cover and darkness in ancient warfare - there's one episode in Tacitus where he pointedly refuses to give the dispositions of a night battle, because nobody at the time, let alone a historian, would have a clue what was going on: the implication being that most of the time you would avoid situations like that. Certainly, one of the main reasons that we go in for night fighting in the modern world is that well-trained professional armies know that it's difficult and practice it a great deal, and can rely on being better at it than practically anybody else. So if you're a Roman officer or observer standing on a hill, looking at a battlefield in which both sides are arrayed in full in quite close order, it's probably not all that difficult to get a vague idea of how many enemy there - especially if you have a reasonably accurate idea of how many men are on your own side, and you can then use the relative sizes as a guide. That said, I can't imagine that it often turned out so perfectly, and most historians ended up hearing things at second or third hand - to say nothing of the obvious reasons for which people might have for exaggerating the numbers in a great victory or embarrassing defeat. It should be noted that in Greek the word for 'ten thousand' (English myriad) is interchangeable for 'lots', and the historians often come out with numbers of barbarians in armies which are significantly higher than the maximum possible populations of the areas from which they allegedly came!
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Flying Pig said:
You are a former soldier so you surely know that armies try to estimate numerical strength of their enemies.
One of ways to do so is to send spies to infiltrate the enemy force.
OK, so there's some multiple of ten or even a hundred thousand people in the camp, and you're in it - what are you going to do, count tents? Even if you ask somebody, you might talk to an Athenian, and he might say 'oh yes, there's 200 here from my village, and 300 from the village down the road, I think there's a about 5000 here from Athens, then a couple thousand from the allies...' - but how on earth would he know anything better than a rough guesstimate? If you read my post above, the impression you should get is that counting people is extremely difficult, particularly when they're shooting at you. Normally the estimates work in threes - so if you're sending a situation report up the chain, you're thinking in terms of 'section sized force' of about ten, or 'platoon sized' of about thirty, 'company sized' of about a hundred, and so on. When you're making decisions, you work on 'more than five but less than twenty' to send in your platoon, then 'more than twenty but less than fifty' to call for a company, 'more than fifty but less than three hundred' for a battalion, and so on. That's not exactly precise!
Well, assuming that formations on the battlefield had some sort of roughly defined dimensions, e. g. 6x20 men (phalanx, perhaps, were standartized in some ways) you could do a reasonably good estimate on how many troops there are. I'm pretty sure the strength of several rectangular formations would be easy to calculate even for an ancient commander.
But I was here for the OT and one of daft's unanswered questions:
Short answer: demographics.
Long answer: they didn't really capture the cities. They 'captured' the land. Mostly without battle. Yes, they took part in many military campaigns against the empire, but those were mostly driven by outside political factors. Slavs, per se, had no real strategic military or statebuilding goals between the 5th and 8th centuries. Even later, it can be argued quite reasonably, it was non-Slavic factors that consolidated the polities, which were already, in essence, Slavic (or more precisely, Slavophonic, understand here, there is no Slavic 'ethnicity', 'gene', whatever, it's a language). The reason this happened is because there were already many Slavic speakers about, so many, in fact, that the only way to rule them was to start speaking their language.
And we come back to demographics and the simple fact that Slavs were farmers. First thing's first, growing crops requires a lot of labour. When you're at the bottom of the social pyramid, as Slavs in the empire then were, and as farmers usually are, the only extra labour you can afford is your children, so families were most probably quite huge. Here in Bulgaria, it was very common for farmers and village folk in general to have kids in the double digits up until 1930 or so. My granddad had 8 or 9 siblings, he was born in 1909.
Now we move on to those you call 'Byzantines'. They called themselves 'Romeoi' (or thereabouts) and the properties and property inheritance rules they had inherited from the proper Romans gave them the worse demographic odds. We'll use easy to digest stereotypes. See, if you're a Roman and you have a villa, and you have five sons, you're screwed and your kids are most likely to try and murder eachother. On the other hand, if you're a Slav and you have ten sons tilling your field, and one of them gets too cocky, you can just slap his face and send him across the river to build his own farm there if he's so smart.
All of this, combined with the fact that the Achilles' heel of Roman statehood, traditionally, was feeding the cities, meant that the Slavs could flourish even within the empire and spread their language. Most evidenced by vocabulary that has to do with agriculture.
But I was here for the OT and one of daft's unanswered questions:
Short answer: demographics.
Long answer: they didn't really capture the cities. They 'captured' the land. Mostly without battle. Yes, they took part in many military campaigns against the empire, but those were mostly driven by outside political factors. Slavs, per se, had no real strategic military or statebuilding goals between the 5th and 8th centuries. Even later, it can be argued quite reasonably, it was non-Slavic factors that consolidated the polities, which were already, in essence, Slavic (or more precisely, Slavophonic, understand here, there is no Slavic 'ethnicity', 'gene', whatever, it's a language). The reason this happened is because there were already many Slavic speakers about, so many, in fact, that the only way to rule them was to start speaking their language.
And we come back to demographics and the simple fact that Slavs were farmers. First thing's first, growing crops requires a lot of labour. When you're at the bottom of the social pyramid, as Slavs in the empire then were, and as farmers usually are, the only extra labour you can afford is your children, so families were most probably quite huge. Here in Bulgaria, it was very common for farmers and village folk in general to have kids in the double digits up until 1930 or so. My granddad had 8 or 9 siblings, he was born in 1909.
Now we move on to those you call 'Byzantines'. They called themselves 'Romeoi' (or thereabouts) and the properties and property inheritance rules they had inherited from the proper Romans gave them the worse demographic odds. We'll use easy to digest stereotypes. See, if you're a Roman and you have a villa, and you have five sons, you're screwed and your kids are most likely to try and murder eachother. On the other hand, if you're a Slav and you have ten sons tilling your field, and one of them gets too cocky, you can just slap his face and send him across the river to build his own farm there if he's so smart.
All of this, combined with the fact that the Achilles' heel of Roman statehood, traditionally, was feeding the cities, meant that the Slavs could flourish even within the empire and spread their language. Most evidenced by vocabulary that has to do with agriculture.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Beyond that, when the Slavs came in to the Balkan peninsula, there were no soldiers due to the fact all forces were lifted to fight the Arabs in Levant.
Also, another Bulgarian, and so smart? damn.
Also, another Bulgarian, and so smart? damn.
Tolni, you sure are a funny and witty guy, thanks for the post.
On the other hand, I disagree, there were some troops, but were overwhelmed and defeated. Like Domen wrote, Slavs for years observed how the Romans(Byzantines) fought, and later became just as good(if not better) at the skill as the Romaioi themselves, as the Romans acknowledged.
If it wasn't for the lack of unity and capability/understanding, how to capture the great capital (Constantinople), Slavs might have taken out the Byzantines altogether, unless Byzantium threw everything they had at them. Unfortunately Byzantines almost constantly had so many adversaries, fought wars one after another, it is amazing they managed to survive as long as they did.
Ps. Absolutely right about family size of ancient Slavs(and other tribes too). It kind of applies to all peasant families from before WWII, doesn't it? To run a farm you need several hands, it's real hard work, you've got no money but you've got a wife, there's no TV, Internet or other entertainment, maybe some mead from time to time? Well, what do you do? You make kids, lots and lots of kids. First of all, the making of kids is great entertainment, second of all, down the road they help you run the farm, nothing but positives. That's why 7-12 kids back then was quite a normal number.
This post makes very good sense. However, the Romans were very well organized, so I think their combat number estimates we can somewhat depend on?
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Not really. For the most part, the reason that Bulgarian plans to attack Constantinople fell through due to untimely monarch deaths. Of course, also the infeasibility of actually taking and then holding it while also defending the rest of the country; for a siege so large in the 9th or 10th century you'll probably need your entire army, and armies don't grow out of the nowhere.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Mize, in the Middle Ages there were very few families with kids in the double digits, because children were dying like flies - especially in poor families - therefore women could not conceive and bear new children at rates sufficient for those living children to number 10 or more at any given point in time. The reason why your granddad had 8 or 9 siblings in the 1900s is because children already stopped dying like flies, but adults didn't yet start to use contraception.
However, this cannot be extrapolated into the Early Middle Ages, when typically 40-50% of children were dying before the age of 5.
There was no Baby Milk available to buy, so mothers couldn't afford to make a new kid before they stopped breastfeeding previous one.
Slavs were farmers, Balts were farmers, Germanics were farmers, Ugro-Finns were for the most part also farmers (though some were still hunters).
Vast majority of "barbarians" in Europe were farmers - nothing special about Slavs with that.
Anglo-Saxons were also farmers, and they migrated to Britain because it had better pastures for their cattle than Denmark / North Germany.
No Tolni. The border on the Balkans wasn't left completely undefended. There are also written accounts about battles against Slavs.
Oh - and by the way, Arab migration to the Levant took place ca. one hundred years after Slavic migration to the Balkans.
When the Slavs came, Eastern Roman forces were fighting not the Arabs, but the Germanic tribes in Italy, Iberia and North Africa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius#Military_campaigns
Slavs hit the Balkan frontier when Belisarius was preoccupied with taking back Western Roman land from various Germanic chieftains.
BTW, there are accounts which say that some Slavs also fought under command of Belisarius, as foederati or mercenaries.
They indeed didn't capture the most well-defended / best-fortified cities, such as for example Thessaloniki or Constantinople.
But many smaller cities and towns - such as for example Topirus (modern name: Corlu, in East Thrace) - were captured by Slavs.
Language is a mark of ethnicity and languages tended to spread with migrating humans, rather than by wind:
From "The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe":
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555
Though of course Slavs were genetically diverse people, like any other ethnic group.
Ethnicity is a cultural phenomenon (and language is an important part of culture), not a genetic phenomenon. So Slavic ethnicity existed.
Today there is no Germanic or Slavic ethnicity. But they existed in the past, before those peoples branched into more ethnic groups.
However, this cannot be extrapolated into the Early Middle Ages, when typically 40-50% of children were dying before the age of 5.
daft said:
There was no Baby Milk available to buy, so mothers couldn't afford to make a new kid before they stopped breastfeeding previous one.
Mize said:
Slavs were farmers, Balts were farmers, Germanics were farmers, Ugro-Finns were for the most part also farmers (though some were still hunters).
Vast majority of "barbarians" in Europe were farmers - nothing special about Slavs with that.
Anglo-Saxons were also farmers, and they migrated to Britain because it had better pastures for their cattle than Denmark / North Germany.
Tolni said:
No Tolni. The border on the Balkans wasn't left completely undefended. There are also written accounts about battles against Slavs.
Oh - and by the way, Arab migration to the Levant took place ca. one hundred years after Slavic migration to the Balkans.
When the Slavs came, Eastern Roman forces were fighting not the Arabs, but the Germanic tribes in Italy, Iberia and North Africa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius#Military_campaigns
Slavs hit the Balkan frontier when Belisarius was preoccupied with taking back Western Roman land from various Germanic chieftains.
BTW, there are accounts which say that some Slavs also fought under command of Belisarius, as foederati or mercenaries.
Mize said:
They indeed didn't capture the most well-defended / best-fortified cities, such as for example Thessaloniki or Constantinople.
But many smaller cities and towns - such as for example Topirus (modern name: Corlu, in East Thrace) - were captured by Slavs.
Mize said:
Language is a mark of ethnicity and languages tended to spread with migrating humans, rather than by wind:
From "The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe":
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555
Though of course Slavs were genetically diverse people, like any other ethnic group.
Ethnicity is a cultural phenomenon (and language is an important part of culture), not a genetic phenomenon. So Slavic ethnicity existed.
Today there is no Germanic or Slavic ethnicity. But they existed in the past, before those peoples branched into more ethnic groups.
Mize said:
It's more complicated than that. But this is kind of missing the point that these Slavs were not necessarily all being engaged in a pitched battle. Nobody sat around counting them for the entire morning and the sorts of standard unit sizes implied here were unlikely to be a factor.
But I'll humor the idea for a moment just to point out some of the difficulties with this approach. First, armies that used standardized unit compositions had exceptions and were almost always under their paper strength anyways (due to deaths, leave, desertion or whatever). Second, there's no guarantee the enemy will have formed up into discrete units with discrete gaps between them to facilitate a count. Simply because gaps in a line are a bad thing, especially in the period being discussed. At best your facing an army that is divided into three chunks - a left, a right, and a center - of usually equal size with a gap between them. As to the guys standing across from you well you can see them, sure. But most of what your seeing is shield, a head probably with some sort of helmet, feet and some leg and not much else. If your lucky you might see unit standards but not everyone used those. Hence the use of round numbers as an indicator of relative size/significance rather than absolute descriptors of the number of combatants.
@Masada, very good points about the difficulties in counting heads. Still, I suppose that an ancient general would have lower ranking officers, which would be better acquainted with their units' exact strength. Adding those up gives you a decent estimation of your own numbers and roughly comparing them visually to the enemy will give you a (very) rough estimate on their strength. Of course, the entire point here is that historians certainly inflate or deflate the numbers, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not, whereas a commander on the ground needs the most accurate information on the enemy he can get. I'm sure that before their battles ancient generals had numbers and estimates much closer to reality than what later historians wrote down.
@Domen, true, but having 15 kids ensures that at least 6-7 of them survive, so people DID have children in the double digits. Having and raising kids are different things. Big percentiles in child mortality amongst rural societies were commonplace in the early 20th century too. And, of course there's nothing special about Slavs being farmers, they're just the topic of discussion. But since you brought the Germanics up, I'll point you to your very own post from the previous page with the pie chart, Germanic languages are in the top 3. Hell, even the Romans themselves started out as farmers. Anyway, my bigger point was that living on the land allowed the Slavs (and farmers in general) to geographically and demographically expand without much limitation, thus spreading their language very succesfully.
Thesalloniki is a prime example of an imperial-held city basically swamped by Slavs even in the 6th century. Raids and sieges then were almost like an annual event: Hey, what are we gonna do when we're done with the harvest? Go lay siege to Solun. Constantinople was always out of the question though. You'd need a fleet for that and Slavs and other invaders from Eurasia were notorious for their lack of maritime skills. Inland, they ruled.
About the Slav culture and ethnicity thing, I was very tempted to add 'there once was' to my there is no Slavic 'ethnicity', 'gene', whatever line, so I agree with you here. I meant that there is none now. The reasonably homogenic Slavic cultures started diverging from one another at the moment they fell under foreign political influence. Examples abound.
@Tolni, whaddayouknow, it's probably that uebermensch Slav gene at work, right?
@Domen, true, but having 15 kids ensures that at least 6-7 of them survive, so people DID have children in the double digits. Having and raising kids are different things. Big percentiles in child mortality amongst rural societies were commonplace in the early 20th century too. And, of course there's nothing special about Slavs being farmers, they're just the topic of discussion. But since you brought the Germanics up, I'll point you to your very own post from the previous page with the pie chart, Germanic languages are in the top 3. Hell, even the Romans themselves started out as farmers. Anyway, my bigger point was that living on the land allowed the Slavs (and farmers in general) to geographically and demographically expand without much limitation, thus spreading their language very succesfully.
Thesalloniki is a prime example of an imperial-held city basically swamped by Slavs even in the 6th century. Raids and sieges then were almost like an annual event: Hey, what are we gonna do when we're done with the harvest? Go lay siege to Solun. Constantinople was always out of the question though. You'd need a fleet for that and Slavs and other invaders from Eurasia were notorious for their lack of maritime skills. Inland, they ruled.
About the Slav culture and ethnicity thing, I was very tempted to add 'there once was' to my there is no Slavic 'ethnicity', 'gene', whatever line, so I agree with you here. I meant that there is none now. The reasonably homogenic Slavic cultures started diverging from one another at the moment they fell under foreign political influence. Examples abound.
@Tolni, whaddayouknow, it's probably that uebermensch Slav gene at work, right?
I don't think B follows from A, though. Certainly, you could say that having experienced NCOs and officers might have made them better at judging certain kinds of enemy formations - they could probably tell you roughly how many men were in a phalanx, if it was in the open, because they'd seen one before. But if you're talking about loose formations, moving through cover, and not all in the same place at the same time, I don't think that organisation comes into it. It's like counting muzzle flashes - all the information that you have is things which usually go hand in hand with total numbers, not the numbers themselves. You can count how many people are firing at you at once, or how many people you can actually see, but if you're a Roman in a trench you have no real way of knowing whether the Slavs in front of you represent 70% of the enemy or 7%.
And again we have to confront the problem that Centurion Jones might well, in some cases, have had a reasonably good steer on how many Greeks were on the other side, but the historian who ends up writing it down probably only heard it from a bloke who heard it from a bloke who was serving with Centurion Jones, and at each stage you probably have exaggeration and rounding going on - and then you have a historical tradition which openly admits (take a look at Thucydides' or Tacitus' statements on speeches) that it has one foot in literature and is often more concerned about painting a vivid picture than reporting the truth precisely. So you end up with 'there were about 40,000 of them' becoming 'there were tens of thousands of them' becoming 'there were 100,000 of them' - and eventually you end up with estimates like that in Herodotus where Xerxes apparently mobilised 2,500,000 men, which is probably not a million miles from the population of Europe at the time.
Those generals are not writing the histories, have no particular reason to record their troop strength, lack the sorts of staff officers who in modern times would compile these estimates and likely worked off round numbers themselves because it's simple and the exact number matters bumpkin anyway.Mize said:
Mize said:
Sure in a broad sense and assuming a bunch of things. But just to return to something I mentioned above: the generals did not write the histories we read for the most part. Sure some generals did a good example is Caesar. But for the most part our histories were written often at some chronological distance from the actual event. Even in cases where they were not there's no end of issues. For one thing, the likely source of the enemies strength is... coming from people with ample incentive to exaggerate either to ham up their achievements or rationalise a loss and with lots of difficulties in counting them besides. Does this mean all the numbers are garbage? No, of course not. Some estimates are thought to be sound. Some historians were just good at using the range of estimates that were available to them - and there was usually more than one - and deducing an appropriate sort of figure. Others just took the largest available or used round numbers to convey a point.
Refer above. A commander on the ground might. A commander afterwards? Nope. And again round numbers serve his purposes just fine.Mize said:
Sure. But it's kind of irrelevant to the question of whether or not there were literally 100 000 Slavs running around? I should also note that people suck at counting large numbers of things. It's a quirk of our brains. Throw 70 sheep in a paddock and ask people to estimate the number of sheep. You'll find most people default to a nice big round number or just resort to something hand-wavey like "there must be hundreds of sheep".Mize said:
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Mize said:
At the beginning Slavs in the Balkans formed tribes and chiefdoms. The process of forming states started later, in the late 7th to 8th centuries as you wrote.
When we look at England, then Anglo-Saxon-Jutes at the beginning also had no strategic goals. They created numerous petty chiefdoms (ruled by "kings" - who were in fact rather chiefs), and those polities were about as likely to fight each other, as they were to fight native Briton polities. So in the early period those Anglo-Saxon-Jutes were not a political monolith. Yet for some reason they were gradually gaining ground vis-a-vis the native Britons.
Mize said:
In the Balkans non-Slavic factors played a role in Bulgaria, but other 7th-9th century polities - Carantania, Croatia, Rascia, Duklija - were Slavic creations. Let's note that the 1st half of the 7th century was still the time of colonization - at that time there took place both immigration of new Slavic groups to areas south of the Danube, and internal expansion of Slavic settlement within the Balkans. Dalmatia was settled only in the 600s. Slavic immigration to Istria started at the turns of the 6th and the 7th century. Areas such as Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia had been settled by Slavs already in the middle of the 6th century.
Those new groups of Slavic immigrants in the early 600s were Croats and Serbs, who came from areas north of the Western Carpathians.
Slavs had some maritime skills because in Slavic-Avar sieges of Constantinople the fleet was always Slavic - consisting of boats called monoxyla. Slavic pirates also raged in the Mediterranean Sea, many of them from the tribe called Narentines. They raided Crete, Italy, even Iberian coasts.
I would be wary of setting too much in store by the outdated 'progress of statehood' model which quite aggressively categorises societies by levels of complexity into 'segmentary society', 'tribe', 'chiefdom', 'state' or similar.
Interesting, I didn't know about the Slav pirates. Anyway, those Slavs you mentioned, who migrated from the North of the Carpathians, sound an auful lot like they could've been under Avar rule there, and let's not forget that the area was а diocese of Rome so you have outside political factors here too - Avars, Romans, Franks. The failed 9th century attempt, the briefly existing Moravia was also a 'Slavic creation', but it was consolidated under serious outside presure from the Franks (mostly through the clergy) and with serious interference from both Rome and Constantinople. Later Slav political entities in the Balkans, such as the Serbs and Croats, had a ready-made example of a realtively succesful Slavic polity in the face of Bulgaria (which was thoroughly slavicised on a state level by about 850, but the process had started before the turn of the 9th century) and their empire-building somewhat imitated that model, just as the Bulgarians imitated the Romans but tried to separate themselves from them, as to not get assimilated. All in all, if one looks at a map, the biggest factor for Slavic state-building seems to have been proximity to (one of) the empire(s).
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Avar rule didn't extend north of the Carpathians, they were in Pannonia and had influence in the Balkans, but not in the north.
Croats and Serbs actually came from the north and succesfully fought against the Avars in the south.
Generally polities don't simply 'emerge like that', but they almost always get consolidated under outside influence.
Note that Germanic tribes did not create any states until they saw how the Roman model of statehood looked like.
All early Germanic kingdoms emerged in former territories of the Roman Empire, and they adopted Roman solutions.
Also Lithuanian tribes only united themselves and formed a state when Teutonic Knights knocked at the door.
Poland also emerged when the Germans conquered Sorbian tribes living west of the Oder River.
Serbs - OK, but Croats imitated the model of Carantania (which was a realm established by the Slovenes), not that of Bulgaria.
That was the biggest factor for all state-building in Western Eurasia since the emergence of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia.
New states were almost always emerging somewhere near previously existing states, rather than far away from them.
Rome emerged under strong Etruscan and Greek influences, but eventually it came to dominate both the Etruscans and the Greeks.
Croats and Serbs actually came from the north and succesfully fought against the Avars in the south.
Generally polities don't simply 'emerge like that', but they almost always get consolidated under outside influence.
Note that Germanic tribes did not create any states until they saw how the Roman model of statehood looked like.
All early Germanic kingdoms emerged in former territories of the Roman Empire, and they adopted Roman solutions.
Also Lithuanian tribes only united themselves and formed a state when Teutonic Knights knocked at the door.
Poland also emerged when the Germans conquered Sorbian tribes living west of the Oder River.
Serbs - OK, but Croats imitated the model of Carantania (which was a realm established by the Slovenes), not that of Bulgaria.
That was the biggest factor for all state-building in Western Eurasia since the emergence of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia.
New states were almost always emerging somewhere near previously existing states, rather than far away from them.
Rome emerged under strong Etruscan and Greek influences, but eventually it came to dominate both the Etruscans and the Greeks.
Heh. You make me seem like Captain Obvious by being an even bigger Captain Obvious, Domen. Imitation is a basic principle of competition. No time now, but I'll probably chime in later, on the OT. I just read an interesting article (unfortunately in Bulgarian, so it would take me some time to even synthethise it) about the origin of the Slav ethnonym, and it listed basically all the theories - as far as that's possible, because there are as many theories as there are Slavic linguists - behind the term. Some of them were really crackpot, but there are several very consistent ones, and that's the problem, there are several of them.
