Breeding like rabbits?! Slavic populations in Europe between 500 CE and 1000 CE

Pangur Bán;12506194 said:
Yes it did. Who adopted Hunnic as a language? What farming area became Hunnic speaking?
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Adopting hunnic as a language is not really a prerequisite for expanding. The empire of the Huns under Attila was larger than the whole Slavic-European world at the end of the Slavic migrations.

Furthermore there is no real knowledge of a Hunnic language. It seems that most of the people in the Empire of the Huns spoke Gothic, itself an older germanic language that died out.

A map of the Empire of the Huns in its peak:

Spoiler :

Maps i found vary, but all show a vast empire during the reign of Attila.

EDIT It has been noted to me that this particular map is a hyperbole, so i am taking it out. Still the Empire of Attila was certainly very large, and hunnic expansion was very pronounced, which was my point.
 
Kyriakos - we know how large was the Hunnic Empire (or rather could be, because according to some other sources they in fact controlled a much smaller area*). They conquered many of the Germanic tribes, for example.

*For example according to this map, they controlled only this area in year 450:

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Huns450.png



The problem is that the Huns (and the Hunnic language) completely "melted" into the peoples they conquered (and thus dissapeared) within a few hundred years from the moment when their Empire collapsed (by year 700 CE there were no longer any Huns anywhere in the world).

In year 700 - 750 CE, there were no longer any Huns anywhere (and Hunnic language was extinct by that time). During WW1 British soldiers called their German enemies "Huns" (derogatory) - but in fact the Huns got entirely assimilated with Germanic tribes they had conquered before.
 
Not sure what you are arguing Kyriakos, but as an incidental point that map is pure fantasy. As far as the sources go, the Hunnic 'state' was based on the Danube and gained temporary overlordship of some Germanic polities (a long way from Latvia and the forests of northern Russia!).
 
BTW, semi-nomadic groups can spread their language to arable farmers as a consequence of high politics, even in densely populated areas. Arabic and Turkish are great examples of it.
 
Pangur Bán;12506213 said:
If you're asking for a primary text that lists regions by language, you are asking for something that is very rare and hardly ever exists. You work that out by inference through studies on texts, place-names, proper names, archaeology, and so forht. If you are asking for some secondary text saying 'Romance was the language of the Balkans', then do a google book search. Or I could do one for you and post the results.
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I just did. Still did not get anything validating your claim. No one said there were no latin speakers in the Byzantine Empire. You claimed that a large number of the people in the Balkans were latin-speakers, and that claim does not seem at all validated.

The Byzantine Empire for most of its time held most of the Balkans. You specifically even referred to the age of Justinian (6th century AD). It sounds somewhat dubious to argue that by that age the Byzantine historians (like Procopios) were unaware of who spoke what main language in their own empire.

Even so, though, i would be interested in you naming your secondary sources, since you offered to do so. I must guess you have read some of them, otherwise you would not have made your claim.
 
BTW, semi-nomadic groups can spread their language to arable farmers as a consequence of high politics, even in densely populated areas. Arabic and Turkish are great examples of it.
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So maybe Slavs are as well a great example of it ???

This would be an even one more explanation how the total Slavic population in Europe could increase so much between 500 CE and 1000 CE.

spoke Gothic, itself an older germanic language that died out.
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As an interesting note, some words from the Gothic language were adopted by the Slavic language.

This had to take place before the Gothic language died out, so there had to be some interactions between people speaking both languages.
 
Kyriakos said:
I just did. Still did not get anything validating your claim. No one said there were no latin speakers in the Byzantine Empire. You claimed that a large number of the people in the Balkans were latin-speakers, and that claim does not seem at all validated.
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If you want you can check out Late antiquity : a guide to the postclassical world eds. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, s.v. "Latin", which discusses the area of spoken Latin, including in the Balkans (and even Lebanon I see!), and has a bibliography.

Kyriakos said:
The Byzantine Empire for most of its time held most of the Balkans. You specifically even referred to the age of Justinian (6th century AD). It sounds somewhat dubious to argue that by that age the Byzantine historians (like Procopios) were unaware of who spoke what main language in their own empire.
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Who said Byzantine historians were "unaware of who spoke what main language in their own empire"? No-one here has claimed that. :confused:
 
Pangur Bán;12506280 said:
If you want you can check out Late antiquity : a guide to the postclassical world eds. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, s.v. "Latin", which discusses the area of spoken Latin, including in the Balkans (and even Lebanon I see!), and has a bibliography.



Who said Byzantine historians were "unaware of who spoke what main language in their own empire"? No-one here has claimed that. :confused:
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I checked that book. It has 280 pages. Surely you can make a specific reference from it to the issue of large latin-speaking groups in the balkans in the 6th century?

My point was that since those historians knew, they would have been rather likely to mention something, even in passing. Obviously it would be rare for them to actually focus on known issues, but not at all rare to refer to them while discussing other issues. So yes, some references to large latin-speaking groups in the 6th century Balkans should have existed in the work of Byzantine historians, if that was known to them to be true.

I fear, though, that this is getting way off-topic. I am not particularly interested on this issue, just was surprised to hear your claim, so i thought i should ask for backing for it. I suppose we will not establish that here- which is ok, since the thread is not about latin speakers in the Balkans when Slavs migrated anyway...
 
Domen said:
So maybe Slavs are as well a great example of it ???
This would be an even one more explanation how the total Slavic population in Europe could increase so much between 500 CE and 1000 CE.
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Possible in theory, but we know they weren't. I suppose it's just about possible that just at the beginning of their expansion they weren't, but this has no evidence. Indo-European peoples as a rule are arable farmers, so you'd need a lot of evidence to show that the Slavs weren't before their expansion. If there is a parallel it is possibly that the Slavs were the arable specialists within an 'empire' with a noble elite of pastoralist nomads (like the Goths to the Huns, Egyptian Arabs to the Mameluks, and so on). Perhaps another sort of parallel could be the English in the British Isles. Even though French speakers were the elite who expanded into Wales, Ireland and Scotland, it was English that expanded because all the middling folk and city folk were English speakers.
 
Kyriakos said:
I checked that book. It has 280 pages. Surely you can make a specific reference from it to the issue of large latin-speaking groups in the balkans in the 6th century?

My point was that since those historians knew, they would have been rather likely to mention something, even in passing. Obviously it would be rare for them to actually focus on known issues, but not at all rare to refer to them while discussing other issues. So yes, some references to large latin-speaking groups in the 6th century Balkans should have existed in the work of Byzantine historians, if that was known to them to be true.

I fear, though, that this is getting way off-topic. I am not particularly interested on this issue, just was surprised to hear your claim, so i thought i should ask for backing for it. I suppose we will not establish that here- which is ok, since the thread is not about latin speakers in the Balkans when Slavs migrated anyway...
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Kyriakos, I did give specific reference. 'S.v' stands for 'sub verbo' or 'sub vide', meaning 'under the word' or 'see under'. The book has a list of introductory essays topics arranged alphabetically, so if you go to the L part of the book you will find an article on Latin.
 
Early Slavic armies had large proportion of cavalry.

According to Constantine Porphyrogennetos among the Chrobats proportion of mounted warriors to foot warriors was like 6 to 10.

Polish army of king Boleslaw Chrobry in year 1000 (Congress of Gniezno) had 3900 Loricati and 13000 Clipeati.

If we assume that only Loricati (but also all of them) were horsemen (while all Clipeati were infantry) then 23% - 24% was cavalry.

But Poland at that time was heavily forested, not full of fields like in Late Medieval, so a worse place for mounted armies.
 
"Mounted warriors" and "cavalry" aren't always the same thing. Famously, Viking armies were mostly mounted, but they fought almost exclusively on foot.
 
Yes it is also possible that they used small breeds of horses / ponies for movement (and such breeds were maybe not very good in combat).

Pomeranians even in the 11th and 12th centuries used mostly small horses ("ponies") similar to horses used by Mongol horse archers.

Those horses used by Pomeranians and Polabian Slavs were smaller than horses used by Western European knights.

But in Poland such large "knight horses" appeared already in the 10th / 11th centuries (although local, smaller breeds were also in use at that time).

Also in heavily forested areas, it was probably often better to fight dismounted than mounted.
 
But Poland's Loricati probably had good, large war horses.

According to Abraham ben Jacob, they were supplied with horses by the Polish duke (by the state).

While Clipeati could use those small ponies, which were typical local breed in this part of Europe.

And probably Clipeati used horses more often for movement than for combat.
 
Do any of the sources indicate Slavic armies being accompanied by many unmounted horses? Generally, if an army made extensive use of cavalry, they'd have plenty of remounts, while if they only had one or two horses a piece, it was unlikely that cavalry were used on more than an ad hoc basis. (It's obviously possible that this varied between or within armies.)
 
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