Europe's Forgotten Medieval Empire (c. 626 - 658 AD)

The year is 626 AD, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire is now a distant memory. A new world is beginning to take form. The Frankish Merovingian dynasty dominates the West. The Germanic Lombards carve up Byzantine Italy. The Avar steppe people pillage and burn the East. And now, for the first time ever, the Slavs step onto the world stage. This is King Samo, first ruler of a united Slavic empire. Kind of. It's such an obscure story that we'll need to comb through some medieval documents to properly tell it. Exciting. For context, roughly between 300 to 600 AD was the migration period here in Europe, when steppe people like the Huns were moving westward, and different steppe Germanic and Slavic peoples were either subjugated or migrating away from them. Our story concerns the Slavic tribes that migrated west towards the Alps, the people that became the Czechs, Merovians, Slovaks, Sorbians, and Carantanians. By the 600s, this region of Central Europe was overrun by the Avar Khaganate, a confederation of horse warrior steppe tribes that were pushed west by the rising Turks, coming in to ally with the Germanic Lombards and conquering the Kingdom of the Gepids in the Pannonian Basin. This initial invasion would have been bloody and brutal in places, horse warriors raiding and sacking your towns and villages, burning your crops and homes, pillaging your belongings as a core part of their early economy. But when they had sufficiently forced their unquestioned supremacy over an area, it would calm down a bit. They'd and made their main homeland the Pannonian Basin. Many would shepherd their herds in the fields and mountains here, and they'd start dealing in commerce and extracting tax and tribute from their subjugated peoples. Of course, they were still out fighting and plundering their neighbors. The Avars are said to have treated their subjugated Slavic peoples poorly. As described in the contemporary Chronicle of Fredegar, the Avars would allegedly put Slavic warriors in the front of their battle lines and make them do all the initial fighting as cannon fodder. But in victory, they'd keep all the pillaged wealth for themselves. They'd also supposedly winter in the Slavic towns and villages, extract tribute, and sleep with the Slavic wives and women. The Slavs suffered under the weight of this shameful oppression, and perhaps starting in 623 out of Moravia, they revolted. I can just imagine the leadership of each Slavic tribe one by one rising up, butchering the Avar herders in their fields, attacking their nearby encampments, each tribe acting on their own to violently push the oppressors out of their land. However, it would be a while until they saw any success throwing off the Avar yoke. Enter Samo, who we're told was a Frankish merchant from around northern France or Belgium. That's about all Fredegar's Chronicle gives on his background, and even that's kinda sketchy. Historians have posited that Samo could've gone to this area in order to give the rebelling Slavs diplomatic Frankish support, trade weapons or slaves with them, or perhaps both. But this merchant guy wasn't there to just sit on the sidelines, because within a few years, he was actively fighting in the war, probably even strategizing and leading their armies. Soon in 626, the mixed armies and fleets of Persians, Avars, and Slavic subjects joined together to try and sack Constantinople. It did not go well. The Avars were thoroughly defeated. At this, the Slavic revolt roared up, and the rebels were said to have won victory after victory, putting an astonishing number of Avars to the sword. The Avars may have had a fortified encampment positioned in these Slavic lands that Samo and the Slavs marched against and destroyed, but we're not told if these victories were pitched battles, sporadic fights with warbands, or bloody attacks on Avar peoples. Regardless, Fredegar tells us, Samo's bravery won their admiration, recognizing his parts, the Slavs made Samo their king. I think this bravery remark from the Chronicle is… a little too cute. That this random Frankish merchant was crowned king for his gusto? To posit my own very specific speculation, I'd guess that Samo had been working deeply with these tribal leaders, and had an active hand facilitating their coordination and strategy when fighting against the Avars. It's a fun story to say, that guy's badass, he's our king now. I think it's more realistic to say, that guy's got good unifying relationships with the leaders of each tribe in our coalition, he's our king now. Could be a little bit of both, I'm likely completely wrong. What we do know, is that this handful of once loose subject tribes now stood victorious over their horse warlord oppressors, bound together under an obscure outsider as their king. The first Slavic empire in history now entered the world stage. On that triumphant note, I gotta address the elephant in the room. Why so much of this is unknown speculation. The Chronicle of Fredegar. As good historians, we gotta dissect this one document that is our only close source for all this. This chronicle probably wasn't even written by a guy named Fredegar, but was probably written by one guy sometime around 660 AD, in the Avanche region of Burgundy within the Frankish empire. That's pretty good, it's written contemporarily, and is a third party source on these happenings, though across the Alps region. So that begs the question, how does the author of this chronicle know what's going on all the way over here in Central Europe? Well, scholars have analyzed and figured out that the chronicle is quite familiar with very technical and complex bureaucratic language and details, often used in the Frankish and Byzantine courts. This means the author might have connections to the Franks diplomatic offices, you know the guys who travel around the region and deal with interstate affairs? If that's true, that's a decent source for hearing updates to the politics of the region. However, the author is also quite clearly writing this chronicle to tell entertaining stories, as the big name tales of Theoderic, Justinian, and Belisarius mix in fanciful romantic legends with historical fact. The wonderful scholar Florin Curta discusses how the author uses Samo's rise to generate an origin story for this particular group of Slavs, as medieval thinkers saw the world as populated by definable people groups, each of whom needed an explainable origin. Fredegar states that the sons of the rapacious Avars and the Slavic women became those warriors who actually did the revolt. So Samo's kind of being inserted as the guy who comes in, organizes, and maybe civilizes the people into a proper, fully established group. But one evident aspect of the chronicle does influence how the author's writing about Samo and these events. The author does not like the Merovingian rulers of this era, particularly King Dagobert I. The author prefers the mayor of the palace's family over the Merovingian dynasty, the mayor being the empire's administrative head. The Fredegar is clearly using the story of Samo, who we're about to see get into a violent, brutal fight with the Frankish armies, to directly smack-talk Dagobert and explain the Merovingian's political struggles, and we should expect this to color the details he writes into Samo's story. So, the Chronicle of Fredegar provides us some short, bare-bones passages on the story of Samo, and he might be hamming up some of the romantic heroics within it and using it as a polemic against his enemies in the Frankish court. The Chronicle has some positives and some negatives as a source for these events, but frankly, it's what you can expect from a 7th century document on some far-away tribal politics. This difficulty is why I can't just come out guns blazing with a medieval Paul Atreides story, but this is the core of studying the super-mysterious, fascinating, and endlessly frustrating realms of medieval history. Real quick, there's a lot more to be said on the historiography here, so if you really love the process of history and want to go further into it, just re-watch this video after with the audio track set to Klingon for more niche historiographical commentary. Also, I live vicariously through history books and videos for their big figures and awesome excitement, so I made a history-simulating Minecraft server where normal people like us make empires, religions, guilds, all that. The computer IP is play.stoneworks.gg, I have other videos on the server history, it's really cool, and you can play to become just like Samo, just like these players have in the past. Now, how does Samo tick a tribal coalition that was united together to kick out the oppressive avars and bind them together into a runnable pseudo-state? The capital of this confederation was somewhere around the modern tri-border of Austria, Czechia, and Slovakia. From here, Samo took 12 wives and had 22 sons and 15 daughters. Dang. Some scholars have taken Samo's polygamy, plus a mention in the later 870 document Conversio Baguariorum et Carantanorum, to mean that Samo wasn't actually a Christian Frank, but a homegrown pagan Slav. We just don't really know though. But Samo integrating himself into tribal leadership families would have been smart. It could have given the prominent tribal leaders a personal interest in supporting his regime, and it could have created deeper long-term relationships with the Slavic supporters of his power. Now, I've been a bit cheeky calling this a kingdom or an empire, it's actually more of a tribal military confederation, so tribal leaders and important military men could have had lots of participation in Samo's decision-making. Whether they'd directly vote, sit down and discuss as a council, or compete for influence over Samo's decision-making, we don't know. But a deeper backbone than military is always money. This confederation sat at an important crossroads for early medieval trade, a close convergence between the Danube and Elba rivers, and later possibly holding the region of Carniola and its overland trade routes out of the Adriatic, just as Venice was starting up nearby. These areas were already vibrant with regional trade routes, and it seems that Samo was intent on establishing his own independent supremacy over the trade in his area, because soon in 632, he would come to blows with Dagobert I, King of the Frankish Empire. The Merovingian Dynasty's power over the Frankish Empire was in decline. Now, Dagobert was personally the ruler of the regions Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, but his royal authority was beginning to slip over the other Frankish holdings as nobles later rebelled from his court, and his son's power was then superseded by the mayors of the palace. Dagobert must have felt troubled then, when he learned that his merchants dealing in Samo's land were being attacked and plundered by Slavic bandits or warriors. So he sent an emissary named Sicarius to go put an end to this. Upon hearing of the coming mission, Samo declared that he didn't want to meet with the Franks, so Sicarius is said to have dressed himself and his party up as Slavs, and tricked their way into meeting with King Samo. Sicarius delivered the charge at Samo's feet, and to paraphrase the whole exchange, Samo brushed it off, saying he'd look into it and bring justice on his own or whatever. But Sicarius snapped at him, saying, hey, you owe fealty to King Dagobert. I imagine Samo raising an eyebrow at this. Sure, this land is Dagobert's, but only if he chooses to keep friendly relations with us. Now that's not a traditional lord and vassal relationship. Samo may have been positioning himself more as an equal than the Franks would have liked. Fredegar had Sicarius dishing a sick pagan phobic burn. It is impossible for Christians and servants of the Lord to live on terms of friendship with dogs. And Samo said, quote, then if you are God's servants, we are his hounds. And since you persist in offending him, we are within our rights to tear you to pieces. And he had Sicarius thrown out of his presence, a failure in achieving his mission. At this news, King Dagobert raised armies from Austrasia and he sent word to the Lombards and Alamanni to mobilize against this defiant king. But Samo as well called upon his tribes to rise and resist the invasions, and they armed themselves and prepared fortifications. As Dagobert's armies were en route towards Samo, the Alamanni army of Duke Cradobert crossed over and defeated the Slavs, plundering the area and taking many people back as slaves. The Lombards to the south crossed over, defeating the Slavs and pillaging the Seine. And finally then, Dagobert's Austrasian armies approached the main force of Samo's best warriors, who were held up in the fortress stronghold of Wogastisberg. We don't exactly know where it is, so I'm just going to agree with one historian and place it here. Uhostane, northwest Czechia. The Austrasians surrounded Wogastisberg in an assaulting siege. We can imagine waves upon waves of armored warriors, shields up, approaching the fortifications of Wogastisberg, climbing uphill, trying to break through their ditches, spikes, and walls. The relentless Slavic warriors holding them back, shooting down with arrows and falling rocks, bashing and stabbing the invaders as they tried to climb and tear into the fortress. Day after day of this, but on the third day of battle, the Austrasian armies had become despondent and demoralized under their King Dagobert's leadership. And so these most resolute Slavic warriors had crushed them, and they fled the battlefield, leaving behind their loot and equipment. The Frankish armies had been repelled from Slavic lands, all in the decisive victory at the Battle of Wogastisberg. Samo quickly jumped at this opportunity, as the Duke Dervan, lord over the Slavic Sorbs, now rejected his long-held allegiance to the Merovingians, and pledged himself under Samo's empire. Together, they sent devastating raiding parties out into the Frankish lands, battering the Duchy of Thuringia for years on end, sending Slavic settlers across the borders, and becoming an existential menace to the Franks' eastern marches. The Slavic attacks continued on for years. The Saxons to the north offered to help the Franks deal with these attacking Slavs, if they agreed to stop collecting a tribute from them, and Dagobert agreed. But the It was only in 636, when Dagobert elevated Radolf of Thuringia as the region's duke, when he successfully put together a defensive force and defeated Dervan's raiding parties, re-entrenching the former boundaries between the Slavic and Frankish realms. But even in this defeat, Samo would eventually grow stronger. Duke Radolf's success defending Thuringia emboldened him against the declining Franks, so five years later, under the next king, Sigbert III, Radolf revolted against the Franks and declared himself king of Thuringia. He decisively crushed young Sigbert's army, and immediately formed an alliance with the neighboring Bavarians in the tribal empire of Samo. For the rest of his life, Samo may well have been the most powerful warlord in Central Europe. We have no indication of further attacks against his lands, nor strife amongst his people. That doesn't mean nothing bad happened, but it does hint that the large literate powers weren't involved, and that Samo's political dealings weren't impactful enough to really write down. Samo ended up reigning over his tribal confederation for 35 years. A pretty insane run. And as all this was going down, the Merovingian's hold over the east crumbled, being wracked by palace intrigue and civil war, and the Avar Khaganate suffered a devastating loss to the Eastern Bulgars that broke their power. Amid the fiery chaos of medieval Central Europe, Samo's tribal confederation here may have been its most stable fixture. But amidst all my editorializing, there remains a great mystery. When Samo died around 658 AD, it all just seems to disappear. Perhaps due to having 22 sons. We know that the Carantanians in the south preserved their independence, becoming a principality later. We know that at some vague point in this timeline, many Sorbians migrated way south under the so-called Unknown Archon, and would later become the Serbs. But the rest just went back their own way, as their own tribes and principalities. Soon the Avars returned to control Samo's southern territories, not as oppressive pillagers, but as settlers and farmers now in symbiosis with the Slavs in the region. And in 150 years, Charlemagne would march east to swallow the region up as conquered or tributary realms, and Great Moravia would later rise to follow Samo's footsteps as the Slavs' first true kingdom. It's just strange to think. This whole saga of revolts, kings, and wars, the first strong Slavic organization in world history, the ancient proto-state of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes is only a tiny blip on our radar now. Cause just one person at the time thought to write down a bare-bones description. Thanks Fredegar, or whoever you are, and thank you for watching. Comment, like, watch more Stoneworks videos, I love you, and check out my history simulation Minecraft server, play.stoneworks.gg.