Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/460

432 sea-robbers got possession of the Russian network of waterways, overcame the Finns and Slavs, and the Scandinavian dynasty of the house of Rurik (= Old Norse: Hroerekr) created the powerful Russian State.

As in the North Germano-Slavic, so in the South Nomado-Slavic States were formed. A nomadic milk-feeding horde dominated a Slavic vegetarian peasant class. A similar state of affairs lasted till yesterday in Ferghana, the former Khanate of Khokand, where the vegetarian Tadjiks languished from the earliest times in the basest nomadic servitude. The same thing can be also traced back far into ancient times in East Europe on the western border of the steppe zone. So we find it as early as Ephorus (fourth century B.C.).

A horde of Sarmatae, the Iazygians, migrated into Central Hungary where (c. A.D. 337) the serfs of the Sarmatae, the Sarmatae Limigantes, revolted against their lords, the Sarmatae Arcaragantes or Sarmatae Liberi, and repulsed them. Here we have a similar double stratum to that which Ephorus mentions, and because the Tabula Peutingeriana (about the third century A.D.) mentions the Venedi Sarmatae and the Lupiones Sarmatae next to the pure nomadic wagon-inhabiting Sarmatae Hamaxobii, Sarmatae Vagi, many assume that these serfs of the Sarmatae, the Limigantes, were Slavs. The oldest explicit information concerning a Nomado-Slavic State on the lower Danube is to be found in Pseudo-Caesarius of Nazianzus of the sixth — probably even the fourth — century A.D., viz. that of the galactophagous Phisōnitae or Danubians (Phisōn according to Marquart is equivalent to Danubius) and the vegetarian Slavs.

The best account we have is of the similar Avaro-Slavic State. The dominating Avar nomad class was absorbed as a nation and language by the subjugated Slavs, but even after the destruction of the Avar Empire it survived socially with Slav names, as is shewn by the remarkable passage in the Arabian geographer of the ninth century: "The seat of their prince lies in the middle of the Slav land. ... This prince possesses mares, whose milk ... is his only food." As mare-milkers he and the dominating class were mounted nomads and, as the date proves, of Avar origin. This information alone destroys our former conceptions of the character of the Slav States north of the middle Danube and the Carpathians, and compels us to assume that nomadic States extended far into the territory of the Balts and even as far as the Baltic. The seafarer Wulfstan at the end of the ninth century says of the Eastland (Prussia, east of the mouth of the Vistula): "Their king and the richest men drink mares' milk but the poor and the slaves drink mead."