Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian pdf

Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian – Transition Zone – Aspects of Mobility between Africa, Asia and Europe, 300–1500 c.e. Edited by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller- Lucian Reinfandt – Yannis Stouraitis

MIGRATION HISTORIES OF THE MEDIEVAL AFROEURASIAN

Migration History of the Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone, c. 300–1500: An Introduction (with a Chronological Table of Selected Events of Political and Migration History)

When the process of compilation of this volume started in 2014, migration was without doubt already a “hot” topic.

Yet, it was only the events of 2015,1 which put migration on top of the discussion about the Euro and the economic crisis in the agenda of politicians, the wider public and the media. In this heated debate, the events of past migrations have been employed in a biased manner as arguments against a new “Völkerwanderung” destined to disintegrate Europe as it did with the (Western) Roman Empire.

Thus, the present volume could be seen, among other things, also as an effort to provide a corrective to such oversimplifying recourses to the ancient and medieval period.2 It should be noted, however, that it was planned and drafted before the events.

The volume emerged from a series of papers given at the European Social Science History Conference in Vienna in April 2014 in two sessions on “Early Medieval Migrations” organized by Professors Dirk Hoerder and Johannes Koder.

 Their aim was to integrate the migration history of the medieval period into the wider discourse of migration studies and to include recent research.

The three editors have added contributions by specialists for other periods and regions in order to cover as wide an area and a spectrum of forms of migration as possible. Still, it was not possible to cover all regions, periods and migration movements with the same weight; as one of the anonymous reviewers properly pointed out, the “work’s centre of gravity is (…) between the Eastern Mediterranean region and the Tigris/Euphrates”, with Africa not included in a similar way as Asia or Europe.

Therefore, the following sections of the introduction aim first to provide some methodological considerations and then to contextualise the individual chapters within an overview on the wider migration history of the “Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone” during the centuries between 300 and 1500 a.d., in Western European historiographical tradition called the “medieval” ones.3

Medieval Migration History and its Study

Migration can be defined as permanent or long-term dislocation of the place of residence, both by individuals and by groups of any size.4

Earlier research on the medieval period focused on the upper end of this scale, such as the assumed mass migration of peoples during the “Völkerwanderung” of the 4th–6th centuries a.d. and its impact on the Late Roman Empire and its territorial and “cultural” integrity.5

 This approach found its basis in the Latin and Greek historiography of late antiquity, which actually described a “landslide” of “barbarians” affecting the Imperium Romanum, especially starting with the “arrival” of the Huns in 375.6 This culminated in a first shocking defeat of the Roman imperial army at Adrianople (modern-day Edirne in Turkey) in 378.7

However, scholars of the 18th–20th centuries were equally interested in these migrating peoples as potential founding fathers of various “modern” nation-states such as France or Germany.

These efforts in historiographical “nation-building” spread from Western Europe into Eastern Europe and beyond, creating similar discourses onto other early medieval migrations such as one of the Slavs (in the 6th–9th centuries) or of the Magyars/Hungarians (in the 9th– 10th centuries).8

Written evidence was increasingly enriched with archaeological findings, which, however, were also primarily interpreted within the framework of ancient and medieval historiography, trying to identify ethnic groups named in the sources with specific material cultures.

Thereby, it was attempted to trace migration routes back beyond the horizon of the Latin and Greek sources to Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia or – in the case of the Huns – even to East Asia, where connections were sought with ethnic labels from Chinese sources (such as the “Xiongnu”, for the first time by Joseph de Guignes in 1756).9

These attempts at grand linear narratives, aiming at “histories of origin” of modern-day peoples and their entitlements to “nation-hood” within specific geographical borders, obscured the actual complexity of archaeological and written evidence and its inconsistencies and obstreperousness against simple interpretations.

When the massacres of World War ii at least partly delegitimised the nationalist history writing of the previous decades, more nuanced interpretative models gained currency. It became evident that there is almost never a one-to-one equivalence of archaeological findings and historiography, and that the latter implied high flexibility of ethnic identities.

Ethnic labels, as well as individuals and groups, could move from one social formation to another, and some groups not only became visible for the first time in Roman, Persian or Chinese historiography but they actually took shape on the frontiers of these imperial spheres or even on their soil.

Assumptions on fixed composition and ethnicity of these “peoples” over centuries, symbolised through colourful balls or arrows moving across maps in historical atlases, were thus rejected.

Migration as such was identified as decisive for group and identity formation. Furthermore, the settlement of these groups on new territories and their interaction with long-established populations and elites were now interpreted less as the results of conquest and subjugation but of negotiations and processes of accommodation and assimilation.

As Walter Pohl has summed up: “Unfortunately, we do not know much about the ethnic identities beyond the borders of the empire. (…)

It is not a people (…) who wandered, but various groups that re-formed themselves after multiple breaks, and which in doing so attached themselves to (ethnic) traditions. (…) The struggles for power in the Empire required large groups whose success strengthened their ethnic cohesion”.10

 Similar models have then been adopted from the Late Roman case for other migration processes of the period, from 4th–7th century China to the Arab conquest of the 7th–8th centuries or the Seljuq invasion into Byzantine Anatolia in the 11th century.11

The earlier research focus on early medieval phenomena of mass migration has been complemented with an attention on the mobility of smaller groups or even individuals and its potential impact on cultural change.12 Migrations