--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> Most of the slaves came from the area between Poland and
> Russia+Ukraine, right? So were they mainly Balts? Does this explain,
> in part, the dramatic shrinkage of Baltic speaking territory at the
> expense of Slavic speakers? Was Polish participation partially in
> response to German pressures from the west?
The source i cited deals withy much later times, around 800 CE, that's not my specialty.
Here's the immediately preceding paragraph:
'Second, and one of the reasons why the scale was so much larger, the late first-millennium network operated with multiple sources of imperial demand for its high-value goods. Demand seems to have originated in western Europe, with goods even from northern Russia being shipped there from the mid-eighth century. The trading station at Staraia Ladoga came into being a couple of generations before any Muslim connection had been established. This makes perfect sense, since increasing demand in western Europe at this point coincides with the rise of the Carolingian dynasty. But an Islamic dimension soon came into play. Not long after 800, Muslim silver coins started to flow north in vast numbers, part of the trade having now been diverted to a second set of customers, the elites of the Abbasid Empire. This was the greatest state of its age, and so demand from there soon dwarfed the west's, to judge at least by the amount of Muslim silver that ended up in the Baltic region. The Muslim connection was not broken even when the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed in the early tenth century, since a great successor state quickly arose under the control of the Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran whose silver mines made them fabulously wealthy. Sometime in the mid- to late ninth century, finally, Constantinople came into the picture. Much less wealthy than the Muslim world, it was nonetheless a distinct third centre of elite demand.53'
More relevant for the time is
pp. 606-607
'More fundamentally, and also more interesting given that it has been so much less discussed, is the effect of the Völkerwanderung upon barbarian Europe. By the sixth century, Germanic-dominated Europe as it had stood in the Roman era had almost completely collapsed. Where, up to the fourth century, similar socioeconomic and political structures had prevailed over a huge territory from the Rhine to the Vistula in the north and to the River Don at their fullest extent in the south, by c.550 ad, their direct descendants were essentially restricted to lands west of the Elbe, with an outlying pocket on the Great Hungarian Plain, which was about to be terminated by the arrival of the Avars (Map 15). The Völkerwanderung had played a central role in this revolution, though not by actually emptying these landscapes of all their inhabitants. Settlement did completely disappear in some restricted localities, but, even making maximum assumptions, the exodus from Germanic Europe from the fourth to the sixth century was not on a large enough scale to denude central and eastern Europe of its entire population. What the Volkerwanderung clearly did do, however, was empty much of the old inner and outer peripheries of the Empire of the armed and organized, socially elite groupings which had previously run them. From the perspective of barbarian Europe, the period saw not just the collapse of the Roman Empire, but also the collapse of the larger state-like structures and organizations of its periphery, the vast majority of which relocated themselves, in the course of the migrations, on to parts of just the old inner periphery -between the Rhine and the Elbe, and the Great Hungarian Plain - and actual, largely western Roman territory.
This first extraordinary revolution in barbarian Europe marked a caesura in over half a millennium of broadly continuous development over large parts of central and eastern Europe. It also allowed a second and equally dramatic transformation. In the aftermath of Germanic collapse, population groups from the third zone of Europe as it stood at the start of the Roman era started to develop, for the first time as far as we can see, substantial political, economic and cultural interactions with the rest of Europe. The Romans had some kind of knowledge of the Venedi who inhabited that part of Europe's low-speed zone closest to them. Tacitus in the first century knew that they were out there, beyond the Vistula and the Carpathians; Ptolemy a couple of generations later could add the names of a few of their broader social groupings. But, remarkably, there is no evidence at all that these populations were sucked into the political events of the first half of the millennium in any shape or form. Venedi mounted no known raids into Roman territory, find no mention in narratives of the Marcomannic War or the third-century crisis, and do not even seem to have participated in the structures of Attila's Empire, which incorporated so many of the other population groups of central and eastern Europe. Nor do the distribution maps of Roman imports suggest that these European population groups from east of the Vistula and north of the Carpathians played a major role in any of the trade networks stretching out into barbaricum in the Roman era, though some of the routes surely passed through their territories.'
And, Roman coins
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66359?var=0&l=1
I suspect someone were sold down the river.
Torsten