Byzantium on the Danube

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Byzantium on the Danube is a household word among archaeologists , comparable to the " Vandals before Rome " and is represented as a working hypothesis by a research direction mainly by Austrian and Hungarian archaeologists in early history .

This does not mean the presence of the Byzantine military in the castles on the Danube , but the increasing cultural turn of Eastern Central Europe to the Byzantine Empire between the 6th and 10th centuries. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire , the cultural impulses from the West weakened. Instead, the areas of what was to become Hungary , Slovakia , Romania and the entire Balkan region received strong cultural impulses from the east. This is expressed during the Avar epoch (late 6th to 9th centuries) in material culture, for example in women's jewelry and men's belts that refer to the Mediterranean area , but also, for example, in Greek Christian inscriptions on fibulae ; this is a kind of brooch for closing a garment. At the time of the Great Moravian Empire (from the 8th century) the Byzantine influence manifested itself in the area of Orthodox missionary work and in Greek-influenced church buildings in the administrative centers of the Great Moravian Empire. Earlier Hungarian research always assumed that every time the archaeological finds changed, a new wave of “ barbarians ” had broken into Europe. The material culture in the west ( Merovingians ) is fundamentally different from that in the east ( Slavs / Avars).

The derivation of part of the Avar finds from the Byzantine area represents, in the opinion of the representatives of this school of archeology, a great step forward compared to the migration theories of ever new peoples, as represented as the dominant doctrine in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nevertheless, Ellen Riemer's thesis was attacked because of the vagueness of the nomenclature (Byzantine, Italo-Byzantine).

Important work on the subject submitted by the Professor of Prehistory and Early History at the University of Vienna , Falko Daim , (above all, the Avars on the edge of the Byzantine world ) and by the Hungarian archaeologist Éva Garam . There is also a work of the same name by Eric Breuer , which, however, is primarily devoted to questions of the chronology of the small finds. Breuer also advocates the thesis that one could speak of a “Byzantinization of everyday culture of the formerly western-Romanesque territories of the earlier Roman provinces on the middle and lower Danube” as a change of epoch, of a change of epoch from Romanized Teutons to Graecized Slavs .

literature

  • Eric Breuer : Byzantium on the Danube. An introduction to chronology and found material on archeology in the early Middle Ages in the central Danube region. Chronological studies to early medieval findings at the danube region. An introduction to byzantine art at barbaric cemeteries. (multilingual) Tettnang 2005, ISBN 3-88812-198-1 .
  • Falko Daim: The Avar Griffin and Byzantine Antiquity. In: H. Friesinger / F. Daim (ed.): Types of ethnogenesis with special consideration of Bavaria. II. Kongr. Zwettl. 1986, Vienna 1990, pp. 273-304.
  • Falko Daim (ed.): The Avars on the edge of the Byzantine world. Studies on diplomacy, trade and technology transfer in the early Middle Ages (= monographs on early history and medieval archeology 7). Innsbruck 2000.
  • Éva Garam: About necklaces, necklaces with pendants and jeweled collars of Byzantine origin from the Avar period. Acta Arch Hung 43, 1991, pp. 151-179.
  • Éva Garam: Byzantine type belt decorations in the Carpathian Basin. Acta Arch Hung 51, 1999/2000, pp. 379-391.
  • Éva Garam: Finds of Byzantine origin in the Avar period from the end of the 6th to the end of the 7th century (Monumenta Avarorum archaeologica 5). Budapest 2001.