Discussione sulla lezione Pritsak
Verlinden: I should then start with a question about what you said about the chronology of the first appearance of the Slavs in Proto-Bulgar. I think - perhaps I didn’t grasp exactly what you meant since you had such an enormous quantity of material to develop -, I think that you said that the first appearance of Slavs is from the 5th or 6th century. Is that correct or not?
Pritsak: our first information about the Bulgarian Slavs comes from about the middle of the sixth century along the Danube (Byzantine sources), but as far as the Slavs at the Kuban-Fanagoria region are concerned, our data belong to the time of Kobrad, which is the first half of the seventh century.
Verlinden: but bookform is, when it is written, in Arab, isn’t it?
Pritsak: the data on the Fanagoria Slavic slaves are written in an Arabic source, but they were based on the information contained in the Sassanian materials. The Arabic author in question is Ibn Khurdädhbeh, himself of Iranian origin.
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Verlinden: that may be true, but for instance, if you look at the facts in South-Western Europe, in Spain, where there are mentions of imported slaves, you find this only from the 10th century onwards, not before that. So there is a problem of chronology in all this matter. I don't exactly realize how you can postulate trades in slaves from the extreme Eastern part of Europe to the West in the periods you say.
Pritsak: excuse me, here I would like to stress the fact that the word ṣaqlab/ pl. ṣaqāliba had two meanings. The first meaning was «frontier-warriors», and this meaning we know from the Danube Limes and from some other terr-tories, as discussed in my paper.
The second meaning was «trained slaves», «slaves trained to rule (especially the nomadic «Pax»)», as the Mameluks later did. We know about them during an earlier period from the Islamic sources dealing with the Islamic East. As far as the Islamic West is concerned, you are right, the data are only from the tenth century on. But if we take, for instance, the sources dealing with the military campaign by Marwan b. Muḥammad against the Khazars from 737 (Ibn Actham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, Ibn al-Athīr and other authors), they tell us about the Ṣaqāliba as «trained slaves», and then, of course, follow the data ábout the Ṣaqāliba-River, the main trade route of the region, i.e., the Don and Volga, which were at that time regarded as one river (because there was a system of portages, not far from the StalingradjVolgograd of today). The river is called nahr aṣ-ṣaqāliba, meaning not «the river of the Slavs», but the highway for the slave-trade. And there are many other data concerning this second meaning of the word ṣaqāliba «slaves». But the word ṣaqāliba «slaves» was well noted in the Umeiyad realm, while as far as the West is concerned,
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the information we have is from the tenth century, as you correctly mentioned.
One may add, that in the letter of Hasdāi b. Šafrūṭ to King Joseph of Khazaria (also tenth century), Otto, the German Emperor is called melek ṣeqlab, because he also had that very important commodity – slaves (Hebrew ṣeqlab = Arab ṣaqlab, pl. ṣaqāliba).
Verlinden: in Western sources from the Merovingian period, I mean hagiographic sources, there are mentions of groups of slaves that are conducted by merchants coming from the East, but always with no other terminology than the classical one.