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By Root 747 0

the east, the Slavs (Tacitus’s Veneti), had far better luck. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns surged through and past them, then withdrew to the Black Sea, leaving the Veneti and their kin to move permanently into the eastern plains (polye) of Poland vacated by the Vandals and Lombards, among others. The following surges of Avars and Bulgars were more or less successfully resisted by the eastern Roman empire. But they served not only to flush the remaining Germans (Gepids, Ostrogoths and Lombards) out of the more southerly areas, the Carpathians and the Balkans; they also served to cover the Slavs’ push southward. In the sixth century, the Slavs took possession of the arterial route from Aquileia on the Adriatic to Constantinople, a road that had kept this part of the empire, alone in the east, strongly linked to Latin-speaking Italy. In this way they finally moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman empire, including—as we have seen (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 261 )—Greece itself. In that traditional centre of the civilised world they were to be diffused and assimilated by the residents; but farther north, their relative numbers were far more overwhelming. By the seventh century the Slavs had been left in linguistic possession of most of eastern Europe, where they are to this day.*

The question naturally arises: why did the Slavic conquerors’ language establish itself, while that of the Germans largely disappeared? But there is no evident answer. Latin survived as Romanian at least; and this might suggest that, as in western Europe, the Slavic invaders had abandoned their language in an area where they were confronted with a more organised culture. But the geography hardly fits. It was Dalmatia and Moesia (former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) that were long-term Roman provinces, unchallenged since Trajan had conquered the whole area of the Balkans in AD 106-7; Dacia (modern Romania) had been abandoned for strategic reasons in 271, when Germanic-speaking Gepids and Visigoths had taken over. It is true that Dacia had at first been heavily settled with colonists by Trajan.47 And there were surviving Romance speakers (known to the Greeks as Rhômšnoi) up and down the Dalmatian coast until the beginning of the twentieth century. But the explanation seems to be that the Latin-speaking population drifted northward from Moesia into Dacia over the next few centuries; Bláxoi hodîtai, ‘Vlach nomads’, were a feature of the scenery on the northern marches of the empire up until the eleventh century.48

* They made a late exception to admit the Magyars in the tenth century, creating the Hungarian pocket in the midst of Slavic central Europe.

Whatever the intervening history, the Roman culture of the Balkan area, always something of an outpost, does not seem to have been strong enough ever to revive under the new Slavic masters.

Against the odds: The advent of English

Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age—the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.

Prima facie, the fate of Britain should have been just like that of Gaul or Iberia, or indeed Italy. Germanic invaders, in this case from the north-western coast of Europe, entered a reeling province of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and never went home. In light of the experience of western Europe, this should have resulted in a few centuries of turmoil before the establishment of a more or less stable kingdom or (failing unification) an array of states, which would have ended up speaking some new variant of Latin. In fact what happened was a gradual advance and settlement of the invaders (whom we may term oversimply ‘Saxons’*), from the south-east towards the north-west, a process arguably never completed but at least covering the lowland areas up to the