The Road That Carried Everything : comments

The Road That Carried Everything

~ Monday, June 14, 2021 ~

A great deal of what gets called the Amber Road is simply geography. The corridor that runs from the Baltic coast to the Danube basin through the Moravian Gate is not a road in any meaningful sense. It is a series of terrain features — river valleys, a gap between mountain ranges, a gradual watershed — that make certain directions of travel easier than others. Amber moved through it. So did everything else.

Markus is writing this from the reading room of the Staatsarchiv in Vienna, which holds among its collections a run of Carolingian administrative correspondence that has been fully digitised and not fully read. This is the normal condition of large archives. The digitisation makes the documents accessible; it does not make them read. A document that has been photographed and uploaded is not a document that has been examined. Markus is in the habit of making this distinction and in the habit of sitting in reading rooms that confirm it.

The corridor precedes the commodity

The Amber Road, as a named route, appears in scholarly literature from the late nineteenth century. The name is a retronym — a label applied backward onto a phenomenon that did not have, and did not need, a name at the time it was operating. The people who moved amber from Samland to Aquileia in the first century CE were not, as far as the sources record, using a term that translates as “amber road.” They were using terrain.

The corridor exists because of the structural geology of central Europe. The North European Plain — the vast lowland that runs from France to the Urals — meets its southern limit in the arc of mountains that includes the Alps, the Carpathians, and the Sudeten range. These mountains are, with one exception, a serious obstacle to wheeled movement across a large distance. The exception is the Moravian Gate: a natural pass at the headwaters of the Oder and Morava rivers, approximately fifteen kilometres across at its narrowest, at an elevation that does not require special preparation to cross with loaded transport. Everything else going north-south between the Baltic and the Danube in the central European corridor has to go around the mountains. The Gate lets it go through.

This terrain feature — the Gate — is the reason for the route. Amber named it because amber is what survived: physically durable, chemically distinctive, identifiable by provenance, present in excavation records across 2,500 kilometres. But amber was the most durable commodity on the route, not the most important one. The corridor moved tin. Iron. Grain. Salt. The archaeological record preserves amber because amber preserves. It does not preserve what is perishable.

What else traveled north-south

The excavation record at Carnuntum — the Roman legionary fortress at the Danube crossing that was the southern anchor of the route — documents a general trading entrepôt, not an amber-specific facility. The amber workshops documented at the site are present but not dominant. The other material categories — ceramics, metalwork, coins, glass, animal bone — suggest a broad commercial function. The Carnuntum evidence is consistent with the amber route as a subcomponent of a larger north-south exchange network that operated along the same geographic corridor.

Roman military logistics followed the same geography. The supply lines that fed the Danube legions ran north-south through the same valley systems. Cattle for the legionary butcheries at Carnuntum, documented in bone assemblages by species and age-at-death, were driven south from breeding grounds in what is now Poland and the Czech lands — along routes that followed the Morava and the tributaries of the Vistula. The amber merchant and the cattle drover were using the same corridor. They did not require each other. The corridor was large enough for both.

People followed goods

The missionary record is not a trade record, but it uses the same landscape. Bishop Kapalini’s account of the missions north of the Danube documents an Irish peregrini network operating in the eastern Alpine and Pannonian zone in the seventh and eighth centuries — eighty or more years before the Byzantine missions that the standard narrative names as the beginning of Christianity in Moravia and Bohemia. These Irish wanderers did not have a logistics infrastructure. They traveled by foot on existing routes, staying at monasteries or settlements where they could find them, moving through terrain that was navigable because other people had been navigating it for centuries.

The routes they used were, in the relevant segment, the routes of the amber corridor. The valley system that carried amber north-to-south also carried missionaries south-to-north. The Morava valley that Elena Voronina documents in this series — the river corridor that Staré Hradisko once controlled, that the Přemyslid centers later organised around — is the corridor through which pre-Frankish Christian contact reached the Bohemian and Moravian highlands before any documented institutional mission.

Markus does not claim to be able to document individual movements. What can be documented is the corridor, its continuous use across the relevant period, and the absence of any serious alternative.

The document Markus wants to find

The Annales Fuldenses — the Frankish royal annals already in the record on this site for the 845 Regensburg baptism of Bohemian dukes — contain in their margins material that the main text does not. Marginal notations, interlinear additions, and scribal comments in the manuscript tradition document things that the principal compiler considered too minor for the main record: a flood, a fire, a group of travelers from the north arriving via the mountains. The notation Markus is looking for — one that would document movement of specific individuals along the amber corridor in the eighth or ninth century — has not been found in the principal manuscripts. It has not been looked for in all of them.

This is not a complaint. It is an observation about the state of the field. The marginal material of the Carolingian annals tradition has been transcribed incompletely and examined for political history almost exclusively. What it contains by way of incidental geographic and demographic information has been treated as background noise. Markus’s interest is in the noise.

The corridor remains. What traveled through it in the period between the amber trade’s Roman peak and the beginning of the documented missions — the period from roughly 400 to 800 CE, when the Roman road infrastructure was degrading but not destroyed, when the terrain was unchanged and the gap in the mountains was still the gap in the mountains — is not well documented. It is not, for that reason, empty.

The road does not know what walks it

The amber is in museums. The milestones are in museums. The route remains, used by whoever finds it useful, without requiring a name or an institution to keep it open. Every generation that does not name the route uses it anyway.

This is what Markus has taken from the documentary record and from Elena Voronina’s work in this series: the geography is the constant. The communities that used the route — amber merchants, cattle drovers, Irish peregrini, Frankish missionaries — all used the same terrain. The terrain was not designed for any of them. It was available to all of them.

The Missions North of the Danube — Bishop Kapalini on the Irish peregrini and the eastern missions
What the Romans Knew About Amber — Elena Voronina on the material and its documentation
The Moved Waymarker — Elena Voronina on a miliarium found not where milestones belong

Sources

Annales Fuldenses. Ed. Friedrich Kurze. MGH SS rer. Germ. 7. Hannover, 1891. (Primary source for Carolingian annals; 845 Regensburg baptism cited in The Missions North of the Danube)
For Elena Voronina’s documentation of the amber corridor: What the Romans Knew About Amber; Samland to Carnuntum; The Moravian Segment; The Moved Waymarker.