Everything Became More Complicated

The advance was no longer into empty space. Everything became more complicated. No chance of mistaking the famed Germanic settlement of eastern lands for the narrative of the American frontier, despite the efforts of comparative history. Colonists from Germania settled east of the Elbe from the twelfth to the thirteenth century and even in the fourteenth, by way of political or social actions, and by force. The newcomers built their villages amid forest clearings, laid out communities along the roads, introduced heavy plows with iron plowshares, shaped towns, and forced German law on both these and the Slav towns. The Magdeburg law for the mainland and the Lubeck for the seas. This comprised an immense relocation. But the occupation took place within an already established Slav people with solid organizational structures able to resist the newcomers, and if needed, to swallow them up. Germania’s bad luck was its late development. It began its march eastwards after the settlement of Slav peoples, who were more firmly attached to the land and established in their towns than was earlier supposed.

The same process happens again with Russian expansion. Not in Siberia, which was nearly empty, but again in the sixteenth century towards the southern rivers, Volga, Don, and Dniester. This expansion was also marked by general peasant colonization. The steppe between the Volga and the Black Sea was not settled but was invaded by the nomadic Nogais and Tartars from the Crimea. These tough horsemen were the vanguard of Islam and the Turkish empire that supported them and sometimes flung them forward. It even saved them from the Russians by outfitting them with firearms, an asset the defenders of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan lacked.  They were not adversaries to be messed with.