For all its historical importance, the creation of Slavic Europe is extremely difficult to reconstruct. Some of the reasons for this are straightforward, others a touch more exotic. First and foremost, we have no contemporary account of the process from any Slavic author. Literacy eventually came to the Slavic world with conversion to Christianity. But it was only in mid-Ninth Century Moravia where we began, that the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Method created the first written version of a Slavic language to translate the bible. In the centuries that followed, even Latin and Greek literacy remained largely restricted to religious contexts, and it was not until the early Twelfth Century that the Slavic world started to generate its own account of the past: the Chronicle of Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia (written from c. 1120), the Gallus Anonymus in Poland (c. 1115), and the Russian Primary Chronicle in Kiev (or Tale of Bygone Years, 1116). Nearly half a millennium separates these first Slavic accounts of Slavic history from the period when Slavic domination was becoming established over vast tracts of the European landscape. The focus of these texts was also on the much more immediate history of the states in which they were composed, and of their ruling dynasties, with references to any deeper past few and far between. Hence, all of our more or less contemporary information on the rise of the Slavs is provided by east Roman or Byzantine authors in the east, and post-Roman, largely Frankish and Italian, authors in the west. In all of these texts, Greco-Roman conceptions of the “barbarians” were alive and kicking. The extent to which any particular report can be relied upon, or represents an ideologically loaded construction of reality brought into line with the preconceived expectations of author and audience, is thus always an open question.

From Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development, and the Birth of Europe, London: Pan Books, 2009, p. 387.