Velkov was disinclined to speculate and eschewed theoretical exposition,
preferring to explore the available evidence as fully as possible. Since his
own systematic investigations ventured into the civic histories of the
coastal trading towns of the Black Sea coast, such as Odessos and Mesam-
bria, as well as into classical slavery and mining, it was clear enough to his
scholarly eye that nocordon sanitairecould realistically be constructed
around the coastal communities, isolating these enclaves of foreign conta-
gion from the healthy independence of rural communities in the interior.
Whilst he acknowledged that slavery was, in his view, much less wide-
spread in the Balkan heartlands than in the cities of the Aegean, he was
well aware of the circumstances that allowed Xenophon’s mercenary army
to acquire 1,000 slaves, 4,000 oxen, and 10,000 sheep, simply by force of
arms (Xen.Anab. 7.3.48). It was equally clear to Velkov that Thracian
rulers did own slaves and were therefore implicated in the process by
which free individuals came to be enslaved as a result of inter-community
violence (Xen.Anab.7.7.53).^61 The acquisition of property, including
human chattel, far from being a specific characteristic of the slave-owning,
corrupt, money-driven world of Greek and Roman cities, was just as much
part of native Balkan experience, and by no means confined to the ruling
élite. In Xenophon’s world, mercenaries, traders, small time husbandmen,
and farmers, could and did negotiate their own terms, unconstrained by
outside powers. So Marxist attempts to separate the organization of
European tribal societies from classical (market-regulated, slave-domin-
ated) ones, in terms of distinct social and economic features, looked rather
less convincing to a scholar like Velkov, sensitive to the ambiguities of
narratives such as Xenophon’s.
An early Byzantine village unit consisted of a dozen or so domestic
structures plus units of land that could be assessed for tax purposes.^62
This kind of village might have housed between 75 and 1,000 inhabitants.
Nevertheless, many of the named historical locations in ancient written
sources referred to settlements that were noticeably larger, involving
populations of several thousand. Sites with names terminating in–bria,
the dominant propertied classes,controlling the conditions of production,ensure the
extraction of the surplus, which makes their own leisured existence possible’. Cf. ibid.
52 – 7; 140; 144–5; 172–3; 256–8; slaves from Thrace: 163, 227; Tacheva 1997, 131– 60
with bibliography on Russian and Bulgarian historiography of the topic; Nafissi 2005,
248 – 56; see further Chs 4 and 5.
(^61) Velkov 1964, 125–8 (= Velkov 1988, 113–15); on mining, Velkov 1971. For Velkov’s
career, see also Delev 2009.
(^62) Velkov 1962, 53–4, 65–6 (= Velkov 1988, 202–3, 215–16).
Introduction 31