40 POLSKA
that 'at this point our knowledge of the world ends'.^5 In his review of the tribes
of Germania, he mentions the Lemovii and the Rugii on the coast of Pomerania,
and the Gotones (Goths) on the Vistula. His delphic reference to the 'Venedii'
has been variously interpreted as proof of the existence of Germanic Vandals or
else of Slavic Wends. Pliny's Natural History recalls the exploits of a Roman
knight in the reign of Nero who travelled overland from Carnuntum on the
Danube to the Baltic coast, returning home with a huge quantity of precious
amber. But what part of the lands through which the knight travelled were
inhabited by Slavs, he fails to mention. And after that, for six hundred years, the
records are virtually silent. Throughout this long darkness, there are few
glimpses of the settled agricultural population; though from time to time occa-
sional echoes are heard of migrating peoples as they trekked across the darkened
stage. Both the Goths and the Vandals lived in the Vistula Basin before migrat-
ing to the south and east on the first stage of their complicated wanderings. The
Ostrogothic Empire, which flourished right across the Baltic—Black Sea area in
the second and third centuries, gave way to the still more ephemeral Empire of
the Huns. It is unlikely that Attila himself crossed the Carpathians on his great
expedition to Gaul in 451; but there is good reason to believe that in the follow-
ing decade the retreating Hunnic horde was run to ground somewhere on the
Vistula and destroyed by the vengeful Ostrogoths. In this regard, prehistorians
are endlessly tantalized by an isolated phrase in a later Anglo-Saxon poem, the
Widsith, which tells how 'the Hraede with their sharp swords must defend their
ancient seat from the people of Aetla by the Wistla wood.'^6 After the Huns came
the Avars, whose rise to supremacy in central Europe coincided with the reasser-
tion of the Roman Empire in the East by Justinian. Then, in their turn, follow-
ing their failure at the gates of Constantinople in 626, the Avars lost control of
their tributary lands north of the Carpathians, and their fragile realm disinte-
grated. From that point onward, the expansion of the Slavonic peoples could
proceed without serious hindrance. The nomadic life was losing its appeal. The
barbarian incursions were becoming ever more infrequent. With the important
intervals of the Magyars in the ninth century and of the Mongols in the thir-
teenth, the Slavs of the North European Plain could look forward to a long era
of consolidation and development.
Inevitably, in the wake of so many human migrations, the ethnic mix of the
population was extremely rich. As a result, it is quite impossible to isolate any-
thing resembling an ethnic core, or, at the distance of more than a thousand
years, to distinguish Slavonic from non-Slavonic racial elements. In a society
that was as yet entirely unlettered, it is impossible to identify a specifically Polish
or 'Lechian' culture from within the undifferentiated mass of the western Slavs.
People who imagine that the Poles or Polish culture are somehow 'indigenous'
to the Polish lands are as mistaken as those who believe that Europe is the
original home of the Europeans. They are looking for full-grown, modern
blooms in unlabelled packets of prehistoric mixed seeds. To look for Poles in the
eighth or ninth centuries, is as anachronistic, and as pointless, as looking for