Old habits die hard. The historiography of the seventh century in the Balkans By Florin Curta

https://www.academia.edu/144757822/Old_habits_die_hard_The_historiography_of_the_seventh_century_in_the_Balkans?email_work_card=title No century is like the 7th in the history of the Balkans. There is a migration at its end, followed by state formation. The 7th century also opens with the general withdrawal of Roman power, followed by demographic collapse, a situation without any parallel in the subsequent history of the Balkans. Its special nature makes it difficult for any attempt to subsume the 7th century into a historical narrative, whether privileging continuity (a viewpoint that is not easy to sustain for the Balkans) or, by contrast, favoring discontinuity. More often than not, historians explain the chasm in ethnic terms: the Romans are out, the Slavs are in. At a closer look, the idea that the Roman defense on the Lower Danube collapsed in 602 and a Slavic tide inundated the Balkans turns out to be a product of the Cold War. In that respect, of all countries behind the Iron Curtain, the official view in Communist Romania was closer to that of historians in Western Europe than to that of Soviet historians. This may have something to do with the apparent volte-face of the Romanian Communists distancing themselves from Moscow in the 1960s. If so, then the idea of a Slavic flood inundating the Balkans after 602 was astutely linked to the dichotomy between Roman civilization and barbarians. The latter has been a traditional feature of research on the Late Roman empire long before World War II. Meanwhile, such ideas had no impact on the historiography of other countries in the Balkans, such as Bulgaria or Yugoslavia. American and British historians nowadays—John Haldon, Chris Wickham, and Peter Heather—perpetuate the Cold War tropes, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. One of the most important platforms for criticism against such tropes is the emerging picture of a demographic collapse in the Balkans between ca. 620 and ca. 680. One can only hope that scholarly effervescence will force the abandonment of the interpretation and models of the past and will make room for a broader evaluation of the newly accumulated data. ...