Political and practical literacy

During the early Middle ages, the new written culture was adopted on the periphery of the Roman Empire under circumstances depending upon the political forces active in each one of the successor polities. Beginning with the 6th century, in the former Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Pannonia and Dacia, the Latin legacy of the Western Roman Empire met with Byzantine form of Christianity deeply rooted in the Greek culture. ¹ The new powers emerging in the early Middle Ages in the region had their own sets of pagan beliefs and only few of them employed a symbolic level of written expression and “augured with strokes and notches,” as the Bulgarian monk Khrabr put it in a 10th-century treatise. ² Very little survives from the 5th- and 6th-century towns in the Balkans or in the Crimea, all of which were “carcasses of so many half-ruined cities,” as another learned man, St. Ambrose, put it in a letter of 387. ³ However, not all is lost: there are records of the church councils in Salona for 530 and 533, ⁴ in addition to inscriptions from Salona (on stone) ⁵ and Trogir (on lead). ⁶ Following that, there is not much, if anything, for two centuries, which is why in the Balkans the Dark Ages are dated to the 7th and 8th centuries.