1) Good lines
On why he is addressing centuries of barbarian activity in one short chapter, having devoted three long ones to the few decades of the rise of Islam:
If, in the account of this interesting people [the Arabs], I have deviated from the strict and original line of my undertaking, the merit of the subject will hide my transgression, or solicit my excuse. In the East, in the West, in war, in religion, in science, in their prosperity, and in their decay, the Arabians press themselves on our curiosity: the first overthrow of the church and empire of the Greeks may be imputed to their arms; and the disciples of Mahomet still hold the civil and religious sceptre of the Oriental world. But the same labor would be unworthily bestowed on the swarms of savages, who, between the seventh and the twelfth century, descended from the plains of Scythia, in transient inroad or perpetual emigration. Their names are uncouth, their origins doubtful, their actions obscure, their superstition was blind, their valour brutal, and the uniformity of their public and private lives was neither softened by innocence nor refined by policy. The majesty of the Byzantine throne repelled and survived their disorderly attacks; the greater part of these Barbarians has disappeared without leaving any memorial of their existence, and the despicable remnant continues, and may long continue, to groan under the dominion of a foreign tyrant.
That last statement is a grand rhetorical flourish, but it wasn’t at all true of the Russians at the time Gibbon was writing, and not really true of the Hungarians though a better argument could be made. It’s fair enough comment on the Bulgarians, and possibly the Ukrainians if we allow them to be the Scythians and the ruled rather than rulers of Kiev (Kiow as Gibbon calls it).
2) Summary
Another short chapter (30 pages) which does what it says on the tin, taking the Bulgarians, Hungarians and Russians in turn and looking at their interactions with the Byzantine Empire over its later centuries. Gibbon is clearly taken with the scholarship of the Hungarians, and the romance of the Russians; rather less so with the Bulgarians. Essentially this is a chapter of three short national histories, each with a different ending – the Bulgarians end up dominated and partially assimilated, the Hungarians assertive and free, and the Russians gain Christianity but become ever more isolated.
3) Points arising
Hungarians as libertarian heroes
Gibbon is puzzled because the Hungarians are related linguistically and ethnically to the apathetic inhabitants of Arctic Scandinavia:
With this narrative we might be reasonably content, if the penetration of modern learning had not opened a new and larger prospect of the antiquities of nations. The Hungarian language stands alone, and as it were insulated, among the Sclavonian dialects; but it bears a close and clear affinity to the idioms of the Fennic race, of an obsolete and savage race, which formerly occupied the northern regions of Asia and Europe. The genuine appellation of Ugri or Igours is found on the western confines of China; their migration to the banks of the Irtish is attested by Tartar evidence; a similar name and language are detected in the southern parts of Siberia; and the remains of the Fennic tribes are widely, though thinly scattered from the sources of the Oby to the shores of Lapland. The consanguinity of the Hungarians and Laplanders would display the powerful energy of climate on the children of a common parent; the lively contrast between the bold adventurers who are intoxicated with the wines of the Danube, and the wretched fugitives who are immersed beneath the snows of the polar circle. Arms and freedom have ever been the ruling, though too often the unsuccessful, passion of the Hungarians, who are endowed by nature with a vigorous constitution of soul and body. Extreme cold has diminished the stature and congealed the faculties of the Laplanders; and the arctic tribes, alone among the sons of men, are ignorant of war, and unconscious of human blood; a happy ignorance, if reason and virtue were the guardians of their peace!
There is of course a confusion here between the Ugric languages, of which Hungarian is one, and the Uighurs of western China, whose language is actually Turkic.
But my point is that the Hungarians are here anointed by Gibbon as passionate about “arms and freedom”, thanks to their “vigorous constitution”, a word definitely chosen to reflect political debate as well, as we can tell from the end of the Hungarian section:
…the house of Arpad reigned three hundred years in the kingdom of Hungary. But the freeborn Barbarians were not dazzled by the lustre of the diadem, and the people asserted their indefeasible right of choosing, deposing, and punishing the hereditary servant of the state.
Gibbon is a bit ambiguous about whether that last bit is a good idea – back in Chapter VII he was rather defensive of the hereditary principle, but he was writing that before Britain lost the American war.
4) Coming next