Empires and Barbarians (91 page)

None of this is credible. The 944 trade treaty with Byzantium tells us that Igor had two nephews important enough to rate a separate mention. There is no record of them or their subsequent fate in the rest of the
Chronicle
, and it’s hard to resist the conclusion that history has been edited to give an impression of secure and smooth Rurikid dominance. Likewise, the Oleg story: was he a collateral relative of Riurik who first conquered Kiev and then imposed his rule on the north? Or was he a complete outsider who perhaps married into the dynasty so as in some way to legitimize his rule after the fact? And how, then, did power pass from him to Riurik’s son Igor? It is also hard to believe that Oleg didn’t have heirs of his own, so what happened to them? The politics of early tenth-century Russia were clearly much messier than the
Chronicle
would have us believe, with independent Viking leaders and a self-assertive dynasty all jockeying violently for position.

The full details of these internal political struggles will for ever escape us, but the kind of world we should be envisaging is clear. At this stage, as one commentator has evocatively called it, it was not so much a state as a ‘glorified Hudson Bay company’, composed of essentially independent trading operations located at various centres along the main river routes, loosely linked together by having to pay protection money to the most powerful among them. They acted in concert only in certain circumstances, such as when using their collective muscle to extract advantageous trade terms from the Byzantines, and no doubt also to engage in a little price-fixing. The Rus state began life, therefore, as a hierarchically organized umbrella organization for these merchants, no doubt established originally by force. Even so, the original merchant adventurers, or their descendants, were left with considerable powers and independence, and as late as 944 still ran their own localities.
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By the eleventh century, however, this stratum of independent non-Riurikid rulers in their own settlements had disappeared. By this date, the preferred solution to the dynastic mayhem which characteristically accompanied transfers of power between different Rurikid generations took the form of giving their own centre of power to each eligible contender. This was already happening by the year 1000, the
Chronicle
providing us with an exhaustive list of the twelve cities that were granted by Vladimir to his twelve sons, the products of five of his more official liaisons. How many other children he had generated from the 300 concubines he kept at Vyshgorod, the three hundred at Belgorod and the two hundred at Berestovoe is not recorded. At some point in the tenth century, then, the independent power of the descendants of the founding merchant princes had been curtailed, turning their formerly self-governing settlements into dynastic appanages. In fact, this was probably a steady process, which played itself out over a lengthy period. Oleg’s suppression of Askold and Dir, to the extent that this story might be taken as historical example, provides us with an early instance of this kind of action. The
RPC
also records some later instances of exactly the same thing. In the civil war between Sviatoslav’s two sons Yaropolk and Vladimir, new merchant settlements continued to be founded. Two Scandinavian leaders by the names of Rogvolod (Ragnvaldr) and Tury established their own trading centres at Polotsk and Turov. Their subsequent fate is not recorded,
but both centres were among the twelve distributed in the next generation to the various sons of Vladimir, by which time their founders had clearly lost out. As part of the same civil war, another such locally dominant line, apparently a family established for a much longer period, that of Sveinald, also met its demise.
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The full story of the suppression of the independent merchant lines is hidden from us, but it clearly happened, and it represented the final stage in the evolution of mercantile settlements into a fully fledged political union. Although the unique origins of the Rus state meant that the Rurikids began as one set of merchant princes among several – rather than as the leaders of one regional tribal group among several, as was the case with the Piasts and Premyslids – nonetheless violent dynastic self-assertion was central to the process of state formation.

The same was true of the last of these new states, Denmark, although here, too, the process differed substantially from that unfolding in the Avar successor states. In the small settlement of Jelling in central Jutland stands a not very substantial church and two huge mounds: the northern one 65 metres in diameter and 8 metres high, the southerly 77 by 11. Within the northern mound there is a wood-lined chamber dated by dendrochronology to 958, which was nearly the last resting place of King Gorm. Gorm’s son and heir Harold Bluetooth originally buried him there, but transferred the body to the church when he himself converted to Christianity, probably around 965. Like the Mormons, Harold was taking no chances that his ancestors might be deprived of the joys of his new religion. Apart from shifting the corpse, he also erected a fabulous runestone whose inscription is still there to be read: ‘Harold had these monuments erected in memory of Gorm his father and Thyre his mother, that Harold who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and Christianized the Danes.’

The case of Denmark differs substantially from the other states, by providing a timely warning against the assumption that political developments always move in a straight line. As we have seen, a powerful centralizing political structure had existed in southern Jutland before the Viking Age, from at least the mid-eighth century when the Danevirke was first constructed. But this monarchy was destroyed by flows of new Viking wealth into Scandinavia. Wealth translated pretty much directly into warriors, and warriors into power, so that
new wealth in sufficient quantities could not but generate political revolution. The old monarchy fell because so many ‘kings’ could now buy in so much military muscle that political stability evaporated.
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By the mid-tenth century, there are further signs of substantial change. For one thing, there seem to have been fewer kings. Viking-period sources demonstrate that a multiplicity of royals had existed in ninth-century Scandinavia. Apart from the one extended, or possibly two, separate dynastic lines found competing for power in southern Jutland (Godfrid, Haraldr and their descendants), there were more independent kings in the Vestfold west of the Oslo Fjord in Norway in the ninth century, and on the island of Bornholm. Birka and Sweden, further east, likewise, also had kings. A large number of other kings also appeared in western waters in the Great Army period, from the 860s onwards, and these must all have had their origins in some particular corner of Scandinavia. By my reckoning about a dozen of them are named, at different points: not enough to suggest that ‘king’ was a status that just anyone might claim, especially as we also meet men of slightly lesser status – jarls – who held back from claiming to be royalty. From the time of Harold Bluetooth, by contrast, the historical narrative throws up other ‘kings’ consistently in Sweden only, and occasionally in Norway. It would appear, therefore, that the word had undergone a change of meaning (as it did in other cultural contexts, too) from something like ‘person from an extremely important family’ to ‘ruler of a substantial territory’, the normal meaning of the word today.
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That said, the Jelling dynasty did seemingly build up its power by bringing under its control disparate territories that had had their own leaderships in the chaos of the later ninth century. It may have been the dynasty’s success, of course, that brought about the substantive change of meaning in the word ‘king’. Gorm’s wife Thyre is called in another inscription ‘the pride of Denmark’. It has been convincingly argued, on the basis of contemporary usage, that in c.900 the ‘mark’ element in ‘Denmark’ meant ‘regions bordering the Danish kingdom’; in other words, somewhere other than the main centres of the Danish monarchy – perhaps northern Jutland or the southern Baltic islands. Like our other dynasties, therefore, despite the substantial differences in historical context, the political activities of the Jelling dynasty were fundamentally accumulative – putting together regions that had previously been independent. This process was begun by Gorm and
carried on by subsequent members of the dynasty. Harold Bluetooth added control of southern Norway to the dynasty’s portfolio of assets after the battle of Limfjord, but ruled it indirectly through the Jarls of Lade. Svein and Cnut maintained this hegemony through most of their reigns, and at times dominated the west coast of what is now Sweden as well. Even so, the heritage of old independence did not disappear overnight. From the narratives of Danish history in the eleventh century, it emerges very clearly that Jutland and the islands of Fyn and Sjaelland were still functioning on occasion as separatist power centres.
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The political processes behind all these new states, therefore, were similar. In each case, one dynastic line was able to demote or eliminate a peer group of geographically proximate rivals to bring a larger region under its control. The vagaries of this process further explain the propensity of the states it created to swap intervening areas amongst themselves. Given that all these areas were originally independent, it is easy to see why some of them might maintain a capacity for autonomous political activity long after they first accepted a new dynasty’s domination, especially in a context where itineration and personal charisma rather than developed bureaucratic structures were being used to govern them. But while full of arresting stories and individuals of striking charisma, political narratives of achieved dynastic ambition do not remotely begin to tell the full story of state formation in the north and east at the end of the first millennium. History is littered with ambitious individuals trying to build their power and thereby eclipse every rival. In most cases, however, such ambition does not lead to new and impressively powerful state structures. Apart from looking at narratives of personal ambition, then, we also need to think about the broader structural transformations that made it possible for entirely ordinary ambitions to achieve such unusual outcomes.

Many of these changes were similar to those that had generated the larger political structures on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the first half of the millennium. Taking the long view, social and economic transformations of the most profound kind were structurally critical to the process of state formation in northern and eastern Europe. This is
most obviously true of the Slavic-speaking world, but to a considerable extent applies to Scandinavia as well.

Up to the mid-first millennium, Slav or Slavic-dominated societies were characterized by little in the way of obvious social inequality. Whatever their exact geographical origins, the Slavic-speaking groups who burst on to the fringes of the Mediterranean in the sixth century had clearly emerged from the undeveloped, heavily wooded regions of eastern Europe, where settlements were small – no more than hamlets – and whose Iron Age farmers were operating at little above subsistence level and with few material markers of differing social status. This state of affairs had already begun to change radically in the sixth century, as a direct result of the migratory processes that brought some Slavic-speakers into a direct relationship with the more developed Mediterranean. From this, an unprecedented flow of wealth – the profits, more or less equally, of raiding, military service and diplomatic subsidy – quickly generated inequalities around which new social structures began to form. These showed themselves initially after c.575 in the rise of a new class of military leader, controlling quite substantial areas and groups several thousand strong – even if there is also some reason to think that other elements within Slavic society, represented by Korchak remains, retained older, more egalitarian social forms and were even using alternative kinds of migration, and in different directions away from the east Roman frontier, as a means to preserve them.
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The new Slavic states of the ninth and tenth centuries were constructed on a marked accentuation of these initial inequalities. This shows up most obviously in the existence of military retinues: that classic vehicle of social and political power, which had played such an important role in the transformation of the Germanic world. Presumably the new Slavic leaders of the sixth century had their henchmen, but large permanent retinues do not figure in any of the historical sources as a major force, military or social. The contrast with the ninth and tenth centuries is striking. The Arab geographers report that Miesco of Poland maintained a personal force of three thousand warriors – and this is just one account among many, stressing the importance of retinues at this time. In Bohemia, the fourteen dukes presenting themselves for baptism in 845 did so ‘with their men’, and the early Bohemian texts associated with Wenceslas refer both to his retinue and to that of his brother, Boleslav I. Frankish texts, similarly,
mention the ‘men’ of both Mojmir and his nephew Zwentibald among the Moravians, and retinues were just as important in Russia. Again, Arab geographers pick out the four hundred men of the dominant Rus prince in the north in c.900, and retinues appear as important political pressure groups for several of the early kings in the narratives of the
RPC
. It was the need to satisfy the demands of his ‘men’, for instance, that led Igor to increase the tribute he customarily imposed upon the Derevlians. He may have regretted giving in, since, as we have seen, it led to his death at the hands of the aggrieved taxpayers. And as we saw among the Germani around the Roman Empire, the rise of permanent military retinues greatly increased the capacity of rulers both to bring rival dynasts into line and to enforce a range of obligations (such as army and labour services) upon the broader population. As such, it obviously played a critical role in the process of state formation, not least – again as among the Germani – in creating a much stronger dynastic component to power at the top. There is no sign among even the late sixth-century Slavs that power was in any sense hereditary, even if particular individuals could build up striking power bases.
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But by the ninth and tenth centuries, dynasties dominated politics, and hereditary power was the order of the day.