Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (29 page)

The
foundation
of
the
Rus
state

During the second half of the ninth century, the Rus settlements were united into a single kingdom. According to the semi-legendary account of the
Russian
Primary
Chronicle
, the first Rus state was founded some time around 860 – 62. The story told in the chronicle is improbable to say the least. The Slavs became tired of their constant internecine wars, so they appealed to the Rus to send them a leader to rule them according to law. They chose three brothers. Rurik, the eldest, established himself as ruler of Novgorod; Sineus became ruler of Beloozero (now Belozersk) on Lake Beloye; and the third brother, Truvor, became ruler of Izborsk near Pskov. When Rurik’s brothers died two years later, he inherited their territories and became ruler of all of north-west Russia. Novgorod was not founded until
c.
930 so Rurik’s capital was probably at Gorodische, a former island 2 miles south of the modern city centre, which has produced substantial evidence of Scandinavian occupation in the ninth century. Rurik is supposed to have died
c.
879 and was succeeded by Oleg (Old Norse Helgi) (r.
c.
879 –
c.
913). According to the
Primary
Chronicle,
Oleg was a kinsman of Rurik but early Novgorod chronicles describe him merely as one of his army commanders. The rulers of the Rus used the title
kniaz
, which is usually translated into English as ‘prince’, which implies something less than full sovereignty. However,
kniaz
shares a common Indo-European root with English ‘king’, which more accurately describes their power and status.

At about the same time that Rurik is said to have become ruler of Novgorod, two brothers, Askold and Dir, sailed south down the River Dnepr and captured the town of Kiev from the Poljani Slavs. According to the
Primary
Chronicle
, it was Askold and Dir who led the first Rus attack on Constantinople in 860. Like all subsequent Rus attacks on Constantinople, it was defeated. Around 882, Oleg brought an army of Vikings and Slavs down the Dnepr from Novgorod and captured Kiev. Askold and Dir were both killed in the attack. Oleg subsequently moved from Novgorod to Kiev and made it the capital of the Rus state. Russians have traditionally seen the foundation of the Kievan Rus state as marking the origins of the modern Russian state. It therefore remains hard for Russians to accept that the city which they see as the birthplace of their nation is now, as a result of the break-up of the USSR in 1991, the capital of an independent country, Ukraine.

According to the
Primary
Chronicle,
Oleg led an attack on Constantinople in 907. If he did no one in Constantinople appears to have noticed because it is not mentioned in any Byzantine sources. The attack may have been invented to explain trade treaties that the
Primary
Chronicle
says were agreed between the Rus and the Byzantine government in 907 and 911. The 907 agreement gave Rus merchants the rights to receive food supplies in Constantinople for up to six months, a monthly allowance, the use of public baths, and supplies of anchors and sails for their ships. In return, the Rus paid a toll of twelve grivnas of silver (about 6 pounds/2.7 kg) for each ship they brought. The Rus were not allowed to live within the city walls, could not bring any weapons into the city with them and, when they were in the city, had always to be accompanied by a government official. Rus merchants from Kiev were given priority treatment over those from other centres. In the 911 treaty, the Rus agreed not to plunder Byzantine ships and to give whatever help was necessary to any they found in difficulties. Other clauses concerned crimes committed by the Rus in Byzantine territories, the ransom of prisoners, return of runaway slaves and terms for Rus who wanted to join the Byzantine army. Oleg died soon after these treaties were agreed, probably in 913. The
Primary
Chronicle
’s account of Oleg’s death is plainly legendary. Having been warned by a soothsayer that his favourite horse would cause his death, Oleg vowed never to ride or even see it again. When the horse died five years later, Oleg mocked the soothsayer for his false prophecy. But when Oleg went to view the horse’s skeleton, a poisonous snake slithered out from its skull and fatally bit his foot. In reality, it is more likely that he was killed during an unsuccessful raid in the Caspian Sea.

Oleg was succeeded by Igor (Old Norse Ingvar) (r.
c.
913 – 45). Though most modern historians think it is unlikely, the
Primary
Chronicle
claims that Igor was Rurik’s son, brought up as a foster-son by Oleg after his father’s death. Fostering was, however, a common practice in Viking Age Scandinavia, at all levels of society. Igor is the first truly historical ruler of the Rus but his reign was not a great success. In 941, Igor led a disastrous attack on Constantinople. Most of his fleet was destroyed by Byzantine galleys fitted with Greek Fire projectors and he was lucky to escape with his life. He was probably also the leader of a Rus rampage around the Caspian Sea in 943. This expedition too ended in failure after sickness decimated its ranks while it was occupying the Muslim city of Barda in modern Azerbaijan. Igor raised a new army of Rus, Slavs and Pecheneg nomads for another attack on Constantinople in 944, but the
Primary
Chronicle
claims that the Byzantines bought him off with an offer of tribute and a new trade treaty in 945. However, the terms offered by the Byzantines were noticeably worse than those won by Oleg in 911, which does not suggest that he was negotiating from a position of strength. The treaty set limits on the amount of silk Rus merchants could buy in Constantinople and banned them from making winter camps on Berezan Island at the mouth of the River Dnepr. This measure was to prevent the Rus becoming a permanent presence in the Black Sea. The poor returns from his expeditions led Igor to double his demands for tribute from his Slav subjects in 945. When he raided the Drevljane for the second time in a month, they attacked and killed him. The Byzantine writer Leo the Deacon records the story that his killers bent two trees together, tied his legs to them and then let them spring apart so that his body was torn in two.

The Drevljane paid a high price for their defiance. Igor’s successor, his son Svyatoslav (r. 945 – 72) was still an infant, so it fell to his formidable wife Olga (Old Norse Helga) to defend the Kievan state. The
Primary
Chronicle
describes the vicious, and probably legendary, reprisals Olga took against the Drevljane. After Igor’s death, the Drevljane sent an embassy to Olga to propose that she marry their chief and so unite the two peoples. Olga had them buried alive in a burial mound. A second embassy was sent and Olga burned its members to death in a bath house. Olga next invited 5,000 of the Drevljane to a funeral feast to commemorate Igor’s life. The Drevljane must have been remarkably lacking in curiosity about the disappearance of their two embassies to Olga because they turned up. When the Drevljane had got thoroughly drunk, she ordered the warriors of her
druzhina
(‘bodyguard’, the Rus equivalent of the Viking
lið
) to massacre them. Finally, Olga laid siege to the Drevljane’s stronghold of Iskorosten (now Korosten, Ukraine). The Drevljane offered to pay tribute in furs and honey in return for peace, but Olga asked only for three sparrows and three pigeons from each household. When the birds had been delivered, they were given to her warriors, who tied pieces of sulphur to their wings and set them alight. The terrified birds flew straight back to their nests in Iskoresten, setting the whole town ablaze. Fighting so many fires at once was impossible, so the Drevljane fled the city only to be massacred by the vengeful Rus. This stratagem features in many other folk tales about Viking and Norman leaders: Guthrum is said to have captured Cirencester in Wessex in this way, for example. Whatever the truth of these colourful stories, there can be no doubt that Olga proved to be a most able regent, preserving the unity of the Kievan state until Svyatoslav attained his majority
c.
963.

The river routes of the Rus

The trade routes on which the early Rus state depended began in the Gulf of Finland, the long arm of the Baltic Sea that separates Estonia and Finland. Ships heading for Russia from the west generally took the sheltered passage through the thousands of islands and skerries along the Finnish coast to the mouth of the River Neva, where St Petersburg now stands. Broad and deep, the River Neva gave easy access to Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest lake, about 45 miles inland. Swedish merchants probably first ventured into Lake Ladoga in the first half of the eighth century in order to obtain furs from the local Finns to trade to western Europe. Miniver, the silky white winter coat of the stoat, was particularly prized and commanded high prices. Around 750, a permanent settlement of merchants and craftsmen developed at Staraja Ladoga a few miles from the lake on its major feeder river, the Volkhov. The earliest structures so far discovered on the site have been dated by dendrochronology to 753. The town became known to Scandinavians as
Aldeigjuborg
, from its original Finnish name Aloda-joki (‘lowland river’). The Slavic name Ladoga is also derived from the Finnish name. From its foundation, the town had a mixed population of Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs. Each of these ethnic groups had their own cemeteries, suggesting that in life they had been segregated into their own quarters in the town. Grave goods from Scandinavian burials suggest that there were close links to the large Swedish island of Gotland: vast quantities of dirhems have been discovered in silver hoards on this island confirming its key role in trade with Russia and the east. Excavations of the town have revealed evidence for a wide range of manufacturing, including jewellery- and glass-making, blacksmithing, bronze-casting, and amber-, bone- and antler-working. Many of these manufactured goods would have been traded for furs with the Finns, who lacked metalworking skills. Towns were an obvious attraction to raiders (both native and Scandinavian) and Staraja Ladoga was protected by a rampart at an early stage in its development. The town was, therefore, already well-established when the first silver dirhems began turning up there in the 780s. Staraja Ladoga’s easy access from the Baltic made it vulnerable to Viking raids from Scandinavia. There is archaeological evidence that the town was burned around 860 and it was sacked by the Norwegian jarl Erik of Lade around 996 – 7, and probably by his half-brother Svein around 1015.

Until the tenth century, Staraja Ladoga remained the most important of the trade centres under Rus control. This was thanks to its strategic position, close to Lake Ladoga, where the river routes to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea divided. Merchants who wanted to trade with the Islamic world would sail the few miles back down the Volkhov into Lake Ladoga and sail east along its southern shore until they reached the mouth of the River Svir, Ladoga’s most important feeder after the Volkhov. An 80-mile sail up the Svir led into Lake Onega. From Lake Onega the River Vytegra was followed to its headwaters from where boats had to be dragged overland across the Baltic-Caspian Sea watershed into the headwaters of the River Kovzha. The Kovzha was followed to Lake Beloye and the Finnish town of Kisima. In the nineteenth century a canal, the Baltic-Volga waterway, was built across the watershed to link Lake Onega with Lake Beloye. In the tenth century Kisima was abandoned in favour of Beloozero, on the southern shore of the lake at the place where the River Sheksna flows out on its way to join the River Volga. Like Kisima, Beloozero was mainly inhabited by Finns when it was founded but over the next few centuries they were gradually replaced by Slavs, migrating from the south. Archaeological excavations have produced plenty of evidence of the town’s wide-ranging trade connections: jewellery and weapons from Scandinavia, combs from Frisia, wine amphorae from Crimea, pottery from Bulgaria, glass from Constantinople and amber from the Baltic Sea.

The first important centre merchants would have reached after sailing down the Sheksna into the Volga was Timerevo, a large unfortified trading place about 4 miles from modern Yaroslavl, which superseded it as the main trade centre in the region in 1010. Evidence from coin hoards suggests that Timerevo was probably founded around 830. Burials indicate a considerable Scandinavian presence in the town. Grave goods included an ‘Ulfbhert’ sword: Viking warriors prized these exceptionally high quality Frankish swords inlaid with their maker’s name. Several Frankish swords have been found in Scandinavian burials in Russia, but they were not just imported for Rus warriors, they were also greatly prized by their Arab trading partners. Not far from Timerevo was another important Rus centre, Sarskoye Gorodishche on Lake Nero, near modern Rostov. This was originally a centre of the Finnish Merya tribe, which was taken over by the Rus in the early ninth century. Sarskoye Gorodishche declined in the late tenth century after the foundation of the mainly Slav town of Rostov around 963.

Bulgaria on the Volga

A few days’ journey from Timerevo the merchants would have left territory controlled by the Rus. For the next 500 miles, the merchants had to pass through sparsely populated territory until they reached Bolghar, about 20 miles downstream from the confluence of the Volga and the Kama rivers. Bolghar was the trading place of the Volga Bulgars, a Turkic nomad tribe from central Asia who had arrived in the area under their leader Kotrag around 660. At around the same time another group of Bulgars migrated to the Balkans, where they founded the precursor of the modern Bulgarian state. When the Rus first made contact with the Volga Bulgars in the ninth century, they were pagan shamanists but they converted to Islam in the tenth century. Until a fort and a mosque were built there in the early tenth century, Bolghar had few permanent buildings and was probably occupied only on a seasonal basis. Bolghar was as far as most Rus merchants ever needed to go. The town was one terminus of the trans-Asian Silk Road and the major centre for fur trading with the Samoyedic peoples of the White Sea and northern Urals regions. To the south, the Volga linked Bolghar to the Khazar Khaganate and the Caspian Sea. Arab merchants travelled either the Volga or the Silk Road to Bolghar to buy slaves, furs, beeswax and honey, Baltic amber and Frankish swords from the Rus. As well as those desirable silver dirhems, Arab merchants also traded in silk, spices and fragrances, and colourful ceramic beads, which Rus women found irresistible. Local interpreters were available to help the Rus and the Arabs communicate with one another. The Bolghar khagan taxed merchants at the rate of 10 per cent of the value of their goods. The khan in his turn paid a proportion of the tax revenues to the powerful Khazar khagan who was his overlord. The Rus had their own quarter at Bolghar, close to the river, where they built wooden huts for themselves and set up a shrine and a wooden idol. The Rus believed that success in trade was a gift of their gods. Before trading, a Rus merchant would prostrate himself before the idol and recite what goods he had brought to sell, make an offering of food, and pray that he would be sent ‘a merchant who has large quantities of dinars and dirhems and who will buy everything that I want and not argue with me about my price’. If trading went well, the merchant would sacrifice a number of sheep and cattle at the shrine as a thanks offering.