Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (30 page)

One of the Arab visitors to Bolghar, Ahmad ibn Fadlan (
fl
.
c.
922), wrote a detailed account of his encounters with the Rus there. A devout and cultured Muslim, Ibn Fadlan made no attempt to disguise his disgust for the pagan Rus, comparing them to wandering asses because of their failure to wash after urinating or defecating, or having sex, and for not washing their hands after eating. The Rus did wash every morning but in water that was filthy because the same bowl was shared by many people who thought nothing of spitting or blowing their noses in it before passing it on to the next person. The Rus shunned the sick and treated their slaves badly (other Arab writers disagree, however, saying that they treated slaves well so that they could get the best price for them). The sex lives of the Rus both revolted and fascinated Ibn Fadlan, particularly the perfunctory way that they had sex with their slave girls in public, even while they were doing business with customers. Ibn Fadlan could not help admiring the appearance of the Rus. ‘I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs,’ he writes. ‘They were like palm trees. They were fair and ruddy.’ The Rus wore cloaks, other Arab writers comment on their baggy trousers, and at all times they carried with them an axe, a sword, and a knife. The Rus were heavily tattooed, a custom they had probably adopted from contacts with Turkic nomad peoples like the Bulgars and Khazars. He was no less impressed by Rus women, describing the round brooches that they wore on their breasts, as made of copper, silver or gold depending on their status. Keys, symbols of a Viking woman’s control of the household, hung from rings attached to the brooches. The women also wore neck rings made of silver or gold. Ibn Fadlan said as soon as a Rus man had 10,000 dirhems, he melted them down to make a neck ring for his wife. Every time he made another 10,000 dirhems, he gave his wife another neck ring. Vikings liked to wear their wealth both to show it off and for security, and it was the fate of most of the millions of dirhems the Rus received to be melted down and recast into arm and neck rings.

Ibn Fadlan also describes the magnificent appearance of the Rus king, who at the time of his visit would have been Igor. The king sat on a huge jewel-encrusted throne, surrounded by forty slave girls who were his concubines. The king rarely left his throne. If he wanted to empty his bowels a servant brought him a bowl and he would even have sex with his slave girls while he sat on the throne. If the king wanted to ride anywhere, his horse was brought into the hall, so he could mount – or dismount – directly from the throne. The king kept 400 warriors in his hall. These were the warriors of his
druzhina
, the king’s personal warrior retinue. Like the Viking warriors of a
lið
, the warriors of the
druzhina
, were supposed to be loyal to their own death or that of the king. Each warrior, Ibn Fadlan says, had a personal slave girl to wash and dress him and serve him at table, and another to have sex with. Ibn Fadlan was clearly impressed by all the sex the Rus got to have.

A Viking ship burial

The burial customs of the Rus interested Ibn Fadlan greatly and he was pleased to have the chance to witness the funeral of one of their chiefs. The chief’s body was placed in a temporary grave for ten days while preparations for a ship burial were made. It was Rus practice to sacrifice a slave to accompany the chief into the afterlife. The chief’s slaves were asked if one of them would volunteer and one of the slave girls agreed. Ibn Fadlan says that it was usually slave girls who volunteered to be sacrificed. Whether they did this out of affection or because life as a sex-slave of the Rus was just so awful that a trip to Paradise seemed like an attractive option, he doesn’t say. For the last ten days of her life, the slave girl was well treated but was also supervised at all times to make sure she did not try to run away if she had a change of heart. Meanwhile, special funerary clothes were made for the chief, and his ship was hauled out of the river and set up level on a funeral pyre. An old woman called the ‘Angel of Death’ oversaw all the funeral arrangements. Ibn Fadlan described her as a witch, ‘thick-bodied and sinister’: she was probably a
völva
(a seeress), who Vikings believed could practice magic and foretell the future. On the day of the funeral the chief’s body was dressed and removed from its temporary resting place, then placed on a made-up bed in a tent on his ship with his weapons beside him. Offerings of food and alcoholic drink were placed in the ship, together with the dismembered bodies of a sacrificed dog, two horses, two cattle, a cock and a hen.

While this was taking place, the slave girl was passed around the chief’s male relatives, each of whom had sex with her, telling her to tell her master that ‘I only do this for my love of him’. When evening came, the slave girl took part in a ritual in which she was lifted up three times to look over a wooden frame. The first time she was lifted she said ‘there I see my father and mother’. The second time she said ‘there I see all my dead relatives sitting’. The third time she said: ‘there I see my master sitting in paradise and it is green and beautiful. There are men and young people with him and he is calling me. Take me to him.’ At that she was taken to the ship. She took off two bracelets she was wearing and gave them to the Angel of Death, whose job it was to kill her. The girl was then lifted onto the ship and given an intoxicating drink, which she sang over before drinking. The drink probably contained a narcotic because she soon began to behave in a confused manner. Once the girl was thoroughly intoxicated she was taken into the tent. Now the chief’s warriors began to bang staves on their shields to drown out the girl’s cries so that the other slave girls would not be frightened and deterred from volunteering to die with their masters. A ritualised gang-rape followed. Six men entered the tent and had sex with the girl after which she was laid next to the chief. Four of the men held the girl’s arms and legs, the other two held the opposite ends of a rope that had been tied around her neck so they could pull on them. All was now ready and the Angel of Death stabbed the girl repeatedly between the ribs while the two men strangled her to death. The girl’s body was left next to the chief’s.

The funeral ceremony now reached its climax. The chief’s closest male relative, stripped naked, walked backwards towards the ship holding a burning torch and set light to the pyre. Then people approached the ship with more wood, each of them holding a burning brand which they threw onto the pyre. The ship and the tent were soon ablaze. One of the Rus told Ibn Fadlan that the Arabs were fools to put the bodies of those they loved most into the ground to be eaten by worms and insects. ‘We burn them in the fire in an instant so that they enter paradise immediately and without delay.’ After the fire had burned out, an earth mound was erected over the ashes and a wooden post erected on top, inscribed with the name of the chief, presumably in runes.

To the Khazar Khaganate

Adventurous Rus merchants could choose to continue another 900 miles down the Volga to trade at Itil (or Atil), the capital of the Khazar Khaganate. The location of Itil has not been identified for certain but it is very likely to have been near the village of Samosdelka in the Volga Delta, where excavations in 2008 revealed the remains of a substantial early medieval town. Rus merchants from Kiev could reach Itil by a shorter route if they sailed down the Dnepr to the Black Sea, and then into the Sea of Azov and the River Don to reach the Khazar border fortress of Sarkel, now lost under the waters of Stalin’s Tsimlyansk reservoir. Upstream from Sarkel, the course of the Don comes to within 40 miles of the Volga. Today the Volga-Don canal links the two rivers at this point, but the Rus had to carry or drag their ships overland into the Volga to complete their journey by sailing downstream to Itil.

Arab visitors to Itil described it as being divided into three parts by two channels of the Volga. The western part of the city was the administrative centre, with law courts, a fortress and a military garrison. The eastern section was the commercial centre where the Rus and Arab merchants would have done business. Tolls levied at 10 per cent of the value goods sold in the markets here were the khaganate’s main source of income. Between the eastern and western parts, on an island, was the royal centre with the palaces of the khagan and the bek. The Arabs described the khagan as a spiritual leader who lived in seclusion, while the bek was a vizier or prime minister who was responsible for the actual running of the khaganate and for leading military expeditions. While the royal palace and associated buildings were built of brick and stone, most of Itil’s population lived in traditional felt yurts. Many people spent only the winter in the city, returning to the steppes in the summer to follow their herds. The khaganate was a tolerant and religiously diverse state. The khagan and the ruling classes had converted to Judaism in the earlier eighth century but most of their Khazar subjects remained loyal to their traditional shamanistic beliefs. Itil had communities of Christians, Muslims and pagans, most of them foreign merchants, who all had their own places of worship. A panel of seven judges – two Christians, two Muslims, two Jews, and one judge to represent the shamanists and pagans – sat to adjudicate in disputes between believers of different religions.

Serkland

For some Rus merchants, Itil was just a staging post on the long journey to the Abbasid Caliphate or, as the Vikings called it, Serkland (probably meaning ‘shirt-land’ from the loose-fitting Arab clothing). By taking a ship from Itil and crossing the Caspian Sea to reach the cities of Abaskun and Ardebil in present-day Iran, Rus merchants could pick up the caravan routes across the Iranian plateau and the Zagros Mountains and descend to the hot, dry plains of Mesopotamia to reach Baghdad. For a merchant who had originally set out from Sweden, this would be the end of a two- or even three-year journey. What he would have made of his first encounter with a camel is not known. Writing in the 840s the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih says that the Rus who traded in Baghdad tried to pass themselves off as Christians for political reasons, because Christians were more acceptable to Muslims than pagans, and that they paid the
jizya
tax that was levied on non-believers. The Arabs relied on Slav eunuchs to interpret for them when they wanted to do business with the Rus. The Arabs generally thought of their Rus visitors as a kind of
Saqaliba
, which was a term they used to describe fair-skinned, light-haired peoples like the Slavs. Other Arab writers, like the well-travelled al-Mas’udi (d. 957), recognised that they were the same people as the
Majus
who sometimes raided Muslim Spain.

Although it was only founded in 763, Baghdad had grown explosively and by the early ninth century it was the world’s largest city with a population of over one million. Baghdad was chosen as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for political, economic and agricultural reasons. Baghdad was close to the geographical centre of the caliphate and was surrounded by the fertile irrigated farmland of the Mesopotamian plain. This allowed the large urban population to be supported without relying on food imports. The city was on the Silk Road, the major caravan route to China, and was also on the navigable River Tigris, giving easy access to Basra and the Persian Gulf, and beyond that to the trade routes to India and the Spice Islands of the East Indies. Rus merchants who made it this far must have been overwhelmed by the sights, smells and tastes of the produce on sale in the city’s dozens of specialist markets, selling meat, vegetables, fruit, textiles, books, slaves, metalwork, Chinese goods: there was even a flower market. However, Baghdad does not seem to have captured the Viking imagination in the way Constantinople did. Perhaps too few made the long and arduous journey there, or it may just have been that Baghdad was hot, dusty and built mainly of dull mud brick so it just failed to impress in the same way that Constantinople’s mighty stone and brick walls and vast cathedrals did.

Rus raiders on the Caspian Sea

On a few occasions Rus fleets reached the Caspian Sea and raided Muslim cities along its southern and western shores. These raids were made possible by the co-operation of the Khazars, whose territory they had to pass through to reach the Caspian Sea. The earliest recorded raid took place some time between 864 and 884 and was an unsuccessful attack on Abaskun. Abaskun was raided again, with more success, by a fleet of sixteen Rus ships in 910 and a third raid in the area was recorded in 911 or 912. In 913 the Rus returned in strength, with a fleet said by al-Mas’udi to number 500 ships, each crewed by 100 men. The fleet sailed down the Dnepr from Kiev, into the Black Sea and around the Crimea into the Sea of Azov. In return for a 50 per cent share of the plunder, the Khazar khagan agree to allow the Rus to sail up the Don past Sarkel and portage their ships overland into the Volga and so sail into the Caspian Sea.

The Rus first attacked Abaskun and then began to work their way west along the coast of Tabaristan and then north to the coast of Azerbaijan, which was also known as the Naphtha Coast because of its many natural oil wells. In Azerbaijan they raided inland, three days from the coast, to sack the caravan city of Ardebil. The coast was undefended and unprepared. The Rus plundered and burned, took captives and ‘spilled oceans of blood’ without meeting any effective opposition. When the Rus seized some islands off the coast of Shirvan, the emir marshalled every ship he could find and attacked their fleet. Lacking any experience of fighting on board ships, the Muslims were no match for the Rus and thousands were killed or drowned in the battle. On their return to the Volga, the Rus sent messengers to the khagan to tell him that they were on their way with his share of the plunder, but he was no longer in a position to guarantee their safe passage. The khagan’s Muslim subjects, outraged by reports of their atrocities, attacked the Rus as they sailed up the Volga, killing, according to al-Mas’udi, 30,000 of them. The survivors continued their flight up the Volga only to be ambushed and massacred by the Bulgars. The leader of the Rus expedition is not known but it is likely to have been Oleg: quite possibly he was killed in these battles as he is said to have died in 913.