The Vikings (18 page)

Saxo Grammaticus, in the
Gesta Danorum
, describes Viking raids across the Baltic in about 840 and 850 and gives the names of the leaders as Ragnar Lodbrok and Hasting. Hasting is another, like Ragnar, who looms large in the treacherous marches that divide legend from credible fact in Viking Age history.
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His activities may lie behind a series of events described by Rimbert in the
Vita Anskarii
, in which he may also be referring to the Grobin colony. According to Rimbert, people inhabiting the Courland regions of Latvia rebelled after a long period as tributaries of Swedish rulers. In about 854 a fleet of Danes - conceivably led by Hasting - attempted to reimpose the tribute on their own behalf but was heavily defeated and suffered the ignominy of having its own ships plundered. The Swedes then raised an army to win back the former colony, in the process destroying an army of 7,000 men and devastating the trading centre at a place Rimbert calls ‘Seeburg’, usually identified as Grobin.
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From Seeburg a march of five days brought them to the gates of a second Courland city at Apulia which they besieged for eight days, finally forcing from its inhabitants a large payment in silver and a resumption of the former tributary status.

 

By the early years of the ninth century female graves from the Grobin settlement associated with Gotland become scarce and later graves are those of seafaring Scandinavian males.
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The change may directly reflect the displacing of the ethnic Scandinavian settler by the transient Viking, whose interest lay in gaining access to the trading markets in the south, at Constantinople, which the Vikings called ‘Miklagård’ - the great city - and along the Volga. The trade entailed long and hazardous journeys and the best chance of survival lay in travelling in company with other men.

At first glance there would seem to have been little in the region to excite the interest of such a trader and pirate. There were no rich Christian monasteries and churches, no towns to raid. The terrain was marshy and densely wooded. In the north it was occupied as far as Lake Ilmen by Slavs who had been slowly making their way north-east from the Carpathian area. The vast and semi-arid zone of the steppes swarmed with nomadic tribes. But three large rivers, the Western Dvina, the Dneiper, and the Volga, rose in this region of the central Russian plateau, and their relative proximity made it possible to move between river basins. They formed the main arteries of a complex system of tributaries, lakes and smaller rivers connected by portages rarely more than 20 kilometres in length that created two long-distance trade routes connecting the Baltic with the Black and the Caspian Seas, the Baltic-Dneiper and Baltic-Volga routes. Together they gave waterborne access to a new world of markets in the south, among the Christians of Constantinople and the Muslims of the expanding Arab world.

The initial stages of the route led the sailors first into the Gulf of Finland, up the stub of the river Neva and then along the southern shores of Lake Ladoga to the river Volkhov. All of their way thus far was navigable by the ocean-going ships in which they had crossed the Baltic. About 20 kilometres down the Volkhov rapids, in the direction of Lake Ilmen, shallows and sandbanks made it necessary to change to smaller ships for the rest of the journey. Some kind of Swedish settlement seems to have been in existence at this staging-post as early as the seventh century, but its development into the significant Staraja Ladoga settlement began sometime in the middle of the eighth century. It functioned as a port and service centre for ships and crews heading south or returning home to Sweden after trading in Constantinople. In the oldest cultural layer of the settlement, established by dendrochronology to date from the 760s, the remains of large timbered houses with central fire-pits have been unearthed, along with articles of identifiably Scandinavian origin - such as the ubiquitous combs - that match items found at Birka. The site of a blacksmith and jeweller’s workshop has been identified from this same early cultural layer, with forge, furnace, metal workshop and a collection of tools including pincers, jewellery hammers, drills and a tiny anvil.
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The find of some twenty wooden toy swords from a cultural level identified as Ladoga’s oldest, dated to between 750 and 830, may suggest that families had begun to settle in the town by this time.
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The burial ground at Plakun, on the bank of the river opposite Ladoga, shows characteristically Scandinavian features, with some twenty mounds containing the remnants of cremations in boats, along with a solitary burial chamber.

Two more settlements were established further south along the river, Gorodische and Novgorod. Gorodische seems to have had no specialized trade activity, its primary function being as a military outpost guarding the approach to Ladoga.
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Novgorod means ‘new’ Gorod, though the settlements appear to have developed simultaneously and were only 2 kilometres apart. It grew up at the northern end of Lake Ilmen and had access by river and portage to the Upper Volga, the Western Dvina and the Dneiper. The neck-rings with pendant hammer that were popular among the devotees of Thor have been found here, as well as amulets with runic inscriptions and a small carved figure identified as a Valkyrie. The Scandinavians called it Holmgård, ‘the island city’, a name that agrees with the description of the settlement given by the tenth-century Arab historian Ibn Rustah as ‘on an island surrounded by a lake. The circumference of this island on which they live equals three days’ journey. It is covered with woods and morasses.’
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He numbered its population in the thousands and summarized their way of life thus:

Trading and colonisation east of the Baltic largely involved Swedish Vikings, known as Rus, who gained access from the Gulf of Finland to the river network that led them down to Constantinople.

They have no fields but simply live on what they get from the Slavs’ lands. When a son is born, the father will go up to the newborn baby, sword in hand and throw it down. ‘I shall not leave you with any property’ he says. ‘You have only what you can provide for yourself with this weapon.’
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Amber, arrows, swords, wax, honey, walrus tusks, fox furs, marten furs, falcons and slaves were what the Vikings brought to these new markets in the south. What they took away from them was silver. A serendipitous result of the Islamic taboo against the reproduction of images is that Arabic coins were stamped not only with epigrams from the Koran but also with the denomination and the year of minting. The find at Ladoga of an Arabic coin dated 786 suggests that the silver trade between the Rus and the Arabs was already under way by this time. In the form of buried hoards some 84,000 silver coins from the Islamic world have been found in what is now Sweden. In addition, 65,000 Arabic dirhams have been found on Gotland alone. The vast size of some of these buried deposits indicates the sheer volume of the trade. The Spillings hoard, discovered in 1999 on a farm in the north-east of the island, weighed 67 kilograms and included over 14,000 coins of Arabic origin, as well as almost 500 silver armbands, some three dozen silver bars and a great many spiral silver rings. Viking Age Scandinavians ignored the face value of silver coins and artefacts and valued them by weight and content alone. The bars and armbands had been fused into equal units of exchangeable weight and about 88 per cent of the coins had been cut, turning them into so-called ‘hacksilver’. The hoard was truly enormous. Each Gotland household paid an annual tax to the Swedish king equivalent to 12 grams of silver; if an estimate of the number of farms on Gotland at the time at about 1,500 be correct, then this one hoard alone would have paid the islanders’ taxes for six years.
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The reluctance of the Rus, who turned up at the court of Louis the Pious in 839 to return northwards by the same route as they had travelled south, indicates that the Baltic-Volga and Baltic-Dneiper river routes to Constantinople were not yet secure. They may have been using the long-distance overland trade route travelled by Jewish merchants between the Near East and France, called
ar-radaniya
in the Arabic sources, that led from the towns of the lower Volga to either Krakow or Prague and then through Germany; but in terms of convenience it could not compare with the potential of the river routes.
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The securing of these routes became an enterprise intimately associated with the formation of the Kievan or Old Russian State by the leaders of the Rus, and the creation of this Kievan polity was the subject of the earliest written history of Russia, the
Russian Primary Chronicle
, a compilation made in Kiev early in the twelfth century by the monk Nestor, whose own
Lives
of the saints Boris and Gleb was among its sources, along with the Byzantine chronicle of Georgius Hamartolus, a
Life
of Methodius, missionary to the Slavs, and various treaties of the Kievan state with Constantinople, some of which are included in what looks their entirety. Like many of the earliest histories of polities that later turned into nations, the
Russian Primary Chronicle
is a source to approach with caution, but there is general agreement that a basic core of historical fact does underlie the literary improvisations of its compiler(s); the dates given may be inaccurate, but it is accepted that the events to which they refer took place.

After a beginning that locates its cast of tribes in a mythical biblical diaspora, the
Chronicle
approaches historical time with a reference to an attack by the Rus on Constantinople in 852, on which it does not expand. In 859 a tribe referred to as ‘the Varangians from beyond the sea’ imposed tribute upon a number of other tribes including the Chuds, the Slavs, the Merians, the Ves and the Krivichians. In a situation that has clear parallels to the one described by Rimbert in the
Vita Anskarii
these tribes rejected the tribute, drove the Varangians back across the sea and set about governing themselves. The task proved beyond them and a period of warfare ensued. In 862 a decision was taken to put an end to the violence by appointing ‘a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to law’. According to the
Chronicle
, tribal representatives then crossed the Baltic to Sweden and approached a group of Scandinavians, known as the Rus, ‘just as some of them are called Swedes, and others Normans, Angles, and Goths’, and explained the problem to them: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it.’ They asked for leaders to be appointed who would emigrate and rule over them. Three brothers named Rurik, Sineus and Truvor, along with their families and retainers, accepted the invitation. Their names have been traced to the original Scandinavian forms ‘Hroerekr’, ‘Signiutr’ and ‘Thorvadr’.
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Soon afterwards two of the brothers were dead and Rurik was in sole charge of the territories. Other than that he made his court at Novgorod, nothing is known of him for certain. Some think it possible he may have been the same man as that nephew of Klak-Harald to whom Louis the Pious gave Dorestad in 837, but this has the disadvantage of making him a Dane rather than a Swede.
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‘On account of these Varangians,’ says the chronicler, ‘the district of Novgorod became known as the land of Rus. The present inhabitants of Novgorod are descended from the Varangian race.’
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In all this there are echoes of another story, told by Rimbert, of the siege of Apulia by the Swedes at about the same time. The terms offered by the Apulians included a tribute in silver as well as a promise to the Swedes, ‘henceforth to be subject and obedient to your rule, as we were in former times’. We may suspect that Rurik similarly imposed himself further east in the Ladoga area by force rather than invitation.
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The similarities between this tale of the ‘summoning of the princes’ and the story of the Jute brothers Hengist and Horsa, who came to England in the middle of the fifth century to assist King Vortigern of Kent against the Picts, have led to a widespread assumption that it is a historical topos, introduced to fill a blank space. But before consigning the tale entirely to legend we might recall that, as recently as 1905, a newly independent Norway invited a member of the Danish royal family to come to Norway and be their king, and that the invitation was accepted. Over the centuries sporadic objection has been raised to the whole idea of the Scandinavian origins of the Rus, usually on patriotic grounds.
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Historians of the Soviet era were particularly opposed to it, since it contradicted Marxist theories on the formation of states. But the evidence of Louis’ visitors in 839, and of the names of the signatories of successive trade treaties with Constantinople during the formative years of the Old Russian State, seem to leave little room for doubt. An ongoing process of assimilation had still not obscured these origins in 949 when Bishop Liuprand of Cremona visited Constantinople, where he noted that the city was menaced in the north by dangerous neighbours that included the Huns, the Pechenegs, the Khazar and the
Rusii
, ‘whom we call Nordmanni’.
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