The Vikings (20 page)

By the time of her death in 969 Svyatoslov had been ruler of the Kievan state for about seven years. It was he who finally broke the power of the Khazar Khaganate, invading in 965 and 968 and destroying the fortress at Sarkel on the Don and devastating the Khazar capital Itil, at the mouth of the Volga. In 971 he led another attack on Constantinople. Diplomatic practice in the empire regarded treaties as valid for some thirty years, and this latest in the Rus’ thirty-year cycle of campaigns may have been connected with a desire to secure improved terms for themselves as the approaching deadline loomed. This time the imperial forces got the better of him. Svyatoslov and his men took refuge in the garrison town of Dristra, on the south bank of the Danube, and successfully brought matters to an impasse. Svyatoslov ignored a challenge from the emperor to meet him in single combat and offered to strike a deal: in return for grain, a safe-conduct and a confirmation of the right of Rus merchants to trade in the city, he offered to release his prisoners and return to Kiev. The Byzantine historian Leo Diakonus was present at the subsequent meeting on the banks of the Danube and has left us a portrait of Svyatoslov as vivid as any photograph:

The emperor arrived on the banks of the Danube on horseback. He was wearing golden armour and accompanied by a large number of riders. Svyatoslov crossed the river on a kind of small Skyrian boat; he manned the oars just as his followers did. Svyatoslov looked like this: he was of medium height, neither too big nor too small. He had thick eyebrows, blue eyes and a short nose. He was not bearded but wore a long drooping moustache. His head was shaven apart from a single lock of hair on one side of his head, this being a sign of his aristocratic status. His neck was thick, his shoulders broad, and all in all he looked quite magnificent. There was something wild and bleak about him. From one ear hung a large, gold ring with two gems and a ruby in the middle. He wore white, the same as the others, the only difference being that his garment was cleaner.
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Svyatoslov conducted his side of the negotiations from his seat in the boat, a firm indication that this was a discussion between equals.
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Not long afterwards, on the long journey home to Kiev, he lost his magnificent head. Having twice invaded the territories of the Bulgars, he had incurred their hostility and they tipped off the Pechenegs that the Rus leader, with a fairly small band of followers and a large amount of treasure, was moving up the river through their territory. The Pechenegs blocked the falls along the Dneiper and the Rus were compelled to make camp. After a hard winter, with little or no food, they tried to move up the falls again when spring came. Under their leader Kurya the Pechenegs attacked. Svyatoslov was killed and beheaded, his skull hollowed out, bound in gold and turned into a drinking bowl.

Like his name, Svyatoslov’s personal style was Slavic. With that single lock of hair he would not have looked out of place among a company of Ukrainian Cossacks 600 years later. Assimilation was the inevitable fate of the Rus warrior elite, stylistically and linguistically. In the
De administrando imperio
(‘On the Administration of an Empire’), from the middle of the tenth century and attributed to Constantine Porphyrogenitos, there is a chapter describing the route taken by Rus warrior-traders on their way to Constantinople that includes the Scandinavian names they gave to the falls they came across as they sailed down the Dneiper. None survived into modern Russian. The emperor’s account of the journey gives a fascinating picture of the dramatic realities of life for these Rus that puts flesh on the dry bones of their trade treaties with Miklagård.

From Constantine we learn that they would arrive at Kiev in longships and there transfer to boats built locally by Slavs, which they would fit out according to their needs. Often equipment from old ships which had been broken up was used. Leaving Kiev in June, the trade fleet set off on the long journey down the Dneiper. At Vitichev they joined up with more Rus ships. The first of several major hazards encountered was the Essupi rapids. Here some were set ashore and the rest organized into three groups, one at the stem, one amidships, and one at the stern, and the passage of the ship through the rapids directed from the shore by means of long poles. Two more rapids were negotiated in the same way. The fourth rapid was ‘the huge one, called in Russian
Aifur
’:

All put ashore, stem foremost, and out get all those who are appointed to keep watch. Ashore they go, and unsleeping they keep sentry-go against the Pechenegs. The rest of them, picking up the things they have on board the ships, conduct the wretched slaves in chains six miles by dry land until they are past the barrier. In this way, some dragging their ships, others carrying them on their shoulders, they get them through to the far side of the rapid. So, launching the ships back on to the river and loading their cargo, they get in and again move off.
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After passing seven rapids and reaching the ford at Krarios they passed through terrain that made them easy targets for the arrows of Pecheneg warriors. Those who survived landed on the island of St Gregorios, where they would make a sacrifice of thanksgiving to their gods beneath the boughs of a huge oak tree:

They sacrifice live birds. Also they stick arrows in a circle in the ground, and others of them provide bread and meat, bits of anything anyone has, as the practice demands. Also they cast lots about the birds - to sacrifice them, to eat them as well, or to let them live.
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Proceeding to the river Selinas, they sailed to its mouth and the island of St Aitherios, where they rested again and carried out repairs to their ships before heading on to the Dniester. At the point where they picked up the Selinas again they were once more liable to be harassed by Pecheneg warriors running alongside on the river banks. When, as sometimes happened, one of the ships was driven ashore and attacked by the Pechenegs the rest of the fleet unhesitatingly went to its aid.

‘After the Selinas,’ writes Constantine Porphyrogenitos, ‘they are afraid of nobody and are able to complete their journey in peace.’ He names seven of the rapids that must be forced on the journey down the Dneiper in both Rus and Slavonic, and linguists have identified Scandinavian original forms for all the Rus names given: Essupi, Ulvorsi, Galandri, Aifur, Barufors, Leanti and Strukun. The likely meanings of these are, in modern Swedish:
sov inte
(don’t sleep),
holmfors
(island falls),
ringande
(the howling),
alltid farlig
(the always dangerous),
varufors
(steep cliff falls),
leende
(the laughing) and
struken
(the racer). Much later on settlements grew up around these falls and portage points, with pilots and other service industries to assist the traders. The portage officials who collected taxes at these places were known in Russian as
tiun
, from the Old Norse
Pjónn
, meaning ‘attendant’. The inscription on the squat, reddish Pilgårds stone that was found at Bogeviken on the east coast of Gotland adds a note of individuality to Constantine’s litany of hazardous rapids. Bogeviken was one of Gotland’s most important harbours during the Viking Age, and the stone seems to recall a journey undertaken by a band of Gotland brothers that ended in death for one of them at a place called Rustain. It was, the stone tells us, in the vicinity of the fourth of the Dneiper falls, Aifur, ‘the always dangerous’.
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Because of its position as a large stepping-stone in the middle of the Baltic, Gotland played a central role in Viking Age trade with the east. The islanders presently established a colony of their own in Novgorod, called Gutagård, from where they cultivated the trade route to Hedeby in south-east Jutland, with the island itself an important staging-post along the way. The archaeological remains of some fifty ports or trading places, on both eastern and western sides of the island, have been found and these seem to have been part of a dramatic expansion that started as early as AD 700. Many of them were small settlements at which farmers and fishermen supplemented their income by trading. Others, like Fröjel, Paviken and Bandlundeviken, were large ports where ship-building and repair work were carried out.

The finds indicate that these larger ports had extensive contacts with the outside world. Though it is no proof the Vikings ever traded with merchants from East Africa or the Indian Ocean, a handful of smaller grave-finds on Gotland can actually be traced to these regions, including two rings of ivory, and certain types of sea-shells in female graves dating from the seventh to the tenth centuries that were used as amulets or pendants. Part of a hoard unearthed at Nygårds, in the parish of Väskinde, included a necklace consisting of some 200 beads, of which almost half had been cut from shells originating from the Indian Ocean. It allows for the possibility that Scandinavian traders and warriors, in their search for new markets and novelties with which to enrich their world, may have penetrated as far south as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.
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And if only a few examples of textiles survive, leaving us largely dependent on later, written descriptions for our knowledge of Viking Age clothing styles, the evidence of the Gotland picture-stones is that some horsemen, at least, had been persuaded of the advantages of wearing baggy trousers gathered below the knees, a comfort imported from the east.
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Another example of the symbiotic nature of the cultural exchange across the Baltic is the stone found at Smiss, in Kräklingbo, with a damaged runic inscription that includes the words ‘. . .
eptir Mutifu, son sin
. . .’.
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Mutifu
has been interpreted by the Icelandic runologist Thorgunn Snædal Brink as a version of the name Mustapha, recalling an Arab settler or perhaps some Gotlander who had converted to Islam.
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The unearthing of hoards of buried silver dirham from the Arab world by builders and farmers remains an almost annual event on Gotland. The finds are not confined to one area of the island but dot the map, and the dates cover the island’s Viking Age and beyond, from about 800 up to about 1140. Occasionally an individual coin is found that provides dramatic confirmation of a detail previously known only from a written source. About the middle of the eighth century the Khazars are reported to have converted to Judaism. Physical evidence for this tribal initiative was lacking until the discovery, as part of the Spillings hoard mentioned earlier, of a coin inscribed ‘
Musa rasul Allah
’, Arabic for ‘Moses is the apostle of God’. This sounds a direct echo of the Islamic ‘Mohammed is the apostle of God’, with the coin itself being the ‘illegal’ work of a minter who was hoping to benefit from the high reputation enjoyed by Islamic silver coin. The Spillings hoard is dated to about 870 and its discovery has raised doubts about the widely accepted idea that the production of silver coins in the Caliphate went into decline in the 800s.
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During the fratricidal struggle between his three sons that followed Svyatoslov’s death, one, Oleg, was defeated and killed. Another, Vladimir, fled to Novgorod and made his way into Scandinavia, leaving Iaropolk as the sole ruler in Kiev. During his brief reign Iaropolk showed a sympathetic tolerance of Christianity.

Vladimir, meanwhile, had gathered an army of Varangian mercenaries. Once he felt strong enough he recrossed the Baltic and declared war on his brother, who was betrayed and killed in 977. Once inside Kiev, Vladimir’s Varangian mercenaries conducted themselves as conquerors in a captured city and as soon as possible after assuming control Vladimir got rid of them, retaining only a select few and sending the rest on to Constantinople with a private word of warning to the emperor: ‘Do not keep many of them in your city, or else they will cause you such harm as they have done here.’
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He advised him to scatter the force - ‘and do not allow a single one to return this way’.

In his private life, Vladimir lived out the submission to instinct and appetite that marked one of the clearest distinctions between Heathendom and Christianity. He is said to have kept some 800 women for his personal use. We may permit ourselves the conventional raised eyebrow at the figure, but the known fact that he took at least seven wives, including his brother’s widow, indicates that self-denial was not natural to him. Perhaps as a way of neutralizing a threatening Christian presence in the city that had developed as a result of Iaropolk’s tolerance, he set about an active revival of pagan worship in Kiev. Wooden images of the old gods were set up close to his palace: Perun, with a head of silver and a mouth of gold, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, Mokosh, Khors, guttural names redolent of the harsh period of human sacrifice that followed.
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The
Russian Primary Chronicle
describes a victory celebration after Vladimir’s subjugation of the Iatviagians at which lots were drawn to find a boy and girl to be sacrificed. Ivan, the unlucky youth chosen, turned out to be the son of a former Varangian, Tury, who had returned from Constantinople and converted to Christianity. In his anger and distress Tury is said to have denounced the gods as merely ‘wood which is here today and rotten tomorrow. They do not eat or drink or talk but are made by [human] hands’, an indiscretion for which he may well have joined his son as a sacrificial offering.
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In 981 Vladimir waged war on the Vyatichians and imposed a tribute on them based on the number of their ploughs. In 983 he marched against the Yatvingians and seized their territories. In 984 it was the turn of the Radimichians. With the Bulgars, against whom his father had waged sporadic war, he signed a treaty that was to prevail between the parties ‘until stone floats and straw sinks’.

The disproportionate number of Scandinavian names appended to the treaty between Igor and Constantinople of 945 confirms that the descendants of Swedish Vikings remained a dominant elite in the Kievan state; the text also makes it clear that a significant number of Kievan Rus - like poor Tury - had already adopted Christianity.
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As we saw earlier, Vladimir’s grandmother Olga is depicted in the
Russian Primary Chronicle
as a saintly figure, ever concerned from the time of her own conversion to persuade her son Svyatoslov to join her. Svyatoslov had resisted, not least because he was afraid that to convert to Christianity would make him an object of ridicule to his retainers.
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Vladimir, however, realized which way the political wind was blowing. A number of Baltic Slav tribes had been baptized between 942 and 968, Harald Bluetooth in Denmark sometime in the 960s, and at about the same time Mieszko of Poland through the influence of his Christian wife Dobrava. Sometime around 980, not long after abandoning their nomadic way of life, the Magyars, too, under their chieftain Geza, accepted baptism.
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Once he had made up his mind that the state needed a new religion, Vladimir methodically set about determining which of the major religions to choose: Islam, which had been the religion of the Volga Bulgars since 922; Judaism, to which the Khazars living south of the Bulgars had converted around 865; the Greek Christianity of his grandmother Olga; and the Roman Christianity that prevailed on mainland Europe and in the west. Representatives of each faith were invited to his court to speak in defence and praise of their faith. Vladimir was attracted by the promise of the seventy-two virgins he would enjoy in the next life, but less enthusiastic about the Islamic injunction in this one against eating pork and drinking wine. ‘Drinking is the joy of the Rus,’ he is said to have objected. ‘We cannot exist without that pleasure.’ Emissaries of the pope arrived from Germany and found their insistence on the importance of fasting similarly unpopular. The Jewish Khazars’ tale of the diaspora seemed to him a poor advertisement for their faith and Judaism too was rejected. By the account given in the
Russian Primary Chronicle
, the apologist for Byzantine Christianity was given a lengthier hearing than the others, and it was he who succeeded in the end.