The sons of Erik Bloodaxe continued to plague Hakon throughout his reign, sailing with the open support of their mother’s Danish relatives. Hakon the Good approached middle age with no sons of his own, and a single daughter, Thora. His luck ran out in 961, in a battle in which his loyal forces were outnumbered six-to-one by the sons of Erik and their Danish allies. He was wounded in the shoulder, supposedly by the pageboy of Gunnhild Kingsmother, and died later from his injury. His loyal subjects, in a final irony, buried him with full Odinic rites, hoping to ensure their king’s place in Valhalla.18
5
THE ROAD EAST
VIKINGS, RUSSIANS AND VARANGIANS
Inland from the Swedish coast, amid a network of lakes and rivers, sits Björkö, ‘birch island’ on Lake Mälar. During the Viking Age, when sea levels were higher, a wide channel led straight from Mälar to the Baltic Sea, affording easy passage for seaborne goods deep into Swedish territory. Around 800, the island became the site of a trading town, founded to replace an earlier settlement that proved to be too small for the needs of Sweden’s rising population. The settlement became known as Birka, and it became a magnet for trade from all over the Viking world, from Hedeby, Skiringssal, and points beyond. To the south of Birka, off the eastern coast of Sweden, lies the island of Gotland, another trading centre. Thanks to their positions on the ends of trade routes, these two islands form the centre of the Viking world – Gotland in particular has more Viking treasure than anywhere else. Archaeologists have unearthed the graves of many a fortune-seeker, buried with his hoard of silver coins and the swords that helped him win it.
Not all of the treasures of Birka and Gotland are below the ground. Rune stones dot the landscape, carved with memorials of journeys to far places – Semgall and Courland (Latvia), Wendland (Poland), Virland (Estonia), Gardariki (Russia), Greekland (more particularly, the Byzantine Empire centred on Constantinople), and Serkland, the land of the Saracens. Although some Swedes followed Danish and Norwegian voyages to the British Isles and beyond, Sweden’s interest has always lain in the Baltic, not the North Sea. For the Vikings of Sweden, the road to fortune lay not to the west, but to the east.
Early Swedish explorations followed a model similar to that of the Norwegians and Danes. Hopping from island to island, vessels first reached Åland in the middle of the Baltic, then the southern coast of what is now Finland. One saga refers to the region as Balagard (Meadow-fort?), implying at least one settlement, and probably more.1 In Finland, they roamed an archipelago of a thousand islands, and penetrated inland. For those in search of secure, unforested farmland to till, Finland did not offer much, but its lakes were teeming with fish, and its forests with game. Traders were able to meet with the same Sámi who also traded with the Norwegians on the Arctic coast, but also with new peoples, the Suomi (Finns), the Kainuans and the Karelians, whose lands bordered on what is now Russia. The local people asked them what they were, and they replied that they were rothr, ‘bands of rowers’. The locals called them Ruotsi, the Finnish word for Sweden to this day.2
In Finland, they discovered an unexpected benefit of the longship. A Viking boat was light enough to be hefted by its crew and dragged out of the water, this much was already known. But in Finland, with hundreds of interconnected navigable lakes, it became possible to sail many miles inland, pulling the ship out of the water and across separating isthmuses of land. The name of Birca had become synonymous with trade, it lent its name to Pirkkala, the ‘Birka place’ near Tampere in modern Finland.3 There, the Swedes traded with the locals, mainly in the furs of animals trapped by hunters in Finland’s endless forests. To this day, the Finnish word for money is raha, ‘pelt’.
The Swedes, however, did not keep pushing eastwards. They ran into the Kainu people along Finland’s eastern borders, a warlike race who excelled at dragging their own boats across the land to the Arctic Sea, and raiding against the Sámi. The Kainuans were already causing trouble for the Norwegians in the far north, and the Swedes preferred to steer clear. They turned instead to the south-east, and Norse sagas would eventually mangle the Kainu region into kvenna-land – the land of the Amazons.4
The Swedes found other things to occupy them further to the south. The ‘Eastland’, southern Baltic countries, Poland and Russia, represented prime raiding territory for early Swedish explorers, whom the locals called Rootsi. The legendary King Ivar the Wide-Grasper supposedly conquered an area corresponding to parts of north Germany and the European Baltic states sometime around the seventh century. Whether Ivar really existed, figures like him certainly explored the rivers and estuaries of the southern and eastern Baltic, and at some point, discovered the largest lake in Europe. Lake Ladoga, in the southernmost part of the Finnish peninsula, is today part of Russian territory, about 25 miles east of St Petersburg. This body of water, occupying some 6,700 square miles, was a vital location on the trade routes. It not only made it possible to sail over a hundred miles into the hinterland, it also brought the light ships within transfer or portage-distance of a series of other rivers and lakes. As they had done in Finland, the Swedes were able to sail from one to the other, negotiating a series of minor barriers until they found themselves on much larger rivers that led to the south – the Dnieper and the mighty Volga. Ladoga takes its name from the Finnish alode-joki, ‘lower river’, a root that was also corrupted to form the name of its original settlement, Aldeigjuborg.5 But the Finnish inhabitants shared the region with Swedes from the earliest days – what archaeologists once assumed to be the Finns’ temple is now thought to be a longhouse that sheltered a sizeable community of Norse traders.
Ladoga archaeologists have yet to find any swords, except for several toy ones fashioned from wood in imitation of Norse originals. The area also revealed a significant amount of Norse jewellery, although who wore it is still open to debate. A Rus cemetery on the other side of the river seems to have been used between 850 and 950. Of the 18 identified graves many are female and wearing Norse jewellery, although it is undetermined whether they are local girls or women from the homeland. Linguistic evidence suggests that even if there were an early population of Scandinavian women with the men, their genes were soon crowded out by those of local people.
Ladoga has yielded no inscriptions apart from a few runes scratched on coins and indistinct runic carvings on a stick, the meaning of which still splits scholars – it has been variously described as an elf-summoning wand, a tribute to a fallen Swede, or perhaps even a poem about an arrow or shield.6
Tree-ring data on the Ladoga buildings tells us that the first Norse settlement was destroyed between 863 and 870, and replaced a few years later with a stronger stone building. This tallies with a description in the early twelfth century Russian Primary Chronicle of a local revolt, in which the new settlers were briefly overthrown, before being invited back:
The Varangians came from beyond the sea and demanded tribute from the Finnish and Slav peoples. They were driven off, but in due course dissension broke out among the people and became so acute that they said ‘Let us find a prince who will rule us and judge justly.’ So they went across the sea to the Varangians, to the Rus, (for the Varangians were called Rus as others were called Swedes, [Northmen], Angles and Goths), and they said to the Rus ‘Our land is large and fruitful, but lacks order. Come over and rule us.’ Three brothers were chosen as rulers, and these three agreed to go over, taking all their family and all the Rus people with them. It is further related that the eldest brother, Rurik, came to Ladoga and built there the town of Aldeigjuborg [Old Ladoga]. The second, Sineus settled near the White Sea [at Byelosersk], and the third, Truvor, at Isborsk in southern Estonia. Two years later, the younger brothers died and Rurik assumed full power, after which he went south and build on the shore of Lake Volkhov the town of Novgorod [Holmgard]. From here, the Rus people spread south . . .7
The relation of Rurik and his ‘brothers’ is fictional – it is no coincidence that each chooses one of the three main lake-routes on which
to settle. The confused to-ing and fro-ing of the report suggests something else, that one group of Norse settlers was violently supplanted by another, who later claimed to have native support.8 Whoever they were, they soon established Novgorod and Kiev where they traded with merchants who came up the Dneiper from the Black Sea. There were no offshore islands for natural protection, so the Swedes built heavily defensible enclosures, divided by hundreds of square miles of potentially hostile terrain. The siege mentality led their kinsmen back in Scandinavia to call Russia Gardariki – ‘the place of fortified towns’.
The Vikings soon headed down the Dnieper to see for themselves. Our sources for their travels are far more reliable than the Russian Primary Chronicle: the treatise De Administrando Imperio, written in the mid-tenth century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (‘the Purple-born’). It is thanks to Constantine’s account that we know of the Byzantines’ attitude towards the Vikings, and of the gruelling journey they had to make in order to reach the Miklagard markets.
South of Kiev, wrote Constantine, was the the great forty-mile natural barrier that kept trade to a trickle – seven cataracts where the river surged between forbidding walls of rock, whose names still invoke the sense of terror they must have struck into medieval travellers. The waterfalls and rapids of the Gulper, the Sleepless, the Island-force, and the Yeller, were followed by the greatest barrier of all, Aifur, the Ever-Fierce, or simply Impassable. Beyond Aifur lay the Narrow-force, the Wave-force, the Highcliff-force, the Seether and the Courser. No ship could hope to run the gauntlet of the whirling waters, steep drops and rapids, but as the Vikings soon demonstrated, no ship needed to. They brought their ships out on to the land and, as they had done in the north, simply dragged or carried them alongside the dangerous waters. The brave of heart only portaged their ships around the waterfalls, preferring to chance their luck in the rapids. To do so, men had to struggle naked in the water, feeling out the river-bottom with their feet, guiding their boats with long poles, as the white waters thundered around them and threatened to pitch them into oblivion. A rune stone in distant Gotland records four brothers who went ‘far into Aifur’ and lived to tell the tale, although their friend Hrafn lost his life in the attempt.9
Beyond Aifur and the other barriers, the dangers were easier to deal with. A long journey awaited, and occasional difficulties from the local Pecheneg tribesmen, but essentially, the worst was over. The Vikings were able to sail their ships along a river-road that eventually took them to the Black Sea.
This was the famed road to Miklagard, the ‘Great City’ of Constantinople, where the Vikings were able to sell their furs and slaves for silk and the other luxuries of Byzantine civilization. A number of Rus first arrived in Constantinople in 838, and, according to the Frankish Annales Bertiani, accompanied Byzantine ambassadors to the court of Louis the Pious. Questioned by the Frankish emperor as to their origins, they volunteered their Swedish ancestry, and the claim that they were friends and allies of the Byzantines at that time. They also asked to be allowed passage through Louis’s kingdom to return home, perhaps indicating that they were the first Rus to ever make it all the way downriver to the Black Sea, and did not much like the idea of trying to make their way back up again, through the rapids and the dangerous natives. The Greek-speaking Byzantines also called them something that sounded like Rus, either Rhos, ‘ruddy’, to mark their complexions or, using the term that had once described the attacking Heruls, Rusioi, ‘blonds’.10
An initial trickle of Rus traders was followed by bolder incursions across the Black Sea and eventually an attack on Constantinople itself. Emperor Michael III had conveniently just departed at the head of an army to fight Muslims, leaving the city unprepared for the arrival of 200 hostile vessels. Byzantine sources claim that the attack was only thwarted by divine intervention, when the sacred relic of the Holy Virgin’s Robe was dipped in the sea, causing a tempest to rise up and destroy the attacking fleet. This was news to many, who regarded the attack as a Viking victory.11 Of particular embarrassment to the Byzantines who claimed a miraculous triumph was the later news that several of the ‘defeated’ Viking vessels sailed past the city to the Princes’ Islands, where they had sacked the monastery at Terebinthos. In a textbook re-enactment of the attack on distant Lindisfarne, the Vikings plundered the riches of the holy sanctuary and slaughtered 22 monks. Thereafter, the Rus of Kiev attempted to deal with the Byzantines peacefully, and the Byzantines were happy to oblige, until 941, when a second Viking attack came out of the north, led by one Igor (Swedish: Ingvar), later said to be the son of the legendary Rurik.12
Meanwhile, further inroads in Russia and north of the Black Sea brought the Rus into contact with new traders even further to the south and east. The archaeology of Russian Swedish graves tells its own story about the progress of these expeditions. During the eighth century, warriors were laid to rest with grave-goods that reflected their life – a sword or two, a spear, and some trinkets for use in the afterlife. Often, such trinkets include small silver coins, from trading deals by the Swedish Rus with merchants from a distant place the Swedes called Serkland.13 The coins, or dirhams, are marked with strange runes that meant nothing to the Scandinavians. If they had, they would have discovered that one side read: ‘There is no god but Allah.’ On the other, ‘He is Allah, the eternally besought of all, He begetteth not nor was begotten and there is none comparable to him,’ and in increasingly cramped Arabic: ‘He it is who has sent His messenger with the guidance and Religion of Truth, that he may cause it to prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may be averse.’14
What interested the idolaters of Rus was the silver itself, capitalizing on the sudden flood of the metal in the Muslim world, largely occasioned by the discovery of a rich silver mine in Benjahir, Afghanistan.15 The Islamic world had silver to spare, and the Vikings had the rich furs and white slaves that the Muslims wanted. By the beginning of the ninth century, there is a vast increase in the number of Muslim dirhams, not just in graves of Rus, but in Scandinavia itself, particularly at the trade centres of Gotland, Birka and Hedeby. The Swedes had cut out the middlemen, and established contact directly with the source of the silver. They may have been encouraged by a sharp rise in demand – the first wave of Muslim silver in Rus areas was followed by a second, even larger wave direct to Gotland, implying that the Vikings of the homeland had gone in search of direct trade, and found a market suddenly booming.16 The years 869–883 saw the catastrophic Zanj Rebellion in what is now Iraq, where thousands of black slaves turned on their masters and set up a short-lived independent state. The incident led to an increase in general mistrust of Africans in the Arab world, particularly since some Muslim soldiers of African origin defected to the rebels. This may have contributed to the improved market for white slaves in the Abbasid Caliphate in the early tenth century, and hence encouraged the Vikings in both their trade and the raids that supplied it.
After Birka and Pirkkala, another ‘birch island’ was added to the list, at Berezany in the Crimea, where runic inscriptions have been uncovered.17 Even as some Vikings were dealing with the Byzantines by sailing down the western coast of the Black Sea, others were finding the mouth of the river Don on its northern shores. By 912, they had found the point where it was possible to drag their ships across a narrow neck of land dividing the Don from the Volga, thereby finding the route down the Volga itself, to the trading post of Itil – the Khazar name for the river, transcribed as Atil in Arab sources. South of it lay the Caspian Sea. Throughout the tenth century, the south shores of the Caspian were home to the Samanids, Persian Muslims that supported a strong trade network into the rest of the Abbasid caliphate that ruled the entire Middle East. From the south shores of the Caspian, traders could make their way to Baghdad itself. The journey was not easy but for the merchant with the right merchandise it was worth it – the return journey went back east from Baghdad, north to the Caspian coast, and then up to the environs of Itil as taking arou
nd eleven months. Some Muslim traders were prepared to take the risk, and met with the Norsemen who had made the long voyage to Itil.18
The Arab impression of them was not altogether positive. In the tenth century, one Ibn Rustah wrote that the Rus were a people of traders and slavers, ruled by a ‘Khagan-Rus’ (a Rus chieftain) dwelling on an island in a lake, who preyed upon the native population to acquire animal pelts, slaves and other tradeable goods. He also noted that they were intensely quarrelsome among themselves, used to settling disputes through fighting, and prepared to sacrifice human beings to their gods in a ritual that involved hanging.19
The writer Ibn Fadlan, who journeyed to Itil himself, observed in 922 that he had ‘never witnessed more perfect bodies’ than those of the traders he encountered, but also that they were the filthiest of the races created by Allah and ‘as stupid as donkeys’.20 Ibn Fadlan’s account also includes an intriguing description of the Rus traders’ religious observances. Ibn Fadlan notes that each of the Rus traders leaves offerings and prays to a wooden pole, the image of his god, giving careful accounts of the number of slave-girls and furs he has to sell. Most tellingly, Ibn Fadlan recounts the increasing desperation with which unlucky traders return to their gods on successive days, doubling and redoubling their sacrifices, pleading with their deities for a ‘merchant who has many dinars and dirhams, and who will buy whatever I wish to sell’.21 It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of a truly unsuccessful trip to Itil. A group of traders would have battled their way down the Dnieper from Kiev, wading through the freezing rapids of the cataracts, sailing through potentially hostile Pecheneg and Khazar territory, dragging their ship across a wilderness and into the Volga, and thence to the remote encampment of Itil, only to discover that Arab traders were not in the mood for buying. What use, then, would be their cargo of furs and slaves? Doubtless such lean times, for traders with nothing left to lose, were the origin of ‘Viking raids’ on the southern Caspian in 864, 910 and 912, when fleets sacked Abasgun, Baku and Azerbaijan.
A Brief History of the Vikings Page 11
