The first Russian state - often referred as Kievan Rus - was essentially a commercial undertaking. It developed out of the mutual needs of Russians in the neighbourhood of what became the city of Novgorod and a band of Vikings in search of employment and plunder. The traders of Novgorod had been prospering and the population of their settlements had been growing, so a bigger food supply had to be assured. Since the soil of the area was poor, however, they had to take control of food producers over a large enough area to ensure an adequate supply They also needed to protect their settlements and their growing commercial interests from predators. It made sense, then, to retain the services of a band of Viking military specialists. 1 From such a beginning, it seems, these Vikings in conjunction with the local Russian elite groups soon gained control of the transcontinental trade between Scandinavia, Constantinople (capital of the Roman Empire now that Rome itself had fallen to the barbarians) and the Orient. Until the middle of the ninth century their operations were confined to the northern part of the complex network of rivers that crossed the vast expanses of Russia. The southern part, already discovered by Arab traders in the seventh century, was controlled by the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people whose territory centred on the Volga estuary and the northern Caucasus and whose rulers were to convert to Judaism in the 86os. 2 Yet emergent Russia was not fated to be part of a Jewish empire. It was the Vikings who eventually gained control of the long river route with all its portages, and who, intermarrying with women of the Russian tribes with whom they dealt, were to become rulers of the Russian lands.
Their first, legendary, leader was a Jutlander called Riurik. He had made a reputation raiding in western Europe, including the British Isles, but then decided to turn east to seek his fortune. Around 856 he and his followers established a base at Ladoga in northern Russia. Subsequently, however, he decided that the area of Novgorod (which the Vikings knew as Holmgarthr) was better situated, and so he built a fort there. Novgorod was to be the key access point to the Russian river route for traders coming from the west. But, as these Vikings probably already knew, Kiev was the key point in the south. It had access to the Dnieper river system, which led to the most populous areas of Russia at that time. Kiev was ruled by the Khazars, but in 858 a Viking war band led by Askold and Dir took command of it. The ambition of these two adventurers soon extended further, and two years later, accompanied by a large force of Russians, they raided Constantinople. The city was heir to the imperial as well as the newer Christian traditions. Its language was now Greek rather than Latin, and since it is commonly referred to nowadays as the Byzantine Empire that is what we shall call it.
The raid of 860 was the first known encounter between Constantinople and the Rus. We do not know precisely who organized it and how, but a book written by the emperor Constantine VII nearly a century later provides evidence about a Rus trading expedition. His account, intended as a brief for his heir, vividly describes the preparations required and the perils of the route. The essential vessel for the enterprise was a dugout ship (monolyxa in Greek) fashioned out of a tree trunk. The trees would have been cut in the forest zone of central Russia during the preceding winter, then dried out and launched into the lakes which ran into the river Dnieper when the ice melted. They would then be ribbed, widened with side-planks, and taken down to Kiev to be sold to the expedition’s organizers, who saw to their fitting out with rowlocks, oars and tackle. In June they would have moved off from Kiev to a gathering point downsteam. Then, when all the boats and men were ready, the expedition set out.
Danger threatened almost at once, at the first of the infamous Dnieper rapids, a defile as narrow, Constantine tells us, ‘as the polo ground’ in Constantinople, full of high rocks. ‘Against these … comes the water and wells up and dashes over the other side, with a mighty and terrific din.’ Here there was no alternative but to put into the shore and disembark most of the men with their slaves in their chains. The remaining men then negotiated the rapids, some with punt-poles, while others, ranged round each boat, felt for hidden rocks with their bare feet, and walked the vessel through. Having negotiated this set of rapids, six more had to be negotiated. The third set was so dangerous that the boats had to be taken out of the water entirely and dragged or carried a distance of 6 miles overland. The fourth set had to be skirted in a similar manner. And from this point the expedition had to watch out for raiding parties from the fierce Pecheneg people, who would come in from the steppe on the prowl for booty.
The most dangerous point of all was a wide ford used by merchants of Kherson to access a river island with a huge oak tree. This was the Pechenegs’ favourite ambush point. So, on reaching the island, members of the expedition would leave food to propitiate their gods and kill some cocks as sacrifices. Four days later they would have reached an island in the Black Sea where they would fit out the boats with the masts, sails, ropes and tackle they had brought with them, for from that point on sail-power could supplement rowing. 3 Now at last they were ready.
The great Rus — Viking raid on Constantinople in 860 was a masterpiece of the genre. Two hundred boats and up to 8,000 men took part. They struck with savagery as well as in force, and they achieved complete surprise. ‘The unexpectedness of the attack,’ wrote a distinguished eyewitness, ‘its strange swiftness, the inhumanity of the barbarous tribe, the harshness of its manners and the savagery of its character proclaim the blow to have been discharged like a thunderbolt from God.’ The civilized inhabitants of the city were pious Christians, and so they saw the Viking attack as a punishment for their sins. And it was shaming as well as surprising to have been hurt by unknowns — by ‘an obscure people, a people of no account, a people ranked as slaves’. 4 In this way, the Rus leaped to the front of the political stage and into the history books. Then they disappeared from it just as suddenly as they had arrived.
Recovering from the surprise, the government took action to forestall any similar attempt. Imperial diplomats were dispatched to the Khazars. Presumably it was assumed that these Rus were subject to them. It is not clear if this was the case or not, though Vikings did contract themselves out as mercenaries as well as trading and plundering on their own account. Nor do we know if Khazar intervention had anything to do with it but in 882, nine years after Riurik’s death, his grandson, Oleg, gathered and took his war bands south against Askold and Dir and killed the two ‘renegades’, as they were to be called henceforth. 5 We cannot be sure that these ‘renegades’ were the same people as those who had taken possession of Kiev in 858, but we can infer that the victory of 882 secured Oleg effective control of the entire commercial network from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and since he now had access to Kiev, over which the Khazars still claimed sovereignty, he was able to operate over much more extensive territory than formerly, collecting honey, furs and slaves to trade with Constantinople, albeit under Khazar tutelage.
From the later 800s Rus were selling furs, especially black fox and beaver, swords and slaves to distant Baghdad. Using the Volga route to the Caspian Sea, they negotiated their way past the Khazar customs posts or else traded their merchandise there for resale to the realm of the Caliph. They brought back beads and oriental cloths, double-headed axes, buttons, and coins — chiefly dirhams, the currency of the caliphs of Baghdad, which Russian merchants, lacking a coinage of their own, were to adopt. Over the next fifty years or so shortage of labour and a surplus of cash generated a steady demand for slaves, especially female slaves, from both the Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire, which the Rus were happy to meet. They were not alone however. Chains and neck shackles have been found in archaeological digs along all the more important Mediterranean and European routes. Not only Constantinople but papal Rome had a thriving slave market, and Spain was a major supplier as well as Rus. 6
Then the Russians fell out with the Khazars who claimed lordship over them. Constantinople sided with the Khazars, but when Oleg led a suc-cesful Rus’ assault on the city in 907 it thought again. The upshot was an agr
eement of 911, by which the Emperor agreed to pay a money tribute both to those Rus who took part in the expedition and to the princes who had sent them. Oleg also obtained permission for Rus merchants to stay for up to six months at a house, or fondaco, set aside for them at the St Mamas quarter of Constantinople, and won agreement that they would be fed at the imperial expense when they visited the city. Yet the Khazars, who had married into the local Rus elite, still reigned as kagans of Kievan Rus, and they were to keep control of Kiev itself till about 930. 7
The exact nature of Oleg’s relationship with them in this period is not yet clear. He may have been their partner or their tributary, but whatever the relationship it must have been tense. And so long as the situation held it seems that many unfortunate tribesmen had to pay tribute both to the Rus and to the Khazars. Eventually, however, Oleg’s son Igor was to displace his former overlords and rule Kiev as kagan.
Igor proved to be no less rapacious than his forebears and predecessors. In 914 he decided to increase the tribute he demanded of the Rus tribes known as Derevlians. Thirty years later he raised it again — only this time the Derevlians resisted. As Russia’s first chronicle recalled, Igor
attacked the Derevlians in search of tribute, and to the old tribute he added a new tribute and collected it by violence from the people … On his way home … he said to his followers, ‘Take the tribute home. I shall turn back and collect more.’ … Hearing of his return the Derevlians consulted with Mal, their prince, saying ‘If a wolf comes among sheep it will take the whole flock one by one, unless it is killed … If we do not kill [Igor] now, he will destroy us all. 8
And so they killed him.
But the Derevlians had not reckoned with Igor’s widow, Olga. Prince Mal offered to marry her, but Olga refused, determined to take personal charge, to rule on behalf of Sviatoslav her baby son, and to take vengeance on the Derevlians. A call went out to her warriors, and they were soon moving against Mal’s stronghold, Ikorosan, about 100 miles upstream from Kiev. They burned the place and rounded up the Derevlian leaders. The vengeance Olga exacted was a model of how to discourage resistance. She had some of them tortured, slaughtered many, and enslaved the rest.
Yet this same fierce, empowered Olga is now revered as a saint, for she became a Christian as well as an historical figure of the first importance. 9Her conversion was prompted by political calculation as well as by spiritual yearning, however. She proved a good and energetic organizer, doing away with the anarchic, ad-hoc, ways of raising taxes which had provoked the Derevlians. She regularized the amount of tribute to be paid — whether in honey, furs or feathers — and journeyed extensively along the main tributaries of the Dnieper, seeing that her order was imposed on the inhabitants. She also visited Novgorod, where she set up an administrative centre. Her reforms have been represented as marking a transition from the ways of a robber economy to a regime based on norms. If so, they were a significant contribution to state-building. 10
The Viking elite were fast losing their Nordic identity as they intermarried with their Rus tributaries. In any case, they were too few to build a state alone. They needed local knowledge and men to organize an economy, to gather in food and marketable goods like honey, furs and slaves on a systematic basis. The indigenous chiefs organized the provision of these things for them. But, just as the Vikings needed the chiefs, the chiefs needed them — for their military prowess and their knowledge of the wider world. The first Russian state was founded on the interdependence of a group of sea-going colonizers and tribes of Slavonic-speakers who used the rivers as avenues for colonization. Intermarriage cemented the alliance and extended the ruling family. At the same time the Scandinavian element was fast being absorbed linguistically and culturally into the Slavonic-speaking mass, though characteristic Scandinavian burial mounds have been found in central Russia from up to a century after Vikings and Slavs established their alliance. 11
In 941 Prince Igor, son of Olga, mounted another large-scale raid on Constantinople. Only this time the previous successes were not to be repeated. The imperial forces were prepared, and were able to exploit their superior technology — ships equipped with rams, grappling chains and a devastating secret weapon known as ‘Greek fire’, an incendiary device containing naphtha, one form of which ignited on contact with water. Scholars do not yet know how it was launched, but it could be extremely effective. Invented in the late 600s, Greek fire had helped save much of the Empire from the Arabs. Had the Emperor been able to deploy it in 860 or against Oleg in 907, the city might have been spared the depredations of the Viking-led Russians. Presumably sheer surprise or unfavourable weather or water conditions prevented its use. But now the weapon was deployed with devastating effect. A graphic account written by a Western envoy about a century afterwards reflects the memory of the great victory:
Having become surrounded by the Rus’, the Greeks [that is, the subjects of the Emperor] hurled their fire all around them. When the Rus’ saw this, they at once threw themselves from their ships into the sea, choosing to be drowned by the waves rather than cremated by the fire. Some, weighed down by their breastplates and helmets … sank to the bottom … Others were burned as they swam on the waves.
No one could escape except by sailing into the shallow inshore waters where the deep-draughted imperial ships could not follow. 12
An apparently earlier source, a Viking saga, records the same traumatic event from the raiders’ point of view, and with some convincing detail. It tells, for example, of a brass tube from which a great spark flew to reduce one of the ships of its pagan hero Yngvar to ashes within seconds. This story, however, was to be changed under Christian influence to put Yngvar on the right side and cast the Emperor as a villainous creature. In this version Greek fire assumes the form of Jakulus, a terrifying flying dragon which spits venom, to which Yngvar has an antidote: arrows bearing ‘consecrated flame’. 13
Byzantine diplomats eventually persuaded Igor/Yngvar and the Rus that they could gain more from negotiation and trade than from naked force. Certainly, by the time the Emperor Constantine VII wrote his account of the Russians in the middle of the tenth century a regular commercial relationship had been established between them. Cargoes of slaves would be brought in for sale in Constantinople’s market, and, once their summer’s venturing was over, the Russian traders would return to Kiev until November, when they would disperse in various directions upstream to the regions they had come from.
The severe manner of life of these same Russians in winter-time is as follows. When the month of November begins, their chiefs together with all the Russians [that is, the Vikings and the Russian tribal chiefs associated with them] go off on … [their] ‘rounds’, that is to the Slavonic regions of the Vervians and Drugovichians and Krivichians and Serverians and the rest of the Slavs who pay … [them] tribute. There they are maintained throughout the winter, but then once more, starting in the month of April, when the ice on the Dnieper river melts, they come back to Kiev…14
And the cycle would begin again.
The organizational centre had moved from Novgorod to Kiev. Even so the frontiers were too stretched and the strategic points too scattered for one man to control the entire operation effectively. 15 Kings of England would take their courts on tour round their domains, but in Russia this was impracticable - the distances too great, the climate too difficult. To overcome this difficulty, the first Russian state devised a working system more like a family business. Riurik’s successors ruled in Kiev, their heirs apparent in Novgorod, while younger brothers and other close relatives ruled centres like Smolensk or Chernigov, according to their seniority and the town’s relative importance. Family could be trusted, and the system (often termed ‘apanage’) had the advantage of giving future rulers experience of governing an important region before acceding to the top position. However, though the system had advantages in co-ordinating commercial operations on a basis of trust, it had disadvantages in respect of the integrity of a state. In R
ussia the system was to break down in the twelfth century, largely, as we shall see, because of its inherent weaknesses. This has led some historians to argue that Kievan Rus was not a state at all. 16
However, the subjects of Kievan Rus paid taxes, they were defended from outside enemies, and they were subject to common laws. These characteristics qualify Kievan Rus as no less a state than some other imperfect political structures of that age. The particular problem of Kievan Rus was that, though imperial in territorial extent, it lacked appropriate imperial institutions. But it soon began to import models and ideals to remedy these deficiencies. The source was the city of Constantinople, and one of the chief carriers of this late Roman influence to Russia was the same Princess Olga who had massacred the Derevlian elite and imposed a semblance of administrative order on the Rus.
Olga travelled to Constantinople in 955 or 957 (the sources differ on the date), and the imperial authorities there, impressed with Russia’s potential, laid down a red carpet for her. She was taken to view the many wonders of the imperial city - the three fortified walls which guarded it; the great cistern which could supply the large population with water in the event of a long siege; the hippodrome, which was used for imperial ceremonies as well as for games and racing. The city’s central market sold every imaginable commodity from every corner of the world. This scene of plenty was presided over by a great column surmounted by the gilded head of the city’s founder, the first Christian emperor, Constantine I. The city’s fine marble buildings and statues, wonderfully carved, and the extraordinary variety of peoples and dress amazed all who saw them for the first time. But only special guests entered the imperial palace. Olga was so privileged.
Inside the palace, plume-helmeted guardsmen punctuated the spaces, and there were astonishing things to see: clockwork metal songbirds that sang like real birds; a pair of gilded lions which rolled their eyes and roared; a throne harnessed to hydraulic power which could lift the Emperor to the ceiling of his audience chamber, making him appear godlike to people beneath. The court protocol was elaborate, with much pomp and many formalities. Some 400 years earlier the wife of the Emperor Justinian — Theodora — had been both influential and visible, but subsequently the Christian Church had whittled away much of the women’s former privileges and freedom. As a result, women were less visible and less powerful than they had once been - even well-regarded women whom the Emperor was wooing. Empresses were still important, but their formal engagements proceeded for the most part separately from those of the men. And so Olga was entertained by the Empress to a separate dinner, though held at the same time as the Emperor’s, and only met the Emperor informally, when he visited the Empress and the imperial children in their quarters.
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