Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  It worked pretty much to perfection. Again, as in the 860s and 870s, the returning Viking armies of the 890s came in several groups. One force of over two hundred ships landed in east Kent, fortifying a base at Appledore, while a second force landed not far away in the Thames estuary, establishing itself at Milton Royal near Sittingbourne. Even though some of the Danes of Danelaw made common cause with the newcomers, three years of campaigning brought the Scandinavians little reward, and the contrast with the first Great Army is very striking. Whereas it had marched the length and breadth of England, and could even, as in winter 877/8, penetrate freely into the heart of the Wessex kingdom, the second failed to win the pitched battles against Alfred’s revamped field armies, and its attempted raids lost all momentum because of a mixture of counterattack and failed sieges. As a result it was largely confined to the fringes of Wessex – parts of Kent and Essex – and worn down too by shortages of supply. Generals are famous throughout history for coming unstuck by basing their plans for future wars on how to fight the last one, but in Alfred’s case the wars were close enough in time and character for the planning to pay off. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘afterwards, in the summer of this year [896], the Danish army divided, one force going into East Anglia, and one into Northumbria; and those that were moneyless got themselves ships and went south across the sea to the Seine’.11

  The main action then switched back to the continent, where those Vikings who had failed to make enough money to settle in England were joined by further reinforcements. By the late ninth century, the Viking presence in Ireland had evolved into a limited number of fortified coastal enclaves, the major ones being Limerick, Wexford, Waterford and, above all, Dublin. In the last decade of the century, the Irish kings united against even this limited presence. The separate Viking forces of Limerick, Wexford and Waterford were all defeated individually, and in 902 even the Dublin Vikings were thrown out of their stronghold. Some of the refugees settled on the Isle of Man and the west coast of the British Isles, not least in Cumbria and Wales. But the expelled Irish Vikings probably also contributed to the events that now unfolded in northern France.12

  Unfortunately, the continental sources become much too fragmentary at this point to reconstruct a historical narrative. Even annalistic sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tended to be written as celebratory pieces to preserve the deeds of kings, but the early tenth century was a period of great political fragmentation in western Francia, with the descendants of Charlemagne losing power in the regions to a whole series of more local lords. In this context, no one was writing connected history and the detailed progression of events is lost to us.

  We do know, though, that substantial Viking inroads were made. The independent kingdom of Brittany was submerged beneath Viking attack in the 910s, some of its political leadership fleeing to the court of Wessex in search of asylum. Viking control then continued in Brittany for twenty years, until the native dynasty reasserted itself in 936 under Alan II. This Viking interlude had virtually no lasting impact upon place names, but did generate the wonderful pagan ship burial found at Île-de-Groux (Plate 24). Faced with this kind of pressure around the northern and western fringes of his domains, the King of the Franks resorted to an old stratagem. In 911, land in and around the port of Rouen at the mouth of the Seine was granted to a Viking leader by the name of Rollo. From his line and this settlement would eventually evolve the Duchy of Normandy. A second Viking settlement was licensed at Nantes in 921, at the mouth of the Loire, although this one lasted for only sixteen years. Both settlements were designed to establish tame Viking leaders who would help control the greater Viking threat. But such settlements were only part of the story. In the same era, other Viking groups were establishing themselves on the Cotentin peninsula and upper Normandy around Bayeux. What we don’t know, and probably never will, is which particular Viking groups from England and Ireland contributed to the settlements at Rouen and Nantes, and whether there were still more Vikings coming directly from Scandinavia at this time.

  These, however, are essentially matters of detail. A combination of forced and licensed settlements in England, Ireland and northern France in the first two decades of the tenth century tied down most of the armed drifters from Scandinavia who had arrived in the west at the tail end of the ninth.13

  The raiding and Great Army eras in the west thus generated a huge Scandinavian diaspora. The northern and western isles of Britain, including probably Man, had been settled in the early ninth century. The Faroe Isles to the north-west were next in line, although the process is undocumented. They had clearly been settled by the mid-ninth century at the latest, and the Great Army era saw still more colonization. Most famously, Scandinavians began to move into Iceland in large numbers in the generation before 900 AD. The ‘official’ story of this settlement, told by the Icelanders themselves in the twelfth century, was that the outward expression of growing centralized royal power in Norway at this time led both Norwegians and some of the earlier settlers of the northern and western isles to move on. This is probably an anachronistic construct, however, reflecting the reaching-out of Norwegian kings of the twelfth century towards the north, because there’s nothing to suggest that their counterparts of the ninth century were anything like so powerful. But the late ninth did see the emergence of an alternative source of centralized authority in the northern and western isles (between 860 and 880): the Earldom of More, based in Orkney. It is this new and demanding authority, it seems, that prompted Scandinavian settlers to move on to Iceland. And from Iceland, or course, Greenland was opened up for settlement from the mid-tenth century. The Earls of More also seem to have been responsible for organizing the campaigns on the northern Scottish mainland that made it possible for yet more Scandinavians to move into Caithness, in particular, which had been wrested from Pictish control at precisely the same era.14

  The final settlement of the Great Army era was in fact a resettlement. The Irish kings’ destruction of the Scandinavians’ bases, culminating in their expulsion from Dublin in 902, had contributed Norse manpower to further settlements in the Isle of Man and western Britain. In 914, however, a large Scandinavian fleet anchored off Waterford, having made its way there from Brittany. Three years later it was joined by a certain King Sihtric, descendant of the dynasty of King Ivar that had ruled in Dublin from the mid-ninth century until 902. Mobilizing the fleet, Sihtric re-established himself at Dublin. At the same time, his brother Ragnall made himself King of the Vikings of York, and from the latter’s death in 921 Sihtric proceeded to rule a united kingdom of Dublin and York. This strange offspring of the Viking era then proceeded to generate a hugely complicated thirty years of political history, whose details do not concern us here, until the defeat of Eric Bloodaxe in 954 severed the bond and set the two Viking centres off on separate trajectories: York to become part of a united Anglo-Saxon England, and Dublin to play a fascinating bit-part in Irish politics.15 But the whole western diaspora was itself only one part of a much bigger phenomenon. At the same time as raiders and the Great Armies had been rearranging large parts of western Europe, other Scandinavians were exploring the river routes of western Russia.

  RUSSIA’S VIKINGS

  Early in the tenth century, in a major diplomatic coup for the Muslim world, the Volga Bulgars officially declared their conversion to Islam. Between the Bulgars and the central world of Islam – the Caliphates – lay the Khazars, who had occupied territories on the Lower Volga and between the Black and Caspian Seas since the seventh century (Map 20). Relations between Khazars and the Caliphs had long been of a settled nature, and alongside the diplomatic niceties trading relations had grown up. The Bulgars had been drawn into this diplomatically stable world of mutually advantageous exchange in the eighth and ninth centuries, participating in the profitable trading alliance. Their conversion to Islam was a declaration of cultural allegiance, and the logical result of their burgeoning relationship with the Islamic world. Early medieval Islam was at
the height of its prosperity and political cohesion. It was a world of extravagant wealth and lavish court life, where scholars had an interest in preserving the ancient traditions of Greek and Roman learning, not least in science and geography, subjects which had largely fallen into abeyance in Christendom.

  As the Volga was drawn into this orbit, not only caliphal embassies but merchants, travellers and scholars, interested in the peoples and customs of this obscure corner of the world, journeyed north. In the lands of the Bulgars, in the emporium of Bulgar, one of the great markets of the early medieval world, they encountered a host of strange peoples. They quickly became aware that the most important were the Ar-Rus. Being ethnographers of the best school, these Islamic Dr Livingstones were not content simply to hear about the Ar-Rus and meet some of them in the Bulgar markets, but travelled west and north to inspect their territories at first hand. Here they found something between a state and an association of merchant princes. The Rus had a king who lived on a fortified island. He maintained a military establishment of many warriors, whom he funded by taking 10 per cent of all, the associated merchants’ profits. There were also priests, but above all, this powerful mercantile class, who drew up the rules of life around their interests. If you insulted one, it would cost you your life or 50 per cent of your property.16

  Who were the Rus, and where had they come from?

  The Rus

  In the past, the identity of the Rus was hugely controversial. Round one of the battle – as usual – was fought out with the nationalistic fervour that so marked the later nineteenth century. Scandinavian scholars argued that the word ‘Rus’ was derived from the Finnish name for Swedes, and identified the Rus as Scandinavian Vikings. This meant, they claimed, that medieval Russia, the state based on Kiev which eventually developed from the modest beginnings observed by the Muslims, was a creation of Scandinavians! In the later nineteenth century, this sort of claim was not likely to go unanswered. That some Scandinavians had played a role in the action could not be denied. The Old Norse names for the rapids that punctuated the lower reaches of the River Dnieper, until they were submerged by one of the great hydraulic projects of the Soviet era, have been preserved in the Byzantine source that we encountered in Chapter 8, the De Administrando Imperio. Also, the earliest Russian chronicle preserves the texts of two Rus trade treaties negotiated with the Byzantines in the tenth century, and many of the Rus participants had straightforwardly Scandinavian names. The scholars who prepared the Slavophile counterblast in the so-called Normannist debate, however, were not daunted. They derived ‘Rus’ from a small river of the northern Black Sea region – the Rhos – and argued that Scandinavians participated in the action only in small numbers, as merchants and mercenaries. Medieval Russia was, of course, the creation of Slavs.

  In the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution added its own twisting entrenchments to the Slavophile position. This, of course, had nothing to do with nationalist pride. As we’ve already encountered in other contexts, according to Marxist-Leninist dogmas, throughout history major epochal developments have come about through internal socioeconomic transformation. Each of the canonically prescribed sequences of modes of production – ancient (that is, slave) mode, feudal, bourgeois – develops, according to this theoretical model, massive internal contradictions – Marxist-speak for class conflict – which lead to its replacement by the next mode of production in line. According to this construct, the Kievan state represented the arrival of feudalism in the forests of Russia. There were some problems. No one could find any evidence of the slave mode of production, which ought to have preceded feudalism, before the foundation of Kiev. Likewise, the feudal mode of production ought to be characterized by agriculture based on the exploitation of large estates, from which a small thoroughly militarized landowning class primarily benefited. But while a Kievan state of some kind certainly existed in the tenth century, the historical evidence shows no sign of large estates before the eleventh. One problem was solved by inventing the concept of ‘state feudalism’, where state structures could perform the functions of the landowning class, and the slave problem was quietly dropped. In fact, in one of its many paradoxes, the Soviet state combined adherence to the internationalist vision of Marx – where nationalism was a false consciousness developed by elites to divide and rule workers who would otherwise unite against them – with rampant nationalistic fervour. So the older arguments were at all times interleaved with the new emphasis on the primacy of internally driven socioeconomic development. Both nationalism and Marxism, then, denied that a bunch of Scandinavian adventurers could have had anything much to do with the emergence of the first Russian state.17

  With the collapse of the Berlin Wall – closely followed by that of the Soviet system – discussion of the Russian past has been relieved of much of the pressure imposed by such intrusive modern agendas. As a result, some consensus has begun to emerge. Most scholars are happy now to acknowledge that the name ‘Rus’ surely does derive from the Finnish name for Swedes, and that Scandinavians played a critical role in the historical processes which underlay the emergence of the first Russian state. Some Rus sent on from Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious in 839 were unambiguously identified by the Franks as Scandinavians, and other historical evidence, such as the names in the tenth-century trade treaties, is equally conclusive. The collapse of the Soviet system has also made it possible to recognize (or, at least, to air the recognition in public) that more material of Scandinavian origin has been found in European Russia than used to be acknowledged. Some of the reports of Muslim travellers, likewise, for all their ethnographic distortions, are strongly suggestive of the northern origins of the Rus. Most famously, Ibn Fadlan witnessed in the lands of the Bulgars a Rus boat burial, and his account of it has always made its readers think of the Vikings. Full of gory details of animal and even human sacrifice, it describes how the corpse and all its attendant offerings were placed in a boat and hauled on to land, then set on fire, the remains of the pyre being covered by a mound, in the top of which was set a wooden post.18

  So the Ar-Rus of northern Russia and their island king were Scandinavians, but what were they doing there, and what was their role in the generation of the first Russian state?

  There are no contemporary accounts of the arrival of Scandinavians along the river systems of eastern Europe. The south-eastern hinterland of the Baltic was too far away from any of the European (or, indeed, Muslim) centres of literacy in the eighth century, when it all began, for these events to attract contemporary comment. Of later texts, there are a few references to Viking activity in Russia in some of the Scandinavian saga materials. The most coherent account of the pre-history of medieval Russia, however, is preserved in the so-called Russian Primary Chronicle (henceforth RPC), a more descriptive title than its proper, more Proustian alternative, The Tale of Bygone Years. The surviving manuscripts are no older than the fourteenth century, but the text as we have it was a creation of the early twelfth. We know from archaeological materials that Scandinavians began to penetrate the forests of European Russia from the second half of the eighth century at the latest, so that even the Tale’s original compiler was having to cast his mind back over three hundred and fifty years of history, much of which had unfolded before literacy became a feature of the Russian world. The author was probably working in one of the monasteries of Kiev in Ukraine, capital of twelfth-century Russia. But Scandinavians came south to Kiev only at a relatively late date, and for a long time, as we shall see, this riverine axis in Russian history – focused on the Dnieper – was much less important than another that focused on the Volga.

  Much of the pre-history of Russia was worked out far to the north and east, therefore, of the area central to the interest of the text recounting it. The author of the Chronicle was aware of this in outline, and traces the arrival of the later Riurikid ruling dynasty of Kiev back to northern Russia, where an invitation is said to have been issued to its foun
der, a Scandinavian by the name of Riurik (surprise), by a group of five tribes who had long been at war with one another: the Chud, the Merja and Ves all of Finnic stock, and the Slavic Krivichi and Slovenes (Map 19). Riurik came in, supposedly with two brothers, Sineus and Truvor, imposed order, and that was that. We will return to the likely historicity of any of this in a moment, but the main point is that the literary tradition has little to tell us about the earliest history of the Rus.19 Archaeological materials have therefore come to the fore.

  Trying to construct anything like a historical narrative from archaeological materials, as we have seen many times before, is an exercise fraught with danger. They are wonderfully evocative of patterns of longer-term change, but not necessarily amenable to documenting the kind of shorter-term exchanges that are the stuff of history. Nevertheless, as with the Slavicization of Europe, the preoccupation of the Soviet state with pre-history means that a huge amount of new material came to light after 1945, and some striking insights have emerged. Above all, it is now certain that in the mid-eighth century, a generation or two before raiding began in the west, Scandinavian adventurers were moving south and east of the Baltic into European Russia. The Baltic had never been a barrier to movement in the first millennium AD. Traces of Scandinavian communities established at more westerly points on its southern shores, in what is now Pomerania, have long been known and can be dated to the fifth and sixth centuries. None of these survived as an identifiably Scandinavian community into the seventh century, the groups concerned either being swallowed up by incoming Slavs or having returned to their homelands. But, after a short break in the mid-seventh century, identifiably Scandinavian materials began to be deposited further east, in Baltic- and in the Estonian-dominated lands, starting at Elblag and Grobin. In the eighth century, a marked Scandinavian presence grew up at Janow in the Vistula delta, and at more or less the same time increasing Scandinavian exploration of the rivers feeding into the Gulf of Finland manifested itself in the form of a permanent, if small, colony established on the River Volkhov close to Lake Ladoga. Thanks to dendrochronology, we know when it began. The wood used for the earliest houses was cut in the year 737.20