Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  What these Scandinavians were doing in the northern forests emerges clearly from the later historical evidence. In the great emporium of Bulgar, Islamic merchants travelled north to meet their Rus counterparts, who were selling above all slaves and furs, but also amber, honey and wax. These same goods were also traded with the Byzantines in the tenth century, and it must be odds on that Scandinavians first came south and east of the Baltic to collect these fruits of the northern forests. Apart from the slaves, this is a classic example of what made long-distance trade profitable in antiquity, despite the great costs and difficulties of transport. The Scandinavians were able to extract goods from one ecological zone – the sub-Arctic north, where the intense cold makes furry animals grow coats of a density and quality that would overheat any of their southern cousins – and then sell them in another at premium prices.

  There is no strictly contemporary evidence for how these eighth-century Scandinavian traders procured the items they were trading, but again, later evidence sheds important light. The slave trade, of course, was run through compulsion. Slaves do not usually volunteer their services. Again, the literary sources provide us with important information. The Arab geographers report that the Rus regularly attacked Baltic-speaking Prussian tribes living near the eastern Baltic, and that the less powerful eastern Slavs lived in dread of their more powerful western Slavic neighbours.21 That this dread was closely related to the operations of the slave trade is suggested by the fact that Arab silver coins are found precisely among the western Slavs, west of the Vistula, and no further east. There is a largely blank area between the zone of operations of the Rus and that of the western Slavs (Map 20). It must have been from this area that most of the unfortunate victims for the Muslim slave markets were taken.

  The extraction of the other goods was not necessarily so involuntary. Where the sources refer to the process, the skins and furs produced in the northern forests and sold on by Scandinavian merchants are often referred to as ‘tribute’. This word suggests an element of compulsion, which finds some confirmation. One relevant anecdote appears in the ninth-century Life of St Anskar, a Christian missionary to Scandinavia, which describes a Swedish raid on the Curs of the southern Baltic who had ceased to provide their agreed tributes. As soon as we have any records, likewise, the Scandinavians of Russia imposed tributes on the Slavic groups that came within their political orbit. Tribute could be extracted on a micro-economic scale too. An appendix to the Anglo-Saxon translation of the history of Orosius produced at the court of, and possibly by, Alfred the Great tells the story of the king’s conversations with a Norwegian trader by the name of Ottar (Othere). Ottar regularly sailed north up the west coast of Norway with his companions, and received furs, bird feathers, whalebone and ship’s ropes made from the hide of seals and whales as tribute from Laplanders there within the Arctic Circle. Ottar was working northern Norway rather than northern Russia, but there is every reason to suppose that Scandinavian merchants in that area too were unafraid to resort to robust persuasion.22

  The full run of evidence does not suggest, however, that relations between Scandinavian merchant and indigenous producer were run solely on this basis. For one thing, even Ottar acquired some of his trade goods through his own efforts. Again, as he told King Alfred, he and five friends killed sixty whales in two days. More generally, and this applies to Ottar too, the whole process of collecting goods clearly involved small groups of Scandinavians moving among much larger indigenous populations, who were themselves central to the trading process. Trapping, for instance, is a highly skilled art, which requires detailed local knowledge of animal runs, and outside Scandinavians making occasional visits to an area would have been incapable of extracting their own furs with any degree of efficiency, so that most trapping was presumably done by local populations.23

  This kind of pattern held good into the tenth century, when the De Administrando Imperio describes in some detail the winter circuit followed by Rus merchants among their Slavic subjects, in the course of which the next year’s trade goods were collected. Indeed, the whole process of connecting up different patches of Russian forest – each being worked individually for trade goods – to the broader exchange system operating up and down Russia’s river systems was conducted by relatively small groups of Scandinavians working more or less independently of one another. This is implied in the Muslim accounts of the northern king who skimmed a percentage off the top of independent merchants’ activities, and in Muslim accounts of merchants at work. Ibn Fadlan, for instance, describes the individual merchants making offerings to their gods of commerce before uttering this entirely apposite prayer:

  ‘I would like you to do me the favour of sending me a merchant with a large number of dinars and dirhams, who will buy from me everything I would wish and will not enter into dispute with me over what I say.’ . . . If [the merchant] has difficulty in selling and his stay is prolonged, he returns with another present a second and a third time.24

  The merchants may have come in groups, but they sold as individuals. The same point is amply documented in the trade treaties the Rus negotiated with Byzantium in the tenth century. These documents show that, while the Grand Prince of Kiev had paramount authority, there were lesser Scandinavian princes operating in the other centres established up and down the river network, men who had their own representatives at the negotiations and were mentioned separately in the final treaties.25

  The Scandinavian traders worked the forest zone, then, in relatively small and largely separate groups, which would have made them very vulnerable to attack if their relations with indigenous population groups were entirely hostile. Against this backdrop, it is striking that the hoards of Muslim silver coins – the fruits of the trade activity – are widely dispersed across the Russian forest zone (Map 20). This may indicate that the Scandinavian merchants purchased a degree of consent from their Slavic and other indigenous producers by recycling to them a share, if perhaps a lesser one, in the fruits of the trading. Slavs were able to profit from the trade network in other ways too. The De Administrando Imperio tells us, for instance, that the Rus brought their goods down the River Dnieper and across the Black Sea to Constantinople in boats purchased from the Slavic Krivichi and Lenzanenes, who spent their winters constructing them.26 The provision of suitable river boats was not simply demanded, therefore, and this is again suggestive that Scandinavian–Slavic relations were not just about constraint. We have to envisage Scandinavian exploitation of the northern forests in the form of a series of small companies with certain rights negotiated and/or asserted over their own particular goods-producing territories. The locals provided the goods, or many of them, the Scandinavians the organization, the transport and the knowledge to take those goods to distant markets and return with a healthy profit. Such a vision takes us a long way from the sterility of the old Normanist debate, emphasizing as it does the symbiotic relationships that clearly grew up on the local level. The ninth and tenth centuries were not about Scandinavian versus Slav, but about small, and, in economic terms, mutually competitive producers. Each individual trading enterprise, composed of Scandinavians and indigenous population (whether Finns, Balts or Slavs), was selling the same products in the same market.

  The King in the North

  The projected market for the goods being collected from Staraia Ladoga was initially western. The colony was established at exactly the same time as trading contacts were building up right across the Baltic and North Sea areas, but long before there is any sign of contact between northern Russia and the Islamic world. The furs and other products being collected by the shores of Lake Ladoga were at this point being shipped west to be sold to the elites of Latin Christendom. In particular, the mid-eighth century was springtime for the Carolingian dynasty and its supporters, and many of the furs collected surely had this market in mind. It did not take long, however, for Scandinavian merchant adventurers to become aware of a particular important fact of east European geography. Whil
e some of the rivers of European Russia flow north into the Baltic, others drain south into the Black and Caspian Seas. The whole area is so flat, moreover, that the headwaters of both north- and south-flowing rivers lie extraordinarily close together. By following the River Volkhov south from Lake Ladoga, new and exciting possibilities came into play. A combination of tributaries, especially the west–east flowing River Oka, combined with carefully reconnoitred portages, where ships were dragged usually on rollers from one set of connected river systems to another, allowed access to the Black and Caspian Seas via two major routes, the Dnieper and the Volga.

  Of these, it was the Volga that most attracted the Scandinavians, even though the literary material – both Kievan and Byzantine – tells us far more about the Dnieper route, on which Kiev itself was eventually founded. But no Scandinavian material found on sites along the middle reaches of the River Dnieper can be dated before the end of the ninth century, and there is incontrovertible evidence that the Volga route had been opened up long before. This comes in the form of the Islamic silver coins that the Rus merchants received in return for their goods. Many thousands of them have been found in northwest Russia and the general Baltic region. For dating purposes, hoards – rather than single finds – have prime importance. The latest dated coin in any hoard gives some indication as to when the whole assemblage may have been deposited, and where hoards are plentiful there is a good chance that the time lag between issuing and deposition was not too great. In the forests of north-west Russia, the earliest latest coin, so to speak, discovered so far was minted in the year 787. Allowing a margin for time delay, this suggests that the hoard was deposited somewhere around the year 800, and hoards of a similar date have also been found in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Muslim silver was certainly flowing to the north by 800 at the latest, but had perhaps begun a little earlier, in any case a generation or two before the Dnieper route was opened up.27

  This makes perfect sense. The Volga route led straight to the Caspian Sea and the economically developed world of the Islamic Caliphs, by this date based on the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. There the taxes of a vast empire, stretching from the Atlantic to India, were being consumed at a court of stupendous magnificence. Here was a real centre of demand for merchants with luxury goods to sell. The southern reaches of the Volga route were already well mapped out, moreover, since the Khazars had long since traded for furs as far north as the Middle Volga. The Dnieper route, by contrast, was far more difficult, involving some awkward rapids around which boats had to be carried, and led out into the Black Sea – not the Caspian – near the Crimea. One could still reach the Islamic world by sailing east, but it was less direct, and the more natural trade axis led to Constantinople. But, as we have seen, Byzantium was a sadly reduced power from its glory days under Justinian, and the Islamic Caliphs and their court grandees represented a far richer market for the luxury goods that the Scandinavians had to offer. Whether Scandinavian merchants themselves regularly went as far south as the Caspian is difficult to know. Some certainly did, but the journey was long, and there may have been a whole series of middle-men. In the second half of the eighth century, at least, the numbers of Scandinavians involved remained limited. Apart from Staraia Ladoga, only one other site in north-west Russia, Sarskoe Gorodishche (Sarski Fort), has so far produced both silver coins and Scandinavian materials that date to 800 AD.28

  In the absence of narrative sources, the full story of what happened next cannot be recovered, but developing Scandinavian contacts with the east may have followed a similar trajectory to the patterns we have already observed further west. One reflection of this is a slow but observable increase in the flow of Arab silver coins into Scandinavia and the Baltic in the ninth century. As the century wore on, increasing numbers of adventurers from the north, whether directly or through middle-men, were using the waterways to sell northern goods to the Islamic market. Theoretically, this could have happened without more Scandinavians actually settling south of the Baltic, but enough evidence has survived to show that they were.

  In 839, as we have seen, some Swedish Vikings came to the court of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. They had been sent on from Constantinople, having reached the city only by a difficult journey past fierce tribes, and were in search of an easier route home. If, as seems likely, they had come down the Dnieper, they had had to carry their boats past its rapids, and the indigenous inhabitants of this region had quickly learned that this was an excellent place for an ambush. In 972, one later prince of the Rus, Sviatoslav, lost his life – and his head – at exactly this point. (The nomadic Pechenegs turned it into a drinking cup.)29 The envoys reported to the Emperor that they were already sufficiently organized to have their own ruler, called a Khagan, and had indeed been acting on his behalf in attempting to establish friendly relations with Constantinople. This mention of a Khagan of the Rus as early as 839 is tantalizing, but at least a sign that the Scandinavian immigrants to the forests of Russia were beginning to evolve some kind of political organization. As in the west at more or less the same time, however, where the initial political structures that emerged among the Vikings in the Hebrides and Ireland were swamped by the arrival of the more powerful ‘kings’ around the year 850, so political developments in the east also failed to move in straight lines.

  Probably in 860, Vikings from somewhere in Russia launched a first attack on Constantinople. Two hundred boats sailed across the Black Sea and ravaged the city’s outskirts. The Byzantines attributed their survival to the intercession of the Virgin, and, whatever credence one gives the figures, this was clearly a major attack.30 It was followed by an intense diplomatic effort to head off further incursions. This included sending Christian missionaries away into the Russian forests. But after an initial claim of success from the Byzantine Patriarch in 867, the mission disappeared without trace, and there is no mention of further diplomatic contacts with the north for more than a generation. This suggests that the political authority to whom the mission had been sent was itself not long-lived: something which, as we shall see, was true of most Viking Age Scandinavian monarchies. There are also other clear signs of trouble. At more or less the same time, the settlement on Lake Ladoga was burned down. Dendrochronological evidence dates the disaster to between 863 and 871. It was manmade and deliberate. The original settlement consisted of isolated wooden blockhouses, all of which were destroyed at the same moment. It is highly implausible that an accidental fire could have spread amongst them all so effectively. In the same era, a Persian historian reports that Rus attacked the port of Abaskos on the south-east coast of the Caspian Sea, but the event can be dated no more closely than c.864–83.31

  Without better historical sources, it is hard to know how to assemble this jigsaw. But the burning of Staraia Ladoga and the attacks on Abaskos and Constantinople indicate that new Scandinavian powers had entered the arena, and it is a striking coincidence that this was happening at exactly the same moment as, further west, kings were arriving and the Great Armies being assembled. I strongly suspect, therefore, that the simultaneous turmoil on the north Russian waterways and the sudden appearance of an authority large enough to attack Constantinople both reflect the intrusion of certainly more organized, and probably also larger, Scandinavian forces into the eastern as well as the western areas of Viking operation. Like their western counterparts, these more powerful newcomers will have been looking to take over and extend the profitable wealth-extracting operations that already existed. The evolving Viking period in east and west in the ninth century reminds me of nothing so much as Chicago in the prohibition era. First small groups started to make limited amounts of money from smuggling in and producing bootleg alcohol, then the more organized gangs set themselves up, alternatively demanding a cut of all profits or suppressing rival organizations, as circumstances demanded. Once the flow of wealth was up and running, the already powerful stepped in to control it and take their cut: precisely 10 per cent, of course, according to Ibn Fadlan.


  In Russia, a second factor ratcheted up the competition. To judge by the deposition of coin hoards, the flow of Arab silver reaching the north slowed considerably between c.870 and 900. The slowdown coincides, in fact, with a period of internal political chaos in the Islamic Caliphate – the ‘anarchy at Samarra’ – which lasted from 861 to 870 and may well have been caused in the first place by disruption on the demand side of the trade equation. This degree of crisis can only have had an adverse effect on the demand for luxury goods at the caliphal court, and would have increased the competition between different groups of Scandinavian fur and slave producers in northern Russia. This may help explain the struggle for dominance of what was left of the luxury trade from the north and, in turn, why Byzantine diplomatic feelers got nowhere. Eventually, however, some degree of order was restored, not only in the Islamic world but in the north – a process, even given the continued absence of narrative sources, that we can still get some grasp of through less direct evidence.32

  For one thing, Staraia Ladoga was eventually rebuilt, probably in the early tenth century, this time in stone. Finds of Scandinavian materials dating to c.900 have also been made at a series of other northern sites: Gorodishche (old Novgorod), Timerevo, Mikhailovskoe, Petrovskoe, Pskov, Yaroslavl and Murom. These settlements were all placed at convenient points of access to, and hence to profit from, the main trade route down the River Volga (Map 20). Between them these sites have generated a greater quantity of Scandinavian material than any of their counterparts of the ninth century. Some of it is also women’s jewellery, suggesting that a mixed immigrant population, rather than just armed Nordic males, was now occupying at least some of the sites.