Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  This further Scandinavian influx coincided with a renewal of silver flows from the Islamic world, which, from c.900, started to arrive in unprecedented amounts. According to the available hoard evidence, something like 80 per cent of all the Islamic silver that flowed into northern Russia and Scandinavia between c.750 and 1030 (when supplies dwindled virtually to nothing) did so after the year 900. It was also coming by a different route. By the 920s, where we began, the Volga Bulgars had established their control of the Middle Volga and become Muslim. The reports of Islamic travellers show that most Scandinavian Rus were by this stage no longer trading directly with the main Islamic world. Most of the trading was being done in the land of the Volga Bulgars, where Islamic and Viking merchants met to do business. This is reflected in the origin of the tenth-century coins. Whereas the eighth- and ninth-century coins had mostly been minted in the great centres of old Islam, in what are now Iraq and Iran, the tenth-century coin flows had a further eastern origin, being produced for the most part by the newly dominant Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran. At this point, the silver mines of Khurasan, controlled by the dynasty, were at the peak of their production, which has been estimated at between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty tons of silver per annum, or a staggering forty to forty-five million coins. Not surprisingly, the territories of the Samanids were a magnet for anyone with something – or someone – to sell, and well-established trade routes led from their lands east to the Middle Volga. A huge new market, served by much less difficult access routes, was attracting larger numbers of Scandinavians than ever before into Russia’s forests.33

  This provides the context for the greater power among the Rus encountered by Islamic travellers of this era: the island king. Everything we know about this king and the structure he presided over suggests that we should think of him as a capo di capi. He took a 10 per cent cut of everyone else’s mercantile operations, and enforced his orders via a permanent armed retinue reckoned at four hundred-strong. If the RPC is correct, the first of these kings ought to have been Riurik, founder of the dynasty, but that is far from certain. Whatever his identity, his seat was almost certainly Gorodishche. Scandinavian occupation began here in the later ninth century, and as the Muslim travellers describe it, it was an island, strategically placed at the point where the River Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen (Map 20). Unlike the other Scandinavian sites of this date, it was also defended by walls, which supports the idea that it was a centre of authority. Anyone who didn’t obey the orders emanating from it was liable to the fate of the inhabitants of Staraia Ladoga, just down the Volkhov, whose houses had met with such a nasty accident in the 860s. No doubt some of them had found horses’ heads in their beds just before the conflagration.34

  But this kind of political structure was hardly stable, and for all the wealth flowing through it, northern Russia of the early tenth century was hardly a land of peaceful prosperity, either. For one thing, much of the business being carried on came in the form of a slave trade. By its very nature this was a violent and unpleasant activity, involving armed raids on likely victims and the brutalization of captives as they were transported to market. Armed raids for the extraction of booty or better trading terms were still being conducted too. Both of the trade treaties with Byzantium, for instance, were the result of armed demonstrations which induced the emperor and his advisers to offer better trading terms. Islamic sources, likewise, report a huge raid on the Caspian in the year 912. And there was a further, internal dimension to the turbulence of this world. The mercantile colonization of European Russia was conducted, as we have seen, by a number of independent Scandinavian groups, not one organizing authority. You can bet your life that, originally at least, the required 10 per cent of the merchants’ profits was not handed over to the king in the north voluntarily. And such a process always carried within itself the potential for generating new rivals for the current capo.

  The king in Gorodishche won out, it seems, in the north. But precisely at the moment that Muslim travellers were taking stock of him, the political structure over which he presided was being overturned by the emergence of a second Scandinavian power base at Kiev, much further south, on a natural crossing of the Middle Dnieper. According to the RPC, Scandinavians first came to Kiev when two followers of Riurik called Askold and Dir obtained his permission to leave Novgorod (Gorodishche) to journey to Constantinople. On the way, they arrived at Kiev and decided to establish themselves there, from where they later launched an attack on Constantinople with two hundred boats. The Chronicle places their arrival in Kiev under the year 862, and the attack on Constantinople during 863–6. About twenty years later, Riurik’s successor, a man ‘of his kin’ by the name of Oleg who was ruling on behalf of Riurik’s young son Igor, set off south with a mixed army of Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs. Askold and Dir were tricked and killed, a fortified centre was built, and tribute imposed upon the surrounding Slavic tribes. Oleg had united north and south and the Russian kingdom was born. These events are placed under the years 880–2.

  The outline of the story seems reasonably correct. Kiev was a secondary and later centre of Scandinavian operations in western Russia. It is one of a series of sites along the Dnieper route to have produced Scandinavian materials, but only from about the year 900. Key to all further progress down the Dnieper was the settlement at Gnezdovo, which controlled the passage from Lake Ilmen to the Upper Dnieper and made it possible for Vikings from the northern Ladoga region to move down towards the Black Sea. Scandinavians established themselves at Gnezdovo only towards the end of the ninth century, and then at Kiev and a number of other centres around it: Shestovitskia and Gorodishche, which was near Yaroslavl where archaeological evidence of a Scandinavian presence of around the same date has emerged, and others such as Liubech and Chernigov which are mentioned in historical sources. The presence of Scandinavians is clear enough in the Middle Dnieper region from c.900, but, so far at least, the archaeological excavations would suggest that the Vikings came here in smaller numbers than in the north, where the materials of c.900 and beyond are far more plentiful.35 If the general chronology of the RPC seems correct, other aspects of its story are much less convincing.

  For one thing, its specific dates are no more than a later attempt to make sense of oral sources, and are thoroughly unreliable. The attack on Constantinople is the one we’ve met already, its date taken directly from the Byzantine Chronicle of George the Monk, which does not name the Viking leaders involved. At some stage in the compilation of the RPC, someone decided that the attack on Constantinople recorded in the Byzantine source was the same as that made by Askold and Dir, and the rest of their story was dated by that decision. This was probably a mistake. Extensive excavations at Kiev have produced no Scandinavian material dated before about 880 (the Podol excavations), so that the attack on Constantinople of the 860s, documented in Byzantine sources, was probably launched from further north.

  The RPC’s story also poses other problems. Its compilers were obviously a bit puzzled by Oleg’s relationship to Riurik. In the main Kievan tradition, he is described as a relative of some kind, but in the northern tradition, in a version of the Primary Chronicle which seems to derive from Novgorod, he is Riurik’s unrelated commander-in-chief. The idea that Askold and Dir would have bothered to ask Riurik’s permission before setting off for the south likewise fails to convince.36 As we have seen, in the ninth and the earlier tenth century, the Grand Prince of Rus was little more than primus inter pares, and Scandinavian expansion was carried forward by a whole series of independent initiatives, with the capo moving in only later to claim his percentage. There is no reason to suppose that moves towards Kiev, whoever made them, took any different form. Perhaps above all, there’s also the much bigger problem of why Viking Russia came eventually to be dominated by its second and later power centre – Kiev in the south rather than Novgorod in the north – especially since Kiev was situated on the much less rich Byzantine/Dnieper trading axis, where fewer Scand
inavians had actually settled. These, however, are puzzles for the next chapter. For now, we must analyse the Viking diaspora in both east and west as a flow of migration.

  FLOWS OF MIGRATION

  Questions of scale raise one of the most famous controversies in Viking studies. In the past, there was a strong tendency to interpret the Viking Age in the light of traditional perceptions of the classic Germanic Völkerwanderung. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people were thought to have been on the move, driven on by a lack of resources: a deluge that drowned western Europe in an unprecedented orgy of violence. The old schoolbooks reproduced the famous Anglo-Saxon prayer ‘From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us’, and more scholarly equivalents are easy to find. A textbook of Latin grammar, copied in Ireland in about 845 and eventually brought to the continental monastery of St Gall, has written into its margins this short but wonderfully evocative poem in Old Irish:

  The wind is fierce tonight

  It tosses the sea’s white hair

  I fear no wild Viking

  Sailing the quiet main.37

  Battle with such views was joined with a vengeance in the 1960s by the most prominent of current anglophone historians of the Vikings: Peter Sawyer. He argued that the traditional views were wildly overstating the likely size of Viking forces. Most of the chroniclers who produced the surviving historical accounts of Viking violence were churchmen, if not monks, and, as we have seen, churches and monasteries provided rich, ‘soft’ targets for predatory Vikings. Hence, he argued, there is an inbuilt tendency for the sources to stress Viking violence, when the Dark Ages were generally pretty violent anyway. The only thing that was perhaps new in the period was that the pagan Vikings attacked Christian religious establishments with a greater sense of freedom than was usual. Equally important, these monastic chroniclers ignored other important kinds of Viking activity, such as trading, which were less or non-violent, and their estimates greatly overstated the numbers involved. In his view, the more specific evidence suggests smaller forces: witness the three ships, maybe ninety or a hundred men, who were involved in that first incident at Portland. There is also, Sawyer argued, precious little evidence of women and children being involved. Viking activity was carried on not by ‘whole’ migrating peoples, but by warbands, whose manpower should be numbered at most in the hundreds.38

  This argument was a necessary corrective, and its validity for the early phases of ninth-century Viking activity has been generally accepted. The argument that the Viking period largely involved males in warbands also seems largely, if not without some exceptions, correct. But as Viking activity in the west intensified from the 830s, there is good reason to believe that larger forces than Sawyer originally had in mind became involved in the action. The Chronicle of Ireland, for instance, records in the 830s that two Viking fleets of sixty ships each were simultaneously in action in Irish waters. The beautiful ninth-century Gokstad ship excavated in the Norwegian Vestfold in 1880 and now on display in Oslo could have carried thirty men, or just a few more, without a problem. At thirty-plus men per boat, each of these fleets would have fielded over a thousand, and this general order of magnitude is consistent with some convincingly specific casualty figures recorded in the same source. In 848, three engagements were fought by different Irish kings against separate Viking forces, who suffered losses of 700, 1,200 and 500 men. And when the fleets of Scandinavian kings started to hit western waters from c.850, then Irish, English and continental sources all – with great consistency – describe them as leading fleets numbering between one hundred and two hundred ships. This would suggest armed forces of a few thousand men.39

  The point is only reinforced by the evidence from the Great Army period. These armies were composites, each bringing together several independent Scandinavian kings and their followers, together sometimes with more warriors under the leadership of independent jarls. The original Great Army assembling in East Anglia in winter 866/7 comprised, probably amongst others, the forces of Ivar and Olaf – who disappeared from Irish waters between 863 and 871 (Ivar is probably the ‘Ingvar’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) – and the Vikings who had been harassing the Frankish world of the River Seine for most of the previous decade. Continental sources indicate a gap in Viking violence between 866 and 880, which corresponds to the first phase of Great Army activity in England, and the Norse departure from Frankish waters was probably hastened by Charles the Bald’s construction of fortified bridges across the Seine which made it much more difficult for the Vikings to penetrate inland. Apart from Ivar, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also mentions by name two further kings, Healfdan (probably a third brother of Ivar and Olaf) and Bagsecg, and five jarls (two called Sidroc, the older and the younger; Osbearn, Fraena and Harold). These kings and jarls led independent contingents within the confederate army. In 875, they were reinforced by three more kings – Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend – making a grand total of eleven Viking contingents gathered in England. Yet more Vikings arrived just a few years later to overwinter at Fulham in 879/80. The same multiple, composite pattern holds true of the later Great Armies as well.

  Not all of these different contingents operated as part of a single army at the one time. Contingents came and went according to their perceptions of the best available opportunities. But five kings, at least five earls (jarls), and other forces besides clearly amounted to a substantial body of warriors. In 878, Healfdan was killed in Devon with 840 (or 860 in another version) of his followers, which suggests that royal contingents may have been somewhere in the region of a thousand men. The Chronicle also notes that this force was carried in twenty-three ships, making about thirty-six men per ship, which fits nicely with the carrying capacity of a Gokstad-type ship. Estimating each of the Great Army’s main contingents in the high hundreds or roughly one thousand mark is also in line with the kind of forces operating in Ireland after the 830s when raiding intensified. If this reasoning is correct, the Great Armies – each composed of half a dozen or more such contingents – must each have mustered several thousand warriors, though probably not much more than a maximum of about ten thousand. This is an entirely appropriate size for armies able to conquer whole Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.40 And there were, moreover, several of them. As we have seen, two well-documented Great Armies attacked England: one between 865 and 878, the other from 892 to 896. Encompassing some of the same manpower, there were also another two armies which assaulted the north coast of the continent in the 880s; and the forces operating in Normandy and Brittany, and back and forth to Ireland in the last decade of the ninth century and the first twenty or so years of the tenth. All told, and even allowing for overlaps between the different forces, we must reckon with a minimum of twenty thousand warriors on the move.

  This is directly relevant to the scale of Viking migration because, in eastern England and northern Francia, it was the Great Armies who turned victory into settlement. Whether this was part of the original design or not, the first Great Army destroyed three out of the four independent kingdoms of ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England, and reallocated substantial parts of their landed resources to its own members. These original settlements of the 870s were then reinforced by more pulses of settlers from the later Great Armies. One is explicitly recorded in 896, and there may have been others. On the continent, further Great Army activity eventually led, as we have seen, to settlements in Normandy and Brittany, one licensed, others not. What percentage of Scandinavian manpower participating in the Great Army action eventually settled in the west is unknowable, but the numerous different settlements are likely to have involved well over ten thousand individuals, even allowing for the fact that some surely preferred to take their wealth back to the Baltic. This is substantial, but not massive, given that the total population of the areas affected must be reckoned in the high hundreds of thousands at least.41

  The Great Army settlements took a particular form, however. Highly suggestive is the entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 896, record
ing the break-up of the second Great Army to attack England: ‘In this year, the host dispersed, some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those without wealth got themselves ships there, and sailed south over the sea to the Seine.’ This is not without its puzzles. Does the reference to wealth mean that the Vikings had to buy estates in Danelaw rather than just seize them? I strongly doubt it, but either way, the entry makes powerful links between membership of a Great Army, amassing wealth and subsequent settlement. Individual Vikings did not drag themselves overseas to fight a series of thoroughly dangerous engagements far from home, in order then to settle down as moneyless peasants. The point of all the effort, for those who wanted to settle in the west, was to amass sufficient resources to establish themselves in a desirable socioeconomic niche. If they had just wanted to be peasants, there was no need to fight. Anglo-Saxon landlords were always looking for labour.42

  How relationships within a particular Great Army contingent may then have translated themselves into a settlement pattern, when lands were distributed, is suggested by case studies of the detailed evidence for Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw county of Lincolnshire. Lincoln itself was one of the five boroughs of central Danelaw, from which some kind of independent political power was exercised; there were kings in Danelaw after 878, but never a king of Danelaw. The centre of Lincoln itself perhaps saw some Viking settlement and certainly expanded considerably in the later ninth and tenth centuries. Outside the town, Viking settlement seems to have come in two forms. Some of the greater estates were received intact by leading Vikings. These are marked by place names of the famous Grimston hybrid variety, where a Norse personal name (Grim-) is combined with the Anglo-Saxon suffix for a settlement (-tun), and are by and large to be found on the best-quality land throughout the Danelaw counties. Other pre-existing estates were then broken up, it seems, to be parcelled out in individual holdings to Vikings of lesser but still free status. The evidence for this is provided by the coincidence between the distributions of Norse place names (ending in -by and -thorp and, again, very often combined with a Norse personal name) and that of smaller landowners with unusually high status – called sokemen – in the official documentation for Lincolnshire generated after the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon state incorporated the county into its territory. The same sokemen also seem to have kept their Norse-derived tastes in the decoration of everyday metalwork well into the tenth century.