Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  The third zone of settlement was centred on the River Dnieper, although this should perhaps be subdivided in two, for whereas the Upper Dnieper region could still give access to the Volga route, routes from its middle reaches led unambiguously to the Black Sea and Byzantium. The biggest Scandinavian site uncovered so far is Gnezdovo on the Upper Dnieper (probably the Smaleski (Smolensk) of the sagas). In the 920s, it tripled in size and grew fortifications, and its cemetery, now partly damaged, contained a minimum of three thousand graves and perhaps twice that number. The original Soviet investigator claimed that only about a thousand of these were of Scandinavians, but that greatly understates the reality. Gnezdovo was a Norse-founded and Norse-dominated site, which, following its tenth-century expansion, had a population of about a thousand. Further south, on the Middle Dnieper, Kiev – as you would expect – has produced some Scandinavian materials. Three of its hilltops beside the river were occupied by Scandinavians from the early tenth century. Much more plentiful Scandinavian materials have emerged about 100 kilometres to the north, however, at Chernigov and Shestovitsa, which were, again, substantial tenth-century sites.52

  These geographical clusters of Scandinavian sites make perfect sense given the nature of Norse activities. The cluster on and around the Volkhov in the north controlled, and had easy access to, the main trade route out into the Baltic; the Upper Volga and Upper Dnieper sites gave settlers easy access to the main trade route to the Islamic world; and the Middle Dnieper led, eventually, to Constantinople. Scandinavian settlements clustered around the major trade routes, therefore, and these excavated sites were presumably all trading centres, from where individual traders established relations with local fur trappers in the surrounding countryside, and set off in the spring either for Bulgar or for Constantinople.

  All of this is straightforward enough, but it is not possible to derive any sense of the actual numbers of Scandinavians caught up in these eastern migration flows. For one thing, all the excavated remains relate to trade centres. Did Scandinavian farmers also establish rural settlements, as they did in Iceland and the northern and western isles? Stray finds from the Volkhov region might suggest that there at least they did, in which case we would have to multiply our conception of immigrant numbers considerably. There is also good reason to doubt that anything like all the Scandinavian settlements in Russia have been identified. Staraia Ladoga and Sarskoe Gorodishche would not be enough to support the reported Khaganate, but they are the only two sites known so far to have been in existence by 839. Similarly I doubt very much that even the fourteen or so known Scandinavian sites of the tenth century are telling the full story. The proportion of women to men among the immigrants is also unclear, although the presence of Scandinavian women is evident in all the tenth-century settlements, except for those of the Middle Dnieper. There are far too many unknowns to hazard much of a guess, but, by the tenth century we must be talking again ten thousand-plus male immigrants, and this is likely to be a gross understatement.

  When it comes to understanding the Scandinavian migration units carrying forward the Russian colonization, there is again an absence of historical sources. At least some, however, are likely to have taken the form of small-scale merchant adventurers, like Ottar and his companions, who either owned one boat, or just a share in one – a pattern recorded on at least one runestone. A famous group of over twenty runestones, likewise, was put up in Svinnegarn in Uppland in the mid-eleventh century to commemorate a group of local merchants who failed to return from an expedition led by a certain Ingvar.53 This was obviously later and larger, but, originally, a flow of Ottar-type figures down the Russian river systems was probably a common sight. At the same time, we must also reckon, at least from the ninth century, with larger and more organized intrusions: jarls or kings, with retinues in the hundreds. It would have needed a group more on this scale to establish the first Khaganate already in the ninth century, and, as we have seen, coinciding with the Great Army era in the west, much larger Scandinavian forces began to operate on the Russian rivers.

  Scandinavian migration into Russia thus probably combined a steady flow of small-scale merchants, some of whom eventually settled there, with more sporadic intrusions of larger armed forces. As in the west both types, presumably, sometimes brought their womenfolk with them, but we have no idea how often. The overall effect of these migration flows, however, was very different from in the west. Scandinavians came to Russia to exploit the wealth that could be generated by trading its natural resources, not to steal its movable wealth and/or to seize farms from existing owners and take control of its landed assets. There is no sign in Russia, therefore, of even a partial elite replacement. In Russia, the Norse formed a new kind of elite, which made its fortune by connecting up areas rich in the requisite raw materials with established centres of consumption in western Europe and the Near East.

  While it is important to sift through the evidence, not least to establish the different types of Norse migration flow, the numbers game, as so often in the first millennium, fails to get you very far. Either we have no idea of how many migrants there were, or we don’t know their ratio to the indigenous population, or both. But, again, taking a qualitative approach is much more revealing. The flow came in several forms. The land-grabbing in the north-west was led by small-scale local elites who could afford ships and gather small armed retinues, Danelaw and north Francia were settled by kings and jarls at the head of much larger warbands, while a mixture of merchant adventurers and kings or jarls was responsible for different aspects of the diaspora into European Russia. Even where landed assets were being seized, none of this looks at all like the Hun-generated migration into the Roman Empire of the later fourth and the fifth century. Viking migration everywhere came in the form of extended flows, sometimes over a century and a half, rather than one big pulse of mass movement. What some of it most resembles, in my view, is what can be constructed of the spread of northern Germanic groups south and east to the Black Sea region in the second and third centuries, or the Boers among more modern examples. And particularly in the west, we are seeing a flow that changed form and grew in momentum as understanding of the range of opportunities now available grew among Scandinavian populations.

  Despite these variations, Viking migration administered a substantial political and often cultural shock, as well, to all the areas it affected. In the northern and western isles, together with Danelaw and Normandy, local political and socioeconomic structures were bent completely out of shape. Local elites were either fully or partially replaced in their control of landed assets, old kingdoms were sometimes destroyed, and new political structures created. The amount of violence here must be properly acknowledged. It is a striking fact of Anglo-Saxon studies that almost no pre-ninth-century charters survive from the old kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia that fell into the hands of the Vikings as Danelaw. They are not that numerous elsewhere, but some survive. They fail to survive from Danelaw because the monasteries, where they were kept, were burned. We know too that the kingdom of Northumbria, the home of Bede, built up a powerful Christian intellectual tradition in the seventh and eighth centuries. Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the early Middle Ages, was a Northumbrian cleric, and has left a detailed account of the library at York. Again, the Vikings destroyed all the books along with the institutions that housed them. In certain places, even bishoprics – highly durable institutions – were extinguished. Three old English sees never resurfaced after the Viking period.54

  Some of the settlements of the Great Army era did not last long as politically independent entities. In the early tenth century, Wessex subdued Danelaw to create a united English kingdom. But even this is a sign of the political shock generated by Norse migration. There is no sign, had the Vikings not previously destroyed the power of Mercia and Northumbria – its two main rivals – that the Wessex monarchy would have become so predominant. Equally important, Wessex’s conquest did not lead to the return of many of the seized estates to the
ir former owners: the sokemen were still there in 1066. Much the same is also true in Scotland, where the emergence of one united kingdom in place of three previously independent polities – the Dalraida Scots, the Picts and the Strathclyde British – owed a vast amount to the damage inflicted on the latter two by Viking attack.55

  Elsewhere, the political fruits of the Viking diaspora were longer-lived. Much water would flow past it down the Seine in the meantime, but the settlement at Rouen was destined to become the Duchy of Normandy. The northern and western isles of Britain, together with northern Scotland and the Atlantic isles, likewise, became part of a long-lived Scandinavian commonwealth. And the interrelations of its many different Scandinavian merchants, along with the kings who came to take a percentage of the wealth they generated, would eventually stitch together the first Russian state, to which we will return in the next chapter, and whose history continued its more or less stately progress down to the Mongol invasions. Of all the areas affected by Viking assault, it is only arguably in Wales and Ireland that the effects were less than earth-shattering, but even in these cases it is at least arguable that, because of the Norse, political development took new and complex trajectories.56 To get too worried about numbers of migrants in the Viking Age is to miss the wood for the trees. In qualitative terms, the ‘shock’ administered to all the societies that played – usually unwilling – host to Scandinavian migrants is clear enough. In that sense, we are once again looking at a set of migration flows that can only be labelled mass migration. But this is to explore only one dimension of the Scandinavian migration process, and big questions remain. Why did the Scandinavian diaspora occur when it did, and why did it take so many different forms?

  THE VIKING EXPLOSION

  The underlying causes of these flows of Scandinavian migration in the ninth and tenth centuries clustered, initially at least, at the positive/economic as opposed to the negative/political corner of the motivation matrix. Such a conclusion would come as a bit of a shock to scholars working before the mid-twentieth century. Then it was generally argued that it was overpopulation that was to blame for a great exodus of men, women and children from Scandinavia. At the time it was thought by many that the Goths had come from Scandinavia, which was, as Jordanes reports, a ‘womb of populations’. Also, recent experience included large-scale migration, particularly to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this context, it seemed an inescapable conclusion that the Viking diaspora was just one in a whole series of pulses of migration outwards, each occurring when population levels in Scandinavia reached bursting point.

  The kind of detailed investigation of landscape and population made possible by modern archaeological methods have clearly shown, however, that some key corners of the Baltic world – Rogaland, Öland and Gotland – were more heavily populated in the sixth century AD than they were in the ninth. It was also the eleventh century – after the Viking period had ground to a halt – that witnessed large-scale clearances of woods and forests to create new arable land right across Denmark. Again, therefore, the chronology is off. If overpopulation was a problem in the ninth century, why wasn’t new land opened up then? There remains the possibility that at that point resources were already tight in western Norway, where fjord and mountain have always offered narrower ecological niches for farming populations. This might explain why moderately prosperous Norwegian farmers and their dependants seem to have been at the forefront of early settlement in the northern and western isles. But this applies only to a restricted area of Scandinavia, and even here we are talking possibility, not demonstrated fact. In general terms, the Viking diaspora cannot be explained by overpopulation in Scandinavia.57

  In most cases, Scandinavian settlement in a given locality was preceded by a lengthy period during which that same place was being targeted for its movable wealth. And for a time, this wealth was carried back to Scandinavia, not used to set up its beneficiaries in new homelands, whether western or eastern. Except, it seems, for the northern and western isles of Britain there was no substantial Scandinavian migration before the 860s, and a determined seeking after wealth is really what unites the diverse activities clustered together under the Viking label. From the east the merchant adventurers wanted Muslim silver. Astonishingly, well over two hundred thousand silver dirhams have been recovered just in hoards of five coins or more from Baltic and northern Russian contexts. And this, of course, is only those coins that have survived. Silver has never been anything other than a precious metal, and it is impossible even to guess how many other dirhams have, in the intervening millennium, been resmelted a dozen times into everything from personal jewellery to Church plate. Trade with the east, while eventually dominant in economic terms, was chronologically secondary to trade with the west. Staraia Ladoga was founded long before the river routes to the Muslim world had been reconnoitred, and there was enough wealth being generated by western trade connections to give rise to other trading stations as well (a point we will return to in a minute).

  In addition to trade, and sometimes actually alongside it, there was a huge amount to be made in both east and west by raiding. Raiding produced loot of all kinds, of course, but also slaves, and there is no doubt, as we shall see in the next chapter, that Vikings played a key role in what became an international slave trade in these centuries. This is a key point, one which makes some recent attempts to minimize Viking violence by pointing out that they were mere traders look a little silly. When you’re trading in slaves, raiding is an essential part of your commercial activities. Raiding also generated higher-status captives who were excellent for ransoms, and it offered the possibility of demanding protection money in order to buy your departure. Between them, the many different types of opportunity for money-making generated by successful raiding brought in huge sums. Just from what happens to have been recorded – and again there is no reason to suppose the records comprehensive – Viking assault on ninth-century Francia extracted 340 kilos of gold and 20,000 of silver.58

  Even Viking settlement, when it did eventually come, can be thought of as at least partly caused by positive, economic motivations. Since there is no evidence that landed resources were particularly tight in Scandinavia in the Viking era, then where Scandinavians did take land elsewhere it is likely a priori that they did so because more and better land, or better terms and conditions for landholding, were available in the areas to which they migrated. This is generally borne out by the detailed evidence. In the west, Norse migrants settled as dominant landholders. Their estates varied considerably in size. At the top end, the larger ones went to jarls and godar, the kind of men whose land seizures in Danelaw are reflected in the Grimston hybrids. But even at the more modest social level of sokemen, Scandinavian migrants were important landholders. Their holdings may have been limited in size, but they were their own, they probably ran them using dependent labour, and they personally retained elevated political rights and social status. Even if the individual farms were not huge, then, there is every reason to suppose that this was a desirable outcome for the individual migrant, and represented a better level of existence than would have been available to him had he not come west. In the east, the bulk of Scandinavian settlement – that, at least, so far visible in either texts or archaeology – was focused on trading opportunities. Scandinavians went to Russia to open up relations with indigenous fur trappers and/or to situate themselves in a more advantageous position on one of the riverine trade arteries. In some areas, such as along the axis of the Volkhov, they established themselves in areas that could be farmed before any Slavic-speaking population got there, so that, as in west, there may have been some taking of landed estates.

  But whether this happened or not does not affect the fundamental point. Real Scandinavian migration – with the northern and western isles as a possible partial exception – developed out of previous contacts that were all about Scandinavians extracting new types of wealth.

  There was a further reas
on why migration had to be secondary to trading and raiding. It was these activities that allowed Scandinavians to build up the wealth of detailed knowledge about both east and west without which settlement would have been impossible. The Scandinavian north had never been entirely cut off from the rest of Europe. In the Roman period, the Amber Route led from the southern shores of the Baltic to central Europe and the Black Sea, and this axis had facilitated and maintained considerable contacts between north and south. Some Jutland populations had been involved in the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Roman Britain, the ruling dynasty of East Anglia seems to have had some Norwegian connections, and some Heruli from the Middle Danube responded to defeat by migrating north at the start of the sixth century. Nonetheless, trading and raiding in the later eighth and the early ninth century brought larger numbers of Scandinavians into a much more intimate set of relationships with populations in both western Europe and European Russia than they had ever previously established, and provided the active fields of geographical, economic and even political information that made settlement possible.59

  The need for geographical understanding is probably the most obvious of these. Without a long period of trial and error, even the terrifyingly vague navigational instructions with which the chapter began could not have existed. The whole North Sea/North Atlantic axis had to be opened up by the intrepid navigators who made the initial jump from western Norway to Orkney, and then made their way round the northern coasts of the British Isles before pressing on out into the Atlantic to open up routes to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and, eventually, even North America. There is a chance that the Irish already had some knowledge of the Faroes and Iceland, which may have sparked the Scandinavians’ interest in the Atlantic, but reports that the first Norse found some Irish monks already in Iceland have never been confirmed archaeologically.60 Less challenging, perhaps, but no less important, other Scandinavians were at the same time busy exploring British, Irish and continental river systems. It is easy to take all this for granted, but detailed knowledge had to be gathered before Norse raiders could push upriver and put fleets on to the inland loughs of Ireland, sail up the Trent to sack the Mercian royal centre at Repton, or find their way up the Seine to the riches of St Germain and Paris.