Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  When their chieftain dies, his family asks his slave-girls and slave-boys, ‘Who among you will die with him?’ and some of them reply, ‘I shall.’ Having said this, it becomes incumbent upon the person and it is impossible ever to turn back. Should that person try to, he is not permitted to do so. It is usually slave-girls who make this offer.

  When that man whom I mentioned earlier died, they said to his slave-girls, ‘Who will die with him?’ and one of them said, ‘I shall.’ So they placed two slave-girls in charge of her to take care of her and accompany her wherever she went, even to the point of occasionally washing her feet with their own hands. They set about attending to the dead man, preparing his clothes for him and setting right all he needed. Every day the slave-girl would drink alcohol and would sing merrily and cheerfully.

  On the day when he and the slave-girl were to be burnt I arrived at the river where his ship was. To my surprise I discovered that it had been beached and that four planks of birch and other types of wood had been erected for it. Around them wood had been placed in such a way as to resemble scaffolding. Then the ship was hauled and placed on top of this wood. They advanced, going to and fro around the boat uttering words that I did not understand, while he was still in his grave and had not been exhumed.

  Then they produced a couch and placed it on the ship, covering it with quilts made of Byzantine silk brocade and cushions made of Byzantine silk brocade. Then a crone arrived whom they called the ‘Angel of Death’ and she spread on the couch the coverings we have mentioned. She is responsible for having his garments sewn up and putting him in order and it is she who kills the slave-girls. I myself saw her: a gloomy, corpulent woman, neither young nor old.

  When they came to his grave, they removed the soil from the wood and then removed the wood, exhuming him still dressed in the izār in which he had died. I could see that he had turned black because of the coldness of the ground. They had also placed alcohol, fruit and a pandora beside him in the grave, all of which they took out. Surprisingly, he had not begun to stink and only his colour had deteriorated. They clothed him in trousers, leggings, boots, a qurtaq, and a silk caftan with golden buttons, and placed a silk fringed with sable on his head. They carried him inside the pavilion on the ship and laid him to rest on the quilt, propping him with cushions. Then they brought alcohol, fruit and herbs and placed them beside him. Next they brought bread, meat and onions, which they cast in front of him, a dog, which they cut in two and which they threw onto the ship, and all of his weaponry, which they placed beside him. They then brought two mounts, made them gallop until they began to sweat, cut them up into pieces and threw the flesh onto the ship. They next fetched two cows, which they also cut up into pieces and threw on board, and a cock and a hen, which they slaughtered and cast onto it.

  Meanwhile, the slave-girl who wished to be killed was coming and going, entering one pavilion after another. The owner of the pavilion would have intercourse with her and say to her, ‘Tell your master that I have done this purely out of love for you.’

  At the time of the evening prayer on Friday they brought the slave-girl to a thing that they had constructed, like a door-frame. She placed her feet on the hands of the men and was raised above that door-frame. She said something and they brought her down. Then they lifted her up a second time and she did what she had done the first time. They brought her down and then lifted her up a third time and she did what she had done on the first two occasions. They next handed her a hen. She cut off its head and threw it away. They took the hen and threw it on board the ship.

  I quizzed the interpreter about her actions and he said, ‘The first time they lifted her, she said, “Behold, I see my father and my mother.” The second time she said, “Behold, I see all of my dead kindred, seated.” The third time she said, “Behold, I see my master, seated in Paradise. Paradise is beautiful and verdant. He is accompanied by his men and his male-slaves. He summons me, so bring me to him.”’ So they brought her to the ship and she removed two bracelets that she was wearing, handing them to the woman called the ‘Angel of Death,’ the one who was to kill her. She also removed two anklets that she was wearing, handing them to the two slave-girls who had waited upon her: they were the daughters of the crone known as the ‘Angel of Death’. Then they lifted her onto the ship but did not bring her into the pavilion. The men came with their shields and sticks and handed her a cup of alcohol over which she chanted and then drank. The interpreter said to me, ‘Thereby she bids her female companions farewell.’ She was handed another cup, which she took and chanted for a long time, while the crone urged her to drink it and to enter the pavilion in which her master lay. I saw that she was befuddled and wanted to enter the pavilion but she had only put her head into the pavilion while her body remained outside it. The crone grabbed hold of her head and dragged her into the pavilion, entering it at the same time. The men began to bang their shields with the sticks so that her screams could not be heard and so terrify the other slave-girls, who would not, then, seek to die with their masters.

  Six men entered the pavilion and all had intercourse with the slave-girl. They laid her down beside her master and two of them took hold of her feet, two her hands. The crone called the ‘Angel of Death’ placed a rope around her neck in such a way that the ends crossed one another and handed it to two of the men to pull on it. She advanced with a broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in and out between her ribs, now here, now there, while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died.

  Then the deceased’s next of kin approached and took hold of a piece of wood and set fire to it … The wood caught fire, and then the ship, the pavilion, the man, the slave-girl and all it contained. A dradful wind arose and the flames leapt higher and blazed fiercely.

  Ibn Fadlan was a man of his time, and no doubt familiar with the ways slaves might be used and abused by their masters. But something in the attention he paid to all the lurid details of the ceremony that played out before his eyes among the Rus suggests it was grimly memorable even to him. Put bluntly, it was the murder of a young girl, after several incidents of choreographed rape. While the implication is that the girl was a willing participant in all of it, she was also plied with some sort of drugged drink to ensure her compliance.

  As with so much else, the origin of the name Rus is unclear but is thought by some scholars to demonstrate an origin for the people in Roslagen, part of eastern Sweden. The Finns’ name for Sweden was Routsi, and all the variants seem to have their roots in the words ro and rodd, meaning row or rowing, and also roor, meaning a crew of rowers — so that the name Rus may be interpreted as something like ‘the men who row’. What made them distinctive first of all, in the eyes of those other peoples they encountered in the east, was their mode of transport. Instead of travelling overland, the Northmen penetrated the continent aboard their boats.

  The men who rowed founded their first capital at what is now Novgorod, beside the Volkhov River, in 860. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a history composed around 1113 and ascribed to a monk named Nestor, the Slavs in the area were crying out for leadership and unable to provide such for themselves: ‘There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe. Discord then ensued among them, and they began to war one against another. They said to themselves, “Let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the Law.’”

  From the point of view of the Rus, who were the people approached with the request to provide the necessary leader, this sounds suspiciously convenient. And it goes on: ‘They accordingly went overseas … then said to the people of the Rus, “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’”

  According to the chronicle (also known as the Tale of Bygone Years) three brothers from among the Rus duly transplanted themselves and their families into the land of the Slavs. The eldest, named Riurik, set himself up in Novgorod, while his siblings, Sineus and Truvor, founded towns in Beloozero and Izborsk respe
ctively. Within a short time, both younger brothers were dead and Riurik ruled alone. Within 40 years the capital had moved to Kiev, on the banks of the Dniepr.

  It was already an extraordinary achievement. Whatever the truth of the means by which the Rus and their descendants rose to dominance, the facts are that within 60 years of those first raids on Britain — by Vikings from Norway — seaborne pioneers from Sweden had been able somehow to exploit their relationships with the native Slavs to such an extent that the emergent state was named, not after the locals, but in honour of themselves — Russia. They came with all manner of goods from their homelands — amber, steel swords of their own design, ivory from walrus (known at the time as ‘fish teeth’), birds of prey, honey, beeswax, fur and slaves.

  What they craved above all else, and therefore demanded in return for all they had to offer, was silver — and the best silver of all was that which could be obtained from the Abbasid Caliphate. After their violent overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate by AD 750, the Abbasids abandoned their erstwhile rivals’ capital of Damascus, in Syria, and centred themselves instead in Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris in the territory known today as Iraq. By the beginning of the Viking Age the Abbasids were in the process of amassing fabulous wealth in the form of silver mined from their holdings in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

  The Vikings would go, almost literally in their eyes, to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of the precious metal. Arabic coins were available in Russia by the end of the eighth century and soon a veritable river of silver was flowing west and north towards Scandinavia. By the early 800s dirhams were going into the ground in hoards along the Baltic coast as well as in Gotland and the rest of Scandinavia itself. Indeed the people of Gotland would grow so conspicuously wealthy it appears they hardly knew what to do with all the money. The jewellery and other items they made were strictly for sale elsewhere and are markedly different from the items they took with them into their graves (and presumably valued more). Once the Viking Age was at its height, the Gotlanders developed a veritable mania for burying their great wealth in hoards in the ground, almost as though they had run out of ideas.

  During the ninth century, and on into the tenth, it was silver melted down and shaped into neck and arm rings that emerged as common currency in the Baltic regions and Scandinavia. Made to standardised weights, they would have served both as personal decorations — highly visible statements of wealth — and also for making purchases. From the Frankish and English trading centres or emporia the Swedes could endeavour to buy wine and weapons. It was also in this atmosphere of burgeoning trade that the Danish King Godfred forcibly shut down the Baltic port of Rerik in AD 808, and relocated all the business to his own emporium at Hedeby.

  The Swedish Vikings can hardly have been the only people in pursuit of Arab silver at that time, and neither were they the only purveyors of furs, slaves, oils and the rest of the goods commonly associated with them. Given the terrain of north-eastern Europe — heavily forested, penetrated usefully only by rivers and already populated by tribes used to exploiting one another as well as the natural resources — many of the same commodities would have been readily available from territories much closer to the lands of the Arabs who apparently coveted them. It would appear, however, that in addition to the trade goods the Vikings had a unique force of personality. The chronicles make plain the Vikings in the east extorted tribute from those they encountered and so were clearly able to dominate at least some of the people around them.

  Despite the violence of the funeral ceremony recorded above, it is nonetheless clear that the experiences and behaviour of the Swedish Vikings in the east were at odds with what was happening in the west. The differences between the modi operandi of the Norwegians and Danes on the one hand, and the Swedes on the other, make them appear almost schizophrenic. These were to some extent one Scandinavian people and yet they manifest themselves as murderous pirates on the one hand, and as peaceful merchants on the other. It is important, however, to bear in mind how different were the two spheres in which the various Vikings had influence. Western Europe was home to established states, monarchies and peoples with at least a fledgling understanding of the need for and benefits of stable government. The Christianity of the majority of those populations the Norwegian Vikings came across was also an issue, a stumbling block that set them at odds with those they encountered.

  In the east, the society known to Balts, Slavs and the rest was much less sophisticated; statehood was still a long way off. Still existing in the main as nomadic populations eking a living from the forests, they had little of the kind of portable wealth that might have made them targets for out and out raiding. Instead, the Vikings found it made more sense mostly to pass them by, trading with them when appropriate or necessary but exploiting them more as stepping stones towards the fantastically wealthy markets much further east.

  No one knows for sure just how far east and south the most intrepid of them actually travelled in their slender little boats, powered by sails and by the strength of their own backs. Baghdad was almost certainly within reach to those most daring — or just plain lucky — and some historians are persuaded that a few at least made it as far as the markets of China. What is certain is that during the ninth century the eastwards expansion brought Vikings to the walls and gates of what was by then the greatest Christian city on Earth — Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

  Consider for a moment what impact such a metropolis must have had on those first Northmen. Having navigated the Baltic Sea, a succession of Russian rivers and then finally the Black Sea — a journey of many months at least — they finally glimpsed towering city walls that were, by the ninth century, nearly 500 years old. Beyond those walls they might have observed a shining city of gigantic stone buildings, home to hundreds of thousands of people. What was to be made of all that by travel-weary men whose idea of civilisation amounted to a few timber buildings with thatched roofs?

  Constantinople was a dream beyond the imaginations not just of Vikings but of most of humanity. Here was the home of a Roman emperor; palaces and places of worship; massive statues, public artworks and mosaics; towering, porticoed buildings; colonnaded streets elegantly planned and executed in regular grid patterns; gardens of fruit trees and fragrant flowers; great squares and triumphal arches. It was a place designed to beguile and to persuade — proof of the supremacy of the Christian God.

  In Kiev, towards the end of the tenth century, the successor of Riurik and ruler of the Rus was Vladimir. By AD 987 he had concluded it was time to end the pagan ways of his people and to choose for them a new faith. Before deciding between the great monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, he sent out emissaries on a series of fact-finding missions. They were to audition all three religions and report back with their recommendations. Neither Jews nor Muslims acquitted themselves well (there was no joy among them, apparently) and by 988 the Russian representatives were in Constantinople. Emperor Basil II received them first of all in the Sacred Palace and then, the following day, the Patriarch, Nicholas II Khrisobergos, walked them into the city’s beating heart.

  Hagia Sophia, the church built by Emperor Justinian and dedicated in AD 537, was nearly 500 years old by the time of the Kievans’ arrival. It was then and is now one of the truly great buildings on the face of the Earth. There beneath the towering central dome floating so far above their heathen heads it might have appeared as distant as the sky itself, the honoured guests witnessed a full pontifical service led by the Patriarch himself. The incense, the music of the choirs floating high above them from galleries so lofty they made men small as ants, the gold and jewels, the shimmering silks of the holy vestments — all of it made for a hypnotic, persuasive spectacle.

  By the time they stood before their master back in Kiev they were already converted to Orthodoxy, in their hearts if not in practice. ‘When a man has tasted something sweet,’ they told him, ‘he does not want anything bitter.’ Vladimir asked them to desc
ribe to him what it was about the city of the Christians that had provoked such rapture. ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or Earth,’ they replied. ‘For on Earth there is no such splendour and beauty and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there, God dwells among men.’

  Vladimir had heard enough. That same year he had the statues of the old pagan gods hauled down and thrown into the Dniepr, and then ordered all Kievans into the same water to receive their new faith. This then was the power of what the Vikings learnt to call Mikligaror in their own tongue, a name that means ‘the Great City’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE ENDLESS STREAM OF VIKINGS

  ‘Like a thunderbolt from heaven.’

  Patriarch Photios, describing an attack

  on Constantinople by Swedish Vikings

  Although theirs was the visit that changed everything for the land that would eventually be Russia, the emissaries of Vladimir the Great were not the first people of Viking blood to confront the wonders of the Byzantine Empire.

  According to a text known as the Brussels Chronicle, it was at sunset on 18 June, AD 860 that Constantinople’s inhabitants looked out over their sea walls and spotted the first of around 200 ships sailing into the calm waters of the Bosphorus. If each vessel carried 40 men, then no fewer than 8,000 were poised to attack. The timing was as unhappy as it could possibly have been for the city’s inhabitants: Emperor Michael III was on the eastern frontier making war on the Muslim forces of the Abbasid Caliph, and the Byzantine navy — famed by then for its fearsome ‘Greek Fire’ — was also occupied elsewhere.

  The only contemporary account of what happened next was recorded by the Archbishop of Constantinople, Patriarch Photios, who described the attackers of that year as strangers from a strange land: ‘an obscure nation, a nation of no account, a nation ranked among slaves, unknown, but which has won a name from the expedition against us, insignificant, but now become famous, humble and destitute, but now risen to a splendid height and immense wealth.’