by Neil Oliver
Later historians have identified them as warriors of the Rus, based perhaps in the territory centred around Lake Ladoga, or maybe further south at Novgorod. Some 22 years earlier those same Rus had sent an embassy to Constantinople, with a view to assessing the opportunities for trade. It seems the links forged at that time meant the Rus had been able to keep tabs on the Byzantine Empire — and when they learnt about the prolonged absence of the capital city’s defenders, in the late 850s they seized their moment and mounted a full-scale attack: ‘a nation dwelling somewhere far from our country, barbarous, nomadic, armed with arrogance, unwatched, unchallenged, leaderless, has so suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, like a wave of the sea, poured over our frontiers, and as a wild boar has devoured the inhabitants of the land like grass, or straw, or a crop … sparing nothing from man to beast … but boldly thrusting their sword through persons of every age and sex,’ wrote Photios.
For the next six weeks or so those Rus wrought havoc and devastation among the people living in the suburbs of Constantinople and the surrounding countryside. The inhabitants were slaughtered, homes and buildings set ablaze. But while the hinterland was helpless in the face of the onslaught, the city’s legendary defensive walls did their job and kept the attackers at bay. Denied entry, the Rus nonetheless put on a show of defiant strength. Photios described how the raiders finally sailed brazenly past the sea walls, with their sword arms raised, ‘as if threatening the city with death by the sword’.
Legend has it that the Patriarch urged the citizens to look to their paramount guardian the Virgin Mary — known to the Greeks as Theotokus — for help in smiting their tormentors. Apparently her sacred effigy was carried in procession down to the sea and there her veil dipped into the salt water. All at once a great tempest arose and swamped the ships of the Rus. Surely a fanciful addition, it nonetheless makes plain that, for the locals, those wild attackers had presented a frightening vision. It would have been impossible for 200 shiploads of warriors, however arrogant and determined, to pose a genuine threat to the capital of the Byzantine Empire — but they had certainly made an impression. Regardless of the details, and of the fact that they failed to gain entry to the city itself, it is important not to overlook what had been accomplished. Little over a century after the foundation of Russia’s first town, at Staraya Ladoga, a people of Scandinavian origin had organised and executed a memorable seaborne attack upon the greatest city on Earth.
The sources are less than clear but it may well be that the leaders of the Rus who attacked Constantinople in 860 were indeed some of the same referred to in The Primary Chronicle — those ‘princes’ who had been invited to rule over the lawless territory of the Slavs. However they arrived, many of them had come to Russian lands to stay — living and dying not only as travelling merchants but as settled farmers. Nearly 200 finds of traditional oval brooches, far more than have been recovered from western Europe, are known from graves and other find sites in Russia and the rest of eastern Europe. Apart from anything else such finds indicate that, just as in the case of Staraya Ladoga, much of the territory beside the river routes to the east was home to Viking women as well as men. For all those who were just passing through, en route to Constantinople and back, there were plenty more who stayed put as colonists. In addition to the exclusively Scandinavian cemetery at Plakun, across the Volkhov River from Staraya Ladoga, there are numerous other occurrences of Viking graves scattered across the east. Usually they occur within cemeteries of other peoples, indicating they were on friendly or at least respectful terms with one another.
If that first raid on Byzantium ended in failure, it was a different story a generation later, in AD 907, when Prince Oleg of Kiev led a mounted attack upon the city. Out in the Bosphorus lay a fleet of 2,000 long ships. It was this same Oleg who had earlier moved the capital of the Rus from the town of Novgorod to Kiev and, according to the chronicle, he was also a relative (perhaps the brother-in-law) of Riurik, the founder of the Rus dynasty.
The story goes that just as Oleg was about to unleash his horde upon the city, the inhabitants sent word they would rather make terms for peace than contemplate the bloodshed of a full-scale assault. With hindsight it seems more likely the Byzantines had simply accepted it made sense to find ways of making friends with a people who clearly were not going to go away and stay away. The eventual deal granted access to the city for those Rus who arrived with suitable goods for trade. They were to enjoy free board and lodging for up to six months at a time and were even entitled to unlimited bathing privileges. Such traders were also permitted to purchase silk to the value of two slaves. Since silk promised wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, this clause alone made it all worthwhile for the traveller. A warrior-merchant, who managed to secure a place on such an expedition, would go home with more wealth than a prosperous farmer at home in Sweden could amass in an entire lifetime.
The details of the trade treaty were finalised four years later and the document even named the Rus who had taken part in the negotiations. Farulk, Hrollaf, Karl, Steinvith and Vermund emerge from the mists of history as five men of obviously Viking stock who had made names for themselves a thousand miles from home.
For years I had dreamed of seeing Hagia Sophia for myself. One of my favourite episodes of history is the fall of the city of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks of Sultan Mehmet II in 1453. For me it is the most thrilling and suspenseful adventure story of them all. The great church had been central to that apocalyptic drama and was duly transformed into a mosque immediately after the fighting stopped. I was keen to see inside it with my own eyes and to experience its famous atmosphere.
After the fall, the name Constantinople was dropped in favour of Istanbul, a corruption of the medieval Greek phrase is tin polin or istambolin, which means ‘in the city’. If it was a wonder to those fifteenth-century Muslim Turks finally to be within the metropolis they had only ever gawped at from beyond the Wall of Theodosius, what must it have been like for ninth-century Vikings?
Walking through the streets and markets of the old town I tried to imagine what those Rus must have made of it all: the smells of the spices, the luxury of the silks, teeming hordes of exotic foreigners speaking in scores of different tongues — and above all the towering, architectural splendour of a city designed and built as heaven on Earth.
For all its ancient significance to Christians and Muslims, Hagia Sophia ceased to be a place of worship — Christian or Islamic — in 1935. The great moderniser Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the first Turkish Republic between 1922 and 1923 as a secular state. As such, Hagia Sophia — a symbol of an ancient clash of cultures and faiths — was deemed too sensitive to remain in use as a mosque and was declared a museum instead. But for all that it no longer figures as a focal point for the faithful, its atmosphere surely as overwhelming as it ever was.
Nowadays in the West we seem to do no more than construct taller and taller rectangles of glass and steel — identikit cathedrals raised only for the worship of commerce and banking. But the Church of the Divine Wisdom is a building with a soul. Already a millennium and a half old, it looks as though it has always been there — as permanent and immovable as a mountain.
The building was substantially renovated between 1847 and 1849, during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid, in a project overseen by the Swiss-Italian architect brothers Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati. As well as carrying out urgently needed structural repairs, cleaning some of the mosaics and making cosmetic changes to both the internal and external appearance of the building, the most immediately noticeable additions were huge discs fixed high up on the interior walls and bearing the names of Allah, the Prophet Muhammad, the first four Caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali and Muhammad’s grandchildren Hassan and Hussain. Tacked onto those ancient walls they are as incongruous as student posters in a stately home. Everything else about the building suggests a cavern hewn from living rock or scoured by aeons of erosion by a subterranean waterway. It is on a scale that dwa
rfs and humbles the thousands of visitors drifting through it, making them as inconsequential in its presence as specks of dust.
Given the Byzantines’ first encounters with the Rus — or Vikings — it is not perhaps surprising to learn their emperors quickly spotted the wisdom of exploiting their warlike tendencies. The best of them have gone down in legend as the Varangian Guard, the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors from the late tenth century onwards. The origin of the name Varangian is as obscure as so much else about those long-lost Scandinavians but some scholars have suggested the roots go back to var, an Old Norse word for an oath of allegiance taken by fighting men. They were mercenaries, any loyalty on their part having been bought and paid for with silver and privilege. Famed for the wild abandon of their drinking and carousing and the cruelty of their battleaxes, their always fearsome reputation is indelibly etched into the story of the later years of Byzantium.
Carved into one of the marble balustrades on the first-floor balcony of Hagia Sophia is one of their names. It is an untidy scrawl of runes, perhaps made by a bored Varangian Guardsman as he endured yet another lengthy religious service. Most of it is indecipherable but the first few marks suggest the name Halfdan; the rest of it is presumed to say something like ‘… made these runes’. Much more than just graffiti, it is nothing less than silent monument to just how far, both geographically and politically, those Scandinavians had come.
They were not the founders of Russia — no one people could make such a claim — rather they were a dynamic catalyst within a mix of peoples whose interactions eventually gave birth to a state. They were undoubtedly among the most ambitious travellers of the period and their determination to reach every corner of the known world in the pursuit of wealth had the effect of invigorating trade in the territories with which they came into contact. Their restless adventuring meant their influence spread like a virus, as if transported by the water of the river systems they made their own.
Having played a key role in the founding of Staraya Ladoga, which they called Aldeigjuborg in their own language, they subsequently turned their attention to the territory centred on Lake Ilmen, futher south. When the Scandinavians arrived, there was just a small Slavic settlement called Gorodisce, on an island in the lake. In time the incomers came to know the area as Holmgardr, the ‘settlement of the islands’, and by the middle of the tenth century, partly due to Scandinavian influence, the focus had shifted slightly north, to the site of what would become the city of Novgorod. Far to the south, beyond Novgorod — ‘the new fortress’ — and after a journey down the Lovat River followed by two portages across to the Dniepr, was the town the Scandinavians would call Koenugarr. Subsequently known by most as Kiev, it was a tactical location that gave its inhabitants control over traffic along the Dniepr towards the Black Sea and therefore to Constantinople.
This then was the territory the Primary Chronicle says was controlled by the Rus dynasty founded by the near-legendary Riurik and his brothers Sineus and Truvor. For as long as the silver mines remained productive the Caliphate in Baghdad exerted a powerful gravitational pull upon the trio’s descendants — and the exotica they in turn transported eastwards along the rivers made those Rus Vikings valuable, if unpredictable customers. Arab emissaries were duly dispatched, tasked with finding out as much as possible about the merchants and their homelands, the better to exploit any opportunities. It was as a member of one such mission that the writer Ibn Fadlan encountered his Rusiyyah among the Bulghars of the Volga.
As well as detailing their appearance and customs, he also took the time to record a hopeful ritual performed by the warrior-merchants as soon as they disembarked from their boats. Each carried an offering of bread, meat, onions, milk and alcohol and this he piled upon the ground at the base of a large wooden carving of a man. Kneeling before it all, each Viking in turn told the idol: ‘Lord, I have come from a distant land, bringing so many slave girls … and so many sables …’ On and on he went, until he had listed every last thing he had brought with him for trade. Finally he said: ‘I have brought this offering. I wish you to provide me with a merchant who has many dinars and dirhams and who will buy from me whatever I want to sell without haggling over the price.’
Despite their intimidating appearance, their formidable reputation for cruelty and violence and for excesses of all kinds, it is worth remembering what all their efforts were truly focused upon: the pursuit of cold, hard cash.
I had travelled east in search of whatever the Swedish Vikings had left behind, but what I felt most strongly in the end was their absence. The artefacts in the Hermitage were impressive and moving, but they were also slight and ephemeral — like Halfdan’s runes on the balcony in Hagia Sophia. Staraya Ladoga had clearly mattered once, and a great deal. There would have been a time when its name was spoken by merchants and travellers all across the European continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But the site of Russia’s oldest known town is quietly anonymous now. Any traces of the emporium the Vikings helped to build, and then populated for centuries, are revealed only by the shovels and trowels of archaeologists.
Most conspicuous to the modern eye is the reconstruction of a fortress built first of all in the twelfth century and then rebuilt in the sixteenth. Much of what is standing today is the result of the latest round of rebuilding work, undertaken to repair heavy damage suffered during the Second World War. In all other respects Staraya Ladoga is a place left behind, surrounded by modest homes scattered across a predominantly rural landscape. Hanging over the place, as palpable as the shadowy chill cast by a low cloud, is an air of depression and of the daily struggle to get by. It is a place that has had its day. Having once been part of shaping the future, it belongs firmly in the past. The Viking spirit of adventure is long gone.
St Petersburg, two hours’ drive to the south, stands squarely on territory that was once controlled not by Russians, but by Swedes. In Britain, my generation grew up scared of Russia and all that lay beyond the Iron Curtain. Still today, in the twenty-first century, it is Russia that has the air of dominance, of global reach and influence. But in terms of the kind of history of which the Vikings are a part, the concept of Russia as I understand the place is a very recent development. I stood in the shadow of the onion-topped domes of St Petersburg’s elaborately named Church of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood — a building as quintessentially Russian as anything you could possibly imagine — and thought about how the city stands on territory that was part of the Swedish Empire until the eighteenth century. The church itself is much newer than it looks, built between 1883 and 1907 on the spot where revolutionaries assassinated Emperor Alexander II in 1881 — so that even the grand imperial edifice that is St Petersburg is a recent veneer glossed over much deeper history.
It occurred to me that it is, in part, that absence — the apparent disappearing act performed by the Vikings after two centuries and more of high visibility — that has made them so fascinating. Their fingerprints are all over the foundations of Europe and the East and yet after all those epic journeys and contributions to state-building they somehow conspired to vanish almost without a trace.
The tale of the Swedish Vikings is, nonetheless, a remarkable one. Apparently embarked upon their own adventure nearly half a century before their neighbours, by the tenth century they were certainly doing business with the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Finds of silk back home in Sweden suggest they had penetrated China and the Indian subcontinent by then as well.
Sometime around the middle of the eighth century, the town of Birka was founded on the north-western side of the island of Björkö, in Lake Mälaren in west-central Sweden. During the Viking Age ‘Lake’ Mälaren was actually an inlet or bay of the Baltic Sea, so that ships from all points east, west and south might take advantage of a visit there via the outlet at Sodertalje. Contemporary with the Danish port town of Hedeby, Birka was of similar importance and for around 200 years it was a busy centre bot
h for export of goods manufactured by craftsmen on site and for the import of exotica from all over northern Europe and the East.
Extensive excavation since the 1990s of the so-called ‘black earth’ of Birka — the layers of soil darkened by two centuries of human occupation — have yielded huge amounts of information of lives lived there during the period when Swedish Vikings were making their presence felt far and wide. For one thing, it seems clear the whole town was planned and laid out in advance — suggesting the presence of a powerful local chieftain with the clout to order and oversee the creation of an emporium to rival those already operating elsewhere around the Baltic and North Sea coastlines. The much older settlement of Helgö is only seven or eight miles away to the east, showing that Lake Mälaren was a hub for Swedish life both before and during the Viking Age. Scores of houses and workshops were laid out in their own plots of land at Birka, carefully and deliberately separated from one another by passageways and ditches. Artefacts recovered reveal many of the town’s inhabitants were jewellers and metal-workers, as well as those skilled in the preparation of animal skins and furs. Finds of large amounts of Arabic coins and bullion testify to the presence of traders who had contacts with the Middle East.
The town was laid out along the lakeside, with houses and workshops stretching inland to cover several acres. During the 900s, the need to protect the place from raids inspired the construction of a semi-circular rampart. From then on the only access to Birka was via wooden jetties built out into the lakes to receive boats and ships, or through several heavily defended wooden gateways through the rampart. All of it speaks of a flourishing, wealthy and well-organised settlement of people who were well aware of the international status of their town.
