by Neil Price;
The routes into the eastern European interior developed early in the Viking Age, if not before, either through the Gulf of Riga or particularly the Gulf of Finland. This was driven, in part, by an internal expansion within Finland from the coasts to the interior, and in general it is clear that Finnish-speaking peoples played a major role in the opening up of the rivers. They acted as Baltic brokers for the Volga route down to the Caspian, and exerted great influence over the northern hunting grounds that partially drove the riverine traffic. One of the leading experts in Viking-Age Finnish interactions likens the eastern Baltic to the Hudson Bay area—both were water worlds with the fur trade at their core.
For the first half of the ninth century, furs seem to have been the mainstay of the eastern merchants. In the North, not least in Finland and among the Sámi, control of hunting was critical, including the management of potential resource depletion. Raw materials and products typical of central Sweden have been found far up the Finnish river valleys, providing clues as to the points of long-distance connections between actors in the trade.
The largest concentration of early Viking-Age finds in the Eurasian interior comes from Staraja Ladoga, the frontier-style settlement on the Volkhov River, where Finns were clearly influential. As perhaps the principal gateway between Scandinavia and the eastern world, it is not surprising that the Ladoga emporium expanded during the early ninth century and continued to do so into the tenth, likely reflecting the growth of increasingly intensive mercantile connections with the lands to the south. Evidence of metalworking, craft activities in antler and bone, and glass making, as well as finds of silver dirhams, attest to the function of the settlement as a major port of exchange. Sites such as Staraja Ladoga remained important throughout the Viking Age, and would soon also become jumping-off points for journeys to the south. While many of the groups operating in the East would have traded along the Volkhov, Dniepr, and Volga rivers, or with the tribes living in the regions either side of these major arteries, for many the ultimate goal was to reach the Black Sea and so travel onwards to Constantinople—the heart of the Byzantine world.
There were many ways to reach it, but perhaps the most well-travelled route went up the Volkhov past Staraja Ladoga, across Lake Ilmen into the Lovat River. Once the limits of its navigable passage were reached, an overland portage to the Dniepr was necessary. From here, the great waterway flowed south to the Black Sea. Perhaps the most crucial and dangerous part of the journey came relatively near its end, in the middle reaches of the Dniepr. Before it was dammed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s, there existed a system of rapids, extending seventy kilometres south from the area of Dnipropetrovsk. Varying from seven to twelve in number depending on the time of year in which they were encountered, they prevented shipping from moving along the river. During the Viking Age, this necessitated portaging the ships around each individual rapid, which provided the nomadic Pechenegs with ample opportunities to attack and plunder merchant travellers.
A remarkable tenth-century Byzantine document testifies to the Scandinavians who made the trip. De Administrando Imperio, ‘On the Administration of the Empire’, was a secret manual of governance written by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus as a guide for his son and successor. Combining confidential tips on foreign policy with a wealth of information about trading partners, it also contains reports of the strange Northerners who came to Constantinople. Their path took them through the Dniepr rapids, and at some point they must have described them to the court scribes because the names of each patch of churning water are rendered in what is clearly Old Norse embedded in the Latin text. Wonderfully illustrative of the dangers that lay in wait for any crew that for some reason did not disembark upstream of the falls, they include Essupi (supa, ‘The Drinker’), Gellandri (gjallandi, ‘The Yeller’), and Aifor (from eifors, meaning ‘Ever Fierce’). The latter is also named on a Gotland runestone that commemorates a man named Ravn who had previously travelled in the East.
Such were the hazards associated with this part of the river that at least some Northern voyagers felt driven to offer sacrifices to the gods on St. Gregory’s Island, which lay just to the south of the rapids, as a token of gratitude for their safe passage through. Excavations in the northern part of the island suggest a settlement may have existed here during the ninth and tenth centuries, possibly as a waystation for groups beginning or ending their passage along the portage route. Having passed through the lower stretches of the Dniepr and into the Black Sea, ships could traverse the western shore, towards Constantinople.
The city had been established as the capital of the Eastern Empire in the late fourth century by Emperor Constantine (which is why it bears his name), and had functioned as the imperial seat for over five hundred years. It had been expanded, refortified, and otherwise augmented numerous times as a result of public work schemes introduced by emperors who were eager to leave a permanent legacy of their rule. By the eighth century, it had grown into one of the largest metropolises in the world, with a population in excess of half a million—probably more than in all of Scandinavia at the time.
The city jutted out into the Bosporus between the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn at the gateway to Asia. Both its landward and seaward sides were protected by an immense system of fortifications. Upon entering through one of its monumental gates, any Scandinavian visiting for the first time would have been confronted with vast public forums and markets, towering churches and governmental buildings, and public structures such as racetracks, all of which were built from stone. Many had been in use since the time of the Romans, and a Northerner visiting Constantinople must have wandered the streets in awe.
In time, a new kind of society would develop along the riverine routes to the south, an ethnic conglomerate that evolved as a manifestation of the trading life. Known as the Rus’, these were the people from whose name the modern ‘Russia’ derives. Their real rise came in the tenth century, but it is clear that even in the first half of the ninth, a sufficiently distinctive identity was emerging that a label was required to describe it.
The earliest record of the name is from the Annals of St-Bertin in 839, when a Byzantine delegation to the Frankish emperor included among its members a group of people called Rhos in the Latin text, although the word appears to be Greek (presumably it was what the envoys called them). According to the Byzantines, these men had experienced such difficulties with hostile tribes on their journey to Constantinople that it was safer for them to travel home via western Europe instead, and the Eastern emperor appealed on their behalf for Frankish assistance. According to the annals, the Franks made enquiries and finally determined that the men were Swedes (and accordingly detained them as spies); the text even records that their king was called Hákon. It is perhaps telling that this first mention of Rus’ not only implies that they were sufficiently frequent visitors to Constantinople for the Byzantines to find a term for them, but also that they were not yet powerful enough to be able to guarantee their own security.
The Rus’ are also mentioned in the Homilies of Photios written in 860 by the Byzantine patriarch of that name, but the main historical source for their ninth-century activities is the so-called Russian Primary Chronicle, which was probably compiled in Kiev in the early twelfth century. It describes the Rus’ as arriving on the shores of the eastern Baltic around the 860s and quickly imposing a tribute system on the indigenous Slavs. They were driven off, but—so the story goes—after a period of infighting, the Slavic tribes allegedly sent emissaries to the Rus’ asking them to bring order to their land. Three brothers—Rurik, Truvor, and Sineus—are said to have been chosen to rule. Rurik occupied an island north of what would later become Novgorod (Holmgarðr in Old Norse) and would take control of his brothers’ territories upon their deaths. There is clearly a fair degree of retrospective legitimising in the Primary Chronicle, but that there was some kind of organised Scandinavian move into the Volkhov system in the ninth century is more than supported by the arc
haeology.
In the Arabic narratives, the Rus’ appear as al-Rūsiyyah, but it is obvious that a single original term must have been behind all these labels that are consistent across cultures. It was presumably self-applied, and there has been much discussion of what it was. Attention has focussed on Roslagen, a district on the eastern coast of central Sweden whose name means approximately ‘the rowing country’. While few believe the Rus’ actually came specifically and only from that region, it is plausible in that it implies an explicit connection with Sweden (as in the Annals of St-Bertin) and with travel by oared boat. The same word is ultimately at the root of the modern Finnish name for Sweden itself, Ruotsi. Perhaps the Norse term for the travellers on the eastern rivers originally meant something like ‘the rowers’, an interestingly small-scale collective noun for expeditions of a few individuals reliant on each other while voyaging largely alone and unprotected into a great vastness. The meaning would have been clear to those they met, and it is easy to see how the name might stick.
Who are you? We’re from the boat, we’re the crew, me and the lads.Maybe the Rowers will come again next year, with more of those wonderful things to sell? Let’s hope so.
Over time, the sense of the word clearly changed, from what was originally perhaps a workaday description to an all-embracing ethnonym for the river traders—and, crucially, for the men who backed their ventures with armed muscle. What is fascinating is how the idea of the Rus’ became associated with a specific identity of mercantile water travel in the East. One should be cautious about ahistorical comparisons, but there is a startlingly close parallel with the Métis of Canada and parts of the northern United States, an identity that combined people of varied origin unified by a way of life—in this instance, the fur trade of the great interior—and changing over time. Beyond their emotional bonds, marriages and other unions with local people provided incoming trappers with protection, privileged knowledge, and access to kinship networks with their associated benefits. This is exactly what we see with the Rus’ in much the same context, and the fusion of cultures on the rivers. They, too, were voyageurs.
The Rus’ were not purely of Scandinavian origin, clearly, but they were always an obvious and dominant presence (probably mainly from Sweden), including in command positions. Two Arab sources explicitly equate the Rus’ with the Scandinavians, making it very clear they regarded the two peoples as interchangeable. However, use of the Rus’ term could also be applied more vaguely, meaning something like ‘northern foreigners’.
In the ninth century, the river trade had both individual and collective aspects. As the Viking phenomenon gathered pace, and the market emporia formed static points on the trading networks, so ships and riverine traffic became mobile connectors—a form of ‘high-speed rail’ between Scandinavia and Europe. However, there is another dimension, too. One obvious consequence of Viking activities was the massive influx of portable wealth to Scandinavia, but this was not the same as having usable wealth. You can make an expensive gift of looted jewellery and the like a few times, but you cannot easily go shopping with the equivalent of a thousand hundred-dollar bills. The economic context for all this, in the background but overshadowing the trade, was the financing of Scandinavian political competition, and this is borne out both by the written sources and the patterns revealed in the archaeology.
The logistics of this system were complex. As the fur trade declined after about 860 or so (it may not be coincidence that this is when Rurik was supposed to have assumed control at Ladoga), there emerged on the eastern rivers what economic historians call ‘high-power money’. This is a currency (that does not have to be literally coinage) with a value that is universally regarded to be more stable than the alternatives. In today’s world, the US dollar widely holds such a position, but for the Viking-Age river trade, it was silver. For most of the ninth century, the source of silver was the mines and mints of the Abbasid Caliphate in today’s Middle East. Importantly, so long as the standard was agreed upon, silver did not even have to be universally available, although there hardly seems to have been a shortage of dirham coins for much of the period.
They are found mostly in the form of buried silver hoards, usually kept in the form of coins but sometimes also melted down and recast. More than a million dirhams have been recovered from Scandinavia and the Baltic, especially on the island of Gotland. It is extraordinary to think that the vast majority of all the dirhams that survive anywhere, some 81 percent, come from Europe; only 9 percent of them are from their points of origin in the Caliphate. An entire industry of coinage is preserved in the legacies of Viking trade. Many of the Gotland hoards contain silver arm-rings—sometimes dozens of them—both decorated as jewellery and completely plain. Much work has been done on the economics of such ‘ring money’, a portable form of payment you could both wear and spend.
Around this river traffic one can infer an infrastructure of commerce without which the trade would have been very hard to maintain. Alien though they may seem to our Viking stereotypes, these traders must have had concepts of time-limited exchange in the more seasonal markets, coupled with the problems of liquidity. Perhaps they used some kind of bills of exchange, drawn on important markets and protected by the potential for expulsion with consequent exclusion from the trade. Just as a gentleman of the British Raj could issue a note in Delhi to be drawn on his bank in London, perhaps there was a Rus’ equivalent for Birka or Bulghar, the settlement at the Volga bend. At the centre of all this is the notion of credit, which may even have governed the majority of transactions. Nor should we forget the carriage of samples, goods to try out before placing larger orders.
The trade was made by individual agents, but probably with collective responsibility for their actions in foreign markets. Mechanisms like this would have kept the peace in the edgy confrontations and negotiations along the rivers, perhaps policed by a form of local security. It is even possible this was originally the service, or one of them, that the Rus’ provided.
All the trade networks, whether to the East or elsewhere, incorporated processes of feedback. What was selling well on the river last year had an effect on the domestic markets back in Scandinavia. The fluctuations of supply and demand are eternal constants, for the Vikings as for anyone else. In a deeply modern sense, even people who never left their farms in Uppland were both aware of, and implicated in, the events and economic trends of a wider world. Nor would this have been something abstract; everyone would have seen things brought back from the river journeys or other trips into Europe and the West. Even the thralls were within earshot of travellers’ tales told round the fire.
Stories were told of other regions too, not only the riches to be had on the eastern rivers, but also of the fabulous wealth of the Muslim world. While the majority of Viking activity on the European continent was confined to modern-day France and the Low Countries, some Viking fleets were drawn farther south by the prospect of plunder, bringing them into contact and conflict with the people of the Iberian Peninsula.
During the Viking Age, the modern-day countries of Spain and Portugal were divided into several discrete polities. In the north, lying along the coast of the Bay of Biscay and abutting the Pyrenees, lay a handful of Christian states, of which the largest was the Kingdom of Galicia and the Asturias. Most of Iberia, however, had been under Muslim control since the late 700s after an invasion from North Africa. Following a coup that brought a new dynasty, the Abbasids, to power in the recently founded city of Baghdad, a breakaway emirate formed in southern Spain, al-Andalus, with its capital at Córdoba. An uneasy peace persisted between the Christian and Islamic kingdoms, broken by small-scale skirmishing and occasional outright warfare.
The first Viking attacks on Spain are recorded as taking place during the mid-ninth century. Having sailed south in 844 from their base at Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire, a large Viking fleet conducted raids along the northern Iberian coast before heading south into Muslim territory. The Scandinavians sac
ked targets in what is now Portugal and southern Spain, including Lisbon, Cadiz, and Algeciras, before turning to enter the Guadalquivir River. Their eventual target may have been Córdoba itself, but in their path first lay the city of Seville. The subsequent assault is documented by Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Rāzī, who tells us of the seven days that raiders spent sacking the city, killing the men, and enslaving the women and children. As word spread into the surrounding countryside, the emir, ’Abd a-Raḥmān, mustered a large army and marched to meet the Viking force, which was now ensconced on the Isla Menor. The Vikings were drawn out of their camp and the city by decoy troops who led them to Tablada, some two miles south of Seville, where they were ambushed and slaughtered by the bulk of the Muslim army. The surviving members of the Viking force fled to their ships and departed, leaving thirty vessels behind, while the dead were hung from the palm trees of Seville.
No other major raiding expeditions were made until 859, when a second force set out from the Loire—a fleet that later sources place under the command of Hástein and one of the most famous Vikings of them all, Björn Ironside. He was almost certainly a real person, although layers of associations grew up around his memory as his reputation morphed into the stuff of legend and saga. Possibly one of the many alleged sons of Ragnar lothbrók, he acquired his nickname (again, in a very late source) because he emerged remarkably unscathed from combat.
His great southern raid left so many echoes in later written sources that it is now difficult to disentangle myth from reality. The fleet is supposed to have numbered sixty-two ships, although one source has a nice round hundred. Like the force that preceded it in 844, the fleet seems to have first raided the northern Iberian coast, attempting and failing to take the town of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The raiders continued to southern Spain, again attacking Seville, Cadiz, and Algeciras, in turn. In the autumn of 859, the fleet then passed unopposed through the Straits of Gibraltar; as far as is known, they were the first Scandinavians ever to do so.
