Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  While the Dnieper River is the largest river flowing into the Black Sea, it doesn't offer the relatively smooth sailing found on Russia's other two major rivers, the Don and the Volga, both of which were navigable for virtually all of their lengths. In particular, a set of nasty rapids, formed by a series of massive granite ridges, extended for nearly fifty miles along the middle Dnieper, forcing boatmen either to make numerous lengthy portages or to face ruin or death.

  The rapids occurred as the river flows through the steppes. Boatmen were forced to get out and laboriously drag their vessels and cargo just at the spot where they were highly vulnerable to attack by mounted nomads. Attacks by the Petchenegs on the middle and lower Dnieper, as Constan-tine Porphyrogenitus reports, would be the bane of the Kievan Rus.

  At the same time that the Rus were looking south, the Byzantines had their own reasons to seek a new alliance in the north. The biggest reason was the attack of 860, which dramatically demonstrated that the old alliance with the Khazars was no longer enough to protect Byzantium from that direction. Khazar power was on the wane. The Byzantines flirted with nomadic peoples nominally in Khazar domains, such as the Magyars and then the Petchenegs, using them when they could, but such wandering warriors were too unreliable for the long term. They showed no interest in settling down as Christians or partaking in any cultural benefits they might derive from civilization. Nor were they much interested in trade beyond the trinkets-and-tools variety.

  Trade, in contrast, was what the Rus were all about. Excavations in Kiev in the 1970s found the remains of log cabins on the waterfront that closely resemble similar structures found on the sites of Varangian Rus trading posts elsewhere. Now securely dated to around 900, these buildings would seem to mark the arrival in Kiev of the Rus from the north. Graveyards now begin to appear also, some Scandinavian but more Slavic, suggesting that increasing numbers of Slavs were drawn to Kiev and surrounding communities as jobs (such as shipbuilding) associated with trade became available.

  To complement the archeological evidence, the Primary Chronicle preserves what appear to be two early trade agreements with the Byzantines. The first, from the year 907, gives the impression of being preliminary to the fuller provisions of the second, from 911. There's no guarantee these agreements were struck by the Rus in Kiev, though that's what the Primary Chronicle states. But for the first time the archeological evidence at least allows the Primary Chronicle's claims about Kiev to be true. If so, these agreements can be seen as Kiev's founding documents.

  The Primary Chronicle depicts the first one as being essentially extorted from the Byzantines by Oleg, the Varangian ruler who it says had earlier seized Kiev by overthrowing Askold and Dir. There's a detailed and dramatic narrative of an attack by Oleg on Tsargrad: the Varangian circumvents the city's fabled defenses by dragging ships overland into the Golden Horn, which the Byzantines had protected with a chain across its mouth. This was the same trick the Turks would use in 1453, and it also suggests the skills necessary for negotiating the Dnieper rapids. Only after being subjected to Oleg's virtuoso tactical skills and merciless rapine do the Byzantines agree to the Rus demands. Remarkably, nowhere do Byzantine sources mention this attack, which makes it almost certain that it never actually occurred. The whole thing seems carefully concocted to preserve the Rus’ reputation as fearsome savages.

  The terms of the agreements are unusually generous from the Byzantine point of view—right down to indulging the Scandinavians’ penchant for unlimited bathing:

  The Russes who come hither shall receive as much grain as they require. Whosoever come as merchants shall receive supplies for six months, including bread, wine, meat, fish, and fruit. Baths shall be prepared for them in any volume they require. When the Russes return homeward, they shall receive from your emperor food, anchors, cordage, and sails and whatever else is needed for the journey.

  But the agreements also laid down terms designed specifically to promote commerce and ensure the visitors’ good behavior:

  If the Russes come hither without merchandise, they shall receive no provisions. Your prince shall personally lay injunction upon such Russes as journey hither that they shall do no violence in the towns and throughout our territory. Such Russes as arrive here shall dwell in the St. Mamas quarter…. They shall not enter the city save through one gate, unarmed and fifty at a time, escorted by an agent of the Emperor. They may conduct business according to their requirements without payment of taxes.

  Without all these carefully negotiated provisions, the Dnieper route would not have been worth the trouble, expense, and danger. Kiev was hardly a propitious spot; being so far south it's extremely hard to defend. Novgorod and other early Rus trade centers lay in the northern forests, out of reach of the nomadic horsemen who have historically dominated the steppe. Kiev, in contrast, lies in the lightly forested zone on the steppe's northern edge, and was more accessible to any hordes of mounted nomadic warriors— Magyars, Petchenegs—who might sweep in for plunder and pillage. The original settlement sits on the right bank of the Dnieper, about six hundred miles upriver from the Black Sea, on a steep line of wooded bluffs looming three hundred feet over the river. It is a dramatic setting; today, at the top of the high bluffs, the spires and golden domes of its old churches can be seen from much of the modern city, which has spread out on the floodplain opposite. The climate here is more forgiving than in the heavy forests of the north, the trees more easily cleared, the soil more fertile. Counterbalancing such temptations lay the danger in the steppes.

  But for a time the gamble, and the carefully negotiated concessions, paid off. This was the first Russian state, and its legitimacy was immeasurably bolstered by Byzantine recognition in the trade agreements. The Primary Chronicle names Oleg's advisors and representatives, and like him they all have decidedly Scandinavian names: Karl, Farulf, Vermund, Hrollaf, Steinvith, Ingjald, Gunnar, Harold, Karni, and the like. So we have a good idea of who founded it. Yet, within a century this new state and the emerging civilization over which it claimed supremacy would be thoroughly Slavic— truly Russian, if you will.

  If Byzantinists liked the old interpretation for the role it gave Byzantium in influencing Kievan Rus after the city's foundation, how much more reason they have to like the new one. Our new picture of Kiev's early days gives Byzantium a far more prominent role even than before. Byzantium, it now seems clear, was a decisive factor in Kiev's very origins— which turn out to be later, more sudden, and more dramatic than had earlier been suspected.

  Commerce and Combat

  It's an open question whether Askold, Dir, and Oleg were actually historical figures. By the decade of the 940s, the evidence is firmer. In 941, the first clearly identifiable Kievan ruler, Igor, led a huge fleet—though the Byzantine reports of ten thousand ships obviously exaggerated its size—down from the Black Sea and terrorized the coastal areas around Constantinople for several months. Only when the Byzantines brought some old ships out of retirement and armed them with Greek fire were the Russian ships driven away. Historians differ on what to make of this raid, but it was followed by a reaffirmation of commercial ties under a new and still more extensive treaty in 945, whose text is also given in the Primary Chronicle.

  Igor died leading a small force against rebels in nearby Dereva soon after the new treaty was signed, and power in Kiev passed smoothly to his widow, Olga, who acted as regent for their small son, Svyatoslav. Olga's first act was to wipe out the Derevlian rebels to a man—at least as the Primary Chronicle tells it, dwelling lovingly on every gruesome detail of Olga's relentless quest to avenge her husband's death. In what can be taken as literary foreshadowing, the little boy Svyatoslav gamely tries to hurl a spear against his father's killers, barely clearing his horse's ears.

  The Primary Chronicle then depicts Olga as going on to further consolidate Kiev's control over other cities as far distant as Novgorod, power that was mainly exercised by the collection of tribute in the form of valuable goods such as furs, wax, hone
y, slaves, and feathers. These raw goods could be traded for cash and manufactured luxury items such as silk, which is prominently mentioned in the 945 treaty. Like her predecessors Olga looked first and foremost to Byzantium for such ventures, not to other markets, though she later flirted briefly with the Germans.

  In 957, right between Liudprand of Cremona's two journeys to Constantinople, Olga herself visited the Byzantine capital with a large retinue. The primary purpose of her visit was trade, but Olga also had something else on her mind. Nearly a century earlier, Photius had reportedly sent Christian missionaries to the Rus. They disappeared without a trace, but as contacts between Byzantium and the Rus grew closer with the rise of Kiev and the Dnieper trade, Christianity inevitably began winning converts among the Rus. Olga herself now asked to be baptized into Christianity. The ceremony was performed by the patriarch of Constantinople, presumably in Hagia Sophia. With the emperor Constan-tine VII Porphyrogenitus standing as her baptismal father, Olga was christened in state under the name Helena, after the mother of Constantine the Great.

  This sort of intimate symbolic acceptance into the imperial family was taken very seriously. It was a rare honor, and it shows the importance that the Byzantines accorded their new ally to the north. But there may also have been a human element to the story, for the Primary Chronicle records Constantine VII—who seems genuinely to have been rather smitten with the remarkable Olga—as proposing marriage to the Rus ruler. She nimbly evades his advances, remarking that as her baptismal father he has called her his daughter, and so any union between them would be inappropriate under Christian law. His response is charmed but rueful: “Olga, you have outwitted me.”

  We might expect the conversion of a strong-willed ruler like Olga to have resulted in the final Christianization of her people, but that step was to be deferred just a bit longer. No matter how she tried, the devout Olga could never shake the firm paganism of her equally strong-willed son and heir, Svyatoslav.

  Svyatoslav was the first Russian ruler to have a Slavic name, which suggests that the Varangian Rus had now, like the Bulgars before them, been largely absorbed by their more numerous Slavic subjects. A restless and hard-charging warrior, gray-eyed and snub-nosed, Svyatoslav modeled himself on the nomadic horsemen of the steppes, right down to hairstyle (shaved head with single side sprig of hair, barbarian style):

  Stepping light as a leopard, he undertook many campaigns. Upon his expeditions he carried with him neither wagons nor kettles, and boiled no meat, but cut off small strips of horseflesh, game, or beef, and ate it after roasting it on the coals. Nor did he have a tent, but he spread out a horse-blanket under him, and set his saddle under his head; and all his retinue did likewise.

  Leaving the formidable Olga to run things in Kiev, Svyatoslav at first devoted himself to further expanding Kievan power to the east. In the early 960s he undertook a series of expeditions against the Khazars, sacking their capital, Itil, and finally putting an end to the limping Khazar state. He then subjugated other tribes whose names the chronicle preserves—Kasogians, Yasians, Vyatichians—as well as attacking the Volga Bulgars. His objective seems to have been to gain access to the still lucrative Don and Volga trade routes, but if so, he was only partly successful.

  Then, in 967, the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus II Phocas asked Svyatoslav to lead an army against the Bulgarians. This was a standard sort of request for the Byzantines to make of an ally, and it was accompanied by the usual bribe, or in this case perhaps slightly larger than usual, 1,500 pounds of gold. Svyatoslav duly crossed the Danube, easily defeated the Bulgarians, and occupied Little Preslav (Pereslavyets) in the Dobrudja, where he spent the winter.

  While he was there, the Petchenegs seized the opportunity to attack Kiev, which they blockaded and besieged with a large force. Svyatoslav rushed back north and relieved the city, driving the Petchenegs back out into the steppes. But his time in prosperous Bulgaria had given him ideas, and after rescuing Olga he had a surprise for her, announcing his intention to transfer the seat of Rus power to Bulgaria. Already ill, Olga died a few days after numbly receiving the news that her son and heir wished to move their capital south. Svyatoslav marched back to Bulgaria and again captured Little Preslav. It took the Byzantine emperor John Tzimisces (who had murdered and replaced Nicephorus II Phocas) three bloody defeats of Svyatoslav, and a long blockade on the Danube, to get him to agree to leave Bulgaria.

  On their way back to Kiev via the Dnieper, laden with booty, Svyatoslav and his small retinue were set upon at the rapids by the Petchenegs. Svyatoslav was killed, and the Petchenegs (perhaps to show who the real barbarians were) gave his carefully shaved skull the now familiar Dixie-cup treatment. Svyatoslav had specifically asked the Byzantines to negotiate a safe passage. Either they had not bothered, or their request had been less compelling than the rich Bulgarian loot that Syatoslav and his men carried with them.

  There is no indication that Svyatoslav's misbehavior in the Balkans did anything much to disrupt Kiev's close relationship with Byzantium. That relationship was based on trade, although that was about to change, and business is business. Both the Byzantines and, after Svyatoslav's death, the Russians were caught up in domestic tensions that would have blurred the lines of any antagonism.

  In Byzantium, John Tzimisces replaced Nicephorus Phocas (whom he had killed) as regent for Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’ young grandson Basil II until Tzimisces’ death in 976. At that point, the eighteen-year-old Basil II, Byzantium's rightful emperor, faced more than a decade of civil war in his struggle to rule the empire in his own name.

  In Russia, where Svyatoslav had left several of his sons in charge of different cities, the 970s were similarly taken up in a succession struggle among those sons, with the youngest, Vladimir, finally emerging as victor in 980.

  Basil II and Vladimir both faced daunting challenges in their respective struggles for power, and as it turned out, each had crucial support to offer the other just where and when it was needed most. These two outstanding rulers helped each other bring their countries, medieval Byzantium and Kievan Rus, to their respective peaks of prosperity and strength. In doing so, they firmly and finally cemented the unique partnership between Byzantine civilization and the emerging civilization of Russia.

  *The Volga Bulgars were a Turkic people related to the same group that founded Bulgaria.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Golden Age of Kievan Rus

  he ruler known variously as Vladimir the Great and St. Vladimir had been born to one of Svyatoslav's peasant concubines around 956. His two older brothers, Yaropolk and Oleg, therefore had breeding and legitimacy as well as seniority on their sides. Svyatoslav had put Yaropolk in charge of Kiev and Oleg in charge of nearby Dereva (whose inhabitants had earlier rebelled against Igor), sending Vladimir to be prince of distant Novgorod. Trouble soon broke out between the two older brothers. Yaropolk defeated Oleg, who was killed in battle, and Vladimir fled to Sweden, leaving Yaropolk in sole control of Kievan Rus.

  But if Vladimir had nothing else, he had nerve. As the Primary Chronicle relates, he gathered together a band of adventurers in Sweden, returned to Novgorod, and easily expelled Yaropolk's lieutenants there. Wasting no time, he marched on Kiev with a large army of mixed northerners, where he induced Yaropolk to flee by suborning his key general. Inviting Yaropolk to negotiations, Vladimir then had him stabbed by two Varangians as he came in the door.

  Upon winning power Vladimir faced a potentially crippling lack of political legitimacy. He turned immediately to religion to solve that problem—but not to Christianity. Not at first, anyway. In the Primary Chronicle, Vladimir's very first act as ruler is to identify himself publicly with the pagan gods of traditional Slavic worship, headed by the thunder god, Perun: “Vladimir then began to rule alone in Kiev, and he set up idols on the hills outside the castle with the hall: one of Perun, made of wood with a head of silver and a mustache of gold, and others of Khors, Dazh'bog, Stribog, Simarg'l, and Mokosh.” Many o
f these gods reflect the local deities of communities over which Kiev now exercised control. A brother-killing bastard who was identified with Kiev's distant rival Novgorod, Vladimir desperately needed a way to establish himself with his still-heterogeneous subject population, and conspicuously adopting their gods was an obvious way to do that.

  “On Earth There Is No Such Beauty”

  Yet, such a course also had pitfalls. Local gods evoke local ties, not loyalty to a central government. And like his father and grandparents, Vladimir made the expansion of Kievan authority his overriding concern, constantly campaigning against outlying towns, attacking, conquering, subjugating, exacting tribute.

  Many of the inhabitants of these towns were Christians, as indeed were many in Kiev by now, and they objected to making mandatory sacrifices to pagan gods. There were also Muslims and Jews living under Kievan rule, indeed almost certainly within Kiev itself. The Khazars had been Jewish, and the Volga Bulgars were Muslim, so that any Rus ruler possessed at least a passing familiarity with both of those faiths as well as with Christianity. From an early stage Vladimir also seems to have begun exploring the possibility of adopting one of these more prestigious, scripture-based monotheistic religions.

  The famous set piece of Vladimir's conversion in the Primary Chronicle has been accepted by most historians as plausible at least in its broad outlines. Vladimir was entertaining some envoys from the Volga Bulgars, and he asked them about their faith. “They replied that they believed in God, and that Mahomet instructed them to practice circumcision, to eat no pork, to drink no wine, and, after death, promised them complete fulfillment of their carnal desires.” The last part sounded good to Vladimir, but not so the prohibition of pork and especially wine. “ ‘Drinking,’ said he, ‘is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure.’ ” This last passage, it seems, is commonly cited as especially strong evidence of the chronicle's plausibility.