13

The Heirs of Attila and the New Rome

In early June of 626, the patriarch Sergius led a solemn procession atop the walls of Constantinople to ward off a new barbarous race, the Avars, who laid siege to the city.1 Before the procession was carried the city’s holiest icon, the Hodegetria, reputedly painted by Saint Luke and housed in the church to the Virgin Mary in the northeastern district of Blachernae.2 The icon depicted Mary Theotokos, Mother of God, cradling the infant Jesus. Soldiers and citizens raised their voices in prayer for deliverance from these new Huns off the Eurasian steppes who were in league with the ancestral foe, the Sassanid shah of Persia. A Persian army of Shah Khusrau II was encamped at Chalcedon on the Asian side of the Bosporus opposite the city.3 Only the imperial fleet prevented the Persians from crossing in force and joining their Avar allies in storming the land walls of Constantinople. For the first time, the citizens of the capital of the Roman Empire of the East endured a siege, for even Attila had not dared to approach the daunting Theodosian Walls. For two months, the Persians and Avars strove to take Constantinople. Then, news of the first victories arrived from the east. The emperor Heraclius had launched a daring counteroffensive against the Persian shah in Armenia and Iran.4 The Avars and Persians withdrew. Within three years, Heraclius smashed three Persian field armies, sacked the Persian capital Ctesiphon, and dictated a peace.5 The Avar siege of Constantinople, however, marked a turning point in the relations between East Rome or Byzantium, and the northern steppe barbarians. For the next four centuries, the Byzantine emperor battled Turkish nomads and their Slavic allies who settled in the Balkans, while on the South Russian steppes, he courted the leading Turkish confederacy to check first the Sassanid shah, and then the Arab caliph.

Two generations earlier, the Avars, Turkish-speaking nomads, had fled west soon after Bumin Kaghan of the Gök Turks had overthrown the Rouran kaghanate in 552.6 In 558, suddenly, twenty thousand Avar warriors and their families appeared on the steppes just northeast of the Caspian Sea.7 They had fled swiftly across the vast steppes of Kazakhstan because Ishtemi, the brother and deputy (or yabgu) kaghan of Bumin, pursued the Avars, who, scions of the Rouran, had refused to accept defeat and to submit to the Gök Turks. When the Avars arrived, they found wide rivers, greener pastures, and a medley of warring nomadic tribes on the south Russian steppes. In the century after Attila’s death, the Byzantine governor resident in Cherson, the principal Greek port on the southern shores of the Crimea, routinely sent envoys bearing gold and silk, to incite wars among Hun, Kutrighur, and Otrighur princes lest one of them unite the tribes and invade the imperial provinces in the Balkans.8 The Avars, however, sent a large deputation directly to Constantinople. The Avar envoys excited awe and curiosity as they strode confidently into the throne room, sporting leather kaftans and felt caps; their long locks of hair were braided with wire-thin gold twists.9 They introduced themselves to the emperor Justinian, then seventy-five years old. Justinian, who had lost none of his diplomatic acumen, immediately put the Avars on the imperial payroll, for he judged that they would soon be masters of the south Russian steppes. Today, Justinian is best remembered for his greatest achievements, his legal code and the church of Hagia Sophia, and for his notorious wife Theodora, the courtesan turned empress. But for thirty years, Justinian had labored to restore the Christian Roman Empire of Constantine. He had nearly bankrupted the empire in wars waged to recover Italy, Africa, and southern Spain from the Germanic invaders.10 Justinian dared not risk the northern frontier by insulting the Avars. Ten years later, Justin II succeeded his uncle Justinian. He and his wife Sophia, a niece of Theodora, were hailed the honeymoon couple of a new golden age, for all in Constantinople despised Justinian for his endless wars, high taxes, and lurid scandals at court. The nervous, irritable Justin soon proved to be worse. He refused any more tribute under his uncle’s treaties, first to the Kaghan Bayan, and then, in 572, to the Shah Khusrau I. Justin thus incited wars with both the Avars and the Persians.11 For the next century, the Eastern Roman and Sassanid Empires were locked in nearly perpetual war that ultimately ruined both belligerents. At the same time, the imperial government could do little to defend either Italy or the Balkans. The emperor Justin soon after went mad. In 574, the empress Sophia prevailed upon her unbalanced husband to adopt as his heir the general Tiberius Constantine, who promised the kaghan an annual subsidy of 80,000 gold solidi (over 1,100 pounds) in return for a peace.12 The Avars observed the treaty far more in the breach than the adherence. In 582, the kaghan made even higher demands from the next general acclaimed the emperor Maurice Tiberius. The kaghan demanded, received, and returned in contempt first an elephant and then a golden throne.13 His final demand to increase the tribute was refused, and ignited a major war in the Balkans. From the start, Maurice Tiberius, while an able soldier, was at a disadvantage.

In 567, Bayan, kaghan of the Avars, had allied with the Lombards to exterminate their inveterate foe the Gepidae, who dominated the Hungarian grasslands between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. The Lombards received the booty, and thereupon invaded Italy and wrested control of half of the peninsula from the Byzantine emperor.14 The Avars occupied the Hungarian grasslands, and Kaghan Bayan built his capital, the “Seven Rings,” upon Attila’s former settlement opposite Budapest. From there Bayan exercised a hegemony over the diverse tribes on the south Russian steppes as far as the Don River. The Avars initiated major ethnic changes that still define Central and Southeastern Europe. The last of the East Germanic tribes, the Lombards, forever departed the steppes to find new homes in northern Italy to which they gave their name, Lombardy. Henceforth, Turkish-speaking Avars, and then their Finno-Ugric-speaking successors, the Magyars, dwelled on the grasslands of Central Europe. Recent DNA testing of skeletal remains of Avars exhumed from graves in the Banat (where the Theiss River joins the Danube) has revealed that members of the elite classes of the Avar confederacy were descended from peoples of the Mongolian steppes.15 Archaeology proves also that the Avars adhered to their ancestral ways, revering their shamans and honoring their ancestral spirits according to burial rites common on the Eurasian steppes.16 The Avar kaghans soon found new allies among the numerous clans and families of Slavs who had migrated out of the forests of Eastern Europe to fill the lands vacated by German tribes in Central Europe between the Elbe and Vistula Rivers. Since the mid-sixth century, Slavic tribes had already crossed the Danube River and pressed south into the Balkan provinces of Moesia and Thrace (the future Bulgaria). True to steppe policy, the Avar kaghan raided to win captives and booty for his followers, but the Slavic tribes came to stay, and they turned the Balkans into a largely Slavic-speaking land over the coming centuries.17

The Avars proved almost as formidable as the Huns. A succession of warlike kaghans under the dynastic name Bayan timed attacks during the winter, when ice and snow blocked the imperial fleet on the Danube, or whenever they received news of the imperial army engaged in campaigns against the Persians. They also employed Roman engineers. In 579, Kaghan Bayan besieged Sirmium (today Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia), the strategic fortress on the Save River, by constructing a fortified bridge that cut off and forced the city to surrender after a siege of over three years.18 Avar horse archers possessed superior mounts and saddles equipped with steel stirrups. An expert archer astride his horse could easily turn about in his saddle and fire deadly volleys at pursuing foes as they were lured into an ambush.19 The author of the Byzantine military treatise Strategikon describes this frontier warfare between Byzantines and Avars.20 Writing under the pseudonym of the emperor Maurice Tiberius, the veteran officer devotes most of his manual to how to battle the Avars and Slavs in the desultory fighting of raids, skirmishes, and ambushes. The imperial army came to depend ever more on mounted lancers and archers, who could move quickly to surprise and encircle the nomadic foe. Over the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, the very nature of this warfare disrupted urban life and agriculture to the benefit of Avar raiders and Slavic colonists. Together, pagan Avars and Slavs massacred, enslaved, or expelled the Christian provincial populations. The survivors fled to cities on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, or to Greek cities on the Aegean and Euxine shores.21 In these cramped cities on the shores, the residents turned to their patron saints. At Thessalonica, the capital of northern Greece, citizens repeatedly beseeched their patron Saint Demetrius, from whose crypt flashed lightning and arose a foul-smelling sulfurous gas that drove off Avar hordes.22 Witnesses swore that apparitions of the saint himself and a host of angels on the walls also warded off the attackers. By the late seventh century, the emperor had lost control over the interior of the Balkans, northern Greece, and even the Peloponnesus. There, Roman cities crumbled into ruins and were abandoned; roads, bridges, and aqueducts were never repaired and fell out of use. With the end of urban life, imperial institutions and Christianity disappeared for the next four centuries.

In 590, the emperor Maurice Tiberius gained an unexpected opportunity to reverse the strategic situation in the Balkans. The young Sassanid shah Khusrau II, named after his illustrious grandfather and rival of Justinian, appeared at Constantinople and pleaded for assistance against a usurper, the popular general Bahram Chobin, who had defeated the Hephthalites and then seized power in Ctesiphon.23 Maurice Tiberius furnished men and money whereby Khusrau regained his crown at the price of concluding a treaty favorable to Constantinople. The emperor Maurice Tiberius thereupon transferred his field army to the Balkans, and waged a methodical war of pacification against the Avars for the next ten years.24 The parsimonious emperor drove his army relentlessly, withheld pay, and, in the winter of 601–602, ordered them into makeshift winter quarters on the dreary Hungarian steppes. The soldiers mutinied under a centurion, Phocas, seized Constantinople, and butchered the imperial family.25 Phocas, a usurper of low birth, proved incompetent and unpopular. Shah Khusrau declared war to avenge his murdered ally and patron Maurice Tiberius. Khusrau soon shifted from revenge to conquest when the disaffected Monophysites, Christian sectarians who were the majority of the population in Roman Syria and Egypt, welcomed the Persians.26 The Avars resumed their attacks, and by 610, the Roman Empire of the East was on the brink of collapse. Heraclius, the son and namesake of the elderly, popular governor of Carthage, was invited to rescue the beleaguered capital. In the autumn of 610, Heraclius and the imperial fleet appeared in the Bosporus. Soldiers and citizens rebelled and slew Phocas, and hailed Heraclius as emperor.27 In the next twenty-five years, Heraclius pulled off the greatest victory of any Roman commander in Rome’s seven centuries of conflict against the Parthians and Persians.28 It ended in the overthrow of Shah Khusrau and unconditional surrender of the Persians, who restored occupied provinces, captives, and the True Cross, which followed Heraclius in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on his march back to Constantinople.

The war climaxed in the siege of Constantinople in the summer of 626. During the long summer, Avar warriors and their Slavic allies suffered grievously from disease and privations, and futile assaults on the outer defenses of the Theodosian Walls. The Avar kaghan was forced to retreat, and he never recovered from his loss of prestige among his vassal peoples.29 Several years later, the Hun, Turkish, and Magyar tribes between the Dniester and the Don Rivers revolted. To the north, Slavic tribes, resentful of paying tribute in furs and slaves, also rebelled and declared the first Slavic state in Central Europe under their prince Samo.30 The Avars retreated to the Transylvanian steppes, abandoning the Balkans and the south Russian steppes. They switched to raiding northern Italy and southern Germany, but the Frankish kings checked the Avars. In 791–796, Charlemagne, soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, invaded the Hungarian steppes, sacked the “Seven Rings,” and ended the Avar kaghanate.31

The collapse of the Avar confederacy brought no respite to Heraclius and his heirs in the Balkans, because they almost immediately faced the full might of the Arabic armies that overran Armenia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the name of Islam. The Byzantine emperor, who henceforth ruled a far lesser state centered on Asia Minor, could not expel the Slavs settled in the Balkans. Hence, the imperial government initially welcomed as allies against the Slavs the Bulgars, Turkic-speaking nomads, who were losers in the most recent tribal war on the south Russian steppes. In 681, the Bulgar khan Asparuh led his nation across the Dobruja and settled in Moesia, the same frontier lands where the Visigoths had settled three centuries earlier.32 The Bulgars, however, quickly welded the Slavic clans of the Balkans and the nomads immediately north of the Lower Danube into the third barbarian confederation to challenge Constantinople. The Bulgar khans thus succeeded the Avar kaghans as the new Scourge of God. The most dreaded was Khan Krum, who surprised and slaughtered an imperial army under the emperor Nicephorus I in the Vorbina Pass in 811.33 The emperor was slain in the rout, and his skull was gilded and decorated with jewels to serve as the khan’s goblet at feasts whenever he received Byzantine envoys. Two years later, Krum slaughtered another imperial army under the emperor Michael I at Versinica. Michael was deposed by his officers of the eastern army, while Krum’s horse archers ravaged across Thrace to the very walls of Constantinople, and then retired to sack Adrianople and enslave its inhabitants.34 The next Khan Omurtag (814–831) obtained a favorable treaty marking off the “Great Fence of Bulgaria” as the southern boundary of the Bulgar Khanate.35 The emperor Theophilus (829–842), in turn, preferred diplomacy to war so that he outfitted his throne room to awe the khan’s envoys.36 A golden tree stood near the throne; in its branches were steam-powered mechanical birds that chirped in unison. The throne’s flanking golden lions simultaneously roared through the power of steam. Finally, the throne itself could be suddenly raised to a second level, where attendants quickly changed the emperor’s ceremonial dress, while Bulgar envoys lay prostrate and facing the ground, reciting the khan’s petition. When they rose again, they would see Theophilus, originally clad in a silk robe sewed with emeralds, now dressed in one sewed with dazzling rubies or diamonds. Yet such diplomatic ploys might have whetted the khan’s appetite for more gold and silk rather than discouraged him.

What must have most impressed the khan’s ambassadors was Hagia Sophia and an imperial mass held beneath its great dome that was pierced at its base by forty glass windows and seemed to float on a flood of light. Today even the casual tourist gapes in awe at the dome hovering seventeen stories above. To steppe nomads, the Dome of Heaven crowned what must have been the dwelling of the all-powerful god of the blue skies. In 866, Khan Boris, who had secretly accepted baptism two years earlier, ordered his subjects to embrace Orthodox Christianity.37 From Byzantine missionaries, Boris received an autonomous church under its own patriarch, the Cyrillic alphabet and liturgy in Slavic, and a literate clergy who could keep records and turn a Bulgar khanate into a Christian kingdom. As a Christian Tzar, Boris fused Turk and Slav into a new Christian people, the Bulgarians, who entered the spiritual and cultural commonwealth of Byzantium, and so the new Christian world of Eastern Europe.

Tsar Symeon (893–927), Boris’s second son, received a Christian education in Constantinople, where he drank deeply from the heady brew of Orthodox theology and Byzantine political ideology. For a generation, Symeon waged abortive wars against Constantinople, but not in the fashion of a nomadic conqueror, but rather as a Christian monarch who, in the second war, sought to marry himself into the imperial family.38 Tsar Symeon was the first among future Slavic monarchs—Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian—who have aspired to sit on the throne of Constantinople. This political legacy still influences Russian foreign policy today. In 895, during his first war against Byzantium, Symeon even outmaneuvered the emperor Leo VI in Byzantine diplomacy.39 Leo VI incited the Magyars, Finno-Ugric speakers of the forest who had adopted the nomadic way of life, to attack the Bulgarians from the north.40 Symeon, however, convinced the even fiercer Pechenegs farther east to invade the homeland of the Magyars. Driven from the south Russian steppes, the Magyars crossed the Carpathian Mountains during the winter of 895–896 and settled on the Transylvanian grasslands.41 Western European chroniclers dreaded these newest barbarian marauders as Hunni (and so Hungarians), or Ougri (and so ogres). The Magyars, like the Avars before them, raided widely across Italy and Germany for the next sixty years, until they suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Otto the Great, Holy Roman Emperor, on the banks of the Lech in August 955.42 In 972, Geza, the Arpad khan of the Magyars, and his queen Sarolt together accepted baptism and the spiritual authority of the Pope, although they and their nation still practiced ancestral rites. Their son, the saintly King Stephen, turned the pagan Magyars into Christian Hungarians.43 Within a century, Hungary ceased to be an extension of the Eurasian steppes, and became a land of cities, villages, and ranches, and so the bastion of Latin Christendom against future invaders from the east. As a consequence of the migration of the Magyars, the Bulgarian Tsar lost control over the steppes north of the Danube, and ruled henceforth a Slavic Balkan kingdom, which Byzantine emperors incorporated into the empire in the late tenth and eleventh centuries.44 But the ethnic lines of today’s southeastern Europe were defined, although Ottoman rule would later complicate the mix.45 The Hungarians still dwell on the Pannonian and Transylvanian grasslands; Roman provincials speaking Latin or Illyrian languages retreated to the mountain zones, where they reemerged as Romanians or Albanians. The south Slavs—Slovenes, Croatians, Serbians, and Bulgarians—settled in the lands north of the treaty line negotiated between the Bulgar khan and Byzantine emperor in 814–816. The lands to the south of the boundary have remained Greek in language and Orthodox in faith.

Meanwhile, on the south Russian steppes, the emperor in Constantinople sought allies among the most powerful of the nomadic confederacies between the sixth and eleventh centuries. The emperor Justin II received an embassy from Ishtemi, yabgu of the Western Gök Turks, who demanded as his any tribute paid by the imperial government to the Avars, who were, after all, his slaves.46 Justin adroitly evaded any payouts, but he sacrificed a lucrative trade agreement for importing silk. The Western Turks continued to press west, reaching the great bend of the Don River and threatening the imperial port of Cherson in the Crimea. The emperor Tiberius Constantine sent the next mission to Tardu, the son and successor of Ishtemi, to arrange an alliance and an alternate route across the steppes to the cities of Transoxiana and so to the markets of the Silk Road now controlled by the Western Turks. Tardu, suspicious of Byzantine duplicity, greeted the imperial envoy as the one who spoke ten tongues and a single lie. He gestured by raising his fingers to his mouth, and likely nodding his head backward, today the gesture of refusal among modern Turks. A generation later, the political situation had changed for emperor and kaghan.47 The Tang emperor Taizong waged a war of conquest against the Eastern Turks, while the Western Turks warred among themselves over the succession. In 625, the emperor Heraclius concluded an alliance with Western Turkish tribes soon to be known as the Khazars.48 Their ten thousand horse archers under their commander Ziebel proved decisive in the victory over Sassanid Persia.

The Khazars initially headed a confederation of ten tribes who dwelled on the steppes along the northern shores of the Caspian Sea and constructed market towns of tents and cabins along the lower Volga River. Under able kaghans, scions of the royal Ashina family of the Gök Turks, the Khazars expanded to the west, to the lower reaches of the Dnieper River, and south to the northern foothills of the Caucasus.49 The Caspian became a veritable Khazar Sea, a popular designation still used by the Turks of Inner Asia today. The Bulgar tribes either retreated northeast to the middle Volga valley, where they accepted the Khazar kaghan as their overlord, or migrated southwest into the Roman Balkans. The Khazars proved invaluable allies to Constantinople for over two centuries. In just four years after his victory over Persia, Heraclius saw his work undone by Arab tribal armies united under the banner of Islam. The Arabs toppled the Sassanid Empire and overran Byzantine Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. A new world power, the Caliphate, emerged, aiming to conquer Constantinople, which Arab armies twice besieged and failed to capture in 671–674 and 717–718.50 At the same time, Arab armies repeatedly crossed the Caucasus Mountains to win the south Russian steppes for Islam. Byzantine emperor and Khazar kaghan allied against the common foe. During the seventh and eighth centuries, the Khazars beat back repeated Arab attacks, and in turn attacked Muslim military colonies in Armenia and Azerbaijan.51 On a single occasion, a kaghan was compelled to embrace Islam as the price of a treaty, but he renounced the faith as soon as the Muslim army withdrew from the steppes.52 The Khazars thus acted as a shield for Constantinople that ensured Byzantine mastery over the Black Sea and access to vital trade routes north to the Baltic Sea and east across the Eurasian steppes. Without the Khazar alliance, the Byzantine Empire might not have survived.

Byzantine emperors recruited many Khazar horse archers into the imperial army. The emperor Justinian II, the last of Heraclius’s dynasty, proved too arbitrarily autocratic even by Byzantine standards so that in 695 he was deposed and mutilated to disqualify him from the throne. His nose was slit. Justinian, now nicknamed Rhinometus or the Slit Nose, was banished to Cherson, but the ex-emperor ten years later escaped to the Khazar court.53 The kaghan likely viewed the emperor’s disfigurement, which Justinian concealed with a golden nose, as a ritual of bravery. He furnished Justinian with an army, and his sister as a wife who was renamed the new Theodora. Justinian regained his throne, but his excessive acts of vengeance ensured a second deposition, and execution.54 Henceforth, those deposed Byzantine emperors who were spared execution were awarded the retirement program of castration, blinding, and consignment to a remote monastery.

Even Justinian Rhinometus must have been impressed by the ceremony of the Khazar court.55 The kaghan ruled as the Son of Heaven; the silk ceiling of his great tent was embroidered with the sun, moon, and stars of the firmament against a blue background. An army of servants catered to his every need, and ritual dictated every act that betrayed familiarity with Chinese practices. A large harem of beautiful, exotic concubines proclaimed the kaghan’s virility and lordship, for no one woman was worthy to be his wife and queen. The kaghans, preoccupied by ritual, appointed the supreme commander or bek (Turkish for lord), and they rewarded tribal leaders and warriors with gifts gained from trade and war. The emperor Leo III, a tough Anatolian general who had seized the throne and defeated the Arabs in their final siege of Constantinople, married his son Constantine V to a Khazar princess renamed Irene of Khazaria.56 She popularized Khazar court protocol and her favorite silk dress with floral patterns (tzitzakion), for in Turkish, her name, Tzitzak, meant “flower princess.” The Byzantine court also adapted the Khazar bridal competition whereby the most beautiful woman was chosen to be the imperial spouse.57 The Byzantines added a test on Classical mythology and a golden apple to the winner in imitation of the Judgment of Paris.

The Khazar kaghans could maintain such an opulent court because their tent encampment at Atil soon emerged as the nexus of trade routes linking the lands around the Baltic and Caspian Seas, as well as caravans crossing the Caucasus to Baghdad and the cities of Iran, and across the Eurasian steppes to the cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin.58 Arab travelers and geographers of the tenth century report Atil straddled both banks of the Volga River and was partitioned into quarters for each community of foreign residents. According to one such report, the palace was located on an island in the middle of the river, and it was connected to both banks by a number of pontoon bridges.59 International trade brought many foreign merchants who settled permanently at Atil, where they engaged in marketing Chinese silk, Indian spices, and Persian cottons in exchange for slaves, furs, and timber destined for the cities of Eastern Islam. Among the merchant families were members of prominent Jewish banking houses in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordova. From them, the Khazar court learned of Judaism, and converted to the faith by the opening of the ninth century. The Khazars gained familiarity with Muslim silver coins, dirhems, and minted their own imitations (called in contemporary records yarmaqs). Two of these, bearing Kufic inscriptions, have surfaced in the Spillings Hoard found on the Swedish island of Gotland and carry the profession of faith altered from Muhammad to Musa (Moses) as God’s prophet.60 The coins are dated by the Islamic calendar to the year 837/8 AD, so the court had embraced Judaism before this date. The Khazar kaghan might have opted for Judaism because adopting either Islam or Orthodox Christianity could lead to political clashes with Byzantium or the Caliphate.61 Far more significant appeals were a universal, omnipotent God easily equated with the Tengri of the eternal blue sky, Judaism’s ritual purity, and its stress on the written word.62 In the cosmopolitan markets of Atil, Jewish merchants and bankers, versed in many written languages and with wide-flung business connections, were welcomed by a court that had grown dependent on the profits of international trade. It was long debated whether the Khazars contributed significantly to later Jewish communities in Russia after the collapse of their kaghanate in 965. Recent DNA testing indicates that this is not the case,63 but the Khazars contributed significantly to the formation of the early Russian state of Kiev.64

The conversion of the Khazars to Judaism cooled relations between Atil and Constantinople from the mid-ninth century on. The Khazar kaghan politely refused overtures to embrace Orthodox Christianity, and tolerated all faiths practiced by the diverse peoples of his confederacy. The imperial government thus sought out new allies among the foes of the Khazar kaghan, foremost the Pechenegs, Turkish nomads recently arrived from the Kazakhstan steppes, and the Rus, Swedes who had crossed the Baltic Sea and followed the Volga River to trade at Atil.65 Each could be a dreaded foe, and an even more frightening ally. Even so, emperors recruited warriors of each race into the imperial army. The Pechenegs, organized into eight hordes (or armies in Turkish), had migrated across the northern edge of the south Russian steppes so as to avoid the pastures of the Inner Tribes of the Khazar confederacy. They expelled some vassals of the Khazar kaghan, notably the Magyars, and subjected many others. By 860, the Pechenegs ruled a rival confederation of the nomadic tribes between the Don and Dniester Rivers, and they could easily threaten the Byzantine cities of the Crimea.66 Nearly a century later, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, an affable and learned emperor, wrote a practical treatise on the governing of the empire, De Administrando Imperio, in which he advised his young son Romanus never to endanger the alliance with the Pechenegs, for they were by far the most formidable of all the empire’s neighbors.67

By 860, many Rus, Swedish merchant princes and warriors, had shifted their primary trade route away from the Volga and the Caspian Sea eight hundred miles west, to the Dnieper and the Black Sea, so that they could trade directly with Constantinople.68 For over one hundred fifty years, the Rus had traded in the market towns along the Volga River with the permission of the Khazar kaghan. They had to pay the costs of dealing with merchants of diverse nationalities who were the essential middlemen. The Rus, well-armed Viking warriors from Scandinavia, provided the slaves destined for Muslim harems, barracks, and plantations by raiding the Slavic tribes of the Russian forests. In exchange, the Rus acquired numerous Muslim silver coins, Chinese silks, and exotic goods of every description. The most remarkable item is a bronze statuette of the Buddha from Gandhara that dates to the sixth century.69 It was unearthed in excavations at Helgö, a Swedish market town on Lake Mälaren. A Rus merchant on the Volga likely acquired it as a conversation piece to settle a debt with a merchant in one of the Khazar market towns. In 921/2, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a jurist in Islamic law, visited the Khazar court at Atil as the envoy of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir. In his account, ibn Fadlan was fascinated by the tall, fair-haired Rus, and so reports their methods of trade and a Viking ship burial on the banks of the Volga that was spectacularly re-created in the film “The Thirteenth Warrior” (1999).70 The Rus, however, were profoundly influenced by their hosts. The Rus prince at Atil, styled kaghan, was enthroned on a tribunal surrounded by bodyguards and concubines of his harem. He donned the silk robes and jewelry gained in trade to project his wealth and power.71 A generation later, the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon gives the earliest description of a Rus prince, Sviatoslav of Kiev, who parlayed with the emperor John Tzimisces on the banks of the Danube.

After the treaties were arranged, Sphendosthlavos [Sviatoslav] asked to come and speak with the emperor [John Tzimisces]. And the latter came without delay on horseback to the banks of the Istros [Danube], clad in armor ornamented in gold, accompanied by a vast squadron of armed horsemen adorned with gold. Sphendosthlavos arrived sailing along the river in a Scythian light boat, grasping an oar and rowing with his companions as if he was one of them. His appearance was as follows: he was of moderate height, neither taller than average, nor particularly short; his eyebrows were thick; he had grey eyes and a snub nose; his beard was clean-shaven, but he let the hair grow abundantly on his upper lip where it was bushy and long; and he shaved his head completely, except for a lock of hair that hung down on one side, as a mark of nobility of his ancestry; he was solid in the neck, broad in the chest and very well articulated in the rest of his body; he had a rather angry and savage appearance; on one ear was fastened a gold earring, adorned with two pearls with a red gemstone, between them; his clothing was white, no different from that of his companions except in cleanliness. After talking briefly with the emperor about the reconciliation, he departed sitting on the helmsman’s seat of the boat. Thus the war of the Romans with the Scythians came to an end.72 This Scandinavian ruler of Kiev had sported the garb of the Eurasian steppes, because his forefathers had learned from the Khazars their dress, mores, cuisine, and court protocol.

During the early ninth century, the Rus founded fortified settlements at Novgorod (in Old Norse, Holmgard) and Kiev (ON Koenugard) to open a new route down the Dnieper to the Black Sea and Constantinople. At the opening of the twelfth century, an unknown monk in the Cave Monastery outside of Kiev composed the Russian Primary Chronicle. The chronicler struggled to reconcile legends and early documents into a coherent narrative. He reports that in 862, warring Slavic tribes agreed to invite a Viking sea king, Rurik (ON Erik), to rule over them and to establish laws.73 Rurik, who resided in the Norse market town of Novgorod, exercised authority over the Norse settlements along the river routes linking the Baltic and Black Seas. His jarls, or earls, Askold (ON Höskuld) and Dir (ON Dýr), administered Kiev on the Dnieper, from whence they launched the first Rus naval attack on Constantinople in 860.74 Rurik’s successors turned themselves into territorial monarchs ruling from Kiev. They subjected the Slavs of the forests, built towns, and exacted tribute in furs and slaves. Commercial and military expeditions required organization, because Rus ships had to navigate seven hundred miles of the Dnieper to the Black Sea, and then another five hundred miles along the western shores of the Black Sea to the Bosporus and Constantinople. In its lower reaches, the Dnieper turns south, dropping over 160 feet through nine granite outcrops stretching over fifty miles. The nine rapids and numerous small islands make the Dnieper unnavigable so that the Rus had to make a portage by dragging their ships over an improvised roadway.75 Since Rus ships were vulnerable to Pecheneg attacks, the Rus had to cooperate with the Pechenegs.

The Rus, as Vikings, also found the Theodosian Walls challenging rather than daunting. Three times in the tenth century, Rus fleets attacked the city.76 Each time, the Rus were repelled by imperial warships armed with siphons squirting out steams of liquid incendiaries known as Greek fire.77 Each time afterward, the prince of Kiev negotiated a favorable commercial treaty. Thereafter, many Scandinavian merchants in the capital and warriors in the service of the emperor accepted baptism. In 957, Queen Olga (ON Helga), regent for her son Prince Sviatoslav (ON Sveinheld), was inspired by a mass in Hagia Sophia to convert on the spot.78 Her son Sviatoslav, an obdurate pagan, instead saw Constantinople as a prize. In 965, he allied with the Pechenegs to sack Atil and topple the Khazar confederacy.79 Two years later, he invaded Bulgaria, and steadily advanced on Constantinople.80 In 970–971, the emperor John Tzimisces drove the Rus back into Dorystolum on the lower Danube, and compelled the Rus to withdraw to Kiev.81 The Pechenegs turned on their allies the Rus as they were negotiating the Dnieper Rapids. The Rus were slaughtered in droves, and Sviatoslav’s skull joined the Pecheneg kaghan’s tableware.

The ill-advised Balkan campaigns of Sviatoslav ended in catastrophic defeat and the destruction of a generation of Rus warriors. The Byzantine emperor John Tzimisces, received in triumph as the savior of Christendom, promptly annexed a devastated Bulgaria.82 The Pechenegs were the real winners because they henceforth dominated the steppes from the lower Danube to the lower Volga Rivers. For the emperor in Constantinople, the Pechenegs had grown too powerful, and he found new allies in Turkish tribes, the Cumans, migrating west from the steppes of Kazakhstan, and, surprisingly, from the Rus too.83 The greatest of Byzantine warrior emperors, Basil II, the Bulgar-slayer, turned to Prince Vladimir of Kiev during a civil war in 989.84 Vladimir furnished Basil with six thousand elite Varangian warriors wielding double-headed axes, who surprised and slaughtered the rebel army. Henceforth, the Varangians, mercenaries recently arrived from Scandinavia, served as the imperial bodyguard, and left their runic graffiti carved on the city’s monuments, including the Hagia Sophia. In return, Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity and received the emperor’s sister Anna as his bride.85 The Russian chronicler reported a later legend, that is probably true, that Vladimir was convinced to embrace Orthodox Christianity after holding a debate among the theologians of the leading monotheistic faiths.86 The final choice came down between Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam. The Byzantine missionary won over Vladimir by demonstrating God’s omnipotence through icons, and affirming that as Christians, the Rus could still drink vodka, essential for surviving brutal Russian winters.

Just like Tsar Boris of Bulgaria, Vladimir gained an autonomous church with its own patriarch, the Slavic liturgy, and a clergy who could staff a royal bureaucracy. Within a generation, Scandinavian nobles and Slav subjects turned into Russians, who were Slavic in speech, Orthodox in faith, and Byzantine in culture. Russian princes built domed churches and palaces that transformed Norse towns into Christian Russian cities.87 Russian peasants with improved plows and oxen relentlessly pushed south and southeast to put under cultivation the black earth of the mixed steppe and forest zones of the middle Dnieper and the upper reaches of the Don and Donets Basin. Pechenegs, Bulgars on the Volga (who had embraced Islam in the early tenth century), and later Cumans were all alarmed by the advance of Kievan Russia that threatened their way of life. Furthermore, Russian Christian princes ceased to be trading partners because they refused to sell their Christian Slavic subjects as slaves. Denied a market in Slavic slaves, Turkic-speaking nomads raided Russian villages and towns for captives. Turk and Russian quickly became sworn enemies, and the resulting desultory frontier warfare defined the future of Russia.88

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the emperor Alexius Comnenus, the most intelligent man ever to sit on the imperial throne, forestalled a Pecheneg migration into the Balkans and so won the final Byzantine triumph over nomadic foes. In 1091, Alexius allied with the Cumans, Kipchak Turks from the Kazakhstan steppes, and together they annihilated the Pechenegs in a great battle at Levounion, near the mouth of the Hebrus River (the modern Maritsa), which empties in the Aegean Sea.89 The Cumans went on to forge the fourth great nomadic confederacy on the south Russian steppes, but Alexius did not have to deal with this threat because Russian princes henceforth battled the nomads. Cumans and Russians warred among themselves and against each other for the next two hundred fifty years. An unknown author was inspired to compose the first Russian heroic lay about Prince Igor of Novgorod-Seversk, whom the Cumans defeated in 1185.90 The epic, while composed in prose, has a poetic cadence rich with alliteration and assonance so that the language conveys magnificent images of nature and omens foreshadowing Igor’s defeat.91 Prince Igor is exalted as an exemplary Orthodox prince who urges unity in the face of the Cumans. He is defeated and captured, but soon escapes. Meanwhile, Yaroslavna, Igor’s wife, atop the city walls of Putivi, delivers the most moving passages as she laments to the winds and rivers for cruelly abandoning her husband at the decisive moment. This powerful epic epitomized how the frontier wars defined the Russians in the generations before the Mongol invasion. The epic, long forgotten, was rediscovered in a monastic library in 1795. It inspired the Russian music, poetry, and paintings of the nineteenth century, foremost the opera “Prince Igor” composed by Alexander Borodin, and completed and performed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1890.

For six centuries, the emperor of New Rome, Constantinople, forged a subtle Byzantine diplomacy against the nomads of the western Eurasian steppes that is still the envy of geopolitical policy makers today.92 The imperial government countered the Bulgars and Slavs who invaded the Balkans, and eventually won their spiritual loyalty within a wider Orthodox commonwealth. Byzantine missionaries scored their greatest success by converting the Russians, who fell heirs to the imperial legacy as the Third Rome. Foremost, successive emperors repeatedly signed and broke a bewildering web of alliances with the Avars, Khazars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Cumans. They thereby saved Constantinople from facing a mighty nomadic confederacy under a new Scourge of God. For all its successes against Turkic-speaking nomads from the north, the Byzantine Empire was toppled suddenly, unexpectedly, and decisively by other nomads from the east, the Seljuk Turks fighting in the name of Allah and his Prophet Muhammad. These newcomers were scions of the Eastern Gök Turks, who had overthrown the Rouran khanate and challenged Tang China.