Apparently unaware that he was dealing with a Viking, the businessman offered Rurik a deal: You come help me take over Novgorod from my two biggest rivals, and we’ll split the cash and prizes.

So Jarl Rurik, the notorious plunderer, sea-raider, and all-around scary guy, rolled into town to settle the dispute. He brought with him his two brothers, Sinaus and Truvor, as well as about ten thousand of their closest mead-chugging, axe-swinging buddies.

The other powerful nobles of Novgorod pulled together armies to stop Rurik from entering the city, but it didn’t take long for the Vikings to carve their way through their enemies and throw the rival groups out on their butts. Then, seeing the situation that fate had handed him, Rurik figured, “What the heck, while I’m here I’ll just take over.” So in 862 he seized control of Novgorod, declared himself Iron-Fisted Autocrat Now and Forever, and named his new empire after his Viking tribe: the Rus.

Now, by this point in history, Novgorod was already a highly advanced, incredibly wealthy city that served as a trade hub connecting Europe to the Arab world, the Byzantines, and even the Chinese. Being connected to the world’s three wealthiest and most advanced civilizations at this time in history was pretty amazing, and Rurik used the massive amounts of money he was able to bring in to increase the size of his military and go to war with the other Slavic tribes of Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic.

For his first conquest, Rurik’s troops headed down the Dnieper from Novgorod aboard two hundred longships, where they ran into another powerful Slavic city, Kiev, conquered it, and added it to Rurik’s empire.

Rurik’s top lieutenants, Askold and Dir, went even farther south, rampaging through the Black Sea in a frenzy of pillaging and sacking, but that party eventually came to an end when they foolishly tried to capture Constantinople itself. You have to admit it took huge guts to try to conquer the world’s most heavily fortified city with just a couple hundred determined Vikings, but the Byzantines had a little thing called Greek fire (the Muslims would later use it in their flamethrowers) that made this attack a very bad idea.

Greek fire was a flammable fire-oil that was shot out of ship-mounted flamethrowers and burned so hot that you couldn’t even put it out by jumping into the ocean. As soon as you swam to the surface, the oil would catch fire again and keep burning. The recipe for Greek fire is so mysterious that to this day we don’t know how they did it. (But it’s basically the same as modern-day napalm.)

Engaging the Viking fleet outside the triple walls of Constantinople, the Greeks torched the Norse warships, sending the remaining ships running back to Kiev. Askold and Dir were so impressed by the Byzantine Empire that they converted to Christianity, declared Kiev an Orthodox Christian city-state independent of Novgorodian rule, and rebelled against Rurik. Naturally, Rurik was like, “Okay, jokers, have fun with that,” and had them killed and replaced.