SWEDISH VIKINGS AND traders, denied the easy access to the western seas enjoyed by their Danish and Norwegian counterparts, turned east instead. Here, from as early as the mid-seventh century, they began to colonise the shores of the Baltic Sea (founding a colony at Grobina in Latvia around 6501). By the mid-eighth century they had pushed deeper into the Russian interior, gradually taking control of trade routes down the Dnieper and establishing a series of settlements (or colonising existing ones) that would form the nucleus of what eventually evolved into the Russian state.
Memories of Scandinavian involvement along the eastern Baltic coastlines ran very deep; the Swedish king Yngvar (probably dating to the seventh century) is said to have harried the lands of the Estonians (and died during one such campaign), while the last of the Swedish Yngling dynasty, Ivar Vidfadmi (‘the Far-Traveller’), is described as having a realm that encompassed Sweden, Denmark, Saxony and much of the Baltic.2 It is not until the mid-ninth century, however, that such involvement emerges from the mists of semi-legend into a more historical framework. Even then, attempts to understand the process by which the Vikings came to establish a number of principalities based around Kiev, Novgorod and a series of other trading towns are bedevilled by controversy. This focuses mainly on the extent to which the incoming Vikings adapted themselves to existing Slavic institutions and were absorbed by pre-existing Slav (and Finnic) populations, or whether, in contrast, the states they founded were fundamentally Scandinavian affairs. The proponents of the theory that the settlements were basically Slavic are known as ‘anti-Normanists’, in contrast to the ‘Normanist’ protagonists of a purely Viking ancestry for the proto-Russian states.3 Unsurprisingly, the anti-Normanist theory has long held sway in Russian historiography, and particularly in Soviet times, when it was an almost obligatory orthodoxy. Scandinavian historians, in contrast, have tended to emphasise the Viking role in the foundation and development of states in the area. The truth, as ever, almost certainly lies in the middle – the Vikings did not arrive in a deserted landscape or develop totally virgin sites, and thus there must have been a significant Slavic component even at the early stages of the Viking settlement of Russia.
Exactly when the Vikings moved southwards into Russia from bases they established in the eastern Baltic such as Grobin, Apuola and Elbing (on the Bay of Gdansk) is unclear.4 There is documentary evidence, however, that by the 830s they had certainly managed to penetrate down the Dnieper as far as Constantinople. The Frankish Annals of St Bertin relate the story of a diplomatic mission from the Byzantine emperor Theophilus, which arrived at the distant court of the Frankish ruler, Louis the Pious, at Ingelheim in 839. The Greek ambassadors are said to have brought with them a group of men ‘called Rhos’ who had themselves come as envoys to the Byzantine emperor, but who had been unable to return by the way they had come, as this was now blocked by hostile tribes, and so instead they had taken the far longer route westwards into Francia. Louis had the men interrogated and found that they belonged to the Swedish nation (Suenones), whose ruler was known as the khagan. He suspected the men of being spies, and kept them at court until he could be satisfied of their good intentions. The Annals do not relate what happened next, but presumably in the end the Frankish king allowed them to go on their way.5
The episode features the first appearance of the name Rhos or Rus, the term by which the Scandinavian settlers of Russia became known, and from which ultimately the country took its name. The term’s origin is unknown, although it could be derived from Ruotsi, the Finnish term for Swedes,6 or alternatively from the Old Norse roÞer, meaning ‘rowers’. More fanciful interpretations include that put forward by the Italian historian Liutprand of Cremona, who believed that it derived from the Greek word for ‘red’ and referred to the ruddy complexions of the Norsemen; and the theory that the name comes from a tribe of Alans called the Rukhs-As who lived in the Caucasus.7 The term Varangians, by which the Norsemen were alternatively known, and which came to refer to mercenaries from Scandinavia – and specifically those in the service of the Byzantine emperor8 – could derive from the Old Norse vár (‘pledge’), which may denote a group of men sworn to mutual support, either warriors or merchants.9
The written account of the Viking advent in Russia is very problematic, as it relies on interpretation of the Povest’ Vremennykh Let (‘The Chronicle of Bygone Years’ or Russian Primary Chronicle), which was composed around 1116.10 The Rus are first mentioned in it in 852, when the ‘Russes attacked Tsargrad [Constantinople]’. Then in 859 comes the entry: ‘The Varangians from beyond the sea imposed tribute on the Chuds, the Slavs, the Merians, the Ves’, and the Krivichians.’ In 860–2, the Chronicle further records:
The tributaries of the Varangians drove them beyond the sea and, refusing them further tribute, set out to govern themselves. There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe . . . They said to themselves, ‘Let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the Law.’ They accordingly went overseas to the Varangian Rus . . . The Chuds, the Slavs, the Krivichians, and the Ves’ then said to the people of Rus’, ‘Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule us and reign over us.’ They thus selected three brothers, with their kinsfolk, who took with them all the Rus’ and migrated. The oldest, Rurik, located himself in Novgorod; the second, Sineus, at Beloozero, and the third, Truvor, in Izborsk. On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgorod became known as the land of the Rus.11
Although the precise details of the story cannot be relied upon too much, the account probably represents a memory of the takeover of a pre-existing centre established by Slavs at Kiev for the collection of tribute among the surrounding tribes. The political make-up of this arena into which the Vikings were now entering was not a simple matter of a patchwork of Slavic tribes. More organised states held sway in the region, too. The Khazars – a people of Turkic origin, whose lands lay between the Volga, the northern Caucasus and the Sea of Azov – had steadily extended their control westwards during the seventh century. Their empire, the world’s only Jewish state between the Roman conquest of Palestine and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, had, after a bitter war against the Arabs in 722–37, reached a modus vivendi with the Abbasid caliphate (based at Baghdad), which allowed it to expand north and west from its base around the Caspian Sea into the forest zone of Russia. In doing so, the Khazars absorbed or subjugated a series of Finnish and Slavic tribes from whom they collected tribute, mainly in furs, beeswax and other forest products. They also came to exercise hegemony over the Volga Bulgars, another Turkic group, who had settled on the Volga around 675 and whose capital Bolghar (near modern Kazan in Russia) was an important trading entrepôt. It was probably some disturbance in this system caused by Scandinavian incomers from the north that is remembered in the Primary Chronicle account.
More tangible evidence of the earliest Scandinavian settlers in Russia comes from a series of settlements in the north of Russia, beginning with Staraya Ladoga (‘Old Ladoga’), a small trading settlement set up by local Slavs around 750 on the left bank of the Volkhov, north-east of St Petersburg. Into this conduit for trade further to the east, and for the proceeds of tribute collection amongst the Slavs and Finnish tribes to the west, there flowed large quantities of Islamic silver coins (often known as dirhams), the first hoards of which appear as early as 780.12 The prosperity this brought to Staraya Ladoga allowed the settlement to grow considerably in the 830s, with new houses being built to the north and the expansion of local manufacturing, such as the working of metal, antler and amber. Unlike their counterparts in western Europe, the Vikings did not come to Ladoga to prey on local monasteries and pillage prosperous nearby towns; there simply were no such appetising targets. The purpose of their colony must have been primarily to tap into local trading networks, including the gathering of furs as tributes, which they could then carry to Bolghar or further south to the Khazar capital at Itil.
At first the northern traders – probably mainly from Sweden – simply visited, but at length they came to stay and Staraya Ladoga became a more predominantly Norse settlement (which they called Aldeigjuborg), with an extensive Scandinavian-style cemetery on its outskirts. Hundreds of burial mounds dot the landscape, eloquent testimony to the travels of merchants who passed up the River Neva to Lake Ladoga and then to the confluence of the Volkhov. Still later archaeological levels include Slav-style single-roomed cottages, and so it is supposed that by the tenth century the Vikings at Staraya Ladoga had become assimilated, or at least had absorbed many of the practices of the local Slavic population.
Eventually the Viking Rus felt the need to control the trade further down the river and established a new settlement at Riurikovo Gorodishche on Lake Ilmen. With a more fertile hinterland than Ladoga, Gorodishche was able to support a larger population and became in turn the launching point for still further Scandinavian expansion, as the Norsemen moved east, founding new settlements such as that at Beloozero, on the lake of the same name. From all of these bases the Vikings used a mixture of force and economic inducement to dominate the local tribes, forging alliances with local chieftains to gain access to furs and other trade goods. Eventually they began to push southwards towards the Dnieper, reaching Kiev, and shortly after 900 they set up a base at Gnezdovo (around 8 miles west of Smolensk), from where they could dominate the routes between the Khazar empire to the south-east and the southern shores of the Baltic.13 The importance of this settlement is indicated by the size of its cemetery, which has more than 3,000 burial mounds. Although only around a small proportion can be identified as exclusively Norse, the presence of a large number of Scandinavian artefacts suggests that the site was a significant centre of Rus power on the Middle Dnieper.14
We are fortunate in possessing a number of Arabic descriptions of the Rus, notably that by the Persian geographer Ibn Rusteh in the early tenth century.15 He recounts:
The Rus live on a peninsula surrounded by a marsh. The peninsula on which they live is three days’ journey in extent and is covered in wood and thick scrub. It is extremely unhealthy and the ground is so sodden that it moves underfoot. Their leader bears the title Khagan-Rus. They make war against the Slavs; they take them prisoner and sell them to the Khazars and the Bulgars. They do not cultivate the land and live off what they pillage in the lands of the Slavs. At the birth of an infant, the father places a naked sword in front of the baby and says ‘I leave you no fortune, no inheritance, save what you can take at the point of this blade’. They have no villages, no estates or fields. Their only occupation is trading in sable and squirrel and other kinds of skins . . . Their garments are always clean, and the men adorn themselves with golden arm-rings. They treat their slaves well and wear showy clothes, since they engage in trade . . .16
Another account of the Rus comes from Ibn Fadlan, who participated in an embassy from the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir to the king of the Volga Bulgars in 921–2.17 Ibn Fadlan came along as the expedition’s secretary and provided a vivid description of the Rus whom he met encamped by the River Itil (the Volga). He was admiring of their physique, noting that they are ‘as tall as date palms, blond and ruddy’, while each of them ‘has an axe, a sword and a knife with him and . . . never let themselves be separated from their weapons. The swords are broad bladed, provided with rills, and of the Frankish type.’18 Ibn Fadlan describes how the Rus prayed to wooden idols placed into the ground near their ships, and built wooden houses close to their moorings; their slave girls and concubines wore neck-rings of gold and necklaces of coloured glass beads. But he is repelled by what he regards as the Vikings’ filthy habits, as they all wash their faces and hair from the same bowl. Their lack of cleanliness, he concludes, makes them like ‘wild asses’.
Ibn Fadlan encountered the Rus far to the east of their core territory and, by the time he met them in the 920s, they seem to have been already well established in western Russia. The Russian Primary Chronicle gives an account of these developments, which, if oversimplified, may contain a core of truth. Within two years of the Varangians’ arrival in Russia, two of their leaders, Sineus and Truvor, both died, and the third brother Rurik took over their territory, after which he based himself at Novgorod.19 A short time later a party of Vikings, dissatisfied with the prospects for enrichment there, sailed further down the Dnieper, finally spying ‘a small city on a hill’, which they promptly seized. Their prize was Kiev, which was most probably a pre-existing Slav settlement, but its capture did not slake the Vikings’ thirst for plunder, and a group led by Askold and Dir carried on southwards towards Constantinople.20
The Rus reached the Byzantine capital, which they would come to know as Miklegard, ‘The Great City’, on 18 June 860, and the unexpected appearance of these new barbarians prompted panic among the Greeks. ‘Why,’ wailed Patriarch Photius, who was entrusted with the defence of the city in the absence of Emperor Michael III on campaign against the Arabs, ‘has this dreadful thunderbolt fallen on us out of the furthest north?’21 The Rus are described as sailing on a calm sea towards Constantinople, their swords raised aloft ‘as if threatening death’. In two sermons composed to steady the nerves of the citizenry (although their content is quite likely to have had the opposite effect), Photius links the advent of the Rus to biblical prophecies such as that in Jeremiah when the Israelites are warned: ‘Behold a people cometh forth from the north country . . . they are cruel and have no mercy; their voice roareth like the sea.’ The Rus are said to be ‘an obscure nation, a nation of no account, a nation ranked among slaves’, which made the shock of their appearance at the city walls all the more profound.
In the end the attack did not amount to much, despite the patriarch’s graphic description that ‘everything was full of dead bodies; the flow of rivers was turned into blood; some of the fountains and reservoirs it was no longer possible to distinguish, as their cavities were made level with corpses’.22 Photius ascribed the city’s escape to divine intervention brought down on the Vikings by processions around the city wall: the mystic power of the Himation, the sacred robe of the Virgin Mary, which the citizenry held aloft, is said to have caused a tempest to blow up, scattering the invaders’ fleet. Whether Askold and Dir’s expedition really did encounter a storm, or whether they were otherwise deterred from continuing their raid, the pair did not last long afterwards. They were killed, according to the Primary Chronicle, by a relative of Rurik called Oleg, who then established himself in Kiev.
The Vikings’ eastern trade (as measured by the inflow of Islamic dirhams) increased significantly in the 860s–880s, the period immediately after the attack on Constantinople, and the prospect of increasing riches may have encouraged the Rus to consolidate their hold on the trade routes. After a brief dip in the late ninth century, mercantile traffic once again surged, as the Samanids of central Asia, in the throes of constructing a new empire, began to produce silver dirhams in large quantities.23 The routes by which trade reached the Rus-controlled areas shifted northwards and no longer went via Itil on the Volga, but instead through Transoxiana (in Samanid-controlled territory) and then across the steppe to Volga Bulgar. This influx of silver brought great prosperity to the Viking settlements in Russia, although much of it ultimately made its way to Scandinavia, where it formed a great part of the large number of hoards found on Gotland.
To what extent the followers of Oleg were independent actors, free of Khazar (or Bulgar) overlordship, or indeed whether the political situation was more complex still, with larger numbers of independent Scandinavian groups than the sources suggest, it is difficult to know, given the great bias of the Russian Primary Chronicle towards relating the dynastic history of the house of Rurik. The Chronicle gives an account of a series of campaigns by Oleg against the Slav tribes in the area around Kiev; in 883 he is recorded as having attacked the Derevlane (and taken a large tribute of black marten fur from them), while in the succeeding two years his armies struck the Severiane and Radimichi in turn (the latter are recorded as having previously paid tribute to the Khazars).
Now well established on the Middle Dnieper, the Vikings then struck south. In 907 Oleg is said to have led a second attack on Constantinople (although there is some doubt as to the historicity of the raid).24 He embarked in a fleet of 200 ships, taking the same route as Askold and Dir before him. Yet when Oleg arrived at Miklegard, he found the Golden Horn, the city’s natural harbour, had been blocked off by a chain.25 The Rus prince was not to be turned aside, and simply mounted his ships on wheels and had them bypass the obstacle by rolling over the land into the Horn (a stratagem also used by the Ottoman Turks in 1453). Seeing the danger, the Greeks promised to pay Oleg tribute in return for his departure in peace, though not without first having attempted to assassinate him with poisoned food and wine. Pagans still, the Norsemen swore oaths by their god Perun not to continue with their attack, and departed, laden with gold and new silk sails for the ships.
There are some reasons to believe that, even if Oleg’s 907 attack is apocryphal, Viking attacks were something the Byzantines felt they needed to guard against. The Taktika of Leo VI, a military manual from the 890s detailing tactics to be used by the imperial navy against a variety of foes, makes reference to the ‘northern Scythians’ who employed small, rapid vessels in their assaults, which seems very likely to be a reference to the Rus.26 In any case, the agreement of 907, which stipulated that the Rus would not be allowed to stay within the city itself, was supplemented by a further treaty in 911, which set down in much greater detail the terms under which the Norsemen were permitted to trade there. Interestingly, the Rus envoys in 911 are listed as Karl, Ingjald, Farulf, Bermund, Hrollaf, Gunnar, Harold, Karni, Frithleif, Horarr, Angantyr, Throand, Leithulf, Fast and Steinvith. Although transcribed in the actual treaty into Greek, these are exclusively Scandinavian names and indicate that at this point in the early tenth century Slavic influence on the Viking elite at Kiev was still comparatively slight.
The clauses of the 911 treaty deal with the ransom of Christian prisoners held in Rus territory and the obligation to return slaves who had escaped, as well as the procedure for dealing with criminal acts committed by the Rus while in Byzantine territory. The treaty states that such crimes were to be settled amongst themselves if they concerned only Norsemen, but were to be dealt with according to imperial law if they concerned others. The Rus were to be permitted to reside in the city for six months (a privilege otherwise accorded only to Syrians) and were exempted from all the normal customs dues.
Oleg died in 914. There had been a prophecy that his favourite stallion would be the cause of his death, and so Oleg had the animal sent away (although he ordered that it should still be cared for). Finally, after four years, Oleg found that he was missing the horse and went to visit the stables where it was kept. On being told the beast had died, he ordered its skull brought to him and stamped on it, but as he did so a venomous snake slithered out from beneath the shattered bones and bit him. It was thus the very act of showing his contempt for the oracle that brought about Oleg’s doom. However he really died,27 Oleg was succeeded by his son Igor, although the gap of several decades between these two events casts some doubt on the chronology of the Russian Primary Chronicle.
In 941, Igor renewed the attack against the Byzantine empire, gathering a large fleet – though probably not the 10,000 vessels the Primary Chronicle, in a fit of hyperbole, claims he mustered28 – which he launched on a series of raids around the Black Sea. This time, the Byzantines countered with Greek Fire, a secret weapon developed in the late seventh century to counter invading Arab fleets, whose precise ingredients have not been established.29 It probably contained some kind of petroleum and saltpetre and may have been in the form of a gel – something like napalm – which was initially delivered by hurling it in earthenware pots (like hand grenades) or by tossing from a trebuchet. Eventually the Byzantines seem to have learnt to pump it out of tubes, like a flame-thrower. Whatever it contained, Greek Fire’s devastating impact on enemy ships – continuing to burn even in contact with water – is clear: the terrified Rus are said to have hurled themselves from their ships, preferring drowning to being burnt alive in the flames. Some of them are said to have caught alight, even in the water, while many of the rest, wearing heavy cuirasses and helmets, simply sank to the bottom. A chastened Igor retreated with the remains of his fleet, which according to one source amounted to just ten vessels from the whole grand flotilla.30 Nonetheless, Igor returned with another fleet in 944, this time reinforced by an army including Slavs and Pechenegs (a nomadic group that had emerged into the historical record with an attack against the Rus in 941, but who were now temporarily allied with them). Forewarned of the approaching armada, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus bought Igor off with a handsome gift of gold and silks, although the Pechenegs still inflicted terrible damage, as they were left behind in the Balkans to plunder their way home to Kiev.
The agreement to leave the Byzantines alone was confirmed by a new treaty in 944, the terms of which were rather less favourable to the Rus than that of 911; they would now need to produce certificates stating how many ships they had brought with them before being allowed to trade, and were henceforth restricted to the purchase of fifty bezants worth of silk.31 The Rus were also no longer allowed to remain for the winter at the mouth of the Dnieper, thus preventing them from basing a fleet of larger warships there – a wise precaution in view of the Vikings’ progression from overwintering to conquest and settlement elsewhere in Europe. Another telling change from the 911 treaty is that the names of those who witnessed it on the Rus side are less overwhelmingly Scandinavian – the creep of Slavicisation had clearly reached the Kievan elite.
The final stipulation about not overwintering means that the account written by none other than Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus of a Rus trading convoy (in his De Administrando Imperio, ‘On the Administration of the Empire’, a kind of guidance manual for future emperors) must date from a little before the 944 treaty. The Rus fleet, Constantine explains, gathered each winter before the spring thaw at Kiev, spending the time until the river became completely navigable in June in building new boats (which the emperor describes as being hollowed out of a single tree trunk). On the appointed day the fleet mustered at Vitichev32 and then descended down the Dnieper together. The principal hazards were twofold. The first was a 45-mile section of rapids (between modern Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia in the Ukraine), where the river was only navigable at the highest June water, and even then the cargoes had to be unloaded and carried by slaves while the Rus carefully navigated their vessels through the treacherous rocks using poles. At some points even this was not enough, and the ships had to be portaged – carried overland until a more tranquil section of water was reached. The emperor records the evocative names that the Scandinavians gave these rapids, including Essupi (‘the drinker’), Gelandri (‘the yeller’), Aifor (‘the ever-fierce’ or ‘impassable’) and Leanti (‘the laugher’).
If the hazards of the river were not enough, there was the equally dangerous threat that the nomadic tribes whose territory bordered the river might attack the Rus as they were at their most vulnerable, during the portage of the boats. In 972, the Pechenegs did just that, killing Igor’s successor, Svyatoslav. Finally, if they had navigated safely between rapids and nomads, the convoys arrived at St Gregory’s Island.33 Here, in the shadow of a great oak tree, the Vikings made sacrificial offerings in gratitude at their safe deliverance, before proceeding on to the island of Aitherios (Berezany, on the Black Sea near Odessa), where they rested for several days before the much more straightforward journey along the Black Sea coast to Constantinople itself.
His ambitions towards Constantinople temporarily thwarted, Igor turned his attention eastwards towards the areas dominated by the Khazars, the Bulgars and, further to the south and east, by the Arabs. Securing the trade routes here under permanent Rus control might prove every bit as lucrative as the violent extraction of more favourable trading terms from the Byzantine emperors. Already in 912,34 a Viking expedition had raided the Caspian (helped by an agreement with the Khazars, who prudently offered the Rus free passage in exchange for a share of the plunder). The Viking raiding fleet, described by the Arab writer al-Masudi as having numbered around 500 ships (each carrying 100 men, to yield an improbably large force of 50,000 warriors), proceeded up the River Don to the Volga and thence to the Caspian Sea. The Rus had the advantage of surprise, as apparently no warships had ever been seen in these waters before, and they were able to raid freely, attacking as far as Baku (in modern Azerbaijan) and even reaching Ardabil, in north-western Iran, some three days’ journey from the sea.
After several months, laden down with booty, the Vikings passed back through the Khazar lands and duly handed over the agreed share of plunder. Although the khagan, the Khazar ruler, himself had no interest in betraying them, many of his Muslim subjects were inflamed by the attacks against their co-religionists, and they formed a huge force of 150,000 men and fell on the Norsemen. The battle lasted three days and around 30,000 Vikings fell in the disaster, with only around 5,000 escaping in their ships down the Don to relative safety among the Bulgars.35
In 943–4, a Viking force returned to the Caspian, this time despatched by Igor. This made its way up the Kura River in the Caucasus, and defeated a force of levies under the governor of Bardha’a. The Rus then captured the town, amid wholesale slaughter of its citizens, but a large number of the raiders died soon afterwards in an epidemic. This made it easier for Marzuban ibn Muhammad, the ruler of Azerbaijan, to besiege the Vikings and then draw the invaders out of the town, surround them and cut them to pieces. The survivors barricaded themselves into the citadel of Bardha’a and then slipped away at night, making off with only a fraction of the plunder they had gathered.
Igor was almost certainly not present on this catastrophic raid but he perished soon afterwards in 945, during a tribute-collecting expedition among the Drevljane, who had refused an increased demand for payment and then attacked Igor’s party when he came to enforce the levy in person. He was succeeded as Grand Duke of Kiev by his son, Svyatoslav, the first of the royal line to bear a Slav name. Although by now the Rus principalities were also increasingly Slavic in nature, the career of Svyatoslav, who ranged widely along the Volga, the Danube and fought against Byzantium, has much of the heroic Viking Age about it. His appearance, as portrayed by Leo the Deacon (in his description of Svyatoslav’s meeting with the Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes on the Danube in 971), could equally well apply to a host of Viking chieftains of the previous century:
He was of moderate height – neither taller than average, or 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 the 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 and a red gemstone between them; his clothing was white, no different from that of his companions, except in cleanliness.36
The first target of Svyatoslav’s armies was the Khazar empire. The attack probably took place sometime in the 960s37 and the Rus army soon took a town called Biela Viezha (‘White Tower’), which may have been Itil, the Khazar capital. A contemporary account (from around 965) tells of the devastation of the town’s orchards, as the invaders left nothing but ruins behind them. The Khazar state collapsed and never recovered, removing a useful buffer state in the Caucasus and opening the way for later nomadic invasions, which the Rus would have cause to regret. As late as the eleventh century the site of Itil was still a field of ruins.
Still ambitious to expand the territory under his control, Svyatoslav then embarked on a campaign against the Bulgars on the Danube. He was encouraged by the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus Phocas (963–9), who hoped that whichever one of them emerged victorious, two potential foes of Byzantium would have been weakened in the fighting. Armed with a bribe of 1,500 pounds of gold from Nicephorus, Svyatoslav made rapid progress, his cause boosted by the death of the great Bulgarian tsar Symeon and his replacement by a rather less warlike successor, Peter. The Rus army rampaged through Bulgaria, confining the Bulgars to the town of Dristra, and sacked several major settlements, before halting somewhere near the bend of the Danube (possibly in the old late-Roman fort at Dinogetia).
There Svyatoslav heard the unfortunate news that his mother, Olga, had fallen ill. The Kievan prince hurried homewards, leaving the bulk of his fleet behind and, though suffering an attack by the Pechenegs on his way back, reached Kiev just before she died in 969. On his return to Bulgaria later the same year he found that most of the Rus gains had been lost to a new Bulgarian tsar, Boris, whose generally pro-Byzantine stance made Svyatoslav a rather less convenient ally for the Greeks. The Rus faced far more stubborn Bulgar resistance than before, but when the new Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes – who had had Nicephorus murdered in his bedroom – offered to continue the payment of tribute to the Scandinavians if they left Bulgaria, he found Svyatoslav surprisingly unreceptive. There was an exchange of blustering messages between the two rulers, in which the Kievan ruler demanded that his Byzantine counterpart should head for Asia, since the only price the Rus would accept to return to Kiev was all the imperial territories in Europe, while Tzimiskes retorted acidly that Svyatoslav should have a care, lest he suffer the same fate that had befallen his father’s fleet when it attacked the empire in 941.38
A Byzantine offensive against the Rus faltered when Bardas Phocas, the general leading it, rebelled against John Tzimiskes and left for Cappadocia in Asia Minor to muster support there. The emperor was forced to conduct the campaign in person, and nearly destroyed the Rus army holed up in Pereyaslavets, from which only a small party managed to break out. Further setbacks for the Vikings followed, with many of their leading warriors killed. A final battle in July 971 was hard fought, with the Byzantines benefiting (as they often seem to have believed) from supernatural aid, this time in the shape of a mysterious man riding a white horse, who led a decisive charge at the critical moment in the fighting. Admitting defeat, Svyatoslav negotiated terms with the Byzantine emperor on an island in the Danube.39
Whether Svyatoslav’s position back at home in Kiev was weakened by his lack of success against the Greeks will never be known. At some point, as he made his way back up the Danube with the remnants of his army – presumably while he was trying to traverse one of the many rapids – Svyatoslav’s party was ambushed by a big force of Pechenegs who had been lying in wait. Large numbers of Vikings were slaughtered, including the Prince of Kiev. Svyatoslav’s skull was hollowed out and inlaid with gold, to be used as a drinking cup by the victorious Pecheneg chief – a charming habit of the steppe nomads, which had been previously visited on the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus I after his defeat by the Bulgarian Khan Krum in 811, although on that occasion it was silver rather than gold that was used as the lining for the macabre drinking vessel.
Svyatoslav’s death was followed by a vicious civil war amongst his sons, Yaropolk, Oleg and Vladimir. Yaropolk killed Oleg, but in 978 he in turn was treacherously murdered by his remaining brother while attending a meeting to discuss peace between them. Vladimir then seized the throne with the aid of a large band of mercenaries whom he had recruited from Sweden and with the assistance of Blud, a Slav general who had defected from Yaropolk’s camp.40 Once secure on the throne, Vladimir attacked several neighbouring tribes, including the Radomichi, in an effort to increase the core territory of Kiev. He built a series of strongholds in the south of the realm, intended to act as bastions against the Pechenegs, and also sent a fleet against the Volga Bulgars.
Vladimir was still a pagan (although his mother Olga was a Christian, few other leading Rus had followed her lead), and is said to have flirted briefly with conversion to Islam. The Primary Chronicle tells how Vladimir called for representatives of the main religions to report on the mode of worship in their home countries. There came in succession ambassadors from the Volga Bulgars (who were Muslim), from the Khazars (who were Jewish), from Germany (which was Catholic) and from Constantinople (which was Orthodox). Having heard them out, Vladimir despatched his own envoys to confirm his impressions. On their return, these nobles reported:
When we journeyed among the Bulgars, we beheld how they worship in their temple, called a mosque, while they stand ungirt. The Bulgar bows, sits down, looks hither and thither like one possessed, and there is no happiness among them but instead only sorrow and a dreadful stench. Then we went among the Germans, and saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld no glory there. Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.41
Vladimir had already given some indication of his final decision, for he had found the insistence of the Muslims on abstinence from pork and wine a most disagreeable prospect; ‘“Drinking”, he said, “is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure.”’ As for the German Catholics, Vladimir was horrified by their promotion of fasting, while the Khazars he rejected on the grounds that the Jews had been driven out of their Holy Land, and so God must be angry with them. That left the Orthodox creed. Whether Vladimir was enticed by the aesthetic grandeur and mystique of Byzantine ceremonial or, more likely, by the very real diplomatic advantages to be gained by becoming a fully fledged Christian ruler within the Greek imperial sphere, in 988 he agreed to accept Christianity from Constantinople. In exchange he was to receive the not insubstantial inducement of Emperor Basil II’s sister, Anna, in marriage. The story that Anna was none too keen on marital exile in far-off Kiev is reinforced by Vladimir’s attack on Byzantine-held Cherson in the Crimea, hardly the act of a would-be brother-in-law. The Rus are said to have captured the city after a traitor inside shot an arrow, to which was attached a message informing Vladimir how to cut off the town’s water supply. With Cherson in his hands, the marriage negotiations seem to have proceeded much more smoothly and both the wedding and Vladimir’s own baptism took place soon afterwards in Kiev. As a symbolic gesture, Vladimir had the pagan idols of the old religion cast down, having the most important – that of Perun (which was made of wood, with a head of silver and a moustache of gold) – tied to a horse’s tail and dragged down the Borichev hill to the stream at its foot. There, in a macabre re-creation of a human sacrifice, he ordered twelve men to beat the image of the fallen god with cudgels.
The change in nature of the Kievan Rus state from Viking outpost to Slav kingdom was almost complete. The Scandinavian warriors who had long been welcomed in the Rus lands (which the Vikings called Gardariki, ‘the kingdom of fortresses’) were now something of an inconvenience to Vladimir. Although he had employed them in his own ascent to power, he wanted no such destabilising bands of unemployed warriors causing mischief, now that he had secured both the throne and diplomatic respectability. He resolved the problem, as well as gaining favour from Basil, by sending a large number of these Varangians (as the mercenaries were known) to support the Byzantine emperor in putting down the rebellion of Bardas Phocas.42 This force, perhaps as large as 6,000 strong, was the origin of the Varangian Guard, which would form the nucleus of the Byzantine Imperial Guard for the next two centuries.43
Vladimir died in 1015, and his death was followed by another bitter succession struggle. One of his sons, Svyatopolk, was driven mad by the effects of his final defeat in battle, while the victor, Yaroslav, was forced into grudging acceptance of a division of the principality between himself and his remaining brother, Mstislav, who ruled from Chernigov. Yaroslav, who based himself in Novgorod, was not particularly popular in his own lands, but was very particular about keeping up connections with his ancestral homeland, and thus obtained rather more approving mentions in the sagas. On no fewer than six occasions he is said to have called on ‘Varangians’ from overseas to reinforce his armies.44 He chose as his wife Ingigerd, the daughter of Olof Skötkonung of Sweden, and gave shelter at various times to Olaf Haraldsson of Norway after he was expelled in 1028, and later to Magnus Olafsson and his brother Harald Hardrada, in the aftermath of Olaf’s defeat and death at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. He strengthened the Scandinavian connection by giving his daughter Elizaveta in marriage to Hardrada (although there were limits to sentimentality in that regard, and other daughters were married off to Andrew I of Hungary and Henry I of France). He further underlined his status as a Christian monarch, rather than a Viking adventurer, by building St Sophia in Kiev, Russia’s first cathedral, in 1037, while advances that he made against the Chud to the north and in pushing the boundaries of the Kievan principality to the west made him the most powerful yet of the Rus princes.
Yaroslav’s most serious misstep was an ill-judged attack on Constantinople in 1043, which ended with the destruction of the Kievan fleet and a severe dent to his own prestige. By then, the last hurrah of Viking Russia had taken place, an expedition in the grand old style led by Yngvar the Widefarer, which set off around the year 1040. It seems to have been a large-scale raid aimed against the Muslim lands around the Caspian, and is remembered by a series of twenty-five runestones (all of them in Sweden) commemorating those who fell on the expedition. One, from Gripsholm, records: ‘Tola had this stone raised for his son Harald, Yngvar’s brother. They journeyed boldly, far afield after gold: in the east they gave food to eagles. They died in the south, in Serkland.’ (Serkland is the generic Old Norse term for the Muslim-controlled lands.) Another, more laconic inscription simply records the names of the deceased and the lands to which they had travelled: ‘Ormika, Ulfair, Greece, Jerusalem, Iceland, Serkland.’
Apart from the runestones, the only real source for Yngvar’s expedition is the Yngvar Saga, which relates how the expedition’s leader won early fame as a warrior, but found that Olof Skötkonung of Sweden would not grant him any land. Rebuffed, he went to the court of Yaroslav and set out to explore the lands to the east of Gardariki, pressing far down the largest river (probably the Volga). His adventures included the utterly improbable (encountering a dragon in flight and seizing a great silver cauldron from a giant); the barely credible, such as his sojourn at the court of a beautiful queen, Silkisif; and the almost plausible, such as encountering a fleet armed with Greek Fire (although the saga then once more descends into the fantastic, as Yngvar kills a giant, carries his enormous foot away and uses it as bait to lure away a dragon, whose mound the Vikings then rob). Finally, Yngvar finds a haunted hall in which the standard of the long-dead King Harald of Sweden has been hidden. When he takes the banner, a curse falls on him and he and many of his men die of disease on the way home.45
By this time other changes, too, had radically modified the nature of Viking Russia. The flow of dirhams being imported from the Islamic lands had slowed in the 960s and came to a virtual halt in the 1030s (so that hoards of this date are rare in Gotland, where the bulk of dirhams have been found). Arabic coins were replaced by Anglo-Saxon and German issues, many of the latter minted using silver from the Hartz Mountains, where production was just stepping up. And, more importantly, the supply of Viking mercenaries also dried up and traditional links of family and shared culture withered. The Kievan rulers became more and more part of a Slavic culture that looked southwards to Constantinople for its inspiration rather than northwards to Scandinavia. By the mid-eleventh century the Viking Age in Russia can be considered at an end.