Early in the tenth century, in a major diplomatic coup for the Muslim world, the Volga Bulgars officially declared their conversion to Islam. Between the Bulgars and the central world of Islam – the Caliphates – lay the Khazars, who had occupied territories on the Lower Volga and between the Black and Caspian Seas since the seventh century (Map 20). Relations between Khazars and the Caliphs had long been of a settled nature, and alongside the diplomatic niceties trading relations had grown up. The Bulgars had been drawn into this diplomatically stable world of mutually advantageous exchange in the eighth and ninth centuries, participating in the profitable trading alliance. Their conversion to Islam was a declaration of cultural allegiance, and the logical result of their burgeoning relationship with the Islamic world. Early medieval Islam was at the height of its prosperity and political cohesion. It was a world of extravagant wealth and lavish court life, where scholars had an interest in preserving the ancient traditions of Greek and Roman learning, not least in science and geography, subjects which had largely fallen into abeyance in Christendom.
As the Volga was drawn into this orbit, not only caliphal embassies but merchants, travellers and scholars, interested in the peoples and customs of this obscure corner of the world, journeyed north. In the lands of the Bulgars, in the emporium of Bulgar, one of the great markets of the early medieval world, they encountered a host of strange peoples. They quickly became aware that the most important were the Ar-Rus. Being ethnographers of the best school, these Islamic Dr Livingstones were not content simply to hear about the Ar-Rus and meet some of them in the Bulgar markets, but travelled west and north to inspect their territories at first hand. Here they found something between a state and an association of merchant princes. The Rus had a king who lived on a fortified island. He maintained a military establishment of many warriors, whom he funded by taking 10 per cent of all, the associated merchants’ profits. There were also priests, but above all, this powerful mercantile class, who drew up the rules of life around their interests. If you insulted one, it would cost you your life or 50 per cent of your property.16
Who were the Rus, and where had they come from?
The Rus
In the past, the identity of the Rus was hugely controversial. Round one of the battle – as usual – was fought out with the nationalistic fervour that so marked the later nineteenth century. Scandinavian scholars argued that the word ‘Rus’ was derived from the Finnish name for Swedes, and identified the Rus as Scandinavian Vikings. This meant, they claimed, that medieval Russia, the state based on Kiev which eventually developed from the modest beginnings observed by the Muslims, was a creation of Scandinavians! In the later nineteenth century, this sort of claim was not likely to go unanswered. That some Scandinavians had played a role in the action could not be denied. The Old Norse names for the rapids that punctuated the lower reaches of the River Dnieper, until they were submerged by one of the great hydraulic projects of the Soviet era, have been preserved in the Byzantine source that we encountered in Chapter 8, the De Administrando Imperio. Also, the earliest Russian chronicle preserves the texts of two Rus trade treaties negotiated with the Byzantines in the tenth century, and many of the Rus participants had straightforwardly Scandinavian names. The scholars who prepared the Slavophile counterblast in the so-called Normannist debate, however, were not daunted. They derived ‘Rus’ from a small river of the northern Black Sea region – the Rhos – and argued that Scandinavians participated in the action only in small numbers, as merchants and mercenaries. Medieval Russia was, of course, the creation of Slavs.
In the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution added its own twisting entrenchments to the Slavophile position. This, of course, had nothing to do with nationalist pride. As we’ve already encountered in other contexts, according to Marxist-Leninist dogmas, throughout history major epochal developments have come about through internal socioeconomic transformation. Each of the canonically prescribed sequences of modes of production – ancient (that is, slave) mode, feudal, bourgeois – develops, according to this theoretical model, massive internal contradictions – Marxist-speak for class conflict – which lead to its replacement by the next mode of production in line. According to this construct, the Kievan state represented the arrival of feudalism in the forests of Russia. There were some problems. No one could find any evidence of the slave mode of production, which ought to have preceded feudalism, before the foundation of Kiev. Likewise, the feudal mode of production ought to be characterized by agriculture based on the exploitation of large estates, from which a small thoroughly militarized landowning class primarily benefited. But while a Kievan state of some kind certainly existed in the tenth century, the historical evidence shows no sign of large estates before the eleventh. One problem was solved by inventing the concept of ‘state feudalism’, where state structures could perform the functions of the landowning class, and the slave problem was quietly dropped. In fact, in one of its many paradoxes, the Soviet state combined adherence to the internationalist vision of Marx – where nationalism was a false consciousness developed by elites to divide and rule workers who would otherwise unite against them – with rampant nationalistic fervour. So the older arguments were at all times interleaved with the new emphasis on the primacy of internally driven socioeconomic development. Both nationalism and Marxism, then, denied that a bunch of Scandinavian adventurers could have had anything much to do with the emergence of the first Russian state.17
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall – closely followed by that of the Soviet system – discussion of the Russian past has been relieved of much of the pressure imposed by such intrusive modern agendas. As a result, some consensus has begun to emerge. Most scholars are happy now to acknowledge that the name ‘Rus’ surely does derive from the Finnish name for Swedes, and that Scandinavians played a critical role in the historical processes which underlay the emergence of the first Russian state. Some Rus sent on from Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious in 839 were unambiguously identified by the Franks as Scandinavians, and other historical evidence, such as the names in the tenth-century trade treaties, is equally conclusive. The collapse of the Soviet system has also made it possible to recognize (or, at least, to air the recognition in public) that more material of Scandinavian origin has been found in European Russia than used to be acknowledged. Some of the reports of Muslim travellers, likewise, for all their ethnographic distortions, are strongly suggestive of the northern origins of the Rus. Most famously, Ibn Fadlan witnessed in the lands of the Bulgars a Rus boat burial, and his account of it has always made its readers think of the Vikings. Full of gory details of animal and even human sacrifice, it describes how the corpse and all its attendant offerings were placed in a boat and hauled on to land, then set on fire, the remains of the pyre being covered by a mound, in the top of which was set a wooden post.18
So the Ar-Rus of northern Russia and their island king were Scandinavians, but what were they doing there, and what was their role in the generation of the first Russian state?
There are no contemporary accounts of the arrival of Scandinavians along the river systems of eastern Europe. The south-eastern hinterland of the Baltic was too far away from any of the European (or, indeed, Muslim) centres of literacy in the eighth century, when it all began, for these events to attract contemporary comment. Of later texts, there are a few references to Viking activity in Russia in some of the Scandinavian saga materials. The most coherent account of the pre-history of medieval Russia, however, is preserved in the so-called Russian Primary Chronicle (henceforth RPC), a more descriptive title than its proper, more Proustian alternative, The Tale of Bygone Years. The surviving manuscripts are no older than the fourteenth century, but the text as we have it was a creation of the early twelfth. We know from archaeological materials that Scandinavians began to penetrate the forests of European Russia from the second half of the eighth century at the latest, so that even the Tale’s original compiler was having to cast his mind back over three hundred and fifty years of history, much of which had unfolded before literacy became a feature of the Russian world. The author was probably working in one of the monasteries of Kiev in Ukraine, capital of twelfth-century Russia. But Scandinavians came south to Kiev only at a relatively late date, and for a long time, as we shall see, this riverine axis in Russian history – focused on the Dnieper – was much less important than another that focused on the Volga.
Much of the pre-history of Russia was worked out far to the north and east, therefore, of the area central to the interest of the text recounting it. The author of the Chronicle was aware of this in outline, and traces the arrival of the later Riurikid ruling dynasty of Kiev back to northern Russia, where an invitation is said to have been issued to its founder, a Scandinavian by the name of Riurik (surprise), by a group of five tribes who had long been at war with one another: the Chud, the Merja and Ves all of Finnic stock, and the Slavic Krivichi and Slovenes (Map 19). Riurik came in, supposedly with two brothers, Sineus and Truvor, imposed order, and that was that. We will return to the likely historicity of any of this in a moment, but the main point is that the literary tradition has little to tell us about the earliest history of the Rus.19 Archaeological materials have therefore come to the fore.
Trying to construct anything like a historical narrative from archaeological materials, as we have seen many times before, is an exercise fraught with danger. They are wonderfully evocative of patterns of longer-term change, but not necessarily amenable to documenting the kind of shorter-term exchanges that are the stuff of history. Nevertheless, as with the Slavicization of Europe, the preoccupation of the Soviet state with pre-history means that a huge amount of new material came to light after 1945, and some striking insights have emerged. Above all, it is now certain that in the mid-eighth century, a generation or two before raiding began in the west, Scandinavian adventurers were moving south and east of the Baltic into European Russia. The Baltic had never been a barrier to movement in the first millennium AD. Traces of Scandinavian communities established at more westerly points on its southern shores, in what is now Pomerania, have long been known and can be dated to the fifth and sixth centuries. None of these survived as an identifiably Scandinavian community into the seventh century, the groups concerned either being swallowed up by incoming Slavs or having returned to their homelands. But, after a short break in the mid-seventh century, identifiably Scandinavian materials began to be deposited further east, in Baltic- and in the Estonian-dominated lands, starting at Elblag and Grobin. In the eighth century, a marked Scandinavian presence grew up at Janow in the Vistula delta, and at more or less the same time increasing Scandinavian exploration of the rivers feeding into the Gulf of Finland manifested itself in the form of a permanent, if small, colony established on the River Volkhov close to Lake Ladoga. Thanks to dendrochronology, we know when it began. The wood used for the earliest houses was cut in the year 737.20
What these Scandinavians were doing in the northern forests emerges clearly from the later historical evidence. In the great emporium of Bulgar, Islamic merchants travelled north to meet their Rus counterparts, who were selling above all slaves and furs, but also amber, honey and wax. These same goods were also traded with the Byzantines in the tenth century, and it must be odds on that Scandinavians first came south and east of the Baltic to collect these fruits of the northern forests. Apart from the slaves, this is a classic example of what made long-distance trade profitable in antiquity, despite the great costs and difficulties of transport. The Scandinavians were able to extract goods from one ecological zone – the sub-Arctic north, where the intense cold makes furry animals grow coats of a density and quality that would overheat any of their southern cousins – and then sell them in another at premium prices.
There is no strictly contemporary evidence for how these eighth-century Scandinavian traders procured the items they were trading, but again, later evidence sheds important light. The slave trade, of course, was run through compulsion. Slaves do not usually volunteer their services. Again, the literary sources provide us with important information. The Arab geographers report that the Rus regularly attacked Baltic-speaking Prussian tribes living near the eastern Baltic, and that the less powerful eastern Slavs lived in dread of their more powerful western Slavic neighbours.21 That this dread was closely related to the operations of the slave trade is suggested by the fact that Arab silver coins are found precisely among the western Slavs, west of the Vistula, and no further east. There is a largely blank area between the zone of operations of the Rus and that of the western Slavs (Map 20). It must have been from this area that most of the unfortunate victims for the Muslim slave markets were taken.
The extraction of the other goods was not necessarily so involuntary. Where the sources refer to the process, the skins and furs produced in the northern forests and sold on by Scandinavian merchants are often referred to as ‘tribute’. This word suggests an element of compulsion, which finds some confirmation. One relevant anecdote appears in the ninth-century Life of St Anskar, a Christian missionary to Scandinavia, which describes a Swedish raid on the Curs of the southern Baltic who had ceased to provide their agreed tributes. As soon as we have any records, likewise, the Scandinavians of Russia imposed tributes on the Slavic groups that came within their political orbit. Tribute could be extracted on a micro-economic scale too. An appendix to the Anglo-Saxon translation of the history of Orosius produced at the court of, and possibly by, Alfred the Great tells the story of the king’s conversations with a Norwegian trader by the name of Ottar (Othere). Ottar regularly sailed north up the west coast of Norway with his companions, and received furs, bird feathers, whalebone and ship’s ropes made from the hide of seals and whales as tribute from Laplanders there within the Arctic Circle. Ottar was working northern Norway rather than northern Russia, but there is every reason to suppose that Scandinavian merchants in that area too were unafraid to resort to robust persuasion.22
The full run of evidence does not suggest, however, that relations between Scandinavian merchant and indigenous producer were run solely on this basis. For one thing, even Ottar acquired some of his trade goods through his own efforts. Again, as he told King Alfred, he and five friends killed sixty whales in two days. More generally, and this applies to Ottar too, the whole process of collecting goods clearly involved small groups of Scandinavians moving among much larger indigenous populations, who were themselves central to the trading process. Trapping, for instance, is a highly skilled art, which requires detailed local knowledge of animal runs, and outside Scandinavians making occasional visits to an area would have been incapable of extracting their own furs with any degree of efficiency, so that most trapping was presumably done by local populations.23
This kind of pattern held good into the tenth century, when the De Administrando Imperio describes in some detail the winter circuit followed by Rus merchants among their Slavic subjects, in the course of which the next year’s trade goods were collected. Indeed, the whole process of connecting up different patches of Russian forest – each being worked individually for trade goods – to the broader exchange system operating up and down Russia’s river systems was conducted by relatively small groups of Scandinavians working more or less independently of one another. This is implied in the Muslim accounts of the northern king who skimmed a percentage off the top of independent merchants’ activities, and in Muslim accounts of merchants at work. Ibn Fadlan, for instance, describes the individual merchants making offerings to their gods of commerce before uttering this entirely apposite prayer:
‘I would like you to do me the favour of sending me a merchant with a large number of dinars and dirhams, who will buy from me everything I would wish and will not enter into dispute with me over what I say.’ . . . If [the merchant] has difficulty in selling and his stay is prolonged, he returns with another present a second and a third time.24
The merchants may have come in groups, but they sold as individuals. The same point is amply documented in the trade treaties the Rus negotiated with Byzantium in the tenth century. These documents show that, while the Grand Prince of Kiev had paramount authority, there were lesser Scandinavian princes operating in the other centres established up and down the river network, men who had their own representatives at the negotiations and were mentioned separately in the final treaties.25
The Scandinavian traders worked the forest zone, then, in relatively small and largely separate groups, which would have made them very vulnerable to attack if their relations with indigenous population groups were entirely hostile. Against this backdrop, it is striking that the hoards of Muslim silver coins – the fruits of the trade activity – are widely dispersed across the Russian forest zone (Map 20). This may indicate that the Scandinavian merchants purchased a degree of consent from their Slavic and other indigenous producers by recycling to them a share, if perhaps a lesser one, in the fruits of the trading. Slavs were able to profit from the trade network in other ways too. The De Administrando Imperio tells us, for instance, that the Rus brought their goods down the River Dnieper and across the Black Sea to Constantinople in boats purchased from the Slavic Krivichi and Lenzanenes, who spent their winters constructing them.26 The provision of suitable river boats was not simply demanded, therefore, and this is again suggestive that Scandinavian–Slavic relations were not just about constraint. We have to envisage Scandinavian exploitation of the northern forests in the form of a series of small companies with certain rights negotiated and/or asserted over their own particular goods-producing territories. The locals provided the goods, or many of them, the Scandinavians the organization, the transport and the knowledge to take those goods to distant markets and return with a healthy profit. Such a vision takes us a long way from the sterility of the old Normanist debate, emphasizing as it does the symbiotic relationships that clearly grew up on the local level. The ninth and tenth centuries were not about Scandinavian versus Slav, but about small, and, in economic terms, mutually competitive producers. Each individual trading enterprise, composed of Scandinavians and indigenous population (whether Finns, Balts or Slavs), was selling the same products in the same market.
The King in the North
The projected market for the goods being collected from Staraia Ladoga was initially western. The colony was established at exactly the same time as trading contacts were building up right across the Baltic and North Sea areas, but long before there is any sign of contact between northern Russia and the Islamic world. The furs and other products being collected by the shores of Lake Ladoga were at this point being shipped west to be sold to the elites of Latin Christendom. In particular, the mid-eighth century was springtime for the Carolingian dynasty and its supporters, and many of the furs collected surely had this market in mind. It did not take long, however, for Scandinavian merchant adventurers to become aware of a particular important fact of east European geography. While some of the rivers of European Russia flow north into the Baltic, others drain south into the Black and Caspian Seas. The whole area is so flat, moreover, that the headwaters of both north- and south-flowing rivers lie extraordinarily close together. By following the River Volkhov south from Lake Ladoga, new and exciting possibilities came into play. A combination of tributaries, especially the west–east flowing River Oka, combined with carefully reconnoitred portages, where ships were dragged usually on rollers from one set of connected river systems to another, allowed access to the Black and Caspian Seas via two major routes, the Dnieper and the Volga.
Of these, it was the Volga that most attracted the Scandinavians, even though the literary material – both Kievan and Byzantine – tells us far more about the Dnieper route, on which Kiev itself was eventually founded. But no Scandinavian material found on sites along the middle reaches of the River Dnieper can be dated before the end of the ninth century, and there is incontrovertible evidence that the Volga route had been opened up long before. This comes in the form of the Islamic silver coins that the Rus merchants received in return for their goods. Many thousands of them have been found in northwest Russia and the general Baltic region. For dating purposes, hoards – rather than single finds – have prime importance. The latest dated coin in any hoard gives some indication as to when the whole assemblage may have been deposited, and where hoards are plentiful there is a good chance that the time lag between issuing and deposition was not too great. In the forests of north-west Russia, the earliest latest coin, so to speak, discovered so far was minted in the year 787. Allowing a margin for time delay, this suggests that the hoard was deposited somewhere around the year 800, and hoards of a similar date have also been found in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Muslim silver was certainly flowing to the north by 800 at the latest, but had perhaps begun a little earlier, in any case a generation or two before the Dnieper route was opened up.27
This makes perfect sense. The Volga route led straight to the Caspian Sea and the economically developed world of the Islamic Caliphs, by this date based on the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. There the taxes of a vast empire, stretching from the Atlantic to India, were being consumed at a court of stupendous magnificence. Here was a real centre of demand for merchants with luxury goods to sell. The southern reaches of the Volga route were already well mapped out, moreover, since the Khazars had long since traded for furs as far north as the Middle Volga. The Dnieper route, by contrast, was far more difficult, involving some awkward rapids around which boats had to be carried, and led out into the Black Sea – not the Caspian – near the Crimea. One could still reach the Islamic world by sailing east, but it was less direct, and the more natural trade axis led to Constantinople. But, as we have seen, Byzantium was a sadly reduced power from its glory days under Justinian, and the Islamic Caliphs and their court grandees represented a far richer market for the luxury goods that the Scandinavians had to offer. Whether Scandinavian merchants themselves regularly went as far south as the Caspian is difficult to know. Some certainly did, but the journey was long, and there may have been a whole series of middle-men. In the second half of the eighth century, at least, the numbers of Scandinavians involved remained limited. Apart from Staraia Ladoga, only one other site in north-west Russia, Sarskoe Gorodishche (Sarski Fort), has so far produced both silver coins and Scandinavian materials that date to 800 AD.28
In the absence of narrative sources, the full story of what happened next cannot be recovered, but developing Scandinavian contacts with the east may have followed a similar trajectory to the patterns we have already observed further west. One reflection of this is a slow but observable increase in the flow of Arab silver coins into Scandinavia and the Baltic in the ninth century. As the century wore on, increasing numbers of adventurers from the north, whether directly or through middle-men, were using the waterways to sell northern goods to the Islamic market. Theoretically, this could have happened without more Scandinavians actually settling south of the Baltic, but enough evidence has survived to show that they were.
In 839, as we have seen, some Swedish Vikings came to the court of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. They had been sent on from Constantinople, having reached the city only by a difficult journey past fierce tribes, and were in search of an easier route home. If, as seems likely, they had come down the Dnieper, they had had to carry their boats past its rapids, and the indigenous inhabitants of this region had quickly learned that this was an excellent place for an ambush. In 972, one later prince of the Rus, Sviatoslav, lost his life – and his head – at exactly this point. (The nomadic Pechenegs turned it into a drinking cup.)29 The envoys reported to the Emperor that they were already sufficiently organized to have their own ruler, called a Khagan, and had indeed been acting on his behalf in attempting to establish friendly relations with Constantinople. This mention of a Khagan of the Rus as early as 839 is tantalizing, but at least a sign that the Scandinavian immigrants to the forests of Russia were beginning to evolve some kind of political organization. As in the west at more or less the same time, however, where the initial political structures that emerged among the Vikings in the Hebrides and Ireland were swamped by the arrival of the more powerful ‘kings’ around the year 850, so political developments in the east also failed to move in straight lines.
Probably in 860, Vikings from somewhere in Russia launched a first attack on Constantinople. Two hundred boats sailed across the Black Sea and ravaged the city’s outskirts. The Byzantines attributed their survival to the intercession of the Virgin, and, whatever credence one gives the figures, this was clearly a major attack.30 It was followed by an intense diplomatic effort to head off further incursions. This included sending Christian missionaries away into the Russian forests. But after an initial claim of success from the Byzantine Patriarch in 867, the mission disappeared without trace, and there is no mention of further diplomatic contacts with the north for more than a generation. This suggests that the political authority to whom the mission had been sent was itself not long-lived: something which, as we shall see, was true of most Viking Age Scandinavian monarchies. There are also other clear signs of trouble. At more or less the same time, the settlement on Lake Ladoga was burned down. Dendrochronological evidence dates the disaster to between 863 and 871. It was manmade and deliberate. The original settlement consisted of isolated wooden blockhouses, all of which were destroyed at the same moment. It is highly implausible that an accidental fire could have spread amongst them all so effectively. In the same era, a Persian historian reports that Rus attacked the port of Abaskos on the south-east coast of the Caspian Sea, but the event can be dated no more closely than c.864–83.31
Without better historical sources, it is hard to know how to assemble this jigsaw. But the burning of Staraia Ladoga and the attacks on Abaskos and Constantinople indicate that new Scandinavian powers had entered the arena, and it is a striking coincidence that this was happening at exactly the same moment as, further west, kings were arriving and the Great Armies being assembled. I strongly suspect, therefore, that the simultaneous turmoil on the north Russian waterways and the sudden appearance of an authority large enough to attack Constantinople both reflect the intrusion of certainly more organized, and probably also larger, Scandinavian forces into the eastern as well as the western areas of Viking operation. Like their western counterparts, these more powerful newcomers will have been looking to take over and extend the profitable wealth-extracting operations that already existed. The evolving Viking period in east and west in the ninth century reminds me of nothing so much as Chicago in the prohibition era. First small groups started to make limited amounts of money from smuggling in and producing bootleg alcohol, then the more organized gangs set themselves up, alternatively demanding a cut of all profits or suppressing rival organizations, as circumstances demanded. Once the flow of wealth was up and running, the already powerful stepped in to control it and take their cut: precisely 10 per cent, of course, according to Ibn Fadlan.
In Russia, a second factor ratcheted up the competition. To judge by the deposition of coin hoards, the flow of Arab silver reaching the north slowed considerably between c.870 and 900. The slowdown coincides, in fact, with a period of internal political chaos in the Islamic Caliphate – the ‘anarchy at Samarra’ – which lasted from 861 to 870 and may well have been caused in the first place by disruption on the demand side of the trade equation. This degree of crisis can only have had an adverse effect on the demand for luxury goods at the caliphal court, and would have increased the competition between different groups of Scandinavian fur and slave producers in northern Russia. This may help explain the struggle for dominance of what was left of the luxury trade from the north and, in turn, why Byzantine diplomatic feelers got nowhere. Eventually, however, some degree of order was restored, not only in the Islamic world but in the north – a process, even given the continued absence of narrative sources, that we can still get some grasp of through less direct evidence.32
For one thing, Staraia Ladoga was eventually rebuilt, probably in the early tenth century, this time in stone. Finds of Scandinavian materials dating to c.900 have also been made at a series of other northern sites: Gorodishche (old Novgorod), Timerevo, Mikhailovskoe, Petrovskoe, Pskov, Yaroslavl and Murom. These settlements were all placed at convenient points of access to, and hence to profit from, the main trade route down the River Volga (Map 20). Between them these sites have generated a greater quantity of Scandinavian material than any of their counterparts of the ninth century. Some of it is also women’s jewellery, suggesting that a mixed immigrant population, rather than just armed Nordic males, was now occupying at least some of the sites.
This further Scandinavian influx coincided with a renewal of silver flows from the Islamic world, which, from c.900, started to arrive in unprecedented amounts. According to the available hoard evidence, something like 80 per cent of all the Islamic silver that flowed into northern Russia and Scandinavia between c.750 and 1030 (when supplies dwindled virtually to nothing) did so after the year 900. It was also coming by a different route. By the 920s, where we began, the Volga Bulgars had established their control of the Middle Volga and become Muslim. The reports of Islamic travellers show that most Scandinavian Rus were by this stage no longer trading directly with the main Islamic world. Most of the trading was being done in the land of the Volga Bulgars, where Islamic and Viking merchants met to do business. This is reflected in the origin of the tenth-century coins. Whereas the eighth- and ninth-century coins had mostly been minted in the great centres of old Islam, in what are now Iraq and Iran, the tenth-century coin flows had a further eastern origin, being produced for the most part by the newly dominant Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran. At this point, the silver mines of Khurasan, controlled by the dynasty, were at the peak of their production, which has been estimated at between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty tons of silver per annum, or a staggering forty to forty-five million coins. Not surprisingly, the territories of the Samanids were a magnet for anyone with something – or someone – to sell, and well-established trade routes led from their lands east to the Middle Volga. A huge new market, served by much less difficult access routes, was attracting larger numbers of Scandinavians than ever before into Russia’s forests.33
This provides the context for the greater power among the Rus encountered by Islamic travellers of this era: the island king. Everything we know about this king and the structure he presided over suggests that we should think of him as a capo di capi. He took a 10 per cent cut of everyone else’s mercantile operations, and enforced his orders via a permanent armed retinue reckoned at four hundred-strong. If the RPC is correct, the first of these kings ought to have been Riurik, founder of the dynasty, but that is far from certain. Whatever his identity, his seat was almost certainly Gorodishche. Scandinavian occupation began here in the later ninth century, and as the Muslim travellers describe it, it was an island, strategically placed at the point where the River Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen (Map 20). Unlike the other Scandinavian sites of this date, it was also defended by walls, which supports the idea that it was a centre of authority. Anyone who didn’t obey the orders emanating from it was liable to the fate of the inhabitants of Staraia Ladoga, just down the Volkhov, whose houses had met with such a nasty accident in the 860s. No doubt some of them had found horses’ heads in their beds just before the conflagration.34
But this kind of political structure was hardly stable, and for all the wealth flowing through it, northern Russia of the early tenth century was hardly a land of peaceful prosperity, either. For one thing, much of the business being carried on came in the form of a slave trade. By its very nature this was a violent and unpleasant activity, involving armed raids on likely victims and the brutalization of captives as they were transported to market. Armed raids for the extraction of booty or better trading terms were still being conducted too. Both of the trade treaties with Byzantium, for instance, were the result of armed demonstrations which induced the emperor and his advisers to offer better trading terms. Islamic sources, likewise, report a huge raid on the Caspian in the year 912. And there was a further, internal dimension to the turbulence of this world. The mercantile colonization of European Russia was conducted, as we have seen, by a number of independent Scandinavian groups, not one organizing authority. You can bet your life that, originally at least, the required 10 per cent of the merchants’ profits was not handed over to the king in the north voluntarily. And such a process always carried within itself the potential for generating new rivals for the current capo.
The king in Gorodishche won out, it seems, in the north. But precisely at the moment that Muslim travellers were taking stock of him, the political structure over which he presided was being overturned by the emergence of a second Scandinavian power base at Kiev, much further south, on a natural crossing of the Middle Dnieper. According to the RPC, Scandinavians first came to Kiev when two followers of Riurik called Askold and Dir obtained his permission to leave Novgorod (Gorodishche) to journey to Constantinople. On the way, they arrived at Kiev and decided to establish themselves there, from where they later launched an attack on Constantinople with two hundred boats. The Chronicle places their arrival in Kiev under the year 862, and the attack on Constantinople during 863–6. About twenty years later, Riurik’s successor, a man ‘of his kin’ by the name of Oleg who was ruling on behalf of Riurik’s young son Igor, set off south with a mixed army of Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs. Askold and Dir were tricked and killed, a fortified centre was built, and tribute imposed upon the surrounding Slavic tribes. Oleg had united north and south and the Russian kingdom was born. These events are placed under the years 880–2.
The outline of the story seems reasonably correct. Kiev was a secondary and later centre of Scandinavian operations in western Russia. It is one of a series of sites along the Dnieper route to have produced Scandinavian materials, but only from about the year 900. Key to all further progress down the Dnieper was the settlement at Gnezdovo, which controlled the passage from Lake Ilmen to the Upper Dnieper and made it possible for Vikings from the northern Ladoga region to move down towards the Black Sea. Scandinavians established themselves at Gnezdovo only towards the end of the ninth century, and then at Kiev and a number of other centres around it: Shestovitskia and Gorodishche, which was near Yaroslavl where archaeological evidence of a Scandinavian presence of around the same date has emerged, and others such as Liubech and Chernigov which are mentioned in historical sources. The presence of Scandinavians is clear enough in the Middle Dnieper region from c.900, but, so far at least, the archaeological excavations would suggest that the Vikings came here in smaller numbers than in the north, where the materials of c.900 and beyond are far more plentiful.35 If the general chronology of the RPC seems correct, other aspects of its story are much less convincing.
For one thing, its specific dates are no more than a later attempt to make sense of oral sources, and are thoroughly unreliable. The attack on Constantinople is the one we’ve met already, its date taken directly from the Byzantine Chronicle of George the Monk, which does not name the Viking leaders involved. At some stage in the compilation of the RPC, someone decided that the attack on Constantinople recorded in the Byzantine source was the same as that made by Askold and Dir, and the rest of their story was dated by that decision. This was probably a mistake. Extensive excavations at Kiev have produced no Scandinavian material dated before about 880 (the Podol excavations), so that the attack on Constantinople of the 860s, documented in Byzantine sources, was probably launched from further north.
The RPC’s story also poses other problems. Its compilers were obviously a bit puzzled by Oleg’s relationship to Riurik. In the main Kievan tradition, he is described as a relative of some kind, but in the northern tradition, in a version of the Primary Chroniclewhich seems to derive from Novgorod, he is Riurik’s unrelated commander-in-chief. The idea that Askold and Dir would have bothered to ask Riurik’s permission before setting off for the south likewise fails to convince.36 As we have seen, in the ninth and the earlier tenth century, the Grand Prince of Rus was little more than primus inter pares, and Scandinavian expansion was carried forward by a whole series of independent initiatives, with the capo moving in only later to claim his percentage. There is no reason to suppose that moves towards Kiev, whoever made them, took any different form. Perhaps above all, there’s also the much bigger problem of why Viking Russia came eventually to be dominated by its second and later power centre – Kiev in the south rather than Novgorod in the north – especially since Kiev was situated on the much less rich Byzantine/Dnieper trading axis, where fewer Scandinavians had actually settled. These, however, are puzzles for the next chapter. For now, we must analyse the Viking diaspora in both east and west as a flow of migration.