Chapter 18
From Rus to Russian
“Every king of Europe marries a princess of Kiev.”
- Russian Primary Chronicle
As much as Sviatoslav admired his mother – he ordered that she should be buried according to Christian custom as a sign of respect – there appeared to be little danger that Odin or Thor would have to give way in Kiev. His immediate neighbors may have been falling like dominoes – Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Hungary all had or were about to accept Christianity, but Sviatoslav was aggressively pagan. Thor demanded victory, and only victory would keep his nobles loyal.
His first advance, while his mother still lived, had been against the Khazars, whom both Olga and Ingvar had tacitly acknowledged as their overlord. In a brutal, six year campaign, he annihilated their forces, culminating with a sack of Atil, their capital city. Clearly, he had inherited his mother’s vindictive streak. The city was smashed beyond recognition. The tenth century Arab writer, Ibn Hawqal, who visited the ruins shortly after, remarked, “No grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch“.
The triumph inspired Sviatoslav to try to conquer in the west, and he savaged his way through the Balkans, adding present day Bulgaria to his domain. Within his first ten years on the throne, he had carved out the largest state in Europe, stretching from modern Romania to Kazakstan. It was a vindication of the old gods, dramatic evidence that the All-father was more powerful than Christ.
A clash with Byzantium, the great bastion of the new faith, was inevitable, but unfortunately for Sviatoslav, Byzantium was, at that moment, in the midst of a revival. The scholar-emperor who had baptized Sviatoslav’s mother had been replaced by the militant John I Tzimisces. In a series of sharp strikes, the new emperor drove the Rus back, pinning Sviatoslav inside an old Roman fort on the Danube. After more than two months of a siege the Prince of Kiev surrendered, humbly rowing across the river to meet with his counterpart.
The emperor John met him on top of his favorite white charger, dressed in golden armor with the heavy Byzantine crown on his head. He accepted the offer of peace on the condition that the Rus pull their forces out of the Balkans, and abandon the most recent of Sviatoslav’s conquests.
Worse humiliation was to follow. On the return trip to Kiev, while attempting to negotiate one of the dangerous rapids along the Dneiper, a group of barbarians ambushed Sviatoslav. They had probably been bribed by the emperor John to do so, an indication of just how nervous the Rus made the emperor feel. Sviatoslav’s head was cut off and made into a drinking cup as a warning to the Rus in any future dealings.156
Sviatoslav’s death threw Kiev into chaos. It was made worse by his sons who began a slow-burning civil war that lasted for nearly a decade and forced the youngest brother Vladimir to flee.
Although the Rus were well on the way to becoming fully slavicized, they still had strong Viking contacts, and Vladimir chose Sweden as his place of exile. There he was greeted by relatives who helped him pick a Swedish princess for a wife, and agreed to raise an army to overthrow his brother.
With several hundred Swedish and Norwegian Vikings at his back, it didn’t take long for Vladimir to seize most of the important Rus cities. He dispatched his brother and offered to share power with him. When Yaropolk arrived to discuss terms, his men were ambushed and he was cut down by Vladimir’s soldiers.
Not content to simply take his brother’s crown, Vladimir rode to the convent where Yaropolk’s wife had taken refuge. The abbess tried to protect her by barring the gates, but Vladimir had his men hack through them with their axes, and sent them surging through the cloister to find her huddled in a room. After she had been violated by Vladimir, he forced her to marry him to lessen the resistance of his nobles to the new regime.
As a political ploy, the marriage worked, so Vladimir repeated it six more times, collecting along the way – if the Russian sources are to be believed – eight hundred concubines. He divided these among his major cities so that wherever he traveled he would have a range of female company.
His prodigious appetites were matched with even greater ambition. He expanded and secured his borders by crushing the tribes inhabiting present-day Slovakia, and forced both the Lithuanian and Bulgar tribes to recognize him as their overlord. The success both increased his prestige and made his neighbors nervous. King Boleslav of Poland hurried to sign an alliance with the Rus warlord to prevent him from moving toward the Polish border.
The most gratifying recognition of his power came in 988 when the emperor Basil II sent his request for six thousand Varangians, offering his sister’s hand in marriage in return. The stipulation that he convert to Christianity first, probably didn’t bother Vladimir too much. Paganism had its downsides for an aspiring autocrat since the crowded pantheon of Slavic and Nordic gods all too accurately reflected the political realities of Vladimir’s territory where every prince had a fortified citadel and could declare themselves independent. Odin may have been the All-father but he was certainly not all powerful, and like the Prince of Kiev, could easily get drowned out by a hundred other petty gods.
Vladimir had already tried to address this by promoting Thor as the supreme deity, but this ploy had failed miserably. In Kiev he had built a huge temple to house both the Slavic and Viking gods, and had placed a wooden carving of Thor in the center. This was taken as a slight to the other gods, and in the uproar that followed, two men were killed.157 Vladimir stubbornly kept to his worship of Thor, but it was a losing battle.
This unease with paganism is reflected in a curious story in an early Slavic chronicle with the wonderful name of Tale of the Bygone Years. Convinced that he needed a new religion, Vladimir sent envoys to find out about the world’s major faiths – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Islam was rejected because of its taboo against alcohol, not to mention the less than thrilling prospect of being circumcised as an adult.158 Judaism was dismissed as well because the Jews lacked a homeland – a powerful argument to the medieval mind. That left only Christianity and the choice to follow either western Catholic doctrines or eastern Orthodox ones. That decision became an easy one once his diplomats returned from their missions. The western ones had gone to the Holy Roman Empire and found squat, dark Romanesque churches. Those in the east, however, had attended a full Divine liturgy in the Hagia Sophia. “We didn’t know“, they breathlessly reported to Vladimir, “if we were in heaven or on earth. We only knew that God lived there.”
The story may be apocryphal, but it captures something of Vladimir’s decision. Kiev was already moving toward Byzantium, and away from the lure of the east.159 Christianity, particularly the Orthodox version, was far more attractive than his native paganism. It had only one God, and an all-powerful one at that. Byzantine autocracy was modeled on this belief in divine authority. Just as there was only one God in heaven, there was only one emperor on earth. God didn’t need permission from his angels or their cooperation. He spoke, and things happened. This was the model that Vladimir wanted to impose on Kiev.
There were also other reasons to draw closer to Byzantium. He was acutely aware of the limitations of his own power and the deep roots of the great empire to his south. However strong he might appear to be right now, the campaigns of his father had taught him an important lesson. The Rus couldn’t sustain the type of warfare in the Balkans that the Byzantines could. They lacked the organization, the bureaucracy, and the hierarchy to really impose themselves. Without changing that, Kiev’s power was ephemeral and it would suffer the fate of countless other kingdoms of the east – vast today and vanished tomorrow.
The conclusion to which Vladimir came – to convert to Christianity – was the realization that he could accomplish far more as an ally of Constantinople than as a Viking sea-king. With that step, he spiritually and culturally cut the ties with his Viking heritage.
A cynical observer, and there were many of them in Vladimir’s time, would say that his conversion was purely a political move, but, strange as it may seem, he appears to have been genuinely changed. The man who had raped his own sister-in-law now organized daily food drives for the ill and destitute. He laid out his own table for the sick, and when told that some were too ailing to make it, he arranged for wagons of bread, fish, vegetables, and mead to be taken to them.
He dismissed his non-Byzantine wives and his small army of concubines, and ironically – considering the amount of blood that he had spilled – abolished the death penalty. Schools were founded in several cities, and a part of each year’s tax revenue was set aside for alms.
Judging by Vladimir’s children, the effort to increase literacy was a dramatic success. His amorous activities had resulted in quite a few daughters, which he proceeded to marry off to the various crowned heads of Europe. So many were exported that the ambitious men of Kiev grumbled – undoubtedly under their breath – that there was a shortage of eligible brides. ‘Every king of Europe‘, went the complaint, ‘marries a princess of Kiev‘. Part of the attraction was their learning. Vladimir’s daughter Anna married King Henry I of France and she was familiar enough with the court bureaucracy to act as regent for their son Philip. A document dating from early in her regency was well stocked with the customary crosses and marks of noble French witnesses that couldn’t sign their own names. Only one signature graces the vellum – Anna the Queen – written in proud Cyrillic characters by her own hand.
Not all of the old Viking traits disappeared, however. Vladimir intended for Kiev to be a Christian city and would not tolerate dissent. His first action upon arriving in his capital was to burn down the temple he had made to the old gods. The carving of Thor was tied to a horse’s tail and dragged down to the Dneiper river where it was symbolically beaten with clubs and then thrown into the water. The entire population of the city was then driven down to the river – at spear point – for a mass baptism.
On the ruins of his pagan temple, Vladimir built a great church in imitation of those in Constantinople. He named it St. Basil after the Christian name he had adopted, and spent the rest of his reign strengthening the clerical infrastructure of Kiev. By the time of his death, no less than seven bishops were needed to administer the spiritual life of the kingdom.
Perhaps the most profound effect of Vladimir’s conversion was that it brought with it the Cyrillic alphabet.160 Vladimir needed to use a written language, and Viking runes were unsuitable for long or complex texts. His adoption of Cyrillic opened the Rus up to the deep literary tradition of Constantinople, and further cemented cultural ties with the empire. When Vladimir’s son, Jaroslav, issued Kiev’s first law code, he did so in Cyrillic, and based it on Byzantine and not Viking precedents.
Physically, the kingdom centered around Kiev even began to look like its southern neighbor. Byzantine craftsmen and artists flowed north, and the wooden halls of the Vikings were replaced by stone buildings. Under Vladimir’s stewardship nearly every town got brick and marble gates in imitation of the imperial capital, and stone churches with onion domes to mimic the arched roofs to the south.161
Under Vladimir and his son, Russia’s market towns swelled to real cities with populations over sixty thousand. The inhabitants were Slavs, who were no longer seen as targets to be raided, but as Christian subjects to be protected. Even the Viking way of life based on animal husbandry was abandoned in favor of agriculture, and cavalry replaced the shield wall.
A sentimental connection to the north remained – both Vladimir and his son hosted Viking sea-kings – but they had clearly begun to think of themselves as distinct.162 They no longer used the Norse language or even Viking names and within a generation, they even began to view the Swedes as trading rivals instead of allies.163
Within a hundred years of Vladimir’s death, the Viking imprint on the east had all but disappeared. Despite the role they played in founding the first centralized state, virtually all that’s left of the Viking legacy in the east is the name ‘Russia’, and Vladimir’s seal on the Ukrainian flag. The Viking roots were scoured away by the cultural pull of the eastern Roman Empire, a process completed in 1472 when the niece of the last Byzantine emperor married Ivan the Great.
If the Rus became Slavic, however, they also changed the Slavs. They gave the Slavic world its first centralized state and its first lasting dynasty. They brought order to an unstable region, and provided a foundation for the Slavic empire that would come.
Perhaps it is to be expected that the Viking influence would quickly wane since the Scandinavians were always a tiny majority among a vast Slavic population. At least a part of the reason that it ended when it did, however, was because by Vladimir’s time the Viking world itself was changing. The days of footloose adventurers and prowling sea-wolves were over. Scandinavia had become a land of kings.