A History of the Vikings
Chapter 5
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CHAPTER V
RUSSIA AND THE EAST
It was not the work of a single mighty conquest, nor was it even the result of a deliberate and carefully planned campaign of many years' duration; yet it was achieved with almost dramatic suddenness before the ninth century had run its course. Of the first event in this memorable Swedish adventure there is no historical record, but archaeology has made it evident that the tale opens with the establishment of a small Swedish colony in the first decades of the century on the south shore of Lake Ladoga. The stronghold here, Aldeigjuborg, was reached by sailing to the end of the Gulf of Finland, where Leningrad is now, and then down the Neva for some thirty miles into the lake and
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along its coast into the mouth of the Volkhov, where the settlement was established eight miles south of the lake. It was placed, therefore, at the head of a fine water-road to distant lands, for the Volkhov led to Novgorod, and Novgorod was a gateway leading by the route of the Lovat to the mighty Dnieper and so, past Kiev, to the Black Sea and the Greek colonies and to Constantinople herself; or from Novgorod boats might fare by way of
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the Syas and the Mologa to the Volga and thence to the Caspian Sea and the markets of the Saracen East. But of the life of the early Swedish settlers at Aldeigjuborg, (1) established like the Jomsvikings in a fortress and, like them, surrounded by a foreign folk, nothing is known; nor are the adventures recorded of the vikings who stayed first in Novgorod or further south in Smolensk.
1. For the archaeology of this and other viking settlements in Russia see a convenient summary by T. J. Arne, Det stora Svitjod, Stockholm, 1917, p. 37 ff. Cf. also the same author's Suède et l'Orient, Uppsala, 1914.
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The story of the Scandinavians in north Russia, as history relates it, does not begin until A.D. 859. In this year, as a passage in the Russian Nestor Chronicle (1) relates, the Varangians (2) (northerners) came 'from the other side of the (Baltic) sea' and laid under them not only the Baltic lands of the Tchuds but also the territories of various neighbouring Slavonic folk. The story goes that the Varangians were expelled from their new dominions in 862 and that after the Swedish suzerainty was thus ended, anarchy reigned among the native people; clan battled against clan, and so disastrous was this internal strife that the Slavs voluntarily invited the Swedes to return and rule them. Three brothers (3) from among the Varangians were chosen to undertake this task and in the same year, 862, they came back at the head of the 'Russians', (4) for so the chronicle calls the
1. Commonly known as the Ancient Chronicle. The authorship thereof used to be attributed to a monk of Kiev, Nestor, who lived at the end of the eleventh century and at the beginning of the twelfth; actually it contains Nestor's original chronicle only in an abridged form and is a compilation edited by Abbot Silvester of Kiev about A.D. 1116. The passage mentioned here will be found in Chaps. XIV, XV (ed. Leger, Paris, 1884).
2. This word varjagi was a synonym in Russia and Greece (b£raggoi) for northerners, Scandinavians; it is supposed to be the equivalent of ON. váeringi and AS. wáergenga, and probably meant originally 'sworn men' or 'men of a brotherhood'. For a review of the various etymologies suggested and a discussion of the problems connected with this word, see R. Ekblom, Archives d'Études Orientales, XI (1915), p. 30.
3. A 'three brothers' legend (Chronicle, Ch. VI) is also part of the story of the Slavonic foundation of Kiev.
4. The chronicler says that the Varangians (northerners) concerned in this episode were called Russians, but he does not use this name as the equivalent of Swedes, for he adds that other Varangians were called Swedes, Normans, Angles, and Goths. This supports the view that these Varangians of the ' Nestor' chronicle were not Swedes who came direct from Sweden, but Swedes who came from the Ladoga settlement, a view, however, that is in conflict with the express statement that the ambassadors of the Slavs journeyed 'over the sea' to invite the return of their former rulers. On the other hand, the chronicler's use of the word Varangians here might be taken as support for the theory that the founder of the Russian state was not a Rurik of Sweden but Rorik of Denmark (see note 1, p. 206). The derivation of the word Russia is uncertain. The territory of Rus, as known to the Greeks, was the Kiev district, and by 'men of Rus' the Greeks quite certainly were referring to 'Scandinavians'; Liudprand, Ant., V, 15, is explicit on this point and says the name Russ meant 'fair' or 'ruddy' men; 'we', he says, 'from the position of their country call them Nordmanni'. Subsequently the Greeks used the name to denote the upper classes, whether Scandinavian, Slavonic, or both, of the Russian cities. Possibly the folkname Russians is a Slavonic form of a Finnish ruotsi, itself derived from ON. roðsmenn, river-folk or rowing-folk, which was the special name of the Swedes of Roslagen, the rowing-law district. For a discussion of the various etymologies see R. Ekblom, Arch. d'Études Orientales, XI (1915), p. 6; cf. also H. Jacobsohn, Nachrichten K. Gesell. d. Wissenschft., Göttingen, Phil. Hist. Klasse, 1918, p. 310; and E. König, Zeitschrft. d. deutsch. morgenländischen Gesell. 70 (1916), p. 22, who considers that the name Rus was applied by eastern peoples to a folk in the south-east of Russia before the arrival of the Varangians. This seems to be the solution of the difficulty arising from the various mentions by Greek and Arab authors of 'Russians' prior to the appearance of the Scandinavians in the ninth century, for distinct from the Rus of the north there was probably a Caucasian folk known by a name etymologically different but almost identical in pronunciation.
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Northmen, to rule the Slavs; the eldest, Rurik, took up his abode in Novgorod and after the death of his brothers became possessed of their provinces, (1) so that he ended his days as lord of all north-west Russia from Rostov to Pskov.
Concerning this legend it may be said at once that it is beyond a doubt a muddled and chronologically dubious description of an actual event, and that it may indeed be correct in so far that a Scandinavian noble of the name of Rurik did become lord of Novgorod in the middle of the ninth century; but it is unlikely that the tale represents more than a solitary episode in the early story of Scandinavian Russia and it cannot therefore be accepted as a complete and truthful version of the beginnings of viking dominion in this great country. It is not, however, lacking in importance, for its unequivocal testimony, all the more noteworthy since it comes from a Slavonic source, is almost in itself sufficient to demonstrate that a ruling caste of Scandinavian vikings obtained control of the Russian merchant-towns. (2) How and when this first happened is not told. But there is reason to believe that the infiltration of the vikings began many years before Rurik came to Novgorod; indeed it is probable that there were resident Scandinavians settled on the upper reaches of the Volga and the Dnieper, and in such important river-towns as Kiev, as early as the beginning of the ninth century. (3) Possibly a Kievan state, controlled by the vikings, was
1. Their capitals are said to have been at Byelozero and Izborsk.
2. This, of course, has been contested by philo-slav authors who have tried to show that the Varangians of this passage were not the vikings or a Germanic folk at all, but Slavs. Other writers have argued that they were Khazars or the descendants of the Goths and Heruls still living in S. Russia. For a summary of the controversy and references see L. Niederle, Manuel de l'antiquité slave, I, Paris, 1923, p. 200, n. 2.
3. Probably the Persian Ibn Hordâdbêh (wrote c. 845) refers to the vikings and not the southern Rus when he describes the Russians as established traders in the Greek and Caspian worlds, Book of Routes, Journ. Asiatique, 6S. V (1865), 154. Of course, Nizami (twelfth century) who brings the Scandinavians to Azerbaijan temp. Alexander the Great has simply attributed the defeat of the Berdaa vikings of 943 to his hero (Sikandar Nama, ed. Clarke, London, 1881).
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in existence by about 840, and if this was so the legend of the invitation to Rurik may represent an appeal for succour made to the Swedes by the peoples of the Novgorod neighbourhood who were at war with the new principality of Kiev; on this view Rurik and his Varangians 'from across the sea' came at first to defend the northern peoples and then remained to rule them, and it was Rurik's royal house that by triumphing in the end over the Kievan Russians provided in 880 a lord-paramount of all Russia in the person of Oleg (p. 151).
The explanation of the settlement of the Swedes on the Ladoga shore and their gradual expansion across Russia, first south to Novgorod and then eastwards to the Volga and southwards along the Lovat to the Dnieper, is that the vikings and not the Slavs were the rightful heirs to the long-sustained and flourishing commerce that of old had united the Baltic with the Black Sea, namely the four or five hundred years of trade between the German peoples of the north and the German emigrants who in the third century A.D. had gone to dwell in the Dnieper basin and on the northern coasts of Pontus. On the other hand the Slavonic peoples of South Russia were newcomers, for it was not until the fifth and sixth centuries that they had taken the place of the Goths and other German folk in the Dnieper valley, and though now in the ninth century these Slavs dwelt in river-towns that the Germans had occupied before them, though they had usurped, as had done the Germans in their turn, the markets and the trade-routes of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians, though they stood sentinel at the gateway between Byzantine civilization and the outer darkness, yet the shattering effect upon them of their wars with the Asiatic Avars and Khazars, added to the serious disadvantages of their own cultural backwardness, presented the daring Scandinavians who sailed their rivers with all the opportunity that such eager and pugnacious Germans required in order to re-assert the ancient supremacy of their forefathers over the golden waterways of Russia.
There was a need, then, for the strength of viking arms in order that the great trade-route of the Dnieper might be made safe; for the Khazars and Patzinaks of Asia terrorized the Slavs to the south of Kiev and blocked the way across the Steppes to the Black Sea. And it was not only the Slavs, but the vikings too, who found the lower Dnieper dangerous. Thus in 839 when certain Swedish ambassadors reached the court of the Emperor
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