A History of the Vikings
Chapter 5
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'Sarkland', the country round the Caspian Sea, (1) and thus visit the markets of the East; by this route the majority of the huge quantity of Arabic silver coins found in Russia and in Sweden travelled from the provinces of the Caliphate into the viking world, and along this mighty stream Bulgars, Khazars, and, may be, Arabs too, themselves sailed up to visit the cold north. The Volga was the first trans-Russian waterway of the vikings, and throughout the ninth and tenth centuries it continued to be the most important trade-route for the merchants of Sweden and Gotland, this because the rival Dnieper was soon in the hands of an independent and jealous group of Swedish settlers who would not allow their countrymen a free and unhindered passage to the south.
There is no doubt of the existence of small Swedish settlements in the upper Volga basin north of the White Bulgars and the Steppes in the ninth century, but the history of their inhabitants is almost unknown. These Volga-Russians, however, are mentioned by Arabic authors, so that at least it can be discovered how they appeared to the cultured travellers of the East. One writer who names them was Ibn Dustah (sometimes called Ibn Roste) who inserts no very flattering picture of them in a work (2) composed by him in the first decade of the tenth century; they were, he says, bold and handsome barbarians, but dressed in dirty clothes, though the men wore heavy gold armlets; their sole occupations were fighting and bargaining, their only merchandise consisted of skins and slaves; they were always armed, and were quick-tempered and pugnacious; they were excellent sailors, but rode little on horseback. Another Arabic author, Ibn Fadlan, (3) described the Volga-Russians from personal knowledge of them, having accompanied in 921 an embassy of the Caliph al-Maktadir to the king of the White Bulgars, whose capital was situated on the Volga between Kazan and Simbirsk.
1. The word Sarkland probably means 'land of Saracens' and denotes the Muslim countries south-west and south of the Caspian (Azerbaijan and N. Persia). It has been suggested, however, that the Norse name referred originally not to the Saracens but to the Khazar town of Sarkel which was built in the '30s of the ninth century as a defence against the Russian attacks.
2. An encyclopedia; Vol. VII, containing the description of the Russians, has been translated into Russian (Kiev, 1870).
3. Quoted by Yâqût, the thirteenth-century geographer, in his lexicon; the passage concerning the Russians is printed with translation and copious notes by C. M. Frähn, Ibn-Foszlan's . . . Berichte über die Russen älterer Zeit, St. P., 1823.
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Ibn Fadlan said that he had seen the Russian traders arriving by river and thought that never before had he beheld such big and ruddy men. They wore cloaks and each man bore an axe, a knife, and a sword, this last being of European work and often ornamented; the women wore brooches and neck-chains; they were one and all especially fond of glass beads and willing to pay a big price for them. Ibn Fadlan declared that they were the dirtiest people that God ever made and so lax in certain specified matters of personal cleanliness that he could only liken them to wild asses. He goes on to say that these Russians, when they had arrived, built themselves wooden booths, each holding from ten to twenty people, and that they spent much time in worshipping and making presents to a large wooden idol that stood in a sacred place surrounded by other idols and posts. Thereat follows the amazing and often-quoted description (1) of a Russian chief's funeral, the ritual burning of him in his boat surrounded by rare and costly merchandise, with rich foods and strong drink, with a dog, horses, oxen, and poultry, and with the dead body of a slave-girl, whose sacrifice, that her soul might journey forth with her master's, is the culmination of the ceremonies and the horrible prelude to the firing of the ship. Ibn Fadlan said that the boat had been drawn up on land for the burning and that the last act of all was the piling up over the charred remains of an earthen mound upon which was set a wooden memorial bearing the name of the dead man and the name of his king.
A third Arabic author who writes of the Russians was Mas'ûdî, a celebrated traveller and story-teller who died in 956 or 957. He said (2) that the nation was made up of several distinct peoples, that their trade took the Russian merchants to Spain, Rome, and Constantinople, and the Khazar world (the lower Volga and north-west coast of the Caspian), and that their sailors were the masters of the Black Sea; then he tells of a great raid carried out by the Kievan Russians. Some time after the year 912, probably in 914, a fleet of 500 of their ships, each manned by a hundred men, sailed through the Sea of Azov into the Don; when they had secured, either by force or bribery, a promise from the Khagan of the Khazars that he would not interfere with them, they went up the Don and then made their way across country, dragging their boats overland, until after a week or so of this labour they
1. An English translation arranged by A. F. Major will be found in Folklore, XXXV (1924), p. 135 (and see n. 40).
2. Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, Eng. trans. by Aloys Sprenyer, London, 1841, I, p. 416 ff.
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had reached the Volga; then they sailed downstream and out past the town of Itil (near Astrakan) into the Caspian Sea. They attacked first the Persian coast in the south and afterwards the western Azerbaijan country; they found that the inhabitants were defenceless and for months the Russians remained in the Baku district, plundering, massacring, and stealing children for the slave-trade. The Muslims, however, raised an army and, after suffering one defeat, this levy of Islam was enlarged by
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reinforcements from Itil of Christian and Mohammedan Khazars who were likewise desirous of ridding the Caspian of these barbarian interrupters of the accustomed peaceful trading between Itil and the Caliphate. A great battle, lasting for three days, was fought near the Volga mouth and in the end the Russians were overthrown and almost annihilated. Only a small remnant of their host escaped and this too perished in the course of the hazardous journey back to the Black Sea.
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This was not the only expedition made by the Russians against the northern and western coasts of the Caspian. As early as A.D. 880, or thereabouts, a band of Russian pirates had seized a town near the modern Gumish Tappeh, far away in the south-east corner, and had been slain one and all by the Muslim levies; (1) again in 910 a fleet of 16 Russian ships plundered the Persian coasts, but after committing a long series of violent robberies the crews were caught divided between ship and land and met with disastrous defeats from which not one of them escaped alive. But the most serious raid took place in 943, (2) some thirty years after that described by Mas'ûdî. On this occasion the Russians arrived at the mouth of the river Kura in Azerbaijan and sailed some 200 miles up-stream to Berdaa on the Terter, a southern tributary. This town, the ancient capital of the Arran province, they took, after defeating a levy of 5,000 Mohammedans, and subsequently they put most of the wretched inhabitants to the sword; after this the Muslim governor, El-Marzoban, collected an army of 30,000 men from out of his province and threatened the Russians. His attacks were beaten off, but by this time the Russian ranks were being thinned to an alarming degree by an epidemic of dysentery, and as it soon became certain that they could not withstand another attack, they made off without waiting for the encounter. As soon as they had gone, the Mohammedans dug up the male corpses of their enemies to secure the fine weapons that these northern warriors had borne with them into the grave, for even during the ravaging of the disease the Russians had buried their dead, according to custom, armed and accompanied by a wife or a slave. The remainder of the Russian army returned to their homes seriously depleted in numbers, but bringing with them a noble spoil.
Another occasion when the Russian fleets crossed the Caspian
1. The sources for this and other Caspian raids are set forth and discussed in a long paper by B. Dorn, Caspia; über die Einfalle der alten Russen in Tarbaristan, Mem. Acad. Imp. des Sciences, St. P., 8 S. XXIII (1877), 1.
2. For this, see Ibn Miskawaih (French trans. by C. Huart in C. R. Acad. des Inscriptions, 1921, pp. 182-191). In the opinion of B. Dorn and others this expedition took place in 944, which was the year of Igor's second attack upon the Greeks, and it is suggested that the Caspian raid provided an outlet for the fighting lust of his enthusiastic mercenaries (cf. Dorn, loc. cit., p. 302). This is unlikely in view of Miskawaih's evidence that the Caspian expedition occurred in 943 and not 944. But it is possible that the events referred to in the Khazar document mentioned above (p. 153 , n. 1) may be connected with Igor's movements in 944.
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was in 969 at the time of Svyatoslav's wars with the Bulgars on the Danube. For in the east the Volga-Russians, descending the river in armed hordes, captured the capital of the White Bulgars and the Khazar town of Itil at the river-mouth; there they embarked and sailed over the Caspian to sack another Khazar town, Semender, near the modern Petrovsk. Yet another incursion of the vikings into the Caspian region was the far-famed expedition of the royal Swedish viking Ingvar Vittfarne, whose illustrious name appears on more than twenty rune-stones in his country. This prince, with a following of Swedes, made a daring voyage down the whole length of the Volga, fighting on the way, so his saga tells, dragons and serpents and monsters of all kinds, until at last he came to Sarkland where he died in the year 1041 at the young age of twenty-five. A memorial-stone in Södermanland is thus inscribed, 'Tola set up this stone for her son Harald (or Havald), Ingvar's brother; in faroff lands they sought wealth boldly; in the east their battles spread food before the eagle; south in Sarkland they died.' (1)
Svyatoslav, for ever busy with his wars, had left the principality of Kiev divided into three parts, each committed to one of his sons, but after his death in 972 there was dispute among them and eventually the eldest, Yaropolk of Kiev, slew the second brother, Oleg, Prince of the Derevylans. At this the third son, Vladimir of Novgorod, fled to Sweden. He returned, however, in 980 with a Swedish army to the town that was his heritage and after rallying the northern Russians to his banner he marched south and overthrew Yaropolk, thus securing the whole dominion of his father for himself.
Vladimir the Great of Russia is an outstanding figure in the early history of his country. First and foremost he was a warrior; he was everywhere successful in re-imposing Kievan authority upon those Slavonic tribes whose allegiance had wavered during the turbulent years of Svyatoslav's wars and in the subsequent period of unrest; Estland and the East Baltic lands were made to acknowledge his suzerainty; he proved his might by carrying the Russian arms into enemy countries; he fought the Bulgars in two victorious campaigns; he fought King Boleslav of Poland, and is even said to have invaded Eastern Galicia; also he built and garrisoned a new chain of forts to prevent the inroads of the Patzinaks. Yet it is above all as a statesman that he is renowned, for it was
1. E. Brate, Runverser 84, p. 194 (A.T.S., x, 1887-91) ; for Ingvar, see F. Braun, Fornvännen, 1910, p. 99.
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