A History of the World (34 page)

Europe was waking up. A parallel transfer of knowledge in astronomy and mathematics now took place, influencing such later European thinkers as Copernicus and Fibonacci. This is where the
long European road towards the Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment begins. It could not have started so early and so determinedly without al-Andalus. Muslim Spain would fall back and eventually collapse not because of exotic Moorish decadence – too many baths, too much sherbet – but for a more down-to-earth and familiar reason, political division. The Arabs had originally been able to topple the Visigoths because one Visigothic ruler could hardly glimpse another without spurring his horse and charging; and the same thing happened to al-Andalus. The religious and moral authority of the amirs was undermined by the vagaries of lineage and by revolts. Waves of new invaders, proclaiming more austere visions of Islam, would arrive from North Africa and restore order, only to be challenged and checkmated themselves. And by the beginning of the new millennium every Muslim division, every period of instability, represented another opportunity for the rising Christian kingdoms in the north.

Viking River

The political history of Russia starts with a trade route, and a frightened people. The Slavs were farmers and cattle-herders who lived in what is now southern Russia, in parts of Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, north of the Black Sea and west of the Caspian. The first mentions of them by Byzantine historians in the mid-500s refer to poor villages and primitive warriors, who spoke an uncouth, incomprehensible language. But the Slavs were not just another nomadic people sliding westwards across Eurasia. Archaeology reveals hill forts, iron ploughs and pottery. They were farming rich black soil, hunting abundant game and fishing lakes and rivers, and able to survive formidably harsh winters. But despite the efforts of nationalistic modern historians, they remain comparatively mysterious.

Often fighting among themselves, the Slavs were vulnerable to the regular arrival of new nomadic peoples, such as the Huns and Bulgars, pushing west across Asia. The most impressive of the cultures of the area in this period was the Khazar empire, a feudal state in which many Slavs lived with comparative safety. The Khazars have world-historical importance, since, often allied with Byzantium, they defeated the northward march of Arab Islam through the Caucasus in
the 600s and 700s, stopping the Muslim conquest of modern Russia and Eastern Europe. Had the Khazar state not existed, Russia would probably not have developed as a nation later on. The Khazar leadership, looking for a more forward-looking religion to replace their old beliefs (which included ritually killing failed rulers), converted to Judaism. They lasted for six centuries on the edge of the literate world, and at least one of their great military leaders was a woman. But intriguing, unusual and important as they were, they would be brought low before their literature and culture could be properly preserved or understood by modern humanity, and so remain one of the most tantalizing of the lost civilizations.

The people who defeated the Khazars claimed they had been invited in to protect the Slavs, both from their own tribal wars and from outsiders. It sounds like ancient propaganda, but it may even be true. Either way, the frightened people, if we can call them that, found themselves under the rule of strangers from the north.

They had been living with one asset of huge value, a river system so extensive it could connect the lush, wealthy world of Byzantium and the Near East with the agricultural and hunting peoples of Scandinavia and northern Europe. Northwards up those rivers went grain, wine, gold and silver and luxury cloths. Southwards came furs, slaves, amber, wood and honey. This called for urban centres. Trading posts, fortified towns and later cities began to appear along the Dnieper and the Volga and their tributaries, in much the same way that towns in the central states of the USA are clustered around autoroutes and railroads. Russia began with her rivers.

The incomers were called the Rus or, in Byzantium, the Varangians. They are better known today as Vikings, the eastern splatter of the explosion of warrior-sailors and farmers flinging themselves out from today’s Norway, Sweden and Denmark from the 700s onwards. The Viking explorers, traders and raiders constituted the first major eruption of Europeans into other parts of the world. They would reach faraway places where they would try to settle but fail, including ‘Vinland’ in North America, and Greenland. In other places, such as parts of eastern Britain, Iceland and northern France, they settled successfully. Their descendants, the Normans, would carve out kingdoms in Sicily and conquer Anglo-Saxon England. These Scandinavians can claim a key role in the creation of that mongrel nation,
Britain, and they were also vital to the creation of mongrel Russia. Though other raiders, notably the Mongols, would have a huge influence here, nobody else would prove effective state-builders.

Vikings had been taking their flat-bottomed trading vessels south downriver for a long time before they finally reached the Black Sea itself. The same superb boat-building skills shown in their famous ocean-straddling longships, which allowed them to raid coastal monasteries and townships without warning, also enabled them to travel further on rivers than anyone else could.

The major Russian river systems presented obstacles – falls, rapids, underwater rocks – which meant boats had to be carried, or rolled, from one section of free-flowing water to the next. The hardest barriers were the cataracts south of Kiev, where for forty miles knife-sharp rock walls broke the water flow: the Vikings had names for them such as Impassable, Ever Fierce, Seether and Wave Force.
⁸
But the eastern Vikings, from today’s Sweden and its major islands, had already learned while raiding and trading in Finland that their boats were light enough to be carried across land barriers. They could go where others could not. From the great Lake Ladoga in the north they moved steadily south and east downriver, establishing settlements from the 850s onwards.

To the far south-east, in today’s Afghanistan, there was a wealthy Muslim settlement with huge silver-mines, ready to trade; and for the Vikings, Byzantium itself was simply Miklagard, ‘the Great City’, source of innumerable good things. Its story will be told later, but it is relevant now to note that in the narrative of Russia what mattered was that exploring Vikings reached this golden city early on, in 838. They later tried twice to raid it, only to be repulsed by Byzantine fleets with their secret ‘Greek fire’, but they eventually settled into an amicable trading arrangement. They would be allowed inside the city walls to trade, but never in groups of more than fifty, and always unarmed. Later, because of their fighting prowess, the Byzantine emperors would recruit Vikings as a personal fighting force, the famous Varangian Guard whose runic graffiti can be found to this day scattered around the eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, far to the north, the Vikings were slowly forming a kind of imported ruling class along the Dnieper and the Volga. According to their own legends, around the year 862 three Swedish
brothers were asked by the Slavs to stay and to institute a new kind of rule. The Rus
Chronicle of Past Times
(also known as
The Russian Primary Chronicle
), composed by monks at Kiev’s beautiful labyrinthine Monastery of the Caves some two hundred years later, and presumably based on stories carried down, claimed that because ‘there was no law amongst them, but tribe rose against tribe’, the local people had told the Rus: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule over us.’
⁹

But why had the Vikings ventured so far from their homeland in the first place? And what possible credentials did they have as state-builders? For Western Europeans these were, after all, terrifying pagan marauders, without law or mercy, ravening sea-beasts: ‘Lord, preserve us from the fury of the Northmen,’ prayed the English. Many modern historians argue that the key to Viking expansion was the familiar trigger of overpopulation. In the warm period towards the end of the Roman Empire, agriculture in the tougher northerly parts of Europe, as we saw earlier, had been more successful. Success of the kind experienced then tends to create a future population bottleneck. Farming and fishing communities that had lived in today’s Denmark, Norway and Sweden since the end of the last ice age found that more boys were surviving than could be found land to farm. Viking culture favoured the first-born son, so there was soon a surplus of young men with no obvious future at home.

Centuries of fishing and of local trading, and an abundance of forest wood, had already produced sailing skills that inevitably prompted the thought of venturing further out across the apparently limitless ‘whale road’. The Vikings were formidable fighters, cruel and ruthless, but in the 700s these were hardly unique qualities, particularly among all-male warrior-bands far away from their families. These men were not even all Scandinavians, but included Finns, Scots, Germans and Welsh.
¹⁰
They have been remembered as worse than Saxons, Franks or Burgundians only because they were slightly more effective raiders. In fact, these warrior-bands were quick to settle down, take local wives and learn local customs – otherwise, they could not have established themselves so quickly in northern England and France and the Mediterranean. These ‘berserkers’, with their bloody myths and dragon-prowed ships, could turn domestic. Some turned up as Dukes of Normandy and then Kings of England.

The eastern branch, however, became Russians. Rurik, the eldest of those three brothers who arrived to rule over the local Slavs, may be a semi-mythic figure, but he founded a dynasty that lasted for five hundred years. The early chronology does not quite stack up, but Rurik’s son Igor certainly was a historical figure. With a thousand ships he unsuccessfully raided Byzantium in 941, and his wife Olga was the first prominent Christian convert among the Rus. After her husband’s death, she ruled in her own right and came to Byzantium to be baptized. Her capital Kiev slowly changed from being a large trading camp of log-cabins, workshops and storehouses into a royal Christian fortress, mingling Swedish warrior customs with new ideas learned from the Khazars and the Byzantines.
¹¹

Slaves were a major part of the trade south, along with hunting-birds and furs. Muslim silver coinage turned up early on in trading towns in Sweden, above all on the island of Gotland. But the exhaustion of the Muslims’ Afghan silver mines led to an economic collapse in Kiev, and Olga’s son – who refused Christian baptism – lashed out against the Khazars, and then, disastrously, against Byzantium. This is central to early Russian history because one of
his
sons, Vladimir, a bastard who had fled to Sweden, now came to his father’s aid, returning with a huge following. After basing himself in the northerly trading town of Novgorod, he journeyed south down the Dnieper, seized Kiev, killed a half-brother and became the leader of the Rus.

Though sanctified with a huge, smug statue overlooking his city, Vladimir was an idol-worshipping pagan with unChristian attitudes to marriage (one chronicler described him as a
fornicator immensus
). His early success was based on raids against tribes and townships, bringing in tribute money to Kiev. But after failing to win against the Muslim Bulgars, in the 980s Vladimir seems to have decided to convert. He was not, however, sure which variety of monotheism to convert to. So, it is said, he summoned representatives of Western, Catholic Christianity, of Eastern, Orthodox Christianity, of Judaism and of Islam, to explain and debate their faiths in front of him. The story that the Swedish warrior-king ruled out Islam because he was horrified at its insistence on banning alcohol may be apocryphal, but Vladimir’s decision to opt for Orthodox Christianity was momentous. The chroniclers say that his envoys influenced him by reporting back on
the magnificence of the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople: ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or earth.’
¹²

Byzantium was rich, but politically embattled. Its then emperor Basil II, hard-pressed by Bulgar revolts, needed Viking help. Part of the agreement was that Basil’s sister, the twenty-five-year-old Anna Porphyrogenita, would be packed off to distant Kiev to become Vladimir’s (latest) bride. If this must have seemed a hideous fate for a sophisticated princess, it nonetheless did the trick: six thousand Viking warriors duly helped the Byzantine army to fight off its enemies. Anna was sent across the Black Sea and up the Dnieper to Kiev, where she married Vladimir. He was baptized and took the name Basil in honour of his new friend and brother-in-law, the emperor. Then, the leading idol in pagan Kiev was pulled down, tied to a horse’s tail, dragged along, symbolically beaten with sticks, and thrown into the river. The other idols were smashed, saints’ images set up in their place, and churches built where they had stood.

There had long been Christians in the land of the Rus, but it was now that a campaign of conversion began.

Vladimir brought in craftsmen and masons from Byzantium to build a lavishly decorated stone church, where he and his wife would later be buried; he imported monks and literacy, and he built huge ramparts around Kiev. Extraordinary multi-towered, onion-domed wooden monasteries and churches were erected, copying the most exuberant flights of fancy of Greek and Byzantine architecture but pushing them even further. The ‘look’ of Russian cities, with their painted wooden structures, walled kremlin-fortresses and gilded domes, begins with Vladimir and Christian Kiev. From now on, the settlements of the Rus began to spread outwards into the untamed tribal lands beyond the big rivers, and the long process of building a nation started. Swedes, interbreeding with Slavs and other groups, became Russians. Pagans became Christians. The people of the Dnieper and the Volga took to Orthodox Christianity, its scented, mesmeric services and its sad-eyed Virgin icons. Under a single ruling family, who would one day mimic the Caesar fantasies of Byzantium and call themselves ‘Czars’, the Russian system of aristocratic functionaries, or boyars, began to take shape.