Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (31 page)

After this disaster, the Rus did not return to the Caspian Sea until 943, when they raided Azerbaijan again. The name of the expedition’s leader is not known but Igor was ruler of the Kievan Rus at this time. The Rus rowed up the Kura river over 100 miles to the city of Barda. Greatly underestimating their strength, the emir confronted the Rus with an army of 600 Iranian and Kurdish mercenaries and 5,000 of the city folk outside the city walls. Faced with a ferocious onslaught by the Rus, the untrained city folk fled, quickly followed by the rest of the soldiers. Only the Iranians stood their ground and most of them were killed. After the Rus took the city, they did their best to calm the people, telling them that they had no quarrel with Islam and that they would treat them well if they were loyal to their new rulers. The wealthier city folk, who had something to lose, made no trouble for the Rus, but when the emir’s forces tried to retake Barda, the common people rose up and attacked them. After this, the Rus gave the population three days to leave. Most ignored the ultimatum – they probably had nowhere to go – and on the fourth day the Rus turned on them, massacring thousands and taking 10,000 people captive. The Rus separated the adult men from the women and children and imprisoned them in the city’s main mosque, demanding that they ransom themselves. A Christian civil servant negotiated a ransom of twenty dirhems a head. Some paid up but many Muslims refused because they did not think they should have been valued the same as
jizya
-paying Christians. The Rus eventually lost patience and massacred them. Those who did ransom themselves were given a clay token, which gave them safe passage. The Rus kept the women and children who, according to the Iranian writer Ibn Miskawayh (d. 1030), were raped and enslaved. The Vikings have a popular reputation for ‘rape and pillage’, but this actually is one of very few instances where a contemporary explicitly accuses them of raping women. The silence of the sources suggests that Vikings were neither better nor worse than most warriors of their day in this regard, not that rape itself was uncommon. Whoever they were owned by, enslaved women had no rights and it was taken for granted that they could be used for sexual gratification: they were, after all, just property.

Barda’s ordeal came to an end when dysentery broke out among the Rus, steadily depleting their numbers. This encouraged the emir to lay siege to Barda. One night the Rus sallied out against the besiegers but were heavily defeated, losing 700 men. The Rus retreated to the city’s citadel but the epidemic continued to take its toll. Under cover of night, the surviving Rus slipped out of the city with as much plunder as they could carry and, dragging their slaves with them, made for the River Kura and their ships. These had been kept under guard, presumably in a
longphort
type of fortification. After the Rus had departed for home, the Muslims dug up the graves of the warriors who had died in the epidemic to recover the swords that had been buried with them.

The raid on Barda needed the co-operation of the Khazars, but it must have caused considerable tensions with their Muslim neighbours and subjects. In about 960, the khagan Joseph wrote to Abd ar-Rahman III, the caliph of Córdoba, telling him that he was now preventing Rus ships entering the Caspian Sea to raid the Muslims. He had to do this, he said, because ‘if I would give them any chance at all they would lay waste the whole land of the Muslims as far as Baghdad.’ The Arabs would probably have agreed. The two Rus raids on the Caspian had created a very strong impression on the Muslim world. Ibn Miskawayh thought them formidable fighters, ‘they do not recognise defeats,’ he said, ‘no one turns back until he has killed or been killed.’ Another writer, Marwazi, praised their courage, saying that one Rus ‘is equal to a number of any other nation’. He was grateful that the Rus fought on foot, ‘if they had horses and were riders, they would be a great scourge to mankind’.

The road to Mikligarðr

Known simply as
Mikligarðr
, the ‘great city’, Constantinople held the Vikings in thrall more than any other place. With half a million inhabitants, Constantinople was Europe’s largest city, and by a long way its most magnificent. It is not known exactly when the first Rus reached Constantinople, but it must have been before 839 when a group of them arrived at the Frankish court with a Byzantine diplomatic mission. A Byzantine hagiography
The
Life
of
St
George
of
Amastris
, written before 848, describes Rus raids on Amastris (now Amasra) on Anatolia’s Black Sea coast not long after the saint’s death in 806, which implies that they must have found their way to Constantinople some time in the early ninth century at the latest.

The main route to Constantinople from Staraja Ladoga followed the River Volkhov upstream to the fortified settlement of Gorodische (‘fortress’), close to the point where the river flows out of Lake Ilmen. In the Viking Age the site of Gorodische was a low island, for which reason the Vikings knew it as
Holmgarð
(‘island city’). Gorodische was a small Slav settlement that appears to have come under Scandinavian control around the middle of the ninth century, making this the most likely site of Rurik’s capital. Many Scandinavian artefacts have been found on the site, including two amulets inscribed with runic charms. Around 930, Gorodische was abandoned in favour of a new site 2 miles downstream: this was Novgorod, the ‘new city’. The Volkhov divided Novgorod in two, the Sofia bank on the west and the Merchantsi bank on the east. Late in the Viking Age, the two banks were linked by a bridge. On the Sofia bank merchants’ and craftsmen’s quarters huddled around the heavily fortified kremlin (citadel) where, in the eleventh century the cathedral of St Sofia was built. On the Merchantsi bank a colony of mainly foreign merchants developed around a royal palace. The whole of this area was protected by a rampart. Novgorod grew quickly to become the dominant Rus centre in north-east Russia, sending Staraja Ladoga into decline. Novgorod’s connections with Scandinavia continued after the Viking Age, when its trade came to be dominated by merchants from the Hanseatic town of Visby on Gotland. Novgorod has seen extensive archaeological excavations. Waterlogged conditions have resulted in excellent preservation of clothing, furniture and other artefacts made from organic materials. The most important finds have been more than 1,000 merchants’ letters and accounts, written on birch-bark in Old Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet. Few specifically Scandinavian artefacts have ever been discovered, however, suggesting that Novgorod’s population was mainly Slavic, at least in material culture, from the start.

The route onwards from Novgorod crossed Lake Ilmen and followed the River Lovat to its headwaters, where there was a portage across into the Western Dvina river. A secondary route from Scandinavia to Constantinople, which avoided Novgorod, joined the Lovat about halfway between the lake and its headwaters. This route began in the Gulf of Finland and followed the River Narva (the modern border between Estonia and Russia) to Lake Peipus and the towns of Pskov and Izborsk. Izborsk, the older of the two towns, began as a small hill-top settlement with a mixed population of Finns, Slavs and Scandinavians. The settlement was protected with an earth and timber rampart in the tenth century and in the eleventh century the whole hilltop was surrounded by a stone wall. Though it remained an important border fortress, in the tenth century Izborsk was gradually supplanted as a commercial centre by nearby Pskov, on the banks of the River Velikaya. This river was followed upstream to a portage over into the valley of the Lovat to join the route south from Novgorod. Around 10 per cent of excavated graves in Viking Age cemeteries around Pskov contained Scandinavian artefacts: the rest of the population were Slavs or Finns.

The Western Dvina flows west to the Baltic Sea at Riga (as the Daugava). The river was a trade route but the Letts controlled its outlet to the sea and it was not a major Rus route. On reaching the Western Dvina, Rus merchants sailed downstream as far as Vitebsk, where they began another portage, which took them to the River Dnepr near Gnezdovo, the forerunner of modern Smolensk. Halfway between Novgorod and Kiev, Gnezdovo was an important staging post for Rus merchants. Outside the town there was a massive cremation cemetery of over 4,000 burial mounds. The cemetery has produced more Scandinavian artefacts than any other site in Russia but, despite this, about 95 per cent of the burials belonged to members of the local Slav tribe, the Krivich. The cemetery contained several Scandinavian warrior burials, with weapons, boats and sacrificed slave girls, as described by Ibn Fadlan. Seven hoards of Arabic and Byzantine coins, Frankish swords and a Crimean wine amphora are evidence of the town’s long-distance trade links.

Kiev

From Gnezdovo, the Dnepr could be followed all the way to the Black Sea but the main destination for many merchants would have been Kiev, by the late ninth century, the main Rus power centre. Along the way, they would have passed close to Chernigov, on the River Desna, an eastern tributary of the Dnepr. No Rus settlement has yet been identified here but a large Viking Age cemetery has, implying that one existed close by. The cemetery contains the ‘Black Mound’, the largest known pagan Rus burial mound. The mound was 36 feet (11 m) high and contained the ashes of a funeral pyre on which had been cremated the bodies of a warrior and a woman. After the cremation, a mound was raised over the ashes and the chief’s weapons and armour were placed on top, with a cauldron containing the bones of a goat, two drinking horns, and a figurine of the Scandinavian thunder god Thor. The mound was then built up to its full height and a pillar was erected on top. The burial is probably that of an important Rus chief in the service of the ruler of Kiev. Now the capital of Ukraine, Kiev –
Kœnugarð
to the Vikings – was built on three hills overlooking the Dnepr. Archaeological excavations have shown that Kiev was already an important Slav town, with a pagan temple, before it came under Rus control in the second half of the ninth century. The town was centred on the Starokievskaya Gora hill and its strongly fortified kremlin where the ruler and his retinue lived. In the tenth century a large settlement of merchants and craftsmen developed on the low-lying Podol on the riverbank below the kremlin. Few Viking Age burials have been discovered in Kiev, probably because later expansion of the city has destroyed the earliest cemeteries.

After Kiev, the journey down the Dnepr became increasingly dangerous because the lower reaches of the river were in territory controlled by hostile Pecheneg nomads. In the twentieth century the course of the Dnepr was transformed by vast hydro-electric reservoirs, but in the Viking Age the passage downriver was obstructed by 50 miles of rapids south of the modern city of Dnepropetrovsk. The rapids had to be bypassed by a series of portages, during which the Rus were very vulnerable to ambush by the Pechenegs. Because of the dangers, merchants gathered at the fortress of Vitichev, 25 miles south of Kiev, in the spring to sail downstream in large parties for mutual protection. It took five to six weeks to reach Constantinople so the expeditions had to leave before the end of June in order to make the return trip before the river froze again. New boats for these expeditions were built every year. No Rus boats have ever been found but Greek and Arab sources suggest they were large expanded log-boats, probably not dissimilar to the chaikas used by the Cossacks in the same region in the early modern period. The boats were built by hollowing out a tree trunk. This was done by the Rus-Slav tributaries in forested areas north of Kiev over the winter. As soon as the ice on the rivers broke up they were floated downstream to Kiev, where planks were added to the sides and to raise the freeboard and rowing benches, masts and sails were fitted.

From Vitichev, it was about ten days sailing to the first of the Dnepr rapids. The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913 – 59) recorded the Old Norse names of the rapids in a government policy manual,
De
Adminstrando
Imperio
(‘On the Administration of the Empire’), that he wrote
c.
948. The first rapid, called Essupi (‘sleepless’) was passable with care: the Rus manhandled the boats through the shallows by the riverbanks. The next two rapids, Ulvorsi (‘island falls’) and Gelandri (‘roaring falls’), were passed in the same way. The fourth rapid, Aïfor (‘impassable falls’), was the biggest and had to be avoided by a 6 mile portage. Some of the crew always needed to stand guard against Pecheneg ambushes, while the rest drew the boats on shore and unloaded them. This had to be done not only to lighten the boats for dragging or carrying but also because, without water to support it, the weight of the cargo could break a boat’s back. Slaves were led around the rapids in neck chains, no doubt carrying the rest of the cargo. A rune stone at Pilgards on Gotland commemorates a Viking called Rafn who drowned trying to run these rapids. The next two rapids, Baruforos (‘wave falls’) and Leanti (‘laughing falls’), could be passed in the same way as the first three. At the foot of the final rapids, Strukun (‘the courser’), was the Kichkas ford, a major crossing place where the river ran broad but shallow. Cliffs near the ford were a favourite vantage point for Pechenegs planning to ambush the Rus in the shallows. After passing Kichkas the Rus hauled in at Khortytsya Island where they made offerings of thanks to their gods at an enormous oak tree.

Below Khortytsya, the Dnepr widened so the Rus could sail out of bow-shot from the shore, safe from the Pechenegs, who always shadowed the convoys from the riverbanks. After another four days sailing, the Rus reached the Black Sea and Berezan Island, where they stopped and rested for two or three days and made such repairs as were necessary. The Rus continued their journey towards Constantinople by sailing south along the coast. The Pechenegs continued to shadow the convoys as far as the mouth of the Danube, hoping to seize any boats that were blown onshore. Once past the mouth of the Danube the main dangers of the journey were behind them and the Rus sailed in easy stages to the Bosphorus straits and Constantinople where, as Constantine put it, ‘their voyage, fraught with such travail and terror, such difficulty and danger’ was finally at an end.