The Vikings (19 page)

 

The
Chronicle
tells us that two of Rurik’s men foraged on down the Dneiper and took control of a small settlement on a hill, known as Kiev, and that on 18 June 860 these two leaders, whose names, Askold and Dir, correspond to Old Norse ‘Hoskuld’ and ‘Dyr’, launched an attack with a fleet of 200 ships on Constantinople. There is some doubt that Kiev was settled quite as early as this, and it is possible that Lake Ilmen and the Gorodische settlement were the likelier starting-point of the operation.
²²
To a striking degree, the sermons preached by the city’s Patriarch Photios in the wake of the raid echo the words in the despairing and apocalyptic letters written by Alcuin after Lindisfarne. There is even the same claim, contradicted by the evidence of familiarity in the 839 entry in the
Annals of St-Bertin
, that the raiders came as a wholly unknown quantity, a ‘savage tribe’ who had descended on civilization ‘out of the farthest north’, an obscure and undisciplined rabble, whose journey ‘from the ends of the earth’ had taken them through countless kingdoms and across ‘numberless rivers and harbourless seas’. Their brutality fully matched that of the Lindisfarne raiders. Women, children, oxen and even chickens who got in their way were indiscriminately killed. Like Alcuin, Photios saw the raid as a punishment, inflicted on the Christians by a god angry with them for their lax morals and depraved ways.
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The report in the
Russian Primary Chronicle
is less detailed, noting ‘a great massacre of Christians’ that was interrupted by a storm, ‘confusing the boats of the godless Russians’ and driving many of the ships ashore, where their crews were killed. The
Chronicle
does not use the terms ‘Christians’ and ‘godless men’ with anything like the frequency of the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon annalists, but it is the defining opposition, and as close as it is able to get to giving a reasonable explanation for the terror.

Rurik died in about 879 and the succession passed to his relative Oleg (Old Norse ‘Helgi’), who ruled as a regent for Rurik’s son Igor (‘Ingvar’). Askold and Dir had set up as independent rulers of Kiev and Oleg/Helgi’s first priority was to extend the claims of the Rus kingship proper - as he and his family interpreted their position - over the city. Askold and Dir were killed in battle in 882 and Oleg became the first ruler of a united eastern Slavic Rus kingdom. From this point onward the
Russian Primary Chronicle
treats the activities of Oleg/Helgi, and in due course of Igor/Ingvar, as those of the leader of a legitimate polity. He pays particular attention to the securing of the trade route along the Dneiper to Constantinople, a task that was closely bound up with the subjugation of the various Slavic tribes that controlled different stretches of the rivers. In successive years following the occupation of Kiev he launched a series of campaigns against the Drevljane, the Severjane and the Radimichi, which, by 885, had completely secured the Dneiper route for Rus traders. These tribes had all formerly been tributaries of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turko-Tartar tribe that was the other great power in the region beside the Byzantine empire, which the Rus had to confront. From about the middle of the eighth century the Khazars had dominated the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian and so controlled trade relations between the Islamic world and northern and western Europe. The transference of these tributary rights was an important first step in the Rus’ struggle to wrest regional hegemony of this part of south-eastern Europe away from the Khazars. Around 890 Oleg/Helgi also set about weakening the power in the south-west of the Magyars. Kiev survived an attempted blockade by the Magyars in 898.

The climax of the first years of the Kievan Rus state was an attack on Constantinople in 907. A list of those who manned an invasion fleet said to consist of 2,000 ships included ‘Varangians, Slavs, Chuds, Krivichians, Merians, Polyanians, Severians, Derevlians, Radimichians, Croats, Dulebians, and Tivercias’, a combination of peoples that might suggest this was already a state enterprise, carried out under the auspices of a de facto Old Russian state.
²⁴
The
Russian Primary Chronicle
tells us that Oleg/Helgi

arrived before Byzantium, but the Greeks fortified the strait and closed up the city. Oleg disembarked upon the shore, and ordered his soldiery to beach the ships. They waged war around the city, and accomplished much slaughter of the Greeks. They also destroyed many palaces and burned the churches. Of the prisoners they captured, some they beheaded, some they tortured, some they shot, and still others they cast into the sea. The Russians inflicted many other woes upon the Greeks after the usual manner of soldiers. Oleg commanded his warriors to make wheels, which they attached to the ships, and when the wind was favourable they spread the sails and bore down upon the city from the open country. When the Greeks beheld this, they were afraid, and sending messengers to Oleg, they implored him not to destroy the city, and offered to submit to such tribute as he should desire.
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Oleg/Helgi’s nickname in the Russian sources and in Russian oral tradition was ‘Veschi’, meaning ‘the Wise’ or ‘the Far-sighted’, and the improvisational talent that led him to transform a fleet of ships into wheeled wagons shows the nickname was warranted. So, too, does the fact that a major result of the attack was to force a way for the Rus into the great market place of Constantinople.
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Byzantine written sources contain no direct reference to this raid of 907, a fact which has led some to doubt that it ever took place at all. But the terms of the peace and trade treaty which followed the attack, and which are given in some detail in the
Russian Primary Chronicle
, show Constantinople, in the persons of the emperors Leo and Alexander, ceding trading terms to the Rus so favourable as to be unthinkable other than as the result of military defeat or the threat of such. Viking enough to know that his first priority must be to reward the loyalty of his men, one of Oleg/Helgi’s first demands was for a sum of twelve
grivni
of silver to be paid to each of them. Of particular interest are the names of those who led the Rus delegation in the trade discussions that followed. All are Scandinavian, none are Slavic. It was the ethnically Scandinavian members of Oleg/Helgi’s variegated soldiery who retained the highest status: the Karls, Farulfs, Vermunds, Hrollafs and Steinviths. The terms of this agreement of 907, and of what looks like its ratification in an expanded, second treaty of 912, fully endorse the suggestion that the Rus’ long-term aim, from the taking of Kiev and its elevation to Oleg/Helgi’s capital to the subjugation of the local tribes, had been all along the opening up of Constantinople to Rus traders and travellers.

The Byzantine leaders made an immediate start on the attempt to civilize their new trading partners:

The Emperor Leo honoured the Russian envoys with gifts of gold, palls and robes, and placed his vassals at their disposition to show them the beauties of the churches, the golden palace, and the riches contained therein. They thus showed the Russes much gold and many palls and jewels, together with the relics of our Lord’s passion: the crowns, the nails, and the purple robe, as well as the bones of the Saints.
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Further west such a display might have invited disaster: here it was a sign of the strength and self-confidence of the Byzantine empire. At the formal ratification of the treaty of 907 they might have realized the process of conversion would have to take its time: while the joint emperors Leo and Alexander kissed the cross, the Rus swore by their weapons and by Perun, a Slavic incarnation of Thor associated with thunder and lightning and generally held to have been the chief god in the old Russian pantheon.
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In practical terms the treaty presented elaborate rules for the provisioning, housing and trading practices of Rus merchants visiting the city, and paragraphs dealing with matters such as the return of runaway slaves and the proper treatment of shipwrecked seamen and their property. There were also rules governing the employment of Rus who wanted to work as mercenaries for the emperors, and how the estate of such men should be disposed of in the event of their dying intestate or childless. This is the earliest reference to what later became known as the Varangian Guard, an elite military force that would presently school some of the Viking Age’s most ambitious leaders. The treaty of 912 refers to itself as an affirmation of the ‘long-standing amity which joins Greeks and Rus’, and seventy years prior to this the Rus traders at Louis’ court had indeed seemed to be on friendly terms with Constantinople. Yet the scepticism with which Louis the Pious had treated his visitors may indicate that their status remained ambivalent in the main European arenas. It may be that one reason Oleg/Helgi went on the offensive was precisely to insist upon the parity and respect due to a great power that was granted him in the treaties of 907 and 912.

The manner in which Oleg/Helgi allegedly met his death in 913 is about all that belies his reputation as a far-sighted leader. After a seer had prophesied that his favourite horse would be the death of him Oleg/Helgi let the animal live, but never rode it again. Five years after the great attack on Constantinople he was told that it was dead. In delight at having outwitted fate he visited its skeleton and stamped on the skull, disturbing a snake which slithered out of the bones and gave him a fatal bite. The story is echoed in the thirteenth-century Icelandic
Saga of Orvar Odd
in which a hero, confronted by a similar prophesy, attempts to cheat fate by killing and burying the horse. After a long and eventful life he returns home. The earth that covered the horse has all been washed away. Out walking one day he comes across the skull and idly prods it with the point of his spear. A snake emerges, gives him a fatal bite, and the prophesy is fulfilled. Over 300 years old at the time, Orvar Odd had either forgotten about the prophesy or simply didn’t care any more.

 

Oleg/Helgi was succeeded by Igor/Ingvar, Rurik’s son according to the
Russian Primary Chronicle
, though the almost forty-year gap between Rurik’s death and Igor’s succession leaves it open to doubt. The
Chronicle
treats Igor in the same way as Oleg, as the leader of a polity rather than an adventuring Viking. As such, the same three political and military aims were ascribed to both rulers: the building of towns and fortresses; the formulation of laws; and the subjugation of the Slavic tribes and regulation of the tribute system of taxation. As noted before, many of these tributary relations had been wrested from the Khazars. The Khazars practised an advanced taxation system of fixed tribute which both Oleg and Igor seem to have adopted unchanged. The Drevljane, who had never been Khazar tributaries, were among those who paid the Rus in kind, a black marten fur apiece in their case, though others paid in different kinds of furs and some in wax. Tributes were collected annually in the autumn, when the Rus ruler and his retinue left Kiev and journeyed down the western bank of the Dneiper, turning at Smolensk and making their way back up the eastern bank through the lands of the Radimichi and the Severjane. But these remained dangerous and uncertain relationships. A year or so after Igor came to power, the Rus were attacked for the first time by the Pechenegs, a tribe of nomads whose presence made every excursion to the lower reaches of the Dneiper a hazardous undertaking.

In 941 Igor launched an attack on Constantinople, landing with his men on the shores around the city where they tortured, burnt and spread terror in familiar Viking fashion: the chronicler mentions a practice of binding prisoners’ hands behind their backs and driving iron nails into their heads. Monasteries and churches were burnt and a large amount of plunder taken. Three Greek armies in action elsewhere were recalled and Igor’s men surrounded. Greek fire was used against them and the Rus fled back up the river in disarray.

Three years later they were back. This time the joint emperors, Romanos and Constantine Porphyrogenitos, offered them terms, a tribute in gold and silver equal to that given to Oleg some thirty years earlier. Another trade treaty was negotiated between the two powers, long and detailed in its regulation of the intercourse between Rus and Greek traders. Over three-quarters of a century after Rurik’s arrival and the foundation of the Kievan state, almost all the sixty Rus envoys and traders from Kiev who signed the treaty still bore Scandinavian names. Many of the Varangians were Christian by this time and swore their oaths to uphold the treaty before God in a Christian church. Igor himself remained devoted to the thunder god and, on the morning of the oath-taking ceremony, he and the other non-Christian Rus made their way to a hill on which stood a statue of Perun, laid aside their weapons, shields and gold ornaments and took their oath there. A year later he was dead, killed by the Derevlians when he tried to increase their tribute.

For some seventeen years after Igor/Ingvar’s death the Rus were led by his widow Olga/Helga, acting as regent for her infant son Svyatoslov. Little is known about her. She may have been Oleg/ Helgi’s daughter and the marriage to Igor/Ingvar in 903 Oleg’s way of focusing the claims of the ruling family. The fact that her son was the first member of the Kievan ruling family to bear a Slavic name perhaps argues for the possibility that she was a Slavic princess. The chronicler speaks well of her, but the stories told of her years in power are heavily coloured by legendary material. Perhaps as a result of her husband’s death on a tax-gathering expedition, she reformed the tax system. The state was divided into districts, each in the charge of a local agent responsible for tax-collection, and the Khazar practice of uniform taxation was adopted. The reform amounted to a centralization of the financial administration of western and northern Russia.
²⁹
Olga/Helga also finds favour with the chronicler as the first member of the Rus ruling house to accept Christianity, which she did at Constantinople in 957. The Byzantine emperor, who was her godfather at the ceremony, apparently offered to marry her afterwards, but was rejected.