The Emergence of Rus 750-1200

Simon Franklin, Jonathan Shepard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317872238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This eagerly awaited volume, the first of its kind by western scholars, describes the development amongst the diverse inhabitants of the immense landmass between the Carpathians and Urals of a political, economic and social nexus (underpinned by a common culture and, eventually, a common faith), out of which would emerge the future Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The authors explore every aspect of life in Rus, using evidence and the fruits of post-Soviet historiography. They describe the rise of a polity centred on Kiev, the coming of Christianity, and the increasing prosperity of the region even as, with the proliferation of new dynastic centres, the balance of power shifted northwards and westwards. Fractured, violent and transitory though it often is, this is a story of growth and achievement - and a masterly piece of historical synthesis.

PART I:

Roots and Routes

CHAPTER ONE

The Silver-Seekers from the North (c. 750–c. 900)

1. BEGINNINGS

When the compilers of the Primary Chronicle tried to explain where in the world their land lay, they conceived of it largely in terms of rivers and riverways. Tribes and peoples are named in connection with them, and great thoroughfares are described, together with journeys of famous men. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a work which sets out to record the deeds of a series of princes and of their subjects, the chronicle’s opening pages treat the land as essentially one of transit, somewhere between other, more famous, places. There is a clear bias in the direction of the river Dnieper, and in favour of those living around one section of it. We are told that St Andrew, wanting to travel from a town on the Crimea to Rome, travelled up the Dnieper until he halted one night on the bank below some hills. Getting up next morning, he exclaimed to his disciples, ‘Do you see those hills, how God’s Grace shines forth upon them? God will cause a great town to stand there, and many churches to be built’.¹ Andrew blessed the hills and planted a cross on what was to become the site of the town of Kiev. He made his way further up the Dnieper and came eventually to the land of the Slovenes and the site of the future town of Novgorod. He observed their daily practice of beating themselves with young branches within an inch of their lives after baths of scalding hot water; having finished their self-flagellation, they plunged into cold water. Andrew continued on his journey and arrived in Rome. He recounted all that he had learnt and seen, and that the Slovenes ‘do this as their way of bathing, not battering’. Andrew’s listeners are said to have ‘marvelled’.

The anonymous contributor of this tale to the chronicle was fostering the sense that the northerners were different, and comically inferior; it was Kiev, and not the wooden bath-houses of Novgorod, that evoked the saint’s prayers and prophecy. This bias reflects the outlook of Kiev-based authors of the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries, wishing to demonstrate that churches and refinement were preordained for the banks of the Middle Dnieper. They had only hazy notions about events of more than three or four generations before their own, and their picture of Rus’ extent and place in the world was not clear-cut. Yet in their attention to rivers as markers of settlements and as the means of travelling huge distances the contributors to the chronicle were not simply reading back the conditions of their own time into a distant past. As we shall see, rivers were used by a variety of people and peoples, sometimes to traverse the land mass, but far more often for the purpose of short trips, or simply as a source of food and water. Other animals besides man came to the river bank, and could be hunted or trapped, and finds of fish-hooks and weights for nets are common in settlements throughout the ‘prehistoric’ and ‘medieval’ periods. River-basins were channels for gradual, piecemeal migrations of groups of people living from hand to mouth in the seventh and eight centuries as in previous periods. Such movements were still under way at the time of the compilation of the chronicle, when several groupings bore the names of ‘tribes’ (see below, p. 77, 336). The chronicle’s editors assumed that most of the ancient inhabitants of their land were Slavs. But in fact the Slavs were relatively recent arrivals to most regions north-east and north of the Dnieper, and even c. 1100 they probably constituted only a minority of the population in the north-east (see below, p. 131, 332).

The chronicle’s assumption is that the Dnieper is the pivot of its story, and some of the most dramatic events which it relates are set there, for example the mass-baptism of the inhabitants of Kiev c. 988 (see below, p. 163). In its awareness that rivers are more important than frontiers, it is responding to, and highlighting, one of the distinctive features of the history of Rus, in contrast to that of many other peoples or political structures. Frontiers were developed in Rus, and became defined by fortifications, from the end of the tenth century onwards (see below, pp. 170–3). But they were seldom clear-cut, and they could not usually be marked by natural barriers. There were dense forests, and marshes which were impenetrable in spring and summer. These stretched for thousands of kilometres across the plain in no particular pattern, save that in a wavering line running mostly to the south of the 57th parallel the pine forests gave way to those mixing conifers with deciduous trees such as chestnut and oak; further south still, the forests thinned out and eventually gave way to what Rus chroniclers called ‘the open field’. There was no obvious focal point in this wilderness, nor were there the roads or ruins of more ancient cultures – nothing man-made to facilitate travel or direct attention towards some central place or half-forgotten authority. Rome was little more than a name even to the bookmen contributing to the chronicle and, as we shall see, awareness of the achievements and the ideology of the Roman empire was very slight (see below, p. 240). The best legitimizing myth that the editors of the chronicle could come up with was the tale of St Andrew planting his cross in the hills above Kiev. St Andrew is not said to have preached there, or anywhere else in the eastern lands. He was merely a traveller, passing through.

The tale of St Andrew’s journey is probably a fairly late contribution to the chronicle. It seems to have been inserted in a geographical description of the land of Rus, and it is in this description that we find a more coherent attempt to give the land a shape, in terms of routes. The chronicle comes close to providing it with a kind of centre – but a forest, not a city or a trading post. We are told that one could travel along the Dnieper to the Greeks or from the Dnieper, by way of other rivers, to ‘the Varangian sea’ (the Baltic), and on from there to Rome and thence to Tsargrad (Constantinople) and ultimately back to the Dnieper’s mouth: ‘the Dnieper flows from the Okovskii forest and flows to the south, but the Dvina flows from the same forest and goes to the north, and enters into the Varangian sea. Now from this same forest the Volga flows to the east’.² Thus in so far as there is any basic starting-point inside the Rus lands, it is the forest of Okovskii, which stretched from Lake Seliger to the upper reaches of the Western Dvina and south-westwards as far as the river Kasplia. Even though it straddled the head-waters of great rivers which offered geographical bearings of a sort to the inhabitants of Rus, it was densely packed with trees and undergrowth, and parts of it were still virtually impenetrable in the later middle ages. Thus even where nature provided fairly convenient means of communications and some sort of focal point, it threw up massive barriers, hindering the concentration of populations in any one area.

Not that travel by means of the great rivers was easy for those covering long distances. Rafts, canoes of stretched hides and dugout canoes enabled the native inhabitants to get about for the purposes of fishing or pursuit of the deer, beaver, wild fowl and other game which tended to congregate near the banks. But they were less suitable for long distances, especially if laden with passengers or bulky cargo. Besides, there were many natural hazards facing anyone sailing far from his home waters. This was the case even along the Volga, which is, rightly, seen as one of the great waterways of the later medieval and modern periods. There were numerous sandbanks, shoals and stretches of white water to be negotiated, and towards the end of summer the water-level could fall so low as to make navigation in all but the smallest and lightest craft awkward and slow. For example, there were more than eight sandbanks along the Volga in the region of modern Iaroslavl, where some important trading settlements would arise in the ninth century. These navigation hazards literally vanished each spring, when the snows melted into the tributaries feeding the river and burst its banks. During the weeks of the thaw, a boat could be swept quite rapidly downstream towards the point where, according to the Primary Chronicle, the river flowed into the Caspian Sea through ‘seventy mouths’.³ The speed and turbulence of the flood waters posed new dangers, especially for small, light, craft, while the breadth of the expanses of water and the lack of landmarks posed navigational problems for boatmen unfamiliar with local conditions. Moreover, a return journey after the force of the current slackened involved coping with the sandbanks and other hazards which now re-emerged from the waters.

The Volga was the longest river in the eastern lands and its floods were among the most spectacular of all. But there is no reason to suppose that navigation was significantly easier or safer elsewhere. So while the major rivers offered a means of piercing the forested land mass, they did not present a particularly soft option for those planning a round trip across great distances. By the time the final version of the Primary Chronicle was being compiled, there were settlements of boatmen, pilots and hauliers at the more difficult stretches of water, and the growing number of villages strung along the river banks could provide food or overnight shelter to the crews of oarsmen. Long-distance commercial travel with a cargo of goods depended on these services, especially if the cargo was a human one of slaves, in need of food. These back-up facilities for regular travellers were not available 400 or so years earlier, at the beginning of our story, and it is likely that the riverways were then most in use for short journeys by boat, or were followed in winter by those able to travel by ski or sledge.

In these circumstances, the case for staying at home might seem to have been overwhelming, and for the vast majority of persons in the eighth and ninth centuries, it was. But ‘home’ was itself a movable and uncertain affair for the inhabitants of the river valleys and the depths of the forests alike – part hunter-gatherers, part fishermen and part agriculturalists. They had few ties other than, in some areas, burial-grounds and ancestor worship to bind them to a particular spot, and dearth and hunger offered periodic stimuli to move on, while the increase in mouths which prolonged freedom from dearth could engender would ultimately have the same effect. Therefore the population of major river valleys was never wholly immobile and the small but fairly numerous promontory settlements in the region of the Upper Volga seem to have been meeting-points and places of co-residence of diverse ethnic groups over a protracted period. These settlements came into being there between the fifth and the end of the seventh or the earlier eighth centuries. The majority of their inhabitants belonged to one variant or another of the Finno-Ugrians, an ethnic group characterized by a basically common language of which modern Finnish is one descendant, Hungarian another. Members of this group inhabited the expanses from northern Scandinavia to the Urals, and their ability to talk with one another perhaps went some way towards offsetting all the obstacles to travel. Finds of metal ornaments and decorative bonework at one of the earliest of the promontory settlements, Berezniaki, on the banks of the Volga, suggest the gradual infiltration there of Finno-Ugrians from as far east as the basin of the river Kama. But a community of language cannot be the sole, or even the main, reason for these movements of small groupings of people. Finds of pottery and ornaments at some of the settlements point to the presence in them of Balts, members of a quite different ethnic group, whose language belongs to the Indo-European stock of languages. They must have made their way from the west to the Volga through forests such as the Okovskii. The pace, scale and dating of the Balts’ seemingly piecemeal migration across the land mass is still very unclear, but that they were on the move is not in doubt.

There were also, in the sixth and seventh centuries, some long-distance exchanges which can reasonably be classified as ‘trade’ and which involved deliberate journeying. The evidence for them is very sparse, but it is important as an indication that long before the appearance of towns or the rudiments of politico-military organizations, the land mass could be traversed in its entirety, seemingly fairly regularly. The historian of the Goths, Jordanes, wrote in the sixth century of the ‘Swedes’, ‘a people famed for the dark beauty of their furs’, who ‘send by way of trade through innumerable other peoples the sapphire-coloured skins for Roman use’.⁴ Jordanes does not state that the ‘Swedes’ themselves made the long journey down to trade with the ‘Romans’ (i.e. Byzantines). But he leaves no room for doubt that commercial ties existed, and the Swedes had gained their reputation for sables by visits to the regions where high-quality furs were to be had, such as Lake Ladoga and the lands to its north and north-east. There is also archaeological evidence of exchanges much further east. The sixth- and earlier seventh-century Persian and Byzantine silverware and Byzantine coins found in the basins of the rivers Kama and Viatka reached the far north by means of trade rather than some non-commercial method such as gifts, plunder or tribute. The Byzantine silver coins and the cups and bowls, many of them bearing the stamps of the Constantinopolitan authorities or Persia’s ruling dynasty, the Sasanians, had most probably been exchanged for furs. They had, presumably, been brought north to the Kama by Persian or other oriental traders. The vessels were highly valued by the Kama region’s inhabitants. Some were used for ritual purposes, but they were also kept as treasures, and occasionally drawings were scratched on their sides. Others were melted down and turned into ornaments responding to the Finno-Ugrians’ tastes.⁵ These two commercial nexuses linking the Byzantine and the Persian civilizations with the extreme north were, however, fragile. They slackened drastically in the course of the seventh century, although it is not certain that contact between the Middle East and the Middle Volga region was, or could be, totally severed. The change had less to do with the arrival of new groups of nomads in the Black Sea and Kazakh steppes – zones which had not been notably tranquil during the sixth century – than with the collapse of the market for sables and similarly high-priced furs in Byzantium and Persia. The Sasanian dynasty was overthrown by Emperor Heraclius and soon afterwards, in the 630s, the Arabs overran Persia and the ruling elite suffered impoverishment. The manufacture of elaborately ornamented silver vessels appears to have ceased. For more than a century the Arabs were at odds not only with the Byzantines but also with the people which had installed itself in the northern Caucasus and along the north-west shores of the Caspian, the Khazars. This people will be discussed later (see below, pp. 82, 95), and here we will note simply their prolonged confrontation with the Arabs. This reached a climax in 737, when an Arab army surged north of the Caucasus and advanced upstream along the Volga. The Khazars’ ruler was obliged to submit and even agreed to accept Islam, albeit not for long. During this period of hostilities the risks for those contemplating a journey to the far north, never negligible, became formidable and elaborate series of short-distance exchanges between the Middle East and the far north could scarcely have avoided dislocation.

Even so, there were in place several of the links in a possible chain of long-range contacts and exchange. Excavations have uncovered small Scandinavian settlements at various points along the eastern coast of the Baltic. There had been exchanges of goods and some circulation of persons between Central Sweden and Estonia and Finland since the early Iron Age. Such contacts are not very surprising, seeing that Sweden lies little more than 150 kilometres from the Finnish mainland and the Åland Islands and the archipelago of islets off the south-west coast of Finland offer many landfalls. There is archaeological evidence suggesting periodic voyages of Swedish kin-groups as far as Lake Ladoga already in the sixth century. Their objective, at a time when the area lacked any permanently settled inhabitants, is very likely to have been fur-cl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Genealogies
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Spellings, Dates and References
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Roots and Routes
• Part II: Kiev and Rus
• Part III: The Rise of the Regions
• Select Bibliography
• Maps
• Genealogical Tables
• Index