Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 7: Kiev, Constantinople and Bolghar. Vikings in Eastern Europe to 1041

It was in the east that the Viking combination of violence and commerce was at its most organised. The great attraction that drew the Vikings east was the dirhem, a high quality silver coin minted in huge quantities in the Arab Abbasid Caliphate and other Muslim states. The caliphate’s vast wealth drew in luxury goods from across the known world, including slaves, beeswax, honey and furs from Northern Europe. Arab merchants bought these goods from the nomadic Khazars and Bulgars who lived on the steppes north of the Caspian Sea, paying for them with dirhems. These coins began to circulate among the Slavs, Balts and Finns and by around 780 were beginning to turn up at trading places like Staraja Ladoga on Lake Ladoga and Grobina on the Baltic Sea, where they came into the hands of Swedish merchants. This encouraged the Swedes to begin exploring the river systems of Eastern Europe to try to discover their source. The Swedes may have been motivated by commerce but their expansion in the east was no more peaceful than the Danish and Norwegian expansion in the west because most of their trade goods came from slave-raiding and tribute-gathering.

Because neither the Scandinavians, nor the Slavs, Balts and Finns who inhabited Eastern Europe had literate cultures at that time, we know far less about the Vikings’ military activities in the east than we do about those in the west. The most valuable contemporary accounts come from the writings of Arab geographers and travellers, and Byzantine chroniclers and statesmen, many of which are informed by direct personal experience. Perhaps because they felt less threatened by the Vikings, these writers, especially the Arabs, had a different perspective to western writers, showing much greater interest in Viking customs and trade than in their raids. Viking activities in the east were closely linked to the origins of the Russian state so they were a major theme of the earliest Russian history, the twelfth century Russian Primary Chronicle. This is a difficult work to use, however, because it contains much material that is clearly legendary, and because its main purpose was to establish the legitimacy of medieval Russia’s ruling Ryurikid dynasty. Viking adventures in the east feature in the Norse saga traditions, but these are the latest of all the main primary sources, not having been written down until the thirteenth century. The only truly contemporary Scandinavian sources for the Vikings in Eastern Europe are ninth–eleventh century Swedish runestones commemorating men who went on expeditions to Russia and Greece.

By the 830s at the latest, the Swedes had forged trade routes from the Baltic through to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Many had gone much further and sailed across these seas to trade in Constantinople and Baghdad, the capitals of the Greek Byzantine Empire and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate respectively. Along the way the Swedes operating permanently in the east acquired a new name, the ‘Rus’. The origins of this name, from which Russia gets its name, is disputed. The most widely accepted explanation is that it is derived from Ruotsi, the Finnish name for the Swedes. Ruotsi itself probably derives from Old Norse roðr, meaning ‘a crew of oarsmen’. An alternative view is that the term is of Greek origin, derived from literary references to the Rusioi (‘blondes’), an alternative name for the well-travelled Heruls from Jutland who served the Byzantine Empire as mercenaries in the sixth century.

The Rus founded settlements or, probably more often, seized control of existing settlements along the trade routes. These gave Russia its Viking name Garðariki, the ‘kingdom of cities’. The Rus became the ruling warrior and merchant elite of these settlements, but the majority of their populations were always native Slavs or Finns. The Rus settlements became bases from which to raid the neighbouring Finnish and Slavic tribes for tribute in slaves and furs, both of which the Greeks and Arabs were eager to buy. Arab writers say that the Rus lived entirely by plunder and did not practice agriculture. Winter was the main raiding season, when travel overland was easier because the ground was hard-frozen. Trading expeditions began to gather in the spring, as soon as the ice on the rivers broke up, and returned home in the autumn. The trade routes took the Rus through hostile territory, so they always travelled in groups for safety. The most dangerous places were the portages, places where it was necessary to carry the ships and their cargoes overland to get from one river system into another or to avoid impassable rapids. Because the portages were unavoidable, they made ideal places for ambushes.

The main source of archaeological evidence for a Scandinavian presence in Russia during the Viking Age comes from hundreds of graves furnished with typical Scandinavian artefacts. Both male and female graves have been found, indicating that the Rus travelled in family groups. According to the Arab writer Ibn Hawqal the Rus were divided into three groups, the Kuyavia, Slavia and Arcania, but it is not clear whether he was referring to ethnic or geographical divisions. A group of Rus who visited the court of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious with a Byzantine diplomatic mission in 839 claimed that they were ruled by a ‘khagan’, a Turkic word cognate with khan, which they must have adopted as a result of their contacts with the Bulgar and Khazar nomads with whom they often traded. When the Franks worked out that the Rus were really Swedes, they suspected that they were Viking spies and detained them while they decided whether or not they were bona fide travellers. The Rus might have expected to be greeted with suspicion by the Franks and so have used an exotic title to increase their status or to distance themselves from the Vikings who had so recently sacked Dorestad four times.

During the second half of the ninth century, the Rus settlements were united into a single kingdom. According to the semi-legendary account of the Russian Primary Chronicle, the first Rus state was founded some time around 860 – 62. The story told in the chronicle is improbable to say the least. The Slavs became tired of their constant internecine wars, so they appealed to the Rus to send them a leader to rule them according to law. They chose three brothers. Rurik, the eldest, established himself as ruler of Novgorod; Sineus became ruler of Beloozero (now Belozersk) on Lake Beloye; and the third brother, Truvor, became ruler of Izborsk near Pskov. When Rurik’s brothers died two years later, he inherited their territories and became ruler of all of north-west Russia. Novgorod was not founded until c. 930 so Rurik’s capital was probably at Gorodische, a former island 2 miles south of the modern city centre, which has produced substantial evidence of Scandinavian occupation in the ninth century. Rurik is supposed to have died c. 879 and was succeeded by Oleg (Old Norse Helgi) (r. c. 879 – c. 913). According to the Primary Chronicle, Oleg was a kinsman of Rurik but early Novgorod chronicles describe him merely as one of his army commanders. The rulers of the Rus used the title kniaz, which is usually translated into English as ‘prince’, which implies something less than full sovereignty. However, kniaz shares a common Indo-European root with English ‘king’, which more accurately describes their power and status.

At about the same time that Rurik is said to have become ruler of Novgorod, two brothers, Askold and Dir, sailed south down the River Dnepr and captured the town of Kiev from the Poljani Slavs. According to the Primary Chronicle, it was Askold and Dir who led the first Rus attack on Constantinople in 860. Like all subsequent Rus attacks on Constantinople, it was defeated. Around 882, Oleg brought an army of Vikings and Slavs down the Dnepr from Novgorod and captured Kiev. Askold and Dir were both killed in the attack. Oleg subsequently moved from Novgorod to Kiev and made it the capital of the Rus state. Russians have traditionally seen the foundation of the Kievan Rus state as marking the origins of the modern Russian state. It therefore remains hard for Russians to accept that the city which they see as the birthplace of their nation is now, as a result of the break-up of the USSR in 1991, the capital of an independent country, Ukraine.

According to the Primary Chronicle, Oleg led an attack on Constantinople in 907. If he did no one in Constantinople appears to have noticed because it is not mentioned in any Byzantine sources. The attack may have been invented to explain trade treaties that the Primary Chronicle says were agreed between the Rus and the Byzantine government in 907 and 911. The 907 agreement gave Rus merchants the rights to receive food supplies in Constantinople for up to six months, a monthly allowance, the use of public baths, and supplies of anchors and sails for their ships. In return, the Rus paid a toll of twelve grivnas of silver (about 6 pounds/2.7 kg) for each ship they brought. The Rus were not allowed to live within the city walls, could not bring any weapons into the city with them and, when they were in the city, had always to be accompanied by a government official. Rus merchants from Kiev were given priority treatment over those from other centres. In the 911 treaty, the Rus agreed not to plunder Byzantine ships and to give whatever help was necessary to any they found in difficulties. Other clauses concerned crimes committed by the Rus in Byzantine territories, the ransom of prisoners, return of runaway slaves and terms for Rus who wanted to join the Byzantine army. Oleg died soon after these treaties were agreed, probably in 913. The Primary Chronicle’s account of Oleg’s death is plainly legendary. Having been warned by a soothsayer that his favourite horse would cause his death, Oleg vowed never to ride or even see it again. When the horse died five years later, Oleg mocked the soothsayer for his false prophecy. But when Oleg went to view the horse’s skeleton, a poisonous snake slithered out from its skull and fatally bit his foot. In reality, it is more likely that he was killed during an unsuccessful raid in the Caspian Sea.

Oleg was succeeded by Igor (Old Norse Ingvar) (r. c. 913 – 45). Though most modern historians think it is unlikely, the Primary Chronicle claims that Igor was Rurik’s son, brought up as a foster-son by Oleg after his father’s death. Fostering was, however, a common practice in Viking Age Scandinavia, at all levels of society. Igor is the first truly historical ruler of the Rus but his reign was not a great success. In 941, Igor led a disastrous attack on Constantinople. Most of his fleet was destroyed by Byzantine galleys fitted with Greek Fire projectors and he was lucky to escape with his life. He was probably also the leader of a Rus rampage around the Caspian Sea in 943. This expedition too ended in failure after sickness decimated its ranks while it was occupying the Muslim city of Barda in modern Azerbaijan. Igor raised a new army of Rus, Slavs and Pecheneg nomads for another attack on Constantinople in 944, but the Primary Chronicle claims that the Byzantines bought him off with an offer of tribute and a new trade treaty in 945. However, the terms offered by the Byzantines were noticeably worse than those won by Oleg in 911, which does not suggest that he was negotiating from a position of strength. The treaty set limits on the amount of silk Rus merchants could buy in Constantinople and banned them from making winter camps on Berezan Island at the mouth of the River Dnepr. This measure was to prevent the Rus becoming a permanent presence in the Black Sea. The poor returns from his expeditions led Igor to double his demands for tribute from his Slav subjects in 945. When he raided the Drevljane for the second time in a month, they attacked and killed him. The Byzantine writer Leo the Deacon records the story that his killers bent two trees together, tied his legs to them and then let them spring apart so that his body was torn in two.

The Drevljane paid a high price for their defiance. Igor’s successor, his son Svyatoslav (r. 945 – 72) was still an infant, so it fell to his formidable wife Olga (Old Norse Helga) to defend the Kievan state. The Primary Chronicle describes the vicious, and probably legendary, reprisals Olga took against the Drevljane. After Igor’s death, the Drevljane sent an embassy to Olga to propose that she marry their chief and so unite the two peoples. Olga had them buried alive in a burial mound. A second embassy was sent and Olga burned its members to death in a bath house. Olga next invited 5,000 of the Drevljane to a funeral feast to commemorate Igor’s life. The Drevljane must have been remarkably lacking in curiosity about the disappearance of their two embassies to Olga because they turned up. When the Drevljane had got thoroughly drunk, she ordered the warriors of her druzhina (‘bodyguard’, the Rus equivalent of the Viking lið) to massacre them. Finally, Olga laid siege to the Drevljane’s stronghold of Iskorosten (now Korosten, Ukraine). The Drevljane offered to pay tribute in furs and honey in return for peace, but Olga asked only for three sparrows and three pigeons from each household. When the birds had been delivered, they were given to her warriors, who tied pieces of sulphur to their wings and set them alight. The terrified birds flew straight back to their nests in Iskoresten, setting the whole town ablaze. Fighting so many fires at once was impossible, so the Drevljane fled the city only to be massacred by the vengeful Rus. This stratagem features in many other folk tales about Viking and Norman leaders: Guthrum is said to have captured Cirencester in Wessex in this way, for example. Whatever the truth of these colourful stories, there can be no doubt that Olga proved to be a most able regent, preserving the unity of the Kievan state until Svyatoslav attained his majority c. 963.

The trade routes on which the early Rus state depended began in the Gulf of Finland, the long arm of the Baltic Sea that separates Estonia and Finland. Ships heading for Russia from the west generally took the sheltered passage through the thousands of islands and skerries along the Finnish coast to the mouth of the River Neva, where St Petersburg now stands. Broad and deep, the River Neva gave easy access to Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest lake, about 45 miles inland. Swedish merchants probably first ventured into Lake Ladoga in the first half of the eighth century in order to obtain furs from the local Finns to trade to western Europe. Miniver, the silky white winter coat of the stoat, was particularly prized and commanded high prices. Around 750, a permanent settlement of merchants and craftsmen developed at Staraja Ladoga a few miles from the lake on its major feeder river, the Volkhov. The earliest structures so far discovered on the site have been dated by dendrochronology to 753. The town became known to Scandinavians as Aldeigjuborg, from its original Finnish name Aloda-joki (‘lowland river’). The Slavic name Ladoga is also derived from the Finnish name. From its foundation, the town had a mixed population of Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs. Each of these ethnic groups had their own cemeteries, suggesting that in life they had been segregated into their own quarters in the town. Grave goods from Scandinavian burials suggest that there were close links to the large Swedish island of Gotland: vast quantities of dirhems have been discovered in silver hoards on this island confirming its key role in trade with Russia and the east. Excavations of the town have revealed evidence for a wide range of manufacturing, including jewellery- and glass-making, blacksmithing, bronze-casting, and amber-, bone- and antler-working. Many of these manufactured goods would have been traded for furs with the Finns, who lacked metalworking skills. Towns were an obvious attraction to raiders (both native and Scandinavian) and Staraja Ladoga was protected by a rampart at an early stage in its development. The town was, therefore, already well-established when the first silver dirhems began turning up there in the 780s. Staraja Ladoga’s easy access from the Baltic made it vulnerable to Viking raids from Scandinavia. There is archaeological evidence that the town was burned around 860 and it was sacked by the Norwegian jarl Erik of Lade around 996 – 7, and probably by his half-brother Svein around 1015.

Until the tenth century, Staraja Ladoga remained the most important of the trade centres under Rus control. This was thanks to its strategic position, close to Lake Ladoga, where the river routes to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea divided. Merchants who wanted to trade with the Islamic world would sail the few miles back down the Volkhov into Lake Ladoga and sail east along its southern shore until they reached the mouth of the River Svir, Ladoga’s most important feeder after the Volkhov. An 80-mile sail up the Svir led into Lake Onega. From Lake Onega the River Vytegra was followed to its headwaters from where boats had to be dragged overland across the Baltic-Caspian Sea watershed into the headwaters of the River Kovzha. The Kovzha was followed to Lake Beloye and the Finnish town of Kisima. In the nineteenth century a canal, the Baltic-Volga waterway, was built across the watershed to link Lake Onega with Lake Beloye. In the tenth century Kisima was abandoned in favour of Beloozero, on the southern shore of the lake at the place where the River Sheksna flows out on its way to join the River Volga. Like Kisima, Beloozero was mainly inhabited by Finns when it was founded but over the next few centuries they were gradually replaced by Slavs, migrating from the south. Archaeological excavations have produced plenty of evidence of the town’s wide-ranging trade connections: jewellery and weapons from Scandinavia, combs from Frisia, wine amphorae from Crimea, pottery from Bulgaria, glass from Constantinople and amber from the Baltic Sea.

The first important centre merchants would have reached after sailing down the Sheksna into the Volga was Timerevo, a large unfortified trading place about 4 miles from modern Yaroslavl, which superseded it as the main trade centre in the region in 1010. Evidence from coin hoards suggests that Timerevo was probably founded around 830. Burials indicate a considerable Scandinavian presence in the town. Grave goods included an ‘Ulfbhert’ sword: Viking warriors prized these exceptionally high quality Frankish swords inlaid with their maker’s name. Several Frankish swords have been found in Scandinavian burials in Russia, but they were not just imported for Rus warriors, they were also greatly prized by their Arab trading partners. Not far from Timerevo was another important Rus centre, Sarskoye Gorodishche on Lake Nero, near modern Rostov. This was originally a centre of the Finnish Merya tribe, which was taken over by the Rus in the early ninth century. Sarskoye Gorodishche declined in the late tenth century after the foundation of the mainly Slav town of Rostov around 963.

A few days’ journey from Timerevo the merchants would have left territory controlled by the Rus. For the next 500 miles, the merchants had to pass through sparsely populated territory until they reached Bolghar, about 20 miles downstream from the confluence of the Volga and the Kama rivers. Bolghar was the trading place of the Volga Bulgars, a Turkic nomad tribe from central Asia who had arrived in the area under their leader Kotrag around 660. At around the same time another group of Bulgars migrated to the Balkans, where they founded the precursor of the modern Bulgarian state. When the Rus first made contact with the Volga Bulgars in the ninth century, they were pagan shamanists but they converted to Islam in the tenth century. Until a fort and a mosque were built there in the early tenth century, Bolghar had few permanent buildings and was probably occupied only on a seasonal basis. Bolghar was as far as most Rus merchants ever needed to go. The town was one terminus of the trans-Asian Silk Road and the major centre for fur trading with the Samoyedic peoples of the White Sea and northern Urals regions. To the south, the Volga linked Bolghar to the Khazar Khaganate and the Caspian Sea. Arab merchants travelled either the Volga or the Silk Road to Bolghar to buy slaves, furs, beeswax and honey, Baltic amber and Frankish swords from the Rus. As well as those desirable silver dirhems, Arab merchants also traded in silk, spices and fragrances, and colourful ceramic beads, which Rus women found irresistible. Local interpreters were available to help the Rus and the Arabs communicate with one another. The Bolghar khagan taxed merchants at the rate of 10 per cent of the value of their goods. The khan in his turn paid a proportion of the tax revenues to the powerful Khazar khagan who was his overlord. The Rus had their own quarter at Bolghar, close to the river, where they built wooden huts for themselves and set up a shrine and a wooden idol. The Rus believed that success in trade was a gift of their gods. Before trading, a Rus merchant would prostrate himself before the idol and recite what goods he had brought to sell, make an offering of food, and pray that he would be sent ‘a merchant who has large quantities of dinars and dirhems and who will buy everything that I want and not argue with me about my price’. If trading went well, the merchant would sacrifice a number of sheep and cattle at the shrine as a thanks offering.

One of the Arab visitors to Bolghar, Ahmad ibn Fadlan (fl. c. 922), wrote a detailed account of his encounters with the Rus there. A devout and cultured Muslim, Ibn Fadlan made no attempt to disguise his disgust for the pagan Rus, comparing them to wandering asses because of their failure to wash after urinating or defecating, or having sex, and for not washing their hands after eating. The Rus did wash every morning but in water that was filthy because the same bowl was shared by many people who thought nothing of spitting or blowing their noses in it before passing it on to the next person. The Rus shunned the sick and treated their slaves badly (other Arab writers disagree, however, saying that they treated slaves well so that they could get the best price for them). The sex lives of the Rus both revolted and fascinated Ibn Fadlan, particularly the perfunctory way that they had sex with their slave girls in public, even while they were doing business with customers. Ibn Fadlan could not help admiring the appearance of the Rus. ‘I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs,’ he writes. ‘They were like palm trees. They were fair and ruddy.’ The Rus wore cloaks, other Arab writers comment on their baggy trousers, and at all times they carried with them an axe, a sword, and a knife. The Rus were heavily tattooed, a custom they had probably adopted from contacts with Turkic nomad peoples like the Bulgars and Khazars. He was no less impressed by Rus women, describing the round brooches that they wore on their breasts, as made of copper, silver or gold depending on their status. Keys, symbols of a Viking woman’s control of the household, hung from rings attached to the brooches. The women also wore neck rings made of silver or gold. Ibn Fadlan said as soon as a Rus man had 10,000 dirhems, he melted them down to make a neck ring for his wife. Every time he made another 10,000 dirhems, he gave his wife another neck ring. Vikings liked to wear their wealth both to show it off and for security, and it was the fate of most of the millions of dirhems the Rus received to be melted down and recast into arm and neck rings.

Ibn Fadlan also describes the magnificent appearance of the Rus king, who at the time of his visit would have been Igor. The king sat on a huge jewel-encrusted throne, surrounded by forty slave girls who were his concubines. The king rarely left his throne. If he wanted to empty his bowels a servant brought him a bowl and he would even have sex with his slave girls while he sat on the throne. If the king wanted to ride anywhere, his horse was brought into the hall, so he could mount – or dismount – directly from the throne. The king kept 400 warriors in his hall. These were the warriors of his druzhina, the king’s personal warrior retinue. Like the Viking warriors of a lið, the warriors of the druzhina, were supposed to be loyal to their own death or that of the king. Each warrior, Ibn Fadlan says, had a personal slave girl to wash and dress him and serve him at table, and another to have sex with. Ibn Fadlan was clearly impressed by all the sex the Rus got to have.

The burial customs of the Rus interested Ibn Fadlan greatly and he was pleased to have the chance to witness the funeral of one of their chiefs. The chief’s body was placed in a temporary grave for ten days while preparations for a ship burial were made. It was Rus practice to sacrifice a slave to accompany the chief into the afterlife. The chief’s slaves were asked if one of them would volunteer and one of the slave girls agreed. Ibn Fadlan says that it was usually slave girls who volunteered to be sacrificed. Whether they did this out of affection or because life as a sex-slave of the Rus was just so awful that a trip to Paradise seemed like an attractive option, he doesn’t say. For the last ten days of her life, the slave girl was well treated but was also supervised at all times to make sure she did not try to run away if she had a change of heart. Meanwhile, special funerary clothes were made for the chief, and his ship was hauled out of the river and set up level on a funeral pyre. An old woman called the ‘Angel of Death’ oversaw all the funeral arrangements. Ibn Fadlan described her as a witch, ‘thick-bodied and sinister’: she was probably a völva (a seeress), who Vikings believed could practice magic and foretell the future. On the day of the funeral the chief’s body was dressed and removed from its temporary resting place, then placed on a made-up bed in a tent on his ship with his weapons beside him. Offerings of food and alcoholic drink were placed in the ship, together with the dismembered bodies of a sacrificed dog, two horses, two cattle, a cock and a hen.

While this was taking place, the slave girl was passed around the chief’s male relatives, each of whom had sex with her, telling her to tell her master that ‘I only do this for my love of him’. When evening came, the slave girl took part in a ritual in which she was lifted up three times to look over a wooden frame. The first time she was lifted she said ‘there I see my father and mother’. The second time she said ‘there I see all my dead relatives sitting’. The third time she said: ‘there I see my master sitting in paradise and it is green and beautiful. There are men and young people with him and he is calling me. Take me to him.’ At that she was taken to the ship. She took off two bracelets she was wearing and gave them to the Angel of Death, whose job it was to kill her. The girl was then lifted onto the ship and given an intoxicating drink, which she sang over before drinking. The drink probably contained a narcotic because she soon began to behave in a confused manner. Once the girl was thoroughly intoxicated she was taken into the tent. Now the chief’s warriors began to bang staves on their shields to drown out the girl’s cries so that the other slave girls would not be frightened and deterred from volunteering to die with their masters. A ritualised gang-rape followed. Six men entered the tent and had sex with the girl after which she was laid next to the chief. Four of the men held the girl’s arms and legs, the other two held the opposite ends of a rope that had been tied around her neck so they could pull on them. All was now ready and the Angel of Death stabbed the girl repeatedly between the ribs while the two men strangled her to death. The girl’s body was left next to the chief’s.

The funeral ceremony now reached its climax. The chief’s closest male relative, stripped naked, walked backwards towards the ship holding a burning torch and set light to the pyre. Then people approached the ship with more wood, each of them holding a burning brand which they threw onto the pyre. The ship and the tent were soon ablaze. One of the Rus told Ibn Fadlan that the Arabs were fools to put the bodies of those they loved most into the ground to be eaten by worms and insects. ‘We burn them in the fire in an instant so that they enter paradise immediately and without delay.’ After the fire had burned out, an earth mound was erected over the ashes and a wooden post erected on top, inscribed with the name of the chief, presumably in runes.

Adventurous Rus merchants could choose to continue another 900 miles down the Volga to trade at Itil (or Atil), the capital of the Khazar Khaganate. The location of Itil has not been identified for certain but it is very likely to have been near the village of Samosdelka in the Volga Delta, where excavations in 2008 revealed the remains of a substantial early medieval town. Rus merchants from Kiev could reach Itil by a shorter route if they sailed down the Dnepr to the Black Sea, and then into the Sea of Azov and the River Don to reach the Khazar border fortress of Sarkel, now lost under the waters of Stalin’s Tsimlyansk reservoir. Upstream from Sarkel, the course of the Don comes to within 40 miles of the Volga. Today the Volga-Don canal links the two rivers at this point, but the Rus had to carry or drag their ships overland into the Volga to complete their journey by sailing downstream to Itil.

Arab visitors to Itil described it as being divided into three parts by two channels of the Volga. The western part of the city was the administrative centre, with law courts, a fortress and a military garrison. The eastern section was the commercial centre where the Rus and Arab merchants would have done business. Tolls levied at 10 per cent of the value goods sold in the markets here were the khaganate’s main source of income. Between the eastern and western parts, on an island, was the royal centre with the palaces of the khagan and the bek. The Arabs described the khagan as a spiritual leader who lived in seclusion, while the bek was a vizier or prime minister who was responsible for the actual running of the khaganate and for leading military expeditions. While the royal palace and associated buildings were built of brick and stone, most of Itil’s population lived in traditional felt yurts. Many people spent only the winter in the city, returning to the steppes in the summer to follow their herds. The khaganate was a tolerant and religiously diverse state. The khagan and the ruling classes had converted to Judaism in the earlier eighth century but most of their Khazar subjects remained loyal to their traditional shamanistic beliefs. Itil had communities of Christians, Muslims and pagans, most of them foreign merchants, who all had their own places of worship. A panel of seven judges – two Christians, two Muslims, two Jews, and one judge to represent the shamanists and pagans – sat to adjudicate in disputes between believers of different religions.

For some Rus merchants, Itil was just a staging post on the long journey to the Abbasid Caliphate or, as the Vikings called it, Serkland (probably meaning ‘shirt-land’ from the loose-fitting Arab clothing). By taking a ship from Itil and crossing the Caspian Sea to reach the cities of Abaskun and Ardebil in present-day Iran, Rus merchants could pick up the caravan routes across the Iranian plateau and the Zagros Mountains and descend to the hot, dry plains of Mesopotamia to reach Baghdad. For a merchant who had originally set out from Sweden, this would be the end of a two- or even three-year journey. What he would have made of his first encounter with a camel is not known. Writing in the 840s the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih says that the Rus who traded in Baghdad tried to pass themselves off as Christians for political reasons, because Christians were more acceptable to Muslims than pagans, and that they paid the jizya tax that was levied on non-believers. The Arabs relied on Slav eunuchs to interpret for them when they wanted to do business with the Rus. The Arabs generally thought of their Rus visitors as a kind of Saqaliba, which was a term they used to describe fair-skinned, light-haired peoples like the Slavs. Other Arab writers, like the well-travelled al-Mas’udi (d. 957), recognised that they were the same people as the Majus who sometimes raided Muslim Spain.

Although it was only founded in 763, Baghdad had grown explosively and by the early ninth century it was the world’s largest city with a population of over one million. Baghdad was chosen as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for political, economic and agricultural reasons. Baghdad was close to the geographical centre of the caliphate and was surrounded by the fertile irrigated farmland of the Mesopotamian plain. This allowed the large urban population to be supported without relying on food imports. The city was on the Silk Road, the major caravan route to China, and was also on the navigable River Tigris, giving easy access to Basra and the Persian Gulf, and beyond that to the trade routes to India and the Spice Islands of the East Indies. Rus merchants who made it this far must have been overwhelmed by the sights, smells and tastes of the produce on sale in the city’s dozens of specialist markets, selling meat, vegetables, fruit, textiles, books, slaves, metalwork, Chinese goods: there was even a flower market. However, Baghdad does not seem to have captured the Viking imagination in the way Constantinople did. Perhaps too few made the long and arduous journey there, or it may just have been that Baghdad was hot, dusty and built mainly of dull mud brick so it just failed to impress in the same way that Constantinople’s mighty stone and brick walls and vast cathedrals did.

On a few occasions Rus fleets reached the Caspian Sea and raided Muslim cities along its southern and western shores. These raids were made possible by the co-operation of the Khazars, whose territory they had to pass through to reach the Caspian Sea. The earliest recorded raid took place some time between 864 and 884 and was an unsuccessful attack on Abaskun. Abaskun was raided again, with more success, by a fleet of sixteen Rus ships in 910 and a third raid in the area was recorded in 911 or 912. In 913 the Rus returned in strength, with a fleet said by al-Mas’udi to number 500 ships, each crewed by 100 men. The fleet sailed down the Dnepr from Kiev, into the Black Sea and around the Crimea into the Sea of Azov. In return for a 50 per cent share of the plunder, the Khazar khagan agree to allow the Rus to sail up the Don past Sarkel and portage their ships overland into the Volga and so sail into the Caspian Sea.

The Rus first attacked Abaskun and then began to work their way west along the coast of Tabaristan and then north to the coast of Azerbaijan, which was also known as the Naphtha Coast because of its many natural oil wells. In Azerbaijan they raided inland, three days from the coast, to sack the caravan city of Ardebil. The coast was undefended and unprepared. The Rus plundered and burned, took captives and ‘spilled oceans of blood’ without meeting any effective opposition. When the Rus seized some islands off the coast of Shirvan, the emir marshalled every ship he could find and attacked their fleet. Lacking any experience of fighting on board ships, the Muslims were no match for the Rus and thousands were killed or drowned in the battle. On their return to the Volga, the Rus sent messengers to the khagan to tell him that they were on their way with his share of the plunder, but he was no longer in a position to guarantee their safe passage. The khagan’s Muslim subjects, outraged by reports of their atrocities, attacked the Rus as they sailed up the Volga, killing, according to al-Mas’udi, 30,000 of them. The survivors continued their flight up the Volga only to be ambushed and massacred by the Bulgars. The leader of the Rus expedition is not known but it is likely to have been Oleg: quite possibly he was killed in these battles as he is said to have died in 913.

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’.

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.

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.

Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was founded in 324 by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (r. 306 – 37) on the site of the ancient Greek port of Byzantium. The first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine intended his new city, which he modestly named after himself, to be a new Christian capital for the empire, untainted by Rome’s paganism. When the Roman Empire was permanently divided on the death of Theodosius I in 395, Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which, because of its predominantly Greek language and culture, historians conventionally call the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine emperors would not have recognised this name, however: they always maintained that they were Roman emperors. Constantine’s choice of site was a stroke of genius. Constantinople stands on the narrow Bosphorus straits that separate Europe from Asia and link the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Its position at this natural crossroads quickly made Constantinople into a wealthy trade centre. The city was built on a peninsula with the Bosphorus on one side and a vast sheltered natural harbour, the Golden Horn, on the other. This was not just convenient for visiting merchant ships, it also gave the city a very strong defensive position. Constantine closed off the landward side of the peninsula with a stone wall but the city soon outgrew it. Between 404 and 413, new walls were built more than a mile further out. About twenty-five years later, walls were built around Constantinople’s seaward sides to protect them against naval assaults. In wartime, the Golden Horn was closed to shipping by an iron chain stretched across its mouth, giving the city even more protection from attack from the sea. When the land walls were damaged by an earthquake in 447, the emperor Theodosius II (408 – 50) ordered them to be rebuilt with a moat and three parallel walls, giving Constantinople the most formidable defences of any city in the world at that time. Theodosius’s walls were arguably the best investment in fortifications ever made: they were breached only once, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Despite the strength of Constantinople’s defences, the Rus found its enormous wealth too tempting not to try to seize it by force. The Rus first attacked Constantinople on 18 June 860, while the emperor Michael III was absent from the city on campaign in the Abbasid Caliphate. The powerful Byzantine navy was also away, fighting Arab pirates in the Mediterranean. The Greeks were taken completely by surprise – the patriarch Photius described the attack as ‘a thunderbolt from heaven’ – and there was little they could do to prevent the Rus plundering Constantinople’s suburbs before sailing through the Bosphorus to raid around the Sea of Marmora, burning and plundering houses, churches and monasteries, and killing and captive-taking. However, the Rus did not attempt to attack Constantinople’s walls, so the city itself remained safe. The Rus faced little or no resistance and the Byzantines ascribed their eventual withdrawal on 4 August to the miraculous intervention of the Mother of God. They were probably really just making sure that they had plenty of time to get home before the rivers froze and left them at the mercy of the Pechenegs.

According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the second attack on Constantinople was Oleg’s, in 907. Oleg sailed to Constantinople with a fleet of 2,000 ships but found the entrance to the Golden Horn blocked with an iron chain. Undaunted, the Rus hauled their ships ashore, fitted wheels to them and dragged them overland around the chain and into the Golden Horn, just as they would have dealt with impassable rapids at home. Oleg fastened his shield to the city gates but the Byzantines beat off his attacks. Impressed by the ferocity of the Rus, the Byzantines subsequently agreed the trade treaties of 907 and 911. The problem with accepting this account is that no Byzantine writer makes any mention of it, which would seem unlikely if an attack of that scale really did take place. A third attempt to take the city was made by Igor in 941. A fragmentary letter from an unnamed Khazar to an unidentified Jew, known as the Schechter Letter, suggests that the attack was incited by the Khazars who wanted revenge on the emperor Romanos Lecapenus (r. 920 – 44) for pursuing anti-Jewish policies. Igor (called Helgu in the letter) agreed to the attack as the price of his liberty after he had suffered a defeat by the Khazars. Igor’s fleet, claimed to be 1,000-ships-strong, landed on the Anatolian coast in May and plundered widely before moving on to Constantinople. Both the Byzantine fleet and army had gone on campaign leaving Constantinople unguarded except for fifteen old dromons, which the emperor fitted out with Greek Fire projectors. The Byzantines kept the formula for Greek Fire a closely guarded secret, but it was an incendiary weapon probably based on naphtha. The Rus had never experienced this weapon before and their ships swarmed around the dromons as they sailed out to do battle. The Rus were in for a nasty surprise:

‘As their galleys lay surrounded by the enemy, the Greeks began to fling their fire all around: and the Rus seeing the flames threw themselves in haste from the ships, preferring to be drowned in the water than burned alive in the fire. Some sank to the bottom under the weight of their armour: some caught fire as they swam among the waves; not a man escaped that day save those who managed to reach the shore. For the Rus ships by reason of their small size can move in very shallow water where the Greek galleys because of their greater draught cannot pass’ (Liudprand of Cremona, The Embassy to Constantinople, trans. F. A. Wright, Routledge, 1930.)

The Byzantine victory was not so decisive as this account implies. Sufficient Rus survived for them to spend weeks plundering on the Asian coast of the Bosphorus, raiding inland as far as Nicomedia (now Izmit). The Rus only withdrew in September when reinforcements finally reached Constantinople. The Rus then sailed to the coast of Thrace (modern Bulgaria) and continued their plundering. Almost at the moment when they were ready to sail for home the Byzantine fleet fell upon them by surprise and only a handful of ships escaped. Those Rus who were captured were taken to Constantinople to be publicly beheaded.

By the middle of the tenth century, the Rus were becoming assimilated with the native Slavs through intermarriage and were losing their Scandinavian culture and identity. Svyatoslav was himself a sign of that assimilation: all previous Rus rulers had had Scandinavian names, his name was Slavic. Slavs, or at least men with Slavic names, were also achieving high rank. The names of the Rus witnesses to the trade agreements with Byzantium made in 907 and 911 all had Scandinavian names. Half the witnesses to Igor’s new trade treaty of 945 had Slavic names. Even by 907, the Rus appear to have adopted native religious beliefs, swearing to uphold the treaties by the Slavic gods Perun, a thunder god, and Veles, a chthonic deity. A steady trickle of Viking warriors still came east to serve in the druzhina of the Rus rulers but these native Scandinavians were now known by a new name to distinguish them from the Slavicised Rus – Varangians. The word is thought to be derived from Old Norse vár, meaning ‘pledge’, after the Viking custom of forming sworn fellowships when embarking on a common enterprise such as a Viking raid or a trading expedition.

Despite his Slavic name, Svyatoslav was very much a traditional Viking warlord. After he attained his majority c. 963, Svyatoslav spent most of his reign campaigning against the Pechenegs, Volga Bulgars and Khazars. Svyatoslav’s motives were probably twofold: to secure complete control of the Volga and Don river trade routes, and to force the Slav tributaries of the Pechenegs, Khazars and Volga Bulgars to pay tribute to the Rus instead. In his greatest campaign, c. 965, Svyatoslav reduced both the Volga Bulgars and Khazars to tributary status. Bolghar, Sarkel and Itil were all sacked and plundered. An eyewitness told Ibn Hawqal soon after the attack on Itil that there was: ‘not enough left of a vineyard or a garden worth giving to a beggar. If a leaf were left on a branch, the Rus would carry it off. There is not a grape or a raisin left in the country.’ The attack permanently broke the power of the Khazars, Rus pirates were free to operate on the Caspian Sea again and a number of small-scale raids are recorded up to around 1030. After destroying Itil and Bolghar, Svyatoslav turned his sights on the Volga Bulgars’ cousins in the Balkans. He was encouraged in this by the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros Phokas (r. 963 – 9) who, in 967, offered him 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of gold to assist him in a campaign against Bulgaria. This began an entanglement with Byzantium’s proverbially devious politics that would ultimately cost Svyatoslav his life. Kalokyros, the Byzantine ambassador charged with negotiating with Svyatoslav, had ambitions to seize the imperial throne for himself. Kalokyros reached a secret agreement with Svyatoslav: if he helped him become emperor, he would allow Svyatoslav to keep Bulgaria if he conquered it. In August 967, Svyatoslav invaded Bulgaria and captured the important trade centre of Pereyaslavets near the mouth of the Danube. Had he held it, Svyatoslav would have gained control over the important Danube river trade route through central Europe. However, the Bulgars recaptured it when Svyatoslav was forced to withdraw in 968 after news reached him that Kiev was under siege by the Pechenegs. Svyatoslav returned to Bulgaria in 969, recaptured Pereyeslavets, and quickly went on to capture the Bulgar capital at Preslav and the fortress of Dorostolon (Silistra, Bulgaria). However, by this time there had been a change of regime at Constantinople. Kalokyros’ treachery had been discovered, and Nikephoros had been deposed and murdered by his wife’s lover John Tzimiskes (r. 969 – 76).

John offered to continue with the payments of gold offered by Nikephoros if Svyatoslav would withdraw from Bulgaria. Svyatoslav refused to negotiate and contemptuously told the emperor he would meet him at the gates of Constantinople. In 970, Svyatoslav crossed the Balkans and sacked the Byzantine city of Philippopolis (Plovdiv, Bulgaria). The Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon, who later met Svyatoslav in person, accused him of impaling 20,000 captives outside the city. Svyatoslav now advanced towards Constantinople, but he was still several days’ march away when a smaller Byzantine army defeated him at Arcadiopolis (Lüleburgaz, Turkey) and forced him to retreat back over the Balkans. At Easter 971, John took the offensive and recaptured Preslav after a short siege. At the same time, 300 Byzantine warships with Greek Fire projectors took control of the Danube, capturing Pereyslavets and cutting off Svyatoslav’s retreat. Svyatoslav fell back to Dorostolon, where he was blockaded by the Byzantine army on land and by the Byzantine warships on the Danube. Desperate Rus attempts to break the siege failed and, after two months, hunger forced Svyatoslav to negotiate for peace. In return for renouncing his territorial ambitions in Bulgaria, John allowed Svyatoslav to withdraw with his forces, even providing his army with rations for the journey. This was just a front, however: John was also negotiating with the Pechenegs. As Svyatoslav’s fleet made its way back up the Dnepr towards Kiev, it was ambushed by the Pechenegs, probably at the Kichkas ford. Svyatoslav and most of his army were killed. In what was the ultimate accolade one barbarian leader could pay to another, the Pecheneg khagan Kurya had Svyatoslav’s skull made into a prestige drinking goblet.

Svyatoslav’s empire was ephemeral. Soon after his death, civil war broke out between his teenage sons, Yaropolk, Oleg and Vladimir (‘the Great’). After Yaropolk killed Oleg, Vladimir fled to Sweden. In 980 Vladimir returned with an army of 6,000 Varangians and drove Yaropolk out of Kiev. Vladimir lured his brother into a peace conference, where two Varangians murdered him. Vladimir’s reign (980 – 1015) was one of the most important in Russian history, marking the end of Kievan Rus as a Viking state. In his early years, Vladimir was a devotee of the thunder god Perun, but in 988 he made the momentous decision to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

The Primary Chronicle tells a rather fanciful story about Vladimir’s conversion. In 987, Vladimir sent envoys around the world to learn about the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Vladimir rejected Judaism on the grounds that they had lost their homeland and must, therefore, have been abandoned by God. Islam was rejected because of its ban on the consumption of pork and alcohol. Especially alcohol. The envoys Vladimir sent to Germany to learn about Roman Catholicism reported unfavourably on their drab churches but those he sent to Constantinople to learn about Orthodoxy gave glowing reports about the beauty of the service they had attended in the vast Hagia Sophia cathedral. They apparently no longer knew whether they were in heaven or on earth. Impressed, Vladimir agreed to convert in return for the hand of the emperor Basil II’s sister Anna. It is not known how Anna felt about being married off to a barbarian warlord who reportedly had several wives and 800 concubines already, and leaving behind the sophisticated comforts of Constantinople for the timber halls of Kiev. Vladimir was baptised at the Byzantine city of Cherson in Crimea in 988 and on his return to Kiev he destroyed the pagan shrines, threw the idol of Perun into the Dnepr, and ordered his subjects to accept baptism, starting with his twelve sons. Significantly, Slavic was adopted as the language of the Russian church, a clear sign that by now the Rus elite were Slavic speakers.

Greek and Arabic sources paint a rather different, and altogether more credible, picture of the conversion of the Rus. In the early Middle Ages, Orthodox and Roman Catholic missionaries competed with one another for the souls of Europe’s last pagans. Byzantine efforts to convert the Rus to Orthodox Christianity were actually begun by the patriarch Photius in the 860s. According to the Primary Chronicle, Askold and Dir became converts in 867, and there were sufficient converts by 874 for the patriarch to appoint an archbishop to the Rus. Christianity did not spread quickly among the Rus, but the Rus-Byzantine trade treaty of 945 mentions that there was a substantial Christian community and at least one church at Kiev. Probably in 957, Olga of Kiev visited Constantinople and became an Orthodox Christian. Her son Sviatoslav, however, refused to convert because he thought he would lose credibility with his druzhina. This suggests that the warrior aristocracy was still mostly pagan. Vladimir’s decision to abandon paganism was most likely made for reasons of political advantage. In 987, Basil II was faced with a serious uprising and he appealed to Vladimir for military assistance. Vladimir’s price was marriage to Anna, but this was politically impossible while Vladimir was a pagan, so he converted and forced his subjects to do so too. Baptism was a small price to pay for an alliance with Europe’s most powerful state. The agreement with Basil solved an immediate problem for Vladimir. He still had with him the 6,000 Varangians he had recruited in Sweden to help him win power and they were getting restless because he could not afford to pay them. By sending them off to fight for Basil, Vladimir rid his kingdom of a possible destabilising influence.

Basil II made good use of Vladimir’s 6,000 Varangians, throwing them into battle against the rebels almost as soon as they arrived in Constantinople in the summer of 988. Their ferocity impressed Basil so much that he decided to create an elite unit of imperial lifeguards to be manned exclusively by Varangians, his own Greek lifeguards having proved disloyal. The Varangian Guard subsequently fought in every major Byzantine campaign until Constantinople was captured by crusaders in 1204. Early recruits to the guard were mostly Swedes and Rus, but by the early eleventh century Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders were making the long journey through Russia to Constantinople, attracted by the generous pay. Regarded as outstandingly loyal, Varangian Guardsmen were the highest paid mercenaries in Byzantine service, receiving the equivalent of between 1⅓ to 2½ pounds of gold a year, a one-third share of the Byzantine army’s war booty, and frequent gifts of treasure and fine clothing from the emperors. They even got to wear silk clothes when off-duty: this at a time when a king back home in Scandinavia would have been satisfied with decorative silk trim on his best clothing. With incentives like these, the emperor could afford to be fussy. Applicants had to prove that they were men of substance by paying an entry fee, and they needed to prove their battle skills by serving in a regular army unit before being admitted to the guard. Appearance mattered too, as the emperor wanted to surround himself with tall, well-built men who would look both magnificent and intimidating.

The most famous member of the guard was Harald Hardrada, a future king of Norway, who served as an officer from 1034 to 1043 on campaigns in Sicily, Bulgaria, Anatolia and the Holy Land. Harald’s saga probably exaggerates the favours shown to him by the emperors to flatter the Norwegian monarchy with this tenuous imperial connection, but he certainly made enough money during his service to finance his successful bid to seize the Norwegian throne. Few others did quite so well but even ordinary guardsmen like the Icelander Bolli Bollason (d. c. 1067) could cut quite a dash when they returned home:

‘Bolli rode from the ship with eleven companions. His companions were all wearing scarlet and rode in gilded saddles; they were all fine looking men, but Bolli surpassed them all. He was wearing clothes of gold-embroidered silk which the Greek emperor had given him, and over them a scarlet cloak. He was girt with the sword ‘Leg-Biter’, its pommel now gold-embossed and the hilt bound with gold. He had a gilded helmet on his head and a red shield at his side on which a knight was traced in gold. He carried a lance in his hand, as is the custom in foreign lands. Wherever they took lodgings for the night, the womenfolk paid no heed to anything but to gaze at Bolli and his companions in all their finery.’ (Laxdaela Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Penguin, 1969.)

The Varangian Guard probably had a formal establishment of 6,000 men, divided into twelve divisions of 500. Strict discipline was imposed by a regimental tribunal. The guard’s commander, the Akolouthos, was usually a Greek. His status reflected that of the guard itself; he held the first rank in the hierarchy of imperial offices and in processions he walked immediately behind the emperor himself. The Varangians were not encouraged to learn Greek – it probably suited the emperor to maintain a communication barrier between the guardsmen and his Greek subjects – so commands were relayed through a corps of interpreters. The guard’s primary function was to protect the emperor, wherever he was. When he was based in Constantinople the guard also acted as a special police force, suppressing civil unrest and arresting suspected traitors, killing, torturing or blinding them as required by the emperor. Having no local sympathies, the Varangians could be trusted to carry out their duties without regard to the rank or family connections of their victims. If the emperor went on campaign, part of the guard was always left behind to garrison Constantinople. In camp, the Varangians’ tents surrounded the emperor’s tent; if the emperor was staying in a city, the keys to its gates were entrusted to the Varangians. In battle, the emperor kept the Varangians with him to the rear of the main battleline, holding them in reserve until the battle reached a critical point. The Varangians made highly effective shock troops, fighting on foot using traditional Viking weapons and tactics. The two-handed broadaxe was their favoured weapon and because of this they were often described as ‘the emperor’s axe-wielding barbarians’ (or, on account of their heavy drinking, ‘the emperor’s wine-swilling barbarians’). The Varangians’ reputation for ferocity and their disregard for the pain of wounds in battle suggests that many must have been practicing berserkers.

In 1071, the Byzantine army suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Seljuq Turks at the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt, Turkey). The emperor Romanos IV was wounded and captured and most of the Varangian Guard were killed, remaining loyal to the emperor after most of the Byzantine army had fled the battlefield. The depleted ranks of the guard were filled, in part, by English warriors who had gone into exile following the Norman conquest. The Varangian Guard still remained attractive to Scandinavians, however. When the Danish king Erik the Evergood visited Constantinople in 1103, many of his retinue stayed on and joined the guard. The same thing happened when King Sigurd of Norway stopped by in 1110 on his way home from a crusade in the Holy Land. When jarl Rognvald of Orkney set out for the Holy Land in 1153, six ships broke away from his fleet as soon as it entered the Mediterranean and went straight to Constantinople where their crews joined the guard. The guard survived until 1204, when Constantinople was captured by crusaders. The guard’s final hour was not its finest: the Varangians refused to fight the crusaders until they were offered an extortionate pay rise. After 1204, English and Scandinavian mercenaries, described as Varangians, continued to serve in Byzantine armies but they were treated no differently to any other mercenaries. The ranking of the Akolouthos says it all – he had fallen in rank from first to fiftieth.

By the later tenth century, the Islamic world’s silver mines were becoming exhausted and the flow of dirhems through Russia gradually declined. Fewer and fewer Scandinavian merchants came east to trade but the memory of Serkland’s fabulous wealth lingered on to inspire a new generation of adventurers. Around 1041, Yngvar the Widefarer, a Swede, led an expedition east to try to re-open the trade routes, but he met with disaster somewhere in the Caspian region and he and most of his men were killed. Yngvar’s expedition is known from a group of twenty-six rune-stones in central Sweden that commemorate men who ‘fell in the east’ with Yngvar. A highly fictionalised account of Yngvar’s expedition survives in the thirteenth century Yngvars saga víðförla (‘The Saga of Yngvar the Widefarer’), a translation into Old Icelandic of a lost twelfth-century Latin work by an Icelandic monk Odd Snorrason. The Yngvar of the saga is a warrior in the service of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (r. c. 995 – 1022). When the king refuses to grant Yngvar a royal title, he raises an expedition to go to the east in search of a kingdom for himself. Yngvar goes first to the court of kniaz Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019 – 54) in Russia and after three years presses on with thirty ships along an unnamed river into the east. From this point onwards, Yngvar’s adventures become increasingly fantastic, with encounters with giants, dragons, witches and, inevitably, a beautiful queen, Silkisif of Gardariki, who falls in love with him. Finally, Yngvar dies in an epidemic that decimates his expedition and his body is returned to Silkisif, who sends the survivors home with instructions to send missionaries to convert her country to Christianity. According to the saga, Yngvar died in 1041 aged twenty-five, in which case he would have been no more than six when he set out from Sweden.

It is almost impossible to disentangle fact from fiction in Yngvar’s saga, but events during Yaroslav’s reign provide it with a credible context. Jaroslav was the last ruler of Kievan Russia to maintain close links with Scandinavia. One of Vladimir’s many sons, Yaroslav, was appointed governor of Novgorod by his father. After his father’s death in 1015, Yaroslav’s older brother Sviatopolk murdered three of their brothers and seized power in Kiev. Supported by the people of Novgorod and an army of Varangians, Yaroslav defeated and killed Sviatopolk in 1019 to establish his rule over Kiev. In the same year Yaroslav married Ingigerd, the daughter of King Olof Skötkonung, establishing an alliance with Sweden. When his brother Mstislav challenged him for control of Kiev in 1024, Yaroslav was able to call on the support of his brother-in-law King Önund Jacob (r. 1022 – 50), who led an army of Varangians over from Sweden. Many other Varangians broke their journeys to Constantinople at Yaroslav’s court at Novgorod, often signing on in his druzhina for a few years before moving on. One of these was Harald Hardrada, who spent three years (1031 – 4) in his druzhina before he left to join the Varangian Guard. When he returned to Russia in 1041, on his way to claim the Norwegian throne, Harald married Yaroslav’s daughter Elisleif (Elizabeth). Yngvar is likely to have been one of these adventurers, like Harald, who served Yaroslav for a number of years before travelling on. But where did Yngvar go? Several of the Yngvar runestones state that he and his men died in Serkland. This is usually taken to mean the Abbasid Caliphate, but it may be that in this case it means the kingdom of Georgia. Georgian chronicles state that in 1042 a group of Varangians landed at the mouth of the River Rioni on Georgia’s Black Sea coast and joined the army of King Bagrat IV (r. 1027 – 72), who was fighting a civil war against a rebel general. The rebels defeated Bagrat and his Varangian allies at the Battle of Sasireti in the Caucasus Mountains. The defeat was so severe that Bagrat lost control of half his kingdom and it is likely that his Varangians suffered heavy casualties. The date of the battle is so close to the date given for Yngvar’s death in the saga that there must be a possibility that this was the disaster that cost him and so many of his men their lives. However, the saga says that Yngvar died of sickness. This was the fate of another Varangian, Önund, a son of King Emund of Sweden (r. 1050 – 60), who, according to Adam of Bremen (d. c. 1080) was sent overseas ‘to extend his dominions’. Önund fell ill and died in ‘the land of the Amazons’, which in the Middle Ages was thought to be on the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, after drinking from a well that had been poisoned by the warrior women. Are Yngvar and Önund the same person, or has the saga conflated the stories of two separate ill-fated Varangian expeditions to re-open the routes to the east?

While Yaroslav’s Scandinavian connection was important to him, it is also very clear that there was no longer a special relationship. The relations he cultivated with other European states, such as the Byzantine Empire, Germany, France and Hungary, were just as important to him as those with Scandinavia. After Yaroslav’s reign, the links between Russia and Scandinavia faded. Aspiring Scandinavian recruits for the Varangian Guard began to travel to Constantinople by sea or through Germany and Hungary rather than by the old river route through Russia. The last time Varangian mercenaries fought in any numbers for the Rus was during an unsuccessful attack on Constantinople, commanded by Yaroslav’s son Vladimir in 1043. Just as in 941, the Rus fleet was destroyed by dromons spewing Greek Fire. Changing trade patterns also weakened the links between Scandinavia and Russia. Novgorod went from strength to strength as Russia’s main outlet to the west, but by the thirteenth century German merchants from Baltic cities like Lübeck had taken control of its trade, excluding Scandinavians through monopolistic practices.

Ultimately, the Viking contribution to the development of Russian civilisation was very slight. Tellingly, despite over 200 years of close interaction, less than a dozen Scandinavian loan words were adopted into the developing Russian language. Nor did the Vikings leave any clear genetic traces in the modern Russian population. Probably, the most important Viking impact was on urbanisation. Many of the eastern Slavs’ fortified settlements were already beginning to develop into towns by the beginning of the Viking Age, but there can be no doubt that the arrival of Scandinavian merchants gave the process enormous impetus by greatly expanding east–west trade links, turning small towns like Kiev into prosperous cities in less than a century. Far more significant to the development of early Russia, was Vladimir’s adoption of Orthodox Christianity, which opened Kievan Russia to the powerful influence of Byzantine civilisation. Byzantine culture shaped Russia for centuries to come and, just as significantly, created an ideological barrier between it and the Catholic west. Kievan Russia’s alphabet, art, architecture, law, music and political ideologies were all essentially of Byzantine origin. Tsargrad (‘city of the emperors’), as Constantinople came to be known to the Russians, was regarded as the cultural and religious capital of the world. When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks in 1453, the Russians were entirely justified in seeing themselves as its cultural and political successors.