Empires and Barbarians (81 page)

Probably in 860, Vikings from somewhere in Russia launched a first attack on Constantinople. Two hundred boats sailed across the
Black Sea and ravaged the city’s outskirts. The Byzantines attributed their survival to the intercession of the Virgin, and, whatever credence one gives the figures, this was clearly a major attack.
³⁰
It was followed by an intense diplomatic effort to head off further incursions. This included sending Christian missionaries away into the Russian forests. But after an initial claim of success from the Byzantine Patriarch in 867, the mission disappeared without trace, and there is no mention of further diplomatic contacts with the north for more than a generation. This suggests that the political authority to whom the mission had been sent was itself not long-lived: something which, as we shall see, was true of most Viking Age Scandinavian monarchies. There are also other clear signs of trouble. At more or less the same time, the settlement on Lake Ladoga was burned down. Dendrochronological evidence dates the disaster to between 863 and 871. It was manmade and deliberate. The original settlement consisted of isolated wooden blockhouses, all of which were destroyed at the same moment. It is highly implausible that an accidental fire could have spread amongst them all so effectively. In the same era, a Persian historian reports that Rus attacked the port of Abaskos on the south-east coast of the Caspian Sea, but the event can be dated no more closely than c.864–83.
³¹

Without better historical sources, it is hard to know how to assemble this jigsaw. But the burning of Staraia Ladoga and the attacks on Abaskos and Constantinople indicate that new Scandinavian powers had entered the arena, and it is a striking coincidence that this was happening at exactly the same moment as, further west, kings were arriving and the Great Armies being assembled. I strongly suspect, therefore, that the simultaneous turmoil on the north Russian waterways and the sudden appearance of an authority large enough to attack Constantinople both reflect the intrusion of certainly more organized, and probably also larger, Scandinavian forces into the eastern as well as the western areas of Viking operation. Like their western counterparts, these more powerful newcomers will have been looking to take over and extend the profitable wealth-extracting operations that already existed. The evolving Viking period in east and west in the ninth century reminds me of nothing so much as Chicago in the prohibition era. First small groups started to make limited amounts of money from smuggling in and producing bootleg alcohol, then the more organized gangs set themselves up, alternatively demanding a cut of all profits or suppressing rival organizations, as
circumstances demanded. Once the flow of wealth was up and running, the already powerful stepped in to control it and take their cut: precisely 10 per cent, of course, according to Ibn Fadlan.

In Russia, a second factor ratcheted up the competition. To judge by the deposition of coin hoards, the flow of Arab silver reaching the north slowed considerably between c.870 and 900. The slowdown coincides, in fact, with a period of internal political chaos in the Islamic Caliphate – the ‘anarchy at Samarra’ – which lasted from 861 to 870 and may well have been caused in the first place by disruption on the demand side of the trade equation. This degree of crisis can only have had an adverse effect on the demand for luxury goods at the caliphal court, and would have increased the competition between different groups of Scandinavian fur and slave producers in northern Russia. This may help explain the struggle for dominance of what was left of the luxury trade from the north and, in turn, why Byzantine diplomatic feelers got nowhere. Eventually, however, some degree of order was restored, not only in the Islamic world but in the north – a process, even given the continued absence of narrative sources, that we can still get some grasp of through less direct evidence.
³²

For one thing, Staraia Ladoga was eventually rebuilt, probably in the early tenth century, this time in stone. Finds of Scandinavian materials dating to c.900 have also been made at a series of other northern sites: Gorodishche (old Novgorod), Timerevo, Mikhailovskoe, Petrovskoe, Pskov, Yaroslavl and Murom. These settlements were all placed at convenient points of access to, and hence to profit from, the main trade route down the River Volga (
Map 20
). Between them these sites have generated a greater quantity of Scandinavian material than any of their counterparts of the ninth century. Some of it is also women’s jewellery, suggesting that a mixed immigrant population, rather than just armed Nordic males, was now occupying at least some of the sites.

This further Scandinavian influx coincided with a renewal of silver flows from the Islamic world, which, from c.900, started to arrive in unprecedented amounts. According to the available hoard evidence, something like 80 per cent of all the Islamic silver that flowed into northern Russia and Scandinavia between c.750 and 1030 (when supplies dwindled virtually to nothing) did so after the year 900. It was also coming by a different route. By the 920s, where we began, the Volga Bulgars had established their control of the Middle Volga and
become Muslim. The reports of Islamic travellers show that most Scandinavian Rus were by this stage no longer trading directly with the main Islamic world. Most of the trading was being done in the land of the Volga Bulgars, where Islamic and Viking merchants met to do business. This is reflected in the origin of the tenth-century coins. Whereas the eighth- and ninth-century coins had mostly been minted in the great centres of old Islam, in what are now Iraq and Iran, the tenth-century coin flows had a further eastern origin, being produced for the most part by the newly dominant Samanid dynasty of eastern Iran. At this point, the silver mines of Khurasan, controlled by the dynasty, were at the peak of their production, which has been estimated at between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty tons of silver per annum, or a staggering forty to forty-five million coins. Not surprisingly, the territories of the Samanids were a magnet for anyone with something – or someone – to sell, and well-established trade routes led from their lands east to the Middle Volga. A huge new market, served by much less difficult access routes, was attracting larger numbers of Scandinavians than ever before into Russia’s forests.
³³

This provides the context for the greater power among the Rus encountered by Islamic travellers of this era: the island king. Everything we know about this king and the structure he presided over suggests that we should think of him as a
capo di capi
. He took a 10 per cent cut of everyone else’s mercantile operations, and enforced his orders via a permanent armed retinue reckoned at four hundred-strong. If the
RPC
is correct, the first of these kings ought to have been Riurik, founder of the dynasty, but that is far from certain. Whatever his identity, his seat was almost certainly Gorodishche. Scandinavian occupation began here in the later ninth century, and as the Muslim travellers describe it, it was an island, strategically placed at the point where the River Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen (
Map 20
). Unlike the other Scandinavian sites of this date, it was also defended by walls, which supports the idea that it was a centre of authority. Anyone who didn’t obey the orders emanating from it was liable to the fate of the inhabitants of Staraia Ladoga, just down the Volkhov, whose houses had met with such a nasty accident in the 860s. No doubt some of them had found horses’ heads in their beds just before the conflagration.
³⁴

But this kind of political structure was hardly stable, and for all the
wealth flowing through it, northern Russia of the early tenth century was hardly a land of peaceful prosperity, either. For one thing, much of the business being carried on came in the form of a slave trade. By its very nature this was a violent and unpleasant activity, involving armed raids on likely victims and the brutalization of captives as they were transported to market. Armed raids for the extraction of booty or better trading terms were still being conducted too. Both of the trade treaties with Byzantium, for instance, were the result of armed demonstrations which induced the emperor and his advisers to offer better trading terms. Islamic sources, likewise, report a huge raid on the Caspian in the year 912. And there was a further, internal dimension to the turbulence of this world. The mercantile colonization of European Russia was conducted, as we have seen, by a number of independent Scandinavian groups, not one organizing authority. You can bet your life that, originally at least, the required 10 per cent of the merchants’ profits was not handed over to the king in the north voluntarily. And such a process always carried within itself the potential for generating new rivals for the current
capo
.

The king in Gorodishche won out, it seems, in the north. But precisely at the moment that Muslim travellers were taking stock of him, the political structure over which he presided was being overturned by the emergence of a second Scandinavian power base at Kiev, much further south, on a natural crossing of the Middle Dnieper. According to the
RPC
, Scandinavians first came to Kiev when two followers of Riurik called Askold and Dir obtained his permission to leave Novgorod (Gorodishche) to journey to Constantinople. On the way, they arrived at Kiev and decided to establish themselves there, from where they later launched an attack on Constantinople with two hundred boats. The
Chronicle
places their arrival in Kiev under the year 862, and the attack on Constantinople during 863–6. About twenty years later, Riurik’s successor, a man ‘of his kin’ by the name of Oleg who was ruling on behalf of Riurik’s young son Igor, set off south with a mixed army of Scandinavians, Finns and Slavs. Askold and Dir were tricked and killed, a fortified centre was built, and tribute imposed upon the surrounding Slavic tribes. Oleg had united north and south and the Russian kingdom was born. These events are placed under the years 880–2.

The outline of the story seems reasonably correct. Kiev was a secondary and later centre of Scandinavian operations in western
Russia. It is one of a series of sites along the Dnieper route to have produced Scandinavian materials, but only from about the year 900. Key to all further progress down the Dnieper was the settlement at Gnezdovo, which controlled the passage from Lake Ilmen to the Upper Dnieper and made it possible for Vikings from the northern Ladoga region to move down towards the Black Sea. Scandinavians established themselves at Gnezdovo only towards the end of the ninth century, and then at Kiev and a number of other centres around it: Shestovitskia and Gorodishche, which was near Yaroslavl where archaeological evidence of a Scandinavian presence of around the same date has emerged, and others such as Liubech and Chernigov which are mentioned in historical sources. The presence of Scandinavians is clear enough in the Middle Dnieper region from c.900, but, so far at least, the archaeological excavations would suggest that the Vikings came here in smaller numbers than in the north, where the materials of c.900 and beyond are far more plentiful.
³⁵
If the general chronology of the
RPC
seems correct, other aspects of its story are much less convincing.

For one thing, its specific dates are no more than a later attempt to make sense of oral sources, and are thoroughly unreliable. The attack on Constantinople is the one we’ve met already, its date taken directly from the Byzantine
Chronicle
of George the Monk, which does not name the Viking leaders involved. At some stage in the compilation of the
RPC
, someone decided that the attack on Constantinople recorded in the Byzantine source was the same as that made by Askold and Dir, and the rest of their story was dated by that decision. This was probably a mistake. Extensive excavations at Kiev have produced no Scandinavian material dated before about 880 (the Podol excavations), so that the attack on Constantinople of the 860s, documented in Byzantine sources, was probably launched from further north.

The
RPC
’s story also poses other problems. Its compilers were obviously a bit puzzled by Oleg’s relationship to Riurik. In the main Kievan tradition, he is described as a relative of some kind, but in the northern tradition, in a version of the
Primary Chronicle
which seems to derive from Novgorod, he is Riurik’s unrelated commander-in-chief. The idea that Askold and Dir would have bothered to ask Riurik’s permission before setting off for the south likewise fails to convince.
³⁶
As we have seen, in the ninth and the earlier tenth century, the Grand Prince of Rus was little more than
primus inter pares
, and Scandinavian
expansion was carried forward by a whole series of independent initiatives, with the
capo
moving in only later to claim his percentage. There is no reason to suppose that moves towards Kiev, whoever made them, took any different form. Perhaps above all, there’s also the much bigger problem of why Viking Russia came eventually to be dominated by its second and later power centre – Kiev in the south rather than Novgorod in the north – especially since Kiev was situated on the much less rich Byzantine/Dnieper trading axis, where fewer Scandinavians had actually settled. These, however, are puzzles for the next chapter. For now, we must analyse the Viking diaspora in both east and west as a flow of migration.

Questions of scale raise one of the most famous controversies in Viking studies. In the past, there was a strong tendency to interpret the Viking Age in the light of traditional perceptions of the classic Germanic
Völkerwanderung
. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people were thought to have been on the move, driven on by a lack of resources: a deluge that drowned western Europe in an unprecedented orgy of violence. The old schoolbooks reproduced the famous Anglo-Saxon prayer ‘From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us’, and more scholarly equivalents are easy to find. A textbook of Latin grammar, copied in Ireland in about 845 and eventually brought to the continental monastery of St Gall, has written into its margins this short but wonderfully evocative poem in Old Irish: