by Cat Jarman
We understand a fair amount about these journeys, although not from the archaeological sources but from semi-fictional written accounts. Here, unusually, we can observe the River Kings from two perspectives. The sagas, mostly Icelandic stories written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (which may or may not have been inspired by true events), provide tales of journeys to places that seemed exotic to me when I learnt about them at school: Garðaríki, Miklagard and Serkland, known now by their modern names Russia, Istanbul and possibly the Abbasid caliphate. In the minds of the medieval writers, these were places filled with riches, wealth and beauty. Here exotic animals, pungent spices and colourful fruits could be found in sumptuous palaces and markets; people wore unusual clothes and spoke mysterious tongues.
In contrast, there exist accounts written down by Islamic travellers who encountered tall and fair-haired northerners along those riverine routes across eastern Europe. In some Muslim sources, the Vikings are referred to as al-Madjus: ‘Fire-worshippers’, a common term used to describe heathens. The accounts describe these people from an outsider’s perspective, often emphasising the barbaric and unusual customs that shocked the writers, and stood in stark contrast to the comparably sophisticated behaviours that they were used to in the (to them) more civilised east. From these tales, we learn of how the Vikings conducted their trade and even of how they earned dirhams to buy jewellery – including beads – for their women; of how their women wore neck rings of silver; and of an elaborate chieftain’s burial with human sacrifice. Crucially, we also learn about the slave trade and the Vikings’ exceptional ability to take advantage of a gap in the market to fill a niche as middlemen between steppe tribes like the Khazars and the prospering Islamic world.
But in both the east and in the Arabic accounts, the northerners are no longer known as Vikings. They have morphed, seamlessly, into a group with a new identity: the Rus’. As it happens, this terminology has, to a significant degree, separated east from west in a way that is intricately linked with modern-day politics. The question of whether the Vikings and the Rus’ are one and the same has been of national importance for decades in eastern Europe, but it is also, arguably, one of the main reasons why up to now Vikings in the east have been so detached from the Vikings in the west. New discoveries are starting to challenge this state of affairs. But before getting that far, we need to consider those written sources.
The first time the Rus’ appear in a written document is in an account from an unexpected source: the Annals of St Bertin. According to the Annals, on 18 May 839, an envoy arrived at the court of Louis the Pious, the emperor of Frankia. At the time Louis was holding court at the Ingelheimer Kaiserpfalz, his imperial residence in Ingelheim am Rhein near Mainz, an opulent palace furnished with riches befitting the Holy Roman Emperor and son of Charlemagne. The envoy who walked through the palace doors that day came from Byzantium and was accompanied by a group of men who called themselves Rhos.
With them, the group brought magnificent gifts and a letter from the Byzantine emperor, Theophilus. The letter contained a special request regarding these men who had travelled with the Greeks. Apart from the usual effusive praise and proclamations of continued love between the two reigning sovereigns, Theophilus requested that the Rus’ be allowed to travel safely through Frankia, as they had been sent there by ‘their king’ to seek friendship. He also requested Louis to give them help to get home if they needed it because, Theophilus described in the letter, they had reached Constantinople by an incredibly perilous route, ‘through the most fierce and savage primitive tribes’. We don’t know who these tribes were, but we can safely assume that they had travelled the riverine route through eastern Europe.
Louis the Pious was suspicious. Despite his Byzantine ally’s apparent faith in the men, he questioned their motives for travelling to Frankia, suspecting that rather than being friendship-seeking travellers, they were probably there to spy on his kingdom. Interrogating their backgrounds further (having never heard of these Rhos before), Louis eventually discovered that they belonged to the people of the Sueones, or Swedes. In other words, those we would call Vikings. Louis decided to keep them in Ingelheim for a while to be on the safe side until he could discover their real motives. He wrote back to Theophilus to tell him as much, threatening to send the men back to the Byzantine emperor to deal with should he discover that they had dishonourable intentions.
At this point the sources fall silent on the fate of this particular group. It is not known if they made it home safely, nor where these particular Rus’ came from: the statement that they belonged to the Swedes was how ethnicity would have been commonly described at the time. While Louis clearly wasn’t familiar with the Rus’, he was definitely familiar with Vikings and Swedes: he had supported the missionary Ansgar in his travels to Birka when he had attempted to convert them to Christianity only a few years earlier. Perhaps it was this understanding, that he was dealing with pagans resisting conversion, that aroused his suspicions.
Most now believe that the name Rus’ derives from the Old Norse word róa, meaning ‘to row’. Eventually this was simplified via an Old Finnish version of the word, used by Finns to describe rowing crews, roðsmenn: migrant, boat-based Scandinavians whom they encountered in eastern territories. In northern written sources, like the sagas and skaldic poetry, the destinations eastwards were jointly known as the Austrvegr – ‘the eastern route’. The term is used in runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia, many of which include either austervegi or simply austr, ‘east’, mostly without any further geographical explanation: in most contexts, this description would clearly have been enough.
The name for much of what we now think of as Russia is known from the Icelandic sagas as Gardarike, where the first element gorod comes from the Russian word for a fortified town (which, again, is based on a Norse word meaning either ‘stronghold’ or ‘settlement’); -rike means ‘kingdom’ or ‘realm’. In other words, the kingdom of cities. Later the name Garðar becomes shorthand for the whole of this eastern region: in one definition, ‘the entire area between the Arctic and the Black Sea and between Poland and the Urals’. Another name sometimes used is Greater Svitjod – or Greater Sweden: in the Ynglinga saga, Snorri Sturluson explains that this territory extended from the north to the Black Sea, claiming that some said the territory was no smaller than ‘Saracen-land the Great’, i.e. North Africa. Either way, the territory of the Rus’ was impressively extensive.
A relatively contemporary description of the Rus’ and their territory is given by the tenth-century Arabic writer Ibn Rustah, who largely based his work on an anonymous account thought to have been written down in the late ninth century. The account goes as follows:
[Their centre] is an island around which is a lake, and the island in which they dwell is a three days’ journey through forests and swamp cover with trees and it is a damp morass such that when a man puts his foot on the ground it quakes owing to the moisture … They make raids against Saqalaba [the Slavs], sailing in ships in order to go out to them, take them prisoner and carry them off to Khazar and Bulgar and trade with them there … They have no cultivated lands; they eat only what they carry off from the land of the Saqalaba … their only occupation is trading in sables and grey squirrels and other furs, and in these they trade and they take as price gold and silver, and secure it in their belts (or saddle-bags).[1]
Although it is not an island, it is often thought this quote refers to Staraya Ladoga or, more likely, somewhere around Lake Ilmen.
This, then, was the starting point or perhaps the heartland of the new Viking territory for trading, raiding and settlement. It seems almost certain from the written sources that the Rus’ had established themselves in these areas by the beginning of the ninth century, which matches the archaeological evidence. But what the evidence from the ground doesn’t tell us is that it was the trade in slaves and furs that particularly attracted and propelled them, ultimately causing vast quantities of silver to flow north
wards. The regions they encountered here contrasted starkly with the territories they would come across in the west: most importantly, these plains did not contain the same kinds of riches as could be found in France or in Britain and Ireland. Here were no wealthy churches or unguarded monasteries rich with gold and precious jewels. Instead, to succeed here the Vikings turned their attention to something else: lucrative resources that could be traded and exploited, things that could give them access to the silver they so hungered for elsewhere. The east paved the way for the most enterprising among them, who could rise to success rapidly. This was a place for entrepreneurs.
STEPPE ROADS
The lands to the south of Lake Ilmen, Novgorod and Staraya Ladoga have a different geography; the forests peter out and are replaced by a belt of grassland known as the Eurasian Steppe. The region reaches as far as Hungary to the west and continues through Ukraine and central Asia, stretching all the way east to Mongolia and China, a distance of some 2500 miles from Europe to Asia, a division that in this continuous landscape makes little sense. There are mountain ranges interrupting the belt in several places, like the Caucasus, the Urals and the Altai mountains, but the regions beyond are all accessible via passes. On horseback, you can travel relatively unhindered from west to east over the grassy territory, which is dotted with trees that grow along riverbanks and streams. For this reason, for thousands of years the steppe allowed for extensive travel and trade, the so-called Steppe Roads being an early precursor to the Silk Roads.
The steppe was inhabited by a large number of different nomadic tribes driven by geography and climate to a lifestyle on the move: the region proved very suitable for the movement of animals, with temperatures and rainfall patterns dictating the availability of grazing, while agriculture became, the further east you went, ever less economically viable.
According to one Islamic traveller, this broad region was home to a bewildering array of people, customs and religions, including tribespeople with customs that shocked in their lack of refinement and not least their lack of modesty and hygiene. But that was the view as seen through the eyes of a missionary, much like those of Christian travellers to the north. The reality was that these nomads and agriculturalists, whom external commentators considered disorganised and haphazard, were part of a network of people whose interactions were well defined, and whose practices made sense in the harsh winters and hot summers that characterised these wide areas of wilderness.
Scandinavians who travelled to these regions would have encountered the Slavs, a people that at the beginning of the Viking Age had already settled in large parts of eastern Europe. Besides the Slavs, they encountered and traded with a wide range of nomadic groups – some more peacefully than others. The major trading partners, and often enemies, were the Khazars, but the Rus’ also frequently interacted with other culturally Turkic groups like the Volga Bulghars, the Pechenegs and the Magyars. The Khazars were originally a Turkish people, specialising in the breeding and trade of horses. The Khazar state emerged as the main successor of the Western Turkic Khaganate, which had been the predominant power on the western steppe since the 550s. At its high point the Khazari empire stretched all the way from the lower Dnieper region in the west to the Volga Bulghar state in the north. With a capital in Itil at the north-western corner of the Caspian Sea, the Khazars were able to take advantage of all the traders coming through the lands that they controlled. Ultimately, they became crucial connectors between parts of Europe and the Muslim world, and the Vikings were part and parcel of the growing trade links.
The Pechenegs were another nomadic Turkic group that caused much grief to both the Byzantine Empire and to the Rus’. They were ferocious and feared by most of those who encountered them as enemies, although this at times led to them being hired as mercenaries by the Byzantines. Occupying territory in the Pontic steppe (a large area stretching roughly from the shores of the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and the Ural mountains) from the late ninth to the mid eleventh century, the Pechenegs were actually a group of eight different tribes with individual rulers tied together by a loose tribal federation. In the tenth century, these tribes were living on both sides of the Dnieper river, which allowed them to assert a certain amount of control over trade in the area. Because these territories were ideally suited to pastoralism and animal herding, groups like the Pechenegs bred and traded horses on a large scale; an important commodity for buyers across a wide territory. Apart from animal husbandry, their main form of income came from plunder and they were very good at it.
Most of what we know of how these groups interacted with the Rus’ comes from written accounts. The first such Islamic account that mentions the Rus’ is the ninth-century Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Ibn Khurradadhbih, who was the director of the Abbasid caliphate’s Bureau of Posts and Intelligence. Ibn Khurradadhbih was concerned with describing trade routes used by an organisation of Jewish merchants, the Radhaniya. They followed four routes, stretching as far as Frankia in the west and China in the east, and alongside these he also noted the routes that were used by the Rus’. According to Ibn Khurradadhbih, these people travelled from the furthest reaches of the Slavic lands down to the eastern Mediterranean, where they sold swords as well as furs and pelts, paying 10 per cent tax to the Byzantine emperor. He explained that on the way back they would travel a different route, across the sea to Samkarsh, located at the Kerch Strait that separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov, before making their way up to Slavic territory again. Alternatively, Ibn Khurradadhbih wrote, the Rus’ could take another route through the capital of the Khazars – where they would again have to pay 10 per cent taxes – before heading to ‘a point they know’ by the Caspian Sea. From here, they might transport goods from the city of Gorgan in Iran overland by camel to Baghdad.
That the waterways were essential to the Vikings is clear from the Ynglinga saga too. After describing the different territories, Snorri names the great river flowing through Svitjod down to the Black Sea: the Tanais, better known to us as the River Don, which flows from the Dnieper basin. This, Snorri proclaims, divides the world into thirds: Europe to the west, Asia to the east, and in between, in the land of the river delta, the Vanaheimr – the world of the Vanir. The gods, then, from whom all the Scandinavians had descended, lived right there on the floodplains of eastern Europe. A more helpful description in practical terms comes from another source: the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who described the travels of the Rus’ from Novgorod to Constantinople and these treacherous routes down the Dnieper in some detail, with a focus on how to get through the difficult rapids.[2] His description is spellbinding and clearly based on first-hand accounts and intelligence.
The journey went as follows: first you came to a rapid named Essoupi, a name that means ‘do not sleep’, for reasons that will become obvious. He explained that the rapid was ‘as narrow as the width of the polo ground’. Right in the middle of it was a series of high rocks standing out like islands around which the water ‘wells up and dashes down over the other side, with a mighty and terrific din’. Apparently, this was too much of a challenge to travel through by boat, so the Rus’ put most of their men on to dry land, while the rest went barefoot in the shallows, feeling their way with their feet and punting with poles from the edge of the riverbank to guide their boats through the danger. The next challenge was the rapid called ‘the Island of the Barrage’, where travel overland was again necessary. The third rapid was named Galandri, which means ‘Noise of the Barrage’, while the fourth was the big one called Aifur. This rapid was tricky, explained Constantine, because when they got out of their boats, they had to keep a vigilant watch for the Pechenegs who were likely to attack. We hear that those who were not standing guard took the goods that were on board and walked six miles overland, alongside the slaves they had captured tied up in their chains. Finally, the boats were carried across to the far side of the rapid before they could load up their cargo and sail off again. Several more rapids w
ere encountered on the journey, including the ‘Little Barrage’ and the creatively named ‘Boiling of the Water’.
Remarkably, there is a runestone on Gotland that refers to one of these rapids, that of Aifur: it is a stone raised by four brothers in memory of a man called Hrafn, who died somewhere in the region. The inscription states that they all ‘came far and wide in Aifur’ and that they also raised stones in memory of Hrafn south of a place called Rofstein, which is thought to have been somewhere nearby.[3] This inscription shows that the names of the rapids were well known back in Sweden, and I can’t help but be reminded of those four brothers identified as having died together on the Salme ship: they had obviously travelled together as well. More evidence that journeys out of Scandinavia were clearly family ventures.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus goes on to explain that when the end of the river was reached, sacrifices were made on the island of St Gregorios, now known as Khortytsia. Here birds were sacrificed to the gods, with the boat crews casting lots to decide whether or not to eat the birds as well, and predictions were made about the future. Not far from this location five swords were found in the riverbed during the building of a hydroelectric dam; these weapons may well have represented symbolic sacrifices.
The extensive use of and adaptation to overland travel in these portages may have implications for what was happening in the west as well. Could it be that portage was required there too, allowing the Vikings to make overland connections? It was common in Scandinavia. The coastal route along western Norway, for instance, had several stretches where sailing was simply too dangerous or slow. The route, Leden, included places where you would instead take an inland course, often via portage overland.[4] This is something that is rarely considered but which could, perhaps, have allowed for more extensive riverine travel in places like England too.