Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Chronology is vital. At the start of the second millennium, one is dealing with an age when Moscow had not even been founded, and when a Moscow-led ‘Russian state’ lay very far ahead. Baltic tribes inhabited much of the coastland, all of the Lakeland, and large parts of the ‘Land of the Headwaters’. For the time being, the forest zone to the east, which was to become Muscovy’s base, was inhabited by Finnic tribes, which called it Siisdai. The East Slavs were slowly expanding from an area further south, colonizing the valley of the great river which the ancient Greeks had called the Boristhenes, the Byzantines the Danapris, and the Slavs the Dniepr. They were to form the largest body of inhabitants in the region, having been left behind when their West Slavic kinsfolk moved off towards the Vistula and Elbe, perhaps in the fifth or sixth century AD, and the ‘Yugo’ or South Slavs began their trek towards a distant destination in post-Roman Illyria. Throughout most of the first millennium all these groups were pagan.32

  Sometime before the end of the millenium, however, Scandinavian adventurers, known as Vikings in the West and as Varangians in the East, succeeded in establishing a regular trade route between the Baltic and Black Seas, using the ‘Land of the Headwaters’ as the critical point of passage. Their favourite porterage, over which Viking longships could be hauled for 15–20 miles, lay between the sources of the Dvina and the Dniepr. What is more, they built a number of forts to protect their landings and staging-posts; the forts attracted Slavic settlers, and the settlers submitted to the rule of Scandinavian overlords. They called their network of forts the Gard – grad/grod/gorod being the Slavic word for town or fort. In the south, beyond the Dniepr rapids, a wide area along the Black Sea coast was held by the khanate of the Khazars, a Turkic people whose lands stretched as far as the Caspian; the Varangians would have had to pay tribute to the Khazars to reach open water and to trade with Byzantium.

  Such were the circumstances in which the East Slavs adopted the name of Rus’. The derivation of the term is obscure, although it is often related to a word for ‘ruddy’ or ‘red-haired’, as the Varangian overlords could well have been. Rus’, at all events, became the name of the country. Ruski was the country’s Slavonic language, and Rusin (m.) and Rusinka (f.) were names for the inhabitants. Byzantine Greeks translated Rus’ as Rossiya; Rusin was the derivative for the Latin terms of Ruthenus and Ruthenia.

  The oldest of the Varangian settlements, Holmgard, was founded c. 860 by a chieftain called Hroerekh on the shore of Lake Ilmen, close to the Gulf of Finland. The most northerly of the forts, Alaborg, lay on Lake Ladoga; the most easterly at Murom near the Volga, and the most southerly at Sambat on the Danapris, close to the existing Slavic settlement of Kiyiv (Kiev). The most westerly fort, which appears in the Scandinavian sagas as Palteskja and entered the historical record in 862, lay on the upper reaches of the Dvina. The Slavs, quite naturally, used their own vocabulary and name systems. They knew Hroerekh as Rurik, Holmgard as Novgorod, that is, ‘new fort’, and Palteskja as Polatsk. Their nomenclature has obliterated all Norse forms.

  In that same era, other important population shifts were taking place. Slavic tribes, notably the Kryvichi and the Dragovichi, migrated from the south, mingling with Balts in the fertile ‘Land of the Headwaters’. Their arrival was accompanied by agricultural advances and by linguistic changes. Some linguists hold that a Balto-Slavic language was created; others content themselves with the occurrence of a complex interaction of Baltic and Slavic idioms. But none would contest the fact that the Balto-Slavic collision created the characteristic phonological and lexical features which gave a distinct identity to the emerging ‘headwaters variant’ of ruski.33

  Here, one must note the contentious issue of the name of ‘Litva’. According to scholars of the Baltic persuasion, Litva was always and ab origine the generic label used by the Baltic tribes living in their Lakeland fastness. In its modern spelling, written as Lietuva, it is the modern Lithuanian name for Lithuania. According to scholars of the Belarusian persuasion, however, Litva was originally the homeland of a Slavic tribe, and had no connection with the Balts until the Balts moved south, absorbed the Slavic tribe and purloined its name.34 The tribe in question lived in a district in the upper reaches of the River Nieman, where another fort, a ‘Little Novgorod’ was built. In the absence of credible information, one cannot say whether this fort began as a Varangian, a Baltic or a Ruthenian foundation. Its Slavic name appears in a variety of forms including Navahrudak, Novogrodok and Nowogródek.

  Statehood reached the region before Christianity did. Three principalities emerged from the Varango–Slavic–Baltic encounters and each was connected with the same Rurikid dynasty. One was at Novgorod, where Rurik died in c. 879. A second was at Kiev, which was conquered by Rurik’s son, Oleg. The third was at Polatsk on the River Dvina. All of them figure in the oldest of the East Slav chronicles, the Povest’ Vremennych lat (‘The Story of the Years of Time’).35 Centuries later, when the East Slavs became differentiated into separate nationalities, their foundation stories were to be fiercely contested. But at the risk of oversimplification, Kiyiv/Kiev was the main centre of the southern part of East Slavdom, in a region that would later be called Ukraine; this Kievan Rus’ long exercised hegemony over the others. Novgorod, where a splendid mercantile republic was to develop, belonged to the north-eastern part of East Slavdom, that is, to ‘Great Rus’. And Polatsk in the north-west planted the political seed which, with the important involvement of the Balts, would grow into the ‘MDL’.

  Two words of warning need to be issued. One concerns the East Slavs, and the other, the Balts. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, when Kievan Rus’ was at its apogee, the area to the north-east of Kiev, the so-called Zalesskaya Zemlya, the ‘Land beyond the Forest’, had still not been absorbed. In so far as the upper valleys of the Ugra, Oka and Moskva rivers were inhabited, they were dominated by a block of Finnic settlement that for a lengthy period separated Kievan Rus’ from places such as Suzdal, Yaroslavl and Rostov. Early Rus’was a world without Moscow, and, more importantly, without the self-centred theories of history which the Muscovites would later invent and impose.

  The presence of Baltic tribes living west of Polatsk is well attested both from archaeology and from passing reference in their neighbours’ chronicles. Yet as Slavic migration undermined their monopoly on the ‘Land of the Headwaters’, they retreated into their lakes and forests, shunning subsequent developments. They customarily divided their homeland into the Zemaitis or ‘Lowland’ on the coast, and the Aukštota or ‘Upland’ of the interior. The tribes of the former, known in Latin as Samogitia, bordered the Prussians, and the frontier zone with the Poles. They long maintained a separate identity, and one tribe, the Sudovians (in Polish, the Jaćwings), showed signs of creating their own statelet. The Upland, in contrast, remained aloof. It was destined to stand out as Europe’s last pagan stronghold.

  The earliest arrival of Christianity in the region occurred in the late tenth century, and bore consequences far beyond the realm of religious practice. In its first phase, it transformed the Slavic communities, but not the others. The Balts were untouched; Scandinavia still bowed to the Old Norse Gods. The Khazar khanate, predominantly Muslim, was ruled by an elite that eccentrically adopted Judaism.36

  Kievan Rus’ had long been in contact with Byzantium, and it was the Greek Orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire that gradually infiltrated the East Slavs. A century earlier, the Byzantine missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius, had developed both an alphabet and a composite language, known respectively as Cyrillic and as Old Church Slavonic, to facilitate the conversion of the Slavs. Their efforts had borne early fruit among the Bulgars, a Slavicized Turkic people living on the Black Sea coast close to Constantinople.37

  Nonetheless, religious conversion was nowhere a simple matter, and the Rurikid ruling houses of Rus’ were not easily detached from their Varangian roots. The Kievan Prince Ingvar, whom the Slavs called Ihor or Igor, had a Christian wife, the sainted O
lga (Helga). He built a fleet of ships that terrorized all parts of the Black Sea; after twice besieging Constantinople, he entered into formal diplomatic relations with the Empire, but consistently rejected his wife’s pleas to accept her religion. His death in 945 was described by a Byzantine chronicler. He had attempted unwisely to exact tribute twice in the same month from one of his subject tribes. The tribesmen captured him, bent two birch trees double, and tied his legs to the tips of the trees; then they let them spring back to their full height.38

  It is impossible to say how exactly the Rurikids viewed their Varangian ancestry, or whether they cultivated their Norse gods in order to distance themselves from their Slav subjects. Over time, their ‘Norseness’ would have been diluted. Svyatoslav, son of Ingvar and Olga, seems to have been the first of the line whose Slav name does not also appear in a Norse form in any source.

  Ingvar’s grandson, Valdemar/Volodimir (r. 980–1015), was born illegitimate, and therefore had marginal chances of scooping the dynastic jackpot. Yet he surmounted all obstacles. Raised at the feet of his Christian grandmother, the Regent Olga, he was sent from Kiev to rule over Novgorod, and in the war of succession that followed his father’s death in 972, he seems to have called on his Scandinavian kinsmen, notably Haakon Sigurdsson of Norway. First, he invaded Polatsk, killed its ruler, Rogvolod, and carried off Rogvolod’s daughter, Rogneda. Then, victorious over his brothers, he re-entered Kiev, settled down as ruler of a reunited Rus’, and took Rogneda as his bride. His name in the Old Church Slavonic of the chronicles was Vladimir – meaning ‘World-Ruler’.

  The most portentous event of Vladimir’s reign occurred in 988. Having sent out envoys to observe all the religions of the day, the ‘World-Ruler’ rejected Latin Catholicism, Islam and Judaism, and decided to introduce Christianity into his land in its Byzantine form. The envoys who had attended the Mass in St Sophia’s cathedral in Constantinople had reported: ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.’ Christian missions were then sent to the different parts of Rus’. An Orthodox eparch, or metropolitan bishop, was installed in Polatsk in 992.

  In the next generation, the Rurikid dynasty splintered again. Prince Izyaslav (d. 1001), son of Vladimir and Rogneda, returned to his mother’s home of Polatsk to re-establish the ruling line of so-called Rogvolodichi. Kiev and Novgorod passed to his brother, Yaroslav the Wise, between whom and the rest of Vladimir’s brood a complicated fratricidal feud broke out. As a result, Polatsk was able to break away to become an independent political entity. Novgorod did the same slightly later. In due course, Rus’ was divided into seven or eight separate principalities.

  Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Principality of Polatsk under the descendants of Rurik governed the ‘Land of the Headwaters’ in north-west Rus’ without serious interference. It was subdivided into five dependent ‘lands’ – Polatsk (Polotsk), Smalensk (Smolensk), Turayˇ (Turov), on the Pripyat’, Chernigayˇ (Chernigov), which bordered Kiev, and Navahrudak (Novogrudok), which bordered Aukštota. At some point, it lost control of Smalensk, whose ruler emerged as an independent prince. Like all the nascent principalities of medieval Europe, it spent much time warring. There were campaigns to the east against Pskov and Novgorod, conflicts to the south with Kiev, and constant skirmishes with the Balts to the north-west. In this context, the chroniclers begin to record the presence of a people described as ‘Lituvins’. The first mention occurs in the German Quedlinburg Chronicle in an entry for 1009. Modern Lithuanians regard this date as their entry into history.39

  In those same centuries, further headway was made in the grounding of the Orthodox Church. St Efrosinia of Polatsk (c. 1120–73) was an abbess, bibliophile and church-builder; her bejewelled cross, plundered during the Second World War, was long regarded as the supreme treasure of local art.40 She died on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and her church of St Saviour still stands. Her contemporary, St Kiryl of Turayˇ (c. 1130–82) was a monk, a bishop, a famous preacher and the author of prayers that are still in use.41 Smalensk was home to an icon of great antiquity traditionally attributed to St Luke.42

  One may assume that people in Polatsk would have heard of the founding of Moskva (Moscow), which occurred in 1147 some 300 miles away. Yet they would have had little reason to regard it as a major event in their lives. Moscow was just one of several cities newly founded by Yuri Dolgorukiy, prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, whose writ did not run in the Land of the Headwaters. The political loyalty of the citizens of Polatsk was quite separate from that to which the infant Moscow belonged. Their ecclesiastical obedience was to the metropolitan of Kiev, who in turn owed allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople. At that stage of their history, the different parts of Rus’ were set on centrifugal courses.

  In the thirteenth century two external dangers appeared whose impact was to be lasting. The first was the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order that had assumed the mission of converting the Baltic pagans. The second, the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan, galloped out of Central Asia into the heart of Europe. The principalities of Rus’ were caught between the two.

  German crusaders landed on the Baltic coast at the very start of the century. Their fort at Riga, founded in 1204, served as the base for their northern province of Livonia, the Terra Marianna (‘Land of the Virgin Mary’). Their southern province of Prussia, founded in 1230, became the base for operations driving eastwards towards Samogitia and Aukštota (see pp. 339ff.). Before long, the Knights controlled access to the sea via the estuaries of the Nieman and the Dvina, and the leaders of Polatsk, Novgorod and Vladimir felt sufficiently threatened to take common action. Prince Alexander Nevsky (1220–63) of Novgorod had already made his name battling the Swedes on the River Neva; in 1242 he and his allies won a still more spectacular victory over the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. He is regarded nowadays as Russia’s most popular hero.43

  The Mongol Horde attacked when Alexander Nevsky was heavily embroiled in the north. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of nomadic horsemen rode out of the steppe into the ill-defended borders of eastern Rus’. Moscow was totally destroyed in 1238, less than a century after its foundation. Kiev suffered the same fate in 1240. The Horde stormed on through Poland, razing Kraków, and cutting down the assembled knights of Silesia. Tribute was exacted by the Mongol khan from all parts of Rus’ that his riders could reach, and Alexander Nevsky was obliged to submit to the Horde for confirmation of his titles.

  The twin threats from north and south produced a predictable reaction from the lands caught in the middle. The Baltic tribes of Samogitia and Aukštota, under pressure from the Teutonic Knights, found common cause with the Orthodox Christian princes of Polatsk. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether the Baltic party simply attacked their weakened Ruthenian neighbours and annexed their land, or whether something closer to a voluntary merger was engineered. The well-established Principality of Polatsk need not have been razed and destroyed in the manner of Moscow and Kiev. It is more likely that the constituent districts of the principality submitted successively to Baltic overlords, until a point was reached at which the new overlords gained a controlling interest.

  However it came about, the key figure henceforth is best identified as the ‘High King’ Mindaugas (1203–63), otherwise Mindoug or Mendog, who was crowned in 1253 with the German-derived title of konung. He could not have attained this position without the benefit of a preceding period of state-building. Recent scholars have emphasized that the Baltic tribes had been organizing military formations, tax collection and manorial enterprises for at least a century.44 One of them proposes 1183 as the date when the new Baltic state was launched. Another suggests that Mindaugas, though originally a pagan warrior, had fought as a mercenary in the land of Navahrudak, had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and had then used Navahrudak as a power-base for further expansion. His religious elasticity was notorious. At another time, he was baptized into the Catholic faith, and later abandoned it. Yet he was certainly
strong enough to attack Novgorod in the early 1240s, and, following his repulse, to pick off Polatsk, Vitebsk and Minsk in turn. His coronation must have been the culmination of a series of political and military triumphs. As a sign of his enhanced dignity, his entourage gave him the same status of ‘grand duke’ or ‘grand prince’ that Alexander Nevsky had recently negotiated for himself from the Mongols, and they called his new state the Grand Duchy of Litva. In the practice of the Ruthenian scribes, the name was usually shortened to VKL: ‘V’ for Vielkie or ‘Grand’, ‘K’ for Knyaztva or ‘Duchy’ and ‘L’ for Litvy. In the practice of Latin scribes, VKL was transcribed as MDL, and Litva was translated as ‘Lithuania’: Magnus Ducatus Lithuaniae.

  The name Belarus – or some earlier form of it – also came into currency in this same era. Its literal meaning of ‘White Ruthenia’ is not in doubt, but its derivation has been the subject of endless speculation. Most plausibly, ‘white’ had the connotation of a free territory, and ‘black’ that of territory that was occupied, or tribute-paying. It certainly fits the circumstances. White Ruthenia was the only part of Rus’ to stay free of the Mongol yoke. The name of Czarnorus� or ‘Black Ruthenia’, which became attached to the Land of Navahrudak, might conceivably be explained in the same way, since it was probably the first part of the Principality of Polatsk to be occupied by the Balts.

  The territory of the grand duchy in this earliest emanation was roughly equivalent to a combination of present-day Lithuania and present-day Belarus, and the creation of the new state dealt a heavy blow to the idea of a united Rus’. White Ruthenia parted company from eastern Rus’ for many centuries, developing along different lines and acquiring a separate identity. Its imminent reunion for a long spell with Kievan/Ukrainian Ruthenia would give the Belarusians and Ukrainians much in common, and would project the expanded concept of ‘Litva’ far beyond its modest Baltic origins. At the same time, in the late thirteenth century, that new state was entering a cultural and political sphere which was quite foreign to Mongol-controlled Moscow.