The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Archeologists show the Eastern Slavs to have been rather more sedentary. They lived in log houses organized in villages with anywhere between four and thirty houses. The villages were grouped in clusters. In the middle of a cluster, the Slavs built a fortification that served as military headquarters during enemy attack. The Slavs engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. They had their own chieftains, and one might assume that they practiced military democracy, like the Slavs described by Procopius. Like the Antes and the Sclaveni, they considered the god of thunder, whom they called Perun, to be their main deity.

  Compared to the Slavs of Procopius, those described by the Kyivan chronicler had made some progress with regard to personal hygiene. The chronicler puts the following words into the mouth of St. Andrew, the apostle who allegedly brought Christianity to Kyiv: “I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with an acid liquid, they take young branches and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive.”

  The Kyivan chronicler, who resided and probably grew up in the vicinity of Kyiv, was not shy about mocking a bathing procedure popular among inhabitants of the northern reaches of present-day Russia and Scandinavia. He was much more scathing about old pre-Christian habits among his countrymen, which he considered barbaric. “The Derevlianians,” wrote the chronicler about the former overlords of Kyiv, “existed in bestial fashion and lived like cattle. They killed one another, ate every impure thing, and there was no marriage among them, but instead they seized upon maidens by capture.” According to the chronicler, other Slavic tribes were guilty of the same behavior. “There were no marriages among them,” he wrote, “but simply festivals among the villages. When the people gathered together for games, for dancing, and for all other devilish amusements, the men on those occasions carried off wives for themselves, and each took any woman with whom he had arrived at an understanding. In fact, they even had two or three wives apiece.”

  It would be wrong to take the chronicler’s account of Slavic marriage practices—or, rather, the lack of them—as a description of a norm rather than a deviation. The Kyivan chronicler, a Christian zealot of a later period, was of course fighting against all deviations from Christian morality and focused his attention on youth festivals that ran counter to the established institution of marriage. Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, a Moorish Jew from Cordoba who visited the lands of the Western Slavs in the mid-tenth century, found Slavic marriages to be strong and the receipt of dowries to be one of the main ways of accumulating wealth. He noted, however, that both young men and young women were expected to have sexual experience before they married. “Their women, when married, do not commit adultery,” wrote Ibn Ya’qub. “But a girl, when she falls in love with some man or other, will go to him and quench her lust. If a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin, he says to her, ‘If there were something good in you, men would have desired you, and you would certainly have found someone to take your virginity.’ Then he sends her back and frees himself from her.”

  We know precious little about the Slavs who settled Ukrainian territory prior to the tenth and eleventh centuries. What we do know comes, by and large, either from their Byzantine or Gothic adversaries or from Christian zealots of later centuries, such as the Kyivan chronicler, who saw the Slavs as little more than bearers of pagan superstitions. Both accounts describe them as barbarians fighting either the Christian Empire or Christian dogma and ritual. What was ignored by the chroniclers and remains largely unknown to us is the process of their mostly peaceful colonization of eastern Europe, which took them from their homeland, part of which was in the northwestern regions of present-day Ukraine, deep into the Balkans in the south, beyond the Vistula and toward the Oder in the west, up to the Baltic Sea in the north, and to the Volga and Oka Rivers in the east. The Slavs were agriculturalists who followed in the wake of nomad invasions, as the nomads who “made history” usually did not know what to do with land that was not steppe in which their animals could graze. The waves of Slavic colonization were slow and mostly peaceful, and the results were to prove long-lasting.

  Chapter 3

  Vikings on the Dnieper

  In Ukraine, as almost everywhere else in Europe, the era of migrations, or “barbarian invasions,” gave way to the Viking Age, which lasted from the end of the eighth century to the second half of the eleventh. As one might expect, the end of the “barbarian invasions” was not the terminus of invasions per se. The new attackers came from what are now Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Those were the Vikings, also known as Norsemen or Normans in western Europe and Varangians in eastern Europe. They plundered, subjugated, and ruled whole countries or parts of them. They also transformed some of the existing polities and created new ones.

  When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.

  The Byzantine court first came into contact with the Vikings no later than 838, when envoys representing the king of Rus’ (Rhos) showed up in Constantinople, offering the empire peace and friendship. They came from the north but were reluctant to return home by the route they had taken for fear of encountering hostile tribes, so the emperor sent them back via Germany. At the court of Louis the Pious, a son of the famous Charlemagne, king of the Franks, they were recognized as Swedes or Norsemen and suspected of espionage. In fact, they were probably anything but spies and had every reason to fear attack—either by Slavic tribes or, more likely, by nomads of the Pontic steppes—on their way back to northern Europe.

  The encounter between Byzantium and the Vikings that began so peacefully soon ended in confrontation. In 959, a Viking flotilla made its presence felt in the Mediterranean. In the following year, another group came down the Dnieper, sailed across the Black Sea, entered the Strait of the Bosphorus, and attacked the city of Constantinople. As in the case of the Viking assault on Lindisfarne, we know the exact date—June 8, 860—when the Vikings attacked the capital of the mighty Byzantine Empire. The city and the empire were taken by surprise, as the emperor Michael was fighting at the head of his troops in Asia Minor. His fleet was in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, defending the empire not only from the Arabs but also from the Vikings who had appeared there the previous year. No one expected them to come from the north as well.

  The intruders were not equipped for a long siege and could not breach the city’s walls, but they attacked the suburbs, pillaging churches and mansions, killing or drowning anyone who offered resistance, and terrifying the citizenry. They then passed through the Bosphorus, entered the Sea of Marmara, and continued plundering on the Prince Islands near the capital. Patriarch Photius, the supreme Christian and imperial official in the city, called for divine protection in his sermons and prayers. In one of his homilies, he described the helplessness of the inhabitants before the invaders: “The boats went past the city showing their crews with swords raised as if threatening the city with death by the sword, and all human hope ebbed away from men, and the city was moored only with recourse to the divine.” The intruders were gone by August 4, when Photius attributed the city’s miraculous survival to the protection of the Mother of God. This grew into a legend that laid the basis for the later celebration of the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, or Pokrova. Ironically, the feast never took hold in Byzantium but became extremely popular in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus—the lands from which the Vikings had come to attack Cons
tantinople.

  The Vikings who attacked the Byzantine capital in the summer of 860 were hardly unknown to Photius and his contemporaries. The patriarch called them Rus’, like the members of the Rus’ embassy of 838. He even stated that they were subjects of Byzantium but left it to subsequent generations of scholars to figure out the details. Who were they? The search for an answer has spanned the last two and a half centuries, if not longer. Most scholars today believe that the word “Rus’” has Scandinavian roots. Byzantine authors, who wrote in Greek, most probably borrowed it from the Slavs, who in turn borrowed it from the Finns, who used the term “Ruotsi” to denote the Swedes—in Swedish, the word meant “men who row.” And row they did. First across the Baltic Sea into the Gulf of Finland, then on through Lakes Ladoga, Ilmen, and Beloozero to the upper reaches of the Volga—the river that later became an embodiment of Russia and at the time formed an essential part of the Saracen (Muslim) route to the Caspian Sea and the Arab lands.

  The Rus’ Vikings, a conglomerate of Norwegian, Swedish, and probably Finnish Norsemen, first came to eastern Europe mainly as traders, not conquerors, as there was little to pillage in the forests of the region. The real treasures lay in the Middle East, beyond the lands through which they needed only the right of passage. But judging by what we know about the Rus’ Vikings, they never thought of trade and war—or, rather, trade and violence—as incompatible. After all, they had to defend themselves en route, since the local tribes did not welcome their presence. And the trade in which they engaged involved coercion, for they dealt not only in forest products—furs and honey—but also in slaves. To obtain them, the Vikings had to establish some kind of control over the local tribes and collect as tribute products that they could ship along the Saracen route. They exchanged these in the Caspian markets for Arab silver dirhams, troves of which subsequent archeologists have discovered. They punctuate the Viking trade route from Scandinavia to the Caspian Sea.

  The problem was that the Vikings were not the first to invent this business model. They faced competition from the Khazars, whose rulers controlled the Volga and Don trade, collecting tribute from the local tribes. The Khazars also had Byzantium on their side, and some scholars believe that the Rus’ attacked Constantinople in retaliation for the Khazars’ construction of the fortress of Sarkel with the help of the empire. Located on the left bank of the Don River, Sarkel gave the Khazars complete control of trade on the Sea of Azov. The Khazars also had an outpost in Kyiv, on the Dnieper trade route, but their rule did not extend to the forest areas west of the river, and they would soon lose the control of Kyiv as well.

  The Primary Chronicle, the source of most of our knowledge about the period, tells of a struggle for the city that took place in 882 among different groups of Vikings. Two of their chieftains, Askold and Dir (the gravesite of the former can still be visited in Kyiv), were killed by Helgi, known to the chronicler as Oleh. He captured the city, allegedly on behalf of the house of Rorik (called Rurik in the chronicle), which already ruled over Novgorod (Velikii Novgorod) in today’s northern Russia. Although one can and should question many details of this story, including its shaky chronology (the chronicler reconstructs much of it on the basis of later Byzantine sources), the legend probably echoes the actual consolidation of power by one group of Vikings in the forested regions of eastern Europe between present-day Velikii Novgorod and Kyiv.

  Most of the existing literature refers to this region as lands along the trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” but recent research suggests that if such a route really existed, it did not begin to function before the second half of the tenth century, and some parts of it were more active than others. Some scholars prefer instead to speak of a Dnieper–Black Sea route. If the Vikings were not the first to use that shorter route, they certainly revived it when they began to encounter increasing problems along the Volga “Saracen route.” In the course of the previous century, internal turmoil in the Khazar realm had rendered the Volga route unsafe. Around the same time, the Arab advance in the Mediterranean disrupted Byzantine trade with southern Europe. The Khazars tried to help their Byzantine allies (and themselves) by serving as intermediaries in Constantinople’s trade with the Middle East, now carried on by way of the Black and Azov Seas. The northern trade route took on new importance for the Greeks, probably greater than at any time since the days of Herodotus. By this time, the main products being supplied to the south were no longer cereal crops from the Ukrainian forest-steppe but slaves, honey, wax, and furs obtained from forested areas farther north. The most precious product that the Vikings brought back was silk. The Rus’ Vikings secured their trade privileges in Constantinople by concluding treaties with Byzantium, first in 911 and then in 944.

  The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus explained in his De administrando imperio, written ca. 950, soon after the conclusion of the second treaty, that the merchandise came from Slavic tribes controlled by the Vikings. “When the month of November begins,” wrote the emperor, “their chiefs together with all the Rus’ at once leave Kyiv and go off on the poliuddia, which means ‘rounds,’ that is, to the Slavic regions of the Vervians and Dragovichians and Krivichians and Severians and the rest of the Slavs who are tributaries of the Rus’.” While some tribes obliged, others rebelled. The Derevlianians, who lived on the Right Bank of the Dnieper and had once controlled Kyiv, paid the Vikings a tribute of “one marten skin apiece.” But after the tribute increased from one year to the next, the Derevlianians eventually revolted.

  The Primary Chronicle’s description of the Derevlianian revolt and its subsequent suppression gives us an early opportunity to look into the Kyivan world, which Viking princes dominated in the tenth century.

  According to the Primary Chronicle, the Derevlianian rebels attacked and killed Helgi’s successor, named Ingvar, known as Ihor to the Kyivan chronicler. “The Derevlianians heard that he was . . . approaching, and consulted with Mal, their prince, saying, ‘If a wolf come among the sheep, he will take away the whole flock one by one, unless he be killed. If we do not thus kill him now, he will destroy us all,’” wrote the chronicler in explanation of the revolt. The Derevlianians did as they had planned and killed Ingvar. Then they did something even more audacious. The mastermind of the coup, the Derevlianian prince Mal, proposed marriage to Ingvar’s widow, Helga, whom, given her importance in Slavic and particularly Ukrainian historical tradition, we shall call by the Ukrainian form of her name, Olha (Russian: Olga). The chronicler explained that Mal made the overture to gain control over Ingvar’s young son, Sviatoslav (Scandinavian: Sveinald).

  This story indicates that the Viking retinues and the local Slavic elites clashed not only over the issue of tribute but also over the Vikings’ control of trade and of the whole realm. Mal clearly wanted to take Ingvar’s place as a ruler, not simply as the husband of Olha. But Olha tricked Mal by inviting him and his people to her Kyiv castle, only to burn them alive, allegedly in the boat in which they had arrived. Then she invited another group of matchmakers from among the Derevlianian elite and killed them as well, this time in a bathhouse. She told her guests that she would not see them until they had washed themselves. The Derevlianians evidently had no idea what a Scandinavian steam bath was. It soon became very hot. They were all scalded to death.

  The fact that boats and bathhouses were important elements of Norse culture reveals the Scandinavian roots of this legend. The Rus’ and Scandinavian burial ritual involved the burning of the deceased in a boat. But the story also hints at the weakness of the Vikings’ power in Kyiv. Before burning Mal alive, Olha seems to have made certain that the people of Kyiv would take her side. On her advice, the unsuspecting Mal and his entourage refused to ride or walk to Olha’s castle, demanding instead that the locals take them there in a boat, which upset the Kyivans. According to the chronicle, they lamented, “Slavery is our lot.” In all, before Olha took to the field against the Derevlianian army, she used
trickery to destroy three groups of their leaders. Still unable to defeat the rest of the tribal army and take their stronghold, she burned it, resorting once again to subterfuge. That would have been unnecessary if the Vikings had had an overwhelming majority in Kyiv.

  Princess Olha’s son, Sviatoslav, is the first Kyivan ruler of whom we have a physical description. (The Kyivan chronicler writes that Olha was not only intelligent but also beautiful, but we have no surviving description of her.) Leo the Deacon, a Byzantine chronicler who met Sviatoslav, described the Rus’ prince, who took over from his mother in the early 960s. According to Leo, Sviatoslav was a broad-shouldered man of medium height. He shaved his beard but had a bushy moustache. His head was shaved as well, with one lock of hair untouched—a sign of his noble origin. The prince had blue eyes and a short, wide nose. He dressed in simple white clothing. His one golden earring, embellished with a ruby and two pearls, was the only sign of his high status. The meeting took place in July 971, when Leo accompanied his emperor, John Tzimisces, on a military campaign in Bulgaria.

  Sviatoslav’s meeting with the Byzantine emperor was a low point rather than a pinnacle of his military career, which began with the war on the Derevlianians waged by his mother, Olha. When she finally brought her troops into open battle with the rebellious tribesmen, the young Sviatoslav was given the honor of starting the fighting. “When both forces were ready for combat,” wrote the chronicler, “Sviatoslav cast his spear against the Derevlianians. But the spear barely cleared the horse’s ears and struck against his leg, for the prince was but a child. Then Sveinald and Asmund [Viking commanders of Olha’s army] said, ‘The prince has already begun battle; press on, vassals, after the prince.’” Sviatoslav grew into a warrior, sharing with his retinue the hardships of military life and using his horse’s saddle as a pillow while on campaign. Leo the Deacon spotted him rowing a boat with his men, distinguishable from them only by his cleaner clothes.