Sviatoslav’s brief reign—he assumed full power in the early 960s and died in battle in 972, probably only thirty years of age—saw a number of successful military campaigns. According to some scholars, in the second half of the tenth century the Rus’ Vikings switched from trade to war to offset the losses they suffered once the mines of Central Asia, exhausted after decades of exploitation, stopped producing silver and the eastern European trade fueled by the Central Asian silver coins came to an end. In the first of his military campaigns, Sviatoslav took control of the last of the East Slavic tribes still ruled by the Khazars. These were the Viatichians, dwelling in the Oka River basin on lands that include the environs of today’s Moscow. After accomplishing that task, Sviatoslav moved against the Khazars themselves. In a series of campaigns, he captured Sarkel, the Khazar fortress in the Don region, and turned it into a Rus’ outpost, then pillaged Itil, the capital of the Khazar kaganate, on the Volga, and defeated the Volga Bulgars, who were vassals of the Khazars. The kaganate was no more. The contest between the Khazars and the Vikings for the loyalty of the Slavic tribes was all but over. They all now recognized the supremacy of Kyiv.
But Sviatoslav did not spend much time in his capital. He actually wanted to move it to the Danube. This idea came to him during a Balkan campaign that he launched against Byzantium in the late 960s. The chronicler reports that Sviatoslav wanted to move his capital to the Danube because most of the goods coming from his lands were transported along that river. Rather than a mere landgrab, he probably had in mind the establishment of control over one of the main trade routes of the era. Two of his predecessors on the Kyivan throne, Helgi (Oleh) and Ingvar, had obtained preferential treatment for Rus’ merchants trading on the rich Byzantine markets. Legend has it that Helgi even managed to nail his shield to the gates of Constantinople. He did not take the city but allegedly got valuable trade concessions from the emperor.
Sviatoslav became involved in the Balkans on behalf of the Byzantines, who paid him to attack their enemies, the Balkan Bulgars. Sviatoslav destroyed the Bulgar army and occupied a good part of their country. The Byzantines believed that he was supposed to turn that territory over to them, but Sviatoslav disagreed. Thus, they bribed the Pechenegs, a new nomadic tribe on the Pontic steppes, to attack Kyiv. Sviatoslav had to go home to deal with the Pechenegs, but by 969 he was back in Bulgaria. In the following year he besieged the Byzantine city of Adrianople, today’s Edirne, less than 150 miles from Constantinople. The court was in a panic, and Emperor John Tzimisces sent one of his best commanders to lift the siege. The emperor soon marched to Bulgaria himself and surrounded whatever remained of Sviatoslav’s army. Sviatoslav had to withdraw.
Leo the Deacon witnessed Sviatoslav’s first and last meeting with John Tzimisces. In return for a promise not to make war on the empire, to leave Bulgaria, and to renounce any claims to the southern Crimea, the emperor granted Sviatoslav and his people safe passage home. This was Sviatoslav’s last military campaign. He died on the way back to Kyiv when he and his troops disembarked from their boats near the Dnieper rapids, a forty-mile stretch of cataracts that is now under water but presented a major obstacle to navigation until the construction of a huge dam in the early 1930s. The travelers had no choice but to portage around some of the biggest rapids. “When the Rus’ come with their ships to the barrages of the river and cannot pass through unless they lift their ships off the river and carry them past by portaging them on their shoulders, then the men of this nation of the Pechenegs set upon them, and, as they cannot do two things at once, they are easily routed and cut to pieces,” wrote Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus less than a quarter century before Sviatoslav’s death.
The need to disembark near the rapids probably gave Pecheneg horsemen their chance to attack and kill Sviatoslav. The Pecheneg chieftain allegedly made a drinking cup out of his skull. Rumor had it that John Tzimisces tipped off the Pechenegs and was behind the attack. But Sviatoslav’s death on the steppe bank of the Dnieper indicated a larger problem that neither he nor his predecessors had been able to resolve. Despite all the power they amassed in Kyiv and over the vast forests to the north of the city, they were unable to establish not only full control of the steppelands but even safe passage across them. This made it impossible for the Kyivan rulers to secure the northern shores of the Black Sea and take full advantage of the opportunities, both economic and cultural, offered by the Mediterranean world. Defeating the Khazars was not enough to open the way to the sea.
Historians have referred to Sviatoslav as the “last Viking.” Indeed, his military expeditions and his idea of abandoning Kyiv and moving to a new capital to control trade between the Byzantine Empire and the cities of central Europe suggest that he had little interest in administering the realm built by his predecessors and expanded through his own military efforts. Sviatoslav’s death marked the end of the Viking Age in Ukraine. While the Varangian retinues would still play an important role in Kyivan history, Sviatoslav’s successors would try to reduce their dependence on the foreign warriors. They would focus on ruling the realm they possessed, not on conquering another one somewhere else.
Chapter 4
Byzantium North
From the very first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.
Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.
As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.
Viking troops remained essential to Volodymyr’s army after his assumption of the throne, but the account in the Primary Chronicle reflects the serious tension between him and his retinue that characterized his reign. This “second coming” of the Vikings was very different from the first. Now they came not as traders or rulers but as mercenaries in the service of a ruler who was of Viking origin himself but whose prime allegiance was to his princely realm.
Volodymyr did not dream of moving his capital to the Danube. He was satisfied with the opportunities available on the Dnieper. Volodymyr would eventually do away not only with the enormous power of the princely retinue but also with the influence of the tribal elites. He countered them by appointing his sons and members of his household to run different parts of his empire, setting the stage for the emergence of future principalities under the auspices of Kyiv.
The Viking Age had indeed come to an end in Rus’, the land named after the Vikings. That change found its way into the pages of the Primary Chronicle. Its authors usually described the princely retinue as consisting of Vikings, local Slavs, and Ugro-Finns. The collective name for the first two groups was Rus’, but, as time went on, it was applied to members of the prince’s retinue in general, then to his subjects in all walks of life, and eventually to the land he ruled. The terms “Rus’” and “Slav” became interchangeable in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. One gets that impression not only from the Primary Chronicle but also from Byzantine reports of the era.
Volodymyr took the throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.
Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.
Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.
Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.
To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.
After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.
Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.
Volodymyr brought Christianity to Rus’, but it fell to his successors to define what that would mean for the politics, culture, and international relations of the realm and to secure a place for Rus’ in the Christian community of nations led by the Byzantine emperor. None of Volodymyr’s successors was more important in making those definitions than his son Yaroslav. While Yaroslav’s grandfather, Sviatoslav, became known in historiography as “the Brave,” and his father, Volodymyr, acquired the designation “the Great,” Yaroslav gained renown as “the Wise.” He could also have been named “Lawgiver” or “Builder,” indicating that the main accomp
lishments of his rule, which lasted well over a quarter century, from 1019 to 1054, were not won on the battlefield but attained in the realm of peace and culture, state and nation building.
One of Yaroslav’s enduring legacies is his large-scale construction. “Yaroslav built the great citadel at Kyiv, near which stands the Golden Gate,” wrote the Kyivan chronicler. The Golden Gate was the main entrance in the new ramparts that the prince caused to be built around the area known to archeologists as Yaroslav’s town. One can hardly overlook the parallel between Yaroslav’s Golden Gate and that of Constantinople, which served as a triumphal arch and official entrance to the imperial capital. Kyiv’s Golden Gate was built of stone (as was part of the wall surrounding the castle), and its foundations are still visible. A replica of the old gate was constructed on those foundations in the early 1980s.
The most striking of Yaroslav’s construction projects was the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which stood outside the city walls. The cathedral is an impressive building that features five naves, five apses, three galleries, and thirteen cupolas. The walls are built of granite and quartzite, separated by rows of bricks; inside, the walls and ceilings are embellished with mosaics and frescos. Construction was completed no later than the year 1037. There is a consensus among scholars that Yaroslav not only took the name of the cathedral and the main elements of its design from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople but also brought its architects, engineers, and masons from the Byzantine Empire. He built not just city walls and churches but a capital for his realm modeled on the most beautiful and powerful city that any of the Rus’ had ever seen: Constantinople.
The Gates of Europe Page 5