By the end of the tenth century, the Rus’ had become the dominant force on the western steppe, controlling lands that stretched from the Caspian across the north of the Black Sea as far as the Danube. One source talks of the vibrancy of the markets they now oversaw, where it was possible to buy ‘gold, silks, wine and various fruits from Greece, silver and horses from Hungary and Bohemia, and from Rus’, furs, wax, honey, and slaves’.44 However, the authority they exerted over these lands was not absolute. Relations with the nomadic peoples were often tetchy because of the competition for resources, as the ritual execution of one prominent Rus’ leader in this period by Pecheneg steppe nomads shows: the capture of the prince was gleefully celebrated, and his skull was lined with gold and kept as a victory trophy, to be used to celebrate ceremonial toasts.45
Nevertheless, in the course of the tenth century Rus’ control of the waterways and of the steppes continued to strengthen, and the communication routes running southwards became increasingly secure. This process was accompanied by a gradual transformation of commercial, religious and political orientation. One reason for this was that after nearly 300 years of stability and affluence, the caliphate in Baghdad underwent a series of dislocations. Prosperity had served to loosen ties between the centre and outlying regions, which in turn opened possibilities for friction as local potentates built up power and came into conflict with each other. The dangers this could pose were graphically shown when Basra was sacked in 923 by Shīa insurgents, before Mecca was attacked seven years later and the sacred Black Stone looted from the Kaba.46
A series of unusually severe winters between the 920s and 960s made matters worse. Conditions were so bad that food shortages became increasingly regular. It was not unusual for people to be forced ‘to pick the grains of barley from the dung of horses and asses and eat them’, wrote one author; rioting and civil disorder broke out frequently.47 As one Armenian chronicler put it, after seven successive years of crop failure in the 950s, ‘many went mad’, and attacked each other senselessly.48
Internal unrest enabled a new dynasty, the Būyids, to establish political control over much of the caliphate’s core territory in Iran and Iraq, retaining the Caliph as a figurehead with greatly reduced powers. In Egypt, on the other hand, the regime was toppled entirely. In a tenth-century version of the Arab Spring, Shīa Muslims who had previously managed to establish an emirate in North Africa that was more or less independent of the mainstream Sunnī caliphates of Baghdad and Córdoba moved on the Egyptian capital, Fusā. In 969, taking advantage of the catastrophic failure of the annual Nile floods that left many dead or starving, revolution spread through North Africa.49 The new masters were known as Fāimids – who as Shīa Muslims had very different views about legitimacy and authority, and about the true legacy left by Muammad. Their rise had serious implications for the unity of the Muslim world: rifts were opening up, with fundamental questions being asked about the past, present and future of Islam.
The upheaval, and the resulting decline of commercial opportunities, was one reason why the Viking Rus’ increasingly turned their attention to the Dnieper and Dniester rivers feeding into the Black Sea, rather than moving along the Volga and towards the Caspian. Their attention began to turn away from the Muslim world to the Byzantine Empire and to the great city of Constantinople, fabled in Norse folklore as ‘Mikli-garðr’ (or Miklegarth) – that is, ‘the great city’. The Byzantines were wary of the attentions of the Rus’, not least since a daring raid in 860 had taken the city’s inhabitants – and its defences – completely by surprise. Who are these ‘fierce and savage’ warriors, ‘ravaging the suburbs, destroying everything’, wailed the patriarch of Constantinople, ‘thrusting their swords through everything, taking pity on nothing, sparing nothing?’ Those who died first were the lucky ones, he went on; at least they were spared knowledge of the calamities that followed.50
Rus’ access to the markets of Constantinople was tightly regulated by the authorities. One treaty from the tenth century notes that a maximum of fifty Rus’ were allowed into the city at any one time, and had to enter through a given gate; their names were to be recorded and their activities in the city monitored; restrictions were set on what they could and could not buy.51 They were recognised as dangerous men who needed to be treated carefully. Nevertheless, relations eventually began to normalise as towns like Novgorod, Chernigov and above all Kiev evolved from trading stations into fortified strongholds and permanent residences.52 The adoption of Christianity by the Rus’ ruler Vladimir in 988 was important too, both because it led to the creation of an ecclesiastical network ministered at the outset by clergy sent from Constantinople, and because of the inevitable cultural borrowings that flowed northwards from the imperial capital. These influences eventually affected everything from icons and religious artefacts to the design of churches and to the way that the Rus’ dressed.53 As the Rus’ economy became more mercantile, the warrior-like society became increasingly urban and cosmopolitan.54 Luxury items like wine, oil and silks were exported from Byzantium and sold on, with traders recording invoices and receipts on birch bark.55
The redirection of the gaze of the Rus’ from the Muslim world towards Constantinople was the result of a pronounced shift in western Asia. For one thing, successive emperors had taken advantage of the unrest and uncertainty in the Abbāsid caliphate. Many of Byzantium’s eastern provinces had been lost during the Muslim conquests, and this led to a fundamental reorganisation of the empire’s provincial administration. In the first half of the tenth century, the tide began to turn. One by one, bases that had been used to launch assaults on imperial territory in Anatolia were picked off and recovered. Crete and Cyprus were retaken, restoring stability to the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, which had been at the mercy of Arab pirate raids for decades. Then in 969 the great city of Antioch, a major commercial emporium as well as a centre for textile production, was also seized.56
This reversal of fortunes spurred a sense of revival in the Christian world. It also represented a significant redirection of assets and revenues away from Baghdad and towards Constantinople: tax and customs revenues that had previously flowed towards the caliphate now filled the imperial treasuries. This heralded the beginning of a golden age for Byzantium, a period of artistic and intellectual renaissance among philosophers, scholars and historians, of large-scale building of churches and monasteries, and the founding of institutions such as a law school to train judges who could oversee the running of an expanded empire. Byzantium was also a prime beneficiary of the breakdown in relations between Baghdad and Egypt in the late tenth century. In the late 980s, Emperor Basil II came to terms with the newly proclaimed Fāimid Caliph, establishing formal trade links and promising to have his name proclaimed in the daily prayers said in the mosque in Constantinople rather than that of his Abbāsid rival in Baghdad.57
Buoyant markets in the imperial capital, fuelled by economic and demographic growth, were mirrored by introspection and uncertainty in the Abbasid caliphate. The result was the reorientation of trade routes from the east, with a clear shift away from the continental hinterland through Khazaria and the Caucasus to the Red Sea. The land routes that had made Merv, Rayy and Baghdad blossom were supplanted by shipping along the maritime lanes. The boost to Fusā, Cairo and above all to Alexandria was unmistakable, with the middle classes mushrooming as these cities thrived.58 Byzantium was well placed, and soon began to enjoy the fruits of its new relations with the Fāimids: from the later tenth century, as Arabic and Hebrew reports make clear, merchant ships were putting in and sailing off from Egyptian ports around the clock, heading for Constantinople.59
Egyptian textiles became prized across the eastern Mediterranean. Linen produced at Tinnīs was so sought after that Nāir-i Khusraw, one of the great Persian writers and travellers of the period, reported: ‘I have heard that the ruler of Byzantium once sent a message to the sultan of Egypt that he would exchange a hundred cities of his realm for Tinnīs alone.’60
The appearance of Amalfitan and Venetian merchants in Egypt from the 1030s and from Genoa three decades later reveals that others from further afield than Constantinople were alert to the opening up of new sources of goods.61
From the point of view of the Rus’ and the new northern trade networks, the changes in the principal routes to market for spices, silks, pepper, hardwoods and other items brought from the east had little impact: there was no need to have to choose between Christian Constantinople and Muslim Baghdad. On the contrary, if anything, having two potential sources for buying and selling goods was better than having one. Silk reached Scandinavia in considerable quantities – as testified by the recovery of more than a hundred silk fragments from a remarkable ship excavated at Oseberg in Norway, and also from Viking graves where silks from the Byzantine world and Persia were buried as prestige objects alongside the men who had owned them.62
There were still those in the mid-eleventh century who thought that they would make their fortunes in the Islamic lands of the east, just as their forefathers had done. A rune-stone by Lake Mälar near Stockholm in Sweden set up in the middle of the eleventh century by a woman named Tóla to commemorate her son Haraldr and his brothers-in-arms provides one example. ‘Like men, they went a long way in the search for gold,’ it states; they had their successes, but then died ‘in the south, in Serkland’, that is to say, in the land of the Saracens – the Muslims.63 Or there is the stone set up by Gudleif in memory of his son, Slagve, who ‘met his end in the east in Khwarezm’.64 Texts like the saga of Yngvar the Wayfarer, Haraldr’s brother, likewise commemorate ambitious escapades that took Scandinavians to adventures in the Caspian and beyond. In fact, recent research suggests that a permanent Viking colony may even have been established in Persian Gulf in this period.65
But attention was increasingly focused on the Christian east and on Byzantium. As western Europe’s horizons expanded, there was rising interest in visiting the land where Jesus Christ had lived, died and risen from the dead. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem became a source of understandable kudos.66 Exposure to the Holy City also underlined the paucity of the Christian heritage of western Europe – particularly when compared to the Byzantine Empire. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, had begun the process of bringing relics to Constantinople in the fourth century. By the eleventh century, the astonishing collections in the city were widely held to include relics such as the nails that had been used to crucify Jesus; the Crown of Thorns; the clothes over which lots had been cast; and parts of the True Cross, as well as hair of the Virgin Mary, the head of John the Baptist and much more besides.67 By contrast, there was little of note in the reliquaries of Europe: although kings, cities and church foundations were becoming richer, they had little physical connection with the story of Jesus Christ and his disciples.
Jerusalem and Constantinople as the home and guardian of Christianity drew growing numbers of men to the Christian east, and to the imperial capital in particular – in order to trade, to take service or to simply pass through on the way to the Holy Land. Men from Scandinavia and the British Isles were welcomed into the Varangian guard, an elite corps entrusted as the bodyguard of the Emperor himself. It became a rite of passage to serve in this brigade, with men such as Haraldr Sigurðarson, later King of Norway (and better known as Harald Hardrada), serving in the brigade before heading for home.68 The call of Constantinople echoed loudly around all of Europe in the eleventh century. Documents record that in the eleventh century it was home to men from Britain, Italy, France and Germany – as well as from Kiev, Scandinavia and Iceland. Traders from Venice, Pisa, Amalfi and Genoa set up colonies in the city in order to buy goods and export them home.69
The places that mattered were not in Paris or London, in Germany or Italy – but in the east. Cities that connected to the east were important – like Kherson in the Crimea or Novgorod, cities that linked to the Silk Roads running across the spine of Asia. Kiev became a linchpin of the medieval world, evidenced by the marriage ties of the ruling house in the second half of the eleventh century. Daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned as Grand Prince of Kiev until 1054, married the King of Norway, the King of Hungary, the King of Sweden and the King of France. One son married the daughter of the King of Poland, while another took as his wife a member of the imperial family of Constantinople. The marriages made in the next generation were even more impressive. Rus’ princesses were married to the King of Hungary, the King of Poland and the powerful German Emperor, Henry IV. Among other illustrious matches was Gytha, the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh, the Grand Prince of Kiev: she was the daughter of Harold II, King of England, who was killed at the battle of Hastings in 1066. The ruling family in Kiev was the best-connected dynasty in Europe.
An ever growing cluster of towns and settlements fanned out in every direction across Russia, each a new pearl added to the string. Towns like Lyubech, Smolensk, Minsk and Polotsk rose as Kiev, Chernigov and Novgorod had done before them. This was precisely the same process that had already seen Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi rise in wealth and power: the key to their growth was business with the east.
The same held true for southern Italy. In one of the most striking achievements of the early Middle Ages, Norman mercenaries who had first been attracted by Apulia and Calabria in the early eleventh century managed to become a leading force in the Mediterranean. In the space of a generation, they overthrew their Byzantine paymasters and then turned their attention to overwhelming Muslim Sicily – a lucrative and strategically vital staging post that linked North Africa with Europe and controlled the Mediterranean.70
What had propelled the rise to power in each case was trade and access to desirable goods. And in this sense it ultimately mattered little where the dividing line was between Christianity and Islam, and whether the best markets were in Constantinople, Atil, Baghdad or Bukhara – or, by the eleventh century, in Mahdia, Alexandria or Cairo. Despite the insistence of many sources that high politics and religion mattered, for most merchants and traders such issues were complications that were better avoided altogether. In fact, the problem was not where to trade or whom to trade with, but how to pay for luxury objects that could be sold on for healthy profit. In the eighth to tenth centuries, the base commodity for sale had been slaves. But as the economies of western and eastern Europe became more robust, galvanised by huge influxes of silver coinage from the Islamic world, towns grew and their populations swelled. And as they did so, the levels of interaction intensified, which in turn led to the demand for monetisation, that is to say, trade based on coinage – rather than, for example, on furs. As this transition happened and local societies became more complex and sophisticated, stratification developed and urban middle classes emerged. Money, rather than men, began to be used as currency for trade with the east.
In a neat mirror image, the magnetic forces that drew men from Europe were being felt in the east as well. The frontiers that had been established by the Muslim conquests and the expansion into Central Asia began to dissolve in the eleventh century. The various Muslim dynasties across Central Asia had long employed men from the steppes in their armies, as had the caliphate in Baghdad – just as the emperors in Constantinople were doing at the same time with men from northern and western Europe. Dynasties like the Sāmānids had actively recruited soldiers from the Turkic tribes, usually as ghulām, or slave troops. But as these began to be relied on increasingly not only in rank-and-file positions but in command positions, it was not long before the moment came when senior officers began to cast an eye on taking power for themselves. Service was supposed to offer opportunities to the ambitious; it had not been supposed to deliver the keys to the kingdom too.
The results were dramatic. By the start of the eleventh century, a new empire centred in Ghazna (now in eastern Afghanistan) had been established by descendants of a Turkic slave-general which could put so large an army in the field that one contemporary compared numbers to a myriad of ‘locusts or ants, innumerable and immeas
urable as the sand of the desert’.71 The Ghaznavids conquered lands that stretched from eastern Iran into northern India, becoming great patrons of visual arts and literature. They championed the work of outstanding writers like Firdawsī, author of the glorious Shāhnāma, one of the jewels of early medieval Persian poetry – even if recent research suggests that the great poet probably did not travel to the court in Afghanistan to present his work in person, as has long been presumed.72
The Qarakhānid Turks were other beneficiaries of the weakening centre in Baghdad, establishing control over Transoxiana by carving out a realm to the north of the Amu Darya (the great Oxus river which flows across the border of modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), agreeing with the Ghaznavids that the river should mark the boundary between their respective territories.73 Like their neighbours, the Qarakhānids championed a flourishing school of scholars. Perhaps the most famous surviving text is the Dīwān lughāt al-turk (The Collection of Turkish Dialects) by Mamūd al-Kāshgharī, which takes the centre of the world to be the Qarakhānids’ capital of Balāsāghūn in Central Asia, set out in a beautiful map that tells us much about how this brilliant polymath saw the world around him.74
Many other fabulously rich texts were produced, works that give a flavour of the refinement – and concerns – of a vibrant and wealthy society. One text that stands out is the Kutadgu Bilig (The Book of Wisdom that Brings Eternal Happiness) written in the late eleventh century in Qarakhānid Turkish by Yūsuf Khā ājib. It is filled with advice that ranges from stressing how much more sensible it is for a leader to respond to problems calmly than in anger to recommendations on how a magnate should host a good banquet. Where modern books on etiquette grate with facile statements of the obvious, it is difficult not to be charmed by this author, writing a thousand years ago, urging rulers to prepare well for a good dinner party. ‘Have cups and serving-cloths cleaned. Purify the house and hall, and set out the furnishings. Choose food and drink that is wholesome, tasty and clean so that your guests may eat to their hearts’ content.’ Be sure to keep glasses topped up, the advice continues, and look after any latecomers graciously and generously: no one should ever leave a feast hungry or cursing.75
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