Empires Apart (3 page)

If the victors of Châlons had been asked to which geographical entity their nations belonged they would have replied not ‘Europe' but the ‘Roman empire'. And the Roman empire had never extended beyond the Elbe.

Within its frontiers the Roman empire continued for centuries after its fall to have an influence on nearly every aspect of life: culture, religion, language, law, architecture, warfare, technology. The list is almost endless. That influence was more long-lasting and more profound in some parts of the empire than others, and in some cases spread well beyond its frontiers. But the one part of Europe on which Rome had virtually no influence at all is what today we call Russia.

If the defeat of Attila is cited by historians as a turning point in western history, its impact on the east was no less important. Attila returned defeated to his base on the Hungarian plains. His power was broken. Although he raided into Italy, attacking Milan and Padua, within two years the man himself was dead. The way lay open for other peoples to emerge on to the stage of history. The group that did so was a tribe that the victors of Châlons may never have heard of, and certainly would not have imagined their descendants would ever fear: the Slavs.

When people in the west talk about ‘Europeans' they usually mean peoples like the Germans, French or Italians. Yet by far the most numerous ethnic and linguistic group in Europe is the Slavs. Three great streams surged out of the Carpathian mountains. The western Slavs became the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks of today. The southern Slavs became Serbs, Croats and Macedonians. In time many western and southern Slavs converted to Roman Christianity and took on the Latin script. The third stream, the eastern Slavs, became today's Ukrainians, Belarus and Russians. For them there was to be no exposure to Rome and its ways.
The Russian language, for example, has very few words of Latin origin (oddly one of the few is the one Russian word all westerners know: tsar, like kaiser in German, is a corruption of the Roman Caesar).

The early Slavs took over vast tracts of land, and took it by force, but they seized the land to use not just for plunder. And as settlers they were soon subject to the bane of all inhabitants of that vast region between the Elbe and the Urals: the constant threat of invasion. Hordes periodically swept in from the east or the north. The flat expanse of steppe provided no natural defences. Rather than acting as barriers, the wide rivers provided further routes of access. Before the Huns came the Sarmatians and Goths. After the Huns came the Avars and Khazars. It is easy to see European history as one long succession of Asian barbarians hurling themselves west in a torrent of violence to be eventually smothered by, and subsumed into, the grip of western civilisation. In reality the traffic was not all one way, and the way the picture of history is depicted depends more on the painter than the painted. One particularly destructive barbarian raped and pillaged his way from Europe into Asia in a haze of alcohol and violence, but even today there are children's books glorifying the murderous exploits of Alexander the Great.

After the Khazars the next invading tribe came from the far west: the Vikings, known more correctly as Varangians. (Those Norsemen who settled in Europe west of the Elbe had semi-permanent homes called ‘viks', thus Vikings; those who settled to the east had more transient ‘vars', thus Varangians.) In 862 Novgorod fell to the Viking leader Rurik. Rus was born. Rurik's successors raided down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea to Byzantium. In 882 they captured Kiev and made this their capital.

Like the Vikings in Normandy, the Varangians merged quickly into local society, much more quickly than the Normans themselves would when they invaded England two centuries later. Rurik's followers changed the head but not the body and soul of Slav society. Within fifty years Varangian princes were giving their children Slavic names, although the process worked both ways. Millions of Russians today bear
the names Oleg, Olga and Igor, derived from the Viking gods Helge, Helga and Ingvar. Rurik's descendants also married into the nobility of the Merja, a Finnish tribe living in the area where the Oka river meets the Volga, what is now Moscow, binding Finns into the new nation. Within a century mercenaries from Rus were fighting as far away as Syria, Cyprus and Crete, and a Russian fleet had rampaged along the coast of Asia Minor.

One of Rurik's successors, with the distinctly un-Viking name of Svyatoslav, entrenched the power of Rus. Svyatoslav destroyed two of the most powerful competing states in the region, the khangate of the Khazars and the kingdom of the Bulgars. He was a physically imposing man who shaved his head, except for a single lock of hair signifying his noble birth, and famously wore a huge gold earring bearing a ruby between two pearls. On the way back to Kiev from his victories in the south nomadic tribesmen ambushed him, and his famous skull became a drinking goblet for a Pecheneg warlord.

Russia, however, was established.

Soon after the Vikings came a force that was to have a much more profound influence on the new society: Christianity. One of the earliest converts was Svyatoslav's mother, who seems at the time to have been called by her Norse name Helga or Helgi, but is now more commonly referred to as Olga. Olga was clearly an exceptional woman. Legend has it that her husband died when he was literally torn apart after being captured by an opposing tribe, who bent down two large saplings, tied one to each of his legs, then watched as they sprang back upright. Their chieftain then invited Olga to marry him, to which she responded by inviting him to send emissaries to escort her to him. When they arrived she had them, still in their carriages, buried alive. In 957, with a largely female retinue, she led an expedition of merchants to Constantinople through the very same regions where her son would lose his head. The emperor Constantinus VII has left a detailed description of her visit,
which evidently impressed him enormously. He is said to have proposed marriage to her; clearly it was a truth then universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a large fortune must be in search of a husband. Olga preferred Christianity to remarriage, and asked the emperor to act as her godfather when she was baptised. He could hardly say no, and once christened Olga was able to point out that under the rules of her new religion godparents cannot marry their godchildren.

Although Svyatoslav's mother converted to Christianity, wholesale conversion did not take place until the reign of his grandson Vladimir. ‘Conversion' in the tenth century had nothing to do with a sudden realisation that turning the other cheek was more morally responsible than hunting people to sell into the slave markets of Asia Minor. Vladimir, after all, had reached the throne by first murdering his older brother. Conversion was about power. Vladimir sent envoys to investigate not only Christianity (in both the Roman and Byzantine versions) but also Islam and Judaism. Byzantine Christianity won, because of the power of the Byzantine emperors and the majesty of Byzantine churches. According to an early collection of texts known as
The Russian Primary Chronicle
, Islam was rejected because, as Vladimir told the Muslim delegates ‘Rusi est' vesele piti, ne mozhet bez nego byti' – Russians are merrier drinking; without it they cannot live. At least that is one version of history. An alternative, more feminist, history of Russian Christianity puts the conversion down firstly to Olga and secondly to an even more remarkable woman. Forty-two years after Olga's perilous journey from Kiev to Byzantium another woman travelled in the opposite direction. The story behind that journey could have come straight from a children's book of adventures. It concerns a little group of orphans who triumphed over all odds and changed the world.

The Byzantine emperor Romanus II died leaving four children under ten to carry on without him. Enemies surrounded the Byzantine empire, and few could have expected great things from the four orphans. And yet the two brothers, Basil II and Constantine VIII, ruled jointly for the next forty-nine years. Their older sister went west, marrying the German king
and eventually ruling as regent over the Holy Roman empire. She was by far the most powerful woman in the world at that time. The youngest sister, Anna, who was just two days old when her father died, travelled north and, some would argue, in doing so had greater impact on world history than her three siblings put together.

For a quarter of a century after their father's death the children and their advisors safely steered the course of empire. Then the Rus appeared, this time in a less diplomatic guise than Olga. Her great-grandson Vladimir unexpectedly captured the town of Kherson on the Black Sea coast. From here he posed a real threat to Constantinople. Anna's brothers turned to a favorite Byzantine weapon: marriage. Anna's elder sister Theophano had already been married off to the German king Otto II, whose father threatened Byzantine possessions in the west. Anna proved every bit as resourceful as her sister. The prospect of exchanging life as a twenty-six-year-old Byzantine princess for that of the sixth wife of a barbarian king in some remote northern settlement cannot have been attractive – and Vladimir himself could not have seemed the most desirable of husbands. In a phrase that needs no translation he was described by the contemporary Bishop of Merseburg as a ‘fornicatur immensus'. Anna had no desire to go to Kiev as a hostage, whatever the diplomatic niceties implied by marriage. The one fact the conflicting accounts agree on is that she was a seriously reluctant bride. Nevertheless she was dispatched to Kherson by her brothers. According to tradition, when she arrived she found that Vladimir had been struck blind, although blind drunk seems more likely. Anna announced that he would never see daylight again unless he saw the light of Jesus Christ and embraced her religion as ardently as he wished to embrace her body. Vladimir converted on the spot, regaining his sight and gaining his bride.

Once Vladimir and Anna were back in Kiev she set about the mass conversion of the Rus, starting with Vladimir's already numerous children and proceeding to mass baptisms in the Dnieper. The huge statue of a Norse god that had dominated Kiev was torn down, churches were thrown up and Russia was placed firmly on the road to Orthodoxy. The
picture of the redoubtable Anna bringing sanctity to the barbarian hordes of Rus is a romantic one. The story of the two sisters Theophano and Anna captured the imagination of the great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote movingly of the way these two eastern princesses changed their worlds. In reality virtually nothing is known about Anna's life once she left Kherson to join her husband's newly Christian harem. She probably died childless, but in legend she was the mother of Russia's first two martyred saints, Boris and Gleb. And when, some generations later, the Muscovy princes laid claim to the title tsar, it was in part through Anna that the purple of Caesar was said to have passed from Rome via Byzantium to Kiev.

Vladimir's decision to follow Byzantium rather than Rome ensured that the final access route along which ‘western' tradition, the heritage of the Roman empire, might pass had been blocked. Although Byzantium claimed to be the true guardian of that heritage it would itself be effectively snuffed out with the rise of Islam in the region, leaving Russian Christianity, like everything else in Russia, to develop along its own unique path.

Within three centuries small bands of marauding Norsemen had transformed the peasant tribes along the Dnieper river into one of the most sophisticated societies in Europe. Indeed within two centuries of the Vikings' arrival Kiev had blossomed into one of Europe's leading cities. Four hundred churches loomed over the city, among them the famous cathedral modelled on, and named after, St Sophia in Constantinople. Dominating the major trading routes along the Dnieper between Europe and Asia, it was home to numerous rich merchants. There were no fewer than eight major markets, selling everything from the agricultural produce that provided the backbone of the local economy to furs such as sable and beaver.

Rus was far from democratic, as slavery was still the foundation upon which economic life depended, but society was considerably less autocratic than in much of Europe. There were serfs, but unlike their western counterparts they were free to leave their land and move around
the country. Local assemblies consisting of all free adult males governed the towns. Most importantly the prince shared power not only with the great nobles but also with an increasingly important class of landed aristocracy. These ‘boyars' were to be a crucial feature of Russian life for centuries to come.

The influence of Kievan Rus was felt from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea and the Byzantine empire in the south. Yaroslav the Wise, who ruled from 1019 to 1054, was one of the leading statesmen of Europe. The traditions of his people had, since the time of Attila, diverged widely from those of the rest of Europe, but he was pointing them back towards the west. Yaroslav married the daughter of the King of Sweden, and his daughters married the kings of France, Hungary and Norway. His daughter Anna caused a particular stir when she arrived at the court of her future husband, Henri I of France. To their amazement the French courtiers discovered that, unlike their king, their new queen could read and write. She signed the nuptial vows in Cyrillic and Latin lettering, while the French king signed an illiterate ‘X'.

The story of early Russia, of Vikings, Huns and Byzantium, captures all the characteristics that lie at the centre of the way the west pictures Russia. It is a story at once romantic and brutal, mystical and majestic. And, as so often in Russia, it is also a story that could be totally untrue.

The outstanding feature of the birth of Russia is that nobody is really sure how it happened. There were no Founding Fathers, no Plymouth Rock. Russia's history is founded not on what we know but on what we want to believe.

On 6 September 1749 Gerhard Mueller, the official imperial Russian historiographer, rose to deliver a speech to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. His theme was the role of the Vikings in the birth of the nation. The very name Rus, he asserted, came from Scandinavia, although rather than being derived from Rurik Mueller he believed it had first attached to Swedes from the Uppland area of Roslagen. He
never finished his speech. Pandemonium ensued, with Russian nationalists outraged at what they regarded as an attack on the Slavic soul of their motherland. For them the mere suggestion that the barbarian west might have contributed anything to the culture of Holy Russia was heresy. Viewed through the prism of their Slavophile philosophy, it was as obvious to them that Russia had never been anything other than Slav as it was to later Americans that their nation had never been anything other than anti-imperialist. After an enquiry the Empress Elizabeth ordered Mueller's records destroyed and his publications banned. He spent the rest of his life researching the history of Siberia.