Sailing from Byzantium (24 page)

From the height of its strength, Serbia abruptly crumbled after Dushan's death as the Ottomans swiftly advanced into the Balkans, winning battles at the Maritsa River in 1371 and at Kosovo Polye, the “field of blackbirds,” in 1389. This last battle, in which both the sultan Murad and the Serbian prince Lazar perished, marked the beginning of Serbian vassalage to the Turks, and for that reason took on an epic quality in later legend. Like the Byzantines, the Serbs enjoyed a brief respite after Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, but by 1459 all of Serbia was under direct Turkish occupation. Serbs still look back to the reign of Stefan Dushan as their golden age.

radition holds that the Rus raiders who so terrified the inhabitants of Constantinople in 860 came from Kiev, the wealthy trading city on the Dnieper River in southern Russia that was the political center of the first Russian civilization, Kievan Rus. This idea is based largely on the earliest Russian account of this period, the
Primary Chronicle.
The
Primary Chronicle
tells how the various Slavic and other peoples in what is now northern Russia and the Ukraine invited a Scandinavian people called the Varangian Rus to rule over them. “Our land is great and rich,” they said, “but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.”

From the start, the story goes, the Slavs and their new overlords coveted Constantinople's shimmering magnificence. To the Slavs, the Byzantine capital was Tsargrad, the “city of emperors;” to the Varangians, it was Micklegard, the “great city.” While moving to Constantinople with their families, two Varangian brothers named Askold and Dir stopped in Kiev, a “small city on a hill” by the Dnieper River. Askold
and Dir stayed in Kiev and took it over, using it as a base for their attack on Constantinople in 860. The besieging fleet was wrecked by a storm that arose from nowhere when the emperor Michael and the patriarch Photius dipped “the vestments of the Virgin” in the sea.

Among the original Varangians had been a prince called Rurik, who became ruler of Novgorod in the north and progenitor of the future tsars of Russia up to 1568. Rurik's descendant Oleg overthrew and killed Askold and Dir, becoming ruler of Kiev. Under Oleg, Kiev extended its rule over other Rus population centers, taking its place as the Rus capital, “the mother of Russian cities.”

Based on this account, the traditional interpretation has Kiev being founded sometime before the mid-ninth century. The city prospers, opening up the famous trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” along the Dnieper River to the Black Sea. This is the route that the
Primary Chronicle
depicts Askold and Dir as intending to take in emigrating to Tsargrad with their families. Kiev also attacks Byzantium from time to time, as in 860, but meanwhile Byzantine cultural influences are filtering back up the Dnieper. Kiev ultimately converts to Orthodox Christianity near the end of the tenth century.

Flattering as it was to Byzantium, for a long time this traditional interpretation was quite agreeable to modern Byzantinists. However, the
Primary Chronicle
has proved rather unreliable. It was compiled from various earlier sources, some of them oral, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Its compilers were Orthodox monks in Kiev looking backward from the era when Kiev's greatness had begun to fade. More recent scholars have concluded that the compilers had reason to exaggerate both Kiev's antiquity
and its role in the founding of Rus power, in order to offer a more “appropriate” version of Kiev's origins.

New archeological evidence has left the scholars little choice, although the myth of Kiev's antiquity has died hard. Some books on Russian history from as recently as the late 1990s continue to assert that the attack of 860 came from Kiev. Yet, the new discoveries (along with the reinterpretation of old ones) have revealed conclusively that in 860 Kiev was nothing more than a primitive village of a few wooden huts, indistinguishable from other villages around it. There is certainly no evidence of voluminous trade with Byzantium going back to the mid-ninth century or before. It would have been a flat impossibility for a fleet of some two hundred vessels to originate there, sail down the Dnieper, and besiege Constantinople. The attack had to come from another Rus center.

There's no shortage of candidates. During the ninth century, the Varangian Rus—bold Viking traders who ventured across the frigid waters of the Baltic—established a string of trading posts along the forested rivers of northern Russia. Archeologists may have exploded the myth of the Dnieper route between the early Rus and Byzantium, but they have found ample evidence of commerce between the early Rus and the other two civilizations on their flanks, those of Western Europe and the Islamic world. Both the Franks and the Arabs, it turns out, got a head start on the Byzantines in trading with the adventurous Rus.

Not the Dnieper but the Don and especially the Volga
appear to have been the most important water routes from the early Rus to southern wealth. Both were well situated for trade with Islamic lands. Like the Dnieper, the Don ultimately gives onto the Black Sea, but farther east, through the Sea of Azov. The Volga gives onto the Caspian Sea, down which merchants could sail in the direction of the overland route to Baghdad. Navigable into their upper reaches, both rivers are accessible by a series of short portages from the Baltic Sea. Furthermore, they swing close to each other near the bottom, allowing boatmen to switch from one river (and thus one sea) to the other by another manageable portage.

By the 830s, we begin to hear of the Rus in the literary sources. The Frankish
Annals of St. Bertin
records a Byzantine embassy arriving at the court of the emperor Louis the Pious in 839. With the Byzantines was a group of travelers carrying a letter to Louis from the Byzantine emperor, who asked Louis to help the strangers return home. Their way home from Byzantium was blocked by some “barbarous and savage peoples of exceeding ferocity” whom the travelers had encountered on their outward journey. The letter said further that the strangers had identified themselves as “Rhos,” and when Louis inquired further he found that “they were of the people of the Swedes.”

It was long thought that these travelers had originated in Kiev, but since, as is now known, Kiev didn't exist at the time, recent scholars favor a trading post near the future Novgorod. The savages who blocked them were probably the Magyars, who would soon (as a result of Symeon's ploy, described earlier) give way to the Petchenegs north of the Black Sea and move into Hungary.

Despite the appearance of the Rus at the Byzantine court, there is little or no archeological evidence of trade between them and the Byzantines at this time. Instead, all the
evidence—such as plentiful silver Arab coin hoards on the Volga and the Don—points to strong ties between the Rus and the Islamic world.

Around the year 900, however, the Varangian Rus found themselves blocked. To the east, their well-established route down the Volga to Baghdad was suddenly obstructed by a band of nomadic incomers, the Volga Bulgars, who demanded a cut of the profits from the lucrative Volga trade.
^∗
To the west, Rus traders on the Danube were subjected to similar pressures from those whose lands they passed through, mostly in the form of tariffs and tolls. This left them one option for expansion: south. That meant the Dnieper— as well as more extensive contacts with the Slavs who lived along its northern shores.

While the Dnieper River is the largest river flowing into the Black Sea, it doesn't offer the relatively smooth sailing found on Russia's other two major rivers, the Don and the Volga, both of which were navigable for virtually all of their lengths. In particular, a set of nasty rapids, formed by a series of massive granite ridges, extended for nearly fifty miles along the middle Dnieper, forcing boatmen either to make numerous lengthy portages or to face ruin or death.

The rapids occurred as the river flows through the steppes. Boatmen were forced to get out and laboriously drag their vessels and cargo just at the spot where they were highly vulnerable to attack by mounted nomads. Attacks by the
Petchenegs on the middle and lower Dnieper, as Constan-tine Porphyrogenitus reports, would be the bane of the Kievan Rus.

At the same time that the Rus were looking south, the Byzantines had their own reasons to seek a new alliance in the north. The biggest reason was the attack of 860, which dramatically demonstrated that the old alliance with the Khazars was no longer enough to protect Byzantium from that direction. Khazar power was on the wane. The Byzantines flirted with nomadic peoples nominally in Khazar domains, such as the Magyars and then the Petchenegs, using them when they could, but such wandering warriors were too unreliable for the long term. They showed no interest in settling down as Christians or partaking in any cultural benefits they might derive from civilization. Nor were they much interested in trade beyond the trinkets-and-tools variety.

Trade, in contrast, was what the Rus were all about. Excavations in Kiev in the 1970s found the remains of log cabins on the waterfront that closely resemble similar structures found on the sites of Varangian Rus trading posts elsewhere. Now securely dated to around 900, these buildings would seem to mark the arrival in Kiev of the Rus from the north. Graveyards now begin to appear also, some Scandinavian but more Slavic, suggesting that increasing numbers of Slavs were drawn to Kiev and surrounding communities as jobs (such as shipbuilding) associated with trade became available.

To complement the archeological evidence, the
Primary Chronicle
preserves what appear to be two early trade agreements with the Byzantines. The first, from the year 907, gives the impression of being preliminary to the fuller provisions of the second, from 911. There's no guarantee these agreements
were struck by the Rus in Kiev, though that's what the
Primary Chronicle
states. But for the first time the archeological evidence at least allows the
Primary Chronicle's
claims about Kiev to be true. If so, these agreements can be seen as Kiev's founding documents.

The
Primary Chronicle
depicts the first one as being essentially extorted from the Byzantines by Oleg, the Varangian ruler who it says had earlier seized Kiev by overthrowing Askold and Dir. There's a detailed and dramatic narrative of an attack by Oleg on Tsargrad: the Varangian circumvents the city's fabled defenses by dragging ships overland into the Golden Horn, which the Byzantines had protected with a chain across its mouth. This was the same trick the Turks would use in 1453, and it also suggests the skills necessary for negotiating the Dnieper rapids. Only after being subjected to Oleg's virtuoso tactical skills and merciless rapine do the Byzantines agree to the Rus demands. Remarkably, nowhere do Byzantine sources mention this attack, which makes it almost certain that it never actually occurred. The whole thing seems carefully concocted to preserve the Rus’ reputation as fearsome savages.

The terms of the agreements are unusually generous from the Byzantine point of view—right down to indulging the Scandinavians’ penchant for unlimited bathing:

The Russes who come hither shall receive as much grain as they require. Whosoever come as merchants shall receive supplies for six months, including bread, wine, meat, fish, and fruit. Baths shall be prepared for them in any volume they require. When the Russes return homeward, they shall receive from your emperor food, anchors, cordage, and sails and whatever else is needed for the journey.

But the agreements also laid down terms designed specifically to promote commerce and ensure the visitors’ good behavior:

If the Russes come hither without merchandise, they shall receive no provisions. Your prince shall personally lay injunction upon such Russes as journey hither that they shall do no violence in the towns and throughout our territory. Such Russes as arrive here shall dwell in the St. Mamas quarter…. They shall not enter the city save through one gate, unarmed and fifty at a time, escorted by an agent of the Emperor. They may conduct business according to their requirements without payment of taxes.

Without all these carefully negotiated provisions, the Dnieper route would not have been worth the trouble, expense, and danger. Kiev was hardly a propitious spot; being so far south it's extremely hard to defend. Novgorod and other early Rus trade centers lay in the northern forests, out of reach of the nomadic horsemen who have historically dominated the steppe. Kiev, in contrast, lies in the lightly forested zone on the steppe's northern edge, and was more accessible to any hordes of mounted nomadic warriors— Magyars, Petchenegs—who might sweep in for plunder and pillage. The original settlement sits on the right bank of the Dnieper, about six hundred miles upriver from the Black Sea, on a steep line of wooded bluffs looming three hundred feet over the river. It is a dramatic setting; today, at the top of the high bluffs, the spires and golden domes of its old churches can be seen from much of the modern city, which has spread out on the floodplain opposite. The climate here is more forgiving than in the heavy forests of the north, the trees more
easily cleared, the soil more fertile. Counterbalancing such temptations lay the danger in the steppes.

But for a time the gamble, and the carefully negotiated concessions, paid off. This was the first Russian state, and its legitimacy was immeasurably bolstered by Byzantine recognition in the trade agreements. The
Primary Chronicle
names Oleg's advisors and representatives, and like him they all have decidedly Scandinavian names: Karl, Farulf, Vermund, Hrollaf, Steinvith, Ingjald, Gunnar, Harold, Karni, and the like. So we have a good idea of who founded it. Yet, within a century this new state and the emerging civilization over which it claimed supremacy would be thoroughly Slavic— truly Russian, if you will.