First draft, I'll be adding citations as I revise...

Beavan, Nicholas William
English 101 Honors
Professor Kerr, Kenneth P.
September 12, 2010
A Concise History of the Varangians in Russia

The Varangians and their impact on Eastern Slavic political traditions continues to be felt, even as recently as the current tensions between the Russian Federation and the United States of America over proposed ballistic missile interception bases in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania. This is in no small part due to the fact that the Varangian king Oleg of Novgorod, a close relative of the legendary Varangian leader known as Rurik, united much of the Rus’ Khaganate (at the time, a small collection of minor states and independent cities) in the years between 880 and 882 CE when he moved the area’s capital from Novgorod to Kiev. This act essentially founded the most notable proto-Russian state in the form of the Kievan Rus’ which lasted until 1054 CE, with the death of Yaroslav the Wise. The subsequent power struggle resulting from his death led to the emergence of the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality which, while a vassal to the infamous Golden Horde, eventually evolved into an independent Grand Duchy of Moscow that proceeded to grow into a Tsardom, then into an Empire after some dynastic incongruities between the descendants of Rurik and the newer House of Romanov were resolved. This process culminated with Peter the Great’s 1697-98 tour of Western Europe and his 1721 coronation as Emperor of All Russia. The Russian Empire would then undergo a series of reforms that failed to satisfy a hardcore faction of socialists called the Bolsheviks, who would fully participate in the Revolution of 1917 and would later play a critical role in the formation (including the newly established Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or abbreviated as the RSFSR) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. The USSR, after sixty-nine years, collapsed in 1991 into several different constituent states including the modern Russian Federation as we know it today. These remarkable events owe much to the legacy of the Varangians and their deft skills in both statesmanship and the arts of warfare. But who were the Varangians and where did they originate from? What records do we have of their time as rulers of the Kievan Rus’? These questions and others can be answered with some elementary research into the most prominent of sources – the Primary Chronicle of 1113.

This crucial document, authored by an Eastern Orthodox monk named Nestor retells the history of the Kievan Rus’ from the coming of the Varangians under the fabled Rurik in the mid 850’s, to the Christianization of the realm and the suppression of the pagan religions under Vladimir Sivatoslavitch the Great in 988 CE. Historians have noted that an additional section of little importance when delving into the topic of Varangian rule was added in 1116 by a hegumen named Sylvester, who included some references to his patron, Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh, who ruled the Kievan Rus’ at the time. The Primary Chronicle, entitled in Russian as The Bygone Years was comprised mainly of folk anecdotes, legal contracts with the Byzantine Empire, oral accounts from notable figures and contemporary Norse sagas. Some preexisting East Slavic epic poetry called byliny was included, presumably to account for some of the popular traditions that abounded at the time. The confluence of source material for Nestor’s opus gives us an accurate picture of the Varangians; and the conditions surrounding their voyages from Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the Frankish lands to settle and rule in what was then recognized as the Rus’ Khaganate. This early political entity was a loose association of city-states that all followed various rulers who were referred to as khagans, a term believed to have been derived from the Turkic term khan, which modern society knows well from its use in the Mongolian Empire. This land was often unstable, according to Nestor’s account, and this instability proved to be fertile ground for the commerce and adventuring undertaken by the Varangian tribes. One such tribe, led by the fabled Rurik, united these lands under his lieutenant and relative, Oleg.

Nestor’s Chronicle begins amidst much infighting between the East Slavic towns and proto-cities. Passages from the Chronicle refer to a period of violence and strife following an earlier Slavic rebellion and cessation of tribute payments to the roaming Vikings who are believed to have been trading with Byzantium at the time, as archeological evidence including earthenware and silver dirhams unearthed near the ancient village of Ladoga attests to. These disputes set the stage for Nestor’s claim that the Slavs agreed to invite a Nordic warrior and statesman to lead them – this assertion has been occasionally disputed, but Nestor continues on to state that Rurik, a Varangian from Ladoga assisted by his two brothers, took up this role, making his first capital at Novgorod. A period of stability ensued until his death in 879 when his closest adult relative, a Varangian named Oleg, assumed the khaganate and moved the capital to Kiev; in the process ousting two “rouge” Varangian generals named Askold and Dir who both served under Rurik’s command at one point. Oleg’s reign is supported by an additional later source, the Novgorod First Chronicle, which differs from the Primary Chronicle in a few minor respects. Following the passing of Oleg in 912 CE, it is told in the Primary Chronicle that Rurik’s only adult son, Igor of Kiev, took up the throne in 914 where he then prosecuted two quick and effective raids against Byzantium in 941 and 944, besieging Constantinople twice and exacting tribute from the Emperor at the time, Romanos I, who would go on to sign a treaty that awarded favorable terms with the Rus’. Oleg’s death in 945 lead to his son and heir Sivatoslav becoming Prince – and it apparent that the proverbial apple did not fall far from the tree, as he undertook a successful military campaign against the Khazars to the southeast in 956 CE, and another campaign against the Bulgarian Empire lasting from either 968 or 969 to 970, that invasion bringing mixed results in the form of a Byzantine intervention. After a peace treaty was signed, the armies of the Rus’ retreated back across the Dnieper River as Sivatoslav stated behind to negotiate. Fearing subterfuge, the Byzantine emperor ordered Sivatoslav’s assassination at the hands of Pecheneg tribesmen, who ambushed and killed him when he was crossing the Dnieper near the island of Khortytsia. His death led to the short but tumultuous reign of his oldest son, Yaropolk. Yaropolk ruled the Kievan Rus’ from 972 to 980 when his brother, Oleg of Drelinia, killed the son of one of Yaropolk’s chief advisers. This prompted a brief civil war between Drelinia and Kiev proper with Kievan forces quashing the rebellion. Oleg was slain but Sivatoslav’s third son, Vladimir, escaped to the protection of Haakon Sigurdsson, contemporary King of Norway. From exile, Vladimir returned in 980 commanding an army of Varangian mercenaries to depose Yaropolk, who would be the last Viking Prince of Kiev to have practiced Slavic paganism throughout his entire life. Vladimir subsequently took up sovereignty and attempted to reinforce the old pagan religions one last time in 983 by proclaiming the cult of the Slavic thunder god, Perun, to be supreme.


Nevertheless, pagan beliefs abroad were on the decline and Vladimir knew that idolatry and polygamy could not be the path forward if the Rus’ were to survive diplomatically in an era of rising Judaic, Christian, and Islamic influence. Thus he quietly began the search for a new religion, accepting emissaries from the Germanic branch of the Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim Bulgarians, the Jewish Khazars, and the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Rite of Christianity. According to Nestor’s Chronicle, the descriptions of the Divine Liturgy as practiced by the Orthodox Church was an act of such beauty and such grace that even the battle-hardened Vladimir was moved. He was baptized in either 987 or 988 according to two disputing versions of the story. Multiple accounts by Arab authors of the time posit that Vladimir’s baptism and state conversion in 988 was to satisfy the conditions of a pact he signed with the Byzantine Empire in order to quell a rebellious region of his domain. The Primary Chronicle makes a claim to the contrary in giving testimony that his baptism was in 987 in the Crimean town of Chersonesos where he was baptized and took the Christian name Basil in exchange for the hand of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II’s sister, Anna Porphyrogeneta. Whatever the means of his conversion were, the switch was not immediately accepted by the constituent tribes of the Rus’. Many outbreaks of violence were cited as the old temples were razed, the statues of the pagan gods torn down, and the idols burnt or thrown into streams. The population of the urban trade and cultural centers across the Kievan Rus’ was taken to nearby rivers for mass baptism, which was almost universally accepted. However some areas around Rostov and Novgorod refused to accept the new religion until 1071, when those uprisings were pacified. Even though the Rurikid line persisted into the seventeenth century CE, the strong cultural bonds formed between Byzantium and the Rus’ marked the decline of the pagan Viking’s days as rulers of a nascent Russia, and a return to their traditional callings as seamen, fighters, and traders who operated across the open steppes and vast forests of medieval Eurasia.

The origins of the Varangians can be found across Northern, Western, and Central Europe. Our first clue outside Nestor’s chronicle would be the Varangian runestones that mention expeditions to the east, with a few mentioning travels to the land of Gardariki, which we know was the Rus’ Khaganate at the time. These runestones are spread across Scandinavia, most of them being concentrated in southern Sweden, with a few outliers being found in Norway and Denmark. Some stones reference a man’s death in the trading town of Holmgard, which is synonymous with the locale of Novgorod. Norse sagas of the time, specifically the Heimskringla, refer to Holmgard as the capital of Gardariki. Physical evidence exists telling of the usage of the Dnieper and Volga Rivers to trade with the Byzantine Greeks and the Abbasid Arabs respectively. The commodities being traded included bread, silver coinage, furs, armaments, amber, and honey from centers of exchange spread across the region. These sources all collaborate to give modern scholars more information on the nature of the Vikings in the East, and therefore information pertaining to their influence on the political, cultural, and religious development of the Kievan Rus’ into the recognizable Russia of modern Western perception.

The phenomena of foreign forces influencing a nation’s evolution are not unique to the Varangians and their effect on the Kievan Rus’. One only has to look towards the United States of America after the Civil War when thousands of legal immigrants from European, Asian, and Latin American nations came in search of a new life in a country where natural rights are guaranteed by the highest law of the land. Multitudes of these same immigrants would later fight to defend those liberties in the First World War which set America on a path though the future radically differing from any future that could’ve been predicted by antebellum thinkers of the early 1800’s. Yet, it could be argued that the Kievan Rus’ is unique in that the Varangians became the ruling power and steered the Slavic natives of the Rus’ towards unification and an eventual Christianization; both of which made Tsarist Russia, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the modern Russian Federation quite powerful from a grand historic perspective. The path of the Vikings through Russia was a rich and bloody one, proper material for an epic by any cultural or academic standards.

1. Russia and the Soviet Union: An Historical Introduction from the Kievan State to the Present
Thompson, John M.
Westview Press, 2008

Deep in the land of the Rus'!

Did actual Vikings patrol and raid what we know as today's Russia?


In a sense. Our foremost source for information on the activities of Norsemen in the region would be the Primary Chronicle, a history of the Kievan 'Rus that is believed to have been originally compiled by an Orthodox Christian monk named Nestor around the year 1113. This account of the area's rich history came from varied sources including tales of the Rus' Khanagate, oral accounts from notable figures, popular folk anecdotes, legal agreements with the Byzantine empire, and a recounting of contemporary Norse sagas.

It is from Nestor's Chronicle that historians have derived a starting point for their research into the Varangians, a tribe of Nordic warriors and merchants who are believed to have taken power in the town of Novgorod in the year 862 CE, under a legendary chieftain named Rurik. While the Chronicle claims that as a result of infighting amongst the native Slavs, the Varangians were invited to rule, it is not known if this actually happened at the behest of any local Slavic leader at the time. What has been established (through independent means) however is that Rurik's successor moved the area's capital from Novgorod to Kiev and became the founder of the Kievan 'Rus, a unified state that scholars almost universally accept as one of the earliest predecessors to what we recognize as a modern Russian nation.
 

From a grand historical perspective, the Varangians had a strong contributing role in the formation of contemporary Slavic cultures, as evidenced by the rule of Oleg of Kiev. Oleg's rule transformed the Rus' Khanagate, a loose collection of cities and minor states, into one of medieval Europe's sleeping giants with the later baptism of Vladimir the Great in 988 CE. So it can be said that while the Vikings once roamed Russia, we know more of their remarkable exploits as statesmen, than as skull splitting raiders of the type known to the Britons.

Amon Amarth – Runes To My Memory

Amon Amarth - Runes To My Memory (Link to video.)

We rode the rivers of the Eastern trail,
deep in the land of the Rus'!
Following the wind in our sails,
and the rhythm of the oars.
No shelter in this hostile land,
constantly on guard.
Ready to fight and defend
our ship 'till the bitter end.

We came under attack,
I received a deadly wound!
A spear was forced into my back,
still I fought on!

When I am dead,
lay me in a mound!
Raise a stone for all to see!
Runes carved to my memory!

Now here I lay on the river bank,
A long, long way from home.
Life is pouring out of me,
soon I will be gone!

I tilt my head to the side,
and think of those back home.
I see the river rushing by
like blood runs from my wound.

Here I lie on wet sand,
I will not make it home.
I clinch my sword in my hand,
say farewell to those I love!

When I am dead!
Lay me in a mound!
Place my weapons by my side,
for the journey to Hall up high!
When I am dead,
lay me in a mound.
Raise a stone for all to see,
runes carved to my memory!