Chapter 3 Vikings on the Dnieper

In Ukraine, as almost everywhere else in Europe, the era of migrations, or “barbarian invasions,” gave way to the Viking Age, which lasted from the end of the eighth century to the second half of the eleventh.

When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.

The Byzantine court first came into contact with the Vikings no later than 838, when envoys representing the king of Rus’ (Rhos) showed up in Constantinople, offering the empire peace and friendship. They came from the north but were reluctant to return home by the route they had taken for fear of encountering hostile tribes, so the emperor sent them back via Germany. At the court of Louis the Pious, a son of the famous Charlemagne, king of the Franks, they were recognized as Swedes or Norsemen and suspected of espionage. In fact, they were probably anything but spies and had every reason to fear attack — either by Slavic tribes or, more likely, by nomads of the Pontic steppes — on their way back to northern Europe.

The encounter between Byzantium and the Vikings that began so peacefully soon ended in confrontation. In 959, a Viking flotilla made its presence felt in the Mediterranean. In the following year, another group came down the Dnieper, sailed across the Black Sea, entered the Strait of the Bosphorus, and attacked the city of Constantinople. As in the case of the Viking assault on Lindisfarne, we know the exact date — June 8, 860 — when the Vikings attacked the capital of the mighty Byzantine Empire. The city and the empire were taken by surprise, as the emperor Michael was fighting at the head of his troops in Asia Minor. His fleet was in the Aegean and the Mediterranean, defending the empire not only from the Arabs but also from the Vikings who had appeared there the previous year. No one expected them to come from the north as well.

The intruders were not equipped for a long siege and could not breach the city’s walls, but they attacked the suburbs, pillaging churches and mansions, killing or drowning anyone who offered resistance, and terrifying the citizenry. They then passed through the Bosphorus, entered the Sea of Marmara, and continued plundering on the Prince Islands near the capital. Patriarch Photius, the supreme Christian and imperial official in the city, called for divine protection in his sermons and prayers. In one of his homilies, he described the helplessness of the inhabitants before the invaders: “The boats went past the city showing their crews with swords raised as if threatening the city with death by the sword, and all human hope ebbed away from men, and the city was moored only with recourse to the divine.” The intruders were gone by August 4, when Photius attributed the city’s miraculous survival to the protection of the Mother of God. This grew into a legend that laid the basis for the later celebration of the Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, or Pokrova. Ironically, the feast never took hold in Byzantium but became extremely popular in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus — the lands from which the Vikings had come to attack Constantinople.

The Vikings who attacked the Byzantine capital in the summer of 860 were hardly unknown to Photius and his contemporaries. The patriarch called them Rus’, like the members of the Rus’ embassy of 838. He even stated that they were subjects of Byzantium but left it to subsequent generations of scholars to figure out the details. Who were they? The search for an answer has spanned the last two and a half centuries, if not longer. Most scholars today believe that the word “Rus’” has Scandinavian roots. Byzantine authors, who wrote in Greek, most probably borrowed it from the Slavs, who in turn borrowed it from the Finns, who used the term “Ruotsi” to denote the Swedes — in Swedish, the word meant “men who row.” And row they did. First across the Baltic Sea into the Gulf of Finland, then on through Lakes Ladoga, Ilmen, and Beloozero to the upper reaches of the Volga — the river that later became an embodiment of Russia and at the time formed an essential part of the Saracen (Muslim) route to the Caspian Sea and the Arab lands.

The Rus’ Vikings, a conglomerate of Norwegian, Swedish, and probably Finnish Norsemen, first came to eastern Europe mainly as traders, not conquerors, as there was little to pillage in the forests of the region. The real treasures lay in the Middle East, beyond the lands through which they needed only the right of passage. But judging by what we know about the Rus’ Vikings, they never thought of trade and war — or, rather, trade and violence — as incompatible. After all, they had to defend themselves en route, since the local tribes did not welcome their presence. And the trade in which they engaged involved coercion, for they dealt not only in forest products — furs and honey — but also in slaves. To obtain them, the Vikings had to establish some kind of control over the local tribes and collect as tribute products that they could ship along the Saracen route. They exchanged these in the Caspian markets for Arab silver dirhams, troves of which subsequent archeologists have discovered.

The problem was that the Vikings were not the first to invent this business model. They faced competition from the Khazars, whose rulers controlled the Volga and Don trade, collecting tribute from the local tribes. The Khazars also had Byzantium on their side, and some scholars believe that the Rus’ attacked Constantinople in retaliation for the Khazars’ construction of the fortress of Sarkel with the help of the empire. Located on the left bank of the Don River, Sarkel gave the Khazars complete control of trade on the Sea of Azov. The Khazars also had an outpost in Kyiv, on the Dnieper trade route, but their rule did not extend to the forest areas west of the river, and they would soon lose the control of Kyiv as well.

The Primary Chronicle, the source of most of our knowledge about the period, tells of a struggle for the city that took place in 882 among different groups of Vikings. Two of their chieftains, Askold and Dir (the gravesite of the former can still be visited in Kyiv), were killed by Helgi, known to the chronicler as Oleh. He captured the city, allegedly on behalf of the house of Rorik (called Rurik in the chronicle), which already ruled over Novgorod (Velikii Novgorod) in today’s northern Russia. Although one can and should question many details of this story, including its shaky chronology (the chronicler reconstructs much of it on the basis of later Byzantine sources), the legend probably echoes the actual consolidation of power by one group of Vikings in the forested regions of eastern Europe between present-day Velikii Novgorod and Kyiv.

Most of the existing literature refers to this region as lands along the trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” but recent research suggests that if such a route really existed, it did not begin to function before the second half of the tenth century, and some parts of it were more active than others. Some scholars prefer instead to speak of a Dnieper–Black Sea route.

The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus explained in his De administrando imperio, written ca. 950, soon after the conclusion of the second treaty, that the merchandise came from Slavic tribes controlled by the Vikings. “When the month of November begins,” wrote the emperor, “their chiefs together with all the Rus’ at once leave Kyiv and go off on the poliuddia, which means ‘rounds,’ that is, to the Slavic regions of the Vervians and Dragovichians and Krivichians and Severians and the rest of the Slavs who are tributaries of the Rus’.” While some tribes obliged, others rebelled. The Derevlianians, who lived on the Right Bank of the Dnieper and had once controlled Kyiv, paid the Vikings a tribute of “one marten skin apiece.” But after the tribute increased from one year to the next, the Derevlianians eventually revolted.

The Primary Chronicle’s description of the Derevlianian revolt and its subsequent suppression gives us an early opportunity to look into the Kyivan world, which Viking princes dominated in the tenth century.

According to the Primary Chronicle, the Derevlianian rebels attacked and killed Helgi’s successor, named Ingvar, known as Ihor to the Kyivan chronicler.

This story indicates that the Viking retinues and the local Slavic elites clashed not only over the issue of tribute but also over the Vikings’ control of trade and of the whole realm. Mal clearly wanted to take Ingvar’s place as a ruler, not simply as the husband of Olha. But Olha tricked Mal by inviting him and his people to her Kyiv castle, only to burn them alive, allegedly in the boat in which they had arrived. Then she invited another group of matchmakers from among the Derevlianian elite and killed them as well, this time in a bathhouse. She told her guests that she would not see them until they had washed themselves. The Derevlianians evidently had no idea what a Scandinavian steam bath was. It soon became very hot. They were all scalded to death.

The fact that boats and bathhouses were important elements of Norse culture reveals the Scandinavian roots of this legend. The Rus’ and Scandinavian burial ritual involved the burning of the deceased in a boat. But the story also hints at the weakness of the Vikings’ power in Kyiv. Before burning Mal alive, Olha seems to have made certain that the people of Kyiv would take her side. On her advice, the unsuspecting Mal and his entourage refused to ride or walk to Olha’s castle, demanding instead that the locals take them there in a boat, which upset the Kyivans. According to the chronicle, they lamented, “Slavery is our lot.” In all, before Olha took to the field against the Derevlianian army, she used trickery to destroy three groups of their leaders. Still unable to defeat the rest of the tribal army and take their stronghold, she burned it, resorting once again to subterfuge. That would have been unnecessary if the Vikings had had an overwhelming majority in Kyiv.

Princess Olha’s son, Sviatoslav, is the first Kyivan ruler of whom we have a physical description. (The Kyivan chronicler writes that Olha was not only intelligent but also beautiful, but we have no surviving description of her.) Leo the Deacon, a Byzantine chronicler who met Sviatoslav, described the Rus’ prince, who took over from his mother in the early 960s. According to Leo, Sviatoslav was a broad-shouldered man of medium height. He shaved his beard but had a bushy moustache. His head was shaved as well, with one lock of hair untouched — a sign of his noble origin. The prince had blue eyes and a short, wide nose. He dressed in simple white clothing. His one golden earring, embellished with a ruby and two pearls, was the only sign of his high status. The meeting took place in July 971, when Leo accompanied his emperor, John Tzimisces, on a military campaign in Bulgaria.

Sviatoslav’s meeting with the Byzantine emperor was a low point rather than a pinnacle of his military career, which began with the war on the Derevlianians waged by his mother, Olha. When she finally brought her troops into open battle with the rebellious tribesmen, the young Sviatoslav was given the honor of starting the fighting. “When both forces were ready for combat,” wrote the chronicler, “Sviatoslav cast his spear against the Derevlianians. But the spear barely cleared the horse’s ears and struck against his leg, for the prince was but a child. Then Sveinald and Asmund [Viking commanders of Olha’s army] said, ‘The prince has already begun battle; press on, vassals, after the prince.’” Sviatoslav grew into a warrior, sharing with his retinue the hardships of military life and using his horse’s saddle as a pillow while on campaign. Leo the Deacon spotted him rowing a boat with his men, distinguishable from them only by his cleaner clothes.

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.