The Voyage from Kiev to Constantinople

'Fhe exceedingly important political, socioeconomic, and cultural relations between Kievan Rus' and the Byzantine Empire were made possible by the famous great waterway ‘from the Varangians to the Greeks,’ which con­nected Kiev with Constantinople along the Dnieper River and Black Sea.

The monoxyla which come down from outer Rus' [i.e., northern Rus'] are from Novgorod, where Sviatoslav, son of Igor, prince of Rus', had his seat, and others from the city of Smolensk and from Teliutsa and Chernihiv and from Vyshehrad. All these come down the river Dnieper, and are collected together at the city of Kiev, also called Sambatas. Their Slav tributaries, the so-called Krivichians and the Lenzanenes and the rest of the Slavonic regions, cut the monoxyla on their mountains in time of winter, and when they have prepared them, as spring approaches, and the ice melts, they bring them to the neighboring lakes. And since these lakes debouch into the river Dnieper, they enter thence on to this same river, and come down to Kiev, and draw the ships along to be finished and sell them to the Rus'. The Rus' buy these bottoms only, furnishing them with oars and rowlocks and other tackle from their old monoxyla, which they dismantle; and so they fit them out.

And in the month of June they move off down the river Dnieper and come to Vytychiv, which is a tributary city of the Rus', and there they gather during tw^ro or three days; and when all the monoxyla are collected together, then they set out and come down the said Dnieper river. And first they come to the first barrage [rapid], called Essoupi, which means in the Rus' and Slavonic languages: ‘Do not sleep!’; the barrage itself is as narrow as the width of the Polo-ground [a great stadium in Constantinople]; in the middle of it are rooted high rocks, which stand out like islands.

The remainder, taking up the goods which they have on board the monoxyla, conduct the slaves in their chains past by land, six miles, until they are through the barrage. Then, partly dragging their monoxyla, partly portaging them on their shoulders, they convey them to the far side of the barrage; and then, putting them on the river and loading up their baggage, they embark themselves, and again sail off in them. When they come to the fifth barrage, called in Rus' Varouforos, and in Slavonic Voulniprach, because it forms a large lake, they again convey their monoxyla through at the edges of the river, as at the first and second barrages, and arrive at the sixth barrage, called in Rus' Leanti, and in Slavonic Veroutsi, that is ‘the Boiling of the Water’, and this too they pass similarly.

After traversing this place, they reach the island called St. Gregory, on which island they perform their sacrifices because a gigantic oak-tree stands there; and they sacrifice live cocks. Arrows, too, they peg in round about, and others bread and meat, or something of whatever each may have, as is their custom. They also throw lots regarding the cocks, whether to slaughter them, or to eat them as well, or to leave them alive. From this island onwards, the Rus' do not fear the Pech­enegs until they reach the river Selinas. So then they start off thence and sail for four days, until they reach the lake which forms the mouth of the river, on which is the island of St. Aitherios. Arrived at this island, they rest themselves there for two or three days. And they re-equip their monoxyla with such tackle as is needed, sails and masts and rudders, which they bring with them. Since this lake is the mouth of this river, as has been said, and carries on down to the sea, and the island of St. Aitherios lies on the sea, they come thence to the Dniester River, and having got safely there they rest again.

But when the weather is propitious, they put to sea and come to the river called Aspros, and after resting there too in like manner, they again set out and come to the Selinas, to the so-called branch of the Danube River. And until they are past the river Selinas, the Pechenegs keep pace with them. And if it happens that the sea casts a monoxylon on shore, they all put in to land, in order to present a united opposition to the Pechenegs.

SOURCE: Constantine Porphyrogcnitus, De Administrantia Imperia, translated by R.J.H. Jenkins, and rev. ed. (Washington, D.C. 1967), pp. 59-63.

Kievan Rus' with Poland and Central Europe toward the west and, across the Car­pathians, with Hungary toward the south.

International trade was generally controlled and exploited by the princes and rich merchants. But Kievan Rus' also had a flourishing domestic commerce, one that initially served the rich urban dwellers and the ruling strata, but later attracted peasants from the countryside, who exchanged their agricultural products, cattle, and honey in the local town markets for cloth, metal implements from the local iron industries, and salt from the Crimea and, later, Galicia. The number of domes­tic handicraft industries continued to grow (scholars debate their number, as being from forty to sixty-four distinct industries), with particular emphasis on building products, military hardware, household implements, religious wares, and the arts.

The relationship between international trade and local agricultural production as the basis of the Kievan economy was directly affected by the changing interna­tional situation. In a real sense, Kievan Rus' had become economically and politi­cally important because the traditional trade routes connecting Byzantium and Europe to Central Asia and the Orient through the eastern Mediterranean were disrupted by the rise of Islam and Arab control of the Middle East beginning in the last decades of the seventh century.

By the twelfth century, however, Arab control over the eastern Mediterranean was ending. The main reasons for the end of Arabic hegemony were internal dissension and the impact of the Crusades, whose leaders in the course of the eleventh century established a European outpost on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in the form of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. As a result, nearby Anti­och and other eastern Mediterranean ports, with their products from the Orient and Middle East, were once again open directly to Byzantium and to western Europe. Italian merchants from Genoa, Pisa, and, especially, Venice (to whom Byzantium gave its trade monopoly in 1082) became the primary beneficiaries of the new international trading pattern. In this sense, regardless of the mid­eleventh-century Polovtsian presence on the Ukrainian steppe that disrupted trade along the Dnieper River, the Baltic-Black Sea route would have declined in importance as a source of wealth for Kievan Rus'.

It is no mere coincidence that the period of disintegration in Kievan Rus' (1132-1240) coincided with the changing pattern of international trade. Faced with this new situation, the ruling strata in Kievan Rus', in particular the boyars, attempted to derive new wealth by controlling larger and larger tracts of agricul­tural land, the products of which could be sold in the cities and traded for what­ever practical and luxury items might be manufactured in the growing domestic industries of Kievan Rus', or might still be imported, especially from east-central Europe via Galicia. This desire for more land had two effects: (1) a struggle between the boyars and the princes that contributed to general instability and the enslavement of free peasants (smerdy), and (2) a slow but inevitable transforma­tion of the economy of Kievan Rus' from one which depended primarily on inter­national trade to one which was based more and more on agriculture.

The third and perhaps most influential of the integrating factors in Kievan Rus' was culture. And when speaking of culture it is essential to recall the role of the Byzantine Empire. In real sense, Kievan Rus' was the cultural child of Byzantium. For the Varangian and East Slavic Rus', as for the many other sedentary and nomadic civilizations in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea, Byzantium was a magnet attracting all those who hoped to capture the imperial capital or to trade with it and live within its culture and economic orbit.

During its more than a thousand years of existence from the fourth to the mid­fifteenth century, the political fortunes of the Byzantine Empire changed many times. After a profound internal crisis (the iconoclast controversy) and the exter­nal threat posed by the Islamic Arabs in the east and the First Bulgarian Empire in the Balkans during the eighth and first half of the ninth centuries, the empire’s strength was restored, and it entered a new period of revival and prosperity dur­ing the second half of the ninth century. The period of revival lasted for almost two centuries (843-1025) and has come to be known as Byzantium’s golden age. The empire’s territorial extent was stabilized in Asia Minor and in the Balkans south of the Danube River, and its influence was renewed over the southern Ital­ian Peninsula in the west and the Crimea in the northeast. Trade, commerce, and learning flourished to restore the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire as the dominant power in Europe. It was precisely during this golden age that Kievan Rus' came into existence and was drawn into the Byzantine sphere or common­wealth. Having developed within Byzantium’s cultural orbit, the religion, litera­ture, architecture, and art of Kievan Rus' were all originally inspired by and often directly based on Greco-Byzantine models.

Acceptance into the Byzantine Commonwealth began with the adoption of the empire’s official ideology, Christianity in its Eastern, Greco-Byzantine, form. At the beginning of Byzantium’s golden age, the empire was able to draw not only the Rus' but many other Slavic peoples into its Christian fold. Its success was pri­marily a result of the missionary work between the 860s and 880s of two brothers, Byzantine civil servants, and fervent Christians, Constantine - or Cyril, to use his later monastic name - and Methodius. Not only did they bring the new faith to the Slavs, but Cyril created an alphabet (the Glagolitic) and a written language for them. Although the Cyril-Methodian missions were initially conducted among the West Slavs, in particular those living in the Great Moravian Empire (the present- day Czech Republic, Slovakia, southern Poland, and northern Hungary), it was among the South and East Slavs that the Byzantine Christian tradition was to have its greatest impact. The original written language created by Cyril and Methodius (called Old Church Slavonic) was derived from Macedonian dialects spoken in the Balkans. It was their disciples, however, who created a new Slav script based on Greek letters that came to be known as the Cyrillic alphabet, which to this day is used by the East Slavic and most South Slavic peoples.

Chapter 5 noted how, in the wake of the Varangian Rus' attack on Constanti­nople in 860-861, a Christian mission was established in Kiev and an archbishop