Vikings (24 page)

Six men entered the pavilion and all had intercourse with the slave-girl. They laid her down beside her master and two of them took hold of her feet, two her hands. The crone called the Angel of Death’ placed a rope around her neck in such a way that the ends crossed one another and handed it to two of the men to pull on it. She advanced with a broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in and out between her ribs, now here, now there, while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died.

Then the deceased’s next of kin approached and took hold of a piece of wood and set fire to it . . . The wood caught fire, and then the ship, the pavilion, the man, the slave-girl and
all it contained. A dreadful wind arose and the flames leapt higher and blazed fiercely.

Ibn Fadlan was a man of his time, and no doubt familiar with the ways slaves might be used and abused by their masters. But something in the attention he paid to all the lurid details of the ceremony that played out before his eyes among the Rus suggests it was grimly memorable even to him. Put bluntly, it was the murder of a young girl, after several incidents of choreographed rape. While the implication is that the girl was a willing participant in all of it, she was also plied with some sort of drugged drink to ensure her compliance.

As with so much else, the origin of the name
Rus
is unclear but is thought by some scholars to demonstrate an origin for the people in Roslagen, part of eastern Sweden. The Finns’ name for Sweden was
Routsi
, and all the variants seem to have their roots in the words
ro
and
rodd
, meaning row or rowing, and also
roor
, meaning a crew of rowers – so that the name Rus may be interpreted as something like ‘the men who row’. What made them distinctive first of all, in the eyes of those other peoples they encountered in the east, was their mode of transport. Instead of travelling overland, the Northmen penetrated the continent aboard their boats.

The men who rowed founded their first capital at what is now Novgorod, beside the Volkhov River, in 860. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a history composed around 1113 and ascribed to a monk named Nestor, the Slavs in the area were crying out for leadership and unable to provide such for themselves: ‘There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe. Discord then ensued among them, and they began to war one against another. They said to themselves, “Let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the Law.”’

From the point of view of the Rus, who were the people approached with the request to provide the necessary leader, this sounds suspiciously convenient. And it goes on: ‘They accordingly went overseas . . . then said to the people of the Rus, “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.”’

According to the chronicle (also known as the Tale of Bygone Years) three brothers from among the Rus duly transplanted themselves and their families into the land of the Slavs. The eldest, named Riurik, set himself up in Novgorod, while his siblings, Sineus and Truvor, founded towns in Beloozero and Izborsk respectively. Within a short time, both younger brothers were dead and Riurik ruled alone. Within 40 years the capital had moved to Kiev, on the banks of the Dnieper.

It was already an extraordinary achievement. Whatever the truth of the means by which the Rus and their descendants rose to dominance, the facts are that within 60 years of those first raids on Britain – by Vikings from Norway – seaborne pioneers from Sweden had been able somehow to exploit their relationships with the native Slavs to such an extent that the emergent state was named, not after the locals, but in honour of themselves – Russia. They came with all manner of goods from their homelands – amber, steel swords of their own design, ivory from walrus (known at the time as ‘fish teeth’), birds of prey, honey, beeswax, fur and slaves.

What they craved above all else, and therefore demanded in return for all they had to offer, was silver – and the best silver of all was that which could be obtained from the Abbasid Caliphate. After their violent overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate by
AD
750, the Abbasids abandoned their erstwhile rivals’ capital of Damascus, in Syria, and centred themselves instead in Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris in the territory known today as Iraq. By the beginning of the Viking Age the
Abbasids were in the process of amassing fabulous wealth in the form of silver mined from their holdings in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Vikings would go, almost literally in their eyes, to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of the precious metal. Arabic coins were available in Russia by the end of the eighth century and soon a veritable river of silver was flowing west and north towards Scandinavia. By the early 800s dirhams were going into the ground in hoards along the Baltic coast as well as in Gotland and the rest of Scandinavia itself. Indeed the people of Gotland would grow so conspicuously wealthy it appears they hardly knew what to do with all the money. The jewellery and other items they made were strictly for sale elsewhere and are markedly different from the items they took with them into their graves (and presumably valued more). Once the Viking Age was at its height, the Gotlanders developed a veritable mania for burying their great wealth in hoards in the ground, almost as though they had run out of ideas.

During the ninth century, and on into the tenth, it was silver melted down and shaped into neck and arm rings that emerged as common currency in the Baltic regions and Scandinavia. Made to standardised weights, they would have served both as personal decorations – highly visible statements of wealth – and also for making purchases. From the Frankish and English trading centres or
emporia
the Swedes could endeavour to buy wine and weapons. It was also in this atmosphere of burgeoning trade that the Danish King Godfred forcibly shut down the Baltic port of Rerik in
AD
808, and relocated all the business to his own emporium at Hedeby.

The Swedish Vikings can hardly have been the only people in pursuit of Arab silver at that time, and neither were they the only purveyors of furs, slaves, oils and the rest of the goods commonly associated with them. Given the terrain of north-eastern
Europe – heavily forested, penetrated usefully only by rivers and already populated by tribes used to exploiting one another as well as the natural resources – many of the same commodities would have been readily available from territories much closer to the lands of the Arabs who apparently coveted them. It would appear, however, that in addition to the trade goods the Vikings had a unique force of personality. The chronicles make plain the Vikings in the east extorted tribute from those they encountered and so were clearly able to dominate at least some of the people around them.

Despite the violence of the funeral ceremony recorded above, it is nonetheless clear that the experiences and behaviour of the Swedish Vikings in the east were at odds with what was happening in the west. The differences between the
modi operandi
of the Norwegians and Danes on the one hand, and the Swedes on the other, make them appear almost schizophrenic. These were to some extent one Scandinavian people and yet they manifest themselves as murderous pirates on the one hand, and as peaceful merchants on the other. It is important, however, to bear in mind how different were the two spheres in which the various Vikings had influence. Western Europe was home to established states, monarchies and peoples with at least a fledgling understanding of the need for and benefits of stable government. The Christianity of the majority of those populations the Norwegian Vikings came across was also an issue, a stumbling block that set them at odds with those they encountered.

In the east, the society known to Balts, Slavs and the rest was much less sophisticated; statehood was still a long way off. Still existing in the main as nomadic populations eking a living from the forests, they had little of the kind of portable wealth that might have made them targets for out and out raiding. Instead, the Vikings found it made more sense mostly to pass them by, trading with them when appropriate or necessary but exploiting
them more as stepping stones towards the fantastically wealthy markets much further east.

No one knows for sure just how far east and south the most intrepid of them actually travelled in their slender little boats, powered by sails and by the strength of their own backs. Baghdad was almost certainly within reach to those most daring – or just plain lucky – and some historians are persuaded that a few at least made it as far as the markets of China. What is certain is that during the ninth century the eastwards expansion brought Vikings to the walls and gates of what was by then the greatest Christian city on Earth – Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Consider for a moment what impact such a metropolis must have had on those first Northmen. Having navigated the Baltic Sea, a succession of Russian rivers and then finally the Black Sea – a journey of many months at least – they finally glimpsed towering city walls that were, by the ninth century, nearly 500 years old. Beyond those walls they might have observed a shining city of gigantic stone buildings, home to hundreds of thousands of people. What was to be made of all that by travel-weary men whose idea of civilisation amounted to a few timber buildings with thatched roofs?

Constantinople was a dream beyond the imaginations not just of Vikings but of most of humanity. Here was the home of a Roman emperor; palaces and places of worship; massive statues, public artworks and mosaics; towering, porticoed buildings; colonnaded streets elegantly planned and executed in regular grid patterns; gardens of fruit trees and fragrant flowers; great squares and triumphal arches. It was a place designed to beguile and to persuade – proof of the supremacy of the Christian God.

In Kiev, towards the end of the tenth century, the successor of Riurik and ruler of the Rus was Vladimir. By
AD
987 he had concluded it was time to end the pagan ways of his people and
to choose for them a new faith. Before deciding between the great monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, he sent out emissaries on a series of fact-finding missions. They were to audition all three religions and report back with their recommendations. Neither Jews nor Muslims acquitted themselves well (there was no joy among them, apparently) and by 988 the Russian representatives were in Constantinople. Emperor Basil II received them first of all in the Sacred Palace and then, the following day, the Patriarch, Nicholas II Khrisobergos, walked them into the city’s beating heart.

Hagia Sophia, the church built by Emperor Justinian and dedicated in
AD
537, was nearly 500 years old by the time of the Kievans’ arrival. It was then and is now one of the truly great buildings on the face of the Earth. There beneath the towering central dome floating so far above their heathen heads it might have appeared as distant as the sky itself, the honoured guests witnessed a full pontifical service led by the Patriarch himself. The incense, the music of the choirs floating high above them from galleries so lofty they made men small as ants, the gold and jewels, the shimmering silks of the holy vestments – all of it made for a hypnotic, persuasive spectacle.

By the time they stood before their master back in Kiev they were already converted to Orthodoxy, in their hearts if not in practice. ‘When a man has tasted something sweet,’ they told him, ‘he does not want anything bitter.’ Vladimir asked them to describe to him what it was about the city of the Christians that had provoked such rapture. ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or Earth,’ they replied. ‘For on Earth there is no such splendour and beauty and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there, God dwells among men.’

Vladimir had heard enough. That same year he had the statues of the old pagan gods hauled down and thrown into the Dniepr, and then ordered all Kievans into the same water to
receive their new faith. This then was the power of what the Vikings learnt to call
Mikligaror
in their own tongue, a name that means ‘the Great City’.

‘Like a thunderbolt from heaven.’

Patriarch Photios, describing an attack on Constantinople by Swedish Vikings

Although theirs was the visit that changed everything for the land that would eventually be Russia, the emissaries of Vladimir the Great were not the first people of Viking blood to confront the wonders of the Byzantine Empire.

According to a text known as The Brussels Chronicle, it was at sunset on 18 June,
AD
860 that Constantinople’s inhabitants looked out over their sea walls and spotted the first of around 200 ships sailing into the calm waters of the Bosphorus. If each vessel carried 40 men, then no fewer than 8,000 were poised to attack. The timing was as unhappy as it could possibly have been for the city’s inhabitants: Emperor Michael III was on the eastern frontier making war on the Muslim forces of the Abbasid Caliph, and the Byzantine navy – famed by then for its fearsome ‘Greek Fire’ – was also occupied elsewhere.

The only contemporary account of what happened next was recorded by the Archbishop of Constantinople, Patriarch Photios, who described the attackers of that year as strangers from a strange land: ‘an obscure nation, a nation of no account, a nation ranked among slaves, unknown, but which has won a name from the expedition against us, insignificant, but now
become famous, humble and destitute, but now risen to a splendid height and immense wealth.’

Later historians have identified them as warriors of the Rus, based perhaps in the territory centred around Lake Ladoga, or maybe further south at Novgorod. Some 22 years earlier those same Rus had sent an embassy to Constantinople, with a view to assessing the opportunities for trade. It seems the links forged at that time meant the Rus had been able to keep tabs on the Byzantine Empire – and when they learnt about the prolonged absence of the capital city’s defenders, in 860 they seized their moment and mounted a full-scale attack: ‘a nation dwelling somewhere far from our country, barbarous, nomadic, armed with arrogance, unwatched, unchallenged, leaderless, has so suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, like a wave of the sea, poured over our frontiers, and as a wild boar has devoured the inhabitants of the land like grass, or straw, or a crop . . . sparing nothing from man to beast . . . but boldly thrusting their sword through persons of every age and sex,’ wrote Photios.