The Northmen's Fury: A History of the Viking World by Parker Philip

Author:Parker, Philip [Parker, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Map 10 The Vikings in Russia

7

Furthest East: The Vikings in Russia, 800–1040

SWEDISH VIKINGS AND traders, denied the easy access to the western seas enjoyed by their Danish and Norwegian counterparts, turned east instead. Here, from as early as the mid-seventh century, they began to colonise the shores of the Baltic Sea (founding a colony at Grobina in Latvia around 6501). By the mid-eighth century they had pushed deeper into the Russian interior, gradually taking control of trade routes down the Dnieper and establishing a series of settlements (or colonising existing ones) that would form the nucleus of what eventually evolved into the Russian state.

Memories of Scandinavian involvement along the eastern Baltic coastlines ran very deep; the Swedish king Yngvar (probably dating to the seventh century) is said to have harried the lands of the Estonians (and died during one such campaign), while the last of the Swedish Yngling dynasty, Ivar Vidfadmi (‘the Far-Traveller’), is described as having a realm that encompassed Sweden, Denmark, Saxony and much of the Baltic.2 It is not until the mid-ninth century, however, that such involvement emerges from the mists of semi-legend into a more historical framework. Even then, attempts to understand the process by which the Vikings came to establish a number of principalities based around Kiev, Novgorod and a series of other trading towns are bedevilled by controversy. This focuses mainly on the extent to which the incoming Vikings adapted themselves to existing Slavic institutions and were absorbed by pre-existing Slav (and Finnic) populations, or whether, in contrast, the states they founded were fundamentally Scandinavian affairs. The proponents of the theory that the settlements were basically Slavic are known as ‘anti-Normanists’, in contrast to the ‘Normanist’ protagonists of a purely Viking ancestry for the proto-Russian states.3 Unsurprisingly, the anti-Normanist theory has long held sway in Russian historiography, and particularly in Soviet times, when it was an almost obligatory orthodoxy. Scandinavian historians, in contrast, have tended to emphasise the Viking role in the foundation and development of states in the area. The truth, as ever, almost certainly lies in the middle – the Vikings did not arrive in a deserted landscape or develop totally virgin sites, and thus there must have been a significant Slavic component even at the early stages of the Viking settlement of Russia.

Exactly when the Vikings moved southwards into Russia from bases they established in the eastern Baltic such as Grobin, Apuola and Elbing (on the Bay of Gdansk) is unclear.4 There is documentary evidence, however, that by the 830s they had certainly managed to penetrate down the Dnieper as far as Constantinople. The Frankish Annals of St Bertin relate the story of a diplomatic mission from the Byzantine emperor Theophilus, which arrived at the distant court of the Frankish ruler, Louis the Pious, at Ingelheim in 839. The Greek ambassadors are said to have brought with them a group of men ‘called Rhos’ who had themselves come as envoys to the Byzantine emperor, but who had been unable to return

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