A Brief History of the Vikings (15 page)

The relation of Rurik and his ‘brothers’ is fictional – it is no coincidence that each chooses one of the three main lake-routes on which to settle. The confused to-ing and fro-ing of the report suggests something else, that one group of Norse settlers was violently supplanted by another, who later claimed to have native support.
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Whoever they were, they soon established Novgorod and Kiev where they traded with merchants who came up the Dneiper from the Black Sea. There were no offshore islands for natural protection, so the Swedes built heavily defensible enclosures, divided by hundreds of square miles of potentially hostile terrain. The siege mentality led their kinsmen back in Scandinavia to call Russia
Gardariki
– ‘the place of fortified towns’.

The Vikings soon headed down the Dnieper to see for themselves. Our sources for their travels are far more reliable than the
Russian Primary Chronicle
: the treatise
De Administrando Imperio
, written in the mid-tenth century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (‘the Purple-born’). It is thanks to Constantine’s account that we know of the Byzantines’ attitude towards the Vikings, and of the gruelling journey they had to make in order to reach the Miklagard markets.

South of Kiev, wrote Constantine, was the the great forty-mile natural barrier that kept trade to a trickle – seven cataracts where the river surged between forbidding walls of rock, whose names still invoke the sense of terror they must have struck into medieval travellers. The waterfalls and rapids of the Gulper, the Sleepless, the Island-force, and the Yeller, were followed by the greatest barrier of all,
Aifur
, the Ever-Fierce, or simply Impassable. Beyond Aifur lay the Narrow-force, the Wave-force, the Highcliff-force, the Seether and the Courser. No ship could hope to run the gauntlet of the whirling waters, steep drops and rapids, but as the Vikings soon demonstrated, no ship needed to. They brought their ships out on to the land and, as they had done in the north, simply dragged or carried them alongside the dangerous waters. The brave of heart only portaged their ships around the waterfalls, preferring to chance their luck in the rapids. To do so, men had to struggle naked in the water, feeling out the river-bottom with their feet, guiding their boats with long poles, as the white waters thundered around them and threatened to pitch them into oblivion. A rune stone in distant Gotland records four brothers who went ‘far into Aifur’ and lived to tell the tale, although their friend Hrafn lost his life in the attempt.
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Beyond Aifur and the other barriers, the dangers were easier
to deal with. A long journey awaited, and occasional difficulties from the local Pecheneg tribesmen, but essentially, the worst was over. The Vikings were able to sail their ships along a river-road that eventually took them to the Black Sea.

This was the famed road to
Miklagard
, the ‘Great City’ of Constantinople, where the Vikings were able to sell their furs and slaves for silk and the other luxuries of Byzantine civilization. A number of Rus first arrived in Constantinople in 838, and, according to the Frankish
Annales Bertiani
, accompanied Byzantine ambassadors to the court of Louis the Pious. Questioned by the Frankish emperor as to their origins, they volunteered their Swedish ancestry, and the claim that they were friends and allies of the Byzantines at that time. They also asked to be allowed passage through Louis’s kingdom to return home, perhaps indicating that they were the first Rus to ever make it all the way downriver to the Black Sea, and did not much like the idea of trying to make their way back up again, through the rapids and the dangerous natives. The Greek-speaking Byzantines also called them something that sounded like Rus, either
Rhos
, ‘ruddy’, to mark their complexions or, using the term that had once described the attacking Heruls,
Rusioi
, ‘blonds’.
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An initial trickle of Rus traders was followed by bolder incursions across the Black Sea and eventually an attack on Constantinople itself. Emperor Michael III had conveniently just departed at the head of an army to fight Muslims, leaving the city unprepared for the arrival of 200 hostile vessels. Byzantine sources claim that the attack was only thwarted by divine intervention, when the sacred relic of the Holy Virgin’s Robe was dipped in the sea, causing a tempest to rise up and destroy the attacking fleet. This was news to many, who regarded the attack as a Viking victory.
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Of particular embarrassment to the Byzantines who claimed a miraculous
triumph was the later news that several of the ‘defeated’ Viking vessels sailed past the city to the Princes’ Islands, where they had sacked the monastery at Terebinthos. In a textbook re-enactment of the attack on distant Lindisfarne, the Vikings plundered the riches of the holy sanctuary and slaughtered 22 monks. Thereafter, the Rus of Kiev attempted to deal with the Byzantines peacefully, and the Byzantines were happy to oblige, until 941, when a second Viking attack came out of the north, led by one Igor (Swedish: Ingvar), later said to be the son of the legendary Rurik.
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Meanwhile, further inroads in Russia and north of the Black Sea brought the Rus into contact with new traders even further to the south and east. The archaeology of Russian Swedish graves tells its own story about the progress of these expeditions. During the eighth century, warriors were laid to rest with grave-goods that reflected their life – a sword or two, a spear, and some trinkets for use in the afterlife. Often, such trinkets include small silver coins, from trading deals by the Swedish Rus with merchants from a distant place the Swedes called Serkland.
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The coins, or
dirhams
, are marked with strange runes that meant nothing to the Scandinavians. If they had, they would have discovered that one side read: ‘There is no god but Allah.’ On the other, ‘He is Allah, the eternally besought of all, He begetteth not nor was begotten and there is none comparable to him,’ and in increasingly cramped Arabic: ‘He it is who has sent His messenger with the guidance and Religion of Truth, that he may cause it to prevail over all religion, however much the idolaters may be averse.’
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What interested the idolaters of Rus was the silver itself, capitalizing on the sudden flood of the metal in the Muslim world, largely occasioned by the discovery of a rich silver mine in Benjahir, Afghanistan.
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The Islamic world had silver to spare, and the Vikings had the rich furs and white slaves that
the Muslims wanted. By the beginning of the ninth century, there is a vast increase in the number of Muslim
dirhams
, not just in graves of Rus, but in Scandinavia itself, particularly at the trade centres of Gotland, Birka and Hedeby. The Swedes had cut out the middlemen, and established contact directly with the source of the silver. They may have been encouraged by a sharp rise in demand – the first wave of Muslim silver in Rus areas was followed by a second, even larger wave direct to Gotland, implying that the Vikings of the homeland had gone in search of direct trade, and found a market suddenly booming.
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The years 869–883 saw the catastrophic Zanj Rebellion in what is now Iraq, where thousands of black slaves turned on their masters and set up a short-lived independent state. The incident led to an increase in general mistrust of Africans in the Arab world, particularly since some Muslim soldiers of African origin defected to the rebels. This may have contributed to the improved market for white slaves in the Abbasid Caliphate in the early tenth century, and hence encouraged the Vikings in both their trade and the raids that supplied it.

After Birka and Pirkkala, another ‘birch island’ was added to the list, at Berezany in the Crimea, where runic inscriptions have been uncovered.
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Even as some Vikings were dealing with the Byzantines by sailing down the western coast of the Black Sea, others were finding the mouth of the river Don on its northern shores. By 912, they had found the point where it was possible to drag their ships across a narrow neck of land dividing the Don from the Volga, thereby finding the route down the Volga itself, to the trading post of Itil – the Khazar name for the river, transcribed as
Atil
in Arab sources. South of it lay the Caspian Sea. Throughout the tenth century, the south shores of the Caspian were home to the Samanids, Persian Muslims that supported a strong trade network into the rest of the Abbasid caliphate that ruled the entire Middle
East. From the south shores of the Caspian, traders could make their way to Baghdad itself. The journey was not easy but for the merchant with the right merchandise it was worth it – the return journey went back east from Baghdad, north to the Caspian coast, and then up to the environs of Itil as taking around eleven months. Some Muslim traders were prepared to take the risk, and met with the Norsemen who had made the long voyage to Itil.
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The Arab impression of them was not altogether positive. In the tenth century, one Ibn Rustah wrote that the Rus were a people of traders and slavers, ruled by a ‘Khagan-Rus’ (a Rus chieftain) dwelling on an island in a lake, who preyed upon the native population to acquire animal pelts, slaves and other tradeable goods. He also noted that they were intensely quarrelsome among themselves, used to settling disputes through fighting, and prepared to sacrifice human beings to their gods in a ritual that involved hanging.
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The writer Ibn Fadlan, who journeyed to Itil himself, observed in 922 that he had ‘never witnessed more perfect bodies’ than those of the traders he encountered, but also that they were the filthiest of the races created by Allah and ‘as stupid as donkeys’.
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Ibn Fadlan’s account also includes an intriguing description of the Rus traders’ religious observances. Ibn Fadlan notes that each of the Rus traders leaves offerings and prays to a wooden pole, the image of his god, giving careful accounts of the number of slave-girls and furs he has to sell. Most tellingly, Ibn Fadlan recounts the increasing desperation with which unlucky traders return to their gods on successive days, doubling and redoubling their sacrifices, pleading with their deities for a ‘merchant who has many dinars and dirhams, and who will buy whatever I wish to sell’.
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It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of a truly unsuccessful trip to Itil. A group of traders would have battled
their way down the Dnieper from Kiev, wading through the freezing rapids of the cataracts, sailing through potentially hostile Pecheneg and Khazar territory, dragging their ship across a wilderness and into the Volga, and thence to the remote encampment of Itil, only to discover that Arab traders were not in the mood for buying. What use, then, would be their cargo of furs and slaves? Doubtless such lean times, for traders with nothing left to lose, were the origin of ‘Viking raids’ on the southern Caspian in 864, 910 and 912, when fleets sacked Abasgun, Baku and Azerbaijan.

By 943, the Muslim merchants in Itil were dwindling, and the few remaining were telling stories of a lack of demand back home. Although the Vikings cannot have known it, their traders told the truth – the supplies of the Afghan silver mines were running out, leading to a financial crisis across the Islamic world. Demand fell for luxuries like fur and slave-girls, and for those Rus unlucky enough to make the arduous journey for no reward, the consequences were predictable. That year a Viking fleet captured the town of Berda near Baku, but was defeated by a Muslim counter-assault, and an outbreak of dysentery. Their enemies showed them no mercy even in the afterlife, looting their buried corpses of their grave-goods.
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The sudden reduction of Arab silver would have an effect elsewhere in the Viking world, and may have ultimately led to Svein Forkbeard’s search for new revenues in England (see
Chapter Eight
). The lean times in the Arab world were also a probable cause of renewed pressure on the Byzantines. In 941, Rurik’s son Igor sailed on Constantinople once more. This time, the numbers were serious, with conservative estimates placing the fleet at over a thousand ships. Byzantium was caught, once again, almost unawares, with the army of Romanus I fighting Muslims in the east, and his navy spread
thinly across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. News of the fleet’s approach reached Constantinople early, the reward for renewed diplomatic links between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgars through whose territory the Vikings passed. The Bulgars made no attempt to stop the fleet, but did get a message to Constantinople that trouble was on the way.

With no other option, the Byzantine shipwrights dragged everything remotely seaworthy into service, refitting 15 old vessels that had been earmarked for scrap. The ships were kitted with launchers for Greek fire, and sent on 11 June to block the Bosphorus, that tiny strait which forms the portal from the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Mediterranean. It was a pitiful attempt at defence, but Greek fire was not something for which the Vikings were prepared.
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Normal fire was one thing, but the Byzantines had a secret ingredient that made their flames impossible to douse with mere water.
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The front line of the approaching Viking fleet was engulfed in the mysterious flame, and the other ships hastily turned. They headed east, and Constantinople was saved, although the remainder of the Viking fleet wrought havoc along the northern Black Sea coast of what is now modern Turkey, particularly among the inhabitants of the local monasteries, with only occasional resistance.

Before long, the remainder of the Byzantine fleet had been successfully recalled to the Black Sea, and stood in wait for the Vikings on their homeward voyage. The Vikings made the fatal error of trying to return by the way in which they had come, past Byzantium itself, where their fleet was met by an overwhelming mass of Byzantine ships, many armed with Greek fire. Few Vikings made it back alive; Igor himself was only saved by the shallow draft of his ship, allowing him to seek refuge in waters where the Byzantine ships could not follow him. He was back in 944, with an even bigger fleet,
sailing alongside an army that marched on the land – all the better to present a double-pronged threat to the Byzantines. But Igor’s new attempt never made it to Constantiople – instead, Romanus met him at the Danube and negotiated a detailed treaty.