In a previous posting (see Prelude: Towards the Consecration of Learning), I made reference to a gathering storm that burst on the face of Europe, in 794 A.D. at the Lindisfarne monastery. It was a story of looting and plunder, murder and mayhem, as the signature calling card of the Scandinavian Vikings. They had broken out of their frozen world. Looking elsewhere to apply their energies, they descended south through the Baltic and North Seas to discover (for themselves) new worlds, new horizons, and new lands. With their well-designed and seaworthy boats, they made surprise raids, daring to sail deep into the heart of western Europe – reaching Paris on Easter Sunday in 845. Their blitzkrieg arrival from the Seine River, and their equally fast departure before nightfall, left shockwaves across Francia and much of the continent. Later in the ninth century, European kingdoms strengthened their defenses, devolving much local authority to manage sieges on their own initiative. In 878, a critical turnaround took place. In that year, the Anglo-Saxon English King Alfred the Great, after having had his army nearly destroyed by Danish Vikings and on the run from them into Cornwall in the Southwest of England, mustered the remnants of his army, rallied them to storm the Danes’ stronghold at the Battle of Eddington, inflicting a total defeat on the Danes, forcing them to sue for peace. Thereafter, the Danes made no more forays into Alfred’s Wessex kingdom.
With European kingdoms actively constructing thousands of castles and fortifications against the Viking menace from the sea, the Scandinavian “rowers”, in the main, began to explore possibilities for trade and settlement. Danes and Norwegians looked to western Europe, while Swedish Vikings used their skill at seamanship to penetrate deep into the Eurasian landmass, trading and settling as far south as Constantinople, and as far east as Persia. One of these ventures sailed down the Volga River where supposed riches were to be found, with the hope of initiating a trade settlement. To the mariners’ surprise, the local Slavic tribes not only offered trade, but had offered the Rus’ (‘rowers’) permanent settlement if they would bring order and stay on to govern them, and bring an end to the constant internecine warring upon each other.
The story of the origins of the Russian nation, as reflected in the title, is commonly understood to be the plea of a number of quarreling Slavic tribes for protection against a surrounding universe of aggressive, expansionist kingdoms. This confluence of events brings into history the visitation of a Scandinavian warrior, or trader, or explorer, or settler, or tourist {take your pick}, named Rurik – founder of Rus’ in 862, giving his eponymous, navigational name (Ros’ or Rus’) to what would eventually become the largest continuous land-based entity in the world – the nation of Russia.
Before I go further into the history of Rurik and his successors, it would be a mistake to ignore or downplay the history of these pre-Russian Slavic people, as part of a longer time frame going back to the original Slavs – and many other peoples that evolved from those proto-people known as Indo-Europeans.
WHO WERE THE INDO-EUROPEANS?
As the name suggests, the history of the Indo-European family of peoples and of languages covers a landscape stretching from its origins in the Eurasian steppes to the Indus Valley and Persian Gulf in the South, and westward to the islands off the coast of Western Europe. Scholars point to evidence that an original Proto Indo-European language – and the people who spoke it, was known to exist in 3000 BC, and possibly as early as 5000 BC.
While the existence of Indo-European languages has existed for more than 5000 years, its discovery was very recent. Sir William Jones, a British colonial official on assignment in India in 1786, who knew Sanskrit and several European and south Asian languages, noted similarities to Sanskrit not only to Indo-Iranian languages, but also, he had observed that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Celtic and Germanic languages had so many similarities that they must have had a common linguistic ancestor. After much debate over the cradle (origin) of this prototypical language and people, the phrase Indo-European was coined in 1813, to assign a name to this phenomenon to facilitate its study. By 1833, Avesta, Armenian, and the Slavic languages were also identified as belonging to the Indo-European family of languages.
The philologists’ inevitable conclusion was that there had once existed an ‘original’ Indo-European language, from which the historical languages of Europe, Persia, and India were derived, and therefore also an ‘original’ Indo-European people.
Modern scholars such as Vyacheslav Ivanov had developed the Armenian hypothesis, which suggests that the Proto Indo-European homeland was located in eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia – probably as early as the fourth or fifth millennia before the Common Era. According to Ivanov, during this time, the entire Proto Indo-European family – Hittite; Indo-Iranian (Aryan); Armenian; Kartvelian – and their fellow European families – were undivided, speaking one Proto Indo-European language in Armenia and its surrounds. It was not until the third millennia that fractures were noted.
The European branch of the Indo-European family [Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Slavic] migrated toward the Pontic steppe, a land rich in pasture and horses, which would prove to be decisive in facilitating movements of whole peoples into Europe, to permanently settle and stay. The pastoral style of warfare of Indo-Europeans emerged from the Pontic steppes [Southern Ukraine, Southern Russia].
Pastoral people (‘good’ shepherds) are more warlike than hunter-gatherers or settled agricultural communities because shepherding entails selecting and killing their own sheep as necessary for flock management.
The nomadic movement of people prior to 2000 BC was done before the domestication of the horse for transportation, and before the invention of the chariot and spoked wheel. This provided added mobility to a nomadic people of a warrior ethos. But no evidence linked the Aryans, Greeks, or Hittites to equitation, whereas a great deal of evidence showed that these peoples used the horse as a draft animal. The draft horse found an ideal, suitable homeland in central and northern Europe, in which the Indo-Europeans who settled there, required heavy horsepower to turn over the soil.
The northern European hypothesis was undermined by Gordon Childe’s The Aryans. Childe surveyed much of Eurasia in search of the most probable Indo-European cradle, and concluded that archaeological and philological considerations pointed to southern Russia, and possibly Scandinavia. This would place the likely ancestors of Rurik and the Slavic peoples of the Rus’ in the Pontic steppes of Russia and Ukraine, and the lands of Scandinavia.
There is much evidence that in the third millennium, the ‘Proto Slavic-Rus’ Indo-Europeans had been skilled woodworkers, in which their cartwrights and wainwrights distinguished them from other societies. It is likely that the ancestors of the people of Rus’ were also skilled horsemen and with their woodworking skills, they would go on to build wagons, chariots, and spoked wheels.
In the construction of wagons and carts, the woods of choice were the oak and the elm, and were used for the wheels, axles, and draught-poles, which had a high bearing strength. Anatolia was the place of the chariot’s development, esp. in Armenia and Transcaucasia, which has been endorsed in several hippological studies. Woodworking skills were aplenty for the manufacture of chariots, in which the elements were regularly joined by mortice-and-tenon, or doweled joints [dowel] construction.
Now that I have shown that the pre-Rus’ Slavic peoples were skilled as warriors and craftsmen, we can take a look at the process of how tribal rivalries were composed under the auspices of a ‘foreign’ ruler to create a single identity for ruler and subjects, an ethnic consciousness in the making of a people.
ETHNOGENESIS OF THE RUS’ PEOPLE
Before the arrival of Rurik, Vikings had come to Russia as traders as early as the sixth century. They had some skirmishes with the Khazar, which, at that time was pressing in on the rich Volga basin. The Khazar was a strong state that for the next several centuries would keep the sword of Islam from penetrating north of the Caucuses. But being in the midst of an area, where borders and alliances constantly changed, the Khazar state weakened and finally disappeared in the eleventh century.
While the Norwegian and Danish Vikings ventured into western Europe, the Swedish Vikings looked eastward to the Baltic and encountered Slavic peoples in the land that would become Russia. The Vikings that pursued trade with these pre-Russian Slavs hailed from Sweden’s Gotland peninsula.
The creation of Russia began with Viking adventurer-traders who opened up trade routes beginning around A.D. 800 on the great Russian rivers like the Dnieper and the Volga between the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. With a reputation for consummate seamanship and ferocious fighting, they exercised control over territory that stretched down to the Black Sea in the south, and bounded by the Volga River in the east and the Carpathian Mountains in the west. These early rulers of what is now Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus were Scandinavians. Viking chiefs became rulers of Slavic cities like Novgorod and Kiev.
As descendants of the Indo-European Slavic tribal peoples, they already presumably had great wood working skills, which they likely applied successfully with a warrior ethos and high-level of horsemanship. Rurik was welcomed, neither as conqueror nor invader. This Varangian, or Viking, prince was invited to rule over a warring group of mostly Slavic tribal peoples to bring law, and order, and civil administration to settle disputes and offer protection from surrounding threats from organized bands of looters – and from conquest. Their internecine warring made them vulnerable to incursions from the Khozars in the South, Mongols and Taters from the East, Livonian and other Germanic peoples and the growing new Slavic kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland to the West. And I would be remiss not to mention Byzantium, an empire and a power that still controlled vast stretches of land including Asia Minor, Anatolia, and parts of the Fertile Crescent, not under control of the Islamic Caliphate. There were thus very practical and pragmatic reasons for inviting a representative of a people known for their seamanship, trading acumen, and the ability to wage war over vast distances at lightning speed. These Vikings, Norsemen, Varangians were history’s first exemplum of the Blitzkrieg.
Before these Slavic tribes came under Rurik’s rule in 862, they had settled in the area situated midway between what would come to be Russia’s two great cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Rurik named the area Novgorod (‘Newtown’), built a governing structure of fortifications, barracks, and buildings. This legendary figure was considered by later rulers to be the founder of the Rurik dynasty, which ruled the Kievan Rus’ and its successor states, including the Kingdom of Ruthenia, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Novgorod Republic, and the Tsardom of Russia, until the seventeenth century. The native inhabitants of Novgorod assumed the demonym Russian, as their new identity, to honor Rurik and the Rus’ “rowers” – a mariner and seafaring people* who brought them peace and protection in a landlocked area, surrounded by hostile forces.
*Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin assigns to the Russia Federation the designation as being the world’s largest land-based civilization, in contestation with the sea-based power of the “Atlanticist” alliance of the Anglo-American, Roman-Germanic core of the Western Alliance. While Western Europe burst out of its limited land area long ago in the Age of Discovery, to create globalism through worldwide trade by virtue of its sea power, the eponymous ‘rowers’ of Russia down to today is still recognized as a vast land power cut off from the sea, except by way of the Arctic Ocean, frozen much of the year, and therefore not suitable for global trade.
As Novgorod would later assume its power base as Kievan Rus’, old tribal pagan customs and their polytheistic gods were coming into contact with a new axial age of monotheistic religions: Judaism of the Khazar, the Islamic caliphate, orthodoxy from Byzantium, and the Western Roman Catholic Church. This was an entirely new age, there was a recognition that the old pagan ways had to go, (although not without some resistance) and a felt need to embrace one of the four faiths mentioned above to add a religious dimension to their self-understanding of what it means to be Russian.
OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC
By the middle of the eighth century, Scandinavian colonists were already beginning to play an important role in the early ethnogenesis of the Rus’ people. This also coincided with a fresh wave of Christian evangelization, flowing out from Francia, Burgundy, and the Church of Rome to the North and East. The evangelizers spoke with “tongues of fire”, culminating on Christmas Day in 800 A.D. under the zeal of a renewed Church and new (Holy) Roman Empire. The “old” Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium at Constantinople took cognizance of this development, and sponsored evangelization into the Balkans and to areas beyond the eastern marches of the Holy Roman Empire.
The most famous of the early evangelizers to the Rus’ were the Apostles to the Slavs, the missionary brothers SS Cyril (827-869 AD) and Methodius (826-885 AD). As their native language was Greek, and the Slavic peoples of the region had no uniform alphanumeric script, SS Cyril and Methodius decided to use the alphabetic script of Greek miniscule, the written script of their native Thessalonica region. Their early efforts employed Greek miniscule to translate the Bible and other religious works into the language of Moravia. For the people of Moravia, SS Cyril and Methodius developed a new alphabet called Glagolitic, based on a cursive form of Greek minuscules, that had been known but not widely diffused among the few Slavs that had some written language. Through integrating their knowledge of the spoken language of their native Thessalonica with Greek miniscule developed for use by the people of Moravia, this became the first written language of the Rus’ and other Slavic peoples, and became known as Old Church Slavonic. (As the name indicates, its original use was almost entirely devoted to liturgical or religious purposes.)
As Old Church Slavonic was in diffusion in the Volga River basin and its surrounds, Rurik the Varangian arrived in Rus’** in 860 for the purpose of establishing trade. To his surprise, he not only was welcome to trade, but, in 862, was invited to establish a permanent settlement – but under one condition: that Rurik shall reign over the various Slavic – and some Finnic tribes *** in “this rich area”, promulgating laws and settling disputes among feuding clans raiding and counter-raiding over fisheries and hunting grounds, or just simple rivalry.
**At the time of Rurik’s arrival in 860, there was no land called Rus’. The area that became the land of the Rus’ was mostly populated by East Slavic and Finnic tribes including Chuds, Slovenes, Krivichs, Meryans and Ves. Except for the Slovenes, the remaining “tribes” assimilated into a larger Rus’ identity.
***See my earlier blogpost on Families of Nations, which distinguishes among alliances, clans, confederacies, leagues, nations, states, and tribes.
TRANSITION FROM PAGAN RUSSIA TO CHRISTIAN RUSSIA
After Rurik accepted the offer of reign and rule, he established the Kingdom of Novgorod (a “New Town”), with the right of his sons in succession to the crown. Rurik’s rule was also a watershed era. Ruling over Novgorod from 862 until his death in 879, the missionary work of SS Cyril and Methodius was taking form in Novgorod during Rurik’s reign. Visitors to Novgorod noted movements from paganism to embrace Christianity. Christianization of the Rus’ was reported by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople Saint Photios the Great in 867, showing that it was well underway five years into Rurik’s rule. Although Rurik is mentioned in later texts for his role in Novgorod’s origin, little is mentioned of Rurik in connection with his relation to paganism and Christianity. It would appear Rurik held an aloof, ‘hands-off’ treatment of this new religion, and likely focused on settling disputes, collecting taxes, and the other requirements of judicial and civil administration.
It would be another century before the Rus’ state rulers would fully embrace Christianity. It would take the form of intrigues among sons, brothers, and relatives from abroad, through the arts of negotiation, tempered by the occasional assassination, until grandmother (St. Olga) and grandson (St. Vladimir) through acts of piety and the “wisdom of serpents” finally locked in (Kievan) Rus’ into the Christian circle of nations. How that happened will be the subject of a future post.
