Rus' Through Foreign Eyes

Who was looking

Writing in Rus' itself begins late. The earliest surviving chronicle compilation, the Rus' Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let), was put together in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, and its account of the ninth and tenth centuries was assembled long after the events, from oral tradition, earlier texts and Byzantine chronicles. For those centuries, some of the earliest written descriptions of the Rus' come from outsiders — people who came to trade, fight, negotiate or serve, or who simply heard about them from others.

This piece reads five groups of such texts. In 921–922 Ibn Faḍlān, a member of an embassy from Baghdad, met Rus' traders on the Volga. In the mid-tenth century the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos had information about the Rus' compiled for his son and recorded the reception of a Rus' princess at his court. At the end of the century the historian Leo the Deacon described the war against the Rus' prince Sviatoslav. In the eleventh century the German chroniclers Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, and Adam, a canon of Bremen, wrote about Kyiv; in the thirteenth, the Dominican Julian of Hungary and the papal envoy John of Plano Carpini reported on the Mongol invasion. And Icelandic writers of the thirteenth century preserved, in the kings' sagas, a Scandinavian memory of Rus' as Garðar.

These texts were written in different languages, for different readers and for different reasons. They are not wholly independent of one another — the two Byzantine works come from the same court, Leo drew on other written accounts, and the saga writers knew more about Rus' than oral tradition alone could give them. But none of them was written to answer the others. That is what makes it worth reading them side by side: not to add up their praise, but to see what each observer noticed, and why.

An envoy on the Volga

Ibn Faḍlān was the secretary of an embassy sent by the caliph al-Muqtadir to the ruler of the Volga Bulghars. Who exactly his Rūsiyyah were — Scandinavians, a mixed trading community, or a group shaped by long contact with the Khazars — has been argued over for two centuries; James Montgomery, whose annotated translation is quoted here, warns against assuming that every Arabic author meant the same people by the name. What Ibn Faḍlān describes is a community of traders camped on the river:

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I have never seen more perfect physiques than theirs — they are like palm trees, are fair and reddish, and do not wear the qurṭaq or the caftan.

Every man, he writes, carries an axe, a sword and a dagger; their swords are "of the Frankish variety, with broad, ridged blades". Each woman wears on her breast a small disc of iron, silver, copper or gold "in relation to her husband's financial and social worth", and neck-bands of gold and silver added for every ten thousand dirhams her husband acquires. The beads they prize most are dark-green ones, bought for a dirham apiece. For a historian of material culture this is a rare thing: a written description of weapons and ornaments that archaeologists also find in the ground.

Admiration sits beside disgust. For a Muslim observer, ritual purity was a religious obligation, and by that standard the Rus' were "the filthiest of all Allah's creatures": they did not wash after relieving themselves or after intercourse, or wash their hands after eating. He describes a slave-girl carrying a single basin of water from man to man each morning, each of them washing, combing, blowing his nose and spitting into the same water.

The most famous passage is his account of a chieftain's funeral. The dead man's property was divided into three: a third for his family, a third for his funeral clothing, and a third for the alcohol drunk over the following days. A slave-girl who was to die with him was ritually prepared, lifted three times above a door-frame, killed and burned with her master in his ship. Whether her consent was meaningful in any modern sense is impossible to know; Ibn Faḍlān's account is of a killing within a ritual, and should be read as such. As the pyre burned, one of the Rus' spoke to Ibn Faḍlān's interpreter:

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You Arabs are a foolish lot! … you purposely take those who are dearest to you and whom you hold in highest esteem and throw them under the earth, where they are eaten by the earth, by vermin and by worms, whereas we burn them in the fire there and then, so that they enter Paradise immediately.

Over the ashes they raised a round mound and set up a post of birch wood, on which they wrote the name of the dead man and the name of the "King of the Rūs". Ibn Faḍlān adds, from hearsay, that this king kept four hundred of his bravest companions in his palace. We cannot tell which ruler or which centre his informants had in mind. But the detail suggests that, for these traders, there was a ruler whose name mattered beyond their own company.

The view from Constantinople

Byzantium's first recorded encounter with the Rus' was violent. In June 860 a Rus' fleet attacked the suburbs of Constantinople, and Patriarch Photios preached two homilies on the attack while the shock was still fresh. In Cyril Mango's translation they describe devastation around the city and an enemy that had been obscure until this attack made its name.

A century later the tone is administrative. The treatise known as De administrando imperio, compiled in Constantine VII's name around 948–952 as advice for his son, has a chapter on how the Rus' come to Constantinople in their dug-out boats:

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The ‘monoxyla’ which come down from outer Russia to Constantinople are from Novgorod, where Sviatoslav, son of Igor, prince of Russia, had his seat, and others from the city of Smolensk and from Teliutza and Chernigov and from Vyshegrad. All these come down the river Dnieper, and are collected together at the city of Kiev, also called Sambatas.

The identifications are the translator's: the Greek has Nemogardas and Miliniska, and whether these mean Novgorod and Smolensk, or nearby predecessors such as the Riurik Gorodishche and Gnezdovo, is still discussed. The chapter goes on to describe the Dnieper rapids, giving their names "in Russian" and "in Slavonic", and the winter poliudie — "which means ‘rounds’" — when the Rus' chiefs left Kyiv in November to live among their Slav tributaries, returning in April "when the ice of the Dnieper river melts". This is the language of an official who wanted to know how a neighbour moved, paid and supplied itself.

The second Byzantine text records diplomacy. The Book of Ceremonies, also compiled under Constantine VII, describes the reception of "Elga, archontissa of Rhosia" — the princess known in the Rus' chronicle as Olga — dated by different scholars to 946 or 957. She was received in several stages in the Great Palace, including in the Triclinium of Justinian; at a dessert after the banquet she was given 500 miliaresia in a gold bowl set with precious stones, and the text lists the sums given to her relatives, attendants, envoys, merchants and interpreter. The ceremony placed Olga carefully within the court's hierarchy of foreign rulers. It shows that she was received with honour; it does not, by itself, tell us how Byzantium defined her status.

Behind these texts lay agreements. The Primary Chronicle preserves the texts of treaties between the Rus' and Byzantium dated 911 and 944, which regulate the status of Rus' merchants in Constantinople, and an oath given by Sviatoslav in 971. An earlier agreement under the year 907 survives only in the Chronicle, and its authenticity is debated.

A historian and a prince

Leo the Deacon was born around 950 and wrote his History in the last years of the tenth century, covering the reigns of Romanos II, Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes. His account of the war of 970–971 against the Rus' prince Sviatoslav in the Balkans was written some twenty years after the events and after Sviatoslav's death in 972; Leo says he used his own observation and the reports of eyewitnesses, but it is not known whether he saw the scenes he describes. His most famous passage is a portrait of Sviatoslav meeting the emperor on the bank of the Danube after the peace:

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Sphendosthlavos arrived sailing along the river in a Scythian light boat, grasping an oar and rowing with his companions as if he were one of them. … his beard was clean-shaven, but he let the hair grow abundantly on his upper lip where it was bushy and long; and he shaved his head completely, except for a lock of hair that hung down on one side, as a mark of the nobility of his ancestry … on one ear was fastened a gold earring, adorned with two pearls with a red gemstone between them; his clothing was white, no different from that of his companions except in cleanliness.

The scene is composed with care. Just before it, Leo shows the emperor arriving on horseback "clad in armor ornamented with gold" with a squadron of horsemen "adorned with gold". Against that, the Rus' prince rows his own boat and differs from his men only in the cleanness of his clothes. For a Byzantine reader the contrast could signal barbarian simplicity and a soldier's authority at once. Leo writes in a classicising style — he calls the Rus' "Tauroscythians" and models speeches on ancient historians — so the portrait should be read as literature as well as description. The Greek word for the gemstone, anthrax, may mean a ruby, garnet or carbuncle, and the phrase usually rendered "on one side" can also be read "on both sides".

Leo also gives Sviatoslav a speech before the last battle at Dorystolon (Silistra): "it is not our custom to return to our fatherland as fugitives, but either to be victorious and live, or to die gloriously". The words are Leo's, in the tradition of speeches written for generals by Greek historians. So are the figures he reports for one engagement — "it is said" that fifteen thousand five hundred Rus' fell, against three hundred and fifty Romans — which belong to the rhetoric of victory rather than to a casualty count. What his account does show is that the emperor led the campaign in person, and that it took months of fighting to bring Sviatoslav to terms.

The Latin West

Latin writers enter the picture after the conversion of Rus' to Christianity. Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, never visited Kyiv, but he wrote shortly after the Polish duke Bolesław I took the city in 1018 and could draw on people who had been there. He reports that the great city, the capital of that kingdom, had more than four hundred churches and eight markets, and a vast population; he also describes the reception of Bolesław by the archbishop in the church of St Sophia, which, he says, had burned the previous year. The number of churches is usually treated as an exaggeration or a hearsay figure, but the impression of a large Christian city is unmistakable. Thietmar also calls the ruler of Kyiv rex, "king" — a word he used readily of rulers across Europe, and which tells us how he classified them rather than what title they held.

Around 1075 Adam of Bremen, writing the history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, called Kyiv "aemula sceptri Constantinopolitani, clarissimum decus Graeciae" — the rival of the sceptre of Constantinople, the brightest ornament of "Greece" (our translation), by which he meant the lands of the Greek Church. It is the phrase most often quoted about eleventh-century Kyiv. It is also a judgement made from Bremen, on the basis of reports, by a writer whose interest was the Christian mission in the north.

The thirteenth-century Latin texts record the end of that Kyiv. The Hungarian Dominican Julian, who had travelled east in search of the Hungarians who had stayed behind in the steppe, sent a report in 1237–38 warning of the Mongol advance. John of Plano Carpini, sent by Pope Innocent IV to the Mongol court, passed through the devastated lands in 1245–47. He writes that the Mongols besieged Kyiv, "the capital of Russia", took it and killed its inhabitants, and that a city once very large and populous now had scarcely two hundred houses.

Garðar in the sagas

The Old Norse kings' sagas were written down in Iceland and Norway in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries — most famously in Heimskringla, attributed to Snorri Sturluson — and drew on skaldic verse and oral tradition about events two or three centuries earlier. They are not eyewitness reports. Their value is different: they show how Rus' was remembered in the Scandinavian world, as a familiar place where exiles found refuge, warriors found service and princes found wives.

In these texts Rus' is Garðar, later also Garðaríki, a name built on garðr, an enclosure or fortified settlement. The sagas name individual centres — Hólmgarðr (Novgorod), Kœnugarðr (Kyiv), Palteskja (Polotsk), Aldeigjuborg (Staraya Ladoga) — and the Russian scholar Tatjana Jackson has shown how detailed, and how uneven, this geography is.

The saga of Olaf Tryggvason tells that the future king of Norway spent part of his youth at the court of King Valdamarr in Hólmgarðr — Volodimer, then prince of Novgorod and later of Kyiv. Eymundar þáttr, a short tale preserved in the late fourteenth-century Flateyjarbók, describes a Norwegian chieftain who hires out his band to Jarizleifr (Iaroslav) in his war with his brothers, with terms of pay set out in silver and furs. Its version of the death of Burizlafr differs from the Rus' chronicle's account of the murder of Boris, and scholars disagree about whether, and how far, the two stories can be matched.

The best-known figure is Harald Sigurdsson, later King Harald Hardrada of Norway, who came to Rus' after the battle of Stiklestad in 1030, served Iaroslav, and then went on to serve the Byzantine emperors. The saga says that he sent the wealth he won in Byzantine service to Iaroslav for safekeeping, and that on his return he married Iaroslav's daughter, called Ellisif in the sagas. Her marriage was one of several that linked Iaroslav's family to the ruling houses of Scandinavia and Western Europe.

Reading them together

Each tradition saw the Rus' from a particular angle and at a particular moment.

Read this way, the differences between them are as informative as the agreements. Ibn Faḍlān sees bodies, goods and rites, and measures them against the norms of Baghdad. The imperial texts see routes, tribute and rank. Leo sees an enemy worthy of an emperor's victory. The Latin writers see churches and a capital — and then its ruin. The sagas see a place where Scandinavian careers were made.

There are also common threads. Several of these writers noticed silver and other portable wealth; several noticed rulers who could command armed followers, collect tribute and deal with emperors; and from the eleventh century the Latin and Norse texts treat Kyiv and Novgorod as places that mattered in a wider Christian and dynastic world. None of this was written to describe Rus' for its own sake, and none of it can stand in for the chronicles and archaeology of Rus' itself. But taken together these outside views show how differently a single society could look, depending on who was watching, and what they hoped or feared to find.