Class 5: Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State (3)
and political power down there in the south.
And they're aiming for Byzantium.
They're trying to get down to Byzantium.
And a midpoint, a beautiful trading post
along the way, is Kyiv, right?
So our Viking age
is not just like, you know, Erik the Red and Iceland
and the sagas, all of which is cool.
And by the way, some of our Ukrainian figures
actually appear in Icelandic sagas,
which gives you a sense of how it's all connected.
But the Viking age is about the Franks,
and it's also about Byzantium,
because the Vikings are trying
to make their way down to Byzantium,
and that's why they get to Kyiv,
which has already existed for several centuries.
Okay.
So Eastern Europe, what is Eastern Europe?
One is always struggling for a reason
to explain why Eastern Europe, and not Western Europe.
What's special about our little zone,
which includes Kyiv and what's gonna be Ukraine,
in this context, is that it is between
these two different kinds of Christianity.
Not just in some kind of metaphorical way,
like lands in between, blah, blah.
It's between them in the sense
that the Franks and the Byzantines
are striving to control these territories.
But it's also in between, in the sense
that it's Eastern Europe, or at least
our part of Eastern Europe,
where the Vikings, who have been in contact
with both the Franks and want contact
with the Byzantines, make their way.
Okay, so those are a lotta the important pieces,
the Franks, the Byzantines, Vikings.
Oh, how the Vikings make their money,
they are slavers.
I mean, it's not really romantic.
That's what they do.
They sell other things, as well,
but they're slavers.
And so when they go from the north to the south,
they are enslaving people
as they go down and they're trading.
Now, I probably told you this already,
but the Vikings, although they were marvelous seamen,
could not actually deal with the rapids.
I told you this, right?
They couldn't actually deal with the rapids
of the Dnipro.
So how did they pass them?
They made the slaves carry the boats.
And at their places where they failed
to ride the rapids,
they left runic markers of the Vikings who died,
some of which we still have, right?
The first people who could actually deal, to my knowledge,
with the rapids are the Kazakhs,
who we're gonna get to.
Don't worry, we'll get to them six
or seven centuries down the line.
Okay.
So we have many of the pieces here.
We have the Franks, we have the Byzantines
and we have the Vikings, who have to do
with both the Franks and the Byzantines.
What we also need
are the other Slavic states.
So, as I said before, every state is gonna tell
a story about how it emerged from nothing, right?
It emerged from nothing.
Our people came from a mysterious place over the sea.
You know, there was a city on a hill, whatever.
Like, our people came from nothing.
That's how it always starts.
There's a blank slate.
There were our people. It's wonderful.
In fact, there's always a tremendous amount
of copying, which is very awkward
for the national legends,
but very important for history.
So the state that emerges in Kyiv
could not have come into existence.
Again, we're talking about possibility, not necessity.
Could not have come into existence
without Moravia and without Bulgaria.
Okay. What's Moravia?
Moravia is so hugely important
because Moravia was the first Slavic state.
It's the first one we know about.
Early 9th century.
The first mention of it is in 822.
Quite a long time ago.
Moravia is where the Czech Republic is now, roughly.
And it was heavily under the influence
of the Franks.
To make a long story short,
and I've mentioned this before,
Moravia sets up the classic geopolitical situation,
which is, okay, you're a little Slavic state.
You have to be Christian.
Why do you have to be Christian?
Because you need to be recognized, right?
If Islam had come further north.
And remember, of like from the point of view of 822,
this almost happened, right?
If Islam had come further north,
then you could be recognized by Muslim states,
and that would also have worked,
but that just barely didn't happen.
And because it just barely didn't happen,
the states you wanna be recognized are the ones
that are around you, namely the Christian states,
namely the Franks.
Okay.
The Moravians are heavily under the influence
of the Franks.
Their ruler, who's a man called Rostislav,
Rostislav does the natural thing,
which is he sends an embassy to Byzantium.
By the way, it's only very recently
that embassies are buildings.
It used to be that embassies were people
who were sent with missions,
with diplomatic missions.
So they sent an embassy to Byzantium.
Why? To balance.
And this is the story everywhere.
Maybe you have to be Christian,
but you wanna get the best deal possible, right?
If you didn't wanna get the best deal possible,
you would be a terrible ruler of your people.
You'd be a terrible power calculator.
And it's this conjuncture, this rivalry
between the Franks and the Byzantines
in Moravia, which generates the mission
of those two gentlemen who we mentioned before, namely.
What was their names again?
- Cyril and Methodius. - Cyril and Methodius.
Right, Cyril and Methodius.
So Cyril and Methodius are Slavs, probably,
and they are Slavs who create
a written language for other Slavs.
That is another huge breakthrough
and also an act of human creativity, right?
It's an act of human creativity,
the importance of which lasts right down
to the present day.
If they had made it up differently,
any little thing they had done differently
would have meant an entirely different cultural history
for all of our region, right?
At this point, these two men
are the ones who lay it down.
Now, they're laying it down for a purpose.
They're translating parts of the Bible.
They're missionaries.
There's a distinct reason why they're doing
what they're doing,
but they're the ones who lay down
a Slavic written language,
which we now call Church Slavonic
or Old Church Slavonic.
They're the ones who make, in principle,
the Bible accessible
for a much larger group of people.
Okay, so this mission
to Moravia fails,
as missions will,
but it has two long-term consequences,
which I want you to note.
The first consequence of its failure is Poland.
So this is not a course in Polish history,
but as it will become clear over time,
you can't really do Ukraine without Poland.
And a very important thing to know about Poland
is that it is a Western Christian country.
So why is Poland a Western Christian country?
It's a Western Christian country
because of the Czechs,
because the Czechs got there first.
The Czechs were a Western Christian country.
In Poland, just like in other Eastern European countries,
there is Old Church Slavonic.
There is a Polish declension
of Old Church Slavonic.
It was not fated that Poland was gonna
be a Western Christian country,
but it became one
when a Polish ruler married a Czech
who was already a Christian,
and that leads to conversion.
So that's a consequence of the failure in Moravia.
So the Czechs, but also the Poles,
are Western Christians, and they still are, right?
That's the way it's gonna be.
The other consequence of this failure
is that the followers of Cyril and Methodius
have to run, as one does.
They and their students
end up in Bulgaria.
And it's in Bulgaria
where the Glagolitic script,
which Cyril and Methodius invented,
was shifted over to a Cyrillic script,
which is much easier to read
and which is basically the alphabet
that, you know, a bunch of people in this room
were educated to learn when they were in kindergarten,
with some minor changes.
So by the time Cyrillic script was created,
which is around the year 893,
we now have an availability
of an alphabet and a language
for other states.
The most important one of these states is Bulgaria.
Again, Bulgaria, not our subject.
I couldn't personally do a whole semester on Bulgaria,
but one could do a whole semester on Bulgaria.
It's a fascinating place.
Who were the Bulgars?
I know that when you woke up this morning,
you were thinking,
I hope Professor Snyder gets to this question
of who were the Bulgars.
I know this has been troubling you.
And it is authentically confusing.
The Bulgars are a Turkic people,
some of whom stayed in what's now
kind of south-central Russia
and converted to Islam.
So there are Turkic people
who stay in Russia, become Muslim.
And just, if we were doing the history of Russia,
and we'll do a little history of Russia,
this is very important.
A lotta the territory of Russia is inhabited
by people who are Muslim.
When I was in Ukraine last week,
I was talking to a woman who had,
in Chernihiv oblast, who had five Russian soldiers
in her basement.
And, of course, none of them were from European Russia.
And two of them, I think, were Muslims.
That's Russia, right?
Russia has been a Muslim country
from the get-go, among other things.
But some of the Bulgars, okay,
some of the Bulgars migrate
and come to dominate part of the Balkans.
And they seem to convert to Christianity
around the year 865.
And that's the prehistory of the Bulgarian nation
that we know and love today.
And the Bulgarian found a state
which is Orthodox,
Eastern Christian, that is,
but which is in rivalry with Byzantium.
And that's a very important model, right?
That you can be Orthodox and Christian,
but not be actually part
of the Byzantine Empire.
That's a model of statehood.
Very important, right?
The Bulgarian get there first.
And part of the way they get there
is that they use the legacy of Cyril and Methodius.
They use Old Church Slavonic.
They develop, you know, a slightly national version
of Eastern Christianity,
but they're also creating a model of statehood.
Okay, by the way,
you've probably been wondering like, you know,
the Russian president's name is Vladimir,
and the Ukrainian president's name is Volodymyr.
So like is Volodymyr a Ukrainian name
or is it a Russian name?
It's a Bulgarian name. (laughs)
It's a Bulgarian name.
The Volodymyr who's gonna convert to Christianity
at the end of this lecture,
his name was actually a Bulgarian name.
It's a cultural borrowing from Bulgaria.
Copying is really important.
It's much more important than we think.
Okay, this brings us to the special case
that we're gonna land on,
which is the case of the Rus'.
And when we talk about the Rus'
and the creation of Kyivan Rus',
we need to now know who the local competitors
for power are.
The local competitors for power
in the 8th, 9th and 10th century here
are the Rus', who we've talked about a little bit,
these Scandinavian slavers who come down
from the Baltic Sea, and the Khazars.
The Khazars are already present,
and the Rus' are on their way down.
So let's talk first about the Rus',
and then let's talk about the Khazars.
Okay, so some of you have asked me about names,
and it is very, I mean,
names are very powerful.
What we name things does have a certain power,
and there's a tendency to say
what something is named now,
it must reveal something essential about it.
And, you know, we all have names
and like we're called by our names,
and it runs very deep.
But one has to be a little careful about this.
So like America is called America,
but we're not all Italian mapmakers
and so on and so on and so on, right?
But we still unproblematically call ourselves America.
