Class 5: Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State (4)
Rossiya, Russia is called Russia
as a reference to Rus',
but Rus' is itself the name of a Scandinavian,
probably a Scandinavian trading company.
In any event, a group of Vikings.
So, and the reason they were called Rus',
no one is quite sure.
It's close to a Finnish word
which means rudder.
So our best guess is that modern Russia
is named after an old Finnish word
for our rudder, right?
But that doesn't mean that the Russians
are actually medieval Finnish rudders.
So the name that something has now
and like working it back
doesn't actually have any magical quality, right?
So, you know, why Belarus is called Belarus,
or Ukraine is called Ukraine, is interesting,
but it doesn't necessarily reveal anything essential
about the country.
Okay.
Right.
So that's the Rus'.
So what do we know about them?
As I said, they're seeking a trade route south.
The first mention we have of them
in our part of the world
is in the 840s, 850s, 860s.
They're mentioned as Scandinavians
engaged in the slave trade
in order to gain silver.
As I mentioned before, we have these silver hoards,
which is part of the evidence
for what they were doing.
They are still nomads, right?
They're marine nomads.
They move mainly by sea, but they're nomads.
And one of the big underlying transitions here,
I've emphasized it in terms of slavery
versus peasantry, right?
But another way to think about this
is nomadism versus settlement.
When the people in power are still moving,
that's one situation.
When the people in power settle
and build cities, or take over someone else's cities,
that's a different situation.
So what the Vikings did
was they overwhelmed sedentary civilizations.
They took cities.
They negotiated trade terms, which is what you do.
That's just normal.
What's special is that they end up settling in Kyiv,
and that's when we get a state,
and I'll talk about that.
So as I mentioned, they tried
to go down the Volga River,
which is in the middle of Russia.
They were blocked by the Bulgars,
the Muslim Bulgars.
And then they went down the Dnipro.
And went down the Dnipro,
then we're setting up the history where we are.
The people who dominated Kyiv and Ukraine
at the time were the Khazars.
The Khazars are tough to figure out.
We have no written documents at all
that are directly from their state.
It was a multiethnic and multi-confessional realm,
which had some Christians and some Jews
and some Muslims in it, but also had lots
of non-monotheistic believers
in it as well.
The Khazars came to an end in a way
which is also incredibly confusing.
There was rivalry among the various monotheisms
about which monotheism they all converted to.
And it's actually not clear they converted to any of them.
There's a beautiful novel, though,
about this called "The Dictionary of the Khazars"
by a Croatian writer called Pavic,
which I don't know if you like read
"Choose Your Own Adventure" stories as a kid,
but it's like, it's a novel,
which is set up as three dictionaries,
a Christian, a Jewish
and a Muslim, where you kind of choose
like in what order you read it.
It's very beautiful.
But it gets across the kind of lack of narrative
that we actually have about the Khazars.
We have very little.
Oh, Cyril visited them.
That's interesting,
Cyril, our same Cyril who went to Moravia,
also visited Khazaria in 860,
in order to try to spread Christianity.
So we know that they weakened
and we know that they faded into,
married into the Rus' in some way.
We know this partly because of language.
When the Rus' settle down and start
to try to rule Kyiv,
they called their leader a khagan,
and that's a Turkic word, right?
That's a word that they got from the Khazars.
Their ruler is first called a khagan.
Okay.
So the Rus' are settling into Kyiv,
late 800s, early 900s.
We know they dominate Podil.
That's the part of Kyiv from which you would trade.
We know they dominate, they control Kyiv
by about the year 900.
They're basically taking over what the Khazars left them.
They're taking tribute from the people
who used to be paying the Khazars tribute.
That's a sign of who's in charge
that historians can follow pretty well,
is who's getting the tribute, right?
Who can make other people regularly pay money.
By 911, a ruler of the Rus', called Oleg,
is signing a treaty with Byzantium, right?
They're reaching Byzantium, but not with violence.
They're now reaching Byzantium with diplomacy.
But you can tell that they're still,
they're not just traders.
They're people who are feared.
A provision of this treaty with Byzantium
is that the Rus' are only allowed to go through
one gate of the city, a specified gate,
and they can't come in more than 50 at a time, right?
So there's a sense that perhaps these people,
you know, might cause a certain amount of trouble
if you just let them come in in large numbers.
Okay.
To put this back into perspective,
we're getting towards the year 1000.
I'm gonna deliver the promised conversion
of Volodymyr before this is all over.
But I want you to notice that in this time
in the 900s, the 10th century,
this is the time of a lot of other conversions as well.
This is the time
when the Vikings in Scandinavia
are starting to move towards establishing
the Danish and the Swedish and the Norwegian states,
which are also associated
with Christian conversions.
The 10th century is a time
when the Vikings are settling down
and founding states everywhere,
including in continental Europe.
So in 911, the same year of this treaty,
is when Charles the Simple of France
grants Duke Rollo, who's a descendant
of the Vikings, Normandy.
Normandy being Northern France.
Normandy also being the launching point
for the Normans, who then control Great Britain.
So this is a time of Viking conversion,
a time of Viking state creation.
Our story is special because it's taking place
amidst different kinds of people,
amidst the Khazars.
It's taking place with different kinds of models,
the Slavic models.
And fundamentally, because it's taking place
at a time when there was a choice
between two different versions of Christianity.
The first time. Okay.
When you convert.
The story always goes, you convert.
You believe it.
All of your people convert.
It's like everything (snaps fingers) changes all at once.
That's not how it happens.
Olga, who rules from 945 to 962,
does convert, but her kids don't convert
and her grandchildren don't convert,
and her people don't really convert.
She converts to Eastern Christianity,
but then she asks for some German missionaries
to come a couple of years later.
Her son, Sviatoslav, which is a great name,
still borne by many lovable people.
Sviatoslav rules from 962 to 972.
He's a pagan.
Her kid is a pagan.
We have few sources about why,
but I really like one of them,
where he basically says,
he's asked why he can't convert to Christianity,
and he says, "Well, like my crew
"would all make fun of me." (laughs)
(students laugh)
And that is kind of what Sviatoslav did.
He, in the 960s,
he seems to have destroyed the remnants
of the Khazar state.
And then in the late 960s, early 970s,
he campaigned in the Balkans
to try to gain control of the Balkans, and failed.
When he was leaving,
this is one of the reasons we know he was a pagan,
in 971, he invoked
two Slavic pagan gods, Perun,
who's the god of thunder, and Veles,
who is the god of the earth and of the harvest.
And by the way, in the Slavic mythology,
which is kind of like the Scandinavians
are clearly influencing it.
But in the Slavic mythology, Perun and Veles
are in this kind of embrace,
where you explain the change of the seasons
by battles between the sky,
which is Perun, and the earth, which is Veles.
It's actually kind of beautiful. Okay.
So in 972, on his way back,
Sviatoslav is killed
on the Dnipro by Pechenegs,
who make a cup from his skull,
as one did in the time and place.
So that leaves us open.
There's then a very complicated succession struggle,
at the end of which
the person who comes to power is Volodymyr,
who's remembered as Volodymyr the Great,
who is the person who actually converts.
So I'm gonna read you the passage
from a primary source, which is the "Primary Chronicle."
It's from about 100 years later.
The story goes like this.
This is after the fact.
It's 100 years after the fact.
So just think about, I mean,
how reliable a source 100 years after the fact
is generally going to be.
It sketches things out in a way
that makes them seem plausible,
but it's kind of more revealing
about how things look in retrospect,
but it's still fun to read.
Okay.
So this is about how you make a choice for Christianity,
and it aestheticizes it and makes it all very clear.
The Bulgars, means the Muslims, right?
The Bulgars bow down and sit
and look hither and dither,
and there is no joy among them,
but only a dreadful stench.
Their religion is not good.
Then we went to the Germans,
the Western Christians, the Franks.
Then we went to the Germans, and we saw them
celebrating many services in their churches,
but we saw no beauty there, right?
Eternal complaint about Germans and their churches.
Then we went to the Greeks, the Byzantines.
Then we went to the Greeks,
and they led us to the place where they worship God,
and we knew not whether we were on heaven or Earth, right?
So it's all very clear.
It's all very aestheticized.
But having gotten this far in the class,
you know that it has to do with other things.
It's gonna have to do with power.
It's gonna have to do with the choices
of a particular ruler.
Volodymyr himself, no particular religious preferences.
Maybe flirted with Islam at one stage in his life.
Certainly tolerant of, encouraging of pagan worship
in Kyiv when he took power in Kyiv in 980.
We know that Perun, the god of thunder, was worshiped.
What he had was an opportunity,
and he took it.
The great power in the south,
the Byzantines, were in internal turmoil.
There was a rebel who sought to take power
from the Byzantine emperor,
and Volodymyr threw the power of Rus'
on the side of the Byzantine emperor
and helped to win, helped the Byzantine emperor
to preserve power in a campaign in,
you guessed it, Crimea.
So Volodymyr, having done this, then says,
"I would now like to marry
"the sister of the emperor,"
which is a big ask, but the circumstances
were what they were.
And the Byzantines answered, not surprisingly,
"Yes, but there's a little proviso,
"which is that you must convert to Christianity," okay?
It's a little power play,
the Rus' helped the Byzantine ruler,
but then there's the larger power play,
which is happening all over Eastern Europe,
which is that one or the other of these large states
is eventually gonna get you to convert
to its version of Christianity.
This time, the conversion sticks.
There's a permanent link now
between Byzantium and Rus'.
Rus' soldiers remain in Constantinople
as an imperial guard.
The Byzantine emperor
sends Greek-speaking churchman to Kyiv.
Churches are built, most famously Saint Sophia,
which still stands in the center of Kyiv,
in all of its beauty.
Volodymyr ensures that the population of Kyiv converts.
Idols and temples that he himself had raised,
or allowed to be built, he destroys,
has thrown into the river.
And as a result,
Rus' becomes part of the Byzantine world,
and in a couple of ways,
part of the classical world.
