Class 5: Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State (3) Klasse 5: Wikinger, Sklavenhändler, Gesetzgeber: Der Kiewer Staat (3) Clase 5: Vikingos, esclavistas, legisladores: El Estado de Kiev (3) Classe 5 : Vikings, esclavagistes, législateurs : L'État de Kiev (3) Klasse 5: Vikingen, slaven, wetgevers: De Kyivische staat (3) Aula 5: Vikings, esclavagistas, legisladores: O Estado de Kiev (3) Занятие 5: Викинги, рабовладельцы, законники: Киевское государство (3) Sınıf 5: Vikingler, Köleciler, Kanun Koyucular: Kiev Devleti (3) Заняття 5: Вікінги, слов'яни, законодавці: Київська держава (3) 第 5 类：维京人、奴隶主、立法者：基辅国家 (3) 第 5 類：維京人、奴隸主、立法者：基輔國家 (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 ||central location||||

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. |working hard||||

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, |||||a lot of|||

the Franks, the Byzantines, Vikings. |||Eastern Romans|

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, ||||||wunderbar|Seefahrer |||||||sailors

could not actually deal with the rapids. konnte|||umgehen|||Stromschnellen ||||||fast-moving water

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, ||runeartig|||||| ||Viking|symbols|||||

some of which we still have, right?

The first people who could actually deal, to my knowledge,

with the rapids are the Kazakhs, |||||Kasachen |||||Kazak people

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. |||blank surface

There were our people. It's wonderful.

In fact, there's always a tremendous amount

of copying, which is very awkward |||||clumsy

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 |||extremely|

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. ||||||||approximately located

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, |||||funktioniert

but that just barely didn't happen. |dass||gerade noch||

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. |diplomatic missions||

It used to be that embassies were people Es|||||||

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 |||Konjunktur||Rivalität |||situation||competition

between the Franks and the Byzantines |||||Byzantine Empire

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 ||||advancement

and also an act of human creativity, right?

It's an act of human creativity, ||||menschlicher|

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. |Missionare

There's a distinct reason why they're doing ||clear||||

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, ||is unsuccessful

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 |||polnisch|Beugung ||||Polish declension

of Old Church Slavonic.

It was not fated that Poland was gonna |||bestimmt||||

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. |||result|||||

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 ||result|||

is that the followers of Cyril and Methodius

have to run, as one does. muss|zu||||

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 |||||first letter

that, you know, a bunch of people in this room

were educated to learn when they were in kindergarten, ||||||||preschool education

with some minor changes.

So by the time Cyrillic script was created,

which is around the year 893,

we now have an availability ||||open slot

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? ||die|Bulgaren

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. |||authentisch|

The Bulgars are a Turkic people, ||||türkisch|

some of whom stayed in what's now ||who||||

kind of south-central Russia

and converted to Islam.

So there are Turkic people

who stay in Russia, become Muslim. ||||werden|

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 ||||hatten|||

in her basement. ||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. von Anfang an||||||

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 |||Vorgeschichte||||

that we know and love today.

And the Bulgarian found a state

which is Orthodox, ||orthodoxe, orthodoxer, orthodoxes

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. ||of the Byzantine|

That's a model of statehood. ||Vorbild|| ||||national governance

Very important, right?

The Bulgarian get there first. Die|Bulgarisch|||

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. |||influence||

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. ||Russen|||||

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. ||läuft||sehr tief

But one has to be a little careful about this.

So like America is called America,

but we're not all Italian mapmakers |||||cartographers

and so on and so on and so on, right?

But we still unproblematically call ourselves America.