From the eighth to tenth centuries there were only two types of trading settlements in Eurasia: in the East there was the "var;" in the West there was a permanent or semipermanent trading place for traveling merchants called in Germanic "vik." The frontier between the "var" and "vik" types of settlements was the river Elbe.
In both types there were local or foreign workers who served the merchants as guards, mercenaries, shoppers, etc. . . To the west of the Elbe these people were called "vikings." To the east of the Elbe, they were known as "varjag" [varangians]. . . . It is futile to attempt to establish the nationality of the "vikings" and the "varjag." They were, above all, professionals ready to serve anyone who needed their skills and could pay for their services.
III. Eastern Europe Enters the Historical Scene (Ninth Century): Emergence of Rus.
Eastern Europe entered the historical scene, i.e., the era for which written records exist, in the ninth century as a result of its discovery by the civilization of the Mediterranean Sea, which created there its colonial "duplication," the economic-cultural sphere of the Mediterranean. One may ask the legitimate question: why did this occur in the ninth century and not in the fifth or twelfth? What incentive stimulated the culture of the Mediterranean to discover Eastern Europe shortly before the ninth century?
The emergence of the Arab Muslim empire around 650 had split the Mediterranean area into two independent parts, the Muslim southern and eastern littoral, and the Christian northern shore. . . . By 740 the Arabs had already conquered all the territory they could control. In the north, they had gone as far as Frankish Gaul, but Tours and Poitiers convinced them that the Pyrenees were a reasonable frontier. . . .
By 740 booty was no longer being captured, and it became imperative to exchange the war economy for a system of production. . . . The Abbasside government then confronted a problem that is familiar to all of us today--that of energy generation. Until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the only profitable source of energy was slave labor. But where was one to get slaves at that time? Neither Muslims nor Christians were permitted by their religion to enslave their own believers. Wars waged between the Christians and Muslims produced prisoners of war whom both sides sought to exchange. But there was a vast territory beyond the cultural world of that time, east of the Elbe River and west and north of the Syr Darya River. This teritory was soon recognized as a reservoir of potential slaves, who were the "sclav." The idea of slave trade may be repugnant to us today, but we should not forget that in the Middle Ages, as in the days of the Roman Empire, slaves were regarded as an important commodity. The importation of slaves was a highly respected profession, requiring experience, expediency, and proficiency.
The territory called "Sclavia" now became (as did Africa from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) a hunting ground from which one could obtain the important commodity called "sclava," or slaves. Arabic geographers during the classic period of Islamic science give a detailed description of how hunters from the Christian West and the Islamic East pursued their trade. Special factories whose purpose was the production of eunuchs were established in Verdun in the west and in Khwarizm in the east.
The ninth-century Arabic author Ibn Khurdadhbeh, who as the chief of the Abbasside intelligence system had expert knowledge of trade routes and trading companies visiting the Caliphate, informs us that only two international trading companies engaged in the Eurasian slave trade: the Jewish "Radhaniya" and the non-Jewish "Rus. . . ." Iban Khurdadhbeh's information, written sometime between 840 and 880, is the earliest mention of the "Rus" in existing sources.
Now we are faced with an unexpected phenomenon. The "Rus" who had just emerged from obscurity, were already skilled international merchants. Who were these "Rus"? There were certainly not a primitaive tribal group with no knowledge of geography, foreign languages, or economics. They must have possessed an idea of the law of the merchant and--a very important point--they must have attained creditability in the world of commerce. . . .
The Radhaniya and the Rus were both based in Roman Gaul, the Radhaniya around Arles and Marseille, and the Rus in a region of present-day south-central France near Rodez ("Rusi" in Middle French, and "Ruzzi" in Middle German).
The Radhaniya discovered Eastern Europe as a commercial base shortly after 750. . . . It is clear why the Radhaniya were the first traders to enter Eastern Europe. With the division of the Mediterranean area about 660, neither Muslims nor Christians could travel and trade freely on the sea, since they were in a continuous state of war. Only former Roman subjects who were of Jewish faith could travel without danger from Marseille to North Africa and from there to Constantinople. Their destination was the capital of the Turkic Khazars [in south Russia] where it was easy to get slaves. The Volga and Don rivers soon developed into a highway of slave trade. . . As a result of the cooperation between the Radhaniya and the Khazars, the military and economic leaders of the Khazar state converted to Judaism. . . .
In the meantime, the non-Jewish merchants from Rodez (Rus) had determined to seek access to this eastern El Dorado. Since they could not use the Mediterranean route, they (like Christopher Columbus at a later date) decided to circumnavigate. . . .
The Scandinavian peninsula was soon circumnavigatted and . . . a route was discovered . . . on the Gulf of Finland to the Neva River. Both routes continued to the Volga basin. New routes to El Dorado followed, and along these the trading company "Rus" established settlements. The most important was located on the peninsula near Jaroslavl and the later Rostov, originally populated by the Fennic Merjans. It was managed by the charismatic Viking clan of Ynglingar. . . .
By the period 800-860 Eastern Europe had already been apportioned into two spheres of interests. While the south remained divided between Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars, northeastern Europe became the dominion of a newly activated society led by agents of the "Rus" company.
Unhappily, no accounts of peoples who followed the routes established by the Rus-Viking cooperation have survived. But there is no reason to doubt that enterprising individuals and groups of seafaring people tried their luck in East European trade, regardless of their origin or ties to the aforementioned trading companies. . . . The Rus appear as international merchants. . . .
The Kabar revolution in Khazaria, described by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was the struggle of the Khagan [Khazar monarch] and his supporters to free the realm from the supremacy of the majordomo and the Judaism he imposed. After his defeat the Khazar Khagan was forced to leave the country and found refuge in the Rus company's settlement near Rostov. . . . Since the Khagan had political charisma, his stay in the commercial settlement of the Rus company elevated it to the status of an imperial political center . . . . The result was the emergence of the Rus Khaganate, about which our first information is dated 839 A.D. . . . . Already during the 830s the Volga Rus were to eliminate the Radhaniya from competition in Eastern Europe.
IV. The Southern Impact on the Emerging Rus State
Up to this point we have observed the East European scene primarily from a northern perspective . . . . By the turn of the tenth century, however, two sets of developments had occurred in the Mediterranian area which affected [events], namely Charlemagne's conquest of the Avars and the Cyrillo-Methodian mission.
The first began with Charlemagne's conquest of the mighty East Central European Avar realm which resulted in . . . the "pacification" of the Slavs, the slaves of the former Avar empire. . . . By the 860s both Romes (even though they were on nonspeaking terms--I refer here to the alienation between Patriarch Photius and Pope Nicholas) decided to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Avar realm by elevating the former slaves of the Avars, the Slavs. Their barbaric tongue was now to become a sacred language alongside Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Since at that time only Constantinople had scholars who could create a new literary language and eventually translate Christian religious writing, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, friends of Photius, journeyed from the eastern capital of Christendom to Moravia, located on territory claimed by the Roman pope.
The paradox of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission was that the Moravian princes failed to take advantage of the extremely important cultural weapon they were offered. Having adopted Christianity [offered by the Greeks] they were angered to realize that they had chosen the wrong rite. The Moravians banished the Slavic missionaries and exchanged their "inferior" rite for the Latin faith. . . . .
The second half of the ninth century was also to be of basic importance for Eastern Europe, for during that time Kiev and the area of the present-day Ukraine entered the realm of history. The impetus for this development was the emergence of Constantinople as the economic capital of Eurasia. . . . Naturally, Constantinople then won the attention of the "vikings," the only society in Eurasia apart from Byzantium and the Arabs which maintained naval fleets during the ninth and tenth centuries. . . .
Soon after the Rus military encounter in Constantinople in 860, the famous "Route from the Varangians to the Greeks" came into being. The Dnieper River replaced the Volga, and Kiev, the former Khazarian garrison point on the Dnieper ford, emerged in the second hlaf of the tenth century as a promising satellite of the new economic capital of the world, Constantinople. Around 930, Igor of the Volga Rus Khagan dynasty conquered Kiev.
There are at least three periods in the history of the Khagans of Rus: the Volga stage (c. 839-930), the Dnieper stage (c. 930-1036), and the Kievan stage (1036-1169). During the first two, the Rus ruled over peoples rather than specific territories. They eliminated competitors when necessary, extracted tributes, and controlled the . . . trade routes. . . . The third, or Kievan stage marked the beginning of the cultural consolidation of Rus and an attempt at their nationalization. During the first two, the Rus' ruled over peoples rather than specific territories. They eliminated competitors when necessary, extracted tributes, and controlled the marketplaces along the following two main international routes: 1) the Volga and Dvina trade routes, important during the ninth and the first half of the tenth centuryies, with their two branches of Islamic-centered commerce, the Bulgar and the Itil; and 2) the Dnieper trade route of the tenth century from the Varangians through Kiev to Greek Constantinople, then the center of international economy. The third, or Kievan stage marked the beginning of the cultural consolidation of Rus' and an attempt at their nationalization.
After 1036 the Kievan ruler Yaroslav routed the Pechenegs and established his own version of the Roman empire, centered now at St. Sophia at Kiev. He adopted Church Slavonic [which had been abandoned by European Slavs] as the realm's sacred language.
Yaroslav also began the transformation of Rus' into a territorial community consisting of the lands of Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereiaslavl. The terms "Rus" and "Russkaia zemlia" (Rus land) then appeared in the second half of the eleventh century and beginning of the twelfth century with the new specific meaning of Southern Rus' (the Ukraine of today). Only now, during this time, did a cultural revolution take place. Transformed from a multiethnic, multilingual, and nonterritorial community with a "low" culture, Kievan Rus' was endowed with a new "high" culture based on a foreign, written, and sanctified Slavic language (traditionally known as Church Slavonic) and as a result appeared on the stage of East European history . . . Up to that time the Rus' were only the foreign ruling class based on a primitive organization of [transient merchants] who periodically collected taxes for their prince but were not connected with any territory. . . . SOURCE:The Origin of "Rus"
by Omeljan Pritsak
The Russian Review (July 1977), 249-273 (abridged).
Re: [Preview] The Kievan Rus' Khaganate
Originally Posted by SHREDDER
what is this nonsense? You know a little history? Kievan Rus was never "Khaganate"!
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