Russia

Yet this same fierce, empowered Olga is now revered as a saint, for she became a Christian as well as an historical figure of the first importance. ⁹Her conversion was prompted by political calculation as well as by spiritual yearning, however. She proved a good and energetic organizer, doing away with the anarchic, ad-hoc, ways of raising taxes which had provoked the Derevlians. She regularized the amount of tribute to be paid — whether in honey, furs or feathers — and journeyed extensively along the main tributaries of the Dnieper, seeing that her order was imposed on the inhabitants. She also visited Novgorod, where she set up an administrative centre. Her reforms have been represented as marking a transition from the ways of a robber economy to a regime based on norms. If so, they were a significant contribution to state-building. ¹⁰

The Viking elite were fast losing their Nordic identity as they intermarried with their Rus tributaries. In any case, they were too few to build a state alone. They needed local knowledge and men to organize an economy, to gather in food and marketable goods like honey, furs and slaves on a systematic basis. The indigenous chiefs organized the provision of these things for them. But, just as the Vikings needed the chiefs, the chiefs needed them — for their military prowess and their knowledge of the wider world. The first Russian state was founded on the interdependence of a group of sea-going colonizers and tribes of Slavonic-speakers who used the rivers as avenues for colonization. Intermarriage cemented the alliance and extended the ruling family. At the same time the Scandinavian element was fast being absorbed linguistically and culturally into the Slavonic-speaking mass, though characteristic Scandinavian burial mounds have been found in central Russia from up to a century after Vikings and Slavs established their alliance. ¹¹

In 941 Prince Igor, son of Olga, mounted another large-scale raid on Constantinople. Only this time the previous successes were not to be repeated. The imperial forces were prepared, and were able to exploit their superior technology — ships equipped with rams, grappling chains and a devastating secret weapon known as ‘Greek fire’, an incendiary device containing naphtha, one form of which ignited on contact with water. Scholars do not yet know how it was launched, but it could be extremely effective. Invented in the late 600s, Greek fire had helped save much of the Empire from the Arabs. Had the Emperor been able to deploy it in 860 or against Oleg in 907, the city might have been spared the depredations of the Viking-led Russians. Presumably sheer surprise or unfavourable weather or water conditions prevented its use. But now the weapon was deployed with devastating effect. A graphic account written by a Western envoy about a century afterwards reflects the memory of the great victory:

Having become surrounded by the Rus’, the Greeks [that is, the subjects of the Emperor] hurled their fire all around them. When the Rus’ saw this, they at once threw themselves from their ships into the sea, choosing to be drowned by the waves rather than cremated by the fire. Some, weighed down by their breastplates and helmets … sank to the bottom … Others were burned as they swam on the waves.

No one could escape except by sailing into the shallow inshore waters where the deep-draughted imperial ships could not follow. ¹²

An apparently earlier source, a Viking saga, records the same traumatic event from the raiders’ point of view, and with some convincing detail. It tells, for example, of a brass tube from which a great spark flew to reduce one of the ships of its pagan hero Yngvar to ashes within seconds. This story, however, was to be changed under Christian influence to put Yngvar on the right side and cast the Emperor as a villainous creature. In this version Greek fire assumes the form of Jakulus, a terrifying flying dragon which spits venom, to which Yngvar has an antidote: arrows bearing ‘consecrated flame’. ¹³

Byzantine diplomats eventually persuaded Igor/Yngvar and the Rus that they could gain more from negotiation and trade than from naked force. Certainly, by the time the Emperor Constantine VII wrote his account of the Russians in the middle of the tenth century a regular commercial relationship had been established between them. Cargoes of slaves would be brought in for sale in Constantinople’s market, and, once their summer’s venturing was over, the Russian traders would return to Kiev until November, when they would disperse in various directions upstream to the regions they had come from.