In Our Time - The Volga Vikings

Episode Date: November 11, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Volga Vikings. Between the 8th and the 10th centuries AD, fierce Scandinavian warriors raided and then settled large swathes of Europe, particularly Britain, Ireland and parts of northern France. These were the Vikings, and their story is well known today. Far fewer people realise that groups of Norsemen also travelled east.These Volga Vikings, also known as the Rus, crossed the Baltic into present-day Russia and the Ukraine and founded settlements there. They traded commodities including furs and slaves for Islamic silver, and penetrated so far east as to reach Baghdad. Their activities were documented by Arab scholars: one, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, recorded that the Volga Vikings he met were perfect physical specimens but also "the filthiest of God's creatures". Through trade and culture they brought West and East into regular contact; their story sheds light on both Scandinavian and early Islamic history.With:James MontgomeryProfessor of Classical Arabic at the University of CambridgeNeil PriceProfessor of Archaeology at the University of AberdeenElizabeth RoweLecturer in Scandinavian History of the Viking Age at Clare Hall, University of CambridgeProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 793, the Northumbrian Christian Island Monastery of Lindisfarne was raided and destroyed by a group of warriors who arrived in amazing boats from Scandinavia. They are the Vikings we know,

and in the three centuries that followed, they plundered and then settled large swathes of Europe, particularly Britain, Ireland and northern France. The Viking invasions are still a subject of fascination to many of us today, but fewer people know that the Norsemen also travelled thousands of miles east of their homelands to modern-day Russia and beyond. Between the 8th and 11th centuries they traded commodities, including silver, furs, honey and slaves with the peoples of Central Asia,

and penetrated as far as Baghdad and even Mongolia. There's a searing eyewitness account of a traditional Viking ship burial written by an Arab scholar. Russia may even have been named after these Scandinavian settlers who were also known as the Rus, and because they used the continent's major river system as trading routes, some scholars have dubbed them Volga Vikings. With me to discuss the Volga Vikings are James Montgomery,

Professor of Classical Arabic at the University of Cambridge, Neil Price, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen and Elizabeth Row lecturer in Scandinavian History of the Viking Age at the University of Cambridge. James Montgomery, can you give us some idea of the... so-called Volga Vikings where they came from and how do they travel? And we talked about the 8th century. The Volga Vikings

originate from the eastern seaboard of Sweden. Most of them were channeled through the trading centre of Birka, which is on the shores of Lake Meleran. They would travel across the Baltic into the Gulf of Finland, follow the Gulf of Finland to the point of then entering the northern Russian forest zone. They would take the river, Volkov is their primary route and make their way down south along that river.

By about 750, they seem to have established a trading outpost at Strayaladoga, which is near Smolensk. There's evidence of a mixed population there of Finns, Slavs and Scandinavians. And by the end of the 8th century, they have proceeded much further south into the major riverine arteries. the Don, the Dnieper and the Volga. What sort of numbers are we talking about, James? I think for that century, for the 8th century, we're talking about very small numbers. We're not talking about an invasion.

We're not talking about a colonisation program. Talking about small numbers of traders who are exploring this part of the world. Big interest in amber, for example, from the Baltic coast. they certainly don't seem to have settled in any large numbers by the 8th century. Most of them appear to have returned home. But there are pockets which begin towards the end of the 790s or so of settlements. So for that first century, we're really talking about a combination of trading and exploration.

Given that they were taking stuff, they must have had a lot of space or a lot of boats, which? Well, there's one theory that says that they come in big boats up to the Volga and then transfer to smaller boats. That some of the goods that they are conveying in the 9th century, particularly when they come into contact with silver from the Islamic Empire, obviously they require boats with enormous draughtage and would require some considerable scale. But I think for this stage we're talking about probably coastal exploration along the Baltic via Gotland, which was a sort of island in the Baltic Sea, along the Gulf of Finland, and then tentatively down the river Volhoff in Russia. And that develops later.

But before we move on, can you just give us a brisk overview of the evidence available for this? Because we're talking about what we like to call the Dark Ages. But there seems to be quite a lot of evidence. here unusually. Yes. For this early century, we're really relying on the archaeologists and we're relying on

the extensive excavations that have been carried out in Ladoga, this early settlement, particularly the cemeteries there. But importantly, we're also relying on the coin finds, the numismatic evidence. And

there has been something in the region of a quarter of a million Islamic silver coins discovered in the Baltic area, including Sweden, not all of them dating from the early 8th century. So in a sense for our period, that still remains something of a dark age. But by the beginning of the 9th century, then the textual evidence begins. And we have evidence in sources in Latin, in Greek, in Arabic, and possibly in Old Slavonic. Elizabeth Throw, most people listening to this program

when I think of the Vikings as coming this way, going to Lindisfan, as I mentioned in the introduction, going to Ireland, coming into Britain, going down the western seaboard and even to the Mediterranean. Can you just give us an idea of what was going on there and how it might contrast with what we're still calling at the moment of the Volga Vikings? Yes, yes indeed.

In the period that James is talking about in the middle of the 8th century, the Viking raids had not yet begun. Instead, the bases that he's referring to in northern Russia are in fact part of a trade network that extends all the way from northern Russia to what is now Southampton in England. Another thing that's interesting about this period is James mentioned the Swedish trading town of Birka. And just at the same time that the first Rus or Scandinavian bases were being established in northern Russia, Birka was being founded itself. if it was not an old town. The previous town there was named Helga and had been run by local aristocrats.

Birka seems to have been a royal establishment. And so what we see at this time in the middle of the 8th century is the replacement of trade being controlled by local chieftains and aristocrats to trade being controlled by kings. And so what we have, can you distinguish them? I'm trying to get a distinction in people's mind, just very swiftly before we move on, of these, you know, plundering and looting and racing across the maram grass Vikings that came down our way and these others?

Is there a distinction to be made? Well, I think it's more... The ones West Coast Vikings, the others from the East Coast, aren't they? It is true. There are two things to remember here. One is that in this period, trade and raid are not diametrically opposites. They are rather two ends of the same spectrum. Trade is voluntary, exchange of goods.

raiding is involuntary, unlimited exchange of goods, but in the middle is the taking of tribute, which is probably involuntary, but it's also limited. And so the ways in which the ruse became so powerful in the east were by a collection of tribute for the most part as well as trading. The Vikings in the West were mostly raiders. So you use the word ruse, and we're going to have to get used to the fact that we've got two names for these. One's the vulgar Vikings, the other is the ruse. Can you tell us one? you use the word ruse and what significance it has? Well, the word ruse probably derives from the place name Roslagan, which refers to the coastal

area of Sweden east of Uppsala. The West Finnish neighbors of the Swedes turned Roslagen into Rwozzi, which became their term for Sweden. And then the Finns-Slavic neighbors in Russia turned Rwotzi into Rus. And so what has happened is that the name for a plozy, which became their term for Sweden, and then the fin's Slavic neighbors in Russia, and then the place has become the name for a people. Can you point a distinction between the Balkan Vikings and the Russe, or are they just interchangeable?

Are we talking about, as it were, synonyms? We're talking about the same people. Ibn Fadlon, in referring to the traders on the Volga, is talking about the Rus. Isn't that so, James? But we're still talking about the same, therefore we still talking about the same group of people. Yes, we are. Somewhere on the East Coast, somewhere on the West Coast, but they're going about business as Vikings. Same sort of boats, same sort of axes, same sort of swords, that sort of thing.

Yes, that's completely true. And indeed, these swords are being provided by Frankish craftsmen and being shipped up to the Baltic, shipped over to Russia, and then down to the Arabs. They found them quite a valuable commodity. It's also important to remember that the path of the Volga River goes up to northern Russia, whereas the Russe eventually formed their center at Kiev on the Tinepra River. And so those are rivers that go in quite different directions. And so the Volga Vikings geographically have an orientation towards the Arab world,

whereas the Rus in Kiev have an orientation towards Byzantium and Constantinople. Neil Price, we've talked about traveling, and they are famous for their boats. They're famous for having got to America, most likely they're famous for. Can you tell us more about the technology they had available to the. them at that time and why it was so effective? In terms of seafaring technology, there's a whole variety of different kinds of vessels. The classic Viking longship, that's the one we all think of with the dragon prowl and so on. That's mainly a warship for relatively short kinds of distances.

They have ocean-going cargo vessels. They're the kinds of things that they took to the North Atlantic and so on. But when it comes to going east, I think the consensus at the moment is generally, that they use fairly small river-going craft. We're looking at little boats about 25, 30-foot long, probably with rather small crews, maybe 10 people, something like that. And bear in mind you've got to have room for all the goods that they're packing in, which is the reason why they're going on these journeys at all.

There is something of a debate, as James mentioned, about whether they use larger vessels as well. Some of the Arab accounts certainly imply that they do. but the big problem with those eastern river routes is that it's not water all the way So the donned at Naipa and the bog are those three main rivers They're going into the mainland of Russia and Asia through Yeah, but there are gaps between them

Where you have to carry your boat or roll it So the kind of vessels that can make that journey Have to be light enough for about half the crew To physically shift them And the rest of the crew to carry all the stuff that's inside There's also several cataracts, especially on the Dinepa, which also require you to carry your boat around them. It takes days and days to do this.

And doing that with a full-scale longship is quite a task. It's a fantastic task, really, isn't it? So can you tell us more about this technology? Because there are several different sort of boats. Did they know in advance they're going to meet cataracts and all that sort of stuff? I think so. There are quite long-term connections with the East. as James mentioned, the earliest actual presence of Scandinavians that we can date there is about 750.

But there are eastern artefacts turning up in Scandinavian graves way back to the 500s. And I have to say to be honest, we're not entirely clear how they get there, what the nature of that communication is. But clearly there's some kind of knowledge of the East. So I think certainly rather quickly after the Scandinavians start going down the river systems in a serious way, they know what's out there. And the technology they developed to cope with that is primarily shallow draft vessels, clinker belt, they're really seaworthy, portable,

rather similar to the kinds of fishing boats that they've been using around the coast of Scandinavia for centuries. Were they known to be extremely good at boat making? Were they known to be, did they have an advantage over everybody else in that period of time? The problem for archaeologists here is that we know quite a lot about Viking. shipbuilding techniques are not a great deal about the equivalent in all the peoples around them.

There are some slight indications in some of the Anglo-Saxon sources that, for example, the English didn't have such good ships. There's a bit where when England is under Viking attack. Alphonsevia was a disaster. That's right. They try to respond and they don't do very well. So it certainly seems that there is something quite special about Scandinavian shipbuilding. and it's an intensely maritime culture going back centuries before the Viking Age.

So ships are their main means of transport. And so can you just tell, listen, so we've got the whole thing based up, they're on the eastern seaboard of Sweden, we all know. There's the Baltic, there's the landmass, and they went down the three rivers. Can you just outline where those three rivers went to eventually? Yeah, the gateway to the whole system is the Niva, and that's the river that's St. Petersburg.

is on now. From there, you have, broadly speaking, two possible destinations. Southwards, along the Dnieper, which will take you to the Black Sea, you go round the coast of the Black Sea and end up in Byzantium, modern Istanbul. This is the capital of Byzantine Empire,

one of the greatest markets in the world at that time. So that's one of their primary destinations. The other is to head eastwards, directly east, from Lake Lardago, just behind St. Petersburg, down the Volga system, and there are various tributaries feeding into these things, there are a number of alternative routes. And the Volga will ultimately take you to the Caspian Sea,

and from there you can link into all the overland trade routes, often by camel, the caravan routes, that take you to the Arab world, to Byzantine, to the Caliphate, to Baghdad, or even further east into the end of what would ultimately become the Silk Road. So before we move into the mainland, just finally, have you any, I asked James this earlier on and he, I just like to see, is there any clarification about the numbers involved?

Are we talking about, you said of an expedition and you're with a thousand people or you're with 7,000 people or you're with 400 people. I mean, just some idea. I think the river traffic itself, we're talking a few hundred people at a time, probably not terribly organized. I think people will be travelling in small flotillas of these little boats that I mentioned. But we're certainly not talking about thousands of people moving up and down. It's a relatively small scale thing. And although it might be operating under some kind of larger patronage, I think these are also individual merchants out for their own profit and wealth.

Thank you. James Montgomery, one of the striking things about the evidence for me, and come new to me was the extraordinary richness of the Arabic texts. You mentioned all sorts of other sources, Greek, Latin, so. Why were the Arabs so interested and why did they write so well? There's a treatise on highways and kingdoms and the Rusin Baghdad. Can you just give us a view of that? Yes. Well, there are over 20 texts in Arabic which deal with the Rus.

They span from 8.50 to about 1030, 1040. The last one mention of the ruse is in fact by El Bironi. But the first one that really comes across with a genuine sense of clarity is Ibn Khuradavbe. Now, he was in a sense the Islamic equivalent of the spy master general. He was in charge of the postal routes. He was in charge of the spy network. And he wrote a treatise for the Caliph in Baghdad called the Kita Bil Masalik, the Book of the Highways and the the kingdoms. And this effectively was a verbal chart of all of the provinces in the empire,

including tax revenues and geographical positions and so on. And towards the end of this, he mentions a group of the Roes. He in fact mentions two groups of Roes, which one of them use the North Sea, the Atlantic route to get down to Islamic Spain and into Morocco and along the north coast of Africa. And from there, they, according to Ibn Khoridav, they make their way to what we would nowadays refer to as Mongolia. The Arabic is al-Sin,

which is actually China, but we think it's Turco-China. The other one, the other route that he gives is this riverine route, and from the 850s the text comes and it mentions that the ruse used the Don, that they are somehow

ethnically cognate with the Slavs. The term is Sakhaliba in Arabic. that they profess Christianity and what that means is that they're actually allowed to trade in Baghdad by paying what's called the poll text, the Jazeera. When they get to Baghdad, the Slavunuchs, Ibn Khoridapis, as I don't know who they are, translate on their behalf. Can I ask Elizabeth Rowe about the visit to Baghdad

and how typical was this and what happened? when they tried it in Baghdad? It was indeed very typical during the 9th century that the Russe merchants would go all the way to Baghdad in person. It was very common for them to deal directly with Islamic merchants. It was also possible, and this would become more and more common in the 10th century, for them not to travel as far as Baghdad, because the Khazars set up very large markets in the cities that they controlled,

Can you tell us about the Hazars? They're the buffer, aren't they? They're a Turkish-speaking mass of people who control vast areas, and the Russo of the Volga have got to come to terms of them somehow or other, and they use them as an intermediary, but you know more about it than I do. James is really the right person to answer this question, but yes, the Hazars were not only the mercantile middlemen between the Rus and the Eastern world, but also they had a large degree of political control.

So they were the ones who created these safe cities to which the Rusk could come and do their trading. But when the Rusk got to Baghdad at that time, Elizabeth, what did they find that? What was Baghdad like in the sort of 10th century? What are we talking about? We're talking about, I guess you could call it, a world-class city with trading connections, political connections. stretched, as James say, to the western parts of China. We have the richness of the Muslim world, Muslim culture, and also what the Russe found was an enormous amount of Arabic silver. The caliphate was minting silver coins in a remarkable quantity,

and because neither Scandinavia nor Russia has anything in the way of precious metal, this was extremely appealing to the Rus and indeed the Scandinavians who previous to the Viking Age had only been able to get their silver from the Roman Empire so there had been a dearth of silver for quite some time. James? Yes. You wanted to come in. Yes, I was going to just say that the Khazars are originally Turkic nomads

from Central Asia make their way across to the Caucasus and set up an empire, very, very powerful empire on the banks of the Volga. In fact, in 737, the Muslim general Marwan bin Muhammad tries, in fact beats the Khazars in the battle, forces them to convert to Islam. But the caliphate is unable to exert complete control over the Khazars and the Khazars revert

at that stage to paganism. By about 70 years later, they seem to have converted to Judaism, at least the elite Khazars have. And the theory is that they created this Pax Khazarica, this Khazarian peace, which allowed trade to flourish. But they were oriented more towards Byzantium than they were towards Baghdad. There was no love lost, in other words, between Muslims and Khazars. We are in a wonderful ancient mix, which is full of marvelous names,

but we've got to find a way through that in a way. Neoprice, let's stick with our ruse or vulgar Vikings. They started to settle. where did they settle? What were their main power bases? In the 8th century from 750 onwards, they start to settle from the mouth of the Volkov River. This is this entry point to all these river systems. And from thereon they establish a series of,

I think we could call them way stations, essentially places to refit your boat, restock on supplies, pick up the gossip on the river, things like that. Essential places, really, when you're making this. kind of journey. The first of these is at Staria Ladiga that James mentioned. There are a whole series of other ones, Ganesh Dauva at the mouth of the Dnieper, lots of different ones.

I think we should see them as rather organic kinds of settlements. They're a bit rough and ready, lots of people mixing there, a bit like a wild west frontier town, quite an edge to them. And by the time we get into the 9th century, they're sufficiently established that they start to need fortifications. They're big enough that they need to defend themselves. And it's at that point that you start to get the establishment of real power bases of the Rus, and there are two of them. The first of them is Kiev in the Ukraine, and this is the foundation of the modern city. It gets going in the late 9th century, essentially as a kind of conglomeration of existing villages

that expand and join together. It's really quite a substantial settlement. planned with streets and different quarters of the town for merchants and the military and the elites, things like that. And then in the early 10th century, about to 920 or so, something like that, we start to get a second power base developing far to the north in Novgorod. So what you have is the Rus controlling the north and the south of that river route, making sure that everything that goes along that sort of river motorway passes, through their control. James Montgomery,

what are the Arab text telling us about the way the Russe lived? There's an Arab scholar, I pronounce him, I pronounce him properly. Ibn Rustah, yes. It was close enough. Ibn Rostah, we know that he was a native of Isfahan

that in 903 he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and his account dates after 903, so we know at least we have a bit of a date to go on. He is connected, with, I'm afraid to bring in another complicated name, the Samanid court, and the Samanids are absolutely vital to our story because they are the ones, there's a sort of shift in power between Baghdad and the eastern lands where the Samanids have their capital in Bukhara. And they come across the most unbelievably rich silver mines and they start minting coins at a tremendous rate. And they are the ones that effectively start to control that part of the trade. And Ibn Rost is connected with the Samanids, I believe.

And he writes his text, very similarly to Ibn Khoradab, in the sense that it's an account of all of the territories surrounding the Samanids. It's connected with the Samanid court. And one of the peoples, the northern peoples that he describes is the Roos. And he gives us about 20 items of information in no discernible order. But, for example, he mentions that they live on a swampy island, which has exerted lots of... attention. He says that the men wear gold bracelets, that they have a peculiar type of

trouser, which is a hundred cubits long and they wrap around their legs, that they're very kind to strangers as long as you don't provoke them, but that there's absolutely no trust amongst them in their society so that if someone needs to go out to answer the call of nature, he has to have a bodyguard. They mention the burial practices of the Roes. They say that they they dig a hole in the ground and build it like a house and buried dead chieftains and there with their wives. So

Eben Roast has a very close connection with the Roos. I'll come back to Burley in a moment perhaps. Elizabeth Roe, one of the richest powers in this period was the Byzantine Empire. And what was the nature of the Russe's trade with that? That must have been, I'm about to say a mecca for them. Let me think of another word.

Right, it was a Byzantine Empire. Yes, indeed. And as Neil has explained, it is the river Volga that allows the route down to Constantinople. And so in the beginning of the 10th century, the relations between the Rus in Kiev and the Khazars was beginning to worsen. And the Rus stopped going to the Khazar markets to sell their goods. And so Constantinople now becomes the logical place for them to take their wares. However, there's also a history of rating of the Rus on Constantinople with all its riches, it must have been an irresistible lure to that Viking spirit

that the Russt still had. And so it in fact takes an attack by the Rus in 907 to force the emperor to consent to allow the Rus to come into the city and trade. And so we actually have the trade agreement between them that on one hand offers many generous privileges to encourage the ruse to pursue commerce rather than killing and also a certain number of restrictions to safeguard the Greeks. And Neil Price, the russes, as I understand it, went to war with Byzantium on a number of occasions and it was the small league, it was David Goliath, wasn't it? It was seen him. And there's this wonderful sermon we haven't time to buy the patriarch, photius, the patriarch

of Peshafurtes of Constantinople about how this insignificant, unlearned tribe from that. It's a fantastic Churchillian sermon. I wish we'd talk. Maybe I'll never. So can you tell us about those engagements? They are one-sided, as you say.

And there's never really any question of the Rus' taking Byzantium, anything like that. It's far too big and undertaking. They're really about the fledgling Rus state kind of flexing its political muscles and its mercantile muscles. It's about the right to trade. Well, we're actually talking about a lot more people now. I seem to be obsessed with numbers.

Never mind, one of those mornings. They can't just take on that without having a lot more people. It isn't 20 people in a few boats disconnected, is it? It's becoming like an army. This is after the point at which those power bases at Kiev and Novgorod have developed where the Rus from their business, from their business, beginnings as essentially a people defined by what they do and where they do it, this riverine trade, are starting to take on a real identity in their own right.

And because of that, they're starting to establish something like a state based around Kiev. They have a nobility. Eventually they will found dynasties. Are they living there full time? Yes. And so they're trading with their own people, so their own people with their own ancestors. and bringing stuff to there. And so they're staying in Kiev.

And so, as it were, they're part of the mass there. They're beginning to root into the society, which begins in the end, it takes their name, the Rus. Yes, absolutely. There's a constant traffic up and down the rivers as well. So it's a very fluid situation. But we are getting these stable, permanent enclaves around the cities in Kiev and Novgorod.

And it's them that are launching these attacks. on Byzantium. But it does seem extraordinary. Can we stay there for one second? To take on Byzantium, I mean, that's massive, isn't it? I mean, we know about the walls of Byzantium, we know about that. And they're at them. I think it's a demonstration of force more than anything else.

They also fight in the areas around Byzantium, in Bulgaria, for example, quite a lot of campaigns there in the late 10th century, where we have some extraordinary eyewitness descriptions of the Rus in combat, which makes them sound rather Scandinavian, actually. There's one of the imperial secretaries that accompanied the Byzantine army, a man called Johannes Scolitzis. He describes the Rus in battle as screaming like animals and howling, and their leader is fighting with such abandon

that he actually thinks he's gone insane, which sounds really very much like these berserk fighting rages of the Vikings. So I think there's quite a lot of that still there. Elizabeth. It is true that the same. city of Constantinople was very well defended with its walls and its gates. And it's also true that the Greeks had a navy. But what happened to allow the Rus to make an effective attack is that the Navy is not always at its headquarters in Constantinople. And so one very effective raid that we hear about

from Photos is in the late 9th century. And the Navy is in fact away. And so it's very easy for the to come across the Caspian Sea in their little boats and go raiding on all the outlying towns around the city itself. They're not literally attacking Constantinople, and the emperor is left with very few defenses, but he remembers he does have a few ships that are being repaired, and he has them ordered out, and it is only because the Greeks have Greek fire, and they essentially napalm the attacking Rus, they're able to drive them away. The Rusw we're told on these boats After the Greek fire has been shot under the boats

They could either burn alive I wonder why it isn't burned dead anyway He could burn alive Or then jump into the river in full armour and drown Exactly Yes James you want to get in There's an account of a raid

In the Caspian area from the 950s And it underlines the fact that Surprise is absolutely vital As a technique The Russe appear very, very quickly in the Caspian. The arraided shores, it's very difficult to mobilize against it, and there's only 500 men.

And 500 men with this kind of warrior capacity and military know-how are extremely powerful. And we're talking about that armoured axe, sword and dagger. Yes, sorry, briefly. Right, and this is precisely the tactics that made the Vikings in the West, so effective small parties able to come and go very quickly. Can we, there's this another Arab scholar, called Ibn Fadlan.

Yes. And he describes the Volga Vikings, and he described in great detail of burial, which is the most detailed I've read. I thought burial was a dead king, ownership, fire, push him out to sea, and that was that. It's not like that at all.

No, it's far from it. Well, Ibn Fadlan is part of a caliphal embassy from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgarians who were another Turkic-speaking people who had converted to Islam and had settled the area in the confluence between, the Kama River and the Volga.

The embassy leaves on the 21st of June 921. It arrives on the 11th of May 922, 11 months later. Now, given that they were probably billeted over the winter for three months, that's a pace of 13 miles a day. It's a 2.5,000 mile journey to get up to Volga Bulgaria. When they're in Volga Bulgaria, Ibn Fadlan recants a number of marvels. One of the marvels he recants is the Roos.

who appear. And part of this account is this burial scene. And he sees this? He does. And what does he say about it? Well, he gives a lot of information about Roos' practice, Rose custom, but basically he says that he knows about Roos' burial practices and was very, very keen to verify it. So he learns of the death of a chieftain and he travels up or downriver, it's not clear, to get there. When he gets there, he finds that the ship has been beached. It's been placed on a massive pyre of wood, that the chieftain has been buried in the

ground with a small structure erected over him whilst they prepare the ceremony. They divide his money, one third for his family, one third for alcohol, one third to make ceremonial robes that they're going to clothe the dead chieftain in. Part of this ceremony involves the volunteering of one of the chieftain's slaves, either boys or girls. in order to die along with the chieftain, and Ibn Ferdlund says it's usually girls who volunteer. This slave girl is then taken from a position of slavery and has made something, I think, of a princess.

She has two other slave girls to wait on her. They wash her feet. They dress her in finery. They also feed her alcohol, probably drugged for the 10 days, leading up to the actual chip buries. itself. The ship burial is a very grisly business. By the time they have placed the chieftain in his ceremonial robes under the guidance of an individual who Ibn Ferdland describes as the

angel of death, the Malacan Malt, who's an old woman and she's in charge of the ceremonies. They slaughter some animals. There's two cows, two horses, there's a dog, there's cocks, hens. These are all thrown on board the ship together with his weapons, money, food, alcohol, all sorts of things. And it's at this point that the girl is prepared for her ritual marriage together with her slaughter. But she's prepared in, I mean, she's mass raped on the way of there, isn't she? According to the account that I've read in your account, by all the chieftains and then

and then when she gets on the boat by another six chieftains now what's all that about I don't actually know what that's all about I think Neil might know more about it because it is very striking

I mean we're talking about the dismembering of horses the cutting into of dogs the decapitating of hands and cocks the ship awash with blood and then this born-in-manchin's poor slave girl

taken from chieftain to chieftain who has sexual intercourse with her and then take them on. Forced, your commentator says, forced to endure the same or go through the same thing with six others. Now, what's that for? And then she declared she's going to meet her master. So what's all that about? It's very hard to say. You'll be surprised here.

One thing we can be sure of, and as an archaeologist, reading even Fadlund, it makes the hair stand up in the back of your neck because it's, it is so close to what we find in the excavated graves even to the way in which animals are killed that one of the dogs is cut in two and things like this and the birds are decapitated and so on where we find them in the ship burials the exact position of them matches what Ibn Fadlan is talking about

what he can do that archaeology can't is to give us all the actions that end up creating those things Among them all the sexual elements, which are very pronounced, all the violence, there's also singing, there's music, chanting, all kinds of things. In terms of what it means, there have been speculations that it's a kind of marriage that the slave is going to be sacrificed is being married to her dead master. there's an idea that there is a sort of oath of fealty involved in this one of the rather puzzling things there's lots of puzzling things about him in Fadlam but one of the very puzzling things about it is that

when the slave is having intercourse with the different chieftains in their tents each of them shouts out tell your master I only do this for love of him as an element of duty in all of this and I think the same applies to the violence as well. So this brings in the notion of slaves, which they were traders in slaves, and that is these tended to be blonde slaves, which much desired by the place they were going to.

But you wanted to come in on what James is talking about, and Neil. I did. One of the interesting details in Ibn Fadlon's account is that the chieftain is placed on the boat sitting up. There's a couch put on the deck of the... the ship and the dead body is propped up with pillows. And this seems very unusual to us. We think of people buried lying down in coffins. And indeed, we find many Viking age graves with supine burials. But we also have a number of upright burials with people sitting up. And so also the slave girl

is taken to a kind of doorframe and lifted up and she looks through. And one of the things that she says is, I see my dead master sitting in paradise. And so although sometimes the upright burials are considered to be a kind of watchfulness, the dead person is overseeing in a protective way, say the town that they're buried by, here I think the upright burial speaks a lot to the nature of the master, that it's not a very lordly position to be lying down like a sick person, but rather he's buried sitting up because he was a master in life and that's how the dead girl, how the slave girl

sees him in the afterlife. I'm afraid I've gone have to move into a final paragraph here James. When did this lot as it were turn into and become Russia and is it true that they did? Sorry about that but there you go. My starter for 10.

Well I think we've heard about the emergence of Kiev and we've heard that Kiev becomes established as the major power in the area. There is a raid on the Khazars by the ruse of Kiev in 965, and that signals the destruction of the Khazars. In 988, Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev, converts to Christianity,

and he marries the sister of the Emperor Byzantium. So that is the point at which we then see the emergence. of Kiev and Rousse as a power. We can also trace this development in the names of the Rus rulers. The first ruler of Novgorod has the Norse name

Rorik. But then his successors, the rulers of Kiev, have Norse versions of, sorry, have Slavic versions of Norse names. So one is named Oleg, which is Slavic for Helgi. And the next one is Igor, which is Slavic for Ivar.

And then his successor has an entirely Slavic named Spiatislav, followed by Vladimir, followed by Yaroslav. So the change to Slavic identity happens in three generations, really. Finally, Neil, is the fact that the Rus were the founders of Russia? Is that disputed? Yes, I think it is. The distance between the early Rus state and what ends up as Russia, the Russia that we know, is very great indeed.

There's a whole range of historical processes in maturis. But I think one of the main legacies of the Rus is that this is the first beginnings of statehood in Russia. And that is remembered as an ambition and as a possibility. It's also something that opens up a whole network of trading possibilities and a wider world. Well, thank you very much, James Montgomery, Neil Price and Elizabeth Row. and next week Fox's Book of Martyrs, 1563, 2,000 pages. Thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

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