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The Rus' Khaganate is a poorly-documented period in the history of East Slavs (roughly the late eighth and early to mid ninth centuries CE). Predating the Rurikid period and the Kievan Rus', the Rus' Khaganate was a state or collection of states in northern Russia inhabited by a mixed Norse, Slavic and Finnic population and dominated by the Rus' tribe or tribes. This region was a center of operations for eastern Varangian adventurers, merchants and pirates.
According to contemporary sources their population centers, which may have included the proto-towns near Novgorod, Staraya Ladoga, Smolensk, and Yaroslavl, were under the rule of a king or kings using the Old Turkic title Khagan. The Rus' Khaganate period marked the genesis of a distinct Rus' ethnos, and its successors would ultimately found the Kievan Rus' and its successors, the states which ultimately would form modern Russia.
Origins
The origins of the Rus' Khaganate are unclear. Scandinavian settlement in "Gardarike" (the Old Norse name for Russia) dated back as early as the mid-eighth century. Norse warlords, known to the Turkic speaking steppe peoples as "köl-beki" or "sea-kings," came to dominate some of these people, particularly along the waterways linking the Baltic Sea with the Dnepr and Volga Rivers.
As with the Rus' generally, there is much debate as to the identity and ancestry of the Rus' Khagans. They may have been Scandinavians, native Slavs or Finns, or (most probably) of mixed ancestry. Omeljan Pritsak, among others, hypothesized that a Khazar khagan named Khan-Tuvan Dyggvi, exiled after losing a civil war (see Kabars), settled with his followers in the Norse-Slavic settlement of Rostofa, married into the local Scandinavian nobility, and fathered the dynasty of the Rus' khagans. The possible Khazar connection to early Rus' monarchs is supported by the use of a stylized trident tamga, or seal, by later Rus' rulers such as Sviatoslav I of Kiev. Thomas Noonan asserted that the Rus' leaders were loosely unified under the rule of one of the "sea-kings" in the early ninth century, and that this "High King" adopted the title khagan to give him legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects and neighboring states. The title of khagan was, according to this theory, a sign that the bearers ruled under a divine mandate.
Documentary evidence
The earliest European reference to the "Khaganate" of the Rus' comes from the Annals of St. Bertin. The Annals refer to a group of Vikings, who called themselves Rhos (qi se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant) and visited Constantinople around the year 838. Fearful of returning home via the steppes, which would leave them vulnerable to attacks by the Magyars, these Rhos travelled through Germany accompanied by Greek ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor Theophilus. They were questioned by the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious somewhere near Mainz. They informed the emperor that their leader was known as chacanus (the Latin for "Khagan") and that they lived in the north of Russia, but that their ancestral homeland was in Sweden (comperit eos gentis esse sueonum). Many historians believe that this polity was based on a group of settlements along the Volkhov River.
Ahmad ibn Rustah, a ninth-century Muslim geographer from Persia, wrote that the Rus' khagan lived on an island in the Volga River, suggesting that their center was at Novgorod (also known as Holmgard or Gorodische). Of their organization ibn Rustah wrote:
They have a prince called Haqan-Rus. They sail their ships to ravage as-Saqaliba , and bring back captives whom they sell at Hazaran and Bulgar . They have no cultivated fields but depend for their supplies on what they can obtain from as-Saqaliba's land. When a son is born the father will go up to the newborn baby, sword in hand; throwing it down, he says; 'I shall not leave you any property: you have only what you can provide with this weapon!' They have no estates, villages, or fields; their only business is to trade in sable, squirrel, and other furs, and the money they take in these transactions they stow in their belts.
If ibn Rustah is to be believed, the Rus of the Khaganate period made extensive use of the Volga trade route to trade with the Middle East, possibly through Bulgar and Khazar intermediaries. The Rus' Khaganate may have acted in turn as an intermediary between goods from the southern lands and Scandinavia; early ninth-century coin hordes unearthed in Scandinavia frequently contain large quantities of dirhem coins minted in the Abbasid Caliphate and other Muslim polities.
Influence by Khazars and other Eurasian nomads
The early Rus' traded extensively with Khazaria. Ibn Khordadbeh wrote in the Book of Roads and Kingdoms that "they go via the Slavic River (the Don) to Khamlidj, a city of the Khazars, where the latter's ruler collects the tithe from them." They likely were influenced by the culture and government of that empire. Ahmed ibn Fadlan described the Rus' khagan (like the Khazar khagan), of having little real authority. Instead, political and military power was wielded by a deputy, who "commands the troops, attacks enemies, and acts as his representative before his subjects." The Khagan, on the other hand, "has no duties other than to make love to his slave girls, drink, and give himself up to pleasure." This dichotomy reflects the structure of Khazar government, with secular authority in the hands of a Khagan Bek only theoretically subordinate to the khagan. This sharply contrasts with the traditional Germanic system, where kingship was held by military prowess and not necessarily by blood. Moreover, some scholars have noted similarities between this dual kingship and the relationship between Igor and Oleg of Kiev in the early tenth century. Burial sites from locations connected to the Rus Khaganate period contain many features common with those of neighboring Eurasian nomad populations.
Legacy
The fate of the Rus' Khaganate, and the process by which it either evolved into or was consumed by the Rurikid Kievan Rus', is unclear. However, it is known that Rus' rulers continued to use the title "khagan" well into the Rurikid period. Hudud al-Alam, an anonymous Arabic geography text written in the late tenth century, refers to the Rus' king as "khaqan Rus", though this may be a reference copied from earlier, pre-Rurikid texts. Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev applied the title khagan to Vladimir I of Kiev and Yaroslav I the Wise in his Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati ("Sermon on Law and Grace"), written around 1050. An inscription in the north gallery of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev invokes God's blessing on "our khagan", apparently in reference to Sviatoslav II (1073-1076). Perhaps most significantly, The Tale of Igor's Campaign refers in passing to a "khagan Oleg," whose identity is unknown.
Moreover, as noted above, the institution of separate sacral ruler and military commander may be observed in the relationship between Oleg and Igor, but whether this is part of the Rus' Khaganate's legacy to its successor-state is unknown. The early Kievan Rus' principalities exhibited many distinctive characteristics in their government, military organization, and jurisprudence that were very similar to those in force among the Khazars and other steppe peoples; many historians believe that these elements came to the Kievan Rus' from the Khazars by way of the earlier Rus' Khagans.
See also
External links
- Britannica Concise on the Origins of Russia
- Pritsak on the Origins of the Rus'
- Rus' in the Hudud al-Alam
- Waugh, Daniel C. "Suggested Chronology of Events in the Pre-Kievan and Early Kievan Periods".
Notes
- ^ Christian 338.
- Franklin and Shepard 33–36.
- Dolukhanov 187.
- Brutzkus 120.
- Pritsak, Origins of Rus' 1:28, 171, 182.
- Brook 154; Franklin and Shepard 120-121; Pritsak, Weights 78-79. It should be noted, however, that the genealogical connection between the ninth-century Khagans of Rus' and the later Rurikid rulers, if any, is unknown at this time.
- Noonan 87-89, 94.
- Brook 154; Noonan 87-94.
- Håkan or Haakon was a name used among Scandinavians of the period, and it is possible that the Rhos described by Bertin referred to a king by this name, rather than a Khagan.
- Bertin 19–20; Jones 249–250.
- This is Brønsted's transliteration. Ibn Rustah wrote a خ, which in Anglophone scholarship is normally transliterated "kh".
- Khazaran was the mercantile center of the Khazar capital of Atil, while Bulgar was the center of Volga Bulgaria.
- Brøndsted (1965), pp. 267–268
- Noonan, "Rus" 213-219.
- Cited in Vernadsky 1:9
- E.g., Jones 164 (summarizing evidence from al-Masudi and al-Muqaddasi; Franklin and Shepard 67-8; Christian 340.
- ^ Ibn Fadlan, as translated in Jones 425–430.
- Christian 341.
- Christian 340, citing, inter alia, Jones 256.
- Minorsky 159.
- Ilarion, "Sermon on Law and Grace" 3, 17, 18, 26; for discussion, see Brook 154. Ilarion referred to Vladimir as "the great khagan of our land" and Yaroslav as "our devout khagan."
- Noonan, "Khazar" 91-92.
- Zenkovsky 160. Historians have variously identified this figure with Oleg of Novgorod, Oleg Sviatoslavich, and Igor of Novgorod-Seversk.
- Brutzkus 111.
References
- Ahmed ibn Fadlan. "The Risala."
- Bertin. The Annals of St. Bertin. Ed. Waitz, Hanover, 1883.
- Brøndsted, Johannes (1965). The Vikings. (transl. by Kalle Skov). Penguin Books.
- Brook, Kevin Alan. The Jews of Khazaria. 2d ed. Littlefield and Rowan, 2006.
- Burtzkus, Julius. "The Khazar Origin of Ancient Kiev." Slavonic and East European Review, 22 (1944).
- Christian, David. A History of Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia. Blackwell, 1999.
- Dolukhanov, P.M. The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe and the Initial Settlement to Kievan Rus'. London: Longman, 1996.
- Franklin, Simon and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750-1200. London: Longman, 1996.
- Halperin, Charles J. Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1987.
- Ilarion of Kiev. "Sermon on Law and Grace". Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus'. Simon Franklin, transl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1991.
- Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. 2nd ed. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984.
- Minorsky, Vladimir. Hudud al-'Alam (The Regions of the World). London: Luzac & Co., 1937.
- Noonan, Thomas. "The Khazar Qaghanate and Its Impact Oon the Early Rus' State: The translatio imperii from Itil to Kiev." Nomads in the Sedentary World, Anatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov and Andre Wink, eds. p. 76-102. Richmond, England: Curzon, 2001.
- Noonan, Thomas. "When Did Rus/Rus' Merchants First Visit Khazaria and Baghdad?" Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 7 (1987-1991): 213-219.
- Pritsak, Omeljan. The Origin of Rus'. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- Pritsak, Omeljan. The Origins of the Old Rus' Weights and Monetary Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1998.
- Vernadsky, G.V., ed. A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972.
- Zenkovsky, Serge A., ed. MEdieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales. New York: Meridian, 1974.