Having settled
Ladoga in the 750s, Scandinavian colonists played an important role in the early
ethnogenesis of the Rus people, and in the formation of the
Rus' Khaganate. Ladoga, then known as
Aldeigja by the Norsemen, was the earliest and most significant settlement of the Rus', while
Gorodische, likely known as
Holmr, was founded over a century later. It was from the Ladoga area, which formed the centre of the Rus', that the envoys went to
Constantinople in 838. The
Varangians are first mentioned in the
Primary Chronicle as having exacted tribute from the Slavic and Finnic tribes in 859. It was the time of rapid expansion of the Vikings' presence in Northern Europe; England began to pay
Danegeld in 865, and the
Curonians faced an invasion by the
Swedes around the same time. The Varangians are mentioned in the
Primary Chronicle, which suggests that the term
Rus was used to denote Scandinavians until it became firmly associated with the now extensively Slavicised elite of Kievan Rus. At that point, the new term
Varangian was increasingly preferred to name the Scandinavians, probably mostly from what is currently Sweden, plying the river routes between the Baltic and the Black and Caspian Seas. Relatively few of the
rune stones Varangians left in their native
Sweden tell of their journeys abroad, to such places as what is today Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Greece, and Italy. Most of these rune stones can be seen today, and are a significant piece of historical evidence. The
Varangian runestones tell of many notable Varangian expeditions, and even recount the fates of individual warriors and travelers. In Russian historiography, two cities are used to describe the beginnings of the country: Kiev and Novgorod. In the first part of the 11th century the former was already a Slav metropolis, rich and powerful, a fast growing centre of civilisation adopted from Byzantium. The latter town, Novgorod, was another centre of the same culture but founded in different surroundings, where some old local traditions moulded this commercial city into the capital of a powerful oligarchic trading republic of a kind otherwise unknown in this part of Europe. These towns have tended to overshadow the significance of other places that had existed long before Kiev and Novgorod were founded. The two original centres of Rus were Staraya Ladoga and Rurikovo Gorodische, two points on the Volkhov, a river running for between
Lake Ilmen in the south to
Lake Ladoga in the north. This was the territory that most probably was originally called by the Norsemen
Gardar, a name that long after the Viking Age acquired a much broader meaning and became
Garðaríki, a denomination for the entire state. The area between the lakes was the original Rus, and it was from here that its name was transferred to the territories inhabited by the Slavs on the middle
Dnieper, which eventually became the "land of Rus" (
Ruskaja zemlja). The
Primary Chronicle portrays the East Slavic tribe of
Polans as the most civilised of the East Slavs, and that they were therefore predisposed to host the Rus', but not give their name to the land. From this area, the Rus' moved eastward to the lands inhabited by Finno-Ugric tribes in the Volga-Oka region, as well as south along the Dnieper. The
prehistory of the first territory of Rus has been sought in the developments around the early-8th century, when Staraja Ladoga was founded as a manufacturing centre and to conduct trade, serving the operations of Scandinavian hunters and dealers in furs obtained in the north-eastern forest zone of Eastern Europe. In the early period (the second part of the 8th and first part of the 9th century), a Norse presence is only visible at Staraya Ladoga, and to a much lesser degree at a few other sites in the northern parts of Eastern Europe. The objects that represent Norse material culture of this period are rare outside Ladoga and mostly known as single finds. This rarity continues throughout the 9th century until the whole situation changes radically during the next century, when historians meet, at many places and in relatively large quantities, the material remains of a thriving Scandinavian culture. For a short period of time, some areas of Eastern Europe became as much part of the Norse world as were Danish and Norwegian territories in the West. The culture of the Rus contained Norse elements used as a manifestation of their Scandinavian background. These elements, which were current in 10th-century Scandinavia, appear at various places in the form of collections of many types of metal ornaments, mainly female but male also, such as weapons, decorated parts of horse bridles, and diverse objects embellished in contemporaneous Norse art styles. The Swedish king
Anund Jakob wanted to assist
Yaroslav the Wise, Grand prince of Kiev, in his campaigns against the Pechenegs. The so-called
Ingvar the Far-Travelled, a Swedish Viking who wanted to conquer Georgia, also assisted Yaroslav with 3000 men in the war against the Pechenegs; however, he later continued on to Georgia. Yaroslav the Wise married the Swedish king's daughter,
Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden, who became the Russian saint, Anna, while
Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king who was a military commander of the Varangian guard, married
Elisiv of Kiev. The two first uncontroversially historical Swedish kings
Eric the Victorious and
Olof Skötkonung both had Slavic wives. Danish kings and royals also frequently had Slavic wives. For example,
Harald Bluetooth married
Tove of the Obotrites. Vikings also made up the bulk of the bodyguards of early Kievan Rus rulers. Evidence for strong bloodline connections between the Kievan Rus and Scandinavia existed and a strong alliance between Vikings and early Kievan rulers is indicated in early texts of Scandinavian and East Slavic history. Several thousand Swedish Vikings died for the defence of Kievan Rus against the
Pechenegs.
Scandinavian sources from the 9th century. In Scandinavian sources, the area is called
Austr (the "East"),
Garðaríki (the "realm of cities"), or simply
Garðar (the "cities"), and
Svíþjóð hin mikla ("Great Sweden"). The last name appears in the 12th century geographical work
Leiðarvísir ok Borgaskipan by the Icelandic abbot Nicolaus (d. 1161) and in
Ynglinga saga by
Snorri Sturluson, which indicates that the Icelanders considered Kievan Rus to have been founded by the Swedes. The name "Great Sweden" is introduced as a non-Icelandic name with the phrase "which we call Garðaríki" (
sú er vér köllum Garðaríki), and it is possible that it is a folk etymological interpretation of
Scythia magna. However, if this is the case, it can still be influenced by the tradition that Kievan Rus was of Swedish origin, which recalls
Magna Graecia as a name for the Greek colonies in Italy. When the Norse sagas were put to text in the 13th century, the Norse colonisation of Eastern Europe, however, was a distant past, and little of historical value can be extracted. The oldest traditions were recorded in the
Legendary sagas and there Garðaríki appears as a Norse kingdom where the rulers have Norse names, but where also dwelt the
Dwarves Dvalin and
Durin. There is, however, more reliable information from the 11th and the 12th centuries, but at that time most of the Scandinavian population had already assimilated, and the term
Rus referred to a largely Slavic-speaking population. Still, Eastern Europe is presented as the traditional Swedish sphere of interest. The sagas preserve Old Norse names of several important Rus settlements, including (
Novgorod), and (
Kiev); Fjodor Uspenskij argues that the use of the element in these names, as well as in the names and (Constantinople), shows the influence of
Old East Slavic (city), as usually means farmstead in Old Norse. He further argues that the city names can be used to show that the Rus were also competent in Old East Slavic. At this time the Rus borrowed some 15 Old East Slavic words, such as the word for marketplace,
tǔrgǔ, as
torg, many of which spread to the other Old Norse-speaking regions as well. The most contemporary sources are the
Varangian runestones, but just like the sagas, the vast majority of them arrive relatively late. The earliest runestone that tells of eastwards voyages is the
Kälvesten runestone from the 9th century in
Östergötland, but it does not specify where the expedition had gone. It was
Harald Bluetooth's construction of the
Jelling stones in the late 10th century that started the runestone fashion that resulted in the raising of thousands of runestones in Sweden during the 11th century; at that time the Swedes arrived as mercenaries and traders rather than settlers. In the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries runic memorials had consisted of runes on wooden poles that were erected in the ground, something which explains the lack of runic inscriptions from this period both in Scandinavia and in eastern Europe as wood is perishable. This tradition was described by
Ibn Fadlan who met Scandinavians on the shores of the
Volga. The
Fagerlöt runestone gives a hint of the Old Norse spoken in Kievan Rus, as
folksgrimʀ may have been the title that the commander had in the
retinue of
Yaroslav I the Wise in
Novgorod. The suffix - is a virtually unique word for "leader" which is otherwise only attested in the Swedish medieval poem
Stolt Herr Alf, but in the later form
grim. It is not attested as a noun in the sense "leader" in
West Norse sources. In
Old Norse, the basic meaning of the adjective is "heartless, strict and wicked", and so is comparable in semantics to Old Norse which meant both "wrath", "king" and "warrior". Other runestones explicitly mentioning warriors serving the ruler of Kievan Rus are
one of the Skåäng runestones, the
Smula runestone and most famously, the
Turinge runestone which immortalises the dead commander with a poem: The
Veda runestone is of note as it indicates that the riches that were acquired in Eastern Europe had led to the new procedure of legally buying
clan land, and the Swedish chieftain Jarlabanke used his clan's acquired wealth to erect the monument
Jarlabanke Runestones after himself while alive and where he bragged that he owned the whole
hundred.
Slavic sources (1899) The earliest Slavonic-language narrative account of Rus history is the
Primary Chronicle, compiled and adapted from a wide range of sources in Kiev at the start of the 13th century. It has therefore been influential in modern history-writing, but it was also compiled much later than the time it describes, and historians agree it primarily reflects the political and religious politics of the time of
Mstislav I of Kiev. However, the chronicle does include the texts of a series of Rus–Byzantine Treaties from
911,
945, and
971. The Rus–Byzantine Treaties give a valuable insight into the names of the Rus. Of the fourteen Rus signatories to the
Rus–Byzantine Treaty in 907, all had Norse names. By the
Rusʹ–Byzantine Treaty (945) in 945, some signatories of the Rus had Slavic names while the vast majority had Norse names. The Chronicle presents the following
origin myth for the arrival of Rus in the region of
Novgorod: the Rus/
Varangians 'imposed tribute upon the
Chuds, the
Slavs, the
Merians, the
Ves', and the
Krivichians' (a variety of
Slavic and
Finnic peoples). From among
Rurik's entourage it also introduces two Swedish merchants
Askold and Dir (in the chronicle they are called "
boyars", probably because of their noble class). The names Askold () and Dir () are Swedish; the chronicle says that these two merchants were not from the family of Rurik, but simply belonged to his retinue. Later, the
Primary Chronicle claims, they conquered
Kiev and created the state of
Kievan Rusʹ (which may have been preceded by the
Rusʹ Khaganate).
Arabic sources of a
Rus chieftain as described by the
Arab traveler
Ahmad ibn Fadlan who visited north-eastern Europe in the 10th century.
Henryk Siemiradzki (1883) Arabic-language sources for the Rus people are relatively numerous, with over 30 relevant passages in roughly contemporaneous sources. It can be difficult to be sure that when Arabic sources talk about
Rus they mean the same thing as modern scholars. Sometimes it seems to be a general term for Scandinavians: when
Al-Yaqūbi recorded
Rūs attacking Seville in 844, he was almost certainly talking about Vikings based in Frankia. At other times, it might denote people other than or alongside Scandinavians: thus the
Mujmal al-Tawarikh calls the Khazars and Rus 'brothers'; later,
Muhammad al-Idrisi,
Al-Qazwini, and
Ibn Khaldun all identified the Rus as a sub-group of the Turks. These uncertainties have fed into debates about the origins of the Rus. Arabic sources for the Rus had been collected, edited and translated for Western scholars by the mid-20th century. However, relatively little use was made of the Arabic sources in studies of the Rus before the 21st century. This is partly because they mostly concern the region between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and from there north along the lower Volga and the Don. This made them less relevant than the Primary Chronicle to understanding European state formation further west. Imperialist ideologies, in Russia and more widely, discouraged research emphasising an ancient or distinctive history for Inner Eurasian peoples. Arabic sources portray Rus people fairly clearly as a raiding and
trading diaspora, or as mercenaries, under the Volga Bulghars or the Khazars, rather than taking a role in state formation. as a different people from the Slavs. At least no source says they are part of the Slavic race. Characteristically,
Pseudo-Simeon and
Theophanes Continuatus refer to the
Rhos as
dromitai (Δρομῖται), a word related to the Greek word meaning
a run, suggesting the
mobility of their movement by waterways. In his treatise
De Administrando Imperio,
Constantine VII describes the
Rhos as the neighbours of
Pechenegs who buy from the latter cows, horses, and sheep "because none of these animals may be found in
Rhosia"; his description represents the Rus as a warlike northern tribe. Constantine also enumerates the names of the
Dnieper cataracts in both
rhosisti ('ῥωσιστί', the language of the Rus) and
sklavisti ('σκλαβιστί', the language of the Slavs). The Rus names are usually etymologised as
Old Norse. An argument used to support this view is that the name
Aeifor in reference to the fourth cataract is also attested on the
Pilgårds runestone from the 10th c. on
Gotland. However, some researches indicate that at least several of the Rus names can be Slavic and, as for the
Dnieper cataract
Aeifar /
Aeifor, its name doesn't have an acceptable and convincing Scandinavian etymology. At the time, the Byzantines also recorded the existence of some of the lesser important Slavic tribes in the region, and the emperor only knew of
Rhosia, which referred to the Rus' who lived in Kiev, closer to Byzantium, and the Rus' who lived in the north, along the Volkhov River. :
Western European sources The first Western European source to mention the Rus are the
Annals of St. Bertin (Annales Bertiniani). These relate that Emperor
Louis the Pious' court at
Ingelheim, in 839, was visited by a delegation from the
Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were men who called themselves
Rhos (in the Latin text,
... qui se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant, ...; translated by
Aleksandr Nazarenko as
... who stated that they, i.e. their nation, were called Rhos, ...). Once Louis enquired the reason of their arrival (in the Latin text,
... Quorum adventus causam imperator diligentius investigans, ...), he learnt that they were Swedes (
eos gentis esse Sueonum; verbatim,
their nation is Sveoni). Fearing that they were spies, he detained them, before letting them proceed after receiving reassurances from Byzantium. Subsequently, in the 10th and 11th centuries, Latin sources routinely confused the Rus with the tribe of
Rugians.
Olga of Kiev, for instance, was designated as queen of the Rugians (
reginae Rugorum) in the Lotharingian Chronicle compiled by the anonymous
continuator of
Regino of Prüm. At least after the 6th century, the name of the Rugii referred to Slavic speaking peoples including the Rus. According to the Annals of St. Bertin, the Rus leader had the title
Khagan (
... quod rex illorum, Chacanus vocabulo, ...). Another source comes from
Liutprand of Cremona, a 10th-century
Lombard bishop whose
Antapodosis, a report from
Constantinople to
Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, says that Constantinople 'stands in territory surrounded by warlike peoples. On the north it has the ...
Rusii sometimes called by another name
Nordmanni, and the
Bulgarii who live too close for harmony'. ==Assimilation==