The Rise of the Russian Empire

by Saki

In 903 the young Igor was mated to a Varangian maiden named Olga, who, by one account, was born of humble parents in the town of Pskov and attracted the Prince by her beauty. Other accounts make her, with more probability, a near relative of the Regent, of whose strength of character she seems to have inherited a share.

In 907 Oleg was in a position to put into practice a project which had probably never been lost sight of, the invasion, namely, of the Byzantine Empire, including an attack on Constantinople itself, a project dear to the Russian mind in the tenth century as well as in later times. His footing differed essentially from that of Askold and Dir in their attempt at a like undertaking. No longer the leader of a mere troop of adventurers, Oleg swayed an army inspired by a long series of successes and confident in the sanction and prestige of the princely authority. Slavs, Finns, and Varangians were bonded together in a representative Russian army, trained, disciplined, and, above all, reliant on the ability of their captain. In their long, light barques they went down the Dniepr, hauling their craft overland where the rapids rendered navigation impossible, and thence emerged into the Black Sea; the boats were escorted along the river-banks by a large body of horsemen, but the Chronicle does not tell whether this branch of the expedition made its way through Bessarabia and Bulgaria into the Imperial territory, and probably it only served to guard the main body from the attacks of hostile tribes in the steppe region. Arrived in the waters of the Bosphorus the invaders landed and ravaged the country in the vicinity of Constantinople, burning, plundering, and slaughtering without hindrance from the Greek forces. Leo VI., “the Philosopher,” shut himself up in his capital and confined his measures of defence to placing a chain across the entrance of the harbour. So much had the Eastern Empire become centralised in the city of Constantinople, that it was apparently a matter of small concern if the very suburbs were laid waste, or else Leo was waiting with philosophic patience for a supernatural intervention. The Virgin, however, not obliging with another tornado, the invaders turned their impious arms against the city itself. According to popular tradition, Oleg dragged his boats ashore, mounted them on wheels, spread sail, and floated across dry land towards the city walls. Possibly he attempted the exploit, successfully carried out some five hundred years later by Sultan Mahomet II., of hauling his vessels overland into the waters of the harbour, a labour which would be facilitated by the lightness and toughness of the Russian craft. At any rate the effect of the demonstration was salutary; the Emperor, alarmed at such a display of energy, determined to come to terms with his barbarous enemy, first, however, the Russian chronicler alleges, trying the experiment of an offering of poisoned meats and fruits to Oleg and his warmen.[9] A study of the history of Byzantium fully supports the likelihood of such a stratagem, which, had it succeeded, would have been hailed as a miraculous epidemic, sweeping the heathen away from the threatened city. The gift was prudently declined, and the more prosaic and expensive method of buying off the invaders had to be resorted to. The treaty which was concluded between the Greeks and the Russians shows that the latter were fully alive to the advantages accruing from a free commercial intercourse with Constantinople. Besides the levy of a fixed sum for every man in the invading fleet, contributions were exacted for Kiev and other towns under the Russian sway, which arrangement gave to all a share in the national victory. More solidly advantageous, under certain specified conditions, Russian merchants were to be permitted right of free commerce at Constantinople.

The Christian Emperor and the pagan Prince called upon their respective deities to witness the solemn pact between them, and Oleg, having hung his shield in triumph on the gate of the Tzargrad, returned to Kiev loaded with presents and covered with the glory of a successful campaign. Five years later the great Varangian, loved and honoured by his people, feared and respected by his foes, finished his long reign of three-and-thirty years. Tradition has it that the soothsayers foretold that his death should be caused by his favourite horse, whereupon he had it led away and never rode it more. Years after, learning that it was dead, he went to see the skeleton, and placing his foot upon the skull, taunted the warlocks with their miscarried prophecy, whereupon a snake wriggled out and inflicted a bite, of which he died. The same legend crops up in the folk-lore of many lands.

In venturing to compare Oleg with Charles the Great, whose life-work lay in somewhat similar lines, it may be noted of the former that his results were obtained with comparatively little bloodshed, and that he strengthened the position of the dynasty while forming the empire over which it was to rule. The fairest and most fertile districts of Russia were added to the principality during his regency, and, more important still, the peoples whom he subjugated were permanently welded into the confederation. The Slavs of Kiev in the later years of Oleg were essentially the “men” of the Russian State, a rapidity of assimilation which was scarcely observable in the case of the Bavarians and Frisians of the Frankish Empire, or the Saxons of Norman England. In the matter of religion, too, the heathen Prince contrasts favourably with the great Christian Emperor, and though the worshipper of the Christ who “came not to send peace but a sword” into the world may have butchered his nonconforming subjects with the honestest conviction of well-doing, it is pleasanter to read of the toleration which the follower of Peroun extended to the Christian communities within his realm.

912

Igor, who after a long minority succeeded to a more extensive and firmly established principality than his father had bequeathed him, was occupied at the commencement of his reign in suppressing a revolt of the Drevlians and Ulitches, the least well affected of the Slav tribes subject to his rule, who had refused payment of the yearly tribute. The gathering-in of this impost was entrusted to Svenald, a Varangian to whom Igor deputed the internal management of the realm; after a three-years’ struggle the rebels were mastered and the amount of their tribute increased. A new source of uneasiness arose at this juncture from the arrival in South Russia of the Petchenigs, a Finn-Turko tribe who migrated from the plains of Asia in the wake of the Magyars and settled in the steppe-land on either side of the Dniepr. The city of Kiev enjoyed an immunity from attack from their horde by reason of the strong force at hand for its defence, and the Russians, moreover, were interested in keeping up a good understanding with neighbours who commanded the waterway to the south. But to the newly-erected Hungarian State the new-comers were a veritable thorn in the flesh, and Moldavia became a debatable ground between the two peoples. It was an act of weakness on the part of Igor and his advisers, with a large fighting force at their disposal, to have permitted the establishment of a dangerous enemy or doubtful ally in such undesirable nearness to their capital, and in a position which threatened their principal trade-route. This policy of peace was all the more ill-judged as the restless spirit of the Varangian warmen required some outlet for its employment, and might fittingly have been turned to the advantage of the State. Their lust for adventure and pillage found vent instead in independent raids, and in the year 914 a fleet of 700 Russian ships appeared, somewhat like the proverbial fly in amber, on the waters of the Kaspian, where they plundered along the Persian coast.[10] Another troop penetrated into Italy in the service of the Byzantine Emperor.

If the saying, “Happy is the country that has no history” will hold good in every case, the bulk of Igor’s reign must have been a period of prosperity, for nothing further is heard of Russia or its Prince till the year 941, when, like a recurring decimal, an expedition against Constantinople is recorded by both Greek and Russian annalists. Whether difficulties had arisen in the trading relations of the two countries, whether the rupture was forced by a war party among the Varangians, or whether Igor was fired with the ambition, to which old men are at times victims, of doing something which should shed lustre on his declining years—he was now not far off seventy—the Chronicles do not indicate, and “what was it they fought about” is lost sight of in the details of the fighting. With a fleet variously written down at from 1000 to 10,000 boats, Igor descended by the old waterway into the Black Sea and ravaged and plundered along the coasts of the Bosphorus. The Imperial fleet was absent on service against the Saracens, with the exception of a few vessels scarcely deemed fit for action, which were lying in the harbour. It occurred to the Greek Emperor Romanos, after many sleepless nights, to arm these despised ships and galleys with the redoubtable Greek fire and steer them against the hostile flotilla, a desperate expedient which was crowned with success; the mysterious flames, which the water itself was unable to quench, not only enwrapped the light barques of the Russians but demoralised their crews, and a hopeless rout ensued. The Greeks were, however, unable to follow up their advantage, and Igor rallied his men for a descent on the coast of Asia Minor, where he consoled himself by pillaging the surrounding country. Here he was at length opposed by an army under the command of the patrician Bardas and forced to make his way to Thrace, where another reverse awaited him. With the remains of his army the baffled prince made his way back to Kiev, leaving many of his hapless followers in the hands of the Greeks. Luitprand, Bishop of Cremona, present at Constantinople on an embassy, saw numbers of them put to death by torture. The Northman was not, however, at the end of his resources; with an energy surprising for his years, he set to work to gather an army which should turn the scale of victory against the Byzantians, their magical fire and intimacy with the supernatural notwithstanding. To this end he sent his henchmen into the bays and fjords of the Baltic to call in the sea-rovers to battle and plunder under his flag. The invitation they were not loth to accept, but many of them showed a disinclination to bind themselves under the leadership of the Russian Prince, and rushed instead, like a brood of ducklings breaking away from their foster-mother, into the charmed waters of the Kaspian, where they carried on an exuberant marauding expedition. A sufficient number, however, followed Igor in his second campaign against the Tzargrad to swell his ranks to a formidable host, and word was sent to the Greek capital, from Bulgarian and Greek sources, that the waters of the Black Sea were covered with the vessels of a Russian fleet. The Emperor did not hesitate what course to adopt, but hastily despatched an embassy to meet the invader with offers to pay the tribute exacted by Oleg and renew the treaty between the two countries. The Imperial messengers fell in with Igor at the mouth of the Danube, and their proposals were agreed to after a consultation between the Prince and his droujhiniki,[11] who in fact gained without further struggle as much as they could have hoped for in the event of a victory. Igor returned to Kiev as a conqueror, loaded with presents from Romanos, who sent thither in the following year his ambassadors with a text of the treaty. This was sworn to by the Prince and his captains before the idol of Peroun, except in the case of the Christian minority, who performed their oath at the altar of S. Elias. The fact of a Christian cathedral—a designation probably more ambitious than the building—being established at Kiev at this period speaks much for the toleration shown to the foreign religion by the followers of the national god.

Igor did not long enjoy the fruits of this success. Baulked of their expected campaign, his men of war chafed at the inaction of the old man’s court, and envied the comparative advantages thrown in the way of Svenald’s body-guards. It was a custom of the Russian rulers to spend one-half of the year, from November till April, in visiting the scattered districts of their dominion, for the double purpose of keeping in touch with their widely-sundered subjects and gathering in the revenue. This winter harvesting of the tribute (which Igor in his declining years left in the hands of his deputed steward) is interesting as being probably the earliest stage of Russian home trade. For the most part the payment in kind consisted of furs and skins, the bulk of which went from the various places of collection in boat-loads down to Kiev, from thence eventually making its way to the sea marts of Southern Europe. The forest country of the Drevlians, rich in its yield of thick-coated sables and yellow-chested martens, lay in convenient neighbourhood to Kiev, and thither the Prince’s men clamoured to be led for the purpose of gleaning an increased tribute. In a moment of fatal weakness Igor consented, and in the autumn of 945 set out to close his reign as he had begun it, in a quarrel with “the tree people” over the matter of their taxing. The armed host which accompanied the Prince overawed the resentment bred by this stretching of the sovereign claims, but the apparent ease with which the imposts were gathered in tempted Igor to linger behind his returning main-guard for the purpose of exacting a further levy. The exasperated Drevlians, hearkening to the counsel of their chieftain, Mal, “to rise and slay the wolf who was bent on devouring their whole flock,” turned suddenly upon the fate-blind Igor in the midst of his importunings and put him to a hideous death. Two young trees were bent towards each other nearly to the ground, and to them the unfortunate tyrant was bound; then the trees were allowed to spring back to their normal position. Thus did the tree people avenge their wrongs.

The safest standard by which to judge a reign of the inward history of which so little can be known is the measure of stability which it leaves behind it. The widow of the murdered Prince and his young heir Sviatoslav came peaceably into the vacant throneship, and it is no small tribute to the statecraft of Rurik and his successors that the grandson of the Varangian stranger and adventurer should inherit, at a tender age and under the guardianship of a woman, the Russian principality without opposition and without question.

The young Kniaz,[12] notwithstanding the Slavonic name which he was the first of his house to bear, was brought up mainly among Skandinavian influences, his person and the domestic management of the State being entrusted to Varangian hands. His mother Olga bore no small share of the administration, and the vigour and energy of her doings were well worthy of the heroic age of early Russia. The first undertaking which was called for, alike by political necessity and the promptings of revenge, was the chastisement of her husband’s murderers. With the idea possibly of averting the storm by a bold stroke of diplomacy, the latter had sent messengers to the widowed princess suggesting a connubial alliance with the implicated chieftain Mal, a proposal which was met with a feigned acceptance. Having lulled the apprehensions of the Drevlians, Olga marched into their country with a large following and turned the projected festivities into a massacre, after which she besieged the town of Korosten,[13] the scene of Igor’s death, and the last refuge of the disconcerted rebels. The Chronicle of the monk of Kiev gives a quaint, old-world account of the manner of the taking of Korosten. All the summer the inhabitants defended themselves stubbornly, and the princess at last agreed to conclude a peace on receipt of a tribute, which was to consist of a live pigeon and three live sparrows from each homestead. How they caught the sparrows is left to the imagination, but the tribute was gladly paid. At the approach of evening Olga caused the birds to be set free, each with a lighted brand fastened to its tail, whereupon their homing instincts took them back to their dwellings in the thatched roofs and barns of Korosten, with the result that the town was soon in a blaze, and the inhabitants fell easy victims to the swords of the besiegers. Thus was avenged the death of Igor, the son of Rurik.