THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
PUBLISHER’S ANNOUNCEMENT
_Demy 8vo, Cloth, 25s._
_With two coloured maps and ten specially drawn_
RUSSIA IN ASIA
A RECORD AND A STUDY
1558-1899
BY
ALEXIS KRAUSSE
_Author of “China in Decay”_
SPECTATOR.--“It is well that the vague alarm generally inspired in the
average Englishman by the thought of Russian successes in Asia should
be replaced by exact knowledge. Books without number have already
been written upon the several phases of the Russian advance, but Mr.
Krausse’s volume is, we think, the first concise presentation in
English of its entire history.”
LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS 9 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
[Illustration:
MAP OF
RUSSIA
under the
EARLY RURIKOVITCH PRINCES
]
THE RISE
OF
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
BY
HECTOR H. MUNRO
“On se flatterait en vain de connaitre la Russie actuelle, si l’on ne
remontait plus haut dans son histoire.”--LE PÈRE PIERLING.
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
1900
PREFACE
With the exception of a translation of Rambaud’s somewhat disjointed
work, there is no detailed history of Russia in the English language
at all approaching modern standards. The reigns of Petr the Great and
of some of his successors down to the present day--a period covering
only 200 years--have been minutely dealt with, but the earlier history
of a nation with whom we are coming ever closer into contact is to the
English reader almost a blank. Whether the work now submitted will
adequately fill the gap remains to be seen; such is its object.
The rule observed with regard to the rendering of names of places and
persons has been to follow the spelling of the country to which they
belong as closely as possible. The spelling of Russian words employed,
and curiously distorted, by English and other historians, has been
brought back to its native forms. There is no satisfactory reason, for
instance, why the two final letters of _boyarin_ should be dropped,
or why they should reappear tacked on to the equally Russian word
_Kreml_. Moskva is scarcely recognisable in its Anglicised form, and
Kiev can only be rendered Kieff on a system which would radically
disturb the spelling of most English towns.
A list of works consulted is appended, arranged somewhat in the order
in which they have been found useful, precedence being given to those
which have been most largely drawn upon.
HECTOR H. MUNRO,
1899.
WORKS CONSULTED
KARAMZIN--Histoire de l’empire russe. 1819. (French translation by MM.
St. Thomas et de Divoff.)
S. SOLOV’EV--Istoriya Rossie. 1858.
TH. SCHIEMANN--Russland, Polen und Livland. 1885.
A. RAMBAUD--History of Russia. 1879. (English translation.)
L. PARIS (translator)--Chronique de Nestor. 1834.
N. KOSTOMAROV--Rousskaya Istoriya v jhizneopisaniyakh eya glavnieyshikh
dieyatelen. 1874.
N. KOSTOMAROV--Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva. 1886.
SIR H. H. HOWORTH--History of the Mongols.
ANONYMOUS--Geschichte der Ostseeprovinzen. 1879.
VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL--Geschichte der goldenen Horde. 1840.
„ „ Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman. (French translation.)
E. A. FREEMAN--Ottoman Power in Europe. 1877.
J. W. ZINKEISEN--Geschichte des osmanischen Reich in Europa.
GENNAD KARPOV--Istoriya Bor’bui Moskovskago Gosoudarstvo s
Pol’sko-Litovskim, 1462-1508. 1867.
“V. N.”--Iz Istorie Moskvui, 1147-1703. 1896.
E. A. SOLOV’EV--Ivan IV. Groznie. 1893.
N. A. POLEVOI--Tzarstvovanie Ioanna Groznago. 1859.
LE PÈRE PIERLING--La Russie et l’Orient. 1891.
„ „ Rome et Demetrius. 1878.
MARQUIS DE NOAILLES--Henri de Valois et la Pologne en 1572. 1867.
V. B. ANTONOVITCH--Otcherk Istorie Velikago Kniajhestva Litovskago.
1878.
N. G. RIESENKAMPFF--Der Deutsche Hof zu Nowgorod. 1854.
LASZLO SZALAY--Geschichte Ungarns. 1874.
A. N. MURAV’EV--History of the Russian Church. 1842. (English
translation by R. W. Blackmore.)
A. PEMBER--Ivan the Terrible.
A. M. H. J. STOKVIS--Manuel d’Histoire, de Généalogie, et de
Chronologie, etc. 1889.
BAR. SIGISMUND VON HERBERSTEIN--Rerum Moscoviticorum commentarii. 1851.
(English translation by R. H. Major.)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE DAWN OF RUSSIAN HISTORY 1
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF THE VARANGIANS AND THE BUILDING OF KIEVIAN RUSSIA 14
CHAPTER III
THE FEUDS OF THE HOUSE OF RURIK 53
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE MONGOLS 81
CHAPTER V
“THE YEARS THAT THE LOCUST HATH EATEN” 96
CHAPTER VI
THE GROWING OF THE GERM 122
CHAPTER VII
THE LAST OF THE PALEOLOGI AND THE FIRST OF THE AUTOCRATS 149
CHAPTER VIII
IVAN GROZNIE 195
CHAPTER IX
THE GREAT BOYARIN 253
CHAPTER X
THE PHANTOM TZAR 271
CHAPTER XI
“THIS SIDE THE HILL” 306
I. TABLE OF RUSSIAN PRINCES OF THE LINE OF RURIK, FROM
SVIATOSLAV I. 327
II. HOUSE OF MSTISLAV VLADIMIROVITCH 328
III. HOUSE OF SOUZDAL-VLADIMIR AND SUB-HOUSES OF MOSKVA AND TVER 329
IV. GRAND PRINCES AND TZARS OF MOSKOVY 330
GLOSSARY 331
INDEX 332
LIST OF MAPS
RUSSIA _Frontispiece_
GRAND PRINCIPALITY OF MOSKVA 194
PLAN OF MOSKVA 270
CHAPTER I
THE DAWN OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Russia, which is blessed with a rich variety of tribes and peoples,
the despair of the ethnographical geographer, who can scarcely find
enough distinctive colours wherewith to denote them all on his maps,
is characterised by a singular uniformity of physical conditions
throughout the greater part of its huge extent. Geographically
speaking, it is difficult to determine what are the exact limits of
the region known as Russia-in-Europe, the Oural Mountains, which look
such an excellent political barrier on paper, being really no barrier
at all, certainly not what is known as a scientific frontier. As a
matter of fact they are less a range of mountains than a chain of low
table-lands, having precisely the same conditions of soil, flora, and
fauna on either side of them. Zoologically the valley of the Irtuish
forms a much stronger line of demarcation, but much of Russia west of
the Ourals coincides more nearly in physical aspect with the great
Asiatic plain than it does with the remainder of Europe. Southward and
westward from this fancy boundary stretches a vast expanse of salt,
sandy, almost barren steppe-land; this gives way in time to large
tracts of more or less fertile steppe, partaking more of the character
of prairie than of desert, bearing in spring and early summer a heavy
crop of grasses, high enough in places to conceal a horse and his
rider. Merging on this in a northerly direction is the “black-soil”
belt, a magnificent wheat-growing country, which well merits the
title of the Granary of Europe. Northward again is a region of dense
forest, commencing with oaks and other deciduous trees, and becoming
more and more coniferous as it stretches towards the Arctic circle,
where pine and fir disappear, and give way to the Tundras, moss-clad
wastes, frozen nine months out of the twelve, the home of reindeer and
Samoved. Over all this wide extent the snows and frosts of the Russian
winter fall with an almost equal rigour, though for varying duration
of time. Except on the east, the country possesses strongly-marked
natural boundaries; on the south-east rises the huge pile of the
Kaukasus Mountains, flanked east and west by the Kaspian and Black
Seas respectively; on the south-west lie the Karpathians, while from
north-west to north the Baltic is almost connected by lake, swamp,
and the deep fissure of the White Sea with the Arctic Ocean. Broadly
speaking, nearly the whole area enclosed within these boundaries is
one unbroken plain, intersected and watered by several fine rivers, of
which the Volga and the Dniepr are, historically, the most important.
This, then, is the theatre on which was worked out the drama of Russian
national development.
It will now be necessary to glance at the racial and political
conditions which prevailed at the period when the curtain rises on
mediæval Russian history. First as to the ethnology and distribution
of the Slavs, a branch of whom was to be the nucleus round which the
empire of all the Russias was to gather. The lore of peoples and of
tongues has enabled scientists to assign to the Slavs a place in the
great Aryan family from which descended the stocks that made their
dwelling on European soil. Exactly when their wanderings brought them
into their historic home-lands it is difficult to hazard, nor is it
possible to do more than speculate as to whence they came in that
distant yesterday of human spate and eddy. At the epoch when Russian
history, in a political sense, may be said to start into existence (the
commencement of the ninth century), the distribution of the Slavs is
more easy to trace; with the exception of an offshoot in the south-east
of Europe, occupying Servia, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, they
appear to have been gathered in a fairly compact though decentralised
mass in what may be termed North Central Europe. Holstein,
Mecklenburg, and Pomerania, roughly speaking, formed the country of the
Wends; another group, the Czechs and Poles, inhabited Bohemia, Moravia,
and Poland; while a fourth body, destined to become the most important,
was established in North-west Russia, hemmed in by Finns on the north,
Turks and Avars on the east and south. These latter Slavs, the germ of
the future Russian nation, lived in tribal communities in the midst of
the mighty forests of oak, pine, birch, willow, etc., which stood thick
around the basin-lands of the Upper Dniepr, Dvina, and Volkhov, and the
source of the Volga. These dense fastnesses they shared with the wolf,
boar, lynx, fox, bear, beaver, elk, aurochs, deer, otter, squirrel, and
marten, which latter especially furnished them with a valuable article
of commerce, the Russian marten skins being highly prized in the fur
markets of Europe. Seals abounded on their sea-coast and in Lake
Ladoga; the numerous swamps were the home of the wild goose, swan, and
crane; the eagle, hawk, raven, cuckoo, and daw were familiar to them,
while pigeons were early domesticated among their dwellings.
In their primitive state the Slavs had this obvious differentiation
from their Asiatic neighbours--though essentially pastoral they were
not nomadic. The village, as a unit of politico-social life, had
arrived with them at a high pitch of development, which involves the
supposition of long-existing contributory causes, the herding together,
namely, of a permanent community of human beings, dependent on each
other for mutual convenience, security, and general well-being. The
_mir_, commune, or village was in the first place the natural outcome
of a patriarchal system other than nomad, the expansion of the
primitive association of members of one or more families who had grown
up together under the common attraction of a convenient water-supply,
a suitable grazing ground, or a wood much haunted by honey-bees.[1]
The development of agricultural pursuits necessarily gave a greater
measure of stability to village life, and the peasant insensibly
rooted himself to that soil in which he had sown his crops and planted
his fruit-trees. Thus far the life-story of the tribal Slavs travelled
along familiar lines, but here it came to an abrupt halt. The village
unit acquired a well-defined theory and practice of government, but
it did not germinate into the town. The few townships that were to
be found in Slavic lands owed their being for the most part not to
any inward process of accumulation, but to extraneous and exceptional
circumstances. While Teutonic peoples were raising unto themselves
burgs and cities, and banding themselves in guilds and kindred
municipal associations, the Slavs remained content with such protection
as their forests and swamps afforded, such organisation as their
village institutions supplied. The reason for this limitation in social
progress was an organic one; in the Slav character the commercial
spirit, in its more active sense, was almost entirely wanting. Trade
by barter, of course, existed among them, but their medium of exchange
had not got beyond the currency of marten and sable skins. The market,
the wharf, and the storehouse were not with them institutions of native
growth.
From their earth of forest, swamp, and stream, which paled them in
from an outer world, and from the sky above, which they had in common
with all living folks, the eastern Slavs had drawn inspirations for
the thought-weaving of a comprehensive catalogue of gods. Their
imaginations gave deific being to the sun, moon, stars, wind, water,
fire, and air, but most of all they reverenced the lightning. In their
dark, over-shaded forest homes it was natural that the sun, which
exercised such mystic sway in the blazing lands of the Orient, should
yield place to the swift, dread might which could split great trees
in its spasm of destruction and shake the heavens with its attendant
thunder. Accordingly the arch-god of Slavic myth was Peroun, in whom
was personified the spirit of the lightning. Under the name of Svaroga
(the different tribes probably had variant names for the same god, and
sometimes, perhaps, varying gods for a common name) he was worshipped
as the Begetter of the Fire and Sun Gods. The latter was sometimes
known as “Dajh’bog,” but in old folk-songs the Sun is Dajh’bog’s
grandchild. The Wind-God was designated “Stribog.” The personality of
these nature-deities was not left entirely to the worshippers’ fancy,
Peroun at least being represented in effigy by more than one idol,
which conformed to the human pattern from which so few divinities
have been able to escape. A slightly more advanced conception of the
supernatural was embodied in the worship of Kolyada, a beneficent
spirit who was supposed to visit the farms and villages in mid-winter
and bring fertility to the pent-in herds and frost-bound seeds. The
festival in honour of Kolyada was held about the 25th of December,
the date when the Sun was supposed to triumph over the death in which
Nature had gripped him and to enter on his new span of life.
Blended with Eastern mysticism there was, no doubt, in their religious
ideas a considerable sprinkling of Northern magic. In their dark and
lonely forest dwellings there was likely to be something more than
a natural dread of that lurking prowler which stamped such an eerie
impression upon the imaginations of primitive folks in many lands. The
shambling form, the wailing howl, and the narrow eyes that gleamed
wicked hunger in the winter woods gave the wolf a reputation for
uncanny powers, and the old Slavic folk-songs clearly set forth a
belief in wehr-wolf lore.
In the matter of disposing of their dead the Slavs of Eastern Europe
had a variety of customs and usages, some of which were probably local
practices of the different tribes. In general the body was burned and
the bones enclosed in a small vessel, which was placed upon a post near
the roadside. Grave-burial was also in vogue, hill-sides being chosen
for that purpose. Drinking and feasting were usual accompaniments of
the funeral rites, while the opposite extreme was sometimes exhibited
by the slashing and scratching of the mourners’ faces in token of
grief.[2]
Thickly mingled with the Slav homesteads in the lake regions of
Peipus, Ladoga, and the forest country stretching eastwards, were
the outlying villages of the Finns, who seem to have lived in harmony
with their alien neighbours without at the same time showing the least
tendency towards a fusion of national characteristics. Branches of
the same people, Tchouds and Livs, occupied the lands of the Baltic
sea-board on the north-west. South of these, wedged in between the
Slavs of Poland and those of the east, in the marshy forest-lands of
the Niemen basin, were the Lit’uanians, a people of Indo-European
origin, who were divided into the sub-tribes of Lit’uanians, Letts,
and Borussians (Prussians). Of doubtful affinity with the first-named
were the Yatvyags, a black-bearded race dwelling on the extreme
eastern limit of the Polish march. The Lit’uanians were even more
ill-provided with towns and strongholds than their Slav neighbours,
but they had at least a definite system of tribal government,
remarkable for the division of the sovereign power between the prince
(_Rikgs_) and the high-priesthood, the former having control of
outside affairs, including the important business of waging war, the
latter administering matters of justice and religion. The gods of
the Lit’uanians were worshipped under the symbolism of sacred trees,
and the religious rites included the putting to death of deformed or
sickly children; this was enacted, not with the idea that bloodshed
and suffering were acceptable to the Higher Powers, but rather because
the latter were supposed to demand a standard of healthy and physical
well-being on the part of their worshippers.[3]
In the lands lying to the south and south-east, where the forests
gave way bit by bit to the open wolds of the steppe country, the
Slavs had for neighbours various tribes of nomads, for the most part
of Turko-Finnish origin, and these completed the encircling band of
stranger folk by which the primitive forest dwellers were shut in from
the outside world. At this yonder world it is now necessary to take a
glimpse.
Europe towards the middle of the ninth century was still simmering in
a state of semi-chaos, out of which were shortly to be evolved many
of the national organisms which have lasted to modern times. Charles
the Great, by the supreme folly of dividing amongst his three sons
the empire he had so carefully built up, had to a great degree undone
the work of his life, and political barriers are rather difficult to
trace after the partition of Verdun (843), though in the dominions
assigned to Charles II. some semblance of the later kingdom of France
may be traced. Germany was in a transition state; the strong hand which
had established dependent and responsible dukes and counts in the
various Teutonic provinces--Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, and
Karinthia--had been withdrawn, and as yet these princes had not erected
their fiefs into independent hereditary duchies. Scarcely tamed and
civilised themselves, the frontier districts of the east were bordered
continuously by Danes, Wends, Czechs, Avars, and Slavonians, ever ready
to make hostile incursions upon their territory. Hamburg in those days
stood as a frontier town, almost an outpost in an enemy’s country, and
formed with Paderborn and Bremen the high-water mark of the Frankish
expansion on the north-eastern marches.
In England national unification was in a more advanced stage; Wessex
had gradually absorbed the other constituents of the so-called
Heptarchy, with the exception of Mercia, which still held out a
nominally separate existence. London, at this period a wooden-built
town surrounded by a wall of stone, was beginning to be commercially
important.
In Spain the Christians had established among the mountains of Asturias
the little kingdom of Leon, and were commencing the long struggle which
was eventually to drive the Moors out of the peninsula.
South of Rome and the Imperial territories in Italy, the duchy
of Benevento alone foreshadowed the crowd of principalities and
commonwealths which were to spring into existence in that country.
To the east the Byzantine Empire, pressed by the Saracens in its
Asiatic possessions, by Bulgars and Slavs on its northern boundary,
severed from Rome, Ravenna, and the Western world by divergencies of
ritual and dogma, humiliated by military reverses in various quarters,
still loomed splendid and imposing in her isolation, and the dreaded
Greek fire, if no longer “the Fire of old Rome,” helped to make her
navies respected in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
But if she still attracted the attention of the world, civilised
and barbarian, it was scarcely by the exhibition of any grand moral
qualities; her annals were one long record of vicious luxuries, servile
flatteries, intrigues, disaffection, and cruelties, which grew like
an unhealthy crop of fungi in an atmosphere charged with the gases of
theological dogmatism. Revolution succeeded revolution, and each was
followed by a dreary epilogue of torturings, executions, blindings,
and emasculations, while synods and councils gravely discussed the
amount of veneration due to pictures of the Virgin, or the exact
wording of a litany. In one respect, however, the first Christian State
approached the New Jerusalem of its aspirations, namely, in upholstery
and artificial landscape gardening, and its gilded gates and rooms of
porphyry, its jewelled trees with mechanical singing-birds, might well
challenge comparison with the golden streets and walls of precious
stones and sea of glass that adorned the Holy City of the Apocalypse.
North of what might be termed the European mainland of the Eastern
Empire, between the south bank of the Danube and the ridge of the
Balkans, was wedged in the kingdom of Bulgaria, a Turko principality
whose territory waxed and waned as its arms were successful or the
contrary in the intermittent warfare it carried on against its august
neighbour. Though never rising to the position of a considerable power,
and at times being reduced to complete subjection, it continued to give
trouble to the Byzantine State for many centuries, and the adjoining
Zupanate of Servia was from time to time brought under the alternate
suzerainty of whichever factor was in the ascendant.
Beyond the Danube the Magyars had not as yet established themselves in
Hungary, in the lands lately overrun by the Avars, and a considerable
section of that country was absorbed in the great Moravian kingdom, a
Czech state whose existence was coterminous with the ninth century, and
which also embraced within its limits the vassal duchy of Bohemia, the
latter country having, however, its separate dynasty of dukes.
Farther north, Poland had scarcely commenced to have a defined
existence in the polity of Europe. Its people, if the early annals are
not merely fables borrowed from the common stock of European folk-lore,
had elevated to the dignity of sovereign duke a peasant nicknamed
Piast, from whom sprang the family of that name who held the throne not
less than 600 years. From the fact that the Poles remained independent
both of the Western Empire and of the neighbouring Moravian power,
may be deduced the assumption that they already possessed some degree
of cohesion and organization--more perhaps than distinguished them in
later stages of their history.
On the north shore of the Black Sea the most easterly possession of
the Byzantine Empire was Kherson, a port in the Krim peninsula, and
here the territory of the Cæsars came into contact with the Empire
or Khanate of the Khazars, a Turko-Finnish race whose dominions
stretched in the ninth century from Hungary to the shores of the
Kaspian, and north to the source of the Dniepr. They appear to have
attained to a comparatively high degree of civilisation, and they
kept up commercial and diplomatic relations with Byzantium and the
two Kaliphates of Bagdad and Kordova. Their national religion was a
form of paganism (subsequently they embraced Judaism), but in spite of
differences of faith and race one of their princesses became the wife
of the Emperor Constantine V. Their two principal cities were Itil,
on the Volga, and Sarkel (the White City), on the Don. Several of the
Turanian and Slavonic tribes on their north-west borders acknowledged
their authority and paid them tribute, but at the commencement of the
ninth century their power was already declining.
On their north-east frontier the Khazars had for neighbours the
Bulgarians of the Volga, an elder branch of the tribe which had
settled in the Balkans. Bolgary, “the great City,” was their capital,
and a trading centre much frequented by the merchants and dealers of
the various semi-barbaric nations in their vicinity, as well as by the
more highly-civilised Khazars and Persians.
Northward of all, in the bleak mountain regions of Skandinavia, on the
roof of Europe as it were, dwelt the Norsemen, those wild and warlike
adventurers who were to leave the impress of their hand on the history
of so many countries. In those days, when Iceland and Greenland were as
yet undiscovered, Norway, Sweden, and Finland formed a stepping-stone
to that unknown Arctic Sea which contemporary imagination peopled with
weird and grimly monsters--for the North had its magic lore as well
as the shining East. And the fierce vikings, fighting and plundering
under their enchanted Raven banner, seemed in those credulous times not
far removed from the legendary warlocks and griffons of whom they were
presumed to be the neighbours.
As has been already noticed, the Khazars were essentially a trading
nation, and much of the commerce of the farther East filtered through
their hands into Eastern Europe. According to one authority[4] the
products of the East, after crossing the Kaspian Sea, were conveyed up
the Volga, and after a short land journey reached the Baltic by way
of Lake Ilmen and Lake Ladoga. It is not easy to see why the shorter
and simpler route along the Don and the Black Sea to Constantinople
and the Mediterranean was not preferred, especially as the balance
of power, and consequently of luxury and wealth, lay rather in the
south of Europe than in the north. It was this trade, however, which
built up the importance, possibly caused the birth, of Novgorod,
that fascinating city which rises out of the mists that shroud the
history of unchronicled times with the tantalising name of New Town,
suggesting the existence of a yet older one. What was the exact
footing of Novgorod in the early decades of the ninth century--whether
an actual township, with governor and council, giving a head to a
loose confederation of neighbouring Slavic tribes, or whether merely
a village or camp, the most convenient station where “the barbarians
might assemble for the occasional business of war or trade”[5]--it is
difficult at this distance of time to determine. Seated on the banks
of the Volkhov some little distance from where that river leaves Lake
Ilmen’s northern shore, and connected with the Baltic by convenient
waterways, it not only tapped the trade-route already referred to, but
occupied a similar favourable position with regard to another important
channel of traffic--that between the North and Byzantium by way of the
Dniepr and Black Sea. Wax, honey, walrus teeth, and furs went from the
frozen North to the “Tzargrad,” as the Imperial city was called by the
Slavs, and in exchange came silks and spices and other products of the
South. Furs and skins, of otter, marten, wolf, and beaver especially,
were in growing demand in Europe, where, from the covering of savages,
they had been promoted to articles of luxury among the wealthy of
Christendom. With the land covered by dense forest, or infested by
savage tribes, and the seas scoured by pirate fleets, traders preferred
to keep as much as possible to the great river-routes, and the large,
placidly-flowing rivers of the Russian plain were peculiarly suited
to their purposes. Thus the early human wanderers adopted the same
methods of travel, and nearly the same lines of journey, as the birds
of passage, ducks, plovers, and waders use to this day in their annual
migrations, winging their way along the coasts and river-courses from
Asia to Europe and back again.
Shut up in their own constricted world of forest, lake, and swamp,
the Novgorodski and neighbouring Slavs would get, by means of these
waterways, glimpses of other worlds, distant as the three points of
a triangle, and as varied in manners, customs, and products; news of
Sarkel, Itil, and the Great City, Bolgary, and strange countries yet
farther east, where men dwelt in tents and rode on camels and hunted
the panther, whose spotted skin was more richly marked than that of
any forest lynx; visits from mariners of perhaps their own nationality,
bringing tales of northern seas, of ice-floes, walruses, sturgeons,
and whales; of Wends who preyed on the vessels driven on to their
inhospitable shore; and, more important still, of Varangian sea-rovers
who were beginning to force themselves on the Finns and Slavs of the
sea-coast; above all, tidings from bands of merchants of the City of
Wonders that guarded the entrance to the Farther Sea, with its gates
and palaces, and temples and gardens and marts, its emperor and saints,
and miracles and ceremonials, like unto nothing they had experience of
themselves.
It is just at this point that the history of the Slavs of Lake Ilmen
and its neighbourhood becomes largely conjectural. That they were
brought in some measure under the subjection of Varangian invaders
appears tolerably certain, and, favoured no doubt by the natural
advantages of their position, girt round with an intricate network of
forest and swamp, or, still better, protected perhaps by the poverty
of their communities, they seem to have freed themselves from this
foreign yoke, as the Saxons of England from time to time drove out the
Danes. It was in consequence, probably, of this common danger that
the Slavs were drawn into closer confederation, with the unfortunate
result that domestic quarrels became rife among them, and each clan
or volost was at enmity with its neighbour. “Family armed itself
against family, and there was no justice.”[6] This sudden ebullition
of anarchy rather suggests that the Varangian intruders had swept
away previous institutions or elements of order, and left nothing
capable of replacing them, or else that the native Slavs were unable to
grapple with the new problems of administration on an extended scale.
Evidently, too, the vigorous Norsemen had obtained the reputation of
being something more than mere undisciplined robbers and raiders, and
their domination seemed more desirable than the turmoil and dissension
attendant upon a state of self-government. And in support of this
deduction, almost the first definite event recorded in the national
chronicles is the resolve of the people of Novgorod to call in the
leaders of a tribe known as the Russ Varangians to restore order in
their land.
(Controversy has arisen among Russian historians as to the probable
nationality or extraction of these “Russ” foreigners, who, like the
Angles, gave their name to the country of their adoption, and some
writers have assumed them to have been Slavs from Rugen or the south
coasts of the Baltic, and not of Skandinavian origin. Apart, however,
from the decidedly Norse form of their leaders’ names--Rurik, Sineus,
Truvor, Oleg, etc.--the manner of their coming and their subsequent
history harmonises exactly with that of the various Skandinavian
offshoots who invaded and established themselves in Normandy, England,
the Scottish islands, Ireland, and Sicily. Under their vigorous rule
the Slavic settlement around Novgorod expanded in a few years into an
extensive principality, imposing tribute on and drawing recruits from
the neighbouring tribes, and carrying the terror of the Russian name
into the Black and Kaspian Seas.)
Whether the “invitation” was genuine, emanating from the desire of
the Ilmen folk to secure for themselves the settled rule of capable
leaders, or whether the presence of the strangers had to be accepted
as a disagreeable necessity, to mitigate the humiliation of which a
legendary calling-in was subsequently invented, must remain a matter
for conjecture; but with the incoming of this new element Russian
history develops suddenly in scope and interest.[7]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The gathering of honey and wax from the combs of wild bees formed
an important industry among the Polish and Russian Slavs.
[2] S. Solov’ev, _Istoriya Rossie_.
[3] S. Solov’ev.
[4] Ralston, _Early Russian History_.
[5] Gibbon.
[6] _Chronicle of Nestor._
[7] S. Solov’ev, _Istoriya Rossie_. Karamzin, _Histoire de Russie_.
_Chronique de Nestor_. Schiemann, _Russland, Polen, und Livland_. N. P.
Barsov, _Otcherke Rousskoy istoritcheskoy Geografie_. V. Thomsen, _The
Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia_.