jonathan shepard
restitution of cargo. The emissaries’ provenance is uncertain, but all five of
those named as responsible for the first agreement recur among the fourteen
listed for the September 911 treaty. Such continuity and regard for law and
order implies a political structure, while the emissaries’ names have a Nordic
ring: Karl, Rulav, Stemid.
The northerners’ move to Kiev might initially have been an attempt at
secession from the other Rus’ strongpoints, reminiscent of the tale of Askold
and Dir. But these traders could scarcely have stood alone for very long,
seeing that the finest furs originated far to the north. The 911 treaty, if not its
precursor, most probablyinvolved northern-based princes, as wellas magnates
newly installed on the middle Dnieper. By contrast with Kiev a centre such as
Gorodishche was huge and populous, and the military potential of its ruling
elite correspondingly formidable. In the early tenth century as earlier, this elite
had a paramount leader. An Arab envoy to the Bulgars, who observed Rus’
traders on the middle Volga in 922, evoked the court of the Rus’ ruler. Residing
on a huge throne together with forty slave girls, he mounts his horse without
ever touching the ground; 400 ‘bravest companions’ live in his ‘palace’, ‘men
who die with him and kill themselves for him’. A lieutenant commands troops
and fights his battles.
13
The Rus’ debt to Khazar political culture is clear from
this and other evidence, including the style of dual rulership, the title of khagan
and use of variants of his trident-like authority symbol. It may well be that
their sacral ruler was ensconced in the north, at Gorodishche, as late as the
920s. The Rus’ on the middle Dnieper, while affiliated to this polity, may also
have paid tribute to the Khazars. In the mid-tenth century a Khazar ruler still
regarded the Severians, Slavs near the middle Dnieper, as owing him tribute,
while Kiev had an alternative, apparently Khazar, name, Sambatas.
14
Princes of Kiev and the ‘Byzantine connection’:
challenge and response
The earliest firm evidence of Rus’ paramount rulership based in the region of
Kiev is for the son of Riurik, Igor’, and he is only clearly attested there c.940.Itis
13 Ibn Fadlan, Ris
¯
ala, ed. T. Lewicki,
´
Zr
´
odla arabskie do dziej
´
ow sl
´
owia
´
nszczyzny, vol. iii
(Wrocl
aw, Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk, and L odz: Polska Akademia Nauk, 1985), pp. 75–6.
See also J. E. Montgomery, ‘Ibn Fadl
¯
an and the R
¯
usiyyah’, Journal of Arabic and Islamic
Studies 3 (2000): 21–2.
14 P. K. Kokovtsov, Evreisko-khazarskaia perepiska v X veke (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1932),
p. 98 and n. 4; Constantine VII, De administrando imperio, ed. and trans. G. Moravcsik and
R. J. H. Jenkins (Corpus fontium historiae byzantinae 1) (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks,
2nd edn., 1967), ch. 9,pp.56–7.
56
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008