20. The Viking Conquest of Medieval Russia
The Viking Age, from the late eighth century to the eleventh, witnessed an onslaught of Scandinavians from seemingly nowhere to terrorize, devastate, and settle in much of Europe. In their homes, the Vikings were farmers, fishermen, traders, and the like. When they took to the sea in groups made up of clan leaders and chieftains, accompanied by their retainers and adventurers in search of booty, they morphed into raiders and pillagers. From their longships, they appeared suddenly along coasts and the banks of navigable rivers in hit and run attacks that left widespread havoc in their wake.
The raiders burned, plundered, and slaughtered on a massive scale that earned them the name vikingr, which meant “pirate” in contemporary Scandinavian languages. They greatly impacted European history. Vikings settled and at times dominated the British Isles, Normandy, the Baltic, and much of modern day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Their reach extended beyond Europe, and their lethal raids terrorized the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. Pants-soiling scary to contemporaries, the Vikings began to be viewed through a romanticized lens of noble savages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the West, the Vikings are best known for what they did in Britain and Western Europe. However, the greatest Viking success story is what they did in Russia, whose origins can be traced back directly to Viking conquerors. The story of Russia literally begins with the Vikings. Specifically, Rurik (circa 830 – 879), a Viking chieftain who gained control of the town of Ladoga near today’s Saint Petersburg, around 855. He then built a settlement named Holmgard near Novgorod, founded the Rurik Dynasty, and his descendants conquered a vast region from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That territory encompassed most of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia’s western parts.
