Empires Apart Read Online Free Page A

those of the rest of Europe, but he was pointing them back towards the west. Yaroslav married the daughter of the King of Sweden, and his daughters married the kings of France, Hungary and Norway. His daughter Anna caused a particular stir when she arrived at the court of her future husband, Henri I of France. To their amazement the French courtiers discovered that, unlike their king, their new queen could read and write. She signed the nuptial vows in Cyrillic and Latin lettering, while the French king signed an illiterate ‘X’.
    The story of early Russia, of Vikings, Huns and Byzantium, captures all the characteristics that lie at the centre of the way the west pictures Russia. It is a story at once romantic and brutal, mystical and majestic. And, as so often in Russia, it is also a story that could be totally untrue.
Russian History: True or False?
    The outstanding feature of the birth of Russia is that nobody is really sure how it happened. There were no Founding Fathers, no Plymouth Rock. Russia’s history is founded not on what we know but on what we want to believe.
    On 6 September 1749 Gerhard Mueller, the official imperial Russian historiographer, rose to deliver a speech to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. His theme was the role of the Vikings in the birth of the nation. The very name Rus, he asserted, came from Scandinavia, although rather than being derived from Rurik Mueller he believed it had first attached to Swedes from the Uppland area of Roslagen. Henever finished his speech. Pandemonium ensued, with Russian nationalists outraged at what they regarded as an attack on the Slavic soul of their motherland. For them the mere suggestion that the barbarian west might have contributed anything to the culture of Holy Russia was heresy. Viewed through the prism of their Slavophile philosophy, it was as obvious to them that Russia had never been anything other than Slav as it was to later Americans that their nation had never been anything other than anti-imperialist. After an enquiry the Empress Elizabeth ordered Mueller’s records destroyed and his publications banned. He spent the rest of his life researching the history of Siberia.
    The debate continued into the twentieth century. Soviet historians continued the anti-Viking line. To accept it, they argued, would imply that Slavs needed the help of foreigners to create an independent state, clearly an untenable position. To bolster their arguments they pointed to a Syrian Christian history from AD 555, which talks about the ‘Hros’ living in the area south of Kiev, surely the ancestors of Slavic Rus. In fact it seems probable that Hros was not the name of a tribe at all but was a corruption of the Greek word ‘heros’ meaning just what it suggests, ‘heroes’.
    Today the role of the Vikings is generally acknowledged, but not universally so. One of the most interesting theories about the origin of the Russians was put forward by Omeljan Pritsak, the Harvard Professor of Ukrainian History, in the 1970s. For him the Rus originate not in Scandinavia or the Caucasus but in the small town of Rodez in south-central France. Pritsak starts his story in the middle of the eighth century, with Arabs controlling the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean and the Spanish peninsula. Muslims and Christians faced each other across the Mediterranean in uneasy peace. The problem both sides faced was that peace meant no booty, above all the booty that economic life depended upon: slaves. Neither side was supposed to enslave its co-religionists, and so they needed an external source. This they found in the vast lands between the Elbe and Syr Darya rivers, which became ‘Sclavia’, the land of the ‘sclavas’, slaves or slavs. Slavehunting was highly organised. Factories for the production of eunuchs were located in Verdun in the west and Khwarizan in the east. By the end of the ninth century two