Rus'

At a glance

Who were the Rus'?

In the earliest texts the Rus' are a foreign, seafaring elite, not a nation. The Frankish court identified them as Swedes in 839. A tenth-century Italian bishop called them "Northmen". The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII recorded their own names for the Dnieper rapids, and these are Norse, set beside Slavic ones. Most of the Rus' envoys named in the treaties with Byzantium of 911 and 944 have Scandinavian names.

They first appear on the Baltic edge of the forest zone, where Scandinavians had settled at Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov by the mid-eighth century. Their communities were never purely Scandinavian. In Ladoga, Gorodishche and Gnezdovo, Scandinavian graves and objects sit beside Finnic, Slavic and Baltic ones, and the Arabic writers who met the Rus' saw them as a merchant-warrior class living off the peoples around them.

The Encyclopedia of Russian History stresses that the name had a double meaning from the start, ethnic ("Scandinavian") and professional ("seafarer"). Over the ninth and tenth centuries "Rus'" came to mean the ruling warrior-merchant group as a whole, whatever its members' origins, and then the land and people it ruled. The longer story of these Scandinavians in the east – as mercenaries, settlers and the later Varangian Guard – is told in our article Who were the Varangians?.

What was the Rus' Khaganate?

The Rus' Khaganate is a label, not a name the Rus' used. Historians apply it to whatever political unit stood behind a handful of ninth-century references to a Rus' ruler called khagan – the title of the supreme rulers of the Turkic steppe, borne by the neighbouring Khazar khagans. Peter B. Golden's classic article "The Question of the Rus' Qağanate" (1982) set out the case, and later scholars – Omeljan Pritsak, Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, Constantin Zuckerman, Władysław Duczko – have argued over how much it can bear.

Constantin Zuckerman sorts the sources into two chronological groups: a few Latin and Arabic texts from about 838–871, and later Arabic and Persian geographies that copy ninth-century material. After Basil I, Byzantine sources call the Rus' leaders archontes ("rulers"), not khagans.

The Frankish evidence: Ingelheim, 839

The earliest securely dated mention of the Rus' is in the Annals of St-Bertin under 839, in the section written by Prudentius, later bishop of Troyes. That year envoys of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos reached Louis the Pious at Ingelheim, ruler of the Carolingian Empire. With them were men "who said that they, that is their people, were called Rhos" (qui se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant). Their king, called chacanus, had sent them to Constantinople in friendship, and Theophilos asked Louis to let them travel home through his empire because the road they had come by ran through "barbarous and very fierce peoples".

Louis investigated and found that they were of the people of the Swedes (comperit eos gentis esse Sueonum). Suspecting spies, he detained them while he enquired further. The Latin and an English rendering are in the University of Texas Old Russian Online lesson on the Annals of St Bertin, and the standard English translation is Janet L. Nelson's The Annals of St-Bertin (1991).

The passage is decisive on two points and open on a third. The Rhos called themselves by that name, and the Franks recognised them as Swedes. Whether chacanus was a title or a man's name is less certain. Ildar Garipzanov's study of the 839 entry (Ruthenica 5, 2006) points out that the spelling chacanus appears nowhere else in Frankish sources, which normally write caganus or chagan. That reopens the old reading of the word as the Scandinavian name Håkon.

The Byzantine evidence: the quarrel of 871

The second witness is indirect. In 871 the western emperor Louis II and the Byzantine emperor Basil I quarrelled by letter over who could rightly be called emperor. Basil's letter is lost, but Louis's reply survives in the tenth-century Salerno Chronicle. From that reply it seems that Basil had argued that each people has its own title for its supreme ruler, the chaganus being that of the Avars, the Khazars and the Northmen.

Louis rejected this. He wrote that the Franks knew of a chaganus only as the ruler of the Avars, not of the Khazars or the Northmen. Later historians read this as indirect evidence that Constantinople knew a Northman ruler who called himself khagan. Donald Ostrowski (2018) objects that the only text we actually have denies it, and that Basil's wording is a reconstruction.

The Arabic evidence: the khaqan on the island

The richest description comes from the Persian geographer Ibn Rusta, writing in the early tenth century but drawing on an older account, probably of the 870s. He describes the Rus' living on an island, three days' walk around, covered in forest and undergrowth, so damp that the ground gives under one's foot. Their king is called khaqan rus. They have no ploughed fields and live by raiding the Slavs from their ships, carrying off captives to sell, and trading in sable and other furs for silver.

The eleventh-century Persian historian Gardizi and the anonymous Persian geography Hudud al-'Alam (982) repeat the title as khaqan-i rus, drawing on the same ninth-century tradition. English translations of Ibn Rusta and related texts are collected in Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone's Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness (2012).

Why would a Rus' ruler call himself khagan?

The likeliest answer is prestige. In ninth-century Eastern Europe the khagan of the Khazars was the dominant power of the steppe, and his title signified sacral, universal rulership. A Scandinavian leader who adopted it, or whom outsiders described with it, was claiming a rank equal to the Khazar ruler, and fit to send envoys to the Byzantine emperor.

Some scholars go further. In a 2023 article, the Oxford historian James Howard-Johnston argues that the Khazars extended their authority over the Rus' in the 830s and that the Khazar khagan himself was acknowledged as Rus' ruler. He calls his propositions "to some extent conjectural". Pritsak proposed that an exiled Khazar dynasty founded the Rus' khaganate, an idea Zuckerman dismisses as speculation.

What the evidence does not prove

The sources show that by the 830s some Rus' had a leader whom outsiders could call khagan, and that this leader was able to send envoys to Constantinople. They do not show a state with fixed borders, a capital, a tax system or a dynasty. Nor do they show that the 839 envoys, the 871 Northmen and Ibn Rusta's islanders belonged to one and the same polity.

Historians disagree: did a Rus' Khaganate exist?

Golden, Franklin and Shepard, and Zuckerman accept that a Rus' ruler bore the title khagan in the ninth century, and treat this as evidence of an early political centre before the Rurikids. Sceptics – among them Oleksiy Tolochko (2015) and Donald Ostrowski (2018), who take the absence of a khagan in later sources as evidence that there never was a Rus' khaganate – call it a "historiographical phantom" and argue that ninth-century Rus' society was too loose to be called a state and that the evidence is a few ambiguous words.

Verdict: A Rus' leader styled khagan is well attested (839, Ibn Rusta, Gardizi, Hudud al-'Alam). A "khaganate" in the sense of a territorial state is an inference. Treat it as a hypothesis about a chiefdom or confederation of trading communities, c. 830s–880s, not as a proven kingdom.

Sources at a glance

Where was the Rus' Khaganate?

No source says where the khagan lived, so every location is a hypothesis built from archaeology and Ibn Rusta's "island". The candidates cluster where Scandinavian finds and early silver are densest: the Volkhov–Ilmen basin, the upper Volga and the upper Dnieper.

Ladoga and the Volkhov

Staraya Ladoga, 12 kilometres from Lake Ladoga on the Volkhov, is the oldest candidate. Tree-ring dating places its first timber buildings no later than 753. Islamic silver arrived early: a hoard found on the Volkhov bank in 1892 held 28 complete dirhams and three fragments minted between 749 and 786, the earliest closely dated hoard in Eastern Europe, as A. N. Kirpichnikov noted in an Iskos study of the Ladoga dirhams. Ladoga's mix of Scandinavian, Finnic and Slavic finds fits a multi-ethnic trading base. Thomas S. Noonan's numismatic studies show how the dirham flow from the Abbasid Caliphate built up from the 780s.

Gorodishche and the "island"

Many scholars place the khagan at Rurikovo Gorodishche, the fortified site where the Volkhov leaves Lake Ilmen, 2 kilometres from Novgorod. The site was surrounded by water and marsh, it has ninth-century Scandinavian finds (excavated by E. N. Nosov), and its Norse name, Holmgarðr, means "island fortress". On this reading Ibn Rusta's damp, forested island is the Ilmen–Volkhov lowland. Novgorod itself is later; the town is dated from the tenth century.

The upper Volga

A second group of scholars looks east, to the Volga route, where most early Islamic silver entered the forest zone. Sarskoe Gorodishche near Rostov and the Timerevo cemeteries near Yaroslavl have Scandinavian graves and rich dirham finds. A khagan here would have sat on the main trade road to Volga Bulgaria and Khazaria, which is where Ibn Rusta's informant met the Rus'.

Kiev, the Don and Tmutarakan

Southern locations are less favoured. The Primary Chronicle puts the Varangians Askold and Dir in Kiev before 882, and some historians link them to the 860 attack on Constantinople. Zuckerman, however, argues that Kiev was a minor fort on the Khazar–Magyar frontier until after 889. E. S. Galkina argues for a khaganate in the Don–Azov steppe and forest-steppe. George Vernadsky placed it at Tmutarakan on the Taman Peninsula, with the "island" in the Kuban delta. Both views go against the distribution of Scandinavian finds.

Historians disagree: where was the khagan?

Northern theories (Ladoga, Gorodishche, upper Volga) rest on Scandinavian archaeology and the early dirham hoards. Southern theories (Kiev, Don, Tmutarakan) rest on the 860 attack and the chronicles' Askold and Dir.

Verdict: The north is far more likely. The khagan's people were Swedes in 839, the earliest Scandinavian and silver evidence lies in the Volkhov–Ilmen and upper Volga basins, and Ibn Rusta's marshy island fits Gorodishche best. No single site is proven, and the "khaganate" may have been a network of centres rather than a capital.

The map shows the Rus' only briefly, for AD 880–881 (see the Rus' on the map in 881), because no source defines the khaganate's borders. Drawing it for the whole 830s–890s would imply a precision the evidence does not have. Its neighbours in 881 included Khazaria, Volga Bulgaria, the Magyars and the Byzantine Empire.

What did the Rus' do?

Furs, slaves and silver

The Rus' were above all long-distance traders. Ibn Khordadbeh, director of posts of the caliphate, reports that Rus' merchants carried beaver and black-fox pelts and swords from the far north. They paid a tithe to the Byzantine ruler on the Black Sea, sometimes took their goods by camel from Jurjan to Baghdad, used Slavic slaves as interpreters, and claimed to be Christians so as to pay only the poll tax. The date of this report is uncertain; his book went through redactions between the 840s and 880s.

Furs were the key commodity. Howard-Johnston argues that a new taste for fur among the Abbasid elite from the later eighth century drove the boom, which explains why the silver flow was so large. Slaves, honey and wax went south too; silver, glass beads, silk and other luxury goods came north. The Rus' and their trade partners are covered in our articles on Volga Bulgaria and the Samanid silver of the tenth century.

The attack on Constantinople, 860

On 18 June 860, a fleet of 200 Rus' ships – the figure given by the Chronicon Bruxellense, whose account Jonathan Shepard calls "chronologically exact and consistent" – sailed into the Bosporus while the emperor Michael III was campaigning against the Arabs, and plundered the suburbs and the Princes' Islands. The date comes from the Chronicon Bruxellense. Patriarch Photios preached two homilies during and after the attack (translated by Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius, 1958), comparing the attackers to a sudden thunderbolt and crediting their withdrawal to the Virgin's robe. Jonathan Shepard has written on Photios' sermons and the route of the Rus'.

In an encyclical of 867, Photios reported that the same Rus' had accepted a bishop and become Christian – the "first baptism of Rus'". It did not last. Howard-Johnston suggests the 860 raid was co-ordinated with Arab attacks and backed by the Khazars; others see it as a Viking-style raid that exploited a temporary weakness.

Caspian raids

Persian and Arabic sources record Rus' fleets on the Caspian. The first attack, on Abaskun, fell in the reign of Hasan ibn Zayd of Tabaristan (864–884), according to the thirteenth-century historian Ibn Isfandiyar. Further raids followed in 909–910 and the following year, when, according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry "Abaskūn", the Rus' landed in Gorgan, pillaging Abaskun and Sari and carrying off Muslims as slaves, until the people of Daylam drove them off. A larger expedition came at some time after 912–913, when, according to al-Mas'udi, about 500 ships, each carrying a hundred men, attacked Abaskun, Baku and the southern Caspian shores and penetrated Azerbaijan as far as Ardabil. In 943–944 the Rus' seized Barda'a in Azerbaijan, an episode described by Ibn Miskawayh. The exact years differ between sources, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the Caspian Sea gives 910 and 911 for the second and third raids.

Khazars, Bulgars and Byzantium

The Rus' had to pass through the Khazar sphere to reach the caliphate, and Ibn Khordadbeh says they paid tithes to the Khazar ruler. The Khazars built a fortress at Sarkel on the lower Don in the 830s with Byzantine help, perhaps partly against the Rus'. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the Khazars traces the rivalry through to the tenth century. Byzantium wooed the Rus' as trading partners and recruits; the Bulgarians, Magyars and Pechenegs stood between them.

Were the Rus' Vikings?

Largely, yes – if "Viking" means Scandinavians of the Viking Age abroad. The Rus' came from the same world as the raiders in the west, and Liutprand of Cremona said so outright: the Greeks call them Rusii "whom we call by another name Northmen" (Antapodosis, translated by Paolo Squatriti, 2007). But most Rus' were traders and settlers more than pirates, and "Rus'" in Eastern Europe soon included people of other origins. For where these Vikings in Russia and Ukraine lived, from Staraya Ladoga to the Black Sea, see our article on the Varangians.

Material culture and religion

The Scandinavian presence is easiest to see in burials. Women's oval ("tortoise") brooches of Scandinavian type, Thor's hammer pendants, weapons, chamber graves and boat burials occur at Ladoga, Gorodishche, Gnezdovo near Smolensk, and Timerevo. The Encyclopedia of Russian History estimates 3,500 to 4,000 burial mounds at Gnezdovo, mostly cremations; more than 1,200 have been excavated, and no more than fifty can be positively identified as Scandinavian. The Rus' worshipped Norse gods; by the tenth-century treaties Rus' oaths were sworn by Perun, the Slavic thunder god, a sign of religious blending.

Ibn Fadlan's portrait

The most vivid eyewitness account comes from Ahmad ibn Fadlan, an envoy of the caliph to the Volga Bulgars in 921–922. He met the Rusiyya trading on the Volga and wrote, in James Montgomery's translation: "I have never seen more perfect physiques than theirs – they are like palm trees, are fair and reddish." He went on to describe their tattoos, Frankish-type swords and the ship cremation of a chieftain. Our article Ibn Fadlan's Risala and the Rus' Vikings examines the full text. Montgomery himself warns that Arabic writers may not mean the same people each time they say "Rus".

What genetics adds

The largest ancient-DNA study of the Viking Age, Margaryan and colleagues' "Population genomics of the Viking world" in Nature (2020), sequenced 442 individuals, including Viking-Age burials from Staraya Ladoga and Gnezdovo. It found "a Swedish influx into the Baltic", matching the written sources. It also found that "Viking" identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry.

Historians disagree: the Normanist debate

Since the eighteenth century, "Normanists" (from G. S. Bayer and G. F. Müller, whose 1749 speech on the origins of the Russians caused a scandal at the St Petersburg Academy) have held that Scandinavians founded the Rus' state and gave it its name. "Anti-Normanists" (from M. V. Lomonosov, and in a strong form Soviet historiography) argued for Slavic or other origins. They proposed the name came from the Ros river or the Iranian Roxolani.

Verdict: The modern consensus, reflected in Britannica, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine and Franklin and Shepard, is that the original Rus' were Scandinavians, but that the state of Rus' grew out of a Scandinavian–Slavic–Finnic society and quickly became Slavic in language. The debate remains politically sensitive in Russia and Ukraine, because the origins of Rus' are bound up with claims to its inheritance.

Where does the name Rus' come from?

The prevailing etymology runs through Finnish. The Finns still call Sweden Ruotsi, the Estonians Rootsi. These words are thought to come from an Old Norse stem rōþ(r)-, "rowing" – compare róþsmenn, "rowers, seafarers" – and perhaps from Roslagen, the coastal district north of Stockholm. Slavic speakers would have borrowed the Finnic form as Rus', just as they called other Finnic peoples Chud' and Ves'. Greek Rhos and Arabic Rus followed.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine's entry on Rus' summarises the alternatives. Mykhailo Maksymovych (1837) and later anti-Normanists derived the name from the Ros river south of Kiev. Others derived it from the Iranian Roxolani (rokhs, "light"). Byzantine writers also linked Rhos to the biblical "Rosh" of Ezekiel. The encyclopedia notes that the Ros theory does not explain why the known Varangian leaders bear Swedish names. The Finnish theory, for its part, has to explain why a Finnish word stuck.

The meaning then shifted. The Primary Chronicle first uses Rus' for the foreign princes and their followers, then for the land around Kiev, then for the whole realm. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine traces how the inhabitants became rusyny (Ruthenians), while the Latin Russia and the Greek Rhosia gave modern Russia its name. Belarus ("White Rus'") carries the same root.

What happened to the Rus' Khaganate?

The khaganate was absorbed into the realm of the Rurikids. According to the Primary Chronicle – compiled around 1113 and read critically by historians – in 862 the Chuds, Slavs, Krivichians and Ves' invited Varangians "known as Russes" to rule them. In the Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor translation they said: "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us." Rurik settled at Ladoga or Novgorod (see Rurik, founder of the Rurikid dynasty).

In c. 882, Oleg moved south, killed Askold and Dir and made Kiev his seat, uniting the northern and Dnieper centres. Whatever the khaganate had been, its leaders, followers and trade now belonged to this larger realm, which modern historians call Kievan Rus'. Zuckerman sees a real break: a crisis in the northern settlements in the 870s, followed by a new beginning under Rurikid leaders.

The title outlived the polity. Writing c. 1037–1050, Metropolitan Hilarion of Kiev praised Vladimir as "the great kagan of our land" in his Sermon on Law and Grace, and a graffito in St Sophia's, Kiev, invokes "our kagan". By then the Scandinavian elite had become Slavic. Its princes bore Slavic names from Sviatoslav (died 972) onward, and later rulers such as Igor led their armies on the Black Sea route.

Timeline

What the map shows next

After AD 881 the map hands the Rus' over to Kievan Rus': open AD 882 on the map to see Oleg's new realm on the Dnieper, AD 900 on the map for Kievan Rus' between Khazaria, Volga Bulgaria and the First Bulgarian Empire, and 1000 on the map for Vladimir's Christian Rus' beside the Byzantine Empire and the Kingdom of Sweden. The Rus' heritage then runs through the Novgorod Republic to modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The Scandinavian homelands appear as Scandinavian minor kingdoms and, with other Viking outposts, as Viking settlements (on the map). The Khazar side of the story is in our entry on Khazaria.