Jonathan Shepard

Luke Treadwell

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.

In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan

Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age

Simon Franklin

This eight-volume series, covering the history of Russia and its immediate neighbors from the emergence of Rus through to the present day, is written for students and non-specialist readers. A major strength of the series its the space it devotes to the less familiar histories of Rus and Russia before the time of Peter the Great. This eagerly awaited study--the first in modern times by western scholars, explores one of the definitive processes int eh making of modern Europe: the emergence, amongst the diverse inhabitants of the bast landmass east of the Carpathians, of the 'Land of the Rus' (Russia to medieval Latin writers), whose modern heirs include Ukraine and Belarus as well as Russia itself. In the eighth century, the region was sparsely inhabited by separate groups of Slavs, Balts, Finno-Ugrain and Turkic peoples, with few focuses of settlement or wealth, and little to link one group to another. By the late twelfth century, it bristled with prosperous towns, bonded in networks of trade and commerce, and ruled by members of a single dynasty. It communicated in a single dominant language (Slavonic) and professed a single dominant faith (Orthodox Christianity). How and why this transformation came about is the subject of this book. It starts with Scandinavian adventures traveling the northern forests in search of eastern silver. It shows how their successors opened the trade route south to Byzantium, and established themselves in Kiev, as their base for the hazardous journey across the steppes. It traces Kiev's rise to become, by the mid-eleventh century, a city of enviable wealth and self-confident Christian culture. And it shows how the ruling dynasty spread it operations north and west into new and increasingly prosperous regional centres, like Novgorod and Galich--and, most significantly for the history of Russia, into the heartlands of the future Muscovy. Within this framework, the authors explore every aspect of the world of the early Rus--social, economic, cultural and religious as well as political. In doing so they fill a vast blank in the mental maps of most of us. Better still, sifting the mass of post-Soviet historiography and using a wealth of evidence from archaeological and literary as well as archival sources, they are able to bring their unfamiliar subject vividly alive. Here are the laws and customs, the buildings and lifestyles, even the everyday letters about love and money (remarkably preserved on birch bark, and many only recently discovered) which illuminate this vanished world. The Emergence of Rus is a major contribution to Russian and Slavonic studies, and a masterly piece of historical synthesis.

750-1200

The Emergence of Rus

Catherine Holmes

Jo van Steenbergen

Björn Weiler

This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres – the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic – roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres

Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1500

This book brings together papers arising from the 24th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held in Cambridge in 1990. It represents a comprehensive investigation of Byzantine diplomacy from the emergence of the empire in late antiquity to its final throes as it fell to the Ottoman Turks. This is not just a narrow study of political relations, but a broad sweep from Italy to the steppes of Central Asia, from the imperial court to the marriage bed, from the scriptorium to the barracks. The book also includes a mysterious communication from a long-dead emperor.

Papers from the Twenty-fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990

Byzantine Diplomacy

According to Byzantium's leaders, their imperial order anchored in Constantinople was the centre of excellence, spiritual, moral, material and aesthetic. They rewarded individuals willing to join, and favoured those prepared to cooperate militarily or politically. Interactions with outsiders varied over place and time, complicated by the sometimes differing priorities of Byzantine churchmen and monks on or beyond Byzantium's borders. Jonathan Shepard here considers the dynamics of such interactions, notably the interrelationships of Bulgarians, Hungarians and Rus with Byzantium.

Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the Balkans and East-central Europe

Byzantium lasted a thousand years, ruled to the end by self-styled 'emperors of the Romans'. It underwent kaleidoscopic territorial and structural changes, yet recovered repeatedly from disaster: even after the near-impregnable Constantinople fell in 1204, variant forms of the empire reconstituted themselves. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c.500-1492 tells the story, tracing political and military events, religious controversies and economic change. It offers clear, authoritative chapters on the main events and periods, with more detailed chapters on outlying regions and neighbouring societies and powers of Byzantium. With aids such as maps, a glossary, an alternative place-name table and references to English translations of sources, it will be valuable as an introduction. However, it also offers stimulating new approaches and important findings, making it essential reading for postgraduates and for specialists. The revised paperback edition contains a new preface by the editor and will offer an invaluable companion to survey courses in Byzantine history.

The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c.500-1492

Jacek Gruszczyński

Marek Jankowiak

That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.

Jonathan Shepard

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