Byzantium

and the

Viking World
Edited by

Fedir Androshchuk Jonathan Shepard

Monica White
 ISSN: 0283-1244
ISBN: {XXX-XX-XXX-XXXX-X}

2016 Fedir Androshchuk, Jonathan Shepard and Monica White for selection and
editorial matter; individual chapters, their contributors

Distribution:
Uppsala University Library,
Box 510, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden, acta@ub.uu.se
Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Notes on contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix
General maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii

PART I: CONTACTS AND CULTURAL TRANSFER BETWEEN

BYZANTIUM AND THE VIKING WORLD
1 Jonathan Shepard
Small worlds, the general synopsis, and the British way from the
Varangians to the Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Lesley Abrams
Connections and exchange in the Viking world . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3 Roland Scheel
Concepts of cultural transfer between Byzantium and the north . . . . . 53

PART II: CONTACTS REFLECTED IN THE MATERIAL CULTURE

4 Fedir Androshchuk
What does material evidence tell us about contacts between Byzantium
and the Viking world c. 8001000? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5 Marek Jankowiak
Byzantine coins in Viking-Age northern lands . . . . . . . . . . . 117
6 Florent Audy
How were Byzantine coins used in Viking-Age Scandinavia? . . . . . . 141
7 Magnus Kllstrm
Byzantium reflected in the runic inscriptions of Scandinavia . . . . . . 169
8 Thorgunn Sndal
Runes from Byzantium: reconsidering the Piraeus lion . . . . . . . . 187
9 Fedir Androshchuk & Glgn Krolu
A Viking sword-bearing resident of southern Asia Minor? . . . . . . . 215
10 Valeri Yotov
Traces of the presence of Scandinavian warriors in the Balkans . . . . . . 241

v
vi Byzantium and the Viking World

1 1 Mathias Bck
Birka and the archaeology of remotion: early medieval pottery from
Byzantium and beyond in eastern Scandinavia . . . . . . . . . . . 255
1 2 Inga Hgg
Silks at Birka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
1 3 Valentina S. Shandrovskaia
The seal of Michael, Grand Interpreter of the Varangians . . . . . . . . 305

PART III: CONTACTS REFLECTED IN THE WRITTEN SOURCES

14 Elena Melnikova
Rhosia and the Rus in Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos De
administrando imperio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
1 5 Anna Litvina & Fjodor Uspenskij
Contempt for Byzantine gold: common plot elements in Rus chronicles
and Scandinavian sagas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
1 6 Sverrir Jakobsson
The Varangian legend: testimony from the Old Norse sources . . . . . . 345
1 7 Scott Ashley
Global worlds, local worlds: connections and transformations in the
Viking Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

PART IV: CHRISTIANITY AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF CONTACTS

1 8 Monica White
Relics and the princely clan in Rus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
1 9 John H. Lind
Christianity on the move: the role of the Varangians in Rus and Scandinavia 409

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
List of illustrations and acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people and institutions, and to acknowledge
their help in seeing this volume into print. First and foremost, thanks go to Ingela Nils-
son, without whose consistent support and guidance we would never have got things
off the ground; to Ragnar Hedlund, who played an invaluable role in organising the
Uppsala workshop in May 2013; to the Nordic Byzantine Network for their support of
that workshop; to Eric Cullhed and all at Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, including our
anonymous reviewers whose insights and comments have helped shape the volume; to
David Cox for his excellent maps; to Nicola Sigsworth for her unstinting work on the
copy editing; to Elena Stepanova for her assistance with illustrations of material in the
Hermitage; to those colleagues who participated in the 2011 Sofia International Byzan-
tine Congress table-ronde or in the Uppsala workshop, but whose papers are published
elsewhere, for the intellectual stimulus they provided; but above all, to our authors for
their enthusiastic participation in the project and for their patience and good-humour
in dealing with a raft of queries great and small.
We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubile-
umsfond; the Stiftelsen Enboms Donationsfond; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced
Studies (SCAS); and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII). Publication of
this volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the Berit
Wallenberg Stiftelse; the Kungliga Patriotiska Sllskapet; the Stiftelsen Konung Gustaf
VI Adolfs fond fr svensk kultur; and the ke Wibergs Stiftelse.

vii
Preface

The title of this book encompasses two quite different academic worldsthose of Byz-
antine and Scandinavian studies. Each has its own academic tradition rooted in dis-
tinctive source materials. The world of Byzantine studies, which owes its origins largely
to the study of the classics, has been accusedrightly or wronglyof being elitist;
while that of Scandinavian studies has long been overshadowed by the romance of the
Old Norse sagas. Within these two academic worlds there are a number of smaller pro-
fessional spaces that seldom overlap, and those of historians and archaeologists offer a
prime example. Each approaches the others source materials hesitantly. Not all histori-
ans are at ease with the relevant archaeological sources, and the same is true for the way
in which some archaeologists deal with the written sources. However, there are subjects
where close collaboration between these disciplines is difficult to avoid. One such is the
Scandinavians activities in eastern Europe and Byzantium during the Viking Age and
beyond. One might assume that Scandinaviansvariously referred to as Rhs, Rs or
Varangiansplayed only a marginal role in the history of the Byzantine empire. How-
ever, as is well known, the empire had need of foreigners as much as the Scandinavians
had need of Byzantium in the construction of a social identity for themselves. It would
probably be no exaggeration to say that Byzantium is also needed by modern Scandina-
vianists as well as by Slavists. Slavonic and, in particular, Scandinavian written sources
only materialised at a very late date and, for research into the history of the Viking Age,
our information comes solely from the Muslim and Byzantine texts and from archaeol-
ogy.
When Byzantium without Borders was announced as the theme for the twen-
ty-second International Congress of Byzantine Studies, it opened up an opportunity
to bring a Scandinavian perspective to this subject. A round table was organised dur-
ing the Congress in Sofia by Fedir Androshchuk, with input from Jonathan Shepard,
on Byzantium and the Viking World. There were twelve participantsfrom Bul-
garia, Denmark, England, Iceland, Russia and Sweden. It had been a while since the
last conference proceedings on this topic were published, and the time seemed ripe to
take stock of work done in the intervening years. Accordingly, we decided to publish
the papers from the round table, but to supplement them with some important new
contributions. A Prepublication Conference was held on 35 May 2013 in Uppsala. It
convened under the aegis of the Nordic Byzantine Network, with support from the
Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This time, twenty scholars took part in the pro-
ceedings.

ix
x Byzantium and the Viking World

Departing from earlier scholarly conventions, which tended to focus wholly on

evidence from the territory of Scandinavia itself, our conception of the Viking world
encompasses the Scandinavian cultural diaspora in the round, while paying special at-
tention to England and Rus, and we also present some new interpretative models of
cultural transfer.
Mastery of the Byzantine and Slavonic sources is of obvious importance to the
task of editing and for this and many other reasons, we are delighted to have Monica
White on the editorial board. Although the editors of this book represent different
generations and academic schools, they share more or less the same approach and expe-
rience in dealing with the various categories of sources.
This volume contains nineteen papers, which form four thematic sections. In the
general introduction the reader may learn something of the reasons for and background
to the contacts between Byzantium and the Viking world. One section contains papers
devoted to runestones and to all forms of material evidence. Another section raises the
question of the image of Byzantium in the Old Norse sagas and Rus chronicles. The
final section deals with the role of Christianisation in the contacts between Byzantines
and Northerners, in so far as they can be deduced from the written and the archaeolog-
ical sources.
This collection of studies is, then, a kind of snapshot of recent findings, with ob-
servations about the problems posed by the many strands of relations between Byzan-
tium and the Viking world.
Working across such a broad range of sources and cultures creates a virtual and
volatile minefield of issues as to how best to style names; whether to quote in the orig-
inal language, and if so, how; whether or not to transliterate; and if so, how to do this.
Striking a balance is never easy, and often leads to charges of inconsistency or worse.
We have aimed to make this volume clear and accessible to an English-speaking and
-reading audience and especially to those who are new to the sometimes arcane fields
of the history and archaeology of early Norse, Rus, Slavonic and Byzantine history
and culture. For this we can but apologiseparticularly to colleagues from those fields
whose sensibilities may, quite understandably, be offended by such an approach.
We have attempted to make proper names and technical terms which appear fre-
quently in the volume comprehensible to non-specialists. In respect of the Old Norse
world, we have tried to use an Anglicised equivalent where one existsThormod in-
stead of ormr and Sigurd the Greek instead of Sigurr grikkr, for example; but we
have generally left place-names untouched unless there is a well-known versionsuch
as Hedeby instead of Heiabr. In the Byzantine sphere, Greek forms of proper names
have generally been adoptedKomnenos instead of Comnenus; but again, place
names have generally been left untouched, unless a familiar English form existsAth-
 Preface xi
ens not Athenai. Some names in Asia Minor appear in their Turkish form, when the
author is orienting the reader by citing present-day locations. And we have generally
preferred the Russian spelling for place names in what were the lands of Rus, rather
than a Ukrainian versionChernigov not Chernihiv, for exampleon the grounds
that the former are still more familiar to the English-speaking world. Future genera-
tions may well thinkand spelldifferently.
With a few exceptions, Greek and Russian have been transliterated, using a mod-
ified version of the Library of Congress system for Cyrillic. Long quotations in the
original language have been avoided and an English translation offered, unless a given
source is being subjected to detailed textual analysis; these translations are by our au-
thors, unless otherwise specified in the footnote. Given the scarcity of sources for the
early history of Rus-Byzantine relations, some of them are discussed by several authors
and the reader will therefore occasionally find varying translations and interpretations
within the volume.
A short Glossary is provided at the end, although this is by no means exhaustive
and wherever possible technical terms and foreign words are explained in their context.
The maps at the start of the book aim to orient the non-specialist and to locate some of
the key places and areas mentioned by our authors. Unless stated otherwise, all maps,
images, photographs and tables are by the author(s) of a given chapter; for acknowl-
edgements, please see below, 44754.

Fedir AndroshchukJonathan Shepard

Monica White