Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

also beasts and dragons of enormous size’. Yet the Northmen, a people incorrigibly adventurous, had never been ones to shrink from the rumour of terrors. Already, as early as 650, a Swedish explorer of the Baltic had won for himself the sonorous title of ‘Far-Reacher’; and there were many, over the succeeding centuries, who had followed in his wake. Beating their way up the rivers that flowed into the Gulf of Finland, gliding across icy lakes, straining as they bore their vessels overland past churning rapids, they had ventured ever further southwards, until at length, borne along widening currents, the Northmen had found themselves debouching into the warm waters of the South, the Black Sea and the Caspian, with easy passage onwards to fabulous cities rich in silks and gold. The seeming wilderness of Sweden the Great had proved itself in truth the very opposite: a land of opportunity. No less than the surging waters of the Atlantic, mighty rivers such as the Dnieper and the Volga had served the Northmen as highways to adventure and betterment. ‘Like men they journeyed for distant treasure.’ Onwards, swelling the gold rush, the crews of their ships had pressed. Tirelessly, their oars had dipped and flashed. No wonder that the natives, watching them from the banks, had referred to them simply as ‘rowers’ — as the ‘Rus’.

Such a name, redolent as it was of energy and effort, had fitted the newcomers well. It might be lucrative to transport furs and slaves to feed the appetites of the great cities of the South, yet the journey was a gruelling one: ‘full of hardship and danger, agony and fear’. Whether it was pulling on their oars, or manning the raw wooden palisades of their trading stations, or slaughtering anyone who sought to muscle in on their cartel, the Rus had found themselves with little choice but to operate as a team. Although they were tiny in number, intruders within a vast and hostile land, the very knowledge of how perilous were their circumstances had served to instil in them a ferocious sense of discipline. They had fought and traded together as ‘ Varangians’: men bound together by a common pledge, a ‘var’. The dangers and the profits: the Rus had shared them both.

And steadily, over the decades, their swords had reddened, and their coffers overflowed. Transit posts had evolved into forts; forts into booming towns. The most imposing of all these went by the name of Kiev: a stronghold raised on a ravine-scored hill beside the Dnieper, ideally placed to control the flow of traffic along the river. Ideally placed as well to cow the natives, and to extort tribute from them, and to recruit them to serve in ever-swelling war bands. Inexorably, in the decades that preceded the Millennium, the Rus had succeeded in establishing themselves as something more than merely merchants— as princes. In 980, when one of them, the bastard son of a Kievan warlord by the name of Vladimir, had succeeded in returning from exile in Scandinavia and seizing power in his native city with the backing of Varangians from Sweden, he had laid claim as well to an immense and shadowy protection racket: one that extended from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

This startling achievement put the lordships won by Northmen elsewhere into a somewhat sobering perspective. Everything in the lands of the Rus – ‘Russia’ – existed on a vaster and more fabulous scale. In 1015, on Vladimir’s death, his sons had fought a great and terrible war that had seemed, by the reports of it that echoed dimly from the frozen battlefields, the shadow play less of mortal princes than of fantastical heroes sprung from the tall tales of pagans. For months, the armies of rival brothers had faced one another across the raging torrents of the Dnieper. The younger, Yaroslav, was nicknamed ‘the Lame’; and his enemies, screaming abuse from the far bank above the howling of the steppeland gales, had jeered at him as a cripple. But then, with the coming of winter, the river had begun to freeze over, and Yaroslav, lame or not, had succeeded in leading his forces across the thickening floes. Trapping his enemies, he had driven them backwards on to thin ice, and their doom.

Still the war had raged. Three times Yaroslav had confronted the armies of his brother – and three times he had dyed the snows red with their blood. His victory, in the end, had been total. His brother, pursued in his imaginings by invisible huntsmen, had fled to Poland and died there a madman, stabbing at empty air with his sword. Other brothers too, over the decades, had been eliminated. Yaroslav himself, meanwhile, laying claim to the rule of Kiev, had set about the task of fashioning his rickety mafia state into a realm such as any king in Christendom might admire – and with such success that he would end up remembered, not as ‘the Lame’, but as ‘the Wise’.

It was in Scandinavia, however, that his fame shimmered most glamorously of all: for to the Northmen he appeared the cynosure of princes, renowned as far as Iceland for his cunning, his opulence and the seductiveness of his daughters. Even though Yaroslav himself, with his Slavonic name, his Slavonic habits and his Slavonic tongue, was no more a Viking than was his distant cousin, the Duke of Normandy, he had not forgotten his roots. As a young man, he had been sent by his father to rule a stronghold only a few days’ journey from the northern seas: the celebrated ‘New Castle’, or Novgorod. Raised on the site of a fabulously ancient shrine, with a black-watered lake on one side and limitless forests on the other, and fashioned so entirely out of wood that even its documents were made of birch bark, the town was still, more than a century after its foundation, brash with frontier spirit. As such, it had long been a magnet for adventurers