Introductory Essay: Migration—Travel—Commerce—Cultural Transfer. The Complex Connections Byzantium-Kiev-Novgorod-Varangian Lands, 6–14th Century

Abstract

Dealing with Varangian-Rus’/Kievan and Byzantine interactions in Europe’s so-called “Middle Ages” involves several macro-regions: the East Roman realm, the Iranian as well as the Mesopotamian and Egyptian realms, and the distant Scandinavian one. Scholarship has been hampered by terminological problems: The East Roman inhabitants—”Rhomaioi”, “Rhom”, or “Rum”—were misnamed “Byzantines” almost a century after the Empire’s demise by the Augsburg humanist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580). His reference to the Greek settlement Byzantion rather than to Constantinople, the Roman Empire’s continuity, and Orthodox Christianity was meant to reduce East Roman culture to an “in-between” and elevate Western Christianity and the Carolingian reinvention of western Rome as sole successor to “Rome” whether Empire or city or St. Peter’s Christianity.1 The still unified Roman Empire—through armed conquest—had established rule or held sway in the Anatolian-Eastern/ Mediterranean-West Asian region but could not annex the Iranian realm once conquered by Alexander [“the Great”] and “Hellenized” as much as the Macedonians were “Persianized”. When, from the 3rd to the 6th century, “Rome”, whether empire, federation of provinces, or region of connected urban centers, came apart as circum-Mediterranean and trans-alpine polity, the eastern half continued as a politically unified but territorially expanding or shrinking realm with Constantinople as capital. It was thus not a “Byzantine” successor state to a dissolved empire. To the north of Constantinople and Anatolia, the vast region from the Black to the Baltic Sea was an arena of migration and of settlement of Baltic-, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic-speaking peoples. Highly mobile groups from further