The Silver Volga

How Viking Trade Revitalized Europe

In 655 AD the first Muslim fleet met the Byzantine navy off the coast of Anatolia. The rough seas forced both sides to lash their ships to one another and the two great rafts collided in a fierce battle. Soldiers and sailors jumped from ship to ship in ruthless melee combat. As the day wore on the Muslim fleet gained the upper hand. When enemies closed in on the Byzantine flagship, Emperor Constans traded uniforms with one of his officers and narrowly escaped with his life.

Soon Muslim fleets would spread across the Mediterranean, bringing new lands under the control of the Ummah and launching devastating raids on the shores of Europe. What had once been a “Roman Lake” became a civilizational battleground. Coastal settlements were left in ruins and populations fled the slavers by retreating to isolated hilltop fortresses. 

Western Europe found itself in a deepening isolation that stalled its political, economic, and cultural development. When mysterious raiders appeared from the mists of the North, few would have expected them to help resolve their mercantile problems. Scandanavians sailed far in their swift ships, ravaging the coasts and waterways of Northern Europe for plunder. After these initial forays, the invaders built a thickening network of settlements, forts, and trading posts and developed trade routes spanning from North America to the Middle East.

Nicholas Roerich

The most important link in this network was the waterways of Eastern Europe. The Norsemen who conquered it became known as the Rus.

The Rus were a great commercial power; linking Northern Europe’s wealth in raw materials to the luxuries & refined goods of the Byzantine Empire, Caliphate, & beyond. The scale of this trade is grossly underestimated & it was one of the busiest trade routes in the world.

The Rus controlled “The Route from the Varangians to the Greeks,” which served as the easiest route for trade between Christendom & the Orient, mainly through the Dnieper and Volga Rivers. By navigating several portages and obstacles, like the famous cataracts on the Dnieper, intrepid Norsemen could access the immensely wealthy markets of Byzantium and the Caliphate.

Adding the natural resource richness of Eastern Europe to this mix offered huge opportunities. The intrepid Norse merchant-raiders brought furs, timber, walrus ivory, metals, wax, honey, & slaves South & returned with silks, spices, jewelry, fine weapons, wine, religious artifacts, and, most importantly, silver.

By Briangotts. The Varangian Way is marked in purple, the Volga route to the Caliphate is in red.

The medieval world ran on silver. Most large-scale commercial activities relied on it as payment. However, Europe lacked any large silver mines and this shortage suppressed trade activity and relegated many to bartering. In order to nurture the mercantile economy, silver needed to be injected into circulation. Thankfully, the Caliphate offered a solution. 

Large silver mines were active in Central Asia and through trade in Eastern Europe it entered European economies. Hoards of Muslim coins have been unearthed in Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Northern Europe, demonstrating the scale of this trade. Scholars estimate that 500,000 dirhams (silver coins from the Caliphate) have been dug up in Scandinavia alone.¹

Norse & Rus merchants weren’t the only ones to see the value of this market. Bulgar, German, Caucasian, Khazar, Armenian, Byzantine, & Jewish trade colonies were established in the great cities of the Rus; magnifying economic activity & influencing Rus culture. So lucrative was the trade that most diplomatic missions & treaties the Rus signed pertained to mercantile activities, most notably in the treaties with the Byzantine Empire preserved in the Primary Chronicle.

George Vernadsky, a famous Russian scholar, was the first to estimate just how massive this commercial operation was. Vernadsky relied on Byzantine accounts of the annual trade flotilla that the Rus sent to Constantinople. Constantine VII estimated the flotilla contained hundreds of ships, possibly a thousand. Vernadsky used the traditional sea-going vessel of the Cossacks, the chaika, built in a similar way to those described by Constantine, to calculate the size of the flotilla.

Vernadsky calculated that the carrying capacity of a modest annual fleet would have been roughly 10,000 tons! Even assuming a staggering half of the weight was for non-commercial goods & slaves, the trade dwarfs almost any other in the medieval period. For reference, this is larger than the main artery of Italo-German trade in the 15th c. (1,250 tons) and towers over any contemporary Western European trade until the heydays of the Hanseatic League & Italian City States hundreds of years later (Venice, Pisa, Genoa, etc.).

The scale of this trade took the Rus from a backwater wilderness to a wealthy & urban society in the 10th & 11th centuries, and enriched these lands & that of their primary trading partners, the Byzantine Empire, who saw a sizable increase in commerce & the wealth that came with it. Unfortunately, the good times couldn’t last & the political fracturing of the Rus, nomad groups severing trade links, & the rise of the Italian trade emporiums weakened this route of exchange.

By the 12th century the Crusades had opened the Orient to Western Europe directly & Italian merchants could easily side-step the Byzantines & Rus, dramatically reducing the importance of Constantinople & Kiev in global commerce. The reduction in commerce weakened the Rus & Byzantines, contributing to their near-simultaneous collapse, the Byzantines at the Fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the new commercial juggernaut, Venice, & the Rus by the greatest nomads of all, the Mongols, who razed Kiev in 1240.

This would sever the nexus of the Medieval Orthodox World & Russia & the Byzantines would grow distant as connections remained tenuous for 100s of years. When Russia emerged victorious over the Mongols it found the Byzantines conquered & claimed status as its successor. Regardless, the status of the Kievan Rus & by extension the Norse, as the mercantile link between Western Europe & the East, provided these nascent states with access to global trade which the collapse of the Western Roman Empire & rise of the Caliphate had weakened their access to.

Through the “Dark Ages” these connections aided in the economic expansion & mercantile foundations of these states until they burst onto the scene in the High Middle Ages. With these new connections spearheaded by the Italians, Western Europe developed trade routes & systems of their own which helped create the conditions for greater commercial & cultural expansion in the 15th & 16th centuries.

1. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/11/nearly-500000-dirhams-were-buried-viking-age-scandinavia-study-finds/