The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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the east the Byzantine Empire, pressed by the Saracens in its Asiatic possessions, by Bulgars and Slavs on its northern boundary, severed from Rome, Ravenna, and the Western world by divergencies of ritual and dogma, humiliated by military reverses in various quarters, still loomed splendid and imposing in her isolation, and the dreaded Greek fire, if no longer “the Fire of old Rome,” helped to make her navies respected in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
But if she still attracted the attention of the world, civilised and barbarian, it was scarcely by the exhibition of any grand moral qualities; her annals were one long record of vicious luxuries, servile flatteries, intrigues, disaffection, and cruelties, which grew like an unhealthy crop of fungi in an atmosphere charged with the gases of theological dogmatism. Revolution succeeded revolution, and each was followed by a dreary epilogue of torturings, executions, blindings, and emasculations, while synods and councils gravely discussed the amount of veneration due to pictures of the Virgin, or the exact wording of a litany. In one respect, however, the first Christian State approached the New Jerusalem of its aspirations, namely, in upholstery and artificial landscape gardening, and its gilded gates and rooms of porphyry, its jewelled trees with mechanical singing-birds, might well challenge comparison with the golden streets and walls of precious stones and sea of glass that adorned the Holy City of the Apocalypse.
North of what might be termed the European mainland of the Eastern Empire, between the south bank of the Danube and the ridge of the Balkans, was wedged in the kingdom of Bulgaria, a Turko principality whose territory waxed and waned as its arms were successful or the contrary in the intermittent warfare it carried on against its august neighbour. Though never rising to the position of a considerable power, and at times being reduced to complete subjection, it continued to give trouble to the Byzantine State for many centuries, and the adjoining Zupanate of Servia was from time to time brought under the alternate suzerainty of whichever factor was in the ascendant.
Beyond the Danube the Magyars had not as yet established themselves in Hungary, in the lands lately overrun by the Avars, and a considerable section of that country was absorbed in the great Moravian kingdom, a Czech state whose existence was coterminous with the ninth century, and which also embraced within its limits the vassal duchy of Bohemia, the latter country having, however, its separate dynasty of dukes.
Farther north, Poland had scarcely commenced to have a defined existence in the polity of Europe. Its people, if the early annals are not merely fables borrowed from the common stock of European folk-lore, had elevated to the dignity of sovereign duke a peasant nicknamed Piast, from whom sprang the family of that name who held the throne not less than 600 years. From the fact that the Poles remained independent both of the Western Empire and of the neighbouring Moravian power, may be deduced the assumption that they already possessed some degree of cohesion and organization—more perhaps than distinguished them in later stages of their history.
On the north shore of the Black Sea the most easterly possession of the Byzantine Empire was Kherson, a port in the Krim peninsula, and here the territory of the Cæsars came into contact with the Empire or Khanate of the Khazars, a Turko-Finnish race whose dominions stretched in the ninth century from Hungary to the shores of the Kaspian, and north to the source of the Dniepr. They appear to have attained to a comparatively high degree of civilisation, and they kept up commercial and diplomatic relations with Byzantium and the two Kaliphates of Bagdad and Kordova. Their national religion was a form of paganism (subsequently they embraced Judaism), but in spite of differences of faith and race one of their princesses became the wife of the Emperor Constantine V. Their two principal cities were Itil, on the Volga, and Sarkel (the White City), on the Don. Several of the Turanian and Slavonic tribes on their north-west borders acknowledged their authority and paid them tribute, but at the commencement of the ninth century their power was already declining.
On their north-east frontier the Khazars had for neighbours the Bulgarians of the Volga, an elder branch of the tribe which had settled in the Balkans. Bolgary, “the great City,” was their capital, and a trading centre much frequented by the merchants and dealers of the various semi-barbaric nations in their vicinity, as well as by the more highly-civilised Khazars and Persians.
Northward of all, in the bleak mountain regions of Skandinavia, on the roof of Europe as it were, dwelt the Norsemen, those wild and warlike adventurers who were to leave the impress of their hand on the history of so many countries. In those days, when Iceland and Greenland were as yet undiscovered, Norway, Sweden, and Finland formed a stepping-stone to that unknown Arctic Sea which contemporary imagination peopled with weird and grimly monsters—for the North had its magic lore as well as the shining East. And the fierce vikings, fighting and plundering under their enchanted Raven banner, seemed in those credulous times not far removed from the legendary warlocks and griffons of whom they were presumed to be the neighbours.
As has been already noticed, the Khazars were essentially a trading nation, and much of the commerce of the farther East filtered through their hands into Eastern Europe. According to one authority4 the products of the East, after crossing the Kaspian Sea, were conveyed up the Volga, and after a short land journey reached the Baltic by way of Lake Ilmen and Lake Ladoga. It is not easy to see why the shorter and simpler route along the Don and the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Mediterranean was not preferred, especially as the balance of power, and consequently of luxury and wealth, lay rather in the south of Europe than in the north. It was this trade, however, which built up the importance, possibly caused the birth, of Novgorod, that fascinating city which rises out of the mists that shroud the history of unchronicled times with the tantalising name of New Town, suggesting the existence of a yet older one. What was the exact footing of Novgorod in the early decades of the ninth century—whether an actual township, with governor and council, giving a head to a loose confederation of neighbouring Slavic tribes, or whether merely a village or camp, the most convenient station where “the barbarians might assemble for the occasional business of war or trade”5—it is difficult at this distance of time to determine. Seated on the banks of the Volkhov some little distance from where that river leaves Lake Ilmen’s northern shore, and connected with the Baltic by convenient waterways, it not only tapped the trade-route already referred to, but occupied a similar favourable position with regard to another important channel of traffic—that between the North and Byzantium by way of the Dniepr and Black Sea. Wax, honey, walrus teeth, and furs went from the frozen North to the “Tzargrad,” as the Imperial city was called by the Slavs, and in exchange came silks and spices and other products of the South. Furs and skins, of otter, marten, wolf, and beaver especially, were in growing demand in Europe, where, from the covering of savages, they had been promoted to articles of luxury among the wealthy of Christendom. With the land covered by dense forest, or infested by savage tribes, and the seas scoured by pirate fleets, traders preferred to keep as much as possible to the great river-routes, and the large, placidly-flowing rivers of the Russian plain were peculiarly suited to their purposes. Thus the early human wanderers adopted the same methods of travel, and nearly the same lines of journey, as the birds of passage, ducks, plovers, and waders use to this day in their annual migrations, winging their way along the coasts and river-courses from Asia to Europe and back again.
Shut up in their own constricted world of forest, lake, and swamp, the Novgorodski and neighbouring Slavs would get, by means of these waterways, glimpses of other worlds, distant as the three points of a triangle, and as varied in manners, customs, and products; news of Sarkel, Itil, and the Great City, Bolgary, and strange countries yet farther east, where men dwelt in tents and rode on camels and hunted the panther, whose spotted skin was more richly marked than that of any forest lynx; visits from mariners of perhaps their own nationality, bringing tales of northern seas, of ice-floes, walruses, sturgeons, and whales; of Wends who preyed on the vessels driven on to their inhospitable shore; and, more important still, of Varangian sea-rovers who were beginning to force themselves on the Finns and Slavs of the sea-coast; above all, tidings from bands of merchants of the City of Wonders that guarded the entrance to the Farther Sea, with its gates and palaces, and temples and gardens and marts, its emperor and saints, and miracles and ceremonials, like unto nothing they had experience of themselves.
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