Class 5: Vikings, Slavers, Lawgivers: The Kyiv State (1)
- All right, everybody, greetings.
Happy Tuesday.
It's good to see you all.
I'm used to being wired
and I'm used to teaching classes,
but I'm not used to being wired
while I teach classes.
And so this has led me
to a certain number already of missteps.
Like, for example, in the previous lecture,
when I unwittingly doxxed my TFs
by telling, saying what their name was
and making them stand up and turn around,
as a result of which, they're all now getting thousands
of emails from the admirers
of all of the stages of their short lives, right?
(students laugh) So I didn't think
of that, guys.
I'm sorry.
The other interesting feature of doing it this way
is that like for every one of you,
there are literally like 10,000
other people watching, or 1,000,
let's not exaggerate, but there's like behind you,
there are like 1,000 people out there
who are watching.
And it turns out they also have views,
which is interesting.
And like they're just writing.
You know, they're not coming to office hours.
Oh, speaking of which, come to office hours.
Some of you have come to office hours.
It's really nice to be able to get
to know you personally, if only for a moment.
And it helps me teach,
if I figure out what you're actually getting
and what you're actually not getting.
Okay, I promise you that by the end
of this lecture, something's gonna happen.
In the previous lectures,
we've been mainly trying to set things up.
We've been thinking about what history is.
We've been thinking about
basic problems of history.
We've been working on the colonial perspective,
and how you work your way out
from under a colonial perspective.
By the end of this lecture, I promise
there will be a state which is in Kyiv.
I'm going to deliver on that promise.
That is definitely gonna happen.
But I'm gonna begin with one more remark
about what we're doing,
because it's really important.
Like, as we're in the middle of a war
in which crimes are being committed
and people are dying and killing
because of certainties
about what had to happen in the past,
or what has to happen in the future,
it's very important to understand
that history is not that.
History is not about predetermination.
It's not about what has to be.
History can do, is it can be a kind
of guide to what was possible, right?
So there is a Ukrainian society
and Ukrainian state today,
which means that it must have been possible.
The most we can do
is we can guide ourselves
towards a greater understanding
of how such a thing was possible.
But when we get to that border
of how much we can understand,
there always has to be room
for what the people actually did, right?
Not just the people today,
but the people all the way back
1,000 years ago or more,
that we'll be talking about today.
Had their choices been somewhat different,
then other things also
would have been somewhat different.
So even as we push our understanding forward
as far as it can go,
we're always keeping in mind
that what people do and the choices that people make
are beyond our ability to predict.
And that's why history is, in a way,
like it's a science,
we're trying to figure things out,
but it's also a humanity,
where we leave room for human agency.
We try to understand human agency.
At the same time, we know that human agency,
you don't understand it with the same methods
that you understand mountains and rivers.
Okay.
So the big idea today
is how you get to a state.
And that is a big idea, right?
I mean, like you might have noticed
that whenever there's a country,
whenever there's a state,
there's always a legend
about how it came to be.
Like, for example, there's an American legend
of how America came to be.
This isn't my strong suit.
You guys can correct me, but I think George Washington
felled the cherry tree.
And then 13 cherries fell,
and from each of them
came a colony, something like that.
I don't know, but everyone has a.
Thank you. Okay.
(laughs) Good.
We have an American studies student here
who says, "Yep, that's what it was."
All right.
So, but everyone has an origin story,
which mixes usually some element
of what happened with some element
of what it would be nice
to think about what happened.
And the reason why everybody has an origin story
is that it's hard to explain
how you get from no polity to a polity.
And it's usually complicated,
and it's best to have a story about us and them,
and how it's very simple.
And those stories are never true.
But it is authentically hard.
So in this lecture today,
we're gonna be talking about
some general causal forces
which made it likely
that there would be states coming into being
in Eastern Europe around the year 1000.
And those general causal forces
are things like Christianity,
and what Christianity could do for people,
for rulers and for others.
Secondly, the fact that Christianity
was not a singularity,
but Christianity was a plurality.
There were two versions of Christianity
that were emerging.
From our point of view,
a Western version and a Southern version,
a Frankish version and a Byzantine version.
And those two versions of Christianity,
it wasn't their theological differences
that mattered so much.
It was that they were represented
by two strong political units
that were pushing outward imperially
into our region,
in competition with one another.
In competition with one another.
And then underlying all this
is the basic economic status
of the place we're talking about,
where nomads are still coming and going,
where slavery is still very prominent.
And when you think of what statehood does
for people, one of the things
that statehood does for people,
and this is not just true in Eastern Europe,
this is a sort of general characterization
of what a state is,
statehood protects the people
that the state recognizes
from being enslaved by other people.
So the basic economics
of the globalization that we're in at this point,
circa 800, 900, 1000,
is a globalization of a slave trade,
in which the human beings of our part of the world
are being shipped, very far distances sometimes,
in order to be enslaved.
That is a form of global economics.
It persists and expands and continues
well beyond our region,
well beyond this time.
What a state can do is put a stop to that locally.
A state can say, "We recognize you.
"We have the coercive means to make sure
"that you will not be sold into slavery.
"We also have the coercive means to tax you.
"So we prefer," making a very long story short,
"We prefer that you stay here and work the land,
"and we tax you,
"rather than we capture you
"and sell you into slavery."
And, you know, not to make you too cynical
about the world, because I know
you're, you know, young and naive,
but the same people who do the enslaving
are also often the same people who start the state.
And that's gonna be true in our case as well, right?
The people who are doing the enslaving
are also gonna be the same people who,
by the end of the story, are gonna start the state.
So there's a general story
about causality here,
but then there's a particular story
that I want you to keep in mind, too,
and be thinking about, which is, okay,
maybe Professor Snyder is right,
that Christianity, the clash of two Christianities,
this economic and human issue
of slavery, that these made it likely
that there would be states.
Fine, but why some states and not others?
Why some states and not others?
From the point of view of a national historiography,
this question never arises, right?
Your state is always inevitable.
Others people's states might be questionable,
but yours is always inevitable,
but it's a real question.
Why some states and not others?
Why Kyivan Rus'? Why Kyivan Rus'?
And here, we're gonna get into particularities,
which involve Vikings,
which involve rivers,
which involve Khazars, and which also involve,
and this is very important,
the presence of other Slavic states.
So a huge amount of politics is copying.
A huge amount of politics is taking things
which someone else has already done
in a neighboring place,
and applying them yourself.
So it's very important for Kyivan Rus',
that there was already Moravia
and that there was already Bulgaria.
Okay, so you remember the basic setup
of where we are.
We've tried to set up
this period in various different ways.
Europe is being created, right?
So again, Europe seems self-evident,
but the difference between Europe
and the classical world
is that Europe is north of the Mediterranean,
and the classical world goes around
the Mediterranean, right?
So when the classical world
blends into Europe
is when Islam begins, in the 7th century,
and the line between Europe
and what's not Europe then becomes a Christendom,
non-Christendom sort of divide, right?
There are famous, you know, examples
of when we should think of this.
The 720s, when the French
stop Arab armies in Poitiers.
The 750s, when the Khazars stop Arab armies
in the Caucuses.
Those are kind of symbolic.
But the basic idea is that Europe
is now north of something,
whereas the classical world
encircled something, right?
So Europe is coming into being,
and is coming into being
as the failure of Christianity
south of the Mediterranean,
or the serious decline of Christianity
south of Mediterranean,
and the spread of Christianity
north of the Mediterranean,
up into, eventually into Scandinavia,
around the year 1000,
and into Eastern Europe, around the year 1000.
Remembering that these are territories,
Scandinavia, Eastern Europe,
which were not directly part
of the classical world, right?
So they're going from their own versions of paganism,
which we've talked about, into Christianity.
Okay, so this brings us to the question,
which we're gonna look at now in a little more depth,
of what is Christianity at this time, right?
And this is tough because,
I mean, many of you will have been raised Christians
or have some contact with Christianity.
And the Christianity that we have in the third decade
of the 21st century
has all kinds of varieties.
And these varieties all have their traditions,
some of them going back to this thing
called the Reformation or the Counter Reformation.
We need to sort of clear our minds of all that,
and try to think what Christianity looked like
to pagans, from the point of view
of the 9th and 10th and 11th centuries.
And to make a long story short,
it's almost always true
that when you convert as a ruler,
you're not converting because you believe.
I'm sorry.
You might believe, I'm not saying it's impossible,
but you're generally converting
because the religion in question
is bringing something to you
that your native cult does not have.
Like, for example, a written language,
a set of elites who can use
that written language,
who can be your ambassadors and your bureaucrats,
like legitimacy with other states, right?
So from the point of view of pagan rulers
looking outward at this world,
the math was working against them.
What do I mean by the math?
The math of slavery, okay?
So if you're a pagan,
everyone can enslave you.
And for a while, you might say,
"Well, I can enslave everyone else.
"I can enslave other pagans.
"I can enslave Christians. I can enslave Muslims."
And so long as the power balance is on your side,
that may seem like an acceptable answer.
And for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
