Emperor John I Tzimiskes launched a surprise attack, a pincer-movement: his cavalry
made for Preslav while a fleet equipped with Greek Fire sailed up the Danube. The Rus
garrison-troops under their commander Svenkel fought bravely, 7 , 000 of them making
a last stand in the palace even after it was set ablaze (Hase 1828 : 137 ; Talbot et al. 2005 :
183 ). And even when beleaguered in Silistra on the banks of the Danube, Sviatoslav and
his warriors took on the Byzantine heavy cavalry, the footsoldiers vainly attempting
mounted combat, and their womenfolk enlisted for combat, as the Byzantines observed
when they came to strip the dead. Our main Byzantine source, Leo the Deacon, depicts a
series of Homeric contests and doubts may be cast on the historicity of some of
his details about ‘Scythian’ pagan sacrifices and beliefs. In any case, the Rus resisted
furiously and after months of heavy fighting they did not so much surrender as agree to
withdraw together with their ample stocks of loot and captives. These trophies were
probably Sviatoslav’s ultimate undoing: they encumbered his withdrawal from the
Danube and the winter of 971 – 2 was spent on the Dnieper estuary. The Rus, weakened
by hunger, were set upon by Pechenegs in the spring and annihilated. Sviatoslav’s own
skull found new uses as a plated Pecheneg drinking-cup.
The disappearance of Sviatoslav and much of the Rus warrior elite left a power
vacuum which his youthful sons were ill-equipped to fill. One of them, Prince Iaropolk,
managed to defeat and kill his brother, whom Sviatoslav had set over the Derevlians, but
another son, Vladimir, fled ‘overseas’ from his seat in Novgorod to a court or courts in
the Nordic world. Iaropolk’s regime was less than robust, seeing that some Slav tribes
ceased to render tribute while opportunists from the Scandinavian world tried to set
themselves up among the Rus, a ‘prince’ named Ragnvaldr at Polotsk and a certain Tury
at the place which took its name from him, Turov (PVL: 36 ; RPC: 91 ). These moves
bespeak political volatility, but they also imply that trading with the Byzantines per-
sisted. Polotsk controlled one branch of what became known as ‘the way from the
Varangians to the Greeks’ (Figure 37. 1 ), skirting Novgorod; and Turov lay on the River
Pripet, leading from the Middle Dnieper towards the Western Bug, or overland to
Cracow and other markets where German-struck silver might be had. By the 970 s a
major reorientation in Rus trading was underway, as supplies of high-quality dirhams
from central Asia dwindled, and exchanges of furs for western goods and silver grew in
value and volume. But access to Byzantine silks and other de luxe goods carried a special
cachet. Ragnvaldr’s and Tury’s choice of seats implies as much, and one of Sviatoslav’s
conditions for vacating the Danube had been that the Rus should be allowed to travel ‘to
Byzantium to trade, as has been the custom from of old’ (Hase 1828 : 156 ; Talbot et al.
2005 : 198 – 9 ). Smolensk owed much of its prosperity to its role as a service-station for
boats hauled over portages on ‘the way to the Greeks’, and its ostentatious barrows, some
raised over boat-burnings, suggest that business was booming through the second half
of the tenth century. In that sense, the trading connection with Byzantium was now too
widely prized to be subject to the vagaries of particular regimes. Sviatoslav’s Danubian
venture, after all, amounted to a variant on the earlier move made by the Rus to the
Middle Dnieper the better to trade with the Greeks.
Nonetheless, the question of the future course of political relations between the
Dnieper Rus and the Byzantines remained open. Byzantine observers were struck by the
organisational skills as well as the fighting prowess shown by the Rus during their
Balkan campaigning, and in the late tenth century the popular interpretation placed
on a relief sculpture in Constantinople was that it portended the city’s fall to the Rus
–– Jonathan Shepard––