Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity as mandatory cult for his subjects accelerated the
Slavicisation of the ruling elite already underway. Slavic was in use among the Rus
leadership on the Middle Dnieper by the mid-tenth century: their tribute-rounds were
termed poliude, from the Slavic for ‘among the people’ (DAI: 62 – 3 ) and Igor and Olga
gave their son a Slavic name by which he was known to the Byzantines, Sviatoslav. But,
as noted above, the Dnieper Rapids still bore distinct Rus and Slavic names at that time.
And the Rus’ reliance on axes, broadswords and shield-walls during Sviatoslav’s Balkan
campaigns, the names of certain commanders (including the beserkr ‘Ikmor’ [= Ingi-
marr?]) and, back in Rus, the occurrence of boat-burnings and chamber graves in burial
grounds in urban centres, attest close affinities of the militaro-commercial elite with
tactics and religious rites practised elsewhere in the Nordic world. But Sviatoslav’s wars
followed by the succession-struggle took a heavy toll on the Rus elite, and Vladimir
(whose name was Slavic) drew on the counsel of his maternal uncle, the Slav Dobrynia,
for victory. Moreover the gods whose idols Vladimir made such a show of venerating
outside his hall had mostly Slav rather than overtly Nordic characteristics; and after
his baptism Slavic probably became the language of liturgical worship quite swiftly,
aided by the assortment of texts readily available from Bulgarian and other Slavophone
Christians. Vladimir himself upheld Slavic as the language of authority, judging by the
legends on the gold and silver coins he struck. One reads: ‘Vladimir on the throne!’
(Sotnikova and Spasski 1982 : 80 ). The retainers and notables remunerated with these
pieces were presumed to be able to make out the Cyrillic lettering, indecipherable as the
later issues became. And waxed wooden tablets excavated at Novgorod suggest that by
the early eleventh century the repeated writing out of psalms in Slavic was one means
of teaching functional literacy (Ianin 2001 : 38 – 42 ; Franklin 2002 : 46 – 7 ). Yet Greek
remained the mother tongue of most of the senior clergy in Rus, who corresponded
with colleagues in the empire. The seal of an earlier eleventh-century metropolitan of
Laodicaea found at Staraia Ladoga may register such correspondence: the town was, in
the second quarter of the century, guarded for Prince Iaroslav Vladimirovich by a
relative of his Swedish wife (Bulgakova 2004 : 85 – 8 ).
Vladimir’s adoption of Byzantine-style Christianity as the religion to be imposed
on diverse subject-populations launched a new written culture for a polity structured
differently from its counterparts elsewhere in the Scandinavian world. Exactly when
newcomers from Scandinavia began to be denoted by the Rus elite with a generic term is
uncertain but ‘Varangian’ was most probably being used partly for this purpose by the
beginning of the eleventh century. In that sense, Rus and the rest of the Scandinavian
world were going their separate ways. But many persons of high status and fortune-
seeking Nordic warbands took advantage of the more or less continuous waterways to
reach Rus, often travelling on to Byzantium. A Saxon visitor to the Middle Dnieper in
1018 gained the impression that Kiev ‘like all this region’ was teeming with ‘speedy
Danes’ and runaway slaves (Holtzmann and Trillmich 2002 : 474 ; Warner 2001 : 384 ),
and river journeys across the steppes became somewhat less hazardous once Rus cavalry
squadrons based as far south as the confluence of the Dnieper and the Sula could escort
vessels to the Rapids. Besides, the Byzantines now let a Christian Rus trading settle-
ment develop in the Dnieper estuary. Such improved communications strengthen the
likelihood that Norse sagas’ depictions of warriors in the service of the Byzantine
emperor denote historical figures from the late tenth century onwards (Blöndal and
Benedikz 1978 : 193 – 209 ; Carroll 2005 : 40 – 3 ). And in the case of Haraldr Harðráða
–– chapter 37 : The Viking Rus and Byzantium––