Kyiv

(Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade Goods | Themes)

by Caroline Stone

For much of the early middle ages, Kyiv was a centre of great importance on the trade route that led along the Dnieper and great river systems from Scandinavia and the north – for example Hedeby and Uppsala – to the great metropolis of Constantinople. This route reached its peak from the 10th to the early 13th centuries. Slaves, furs, weapons, amber, honey, wax and sea ivory were among the products that came from the north, while the Varangians carried luxury goods back with them and Kyiv was a vital staging point along the way. Again, because of its position during its early period on the fringes of the Khazar empire, Kyiv had trade connections with south-western Asia.

The date of the foundation of Kyiv is disputed: the 9th century seems probable, although there may well have been a trading post on the site going back to the 5th-6th centuries. Kyiv’s location gave it not only wealth, but also a rich cultural mix, with influence from the steppe (Khazar and Magyar), from the north (the Varangians or Rus, who established the polity of the Kyivan Rus), and south from Constantinople (the influence of which led to the conversion to Christianity in the late 10th century). This last also had a very considerable effect not only on Kyivan culture, introducing the Cyrillic alphabet and something of the intellectual traditions of Byzantine Greece, but on the whole of the Eastern Church, which looked to Kyiv for its origin. As a result, the city has remained an important centre of pilgrimage down the centuries.

At later periods, Kyiv suffered as much as it gained from its position at the crossroads between Europe and the steppe. The city was repeatedly attacked and several times destroyed –- during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and by the Tatars in the 15th -- and was often dominated by the Lithuanians, Poles and Russians.

Not surprisingly, given its importance, Kyiv appears in a number of sources. The most fundamental is the Primary Chronicle, compiled in Old Church Slavonic in Kyiv in about 1113 and covering the history of the city over some 250 years. There is an early mention of travellers from the area, probably Swedes in origin, in the early 9th-century Annales Bertiniani. The early 10th-century Kyivan Letter, now in the Cambridge University Library, deals with the problems of the Jewish community, while a very important source for the trade route through Kyiv and the way it functioned is to be found in the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus’ De Administrando Imperio, written in the mid-10th century. There are also other Greek histories and chronicles from the Byzantine period.

Many geographers and travellers mention or describe Kyiv, including a number of the early Arab authors (see Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone, Penguin, 2012). The city is also mentioned by the Russian, Afanasy Nikitin, in the mid-15th century and by other travellers and pilgrims, both Slavic and Western European, as well as in some of the accounts of members of the Religious Orders. Later mentions of Kyiv and the region are to be found in de Beauplan (ca. 1600), perhaps Makarius al-Halabi (ca. 1650), P. S. Pallas (ca. 1790), and Prince Demidoff (ca. 1850), while Mary Holderness is probably one of the best sources (ca. 1820).