ABSTRACT
From the end of the ninth century onwards the Rus faced, in the form of the Volga Bulgars, a military power blocking any ambitions they may have entertained of expansion down the Volga. About the same time, they began to instal themselves in the south, in the region of the Middle Dnieper. To state this is at once to stir up controversy. For it has been assumed by the compilers of the Primary Chronicle and by modern historians that the Rus attack on Constantinople of 860 was launched from Kiev and that Rus had been living there for at least a few years. However, Photios writes of the attackers as if they were coming from even further north and states that they have already ‘subjugated those around them’.1 This fits better with an attack launched or helped on its way from an established centre, such as Gorodishche (see above, p. 54). As we shall see below (pp. 94-5, 96-102), there is no firm archaeological evidence of Scandinavian settlement, or of any significant political centre at all, on the Middle Dnieper in the mid-ninth century. For want of reliable literary or archaeological evidence of a Dnieper base for the Rus raid of 860, some scholars have supposed an abode for them somewhere on the north coast of the Black Sea, for example, the eastern Crimea.2 But no convincing archaeological evidence has been produced in support of such theories and the Byzantine sources have nothing to say about any Rus establishment on the Black Sea in the ninth century. Here, their silence is damning (see above, p. 54). That leaves the majority of the Rus sticking to the north through most of the ninth century, with merely a handful of envoys or fortune-seekers venturing as far as Byzantium, or taking goods for sale down to the steppes or a port on the Black Sea (see above, p. 42).
