New Histories of Northern Eurasia:
A Reader

Chapter 1 of A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1918 argues that, in the first millennium CE, “Northern Eurasia” was but a multitude of spaces, a hypothetical entity that can be defined only negatively, as a blind spot in the perspective of actually existing “collective observers” of the time: the literate cultures of ancient China, Persia, and Byzantium. Extremely low population density allowed various groups on the vast territory—between the Carpathian Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, from the steppes in the south to the tundra in the north—to mold their social organization primarily based on the specific ecological niches they inhabited. Infrequent intergroup contacts and the general lack of written culture prevented the synthesis of multiple local knowledge into a more general worldview and its transmission in space and time.

An important exception that only confirmed this generalization is the case of the so-called Orkhon inscriptions on the stela in Old Turkic script, dated back to the early eighth century CE. On the one hand, they register the rather late acquisition of literacy in the region and the mechanism of this process—in close proximity to and in direct interaction with one of the great literate cultures of the South, the Tang Empire in China. On the other hand, they document the peculiar social organization and nascent political order of the region’s most cohesive group—the steppe nomads. We learn about their perception of their neighbors, including the exceptional place of China on this mental map, the biography of an ideal nomad leader, and the role of horses, whose names are registered in the inscriptions more diligently than the names of princes. Excerpts from the Orhon inscriptions—one of the first authentic voices from the would-be region—open this sourcebook.

The second text included in this section documents the opposite perspective—from the great Islamic/Persian literate culture onto the conglomerate of semi-isolated, and thus perceived as exotic, societies of the north. A Persian geographer and traveler of the early tenth century CE, Abu-Ali Ahmed ibn Rustah, personally visited many remote places, traveling as far north as Novgorod. However, his Book of Precious Records reflected the collective knowledge accumulated by his culture, as personal impressions are seamlessly interwoven with borrowings from earlier texts by Arabic and Persian authors. Ibn Rustah registers a diversity of the region’s “tribes” that are described in terms of the constellation of and adjustment to specific environmental conditions, their shared religious beliefs, nascent political organization, and socioeconomic arrangements. Though very distinctive, these population groups are fairly interconnected, both in their more or less systematic contacts and in the eye of an outside observer, who describes their position relative to each other, placing them side-by-side on the same mental map.

This chapter contains three documents that illustrate the mechanisms of nascent political self-organization in the region in the ninth–tenth centuries.

The first text is an extract from a book by another great Arab-language scholar and native of Central Asia, Muhammad al-Farghānī. In the mid-ninth century, he attested to the inclusion of the region’s nomads and the sedentary societies north of them on the mental map of Islamic culture. Identified with the most remote sixth and seventh “climes”—regions defined by the length of the longest day—these societies were now imagined as parts of a common geographical and potentially political space.

A century later, Liudprand, the bishop of Cremona in Lombardy, was dispatched by the soon-to-be king of Italy, Berengar II, on a mission to Constantinople in 949 CE. In the book written at this time, he cited eyewitness accounts of Prince Igor’s 941 attack on Constantinople, recorded just one year after the event. The book’s fragment included in this volume presents the most authentic record of the episode, which is usually described based on the work of authors writing a century or two later. Liudprand identifies “Rusii” as “Nordmanni” and characterizes them as neighbors of nomadic confederations in the steppes.

The third document in the chapter is an excerpt from the letter of the missionary bishop Bruno of Querfurt to Holy Roman Emperor Henry II (ca. 1008 CE), written from the border of the Rous’ Lands. This is a unique firsthand testimony on intergroup cultural contacts: amicably received by the Kyivan prince, Bruno traveled to his archenemies, the nomadic Pechenegs. Despite their initial hostility toward him, he was not harmed, and he succeeded in baptizing some of them, thus offering us a glimpse of the region’s Christianization as a foundation for gradual political consolidation.