Does this exchange sound familiar?
"'A golden chalice set with precious stones for the Church of St. Boris. Six altar cloths of the finest silk, and scores of pearls sewn on, for St. Mary.' He paused. 'I'd best say that in Russian and Romaic too. And, oh, yes, Norse.'
"Reid couldn't resist japing: 'Your saints have not been born.'
"Oleg looked stricken. The American added hastily, 'Well, I could be wrong, I suppose.' No sense in pointing out that Christ - that Abraham, most likely - was also in the future."
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977), CHAPTER SIX, pp. 42-43.
Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn makes similar extravagant promises to his patron, St. Dismas. Some of SM Stirling's Christian Nantucketers had theological problems with the fact that they had time traveled to a time before Christ.
Oleg resembles van Rijn in other respects. Not only is he a trader and ship-owner but:
"Reid decided that the Russian's bluff manner must be in a large part a disarming mask over a sophisticated intelligence."
-op. cit., p. 43.
The Kievan state in 1050 A.D.:
holds eight million people, including a dozen nationalities in the city of Kiev;
is as big as the US east of the Mississippi;
has many natural resources that its inhabitants cannily exploit;
is governed by an undespotic monarchy and turbulent popular assemblies;
has a well-informed, literate Russian upper class, more capitalistic than aristocratic, whose life style encompasses stoves, glass windows, silver and gold cutlery, tablecloths, oranges, lemons, sugar and Hungarian grooms for the stabled horses and kenneled dogs.
Anderson rightly values any society that combines freedom with dynamism.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I too thought of Nicholas van Rijn as I started reading about Oleg Vladimirovich. I think he and Old Nick would have gotten along fine, good naturedly trying to swindle each other! And then they might have prayed together, or talked about the Bible and theology.
I too have wondered what Christian should do if they were somehow stranded in the past before the Incarnation of Christ. One thought I had was, if Judaism existed at that time, then they should become Jews. The Catholic Church holds that Judaism was a true and valid revelation from God, but INCOMPLETE, due to most Jews not agreeing Christ is the Messiah and Redeemer. So Christians during the First or Second Temple periods would do best to become Jews.
I agree with your comments about the Kievan state, circa AD 1050. If my recollections about Russian history is correct, things started going bad after Yaroslav the Wise died. A big reason for that being the disastrous custom of dividing the realm among all the sons of a Grand Prince. That led to endless fratricidal strife and a proliferation of smaller and smaller principalities. THEN came the Mongol invasions under the sons and grandsons of Genghis Khan. The capricious autocracy of the Khans had a seriously retarding effect on the political development of the Russian states. As was to become plain when one principality, Muscovy, eventually began the reunification of the Russian principalities.
Sean
The East Slavs had the terrible disadvantage of having a long border on the Eurasian steppe zone -- and since the late Bronze Age, migrations in the steppe have had an east-to-west gradient, with disturbances in the far east often resulting in movements that cannonball all the way into Europe. This happened at least five times in recorded history and possibly more.
It got worse as time went on, too, because the Eurasian nomads became more specialized and better-adapted to their environment, and hence more numerous and better organized.
But the nomads always wanted the goods of and agricultural surplus of the settled zones, far more than the agriculturalists needed anything from them.
Throw in that in nomad societies every man (and in some of them, significant numbers of women) was a skilled horse-archer, that they could mobilize a much higher proportion of their population than farmers (because the noncombatants could manage the herds for some time at a pinch) and you've got a terrible headache for settled states that wasn't solved until the 17th century.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with your comments. And I remarked in another combox that the open plains of eastern Europe and Ukraine left them exposed to precisely the kind of nomadic invasions sweeping in from the eastern steppes that you described.
And the political disintegration of the Kievan state after Yaroslav the Wise died didn't help!
Sean
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