Invitations to Nrdics etc to rule.

[Watchman]

Just as a general note, one should always be sceptical of any old chronicles or similar claiming someone or other was "invited" to lord it over someone else. There's an awfully big chance those are blatantly falsified to help legitimize the continued rule of a dynasty, y'see. The chroniclers usually did write on the lords' commission, after all...

[Adrian II]

The chroniclers usually did write on the lords' commission, after all...

Indeed, and in this case there is only one written source: the Primary Chronicle which was composed around 1037, well after the events surrounding the Ros which it described.

The (Swedish) Varangians had penetrated the Slav areas in the eighth century. They were avid to use the many good waterways that sprung or connected there for their trade with (and occasional plunder of) Byzantine and later also Arab lands, and they gradually became the overlords of some of the Slav tribes.

The Primary Chronicle has it that the Slav inhabitants of Novgorod chased away their Varangian lords and then invited one of them, Riuruk, to come back and become their defender, which he accepted. The result nascent state became known as 'Ros' or 'Rus'. Riurik's successor Oleg moved his capital to Kiev, closer to the Byzantine gold.

In 1037, their descendant King Yaroslav was just marrying a Swedish princess and it is quite possible that the writer of the Primary Chronicle put a nice Swedish/Varangian gloss on the Riurik affair to consolidate his ruler's new bond with the neighbors ...

[spmetla]

I highly doubt that the slavs had asked the Norse to rule them seeing as the slavs were sold as slaves by the norse (slav being the orgin of the word slave).

[Adrian II]

I highly doubt that the slavs had asked the Norse to rule them seeing as the slavs were sold as slaves by the norse (slav being the orgin of the word slave).

I believe it was mostly the Romans and early Germanic peoples who sold the Venedi as slaves, so they got the name of Slav a little earlier. The Varangians seem to have mainly demanded tribute from the Slavs they pacified, though some of that may have been in human form. Anyway, here is the relevant passage in the 1037 Primary Chronicle of Ros that I mentioned:

Years 860-862. The tributaries of the Varangians drove them back beyond the sea and, refusing them further tribute, set out to govern themselves. There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe. Discord thus ensued among them, and they began to war one against another. They said to themselves, "Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the law." They accordingly went overseas to the Varangian Rus: these particular Varangians were known as Rus, just as some are called Swedes, and others Normans, Angles, and Goths, for they were thus named. The Chuds, the Slavs, and the Krivichians then said to the people of Rus, "Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us." They thus selected three brothers, with their kinfolk, who took with them all the Rus, and migrated. The oldest, Rurik, located himself in Novgorod; the second, Sineus, in Beloozero; and the third, Truvor, in Izborsk. On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgored became known as Russian (Rus) land. The present inhabitants of Novgorod are descended from the Varangian race, but aforetime they were Slavs. After two years, Sineus and his brother Truvor died, and Rurik assumed the sole authority. He assigned cities to his followers, Polotzk to one, Rostov to another, and to another Beloozero. In these cities there are thus Varangian colonists, but the first settlers were, in Novgorod, Slavs; in Polotzk, Krivichians; at Beloozero, Ves; in Rostov, Merians; and in Murom, Muromians. Rurik had dominion over all these districts. With Rurik there were two men who did not belong to his kin, but were boyars. They obtained permission to go to Constantinople with their families. They thus sailed down the Dnepr, and in the course of their journey they saw a small city on a hill. Upon their inquiry as to whose town it was, they were informed that three brothers, Kii, Shchek and Khoriv, had once built the city, but that since their deaths, their descendants were living there as tributaries of the Khazars. Oskold and Dir remained in this city, and after gathering together many Varangians, they established their domination over the country of the Polianians at the same time that Rurik was ruling at Novgorod.

[BalkanTourist]

I highly doubt that the slavs had asked the Norse to rule them seeing as the slavs were sold as slaves by the norse (slav being the orgin of the word slave).

Some people including myself believe that the name slav comes from the word slovo (speech or word).
The slavs devided everyone into two categories. They were the ones with the word, who could speak as opposed to the Nemtsi (in Russian it is the name for German people) that comes from the word niam or nem which means mute, dumb, someone who could not speak.
Yet other people believe that the name comes from the word slava and the name of all the land inhabited by slavs was called Slavia. Slava in slavic means glory.

[Watchman]

One thing I know is that way back the Scandinavian word for slave was träl, or "thrall" in its English form. When you count in all the trade and raiding that went on over the Baltic and the so-called "East Route" (the Russian rivers that link the Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas), and the curious similarity between the name Slav and the term "slave" (bluntly slav in Swedish, AFAIK), it gets a whole lot difficult to assume coincidence.

Wherever the name Slav originated from is then a whole another issue, but by what I've read the whole ethno-cultural concept developed under Avar overlordship during the Dark Ages. *shrug* A little irrelevant really, as we were discussing the political influence of Scandinavians (mostly Swedes; they plied the Eastern route, while the Norse and Danes went to Britain and Europe) in the riverside princedoms of southern Russia. Odds are the Vikings' considerable seamanship skills and good ships allowed them to pull some serious weight on the waterways and dominate trade, which would naturally also have make them desirable allies and partners to the local potentates (I understand the Khazars and Hungarian-Magyars were the big names around the period, although the latter eventually departed for Hungary). Political marriages or straight armed power grabs flow naturally from that, and usurpers in particular have since the dawn of history always been keen on whitewashing their background...

[Adrian II]

Some people including myself believe that the name slav comes from the word slovo (speech or word).

Sounds plausible to me, but then I'm no expert. It would seem odd that a people would name themselves 'slaves' in the very language of their slave-masters. It would make more sense if it were the other way round.

The Germanic word for slave (Swedish slav, English slave, German Sklave, French esclave) could have been a generic name for the sort of people the Vikings usually enslaved, being the Slavianie as the Slavs called themselves.

The matter is rather controversial for obvious reasons. Does anybody have more thorough knowledge than the usual Wikipedia fare?

[Watchman]

As I said, the original term was thrall. At some point, Slavs became the group mainly traded as thralls (one suspects this has much to do with the way they tended to have the dubious honor of living next to the steppe nomads, who would quite cheerfully capture people to sell into slavery for example along the great Russian rivers) and the word seems to have stuck. Chances are this wasn't for quite a while any issue, as national consciusness is quite a new phenomenom and the Slavic peoples didn't have too much contact with the English-speaking world anyway. The Scandinavians stopped having thralls around the time they went Christian (11th century), and in any case kept using the old term thrall at least into mid-17th century, so odds are they never had much in the way of issues about it with the folks living on the eastern shores of the Baltic.

Case in point of this is the worry of Swedish peasantry during the Thirty Years' War of the influx of foreign nobles into the kingdom (they were granted land as reward for various services) would lead to the introduction of serfdom - and their written appeal to the governement on the subject specifically uses the term "träl" to describe it.

[Adrian II]

Here's the full etymology of the word, taken from the Online Etymology Dictionary which is a compilation of several modern print etymology dictionaries. Says it all, really, particularly the Klein quote at the end.

Slav
1387, Sclave, from Medieval Latin Sclavus (c.800), from Byzantine Gk. Sklabos (c.580), from Old Slavic Sloveninu, 'a Slav', probably related to slovo, 'word, speech', which suggests the name originally meant member of a speech community (cf. Old Church Slavonic Nemici, 'Germans', related to nemu, 'dumb'). Identical with the -slav in personal names (e.g. Rus. Miroslav, lit. 'peaceful fame', Mstislav, lit. 'vengeful fame'; Jaroslav, lit. 'famed for fury'; Czech Bohuslav, lit. 'God's glory'; and cf. Wenceslas, from Slavic vetye-, 'greater', + -slavu, 'fame, glory'). Spelled Slave c.1788-1866, infl. by Fr. and Ger. Slave. Adj. Slavic is attested from 1813; earlier Slavonic (c.1645), from Slavonia, a region of Croatia.

slave (n.)
c.1290, 'person who is the property of another', from Olf French esclave, from Medieval Latin Sclavus, 'slave' (cf. It. schiavo, Fr. esclave, Sp. esclavo), originally Slav, so called because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.

'This sense development arose in the consequence of the wars waged by Otto the Great and his successors against the Slavs, a great number of whom they took captive and sold into slavery' [Klein].