How the Vikings Founded Russia and Ukraine

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]In Western Europe, the Viking Age traditionally began in 793, when a gang of Norse pirates sacked a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne in northern England.

[00:00:11]In Eastern Europe, it began in 860, when the Scandinavians attacked Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire's eastern remnant and the richest city in Europe.

[00:00:22]But, how did these rugged Norsemen arrive in a land so distant from their icy home?

[00:00:28]In the East, the Vikings were known as Varangians or Rus. The latter derived from an archaic Swedish word meaning men who row.

[00:00:37]An apt title, for it was along the Don, Volga, and Dnieper that they first appeared in Eastern Europe seeking to use those mighty rivers as a highway to access the extremely lucrative markets of Constantinople and Baghdad.

[00:00:52]While doing this, they established a tributary relationship over many of the East Slavic tribes living along the trade rivers en route.

[00:01:00]According to the Primary Chronicle, a medieval manuscript written 300 years after the fact, in 879, a Norse chieftain named Rurik was actually invited by the Slavic tribes of the north to rule over them.

[00:01:14]Rurik duly accepted and made the city of Novgorod the capital of his hand-gifted realm.

[00:01:21]Rurik died three years later and his impromptu domain was entrusted to his brother-in-law, Helgi, who pushed its borders southward.

[00:01:30]Along the Dnieper, he encountered the old Slavic settlement founded by the eponymous Kiev four centuries earlier, which was at the time ruled by another pair of Viking chieftains.

[00:01:41]Helgi seized Kiev and made it his new capital, traditionally marking the beginnings of a medieval state known as both Kievan for its capital and Rus after the longboat-rowing Norsemen who founded it.