The Varangian Routes

The Norse Who Went East

The popular image of the Norse is westward — longships on the Atlantic, raids on Lindisfarne, settlements in Iceland. This is the smaller half of the picture. Swedish Norse traders and warriors — primarily from the regions of Svealand and Gotland — pushed east, down the river systems of what is now Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, reaching Constantinople and Baghdad before 900 CE.

The Byzantine Greeks called them Rhōs or Varangians (Væringjar in Old Norse — probably from vár, oath or pledge, referring to men bound by oath of service). The Arabic sources called them al-Rūs. The Slavic peoples they encountered and traded with and fought called them Varyagi. These are the same people.

What they called themselves depended on context. In Scandinavia, a man who had traveled these routes might call himself a garðsmaðr — a man of the garths (the fortified market towns of the east). The route itself became known as the Austrvegr — the Eastern Way.

The River Routes — Engineering the Journey

The Varangian routes were not roads. They were rivers, and between the rivers, they were portages — overland carries where ships had to be dragged across land to reach the next river system. The Norse knarr that crossed the Atlantic was too large and too heavy for this. The boats used on the eastern routes were smaller, lighter, and built to be carried.

The primary route ran from the Gulf of Finland up the Neva River to Lake Ladoga, then up the Volkhov River to Lake Ilmen, then up smaller tributaries toward the Valdai Hills — the watershed that divides rivers flowing north to the Baltic from rivers flowing south to the Black Sea and east to the Caspian. Over the watershed by portage. Then down — the Dnieper system south toward the Black Sea and Constantinople, or the Volga system east toward the Caspian and the Islamic caliphate beyond.

Constantine VII, Byzantine emperor, wrote a detailed account of the Dnieper route in his De Administrando Imperio around 950 CE. He names the seven cataracts of the Dnieper — dangerous rapids where boats had to be pulled ashore, unloaded, and carried past. He gives both the Slavic and the "Rhōs" (Norse) names for each one. The Norse names are recognizable: one means "the island rapid," another "the impassable one." Constantine notes that the men had to wade into the water and feel for the bottom with their feet while others pushed the boats through. They did this while posting guards against the Pechenegs — nomadic raiders who knew exactly when the Varangians were most vulnerable.

This was not a casual journey. It was a multi-month, logistically complex operation that required coordination across a large group, knowledge of the route, and the ability to fight at any point along it. The men who did it were professionals.

What They Traded — and What Came Back

The eastern trade was not primarily about raiding. It was commerce — deliberate, organized, and enormously profitable.

The Norse brought from the north: furs (sable, beaver, marten, ermine), honey, wax, amber, walrus ivory, and — most critically — slaves. Thrall-taking was part of the western raiding economy too, but the eastern slave trade was industrial in scale. Captives taken in raids on Slavic populations (the word "slave" derives from "Slav," which gives the historical scope of this) were transported south and sold to Byzantine and Islamic buyers. Constantinople was a major slave market. Baghdad was another.

What came back was silver. Specifically: Islamic silver dirhams, minted by the Abbasid Caliphate and its successors, struck in enormous quantities and distributed across the Islamic world's trade networks. The Varangians brought them back in staggering quantities. Archaeological surveys have found over eighty-five thousand Arabic dirhams in Scandinavian hoards — the largest concentration anywhere outside the Islamic world itself. Gotland island alone has produced more Arabic silver than anywhere in Russia.

This silver financed the Viking Age. It paid for ships. It funded raids. It was used in ornaments and jewelry (the elaborate silver work of Viking Age finds is largely made from melted-down dirhams). It created the economic base for the warrior aristocracy that gave the age its character. The Norse were not just violent — they were wealthy, and their wealth came substantially from the east.

Ibn Fadlan — The Best Witness

In 921–922 CE, the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad sent a diplomatic mission north to the Volga Bulgars, a Turkic Muslim people who had requested an Islamic teacher. The mission's secretary was Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a scholar whose written account — the Risāla — is the most detailed first-hand description of Norse people produced by anyone in the medieval world.

Ibn Fadlan encountered a group of Norse traders (whom he calls the Rūs) camped on the Volga. His account is extraordinary in its specificity. He describes their appearance (tall, tattooed with dark blue or dark green patterns from fingernails to neck — tree patterns according to some translations), their hygiene (they used a shared washing basin, which horrified him), their religious practice (household posts carved with faces that they prostrated before and offered food to), their commercial practices (women wore neck rings of silver or gold in numbers that indicated their husband's wealth), and their treatment of the sick (set aside from the group with some provisions and left).

Most famously, he witnessed a ship burial — the funeral of a Norse chieftain. The account is detailed and has been partially confirmed by the archaeological record: the body kept in a temporary grave, a slave girl who volunteered to die with her master (or was chosen), the ten-day preparation, the cremation of ship and contents together, the burial mound raised over the ashes, and the Rūs interpreter's statement to Ibn Fadlan that the Norse did this so their dead would go to paradise quickly, rather than being consumed slowly in the ground.

Ibn Fadlan was not always neutral — he found much of what he saw distasteful and said so — but he was scrupulously observational. He described what he saw, not what he expected. The Risāla is the closest thing to journalism that survives from ninth-century contact between the Norse and the wider world.

Kievan Rus' — The State the Norse Built (and Then Became)

The Norse did not just travel through the river systems of the east. They built political structures along them. The Primary Chronicle, written by monks in Kiev around 1113 CE, preserves a tradition — contested by modern historians, probably with some basis — that the Slavic peoples of the Novgorod region invited Varangian chieftains to rule them because they could not stop fighting each other. A man named Rurik arrived with his kinsmen around 862 CE and established himself at Novgorod. His successors moved south and took Kiev. The Rurikid dynasty ruled Kievan Rus' until the thirteenth century.

The Rurikid rulers had Norse names: Rurik (Hrœrekr), Oleg (Helgi), Igor (Ingvarr), Olga (Helga). The elite of early Kievan Rus' spoke Old Norse alongside Slavic. The army included large contingents of Scandinavian warriors. Treaties between Rus' and Byzantium, preserved in the Primary Chronicle, include names that are recognizably Norse — Karli, Farulf, Ruald, Ivar — alongside Slavic names.

Within two to three generations, the Norse elite had assimilated into the Slavic world. By the time Prince Vladimir converted Kievan Rus' to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE — a political decision as much as a religious one, cementing Rus' alliance with Byzantium — the ruling dynasty was Norse in origin but Slavic in culture. The process of how the Norse became the Rus became the Russians is one of the most consequential ethnogenesis stories in European history. It is rarely taught alongside the Atlantic-facing version of Norse history.

The Varangian Guard — Axes in Constantinople

The Byzantine emperors had a problem: they could not trust their own armies, which were politically entangled with the factions that repeatedly overthrew and replaced emperors. The solution, first formalized under Basil II around 988 CE, was a personal bodyguard of foreign mercenaries who had no stake in Byzantine court politics — the Varangian Guard.

The Guard was composed primarily of Norse warriors — initially from Kievan Rus', later increasingly from Scandinavia directly, and eventually, after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, from Anglo-Saxons who had lost their kingdom and had nowhere else to go. At its height, the Guard numbered several thousand men. They were armed with the two-handed Danish axe. They were the most feared close-quarters fighters in the Byzantine army.

The Guard's most famous member was Harald Sigurdsson — later Harald Hardrada, last of the great Viking kings. A half-brother of Saint Olaf of Norway, Harald fled Norway after the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, made his way east, entered Byzantine service, fought across the Mediterranean world (North Africa, Sicily, Asia Minor, Bulgaria), rose to command a large portion of the Guard, allegedly acquired enormous personal wealth, and eventually returned to Norway, claimed the throne, and died at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 — the battle that is conventionally marked as the end of the Viking Age.

The Varangian presence in Constantinople left physical traces. Runic inscriptions have been found carved into the marble of the Hagia Sophia — the vast Byzantine cathedral that was the center of the Christian world for centuries. One reads, in part: "Halfdan carved these runes." Another: "Ari made these." Bored soldiers in a great church, leaving their names in the stone because that is what Norse people did.

When the Silver Stopped

The flow of Arabic silver into Scandinavia was not permanent. Around 970–1000 CE, the dirham hoards in Scandinavia stop accumulating at their previous rate. The Abbasid Caliphate had fragmented. The silver mines of Central Asia that supplied the dirham economy were in political turmoil. The supply dropped.

The Norse east-trade did not stop — the Varangian Guard continued, trade continued — but the economic engine that had funded the Viking Age's expansion shifted. Western silver — English silver, paid as Danegeld in quantities that English kingdoms could barely sustain — partially filled the gap. The raids on England, France, and Ireland intensified precisely as the eastern silver declined.

Understanding this economic context changes how the late Viking Age looks. The intensification of western raiding in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries is not simply increased Norse aggression. It is, at least partly, the economic consequence of a disruption in eastern trade that the Norse needed to replace. History is often made by people trying to maintain cash flows that have been cut.