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Ladoga-Novgorod. But as the Normans assimilated and the ranks of their retainers filled with Slavs, Rus' lost its ethnic connotation and came to designate all the peoplemanning the fortress-cities and involved in the annual expeditions to Constantinople. From such usage, it required only a minor shift for 'Rus'' to be extended to the country where these people lived, and, finally, to all of this country's inhabitants, regardless of ancestry and occupation. Examples of such name transfers from conqueror to the conquered are not uncommon, the case of France, a name adopted for Gaul from the invading German Franks, being the one that most readily comes to mind.
The Normans gave the Eastern Slavs several elements essential to forging out of their disparate tribes and tribal associations a national entity: a rudimentary state organization headed by one dynasty, a common religion and an ethnic name. How much national unity the East Slavs actually perceived during the tenth and eleventh centuries no one knows, because the only indigenous documents bearing on this period, the chronicles, are of a later provenance.
One more legacy bequeathed by the Normans to the Eastern Slavs deserves mention - it is a legacy of a negative kind to which allusion has been made already and will continue to be made on the pages of this book. The Kievan state which they had founded and which their Slavicized and Slavic descendants had inherited did not emerge out of the society over which it ruled. Neither the princes nor their retainers, the raw material of a future nobility, issued from the Slavic communities. The same, of course, holds true of England after the Norman Conquest. But in England, where land is fertile and valuable, the Norman elite promptly divided it among themselves and turned into a landowning aristocracy. In Russia, the Norman elite retained all along a semi-colonial character: its principal interest lay not in exploiting land but in extracting tribute. Its local roots were extremely shallow. We have here a type of political formation characterized by an unusually sharp gulf between rulers and ruled. The Kievan state and Kievan society lacked a common interest capable of binding them: state and society coexisted, retaining their separate identities and barely conscious of a sense of commitment to one another.*
* Just how little the Normans cared for their Russian kingdom may be gathered from an incident in the life of Great Prince Sviatoslav. Having in 968 seized the Bulgarian city of Pereieslavets (the Roman Martianopol) he announced the following year to his mother and boyars: 'I do not care to remain in Kiev, but should prefer to live in Pereieslavets on the Danube, since that is the centre of my realm, where all riches are concentrated; gold, silks, wine, and various fruits from Greece, silver and horses from Hungary and Bohemia, and from Rus* furs, wax, honey, and slaves' (The Russian Primary Chronicle; Laurentian Text, edited by S.H.Cross and O.P.Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Cambridge, Mass. [1953], p. 86). The intention was frustrated by a Pecheneg attack on Kiev; but the sentiments speak for themselves.
THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA
The Kievan state disintegrated in the twelfth century. Its collapse can be explained by the combined action of internal and external factors.
The internal factor was the inability of the ruling dynasty to resolve the issue of succession. Because there existed no orderly system by which Kiev and the provincial cities with their adjoining tributary territories, the volosti, passed from hand to hand upon the death of their rulers, the princes tended to develop a proprietary interest in whatever areas happened to have come under their control. Thus, what had been intended as a temporary and conditional right to exploit a given city and region transformed itself into outright ownership. The princely custom of bequeathing their sons cities and volosti in perpetuity must have been well established by 1097 when a conference of Kievan princes held at Liubech acknowledged the right of each prince to retain as property territories inherited from his father. This principle implied that princes were also at liberty to bequeath cities and volosti to their sons. The common dynastic ownership of Russia, though never formally abjured, thus ceased to be observed in practice.
The centrifugal force inherent in this process was aggravated by a concurrent external development, namely the decline of Russia's trade with Byzantium. In 966-7 the impetuous Prince Sviatoslav, in an argument over control of the only remaining Slavic group still paying tribute to the Khazars, attacked and destroyed the capital of the Khazar kagan-ate. By this foolhardy act he helped open the flood-gates through which at once poured into the Black Sea steppe belligerent Turkic tribes, until then kept in check by the Khazars. First came the Pechenegs. They were followed in the eleventh century by the Cumans (Polovtsy), an exceptionally aggressive nation who carried out such vicious attacks on the flotillas sailing from Kiev to Constantinople as eventually to bring this traffic to a standstill. Expeditions to dislodge the Cumans had little success; one such disastrous campaign, launched in 1185, is commemorated in the Song of the Host of Igor, the medieval Russian epic. In the middle of the twelfth century, Russian princes ceased to mint coins, which suggests they were in serious financial difficulty and that the economic unity of the country was distintegrating. To compound Kiev's calamities, in 1204 the Fourth Crusade captured and sacked Constantinople, at the same time opening up the eastern Mediterranean to Christian navigation. In other words, around 1200 there disappeared those particular circumstances which in the preceding four centuries had brought the territories inhabited by Eastern Slavs under a single authority.
The internal and external tendencies working independently but towards the same end unleashed powerful destructive forces, and caused the country to fall apart into self-contained and virtually sovereign
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principalities. The pull, of course, was not all in one direction. The country as before, continued to be ruled by members of a single dynasty and to profess one and the same faith - a faith which sharply separated it from its Catholic and Muslim neighbours. These centripetal forces eventually enabled Russia to reunite. But this occurred several centuries later. In the meantime, the dominant force was centrifugal. The impetus was towards the creation of regions composed of economically self-sufficient principalities, each of which, by virtue of an inner logic, tended to divide and subdivide without end.