Siege of Constantinople (860)

Coordinates: 41°00′N 28°54′E / 41.0°N 28.9°E / 41.0; 28.9
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Rus'–Byzantine War (860)
)
Rus' siege of Constantinople
Part of Rus'–Byzantine Wars

The Rus' under the walls of Constantinople.
Date860
Location41°00′N 28°54′E / 41.0°N 28.9°E / 41.0; 28.9
Result

Indecisive

  • Successful raid, but the Rus retreated
Belligerents
Byzantine Empire Rus'
Commanders and leaders
Michael III
Oleg of Novgorod(?)
Rurik(?)
Askold and Dir
(?)
Strength
Main Roman army of 60,000 men Fleet of 200-300 ships
5,000 men

The siege of Constantinople of 860 was the only major military expedition of the

Byzantine and Western European sources. The casus belli was the construction of the fortress Sarkel by Byzantine engineers, restricting the Rus' trade route along the Don River in favour of the Khazars.[citation needed
] Accounts vary, with discrepancies between contemporary and later sources, and the outcome is unknown in detail.

It is known from Byzantine sources that the Rus' caught Constantinople unprepared; preoccupied by the ongoing Arab–Byzantine wars, the empire was unable, at least initially, to make an effective response to the attack. After pillaging the suburbs of the Byzantine capital, the Rus' retreated for the day and continued their siege in the night after exhausting the Byzantine troops and causing disorganization. The event gave rise to a later Orthodox Christian tradition, which ascribed the deliverance of Constantinople to a miraculous intervention by the Theotokos.

Background

The first mention of the Rus' near the Byzantine Empire comes from Life of St. George of Amastris, a

Asia Minor to invade the Abbasid Caliphate.[2]

Siege

On June 18, 860,

Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople was living in exile. The Rus' plundered the dwellings and the monasteries, slaughtering those they captured. They took twenty-two of the patriarch's servants aboard ship and dismembered them with axes.[6]

The attack took the Byzantines by surprise, "like a thunderbolt from heaven", as it was put by Patriarch Photius in his famous oration written on the occasion.

Byzantine Navy was occupied fighting Arabs in the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. These simultaneous deployments left the coasts and islands of the Black Sea, the Bosporus
, and the Sea of Marmara susceptible to attack.

The invasion continued until August 4, when, in another of his sermons, Photius thanked heaven for miraculously relieving the city from such a dire threat. The writings of Photius provide the earliest example of the name "Rus" (Rhos, Greek: Ῥῶς) being mentioned in a Greek source; previously the dwellers of the lands to the north of the Black Sea were referred to archaically as "Tauroscythians". The patriarch reported that they had no supreme ruler and lived in some distant northern lands. Photius called them ἔθνος ἄγνωστον, "unknown people", although some historians prefer to translate the phrase as "obscure people", pointing out the earlier contacts between Byzantines and the Rus'.[7]

Later traditions

Moscow Kremlin
).

The sermons of Photius offer no clue as to the outcome of the invasion or the reasons why the Rus' withdrew. Later sources attribute their retreat to the Emperor's speedy return. As the story goes, after Michael and Photius put the

George Hamartolus, whose manuscript was an important source for the Primary Chronicle.[8] The authors of the chronicle appended the names of Askold and Dir to the account as they believed that these two Varangians had presided over Kiev in 866. It was to this year that (through some quirk in chronology) they attributed the first Rus' expedition against the Byzantine capital.[9]

The Blachernitissa: the icon before which Michael III may have prayed to the Theotokos for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Rus'.

Kiev. Furthermore, when the Blachernitissa was brought to Moscow in the 17th century, it was said that it was this icon that had saved Tsargrad from the troops of the "Scythian khagan
", after Michael III had prayed before it to the Theotokos. Nobody noticed that the story had obvious parallels with the sequence of events described by Nestor.

In the 9th century, a legend sprang up to the effect that an ancient column at the Forum of Taurus had an inscription predicting that Constantinople would be conquered by the Rus. This legend, well known in Byzantine literature, was revived by the

Slavophiles
in the 19th century, when Russia was on the point of wresting the city from the Ottomans.

Criticism

As was demonstrated by Oleg Tvorogov and

Constantine Zuckerman
, among others, the 9th century and later sources are out of tune with the earliest records of the event. In his August sermon, Photius mentions neither Michael III's return to the capital nor the miracle with the veil (of which the author purportedly was a participant).

On the other hand,

John the Deacon reports that the Normanorum gentes, having devastated the suburbanum of Constantinople, returned to their own lands in triumph ("et sic praedicta gens cum triumpho ad propriam regressa est").[11]

It appears that the victory of Michael III over the Rus' was invented by the Byzantine historians in the mid-9th century or later and became generally accepted in the Slavic chronicles influenced by them.

907 campaign, which is not recorded in Byzantine sources at all.[citation needed
]

Notes

  1. ^ a b Turnbull 48–49
  2. ^ Vasiliev 188
  3. Kievan
    rulers at the time. However, the dating in the early part of the Primary Chronicle is generally faulty. (Vasiliev 145)
  4. Viking
    attack on Constantinople from the south in 861, otherwise not attested by any other source (Vasiliev 25). The Primary Chronicle gives an even more exaggerated number of ships — 2,000. (Logan 188)
  5. ^ Logan 190
  6. ^ Vasiliev 188–189
  7. ^ Vasiliev 187
  8. Symeon Logothetes
    674–675
  9. ^ The number of raids was multiplied in the 16th century Nikon Chronicle, which interpreted the 860 raid (described in Byzantine sources) and the 866 raid (described by the Primary Chronicle) as two distinct events. This obvious blunder led Boris Rybakov to conclude that the Rus' raided Tsargrad in 860, 866, 874. For a critique, see Tvorogov 54–59.
  10. ^ Nicolai I 479–480. Analyzed in Vasiliev 61–62.
  11. ^ Iohannes Diaconus 116–117.
  12. ^ [page needed]This theory is advanced by Zuckerman, among others (see Zuckerman 2000).

References

  • Iohannes Diaconus
    . Chronicon. Rome: Monticolo, Cronache veneziane antichissime
  • Leo Grammaticus
    . Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. Bonn, 1842.
  • Logan, Donald F. The Vikings in History, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1992.
  • Nicolai I. Papae epistolae. Ed. in: Monumenta Germaniae Hictorica. Epistolae VI. (Karolini eavi IV). Berlin, 1925
  • Symeon Logothetes
    . Chronicon. Bonn, 1838.
  • Theodose de Melitene [ca]. Chronographia. Munich, 1859.
  • Harris, Jonathan, Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium. Hambledon/Continuum, London, 2007.
  • Sverrir Jakobsson, The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire Archived 2021-04-18 at the
  • Tvorogov, Oleg. "Skol'ko raz khodili na Konstantinopol Askold i Dir?" Slavyanovedeniya, 1992. 2
  • Vasiliev, Alexander. The Russian Attack on Constantinople in 860. Cambridge Mass., 1925
  • Uspensky, Fyodor. The History of the Byzantine Empire, vol. 2. Moscow: Mysl, 1997
  • Zuckerman, Constantine
    . Deux étapes de la formation de l’ancien état russe, in Les centres proto-urbains russes entre Scandinavie, Byzance et Orient. Actes du Colloque International tenu au Collège de France en octobre 1997, ed. M. Kazanski, A. Nersessian & C. Zuckerman (Réalités byzantines 7), Paris 2000, pp. 95–120.

See also

External links