The Annals of St. Bertin (839) and Chacanus of the Rhos

Ildar Garipzanov The Annals of St. Bertin (839) and Chacanus of the Rhos In 839, an embassy from Emperor Theophilus arrived in the court of Louis the Pious at Ingelheim, accompanied by some men who claimed that they belonged to the people called Rhos (qui se, id est gentem suum, Rhos vocari dicebant) and who asked Louis’ permission to pass through his empire on their way back home. This matter was thoroughly investigated at the Carolingian court, and the Frankish emperor came to the conclusion that they belong to the gens of Swedes.1 This record in The Annals of St. Bertin for the year 839 became the first written record on the Rus’/Rhos and has been analyzed in scholarly literature since the eighteenth century. This passage has been used to trace the Scandinavian origins of the Rhos as well as the political structure existing among the early Rus’.2 Modern surveys of Rus’ history, such as the one by Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, narrate that in these Frankish annals the chief of the Rhos was called chaganus (khagan), similar to the title of the Khazarian rulers, and draw certain conclusions about the political organization of early Rus from the use of such a title.3 This belief in the use of this title by the rulers of the Rhos ca. 839 became a part of a modern scholarly discourse, and most prominent scholars working on the history of early Rus’ and the Khazars refer to this as a well-established fact, which does not need any argument. For instance, Omeljan Pritsak states that the existence of the Rus’ Kaganate was “first attested about 839”; and Vladimir Ja. Petrukhin, writes that “[t]he power of the khagan [among the Khazars — I. G.] could still be real at least in the 830s, when the Russian princes appeared to raise claims for the first time to his title (chaganus according to the Annales Bertiniani, ad a. 839).”4 Such statements are confirmed by the modern translations of the Annals of St. Bertin. The English edition by Janet Nelson, referred to by Franklin and Shepard, gives the following translation of the analyzed passage: 1 Annales Bertiniani, a. 839, ed. G. Waitz, MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum (Hanover, 1883), 19–20. 2 For the classical analysis of the account in English and all references see Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London and New York, 1996), 29–32. 3 Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 31–41. 4 “A Note on the Sacral Status of the Khazarian Khagan: Tradition and Reality,” in Monotheistic Kingship: The Medieval Variants, ed. Aziz Al-Azmeh and Janos M. Bak, CEU Medievalia, no. 6 (Budapest, 2004), 269. ã Ildar Garipzanov, 2006 8 Ildar Garipzanov He [Theophilus — I. G.] also sent with the envoys some men who said they — meaning their whole people [gens] — were called Russians and had been sent to him by their king whose name was the Khagan for the sake of friendship, so they claimed. … When the Emperor [Louis the Pious — I. G.] investigated more closely the reason for their coming here, he discovered that they belong to the people of the Swedes.5 This translation corresponds with the German edition by Reinhold Rau, used by Petrukhin: Mit ihnen schickte er auch einige Männer, die sich, d. h. das Volk, dem sie angehörten, Rhos nannten: ihr König, Chagan mit Namen, hatte sie, wie sie sagten, an ihn aus Freundschaft geschickt … Bei einer genaueren Nachforschung nach dem Grund ihrer Reise erfuhr der Kaiser, daß sie dem Volke der Sueonen angehörten.6 Yet the original Latin text published by Weitz in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in the late nineteenth century contains a very significant difference from modern translations: it says that the ruler of the Rhos was named not chaganus, but chacanus: Misit etiam cum eis quosdam, qui se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant, quos rex illorum chacanus vocabulo ad se amicitiae, sicut asserebant, causa direxerat… Quorum adventus causam imperator diligentius investigans, comperit, eos gentis esse Sueonum.7 Based on such a spelling of the royal name, chacanus, some eighteeeth- and nineteenth-century historians thought that it simply meant the Scandianvian name Håkan. But already in the first half of eighteenth century, the orientalist Gottlieb (Theophilus) Siegfried Bayer argued that this name referred to the title “khagan,” used by the Turkic peoples of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This interpretation was further developed by Ernst Kunik in the nineteenth century.8 The second interpretation was considered as more authoritative and prevailed in the late nineteenth century. Yet at that time, scholars still felt necessary to explain why they chose that interpretation, as did Mikhailo 5 Janet L. Nelson, ed., The Annals of St-Bertin (Manchester, 1991), 44. 6 Reinhold Rau, ed., Annales Bertiniani, in Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Darmstadt, 1969), 45. 7 Annales Bertiniani, a. 839, ed. Waitz, MGH, 19–20. 8 For the examples of the first interpretation, see Stroube de Piermont, Dissertation sur les anciens Russes (St. Petersburg, 1785); A. L. Schlözer, Nestor. Russische Annalen in ihrer slawonischen Grundsprache, vol. 1–5 (Gottingen, 1802–9); W. von Gutzeit, Die Nachricht uber die Rhos des Jares 839 (Riga, 1882); and M. P. Pogodin, Issledovanija, zamechanija I lekciji po russkoj istoriji (Studies, notes and lectures on Russian history), vol. 1–7 (Moscow, 1846–56). I am grateful to Oleksiy P. Tolochko for providing me with the historiographic data on Khagan-versus-Håkan debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the data which otherwise would not have been available to me. For detailed criticism of Schlözer’s interpretation, combined with the argument in support of the second interpretation see Ernst Kunik, Die Berufung der schwedishcen Rodsen durch die Finnen und Slawen, vol. 1–2 (St. Petersburg, 1844–45), 2: 193–284. The Annals of St. Bertin 9 Hrushevsky in 1898.9 The “khagan” interpretation became an axiom in Soviet, as well as subsequent Russian and Ukrainian, historiographies; and nowadays most scholars do not even feel it necessary to provide an argument for the khagan of the Rus’ as early as 839.10 Even when scholars use the spelling “chacanus” in their reference to The Annals of St. Bertin, they take it as a variation, “õàêàí” or “êàêàí”, of the same Turkic title “khagan.”11 Yet the examples of the spelling “õàêàí” can be found only in Arabic, Persian, Armenian and Georgian writings, not in Old Ruthenian, Greek or Latin sources, except the passage in The Annals of St. Bertin.12 On the following pages, I would like to bring some manuscript and linguistic evidence questioning the interpretation of the passage in The Annals of St. Bertin, established by Bayer and Kunik. The first thing which ought to be mentioned is the uniqueness for Frankish sources of the spelling “chacanus.” This spelling was corrected to “chaganus” by Reinhold Rau in his new edition of the Latin text of the annals, accompanied with its German translation, mentioned earlier.13 Because his edition lacks apparatus criticus, it is difficult to see his rationale for such a correction. In the introduction to his edition, Rau wrote that for the period from 839 to 863 he used a seventeenth-century copy of a fragment of The Annals of St. Bertin in order to compare and correct the classical MGH edition of the annals by Weitz, because that copy presented “vielfach besseren Text” than the manuscripts used by Weitz.14 The question is to what extent one can trust a seventeenth-century copy of a manuscript, since it is known that, in the early modern period, editors could correct medieval abnormalities in their texts to proper classical Latin. The comparison of the paragraph describing the Rhos in Weitz’ and Rau’s editions supports such a suspicion. Rau corrected such abnormalities which Weitz had tried to preserve, even if they did not work grammatically, and he had often given a proper form in a footnote: 1. spatarius is corrected to spatharius; 2. ferentes cum donis imperatori dignis epistola to ferentes cum donis imperatori dignis epistolam; 3. inter utrumque imperatorem eique subditos to inter utrumque imperatorem eisque subditos; 9 See the recent English translation of this work: Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus, ed. Bohdan Struminsky, vol. 1. From Prehistory to the Eleventh Century (Edmonton and Toronto, 1997), 300–301 and 482–483. 10 M. I. Artamonov, Istorija Khazar (History of the Khazars) (Leningrad, 1962), 365; and A. P. Novoseltsev Khazarskoje gosudarstvo i ego rol’ v istoriji vostochnoj Rusi i Kavkaza (The Khazarian state and its role in the history of Eastern Rus’ and Caucasia) (Moscow, 1990), 206–208. 11 A. P. Novoseltsev, “K voprosu ob odnom iz drevnejshikh titulov russkogo kniazia (On the question of one of the most ancient titles of the Rus’ prince),” Istorija SSSR 1982, no. 4: 150–9; and G. G. Litavrin, Vizantija, Bolgarija, Drevniaja Rus’ (IX — nachalo XII v.) (Byzantium, Bulgaria, Ancient Rus’ (9th–12th centuries) (St. Petersburg, 2000), 37–46; and Ye. A. Mel’nikova, ed., Drevnaja Rus’ v svete zarubezhnuh istochnikov (Early Rus in foreign sources) (Moscow, 2001), 288–89. 12 Novoseltsev, “K voprosu ob odnom iz drevnejshikh titulov russkogo kniazia,” 151–52. 13 Rau, ed., Annales Bertiniani, 44. 14 Ibid., 5.