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НОВОЕ ПРОШЛОЕ • THE NEW PAST • № 3 2020 DO1 10.18522/2500-3224-2020-3-230-236
РУСЬ В СРЕДНЕВЕКОВОЙ ЕВРОПЕ: ОСМЫСЛЕНИЕ ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ
Кристиан Раффеншпергер
Аннотация. Что значит «средневековый» и что такое «Средние века»? Наконец, каким временем датировать «Средневековье»? Эти вопросы дебатируются на протяжении многих лет. Однако восточноевропейское Средневековье, и в частности Русь, оставались, как правило, вне рамок этих дискуссий. Истории России, Украины, Польши и Венгрии, например, в течение долгого времени рассматриваются, как правило, по-отдельности, но не как элементы горизонтального общеевропейского спектра. В данном отклике на вопросы дискуссии представлена точка зрения американского ученого на состояние исследований средневековой Руси, проблемы нации и национализма в медиевистике, а также видение дальнейших перспектив развития данного направления историографии (преимущественно англоязычной, а не российской). В конечном счете цель видится в том, чтобы вывести исследование Руси и других восточноевропейских политий за рамки узких обособленных историографических контекстов и вновь сделать их частью средневековой Европы.
Ключевые слова: Средние века, средневековая Европа, средневековая Русь, восточноевропейское Средневековье.
I Раффеншпергер Кристиан, доктор наук, профессор истории, Виттенбергский университет, доцент, Гарвардский украинский исследовательский институт, редактор серии - Beyond Medieval Europe, P.O. Box 720, Springfield, OH 45501, [email protected].
RUS' IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE: A CONSIDERATION OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
Christian Raffensperger
Abstract. What is Medieval and what are the Middle Ages? Not to mention when are the Middle Ages? These questions have been hotly debated topics for a number of years. However, the Eastern European Middle Ages, and Rus' in particular, have been typically left out of those discussions. Histories of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary (as examples) are typically considered in silos over time rather than as part of a horizontal spectrum across Europe. This forum response discusses the perspective of an American academic on the state of the field of Medieval Rus'; issues of nation and nationalism in medieval studies; as well as suggesting possibilities to move the field in a more unified (less Russian v. Anglophone) direction. The ultimate goal would be to remove Rus', and other Eastern European polities, from their respective silos and make them once more, part of Medieval Europe.
Keywords: the Middle Ages, Medieval Europe, Medieval Rus', Eastern European Middle Ages.
I Raffensperger Christian, PhD, Professor of History, Wittenberg University, Associate, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Series Editor - Beyond Medieval Europe, P.O. Box 720, Springfield, OH 45501, [email protected].
As a preface to my discussion of these forum questions, I would like to do two things. The first is to thank Andrey Korenevskiy for reaching out to include me in this conversation. I am very glad that there are so many voices (as well as regions and perspectives) included here. The second, and related item, is to note my own identity and background. While this might seem postmodern, or too postmodern, to some I believe that it is important to situate me in my understanding of, and approach to, the medieval past1. First of all, I am an American, born during the late Cold War, but who came of age, and became an adult and a scholar after the fall of the Soviet Union. Why is this important? Well, with regard to being an American, I live in a country without a medieval past. There are no medieval monuments anywhere to be seen, and no medieval past to defend - not to mention the fact that many Americans are ignorant of, and uninterested in, the past in general. I do not have a medieval context surrounding me, and thus medieval history is something for the classroom and scholars, not for claiming or participating in discussions regarding national identity. As for my age, I grew up without a dividing line between East and West in Europe; there was just Europe, or occasionally old and new Europe. Thus, when I read classic works like Dimitri Obolensky's Byzantine Commonwealth, I was puzzled to see modern Cold War political boundaries read back into the past, as such boundaries were not a part of my life [Obolensky, 1971]. This shaped my conception of medieval Europe when I did the research for, and wrote, my first monograph - Reimagining Europe: The Place of Kievan Rus'in the Medieval World [Raffensperger, 2012].
1) and 2) With that information as an introduction, I can move on to address some of the questions that are part of this forum in a way that might make my background and where I am coming from, more clear. The first two questions regarding the "Russian Middle Ages" and a separation between the West and Russia in the middle ages are inextricably linked in my mind and thus I will discuss them in conjunction. I would note as a starting point, that I do not see a Russian middle ages when I look at the sources. When I read the sources I see that there was a medieval kingdom known as Rus', who had multiple kniazia (kings - as I will discuss below). Though perhaps an unpopular opinion in Russia today, this is not Russia. Russia is a modern nation that has been read back into the medieval period to take and claim space and ideas to justify various actions and identities. Vladimir Putin's annexation of the Crimea and proxy war in eastern Ukraine have been justified by him as based on Russia's historic claims to the heritage of Kievan Rus'2. If we act with historically accuracy and separate Rus' from Russia (and from Ukraine) then we can divorce those claims of territorial annexation from any historical legitimacy and label them as the land grab that they are.
Taking the kingdom of Rus' then as our center, it was the territorially largest kingdom in medieval Europe. Yet, for many, many years it has been dealt with as a separate entity from the rest of medieval Europe. Obolensky did not create the idea of the Byzantine Commonwealth, he only codified it. Partly because of a whole series of events from the Enlightenment
1 I expand on this idea in an article "Reimagining Europe: An Outsider Looks at the Medieval East-West Divide" [Raffensperger, 2018].
2 In the linked speech, Putin calls Ukraine and Russia one nation and asserts that Kiev is the mother of Russian cities; a clear attempt to utilize medieval history to claim modern territory [Transcript].
onward, Russia, and the past associated with it, was addressed as "East" and "other"1. In the medieval world this linked it with Byzantium, not with "the West." And yet, when one looks at the historical sources it is easy to see a plethora of connections between Rus' and the rest of medieval Europe. There are the many marriages that were made between the ruling family of Rus' (the Volodimerovichi, often anachronistically referred to as the Riurikids), there are trading connections (and not just through the Hansa in the Baltic, but through east-west land trading routes), there are religious connections with the papacy, Poland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere2. These webs of connections help tie Rus' into the larger medieval European world and very firmly make it part of medieval Europe; not "the East" or "the Other."
Taking this idea a step further, and again basing it on Rus', we can say that Rus' is part of medieval Europe throughout its history. This is another benefit of disconnecting Rus' from "Russia" in our understanding of the medieval past. After the dissolution of central control of Rus' in the twelfth century, the narrative of Russian history is that power moved to the northeast, to Vladimir-Suzdal, and this was cemented during and after the Mongols with the rise of Moscow. If, instead, we focus on Rus', we can see that Kiev and its environs continued to exist and thrive in the twelfth and early thirteenth century. Galicia and Volhynia as well, had their own history in this period, as did Novgorod, Polotsk, and elsewhere. Those areas of Rus' continued to maintain connections with the rest of medieval Europe. The history of Novgorod is the most well documented, and well known in secondary sources in Anglophone literature, but Galicia-Volhynia in particular was deeply integrated into the history of medieval Poland, Hungary, and the Roman Empire (Byzantium)3. Ending up at this point, of seeing Rus' (in all of its component pieces) as part of medieval Europe, demonstrates why it is important to establish Rus' as our medieval base and to pay attention to terminology.
4) As noted earlier when discussing the integration of Rus' into medieval Europe, I believe strongly that terminology, and historically accurate terminology, is particularly important. The linguistic turn, which has taken a while to get to medieval studies and longer to get to Slavic studies, has been an important development in scholarship of the twenty-first century [Surkis, 2012]. Moreover, I would suggest that to best reach the broadest audience, we need to use understandable and broadly applicable terms. For instance, if we are going to use "king" for the ruler of France, we should not use "kniaz'" for the ruler of Rus', and "konungr" for the ruler of Sweden. I have written about the importance of terminology in my Kingdom of Rus', where I made the argument that kniaz' should be translated; and not as prince or as duke, but as king [Raffensperger, 2017]. This has
1 The classic work on this divide is by Larry Wolff, though Paul Milliman has pushed the date back earlier in, as yet, unpublished work [Wolff, 1994].
2 I explore all of these issues in a broad way in my "Reimagining Europe". But I have done extensive work as well with the marriages which can be found online at genealogy.obdurodon.org and at gis.huri.harvard.edu/ rusgen as well as in "Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus'" [Raffensperger, 2016].
3 This was well established already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as can be seen in the work of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, now translated into English for the first time [Hrushevsky, 2016]. Much modern work has been done on this subject as well. I would point to only one excellent new book - Vitaliy Mykhaylovskiy [Mykhaylovskiy, 2019].
generated a great deal of discussion, but I would like to briefly outline why I think this is the case, and perhaps recapitulate (very briefly) my rationale for making this argument.
Kniaz' has been translated for centuries into English as "prince" or "duke." This translation comes from the British travelers who came to Muscovy in the sixteenth century and found a court which was presided over by a tsar' with multiple subordinate political figures all titled as kniazia. The British then, quite naturally, mapped this onto the monarchical system with which they were most familiar - their own, and turned tsar' into king or emperor and the kniazia into dukes or princes. Later scholars were quite content to consult those early Russian-English dictionaries and translate kniaz' as duke or prince, rather than reevaluating its meaning for any period earlier than the Muscovite one. This is where my work comes in, as it became clear to me that in the medieval period, the kniaz' of Kiev was not a prince, but a king1. Not only was it clear to me, but it was clear to his contemporaries. In the Latin speaking and writing world, the kniazia of Rus' were referred to as reges. "Rex Russorum" was one of the most common labels for the ruler of Rus' to be found in the multiple Latin sources which discuss Rus'2. Rex, which is always translated into English as king, was not their only choice of titles of course - as Karl Werner noted in his discussion of titles in the Register of Pope Gregory VII when he counts 152 lay addressees and delineates their separate titles. In that register, the ruler of Rus' is not princeps, dux, or anything else but rex [Werner, 1979; The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 2002].
Why does this issue of titulature matter? Because it creates an impression in the mind of the reader of rank, prestige and importance; but also because we are striving for historical accuracy (as much as we can) in our presentation of the past. When Henry of Livonia wrote about Rusian rulers in the early thirteenth century he uniformly called them "reges"3. However, when James Brundage translated Henry of Livonia into English, he kept the text the same, translating the rulers of Rus' as kings, but then added editorial footnotes such as, "Vladimir was a Russian prince, not a king, as Henry calls him" [Lettus, 2003, bk. 1, fn. 39]. This change of title, even relegated to a footnote, changes the meaning of the text, and more so the impression that the text makes on the reader. Henry chose to use "rex" uniformly, and by doing so, he put the rulers of Rus' on par with other rulers in medieval Europe. To then make a change in translating that titulature lowers the impression of the rulers of Rus' in the minds of modern readers, and changes how we view them, and especially how we view them in conjunction with other rulers of medieval Europe.
As a brief final note, I would like to acknowledge that nearly the entirety of my footnotes are to works in English. This was not done by accident. Fjodor Uspenskij and I once had a discussion in Moscow about how there are two (at least) scholarly worlds relating to medieval Rus' -Anglophone and Russian. This is certainly true in the broad strokes. To take just one personal example, in reviews of my Reimagining Europe, Russian scholars (such as Uspenskij) noted that
1 There had been some discussion of this topic, especially in Ukrainian historical circles, before my work [see, particularly: Andrusiak, Mykytiak, 1955; Soloviev, 1966].
2 Thietmar of Merseburg provides only one example - Thietmar of Merseburg [Chronica].
3 See the many examples in the Latin version [Lettus, 1874].
it was passé and did not cite sufficient Russian scholarship; German scholars said that it did not cite sufficient German scholarship; Ukrainian scholars were grateful that Rusian history was getting to a wider world outside of a Russo-centric context; and American reviewers thought it was path-breaking and should be read by all medievalists. In a nutshell, this is the academic world we live in. This is one of the reasons why it is so important that we are talking with one another in this forum, but even in so doing, it will be noted that the questions asked in the forum are not ones that are being discussed much in Anglophone literature, as can be seen from some of the responses, or lack thereof. Even if we cannot fix this scholarly divide, perhaps at least acknowledging its existence and having such conversations is an important first step.
REFERENCES
Andrusiak M., Mykytiak A. Kings of Kiev and Galicia: On the Occassion of the 700th Anniversary of the Coronation of Danilo Romanovich, in Slavonic and East European Review. 1955. Vol. 33. № 81. Pp. 342-349.
Chronica. Ed. J.M. Lappenberg, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores. Volume III. Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Aulici Hahniani, 1839 (reprinted Leipzig: Verlag Karl W. Hiersemann, 1925). Bk. VI, ch. 37, Bk. VII, chs. 48, 52, Bk. VIII, ch. 16. Hrushevsky M. History of Ukraine-Rus'. Volume 3: To the Year 1340. Trans. Bohdan Struminski; ed. Robert Romanchuk, with Uliana Pasicznyk (and Marta Horban-Carynnyk). Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2016. 651 p. Lettus H. Heinrici Chronicion Lyvoniae. Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1874. 269 p.
Lettus H. The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia. Transl. J.A. Brundage. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Mykhaylovskiy V. European Expansion and the Contested Borderlands of Late Medieval Podillya, Ukraine. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019. 182 p.
Obolensky D. The Byzantine Commonwealth, Eastern Europe 500-1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. 445 p.
Raffensperger C. Reimagining Europe: An Outsider Looks at the Medieval East-West Divide", in Medieval Networks in East Central Europe: Commerce, Contacts, Communication. Eds. B. Nagy, F. Schmieder and A. Vadas. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 9-24.
Raffensperger C. Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus' in the Medieval World, 988-1146. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 340 p.
Raffensperger C. The Kingdom of Rus. Kalamazoo: ARC Humanities Press, 2017. 92 p. Raffensperger C. Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus'. Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications, 2016. 407 p. Soloviev A.V. 'Reges' et 'Regnum Russiae' au Moyen Âge, in Byzantion. 1966. № 36. Pp. 144-173.
Surkis J. When was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy, in American Historical Review. 2012. Is. 117-3. Pp. 700-722.
The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085. Ed, transl. H.E.J. Cowdrey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 600 p.
Transcript: Putin says Russia will protect the rights of Russians abroad, in The Washington Post. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/ef945a80-ae94-11e3-b8b3-44b1d1cd4c1f (accessed 15 June 2020).
Werner K.F. Kingdom and Principality in Twelfth-Century France, in The Medieval Nobility: Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century. Ed. Timothy Reuter. Amsterdam, New York, Oxford: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1979. Pp. 243-244.
Wolff L. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 436 p.
