Ildar Garipzanov

The An nals of St. Ber tin (839)

and Chacanus of the Rhos

In 839, an embassy from Emperor Theophilus arrived in the court of Louis the Pious atIngelheim, accompanied by some men who claimed that they belonged to the peoplecalled 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 wasthoroughly investigated at the Carolingian court, and the Frankish emperor came tothe conclusion that they belong to the gens of Swedes.1 This record in The Annals ofSt. Bertin for the year 839 became the first written record on the Rus’/Rhos and hasbeen analyzed in scholarly literature since the eighteenth century. This passage hasbeen used to trace the Scandinavian origins of the Rhos as well as the political structureexisting among the early Rus’.2

Mod ern sur veys of Rus’ his tory, such as the one by Si mon Frank lin and Jon a thanShepard, nar rate that in these Frankish an nals the chief of the Rhos was calledchaganus (khagan), sim i lar to the ti tle of the Khazarian rul ers, and draw cer tain con clu -sions about the po lit i cal or ga ni za tion of early Rus from the use of such a ti tle.3 This be -lief in the use of this ti tle by the rul ers of the Rhos ca. 839 be came a part of a mod ernschol arly dis course, and most prom i nent schol ars work ing on the his tory of early Rus’and the Khazars re fer to this as a well-es tab lished fact, which does not need any ar gu -ment. For in stance, Omeljan Pritsak states that the ex is tence of the Rus’ Kaganate was“first at tested about 839”; and Vladi mir Ja. Petrukhin, writes that “[t]he power of thekhagan [among the Khazars — I. G.] could still be real at least in the 830s, when theRus sian princes ap peared to raise claims for the first time to his ti tle (chaganus ac cord -ing to the Annales Bertiniani, ad a. 839).”4

Such state ments are con firmed by the mod ern trans la tions of the An nals of St. Ber tin. The Eng lish edi tion by Janet Nel son, re ferred to by Frank lin and Shepard, gives the fol -low ing trans la tion of the an a lyzed passage:

ã Ildar Garipzanov, 2006

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 andJonathan 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.

He [Theophilus — I. G.] also sent with the en voys some men who said they —mean ing their whole peo ple [gens] — were called Rus sians and had been sent tohim by their king whose name was the Khagan for the sake of friend ship, sothey claimed. … When the Em peror [Louis the Pi ous — I. G.] in ves ti gated moreclosely the rea son for their com ing here, he dis cov ered that they be long to thepeo ple of the Swedes.5

This trans la tion cor re sponds with the Ger man edi tion by Reinhold Rau, used byPetrukhin:

Mit ihnen schickte er auch einige Männer, die sich, d. h. das Volk, dem sieangehörten, Rhos nannten: ihr König, Chagan mit Namen, hatte sie, wie siesagten, an ihn aus Freundschaft geschickt … Bei einer genaueren Nachforschung nach dem Grund ihrer Reise erfuhr der Kai ser, daß sie dem Volke der Sueonenangehörten.6

Yet the orig i nal Latin text pub lished by Weitz in the Monumenta Germaniae His -torica in the late nine teenth cen tury con tains a very sig nif i cant dif fer ence from mod erntrans la tions: 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, causadirexerat… Quo rum adventus causam im per ator diligentius investigans, com -perit, eos gentis esse Sueonum.7

Based on such a spell ing of the royal name, chacanus, some eighteeeth- and nine -teenth-cen tury his to ri ans thought that it sim ply meant the Scandianvian name Håkan.But al ready in the first half of eigh teenth cen tury, the orientalist Gottlieb (Theophilus)Siegfried Bayer ar gued that this name re ferred to the ti tle “khagan,” used by the Turkicpeo ples of East ern Eu rope and Cen tral Asia. This in ter pre ta tion was fur ther de vel opedby Ernst Kunik in the nine teenth cen tury.8 The sec ond in ter pre ta tion was con sid ered as more au thor i ta tive and pre vailed in the late nine teenth cen tury. Yet at that time, schol -ars still felt nec es sary to ex plain why they chose that in ter pre ta tion, as did Mikhailo

8 Ildar Garipzanov

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 slawonischenGrundsprache, 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 theeighteenth 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 thesecond interpretation see Ernst Kunik, Die Berufung der schwedishcen Rodsen durch die Finnen undSlawen, vol. 1–2 (St. Petersburg, 1844–45), 2: 193–284.

Hrushevsky in 1898.9 The “khagan” in ter pre ta tion be came an ax iom in So viet, as wellas sub se quent Rus sian and Ukrai nian, historiographies; and now a days most schol arsdo not even feel it nec es sary to pro vide an ar gu ment for the khagan of the Rus’ as earlyas 839.10 Even when schol ars use the spell ing “chacanus” in their ref er ence to The An -nals of St. Ber tin, they take it as a vari a tion, “õàêàí” or “êàêàí”, of the same Turkic ti -tle “khagan.”11 Yet the ex am ples of the spell ing “õàêàí” can be found only in Arabic,Per sian, Ar me nian and Geor gian writ ings, not in Old Ruthenian, Greek or Latinsources, ex cept the pas sage in The An nals of St. Ber tin.12

On the fol low ing pages, I would like to bring some manu script and lin guis tic ev i -dence ques tion ing the in ter pre ta tion of the pas sage in The An nals of St. Ber tin, es tab -lished by Bayer and Kunik. The first thing which ought to be men tioned is the unique -ness for Frankish sources of the spell ing “chacanus.” This spell ing was cor rected to“chaganus” by Reinhold Rau in his new edi tion of the Latin text of the an nals, ac com -pa nied with its Ger man trans la tion, men tioned ear lier.13 Be cause his edi tion lacks ap -pa ra tus criticus, it is dif fi cult to see his ra tio nale for such a cor rec tion. In the in tro duc -tion to his edi tion, Rau wrote that for the pe riod from 839 to 863 he used a sev en -teenth-cen tury copy of a frag ment of The An nals of St. Ber tin in or der to com pare andcor rect the clas si cal MGH edi tion of the an nals by Weitz, be cause that copy pre sented“vielfach besseren Text” than the manu scripts used by Weitz.14 The ques tion is to whatex tent one can trust a sev en teenth-cen tury copy of a manu script, since it is known that,in the early mod ern pe riod, ed i tors could correct medieval abnormalities in their textsto proper classical Latin.

The com par i son of the para graph de scrib ing the Rhos in Weitz’ and Rau’s edi tionssup ports such a sus pi cion. Rau cor rected such ab nor mal i ties which Weitz had tried topre serve, even if they did not work gram mat i cally, and he had of ten given a properform in a footnote:

1. spatarius is cor rected to spatharius;

2. ferentes cum donis imperatori dignis epistola to ferentes cum donis imperatoridignis epistolam;

3. inter utrumque imperatorem eique subditos to inter utrumque imperatorem eisquesubditos;

The An nals of St. Ber tin 9

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 Khazarianstate 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 questionof 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, AncientRus’ (9th–12th centuries) (St. Petersburg, 2000), 37–46; and Ye. A. Mel’nikova, ed., Drevnaja Rus’ vsvete 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.