Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300

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Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 This book provides a thorough survey and innovative analysis of the emergence and functions of written culture in Rus (covering roughly the modern East Slav lands of European Russia, Ukraine and Belarus). Part I introduces the full range of types of writing: the scripts and languages, the materials, the social and physical contexts, ranging from builders’ scratches on bricks through to luxurious parchment manuscripts. Part II presents a series of thematic studies of the ‘sociocultural dynamics’ of writing, in order to reveal and explain distinctive features in the Rus assimilation of the technology. The comparative approach means that the book may also serve as a case-study for those with a broader interest either in medieval uses of writing or in the social and cultural history of information technologies. Overall, the impressive scholarship and idiosyncratic wit of this volume commend it to students and specialists in Russian history and literature alike.              is Reader in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. His publications include many scholarly articles on Russian and East European history, literature and culture, and Sermons and Rhetoric in Kievan Rus
(1991) and (with Jonathan Shepard) The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (1996).

Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 Simon Franklin

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Simon Franklin 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-03025-8 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-81381-6 hardback

‘My gracious!’ said Taffy, ‘what a lot of noise-pictures we’ve made – carp-mouth, carp-tail, and egg! Now, make another noise, Daddy.’ ‘Ssh!’ said her Daddy, and frowned to himself, but Taffy was too incited to notice. ‘That’s quite easy,’ she said, scratching on the bark. ‘Eh, what?’ said her Daddy. ‘I meant I was thinking, and didn’t want to be disturbed.’ ‘It’s a noise just the same. It’s the noise a snake makes, Daddy, when it is thinking and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Let’s make the ssh-noise a snake. Will this do?’ . . . ‘Taffy dear, I’ve a notion your Daddy’s daughter has hit upon the finest thing that there ever was since the Tribe of Tegumai took to using shark’s teeth instead of flints for their spear-heads. I believe we’ve found out the biggest secret of the world.’ Kipling, ‘How the Alphabet was Made’

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on transliteration, citation and terminology List of abbreviations Map: Rus and adjacent lands, 10th–13th centuries Introduction

page ix x xi xiii xvi 1

Part I: THE GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT 1 The written remains Describing writing: categories, principles Primary writing Secondary writing Tertiary writing

2 Scripts and languages Slavonic Greek ‘Latin’ Runes Other scripts

3 The changing environment

16 16 21 47 70

83 83 101 106 110 115

120

Part II: FUNCTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS OF WRITING 4 Writing and social organisation Types of administrative writing Normative writing: codes, rule-lists Contingent writing: documents in administration

5 Writing and learning Writing about writing: the alphabet Learning about writing: a literate education

129 129 132 160

187 187 202

vii

viii

Contents ‘Equi-valent’ writing: language and translation ‘Writers’ Writing about learning: ‘bookmen’, ‘philosophers’

6 Writing and pictures Reading pictures: (i) some traditional views The multimedia graphic environment: reading a church Reading pictures: (ii) implicit readings? Real readers? Writing about pictures

7 Writing and magic Perspectives and definitions Writing about magic Magical writings Writing as magic?

206 217 223

229 229 233 241 248

255 255 259 264 272

8 Afterword: on the social and cultural dynamics of writing

275

Bibliography Index

280 309

Illustrations

The plates will be found between pp. 279 and 280. 1. Hebrew document from Kiev, with Turkic inscription 2. Mosaic of St Mark, in St Sophia, Kiev 3. ‘Snake Amulet’ 4. Stone icon of St Symeon the Stylite and St Staurakios 5. ‘Dvina Stone’ no. 2 6. Inscribed wooden cylinder-seal 7. Votive graffiti in St Sophia, Kiev 8. Graffito ‘document’ in St Sophia, Kiev 9. Birch-bark letter no. 109 10. Birch-bark letter no. 147 11. Fresco of the Rich Man in Hell; Novgorod, 1199 12. Panel icon of the Mother of God with Saints Antonii and Feodosii 13. Panel icon of the Veneration of the Cross 14. Document on Smolensk trade, 1284

ix

Acknowledgements

This book could barely have been conceived, let alone completed, without decades of dedicated work for which I can claim no credit whatsoever: work by Russian and Ukrainian scholars who have sought out, published and analysed the primary material on which substantial parts of the book are based. In particular I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the pioneering ‘graffitologist’ Sergei Aleksandrovich Vysotskii, to Albina Aleksandrovna Medyntseva and Tatiana Vsevolodovna Rozhdestvenskaia for their work on many types of inscriptions, and perhaps above all to Valentin Lavrentevich Ianin for his extraordinarily productive labours in the recovery and publication of writings on birch-bark and related materials and his monumental reference-tomes on early seals. I am also grateful for the comments of the three anonymous readers consulted by Cambridge University Press. Special thanks are due to my students for continually posing awkward questions. I hope they will have learned that neither this nor any other book on the period can provide definitive answers. Illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Cambridge University Library (no. 1), V. L. Ianin (nos. 6, 9, 10 and the cover illustration), N. N. Nikitenko (nos. 2, 7, 8), and the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow (nos. 12, 13).

x

Note on transliteration, citation and terminology

It is hard, and not always appropriate, to be consistent in the transliteration of proper names. Consistency might demand, for example, either Konstantinos Porphyrogennetos or Constantinus Porphyrogenitus. Established convention turns Konstantinos/Constantinus into Constantine, and combines his anglicised name either with the Greek (Porphyrogennetos) or more commonly with the notional Latin (Porphyrogenitus) form of his soubriquet. Little is gained by banning such hybrids for the sake of linguistic purism. In the present book Greek names are mostly transliterated from their Greek forms, except where – as in the case of Constantine – anglicised versions are long established. However, names of people active in an East Slav context are given in Slavonised form: hence, for example, Ilarion rather than Hilarion, Andrei rather than Andrew, Georgii (or Iurii) rather than George. This leads to some anomalies. A Byzantine churchman called Konstantinos would normally be rendered here as Constantine; but the same churchman working in Rus becomes Konstantin. The missionaries who rendered the Scriptures into Slavonic are Cyril (rather than Kyrillos) and Methodios, but a twelfth-century bishop of Turov is Kirill. The obvious solution might seem to be to standardize all forms. But the obvious solution is in fact even more problematic, especially when extended to the mass of local forms found in, for example, graffiti or in birch-bark documents: should the ‘Ivanko’ of an inscription and the ‘Ioann’ who was head of the Kievan Church both be turned into ‘John’? In general I have preferred to preserve the variety of local forms of names; unless the local sources give several versions of the name of the same person, in which case one simply has to choose. Thus the prince of Kiev at the turn of the eleventh century generally appears as Volodimer in later chronicles, reflecting East Slav vernacular pronunciation, but as Vladimir on contemporary coins, reflecting the Church Slavonic, bookish form. The former also happens to be closer to modern Ukrainian and the latter to modern Russian. There is no ‘correct’ choice. xi

xii

Note on transliteration, citation and terminology

Slavonic words are transliterated according to the ‘modified’ Library of Congress system, without diacritics. Early vocabulary is transliterated in modernised form, except in a very few cases where specific features of the early form are relevant to the argument. ‘Soft signs’ (or reduced vowels, in early texts) are indicated (
) where a word is transliterated as a Slavonic form (e.g. in titles of books or articles cited in the footnotes), but not where the word occurs as part of the ordinary English text. The word ‘Rus’ itself has a long and controversial history with regard to its meanings and usage in the medieval sources, in modern Slav historiography, and in English. In this book Rus has five meanings: (i) predominantly Scandinavian traders who explored the river-roads of Eastern Europe from the eighth century; (ii) the ruling dynasty and their retinues, of Scandinavian origin, who settled among and became linguistically assimilated to the local Slav population, for the most part by the late-tenth century; (iii) by extension, the lands over which the dynasty exercised authority; (iv) by further extension, the inhabitants of those lands; and (v) as an adjective relating to any or all of the above. Rather than devise a consistent sub-set of terms, I hope that the relevant connotations in each case will be clear from the context. For ease of reference, when quoting from Rus sources I make fairly extensive use of the texts printed in the series Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi, unless the context requires reference to an edition with a critical apparatus. English translations are mostly my own, although where possible I also provide references to published translations.

Abbreviations

AION: APDR I–III: ASSSR SAI: BLDR: BZ: CFHB: Cross, Primary Chronicle: DGTSSSR: DGVEMI:

DKU: DOP: DRM: FBR: Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric: GVNP: Heppell, Paterik: HLEULET: Hollingsworth, Hagiography: HUS:

Annali dell’Istituto universitario Orientale di Napoli V. L. Ianin, Aktovye pechati Drevnei Rusi Arkheologiia SSSR. Svod arkheologicheskikh istochnikov Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi Byzantinische Zeitschrift Corpus fontium historiae byzantinae S. H. Cross (transl.), The Russian Primary Chronicle Drevneishie gosudarstva na territorii SSSR (continued as DGVEMI ) Drevneishie gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy: materialy i issledovaniia (continuation of DGTSSSR) Ia. N. Shchapov, Drevnerusskie kniazheskie ustavy Dumbarton Oaks Papers M. P. Sotnikova, Drevneishie russkie monety Forschungen zur byzantinischen Rechtsgeschichte S. Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus
S. N. Valk, Gramoty velikogo Novgoroda i Pskova M. Heppell, The ‘Paterik’ of the Kievan Caves Monastery Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature. English Translations P. Hollingsworth, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus
Harvard Ukrainian Studies xiii

xiv

List of abbreviations

JGO: Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
: KSIA: LUB: NGB: NPL: OCA: ODB: ORIaS: Pap. Oxy.: PG: PK: PLDR: PRP: PSRL: PVL: RA: RDN: REB: RES: RIB: SA: SDRIaz (XI–XIV vv.): SG: SK:

SKKDR: Smirnov, Materialy: Sreznevskii, Materialy: SRIaz XI–XVII vv.:

Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas Daniel H. Kaiser (transl.), The Laws of Rus
– Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries Kratkie soobshcheniia Instituta arkheologii Liv-, esth- und curl¨andisches Urkundenbuch, ed. F. G. von Bunge Novgorodskie gramoty na bereste, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii et al. A. N. Nasonov (ed.), Novgorodskaia pervaia letopis
Orientalia christiana analecta The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium Otdelenie russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk The Oxyrhynchus Papyri J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca Polata knigopisnaja Pamiatniki literatury Drevnei Rusi Pamiatniki russkogo prava Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei D. S. Likhachev and V. P. Adrianova-Peretts (eds.), Povest
vremennykh let Rossiiskaia arkheologiia (continuation of SA) B. A. Rybakov, Russkie datirovannye nadpisi XI–XIV vekov Revue des e´tudes byzantines Revue des e´tudes slaves Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka Sovetskaia arkheologiia (continued as RA) Slovar
drevnerusskogo iazyka (XI–XIV vv.) R. I. Avanesov (ed.), Smolenskie gramoty XIII–XIV vekov Svodnyi katalog slaviano-russkikh rukopisnykh knig, khraniashchikhsia v SSSR. XI–XIII vv. Slovar
knizhnikov i knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi S. Smirnov, Materialy dlia istorii drevne-russkoi pokaiannoi distsipliny I. Sreznevskii, Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka Slovar
russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv.

List of abbreviations

Symp. Meth.: Tab. Vindol.: TODRL: Usp. Sb.: VC: Veder, Utrum in alterum: VID: VM: VopIaz: VV: Vysotskii, Nadpisi I–III:

ZDR: ZSl: ZSP:

xv

Symposium Methodianum, ed. K. Trost et al. Tabulae Vindolandenses Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury O. A. Kniazevskaia et al. (eds.), Uspenskii sbornik XII–XIII vv. Vita Constantini, ed. F. Grivec and F. Tomˇsiˇc William R. Veder, Utrum in alterum abiturum erat? Vspomogatel
nye istoricheskie distsipliny Vita Methodii, ed. F. Grivec and F. Tomˇsiˇc Voprosy iazykoznaniia Vizantiiskii vremennik S. A. Vysotskii, Drevnerusskie nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi; Srednevekovye nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi; Kievskie graffiti X–XVII vv. Zakonodatel
stvo Drevnei Rusi Zeitschrift f¨ur Slawistik Zeitschrift f¨ur slavische Philologie

Lake Ladoga

Baltic S e

Ladoga a

Volga

Novgorod Rostov Pereiaslavl

Lake Ilmen

Staraia Pskov Russa

Kliazm

Riga W e

ste

rn

Dvi na

Suzdal Vladimir a

Oka Riazan

Polotsk

Dorogichin Pripiat

n ter es

Turov

n Do

W

Chernigov Kiev Pereiaslavl

Bu

Vladimir

g

Dnie

per

Galich

D ni

es

er

t

Tmutorokan

Black Sea Preslav

Ohrid

Constantinople

Rus and adjacent lands, 10–13th centuries

Volga

Smolensk

Introduction

This book is about the origins and early uses of writing in a particular society (Rus), but it may also serve as a case-study for those with a broader interest either in medieval uses of writing or – still more broadly – in the cultural history of information technology. The book has two main aims, one informative, the other interpretative. The first aim (the focus of Part I) is to introduce the evidence, the primary material, the full range of different types of writing, from scratches on spindle whorls to luxury parchment manuscripts. The second aim (the focus of Part II) is to consider aspects of the social and cultural dynamics of writing: its functions, its status, its ‘meanings’, its relationship to processes of social and cultural change. In pursuit of the two aims I pose three questions: what were the characteristic features of the period as a whole? how did they emerge or change over time? and to what extent were they similar or dissimilar to equivalent phenomena elsewhere? In other words, the treatment combines elements of the synchronic, the diachronic and the comparative. Any beginning or end is to some extent arbitrary. I start in the middle of the tenth century because that, very roughly, is the time of the earliest extant evidence for native uses of writing. It also coincides, very roughly indeed, with the first phase of the emergence of the ‘land of the Rus’ as a coherent entity with some degree of political, geographical and linguistic definition.1 Closure is more problematic. I stop at the end of the thirteenth century. The Mongol invasions of 1237–1240 might provide a conventional pretext for closure, but they do not mark an immediate social or cultural break. For present purposes, more relevant than the Mongol invasions in themselves are, in the north and east, the rise of Moscow and, in the west and south, the incursions by Lithuania. Though I shall occasionally refer to ‘Pre-Mongol’ Rus, the period covered by this book 1

I provide a map and the occasional explanatory excursus, but no general narrative of background ‘events’. Readers may find it useful to refer to, e.g. Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge, 1995); also Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996).

1

2

Introduction

might better be termed ‘Pre-Muscovite’, or ‘Pre-Lithuanian’. Thus we arrive at circa 950–circa 1300, with emphasis on the circa at both ends.

At the risk of labouring what may be obvious, it would be as well to outline in advance some of the main elements of my approach to the theme of writing in cultural history: first, in general; then, in relation to Rus. In the very broadest definition, any graphic sign or set of signs can be labelled ‘writing’. All visual representation is a form of ‘text’, which can be ‘read’. Writing is a form of depiction; or, more simply, depiction is writing. Indeed, some languages (including, for the present context, Greek and Church Slavonic) use the same word for ‘to write’ as for ‘to depict’. More narrowly, writing is a system of graphic signs, the primary use of which, in combination with one another, is to indicate the sound-, word- or thought-sequences of language. ‘Thought-writing’ (pictograms, ideograms) is not necessarily tied to a specific language; hence identical signs – such as mathematical symbols, or road signs, or manufacturers’ logos, or Chinese characters – can ‘mean’ roughly the same thing, yet are decoded through entirely different sets of sounds. ‘Sound-writing’ (syllabic, consonantal or alphabetic script) is a system of graphic signs which, when combined, are designed to be decoded as specified words of a particular language.2 In the present book ‘writing’ for the most part implies alphabetic script. In principle, alphabetic script is generally understood to represent graphically the sounds of speech. In practice, the functions of real alphabets in real use are not so straightforward, either in relation to the sounds of speech or in relation to other graphic devices. On the one hand, even in their main function as signifiers of utterances through their constituent sounds, alphabets depend on cultural collusion among their users more than on the transparent ‘logic’ implied in the alphabetic principle. Except in the early stages of learning, the act of reading – the act of decoding the graphic sign – tends to be by word-recognition rather than by the sequential reconstitution of sounds. Modern reading is mostly silent, so that the ‘sound’ is in any case notional. The same alphabet can be used in different languages, such that the same graphic signs (letters) are decoded as different sounds. Within a language, alphabets tend to be normative and conservative, taking little 2

Here I fall into the ‘scriptist’ heresy excoriated by Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing (London, 1986), pp. 29–56, although Harris’s theory of writing, which stresses its nature as graphic sign, is a stimulating corrective to complacent identification between writing and language: see his later book, Signs of Language (London, 1996). For the convenient distinction between ‘thought-writing’ and ‘sound-writing’ see Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing, revised edn (London, 1992), pp. 14–15.

Introduction

3

account of variation in speech-sounds over time or region (nor do we fully abolish the problem by speaking of ‘phonemes’ instead of ‘sounds’). In other words, real alphabetic writing should not be confused with phonetic transcription, its more pliant derivative. On the other hand, what alphabetic writing ‘says’ is not always directly retrievable as speech. Though the basic job of an alphabet is to serve as a form of notation for words, those who use alphabetic script are also free to exploit other dimensions of its semantic potential as a graphic medium. A piece of writing is a made object, with visual and perhaps even tangible properties. Variables in the way writing is presented – in its materials, or its design, size, context, colours or techniques – can be used to convey non-verbal messages: messages about status and authority, for example, or about wealth, or taste. In some situations the non-linguistic (or non-glottal) messages even constitute the main ‘text’ to be read, more important than the bare words. Although alphabetic script does have its own distinct functions, it can also share the semantic functions of other graphic devices, and on this non-linguistic level the boundary between writing in the narrow sense and writing in the broad sense (where any depiction is a ‘text’) is far from clear. For example, the ability to ‘sign’ one’s name is commonly taken as a measure of the ability to write alphabetic script; yet the point of a modern ‘signature’ is not to convey a word through correct spelling (modern signatures are often strictly indecipherable as alphabetic script), but to form a unique and identifiable shape, a personal graphic ‘sign’, to function as an ideogram. The writing of meaning is only a part of the meaning of writing. In this respect, alphabetic writing should be seen as only a part of what might be called the total graphic environment. I shall be concerned not only with who wrote or read what kinds of articulated words, but also with the semantic implications of writing in the wider graphic environment. Writing is a technique, as is reading. Those who acquire the technical skills tend to be labelled ‘literate’, and the study of the uses of reading and writing is generally associated with the study of literacy. With reference to individuals, ‘literacy’ has two meanings, one technical, the other cultural. In the technical sense it implies some level of ability in reading and/or writing. In the cultural sense it implies some level of familiarity with, and mastery of, cultural activities in which reading and writing are used. In both cases the criteria for what constitutes literacy, in an individual, vary from society to society, and there is no point in setting a universal standard. Nowadays, in order to be functionally literate, an individual needs to be able to perform quite complex tasks fluently. At other times, for technical literacy, it may have been sufficient to be able to write one’s name or to struggle through a document with guidance. The two skills

4

Introduction

can even be separated. Just as it is possible to read a language without being able to speak it, so it is possible to write without being able to read (i.e. merely to reproduce letter-forms from an exemplar, such as when a monoglot typesetter sets a text in foreign script) or to read without being able to write. What matters is what matters in context, what one needs to be literate for. With reference to the individual, the notional opposite of ‘literacy’ is ‘illiteracy’. The opposition is notional, because the boundary is socially constructed. A person considered literate in one society may be considered illiterate in another; or, more confusingly, a person obviously literate in the technical sense may nevertheless be branded – or confess to being – illiterate in the cultural sense. In this book I try to avoid any general measure of individual literacy, reserving the word instead for the technical skills required in specific contexts, or for occasions when the term is specifically justified by an equivalent expression in the sources.3 In cultural history ‘literacy’ has acquired a third meaning: it denotes the sum of social and cultural phenomena associated with the uses of writing (here the notional opposite of ‘literacy’ is ‘orality’).4 ‘Literacy studies’, in this sense, flourish. However, if one accepts this use of the term, one must be wary of implicit contamination with the technical meanings of the word with regard to individuals. In industrial or post-industrial societies it is reasonable to link the study of the uses of writing with the study of the individual technical skills, since mastery of the technical skills is a prerequisite for any form of significant involvement in the uses of writing. Not so in a pre-industrial age, or for a different type of cultural ‘literacy’.5 Of course it is interesting, and relevant, to know who could read and/or write, and to what level and for what purposes, but an individual or social literacy-index is not at all the same thing as a survey of those who were, to varying degrees and in various ways, involved in the culture of the written word. Participation in, or access to, the culture of the written word was far from being the exclusive preserve of technically literate people. The written word reaches and may affect anybody who can listen to it being read (or even recited from third-hand memory), or anybody who sees written objects in their graphic environment. The culture of the written word may 3 4

5

See e.g. below, pp. 223–4, on the knizhnik (bookman, man of letters, litteratus). Compare the sharply contrastive approach of Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), with the more nuanced essays in David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Literacy and Orality (Cambridge, 1991). See esp. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London, 1979); Franz H. Bauml, ¨ ‘Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Speculum 55 (1980), 237–65; D. H. Green, ‘Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies’, Speculum 65 (1990), 267–80; Charles F. Briggs, ‘Literacy, Reading and Writing in the Medieval West’, Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000), 397–420.

Introduction

5

even be partly shaped by people who do not themselves apply the technical skills: ‘writers’ need not write, if they can dictate, and texts are produced by those who commission them as much as by those who copy them out. ‘To read’ may mean ‘to hear’, and ‘to write’ may mean ‘to cause to be written’. No points are being stretched here. Nowadays ‘to build’ can mean ‘to cause to be built’, as in ‘we built an extension to our house last year’. Or, perhaps a closer analogy: computer culture is a far larger and more complex phenomenon than the culture of computer programmers. This book is about the culture of the written word, of which individual, technical literacy is a necessary component, but not necessarily a major component, and certainly not the only component. Writing is also a technology. The invention of writing, and its acquisition in successive societies, is one of the great leaps in information technology, along with the emergence of speech itself, the invention of printing and the development of electronic media (hence such metaphorical usages as ‘computer literacy’).6 In a period of unprecedentedly rapid global change in information technology, the historical study of the uses of writing can become an oblique form of self-exploration: what are the implications of technological change? How profound or predictable or controllable are its consequences in which areas of social and personal life? This is a fertile environment for interdisciplinary and crosscultural study, where the theoretical and the practical, the past and the present, the remote and the immediate, mingle to mutual advantage. The study of the sociocultural ramifications of writing fits into no single academic niche. It is nobody’s property. Insights derived from case-studies of ancient Mesopotamia, or of classical Greece, or of medieval England, or of twentieth-century West Africa, are exchanged in productive dialogue across chronological, geographical, institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Writing is a technology which turns words into objects. It gives them form, or signifies them by means of form. It makes words visible, tangible, portable. It separates speech from speaker, message from messenger, known from knower. It resituates the word in time and space. It enables words to be preserved, verified and copied, rearranged and revised, contemplated and analysed at leisure. Such, in principle, are some of its properties. The contentious issue is how, in general and in particular cases, the properties of the technology relate to social and cultural change. Answers can be arranged on a scale running from an extreme 6

For an overview see e.g. Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages. Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore and London, 1998), although here the authors argue that ‘information’ as such is first made possible through writing, not through speech alone: see ibid., pp. 27–30.

6

Introduction

‘technocentric’ approach at one end to an extreme ‘anthropocentric’ approach at the other. According to the ‘technocentric’ approach, technology causes change, and the spread of writing has profound consequences both for individuals and for societies. In the individual the acquisition of the technical skills changes not only the scope of activities and social opportunities but also structures and habits of thought. Since writing can be preserved and perused, its messages can be analysed and criticised. Writing engenders habits of abstract argument, formal logic, critical thought. In society the ability to make and keep written records of transactions encourages the emergence of new institutions, new forms of social control. Written procedures allow the standardisation of administrative norms across vast areas. Record-keeping swells the power of the record-keeper, or the record-validator. The spread of writing enables – hastens, even causes – the growth of centralised bureaucracies. And then there is ‘culture’: religion, ideology, literature. Writing enables the dissemination of authoritative texts which cut across social, communal and geographic divisions. It allows the words of authority to extend beyond their immediate audience. It creates, in effect, new communities, ‘textual’ communities,7 those who share a written language, or who acknowledge the authority of a particular body of writings. In all these capacities writing not merely enables its users to perform certain tasks more effectively; it alters the very nature of the tasks which they are able to perform, and it alters their perception of such tasks. Writing changes the world. When fully exploited, the technology of writing, whether it functions as a means of information storage or as a means of expression or as a means of communication, fundamentally affects the way societies are organised, the hierarchies of power, the criteria of authority, the forms of cultural activity, the structures of thought,8 even the very workings of the human brain.9 The grand technocentric vision has opened broad avenues of speculation and inquiry, but in its pure form (which, to be fair, few of its 7 8

9

A term usefully developed by Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Modes of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983). See, especially, the influential ‘trilogy’ by Jack Goody: The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977); The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986), and The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987). Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: the Conflict Between Word and Image (London, 1999) has argued with considerable verve that writing brings about the dominance of ‘left-brain’ capabilities over ‘right-brain’ capabilities, and hence leads to the triumph of militant rationalism and the destruction of matriarchy; cf. Richard Hellie, ‘Late Medieval and Early Modern Russian Civilization and Modern Neuroscience’, in A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff (eds.), Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584 (UCLA Slavic Studies, New Series, vol. III; Moscow, 1997), pp. 146–65, who speculates that traditional low levels of literacy were responsible for Muscovy being a ‘right-brained civilization’.

Introduction

7

proponents would advocate) it is easier to knock than to defend.10 Above all, a normative scheme of technologically determined cultural evolution stumbles against the diversity of actual case-studies. If technology is the cause, why do not all societies show the same effects? Writing has existed for millennia, most societies have had opportunities to acquire and exploit the technology, but why have not all of them produced Greek philosophers, Hebrew scribes, Arab calligraphers, Roman lawyers, or Soviet bureaucrats? Demonstrably, ‘the mere availability of writing does not transform a society’.11 The anthropocentric response is to assert that the agent of change is not the technology but the user: people, society. People choose, or do not choose, to adopt writing or to explore its potential according to their perception of their own needs. There is resistance to writing in those societies, or in those activities within a society, which are perceived to function adequately without it. Writing is accepted or rejected, expanded or contracted, according to need. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Societies do not change because they introduce writing; they introduce writing because they change. The anthropocentric riposte sounds eminently reasonable, but this plain reversal of causation is no less crude; as if ‘needs’ are consistently identified independently of the means available to meet them. People may indeed exploit writing according to their needs, but people’s perception of their needs can be affected by their experience of writing. Writing is not literally an agent, and it does not bring inevitable consequences, but through the use of writing and through reflecting on writing, people can develop habits of thought and behaviour which they would not otherwise have suspected in themselves; they can develop new needs. There is an interaction, a dynamic relationship. The contrastive approaches can be recast as an inclusive approach: societies exploit writing because they change, and societies change because they exploit writing. We may well distrust technological determinism and prefer human agency, but we can still accept, if not that the technology changes people, then at least that people’s own experience of the technology can induce them (individually and collectively, as societies) to change themselves. The uses of writing must therefore be considered not just in themselves, but in their dynamic relationship with, on the one hand, the non-uses of writing and, on the other hand, social perceptions of what writing is, of its nature, status, authority and functions. 10

11

See, for example, the critiques by Carol Fleischer Feldman, ‘Oral Metalanguage’, in Olson and Torrance, Literacy and Orality, pp. 47–65; and J. Peter Denny, ‘Rational Thought and Literate Decontextualization’, ibid., pp. 66–89. Gaur, A History of Writing, p. 15.

8

Introduction

Writing and non-writing, the sphere of the written and the sphere of the spoken (‘literacy’ and ‘orality’) have often been presented as polar opposites, or – in the technocentric scheme – as ideally distinct stages in sociocultural evolution.12 This is misleading. The written mode and the spoken mode are neither discrete stages on an evolutionary journey nor entirely interchangeable options at any given time. The notion of a distinct ‘orality’ is properly tenable only with regard to societies where writing is wholly unknown. Otherwise the culture of the written word and the culture of the spoken word overlap, interact, modify and modulate each other. Writing does not obliterate speech and memory, but rather the functions of each are affected by the presence of the other. The ways in which they do so are not simply predictable, but are specific to the sociocultural dynamics of a given society. To risk some analogies: contrary to prediction, computerisation has not led to mass bankruptcies among paper manufacturers, though the functions and status of printcopy are affected (in some areas reduced, in other areas enhanced) by the existence of electronic storage. Contrary to some predictions (and to early trends), television and video have not rendered cinemas redundant; instead cinemas have adapted in response to television and video, and film-production has adapted to explore the differential qualities of the large and the small screen, of public and domestic display. Contrary to what might seem practical logic, telephone and e-mail have not led to a decline in academic and business travel. Words delivered in a face-toface meeting, by telephone, by e-mail, in a hand-written letter, or in a computer-generated letter may carry an identical verbal meaning, but the choice of modes may convey different cultural messages. In none of these cases should one speak of either ‘residual’ survivals of the older technology or of straightforward alternatives. In all cases the functions of one mode are adapted through the presence of the other. The uses of writing have a bearing on the cultural semantics of non-writing, and vice versa.13 Writing is a cultural phenomenon. Its meanings are not implicit. As a set of signs, it has the significance and functions ascribed to it by those who use it or who come into contact with it. Its status and authority (and hence its non-verbal meaning) reflect cultural values. The value attributed to writing is rarely constant in all its contexts, and it is rarely appropriate to speak of ‘the’ status of writing throughout a given society. On the contrary, the sociocultural dynamics of writing in a society may be characterised by the patterns of variation in the status and authority of types 12 13

Hence, for example, the persistent retention of oral methods, where writing is available, can be classified as merely ‘residual’: see Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 99, 109, 115–16. See the ‘ecological’ metaphor applied by David Barton, Literacy. An Introduction to the Ecology of the Written Word (Oxford, 1994).

Introduction

9

of writing within that society. Variables include the social or occupational status of the producers of writing (author, scribe, editor, individual or institutional patron), the verbal contents, the social or transactional context, the consumer (individual reader, recipient, communal addressee), as well as the forms of presentation of the medium itself. In their fluctuating combinations, such variables produce quite complex patterns of differentiation within and between the linked communities of a given society. Before seeking a unifying theory, or perhaps instead of seeking a unifying theory, one needs to map the patterns of differentiation which, taken together, characterise the culture (or cultures) of the written word in Rus. Such patterns are not rigidly predictable, and to that extent the adoption and spread of writing does not have a fixed set of consequences, or even of implications. But neither are the patterns completely random. Although few if any societies reproduce the totality of each other’s uses and perceptions of writing precisely in every detail, few if any societies develop features in their uses and perceptions of writing which are wholly unparalleled elsewhere. Hence, however fragile any unified theory, the cultural history of writing remains a unified field of study in which each case history has a bearing on our understanding of the field as a whole.

Writing in Rus has, naturally, been of interest to historians for as long as written sources have been studied, and the first object of study is the sources themselves. Until about the middle of the twentieth century the study of early Rus writing meant, almost exclusively, the study of books. The scholar toiled in libraries and archives, scrutinising ancient parchment folia, classifying variants in the forms of text, language or letter, hypothesising about lost prototypes, and scouring native and foreign narratives for allusions which might shed light on periods for which little or no authentic material had survived. Since the middle of the twentieth century the front line of investigation has shifted from the library into the field, from dusty-fingered palaeographer to muddy-booted archaeologist. Thanks to the successes of archaeology, the quantity and range of available written sources grow year by year, and the picture of early Rus written culture has changed dramatically. The most significant revisions relate to three issues in particular: (i) the origins of writing; (ii) the language of writing; and (iii) the social distribution of writing. And in all three cases the call for revision derives from the same underlying change in the scope of the available evidence: the discovery of large quantities of written objects produced by and for members of the lay urban community, and the consequent reconsideration of the role of the Church.

10

Introduction

When almost all known or analysed specimens of writing were parchment manuscripts emanating from a predominantly ecclesiastical milieu, the general contours of the adoption and spread of the technology seemed clear; or seemed clear to those who took a prudent view of the evidence. Towards the end of the tenth century (the traditional, emblematic date is 988) Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich of Kiev made Christianity the ‘official’ faith of his people. The Church brought the technology of writing, and an established language of writing (Church Slavonic), and it trained personnel (the clergy, monks) in the uses of writing. Scraps of non-ecclesiastical writing were too rare and enigmatic to have a major impact on the overall scheme. Word-forms and spellings that failed to adhere to Church Slavonic norms could be dismissed as mistakes or as evidence of an occasional, limited semi-literacy among some laymen. Advocates of a strong early secular context for writing relied on speculative over-interpretation of dubious material. Now, however, objects with non-ecclesiastical writing are more than numerous enough, and just about early enough, to call into question the extent to which the Church was exclusively responsible for introducing and sustaining the technology;14 ‘non-standard’ ways of writing turn out to have their own regularity, their own ‘standards’,15 which simply happen not to coincide with Church Slavonic norms; a culture of urban secular writing flourished. These sorts of questions are traditional, although in the Rus context the answers are relatively new (or rather, the opportunity to support such answers with authentic material is relatively new). In Part I of the present book I focus mainly on the traditional questions, surveying the evidence for written culture and its development, building on the achievements of those whose studies of sources have made a new general survey possible, and necessary. Existing surveys are selective, concentrating on particular groups of sources (e.g. manuscripts, or inscriptions, or birch-bark letters). Furthermore, existing surveys tend to concentrate on writing either ‘in itself’ or in relation to its producers. Here I attempt to take a more holistic approach, to break down some of the barriers and categories, to attempt a more comprehensive overview of written culture not only as it was created but also as it was seen and experienced, to explore the graphic environment as a whole. As a by-product of the attempt to give coherent shape to such an overview, I also suggest a new way of 14

15

See the excellent summary in A. A. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi. Po pamiatnikam epigrafiki X– pervoi poloviny XIII veka (Moscow, 2000), esp. pp. 230–66. Note, however, that Medyntseva still treats 988 as an emblematic date, before which writing is ‘pre-Christian’ (e.g. pp. 15–16, 245): the label is of course misleading, since Christianity in Rus does not begin with the ‘official’ adoption of the faith. See esp. A. A. Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow, 1995), pp. 9–210.

Introduction

11

classifying the sources. I suggest it not as a general theory of how written sources ought to be classified, but as a useful device for present purposes. The wider sociocultural questions in the history of writing have received less attention: far less attention with regard to Rus than with regard to, say, classical antiquity or medieval Western Europe. In Soviet scholarship explanations for the adoption and spread of writing were established in the 1950s, when the ‘need’ for writing was linked to the process of class-formation and state-formation.16 Beyond a general concurrence that writing has a role in processes of social integration (whether or not one defines the processes in terms of class or state), little has moved since then.17 Either way, the adoption and spread of writing is in essence interpreted as a marker of progress, of finding the cultural tool for the next historical phase.18 The study of early Rus culture has experienced barely even a ripple from the explosion in Western ‘literacy studies’, in the sociocultural study of information technologies, and in the more nuanced approaches and perceptions which derive therefrom. Hence the scope for the thematic investigations in Part II of the present book. I would certainly not claim that every aspect of these investigations is new. On the contrary, as in Part I, it will be obvious that in many places I continue to rely on the source-work of others. But few if any attempts have been made, in detail, to link the separate questions into a larger picture of the sociocultural dynamics of written culture.19 I do not claim that this study is comprehensive. I am aware of many gaps, and I do not expect all readers to share my priorities for the inclusion or arrangement of themes. A couple of omissions may be especially noticeable, and should be signalled in advance. First, I have not tried to reach a general view of the implications of writing for some notional Rus 16 17

18

19

For a thoughtful version see e.g. D. S. Likhachev, Vozniknovenie russkoi literatury (Moscow, Leningrad, 1952), pp. 14–24. See e.g. A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Pis
mennost
i khristianstvo v protsesse stanovleniia drevnerusskoi gosudarstvennosti’, in Istoki russkoi kul
tury (arkheologiia i lingvistika) (Materialy po arkheologii Rossii, 3; Moscow, 1997), pp. 11–20; I. Ia. Froianov, A. Iu. Dvornichenko, Iu. V. Krivosheev, ‘O sotsial
nykh osnovakh razvitiia pis
mennosti i gramotnosti v Drevnei Rusi’, in I. V. Dubov and I. Ia. Froianov (eds.), Slaviano-russkie drevnosti 3. Problemy istorii severo-zapada Rusi (St Petersburg, 1995), pp. 114–27: the authors of the latter article argue that writing was linked not to class- or state-formation, but to the transition from a tribal to a communal order. They also assert, on highly dubious grounds, that early literacy was widespread among the rural population. Note, however, T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘O sotsiolingvisticheskoi situatsii na Rusi v IX– X vv.’, in Traditsii drevneishei slavianskoi pis
mennosti i iazykovaia kul
tura vostochnykh slavian (Moscow, 1991), pp. 188–200, who links changes in the uses of writing to the rise of towns. S. O. Vysots
kyi, Kyivs
ka pysemna shkola X–XII st. (Lviv, Kiev, New York, 1998) surveys some of the same material, but mainly in order to argue for the central role of a ‘Kievan school of writing’ which in his view disseminated a ‘state language’.

12

Introduction

mentality. Various chapters touch on issues relating to habits of thought, but I am sceptical about both the possibility and the appropriateness of an integrated conclusion. Second, no separate chapter is devoted specifically to the written and the spoken in ‘literature’ as such, whether with regard to qualities of ‘literariness’ (the respective forms of verbal art and their interaction)20 or with regard to their systemic relations. The topic is large enough to merit – and may yet receive – a separate book. Here, however the status of the literary is neither higher nor lower than that of any other component of written culture (or of spoken culture, if we accept the conventional oxymoron ‘oral literature’).

The social and cultural dynamics of writing in Rus must in the first instance be explored in and for itself, but the general patterns which emerge can be brought into sharper focus by analogy and comparison. Rather than choosing a particular society for close and systematic comparison, it is more useful to indicate a variety of analogies and (just as important) non-analogies from a range of areas from time to time. The comparative dimension in this book is therefore somewhat patchy, partial, eclectic. To explore each comparison in due detail would be far beyond my capacity. With whose writings should the writings of the Rus most appropriately be compared? If we had been able to put the question to one of the purveyors of high-status ecclesiastical writing – a bishop, say, or a monk – the answer would probably have been: the Greeks. These ‘Greeks’, for the Rus, were not the classical Athenians but the Greek-speaking, Greek-writing Christians of Byzantium. The Church in Rus, the institutional guardian of high-status writings, was answerable to the Church in Constantinople. The head of the Rus Church, the Metropolitan of Rhosia (based in Kiev) was in charge of an ecclesiastical province of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and most of the incumbents were themselves ‘Greeks’. The faith of the Rus was, formally speaking, the faith as received from and sanctioned by Byzantium. The vast majority of Christian writings produced and disseminated in Rus consisted of works which had been translated or adapted from Greek and local writings tended self-consciously to situate themselves in a tradition which derived its authority from the ‘Greeks’. In officially accepting Byzantine (‘Orthodox’) Christianity, the Rus accepted a body of texts and a framework of textual practices which were automatically – axiomatically – regarded as prestigious. 20

See D. S. Likhachev, Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury, 3rd edn (Moscow, 1979), esp. pp. 209–351; for some general remarks see Henrik Birnbaum, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Literature in Old Rus
’, in Birnbaum, Aspects of the Slavic Middle Ages and Slavic Renaissance Culture (New York, Bern, Frankfurt, Paris, 1991), pp. 131–80.

Introduction

13

The analogy with Byzantium is nevertheless limited. Rus was a very different kind of place. A wholly new, wholly artificial ‘textual community’, such as a monastery, might constitute itself in detailed emulation of a Byzantine prototype (though even here emulation never quite achieves identity), but the patterns and assumptions of life outside were not so susceptible to remodelling according to imported written precedent. For example: Byzantine administration was highly bureaucratised, with the emperor operating through a dense network of quill-pushing, documentauthenticating functionaries. The Byzantines’ historical sense of themselves as Rhomaioi was embedded not just in political ideology but in educational practice, in the manner and texture of Byzantine high-status writing. As we shall see, the Rus were not particularly receptive either to Byzantine bureaucratic rulership or to Byzantine quasi-classical educational practices. The assimilation of writing did not in itself change traditional non-written modes of rule and of communal self-regulation, and the ‘Roman’ idea had no special status in the Rus understanding of their own historical experience, national mythology or cultural values. After Byzantium (perhaps before Byzantium) the obviously relevant analogy is with Bulgaria. The Rus received the written Christianity of the ‘Greeks’, but not in Greek. The faith arrived in pre-packaged Slavonic translation. Written Slavonic Christianity has its origins in the mid-ninth century, when the earliest translations were made for the mission of the Thessalonican brothers Constantine (also known by his monastic name of Cyril) and Methodios to Great Moravia in 863. In its immediate aim the Moravian mission was a flop, since in 886 Moravia rejected Slavonic in favour of Latin, Constantinople in favour of Rome, and barred the followers of Cyril and Methodios (Cyril had died in 869 and Methodios in 885) from spreading the words of the Book in the vernacular. There was a warmer welcome in Bulgaria, where Slavonic was installed as the official language of the faith towards the end of the ninth century. The written Christianity received by the Rus was in its essentials a textual package derived from Bulgaria rather than directly from Byzantium. Again the analogy has limits. Bulgaria was Byzantium’s neighbour, in the early tenth century even Byzantium’s rival. It was within Old Roman imperial territory. Here and there one might even stumble across the debris of classical inscriptions. In some Byzantine eyes the existence of Slavonic Bulgaria as an autonomous polity was an historical aberration. In the early eleventh century, just as Slavonic Christianity was becoming established among the Rus, Bulgaria was being liquidated by the Byzantines (or was being reabsorbed into the Empire of the Rhomaioi ). The Byzantino-Bulgarian frontier was not a clear ethnic or linguistic dividing line. There were Greek-speakers in Bulgaria, and Slavs within

14

Introduction

the Empire. Bulgarian literati spanned both languages, at least some of them were educated into Byzantine literate practices and Byzantine literate assumptions. Their historical experience, identity and education brought them into a kind of dialogue with aspects of Byzantine written culture which were remote and irrelevant to the Rus. Beyond Byzantium and Bulgaria lie the written cultures of medieval Western Europe. Writing in Rus was linked to writing in Byzantium and Bulgaria by genetic descent. The wider comparisons can only be by generic analogy. The lure of synchronicity encourages us to think of Rus alongside other medieval societies, and such comparisons are quite often proper and productive, but we must be cautious. In much of Western and Southern Europe writing had been known for centuries: sometimes by many, sometimes by a few, sometimes only in Latin or Greek, sometimes in vernacular languages.21 Writing was familiar, whether from Greek antiquity or as part of the Roman imperial legacy, whether as a continuing practice or just as occasional inscriptions on re-used stones. Within the old Empire, despite disruptions, there was a remarkably widespread continuity in the existence of writing, if not in all its uses and languages. Even when applied minimally, writing remained a presence, a potential.22 In Rus writing was new. It was wholly unfamiliar, barring perhaps the inscriptions on coins deposited by traders in transit. When the Rus began to adopt writing for themselves, it came with no locally inherited cultural baggage. It meant what they made of it. Rus was in several respects recognisably ‘medieval’, even if the adjective is something of a misnomer for a polity without the kind of ‘antiquity’ which by implication lies behind its Middle Age. Although the Rus rulers adopted the culture of their official faith from the south, in their social and communal customs they probably had greater affinities with the north: the Scandinavian origins of the dynasty; succession by divided inheritance; a highly mobile warrior-elite; the absence of a Roman past or of mythologies of identity derived therefrom. In the non-ecclesiastical uses of writing it may be more fruitful to look for generic analogies in the Germanic or Anglo-Norman worlds rather than around the Mediterranean or Black Sea fringes.23 21

22

23

Latin and Greek do not, of course, always stand in stark contrast to local vernaculars. The learned language of Byzantium was obscure to the untutored, but was still reckoned to be Greek. On Latin see Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 7–22. Several of the essays in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, 1990; Paperback edn, 1992) reveal the differences, even in Western Europe, between former imperial and non-imperial regions. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, deals with approximately the same period as the present survey and provides a rich source of ideas and material for comparison. However, closer analogies can often be found in a slightly earlier period, as in the range of studies in McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe.

Introduction

15

Wider still, the constraints of chronology and geography can be abandoned. Analogies and contrasts arise out of particular features of the sources. The Novgorod birch-bark documents, for example, invite comparison with some groups of papyri, or with the extraordinary and apparently unique Latin writing-tablets from the Roman garrison at Vindolanda in Northumbria. I plead guilty to a certain amount of digressive eclecticism.24 The purpose, however, is not to imply that all writings from all times and places are in essence alike, but to locate and specify more precisely the central object of study: the uses and functions of writing among the Rus. 24

See, for example, the stimulating range of essays in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1994).

Part I THE GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT

1

The written remains

Describing writing: categories, principles What kinds of writing did the Rus produce, or use, or see, or know about? And when, and where? Before we consider the functions of writing, we need to survey the material itself, to embark on a tour around the graphic environment. For the modern observer the ‘graphic environment’ can only be a ‘virtual’ landscape, generated by hypothesis, inference and a degree of conjecture from such of its components as happen to survive. We start, therefore, with a survey of the evidence, with the real specimens of writing from which the ‘virtual’ environment may be reconstructed. How should the evidence be described? The seemingly simple question has no obvious or entirely satisfactory answer. Description is not neutral. Choices have to be made about how the evidence should be presented, about the appropriate categories and labels, and – at the margins – about what does or does not qualify for inclusion. A structured survey seeks to impose shape and coherence, but to shape is already to interpret. Systems of classification are not ‘correct’, merely more or less useful for the purposes for which they are devised. Thus, for example, the relevant objects could legitimately be arranged according to date, or location, or language, or material, or function, or technique; according to the nature of the object or according to the nature of the text. Classification is a cognitive device, the validity of which depends on what it is designed to reveal. No comprehensive guide to early writing in Rus has been published. This is not to say that the entire territory is uncharted, but different areas are charted on separate maps drawn up according to disparate criteria. The commonest convention, observed or implied in most of the partial surveys, splits specimens of writing into two categories: manuscripts, 16

The written remains

17

and inscriptions. The writing in manuscript books (products of what I shall call ‘parchment literacy’) is quite well served by modern guides, who take a variety of routes. One can tour the ‘real’ landscape of surviving manuscripts arranged in chronological sequence1 or grouped and analysed according to their contents.2 Or one can explore the ‘virtual’ landscape of what probably or possibly existed (taking into account later copies of plausibly early material), arranged according to genre and function,3 or highlighting writers and works.4 Guides to inscriptions are more diffuse. Separate catalogues treat separate types of object.5 An integrated chronological list was published in the early 1950s, but has been rendered obsolete by subsequent discoveries and studies.6 Even the admirable recent survey by A. A. Medyntseva, leaves unexplained gaps in the categories of objects included.7 The twofold classification of written materials – manuscripts and inscriptions – has certain advantages, especially for linguists, palaeographers and intellectual historians. The writing in manuscripts and the writing in inscriptions differ from each other (generally, if not in all cases) in length, in material, in technique, in content and in manner. Manuscripts are made to be capacious, inscriptions are necessarily brief. Thousands of inscriptions survive from early Rus, but if every one of them were to be written out in sequence they could collectively be accommodated within a single moderate-sized parchment manuscript. Parchment manuscripts contain the substantial texts which tend to define (though not with 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

See SK. Roland Marti, Handschrift – Text – Textgruppe – Literatur. Untersuchungen zur inneren Gliederung der fr¨uhen Literatur aus dem ostslavischen Sprachbereich in den Handschriften des 11. bis 14. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1989). Gerhard Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus
(988–1237) (Munich, 1982); Russian translation, with corrections and additions: Khristianstvo i bogoslovskaia literatura v Kievskoi Rusi (988–1237 gg.) (St Petersburg, 1996). E.g. N. K. Nikol
skii, Materialy dlia povremennogo spiska russkikh pisatelei i ikh sochinenii (X–XI vv.) (St Petersburg, 1906); I. U. Budovnits, Slovar
russkoi, ukrainskoi, belorusskoi pis
mennosti i literatury do XVIII veka (Moscow, 1969) (brief entries, covering a much longer period); SKKDR I; also, though not in ‘reference’ format, the studies by Francis J. Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia (Aldershot, Brookfield, Singapore, Sydney 1999). See, for example, the works by Artsikhovskii, Ershevskii, Gal
chenko, Ianin, Makarova, Medyntseva, Mel
nikova, Nikolaeva and Chernetsov, Rozhdestvenskaia, Sedova, Sotnikova, Vysotskii, Zalizniak and others. A. S. Orlov, Bibliografiia russkikh nadpisei XI–XV vv. (Moscow, Leningrad, 1952); cf. also RDN, a corpus of 55 ‘dated’ (in the view of the editor, B. A. Rybakov) inscriptions, 45 of which are ascribed to the period before 1300. A. A. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi. Po pamiatnikam epigrafiki X–pervoi poloviny XIII veka (Moscow, 2000): Medyntseva is well aware (p. 15) of the problems of classification, but fails to explain why her own scheme leaves no place for coins and seals, for example, or even the birch-bark documents (although she refers to such items at various points in the book).

18

The graphic environment

absolute consistency) the high-status ‘standard’ norms of written expression, inscriptions are more accommodating towards (but are not restricted to) local and individual variants. The letters in parchment manuscripts are formed with quill and ink, the letters of inscriptions are – by and large – not. The twofold classification generates two distinct disciplines: codicology (the study of manuscript books) and epigraphy (the study of inscriptions). Nevertheless, as a basis for the study of written culture the conventional scheme is inappropriate. In origin, and still to some extent by implication, it is hierarchical, deriving from an age in which manuscript books were objects of serious cultural study and inscriptions were merely useful supplements.8 A century ago, when libraries were virtually the sole repositories of early written material, the imbalance might have seemed reasonable. Now, with the discovery of large quantities of material through archaeology, it is incongruous. It does not represent a balanced opposition of two equal and equivalent groups. Manuscript books form a reasonably coherent category; inscriptions do not. The term ‘inscription’ tends in practice to cover everything which is not a manuscript, a group defined by its exclusion from the privileged category rather than by specific characteristics of its own (like ‘foreign’ as opposed to ‘native’, or ‘barbarian’ as opposed to ‘Greek’, or ‘pagan’ as opposed to ‘Christian’). Inscriptions are therefore vastly more varied than manuscripts: more varied in their materials, in their techniques, in their locations, in their social origins and functions. Inscriptions survive on wood, on stone, on gold, silver, lead, bronze and iron, on textiles and ceramics, on bone and glass, on plaster and brick. They were formed by moulding, stamping, daubing, scratching, chiselling, casting and inlaying. They could be formal or informal, expensive or cheap. Their norms and contexts can coincide with, or differ from, those of parchment literacy. There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ inscription. Parchment manuscripts constitute one very important component of the overall graphic environment, but the environment itself is misrepresented when it is described according to the simple contrast between manuscript and non-manuscript. Such problems are occasionally recognised and attempts have been made to overcome them, but the inadequacy of one system does not mean that its abolition automatically produces a satisfactory solution. Linguists – lexicographers in particular – have always wanted undifferentiated source-lists,9 but historians want order and system, and system 8

9

See, for example, the inequitable treatment in textbooks of palaeography or linguistic history such as E. F. Karskii, Slavianskaia kirillovskaia paleografiia (Leningrad, 1928; repr. Moscow, 1979) (references to inscriptions on pp. 61–2, 104–10, 124–5); A. P. Vlasto, A Linguistic History of Russia to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 24–30. For example: I. I. Sreznevskii, Drevnie pamiatniki russkogo pis
ma i iazyka. (X–XIV vekov). Obshchee povremennoe obozrenie, 2nd edn (St Petersburg, 1882; repr. Leipzig,

The written remains

19

is contentious. A recent project to survey and characterise the totality of pre-1300 ‘written sources’, regardless of medium, illustrates the difficulty.10 Twenty-seven scholars pool their efforts to produce an annotated list of over 700 items (including eighteen designated forgeries) under twenty-three separate headings. The basic arrangement is by type of text, by genre: historiography, hagiography, hymnography, epistles, treaties, and so on. The declared aim is to present a checklist of ‘all early Rus written sources which bear historical (rather than purely linguistic) information, except for inscriptions on seals’.11 The coverage is extensive, the research is thorough, yet the result is open to objection on every page. For example, the section on historiography starts with the Primary Chronicle, which does not survive independently. It then lists, as separate items, the later compilations of which the Primary Chronicle is part, and from which it is extrapolated; and it proceeds to yet another list of shorter narratives which themselves exist only as constituent parts of the chronicles. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery appears under ‘Compilations’, while its constituent narratives are separately itemised: mostly under ‘Hagiography’, but also sporadically in sections on ‘Historiography’ (in a subsection for ‘Tales of the Construction and Dedication of Churches’), ‘Eulogy’ and ‘Epistles’.12 Still under ‘Historiography’: a subsection includes a Slavonic translation of the brief chronology by Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople, presumably because it has ‘historical information’ in the form of local additions;13 but there is apparently no room for any of the locally used translations of far more substantial Byzantine chronicles, despite the fact that they contained ‘historical information’ about the Rus, were used by the Rus in the writing of history, were edited for local distribution, and could even contain local ‘historical’ insertions. More generally, the omission of almost all translated writings distorts the overall impression of the early ‘written sources’, just as the sweeping decision to omit items of purely ‘linguistic’ value implies a dubious limitation on what may be of use to the historian. And one could argue at length about the adequacy or accuracy of the genredefinitions throughout the list. To object is easier than to improve. One might voice fundamental objections, but there is no point in adopting a fundamentalist attitude. All maps distort according to the perspective of their cartographers. From the perspective of the present survey I propose a new scheme based on 1973); S. F. Gekker, S. P. Mordovina, G. Ia. Romanova, Ukazatel
istochnikov Kartoteki Slovaria russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv. v poriadke alfavita sokrashchennykh oboznachenii (Moscow, 1984). 10 Ia. N. Shchapov (ed.), Drevnerusskie pis
mennye istochniki X–XIII vv. (Moscow, 1991). 11 Shchapov, Drevnerusskie pis
mennye istochniki, p. 7. 12 Shchapov, Drevnerusskie pis
mennye istochniki, pp. 47, 19–21, 11, 18, 26. 13 Shchapov, Drevnerusskie pis
mennye istochniki, p. 9.

20

The graphic environment

the ways in which writing was produced, or made. The invention of writing turned the word into an object, and into a part of an object. Modern technologies have once more ‘de-objectified’ or dematerialised the word, enabling it to be stored and transmitted invisibly, splitting production and storage from display. Pre-modern writing exists only as graphic representation on (fixed to, as part of ) a visible object. The present survey classifies types of writing according to the relationship between, on the one hand, the writing itself and, on the other hand, the object on which it appears. The proposed classification distributes types of writing across three categories, which, owing to an unfortunate lack of lexical inspiration, I have rather uninventively labelled ‘primary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’. Objects with primary writing exist where the principal purpose of the production of the object is that it should bear a written message. Examples of objects with primary writing range from manuscript codices through birch-bark letters (in Rus) to waxed wooden tablets. Objects with secondary writing exist where writing is integral to, but not the main purpose of, the object’s production; these are objects created with writing but not necessarily for writing. Examples of objects with secondary writing would include coins and seals, or pictures with labels and captions. Tertiary writing is that which is produced on objects which already exist for other purposes. A fair proportion of tertiary writing could be described as graffiti (whether on walls or on pots or other portable objects), though the category can also include some kinds of monumental writing. The division of writing into primary, secondary and tertiary cuts across old boundaries, and sets up new ones. The distinctions between primary, secondary and tertiary writing do not necessarily coincide with the distinctions between types of object, linguistic register, palaeographic feature, social function, genre, materials, confessional or non-confessional status, cost, technique. A single object may display one, two, or even all three categories of writing: a captioned wall-painting (secondary writing) covered in graffiti (tertiary writing); a manuscript book (primary writing) with captioned illustrations (secondary writing) and later marginalia (arguably, tertiary writing). Conversely, individual specimens of writing may fall into more than one category: thus the introduction of (tertiary) writing to a pre-existing object may in itself change the function and nature of the object, in a sense create a new kind of object with secondary writing (writing as integral to the production of the object).14 The categories are not rigidly separable areas; they are adjacent fields with occasionally indistinct boundary markings. 14

See below, p. 74.

The written remains

21

The proposed scheme is not intended to replace all other ways of grouping and describing specimens of writing, but merely to provide a somewhat different starting point. It is dynamic, since it focuses on writing in the life of the object, in production and use. Its value depends partly on its convenience, partly on its cognitive implications, on the patterns and insights to which a regrouping of the material might lead. I do not offer it as a ‘theory’ of pre-modern writing, or as a scheme which can or should be applied without modification to the analysis of writing in other societies, though aspects of it may well be transferable.15 The purpose of the book is not to promote or justify a scheme of classification; rather the reverse, the scheme of classification is designed to assist the purposes of the book. The scheme is not in any universal sense ‘true’, but in context I believe it to be useful. Finally, a word or two should be said in advance about limitations in the scope of this survey. The first limitation is that it is only a survey, not a catalogue; an introductory guide to the principal types of objects with writing, not a list and description of every item individually. Most individual items – at any rate those which have been published – should be traceable through the footnote references, although the successes of modern archaeology would render even the most comprehensive catalogue out of date with each new season of excavation. Second, the survey of objects concentrates on the Slavonic material, with occasional passing reference to the non-Slavonic; fuller treatment of the non-Slavonic is reserved for the subsequent section on scripts and languages. Third, and perhaps more serious, systematic coverage extends only to objects with alphabetic script. Other graphic signs are mentioned from time to time but are not comprehensively surveyed or analysed, despite the fact that in some contexts alphabetic and non-alphabetic graphic signs may have identical functions (for example, when used as marks of ownership). These limitations are practical, not principled, and more work still needs to be done. Primary writing Objects with primary writing are objects which have been prepared for the specific purpose of being written on. The materials for primary writing 15

For example, without significant modification the scheme could probably not usefully be applied to a society, such as ancient Greece or Rome, where substantial amounts of the extant specimens of writing are commemorative inscriptions in stone: are such inscriptions tertiary (scratches on an existing object), or secondary (parts of a manufactured object) or primary (written on an object prepared for the purpose)? The questions make little sense. In the material from Rus such problems of definition are rare, if not entirely negligible.

22

The graphic environment

in Rus were parchment, birch-bark, and wooden tablets. The specific properties of each type of material affect the types of writing for which each was employed, the sociocultural contexts, the place and functions of each in the graphic environment. Sheets of parchment were prepared from animal skins, segments of birch-bark were scraped smooth and perhaps boiled for elasticity, wooden tablets were coated with wax. Writing on parchment was with quill and ink, while on birch-bark and on the waxed surface of wooden tablets letters were incised with a pointed stylus. Parchment leaves could be used individually, but individual parchment documents were not common in Rus, and more typically the parchment leaves were cut, folded and sewn together to form books which might consist of several hundred pages. By contrast, although ‘books’ can also be made from birch-bark or waxed tablets, in Rus the incised texts on birch-bark or waxed tablets were usually limited to a single piece of the material. Parchment books were bulky but durable, suitable for multiple use and long-term preservation. Wooden tablets are also durable and reusable, but here the ‘reuse’ is by repeated obliteration of the writing: by smoothing the incised wax with the flat end of the stylus, by preserving and renewing the material but not the text. Birch-bark writing was entirely ephemeral, quickly used and discarded, and is retrieved only if, by chance, the archaeological conditions are favourable. Parchment literacy was predominantly associated with the Church and served to sustain the Christian faith and its institutions. Birch-bark was primarily (though not exclusively) a medium associated with economic activities in the urban community. Waxed tablets are too rare to reveal any particular pattern of use, and we can only speculate by analogy with their uses in other societies. Parchment manuscripts We start with books. What books might we find in the ‘library’ of early Rus? The answer depends on what one means by ‘book’. Consider, for example, the following list of twenty authors: Pseudo-Anastasios of Sinai, Basil the Great, Cyril of Alexandria, Isidore of Pelusium, Justin the Philosopher, Maximos the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Michael Synkellos, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Theodore of Raithou, George Choiroboskos, Epiphanios of Salamis, Irenaeus, Eusebios, Hesychios, John of Damascus, Gregory of Nazianzos, Hippolytos of Rome, Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople. If I were to describe the early Rus ‘library’ by cataloguing names of the authors represented in it, the catalogue would contain all these twenty names and many more. A modern reader might well assume that a visitor to this

The written remains

23

reconstituted ‘library’ would be able to look along the shelves and pick up ‘books’ with the names of such authors on the cover. Our modern expectation of a book is likely to be that it consists of a ‘work’ by an ‘author’. Of course we know that there are exceptions, such as reference works, or anthologies, or all those bibliographically irksome Festschriften and conference volumes; but in the absence of a single author we can usually count on a named editor or editors. The underlying and usually correct premise is that ‘books’ are identified by the names of people who are responsible, directly or indirectly, for the ‘works’ contained therein. Anybody who enters the early Rus ‘library’ with this assumption will quickly become frustrated. Although early Rus book culture does to some extent recognise authors and works, neither author nor work normally defines the concept or contents of a ‘book’. How, then, do we arrive at the above list? The point of the question can perhaps be made clearer through another such list: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, Jude . . . The first four names are enough. The physical ‘book’ – the entry in the library catalogue – is obviously the New Testament. Like the New Testament, most medieval manuscript books are compilations, or collages, or copies of compilations or collages. The twenty-author list, for example, gives the names of writers whose works are excerpted and combined in just one book, a copy of which, dated 1073, happens to be among the earliest surviving manuscripts from Rus.16 The repertoire of authors and works in the early Rus library is therefore considerably more ample than the repertoire of types of book. A list of types of book may fail to convey the diversity of content, but a list of authors or works falsely implies a greater diversity of books. Here we stick to books: to real written objects rather than to literary-historical extrapolations from them. Approximately 300 East Slav (Rus) manuscript books and fragments of manuscript books from before 1300 survive to the present day. The figures are approximate, since only a minority of manuscripts include scribal colophons to indicate the exact date of production. In most cases the dates are hypothetical (based mainly on palaeographic analysis) and subject to debate and occasional revision. The rough count yields 23 extant manuscripts from the eleventh century, 83 from the twelfth, and 191 from the thirteenth.17 The surviving manuscripts were in virtually all cases generated by the rhythms and requirements of church life. Consistently the largest category comprises books which contained texts to be read or sung 16

17

SK, no. 4. See the comparative table of contents in the various manuscripts of this compilation in M. V. Bibikov, Vizantiiskii prototip drevneishei slavianskoi knigi (Izbornik Sviatoslava 1073 g.) (Moscow, 1996), pp. 248–55. Marti, Handschrift – Text – Textgruppe – Literatur, pp. 152–213, 298–302.

24

The graphic environment

in church or otherwise at prayer according to the daily, weekly or festal cycles (12 from the eleventh century, 64 from the twelfth century, 150 from the thirteenth century). Add biblical texts in non-liturgical format (2 : 9 : 5), homilies and edificatory texts ascribed to specified patristic writers (4 : 4 : 13), paterika (sayings and tales of early monks) and other miscellanies (3 : 3 : 10),18 and there is very little left. Manuscripts with legal texts – mainly church law – can be listed on fewer than the fingers of one hand (0 : 1 : 3). Chronicles are represented by just one manuscript (0 : 0 : 1); or rather, by a defective part of a composite manuscript book.19 How does the surviving ‘library’ relate to a notional complete library of all the books which existed? Is it or is it not ‘representative’? The factors which allow one book or type of book to survive and another to perish are not consistent. Common sense might suggest, for example, that a book which was copied frequently had a greater chance of surviving, while a book which was copied rarely is more likely to perish. But common sense might also suggest the opposite: books which were copied frequently tend to be those which were most heavily used; books deteriorate through use, hence such books are more likely to perish (so that their texts survive only in later copies); books which were copied rarely may be less frequently disturbed, or may be special editions to be honoured as objects rather than read as texts, and are thus more likely to be preserved in their original early state. Consider, for example, the contrasting fate of two types of book: Gospel lectionaries and Psalters. A Gospel lectionary contains extracts from the four Gospels in the sequences in which they are read in the various cycles of church services (moveable feasts; saints’ days and other fixed feasts).20 Gospel lectionaries comprise over 20 per cent of the total inventory, far more than any other type of book. One reason, of course, is that they were absolutely essential to the core task of the Church, which was to celebrate the liturgy. But it is also relevant that Gospel lectionaries tended to be more solidly constructed, larger in format (as altarGospels, high-profile liturgical objects in their own right), more likely to include illustrations, more frequently protected by metal bindings (by 18 19

20

The inclusion of paterika here represents a departure from Marti’s groupings: cf. Marti, Handschrift – Text – Textgruppe – Literatur, pp. 115, 302. SK, no. 270, fos. 1–118 of the First Novgorod Chronicle. On the components of this manuscript see also A. A. Gippius, Lingvo-tekstologicheskoe issledovanie Sinodal
nogo spiska Novgorodskoi pervoi letopisi (Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata filologicheskikh nauk; Moscow, 1996). For brief descriptions of the structure of types of Slavonic Gospel lectionary (Aprakos) see Marti, Handschrift –Text – Textgruppe – Literatur, pp. 117–20; A. A. Alekseev, Tekstologiia slavianskoi Biblii (St Petersburg, 1999), pp. 13–21. In more detail, L. P. Zhukovskaia, Tekstologiia i iazyk drevneishikh slavianskikh pamiatnikov (Moscow, 1976), pp. 224–321.

The written remains

25

comparison with, say, prayer books, or hymn books such as the oktoechos or triodion). The earliest surviving dated East Slav manuscript book, the Ostromir Gospel of 1056–7, is exceptionally grand, with a page area of 1050 cm2 , but large altar-Gospels constitute quite a conspicuous group.21 Compare the Psalter. Few books were more widely used, both inside and outside church. Apart from readings during services, a good monk should know the Psalms by heart and – as urged by Feodosii of the Caves, echoing a Byzantine commonplace – should constantly have a psalm on his lips.22 Nestor’s Life of Feodosii of the Caves describes a scene in Feodosii’s cell: while Ilarion copied books, Feodosii ‘would quietly sing the Psalter and spin wool with his hands or do some other work’.23 The monk Spiridon of the Caves was not an educated man, yet he ‘sang the Psalter ceaselessly and completed it every day. Whether he was chopping wood or mixing dough [the Psalter] was ceaselessly on his lips’.24 Outside the monastery, too, the Psalter was used in private devotional reading, even for divination.25 With the exception of the Gospels, it is probably the text most frequently cited by native East Slav writers.26 Yet only nine copies of the Psalter survive from the period, about 3 per cent of the total.27 None is especially large, none is illustrated.28 In terms of glib contrasts: Psalters are comparatively under-represented through overuse, while de luxe copies of Gospel lectionaries may be comparatively over-represented through underuse. 21

22 23 24

25 26

27

28

The dimensions of the Ostromir Gospel are 35 × 30 cm; cf. SK, nos. 28 (34 × 28 cm), 51 (35 × 27 cm), 52 (31 × 25 cm), 67 (30 × 25 cm), 68 (31×22 cm), 117 (30 × 24 cm), 145 (31 × 25 cm), 146 (34 × 27 cm), 149 (32 × 23 cm) etc. In general, page-heights of 30 cm or above are exceptional. PVL I, p. 122; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 156. BLDR I, p. 394; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 65. BLDR IV, p. 456; Heppell, Paterik, p. 191; cf. the almost exactly contemporary Byzantine typikon of Gregory Pakourianos, prepared in 1083 for his monastery at Petritsos (Bachkovo): ‘those who undertake any bodily labour must not cease from singing the psalms; on the contrary, while they work with their hands, psalms should issue from their mouths’: P. Gautier, ‘Le typikon du s´ebaste Gr´egoire Pakourianos’, REB 42 (1984), 76, lines 979–80. For a full annotated translation of this typikon by Robert Jordan, see John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero (eds.), Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents. A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ ‘Typika’ and Testaments (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 35; Washington DC. 2001) pp. 507–63; also available electronically at http:// www.doaks.org/typ000.html. See below, p. 266. For a rough impression of the relative frequencies of citation, see the citation indexes in Heppell, Paterik, pp. 242–4; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. 193–203; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, pp. 249–52. Plain Psalters are distributed 1 : 1 : 4; Psalters with commentaries (Psaltyr
tolkovaia) have the peculiar pattern 2 : 1 : 0: see Marti, Handschrift – Text – Textgruppe – Literatur, pp. 300–1. There was, however, a Byzantine tradition of copiously illustrated Psalters, but the earliest surviving East Slav example dates from the fourteenth century: see below, p. 67.

26

The graphic environment

That which survives is not an exact replica of that which existed. The numbers are of course low.29 The balance of survival may be somewhat distorted. The chronology is somewhat foreshortened: the Ostromir Gospel is the earliest securely dated book (1056–7), one or two of the other survivals may also have been written around the middle of the eleventh century, but we cannot conclude from this that there was a complete vacuum in book culture for sixty years after the official Conversion, or even earlier. Analysis of manuscripts from a later period shows that many are derived from lost pre-fourteenth-century originals.30 Nevertheless, with all due warnings noted, the library of surviving books is probably not a bad indicator of the general nature and scope of book culture in early Rus, sufficient as the basis for a summary of its main characteristics. In the first place, the principal function of books was devotional. Above all, books were devotional in the narrow sense, their contents and shape determined by (and determining) the needs of practical worship (the cycles of church services, prayers, the calendar of saints etc.). Books which were not devotional in the narrow sense – ‘reading books’ rather than ‘service books’ – can in most cases be reckoned devotional in a broad sense: for instruction and edification in a deeper understanding of the Faith. Secondly, books for specified purposes heavily outweigh books by specified authors: only about 7 per cent of the inventory consists of single-author volumes. Thirdly, no author of a named single-author volume was a native of Rus. One (Konstantin of Preslav) was Bulgarian and wrote in Slavonic;31 the others (Antiochos the Monk, Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nazianzos, Hippolytos of Rome, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, John Klimax, Nikon of the Black Mountain, Cyril of Jerusalem32 reached the Rus via Slavonic translations from Greek. Fourthly – in effect a starker version of the same point – less than 1 per cent of the surviving pre-1300 manuscript books consist entirely, or even substantially, of native ‘works’. Rus book culture consisted overwhelmingly of translations, imported with and/or made for the imported Faith.33 When alluding to native ‘works’ here and in subsequent chapters, we should keep in mind that they occupied a very small niche in book culture as a whole. Natives of Rus could be actively engaged in book-production in many ways, through copying, editing, adapting, 29 30 31 32 33

See the rather over-speculative statistical conjectures as to the original totals in B. V. Sapunov, Kniga v Rossii v XI–XIII vv. (Leningrad, 1978), pp. 30–83. See, for example, the reconstructions of early chronicles: Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur, pp. 202–31; SKKDR I, pp. 235–51. See below, pp. 197–9. See Marti, Handschrift – Text – Textgruppe – Literatur, pp. 115, 302. See below, pp. 206–8.

The written remains

27

interpreting, adding bits and pieces. Some substantial ‘original’ works were produced (later manuscripts show that the chronicle tradition was particularly robust, and there are some notable sermons and hagiographic works); but the history of early Rus ‘original literature’ should not be confused with the history of book culture in early Rus. In order to see more clearly the background, the wider context for early Rus book culture, we need to look beyond the confines of early Rus. In March 1077, Michael Attaleiates, Byzantine judge, writer and man of means, set forth in detail his provision for the disposition of his wealth. In particular, he was concerned to ensure that his good works survived him and to secure the future for two of his religious and charitable foundations: the monastery of Christ the All-Merciful in Constantinople, and an alms-house at Rhaedestos. His detailed Disposition (Diataxis), which runs to over fifty pages of modern printed text34 (with attached copies of two imperial chrysobulls) includes a substantial inventory of moveable goods at the disposal of the monastery: icons and crosses, liturgical vessels, textiles; and books. Actually the surviving document, signed by Attaleiates himself but also with some supplementary material from the 1080s, includes no fewer than nine separate lists of books, showing different sources and stages of acquisition.35 Some thirty books were donated by the founder at the time of foundation: four by the praipositos John; two donations – eight books, followed by a further three books – are recorded as from the monastery’s hegumen, also called Michael; thirteen volumes were donated from the founder’s estate by his trustees after his death; four books were ‘acquired after the death of the founder’; a couple of volumes came after the founder’s death from his spiritual father the monk John; three were subsequently purchased; and a further four came from other named donors. The Diataxis of Michael Attaleiates thus records the fairly rapid growth of a collection of over seventy volumes. This was a modest monastery. Its founder expressly set the ideal number of monks at just seven (he liked the mystical qualities of the number), to be increased only if the monastic revenues increased in proportion.36 Attaleiates’s Diataxis is only one of a number of eleventh- to thirteenthcentury Byzantine inventories of books. In 1059 Eustathios Boilas, a nobleman from Asia Minor, drew up a will. Most of his possessions went to his daughters, but the testament includes a list of about eighty books, 34

35 36

Edited and introduced by P. Gautier, ‘La Diataxis de Michel Attaliate’, REB 39 (1981), 5–143. Annotated English translation by Alice-Mary Talbot in Thomas and Hero (eds.), Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, pp. 326–76. Gautier, ‘Diataxis’, lines 1228–89, 1723–70. Gautier, ‘Diataxis’, lines 681–703.

28

The graphic environment

to be bequeathed to a church which Boilas had founded in Edessa.37 An inventory of some thirty books forms part of the typikon (foundation charter) of Gregory Pakourianos for his monastery at Peritsos (Bachkovo, in Bulgaria) in 1083.38 Half a dozen lists survive from the twelfth century, relating to monasteries ranging from Sicily to Athos.39 And there is a remarkable series of inventories from the monastery of St John on Patmos, with texts from the late eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, one of which, dated September 1200, lists over three hundred books.40 The Byzantine inventories provide rich records of donation, acquisition and possession, of materials and decoration (parchment predominates, but even the eleventh-century lists mention items on paper),41 of preservation and distribution. No two inventories are identical, but most are broadly comparable in shape and range. Pride of place is allocated to Gospel books with luxury bindings, often silver or gilt, sometimes jewelled or enamelled: not merely repositories of words to be read, but visibly precious liturgical objects, focal points of the performance. Next, and by far the most numerous, come other books for use in divine services: books of readings from the Acts and Epistles ( praxapostoloi ) or, more rarely, from the Old Testament ( prophetologia, or paroimiaria); books of liturgical hymns and prayers (sticheraria, heirmologia, euchologia or schematologia); Psalters; books of prayers and offices arranged according to the many cycles of the services – by day or week, by moveable or immoveable feast, by the calendar of saints – (horologia, triodia, oktoechoi, menaia). Service books for the performance of the regular monastic or ecclesiastical functions massively outnumber ‘reading books’ for edification, interest or mere pleasure. The monastic life was affirmed or exemplified in paterika or in the Heavenly Ladder of John Klimax, biblical commentaries and 37

38 39

40

41

Text in: Paul Lemerle, Cinq e´tudes sur le XIe si`ecle byzantin (Paris, 1977), pp. 15–63; the inventory, lines 141–66; see the analysis by Cyril Mango, Byzantium: the Empire of New Rome (London, 1980), pp. 239–40. P. Gautier, ‘Le typikon du s´ebaste Gr´egoire Pakourianos’, REB 42 (1984), 5–145; booklist, lines 1699–722. For a survey of the genre see Jacques Bompaire, ‘Les catalogues de livres-manuscrits ´ d’´epoque byzantine (XIe–XVe s.)’, in Byzance et les slaves. Etudes de civilisation. M´elanges Ivan Dujˇcev (Paris, 1979), pp. 59–81. For the 1200 catalogue see Charles Astruc, ‘L’inventaire dress´e en septembre 1200 du ´ tr´esor et de la biblioth`eque de Patmos. Edition diplomatique’, Travaux et M´emoires 8 (1981), 15–30. Oriental or oriental-type paper (Bagdatikos, or Bambykinos) was used in Byzantium from as early as the eighth century; Western paper was not imported until the thirteenth century, and predominated from the fourteenth century: see J. Irigoin, ‘Papiers orientaux et papiers occidentaux’, in La pal´eographie grecque et byzantine (Colloques internationaux du CNRS, no. 559; Paris, 1977), pp. 45–54.

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29

collections of patristic writings provided further guidance, wise opinions could be gleaned from thesauri such as the Melissa (a kind of thematic dictionary of quotations) while some of the lists also include books of canon law. Apart from the Psalter the Old Testament is represented only by occasional and partial collections, sometimes abridged or interpreted (e.g. as hexaemera or tetrabasileia), or supplemented with quasi-sacred narrative such as Josephus’s Jewish Wars. ‘Secular’ writings are notable only for their scarcity: Leukippe and Kleitophon by Achilles Tatios in a couple of the eleventh-century lists;42 Aristotle’s Categories at the start of one of the books listed for the monastery on Patmos;43 Attaleiates’s monastery was given a copy of the History written by its founder, while the monastery on Patmos had the chronicles by John Skylitzes and the Patriarch Nikephoros (all these, curiously, on paper).44 Apart from the fact that the Rus had no interest in Achilles Tatios, Aristotle or Byzantine political histories, these inventories look strikingly familiar. Remove the thin layer of political and ‘classical’ writings, and the library of early Rus book culture is a fair approximation of the inventory which one might find in a Byzantine monastery.45 Given the repertoire of books, self-evidently the institutional source, guardian and catalyst for the production of books was the Church. Books were produced in order to enable the Church to perform its institutional functions, and – more broadly – to disseminate its message. This does not mean that every book was produced exclusively by churchmen for internal institutional use. Not every scribe was necessarily a priest or monk (though most of them probably were),46 not every patron or purchaser was necessarily a churchman, not every volume was instantly deposited within the precincts of a house of worship.47 Yet the occasional evidence 42 43 44 45

46

47

Gautier, ‘Diataxis’ line 1762 (purchased by Attaleiates’s monastery); Lemerle, Cinq e´tudes, p. 25, line 160. Astruc, ‘L’inventaire’, 25, line 112. Gautier, ‘Diataxis’, line 1272 (donated by John the praepositos); Astruc, ‘L’inventaire’, 29, lines 197, 203; cf. also Lemerle, Cinq e´tudes, p. 25, line 162. An observation made forcefully by Francis J. Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia, no. I, p. 117. Note that analogies are not restricted to contemporary Byzantium: cf. seventh- or eighth-century Greek papyrus with a very similar list of the non-liturgical books in an inventory of church property: F. A. J. Hoogendijk and P. Van Minnen, Papyri, Ostraca, Parchments and Waxed Tablets in the Leiden Papyrological Institute (Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava XXV; Leiden, 1991), pp. 40–77. See L. V. Stoliarova, Iz istorii knizhnoi kul
tury russkogo srednevekovogo goroda XI– XVII vv. (Moscow, 1999), pp. 13–19; Svod zapisei pistsov, khudozhnikov i perepletchikov drevnerusskikh pergamennykh kodeksov XI–XIV vekov (Moscow, 2000), pp. 444–5; cf. N. N. Rozov, Kniga Drevnei Rusi. XI–XIV vv. (Moscow, 1977), pp. 99–100, 154–5, who argued that the majority of scribes in this period were laymen. See also below, pp. 220–3. See Stoliarova, Svod zapisei, pp. 449–50, 453, for lists of patrons and owners mentioned in scribal inscriptions. For additional information in narrative sources see below.

30

The graphic environment

of non-ecclesiastical involvement in book-production or storage or reading should not be interpreted primarily as proof of lay literacy counterbalancing ecclesiastical literacy, but rather as a measure of the Church’s success in promoting the value and status of its books. To commission and donate books was a conspicuous sign of piety, worthy of record. Patterns of institutional book-acquisition were comparable to those revealed in Byzantium through, for example, the Diataxis of Michael Attaleiates, and could involve a mixture of in-house production or purchase and lay commissions and donations. Iaroslav Vladimirovich of Kiev (d. 1054) ‘commissioned many books and deposited them in the church of St Sophia which he had founded’.48 At the Kievan monastery of the Caves the monk Ilarion spent days and nights copying books;49 Feodosii specially ordered a copy of the Stoudite Rule from Constantinople;50 a Kievan boiar named Kliment donated a Gospel and other valuables in gratitude to the Mother of God for his safe return from a military campaign;51 the ‘Greeks’ who decorated the church of the Dormition brought ‘Greek books’ which were preserved in the monastery’s treasury, as were ‘many books’ which had belonged to the prince-monk Sviatosha;52 monks could read books in their cells, and at least in some cases the books were the individual monk’s own property, to be kept or sold or donated to the monastery as he pleased.53 These episodes relate to the diverse patrons of a single institution. The diverse patronage of a single individual is described in an account of the donations of Prince Vladimir Vasilkovich of Vladimir in Volynia, appended to the account of the prince’s death (December 1288) in some manuscripts of the Volynian chronicle.54 This uniquely – though still sparsely – detailed record of princely patronage lists Vladimir’s donations to ten churches and monasteries, not only in his city of Vladimir and its surrounding settlements but as far away as Chernigov. Eight of the ten sets of gifts include books, sometimes unspecified (e.g. simply ‘books’ to the church in Belsk), sometimes named and described. Vladimir was a generous benefactor. For example, the church of St George at Liuboml received a Gospel lectionary in a gold and jewelled binding, and another in a brocade and 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

PVL I, p. 103; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 137–8; on donations by princes cf. also PSRL I, col. 443. BLDR I, p. 394; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 65. PVL I, p. 107; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 142; BLDR I, p. 378; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 53. BLDR I, pp. 400–2; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, pp. 69–70. BLDR IV, pp. 310, 376; Heppell, Paterik, pp. 12, 132. On reading in cells see e.g. BLDR I, p. 396; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 67; BLDR IV, p. 394; Heppell, Paterik, pp. 144–5. PSRL II, cols. 925–7; also BLDR V, pp. 346–8; transl. George A. Perfecky, The Hypatian Codex II. The Galician-Volynian Chronicle (Munich,1973), pp. 111–12.

The written remains

31

enamelled binding, as well as a praxapostolos, synaxaria and menologia for all twelve months; triodia, oktoechoi, heirmologia, a standard prayer book (molitvennik; presumably the euchologion) plus an additional book of morning and evening prayers, and a book of offices for St George, the monastery’s patron saint. Four other churches received luxury-bound Gospel lectionaries, usually in silver with jewelled or enamelled decoration. Several of the books were specially commissioned by the prince himself.55 One prayer book was bought, ‘from the archpriest’s wife [or widow? – S.F.]’. The patterns of patronage indicate the spiritual value, or the prestigevalue, of books. As the repositories of sacred texts, and as objects used during sacred rituals, books could acquire the status of sacred objects. In canon law the fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council prescribed temporary excommunication for anybody who ‘damaged or cut the books of the Old and New Testaments or of the holy and accepted prophets and teachers’, unless the books were already damaged beyond repair by moths or moisture.56 In the original Greek the chief villains are ‘book-dealers and so-called unguent-makers’, sadly diluted in Slavonic translation (presumably because of cultural differences) into ‘devious bookmen and so-called corrupters’.57 Bibliophily for its own sake was also unacceptable: the holy books were to be used, and any man who bought them and merely kept them, without applying their benefits to himself or to others, was also to be deprived of communion. In the translated Byzantine monastic Rule adopted at the Caves monastery, strict instructions were laid down for the librarian to protect books from dust and from flies, it was forbidden to touch the parchment with naked fingers (‘so as not to befoul it’), and readers were warned to avoid splattering the pages with candle-wax or spittle.58 Books also had material value. Books are among the lists of treasures whose loss is mourned when churches are looted,59 or, more dubiously, among signs of the wealth accumulated by an avaricious bishop.60 They 55

56 57 58 59 60

Spisa must here mean ‘commissioned’ rather than ‘wrote’ or ‘copied’, despite Perfecky, The Hypatian Codex, pp. 111–12, just as in the same lists the same word, when used for Vladimir’s gifts of icons and wall-paintings, must also mean ‘commissioned’ rather than ‘painted’. The sheer number of volumes makes Vladimir’s own participation implausible; besides which, we know that when drawing up even a brief document such as his own testament Vladimir employed a scribe: see below, pp. 180–1. V. N. Beneshevich, Drevne-slavianskaia kormchaia XIV titulov bez tolkovaniia, I (St Petersburg, 1906), p. 187 (rule 68). Ibid., Greek bibliokapeloi, murepsoi; Slavonic lukavnii knizhniki, prevratniki. A. M. Pentkovskii, Tipikon patriarkha Aleksiia Studita v Vizantii i na Rusi (Moscow, 2001), p. 408. See e.g. PSRL I, cols. 354, 371, 392, 418. PSRL I, col. 452, on Bishop Kirill of Rostov in the late 1220s.

32

The graphic environment

were worth stealing for resale.61 Average costs, however, are almost impossible to estimate. There was no upper limit. ‘God only knows the price of this book’, wrote Naslav in his additional colophon to an early twelfthcentury Gospel lectionary for which Prince Mstislav Vladimirovich had ordered him to commission a gold and silver and jewelled binding with cloisonn´e enamel medallions purchased in Constantinople.62 At the plainer end of the market, Vladimir Vasilkovich’s late-thirteenth-century list of donations includes a prayer book which he had purchased for eight grivnas of kunas (kuna = originally a marten skin, then a unit of currency).63 The silver-equivalent of a grivna of kunas in late-thirteenthcentury Volynia is hard to specify,64 but for rough comparison this was eight times the compensation required for the theft of a young unbroken stallion, or about one twelfth of the annual tithe paid to the bishop’s church in Novgorod (St Sophia) from the Onega region.65 In the absence of more information on market prices, we can try to estimate the costs of production. Disregarding optional extras such as illustration or expensive binding, the main element in the cost of materials was the parchment, followed by the ink, perhaps wax and wooden tablets for rough drafts, and quills for writing.66 The earliest extant use of paper is in a thirteenth-century manuscript from south-western Rus (in which paper and parchment are interleaved),67 but paper was not used regularly in Rus until the late fourteenth century.68 The parchment for a modest-sized 61 62

63 64

65

66 67

68

See the tale of the monk Grigorii, whose collection of books was a temptation to thieves: BLDR IV, pp. 406–8; Heppell, Paterik, pp. 153–5. Text: Aprakos Mstislava velikogo, ed. L. P. Zhukovskaia (Moscow, 1983), p. 289 (fo. 213). On 1117 as a probable date for the book see N. N. Lisovoi, ‘K datirovke Mstislavova Evangeliia’, in Mstislavovo Evangelie XII veka. Issledovaniia (Moscow, 1997), pp. 710–19. PSRL II, col. 926. The usual value of the grivna of kunas in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was approximately 51 g of silver, but towards the end of the period regional devaluations produced grivnas of kunas worth closer to 40, 25 and even 13 g. of silver: see V. L. Ianin, Denezhnovesovye sistemy russkogo srednevekov
ia. Domongol
skii period (Moscow, 1956), pp. 42–6; and the same author’s remarks in B. A. Kolchin (ed.), Drevniaia Rus
. Gorod, zamok, selo (Moscow, 1985), p. 366; A. V. Nazarenko, ‘Proiskhozhdenie drevnerusskogo denezhnovesovogo scheta’, DGVEMI 1994 god (1996), esp. pp. 62–79. See ZDR, pp. 67, 225; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 25, 57. For further attempts at comparison see B. V. Sapunov, Kniga v Rossii v XI–XIII vv. (Leningrad, 1978), pp. 97–108. On the relative costs of these materials in England see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307 (London, 1979), pp. 93–5. The manuscript: SK, no. 354. The presence of paper was revealed only recently: see D. A. Morozov, ‘Drevnerusskaia rukopis
na sredneaziatskoi bumage (Zapolnivshaiasia lakuna slavianskoi kodikologii)’, Arkhiv russkoi istorii 5 (1994), 193–200; M. G. Gal
chenko, Knizhnaia kul
tura. Knigopisanie. Nadpisi na ikonakh Drevnei Rusi. Izbrannye raboty (Moscow, St Petersburg, 2001), pp. 46–59. Although the introduction of paper in Rus was several centuries later than in Byzantium (see above, n. 41), note that it was not so far out of line with much of Western Europe.

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33

book might be prepared from perhaps half a dozen skins (usually calfskin, but sometimes sheepskin or goatskin or foalskin). Preparation of the skins – cleaning, washing, cutting, scoring – required a certain amount of labour, but the main input of labour was that of the scribe. The copying of a book could be spread over several months, with variations depending on the format, the size of the lettering, the amount of decoration, the degree of care, and of course the number of hours worked per day. The deacon Grigorii took nearly seven months to copy the Ostromir Gospel (21 October 1056–12 May 1057), while a comparably splendid Acts and Epistles with commentaries was completed in less than two months in the late summer of 1220.69 Where the scribe had to be paid, labour was probably the main component of the production cost of a book. A scribe travelling with the prince’s judicial agent was allocated a fee of ten kunas (approx. 20 g of silver).70 Although we cannot necessarily deduce a rate for book-copying from this component of a court fee, it is worth noting that here the scribal fee was four times larger than the payment required to supply parchment.71 In book-copying, however, scribal labour may not always have had to be reckoned a direct cost. Laymen who commissioned books had to pay the scribe (a Life of the twelfth-century nun and princess Evfrosiniia of Polotsk shows her copying books on commission),72 but monks copying books for use in their own monasteries are not likely to have expected cash for their efforts. However we quantify their cost, clearly parchment manuscripts were beyond the everyday budget of ordinary people. But it is not enough merely to conclude that they were expensive. Expensive for what? Granted, the average peasant is unlikely to have spent time browsing around the Kievan markets in search of a bargain bedtime read, but it is facile to assert that this illustrates the social elitism of book culture (the ‘class restrictions’ of the ‘culture of feudal society’).73 There is no point in comparing book prices then with book prices now, because the book then was a different type of cultural phenomenon and served different functions. What did the money actually buy? A donor’s motives might not always be entirely altruistic while investing in his own future beyond

69 70 71

72 73

The earliest paper document from England, for example, dates from 1307: see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 92. SK, nos. 3, 175. Article 74 of the ‘Expanded’ version of Russkaia Pravda: ZDR, p. 69; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 29. Ibid., ‘2 nogatas for the hide’, if mekh (hide) here refers to the supply of parchment for the scribe (but cf. the different interpretation in the commentary in ZDR, p. 109). A kuna was worth four-fifths of a nogata. Zhitie Evfrosinii Polotskoi, ed. A. Sapunov (Vitebsk, 1888), p. 6; also V. V. Kuskov (ed.), Drevnerusskie kniazheskie zhitiia (Moscow, 2001), p. 149. The Life is not contemporary. Sapunov, Kniga v Rossii v XI–XIII vv., p. 109.

34

The graphic environment

the grave (what price salvation?), but in plain practical ways parchment manuscripts can be reckoned cheap for what they achieved. A book is by nature an enclosed medium. Most books are closed most of the time and their words are visible to nobody. An open book still hides most of its words, for it only displays two sides of writing, and even these are only seen by a viewer or reader in close proximity to the object. The writing in books is therefore not a conspicuous part of the graphic environment; yet the words from books can become ubiquitous. Most modern printed books are bought by individuals for private use, to be read once (or less). The principal means of dissemination of the words is by the printing and sale of multiple copies. Parchment manuscript books were intended for multiple use, in most cases by multiple users. The robust material, oral delivery, and – especially – a predominantly devotional context made it possible for the words of a single parchment manuscript to reach something close to a mass ‘readership’.74 Listeners were also ‘readers’. Monks listened to readings from books even while eating in the refectory. A single lectionary, hymn book or synaxarion could serve generations of clergy and their congregations for decades. If we reckon the price of a book not in terms of the one-off payment for the object (generally much higher than a modern equivalent), but in relation to the cost per ‘reader’ (often negligible, much lower than a standard modern equivalent), then parchment manuscripts could be remarkably cost-effective. It is perhaps misleading to think of them as ‘books’ in any modern sense apart from aspects of their appearance. Parchment manuscripts were not, in the main, consumer goods for private pleasure (the Rus did not import the more esoteric book culture of the Byzantine intellectual elite),75 nor in this period were they extensively used for closed archival storage. In their devotional functions they were the most efficient available devices for mass communication, for enabling widespread access to the culture of the written word. The initial capital outlay was as nothing by comparison with the potential return on the investment.

Book-production is not the only possible use for parchment. Returning to the Byzantine inventories we find, for example, that, apart from the books, the typikon of Gregory Pakourianos’s monastery mentions over a hundred administrative documents.76 A search for the equivalent in Rus leads to frustration. Barely a dozen original administrative documents 74 75 76

See also below, pp. 243–4, on books and citations from books in the pictorial component of the graphic environment. See below, pp. 101–3, 224. Gautier, ‘Le typikon du s´ebaste Gr´egoire Pakourianos’, 125–31, lines 1767–1844.

The written remains

35

survive from throughout the lands of the Rus for the entire period up to the end of the thirteenth century. Of course more than a dozen were produced, but nevertheless the most salient feature of all evidence for formal documentary administrative practices is its scarcity.77 Schematically speaking, in Byzantium, parchment literacy functioned in three main contexts, associated with three (overlapping) institutional structures: the ecclesiastical, the (higher) educational, and the administrative. The Rus adopted the ecclesiastical institutions together with their attendant technologies, but did not import either Byzantine higher education or – a vastly more complex undertaking – Byzantine structures and methods of administration. Although elements of ‘learned’, non-ecclesiastical writing and (gradually increasing) elements of formal documentation are not wholly absent, nevertheless the general balance is clear: parchment literacy in Rus was associated predominantly, distinctively, almost exclusively, with the book culture of the Church. Birch-bark What do the following fragments – which can stand for many others like them – have in common? (i) ‘Petosiris to Didyme, many greetings. The purple which you were sending has not been done. Send to us for Daphne ten bundles of balls of yarn, about the colour of your cloak. Sell the cloak you have for 40 drachmas. If you don’t get the price, don’t sell, but get hold of the 40 drachmas and send them to us quickly. Find out whether Nilous’s son is well and write us about him if necessary. Collect 40 drachmas in delivery charges from T¨eeus the daughter of Heracleides the son of Sarammon.’78 (ii) ‘Greetings from Kharitaniia to Sofiia. As to my sending three rezanas to Mikhal for the cloth: he should hand it over. And also I entreat you, mistress, he should forthwith hand over the salted and fresh fish. I kiss you.’79 (iii) ‘please take letters from him to Dionysios about handing the goods over to us . . . so that he can receive the price and let us have the fodder. Bring me a jar of salted fish-sauce, if possible. If this is difficult for you, perhaps you might persuade Sosos to bring me a pot. Greetings from the children. I hope you are well.’80 (iv) ‘From X to Spirko. If Matei has not taken from you the large measure [kap] of wax, then send it to me with Prus. I have sold the 77 78 79 80

See below, chapter 4. Pap. Oxy. LXII, no. 4340. NGB, no. 64; mid–12th century; A. A. Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow, 1995), p. 323. Pap. Oxy. XIV, no. 1760.

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The graphic environment

tin and the lead and the metalwork. I no longer have to go to Suzdal. Three kapi of wax have been bought. You should come here. Bring with you about four small measures [bezmene] of tin and about two of sheet copper, and pay the money immediately.’81 (v) ‘Candidus, 2 denarii; for timbers purchased, 7 denarii; a tunic, 3 denarii; from Tetricus, [7?] denarii; from Primus, 21/2 denarii; from Alio the veterinary doctor, 10 denarii; from Vitalis the bathman, 3 denarii; total, 341/2 denarii; the rest owe: Ingenuus, 7 denarii; Acranius, 3 denarii; the Vardullian cavalrymen, 7 denarii; the companion of Tagmatis the flagbearer, 3 denarii; total, 20 denarii.’82 (vi) ‘Opal in Molvotichi, 6 kunas; Snovid in Molvotichi, 7 kunas; Torchin, 3 kunas; Boian in Ozereva, 6 kunas; Mestko in Velimichi, 2 kunas.’83 (vii) ‘Parion the banker, 313/4 aruras. Amunus, daughter of Psenamunus, 71/2 ar. Sara¨eous, daughter of Cornelion, 143/4 ar. Horigenies, son of Sarapion, 81/2 ar. through Chous, agent in Mytron . . . ’84 Separated from one another by thousands of miles and by more than a thousand years, these succinct notes and memos (from Upper Egypt, Roman Britain and northern Rus) seem to be generically, even humanly, related. All of them bear witness to mundane anxieties and preoccupations which are usually ignored in larger-scale written sources. All of them lay buried under the ground until their resting-places were disturbed by archaeologists. When the first birch-bark documents emerged from under the Novgorodian mud, a grand comparison was obvious. ‘I venture to think’, wrote A.V. Artsikhovskii, director of the excavations, ‘that as sources for the history of Novgorod the Great they will be like the papyri are for the history of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt’.85 In Novgorod, as in Egypt, archaeology had found the voice of those who had been thought mute. Here too, as in Egypt, were the discarded ephemera, the same hotchpotch of ordinary life, the letters and memos, the accounts and the doodles, the lists, the complaints, the financial dealing and the private pleading. Indeed, apart from the names and the technical terms, the voices often seemed almost interchangeable. In Novgorod, on 26 July 1951 (the date of the first discovery), Russia had acquired its very own Oxyrhynchus. Well, perhaps. Evocative though some of the parallels may be, comparison also helps to clarify the differences, the local specifics. And the search 81 82 83 84 85

NGB, no. 439; late 12th century; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 357. Tab. Vindol. II, no. 181 (pp. 129–31). NGB, no. 516; 1150s–1170s; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 305. Pap. Oxy. XLVIII, no. 3428. NGB I, p. 8; also cited with approval twenty-five years later by V. L. Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu . . . , 3rd edn (Moscow, 1998), p. 8.

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37

for specifics begins not with flights of fancy but with a plod through the facts: a brief survey of the birch-bark sources in themselves and in their immediate contexts. A typical Novgorodian birch-bark document was about 20–25 cm wide (though some of the larger documents unroll to a width of over 40 cm)86 and about 4–8 cm high. To prepare the bark for writing, the coarser layers were stripped away to leave a smooth and flexible strip, which was perhaps then soaked or boiled for additional elasticity. Letters were scored on the inner – and softer – surface with a sharp-pointed stylus ( pisalo) of metal, wood or bone,87 after which the edges were usually trimmed. The resulting long, thin rectangular document then curled in reverse, forming a kind of scroll with the lettering on its outer surface. Relatively few documents bear writing on both sides.88 Before any specimens with writing had come to light, archaeologists tended to identify such tightly curled scraps of birch-bark as fishermen’s floats. In fifty years of regular seasonal excavation the total number of birchbark documents from Novgorod has crept – or perhaps lurched, since the pace of discovery is uneven – towards a thousand.89 Nor are the finds limited to Novgorod. Novgorod happens to provide the best conditions for preservation and recovery, but birch-bark letters have also been unearthed at nearby Staraia Russa and further afield at Smolensk, Pskov, Vitebsk, Mstislavl, Torzhok, Tver, Zvenigorod in Galicia, and even in Moscow.90 These non-Novgorodian discoveries have between 86 87

88

89

90

E.g. NGB, nos. 412, 421, 449, 531, 545, 600, 602, 638, 640, 675, 704. A. F. Medvedev, ‘Drevnerusskie pisala X–XV vv.’, SA (1960, no. 2), 63–88; also A. A. Medyntseva in B. A. Kolchin and T. I. Makarova (eds.), Drevniaia Rus
. Byt i kul
tura (Moscow, 1997), pp. 150–1, 336 (fig. 90); B. B. Ovchinnikova, ‘Pisala srednevekovogo Novgoroda’, Novgorodskie arkheologicheskie chteniia (Novgorod, 1994), pp. 83–5. See NGB, no. 736: a correspondence between Ivan and Dristliv (who seems to be Ivan’s agent), with Ivan’s letter on one side and Dristliv’s reply on the other; also Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 241–3. Here and subsequently, references to the birch-bark documents are by the documentnumber. ‘NGB’ followed by a Roman numeral (I–X) refers to the volume number of the series of complete publications: Novgorodskie gramoty na bereste, ed. A. V. Artsikhovskii et al.: I (1953, nos. 1–10); II (1954, nos. 11–83); III (1958, nos. 84–136); IV (1958, nos. 137–94); V (1963, nos. 195–318); VI (1963, nos. 319–405); VII (1978, nos. 406–539); VIII (1986, nos. 540–614); IX (1993, nos. 615–710); X (2000, nos. 710–75). Seasonal additions are published in part by V. L. Ianin and A. A. Zalizniak in VopIaz (1998, no. 3), 26–42 (nos. 776–808); (1999, no. 4), 3–27 (nos. 809–900); (2000, no. 2), 3–14 (nos. 901–15). Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, publishes many of the documents (up to no. 752) in chronological groups. The most numerous are from Staraia Russa, in NGB VII, pp. 143–53; VIII, p. 77; IX, pp. 104–11; and from Smolensk: in DGTSSSR. 1984 god (1985), pp. 199–211. Documents from Vitebsk, Zvenigorod, Pskov, Staraia Russa, Smolensk and Tver are included in Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt. For a summary up to 1996 see Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu . . . , pp. 413–19.

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The graphic environment

them yielded over sixty documents. The earliest birch-bark letters date from the first half of the eleventh century, the latest from the mid- to late fifteenth century. Roughly half are dated to before 1300. Dates are established mainly by a combination of stratigraphy and dendrochronology: the stratum of excavation in which the object is found, and the date of that stratum on the dendrochronological scale deduced from the tree-rings in the logs which form successive layers of the Novgorodian roadways. Further clues may be provided by palaeography. Many of the birch-bark documents are mere scraps yielding the odd word or broken fragments of a phrase, most contain enough to provide reasonable clues as to their themes, some contain complete and substantial messages. By far the most common motif in the birch-bark letters, indeed the dominant motif at least up to the end of the thirteenth century, is money: lists of debtors, demands for payment, complaints about late payment or non-payment, instructions for exchange and purchase, requests for concessions or assistance, threats of action to be taken if settlement is not reached. Even where we have just a fragment of a word or two, the word is as likely as not an indication of a sum of money. The contexts vary (commerce, litigation, usury etc.), but the theme is constant.91 Yet birch-bark writing was not exclusively financial; indeed, the sense of anticipation for each fresh season’s digging is partly sustained by the regularly fulfilled expectation of the unpredictable, of the serendipitous: a cluster of documents on which an icon-painter notes his commissions;92 a letter from a woman to her brother complaining that she has been slandered;93 alphabetical and other jottings, perhaps by a boy;94 the occasional prayer or incantation, or lines from a sermon;95 words of advice on running a household;96 a letter from a man to his parents urging them to sell the house and move to Smolensk or Kiev; a monk makes excuses for not having kept an appointment; nuns send 91

92 93 94 95

96

See Eduard Muhle, ¨ ‘Commerce and Pragmatic Literacy. The Evidence of Birchbark Documents (from the Mid-Eleventh to the First Quarter of the Thirteenth Century) on the Early Urban Development of Novgorod’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.), Medieval Russian Culture, II (California Slavic Studies XIX; Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994), pp. 75–92. The letters associated with Olisei Grechin: see Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu . . . , pp. 287–99; also Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 336–40. NGB, no. 531. See Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu . . . , pp. 50–70. E.g. NGB, nos. 419, 715, 727, 906, 914. A large letter discovered in Torzhok in 2001 contains part of a homily attributed to the twelfth-century bishop Kirill of Turov (I am grateful to V. L. Ianin for pre-publication information on this document). NGB, no. 893, which the editors somewhat fancifully call a ‘literary’ work: V. L. Ianin, A. A. Zalizniak, ‘Berestianye gramoty iz novgorodskikh raskopok 1998 g.’, VopIaz (1999, no. 4), 24–5.

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39

notes about the management of their convent; a young woman complains to her young man that he is ignoring her; Mikita proposes marriage to Anna, while parents write to a match-maker on behalf of their son; an official apologises that he cannot yet supply fish;97 and so on, from the material to the spiritual, from the public to the intimate. Who was involved in this world of birch-bark literacy? The initial discoveries gave (to some) the impression of a truly ‘popular’ literacy, but as more documents emerge the patterns and limitations become clearer. Few letters define specifically the status of their senders or recipients, but the context can often be inferred from the contents: the sums of money, the commercial activities, references which imply access to the prince or his agents. Birch-bark literacy reflects daily concerns of the urban elites at a level below that of the princes and the bishops: predominantly (but not exclusively) laymen, predominantly (but not exclusively) men, predominantly (and perhaps exclusively, at least for the first three centuries) people of means. The lengthening list of letter-writers and recipients is no longer a random set of names, but reveals subsets and networks of correspondents, such as the group of letters associated with the posadnik Ivanko Zakharich and his circle,98 or with Olisei Grechin,99 or with Semiun and Dobroshka,100 or the requests to Klimiata to intercede with the authorities.101 The social scope expands, gradually. Several letters in the period refer to people outside the urban elite – lists of dues from villages, for example. Very occasionally we find collective missives from inhabitants of outlying settlements in the Novgorodian lands.102 Besides their active involvement in the uses of birch-bark writing, a fair proportion of these urban householders and their agents probably also possessed the requisite literate skills, rather than operating through scribes. In a few cases the use of a scribe might be inferred: letters which refer to their sender in the third person (‘Ofimiia sends you a message’; ‘This is a letter from Iarila’);103 letters in the same hand from different 97 98 99

100 101 102 103

NGB, nos. 424, 605, 657, 682, 717, 752, 377, 731, 147; see also Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 246–8, 323–9, 229–33, 406, 308. NGB, nos. 79, 80, 117, 165, 225, 226, 231, 239; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 314–18. E.g. NGB, nos. 502, 506, 545, 546, 549, 553, 558, 560, 602, 603. For critical remarks on the identification and the name ‘Grechin’ see Aleksandr B. Strakhov, ‘Filologicheskie nabliudeniia nad berestianymi gramotami: VI–IX’, Palaeoslavica 3 (1995), 244–7. NGB, nos. 664, 665, 683, 710, 721, 735; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 267–72. NGB, nos. 531, 725; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 343–7. NGB, nos. 844, 872, 885, 900. These become more common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. E.g. NGB, no. 771; Staraia Russa, no. 10; cf. NGB, no. 745.

40

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senders, or from the same sender in different hands;104 perhaps letters from more than one sender.105 For the most part, however, it seems that the writers wrote and the readers read.106 The world of birch-bark literacy was therefore both more open and more enclosed than the world of parchment literacy. It was more open in its contexts and locations, as a fairly habitual item in the urban graphic environment, in its domestic and commercial applications, in its linguistic responsiveness to local idiom, in accommodating the secular as much as the sacred, the private more than the public. Yet for some of the same reasons it was also more enclosed. It lacked the wider resonances, the penumbra of passive participants. The channels of communication were narrower, limited to sender and recipient and perhaps a small number of other parties to a transaction, without an audience (let alone a congregation). The messages were ephemeral, sometimes even casual, of the moment rather than for posterity. The material was perishable, disposable. The users of birch-bark letters cast away their scraps of writing to sink into the mud, to be trodden into the ground. Scribes of parchment manuscripts kept half an eye on eternity; senders of birch-bark letters would hardly have counted on the prying persistence of future archaeologists. Which brings us back to Egypt and Northumbria. Nobody would suggest any direct link with Novgorod, but analogies can help to put the Novgorodian material in clearer perspective. Remarkable though the birch-bark finds may be, they cannot match the papyri in quantity or range. When Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt started digging into the rubbish-mounds on the outskirts of Oxyrhynchus (modern al-Bahnas¯a) in the winter of 1896/7, they knew exactly what they were looking for, but they could have little notion of just how much they would find. Excavations at several sites over the previous couple of decades had enabled archaeologists to hone their guesses as to the most promising places to dig for papyri, but the riches of Oxyrhynchus were and remain far beyond all reasonable desires. Document-seekers still salivate with envy at accounts of carting away papyri by the basketful. Ten years of digging by Grenfell and Hunt, and the subsequent work by the 104

105 106

NGB, no. 664 from Dobroshka to Semiun, and 710 from Semiun to Dobroshka, in the same hand; 665 from Dobroshka to Zavid, in a different hand: see Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 271. However, a single sender, writing himself, might vary his manner and orthography to suit the occasion: see NGB, no. 724 and the analysis in Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 296–8. NGB, nos. 731, 735; Pskov, no. 6 (Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 422–4). On birch-bark hands see W. Vermeer, ‘Towards a Thousand Birchbark letters’, Russian Linguistics, 19 (1995), 109–23; A. A. Zalizniak, ‘Problema tozhdestva i skhodstva pocherkov v berestianykh gramotakh’, in Velikii Novgorod v istorii srednevekovoi Evropy. K 70-letiiu Valentina Lavrent’evicha Ianina (Moscow, 1999), pp. 292–328.

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Italians who took over from them, produced enough to sustain teams of papyrologists for as long as curiosity and funding survive. The continuous series of Oxyrhynchus publications edges towards its seventieth volume and its 5,000th document, with thousands more to come.107 And Oxyrhynchus, though exceptionally fertile for the papyrus-diggers, is only one site among very many. A recent bibliography of published documentary papyri (not limited to Oxyrhynchus) lists over 400 volumes with significant texts.108 Quantity counts, but the difference between papyrus literacy and birchbark literacy is qualitative. The numerical mismatch may, in principle, be attributed merely to the accidents of preservation or investigation, but the difference in scope is due partly to the nature of the respective materials and partly (in consequence) to their differing status in the larger patterns of literate activity. Papyrus was the standard material for writing; birch-bark was one option. Papyrus documents could be long, short, or medium-sized, in single sheets or in multiple sheets joined as rolls or codices. Birch-bark documents are short.109 Only one birch-bark ‘codex’ has been discovered, dating from the very end of the thirteenth century. It consists of three double leaves (hence six pages, or twelve sides) complete with holes for sewing and even the remnants of thread; but it is tiny, measuring less than 5 cm square.110 Papyrus was the material of record as well as the material of ephemera; birch-bark documents are predominantly disposable. Papyrus literacy encompasses the literate culture of its time, birch-bark literacy occupies a niche. Papyrus literacy stretches from domestic accounts to the Dead Sea Scrolls, from testaments to Testaments, from marriage contracts to Aristotle: there are tax schedules, estate accounts, reports on building works, deeds of purchase 107

108 109

110

For a summary of the excavations see E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri. An Introduction (Paperback edn, Oxford, 1980), pp. 26–34. The series The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, published by the Egypt Exploration Fund (since 1920 the Egypt Exploration Society) was initiated by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898. See John F. Oates, Roger S. Bagnall, William H. Willis, Klaas A. Worp, Checklist of Editions of Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, 4th edn (Atlanta, 1992). The longest birch-bark document hitherto revealed (no. 531) contains just under 170 words, on 13 lines covering both sides of the material: see Alexander Lubotskii and Willem Vermeer, ‘Observations on the Longest Birchbark Letter (Novgorod 531)’, Russian Linguistics 22 (1998), 143–64. Compare, for example, among the recent Oxyrhynchus publications, a papyrus roll (a contract for the settlement of claims) with a text of over 2,000 words spread over 250 lines: Pap. Oxy. LXIII, no. 4397; or a complete roll made out of twenty-two sheets and containing estate accounts for the year 566: Pap. Oxy. LV, no. 3804. Full literary and biblical papyri could be much longer. NGB, no. 419, containing a couple of prayers. The material itself was not necessarily a constraint: see e.g. the Sanskrit bark codices of Kashmir, specimens of which survive from the sixteenth or seventeenth century: see Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing, revised edn (London, 1992), pp. 40–1 and pl. 21.

42

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and lease agreements, invitations to dinner, shopping lists, official correspondence, private correspondence, lyric poetry, epic poetry, philosophy, forensic rhetoric, tragedy and history. As a material for primary writing papyrus spans the functions both of parchment and of birch-bark in Rus. The comparison with birch-bark alone, suggested by the circumstances of preservation and discovery, is attractive but false. The route to closer analogies leads from the sands of North Africa to the clods of Northumbria: to the excavated remnants of the Roman frontier garrison of Vindolanda, in the Tyne Gap. Vindolanda lies roughly in the middle of a line between Carlisle and Newcastle, a line made solid in  122–6 by the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. The garrison at Vindolanda was an important part of pre-Wall border defence in the late first and early second centuries. The pioneer interpreters of Novgorodian birch-bark can hardly be blamed for ignoring Vindolanda, since the first specimens of Vindolandan writing were only unearthed in 1973, but when they began to emerge they looked in many respects uncannily familiar. The archaeological revelation at Vindolanda was the discovery – strewn in ditches and on floors, on the street and in the remains of bonfires – of rectangular wooden ‘leaf tablets’, thin as veneer (0.25–3 mm thick), of varying dimensions (approximately 20 × 8 cm would be fairly typical) scored down the middle and folded so as to form diptychs, with writing in ink, in Old Roman cursive, on the inner surface. Nearly 500 such tablets and fragments of tablets were revealed in excavations of the 1970s and 1980s.111 Like the Novgorod birch-bark letters, the Vindolanda wooden tablets owe their preservation to the damp, anaerobic (oxygen-free) surroundings in which they lay undisturbed for almost two thousand years. Like the Novgorod letters, the Vindolanda tablets are, by and large, literate but not literary (one tablet contains a single and somewhat mangled line from The Aeneid ).112 Like many of the Novgorod letters, the Vindolanda tablets reflect the ‘unofficial’ jottings of people who occupied – or who were close to people who occupied – official posts. They do not constitute the camp records, but they do concern camp business, in a broad sense, as well as the personal business of the camp’s officers and their 111

112

Alan K. Bowman and J. David Thomas, Vindolanda: the Latin Writing-Tablets (Britannia Monograph 4; London, 1983) [Tab. Vindol. I], and The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses II) (British Museum Press; London, 1994) [Tab. Vindol. II]. Tab. Vindol. II renumbers all the tablets, including those published in Tab. Vindol. I, in a new series starting with no. 117. There are also about 200 ‘stilus tablets’, preserving in some cases traces of scratched writing which penetrated their original wax covering. These are currently (Spring 2002) being deciphered with the aid of a computer-based image-enhancement technique for incised objects. On Novgorodian waxed tablets see below, pp. 46–7. Tab. Vindol. II, no. 118 (Aeneid 9: 473: ‘interea pavidum volitans pinnata [per] urbem’; perhaps a school exercise).

The written remains

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households. There are lists of the garrison’s units, letters requesting leave, routine reports (one of which refers disparagingly to the Britunculi ), accounts for supplies, and domestic shopping-lists, including references to bacon and pork-fat, wine-lees, barley, wagon-axles, salt, vests, Celtic beer, fish-sauce, eggs and radishes, venison, pickling, beans and bedspreads, eggcups, side plates and vinegar-bowls, blankets and tunics and Gallic shoes, to list but a sample.113 By far the largest single group consists of correspondence associated with Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians, including correspondence of his wife Sulpicia Lepidina. The prefect’s letters tend to revolve around his duties and responsibilities, whereas his wife’s correspondence is delightfully personal: ‘Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival . . . .’114 If the papyri are more diffuse than the Novgorod birch-bark documents, then the Vindolanda tablets are more compact. The outer chronological boundaries are barely forty years apart, c.92–130 , while the majority of the tablets in fact fall within an even smaller period, c.92–102. Novgorodians produced birch-bark documents for five centuries. The Vindolandan milieu was also more homogeneous. By comparison with Novgorod, Vindolanda was tiny. Its existence was due entirely to its function as a garrison. It never grew into a diverse and self-sustaining urban community analogous with Novgorod. Nevertheless, the officers and men of Vindolanda – Batavians and Tungrians transplanted from Germany and northern Gaul (Gallia Belgica) – did maintain an infrastructure of urban-type support, with crafts and trades, buying and selling, wives and slaves, building and shopping and polite communication.115 Their literate activities are at least in some respects generically equivalent to those of the Novgorodians, and certain features of Vindolandan leaf-tablet culture can provide useful commentary on their birch-bark counterparts. Similarities abound, in theme, in form, in format. Three examples can serve as illustration. In the first place, the Vindolanda tablets reveal an interesting and perhaps unexpected pattern in the use of scribes. One might assume that brief and ephemeral messages such as those at Vindolanda and Novgorod would normally be written out by their authors unless the 113 114

115

See Tab. Vindol. II, nos. 182, 185, 190–2, 196–7, 301–2. Tab. Vindol. II, no. 291. For a general survey of the Vindolanda tablets in context see Alan K. Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its People (London, 1994). See the introduction to Tab. Vindol. II, pp. 29–30 on a ‘civilian’ presence at Vindolanda.

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authors were unable to write. The context is informal, neither public nor official, and to resort to a scribe for such a perfunctory job might seem more trouble than it was worth, if the author could just as easily do it himself (or herself ). In the Novgorod documents the variety of hands implies that delegation to scribes was limited, if not unknown,116 although the documents themselves provide no quantifiable evidence. By contrast, the typical Vindolandan epistle is written in two hands: one for the substantive message, another for the closing greetings. For example, the birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina, quoted above, concludes with a phrase in a new hand: ‘Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail’.117 In other words the use or non-use of scribes, even in an informal context, does not show whether or not the author possessed literate skills. While the Vindolanda letters are, of course, inadmissible as evidence for Novgorodian practice, they nevertheless expose the weakness of one seemingly sensible a priori assumption. Secondly, the Vindolanda tablets highlight one of the functions of practical literacy as an agent of rapid and effective integration. Rome did not choose to man this distant frontier with crack troops from the capital. The Batavians and Tungrians of the Vindolanda garrison came from an area which was itself geographically and culturally peripheral, the frontier zone of Gallia Belgica on the remote north-western fringes of the mainland Empire. Remaining formally within the Empire after the Roman withdrawal to the Rhine in 9 , the Batavians nevertheless paid no taxes; although by the middle of the century they were providing auxiliary units for the Roman army, they served under their own commanders. Yet here, in Vindolanda, were Batavian officers, women and slaves, routinely communicating with one another (rather than just with Rome), routinely exchanging private messages (rather than just official army business) in literate written Latin.118 If the conditions are appropriate, the assimilation of this type of practical literacy need not be a particularly long or complex process. The example is relevant to Novgorod in one respect: it further inclines us to believe, more or less, the chronology of the surviving evidence (that birch-bark and related urban patterns of literacy flourished from about the early to mid-eleventh century), and to reject the need to posit a long gestation period of hidden activity.119 116 117

118 119

See above, n. 106. Tab. Vindol. II, no. 291, lines 11–14: ‘sperabo te soror vale soror anima mea ita valeam karissima et have’; cf. e.g. nos. 242, 247, 248, 250, 252, 256, 258, 264, 285, 292, 293, 295, 298, 300, 309–12, 316, 320, 345. See Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier, pp. 25–7, 96–8. See, however, below, pp. 120–6.

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Thirdly, the material from Vindolanda confirms that one circumstance conducive to such uses of writing is a high degree of mobility. In Vindolanda the mobility was military; in Novgorod, mainly mercantile; but in both cases many of the functions of – and the stimuli for – the uses of writing are similar. Troops based at Vindolanda were positioned and re-positioned across other border outposts.120 Deputations travelled to procure supplies of food and equipment. Scouts reported, friends departed. Vindolanda documents refer to a range of Roman settlements across northern Britain. Letters were sent to and from York, Catterick, Carlisle, even London.121 The senders and recipients of the Novgorod letters scurry around the city’s huge forested hinterland, collecting tribute, recording debts, exchanging goods. And they travel to and from the other urban centres in Rus: Pskov, Polotsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Iaroslavl, southern Pereiaslavl, Suzdal, Rostov, Uglich, even Kuchkov on the site of the town later known as Moscow.122 Why limit oneself to Oxyrhynchus and Vindolanda? To locate the birchbark letters more firmly in the history of archaeologically retrieved specimens of writing, why not explore the further possibilities of analogy with, say, the Sumerian, Old Canaanite and Eblaite tablets from the Syrian state of Ebla in the third millennium ?123 Or with the thousands of Elamite cuneiform tablets from Persepolis, dating from the late sixth and early fifth centuries ?124 Or indeed with the vast majority of specimens of primary non-sacred writing which do not happen to be in the form of rolls or codices or to be preserved in libraries? There are limits to digression. The comparisons here are illustrative rather than systematic, and they are certainly not comprehensive. Our purpose, for the moment, is simply to introduce the material, and to indicate appropriate contexts – temporal, cultural or typological – in which the material might be viewed. The birch-bark letters discovered in Novgorod and elsewhere constitute a type of source previously unsuspected for Rus, exceptional in the context of medieval Europe, but not rare in the broader history of the uses of writing. Artsikhovskii’s claims on first presenting the documents were perhaps inflated, but not wholly inapposite. 120 121

122 123 124

Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier, pp. 22–4. On the problems of establishing the direction of any given letter see the introduction to Tab. Vindol. II, pp. 42–5. For geographical names in the documents see ibid., pp. 393–4; also the map in Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier, p. 147 (fig. 3). See e.g. from among the pre–1300 documents, NGB, nos. 69, 105, 109, 424, 439, 524, 636, 656, 675, 723, 724, 745, 844, 872, 885, 900. See G. Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla: An Empire Inscribed in Clay (New York, 1981). D. M. Lewis, ‘The Persepolis Tablets: Speech, Seal and Script’, in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 17–32.

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Wooden tablets Waxed wooden tablets were a common form of writing material in the ancient and medieval worlds.125 Typically, such tablets would have a raised rim, leaving the recessed area to be coated with wax. Two or more tablets could be secured together to form diptychs or triptychs, touching each other around the rim but protecting the waxed area. The advantage of waxed tablets was their durability and adaptability. They were ideal as note-pads or exercise books, since the lettering, scored in the wax with the pointed end of a stylus, could simply be smoothed over with the flat end, thus enabling the same tablet to be reused as often as needed. When protected by its wooden cover, however, a waxed tablet could preserve its text quite effectively. Cheaper than parchment for private use, sturdier than birch-bark for formal use, convenient either to recycle or to conserve, waxed wooden tablets well merited their longevity and popularity. It has long been assumed that waxed wooden tablets were also used in Rus. Wooden tablets of the appropriate shape have turned up from time to time in excavations. We might surmise that they were in fact quite common, if the frequency of styluses of the right type (one end pointed, the other end flat) is any indication.126 But the number of excavated tablets was small, and – crucially – none of them preserved their inscribed wax coating, so they provided no solid evidence – beyond analogy with other societies – for how they were used in Rus: whether they were standard equipment in learning to write, or for scribes to prepare rough drafts before committing fair copy to parchment,127 or perhaps also for more formal purposes such as the recording of debts or assets,128 or a mixture of these and other purposes. That, at any rate, was the position until the summer of 2000. Novgorod archaeology is full of surprises, and the season’s sensation was a set of three waxed wooden tablets which retained their writing. One of the tablets was recessed on both sides, while the other two were flat on one side, so that the three could be bound together as a triptych: in effect as a ‘book’ with plain outer protective covers and four ‘pages’ of inscribed text. Just as sensational was the provisional date: the tablets were found 30 cm beneath a layer which included logs dated to 1036, which suggests that 125

126 127 128

See e.g. R. Pintaudi and P. J. Sijperteijn, Tavolette lignee e cerate da varie collezioni (Papyrologica Florentina XVIII; Florence, 1989); also Hoogendijk and Van Minnen, Papyri, Ostraca, Parchments and Waxed Tablets, pp. 87–105; John C. Shelton, Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca, and Wooden Tablets in the Collection of the Brooklyn Museum (Papyrologica Florentina XXII; Florence, 1992), pp. 45–51. On forms of stylus see above, n. 87. A use recorded for England in the same period: see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 91–2. See below, pp. 182–3, on references to ‘boards’ in legal codes and chronicles.

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the tablets might date from as early as the very beginning of the eleventh century. And then there was the text; or rather, the texts. The marks on the wax were no mere fragment of semi-decipherable jottings, but line after line of quotation from the Psalter. Most of the ‘book’ is taken up by psalms 75 and 76, but sections of psalm 67 at the end suggest that earlier psalms had also been written out on the same tablets. And there was more: numerous short inscriptions on the raised borders; and, perhaps most surprising of all, when the wax was removed for conservation, faint traces of other texts – sets of repeated phrases – were discerned on the flat bed of the wood, where the stylus had pressed through the wax coating.129 If the dating can be confirmed, these tablets instantly become the earliest substantial pieces of East Slav writing in existence. A sample of one is, of course, not enough to justify a general theory of the uses of waxed tablets in Rus, but it is much better than none at all, and the analyses and hypotheses will doubtless be exhaustive. Psalms are quite likely to have served as standard study-texts, and to find waxed tablets with psalms would therefore be compatible with the use of such tablets in an educational context.130 Repetitions are also found in Greek waxed tablets with literary texts. So were these exercises for a trainee scribe? Or rough preliminary copies? Or lines to be learnt by heart? It is too early to draw firm or confident inferences, but at least the discovery spectacularly confirms the suspicion, based on the chronology of styluses, that waxed wooden tablets had their place in the graphic environment, as bearers of primary writing, from the very earliest phases of written culture among the Christian Rus.131

Secondary writing Secondary writing exists where writing is integral to, but not the main purpose of, an object’s production; where objects are created with writing but not necessarily for writing. Secondary writing appears on seals and 129 130 131

For the texts thus far deciphered see A. A. Zalizniak, V. L. Ianin, ‘Novgorodskii kodeks pervoi chetverti XI v. – drevneishaia kniga Rusi’, Voplaz (2001, no. 5), 3–25. See below, p. 203. Note also e.g. psalms on (unwaxed) wooden tablets in Pintaudi and Sijpesteijn, Tavolette lignee e cerate, nos. 9, 12. Among the ‘birch-bark’ publications we should also note two documents scratched on thin plates of lead: see Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 238–9 (late 11th–early 12th centuries); V. L. Ianin, A. A. Zalizniak, ‘Berestianye gramoty iz novgorodskikh raskopok 1997 g.’, VopIaz (1998, no. 3), 41 (a partial alphabet, late 12th century). Inasmuch as the material was perhaps prepared for the purpose, lead should join the list as an occasional material for primary writing. On lead as a more prominent material elsewhere see below, p. 269. On problems of interpreting the first of the lead documents see Aleksandr B. Strakhov, ‘Filologicheskie nabliudeniia nad berestianymi gramotami: V’, Palaeoslavica 2 (1994), 205–33.

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coins, on amulets and on medallions, on pendant crosses and on textiles, on liturgical goblets and on reliquaries, on sword-blades and on warriors’ helmets, on panel icons and on wall-paintings, on monumental mosaics and on manuscript miniatures. The letters are formed by inlay and overlay, by stamping and casting, by carving and by chiselling, by daubing and by weaving. They are created in stone, clay, silver, gold, bronze, iron, lead, glass, paint, ink, thread. The objects were for use in worship and in battle, in commerce and in diplomacy, as public monuments and as personal adornments, and they range in size from a few millimetres to a few metres. The written elements may be narrative or declamatory, votive or citational, descriptive or symbolic. Objects with secondary writing are far more numerous than objects with primary writing. Technically and functionally (but not textually) they are also far more diverse. Yet despite such diversity, objects with secondary writing do in significant respects form a coherent group, with a distinctive place in the graphic environment and in the cultural dynamics of the written word. In this section we shall, in the first instance, list and briefly summarise the main types of objects with secondary writing, before considering the common features which justify bringing together such disparate materials under a single heading. The categories of object in the list are arranged in no special order of importance, nor are they all homogeneous in themselves. The purpose is to give an initial impression of the scope of secondary writing, to provide basic bibliographical assistance for those who would like to explore in more detail, and to establish a set of reference points for the discussion in later chapters. The result is a dry catalogue, largely devoid of discursive digression at this stage. One general feature, however, should be mentioned at the outset. Secondary writing often accompanies pictures, and the inventory of types of script-bearing objects can in places look more like an inventory of types of picture-bearing objects. If primary writing tends to isolate and hence to highlight the verbal message, secondary writing tends to relate more directly to other visual components of the graphic environment. Seals The purpose of a seal is that it be attached to a written document (an object with secondary writing attached to an object with primary writing), as a mark of validation from the person in whose name the document is issued. The published corpus of Rus seals includes, to date, about 1,200 attributed to the pre-Mongol period.132 The number grows with 132

APDR III, p. 8.

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each season’s digging, though it is still a tiny fraction of the number of seals which survive from, say, Byzantium during the same centuries. Rus seals are normally made of lead (we have no equivalent of the Byzantine ‘chrysobull’ or gold-sealed Imperial document), about 20–30 mm in diameter. Most are stamped on both sides with portraits of saints, who are usually labelled by name. Instead of a saint, some seals are stamped on one side with a cross, or a bident or trident (variants of the ‘princely sign’ associated with members of the ruling dynasty), or simply with a text.133 Writing thus appears either by itself or – normally – as a label for a picture. For whom were seals produced? Although no pre-Mongol seal survives together with its accompanying document, it is intrinsic to the purpose of a seal that the signs on the object itself should in some way indicate the identity of the issuer. Attributions at a distance are not entirely secure, since we do not have perfect access to the most common ‘code’ whereby issuers were identified by the combination of saints represented on the seal, but the general pattern of development is reasonably clear. A very few seals are dated to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and all of them are ascribed to princes.134 Seals appear more regularly from the middle of the eleventh century onwards, but right down to the thirteenth century their main issuers were princes and senior churchmen (metropolitans and bishops). Some quite prominent groups of seals can be attributed to secular functionaries,135 but these are individual exceptions, and the evidence does not suggest that secular functionaries during this period issued seals on a routine basis. Writing on seals is of two types: labels for the portraits, and the ‘textonly’ inscriptions (which also provide the clearest identification). The portrait labels follow the formulae for representations of saints, common in other forms of secondary writing. The ‘text’ inscriptions use a range of phrases, in Greek or Slavonic.136 ‘Lord, help thy servant X’ is the most frequent formula. Some churchmen address their invocation to the Mother 133 134

135

136

Or, very exceptionally, with a portrait of the prince who issued the seal: APDR III, nos. 2a, 2b. APDR I, pp. 38–40; III, pp. 13–19 (nos. 1, 2, 2a, 2b): seals attributed to Sviatoslav Igorevich, and to his grandsons Iziaslav, Iaroslav and Sviatopolk. Also a seal recently ascribed to their brother Gleb/David (d. 1015): V. L. Ianin, ‘Nakhodka drevnerusskikh vislykh pechatei v Sigtune (Shvetsiia)’, in Vostochnaia Evropa v drevnosti i srednevekov
e. X. Chteniia k 80-letiiu chlena-korrespondenta AN SSSR Vladimira Terent
evicha Pashuto (Moscow, 1998), pp. 139–41. On Ratibor, the ‘Protoproedros Eustathios’ and ‘Iaved’ see nn. 138, 139. See also Ianin’s tenuous attribution of about a dozen seals to posadniki (mayors, governors) of Novgorod and Ladoga c. 1117–36: APDR I, pp. 67–75; III, pp. 41–2 (nos. 123–32, 132a); also III, 25, where Ianin attributes a seal (no. 40c) to a Byzantine functionary in the employ of Prince Sviatopolk Iziaslavich. See below, pp. 103–5.

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of God (‘Sweet [Mother of God], watch over me’), while others simply state their name and office (e.g. ‘Mitrofan, Archbishop of Novgorod’). Individual seals or groups of seals produce their own variants: a group (31 seals) inscribed on the reverse with an invocation to ‘watch over me, the Protoproedros Eustathios’;137 a smaller group (11 seals) bluntly inscribed ‘from Ratibor’;138 a couple of specimens of a seal from Pskov, inscribed ‘Iaved’s seal’;139 the large set (45 seals) with an impersonal inscription (d
neslovo) which probably means something like ‘herein lies a message’.140 Besides these ‘documentary’ seals – indeed, far more numerous than the ‘documentary’ seals – there are the so-called ‘Drogichin seals’. Drogichin seals are smaller (between 8 and 15 millimetres in diameter), more crudely stamped with symbols and monograms, lacking inscriptions except for the occasional individual Cyrillic or (more rarely) Latin letter. About 15,000 such objects have been found, mostly in the western borderlands around the town of Drogichin, dated (probably) from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Although we cannot exclude the possibility that Drogichin seals may sometimes have been used to validate documents, their more likely functions are in connection with transit trade, attached to packages of goods to indicate ownership or the payment of or exemption from customs dues.141 Coins The history of coins in Rus divides into two distinct and unequal parts: the history of foreign coins, and the history of native coins. Foreign coins were vastly more prominent numerically and economically. Tens of thousands of silver dirhams from the East, of silver deniers from Western Europe, and (in much smaller quantities) of copper, silver and gold coins from Byzantium have been unearthed in hoards and stray finds across the lands of the Rus. Their presence reflects (or suggests) patterns of longdistance trade and travel: hence dirham hoards are found in the north from the late eighth or early ninth century and in the south (Kiev) in the first half of the tenth century; the influx of deniers spanned the late tenth 137 139 140

141

138 APDR I, pp. 60–4; III, p. 39. APDR I, pp. 64–7; III, p. 39. APDR III, p. 63 (nos. 348–2); cf. ibid., ‘Sviatoslav’s seal’ (no. 349a). Inscriptions beginning ‘the seal of’ become common later, from the fourteenth century. Ianin in APDR I, pp. 75–86 (also III, p. 40), associates these seals with princely diplomacy of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. On the view that these seals have a talismanic function see below, p. 268 (chapter 7, n. 47). See B. D. Ershevskii, ‘Drogichinskie plomby. Klassifikatsiia, tipologiia, khronologiia (po materialam sobraniia N. P. Likhacheva)’, VID 17 (1985), 36–57; V. B. Perkhavko, ‘Rasprostranenie plomb drogichinskogo tipa’, DGVEMI. 1994 god (1996), pp. 211–47.

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to early twelfth centuries, while Byzantine coins are found sporadically throughout the period.142 With their Kufic, Latin and Greek inscriptions the foreign coins represent the largest group of inscribed objects to survive on (or in) Rus soil. The dirhams predate any native Slavonic uses of writing, though writing was known among those who imported and traded them (some of the dirhams bear runic graffiti).143 Whether or not their inscriptions were locally understood – or even recognised – as alphabetic script, they were part of the graphic environment for those involved in such commerce, and should not be completely discounted as an early means of contact with uses of writing in economic activity. The import of West European and Byzantine coins continues into the age of native writing. Native coinage was an altogether more limited phenomenon, its production a transient episode in the economic history of the Rus. The most recent catalogue lists 227 variants, yielding (with duplicates) a total of fewer than 350 actual coins, although the real number of known specimens may in fact be still less, since the list may include some double entries from older and imprecisely documented descriptions.144 However, the limitations are not so much numerical as chronological and functional. All the coins date from a decade or two either side of 1000, and are attributable to just three princes: gold and silver coins of Vladimir Sviatoslavich, and silver coins of his sons Sviatopolk and Iaroslav.145 By the 1020s the experiment in native coinage was over, except for an even more ephemeral experiment in coinage in the late 1070s by one of Vladimir’s great-grandsons, Oleg Sviatoslavich of Tmutorokan.146 In a way it was over almost as soon as it had begun, since about three quarters of the ‘silver’ coins are not actually made of silver. Real exchange was conducted in deniers, in silver ingots (grivnas),147 in furs, perhaps 142

143 144

145

146

147

See V. M. Potin, Drevniaia Rus
i evropeiskie gosudarstva v X–XIII vv. Istorikonumizmaticheskii ocherk (Leningrad, 1968); Thomas S. Noonan, The Islamic World, Russia and the Vikings, 750–900: the Numismatic Evidence (Aldershot, 1998). See below, pp. 113–4. DRM, p. 15. This edition is an updated version of the previous catalogue which appeared in English as M. P. Sotnikova and I. G. Spasski, Russian Coins of the X–XI Centuries A.D., transl. H. Bartlett Wells (British Archaeological Reports International Series 136; Oxford, 1982). For a recent attempt to stretch the chronology through to the early twelfth century see Omeljan Pritsak, The Origins of the Old Rus
Weights and Monetary System. Two Studies in Western Eurasian Metrology and Numismatics in the Seventh to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 67–119; brief critical comments by Thomas S. Noonan in The Russian Review, 58 (1999), 319–20. See V. V. Kropotkin and T. I. Makarova, ‘Nakhodka monety Olega-Mikhaila v Korcheve’, SA (1973, no. 2), 250–4. On Oleg, and the likely dates, see Martin Dimnik, The Dynasty of Chernigov: 1054–1146 (Toronto, 1994), pp. 171–2. See below, pp. 76–8.

52

The graphic environment

in small objects such as beads and ornaments. The implication is that these non-silver ‘silver’ coins (and perhaps the authentically gold coins as well)148 were not really coins at all, that they were created more for display, as tokens of princely status, than as functioning currency. Nearcontemporary cast-bronze copies of Iaroslav’s silver coins were manufactured as pendants.149 The graphic components (the images and inscriptions) emphasise the status of the prince. The gold coins of Vladimir Sviatoslavich, and the first version of his silver coins, show a portrait of the prince on one side, inscribed ‘Vladimir on the throne’ or ‘Vladimir and this is his gold/silver’, and a (labelled) image of Christ on the other side.150 On Vladimir’s remaining silver coins the declaration ‘this is his silver’ is transferred to the reverse side, where the image of Christ is supplanted by the dynastic ‘trident’ emblem.151 Sviatopolk’s coins begin in the same style as those of his father: a portrait of the prince on the obverse (‘Sviatopolk on the throne’) and his version of the dynastic emblem on the reverse (‘and this is his silver’).152 Then there are variations: coins with St Peter instead of the prince on the obverse, labelled in Greek on both sides;153 and coins still showing the prince on the obverse, but labelled as ‘Petor’.154 Iaroslav’s coins show St George (labelled in Greek) on the obverse, and the dynastic emblem (with the legend ‘Iaroslav’s silver’ in Slavonic) on the reverse. Native coinage was an experiment which failed to take root. Nevertheless, the graphic components of the native coins are particularly valuable among native written sources. The inscriptions massively outnumber all other extant specimens of locally produced Slavonic writing of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. ‘Snake amulets’ A distinctive group of inscribed pendant metal discs consists of objects known as ‘snake amulets’ (zmeeviki ). A ‘snake amulet’ is a disc of gold, 148 149

150 151

152 153 154

Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 167–8. DRM, pp. 121–3; also P. G. Gaidukov, A. S. Khoroshev, ‘Novye nakhodki privesok – litykh kopii s monet tipa “iaroslavle srebro” v Novgorode’, DGVEMI 1994 god (1996), pp. 204–10. Note that imported coins are often found with ring-attachments enabling them, too, to be worn as decorative pendants. DRM, nos. 1–51. DRM, nos. 52–176. Note, however, that the inscriptions are often crude to the point of illegibility. On one set of coins (no. 175; four specimens) the inscription, which runs on from the obverse to the reverse, reads ‘Vadimir’s silver; [of ] Saint Basil’. DRM, nos. 177–205, again with the proviso that most of the inscriptions are illegible. DRM, nos. 206–10. DRM, nos. 211–18. See also ibid., pp. 200–1 on the garbled letters which accompany this: probably a crude graphic imitation of the Greek for ‘Saint’.

The written remains

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silver, bronze or brass (with one exception, in stone) showing a saint or saints on one side and on the other a head with snakes emerging from it, or sometimes a figure of a woman with snakes emerging from her head. The most frequently depicted saint is the Archangel Michael, closely followed by the Mother of God, with a few specimens depicting Christ, St George, St Theodore Stratelates, Kosmas and Damian, Boris and Gleb, or the Seven Youths of Ephesos. Of the twenty-nine varieties of snake amulet – some in multiple copies – tentatively ascribed to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, 75 per cent are inscribed around the rim on one or both sides, mostly with incantatory and votive formulae: eight in Greek, eight in Slavonic, one bilingually (the type with the most numerous copies), one with imitation lettering, and four with monogram labels only.155 It is noteworthy, as a point of snobbery, that all of the gold amulets bear Greek or bilingual inscriptions, while Slavonic predominates in the amulets made of less costly materials. A recurrent Greek inscription, often incomplete or disfigured in manufacture and not reproduced in Slavonic inscriptions, is an incantation addressed to the womb (‘Womb, black, blackening, as a snake you coil’). The ‘snake amulets’ from Rus were derived from Byzantine models. In origin these objects were uterine charms, to ward off diseases of – or thought to be caused by – the womb. The image of the head with snakes probably represented the womb itself, to which the Greek inscription was addressed.156 However, there is no clear evidence as to their functions in early Rus, beyond serving as decorative luxury objects. Some of the examples label the head-and-snakes image with a Slavonic word (variations of d

na) which may indicate ‘womb’, so that the uterine associations were perhaps sometimes retained.157 Enamelled and niello medallions Among the luxury objects and techniques exported from Byzantium to Rus was cloisonn´e enamel. Usually set in gold, occasionally in silver or bronze, enamelled medallions were designed or adapted to a range of settings: as pendants in diadems or necklaces, as inset elements of reliquary 155

156 157

T. V. Nikolaeva and A. V. Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amulety-zmeeviki (Moscow, 1991). Greek: types 2, 6, 13–17, 38; Slavonic: types 3, 7, 18, 32, 33, 37, 42, 43; bilingual: type 1; imitation lettering: type 20; labels only: types 8, 11, 26, 30. The datings are not secure, since most of the amulets have no clearly recorded historical or archaeological context. See Jeffrey Spier, ‘Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and their Tradition’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993), 25–62. Nikolaeva and Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amulety-zmeeviki, pp. 38–9; nos. 32, 39; cf. nos. 11, 26; further on zmeeviki and other amulets see below, pp. 267–71.

54

The graphic environment

crosses, icons, book-covers or ecclesiastical vestments. The majority of enamelled medallions advertised wealth and taste rather than piety, feasts for the eye unhampered by the spirit; colour and form without the message spelt out. But where saints were admitted, they brought their labels with them. Most of the inscribed enamels depict Christ or the Mother of God, sometimes also with John the Baptist, identified by monogram inscriptions.158 The remaining inscriptions, with just a handful of exceptions, tend to be captions with the names of saints (most commonly the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, or Peter and Paul).159 Miniature images of Christ, the Mother of God, the Archangel Michael, Boris and Gleb also occasionally appear on silver niello pendant medallions, usually in clusters to be suspended from a chain draped on the shoulders (barmy), although a more frequent symbol in this context was the Cross with foliage sprouting from its base.160 Inscriptions on these medallions are rare. Relief icons in stone Small stone icons with relief carving (probably pendants, originally in metal mounts) seem to have been quite widely distributed. The fullest systematic study of the genre includes 145 items dated from the mideleventh to the thirteenth century, from all corners of the Rus lands: predominantly from the Middle Dnieper region (Kiev was probably the main centre of production), but also from Novgorod and Pskov, Vladimir and Suzdal, Vologda and Ustiug, Polotsk and Smolensk.161 The production of such icons was a Byzantine tradition, and imported Byzantine steatite icons are found in Rus as well as versions in local stone.162 Quite 158 159

160

161

162

T. I. Makarova, Peregorodchatye emali Drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1987), nos. 61, 74–80, 83–7, 99, 100–2, 106, 124, 127, 133, 143–6. The exceptions are: Makarova, Peregorodchatye emali, no. 117, a label for the hetoimasia (p. 75, table 21.1); no. 124, where the enamels are among the multiple inscriptions on the reliquary cross of Evfrosiniia of Polotsk (on which see below, pp. 57–8); and no. 142, with a circular scriptural citation around the border (ibid., p. 89, table 27.8). T. I. Makarova, Chernevoe delo Drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1986); miniature icons: nos. 264–80; also pp. 101–5, figs. 49–52; sprouting crosses: nos. 281–305, 307–10, 315–17; also pp. 108–10, figs. 53–5. T. V. Nikolaeva, Drevnerusskaia melkaia plastika iz kamnnia. XI–XV vv. (ASSSR SAI E1–60; Moscow, 1983), nos. 1–31, 33–53, 54–60, 66–8, 70–9, 81–4, 86–90, 92–3, 95, 98–101, 103–5, 153–4, 173, 259, 261, 263, 266, 270, 276–77, 279–80, 289–90, 296–7, 303, 310–12, 323, 348–64, 366–7, 369, 372–4. See below, plate 4. See e.g. Ia. E. Borovskii and E. I. Arkhipova, ‘Novye proizvedeniia melkoi kamennoi plastiki iz drevnego Kieva (po materialam raskopok)’, in Iuzhnaia Rus
i Vizantiia. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (k XVIII kongressu vizantinistov) (Kiev, 1991), pp. 119–31; L. V. Pekarskaia and V. G. Putsko, ‘Vizantiiskaia melkaia plastika iz arkheologicheskikh nakhodok na Ukraine’ ibid., pp. 131–8; also V. Zhyshkovych, Plastyka Rusi-Ukrainy. X–persha polovyna XIV stolit
(Lviv, 1999), pp. 155–223.

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possibly there were also Byzantine craftsmen working in Rus and using the local material.163 The icons usually display one or two figures on each side, although sometimes the compositions were more elaborate. For example, seven of the early reliefs in the published catalogue depict the Holy Sepulchre, three show the Anastasis; and one pendant from the thirteenth century shows St Nicholas with scenes from his life, fitting about forty figures into the hagiographical relief which measures just 10 × 6 cm.164 The most favoured individual figures are the Mother of God (17 examples), St Nicholas (16) and St George (11). Carved label-inscriptions routinely flank the figures throughout. Monumental stone crosses By contrast with, for example, ancient Rome, writing in Rus rarely impinges upon public open spaces. Outside the church, monumental public inscriptions are rare. Occasionally, however, one is liable to come across massive stones with inscribed letters. For the purposes of the present classification, such lettering counts as tertiary writing when the stones are uncut boulders or pre-existing objects,165 as secondary writing when produced as part of a manufactured object – an inscribed stone cross. Monumental inscribed stone crosses are few, but varied. The earliest, measuring 3.4 metres in height, stood near the village of Pregradnoe, east of the Azov sea. Its inscription suggests it was set up in 1041 to commemorate (the death of ) a certain Ivan.166 A somewhat smaller cross, about 1.7 metres high, was set up and inscribed in 1133 by the Novgorodian Ivanko Pavlovich (who in the following year was made mayor of the city) to mark the start of some dredging work on the channel between the Upper Volga and Lake Sterzh.167 A cross outside the church of the Intercession of the Veil (Pokrov) on the bank of the river Nerl outside Bogoliubovo, perhaps set up in connection with the foundation of the church in the late 1160s, was inscribed with a eulogy to the Cross itself.168 A twelfth-century cross from Voimeritsy, about 120 miles east of Novgorod, was carved by a certain Slavon to commemorate Boguslav 163

164 165 166

167

See V. G. Putsko, ‘Konstantinopol
skie mastera na Rusi nakanune mongolo-tatarskogo nashestviia’, in Rossiia i khristianskii vostok. Vypusk I (Moscow, 1997), pp. 17–23 and plates 1–10. Nikolaeva, Drevnerusskaia melkaia plastika, no. 277 and plate 49. See below, pp. 74–5. V. A. Kuznetsov and A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Slaviano-russkaia nadpis
XI veka iz s. Pregradnogo na severnom Kavkaze’, KSIA 144 (1975), 11–17; for a detailed study of the circumstances see Jonathan Shepard, ‘Yngvarr’s Expedition to the East and a Russian Inscribed Stone Cross’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society 21 (1984–5), 222–92. 168 RDN, no. 28, p. 33 and plate XV/2. RDN, no. 23, pp. 27–8 and plate XIII.

56

The graphic environment

and Lazar.169 On 15 August 1234 a Novgorodian monk named Simeon set up a stone cross, inscribed to mark his name and the occasion (the significance of which he omits to specify), and in the same year Prince Sviatoslav Vsevolodovich inscribed a cross on the completion of work at the church of St George at Iurev-Polskoi.170 The stone crosses thus commemorate either some public work, or a death. The latter are particularly notable for drawing attention – through their very rarity – to the lack of a native tradition of public carved burialinscriptions. It is perhaps not coincidental that both the known specimens (at Pregradnoe and at Voimeritsy) are in relatively remote places, away from the mainstream; and that one of them includes formulaic components reminiscent of foreign practice. Pendant crosses Metallic pectoral crosses, usually of bronze or copper, are found in urban sites throughout the lands of the Rus. Many are simply crosses, eloquent in their shape alone, with no added images or words. However, crosses with relief or engraved pictures are not rare, especially reliquary crosses, or encolpia. There is no systematic modern catalogue of the several hundred surviving specimens, but early published collections, plus the very numerous archaeological finds, give a clear enough impression.171 For example, smallish (about 5 × 3 cm) bronze crosses with incised images of Christ on the obverse and the Mother of God on the reverse have been found in sites ranging from Vladimir to Kiev to Novgorod to Belarus.172 Slightly more elaborate cast bronze crosses display roundels of saints at each end of the horizontal arm and at the top and/or bottom of the vertical arm.173 There are several specimens (mainly from the Kiev region, but also from Novgorod) of a much larger (7.3 × 10.5 cm) double-sided bronze cross displaying, on the obverse, the crucified Christ with the Mother of God and John the Baptist looking on from the ends of the 169

170 171

172

173

Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 374, notes the closeness of the inscription’s formulae to the formulae of runic commemorative stones, including mention of the name of the carver. RDN, nos. 39, 38, p. 39 and plate XVII/1–2. One of the most useful assemblages is still Collection B. Khanenko. Antiquit´es russes. Croix et images (Kiev, 1899), which includes illustrations of over seventy crosses dated from the 11th to 13th centuries. On Kievan encolpion-types see V. G. Putsko, ‘Drevneishie tipy Kievskikh krestov-enkolpionov’, Trudy piatogo mezhdunarodnogo kongressa slavianskoi arkheologii III, 2b (Moscow, 1987), pp. 62–74; V. Kovalenko and V. Putsko, ‘Bronzovye kresty-enkolpiony iz Kniazhei gory’, Byzantinoslavica 54 (1993), 300–9. M. V. Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia drevnego Novgoroda IX–XV vv. (Moscow, 1981), p. 57, and fig. 118.1, 2. See also the range of crosses illustrated in Drevnii Novgorod. Prikladnoe iskusstvo i arkheologiia (Moscow, 1985), pp. 56–7, plates 67–71, 73–4. Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia, pp. 50–1 and fig. 16.5, 6.

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57

horizontal arm and St George at the top, and on the reverse the Mother of God and child standing in the vertical arm with St Nicholas above them and Peter and Paul at the ends of the horizontal arm.174 The central spaces were usually filled by Christ and (if the cross was double-sided) the Mother of God, although alternatives such as Boris and Gleb were possible.175 An accompanying text was usual, but not absolutely obligatory. Many of the small and relatively plain crosses are uninscribed, or else bear only monogram inscriptions, while the larger and more elaborate encolpia tend to display more copious and elaborate lettering.176 The Rus carried their crosses with them on their travels, into exile and into captivity: a fair number have been discovered in Golden Horde settlements on the Middle and Lower Volga.177 A little slate cross, with no picture but with the maker’s name inscribed, has been found on the island of Gotland.178 Liturgical silver, goblets, reliquaries, textiles etc. The same Byzantine inventories that list donations and holdings of manuscript books also list donations and holdings of liturgical silver and other precious objects, as – more exiguously – does the list of donations from Prince Vladimir Vasilkovich in the Volynian chronicle.179 Byzantium itself was an important source of supply for such objects in Rus, but increasingly the Rus acquired the means for local manufacture, both by attracting Byzantine craftsmen to work for local patrons, and by learning the techniques themselves. The surviving specimens, few in number, but adequate to provide an impression, are usually inscribed in one or more of four ways: with liturgical citations; with labels for the images depicted on them; with information on the patron, or on the maker. A list of inscribed luxury objects of this kind would include: the ‘Large Novgorod Sion’, with twelve carefully inscribed standing portraits of apostles and four Deesis roundels;180 174

175 176 177 178 179 180

Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia, pp. 55–7 and fig.18.3, 4; cf. an equivalent composition, with the Mother of God orans rather than eleousa, illustrated in B. A. Rybakov, Russkoe prikladnoe iskusstvo X–XIII vekov / Russian Applied Art of the Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries (Leningrad, 1970), p. 77, plate 99. Rybakov, Russkoe prikladnoe iskusstvo, p. 79, plate 102. But see below, p. 247, on a thirteenth-century(?) encolpion with ‘mirror’ inscriptions. See M. D. Poluboiarinova, Russkie liudi v Zolotoi Orde (Moscow, 1978), pp. 56–70, 81–2, 95–7, 110–11, 126–8. A. A. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 182–7; cf. another slate cross, with an invocation in the name of the owner, ibid., pp. 127–9. See above, pp. 30–1. G. N. Bocharov, Khudozhestvennyi metall Drevnei Rusi. X–nachalo XIII vv. (Moscow, 1984), pp. 219–38; A. A. Medyntseva, Podpisnye shedevry drevnerusskogo remesla. Ocherki epigrafiki XI–XIII vv. (Moscow, 1991), pp. 76–91.

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copious inscriptions on a large gold-, silver- and enamel-covered reliquary altar-cross commissioned in 1161 from the master Lazar Bogsha by Princess Evfrosiniia of Polotsk for her own monastery;181 a couple of silver icon-mounts from Novgorod, with inscribed portraits of saints standing in their individual arches;182 two twelfth-century silver chalices by Bratila and Kosta, with depictions of Christ, the Mother of God, St Peter and St Barbara or St Anastasia, each with a eucharistic inscription around the rim, labels for the portrait figures, an inscription identifying the donor, and incised letters under the base identifying the maker;183 another chalice of the middle of the twelfth century, also with the eucharistic formula around the rim, and with delicately outlined inscribed roundels depicting the Deesis figures (Christ, the Mother of God, John the Baptist) plus the military trio of Michael, Gabriel and George;184 a silver and gilt reliquary box now in the Arkhangelsk museum, with depictions of Constantine and Helen and St Clement;185 a small eleventh-century silver reliquary from Chernigov with the inscribed names of three saints;186 a cast-lead ampulla (small flask for holy water or oil) from the late twelfth century, with labelled images of Christ on one side and St Demetrios on the other. Two textiles preserve twelfth-century inscriptions in Slavonic: one, with five full-length inscribed woven portraits in the central scene of the Crucifixion and eleven inscribed portrait roundels in the border, is a Slavonic embellishment of a somewhat earlier Byzantine cloth;187 the other is an antimension (portable altar, or altar-cloth) with an inscription commemorating the consecration of a church of St George in one of the 181

182

183 184

185 186 187

See L. V. Alekseev, ‘Lazar Bogsha – master-iuvelir XII v.’, SA (1957, no. 3), 224– 44; RDN, no. 27, p. 32 and plates XXXI–XXXII; Makarova, Peregorodchatye emali, pp. 69–73 and figs.19–20. The cross was removed from the Minsk museum by German occupying forces in 1941. See also RDN, p. 35 and plate XXXII for an inscription recording the donation of a similar (though less elaborate) cross to St Sophia in Novgorod by Archbishop Antonii (1211–19, 1225–8). Normally dated to the early or mid-twelfth century, but the first thorough epigraphic analysis leads Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 134–51, to propose redating the mounts to the late eleventh century. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 155–68; RDN, pp. 23–5 and plates XXVI– XXVII. Rybakov, Russkoe prikladnoe iskusstvo, pp. 61–3 and plates 73–7; RDN, plate XXX; Bocharov, Khudozhestvennyi metall, pp. 110–16. Note that, unusually, the shape of this chalice seems to be copied from a West European rather than Byzantine model. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 124–34; the epigraphy suggests a date before the middle of the twelfth century. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 123–4. See L. V. Efimova, ‘Pamiatnik drevnerusskogo shit
ia s nadpisiami XII v. iz sobraniia GIM’, Voprosy slaviano-russkoi paleografii i kodikologii (Trudy Gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia 63; Moscow, 1987), pp. 59–62; or, with illustrations, L. V. Efimova, ‘Shitaia pelena “Raspiatie s predstoiashchimi” XII veka v sobranii Istoricheskogo muzeia’, in Russkoe iskusstvo XI–XIII vekov. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1986), pp. 128–35 and plates 55–7.

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north-eastern towns (possibly Iurev-Polskoi) in 1148 by Nifont, bishop of Novgorod.188 Fighting and feasting A couple of sword-blades from the late tenth or early eleventh century bear inlaid Slavonic inscriptions with the name of their manufacturers, in imitation of the makers’ inscriptions on imported Frankish swords.189 Individual letters are occasionally found among the designs on decorative battle-axes, of which the best-known example, with silver and gilt inlaid patterns including three instances of the letter ‘A’, is most plausibly dated to the eleventh century.190 The wearer of a battle-helmet of the late twelfth century was well protected by a covering of silver plaques depicting and labelling Christ and a quartet of warriors and the patrons of his ancestors: St George, St Theodore (Stratelates), St Basil and St Michael (to whom there was also a votive inscription).191 A plain silver goblet declares, in engraved lettering around the rim: ‘This is the goblet of Prince Vladimir Davidovich. Whosoever drinks to his health from it, may he praise God and his lord the Grand Prince.’192 Vladimir Davidovich was prince of Chernigov from 1139 to 1151. The inscription is unusual in that remnants of a scratched ‘rough draft’ of the lettering can still be discerned, not fully obliterated by the final version. Bricks The rubble of old churches reveals that significant numbers of bricks were marked before baking. Some of the marks were stamped into the clay, others were made by pressing a flat wooden mould against the clay so that the mark protrudes. Many of the marks are abstract symbols – lines, cross-hatched patterns, boxes, crosses. Versions of the dynastic trident are not uncommon among marks made on the upper or lower surface. Marks resembling individual letters occasionally figure on the sides of bricks; and so – rarely – do full inscriptions (‘Iakov made this’). The signs on the sides of bricks are probably batch-marks, indicating the top of a pile or the limit of a batch for the kiln. The dynastic tridents on the upper or lower surfaces most likely allude to the building’s patron, the 188 190

191 192

189 See below, pp. 109–10. RDN, pp. 28–32 and plate XLII. Sometimes known, probably erroneously, as the ‘axe of Andrei Bogoliubskii’: see Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, 95–8; for illustrations of decorative axes see B. A. Kolchin (ed.), Drevniaia Rus
. Gorod, zamok, selo (Moscow, 1985), p. 340 (table 128). For hypotheses as to the helmet’s owner see RDN, pp. 34–5 and plate XXXIII; Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 98–104. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 104–13.

60

The graphic environment

person paying for the bricks. Stamped batch-marks and patronal marks also appear on bricks in Byzantine buildings, and one may suppose that the practice was introduced into Rus from Byzantium.193 Manufacturers’ marks on bricks highlight the artificiality, in some contexts, of separating alphabetic script from other types of graphic sign. The occasional alphabetic variants function in the same way as the nonalphabetic variants, as identifying signs or ideograms.194 Church walls: wall-painting, mosaics, carving Worshippers at the major churches of Rus were surrounded by pictures and, in and around the pictures, by writing. The flat, plastered inner walls of masonry churches provided expanses of inviting and, in Byzantine practice, traditional surfaces for adornment with paint and – if one could afford it – mosaic tesserae. The images thereon were copiously and variously inscribed with monumental lettering. Evangelists hold books open to display their written words, donors are depicted ‘speaking’ a written text, eucharistic representations are fringed with eucharistic citations, narrative scenes from lives of saints are captioned in writing, and of course there are the ubiquitous labels for the portraits. Relatively little has survived intact, and many of the losses have been due less to natural decay over time than to wilful acts of intervention: insensitive over-painting in oils in the nineteenth century; and in the middle of the twentieth century both the militant atheist zealotry of Communist youth and the casual but clinical vandalism of Hitler’s army. Only one substantial ensemble remains in its original location: the magnificent expanses of gold, blue and green which illuminate the apse, the dome, and the upper surfaces of the transept in the mid-eleventh-century church of St Sophia in Kiev. Made by Byzantine craftsmen, the Sophia mosaics include monumental inscriptions in Greek, most prominently the eucharistic inscription which serves as a caption to the frieze of the Eucharist in the main apse.195 Comparably opulent were the mosaics of 193

194

195

L. A. Beliaev, ‘Iz istorii drevnerusskogo stroitel
nogo remesla. (Znaki na drevnerusskikh kirpichakh X–XIII vv.)’, Problemy istorii SSSR (Moscow, 1973), pp. 439–55; P. A. Rappoport, Stroitel
noe proizvodstvo Drevnei Rusi X–XIII vv. (St Petersburg, 1994), pp. 22–32. Cf. potters’ marks on the bases of pots: B. A. Kolchin and T. I. Makarova (eds.), Drevniaia Rus
. Byt i kul
tura (Moscow, 1997), pp. 26, 264 (table 18). See, however, a few ‘textual’ inscriptions scratched into bricks before baking: Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 83–91. V. N. Lazarev, Mozaiki Sofii Kievskoi (Moscow, 1960). On the date and phases of construction see A. Poppe, ‘The Building of the Church of St Sophia in Kiev’, Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), 15–66; repr. in his The Rise of Christian Russia (London, 1982). Arguments for an earlier dating: see e.g., most recently, N. N. Nikitenko, Rus
i Vizantiia v monumental
nom komplekse Sofii Kievskoi (Kiev, 1999), pp. 224–40.

The written remains

61

the early twelfth century in the Kievan church of St Michael, including an equivalent apse-inscription (in Slavonic). The church was destroyed in the 1930s, and the salvaged sections of mosaic were split between museums in Kiev and Moscow.196 Traces of mosaics from other major Kievan churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries survive only as shattered scraps amid the rubble: from Vladimir Sviatoslavich’s ‘Tithe Church’ of the Mother of God, which collapsed under the weight of refuge-seekers during the Mongol capture of Kiev on 6 December 1240; from the church of the Dormition at the Caves monastery, blown up on 3 October 1941.197 Wall-paintings fare rather better in terms of quantity, although the quality of preservation is variable and by no means all the specimens have kept their inscriptions. Again St Sophia in Kiev preserves quite a lot of its original programme, if not all in its original state. Also in Kiev, the twelfthcentury frescoes in the church of St Cyril are substantial in area, though the pigments have been badly damaged.198 The little Novgorodian church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa hill kept its floor-to-dome frescoes almost intact, including a remarkably elaborate donor-inscription, from the time they were painted in 1199 until the Germans obliterated the church in 1941. The Nereditsa frescoes survived long enough to be studied and photographed,199 but since their destruction the fullest array of original pre-Mongol wall-painting in Russia is in another church of the Saviour, in the Mirozha monastery just outside Pskov, built and decorated in the late 1140s.200 196

197

198

199

200

V. N. Lazarev, Mikhailovskie mozaiki (Moscow, 1966). The main sections are in Kiev, with smaller pieces, including a full-length inscribed portrait of St Demetrios, in the Tretiakov gallery: see Gosudarstvennaia Tret
iakovskaia Gallereia. Katalog sobraniia. Tom I. Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo X–XV veka (Moscow, 1995), pp. 40–3. A full-size copy of the church was built in situ in the late 1990s. V. N. Lazarev, Old Russian Murals and Mosaics (London, 1966), p. 31; Rappoport, Stroitel
noe proizvodstvo Drevnei Rusi, p. 55; Tserkva Bohorodytsi Desiatynna v Kyevi. Do 1000-littia osviachennia (Kiev, 1996), pp. 70, 132–4. A full-size copy of the church at the Caves was completed in 2000. See I. M. Dorofienko and P. Ia. Red
ko, ‘Raskrytie fresok XII v. v Kirillovskoi tserkvi Kieva’, in O. I. Podobedova (ed.), Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Monumental
naia zhivopis
XI–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1980), pp. 45–51; N. V. Blinderova, ‘Zhitie Kirilla i Afanasiia Aleksandriiskikh v rospisiakh Kirillovskoi tserkvi Kieva’, ibid., pp. 52–60; I. E. Marholina, Kyrylivs
ka tserkva – relihiinyi ta tserkovno-politychnyi oseredok seredn
ovichnoho Kyeva (Avtoref. dis. na zdobuttia naukovoho stupenia kandidata istorychnykh nauk; Kiev, 2000). V. N. Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski XI–XV vv. (Moscow, 1973), plates 241–77. NB: the text of Lazarev’s 1973 Russian book is substantially the same as his Old Russian Murals and Mosaics, but the Russian version has far more plates. I refer therefore to the plates of the Russian edition and to the text of the English edition. On the Nereditsa inscriptions see T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Nadpisi na freskakh tserkvi Spasa na Nereditse: grafika i orfografiia’, Novgorodskii istoricheskii sbornik 8(18) (2000), 30–5. See M. N. Soboleva, ‘Stenopis
Spaso-Preobrazhenskogo sobora Mirozhskogo monastyria v Pskove’, in V. N. Lazarev, O. I. Podobedova and V. V. Kostochkin (eds.), Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Khudozhestvennaia kul
tura Pskova (Moscow, 1968), pp. 7–50;

62

The graphic environment

Further down the scale of relative completeness, there are noteworthy sections of fresco in the church of St George at Staraia Ladoga201 and at the church of the Annunciation at Arkazhi, also near Novgorod.202 Individual portraits, scenes and decorative details survive in Novgorod’s version of St Sophia (in particular, a portrait of Constantine and Helen), and in the Novgorod churches of St George (in the Iurev monastery), of the Birth of the Mother of God (in the Antoniev monastery) and of St Nicholas, as well as in at least a dozen other churches scattered around the towns of the Rus: the church of the Saviour at the princely residence of Berestovo outside Kiev; the church of St Michael at Ostersk; at Chernigov the church of the Saviour (from the middle of the eleventh century) and the church of the Dormition at the Eletskii monastery; the church of the Saviour in Polotsk; in the north-east, the church of the Saviour at Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii (a segment now housed in the Historical Museum in Moscow), the churches of the Dormition and of St Demetrios at Vladimir, the church of Boris and Gleb at Kideksha, and the church of the Birth of the Mother of God at Suzdal.203 Significant amounts of lettering have survived only on a small minority of the remnants of wall-paintings, but the better-preserved examples are sufficient to indicate the prominent place of writing in the graphic environment created by ecclesiastical wall-decoration.204 A small number of churches also displayed lettering on the outer walls. The limestone churches peculiar to the north-east in the mid-twelfth to early thirteenth centuries (Suzdal, Vladimir and associated towns) came to have increasingly elaborate carved decoration on the facades, including portrait figures, a few of whom are identified in surviving carved inscriptions.205

201 202 203

204 205

also Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski, plates 187–206; V. D. Sarab
ianov, Freski Drevnego Pskova. The Painting of Old Pskov (Moscow, 1993). V. N. Lazarev, Freski Staroi Ladogi (Moscow, 1960). Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski, plates 229–38; T. Iu Tsarevskaia, Freski tserkvi Blagoveshcheniia na Miachine (v Arkazhakh) (Novgorod, 1999). Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski and Old Russian Murals and Mosaics, passim. On the continuing recovery of inscribed painting see e.g. T. Iu. Tsarevskaia, ‘NikoloDvorishchenskii sobor v Novgorode: novye otkrytiia rospisei XII veka’, in Sakral
naia topografiia srednevekovogo goroda (Izvestiia Instituta khristianskoi kul
tury srednevekov
ia 1; Moscow, 1998), pp. 204–6; I. V. Filatov, ‘O freskakh XII veka Spasskogo sobora v Polotske’, in Russkoe iskusstvo XI–XIII vekov. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1986), pp. 120–8; Halina R. Rusak, ‘Cathedral of St Saviour and the Polacak Principality of the Medieval Rus
’, Byzantinoslavica 59 (1998), 324–50 (with twelve plates). See below, chapter 6. On the ‘anthropomorphic’ carvings in general see G. K. Vagner, Skul
ptura Drevnei Rusi. XII vek. Vladimir, Bogoliubovo (Moscow, 1969). There are inscriptions for all three relief figures of David on the north, west and south faces of the church of the Intercession on the Nerl (ibid., plates 87, 90, 105), and an inscribed St George at Iurev-Polskoi:

The written remains

63

Panel icons Panel icons – icons on wood – come in many settings and at many points on the scale of luxury. A fine icon in a silver and jewelled mount was a treasure and a gift to the church or monastery worth recording not just in an inventory but even in a chronicle, while at the domestic end of the market a priest could fret over whether it was acceptable for a man and his wife to engage in sexual intercourse in their own home if there was an icon in the room.206 On the walls of wooden churches panel icons could serve where masonry churches might have wall-paintings. But the most abundant display, at least for a modern visitor to a ‘typical’ church, is on the artificial interior ‘fourth wall’ which consists almost entirely of panel icons: the floor-to-ceiling, multi-tiered icon-stand (iconostasis) which screens the sanctuary from the congregation in the nave. The iconostasis was the original setting for a large proportion of the panel icons likely to be displayed in modern museums and illustrated in catalogues. Yet the full-height iconostasis is a relatively late development in the organisation and aesthetics of East Christian liturgical space, replacing a lower and more symbolic sanctuary barrier. Instead of boxing off the congregation from the sanctuary, this earlier sanctuary barrier had allowed the entire interior to be experienced as a coherent whole, with the images in the apse as the focus of contemplation at the east end. The transition to a multitiered iconostasis took place gradually and unevenly, in a process which seems to start around the eleventh century. 207 In the Middle Byzantine templon – the starting point for Rus developments – columns between sections of the barrier extended upwards to a cross-beam, thus creating a row of window-like spaces between the upper portions of the columns. These spaces could be empty, or curtained (sometimes with embroidered icons), or partly covered with icons suspended from the cross-beam. Several early Rus churches have notably high templon columns, precursors of the ‘high’ wooden iconostasis. Examples of both types of screen – opaque and transparent, low and multi-tiered – could be found in Rus churches of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.208

206 207

208

see Iur
ev-Pol
skoi. Pamiatniki arkhitektury i iskusstva (Moscow, 1985), plate 34; also the lettering beside a relief of Christ, ibid., plate 36; on the latter see also Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 218–21. See below, pp. 253–4. See M. Chatzidakis, ‘L’´evolution de l’icone ˆ aux 11e–13e si`ecles et la transformation du templon’, Actes du 15e Congr`es international d’´etudes byzantines. Ath`enes – Septembre 1976 (Athens, 1979), pp. 333–66; A. Epstein, ‘The Middle Byzantine Sanctuary Barrier: Templon or Iconostasis?’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 134 (1981), 1–28. T. A. Chukova, ‘Altarnye pregrady v zodchestve domongol
skoi Rusi’, in K. K. Akent
ev (ed.), Liturgiia, arkhitektura i iskusstvo vizantiiskogo mira (Vizantinorossika I;

64

The graphic environment

Only about two to three dozen panel icons survive from the period. The total is flexible because the dating of early panel icons is necessarily approximate.209 None has a precisely recorded history, and the hypothetical dates of individual items can fluctuate by as much as two hundred years.210 Besides dates, there are problems of attribution (how can we be sure that an icon was painted by a native of Rus and not imported or painted by a Byzantine?) and authenticity (how much of what we now see is actually original?) The best-known of all ‘Russian’ icons, the ‘Vladimir’ Mother of God, was imported from Constantinople; in an eleventh-century panel of Peter and Paul, only the drapery is early;211 on the only icon which has a detailed inscription apparently identifying the painter by name and the painting by date – St Nicholas, by Aleksa Petrov, painted in 1294 – the inscription turns out to be part of a longer account of the panel’s ‘renewal’ in 1556.212 The low rate of authentic survival is unfortunate but not exceptional or significant. Byzantine panel icons from the same period are also rare. Varnish blackens, panels fade, wood cracks, worshippers gently submerge the image under incrustations of candle-grease, soot and the dried saliva of kisses. In theory a new image was as valid as an old one. When the image decayed beyond recognition (in which case, properly speaking if not always in devotional practice, it was no longer an image, a ‘likeness’, an icon) the panel could be touched up, or discarded and replaced. With due respect, of course. On a pilgrimage to Constantinople in 1200 Dobrynia Iadreikovich, future bishop of Novgorod, notes with approval the custom of burning the wood of old icons ‘on which one can no longer recognise the saints’ to heat the

209

210

211 212

St Petersburg, 1995), pp. 273–87; A. M. Lidov, ‘Ikonostas: itogi i perspektivy issledovaniia’, in Lidov (ed.), Ikonostas. Proiskhozhdenie – razvitie – simvolika (Moscow, 2000), pp. 11–32 (English summary pp. 713–17); V. D. Sarab
ianov, ‘Novgorodskaia altarnaia pregrada domongol
skogo perioda’, ibid., pp. 312–59 (English summary pp. 730–1). See the twenty-eight panels (three of them double-sided) described and illustrated in V. N. Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
ot istokov do nachala XVI veka (Moscow 1983), pp. 31–47, 163–71 plus the accompanying plates. No list has definitive status: see e.g. E. S. Smirnova, ‘“Spas vsederzhitel
” XIII v. v muzee drevnerusskogo iskusstva im. Andreia Rubleva. Voprosy atributsii’, in A. I. Komech and O. I. Podobedova (eds.), Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Khudozhestvennaia kul
tura X – pervoi poloviny XIII v. (Moscow, 1988), pp. 244–61. Compare, for example, Lazarev’s datings (generally later) with those preferred by Volodymyr Ovsiichuk, Ukrains
ke maliarstvo X–XVII stolit
. Problemy kol
oru (Lviv, 1996), pp. 47–129; also several of the articles in Russkoe iskusstvo XI–XIII vekov. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1986). Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, no. 1. Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, no. 17; see E. S. Smirnova, ‘Ikona Nikoly 1294 goda mastera Aleksy Petrova’, in G. V. Popov (ed.), Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Zarubezhnye sviazi (Moscow, 1975), pp. 81–105.

The written remains

65

oil used to anoint children at baptism:213 a kind of spiritual recycling process. Panel icons were inscribed, like the other sacred images which included secondary writing: with labels or monograms identifying the figures or scenes portrayed, with texts on scrolls, with narrative captions. Most of the icons retain at least fragments of their inscriptions,214 but few of the inscriptions have been analysed in detail.215 Church doors Most of the categories of object in this survey are in some way typical, representative. One set of objects, however, merits special mention despite (or because of ) being highly exceptional: the fire-gilt west and south doors of the church of the Birth of the Mother of God in Suzdal, dating from about 1230. The Suzdal ‘Golden Doors’ are among the most opulent products of early Rus craftsmanship. Each door’s wooden core was plated with bronze, which in turn was coated with hard varnish. The varnish was then selectively scraped off to leave the requisite design in uncoated bronze, to which an amalgam of gold and mercury was applied and heated until the mercury evaporated. The technique was Byzantine. Fragmentary finds in and near Kiev, and in Riazan and Vladimir, indicate that fire-gilt craftwork was quite widely disseminated in Rus, but the only major examples to survive more or less intact from the pre-Mongol period are the Suzdal doors.216 The doors are decorated with an extraordinary density and delicacy, a tracery of gold and deep black hugging every surface and contour: the panels, the bosses, the cross-bands and multiple protuberances. Lines twine and intertwine, sometimes forming geometrical or floral patterns, sometimes thickening into fantastic beasts and birds.217 The flat panels display a total of forty-eight portrait narrative scenes: on the south doors, mainly deeds of the Archangel Michael, and on the west doors mainly from the life of the Mother of God. Add a dozen pairs of portraits of saints on the vertical banding, and we have 213 214

215

216 217

Kh. M. Loparev (ed.), ‘Kniga palomnik. Skazaniie mest sviatykh vo Tsaregrade’, Pravoslavnyi Palestinskii sbornik 51 (1899), 8; also below, pp. 251–2. The exceptions are Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, nos. 1–3, 6, 12, 18, 25–6. Ten of the inscriptions, from icons in the Tretiakov Gallery, are published in Gosudarstvennaia Tret
iakovskaia Gallereia. Katalog sobraniia. Tom I, nos. 6–11, 14–17. Four sets of pre-fourteenth-century inscriptions are analysed by M. G. Gal
chenko, Nadpisi na drevnerusskikh ikonakh XII–XV v.v. Paleograficheskii i grafiko-orfograficheskii analiz (Moscow, 1997), pp. 47–62. Fullest reproduction in A. N. Ovchinnikov, Suzdal
skie zolotye vrata (Moscow, 1978). See esp. G. K. Vagner, Belokamennaia rez
ba Drevnego Suzdalia. XIII vek. Rozhdestvenskii sobor (Moscow, 1975), pp. 97–141.

66

The graphic environment

some sixty figurative images. And virtually all of them are inscribed: quite lengthy descriptions on the south doors, more cursory labels on the west doors.218 A blend of the fixed and the mobile, the monumental (in overall size) and the miniature (in the size of each image), the public (in location) and the intimate (in proximity to the viewer), the prosaic (in function) and the spectacular (in execution), the ‘Golden Doors’ straddle – so to speak – the thresholds of genre. No other single set of objects from early Rus preserves such copious and complete combinations of image and inscription. Manuscript miniatures Inscriptions on miniatures within manuscript books can be considered specimens of secondary writing, generated through the production of the miniature (as object). There are of course many varieties of relationship between writing and illustration in manuscript books. For the moment we shall focus only on miniatures, ignoring marginalia and decorative initials and headpieces.219 Eighteen extant East Slav manuscript books from the mid-eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries contain figurative illustrations: two from the eleventh century, five from the twelfth century, seven others firmly located before the middle of the thirteenth century, a further four which perhaps fall within or around the mid-century boundary, and a further couple from the latter part of the century.220 Between them they yield a total of thirty-seven miniatures.221 To the list of internal survivals one might add at least two of the five eleventh-century miniatures in the Trier Psalter (also known as the Egbert Psalter).222 To underline the sparseness of 218 219

220

221

222

For publication and analysis of all the inscriptions, including persuasive arguments as to date, see Medyntseva, Podpisnye shedevry, pp. 144–213. For a succinct illustrated overview of the Byzantine context see Nancy Patterson ˇ cenko, ‘Illuminating the Liturgy: Illustrated Service Books in Byzantium’, in Linda Sevˇ Safran (ed.), Heaven on Earth. Art and the Church in Byzantium (Pennsylvania, 1998), pp. 186–228. For more on the relations between text and depiction in manuscripts see below, pp. 237–40. 11th century: SK, nos. 3, 4; 12th century: SK, nos. 51, 55, 117, 118, 129; c.1200–1250: SK, nos. 146, 147, 167, 175, 197, 199, 204; 13th century: SK, nos. 227, 268, 300, 311. Note that the count does not include decorative initials, headpieces and tailpieces, or occasional marginalia. Twenty are reproduced in O. Popova, Les miniatures russes du XIe au XVe si`ecle (Leningrad, 1975). See also G. I. Vzdornov, Iskusstvo knigi v Drevnei Rusi. Rukopisnaia kniga Severo-Vostochnoi Rusi XII–nachala XV vekov (Moscow, 1980), nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9. A Latin manuscript of the late tenth century with the addition (probably in the 1070s) of prayers and miniatures commissioned by Gertrude, Polish wife of Prince Iziaslav Iaroslavich of Kiev. Two of the miniatures include portraits identified with Gertrude and members of her family. See N. P. Kondakov, Izobrazhenie russkoi kniazheskoi sem
i

The written remains

67

the material: a catalogue of Byzantine dated illustrated manuscripts lists about 180 items for this period;223 the grand total of illustrated dated manuscripts from Rus is just four.224 All the miniatures are portraits, usually labelled: nineteen pictures of evangelists; thirteen of others associated with the composition of the relevant books (Romanos the Melode in a Kontakarion, David in a Psalter, groups of Fathers in a patristic miscellany); half a dozen donors (patrons). The tradition of manuscript illustration was possibly much richer. Later East Slav manuscripts include copious illustrations, at least some of which are conjectured to derive from early prototypes. A Slavonic manuscript of the Byzantine chronicle by George the Monk, dating from the early fourteenth (or perhaps late thirteenth century), contains 127 scenes of events in world history from Genesis down to the end of the fourth century.225 From the same period, the Simonov Psalter (also known as the Slavonic Khludov Psalter, not to be confused with the much older Greek Khludov Psalter) preserves 110 marginal illustrations.226 The fifteenth-century Radzivil Chronicle has 618 illustrations to accompany its narrative of the history of the Rus down to 1205.227 The sumptuous Kiev Psalter of 1397 (written in Kiev, but probably illuminated in Moscow) contains over 300 marginal illustrations which in manner, topic and arrangement are comparable with Byzantine illuminated Psalters of the eleventh century and earlier.228 Each of these manuscripts generates discussion as to whether their respective traditions of illustration did or did not have precursors in the pre-Mongol period.229

223 224 225 226 227

228 229

v miniatiurakh XI veka (St Petersburg, 1906); I. Spatharakis, The Portrait in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts (Leiden, 1976), pp. 39–43 and plates 13–14; F. K¨ampfer, Das russische Herrscherbild von den Anf¨angen bis zu Peter den Grossen. Studien zur Entwicklung politischer Ikonographie im byzantinischen Kulturkreis (Recklinghausen, 1978), pp. 121–9; E. S. Smirnova, ‘Miniatures in the Prayer Book of Princess Gertrude. Program. Dates. Painters’, Russia Mediaevalis 10 (2001), 5–21. See I. Spatharakis, Corpus of Dated Illuminated Greek Manuscripts to the year 1453. I. Text (Leiden, 1981), pp. 5–50. SK, nos. 3, 4, 55, 175. MS: GBL F.173, Fund. no.100; see Vzdornov, Iskusstvo knigi Drevnei Rusi, pp. 44–53. SK, no. 384. MS: BAN 34.5.30; complete facsimile, plus text, descriptions and studies: Radzivilovskaia letopis
. Faksimil
noe vosproizvedenie rukopisi. Tekst. Issledovanie. Opisanie miniatiur, ed. M. V. Kukushkina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1994). MS: GPB, OLDP F 6; see G. I. Vzdornov, Issledovanie o Kievskoi Psaltiri (Moscow, 1978), with full facsimile appended: Kievskaia Psaltir
1397 goda (Moscow, 1978). For example, B. A. Rybakov, ‘Miniatiury Radzivilovskoi letopisi i russkie litsevye rukopisi X–XII vv.’, in his, Iz istorii kul
tury Drevnei Rusi. Issledovaniia i zametki (Moscow, 1984), pp. 188–240; repr. in Radzivilovskaia letopis
, pp. 281–301, posits a succession of sixteen native illustrated chronicles starting in the tenth century! For a more restrained view, though still positing pre-Mongol traditions, see

68

The graphic environment

The inscribed illustrations in manuscript books are often more authentic than panel icons, preserving their original pigments, unblackened, not over-painted. Yet the conditions which are conducive to their preservation also diminish their significance for a survey of the graphic environment. Miniatures keep best when a book is closed. Even when the book is open in the relevant place, the interplay of the visual and the written is accessible only to the individual looking at the page. The primary writing in manuscript books could be translated into speech and broadcast to multitudes; the secondary writing in the illustrations was part of the private world of the reader or viewer.

The inventory of types of object with secondary writing shows its diversity and its widespread diffusion. What of its coherence? Diffuseness is not a distinctive quality. Apart from the relationship between writing and production, are there common features which characterise the uses of secondary writing in general? In the first place, the written messages are usually self-referential in some way, with regard to the object of which they are part. They allude to the owner or patron (‘Iaroslav’s silver’; ‘this is the goblet of Prince Vladimir Davidovich’ etc.), or to the maker (‘Iakov made [this]’; ‘Liudota the Blacksmith’), or to the nature of the object (e.g. a eulogy to the Cross, inscribed on a cross), or to its contents (e.g. saints’ names inscribed on a reliquary), or to the identity or utterances of characters or scenes depicted thereon (labels, captions). Primary writing may occasionally allude to the object of which it is part (e.g. scribal colophons), but in secondary writing self-allusion is a characteristic and near-standard feature. Secondly, most of the objects in this survey include pictures. Indeed, as we said at the start, sometimes the inventory of objects with secondary writing may give the impression that it is actually an inventory of objects with pictures. The impression would be both fair and false. Most objects with secondary writing include pictures, but by no means all objects with pictures include secondary writing. The Rus had a rich culture of figurative imagery without writing. For example, a description of Novgorodian ‘jewellery’ presents and illustrates over 800 prettily fashioned pins and bangles, rings and jangles including medallions with strutting birds, another with a rather puzzled-looking lion, and hooked metallic ornaments with fantastic winged beasts.230 Except for the types of object already listed above (snake amulets, pendant crosses),231 none bears any trace

230 231

O. I. Podobedova, Miniatiury russkikh istoricheskikh rukopisei. K istorii russkogo litsevogo letopisaniia (Moscow, 1965). Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia; for the birds, lion and beasts see figs. 5, 28, 63. Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia, figs. 16–24.

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69

of writing. An excellent analysis and categorisation of early ‘zoomorphic’ ornaments presents about 250 objects, mainly metallic, including pendants in the shape of birds and horned beasts, cockerels and horses’ heads, ducks and rabbits, even mounted riders; and not an inscription in sight.232 Passing from the zoomorphic to the anthropomorphic, an inventory of images would have to include the quaintly expressive dancers, musicians, fishermen, hunters and drinkers depicted on several wide-banded silver niello bracelets;233 the cloisonn´e enamel female heads – possibly with local aristocratic headgear – on gold medallions found in Kiev and, quite recently, in a hoard in Riazan;234 the Ascension of Alexander the Great, on a spectacular twelfth-century gold and cloisonn´e enamel diadem in Kiev;235 the bearded and moustached figure (possibly the pagan deity Perun) perched on a metal shaft – and another dangling from a ring – from excavations of twelfth-century Novgorod;236 the gargoyles and humans (including another Ascension of Alexander the Great) carved on the facades of the white-stone churches of the north-east.237 Secondary writing was a normal attribute only of certain types of objects with figurative images (or of objects only with certain types of figurative images), while other types of objects with figurative images never display secondary writing. The difference lies in the subject, the context, and the provenance. Secondary writing, when used in conjunction with pictures, was a specific and characteristic feature of objects which displayed Christian imagery and which were derived from Byzantine prototypes. The production of secondary writing was largely fuelled by the demand for Christian images. The imagery could be Christian in the broad promotional sense (e.g. ruler portraits, donor portraits, even snake amulets) as well as in the narrow devotional sense (saints, Christ, the Mother of God), but secondary writing did not cross the barrier of provenance. Even when not used with pictures, secondary writing was conservative, limited to objects initially produced in imitation of foreign equivalents which themselves were produced with secondary writing (the inscribed sword-blades, stamps on bricks). When accompanying pictures, secondary writing was not adopted into the production of objects with 232 233 234 235 236

237

E. A. Riabinin, Zoomorfnye ukrasheniia Drevnei Rusi X–XIV vv. (ASSSR SAI, E1–60; Leningrad, 1981). Makarova, Chernevoe delo Drevnei Rusi, pp. 64–99, nos. 207, 208, 210, 214, 217, 222, 223; from Tver, Kiev and Riazan. See V. P. Darkevich nd G. V. Borisevich, Drevniaia stolitsa riazanskoi zemli (Moscow, 1995), pp. 72–4 (figs. 37–8); cf. Rybakov, Russkoe prikladnoe iskusstvo, p. 46 (fig. 51). Rybakov, Russkoe prikladnoe iskusstvo, pp. 43–5 (figs. 46–8). Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia pp. 175–6 (figs. 75, 76). For other ‘pagan’ figures see also V. V. Sedov, Vostochnye slaviane v VI–XIII vv. (Moscow, 1982), pp. 286–9, tables LXXIII– LXXVI. Vagner, Skul
ptura Drevnei Rusi. XII vek. Vladimir. Bogoliubovo.

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native, non-Christian traditions of representation. The very presence of writing with or in the pictures was therefore a distinctive marker, an emblem by which to differentiate at a glance the cultural status of the image on the object which bore it. Thirdly, and partly in consequence, specimens of secondary writing are often textually difficult or flawed, in ways which cast doubt on the extent to which they functioned as ‘textual’ messages at all. Many of the portrait labels are conventional monograms rather than full script; Slavonic mingles with Greek; errors abound; mirror reversal is not unusual; occasionally the lettering is not even lettering but merely a series of letter-like signs and marks.238 Taken individually, each example of such difficulties might have a local explanation: skilled craftsmen produce esoteric forms for erudite viewers; ignorant craftsmen miscopy inscriptions which they do not properly understand; careless craftsmen knowingly produce or reproduce manifest nonsense. But whatever the immediate cause in each case, the cumulative implication is clear: secondary writing, when used in conjunction with images (i.e. most of the time) had functions which were not purely – perhaps not primarily – textual. The writing was part of the picture, to be read as graphic emblem, as ideogram, rather than as letters which represented words. At the logical extreme – imitation writing – it was reduced to being emblematic of itself. Secondary writing with images was the most widely disseminated, multi-contextual and familiar mode of visible writing in the graphic environment, probably reaching a broader section of the population than any other. It is distinct from primary writing not only in its mode of production but also, usually, in the way it functions as graphic sign, in the balance of its textual and visual semantics, in its meanings as part of the object.

Tertiary writing Objects with tertiary writing are not made specifically to be written on, nor is writing part of the process of their production. Tertiary writing is a later addition to objects which already exist for other purposes. Much (not all) of tertiary writing could be described as graffiti, though we should be wary of the modern social and generic assumptions associated with the term. In this section, as in the last, we summarise the main categories of material, before considering some of the general characteristics of this type of writing in Rus. 238

See below, pp. 246–8.

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Church walls Science has yet to explain the force exerted by blank walls on implements of writing. From prison cells to public monuments, from pocket-knives to spray-cans, from Pompeii to the New York subway, the temptation to scratch, gouge or daub lettering on walls seems almost universal.239 Rus was no exception. For the evidence, look closely at the plaster of almost any church wall. Publication of early Rus graffiti is far from complete or systematic, but the current corpus is eloquent enough, with material from buildings throughout the lands of the Rus:240 from Kiev (St Sophia, the Church of the Dormition at the Caves monastery, the church of St Michael at the Vydubichi monastery, the church of the Saviour at Berestovo, the church of St Cyril, the Golden Gates);241 from Novgorod (St Sophia,242 the Iurev monastery, the church of the Saviour at Nereditsa); from Polotsk (St Sophia, Evfrosiniia’s monastery of the Saviour), Staraia Ladoga, Galich,243 Smolensk,244 Suzdal,245 Riazan.246 The total number of published graffiti attributed to this period is about five hundred, mostly (around 80 per cent) from the two largest and best preserved churches – St Sophia in Kiev and St Sophia in Novgorod. Dates, however, are rarely certain. A few graffiti give their own dates, others can sometimes be dated approximately with reference to aspects of the history of the relevant building such as layers of plaster or painting, but mostly the estimates of dates depend on palaeographic analysis. Except perhaps for the main apse, no part of a church seems to have been exempt. Clusters of graffiti can be found in side-apses and under arches, in the aisles, up staircases, in the gallery, on the walls outside, even high up under the dome in places which would only have been accessible from scaffolding (i.e. during construction or decoration). However, in Kiev there was apparently a pronounced preponderance of graffiti on the southern side of the nave (plausibly explained as the area reserved for 239 240 241 242 243

244 245 246

For a popular overview see e.g. Robert Reisner, Graffiti. Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing (Chicago, 1971). The list includes graffiti recorded before the destruction of the buildings in which they were found in the middle of the twentieth century. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I–III. A. A. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi Novgorodskogo Sofiiskogo sobora (Moscow, 1978). T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh khramov. Novye istochniki XI– XV vv. (St Petersburg, 1992), nos. 1–6, 8–17, 22, 24–9, 34–5, 38–40, 47, 51–3, 55–6, 76–82, 84–6. N. N. Voronin, ‘Smolenskie graffiti’, SA (1964, no. 2), 171–8; also RDN, pp. 35–6 (no. 34). See M. V. Sedova, ‘Epigraficheskie nakhodki iz Suzdalia’, KSIA 190 (1987), 7–13. A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Epigraficheskie nakhodki iz Staroi Riazani’, in B. A. Timoshchuk (ed.), Drevnosti slavian i rusi (Moscow, 1988), pp. 247–56.

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men, with women on the northern side) and in the side-apses (most likely frequented by clergy).247 Most of the graffiti can be assigned to more or less regularly recurring types, although the nature of graffiti is such that no set of categories quite catches everything:248 (i) Graffiti which merely record their own creation and creator. This is by far the largest group, in which a typical graffito consists of just a name, or ‘X wrote [this]’, sometimes with brief supplementary data on the writer or the occasion (‘Vlas wrote this: poor, but rich in sins’; ‘Stefan wrote [this] on Monday of Easter week’; ‘Ivan wrote [this] with his left hand’).249 (ii) Votive graffiti, with appeals to God (‘Lord, help thy servant X’) or, less frequently, to the saint to whom the church or side-chapel is dedicated or on whose wall-painted portrait the graffito is scratched. Again, there are occasional scraps of supplementary information (‘Lord, help thy servant Farman, Gleb’s otrok’; ‘Lord, help thy servant Kuzma, sinful presbyter, and forgive me, Lord, my many sins’; ‘Lord, help thy servant Stavr, thy unworthy servant . . . Stavr Gorodiatinich wrote [this]’; or, remarkably, ‘Lord, help thy servant Olisava, Princess of Rus, Sviatopolk’s mother’).250 (iii) Commemorative graffiti, recording events. These can be subdivided: (a) Concerning death. About twenty of the graffiti consist of brief funerary or commemorative notices.251 The usual formula includes the name, the month and the day (‘On 22 August X died’). The year is commonly recorded only in the later notices, from the thirteenth century. The sole exception – apparently – among earlier notices is the earliest of all: an inscription recording the death of ‘our tsar’ (assumed to be Iaroslav Vladimirovich, Prince of Kiev) on 20 February 1054.252 Such biographical hints as exist suggest that, again with the exception 247

248

249 250

251

252

See the frequency-charts in Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 134–5 and II, pp. 132–3. Because fewer women could write? Or because fewer women were inclined to scrawl on the walls? These categories do not exactly replicate the thematic scheme applied by Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, p. 307 (table IV) or the (different) scheme by which Vysotskii (Nadpisi I-II) arranges his catalogues; cf. also the ‘generic’ analysis of graffiti by T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Sofiia Kievskaia kak pamiatnik pis
mennosti’, in Otechestvennaia filosofskaia mysl
XI–XVII vv. i grecheskaia kul
tura. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Kiev, 1991), pp. 37–44. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, nos. 180 (cf. the same formula in Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 24), 152; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, no. 13. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, no. 167; Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, nos. 18–19, 27; II, no. 135; for addresses to the saints portrayed see Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, nos. 39–48; II, nos. 109–11, 156–72; also below, p. 244 and plate 7. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, nos. 8, 10–12, 49–50, 52, 53–4(?); II, nos. 152, 212–13(?); Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, nos. 82, 137, 190; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, nos. 15–17, 81–2, 85. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 8.

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of ‘our tsar’,253 the deceased were members of the clergy or their relatives, or monks: Luka, Bishop of Belgorod; Kirill, Metropolitan of Kiev; Petr the subdeacon; Anna, wife of the priest Semen; the hegumen Klimentii; Isaia(?) from the church of St Blasios; the monk Sevastian; the wife of Kuzma the icon-painter. (b) Concerning actions. A small but varied group of about a dozen graffiti, noting such occurrences as a visit by a prince or princess, the arrival of a metropolitan, an illness, the appointment of a bishop, the start of building works, a peace-conference of princes.254 (c) Concerning transactions. Two of the published graffiti are constructed in the manner of formal documents: a detailed account of the sale of a piece of land, in St Sophia in Kiev; and an inscription from the church of St Panteleimon in Galich, apparently recording the prince’s judgement in the case of a Pole held responsible for debts incurred by builders.255 (iv) Sub-literary graffiti: quotations, prayers, sayings, epigrams, insults. Most graffiti are, in a sense, quotations, in that the formulae of expression tend to be fairly constant. Then as now certain formulae become established for the medium, so that most graffiti follow the structure of expression of other graffiti. However, one of the delights of the genre is its eclecticism. Nothing is excluded, and graffito-writers can pick their models where they will: reverent or irreverent, earnest or flippant, sacred or profane. Thus on the walls of the churches of Rus one can find, for example: allusions to prayers and segments of hymns;256 pithy declarations of spiritual wisdom (‘He who sits in obedience to his [spiritual] father is better than he who abides in the wilderness’; ‘A mother unwillingly chastises her child; God unwillingly castigates man with afflictions’);257 folksy allegories and riddles (e.g. the bell-riddle ‘son of iron, breast of stone, head of bronze, jaws of lime-wood’);258 bantering catch-phrases 253

254 255 256

257

258

Note, however, Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 4, recording the placing of the sarcophagus of Prince Andrei (Vsevolod?) on Maundy Thursday 14 April (1093?); also Vysotskii’s conjecture that no. 151 relates to the death of Vsevolod’s son Vladimir (Monomakh). Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, nos. 3–7, 9; II, no. 112; III, no. 307; Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, nos. 29, 184; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, no. 5. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 25; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, no. 86. E.g. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 23; II, nos. 119, 135, 156; Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, nos. 206, 208–10; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, no. 76; cf. the fragment of a eulogy to the Cross in an inscription from Suzdal: RDN, p. 34 and plate XV (no. 32). Vysotskii, Nadpisi II, nos. 128, 108; on the sources of these texts see Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, pp. 142–8; A. A. Turilov, ‘Zametki o kievskikh graffiti’, in Lingvisticheskoe istochnikovedenie i istoriia russkogo iazyka (2000) (Moscow, 2000), pp. 35–6. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, no. 199; cf. no. 203 and the interpretation by T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Drevnerusskaia epigrafika X–XIII vv. Tekst i norma’, Russian Linguistics 17 (1993), 170–3; also Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, no. 73.

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and fragments (‘Iakim will doze standing up, and won’t even smash his mouth on a stone’; ‘Kuzma poisoned the piglet’).259 Only obscenities seem to be missing, though further investigation may yet reveal more than is apparent in the existing publications.260 Wall-writing is a single medium with multiple genres and functions, from the quasi-scurrilous to the quasi-official. For all their brevity, the graffiti are valuable and varied sources on the history of the buildings (for example, they reveal the names of those working on the decoration),261 of the language, of conventions of expression, of the ways in which those who served and those who attended services in the churches of Rus contributed to their own graphic environment. Monumental stones Secondary and tertiary writing are adjacent fields without a clearly marked boundary. The lettering on monumental inscribed stone crosses counts as secondary writing, part of the production of the object. Lettering carved into pre-existing stones should probably count as tertiary writing, although it could be argued that the very presence of writing turns the stone into a different kind of object, in effect produces a new object with writing as an integral part of its production, and that the writing is therefore ‘secondary’. To take an analogy: in Athens in the fifth century  writing scratched on a fragment of pot (in principle, tertiary writing) could turn the fragment into a new type of object, an ostrakon or ballot-slip, where the writing is an integral part of the production (hence secondary). The paradox is curious but in this instance the distinction is not crucial. Seven massive boulders strewn around the Polotsk land, the largest about 17 metres in circumference, are collectively known as the ‘Dvina stones’, or the ‘Boris stones’. Both labels are slightly misleading, since only four of the stones are actually located along the river Dvina, and one of them is not directly associated with any Boris. Four of the stones preserve relatively complete and legible inscriptions.262 In each case the centrepiece is an enormous cross flanked by abbreviated elements of the conventional Greek legend proclaiming Christ’s victory. On three of the boulders the inscription on either side of the stem of the cross reads 259 260

261 262

Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, no. 136; Vysotskii, Nadpisi II, no. 123 (with a different interpretation). See V. Orel, ‘“Unofficial” Old Russian Graffiti in Kiev’, ZSl 41 (1996), 166–70. Besides the above categories, occasional graffiti include alphabetical doodles, exclamations, sums and calculations: see Vysotskii, Nadpisi II, no. 100, the over-celebrated ‘Sophia alphabet’; Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, nos. 5, 124, 146, 183, 204, 205, 234, 237; Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh, no. 23. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, pp. 32–61 (nos. 11–35). RDN, pp. 26–7, 33 and plates XIV, XV (nos. 20–2, 29). See below, plate 5.

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‘Lord help thy servant Boris.’ The fourth is more elaborate: a circular inscription on what was probably a recycled dolmen, recording that the carving of the cross was completed on 7 May 1171, and continuing ‘Lord help thy servant Rogvolod, in baptism Vasilii, son of Boris.’ These monumental inscribed boulders are thus associated with two men, father and son. ‘Boris’ was in fact another Rogvolod (Boris being his baptismal name) – Rogvolod Vseslavich, Prince of Polotsk for about a year from early autumn 1127. Why should Rogvolod / Boris p`ere and Rogvolod / Vasilii fils have set up these hugely prominent and (in the Rus context) unconventional inscribed monuments? What was their function along the riverbanks rather than in towns? They cannot be intended as boundary stones, for they mark no boundaries. A plausible conjecture, though no more than a conjecture, is that the elder Rogvolod set up his monumental declaration of piety in an attempt to mitigate or end a famine which had started in the summer of 1127, and that he chose to inscribe the boulders as a means of colonising for Christianity the sacred sites of paganism. If so, then the presence of writing would indeed transform the function of the object. More celebrated, smaller, and more isolated, is the ‘Tmutorokan stone’: a slab of antique marble, discovered in 1792, perhaps from the base of an ancient statue, with an inscription announcing that in the year 6576 (probably a ‘September’ year, running from 1 September 1067 to 31 August 1068) Prince Gleb (Sviatoslavich) measured the distance across the ice from Tmutorokan to Kerch – i.e. that he had measured the straits of Kerch – and found that it came to 14,000 sazhens. The stone is unique. Its contents, its material, its early date, and the date of its discovery (in an age of forgeries), have all caused its authenticity to be questioned, but the fullest analyses suggest that the inscription is genuine.263 Pots The most debilitating disease for a classical or medieval archaeologist would be an allergy to fragments of pots. Bits of broken pot turn up everywhere: pots for cooking, pots for storage, pretty pots and heavy-duty pots, pots for transport and trade. And in excavations in and around Rus some of the fragments of pot – a small proportion – bear scratch-marks; and some of the scratch-marks form letters, in a few cases multiple letters, in a very few cases complete words. The ‘full’ inscriptions, with complete words, usually refer to the contents (‘wine’, ‘oil’) or to the owner’s name, occasionally to exterior circumstances (‘Bogunka sent the new “Dobrilo” wine to the prince’). 263

A. A. Medyntseva, Tmutorokanskii kamen
(Moscow, 1979).

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Such graffiti seem to be found only on one type of vessel: on amphorae, double-handled pots used for the storage and transport of goods. Follow the trail of broken amphorae, and one follows the routes of trade and exchange. Pot-graffiti were, of course, traditional among the Rus’s Greek-speaking suppliers and trading partners in the south: classical and medieval Greek graffiti are found on pots in Greek settlements in the Crimea.264 Though few in number, the Cyrillic-inscribed fragments of amphorae are widely distributed: from Pinsk and Novogrudok through Gnezdovo (old Smolensk) to Suzdal and Riazan, from Kiev and Belgorod to Beloozero,265 and further afield in Tmutorokan and in the Khazar capital of Sarkel.266 Pot-graffiti are among the very earliest extant specimens of East Slav writing. The Gnezdovo fragment – most plausibly interpreted as referring to the owner, Gorun – is reckoned to date from the early tenth century.267 A fragment from Belgorod near Kiev, which bears both a Slavonic inscription and a runic inscription, may date from the late tenth or early eleventh century.268 Three fragments from Tmutorokan probably date to the late tenth century, although at least two of them are more likely to be Greek than Slavonic; three fragments from Sarkel, at least one of which renders a Slavonic word-form in Greek letters, may date from the first half of the eleventh century.269 The distribution, the dates, the contents, and the multilingual or multiscriptal inscriptions (Greek, Slavonic-in-Greek, Slavonic-in-Cyrillic, runic) attest to the mercantile context of this use of writing, and make the inscribed amphorae peculiarly significant – despite their scarcity – for the early history of the graphic environment. Silver coins and ingots From about the middle of the eleventh century (just after the short-lived experiment with native coins, and in a period of decline in the supply 264 265 266

267 268

269

See e.g. E. I. Solomonik, Graffiti s khory Khersonesa (Kiev, 1984); A. I. Romanchuk, ‘Graffiti na srednevekovoi keramike iz Khersonesa’, SA (1986, no. 4), 171–82. See Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 21–52; Sedova, ‘Epigraficheskie nakhodki iz Suzdalia’, pp. 8–9; also Vysotskii, Nadpisi III, nos. 408–15. A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Nadpisi na amphornoi keramike X–nachala XI v. i problema proiskhozhdeniia drevnerusskoi pis
mennosti’, in Kul
tura slavian i Rus
(Moscow, 1998), pp. 176–95. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 21–31. Others have interpreted it as referring to the contents (‘mustard’, or some such). Medyntseva, ‘Nadpisi na amphornoi keramike’, pp. 189–90 (the Slavonic inscription), pp. 194–5 (the runic inscription), although others date this piece somewhat later. On runes in Rus see below, pp. 110–15. Medyntseva, ‘Nadpisi na amphornoi keramike’, pp. 178–85.

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of imported coins)270 the Rus began to produce an alternative form of metallic exchange-token: standard-weight silver ingots – grivnas – which might function as coins in high-value transactions. Just over a thousand such ingots have been discovered and examined. To complicate matters, there were at least three different standards: the ‘Kievan’ grivna, weighing about 164 g; the ‘Novgorodian’ and ‘north-eastern’ grivnas weighing about 204 g; and the ‘North-Rus’ or, confusingly, ‘Chernigov-type’ grivna, weighing about 196 g.271 The Novgorodian grivna was in use continuously from the late eleventh or early twelfth century right through to the fifteenth, while the other types ceased to be used after the thirteenth century. A small proportion both of the dirhams and of the locally produced silver ingots bear graffiti: grooves, crosses and other signs, letters, complete words. The letter-graffiti on the dirhams are runic, products of the early Scandinavian trade with the East.272 The letter-graffiti on the silver grivnas are Slavonic, signs of local production and use.273 They consist either of individual letters or of names or abbreviations of names (‘Tikhota’, ‘Byliata’, ‘Seliata’, ‘Iliia’). The names can be in the nominative case, but also in the genitive or dative (‘of’ or ‘for’ the person) or in the possessive adjectival form (‘belonging to’),274 so there is little doubt that the names refer to the owners. Several of the ingots are marked with more than one graffito, written by more than one person, reflecting their passage from owner to owner. They therefore reflect usage, and not – as had once been conjectured – production.275 The distribution of graffiti is uneven. Only about 3% of the Kiev-type ingots are inscribed, by contrast with about 18% of the North-Rus type and about 15% of the Novgorod type.276 Did northerners have particular ways of doing business, which encouraged the individual marking of ingots? Or were they, by comparison with their southern counterparts, simply more accustomed and inclined to scratch 270 271 272 273

274 275 276

See above, pp. 50–2. For a convenient table of types with weights and dates and quantities see N. F. Kotliar, ‘Severnorusskie (“chernigovskie”) monetnye grivny’, DGVEMI 1994 god (1996), p. 87. See below, pp. 112–4. The fullest catalogue, based on 477 ‘Novgorod’ grivnas (many of which, however, date from after 1300): M. P. Sotnikova, ‘Epigrafika serebriannykh platezhnykh slitkov Velikogo Novgoroda XII–XV vv.’ Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha. IV. Numizmatika (1961, no. 2), 44–91; descriptions and photographs of 34 ‘North-Rus’ grivnas in Kotliar, ‘Severnorusskie (“chernigovskie”) monetnye grivny’, pp. 109–34 (descriptions by A. A. Medyntseva). Sotnikova’s classification of the Novgorod-type graffiti. E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Epigrafika drevnerusskikh platezhnykh slitkov (v sviazi s nadpisiami na grivnakh klada iz Biurge, Gotland)’, DGVEMI 1994 god, pp. 143–50. Mel
nikova, ‘Epigrafika drevnerusskikh platezhnykh slitkov’, p. 144; note also the wide variation in the incidence of graffiti among grivnas from different hoards.

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their names on what belonged to them? Any answer is conjectural, but the uneven distribution of graffiti on ingots does make one wonder whether the broader preponderance of northern specimens of writing really is merely an accident of survival or whether it mirrors genuine regional variation in the acquisition and uses of writing. Silver goblets Those who commissioned precious objects could ensure that their largesse was recorded by suitable inscriptions during the process of production.277 Those who acquired precious objects might similarly wish to record their ownership, or the value of their acquisition. The former are commemorated in elegantly crafted secondary writing, the latter – like the new owners of silver ingots – in scratched tertiary writing. Four imported goblets (from Byzantium and Western Europe) bear faintly scratched Cyrillic lettering on their stems or bases. Two of them record that the relevant goblet was the property of the prince; a third apparently belonged to a certain Naum, while the fourth is inscribed with the information that it cost (or weighed) 35 grivnas.278 Spindle whorls Every spindle needs a whorl. The standard early Rus spindle was a rounded stick about 25–30 cm long, bulging in the middle and tapering at the ends. The spindle whorl was a weight with a hole in it. The hole fitted the spindle a few centimetres up from the base, and the purpose was to aid the momentum and balance of the spindle as it spun.279 The weight could be of stone, clay, bone or metal, but the most popular material seems to have been pink slate. The pink slate was obtained from Ovruch (north-west of Kiev), perhaps brought to Kiev to be made into spindle whorls, and then exported across the lands. Production was on a large scale. In virtually any urban excavation of an early Rus site one may expect to find a fair quantity of pink-slate spindle whorls. Many thousands have been unearthed, and some of them – again a small proportion – are inscribed. Inscribed spindle whorls have been excavated in Kiev, Vyshgorod, Liubech, Terebovl, Drutsk, Vitebsk, Grodno, Volkovysk, Pinsk, Riazan, Suzdal, Beloozero, Gorodishche and Novgorod:280 a total of thirty 277 279 280

278 Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 114–22. See above, pp. 57–8. On early Rus spinning see B. A. Kolchin (ed.), Drevniaia Rus
. Gorod, zamok, selo (Moscow, 1985), pp. 265–9, 292 (table 108). A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Gramotnost
zhenshchin na Rusi XI–XIII po dannym epigrafii’, in B. A. Rybakov (ed.), Slovo o polku Igoreve i ego vremia (Moscow, 1985), pp. 218–40;

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inscriptions, not many in each location, but sufficient to establish a pattern. Apart from graffiti consisting of individual letters or alphabetic sequences of letters,281 all the decipherable inscriptions relate to ownership: usually names (‘Molodilo’; ‘Nastasiia’s spindle whorl’; ‘Nastka’s’), sometimes status (‘granny’s spindle whorl’; ‘the prince’s’; ‘the bride’s’), occasionally circumstances (‘Ianka gave this spindle whorl to Zhirka’; ‘Ivanko found [this]’) or a votive formula (‘Lord, help thy servant Nedana’). On the face of things the inscribed spindle whorls reveal a casually domestic use of writing, writing in the home, writing in women’s occupations, writing in the family (‘Ivanko made this for you, his only daughter’). Suggestive though such inscriptions are, we should not be too hasty to accept an image of legions of simple Rus women spinning and reading and scratching their names on their spindle whorls. In the first place, inscriptions on spindle whorls remain rare and their social context is probably restricted, as suggested by the two inscriptions referring to the prince.282 Secondly, even the most homely touches may not quite be what they seem. The inscription ‘granny’s spindle whorl’ (babino priasl
ne; babin
priasl
n
), like ‘the prince’s’ (as well as the names Ivanko and Nastka/Nastasiia), occurs twice, on objects found a long way from one another.283 The relatively high incidence of repetition – in a small corpus – may be mere coincidence, but it points to the possibility that the inscriptions may not mean literally what they appear to mean. For example, rather than marking granny’s spindle whorl so that the poor dear has it returned to her when she loses it, perhaps the label refers to a type. Thirdly, and more substantially, domestic use, though of course the primary function of a spindle whorl, was perhaps not its only function. Why should spindle whorls, alone among domestic objects, have attracted clusters of inscriptions? As relatively standard commodities in wide circulation, pink-slate spindle whorls may have served also as objects of exchange, as one of the many forms of currency.284 Wood A deal is done. Money is loaned or borrowed. How can the two parties securely record their agreement? Take a rounded stick of wood and cut

281 282 283 284

NGB IX, pp. 113–14; Sedova, ‘Epigraficheskie nakhodki iz Suzdalia’, p. 10; integrated catalogue in Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 52–68. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 56, 64 (nos. 5, 21). Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 58, 61–2 (nos. 11, 16). Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi, pp. 58, 64 (nos. 10, 26). See V. A. Mal
m, ‘Shifernye priaslitsa i ikh ispol
zovanie’, in Istoriia i kul
tura vostochnoi Evropy po arkheologicheskim dannym (Moscow, 1971), pp. 197–206.

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notches into it, the number and width or depth of the notches to represent sums of money paid or owed. Then split the stick in half lengthways, with the line of the split running along the mid-point of the notches. Each half will retain a pattern of notches precisely matching the other, so that those who did the deal can each receive their half of the uniquely paired record. ‘Tally-sticks’, or simply ‘tallies’, are well known from medieval Western Europe.285 Tallies do not have to be inscribed. Their notches are, in a sense, their inscription. Separate lettering on one half only is superfluous or at best supplementary. Nevertheless inscribed tallies do occur. Eight from Rus have been published, ranging in date from the mid-eleventh to the mid-fifteenth centuries, all from excavations in Novgorod.286 The inscriptions amplify the information conveyed by the notches: the name of one of the parties, the sums, the type of goods in the transaction. Take another rounded piece of wood, about 7 or 8 centimetres long and about 5 centimetres in diameter. Drill a channel through the centre lengthways to form a hollow cylinder, and then a second channel through the diameter, intersecting with the first. Secure a sack of goods with a cord, thread the two ends of the cord through opposite ends of the wooden cylinder, bring them out through the central hole in the side, tie them with a knot, hammer a wooden wedge through this hole, and cut the ends of the wedge flush with the sides of the cylinder. Your goods are now secure. The ‘seal’ can be broken only by cutting the cord or by breaking the cylinder. Finally, you may choose to gouge a message into the sides of the cylinder, indicating the value or owner or provenance of the goods. Over fifty such cylinder-seals have been discovered in the Novgorodian excavations, including a large cache on a single site in 1999.287 Fifteen are inscribed, and the inscriptions point very clearly to the context in which the seals were used. Some are marked with the dynastic trident emblem. One is labelled ‘the prince’s’. Some name the owner. And at least six of the inscriptions refer directly to administrative officers: the emets or, most frequently, the mechnik.288 The site with the large cache of cylinder-seals would seem to be some kind of focus of administrative activity, and a 285 286

287

288

See, with reference to England, Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 96 and plate VIII. V. L. Ianin, ‘Nadpisi na dereviannykh “schetnykh” birkakh’, in NGB VIII, pp. 81–6. Three of them fall within our period: nos. 4 (late 13th century), 7 (c.1200), 8 (early to mid-11th century). On the use of tallies in Rus see Thomas S. Noonan and R. K. Kovalev, ‘What can Archaeology Tell Us About How Debts Were Documented and Collected in Kievan Rus
?’, Russian History 27 (2000), 131–5, with announcements of further forthcoming articles on the subject by Kovalev. V. L. Ianin, U istokov novgorodskoi gosudarstvennosti (Novgorod, 2001), pp. 93–150. The description of the cylinders’ use follows Ianin’s conjecture based on experiment with a model. See below, plate 6. The emets: cylinder no. 1; the mechnik: cylinder nos. 6, 19, 21, 30, 50.

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81

principal function of the seals was to secure bags of goods (tribute, fees) collected on official business. One of the inscriptions (cylinder no. 7) appears to allude to a division of dues which corresponds exactly to the proportion allocated to the mechnik in the provisions of the law-code Russkaia Pravda.289 Two inscriptions (cylinder nos. 19, 30) even name the place from which the dues have been collected. We might conjecture that in Novgorodian administration these wooden cylinder-seals were in some respects functionally analogous to the lead ‘Drogichin seals’ in the western borderlands.290 Stratigraphy and palaeography indicate that some of the inscribed wooden cylinder-seals are notably early. The majority are ascribed to the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, but at least three (nos. 6, 7, 50) are thought to be significantly earlier, in two cases (nos. 6 and 7) perhaps as early as the 970s or 980s, which would place them among the very oldest of all surviving specimens of East Slav writing. Varia Finally, there are the odds and ends, the miscellaneous individual inscribed objects which form no particularly coherent group or subcategory: the name(?) ‘Slovisha’ on a musical instrument (gusli ); ‘Zavid’s comb’; letters scratched on the base of a wooden tub, the name ‘Marfa’ on a fragment of a whetstone;291 a wooden panel divided into four sections on each side, each section scored with the names of the figures whom the icon-painter is to depict (‘paint Jesus here’, ‘Clement’, ‘Michael’ etc.);292 a jeweller’s stone moulds inscribed with the name ‘Maksim’;293 an unworked piece of granite from Smolensk with an inscription noting the death of a monk.294

Like secondary writing, tertiary writing is diverse; but also like secondary writing, its uses turn out to follow certain general (though not obligatory) 289 290 291 292

293

294

Ianin, ‘U istokov novgorodskoi gosudarstvennosti, pp. 35–43. On Russkaia Pravda see below, pp. 156–9. See above, n. 141. On the administrative context of the Novgorod seals see Ianin, U istokov novgorodskoi gosudarstvennosti, pp. 6–92. See NGB IX, pp. 112–22. A. V. Artsikhovskii, ‘Zagotovka ikony iz Novgoroda’, in Vizantiia. Iuzhnye slaviane i Drevniaia Rus
. Zapadnaia Evropa. Iskusstvo i kul
tura. Sbornik statei v chest
V. N. Lazareva (Moscow, 1973), pp. 199–202. A. A. Medyntseva, ‘O liteinykh formochkakh s nadpisiami Maksima’, in Drevniaia Rus
i slaviane (Moscow, 1978), pp. 378–82: two from Serensk, one from Kiev, but inscribed apparently in the same hand. RDN, pp. 9–10 (no. 44) and plate XV.

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patterns. Objects with tertiary writing fall into two broad groups: the moveable and the immoveable, or the portable and the fixed. If we are mainly concerned with the palaeography of inscriptions, or with the history of language, or even with content of inscriptions, there is no real distinction between the two groups. But if we are concerned with context and function, the distinction between portable and fixed objects is substantial. A plain list of portable objects with tertiary writing suggests at first sight a degree of randomness, a delightfully casual and unsystematic quality that one might indeed have expected from graffiti: writing in the home, at work, at play; writing in domestic and commercial crafts, writing among men and among women; writing which personalises the impersonal, turns an object into a possession, writing as a means of appropriation; writing on any surface hard enough to bear and retain it. In practice, however, most of the specimens of portable tertiary writing are not random doodles on any object which happens to come to hand. Certainly there are some random examples, but in general the evidence appears in clusters, on particular types of object used for particular purposes in particular socioeconomic contexts. Objects with tertiary writing are, in the main, linked with commerce and exchange: objects with a standard exchange value, such as coins and silver ingots, and perhaps also slate spindle whorls; objects for storing or packaging exchangeable commodities, such as amphorae, or the inscribed wooden cylinders; objects recording exchange, such as tally-sticks; even objects used for making valuable commodities, such as the jeweller’s moulds. To an extent, the surprising feature of tertiary writing is not that it was so widespread but that its uses were so coherent and relatively consistent. If one accepts the chronological conclusions of stratigraphists and epigraphists, several of the portable objects with tertiary writing are notable for their early dates. There are pot-graffiti, tallies and wooden cylinder-seals ascribed to the tenth century. These are not products of a coordinated drive for literacy in primary writing such as Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich is alleged to have initiated after he ‘officially’ converted his people to Christianity. Nor are they objects produced by single decision from above, such as Vladimir’s inscribed coins with secondary writing. The early specimens of tertiary writing are the results of individual, uncoordinated decisions, of a recognition, albeit in fairly limited spheres, that in trade and exchange and financial enforcement, Slavonic tertiary writing could be helpful in the conduct of business. And the chronology of the surviving evidence suggests that tertiary Slavonic writing may well have appeared in Rus earlier than either primary or secondary Slavonic writing: that perhaps, in strictly chronological terms, tertiary writing was, so to speak, primary.

2

Scripts and languages

The Rus wrote in Slavonic and used the Cyrillic script. And that, up to a point, is that. But the adequacy of generalisations depends on distance: from the air a green field is grass, to a summer walker it is grass and wild flowers and insects, but for a botanist or zoologist such trite statements barely begin to hint at the complexity that may be revealed through closer scrutiny. What to some is a sufficient conclusion is to others merely the starting point for investigation. Thus the statement that the Rus wrote in Slavonic and used the Cyrillic script is both true and misleading, a reasonable summary and a crass oversimplification. The single word ‘Slavonic’ covers a multitude of linguistic modes. ‘The’ Cyrillic script is not a wholly uniform graphic device. Other scripts, and other languages, had their place in the graphic environment. And the entire relationship between script and language is fraught with conceptual and practical hazards. In this chapter we survey some of the issues and sources that lend texture to the truism, always bearing in mind that the truism (that the Rus wrote in Slavonic and used the Cyrillic script) remains broadly true. Slavonic Language(s) In the early Middle Ages most Slavs, given adequate goodwill, could probably still have understood each other in conversation. Their shared language is known as Common Slavonic, sometimes also equated with Proto-Slavonic.1 Beyond the hypothetical unity of Common Slavonic (or the unity of hypothetical Common Slavonic) we have to tread very carefully through a battlefield of competing definitions, of rival claims to package and label the regional and temporal varieties of Slavonic according to retrospective national or ideological (and occasionally linguistic) 1

For an extensive account of Proto-Slavonic (or Proto-Slavic) see Alexander M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic. An Introduction to Slavic Philology (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 77–164.

83

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The graphic environment

criteria. It is a field in which one should be even more than usually alert to the danger of accepting terms as if they were things. For the present purposes the relevant variants are East Slavonic and Church Slavonic. In Rus, East Slavonic and Church Slavonic were both written and spoken, though in the relationships between written and spoken they are like mirror images of each other. In origin East Slavonic was the spoken vernacular of the East Slavs of the lands of the Rus, while Church Slavonic was the written medium which was developed in the process of translating Scripture for West and (eventually, mainly) South Slavs. In usage, spoken Church Slavonic was a means to disseminate the written forms (e.g. through liturgy, through sermons, through recitation and reading aloud), while written East Slavonic derives from (which is not to say that it is identical to) speech. Initially distinct both geographically and culturally, East Slavonic and Church Slavonic form the outer parameters of most discussion about language in Rus. Like Common Slavonic, they are abstractions, and hence contentious: should they, for example, be regarded as distinct languages, or as variants of the same language? If viewed separately, is either of them in fact an entity, or do they, too, dissolve into their own subvariants? If viewed together, what is their interrelationship? Pristine Church Slavonic (the Cyrillo-Methodian translations) and pristine East Slavonic (the speech of the East Slavs) are irrecoverable from direct contemporary evidence. ‘Old’ Church Slavonic is normally deduced from a more or less agreed ‘canon’ of somewhat later manuscripts (mostly from the eleventh century) which are deemed to reflect it most accurately.2 In practice, however, virtually all Church Slavonic manuscripts already contain hints of their own linguistic milieu, and over time Church Slavonic divides into increasingly pronounced regional variants, or dialects, dubbed ‘Russian Church Slavonic’, ‘Bulgarian Church Slavonic’ (or ‘Middle Bulgarian’), and so on. Nevertheless, the differences in written convention are too trivial to be interpreted as disintegration, and throughout the Middle Ages, Church Slavonic – in the legitimately capacious sense of the term – continued to serve as a written lingua franca for Orthodox Slavs. Spoken forms of East Slavonic (aka. ‘Old Russian’, ‘Old Ukrainian’, or the ingenious coinage ‘Rusian’) are of course unrecorded, because our only evidence is filtered through the selective and more or less conventionalised medium of writing. We see spoken East Slavonic as if through occasional gauze-covered holes in a screen. There is no way in which we can reconstruct, for example, the 2

See Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic, pp. 189–90. ‘Old’ Church Slavonic is also known as ‘Old Slavonic’ (mainly in Russian and French scholarship) and occasionally as ‘Old Bulgarian’.

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rhythms and nuances of an authentic domestic conversation. Nevertheless, the glimpses are sufficient to reveal certain general features, as well as certain distinctive regional features. Accidents of survival mean that we are particularly well informed about the Novgorodian version.3 How different from one another were Church Slavonic and East Slavonic? Linguistic comparisons cover four main categories: sounds (phonology), word-forms (morphology), sentence structures (syntax), and vocabulary and meaning (lexis and semantics). The sounds of pristine Church Slavonic, reflecting South Slav pronunciation, would have been somewhat strange to the ear of an untutored East Slav at the time of the official Conversion of the Rus; and stranger still by the late twelfth or early thirteenth century as the loss of reduced vowels brought about major changes in the sound structures (and word-forms) of East Slavonic.4 However, this is to some extent a false contrast, since the sounds of pristine Church Slavonic are unlikely to have been imported intact together with the writing system. Church Slavonic is a written language, but this does not mean that the conventions of writing ‘are’ the language. For readers and their listeners in Rus, Church Slavonic probably had a strong local accent.5 Our notional untutored East Slav might have been even less struck by the morphological contrasts between his spoken vernacular and Church Slavonic. Inflected word-endings, for example, were broadly similar, and one could quite easily get used to the consistent alternatives in word-formation. More exotic was the way in which words were strung together in clauses and sentences. Devised for the purpose of translating from Greek, Church Slavonic was apt to mirror Greek rhetorical structures unfamiliar to spoken East Slavonic: complex structures of subordination, or the widespread use of participles. But perhaps most alien of all were many of the words themselves, and their meanings. Although Church Slavonic and East Slavonic shared a common core of vocabulary, Church Slavonic brought a mass of concepts which were wholly new to the East Slavs. It was saturated with words and expressions which had no precise precedent in any pre-literate variety of spoken Slavonic: words 3 4

5

See A. A. Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow, 1995). On the basic phonological differences between Church Slavonic and East Slavonic see A. P. Vlasto, A Linguistic History of Russia to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 10–22; on the implications of the loss of reduced vowels see ibid., 50–63; also Michael S. Flier, ‘Morphophonemic Consequences of the Development of Tense Jers in East Slavic’, in Alexander M. Schenker (ed.), American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists. Sofia, September 1988. Linguistics (Columbus, Ohio, 1988), pp. 91–105. On the chronology see V. V. Ivanov (ed.), Drevnerusskaia grammatika XII– XIII vv. (Moscow, 1995), pp. 20–9. See O. V. Malkova, ‘Drevnerusskoe liturgicheskoe proiznoshenie v iuzhnoi Rusi v XII– XIII vv.’, in L. P. Zhukovskaia (ed.), Drevnerusskii literaturnyi iazyk v ego otnoshenii k staroslavianskomu (Moscow, 1987), pp. 129–43.

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borrowed or calqued from Greek, or familiar Slavonic words imbued with unfamiliar connotations. What, then, does our East Slav make of Church Slavonic? If he listens to a catalogue of his debts read from a piece of birch-bark, and then to the Lord’s Prayer, is he experiencing two languages, or one? Compare the following assertions by modern linguists: (i) ‘all the evidence says that Old Church Slavonic and Rusian belong to a single language’;6 (ii) ‘the most striking feature of East Slav writing is the juxtaposition of two languages’;7 (iii) ‘[the language reflected in early Novgorodian sources is] simply a dialect of the Late Common Slavonic language’;8 (iv) ‘we must accept that there were . . . two types of Early Russian literary language’.9 Some of these assertions relate to language in general, others specifically to written language, but the underlying question is the same. Linguistic argument alone cannot produce an adequate answer.10 There is no purely quantitative measure – a particular number of distinct phonological, or morphological, or syntactic, or lexicographic features – which determines whether the Rus version of Church Slavonic and the written derivatives of East Slavonic should be regarded as separate languages. Linguists can plausibly assert that substantial elements of Church Slavonic might have been incomprehensible to an audience of ordinary East Slavs, but comprehensibility is not the paramount criterion. I find great difficulty in comprehending some varieties of writing and speaking in English (such as computer manuals, or specialist discourses on literary theory, or the Statutes and Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, or the dialogue in a Newcastle pub), but I have no difficulty accepting that the language is English. What matters is perception: the perception of those who see themselves as within – or outside – the linguistic community. To put it crudely: language does not define community; community defines language. The wider community of early Rus – the silent majority – cannot tell us what it thought, but for the community of articulate Christians there was no doubt: the whole point of Church Slavonic lay in its affinity with the native tongue, in the fact that it was not Latin 6 7 8 9 10

Horace G. Lunt, ‘On the Relationship of Old Church Slavonic to the Written Language of Early Rus
’, Russian Linguistics 11 (1987), 158. Alexander Issatschenko, Geschichte der russischen Sprache. 1. Band. Von den Anf¨angen bis zum Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1980), p. 68. See Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 5. V. V. Vinogradov, Osnovnye problemy izucheniia obrazovaniia i razvitiia drevnerusskogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1958; repr., Leipzig, 1974), p. 41. Despite Issatschenko, Geschichte der russischen Sprache, p. 78: ‘Letzten Endes kann die Frage “zwei Sprachen” oder “zwei Sprachstile” nur aufgrund sprachimmanenter Strukturbemerkale antwortet worden.’

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or Greek or Hebrew, in the fact that it was therefore, in principle at least, accessible. No source ever suggests that there might be two written languages, or even that there might be different languages for writing and speaking:11 ‘The Slavonic tongue is one.’12 However we decide to conceptualise them – as languages, or as dialects, or as idioms or (my own preference) as registers of language – the more interesting question is not their separateness in linguistic abstraction but their interrelationship in the practice of writing. Church Slavonic and East Slavonic both coexist and interact. Church Slavonic is the ‘bookish’ (knizhnyi ) register: the mode of expression that one is most likely to find in manuscript books, derived from the core devotional writings in those books. East Slavonic is the ‘practical’ (delovoi; bytovoi ) register: the mode of expression that one is most likely to find in commerce and administration.13 A sermon, for example, would be written in a register based on Church Slavonic, whereas a law-code or private birch-bark communication would normally be based on East Slavonic. Each operates in its proper sphere, fulfilling its distinct functions. Many other written cultures also exploit variant linguistic norms or registers in functionally distinct contexts. In Byzantium the pseudo-classical Greek of higher learning and the legal Greek of imperial documents were distinct idioms which could be mastered only through special training. A situation in which two related languages (or two registers with distinct norms) serve different functions within one written culture is sometimes labelled ‘diglossia’. Broadly speaking, the term is applicable to early Rus.14 But only broadly.15 Its neatness can be misleading. Dualities are conceptually 11

12

13

14

15

The much-quoted distinction reported at the end of the seventeenth century by Wilhelm Ludolf, Grammatica russica (Oxford, 1696), fo. A2: ‘adeoque apud illos dicitur, loquendum est Russice et scribendum est Slavonice’. PVL I, p. 23; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 63. For cogent argument on the perception of affinity, regardless of potential areas of incomprehensibility, see Horace G. Lunt, ‘On the Language of Old Rus: Some Questions and Suggestions’, Russian Linguistics 2 (1975), 269–81. Other labels for the ‘bookish’ register include ‘Book Slavonic’, ‘literary-bookish’, ‘Slaviano-Rus’; M. L. Remneva, Istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1995), pp. 189–208, also identifies a distinct ‘language of Church Slavonic translated administrative writing’. See Issatschenko, Geschichte der russischen Sprache, I, 68–78; B. A. Uspenskii, Iazykovaia situatsiia Kievskoi Rusi i ee znachenie dlia istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1983), esp. pp. 9–54. The main proponents of the ‘diglossia’ model also tend to view Church Slavonic and East Slavonic as distinct languages (together comprising what Issatschenko calls early Rus ‘linguistic dualism’), but in a loose sense diglossia is also plausible between registers or styles. The term has proved controversial, often for spurious quasi-ideological reasons, but the spuriousness of some objections does not in itself justify the term. For a range of arguments against see e.g. the articles by A. A. Alekseev, L. P. Klimenko and V. V. Kolesov in Literaturnyi iazyk Drevnei Rusi (Problemy istoricheskogo iazykoznaniia 3; Leningrad,

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pleasing, but the artifice distorts the more nuanced phenomena of early written culture. Besides their coexistence, Church Slavonic and East Slavonic also interact with one another, and the nature of their mutual contamination can at times make the diglossia model seem over-strained. The aesthetics of written culture allowed for consistency of register within a given text or context, but did not necessarily require it. Register can change abruptly within a single text, depending on the theme or the source. Chronicles juxtapose Church Slavonic rhetoric with un-bookish dialogue, oral-based narrative formulae, and diplomatic protocols. Texts with substantially local vocabulary could be structured with Church Slavonic grammar.16 Birch-bark letters can employ East Slavonic and Church Slavonic formulae (of greeting, for example) interchangeably in identical functional contexts.17 Vladimir’s coins display the word for ‘silver’ in its Church Slavonic form, while those of his son Sviatopolk display the East Slavonic form.18 The linguistic forms of labels on religious images fluctuate wildly.19 Diglossia encourages us to think in terms of a simple dichotomy, whereas in fact the mutual contaminations of register are more diverse. The language of early Rus written culture occupies a space between two poles, but the registers of the language were not always consistently polarised. Written culture as a whole was not, therefore, based on a common core of agreed norms with privileged status, extending into variants at the periphery. There was no ‘standard’ language or (to translate ‘standard’ into the common and to my mind inappropriate terminology of the field) ‘literary’ language.20 The written culture of early Rus used registers of Slavonic. The registers were distinct in origin and, by and large, in context and function, but each could also penetrate the sphere of the other. Any given specimen of writing – primary, secondary or tertiary – might include a hybrid of registers. Hybrids could be formed mechanically, by mistake or through combinations of heterogeneous sources. But one

16 17 18 19 20

1986), pp. 3–41; also Lunt, ‘On the Relationship of Old Church Slavonic to the Written Language of Early Rus
’. See Remneva, Istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, p. 18. Remneva’s focus on grammar is a valuable counterweight to the usual emphasis on spellings, sounds and words. See e.g. Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 31. DRM, pp. 26–96 (Vladimir’s coins), pp. 96–110 (Sviatopolk’s coins). See below, pp. 105, 246. As is apparent from the titles of many of the works mentioned in these footnotes, ‘literary language’ has in effect become the name of the subject. For succinct critical remarks on the term see Dean S. Worth, ‘Was There a “Literary Language” in Kievan Rus
?’, The Russian Review 34 (1975), 1–9. By contrast S. O. Vysots
kyi, Kyivs
ka pysemna shkola X–XII st. (Lviv, Kiev, New York, 1998), esp. pp. 207–26, conceives local variants as emerging from within the ‘Kievan school of writing’ which created a single state language.

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must also assume that changes of register could be deliberate, as a means of introducing the appropriately resonant expressions for a given theme or thought. If we look at written culture as a whole it is clear that in many contexts linguistic and stylistic harmonisation was not necessarily regarded as a high priority either on practical or on aesthetic grounds. Scripts Slav script was invented by St Cyril for his mission, together with Methodios, to Moravia in 863. Slav script was rejected in Moravia after only a couple of decades, and the Cyrillo-Methodian version of Slav script enjoyed only limited success elsewhere. Yet to the extent that Cyril and Methodios are credited with devising the first Slav writing system, they are seen as the progenitors of Slav writing systems in general. In this section we shall survey some features of Slav script in Rus. But first, a digression, a pause to consider views which challenge the above statement of ‘fact’: the views of those who deny the Cyrillo-Methodian origins of Slav writing, and who posit the existence of ‘pre-Christian’, or ‘pre-Cyrillic’ native writing in Rus.            Accounts of early Slav writing reflect a periodically virulent polemic between those who believe that indigenous, pre-Cyrillic Slav writing did exist, and those who believe that it did not. The sparser the evidence, the more fertile the speculation. Hidden or not-so-hidden agendas can provide the stimulus on both sides, and argument can shade into crankiness at both extremes. The questions are worth asking, though I should confess at the outset that I do not find any of the supposed evidence for pre-Cyrillic script persuasive. Four types of material tend to be brought into play: language; narrative sources; nonCyrillic inscriptions; and a fourth category which for the moment will remain nameless. Slavonic words for reading and writing derive from common, preChristian roots, but it would be too facile to deduce therefrom that pre-Christian Slavs read and wrote; or, crucially, that they read and wrote using an alphabetic, syllabic, or systematically ideographic script. If the definition of writing includes all graphic signs, and if the definition of reading includes all responses to graphic signs, then early Slavs, like most (or indeed all) peoples probably did read and write. With or without abundant evidence one could take more or less for granted the probable use of signs and marks, pictures and symbols, whether in mundane contexts like the indication of ownership or quantity, or with esoteric functions

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such as divination.21 But the all-embracing definitions are too loose to be helpful in the present context. A common vocabulary of reading and writing points to an early awareness of the semantic possibilities of the visual, but provides no evidence for the early existence of any formal system of signs which might qualify as script. Narrative sources relating to the early and mid-tenth century mention or imply that the Rus used writing. The Rus–Byzantine treaties of 911 and 944, preserved in the Primary Chronicle, derive from contemporary written documents and in their provisions they also stipulate certain written procedures: for example, any Rus boats arriving in Constantinople without written authentication from the Rus prince would be detained.22 The Arab traveller ibn Fadlan, who visited the Middle Volga in 922, tells of a Rus burial at which the names of the deceased and of the leader of the Rus were carved on a wooden plank which was erected over the ashes of the pyre.23 Interesting as such nuggets are, however, they too reveal nothing about language or script. Ibn Fadlan in effect describes a Viking boat-burial, and his Rus were surely Scandinavians. The Rus–Byzantine treaties survive in Slavonic, but there is no compelling reason to suppose that the Greek originals were translated into Slavonic much before the turn of the twelfth century, or that they imply documentary practices in Slavonic.24 Among earlier sources, just two phrases merit (and have received) serious attention. The treatise On Letters, attributed to the Bulgarian monk Khrabr, probably from the late ninth or early tenth century, states that in former times the Slavs used to read and divine by means of ‘marks and notches’.25 And the hagiographic account of St Cyril’s life, the Vita Constantini (Cyril was Constantine’s monastic name) states that, while visiting the Crimea, the saint came into possession of a Gospel and Psalter written ‘in Rus letters’.26 Khrabr expressly contrasts the mysterious and divinatory ‘marks and notches’ with alphabetic script. In theory he could be referring to syllabic script or to pictograms, but any such supposition would require strong corroborative evidence. As for the phrase in the Vita Constantini: though taken by many at face value, it is most likely 21 22 23

24 26

See, e.g. V. A. Istrin, 1100 let slavianskoi azbuki (Moscow, 1963), pp. 88–108, although Istrin is over-optimistic as to the decipherment of some apparent signs. PVL I, p. 35; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 74; see below, p. 164. Ibn Fadlan, Voyage chez les Bulgares de la Volga, transl. M. Canard (Paris, 1988), p. 82; also A. P. Kovalevskii, Kniga Akhmeda ibn-Fadlana o ego puteshestvii na Volgu v 921–922gg. Stat
i, perevody i kommentarii (Kharkov, 1956), p. 146. 25 See below, pp. 190–5. See below, pp. 164–5. VC VIII.15; transl. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 43.

Scripts and languages

91

a scribal error (involving the transposition of letters)27 or perhaps a late interpolation.28 Even if the phrase is authentic, one would again be rash to assume that these mid-ninth-century Rus in the Crimea were Slavs rather than Scandinavians. Authentic surviving inscriptions form the next group of potential sources for a pre-Cyrillic Slav script. Puzzling letter-like signs scratched on scattered and miscellaneous fragments of wood, bone, stone and metal stimulate the ingenuity of would-be decipherers.29 We can include in this category the half-dozen characters which are actually given as specimens of Rus writing by the late-tenth-century Arab bibliographer and scholar al-Nadim, who relates that he had met a man who had been sent as an envoy to a king of the Rus and who brought back a piece of wood with the characters inscribed on it.30 The characters, as transmitted in manuscripts of al-Nadim, resemble neither Cyrillic nor (the next obvious assumption) Scandinavian runes. It would be safest to suppose that, if alNadim’s tale was true, the specimen signs were originally Cyrillic or runic but have been distorted beyond reasonable recognition by uncomprehending copyists. Bolder spirits, however, prefer the reverse procedure: which known script or scripts, however remote from the known scripts of the Rus, resemble al-Nadim’s surviving transcription? This way, more exciting solutions emerge. An early commentator found remarkable similarity with characters from undeciphered inscriptions from Sinai, though he draws back from asserting any real connection.31 A recent investigator has perceived in al-Nadim’s characters an affinity with ancient Indian Brahmi syllabic script, and with the aid of Brahmi he manages to decode the message as Slavonic. Primed with this revelation – which also turns out to be the key which unlocks virtually all the epigraphic conundrums of previously indecipherable signs on Slav territory – he then argues that the Slavonic syllabary was not in fact derived from Brahmi, but from 27 28

29 30

31

rus- for sur-, interpreted as ‘Syriac’: see the analysis by B. N. Floria, Skazaniia o nachale slavianskoi pis
mennosti (St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 223–7. Harvey Goldblatt, ‘On rus
kymi pismeny in the Vita Constantini and Rus
ian Religious Patriotism’, in M. Colucci et al. (eds), Studia slavica mediaevalia et humanistica Riccardo Picchio dicata (Rome, 1986), pp. 311–28. Cf. the reconstruction of a syllabic script from such material in Bulgaria: Vasil Ionchev, Azbukata ot Pliska, Kirilitsata i Glagolitsata (Sofia, 1997), pp. 11–48. Bayard Dodge (ed. and transl.), The Fihrist of al-Nadim: a Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York, 1970), p. 37; on this passage see Ch. M. Fraehn, ‘Ibn-abi-Jakub elNedim’s Nachricht von der Schrift der Russen im X. Jahrhundert n. Ch.’, M´emoires de l’Acad´emie Imp´eriale des Sciences de Saint-P´etersbourg. 6 s´erie. Sciences politiques, histoire et philologie, III (1836), pp. 507–30; more generally see V. V. Polosin, ‘Fikhrist’ Ibn anNadima kak istoriko-kul
turnyi pamiatnik X veka (Moscow, 1989). Fraehn, ‘Ibn-abi-Jakub el-Nedim’, pp. 516–18.

92

The graphic environment

a common source: a secret, priestly Indo-Aryan script dating from the second millennium .32 Yet perhaps even this grand hypothesis is too modest. The author of another recent study seeks to demonstrate, with the aid of detailed tables and character-by-character analysis, that virtually all the major undeciphered or problematic scripts of the ancient world, starting from the fifth millennium , were in fact proto-Slavonic, written in a syllabic script which St Cyril eventually replaced with an alphabetic variant. ProtoSlavonic turns out to be the language of: clay tablets from Romania dated to the fifth millennium ; the pre-Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia; proto-Indian inscriptions of the third millennium ; Cretan Linear A and Linear B inscriptions, and the Phaestos disk, from the second millennium ; Etruscan inscriptions from the eighth to the second century ; and of course the ‘marks and notches’ (to borrow Khrabr’s phrase out of context) of the enigmatic inscriptions on East Slav territory. Thus the ancient Slavs migrated across the continents and through the ages, sowing civilisations as they went.33 This new decipherment of Linear B and (for the first time) Linear A also reveals, incidentally, that the proto-Slavonic Cretan inscriptions refer to an invasion of aliens in rockets.34 Seek and ye shall find. The distressing obstacle to such investigations has been the lack of any significant local East Slav pre-Cyrillic narrative texts. Where was the missing link, the tangible produce of a pre-Christian written civilisation among the East Slavs? In November 1953 the San Francisco e´ migr´e Russian journal Zhar-ptitsa announced a ‘colossal historical sensation’: the discovery of a quantity of wooden tablets with writings about ancient Rus. The tablets – around forty double-sided inscribed slabs measuring c.38 × 22 cm – had apparently been found in 1919, during the Civil War, in the ruins of a provincial gentry estate, by a major in the White Army, Fedor Arturovich Izenbek. Izenbek took them with him to Brussels, where in 1925 he showed them to Iurii Petrovich Miroliubov, a writer of poetry and historical narratives. For fifteen years Miroliubov worked on transcribing the inscriptions, until the tablets disappeared after Izenbek’s death in 1941. This – Miroliubov’s transcription from the all-too-briefly rediscovered tablets – was the text to which the 1953 announcement in Zhar-ptitsa alluded; the text which has become known as the Book of Veles, or the Book of Vles. Here at last was the proof and the key: the gods and the ancestors, the migrations and tribulations, 32 33 34

M. L. Seriakov, Russkaia dokhristianskaia pis
mennost
(St Petersburg, 1997), esp. pp. 35–64. G. S. Grinevich, Praslavianskaia pis
mennost
. Rezul
taty deshifrovki (Moscow, 1993). Grinevich, Praslavianskaia pis
mennost
, pp. 122–35.

Scripts and languages

93

the legends and beliefs, the histories and the prophecies, as expounded (according to students of the Book) by priestly bearers of the tradition in ninth-century Novgorod, in the local vernacular, in a kind of pre-Cyrillic or proto-Cyrillic native script. Doubters doubted, but the guardians of the Book persisted, and amateur publications abroad were eventually superseded by full ‘scholarly’ publication and commentary in Russia.35 For East Slav studies the Book of Veles would indeed be a ‘colossal sensation’, were it not for just one awkward fact: the Book is a twentieth-century forgery, probably created (along with the legend of the discovery and loss of the tablets) by Miroliubov himself.36 Its status as the focus of a fringe cult is probably assured, but as an ancient or medieval relic it is utterly spurious. One cannot but be impressed by the ingenuity and tenacity of the hypotheses and speculations about pre-Cyrillic native writing. The net result, however, is a swelling mass of grand theories and visions conjured out of the thinnest of air. Even the relatively ‘mainstream’ speculations about the existence of a ‘proto-Cyrillic’ script before Cyril, based on Slavonic adaptations of Greek,37 rely more on abstract schematism than on evidence. Of course one can never prove the negative, but the surviving material is not sufficient to justify a belief in the positive. As we shall see, the Rus and the Slavs did have some contact with a range of scripts and written languages before and apart from their official Conversion to Christianity, but if a native pre-Cyrillic or proto-Cyrillic script existed, it has left insignificant traces. For practical purposes it is irrelevant.       East Christian Slavs used two alphabets, Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Just to confuse matters, the script devised by St Cyril was probably Glagolitic, while Cyrillic – which came to predominate – emerged somewhat later.38 The letter-forms of the Glagolitic alphabet were invented. Some of them have apparent affinities with letters in various ancient scripts, and Cyril may well have been influenced by his 35 36 37 38

A. Asov (transl. and comm.) Velesova Kniga (Moscow, 1994). See the detailed and wholly convincing analysis by O. V. Tvorogov, ‘“Vlesova kniga”’, TODRL 43 (1990), 170–254. E.g. Emil Georgiev, Slavianskaia pis
mennost
do Kirilla i Mefodiia (Sofia, 1952); Istrin, 1100 let slavianskoi azbuki, pp. 88–126. For a summary of arguments on this point see Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic, pp. 179– 80. Cf., however, G. M. Prokhorov, ‘Glagolitsa sredi missionerskikh azbuk’, TODRL 45 (1992), 178–99, who dates the invention of Glagolitic to the seventh century, and revives the notion of a direct link between Cyrillic and Cyril; for a critique see E. V. Ukhanova, U istokov slavianskoi pis
mennosti (Moscow, 1998), pp. 126–44. See also below, n. 57. Ionchev, Azbukata ot Pliska, pp. 51–126, wants the best of both worlds: Cyril invented both alphabets: Cyrillic for Bulgaria, and then Glagolitic for the mission to Moravia.

94

The graphic environment

knowledge of how others wrote, but no single line of borrowing can be established.39 In its implied analysis of the sounds of speech (that is, in its identification of Slavonic phonemes), Glagolitic draws on Greek: twentyfour letters were reckoned equivalent in phonemic value to the letters of the Greek alphabet, and fourteen letters were added for Slavonic sounds deemed not to be represented in the Greek alphabet. Cyrillic broadly followed Glagolitic in the number and sequence of letters; but in the forms of letters, where Greek and Slavonic were deemed to have equivalent sounds, Cyrillic borrowed directly from Greek (specifically, from Greek majuscule forms). One can regard early Cyrillic and Greek majuscule as two alphabets which coincide in the majority of their letters; or one can regard Cyrillic as, in origin, simply a supplemented version of Greek. Early specimens of Glagolitic are exceedingly rare, and none – whether inscription or parchment manuscript – bears a date. The earliest Glagolitic inscription, from the Round Church in Preslav in Eastern Bulgaria, possibly derives from the very end of the ninth century, while the earliest Glagolitic parchment manuscripts (none of them from Rus) are usually ascribed to the eleventh century (or in two cases perhaps to the late tenth century).40 In the graphic environment of the Rus, Glagolitic material exists on two levels: the visible and the invisible. Both are enigmatic. The ‘invisible’ Glagolitic consists of hypothetical Glagolitic parchment manuscripts. We have no reason to suppose that Rus bookmen actively used Glagolitic as their alphabet of choice. However, a part – perhaps a large part – of the corpus of surviving East Slav Cyrillic manuscripts ultimately derives from versions transcribed from Glagolitic. The awkward question is: what proportion of texts did the Rus receive before they had been transcribed, or after they had been transcribed? If significant numbers of Glagolitic texts were imported, and transcribed locally, then Glagolitic has a significant (though limited) place in early parchment literacy and in the history of East Slav letters. If not, not. Three types of evidence may be adduced: (i) explicit statements in the sources; (ii) deductions from the study of the history of texts; and (iii) the implications of ‘visible’ Glagolitic in Rus. 39

40

For a survey of theories as to the models for Glagolitic see Thorvi Eckhardt, Azbuka: Versuch einer Einf¨uhrung in das Studium der slavischen Pal¨aographie (Wiener Archiv fur ¨ Geschichte des Slawentums und Osteuropas, XIV; Vienna, Cologne, 1989), pp. 31–48. On a range of issues connected with Glagolitic see the essays in Heinz Miklas (ed.), Glagolitica. Zum Ursprung der slavischen Schriftkultur (Vienna, 2000). For early Glagolitic inscriptions see Kazimir Popkonstantinov, ‘Glagolicheskata pismena traditsiia v srednovekovna B

lgariia prez IX–XI v.’, Kirilo-Metodievski studii 4 (1987), 283–90; for a list of early Glagolitic manuscripts see Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic, p. 189.

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The explicit statements are not very explicit: just two phrases, one in the Primary Chronicle’s entry for the year 1037, one in late copies of a colophon originally dated 1047. The phrase in the chronicle may or may not be interpreted to mean that Prince Iaroslav Vladimirovich decreed that many imported books be transcribed.41 The colophon may or may not be interpreted to mean that its author, Upir, had transcribed from Glagolitic.42 Deductions from textual history require massively detailed analysis, piling hypothesis upon hypothesis, in order to posit the convergence of two things: that a given version was a direct transcription from Glagolitic; and that this version was first produced in Rus. The range of texts to which such analysis has been applied is as yet small, and the conclusions (that Glagolitic versions were transcribed in Kiev) are plausible but by nature cannot be definitive.43 Here we focus on the nature and implications of ‘visible’ Glagolitic. In a full catalogue of surviving writings from early Rus, specimens of Glagolitic would be statistically negligible. Yet they exist: on the one hand, too rare to be troublesome; on the other hand, too troublesome to be ignored. They are bunched into two small clusters: graffiti, mainly in Novgorod; and Glagolitic elements in a small number of parchment manuscripts. All ten Glagolitic graffiti from St Sophia in Novgorod are ascribed to the second half of the eleventh century or the first half of the twelfth century.44 Six of them are fully Glagolitic, while the other four are hybrids with a mixture of Cyrillic and Glagolitic letters. Where the graffiti are sufficiently complete to bear a legible message, the contents are mostly devotional, with pleas for salvation. One contains the beginning of an alphabet. All of the four hybrid inscriptions include names: Ian45 the soldier, Dadiata, Kosta, Voiata. Brief hybrid graffiti turn up in the Iurev monastery outside Novgorod, and further afield at the church of St Basil at Vladimir in Volynia.46 Apart from the graffiti, elements of Glagolitic are 41 42 43 44

45 46

Or translated. See below, pp. 101–3. For a different interpretation, however, see A. Poppe, ‘ “Is kurilotse” i “is kurilovitse” ’, International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 31–32 (1985), 319–50. See Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 179–86 (esp. the list, p. 185, n. 15). A. A. Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi Novgorodskogo Sofiiskogo sobora XI–XIV vv. (Moscow, 1978), pp. 25–32 (nos. 1–10). For a few individual Glagolitic letters among graffiti in Kiev see Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 126–7; II, pp. 259–60. One should bear in mind, however, that palaeographic dating of early Glagolitic is particularly tenuous. A problematic reading: see Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, p. 28. The latter mentioning a date, probably 6802 (=1294): T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Nadpisigraffiti XII–XIII vekov v pamiatnikakh zodchestva Volyni i Galicha’, in Problemy izucheniia drevnerusskogo zodchestva (po materialam arkhitekturno-arkheologicheskikh chtenii, posviashchennykh pamiati P. A. Rappoporta, 15–19 ianvaria 1990 g.) (St Petersburg, 1996), pp. 90–1, and the same author’s, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh khramov. Novye istochniki XI–XV vv. (St Petersburg, 1992), pp. 52–3.

96

The graphic environment

contained in around a dozen East Slav Cyrillic parchment manuscripts of the period. Three of them have hybrid spellings in the main text,47 a couple have individual Glagolitic letters outside the text,48 one has a hybrid inscription in the margin,49 while five have full Glagolitic marginal inscriptions: votive formulae, a gnomic utterance, the beginning of an alphabet.50 Perhaps the most striking feature is the frequency of hybrids: Cyrillic texts with occasional Glagolitic letters, Glagolitic words with occasional Cyrillic letters. Sometimes one might divine a semblance of logic. For example, the Glagolitic letters in one manuscript are the initial letters of psalms, while in another they mark places for insertions, and in another they index the start of hymns.51 However, most of the hybrid spellings follow no pattern. Most bizarre of all are the two leaves of parchment known as the Pogodin Folia (or the Moscow Folia): the first leaf is fully Cyrillic, with no trace of Glagolitic, yet the text on the second leaf includes ninety-one Glagolitic letters scattered apparently at random among the Cyrillic words on both sides.52 What was the point? Such hybrids are not unique to Rus. Inscriptions combining Cyrillic and Glagolitic are also found in Bulgaria.53 If the phenomenon was limited to the occasional Glagolitic letter in Cyrillic parchment manuscripts, we might attribute it to the occasional lapse in concentration of a scribe transcribing from one alphabet to the other, or of a scribe writing in the alphabet with which he was less comfortable.54 This explanation may be valid in some cases, but it cannot account for the hybrid graffiti, nor indeed would it account for the non-hybrid Glagolitic inscriptions. A different suggestion is that 47 48

49 50

51 52

53 54

SK, nos. 30, 33, 105. SK, nos. 59–60 (mid-12th century), 457. On the latter see the addenda to SK by A. A. Turilov, ‘Svodnyi katalog slaviano-russkikh rukopisnykh knig, khraniashchikhsia v SSSR XI–XIII vv.’, AION – Slavistica 5 (1997–8; publ. 2000), 494. SK, no. 41. SK, nos. 45, 50, 176, 289; RGADA, F. 196, no. 1698: the marginal inscriptions (these five plus SK, no. 41) are published and analysed by L. V. Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi XI–XIV vekov na pergamennykh kodeksakh (Moscow, 1998), pp. 56–73. SK, nos. 30, 56–60, 457. SK, no. 105. Text and commentaries: G. Iljinskij [Il
inskii], ‘Pogodinskie kirilloglagolicheskie listki’, Byzantinoslavica 1 (1929), 86–117; analysis of the Glagolitic, esp. 101–4. Popkonstantinov, ‘Glagolicheskata pismena traditsiia’, p. 288. Note the reverse phenomenon, the appearance of occasional Cyrillic letters in an early Glagolitic text: see Mosh´e Altbauer, Psalterium Sinaiticum. An 11th Century Glagolitic Manuscript from St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt Sinai (Skopje, 1971), p. vi; Ioannis C. Tarnanidis, The Slavonic Manuscripts Discovered in 1975 at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai (Thessaloniki, 1988), p. 80. Note that, like the Glagolitic letters in the Evgeniev Psalter (SK, no. 30), Cyrillic in the Sinai Psalter is used for the initial letters of some of the psalms.

Scripts and languages

97

Glagolitic was used as a form of cryptography.55 Certainly Glagolitic was esoteric, but these are not ‘secret’ types of messages, nor is there much substantive evidence for any kind of cryptography in this period. The most plausible guess – tame though it may be – is that these infrequent uses of Glagolitic were products of mere affectation, private games, without wider cultural resonance.56 Yet to play such games, the players had to be familiar with the rules. Obviously the players had some knowledge of Glagolitic. Either a knowledge of Glagolitic was functionally redundant and it was acquired by some simply as an educational accomplishment, or it was learnt for a practical reason. If, as seems more likely, it was learnt for a practical reason, the implication is that Glagolitic manuscripts did still exist in Rus right through to the latter part of the thirteenth century, and that there was some demand for the skills which would enable them to be read and transcribed. The visible Glagolitic strengthens the case for the existence, to an unknown extent, of now-invisible Glagolitic in the graphic environment.     A converted Bulgarian in the late ninth century was more likely to come into contact with Greek script than his Moravian precursors. Here and there he might stumble across bits of old stone with Greek inscriptions. Greek script had been used by the Turkic Bulgars for rendering words from their own language in ‘Protobulgarian’ inscriptions. Some of the Bulgarian elite received a Greek education. One might surmise that they found it more convenient to adapt that which they knew (Greek) than to adopt that which was alien (Glagolitic). Hence the emergence of the augmented version of the Greek alphabet subsequently known as Cyrillic, probably in Preslav in eastern Bulgaria towards the end of the ninth century.57 The first Cyrillic inscriptions perhaps date from this period.58 Several dozen Bulgarian Cyrillic inscriptions are attributed 55 56 57

58

E. F. Karskii, Slavianskaia kirillovskaia paleografiia (Moscow, 1979), p. 251. Contrast the significance of the much more common (in particular contexts) hybrid uses of Cyrillic and Greek: see below, pp. 105, 246. Peter Schreiner, ‘Grecheskii iazyk i kirillitsa na territorii Bolgarii’, Kirilo-Metodievski studii 4 (1987), 274–82. See, however, T. L. Mironova, ‘Slavianskie azbuki glagolitsa i kirillitsa kak tvorcheskoe nasledie Kirilla Filosofa’, Germenevtika drevnerusskoi literatury 10 (2000), 6–17, who argues that Cyrillic was devised at virtually the same time as Glagolitic, as a kind of Greek transcription of the latter. S. Iu. Temchin, ‘O razvitii pis
mennoi kul
tury Vostochnoi Bolgarii do 971 goda’, Slavistica Vilnensis 2000; Kalbotyra 49:2 (2000), 61–77, proposes a series of stages in the development of Cyrillic (from ‘Proto-Cyrillic’ through ‘Semi-Cyrillic’), functionally differentiated from Glagolitic, in the latter part of the ninth century. Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, I (Die Slawischen Sprachen 34, 1994), pp. 156–7, 214–17.

98

The graphic environment

to the tenth century, of which five are precisely dated: a commemorative stone at Krepˇca dated October 921; an incantation on a clay mug from Preslav, dated 931; an inscription on a stone from the Dobrudja, dated 943; a commemorative stone from Hagios Germanos in Greece, placed by a certain Samuil in honour of his father, mother and brother, dated 993; and a commemorative inscription from a village near Prilep in Macedonia, dated 996.59 In Rus, apart from the Gnezdovo pot (reckoned to be from the first half of the tenth century) specimens of Cyrillic turn up with increasing frequency from about the 970s, though one has to wait until the 1050s for the earliest precisely dated examples (graffiti in St Sophia in Kiev dated 3 March 1052 and 20 February 1054; the Ostromir Gospel of 1056–7).60 ‘The’ Cyrillic alphabet, like most alphabets, was not a single, permanently fixed set of graphic signs with a fixed relationship to sounds of speech. Neither the repertoire of letters, nor the shapes of the letters, nor the uses of the letters, are entirely stable or consistent in all contexts. The repertoire of letters in a notionally complete early Cyrillic alphabet fluctuates even in modern textbooks, between about 38 and a maximum of 43.61 Alphabetic graffiti, birch-bark documents and manuscript marginalia from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries give sets of 27, 32, 33, 34 and 36 letters.62 We should probably not attach great significance to such fluctuations. Fashion, pedagogic method, variant definitions of what constitutes a letter (such as the treatment of digraphs or iotated vowels) may all play a role, and the evidence is not sufficient to posit distinct stages in the development of the repertoire. One reason for fluctuations in the repertoire, and more importantly for fluctuations in usage, is that the underlying assumption of a oneto-one relationship between letters and speech-sounds63 was flawed at its inception and became harder and harder to sustain over time and across regions. Spoken Greek had long ceased to distinguish iota, eta and upsilon; spoken Slavonic did not differentiate phi from theta, or omega from 59 60

61

62

63

Popkonstantinov and Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, pp. 36–7, 49–50, 108–9, 204–5, 244. On the Sophia graffiti see Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 16–18, 39–41 (nos. 3, 8); also RDN, pp. 13–16. Vysotskii reads two other graffiti as bearing earlier dates, but his interpretations are dubious. Depending, for example, on whether one counts digraphs or iotated vowels as distinct letters: see e.g. M. N. Tikhomirov and A. V. Murav
ev, Russkaia paleografiia, 2nd edn (Moscow, 1982), pp. 5–7; Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic, pp. 168–72. NGB, nos. 199, 201, 205, 460, 591, 778, 783; Vysotskii, Nadpisi II, pp. 12–23 (no. 100); SK, no. 7. For tables comparing some of these, see NGB VIII, p. 53; cf. also Roland Marti, ‘Slavische Alphabete in nicht-slavischen Handschriften’, Kirilo-Metodievski studii 8 (1991), 139–64. See also below, pp. 191–2.

Scripts and languages

99

omikron. Logically superfluous letters could become variants, or keep their place as numerals, but the mismatch became progressively more acute. In the East Slav area, even specially invented Slavonic letters such as nasal vowels came to ‘represent’ the same sounds as their non-nasal equivalents, while reduced vowels either merged with full vowels or were dropped entirely.64 Speakers in the north-west made no distinction between ‘ch’ and ‘ts’. And so on. Manuscript copyists tended to be fairly conservative, as did others when writing texts derived from, or imitative of, the sorts of texts to be found in parchment manuscripts (i.e. mostly religious texts), though one should bear in mind that even the most formal and careful parchment manuscripts produce variants, and that conventions of spelling did to some extent change. Non-parchment writing, and particularly the writing of texts which had little or no link with the ecclesiastical models derived from parchment manuscripts, was markedly more flexible in its spelling, such that two or even three letters could be virtually interchangeable in the same position in the same word.65 These are tendencies, not rules, and it is debatable whether we should speak of distinct ‘systems’ of Cyrillic writing, the formal (bookish) and the everyday, or the ecclesiastical and the secular.66 The tendency in parchment manuscripts was to preserve traditional Cyrillic spellings (in effect, to copy word-forms) and hence to preserve graphic distinctions unrelated to speech; the tendency in non-ecclesiastical writing – most notably in the birch-bark letters – was to allow flexible spelling where two or more letters were perceived to represent equivalent speech-sounds (i.e. in effect to preserve the repertoire of letters but not the word-form). To some extent, therefore, we can posit distinct criteria and conventions for the ‘correct’ use of Cyrillic. What might be a ‘mistake’ for a scribe copying the Gospels, might be quite normal and acceptable for a trader sending instructions to his agent. If the former seems to us a more ‘proper’ approach to spelling, we need only glance at, say, seventeenth-century English printing to realise that an insistence on standard word-forms is not the only viable – and fully ‘literate’ – approach to orthography. In either case, of course, these variants in orthography serve to underline that conventions for the use of graphic signs are poor guides to language as such, or even to 64

65 66

See T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘O rannem variante kirillicheskogo alfavita na Rusi. (Po materialam “odnoerovykh” pamiatnikov)’, in Issledovaniia po drevnei i novoi literature (Leningrad, 1987), pp. 348–52. A. A. Zalizniak in NGB VIII, pp. 93–111, summarised in Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 19–30. See, however, Aleksandr B. Strakhov’s objections to such systemic distinctions, in his series of studies, ‘Filologicheskie nabliudeniia nad berestianymi gramotami’ in the journal Palaeoslavica.

100

The graphic environment

pronunciation. They do not help us to determine in what measure a given parchment manuscript or birch-bark letter was read ‘as it was written’. In contrast to these fluctuations in repertoire and usage, the shapes of Cyrillic letters in early Rus are notably stable. Palaeographers will pore over variations in detail, and variations in size and care and elegance are obvious, but in a larger comparative perspective early Rus Cyrillic is distinguished for its limited range of graphic realisations. There is a single style of lettering, ustav, which is normally and not quite satisfactorily translated as ‘uncial’. In Latin palaeography uncial letters are written as if to fill the space between two parallel lines which thus form the top and bottom edges of a continuous text. The letters are separate, evenly spaced, regular in shape. Uncial can be contrasted with semi-uncial, where some letters have strokes extending above or below, to an imaginary second set of outer lines. In Cyrillic, ustav can likewise be contrasted with poluustav (usually ‘semi-uncial’), but the distinction is less clear.67 But whatever the precise definitions, the point is that all East Slav Cyrillic in this period, even allowing for inevitable differences between the realisations of letterforms in manuscripts and inscriptions, is based on a single mode, the ustav form: no poluustav; no choice between ‘majuscule’ and ‘minuscule’ letter-forms (loosely = ‘capital’ and ‘small’, or in the anachronistic jargon of print and proof-reading ‘upper-case’ and ‘lower-case’); no cursive or book-hand. Why were the letter-forms so stable and limited? To risk a rash generalisation: because writing in Rus was not in much demand in contexts where other types of lettering tend to flourish. Semi-uncial and especially minuscule and its cursive forms tend to flourish where there is a significant demand for writing to be produced quickly and in large quantities, or with greater economy of time or materials:68 typically, for the production of administrative documents, or in books for private reading and scholarship. While the relative stability of ustav can hardly serve as the basis for grand sociocultural theories, this feature of the graphic environment is perhaps in some measure a reflection of the specific patterns of uses of the written word in early Rus.69 67

68

69

On the problem of using the Latin equivalent terms see Thorvi Eckhardt, ‘Ustav. Glossen zur pal¨aographischen Terminologie’, Wiener slavistisches Jahrbuch 4 (1955), 130–46; also Eckhardt, Azbuka, pp. 49–79; on inconsistent usage of the terms ustav and poluustav even in an East Slav context see I. V. Levochkin, ‘Russkoe ustavnoe pis
mo i ego khronologicheskie parametry’, VID 15 (1983), 72–7. Poluustav appears in some South Slav documents from the late thirteenth century, but not in East Slav texts for our period. On Greek hands during this period see the contributions by Cavallo, Follieri, Blanchard, Mango and (on cursives) Wilson in La pal´eographie grecque et byzantine (Colloques internationaux du CNRS, no. 559; Paris, 1977), pp. 95–239. See esp. below, chapter 4. East Slav book-hand and cursive eventually thrived in the

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Greek The Byzantines spoke and wrote Greek. In Rus sources they are ‘Greeks’, labelled according to their language. The Rus experience of Greek was a product of their economic, political and cultural relations with Byzantium. The range of people who came into contact with spoken Greek, and who acquired some passive or active knowledge of the language, must have been quite broad.70 Rus travellers to Byzantium included merchants, monks and mercenaries, envoys, princesses and pilgrims. Outcast princes settled with their families on Byzantine territory, traders lodged in the city itself, wonder-seekers came to gawp at the holy relics, monks to find inspiration in the monasteries. Their conversations are lost, but it would be implausible to claim that all of them always resorted to interpreters. We might imagine, without stretching credulity too far, that at any rate some of the Rus could haggle over prices in a Constantinopolitan market, laugh at a pun, savour an obscenity, and generally pass the time of day in conversational (demotic) Greek. And ‘Greeks’ came to Rus, probably in smaller numbers, but steadily enough: diplomats and churchmen (the head of the Church in Rus was normally a ‘Greek’), painters and architects, craftsmen and traders, the occasional bride. The sounds of Greek reached the Dnieper and the Volkhov.71 What did the Rus know of Greek primary writing? In any formal dealing with Byzantium it would have been essential to have some personnel competent to cope with administrative, documentary, diplomatic Greek (written demotic), though we need not posit the existence of a substantial secretariat, nor even that the competent persons were necessarily East Slavs.72 The more contentious issue is the place of Greek in Rus bookculture. Could bookmen in Rus check their Slavonic texts against Greek originals? Or read Greek manuscripts for their own edification? Or translate from Greek manuscripts into Slavonic? In short, to what extent did the Rus ‘know’ the written Greek of books?

70

71 72

chanceries of Muscovy: see Karskii, Slavianskaia kirillovskaia paleografiia, pp. 169–78; Tikhomirov and Murav
ev, Russkaia paleografiia, pp. 17–27. See Francis J. Thomson, ‘Communications orales et e´ crites entre Grecs et Russes (IXe– XIIIe si`ecles): Russes a` Byzance, Grecs en Russie: Connaissance et m´econnaissance de la langue de l’autre’, in A. Dierkens and J. M. Sansterre (eds.), Voyages et voyageurs a` Byzance et en Occident du VIe au XIe si`ecle (Geneva, 2000), pp. 113–63. ˇ cenko, ‘To On direct lexical borrowing from spoken Greek into East Slavonic see I. Sevˇ Call a Spade a Spade, or the Etymology of Rogalije’, HUS 19 (1995; publ. 1997), 608–26. See APDR III, pp. 25–5 (nos. 40a–40c), on Greek seals perhaps attributable to Byzantine administrative functionaries in the employ of Rus princes in the late eleventh century. See also below, pp. 163–5 on Rus–Byzantine treaties.

102

The graphic environment

Greek manuscripts existed in Rus. We have (in later copies) works in Greek – and in some cases their Slavonic translations – by Byzantine churchmen in Rus.73 Anecdotal evidence suggests that some Greek books were preserved at the Caves monastery.74 Were such books read by the locals? Byzantium did not export its ‘higher’ learning to the Rus. Aristotle and Homer were not on the Kievan curriculum, nor was the study and practice of rhetoric in neoclassical ‘atticising’ Greek. Furthermore, no known native author, with the possible exception of Metropolitan Ilarion in the middle of the eleventh century, writes in a way which suggests he has been engaged in the independent reading of any Greek books in their original language, whether atticising or demotic. Some copyists perhaps acquired sufficient passive knowledge of the biblical or liturgical Greek to be able to check Slavonic readings against a Greek original,75 but native works cite from pre-existing Slavonic translations. So the question boils down to who was responsible for the translations. The Rus received their Slavonic Christianity pre-packaged through the CyrilloMethodian and subsequent Bulgarian translations. However, the repertoire of Slavonic translations from Greek continued to expand through the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Who produced them, and where? At the optimistic (or credulous) extreme, scores of translations are ascribed to the Rus. At the sceptical (or cynical) extreme, no translation can unequivocally be proved to have been made in Rus by a native of Rus, hence all of them were made elsewhere or by people trained elsewhere.76 The gulf between the extremes is perhaps neither as wide nor as deep as might appear. On the one hand, nobody seriously proposes, as a general statement, that parchment literacy in Rus reflects an active engagement with, or direct knowledge of, higher Greek learning in the Byzantine manner, or that a school of Greek rhetoric or philosophy existed in Kiev.77 On the other hand, it is broadly accepted that some East Slavs could and 73

74 75 76

77

Leo of Pereiaslavl’s treatise on the azymes, in A. Pavlov, Kriticheskie opyty po istorii drevneishei greko-russkoi polemiki protiv latinian (St Petersburg, 1878), pp. 115–32; an epistle and a set of canonical responses by Metropolitan Ioann II: Pavlov, Kriticheskie opyty, pp. 169–86; ‘Otryvki grecheskogo teksta kanonicheskikh otvetov russkogo mitropolita Ioanna II’, Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk 22 (1873), Appendix 5, pp. 5–17. BLDR IV, p. 310; Heppell, Paterik, p. 12. See e.g. M. A. Momina, ‘Problema pravki slavianskikh bogosluzhebnykh gimnograficheskikh knig na Rusi v XI v.’, TODRL 45 (1992), 200–19. Francis J. Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia (Aldershot, Brookfield, Singapore, Sydney, 1999), esp. nos. I–III, V and the Addendum, pp. 16–51. See the critical comments of A. A. Alekseev, ‘Koe-chto o perevodakh v Drevnei Rusi (po povodu stat
i Fr. Dzh. Tomsona “Made in Russia”’, TODRL 49 (1996), 278–96. See also below, pp. 202–6, 223–7.

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probably did receive training sufficient to enable them to translate Greek books.78 The points at issue are therefore reduced to where such training was received (plausibly in Constantinople or on Mt Athos, but Rus cannot definitively be excluded) and where the trained translator actually sat down and did his work (no evidence in any direction; certainly no need to presume that an East Slav trained abroad would be struck by instant amnesia the moment he returned home). The validity of the cultural generalisation does not depend on a denial of all contact between East Slavs and Greek books. Rather the opposite: the Rus lack of interest in Byzantine ‘higher’ learning is all the more notable if it cannot be attributed simply to a linguistic barrier. East Slavs did travel; linguistic barriers can be broken down. Higher Byzantine book-learning in Greek was filtered out from the Rus version of Eastern Christianity for cultural reasons, not just for lack of opportunity.79 Greek secondary writing prospered in plainer ways. Look at the walls in the grandest church in Rus, St Sophia in Kiev. All the inscriptions in the mosaics and frescoes are in Greek; as are the inscriptions on the seals of all metropolitans of Kiev, and on the seals of many of the regional bishops, and on the seals of a fair sprinkling of princes, and on many ‘snake amulets’, and indeed on vast numbers of image-bearing objects.80 We can divide such specimens of Greek secondary writing into two groups: ‘captions’, and ‘messages’. Captions are necessary to the image, identifying the figure depicted (‘Jesus Christ’, ‘The Mother of God’ etc.). ‘Messages’ are not necessarily linked to a picture (e.g. ‘Archbishop of the metropolitanate of Rhosia’, without a portrait); or they contain at least a phrase, sometimes much more, of continuous text (‘Lord, help thy servant X’, (‘Take, eat, this is my body’ etc). Messages and captions in Greek secondary writing have different histories in the Rus graphic environment. Message-inscriptions in Greek were the height of fashion in the middle of the eleventh century. All secondary message-inscriptions in the early part of the century are in Slavonic: on the native coinage, on an early seal of Iaroslav Vladimirovich.81 Suddenly, in mid-century, Greek is everywhere. Who made the messages, or how they were ‘read’, is for the moment not important. They were commissioned, they were displayed, 78

79 80 81

Thomson, The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia, Addendum, pp. 30–3; A. M. Moldovan, Zhitie Andreia Iurodivogo v slavianskoi pis
mennosti (Moscow, 2000), pp. 103–5. Simon Franklin, ‘Po povodu “intellektual
nogo molchaniia” Drevnei Rusi’, Russia Mediaevalis 10 (2001), 262–70. Simon Franklin, ‘Greek in Kievan Rus
’, DOP 46 (1992), 74–8; below, plates 2–3. The seal, discovered in 1994: APDR III, pp. 13–18 (no. 2a), with the Slavonic message ‘Iaroslav, Rus Prince’.

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The graphic environment

presumably they were wanted and esteemed. It may be no coincidence that the fashion for visible Greek arrives at about the same time as Iaroslav’s intensive programme of public works ostentatiously reminiscent of Constantinople;82 or that the mid-eleventh century is also the period for which there is the strongest – though by no means conclusive – evidence for some direct engagement with Greek primary writing by bookmen in Kiev. But the fashion faded; not suddenly, and not at the same pace in every context. Metropolitans continued to issue seals with Greek inscriptions through into the thirteenth century. Bishops’ seals tended to switch from Greek to Slavonic sooner, in the latter half of the twelfth century, but the first to change were laymen (mainly princes), whose seals made the linguistic transition around the end of the eleventh century. The period of transition produced some curious mixtures, as patrons apparently sought to retain the best of both worlds. For example, the reverse side of the golden snake amulet known as the ‘Chernigov grivna’ has two concentric circular inscriptions, the incantatory formula in Greek and a supplicatory formula in Slavonic.83 A seal of Prince Iaroslav Sviatoslavich (d. 1129), found at Gorodishche in 1994, gives the prince’s baptismal name (Pankratios) in Greek, followed by his patronymic (Sviatoslavich) in Slavonic.84 But the writing was off the wall for public Greek: the Kievan church of St Michael with the Golden Dome was decorated with mosaics about fifty years after St Sophia, displaying exactly the same eucharistic inscription in the apse, but now in Slavonic.85 ‘Caption’ inscriptions defied the rise and fall of fashion and came to fulfil a special function of their own. In terms of their dissemination, and of the types of objects on which they appear, caption inscriptions are probably the most widely diffused forms of writing in Rus. They appear on coins and seals and mosaics and in graffiti, on frescoes and panel icons, on silver and enamels, on pectoral crosses and in manuscript miniatures. Through this type of inscription, and only through this type 82 83 84

85

Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 209–17. T. V. Nikolaeva and A. V. Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amulety-zmeeviki (Moscow, 1991), pp. 49–51 (no. 1). See below, plate 3. APDR III, pp. 22–4 (no. 30); cf. the donor-portrait in the Trier Psalter: ‘Iaropolk’ in Slavonic, but the epithet o dikaios (‘the righteous’) in Greek; and ‘Iaropolk’s mother’ with ‘Iaropolk’s’ in Slavonic and ‘mother’ in abbreviated Greek: N. P. Kondakov, Izobrazhenie russkoi kniazheskoi sem
i v miniatiurakh XI veka (St Petersburg, 1906), plate I. For other signs of transition on princely seals see Franklin, ‘Greek in Kievan Rus
’, 78. See, however, the clearly Slavonic preferences of Sviatoslav Iaroslavich (d. 1076): APDR I, pp. 167–8; III, pp. 113–14 (nos. 9a–13). V. N. Lazarev, Mikhailovskie mozaiki (Moscow, 1966), pp. 43–75. There are errors in the inscription, but they do not diminish the significance of the choice of script for display.

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of inscription, Greek script became firmly and permanently embedded in East Slav visual culture. However, a plain statement to the effect that caption inscriptions were ‘in’ Greek would be misleading. Graphically and semantically the position was more complex. Caption inscriptions may include one or both of two forms: full words (normally the saint’s name), and abbreviations (standard abbreviations for Christ and the Mother of God, and for the word ‘saint’). Spellings of the saints’ names fluctuate widely: sometimes Greek, sometimes Slavonic, sometimes Greek word-forms in Slavonic letters, sometimes strange hybrid forms which are neither one nor the other.86 The abbreviations remain consistently Greek.87 Here Greek became a permanent and prominent feature of the East Slav graphic environment. Yet it would of course be absurd to conclude that all viewers must therefore ‘read Greek’. The abbreviations are Greek in origin and in graphic form, but no longer in language or function. In effect they have become ideograms, rather than specimens of alphabetic script. they are components of the visual scheme, of the iconography.88 Greek tertiary writing in Rus is much harder to find. A few graffiti testify to the presence of visitors, in some cases perhaps of the artists who decorated the churches.89 But the more intriguing specimens are a few scratches on pots from the deep south – Tmutorokan on the straits of Kerch, and Sarkel on the Lower Don.90 While it is natural to find Greek graffiti where ‘Greeks’ are involved in trade, the curious feature here is that at least in one case Greek script seems to be used to render a Slavonic name, and in other cases it is not clear whether the inscription is Greek or Cyrillic. The inscriptions are very early, from the late tenth or early eleventh century, so that these pots may hint at a commercial context not merely for contact with, but for participation in, the use of Greek script. In surveying the evidence for Greek in Rus, the distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary writing turns out to be quite useful. Considered separately, each reveals a different pattern. Considered together they give the impression that Greek was a significant presence in the graphic environment. And so it was; but its significance should be put into perspective. If we compare the presence of Greek in Rus with the presence 86 87

88 90

Franklin, ‘Greek in Kievan Rus
’, 78–81. I
C
(Iesous Khristos – Jesus Christ); MR QU (Meter Theou – Mother of God); O AGIO
(ho agios – ‘saint’, ‘holy’) or its equivalent of an alpha within an omicron; I
C
NI KA (Iesous Khristos nika – Jesus Christ is victorious), a formula flanking representations of the Cross. 89 Franklin, ‘Greek in Kievan Rus
’, 75. See below, pp. 246–7. A. A. Medyntseva, ‘Nadpisi na amphornoi keramike X–nachala XI v. i problema proiskhozhdeniia drevnerusskoi pis
mennosti’, in Kul
tura slavian i Rus
(Moscow, 1998), pp. 176–94.

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The graphic environment

of Greek in Bulgaria, the notable feature is not the intensity of the Greek presence in Rus but the relatively muted response to it. Rus was remote from the Byzantine Empire. Bulgaria was at various times a neighbour of the Empire or a component of the Empire. Greek-speakers mixed with Slav-speakers, and there is no doubt that some knowledge of Greek was deemed a desirable accomplishment for an educated Christian Bulgarian. In the late ninth century Khan Boris even sent his son, the future Tsar Symeon, to study in Constantinople for several years. Supercilious Constantinopolitan gossips may have mocked Symeon as a ‘semi-Greek’, but even their contempt is a revealing acknowledgement of the Bulgarian leader’s pretensions.91 In early Bulgarian written culture the Greek presence is strongly felt on all levels: from Symeon’s Greek correspondence with Byzantine diplomats and churchmen, through the discussion of linguistic issues of script and translation in the Bulgarians’ own Slavonic writings, right down to the languages of inscriptions.92 Greek inscriptions in Rus served mostly as components of visual display. By contrast, early East Bulgarian inscriptions include several which are authentically bilingual: inscriptions with parallel texts in Greek and Slavonic, and even continuous texts which alternate between the two languages.93 Greek was much the most conspicuous of the non-Slavonic scripts in Rus, but by comparison with Bulgaria the Rus engagement with Greek language was slight. ‘Latin’ ‘Latin’, for the Rus, was more than a purely linguistic term. It could refer to an alphabet, or to the Latin language, or to any language written with the same script. In a geographical sense ‘Latins’ were, in effect, West Europeans, those whose written language was neither Greek nor Slavonic. In a confessional context ‘Latins’ were those who used the Latin language in their services, who accepted the ecclesiastical authority of Rome. ‘Latin’ could therefore signify a script, a language or languages, a collection of peoples, or a version of the Faith. The meanings overlap with one another, but there are variations in focus and emphasis. 91

92

93

See e.g. Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth. Eastern Europe 500–1500 (London, 1971), pp. 102–4; John V. A. Fine Jr., The Early Medieval Balkans. A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (Ann Arbor, 1983), pp. 133–4. For early Bulgarian inscriptions in Greek see Veselin Beshevliev, P

rvob

lgarski nadpisi (vtoro preraboteno i dop

lneno izdanie) (Sofia, 1992); further on Greek and Slavonic in Bulgaria see above, p. 97. See the seven bilingual inscriptions published in Popkonstantinov and Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, pp. 128–9, 140–1, 152–3, 178–82, 186–7, 214–16, 218–19; also the distribution map, ibid., p. 11 (Map 6).

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Latin as language is mentioned in texts concerning, for example, the inscription on the Cross, which was well known to have been written ‘in Hebrew, in Latin and in Greek’.94 ‘Latins’ as people, in the neutral sense, can appear in official documents. For example, in the 1229 trade agreement between Smolensk, Riga and Gotland, Rigans and Gotlanders are routinely termed ‘Latins’. Indeed, the words ‘Latin’ and ‘German’ can be interchangeable: ‘If a Latin in Smolensk gives a Rusin goods on credit, then the German is to be paid first even if the Rusin has other debts; and a Rusin shall have the same in Riga or Gotland’; ‘If a Latin gives a loan to a servitor of the prince . . . and if [the recipient of the loan] dies without having repaid it, then whosoever shall receive his assets shall repay the German.’95 Yet the most frequent connotations of ‘Latin’ are confessional. Occasionally the label can be almost neutral, as when the Rus pilgrim Daniil, who travelled to the Holy Land c.1106–8, describes ‘Latin’ and ‘Orthodox’ priests jointly celebrating at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.96 Normally, however, the context is partisan and polemical. ‘Do not accept teaching from the Latins, for their teaching is corrupted’, the Byzantines warn Vladimir Sviatoslavich after his Conversion, according to the Primary Chronicle97 – a warning which was repeated and reinforced by a succession of Byzantine churchmen serving in Rus in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.98 Ecclesiastical polemicists highlighted the confessional disparities. But since the Rus did not adopt Latin as a language of learning or worship or public display or rhetoric, they were neither equipped nor inclined to absorb or refute Latin-based teachings directly, in the Latins’ own terms. Real contact between the Rus and the Latin script and its language(s) was sustained at a more mundane and practical level, more through trade and diplomacy than in direct clashes of theology and liturgy. Surviving papal correspondence with Rus princes deals with politics rather than dogma.99 Members of the princely family were married into ‘Latin’ families across Europe, especially in the eleventh century. ‘Latin’ merchants were a habitual sight in the towns of the north and west, and presumably 94

95 97 98 99

John xix.12. See e.g. in Aprakos Mstislava Velikogo, ed. L. P. Zhukovskaia (Moscow, 1983), fo. 168a, line 1. ‘In Latin’ here renders the Greek rhomaisti. This passage figures prominently in narratives about the Cyrillo-Methodian mission and attendant debates about the use of a separate script for the Slavs: see below, pp. 191–3. 96 BLDR IV, p.112. SG, pp. 21–2, lines 24–6, 29–31. PVL I, p. 79; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 115. See G. Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus
(988–1237) (Munich, 1982), pp. 170–84. Athanasius G. Welykyj (ed.), Documenta Pontificum Romanorum historiam Ucrainae illustrantia, I (Rome, 1953), pp. 5–6, 28–43, 49–51. See Sophia Senyk, A History of the Church in Ukraine. Volume I. To the End of the Thirteenth Century (OCA 243; Rome, 1993), pp. 298–326, 432–9.

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their local counterparts must have had some way of communicating with them. The 1229 treaty between Smolensk and Riga and Gotland contains Latin and Low German features, and there may well have been versions in one or both of these languages,100 as there were for diplomatic documents 101 From the late twelfth between Novgorod and Gotland and Lubeck. ¨ or early thirteenth century the rules governing the German merchant community in Novgorod began to be codified in written documents by agreement with the local authorities. Later texts of such agreements survive in Low German.102 Despite such contacts, Latin remained ‘other’. Hard evidence for any active involvement in Latin-script literacy is virtually non-existent. It is not, however, entirely negligible, and some of the fragments turn out to have significant, if modest, implications for the Rus uses of the written word. The direct proximity of Slavonic and Latin is brought about through the mobility of goods and people. Two Latin manuscripts bear the signs of their use in the eleventh century by Rus princesses abroad. The first is a document issued in 1063 by the infant Philip I and signed by Philip’s mother Anna, wife of Henry I and daughter of Iaroslav Vladimirovich of Kiev. She signs ‘Anna regina’. This is the only known signature, on parchment, of any member of the Kievan princely dynasty.103 It is also the only known example of Latin writing by a native of Rus. And it curiously confirms the rule that the Rus were resistant to Latin, since even on an official document from the French court Anna’s inscription is made not in the Latin alphabet but in Cyrillic transliteration!104 The second example is the Trier Psalter, a Latin manuscript with miniatures commissioned by Anna’s sister-in-law Gertrude, wife of Prince Iziaslav Iaroslavich. Gertrude was of Polish origin, the sister of Duke Casimir I, so it is again noteworthy that the inscriptions on these miniatures are not in Latin but in Cyrillic and Greek.105 Latins in Rus leave equally exiguous traces. One of the earliest of the Novgorod birch-bark documents, from the first half of the eleventh century, is in Latin script. Discovered in 1993, its brief Germanic message has been deciphered as ‘   ’, and interpreted as an apotropaic incantation, ‘arrow, do not fall on him’:106 perhaps a talisman for a soldier, 100 102

103 104 105

101 See below, pp. 166–9. See SG, pp. 18–19, for a summary of hypotheses. W. Schluter, ¨ Die nowgoroder Schra in sieben Fassungen vom 13. bis 17. Jahrhundert (Dorpat, 1911); W. Rennkamp, Studien zum deutsch-russischen Handel bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts. Nowgorod und D¨unagebiet (Bochum, 1977). There may be some princely autographs among the graffiti in St Sophia: see Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 73–81, nos. 27–8. Ana r

ina: Karskii, Russkaia kirillovskaia paleografiia, p. 125. 106 NGB, no. 753. See above, n. 84.

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although the ‘arrow’ might also be ‘God’s arrow’, i.e. lightning.107 Also from the early eleventh century, an anomalous Latin ‘R’ appears in the otherwise Cyrillic spelling of Iaroslav’s name on three variants of his silver coins. These variants are sometimes dubbed ‘Scandinavian imitations’. Metrologically they are close to Scandinavian coinage, which, together with the Latin letter-form, suggests that they may have been made by a Scandinavian master. Of the six surviving specimens of this type, four were discovered in Norway or Sweden, and one other – of unknown provenance – is in the Stockholm Museum.108 The most numerous examples of Latin script arrived in Rus readyformed, on objects made abroad, with secondary writing: on the large quantities of Western coins;109 or inscribed on the blades of Frankish swords. The sword-blades merit closer attention. Manufactured probably in the Rhinelands, similar inscribed swords have been found in large quantities throughout northern Europe. The lettering, on the upper part of the blade, was created by laying wire into pre-stamped channels and then reheating and polishing. One of the commonest types (with nearly 200 examples identified across Europe by the mid-1990s) bears the name ‘’. Originally indicating a maker’s name, the ‘’ mark appears to have become a prestigious brand-name which continued to be copied – and probably pirated – from the ninth century to the middle of the eleventh century.110 The ‘’ brand is clear and recognisable, as are other inscribed names of manufacturers such as Ingelred, Cerolt, Ulen, Leutlrit, Lun. However, many of the inscribed Frankish sword-blades display instead more cryptic messages: groups of Latin letters in what can appear to be random combinations, such as ‘’, or ‘’, or even ‘’. For the makers, and in particular for users with some understanding of Latin, these inscriptions served a talismanic purpose, as abbreviated appeals for divine protection: ‘[] [] [] [] []’; ‘[] [] []. []. [] [] []’; ‘[] [] [] . . . ’111 For the Rus such clusters of foreign letters were presumably incomprehensible, functioning as signs of otherness. 107 108 109 110

111

Cf. the similar phraseology in a Balto-Finnic inscription (in Cyrillic letters) on birchbark: see below, p. 116. DRM, pp. 118–20; 206–7, 227, 230 (coin types 225–7). V. M. Potin, Drevniaia Rus
i evropeiskie gosudarstva v X–XIII vv. Istorikonumizmaticheskii ocherk (Leningrad, 1968). See A. N. Kirpichnikov, ‘Mechi s nadpis
iu ULFBERHT v severnoi Evrope’, in A. N. Kirpichnikov, E. A. Riabinin and A. I. Saksa (eds.) Slaviane i finno-ugry. Arkheologiia, istoriia, kul
tura (St Petersburg, 1997), pp. 116–22. D. A. Drboglav, Zagadki latinskikh kleim na mechakh IX–XIV vekov (Moscow, 1984). For a convenient overview of sword inscriptions, with drawings and tables, see the

110

The graphic environment

In general, therefore, despite areas of prolonged contact with ‘Latins’, the Rus were unreceptive to Latin-script literacy, and the role of Latin writing in the emergence of a local written culture was indeed almost negligible. Almost, but not absolutely. Local responses to Latin-script literacy cannot be measured entirely in terms of the local use or non-use of Latin script. In this respect two locally manufactured inscribed swordblades are of special interest. One of them dates from the late tenth or early eleventh century; the other, on which an inscription was only recently discovered, is slightly older, perhaps from the third quarter of the tenth century. Their inscriptions were formed by the same method as was used for the ‘’ swords or for the swords with talismanic Latin abbreviations. Like the ‘’ swords, these bear the names of their manufacturers. The unusual feature, however, is that here the names are Slavonic and the script is Cyrillic: ‘ 
’ (‘Liudota the Blacksmith’) and ‘-’ (the start of a name).112 Although the inscriptions are Slavonic, the idea and the technique were clearly borrowed from ‘Latin’ prototypes.113 The transfer of technology in military production brought a transfer of a use for writing. These two swords are among the earliest East Slav inscribed objects, and among the very, very few East Slav applications of writing that were demonstrably inspired by ‘Latin’ example. Not everything originated with the ‘Greeks’. Runes A sequence of vertical lines, embellished with a few additional strokes at a variety of angles, is as likely as not to be interpreted as a specimen of runic script. Derived – perhaps, in part – from the Etruscan script of northern Italy, runic script (or futhark from the initial sequence of letters) was used by Germanic peoples from Late Antiquity.114 The simplicity and angularity of runes derives from the fact that they were designed for incision, to be cut into wood or bone, rather than for ink-strokes. With Christianisation and the spread of parchment literacy, futhark tended to be displaced by the

112 113

114

relevant section in the chapter on weapons by A. N. Kirpichnikov and A. F. Medvedev in B. A. Kolchin (ed.), Drevniaia Rus
. Gorod. Zamok. Selo (Moscow, 1985), pp. 300–7 and tables 120–2 (pp. 332–4). Note also the inscription which Drboglav (Zagadki, pp. 106–7) reads as ‘’: this sword was apparently found in Kiev, and Drboglav links it with the presence of Polish troops in the city in 1069. A. N. Kirpichnikov, ‘Novoobnaruzhennyi drevnerusskii podpisnoi mech’, TODRL 50 (1996), 717–22; alternative reading ‘Liudota forged [this]’. On the possibility that Latin formulae lie behind other makers’ inscriptions, even when the objects are not imitative of ‘Latin’ equivalents, see T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Drevnerusskaia epigrafika X–XIII vv. Tekst i norma’, Russian Linguistics 17 (1993), 159–60. On Turkic runes see below, p. 117.

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111

Latin alphabet (or Gothic), though in certain contexts runic inscriptions continued to be produced throughout the Middle Ages.115 Medieval runic inscriptions are scattered across a vast area, from Suzdal in north-eastern Rus to the Isle of Man and Ireland, from Greenland to Constantinople, yet the home of medieval rune-literacy is Scandinavia. Or rather, they are scattered across a vast area because their home is Scandinavia: to follow the trails of runic inscriptions is to follow the trails of the Vikings. Runic inscriptions in and around the lands of the Rus therefore provide supplementary evidence for the activities of Scandinavians, whether in transit or in residence. Members of the Rus elite were of Scandinavian descent and continued to have dealings with Scandinavians.116 To what extent was runic literacy part of the cultural heritage, or of the graphic environment? Were runic and Slavonic written practices entirely distinct in every respect, or were any practices transferred from the former to the latter? Runes are notoriously difficult not merely to decipher but even to identify.117 In the 16-character medieval futhark (reduced from the older 24-character version) individual letters may have several different soundvalues, so that even a well-preserved and legible inscription is often susceptible to a range of readings. More seriously, since many inscriptions are mere fragments or consist of just one or two characters, it is often hard to determine whether a given mark or set of marks is actually runic at all. Two or three lines are scored into a fragment of wood, or bone, or metal. Together, if rotated so that the longest line is vertical, they look rather like a runic letter, but the resemblance might be coincidental: could they instead be the abstract sign of an owner, or maker? Or a symbol indicating a quantity or value? Or an idle doodle, signifying nothing? Or, in fact, a genuine rune?118 And even if runic in origin, do they function as alphabetical signs in context? Inscriptions which are ‘rune-like’ far outnumber inscriptions which are definitively runic. Hence an inventory of medieval119 runic inscriptions from Rus might vary in length, according to taste and opinion. 115 116

117

118 119

See Ralph W. V. Elliott, Runes. An Introduction, 2nd edn (Manchester and New York, 1989). On linguistic interaction see Bohdan Struminski, ´ Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus
. Northmen, Finns and East Slavs (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries) (Rome, Edmonton, Toronto, 1996). ‘There seems to be a primary epigraphical law by which characters that cannot be identified as anything else are called runes’: R. I. Page, ‘Runes and Non-Runes’, in his Runes and Runic Inscriptions. Collected Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Viking Runes (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 161–2. E.g. E. N. Nosov and T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Bukvennye znaki na priaslitse serediny X v. s “Riurikova” gorodishcha (voprosy interpretatsii)’, VID 18 (1987), 45–55. Ignoring the much earlier specimens – the Kowel spearhead and the Lepesovka ceramic fragments – probably from the third century : see the analysis by M. A. Tikhanova

112

The graphic environment

Candidates for such an inventory – mainly specimens of tertiary writing – would currently include, in approximate chronological order: (i) Less than a dozen multi-character graffiti on Eastern coins, mainly of the eighth and early ninth centuries from finds in northern Rus, but with three or four examples on mid-tenth-century coins from various hoards now preserved in museum collections in Kiev and Chernigov, plus considerably larger numbers of ‘rune-like’ singlecharacter graffiti.120 Four of the inscriptions spell ‘god’, two contain names, one is perhaps a magic formula, and one seems to affirm the value of the coin. This is a meagre yield from the inspection of tens of thousands of Eastern coins, which between them bear several hundred graffiti. (ii) A long inscription (forty-eight letters), apparently poetic and perhaps magical, on a ninth-century wooden shaft from Staraia Ladoga.121 (iii) ‘[X cut] these runes’, on a ninth-century stone club-head found in Latvia.122 (iv) Two bronze trapezoidal amulets, with identical inscriptions, from Gorodishche. One (which also bears an older, ninth-century inscription on the reverse side) was probably produced at Staraia Ladoga in the early or mid-tenth century, the other was copied from it in Gorodishche towards the end of the tenth century. The older inscription invokes protection on a voyage or journey, while the younger and duplicated inscription reads ‘may you not lack the strength of a man’.123

120

121 122 123

in E. A. Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi. Teksty, perevod, kommentarii (Moscow, 1977), pp. 133–41 (nos. 121–5), 264–5 (figs. 71–2). A second volume by E. A. Mel
nikova (Moscow, 2001), with the more recent discoveries, reached me when the present book was already in production. Three, or perhaps six, multi-character graffiti, plus six rune-like single marks, from the Hermitage collections: see the analysis by I. G. Dobrovol
skii, I. V. Dubov, Iu. K. Kuz
menko in Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi, pp. 142–52; three multi-character graffiti on eighth-century coins from the collections of the Historical Museum in Moscow: see V. E. Nakhapetian and A. V. Fomin, ‘Graffiti na kuficheskikh monetakh, obrashchavshikhsia v Evrope v IX–X vv.’, DGVEMI 1991 god (1994), pp. 139–208, nos. 120, 129 (from a hoard at Peterhof ), 46b. Nakhapetian and Fomin argue that over a hundred further rune-like marks are in fact not runes and not Scandinavian. On the graffiti in the southern collections see E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Graffiti na vostochnykh monetakh iz sobranii Ukrainy’, DGVEMI 1994 god (1996), pp. 248–84: multi-character runic graffiti, nos. 1, 2, 15(?), 37, plus about a dozen ‘rune-like’ single-character graffiti. See now Mel
nikova’s second volume (n. 119), pp. 102–74. Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi, pp. 158–62 (no. 143). Ibid., p. 155 (no. 140). E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Skandinavskie amulety s runicheskimi nadpisiami iz Staroi Ladogi i Gorodishcha’, DGVEMI 1991 god (1994), pp. 231–9, synthesising and revising preparatory publications: V. P. Petrenko and Iu. K. Kuz
menko, ‘No. 144’, in

Scripts and languages

113

(v) Three signs, perhaps spelling a name, scratched on an amphora from Belgorod, dated to the late tenth or early eleventh century.124 (vi) A sixteen-letter futhark (lacking the first five letters) incised on a pig-bone, from Novgorod, dated archaeologically to the first half of the eleventh century; and perhaps also an undeciphered inscription of thirty-two rune-like characters incised in a cow’s rib-bone, also from early-eleventh-century Novgorod.125 (vii) An eleventh-century memorial runestone set up on the island of Berezan in the Dnieper estuary by Grani for his comrade Karl.126 (viii) ‘This [is] Olaf ’s’, on a mould for a pendant, discovered in Suzdal among finds dated to the late eleventh century.127 (ix) Perhaps about half of the single-character signs on over a hundred incised fragments of bone found at Maskovichi on the western borders of the Polotsk lands, dated roughly from the eleventh to the thirteenth century.128 (x) ‘Viskarr [=V´ısgeirr?] acquired this plot of land’: the sole runic birchbark document, found in Smolensk and dated stratigraphically to the twelfth century.129 (xi) ‘Sigrid’, on a spindle whorl from Galician Zvenigorod.130 (xii) A graffito to bring good luck, on one of a group of knuckle-bones from Polotsk, stratigraphically dated to around the 1220s but perhaps in fact slightly earlier.131 As the remnants from nearly half a millennium of contact through trade and settlement, these sparse and scattered fragments do not amount to very much. They are hardly testimony to a flourishing runic-script literacy among Scandinavians in Rus, and hence they hardly allow us to surmise that the indigenous or assimilated population had intensive and prolonged exposure to the uses of runes. There are some striking contrasts

124 125 126 127 128 129 130

131

Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi, pp. 162–9; E. A. Mel
nikova and E. N. Nosov, ‘Amulety s runicheskoi nadpis
iu s Gorodishcha pod Novgorodom’, DGTSSSR 1986 god (1988), pp. 210–22. E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Nadpis
II iz Belgoroda’, in Kul
tura slavian i Rus
(Moscow, 1998), pp. 194–5. Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi, pp. 156–8, (nos. 141–2). Ibid., pp. 154–5 (no. 139). E. A. Mel
nikova, M. B. Sedov, G. V. Shtykhov, ‘Novye nakhodki skandinavskikh runicheskikh nadpisei na territorii SSSR’, DGTSSSR 1981 god (1983), pp. 183–6. L. V. Duchits and E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Nadpisi i znaki na kostiakh s gorodishcha Maskovichi (Severo-Zapadnaia Belorussiia), DGTSSSR 1980 god (1981), pp. 185–216. D. A. Avdusin and E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Smolenskie gramoty na bereste (iz raskopok 1952–1968 gg.)’, DGTSSSR 1984 god (1985), pp. 208–11 (no. 11). E. A. Mel
nikova, ‘Kul
turnaia assimiliatsiia skandinavov na Rusi po dannym iazyka i pis
mennosti’, in Obshchestvo, ekonomika, kul
tura i iskusstvo slavian (Trudy VI Mezhdunarodnogo Kongressa slavianskoi arkheologii, IV (Moscow, 1998), pp. 135–43. Mel
nikova, Sedov, Shtykhov, ‘Novye nakhodki’, pp. 187–8.

114

The graphic environment

with the survival of runes in Scandinavia itself. Graffiti on Eastern coins in Scandinavia are both more frequent and more frequently runic. For example, while ‘God’ figures five or six times in the coin-graffiti from Rus (based on surveys of a total of about 55,000 coins), in Swedish collections, containing 34,000 coins, it occurs over a thousand times.132 Perhaps more eloquent is the virtual absence of runic memorial-stones, which are so characteristic of Scandinavia, where ‘they are to be found everywhere, in fields and farms, incorporated in houses and churches, used as boundary marks and to indicate fords’.133 Often these Scandinavian rune-stones commemorate those who had journeyed the East Way, but their memorials were set up at home, not strewn along the paths of their travels.134 The sole exception highlights the rule: Grani’s stone at Berezan, on the Black Sea coast, beyond Rus rather than in it, perhaps just too remote for an assured commemoration back home. Rune-readers, however, are used to conjecture. Conjecture is encouraged by the supposed [oc]cult origins and functions of runes (the word ‘rune’ derives from a word meaning ‘whisper’, ‘secret’, ‘mystery’), and historians, too, have become comfortable with extreme uncertainty, as in statements such as: ‘it is possible that the early Anglo-Saxons made extensive use of rune-sticks for practical communications, but the absence of even one surviving example makes it difficult to proceed beyond speculation’.135 The material from Rus likewise allows little more than speculation, but at least the bits and pieces are better than nothing at all. A striking feature of the runic inscriptions from Rus is their wide distribution, both geographically and chronologically. The preponderance of finds from the North-west – Staraia Ladoga, Gorodishche/Novgorod – is what one would have expected, since these were the areas of the earliest, most intensive and continual Viking trade and settlement. Graffiti on coins from tenth-century hoards in the Middle Dnieper region similarly fit the predictable pattern. But the late-eleventh-century Suzdal pendantmould? The twelfth-century birch-bark document from Smolensk? The bones from Polotsk and its hinterlands? The spindle whorl from 132 133 134

135

See I. Hammarberg and G. Rispling, ‘Graffiter p˚a vikingatida mynt’, Hikuin 11 (1985), 63–78; also Nakhapetian and Fomin, ‘Graffiti na kuficheskikh monetakh’, pp. 142–3. Elliott, Runes, p. 33. Such stones form the bulk of Mel
nikova’s corpus of runic inscriptions relevant to Rus: Mel
nikova, Skandinavskie runicheskie nadpisi, pp. 221–66 (plates 1–70); also Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of Rus
. Volume I. Old Scandinavian Sources Other than the Sagas (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 305–463. Susan Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990), p. 37.

Scripts and languages

115

Zvenigorod in the far west? These later, scattered fragments are no longer the haphazard leftovers of transit trade. The Suzdal mould was unearthed at the citadel in a residential compound which appears to have been associated with the druzhina, the prince’s retinue, the local defence forces. Suzdal in the late eleventh century was still a disputed outpost of the dynasty’s possessions,136 and it is plausible that Scandinavians were among those brought in to police it.137 The mould implies settlement, local craft production, and the nature of the inscription implies that the runes were used by somebody who knew how to write them, not merely as a decorative relic. The Zvenigorod spindle whorl points to the same conclusion. Similarly the Smolensk letter, with its claim to land, suggests the activity of local rune-users (unassimilated settlers, presumably) well into the twelfth century. Thus the nature of the evidence – if not its quantity – indicates that pockets of fairly mundane, practical runescript literacy existed in Rus both before and after the spread of Slavonic writing. Runes remained sparse but persistent features of the graphic environment for a surprisingly long time and over a surprisingly wide area. What, if any, was their impact on local written practices? The runic survivals produce no obvious and neat examples of direct transference such as the Latin and Slavonic inscriptions on sword-blades, or the Greek and Slavonic portrait-captions on pictures. Straining a little, however, one might pursue analogies between the tradition (not exclusively Scandinavian or runic) of incising graffiti on Eastern coins and the subsequent (though not necessarily consequent) local practice of incising graffiti on silver ingots.138 Straining still further, one might consider runic analogies for the early monumental Cyrillic inscriptions on stone,139 or for some of the magical or talismanic uses of writing.

Other scripts A party of script-collectors scouring the lands of the Rus for specimens might pick up a fair variety, but they would have to be in the right places at the right times. We can accompany them on an imaginary tour. 136 137

138 139

See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 267–8. The Paterik of the Kievan Monastery of the Caves refers to a certain Georgii, a secondgeneration resident of Rus, who was sent to Suzdal by Vladimir Monomakh in the late eleventh or early twelfth century: BLDR IV, p. 300; Heppell, Paterik, p. 5; on the problems of genealogy and chronology see Pritsak, The Origin of Rus
, pp. 417–22. See above, pp. 77–8. In particular, the formula of the inscription on the Voimeritsy Cross: Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 374.

116

The graphic environment

Starting in the north, one would cover the largest spaces for the least reward. The Finno-Ugrian tribes had no native script until the invention of an alphabet for the Permians by Muscovite missionaries in the fourteenth century.140 The earliest surviving written specimen of Balto-Finnic language, pre-dating all other examples by several centuries, happens to have been discovered in Novgorod, but is in Cyrillic script:141 a short, threeline incantatory formula on lightning (‘God’s arrow’), scratched on birchbark in the middle of the thirteenth century. However, if the group began its journey early enough, it would catch the first specimens of alphabetic writing to reach the lands of the Rus in significant quantities: not local alphabets or local languages, but coins from the East, with inscriptions in Arabic. From the late eighth to the early eleventh century, generations of Rus traders and hoarders therefore had some notional experience of seeing Arabic script, though we have no evidence as to whether any of them appreciated or cared about its function as alphabetic script rather than as a set of characteristic graphic signs which might help to identify the commodity, or perhaps in some cases also to help endow it with magical properties.142 Following the river-roads eastwards, we reach the Volga Bulgars. The Volga Bulgars converted to Islam in the early to mid-tenth century, but we have no record of a thriving written culture. Surviving Volga Bulgar funerary inscriptions – partly in Arabic – date from the thirteenth century and later.143 However, a tenth-century stone mould in Kiev itself (from the Podol, the commercial quarter) is inscribed with a name in Arabic,144 suggesting the presence of Moslem traders or craftsmen in Kiev at the time. There is no obvious or necessary link between these disparate specimens of Arabic script in and around the lands of the Rus, nor any hint that they had an effect on local written practices. The dominant spoken languages to the north were Finnic; to the east and south the dominant spoken languages were Turkic, among a vast swathe of peoples from the Volga Bulgars across the steppes to the Black Sea. Some of the Volga Bulgar inscriptions are Turkic. The prolonged contacts, conflicts and exchanges between Slavs and Turkic nomads left their mark on the Slavonic language. Turkic words turn up in written 140 141 142

143 144

On linguistic contacts see Struminski, ´ Linguistic Interrelations, pp. 255–87. NGB, no. 292; see E. A. Khelimskii, ‘O pribaltiisko-finskom iazykovom materiale v novgorodskikh berestianykh gramotakh’, in NGB VIII, pp. 252–9; esp. 255–6. Some dirhams have had their rims pierced for use as pendants or amulets: see e.g. A. V. Fomin, ‘Kuficheskie monety Gnezdovskogo klada’, DGVEMI 1994 god (1996), pp. 187–202. See F. S. Khakimzianov, Epigraficheskie pamiatniki Volzhskoi Bolgarii i ikh iazyk (Moscow, 1987). The mould is for casting belt-ornaments: see K. N. Gupalo, Podol v drevnem Kieve (Kiev, 1982), pp. 74–83.

Scripts and languages

117

(and doubtless in spoken) Slavonic.145 Yet no Turkic writing has thus far been discovered within the lands of the Rus; and just one specimen of Turkic writing in a Turkic script apparently emanates from within the lands of the Rus: a single word, consisting of six Turkic runes, which have been interpreted to mean ‘I have read’. This unique text turns up in a unique context, and before commenting on the text we should look at its provenance. The Turkic-speaking Khazars, rulers of a steppe empire to which the Slavs of the Middle Dnieper probably paid tribute until the early to mid-tenth century, were converts to Judaism and hence users of Hebrew script.146 The Turkic runes spelling ‘I have read’ are appended to a Hebrew letter of recommendation, sent in the late ninth or early tenth century by members of the Jewish community in Kiev on behalf of one of their number to help him on his travels.147 The document’s editors surmise that the Khazar Jews used Hebrew as the language of learning and of international communication (other specimens of their international correspondence also survive), but used Turkic runes for local administration.148 Local spoken languages thus produce a meagre yield for our scriptcollectors: a word or two in Balto-Finnic, but written in Cyrillic; six enigmatic Turkic runes. The heterogeneous haul of specimens of Arabic suggests that we might be better off looking for signs of other imported, learned scripts; and the Hebrew letter points in the right direction. One of the most disputed and obscure questions of early Rus written culture is the extent of local contact with Hebrew. That the Middle Dnieper Slavs had long, continuous and varied contacts with Jews is not in doubt. Apart from the Khazars, Jewish merchants – Radhanites – travelled between Western Europe and China via the ‘land of the Slavs’ at least from the middle of the ninth century.149 Nor were the merchants merely in transit. Jews were resident, not only in Kiev and other southern cities, but by the twelfth century even in the emerging 145

146

147

148 149

Karl Heinrich Menges, The Oriental Elements in the Vocabulary of the Oldest Russian Epos, the Igor
Tale “Slovo o p

lku Igoreve” (New York, 1951); N. A. Baskakov, Tiurkskaia leksika v “Slove o polku Igoreve” (Moscow, 1985). The Khazars’ formal conversion probably dates to c. 860–1: see Constantine Zuckerman, ‘On the Date of the Khazar Conversion to Judaism and the Chronology of the Kings of Rus Oleg and Igor’, REB 53 (1995), 237–70 (esp. 241–50). Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca, London, 1982), pp. 3–71. The editors date the letter to c. 930, but there is scope for doubt in either direction: see the commentary by V. Ia. Petrukhin on the Russian edition of Golb and Pritsak, Khazarsko-evreiskie dokumenty X veka (Moscow, Jerusalem, 1997), p. 217. See below, plate 1. Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents, pp. 41–3. However, the Turkic runes were not necessarily appended to the document in Kiev itself. Moshe Gil, ‘The R¯adh¯anite Merchants and the Land of R¯adh¯an’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974), 299–328.

118

The graphic environment

north-eastern centres such as Vladimir on the Kliazma. English Pipe Rolls (records of the Exchequer) for 1180–1 and 1181–2 list payments – in Hampshire – by three Jews including ‘Isaac of Russia’.150 The Sefer hashoham (‘Onyx book’), written in England by the grammarian Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nesiah in the middle of the thirteenth century, mentions a certain Isaac from Chernigov, who tried to explain a number of Hebrew etymologies by comparison with Slavonic words from the language of the Rus.151 Jews occasionally appear in local narrative sources of the eleventh and twelfth centuries:152 Feodosii of the Caves shows his zeal by going out and berating the Jews; during a tense interregnum in 1113 the Kievans threaten to plunder the property of the Jews and the powerful; Jews’ property suffered in a fire in 1124; one of the entrances to the fortified part of the city was known as the Jews’ Gate. The intensity of Jewish settlement is unknown, and there may be no direct links between the various identifiable groups – Khazars, Radhanites, and later traders – but the evidence for a Jewish presence over several centuries, whether sporadically or continuously, is adequate.153 Hebrew was, presumably, a feature of the graphic environment for those who cared to look. But did anybody look? and if so, how intently? The Rus came into contact with Jews and Hebrew from two quite separate sources: the real, and the abstract. The real Jews bringing real Hebrew were the Khazars and Rhadanites and other merchants. The abstract Jews and the abstract Hebrew are images from Church Slavonic Christian writings: Hebrew as a sacred language, one of the three inscribed on Christ’s Cross; Jews in sacred history.154 The question is: to what extent, if at all, did real Hebrew 150

151

152 153

154

‘The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Twenty-Seventh Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second AD 1180–1181’ and ‘The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Twenty-Eighth Year of the Reign of King Henry the Second AD 1181–1182’, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society 30 (London, 1909), 134; 31 (1910), 143; V. I. Matuzova, Angliiskie srednevekovye istochniki. XI–XIII vv. Teksty, perevody, kommentarii (Moscow, 1979), pp. 49–50. Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nesiah, The Sefer haShoham (The Onyx Book), ed. Benjamin Klar, introd. Cecil Roth, Part I (London, 1947); in his introduction (p. 11) Roth points out that chronological considerations exclude the possibility that Isaac of Chernigov is the same man as the Isaac of Russia who is mentioned in the English Pipe Rolls. For a survey see L. S. Chekin, ‘K analizu upominanii o evreiakh v drevnerusskoi literature XI–XIII vekov’, Slavianovedenie (1994, no. 3), 34–42. J. Brutzkus, ‘Trade with Eastern Europe, 800–1200’, The Economic History Review 13 (1943), 31–41; Henrik Birnbaum, ‘On Some Evidence of Jewish Life and AntiJewish Sentiments in Medieval Russia’, Viator 4 (1973), 225–55; O. Pritsak, ‘The Pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in Relation to the Khazars, the Rus
and the Lithuanians’, in P. J. Potiˇcnyj and H. Aster (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1988), pp. 7–13; Leonid S. Chekin, ‘The Role of Jews in Early Russian Civilisation in the Light of a New Discovery and New Controversies’, Russian History 17 (1990), 379–94. Simon Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. xxxvii–xxxiii, 3–17. A. Pereswetoff-Morah, ‘A Shadow of the Good Spell: On Jews and Anti-Judaism in the world and work of

Scripts and languages

119

enter Church Slavonic book culture in Rus? It has been argued, in particular, that two works in Church Slavonic, the Book of Esther, and extracts from the Iosippon, were translated in early Rus direct from Hebrew.155 However, both aspects of the hypothesis (the dates of translation, and whether the source-language was Hebrew) are highly contentious.156 The ‘idea’ of Hebrew was securely entrenched in the Christian tradition assimilated by the Rus. Hebrew script was probably used in Rus, whether sporadically or continuously, over a long period. For any native Rus to read and understand Hebrew script was a rare accomplishment: perhaps so rare as to be non-existent.

155

156

Kirill of Turov’, in Ingunn Lunde (ed.), Kirill of Turov. Bishop, Preacher, Hymnographer (Bergen, 2000), pp. 33–75. A. A. Alekseev, ‘Perevody s drevneevreiskikh originalov v Drevnei Rusi’, Russian Linguistics 11 (1987), 1–20; Andrei Arkhipov, Po tu storonu Sambationa. Etiudy o russkoevreiskikh kul
turnykh, iazykovykh i literaturnykh kontaktakh v X–XVI vekakh (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 241–63. Horace G. Lunt and Moshe Taube, ‘Early East Slavic Translations from Hebrew?’, Russian Linguistics 12 (1988), 147–87; Lunt and Taube, The Slavonic Book of Esther. Text, Lexicon, Linguistic Analysis, Problem of Translation (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), esp. pp. 245–8. Irina Liusen (Lysen), Kniga Esfir
. K istorii pervogo slavianskogo perevoda (Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 41; Uppsala, 2001) (with English summary) concludes that the work was translated from Hebrew, but not before the latter part of the fourteenth century.

3

The changing environment

Alphabetic script reached the lands of the Rus before they were the lands of the Rus. There is no plausible evidence for indigenous script among the diverse peoples, mainly Slavs and Finno-Ugrians, who inhabited the lands between the Baltic and the northern fringes of the steppes during the period of the European early Middle Ages, nor was the landscape littered with the debris of a script-bearing culture of ‘antiquity’. The infiltration of alphabetic script – or rather, of a plurality of scripts – began in the late eighth or early ninth century and reflects the movement of non-native peoples and goods into and across the territories. The process was diffuse, uncoordinated, not a consequence of policy, and certainly not a result of any intention to bring literacy to the natives. The presence of script-bearing objects was a by-product of unrelated or loosely related activities by different peoples based in different areas: from the north, Vikings trading furs for silver; from the south, Khazars trading and exacting tribute. Some of the participants used alphabetic script, some of the goods happened to bear alphabetic inscriptions. Most of the local population were probably unaware or indifferent. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss these early haphazard processes as irrelevant to the emergence of local written culture. Over a century or so, the volume of activity and the traffic of script-bearing people and objects expanded to greater levels of significance. More of the local populace became involved, more of the transit-populace settled and became local. By the middle of the tenth century the graphic environment could show a fair assortment of scripts: scraps of Latin, Arabic and Greek on imported coins and other objects, Scandinavian runes in the north, Turkic runes in the south, along with Hebrew. And some Slavonic.1 The involvement of Slavs, or of Slavonised settlers, in the use of non-Slav script is perhaps first indicated by the fragments of Slav words in the southern pot-graffiti written in Greek letters, but before the middle of the tenth century we 1

See also T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, ‘Graficheskie sistemy v pis
mennosti Rusi IX–XI vv.’, in Feodal
naia Rossiia (St Petersburg, 1993).

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also have the first faint evidence for the local use of Slav script (the single word on the Gnezdovo pot). How and when and why did Slav script first reach the lands of the Rus? The answers can never be known with certainty.2 Slav script can only have reached the Rus from those who already possessed it, whether directly or via Constantinople. It had been devised for religious uses, but its earliest specimens from Rus derive from non-confessional contexts. There were Christians in Rus by the middle of the tenth century, but we have no evidence as to the language of their worship. All the earliest surviving specimens of Slav script from the lands of the Rus relate to the same kinds of activity as the contemporary specimens of non-Slav script: trade, crafts, tribute-collection, exchange. Although the Slav script had been devised to serve missionary purposes, by the tenth century its uses in Bulgaria had extended well beyond the ecclesiastical,3 so that Christianisation was by no means a precondition for contact with or use of such script in Rus. From the Gnezdovo pot onwards, the Slav script adopted for native use in all contexts was Cyrillic. Knowledge of Glagolitic was a sporadic, bookish accomplishment. The spread and functions of Cyrillic in Rus remain obscure for over a century after the first evidence for its native use. The droplets of evidence only merge into a continuous flow from about the 1050s. Yet the very diffuseness of the surviving material from the period c.930–1050 suggests that at least in some contexts Cyrillic had become reasonably well established. Finds of styluses ( pisala) at several urban sites indicate regular literate activity. Cyrillic on pots, Cyrillic on the wooden cylinderseals and tally-sticks, Cyrillic on sword-blades, the choice of Cyrillic for the inscriptions on Vladimir’s coinage: together the scattered and heterogeneous fragments imply that by the late tenth or early eleventh century Cyrillic writing was more than a sporadic and esoteric experiment, that it was habitual and familiar in a range of urban economic and administrative contexts. The trickle became a stream became a torrent, which in hindsight can give the impression of simply having engulfed and obliterated the non-Slav scripts, of having rendered them irrelevant to the local written culture. Eventually this might have been so; but only eventually, and never entirely. In the first place, the diversity of this early graphic environment did leave traces – faint and often overlooked – on some of the local uses 2

3

For a critical review of some of the hypotheses see G. A. Khaburgaev, Pervye stoletiia slavianskoi pis
mennoi kul
tury. Istoki drevnerusskoi knizhnosti (Moscow, 1994), pp. 117–38, 155–65. For a range of contexts see Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, I (Die Slawischen Sprachen 36, 1994).

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of Slavonic: the tenth-century makers’ inscriptions on sword-blades, in clear imitation of Latin and Germanic models; the declarative legends on coins from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, suggestive perhaps of Turkic formulae;4 as late as the twelfth century the inscribed stone cross at Voimeritsy, east of Novgorod, with a maker’s inscription reminiscent of the formulae of rune-carvers; more tenuously, the Novgorodian and northern Rus habit of scratching letters on silver ingots, comparable to the earlier Viking habit of scratching letters on dirhams. There is a vague but perceptible eclectic quality in some of the early native uses of script in crafts and exchange, reflecting the diversity of the early non-Slav graphic environment. The non-Slav scripts were overshadowed, but they did not disappear. The balance and the contexts changed. Dirhams, by far the most numerous and most widely distributed of the early imported script-bearing objects, which had been imported in their tens of thousands during the ninth and tenth centuries, had all but ceased to arrive by the turn of the eleventh century, as had West European deniers by the early decades of the twelfth century. The Viking presence diminished as most settlers became assimilated. In the south the destruction of the Khazar empire distanced Kiev from one source of potential exposure to Hebrew script and (perhaps) Turkic runes. However, contacts with non-Slav script-users were by no means weakened. Quite the contrary, they intensified. Small pockets of rune-producers survived, Jewish traders operated in Rus irrespective of the fall of the Khazars, the Baltic trade brought Latin-writing and Low-German-writing partners and residents to the northern cities, the successes of Christianity among Poles and Hungarians thickened the ‘Latin’ presence on the western borderlands, and of course the commercial and cultural contacts with the ‘Greeks’ brought non-Slav script into prestigious, high-profile settings. The Rus habitually did business with people who used non-Cyrillic scripts while doing business with the Rus. And yet, from the mid to late eleventh century, the graphic environment of the Rus lost its eclectic quality. The choice had been made, and the environment became dominated by the rapid growth in the uses of Cyrillic, with a special subsidiary status, in certain contexts, for Greek. A catalyst for the expansion in the uses of Cyrillic was undoubtedly the spread of Christianity. The important process here was the spread of the faith, not necessarily the official Conversion in itself in the late 980s. The pattern of surviving evidence for uses of writing in the half-century after the official Conversion is not fundamentally different from the 4

Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of the Old Rus
Weights and Monetary System. Two Studies in Western Eurasian Metrology and Numismatics in the Seventh to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 99–101.

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pattern of surviving evidence for the half-century prior to the official Conversion. No obvious dividing-line appears at 988. The more significant break, amply witnessed in all types of source, occurs around the middle of the eleventh century. Whether in primary, secondary or tertiary writing, the mid-eleventh century appears as a kind of invisible barrier. Before this period direct evidence for any kind of locally produced writing is sporadic and sparse; after this period direct evidence for virtually all kinds of locally produced writing is strong, continuous, and increasingly abundant. In primary writing, the chronology of extant parchment manuscripts and known parchment literacy broadly matches the chronology of surviving birch-bark documents. The earliest surviving precisely dated parchment manuscript, the Ostromir Gospel, was completed on 12 May 1057, followed by a pair of edificatory miscellanies dated to 1073 and 1076, and a cluster of dated manuscripts from the 1090s. One or two of the surviving manuscripts which lack colophons may predate the Ostromir Gospel, but not by much. The earliest compositions by named local authors are from the same period: the Sermon on Law and Grace by Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev, written in the late 1040s; and a brief homily attributed to a Luka Zhidiata, bishop of Novgorod (c.1035–59). More or less plausible hypothesis locates a handful of other compositions in the second quarter of the eleventh century, including the first version of the law-code Russkaia Pravda, possibly some components of the Primary Chronicle, and works relating to Saints Boris and Gleb. By contrast, no known local compositions can be dated to the age of Vladimir Sviatoslavich, except perhaps the lost original of the Church Statute attributed to him.5 Arguments for even earlier East Slav Cyrillic parchment literacy range from the dubious (the Slavonic versions of the tenth-century Rus–Byzantine treaties)6 to the absurd (e.g. the notion of a ninth-century chronicle).7 Birch-bark letters are not dated to the day, month or year, but a combination of stratigraphy (the level at which the birch-bark is found) and dendrochronology can narrow the range to a couple of decades. The layers of logs which constitute the chronological grid of the Novgorod excavations can in places extend into the tenth century, yet fifty years of searching have not yet revealed any birch-bark document from the 5

6 7

Cf., however, E. V. Ukhanova, ‘Kul
t sv. Klimenta, papy Rimskogo, v istorii Vizantiiskoi i Drevnerusskoi Tserkvi IX–1-poloviny XI v.’, AION – Slavistica 5 (1997–8; publ. 2000), 505–70, who argues for an early-eleventh-century date for a canon on the translation of the relics of St Clement. See below, pp. 164–5. E.g. B. A. Rybakov, Drevniaia Rus
. Skazaniia, byliny, letopisi (Moscow, 1963), pp. 159–82; cf. M. Iu. Braichevskii, ‘Neizvestnoe pis
mo patriarkha Fotiia kievskomu kaganu Askol
du i mitropolitu Mikhailu Sirinu’, VV 47 (1988), 31–8.

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tenth-century layers, or from the first quarter of the eleventh century. Birch-bark documents with stratigraphic dating which puts them no later than 1050 can be counted on fewer than the fingers of one hand.8 In strata from the late eleventh century onwards, birch-bark documents become almost commonplace. The pattern of survival of birch-bark letters thus matches the pattern of survival of parchment manuscripts, despite the utterly different circumstances of their preservation. This striking coincidence – and the contrast with other categories of writing – tends to support the scheme of classification which brings parchment manuscripts and birch-bark letters together in the same group. Surviving examples of locally produced secondary writing pre-date by some distance the oldest primary writing: the sword-blades; seals attributed to Sviatoslav, and to three of the sons of Vladimir (Iziaslav, Sviatopolk, and Iaroslav); and coins, the most plentiful of all of the pre-1050 specimens of writing. Clearly the Rus did try their hand at producing objects with secondary writing in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. And yet, despite the large numbers of coins, these objects are isolated from the flow of secondary writing after the middle of the eleventh century. The experiment in local coinage was over by about 1020 (with the minor exception of Oleg Sviatoslavich’s Tmutorokan coinage in the 1070s). The two inscribed sword-blades, also dating from the late tenth and/or early eleventh centuries, do not inspire imitation in later manufacturers. The number of early seals is minuscule by comparison with the widespread and repetitive finds of the seals of the churchmen and princes of the mid-eleventh century onwards, and indeed with the great mass of secondary writing on all kinds of image-bearing objects associated with the spread of Christianity. Tertiary writing has the longest pedigree among the surviving objects: pot-graffiti and inscribed cylinder-seals and tally-sticks may date from the tenth century. Yet here too the invisible mid-eleventh-century barrier remains effective. For the largest category – graffiti on church walls – the barrier is set by the dates of the oldest surviving masonry buildings, both of which (the Kievan and Novgorodian churches of St Sophia) happen to have been built in the middle of the eleventh century. The earliest precisely dated monumental inscription on stone (the Tmutorokan stone, if we accept it as authentic) was carved in 1068. Silver ingots, with their occasional graffiti, began to circulate in the latter half of the eleventh century. Spindles and spindle whorls are discovered in strata from the second half of the tenth century, but none of the inscribed examples can 8

NGB, nos. 526, 591, 593; cf. also nos. 246, 247, 527, 613, the datings of which straddle the middle decades of the century. Inscribed waxed wooden tablets are too rare to produce a chronological pattern.

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confidently be dated earlier than the middle of the eleventh century. Of the ‘miscellaneous’ objects with ownership inscriptions, the oldest appears to be Slovisha’s wooden gusli, stratigraphically dated, once more, to the middle of the eleventh century. How trustworthy are the early datings and attributions? With respect to any individual object, not very. But the overall pattern is too consistent to be fortuitous. Whichever type of writing we survey, the traces of surviving examples are absent or sporadic before the middle of the eleventh century, continuous and increasingly plentiful afterwards. Naturally we should not reduce what was to what is, what existed to what exists, and of course more was produced than has survived to the present. It would be absurd to claim dogmatically that nobody among the East Slavs wrote on birchbark or parchment in the age of Vladimir, or venerated an inscribed icon, or scratched a pious or scurrilous message on the wall in some dark corner of a building. The limits of the evidence represent the limits of our knowledge, not the limits of the facts, and discovery of the first birchbark documents in 1951 served as a good warning to anybody who might previously have assumed otherwise. It would not be at all surprising if future discoveries were to extend the inventory of early specimens of writing, and every new item would be interesting and significant; but it would take a great deal of new evidence to change the overall pattern. The middle of the eleventh century corresponds to no single symbolic event, such as the official Conversion, which we might claim to have triggered this significant expansion in the production of writing. Instead, provisionally, one might point to two related processes. On the one hand, despite the earlier official Conversion, towards the middle of the eleventh century there are signs of a drive towards the firmer establishment of Christianity and its institutions as part of the urban environment: the resources poured into the construction of major masonry churches in Chernigov, Kiev, Novgorod and Polotsk; a clearer picture of an established hierarchy of a metropolitan and bishoprics; monastic foundations. On the other hand, and partly in consequence, the eleventh century saw a rapid rise in urban craft-production, which emerged as a significant supplement and counterweight to the long-established trading economy. By the late eleventh century the graphic environment had taken shape, had developed the norms and characteristic features which, broadly speaking, it subsequently retained as the basis for a continuing (though not static) tradition. Apart from the temporary fashion for Greek in displays of secondary writing from the middle of the century, and the residual Greek embedded in Christian inscribed visual imagery, the language of native writing was Slavonic in its various registers, and the standard script was Cyrillic. The densest concentration of all types of writing was

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to be found in the church: primary writing from the authoritative books of the faith and of the services; monumental secondary writing on the images around the walls, in the dome, perhaps on decorative doors; more intimate secondary writing on the image-bearing objects such as bookbindings, processional and pendant crosses, textiles, chalices and reliquaries; tertiary writing scratched haphazardly in the plasterwork. The Faith was also the inspiration for what was probably the most widespread and familiar form of writing outside the confines of an ecclesiastical building: the secondary writing which was a standard and distinctive component of Christian images. Indeed, the production of secondary writing was stimulated almost entirely by the demand for Christian imagery, and spread barely at all to other kinds of object. Yet such writing was not narrowly ecclesiastical; it was also part of urban craft-production and commerce, where its makers and their clients might haggle prices and payment in sharp notes to each other on birch-bark; and it could extend its presence even into the home, where it might share space with an inscribed slate spindle whorl. None of this should be taken to imply that from about 1050 suddenly all kinds of writing were available to everybody, or that the Rus constituted anything remotely resembling a literate society in a modern sense. In the first place writing, like craft-production and commerce and for most of this period Christianity, was mainly an urban phenomenon. We have no significant quantities of evidence to indicate the involvement of the rural population in the culture of the written word. The geographic expansion of that culture followed the growth of towns, which also set the context and regional pattern for the spread of Christianity. A disproportionate amount of the surviving material – including parchment manuscripts – happens to come from Novgorod, but this probably is a result of special circumstances of survival rather than a reflection of the real balance of early written culture. The sodden ground, the lack of any physical destruction during the Mongol invasions, and the relative lack of post-medieval development, have tended to favour the survival of Novgorodian material down to the middle of the twentieth century (when more was destroyed in the Second World War than in any single catastrophe over the previous thousand years). Nevertheless, it is not impossible that some uses of writing were genuinely more widespread in Novgorod than elsewhere, as perhaps suggested by the higher incidence of graffiti on Novgorodian and ‘northern’ silver ingots. Secondly, there were social restrictions: not formal social barriers, but the density of the graphic environment varied according to the social context. Very, very few of the specimens of writing provide any explicit information as to the social status of the people by whom the writing

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was commissioned, made, used or seen, so the social geography is largely a matter of inference. All Christians were ipso facto participants in the (or a) culture of the written word, all church-going Christians were ipso facto witnesses to a dense and complex multimedia environment in which writing was a vital component. Outside the church, however, the pattern of evidence suggests, not surprisingly, that one was more likely to be more familiar with more types of writing if one was relatively affluent: more likely to acquire or commission the luxury or semi-luxury objects with secondary writing, more likely to be dealing in the commodities with written signs of value or ownership, more likely to be jotting lists of one’s debtors on birch-bark. The material may be diverse, but it is also consistent in its limitations, in what it does and does not include. Despite periodic forays into interpretation, the aim of Part I of this book has been merely to set the scene, to describe and structure the basic material. The graphic environment is the background. In itself it tells us little about what writing ‘meant’ in society and culture, about how people actually engaged with it individually and collectively, about its functions, about relations between the written and the spoken, between script and other visual representation, about the sociocultural dynamics of the technology. These and other such issues will be addressed in the thematic studies in Part II.

Part II FUNCTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS OF WRITING

4

Writing and social organisation

Types of administrative writing Writing can be a powerful instrument in social organisation, in the maintenance and exercise of authority. It can amplify the ‘voice’ of those who control its contents and dissemination, carrying that voice across huge distances and preserving its resonance over time. It can help to sustain networks of communication outside the narrow local community, or to accumulate and convey orders and rules, or to fix the memory of individual transactions; it can be stored for the future, and retrieved in cases of dispute. For some forms of government – particularly those which seek to operate through a centralised administration, to implement intrusive rules and to standardise practices over a large area – writing is virtually a prerequisite. The properties of writing enable the development of bureaucratic habits, assumptions and institutions. From a modern perspective the potential of writing as an instrument of social organisation and control seem obvious. But the modern perspective is not necessarily the appropriate perspective. In practice, in history, the notional advantages of a new technology may be far from obvious to those who are accustomed to conducting their affairs by other means. In the very long term the broad – though not universal – tendency is to adopt and eventually to require written methods in administration, but there is no standard pattern, and no standard timescale, for this process. One should not underestimate the barriers. Written rules are only as effective as the moral or coercive authority of those who issue them. To record any individual transaction may or may not be more convenient than simply to remember it, but to record transactions routinely and to store the records 129

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Functions and perceptions of writing

systematically requires, at the very least, investment in personnel, at most a fundamental restructuring of government. To induce reliance on the authority of stored records may require radical changes in behaviour and in attitudes. As we know from more recent developments, the thorough assimilation of new information technology does not just involve doing old things in new ways; it involves the doing of new things. There is no doubt that the spread of writing can be part of a process of change in social organisation and modes of administration,1 but the ‘logic’ of the technology is not inexorable.2 The highly literate elite of classical Athens apparently felt comparatively little need to exploit the administrative potential of writing,3 in marked contrast with, say, Ptolemaic Egypt, or Late Imperial Rome.4 The rapid expansion of administrative uses of writing in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England was not an instant exploitation of newly discovered possibilities, but was preceded by significant – though less pervasive – administrative writing in the Anglo-Saxon period.5 Did the Rus use writing in administrative contexts? If the question is posed in this general form, then the simple answer is, manifestly, yes. As we have seen, writing was taken up by rulers, churchmen and traders in the conduct of their business. But the simple answer is misleading, since the general form of the question obscures the essential nuances. If we are interested in the sociocultural dynamics, then we must be more specific: what types of writing were used, in which contexts, for what purposes? What types of writing were not used? What were the relations between written and non-written modes of operating, or between technological change and social change? Administrative writing6 can be divided into two broad categories: (i) the 1

2

3 4 5

6

See the classic study by Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307 (London, 1979); also Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 23–75. On such ‘logic’, with reference mainly to Africa and the ancient Near East, see Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986). Further on these issues see above, pp. 5–9. See Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989). For a range of case-studies see Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1994). See Simon Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, 1990; Paperback edn, 1992), pp. 226–57. I use the term ‘administrative writing’ in a broad sense to include what is sometimes called ‘practical literacy’, ‘pragmatic literacy’, or ‘convenient literacy’: see, with regard to different societies, Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 258–65; Eduard Muhle, ¨ ‘Commerce and Pragmatic Literacy. The Evidence of Birchbark Documents (from the Mid-Eleventh to the First Quarter of the Thirteenth Century) on the Early Urban Development of Novgorod’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.), Medieval Russian Culture. Volume II (California Slavic Studies XIX; Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994), pp. 75–92; Robin Lane Fox, ‘Literacy and Power in Early Christianity’, in Bowman and Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, pp. 126–48.

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normative, and (ii) the contingent. Normative administrative writing provides the authority for regulating behaviour; contingent administrative writing is part of the process of such regulation. Normative administrative writing consists, typically, of codes, lists of rules (sometimes amplified with explanations); contingent administrative writing fixes individual events, transactions or decisions. The distinction between the normative and the contingent thus relates both to form or genre and to function. The distinction is not absolute since a given specimen of writing may migrate from one category to the other: documents produced for specific occasions may come to be regarded as normative (e.g. treaties, or court rulings in a system which honours precedent), and may come to be reproduced in or as codes. Nevertheless the distinction between the normative and the contingent is consistent enough, and significant enough, to provide a framework for the discussion in the present chapter. Contingent administrative writing can itself be subdivided into two sub-categories: (a) the formal, and (b) the ephemeral. Formal contingent writing is in some degree integral to the transaction itself, an agreed requirement, where the production of a written document is one of the signs by which a transaction is recognised as valid. Formal contingent writing produces formal administrative documents. Ephemeral contingent writing may accompany or facilitate a transaction, but has no special status as a component of the transaction. It may be convenient, but it is not a requirement, nor is it likely to be bound by the same conventions of procedure or expression. Again the distinction between the two categories is not absolute: a piece of ephemeral writing may acquire formal status, and in a long period of transition there is potentially a large grey area between the two. But again, the broad distinction is adequate to serve as a framework for discussion in the present chapter. The intended status of a given piece of ‘administrative’ writing is in part suggested by its form, but ultimately its status (and hence its actual function) depends on the collusion – stated or unstated – of those who are notionally involved in its use. Writing ‘as such’ has no defined status. Individuals and groups may accord different types of status to different types of writing. Those who agree, more or less, on the status of a given type of writing can be called a ‘textual community’ with respect to that type of writing.7 In its social dimension, therefore, written culture can involve several overlapping but not identical textual communities, acknowledging the authority of different types of writing. And an individual may belong to all, or some, or none of them. The task of this chapter is to consider the appearance (or non-appearance), the growth 7

The expression is borrowed from e.g. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Modes of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), though I extend somewhat its application. See also above, p. 6.

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(or non-growth) and the interaction (or isolation) of textual communities which accorded status to the various types of administrative writing. To anticipate a conclusion: normative administrative writing was from the beginning an instrument of the Church’s self-regulation, but spread only slowly beyond the Church’s own sphere – whether in Church rules for non-churchmen or in secular regulation; ephemeral contingent writing was notably quick to become adopted into a wide range of private and public contexts; formal contingent writing (administrative documentation) appeared sporadically at the margins, but made few inroads into traditional unwritten procedures. Not until the very end of our period, towards the second half of the thirteenth century, do we begin to see signs of an appreciably broader shift towards (though not yet a decisive adoption of) documentary assumptions and habits. If this was so, then why? The principal model of written culture for the Rus was Byzantium, yet Byzantium operated the most elaborate systems of administrative writing of the age. Why did not the Rus ‘simply’ import Byzantine practices? What was the nature and pattern of resistance, of cultural and social blockage? We start with a stark contrast of polar opposites: Byzantium, where writing was a long-established instrument of social organisation and an integral part of administrative practice; Rus, initially without any native uses of writing at all. The point of the comparison is not, of course, simply to indicate the contrast, but to set out a framework within which and in response to which the Rus explored both the potential and the limitations of written technology for their own changing circumstances. Normative writing: codes, rule-lists Rule-lists in Byzantium The Byzantine emperor was both the maker and the preserver of written law. As preserver of the law he sustained the ‘lawful State’ (ennomos politeia). As maker of the law he asserted his legitimate rule (ennomos arche, ennomos epitasia). The two functions are reflected in different genres of legal text, of rule-writing: on the one hand, the compendium of received law, and on the other hand rules promulgated by an emperor in his own name.8 Byzantine Imperial law was derived from Roman law, via the great compendia issued under the Emperor Justinian in 533–4 . The Justinianic corpus had three components: the Digest, or Pandects, a massive systematic compilation of Roman law in fifty books; a collection 8

See Gilbert Dagron, ‘Lawful Society and Legitimate Power: ennomos politeia, ennomos arche’, in Angeliki E. Laiou and Dieter Simon (eds.), Law and Society in Byzantium, Ninth–Twelfth Centuries (Washington DC, 1994), pp. 27–51.

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of Imperial legislative enactments (‘constitutions’) known as the Codex; and a textbook of the law, in four volumes, known as the Institutes. A fourth component of the project, issued after the main corpus, consisted of Justinian’s own ‘Novels’ (new edicts; novellae constitutiones). For the next millennium Justinian’s legislation was reckoned to be the basis, the legitimising reference-point, of Byzantine Imperial law. The fixity of writing is its defect as well as its virtue. Old laws required increasingly elaborate interpretation in changing conditions. Later emperors maintained the prestige of the Justinianic corpus in principle while in practice adapting, condensing, supplementing, reordering, or ‘purifying’ it.9 The most voluminous compendium, known as the Basilics (Basilika),10 was issued in sixty books by the Emperor Leo VI, probably in 888. Though regarded as the official systematised source-book of Justinianic law, the Basilics, like the Justinianic corpus itself, was too cumbersome to be frequently copied in its complete form, and Byzantine Imperial law was better known and more widely disseminated in smaller codes: whether in official digests or in private copies and summaries. The prototype of the official digest was the Ecloga (Ekloge ton nomon – selection from the laws) – about forty pages in the modern printed edition11 – issued by Emperor Leo III in 741. To judge from its manuscript history the Ecloga had a long shelf-life, remaining popular despite being superseded officially by updated and revised digests: first by the Epanagoge (or Eisagoge – the ‘introduction’ to the laws), commissioned by Basil I, with a preface by the Patriarch Photios, and supplemented under Leo VI and Alexander; then by the Prochiron (Procheiros nomos – the handbook of law), dated by some to the 870s, reckoned by others to be a revision of the Epanagoge ordered by Leo VI in 907. Leo VI also issued a collection of his own Novels. Other summaries included thematic collections of rules relevant to particular social groups, such as the ‘Farmers’ Law’ (Nomos georgikos),12 the ‘Soldiers’ Law’ (Nomos stratiotikos),13 or the ‘Rhodian Sea Law’ (Nomos nautikos).14 Besides the Imperial codes the Byzantines compiled, copied and disseminated rule-lists issued by the Church. Schematically speaking, emperors issued nomoi, the Church issued kanones, canons (kanon – straight 9 10 11 12 13 14

Marie Theres Fogen, ¨ ‘Legislation in Byzantium: a Political and Bureaucratic Technique’, in Laiou and Simon (eds.), Law and Society in Byzantium, pp. 53–4. On whether this was the original title see Andreas Schmink, Studien zu mittelbyzantinischen Rechtsb¨uchern (FBR 13; Frankfurt am Main, 1986), pp. 24–54. Ludwig Burgmann (ed.), Ecloga. Das Gesetzbuch Leons III. und Konstantinos’ V. (FBR 10; Frankfurt am Main, 1983). See I. P. Medvedev (ed.), Nomos Georgikos/Vizantiiskii zemledel
cheskii zakon (Leningrad, 1984). W. Ashburner, ‘The Byzantine Mutiny Act’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 46 (1926), 80– 109; P. Verri, Le leggi penali militari dell’impero bizantino nell’alto Medioevo (Rome, 1978). W. Ashburner, The Rhodian Sea Law (Oxford, 1909).

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rod; something fixed; rules; a list or catalogue). Canon law was in principle even more static than Imperial law. Its basic and immutable components were the canons issued by the seven Ecumenical Councils: the first at Nicaea in 325, the seventh also in Nicaea in 787, although the canons of a Council held in Constantinople in 879–80 also came to be acknowledged in the Eastern Church. In the late seventh century the so-called Apostolic Canons were also officially recognised as valid, although the Apostolic Constitutions, to which the Apostolic Canons sometimes formed an appendix, were deemed dubious. To this core, collections of canon law might add further pronouncements of Church Fathers, occasional rulings by subsequent patriarchs, and extracts from Imperial legislation relating to the Church. Such combinations of kanon and nomos are known by the generic name of nomokanon. Implicit in the very notion of a nomokanon is the idea, and the fact, that Imperial and ecclesiastical codes overlapped. Themes of common interest included, for example, aspects of family law such as the degree of consanguinity permitted in marriage, issues of divorce and inheritance (with both economic and moral ramifications), rape and abduction (with both moral and ‘public order’ implications). Emperors could have views on anything from diet to heresy, while the Church naturally had views on the proper treatment of murderers and robbers. Though notionally authoritative, the accumulated corpus was by nature untidy, strewn with anomalous, anachronistic, overlapping or conflicting utterances. The authority of the code had therefore to be balanced by a flexibility of attitude and interpretation. The Byzantines might respect the fixity of a received text, but they could still argue for greater or lesser rigour or indulgence in the extent to which behaviour should be required to comply with the written rules. The head of a monastery, for example, might urge a lenient use of pastoral discretion (oikonomia); or a state official might urge a judge to bend the rules for friendship’s sake; or a chronicler could wax indignant at the harshness of the courts.15 Even the code-makers were aware of Christ’s admonition: ‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.’16 Bridging the gaps between the letter of the codes and the exigencies of the case, Byzantine literature is rich in what might be called ‘para-legal’ 15

16

Alexander Kazhdan, ‘Some Observations on the Byzantine Concept of Law: Three Authors of the Ninth through the Twelfth Centuries’, in Laiou and Simon (eds.), Law and Society in Byzantium, pp. 199–216. Luke xi.46, cited even in collections of canon law: see e.g. K. A. Maksimovich, Pandekty Nikona Chernogortsa v drevnerusskom perevode XII veka (iuridicheskie teksty) (Moscow, 1998), p. 365.

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writings in a range of genres, especially with regard to canon law: from early ‘erotapocritic’ writings (questions and answers) and pastoral advice such as penitentials (senior churchmen guide junior churchmen in how to apply the rules), through thematic compilations such as the eleventh-century Pandektai of Nikon of the Black Mountain, to the commentaries of twelfth-century canonists such as John Zonaras, Alexios Aristenos or Theodore Balsamon, trained professionals (Aristenos and Balsamon held the office of nomophylax – guardian of law – established in 1043 for the law school in Constantinople). Especially valuable, though scarce, are the records of actual court judgements: the Peira, systematic excerpts from the verdicts of the Constantinopolitan judge Eustathios Rhomaios in the early eleventh century; the acts of Demetrios Chomatenos (d. c.1236), Archbishop of Ohrid; the decisions of John Apokaukos (d.1233), Metropolitan of Naupaktos. The written culture associated with law-codes had ramifications well beyond the issuing and copying of the codes themselves. ‘Law’ is only one of the contexts for the production of codes and rule-lists in Byzantium. Many other types of regularised activity attracted written regulation, whether as formal sets of rules or more loosely as guidance or instruction: lists of saints for commemoration through the year;17 lists of readings for church services;18 detailed rules for the ordering of monastic life;19 protocol at palace feasts;20 guidance on the conduct of court ceremonial;21 regulation concerning the Constantinopolitan guilds under the Eparch of the city.22 The conscientious citizen of Byzantium might find a written rule to cover virtually whatever he was doing, wherever he was doing it: in the marketplace, at sea, on the farm, in church, at court, at home, in bed, even in the invisible world of his thoughts and beliefs. How much of this material became available to the Rus? And what was its status and use in its new setting? 17 18

19 20 21

22

The Synaxarion: see e.g. the studies by Hippolyte Delehaye, Synaxaires byzantins, m´enologues, typica (London, 1977). The liturgical Typikon, and the Diataxis: see Robert F. Taft, The Great Entrance. A History of the Transfer of the Gifts and other Pre-anaphoral Rites in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom (OCA 200; Rome, 1975), pp. xxix–xxxviii; cf. the same author’s Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond (Aldershot, 1995), no. II. On monastic typika see below, pp. 143–5; on a significant sub-set of typika see C. Galatariotou, ‘Byzantine Ktetorika Typika: a Comparative Study’, REB 45 (1987), 77–138. In taktika or kletorologia: see below, pp. 161–2. Notably the huge compendium De cerimoniis, associated with Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: see Averil Cameron, ‘The Construction of Court Ritual: the Byzantine Book of Ceremonies’, in David Cannadine and Simon Price (eds.), Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 106–36. The Book of the Eparch: see Johannes Koder (ed.), Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen (CFHB XXXIII; Vienna, 1991).

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Imported codes: the textual reception The Church in Rus was established as a metropolitanate within the sphere of authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople, part of the wider Byzantine Church.23 The Church in Rus operated within an assumed framework of canon law as filtered through Byzantium. By contrast, political authority in early Rus was home-grown, indebted to Byzantium neither for its origins nor for its institutional framework and practices. In principle at least, canon law was embedded in the Church’s institutional and confessional identity, whereas a Rus prince without Byzantine civil law was still very much a prince. Rulers of Rus were Christians, but not ‘Romans’, and certainly not ‘Greeks’.24 In this, Rus was distinct both from Bulgaria and from Serbia, which at various times came under the direct authority of the Emperor. There was therefore a predictable imbalance between the Rus reception of Imperial and ecclesiastical written codes. Yet the imbalance cannot be reduced to the bald assertion of a polarity, that the Rus accepted Byzantine ecclesiastical codes and rejected Byzantine civil codes. In each case the reception of and response to the written rule-lists were not single events but parts of a complex and continual sociocultural process. The status of the nomokanon as an essential component of established Faith is emphasised in one of the core narratives of early Slav Christianity, the Life of Methodios, where a nomokanon is listed among the first books translated by Methodios himself (after the Psalter, Gospels and the Acts and Epistles).25 In Rus, however, although copies of the ‘Methodian’ translation eventually turn up,26 textual evidence for the use of translated Byzantine rule-lists is minimal for at least a century after the official Conversion under Vladimir Sviatoslavich. The ecclesiastical ‘statutes’ attributed to Vladimir, and to his son Iaroslav, mention in their preambles that the prince with the metropolitan had consulted the ‘Greek nomokanon’.27 If the allusions to nomokanons are authentic, 23 24 25

26

27

On the status of the Church see Andrzej Poppe, ‘The Original Status of the Old-Russian Church’, in Poppe, The Rise of Christian Russia (London, 1982), no. III. See Simon Franklin, ‘The Empire of the Rhomaioi as Viewed from Kievan Russia: Aspects of Byzantino-Russian Cultural Relations’, Byzantion 53 (1983), 505–37. VM XV.5; Usp. Sb., fo. 108c, 31–2; transl. Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 125. The ‘Methodian’ nomokanon was probably a version of the Synagoge of Fifty Titles, attributed to the late-sixth-century Constantinopolitan Patriarch John III Scholastikos. In a manuscript of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, containing a compilation known as the Ustiug Miscellany, or Ustiug kormchaia: see Kirill Maksimoviˇc, ‘Aufbau und Quellen des altrussischen Ustjuger Nomokanons’, Fontes minores 10 (FBR; Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 477–508. DKU, pp. 15, 85; transl. Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 42, 45. ‘Greek’ here means ‘of Byzantine origin’ and not necessarily ‘in the Greek language’. Iaroslav’s Statute states that he and the metropolitan ‘slozhikhom’ the Greek nomokanon, variously understood

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then they affirm the idea of written authority, but in this first phase of reception it is possible that the main sources of actual authoritative information on Byzantine written rules were Byzantine churchmen serving in the hierarchy of the Rus Church, rather than Slavonic written texts.28 The second phase of assimilation runs from the latter part of the eleventh century, whence we begin to see slightly firmer evidence for the presence of real texts in Slavonic, and of some active engagement with those texts. The Life of Feodosii of the Caves, written by the monk Nestor (probably in the mid-1080s), records that Feodosii expressly ordered a copy of the Stoudite monastic Rule (Gk. typikon; Slav. ustav) from Constantinople, to be adopted in the Caves monastery in Kiev.29 The twelfth century begins to yield real manuscripts: of the Slavonic translation of the monastic Rule;30 of the translation of a different Byzantine nomokanon, the Syntagma of Fourteen Titles,31 which would be far more influential in Rus than the Methodian version; or from the start of the thirteenth century the Pandektai of Nikon of the Black Mountain.32 By the later twelfth or early thirteenth century it seems likely that the Rus possessed, and were to some extent copying, editing and using not only the Slavonic versions of the nomokanons and the monastic Rule but a range of other translated codes, especially penitentials for pastoral use.33 A critical engagement with issues touched on by canon law even spills out into political polemics and onto the pages of the chronicles, in mid-twelfth-century disputes over the procedures for appointing a metropolitan, or on the rules for fasting.34 The third phase of engagement with translated codes begins in the middle of the thirteenth century. It is associated with the initiatives of the long-serving Kievan Metropolitan Kirill II (c.1242–81),35 in commissioning and disseminating texts of the kormchaia. Kormchaia

28

29 31 33

34 35

to mean ‘collated’ or ‘compared’, perhaps ‘considered’; the meaning ‘rejected’ is to be rejected: see V. M. Zhivov, ‘Istoriia russkogo prava kak lingvo-semioticheskaia problema’, in Semiotics and the History of Culture. In Honor of Jurij Lotman (UCLA Slavic Studies 17; Columbus, Ohio, 1988), pp. 97–8 (n. 35). On the statutes see below, pp. 152–6. On the phases of reception outlined here, see Ia. N. Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie na Rusi v XI–XIII vv. (Moscow, 1978), pp. 234–54. For a bibliography of the topic see Ludwig Burgmann and Hubert Kaufhold, Bibliographie zur Rezeption des byzantinischen Rechts im alten Rußland sowie zur Geschichte des armenischen und georgischen Rechts (FBR 18; Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 1–87. 30 SK, no. 138. BLDR I, p. 378; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 53. 32 SK, no. 214. SK, no. 75: in the Efremovskaia kormchaia. For the fullest array of texts and their analysis see Smirnov, Materialy, esp. pp. 245– 319; cf. also M. B. Korogodina, ‘O sozdanii pamiatnikov pokaiannoi distsipliny v drevnerusskoi pis
mennoi traditsii’, in Opyty po istochnikovedeniiu. Drevnerusskaia knizhnost
: redaktor i tekst. Vyp. 3 (St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 96–113. See below, pp. 145–6. On Kirill’s dates and career see the appendix by Andrzej Poppe in Gerhard Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus
(988–1237) (Munich, 1982), pp. 299–301.

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(kormchaia kniga; kniga kormchego – book of the helmsman; book of guidance; guide-book) is the conventional generic term for a Slavonic reference-compendium of rules relating to the Church, based on a translated nomokanon.36 In 1262 – or perhaps 1270 – Kirill wrote to Svetoslav, Despot of Vidin in Bulgaria, requesting a copy of a translated nomokanon. Svetoslav was of Rus princely origin, from a branch of the dynasty which had emigrated earlier in the century. He gained autonomy for Vidin in 1263 and managed to retain rule there for a dozen years until he was poisoned by his adoptive mother in about 1275–7.37 The nomokanon sent by Svetoslav to Kirill had been put together quite recently in Serbia. By comparison with the earlier Slavonic versions this Serb version was vastly expanded and updated to take into account Byzantine interpretation up to the second half of the twelfth century. It included, for example, the synopsis of the canons with commentaries by the twelfth-century Byzantine scholar Alexios Aristenos, the Syntagma of Fourteen Titles with commentaries by Alexios’s contemporary, John Zonaras, as well as patriarchal and synodal decisions and – somewhat incongruously – the full text of the digest of Imperial law, the Prochiron.38 The receipt of this Serb nomokanon marks the start of a period of remarkably intense kormchaia-production, kormchaia-editing and kormchaia-dissemination in Rus. On the one hand, the imported text was recopied in its complete form, of which the earliest surviving East Slav manuscript was commissioned by the princes of Riazan in 1284.39 On the other hand it was supplemented and modified to form a distinct ‘Rus’ kormchaia, which in turn was copied, distributed and re-edited in distinct local variants throughout the lands of the Rus, from Kiev in the south to Vladimir in the north-east, from Novgorod in the north to Vladimir in the south-west, mainly in the 1270s and 1280s. The local editing involved two main types of adjustment: the addition of local material such as penitentials, and the filtering out of non-ecclesiastical material, principally the bulk of the Prochiron. 36

37

38 39

Here I stick to the convention of using kormchaia as a generic label for translated nomokanons and their derivatives in Rus, although the name itself was probably first applied in the 1280s: see M. I. Chernysheva, ‘Kormchaia. K istorii russkogo nazvaniia vizantiiskogo pravovogo sbornika’, Fontes minores 10 (FBR; Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 517–32. Chernysheva argues persuasively against an earlier consensus, as represented ˇ zek, Kormˇcaja kniga. Studies on the Chief Code of Russian Canon Law in e.g. P. Ivan Zuˇ (OCA 168; Rome, 1964), pp. 7–13. For an account of Svetoslav/Iakov’s political career see John V. A. Fine Jr., The Late Medieval Balkans. A Critical Survey From the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor, 1987), pp. 175–83. Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, pp. 117–19. SK, no. 186.

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The early history of translated Imperial written codes is far more obscure even than that of ecclesiastical codes, but in the late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century they, too, suddenly appear in sharper focus. There is no sign of any attempt to import any of the full and systematic collections of Byzantine Imperial codes, whether in their Justinianic form or via the Basilics. Digests and extracts, however, did reach Rus, in their own right as well as in conjunction with nomokanons. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Rus possessed a compilation headed Books of Law (Knigi zakonnye) comprising substantial parts of the Prochiron and Farmers’ Law.40 A later and larger production was the so-called Measure of Law (Merilo pravednoe),41 which includes the full texts of both the Prochiron (borrowed from the Serb kormchaia) and of Leo III’s Ecloga (in a translation of earlier origin), as well as a separate version of part of the Ecloga (mainly section 17) known as the Court Law for the People. The Court Law for the People is sometimes reckoned to have been one of the very earliest products of Slav letters, but in Rus it only acquires visibility from the later thirteenth century, when it was included among the supplementary texts in the Rus redaction of the kormchaia.42 By the end of the thirteenth century, therefore, the Rus possessed and showed an active engagement with a fairly extensive corpus of Byzantine ecclesiastical codes. Their repertoire of Imperial rule-lists was not nearly so comprehensive, but nor was it entirely negligible, and at least by the start of the fourteenth century (to judge from the evidence of the Merilo pravednoe) there appears to have been some interest in Imperial codes as such, rather than just in the fragments conveyed via the nomokanons. Imported codes: problems of cultural translation What was the status of the imported rule-lists in Rus? What was their applicability, their relationship to custom, to habit, to life? A chronicler writing early in the twelfth century states the ideal. After citing the Byzantine chronicler George the Monk on the general correlation of written law to ancestral custom (‘among all peoples some have written law, others have custom; the lawless think that ancestral custom is law’), he illustrates the diversity of custom, and declares that – by contrast – ‘we 40

41 42

A. Pavlov, ‘Knigi zakonnye’, soderzhashchie v sebe v drevnerusskom perevode vizantiiskie zakony zemledel
cheskie, ugolovnye, brachnye i sudebnye (Sbornik ORIaS 38:3; St Petersburg, 1885); see also Ia. N. Shchapov, ‘Prokhiron v vostochnoslavianskoi pis
mennosti’, VV 38 (1977), 50–1. M. N. Tikhomirov (ed.), Merilo pravednoe po rukopisi XIV veka (Moscow, 1961). M. N. Tikhomirov (ed.), Zakon Sudnyi liudem kratkoi redaktsii (Moscow, 1961); English translation of the short (early) version in H. W. Dewey and A. M. Kleimola, Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem (Court Law for the People) (Michigan Slavic Materials 14; Ann Arbor, 1977).

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Christians, of whatever land, who believe in the Holy Trinity and in one Baptism, in one Faith, have one law’.43 The ‘ancestral customs’, the diversity of which the chronicler illustrates, are almost all to do with food and sex (or diet and marriage), so that ‘written law’ here implies not just the basic sacred texts, and certainly not Imperial legislation on matters such as taxation or court procedures, but precisely the sorts of issues dealt with in the nomokanon and associated writings. As a declaration of identity in Faith it is plain: ‘we’ live by written (canon) law, ‘they’ live by ancestral custom. As a declaration of fact it is of course flawed. The chronicler affirms that the acceptance of written codes was an integral part of Christian identity, but he gives no hint of what it means to ‘have’ written law. What does one do with it once one possesses it? What bearing does it have on anything other than the consciousness of its possession? Consciousness and identity are not trivial, but I doubt whether even the chronicler, in his less rhetorical moments, would have contended that everybody actually lived in accordance with all aspects of the ‘one law’. Assessed according to its applicability, the assemblage of imported rulelists had been untidy even at source, in Byzantium. The problems were amplified in the transition to Rus as the Byzantine rules passed through a succession of linguistic, textual and cultural filters. First, the rules were translated, and no translation ever means quite the same as its original. Second, they were copied in a variety of versions and combinations, not in any rigid ‘standard’ format. And third, they were necessarily intrusive, cutting across the boundaries of custom, often assuming in their prescriptions a very different social, cultural and conceptual environment from that which pertained among the Rus. The result was a body of material which – if the criterion was one of simple and consistent applicability – might have perplexed even the best-intentioned Rus reader. As an example, let us imagine that this well-intentioned reader wants to know what is to be done with those who commit malicious arson. He can find an answer in the translated Ecloga, at the start of article 41 of section 17: those who commit such an offence in the city should be committed to fire, those who thus offend outside the city should be punished with the sword.44 The full Slavonic version conveys the prescription reasonably, if a little clumsily,45 while the version in the Court Law for the People is slightly paraphrased. However, the latter then interpolates a phrase not in the Ecloga: ‘but according to ecclesiastical law he shall be made to fast twelve years’.46 Our inquirer might well be confused by this ‘helpful’ 43 44 45 46

PVL I, pp. 15, 16; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 57–8. Burgmann, Ecloga, p. 240. Tikhomirov (ed.), Merilo pravednoe, p. 389 (fo. 193). Tikhomirov (ed.), Zakon Sudnyi liudem, pp. 37–8; Dewey and Kleimola, Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem, p. 15.

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interpolation. Which is it to be, fasting or the sword? Is the Court Law for the People meant to be a list of real rules, or a menu of available options, or an academic exercise in recording what has been written? If punishments seem confused, perhaps the codes can help to clarify procedures. Let us suppose that our well-intentioned reader is interested in the treatment of witnesses. The supposition is legitimate, since issues of procedure and the treatment of witnesses are not only prominent in full versions of the codes but are also retained in edited extracts and highlights. Turning first to the Greek text of the Ecloga, we find section (‘title’) 14 headed ‘Concerning Trustworthy and Inadmissible Witnesses’.47 Articles 8 and 9 of this section caution against giving too much credence, in cases of debt, to the notaries, the taboularioi: article 8 declares that hearsay is inadmissible, ‘even if those giving such witness are taboularioi’; article 9 stipulates that the written evidence of a literate debtor must be signed in the debtor’s own hand, and that if this is not the case then the taboularios is not to be believed.48 The prominence of taboularioi in Byzantine administration is clear from, for example, the substantial section devoted to them in the city-governors’ handbook the Book of the Eparch.49 Yet Slav translators and editors had obvious difficulty conveying the role of taboularioi, and of written evidentiary procedures. Our well-intentioned Rus reader might find at least four different, and in some respects incompatible, versions: (i) Whoever produced the full translation of the Ecloga clearly did not understand – or did not understand clearly – what he was trying to render into Slavonic. The negative (‘Let witnesses not . . . ’) is omitted (from a defective original?), so that 14.8 in Slavonic actually encourages hearsay testimony; the Greek for ‘to pay off a debt’ is calqued nonsensically, while the technical term taboularioi is transliterated and distorted.50 (ii) The Court Law for the People is based mainly on section 17 of the Ecloga. However, it also contains the article from section 14 on hearsay evidence, but in a different translation. The main point – that hearsay is unacceptable – is conveyed correctly; ‘paying off debts’ is 47 49 50

48 Burgmann, Ecloga, p. 216. Burgmann, Ecloga, pp. 214–18. Koder (ed.), Das Eparchenbuch, pp. 74–84. In Tikhomirov (ed.), Merilo pravednoe, p. 377 (fo. 187). This passage is analysed by L. V. Milov, ‘Drevnerusskii perevod Eklogi v kodifikatsionnoi obrabotke kontsa XIII v.’, Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Seriia 8. Istoriia (1984, no. 3), 56–65, who reaches exactly the opposite conclusion: that the translator of the Ecloga was a juridically skilled interpreter. Here and in an earlier article (L. V. Milov, ‘O drevnerusskom perevode vizantiiskogo kodeksa zakonov VIII veka (Eklogi)’, Istoriia SSSR (1976, no. 1), 142–63) Milov compares the Slavonic with a modern Russian translation from the Greek. Direct comparison with the Greek leaves little room for doubt: the translation is mechanical often beyond sense.

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fudged as ‘something else’, but the taboularioi are transformed into (Serbian) zhupans.51 (iii) In the compilation known simply as the Books of Law (Knigi zakonnye), the article on hearsay appears in a section ‘On Witnesses’, most of which is actually derived from the Prochiron rather than the Ecloga. The word for paying off debts is again incorrectly calqued, but here, in a fair attempt at producing something which might make sense locally, the taboularioi become ‘very truthful’ witnesses.52 (iv) A collection of rules ‘On Witnesses and their Numbers’ contains the same article, essentially in the same translation as the full version, but with the transliterated taboularioi changed into zhupans, presumably under the influence of the Court Law for the People.53 Besides illustrating the ways in which bits of rule-lists could become detached from their original codes and migrate from compilation to compilation, these four versions of the same straightforward rule show the difficulties faced by translators and editors as they tried – or did not try – to make sense of a received code reflecting alien concepts and procedures and administrative structures. Variation is not in itself peculiar or unexpected in manuscript transmission. But the point to note is that the four versions do not merely represent distinct or divergent textual traditions; three out of the four can actually be found in the same manuscript: the Merilo pravednoe, which includes the full Slavonic text of the Ecloga, the collection headed ‘On Witnesses and their Number’, and a text of the Court Law for the People.54 Faced with three incompatible versions of the same prescription in the same manuscript, what is a reader, ancient or modern, to think? Despite the status of imported rule-lists as part of Christian identity, and despite the active intervention of local editors and compilers, the problems of cultural translation are far from resolved. A superficially attractive conclusion would be that the imported rulelists were confined to the sphere of ‘culture’, that they had textual, emblematic, perhaps vaguely aspirational status but were not regarded as operative, as applicable, as codes with any direct and necessary bearing on life as it was lived.55 However, the linguistic, cultural and institutional 51

52 53 54

55

Tikhomirov (ed.), Zakon Sudnyi liudem, p. 38; see also Dewey and Kleimola, Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem, p. 19. The full translation and the Zakon sudnyi liudem translation are based on slightly differing versions of the Greek: see Burgmann, Ecloga, p. 216. A. Pavlov, ‘Knigi zakonnye’, p. 86. Tikhomirov (ed.), Merilo pravednoe, p. 150 (fo. 74v). For a full list of contents see Tikhomirov (ed.), Merilo pravednoe, pp. VII–XIII; for a summary of the text see Daniel H. Kaiser, The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton, 1980), pp. 23–4. See Zhivov, ‘Istoriia russkogo prava kak lingvo-semioticheskaia problema’, esp. pp. 46– 66; persuasively refuted by Ludwig Burgmann, ‘Zwei Sprachen – zwei Rechte. Zu einem

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filters were not impermeable. To posit a simple polarity between inoperative (yet high-status) written codes on the one hand and living custom on the other hand is as crude a distortion as the chronicler’s polarised contrast between ‘us Christians’ (possessors of one written law) and ‘them’ (followers of diverse ancestral customs). The examples of gross inconsistency are in a sense unfair, since a more nuanced picture would emerge from an article-by-article, theme-by-theme analysis; or, in line with the concerns of the present study, from a survey of the responses to written codes in a range of sociocultural contexts. Church codes and their communities The existence of native custom did not automatically render imported rule-lists inoperative, nor did respect for imported rule-lists automatically lead to the abandonment or modification of native custom. Instead there was a scale of responses: at one extreme, active reception involving major changes in real behaviour; at the other extreme, utter imperviousness, with a variable middle ground. Crudely speaking, where there was no specific incentive to breach traditional relations and change customary patterns of social organisation and behaviour, there was equally no incentive to transfer authority to the new technology, to rule-lists, still less to rule-lists that were designed for elsewhere. The weakest administrative response to imported written codes was in the exercise of secular authority in the secular domain, the strongest was in the running of self-contained institutions of the Church. Between the two, the imported written rulelists functioned as points of reference for a range of more or less tightly or loosely bonded ‘textual communities’. We shall start from the tightest of them all, the community whose very identity depends on enclosure and strict communal adherence to written prescription and precedent.                    :            The more enclosed the community, the simpler it is to live either wholly by the book or wholly without the book: at one extreme, the remote traditional village, with little contact with outsiders, untouched by writing, where norms of behaviour, allocation of resources, and methods of resolving disputes are regulated according to self-renewing memory and custom; at the other extreme, an organised monastic community. In principle the organised monastery, the koinobion, is a textual community on at least three levels: dedicated to the Christian life according to Scripture; imitating the recorded example of those who have chosen the same Versuch einer linguo-semiotischen Beschreibung der Geschichte des russischen Rechts’, Rechtshistorisches Journal 11 (1992), 103–22.

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path; in daily observance and discipline submitting to the requirements of the Rule. Byzantine monasticism was rather more loosely structured than its West European counterpart. Instead of monastic Orders which in the West provided a standard code and a hierarchy of authority, each community might have its own Rule (typikon). This is not to say that the patterns of common life were invented afresh for each foundation: a new typikon was likely to follow prestigious precedent. The major Middle Byzantine typika tend to draw heavily on the ‘Stoudite’ tradition, after the prescriptions drawn up by Theodore of the Stoudios monastery at the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth century.56 In Rus the history of organised monastic communities can be traced to about the middle of the eleventh century, a generation or two after the official Conversion. The most influential and prestigious community in Rus was the monastery of the Caves in Kiev, and a central episode in accounts of its emergence presents its superior, Feodosii (d. 1074), formally introducing a version of the Stoudite Rule. Feodosii’s hagiographer, the monk Nestor, announces that, having ordered a copy of the Rule from Constantinople, Feodosii ‘arranged everything in his monastery according to the Rule of the Stoudios monastery, just as his disciples do to this day’.57 The Primary Chronicle, in its entry for 1051, specifies in more detail what was thus ‘arranged’: ‘how to sing the monastic offices, how to make prostrations, how to read the lessons, and standing in church, and all the church rites, and sitting at table, and what to eat on which days, all according to regulation’.58 Apart from the Conversion to Christianity itself, this is the first record of any set of wholly imported written rules being formally adopted in Rus. However, even in the act of ostentatiously asserting Byzantine precedence, Feodosii departed from it. The Byzantine way would have been for him to draw up his own typikon, based on or adapted from authoritative models, not simply to impose a document composed elsewhere for somebody else’s monastery. The Slavonic version of the Stoudite Rule59 was translated from a typikon issued by the Byzantine Patriarch Alexios (1025–43) for a monastery of the Dormition (the same dedication as the main church at the Caves) which he founded in Constantinople in 56

57 58 59

For various aspects of monastic organisation in the period when the first communities were being formed in Rus, see Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby (eds.), The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Monasticism (Belfast, 1994). BLDR I, pp. 378–80; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 53. PVL I, p. 107; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 142. The Chronicle and Nestor’s Life of Feodosii of the Caves give slightly different accounts of how the Rule reached Kiev. Text in A. M. Pentkovskii, Tipikon patriarkha Aleksiia Studita v Vizantii i na Rusi (Moscow, 2001), pp. 233–420.

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1034. Some of its prescriptions are blatantly inappropriate for the northern environment: on food and clothing, for example, or its references to the Imperial family. The extent to which the Caves did or did not apply the letter of Alexios’s law is a matter of some debate,60 but presumably at this stage the integrity of the imported code was reckoned more significant than the mundane minutiae of its consistent applicability. In consequence, by the very strictest criteria, even the enclosed textual community could not live consistently by its own normative text. Here, too, the written rules were mediated by the discretion – granted in the Rule – of the abbot. Between the authoritative text, and the community supposed to live by it, was the crucial figure of the authoritative intermediary.                    :               To mark out space for a monastery was far simpler, physically and textually, than to mark out space for the Church. The monastery, once established, was almost by definition self-contained, while the Church by the nature of its mission was in continual complex interaction with the wider community. We can identify, in particular, three sets of sociocultural relationships, in which the Church’s imported rule-lists functioned in distinct ways: first, the Church’s internal institutional relationships; second, the Church’s pastoral relationships; and third, the Church’s ‘external’ relationships as an economic and juridical entity. Broadly speaking, the role of the imported rule-lists becomes progressively diminished the further one moves away from the first and towards the third of these sets of relationships. A great deal of canon law consists of rules made by the Church about its own functioning as an institution: rules about procedures and criteria for the ordination of priests, for example, or for the appointment of bishops; rules about the proper conduct of services; rules about the proper observance of fasts and feasts. The job of a churchman was to observe, promote, interpret and apply the rules, at the appropriate level of his authority. In the words of an anonymous exhortation, ‘bishops must with all their strength and with all their might keep watch over the holy rules. It is entrusted to them to maintain [the rules] firmly, that nothing be transgressed . . . God aids bishops who preserve the holy canons.’61 The highest authority was Constantinople, and from time to time the knottiest issues were referred to Constantinople for decision. In the early 60

61

For a detailed study of the issue see Claire Farrimond, ‘Tradition and Originality in Early Russian Monasticism: the Application of the Stoudite Rule at the Kievan Caves Monastery’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2000). RIB VI, cols. 128–9.

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1160s a local bishop with controversial views on fasting was sent to be examined in the presence of the Emperor Manuel I himself.62 Shortly afterwards, Patriarch Luke Chrysoberges was asked to rule on a request relating to new ecclesiastical appointments in the north-east. More mundanely, in 1228 Patriarch Germanos II wrote to Metropolitan Kirill I instructing him that the practice of ordaining slaves to the priesthood was contrary to canon law and must cease,63 while in 1276 the patriarchal synod responded to questions from Bishop Feognost of Sarai (the Rus bishop at the Golden Horde).64 In a curious way the authority of Constantinople is confirmed even where it appears to be challenged. In 1147 a synod of local bishops met in Kiev to discuss the appointment of a local candidate, Klim Smoliatich, as metropolitan, without the approval of Constantinople.65 Klim’s opponents – the defenders of the authority of the patriarch – cited the letter of the law: ‘the law does not permit bishops to appoint a metropolitan; the metropolitan is appointed by the patriarch’. The other side – those who would bypass the patriarch – cited Constantinopolitan custom: ‘we have the head of St Clement, just as the Greeks appoint by the hand of St John’.66 In this reported exchange, Constantinopolitan precedent is cited both against the letter of the law and against direct Constantinopolitan authority. Even at the very top, the relations between code and custom leave plenty of scope for contingent interpretation. At the local level, very little is visible of the routine mediation by churchmen.67 Aspects of church discipline are touched on in the Canonical Responses of Metropolitan Ioann II in the late eleventh century, and in the responses of Bishop Nifont and others to questions from clergy 62

63 65

66

67

C. L. Barrick, ‘Andrey Yurevich Bogolyubsky. A Study of the Sources’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1984), pp. 22–61; G. Prinzing, ‘Wer war der “bulgarische Bischof Adrian” der Laurentius-Chronik sub anno 1164?’, JGO 36 (1988), 552–7. 64 RIB VI, cols. 129–38. RIB VI, cols. 79–84. On the context see Simon Franklin, ‘Diplomacy and Ideology: Byzantium and the Russian Church in the Mid Twelfth Century’, in Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (eds.), Byzantine Diplomacy. Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990 (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 145–50. PSRL II, col. 341. On the issues of law and precedent see Dimitri Obolensky, Byzantium and the Slavs (New York, 1994), pp. 128–37; B. A. Uspenskii, Tsar
i patriarkh. Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model
i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) (Moscow, 1998), pp. 260–70. Thus, for example, of the hundred pages on ‘Church organisation’ in Sophia Senyk, A History of the Church in Ukraine. Volume I. To the End of the Thirteenth Century (OCA 243; Rome, 1993), pp. 82–181, fewer than ten are devoted to ‘the clergy’ and fewer than twenty to ‘administration’. The fullest attempts to synthesise such evidence as there is remain those of E. E. Golubinskii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi. Tom I. Period pervyi, kievskii ili domongol
skii. Pervaia polovina toma, 2nd edn (Moscow, 1901; repr. Moscow, 1997), pp. 257–700; and – covering a longer period – S. Smirnov, Drevne-russkii dukhovnik. Issledovaniia po istorii tserkovnogo byta (Moscow, 1914; repr. Farnborough, 1970).

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towards the middle of the twelfth century.68 From the mid–1160s a brief ruling by Bishop Ilia of Novgorod, in consultation with a colleague, specifies duties of a deacon in the liturgy.69 But for a more formal approach to local code-making we again have to wait for the initiatives of Metropolitan Kirill II in the latter part of the thirteenth century. In 1273 Metropolitan Kirill summoned a synod to consecrate a new bishop of Vladimir,70 but the assembled hierarchs took advantage of their gathering to consider a range of problems relating to church discipline and procedure: illicit charging for appointments; the ordination of slaves (apparently not stamped out after the missive from Patriarch Germanos II half a century earlier); the Novgorodian version of procedures for deacons in the liturgy (cf. Bishop Ilia’s earlier ruling); the proper method of anointing at baptism; drunken priests; the performance of liturgical functions by those who are not ordained.71 Kirill’s Rule (Pravilo), adopted in synod with four other bishops, is self-consciously modelled on authoritative canonical interpretation. It is sprinkled with specific references to the canons, and, significantly, its preamble refers to Kirill’s own recent efforts to introduce a new version of the nomokanon. According to Kirill, the woes of the Rus are due to the fact that the canons have been ignored or transgressed: ‘Has not God scattered us across the face of the earth? Have not our cities been taken? Have not our strong princes fallen at the point of a sword? Have not our offspring been led into captivity? Have not God’s holy churches been laid waste? Are we not afflicted every day by the godless and unclean pagans? All these things happen to us because we do not observe the rules of our holy and venerable fathers.’ Yet the Rus themselves were not entirely to blame, for they had known no better. Citing a note in the Serbian version of the kormchaia which he himself had recently requested from Svetoslav of Vidin, Kirill explains: ‘Previously they [the rules of the Church] were obscured by the cloud of the learnedness of the Hellenic language, but now they have gleamed forth – that is, they have been interpreted – and by God’s Grace they shine brightly, driving away the darkness of ignorance.’72 Kirill’s Rule from the synod of 1273 refers to, and is a product of, the proliferation of rule-lists in the latter half of the thirteenth century. Nearly three centuries after the Conversion, it is the first surviving text which shows the Rus Church appropriating to and for itself formal written 68 70 71 72

69 RIB VI, cols. 75–8. See below, pp. 149–52, on the pastoral aspects of these works. On the date see Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, pp. 183–4. RIB VI, cols. 83–100. On this as a quotation from the Serbian kormchaia see Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, p. 182. ‘Interpreted’: istolkovany – here perhaps also, or even primarily, meaning ‘translated’.

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code-making procedures. Taken together with his revision and dissemination of the kormchaia it implies a new type of local engagement with the production of normative codes. In the first place, the Serbian version of the kormchaia was considerably more capacious than the existing Slavonic version in Rus. It was more up-to-date, with additions and commentaries down to the middle of the twelfth century;73 the canons themselves were abbreviated (the core texts were already available), so that the balance was shifted towards the supplements and interpretations.74 Secondly, for the first time the imported kormchaia was augmented with local material, which thus became fused with the authoritative tradition of imported rule-lists. Third, the new version was disseminated widely, rapidly and, it would seem, systematically throughout the lands of the Rus. No evidence of such concerted efforts towards the harmonisation of written rules emerges from any earlier period. And fourthly, the new version quickly acquired regional variants. Harmonisation did not quite amount to standardisation. Instituted in part to combat a diversity of custom in the Rus Church, the new rule-lists came to be diversely moulded into local custom. Metropolitan Kirill’s preamble to his Rule is not to be taken entirely at face value. Grumbling about a decline in standards is a staple activity for arbiters of morality, too common to be useful in analysis except as a feature of the perceptions of those who do the grumbling. Nor – despite Kirill’s references to war and destruction – should we assume that copies of codes were scarce because of the Mongol invasions:75 the destructive phase of the invasions was already several decades into the past, and in any case the new code-producing activity extended into areas not directly affected by Mongol armies. Nor is it strictly true that access to the canons had previously been barred by language, since both the Methodian version of the Synagoge of Fifty Titles and the ‘Efremovskaia’ kormchaia with the Syntagma of Fourteen Titles had reached the Rus long before Kirill’s own time. About Kirill’s own motives we can only speculate. It is ironic that this pan-Rus, quasi-legislative activity by the Church coincided with the time when the old dynastic order was at its most fragmented. Perhaps, Kirill 73 74

75

Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, p. 152. See above, p. 138. There has been some speculation as to why the Serbian kormchaia included the commentaries of Aristenos and Zonaras, but not those of their near-contemporary Theodore Balsamon: see Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, pp. 119–20. Possibly Aristenos and Zonaras were found more useful because their interpretations tended to be expressed in more generalised form: for a comparison see Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni 1081–1261 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 148. The explanation offered by Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, p. 152.

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and others were trying to promote ecclesiastical harmonisation as a device to maintain a semblance of the old unity. Kirill’s Rule from the synod of 1273 attacked local variation in ecclesiastical practices. Or perhaps Kirill’s goal was to insert the Church into the dynastic vacuum.76 Without denying any of a range of possible personal, political, social and spiritual motives, I suggest that both Kirill’s Rule and the surge in active kormchaiaproduction reflect more than just his personal initiatives and cannot be explained solely as a result of his personal influence. His perception of a scarcity of written rules is surely relevant, but it should be seen in the context of the wider change in administrative document-production over the same period.                :             ‘Abide by the law, rather than by the custom of the land.’77 Thus, in one of his Canonical Responses to the monk Iakov, Metropolitan Ioann II (c.1077–89) provides ostensibly unambiguous guidance on the daily pastoral dilemma of the front-line churchman in a missionary Church. Ioann II, a Byzantine appointee to the metropolitanate of Rhosia, was well used to coping with people who broke the rules: besides the Canonical Responses he is also known as the author of a polemical letter to Pope Clement III, listing ways in which the Roman Church violated canon law.78 Both works were written in Greek, and translated into Slavonic. The thirty-four instructions in Ioann’s Canonical Responses have the air of a random miscellany, answers to questions in the serendipitous order in which they happen to occur, without an imposed thematic structure: should one baptise a newborn baby that is too weak even to feed? If no wet nurse can be found when the mother is unclean, should the mother feed her own child? Is it permitted to eat carrion, or to eat with Latins? How should one deal with those who ignore the Fast, or with adulterers, or with those who indulge in magic and sorcery? Should laymen stand or sit at a particular point in the service? What should one do with old icons where the image of the saint is beyond recognition? What is the penance for husbands and wives who abandon each other to take new partners? Or for those who sell baptised slaves? If a priest’s wife returns after having been captured by pagans, should she be rejected as unclean? 76

77 78

P. Sokolov, Russkii arkhierei iz Vizantii i pravo ego naznacheniia do nachala XV veka (Kiev, 1913), pp. 174–8, argues that the decisions of the Council were specifically aimed against Novgorod; but Novgorod soon accepted and adapted the new kormchaia, including Kirill’s Rule. RIB VI, col. 3. The letter was probably written in the mid- or late 1080s: see R. G. Pikhoia, ‘Vizantiiskii monakh – russkii mitropolit Ioann II kak kanonist i diplomat’, Antichnaia drevnost
i srednie veka 11 (1975), 133–44.

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How should one deal with those who consort with pagans in the course of trade? Or with those (apparently the majority) who celebrate their marriages according to pagan custom? Or with priests who get drunk? And so on, mainly on pastoral matters but also with a sprinkling of questions on ritual and church discipline. Ioann’s constant touchstone is the law (cited of course from Greek, not from a translated nomokanon), but as often as not he is being asked to adjudicate not on the law alone but on the degree of rigorousness (akribeia) appropriate and permissible in the circumstances. Thus the categorical statement cited above (‘abide by the law, rather than by the custom of the land’) is not a general instruction but a response only to the particular question, on whether one may eat ‘animals that have been taken by a dog or by a beast or by an eagle or by another bird, if they die without being slaughtered by men’. Although both the Slavonic and Greek texts mention the rulings of the ‘divine fathers’, only the Slavonic actually uses the word ‘law’, while the Greek refers to akribeia.79 In his previous response, by contrast, Ioann counsels against excessive akribeia: an unclean mother should be allowed to suckle her baby if the baby’s life is in danger, since ‘it is better to revive [the child] than to kill it with excessive abstinence’.80 If second cousins marry, penances must be imposed upon them by the Church, ‘even if secular [“outer”] law permits it’.81 Curiously, while the Greek allows priests to dress according to ‘the custom of the country’ except during services in church, the equivalent article in the Slavonic text insists on a penance for improper dress;82 except that priests are allowed to wear warm leather underclothes in winter regardless of whether the animal would be considered clean for eating.83 Sometimes it is a matter of finding the right category for the local offence: thus those who marry according to pagan rituals should be given penances ‘as fornicators’.84 Ioann’s Canonical Responses provide an all-too-rare and all-too-brief glimpse of the challenges facing the Byzantine head of the Church. They illustrate the kind of pastoral discretion required in trying to interpret behaviour in the light of the rules; and they clearly show that substantial portions of the putative flock were likely to eat, drink, consort with 79

80

81 82 83

RIB VI, col. 3 (question 3). The Greek: A. S. Pavlov, ‘Otryvki grecheskogo teksta kanonicheskikh otvetov russkogo mitropolita Ioanna II’, Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk 22 (1873), Appendix 5, pp. 6–7. RIB VI, cols. 2–3; Pavlov, ‘Otryvki grecheskogo teksta’, p. 6: ‘abstinence’ (v

zderzhanie) in Slavonic, but again akribeia in the Greek: Pavlov, ‘Otryvki grecheskogo teksta’, p. 11; question 33 in the Slavonic: RIB VI, cols. 19–20. RIB VI, col. 12 (question 23). Question 10 in the Greek: Pavlov, ‘Otryvki grecheskogo teksta’, p. 11; cf. RIB VI, cols. 19–20 (question 33). 84 RIB VI, col. 17 (question 30). RIB VI, col. 7 (question 14).

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foreigners, marry and dress according to the custom of the land, whatever might be written in the Greek churchman’s rules. Evidently the problems persisted, and Ioann’s decisions were found useful by successive generations. In the late thirteenth century they, too, were included in the new, local edition of the kormchaia.85 A more extensive set of questions and answers is associated with the names of the mid-twelfth-century Novgorodian monk Kirik and his bishop Nifont (1131–56). Kirik served as choirmaster in the Monastery of St Antony (Antoniev monastery), and he seems to have had a taste for formulation and tabulation. In 1136 he compiled a brief manual on chronology and calendrical calculation. The questions and answers were put together later, probably no earlier than the mid-1140s.86 Kirik’s general themes are similar to those of Ioann – discipline and liturgy and ritual among the clergy, food and clothing, sex and marriage, purity and impurity, pagan customs among laymen, penances – but his instances are more precise, more probing in their particulars, tending sometimes towards the robustly anecdotal. ‘I said to him: “some claim to have heard from other bishops that if one finds a bird already choked to death in a snare one should cut it open without removing it from the snare.” “They lie,” he said. “No bishop said that.”’ ‘They brought him a grouse at the feast, but the lord [bishop] ordered it to be thrown over the fence: “It is not right to receive communion after eating that,” he said.’87 Be lenient towards a young priest who cannot restrain himself from having intercourse with his wife on a Monday (between the Sunday and Tuesday services).88 Try to persuade laymen not to take interest on loans, or at least to moderate their demands and take, say, three or four kunas rather than five.89 There are no taboo subjects, and Kirik’s questions are the fullest contemporary sources for teachings on sexual behaviour: a priest who has a nocturnal emission may serve at matins after washing and praying, but not if in his thoughts or dreams he was with a woman; penance must be imposed 85

86

87 88

89

Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, pp. 173–9. Shchapov suggests that responses 23–34 may have been written not by Ioann but by a subsequent Byzantine churchman. Kirik is one of the very few Rus writers of his age to have spawned a modern ‘biography’: R. A. Simonov, Kirik novgorodets – uchenyi XII veka (Moscow, 1980). See also, Podskalsky, Christentum und theologische Literatur, pp. 187–90. The Canonical Responses: RIB VI, cols. 21–62; in a slightly different version in Smirnov, Materialy, pp. 1–27. Most of the responses are assumed to be by Nifont, although some are associated with other bishops. Questions K87, K88: Smirnov, Materialy, p. 14. Question K77: Smirnov, Materialy, p. 22 ; on Nifont’s comparatively tolerant attitude to sexual desire and intercourse see Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, London, 1989), pp. 164–8. Question K4: Smirnov, Materialy, p. 13.

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for ejaculation without penetration; twenty days’ penance for intercourse during menstruation.90 Kirik’s questions emerge not only from practical experience but also from his own reading of rules: ‘I read him [Nifont] the canon of Timothy . . . ’; ‘as is written in the nomokanon . . . ’; ‘as is written in the Instructions of John the Faster . . . ’91 The bishop here is not the sole repository of direct knowledge of the canons, but an interpreter, an adjudicator. Perhaps the most intriguing exchange concerns the alleged perils of conceiving a child on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday: ‘I read to him from a certain Instruction that a child thus conceived will become a robber, or a fornicator, or a coward . . . and he said to me, “those books of yours should be burned.”’92 Kirik’s dubious Instruction has been identified as a quasicanonical translated compilation masquerading as the Rules of the Holy Apostles, which gained quite wide circulation in Rus.93 His exchange with Nifont on this quasi-rule reveals, first, that rule-lists were available outside the kormchaia; and second, that at least by the middle of the twelfth century a translated rule-list did not automatically have authoritative status even among churchmen. Nifont’s dismissive riposte is the earliest recorded example of a critical approach to the received corpus of written ‘canonical’ rules. Nifont consigned this source to dishonour, if not to oblivion, while his own responses – in Kirik’s rendition – were already being cited by others in the 1160s. Eventually Kirik’s compendium also entered the authoritative corpus through inclusion in the local redaction of the kormchaia in the late thirteenth century.94 Princely rule-lists for the Church As an intrusive and expanding institution with official status, the Church needed an agreed space in which to operate. Its geographical and demographic limits were set by the official Conversion: it was supposed to reach everybody everywhere. But the missionary ideal had to proceed from practical arrangements to provide it with physical, economic and social space: buildings, means of support, designated powers. In 90 91

92 93 94

Questions K17, I24, S24: Smirnov, Materialy, pp. 22, 10, 8. For a collation and analysis of such passages see Smirnov, Materialy, pp. 271–81. Francis J. Thomson, ‘The Problem of the Reception of the Works of John IV Ieiunator of Constantinople Among the Slavs: Nicon of the Black Mountain and Cirycus of Novgorod’, Palaeobulgarica 11:1 (1987), 23–45, suggests (pp. 33, 45) that Kirik may at one point have cited John the Faster via the Pandektai of Nikon of the Black Mountain, although Kirik’s wording does not coincide with the translation of Nikon (see Maksimovich, Pandekty Nikona Chernogortsa, p. 173) and Thomson speculates that he cited from memory. Question K74: Smirnov, Materialy, p. 7; RIB VI, col. 44. Text: Smirnov, Materialy, pp. 28–31; analysis ibid., pp. 282–98. Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, pp. 179–80.

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short, the institution needed to be instituted, or constituted. The Church brought with it the assumption that formally sanctioned powers should be formally set down in writing (like the Imperial legislation for the Church in the Byzantine nomokanon), and written legislative acts attributed to the immediate post-Conversion princes consist of lists of rules defining the Church’s income and jurisdiction. Two written documents are traditionally accorded ‘constitutional’ status with regard to the nature and extent of Church powers. Labelled Church ‘statutes’ (ustavy), they are attributed to the two most revered princes of early Rus Christianity: the first to Vladimir Sviatoslavich (d. 1015), Converter of the Rus, and the second to his son Iaroslav (d. 1054). Both statutes survive only in much later manuscripts, and there is considerable doubt as to whether either of them reflects in detail its putative original.95 While the statutes are not, therefore, clear evidence on the exact provisions which may have been recorded in codes from the late tenth and early to mid-eleventh centuries, they nevertheless indicate what came to be accepted, at least towards the latter part of our period, as a basic demarcation of authority.96 In their contents the two statutes complement one another. Vladimir’s Statute allocates to the Church its guaranteed means of material support, lists categories of people who were to be subject to the Church’s exclusive authority, and names the types of offences which the Church was entitled to judge. For material support the prince pledged a tenth part of his income (strictly speaking in the statute he pledged it only to his palace church of the Mother of God – the ‘Tithe Church’ – but tithe-giving came to be reckoned the norm). ‘Church people’ included not only monks and nuns and the clergy and their wives but also some of the socially disadvantaged such as the blind and the lame, widows and pilgrims. The jurisdiction of the Church’s courts was to cover sexual and marital matters (divorce, adultery, abduction, incest, rape), beliefs and rituals (heresy, sorcery) and domestic disputes (violence, contested inheritance).97 Iaroslav’s Statute extends the code beyond principle into prescription for judicial practice. It consists mainly of a detailed list of fixed penalties to be imposed by the Church courts. The Church’s own pastoral and disciplinary documents, such as Metropolitan Ioann’s Canonical Responses or Kirik’s Questions, prescribe punishment on a scale of penances. In Iaroslav’s Statute, sanctioned by the prince, the penalties are financial: 95 96

97

The fullest edition of the texts: DKU, pp. 13–139; with annotations and commentaries in ZDR, pp. 137–208; English versions in Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 42–50. I broadly accept the conclusions of Shchapov in DKU; for a cautious view of the chronology, especially with regard to Iaroslav’s Statute, see Kaiser, The Growth of the Law, pp. 50–8. The exact lists vary. For the two redactions reckoned to be the earliest see ZDR, pp. 139–40, 148–50; for an English translation of the second of these versions see Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 42–4.

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mainly fines, sometimes also combined with compensation for the victim, and occasionally with the proviso that there will also be a penance, or that further punishment will be imposed by the prince. For example, sexual intercourse with a nun attracted a fine of 100 grivnas (to the bishop) and a penance; for sexual intercourse with an animal, 12 grivnas and a penance; for calling the wife of a senior boiar a whore, 5 gold grivnas in compensation, plus a fine of 5 gold grivnas to the bishop, plus punishment by the prince, but the sums were reduced to 3 grivnas for the wife of a lesser boiar or townsman, and to just 1 silver grivna for the wife of a villager; if two men fight ‘like women’, biting and scratching, they must pay 3 grivnas to the bishop.98 In theory a transgressor might stand in fourfold jeopardy: compensation for his victim, laid down in the statute; a fine to the bishop, also laid down in the statute; punishment as specified separately by the prince; penance as specified separately by the Church. The statutes of Vladimir and Iaroslav straddle, sometimes uncomfortably, the boundaries of the ecclesiastical and the civil. They are hybrids, which attempt to graft together two separate traditions and in the process to create their own distinct sphere of rule-governed action at the intersection between imported norm and local custom. On the one hand, both documents ostentatiously claim an association with canon law. Article 4 of Vladimir’s Statute asserts that: ‘I looked at the Greek nomokanon and discovered in it that it is not fitting for the prince to judge these cases, nor for his boiars nor for his judges’,99 an assertion more or less precisely repeated in Article 1 of Iaroslav’s Statute.100 On the principle of a separation of powers they are correct: canon law does allow for areas of Church jurisdiction where the secular authorities are supposed not to intervene.101 Most of the offences are broadly of a type familiar in the imported codes and the penitentials, where we would expect the Church to take an interest: marriage, sex, domestic violence. Some offences, such as rape and abduction, have both a moral and a ‘public order’ dimension, and one can find dual provision in Byzantium as well.102 The ‘expanded’ redaction of Iaroslav’s Statute includes a purely canonical section enumerating grounds for divorce, with no reference to courts or punishment.103 98 99 100 101 102

103

ZDR, pp. 168–71; Articles 18, 25, 30 of the ‘short’ redaction. DKU, p. 15; cf., from a slightly different text, Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 42. DKU, p. 85; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 45. On the interpretation of the phrase in Iaroslav’s Statute see above, n. 27. Shchapov, Vizantiiskoe i iuzhnoslavianskoe pravovoe nasledie, p. 240. See Angeliki E. Laiou, ‘Sex, Consent and Coercion in Byzantium’, in Laiou (ed.), Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 109–221. ZDR, p. 192 (article 53); Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 49–50.

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On the other hand, a number of the offences – especially in the ‘expanded’ redaction – have no obvious ecclesiastical dimension: damaging a man’s beard, for example, or setting fire to a threshing-floor, or stealing hemp or flax.104 More significant, however, is the fact that the specific benefits granted to the Church – the tithe in Vladimir’s Statute, punishment by, and the income from, fines in Iaroslav’s Statute – owe nothing whatever to Byzantium, neither to written precedent nor to customary norms. This use of a tithe, which is well attested in Rus sources from the eleventh century onwards, was perhaps derived from Slav precedent.105 The imposition of fines reflects the emerging provisions of princely administration in Rus.106 Although the exact lists of offences and fines in the surviving copies of Iaroslav’s Statute cannot be considered as fully reliable evidence for the early period, independent sources confirm that fines were being levied at the bishops’ courts, and that for some offences fines might be due both to the bishop and to the civil authorities, at least by the middle of the twelfth century.107 The Church statutes bring canon-law offences (for the most part) into a local framework of secular sanctions. In principle they were mutually beneficial to Church and prince. The Church acquired formal status as an economic and juridical entity, it was allocated sources of income, and its moral instructions were backed by material sanctions imposed with the authority of the prince. At the same time, the prince by implication extended his own authority through the Church, since most of the offences were in areas where the prince traditionally had little scope to intervene. The line of demarcation was not absolutely clear, hence the (increasing) appearance of joint sanctions, but a degree of overlapping jurisdiction is no more confusing than the overlapping and sometimes contradictory rules that Byzantine lawyers could find in their own Imperial and ecclesiastical codes.108 In Byzantium, Imperial legislation for the Church became part of the nomokanon. In Rus neither of these princely statutes appears in any of the manuscripts of the kormchaia before the fourteenth century. This perhaps implies that in our period the princely statutes were perceived as 104 105

106 107 108

ZDR, pp. 190, 191 (articles 14, 31, 32); Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 47–8 (articles 15, 32, 33). See B. N. Floria, Otnosheniia gosudarstva i tserkvi u vostochnykh i zapadnykh slavian (Moscow, 1992), pp. 5–20; Ia. N. Shchapov, Gosudarstvo i tserkov
Drevnei Rusi X– XIII vv. (Moscow, 1989), pp. 85–7; also Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 231–2. Kaiser, The Growth of the Law, pp. 62–93. Shchapov, Gosudarstvo i tserkov
, p. 117. On this relationship, viewed through the prism of Balsamon’s commentaries, see Ruth Macrides, ‘Nomos and Kanon on Paper and in Court’, in Rosemary Morris (ed.), Church and People in Byzantium (Birmingham, 1990), pp. 61–85.

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essentially secular writings, despite their claim to derive authority from the nomokanon and despite the ‘nomokanonical’ nature of the behaviour with which they are concerned. They were, so to speak, more nomos than kanon, while in Rus the kormchaia would seem at this stage to be regarded more as kanon than as nomos. Regular integration of the two is a feature of the subsequent period, from the fourteenth century onwards. The status of the statutes before 1300 therefore has to be considered not primarily in relation to rule-lists from and for the Church, but in relation to the non-ecclesiastical, wholly non-nomokanonical rule-lists issued by the Rus princes. Secular codes The main princely code of secular ‘law’ is known as Russkaia pravda (from the root prav-, similar in its range of connotations to ‘right’ in English, ‘recht’ in German). Russkaia pravda – ‘the law of the Rus’ – is a cumulative set of rules, with later provisions grafted onto an original code which probably dated from the early to mid-eleventh century. Two main versions survive: the Short Pravda (SP) and the Expanded Pravda (EP). SP consists of forty-three brief articles (in total not much more than a couple of pages in modern print),109 of which about half are normally reckoned to belong to the original code issued by Iaroslav Vladimirovich, while the remainder are attributed to his sons Iziaslav, Sviatoslav and Vsevolod. In the twelfth century, SP was superseded by EP, consisting of 121 articles, which incorporate, modify and add to the earlier code. EP includes rules attributed to Iaroslav’s grandson Vladimir Monomakh (d. 1125), though the date of the compilation as a whole is uncertain (the most plausible hypotheses veer towards the end of the century, or even the start of the thirteenth century). SP, as the defunct version, survives fortuitously, inserted into narrative in a couple of chronicle manuscripts, whereas EP came to be regarded as the fundamental code of princely law and it survives in about a hundred copies.110 The successive versions of Russkaia pravda show the expansion, over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the social range of activities which were notionally brought into the sphere of princely written rule-making. SP starts with some rather general provisions on homicide, personal injury and theft, and proceeds to a more specific scale of penalties for particular cases: penalties for killing the prince’s stablemaster, field supervisor, contract labourer or peasant; penalties for the theft of a boat, a 109 110

ZDR, pp. 47–9; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 15–19. For a list of copies see A. A. Zimin, Pravda russkaia (Moscow, 1999), pp. 381–7.

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dove, a dog, a goat, or hay. Most of the rules, explicitly or by implication, are designed to protect – or to resolve conflicts between – the prince’s (or the princes’) men. EP in part refines the rules for the same types of case (subdividing, for example, various kinds of injury sustained in a fight), but also adds a number of rules on economic and social issues such as debt and interest rates, liability for goods lost through shipwreck, terms of labour contract or indenture, estates and inheritance, beehives, the methods of recovery for stolen property sold at the market, definitions and conditions of slavery. Thus as the rule-list grow longer it also extends its social and economic range, in two ways. First, it touches on more types of activity in a greater variety of contexts, seeps out from the prince’s close circle into the marketplace and to some extent even into the home (at any rate into the economic aspects of family life). Second, it hints at aspects of a (slow) change in the structure of the exercise of authority, an extension of areas in which transgressors may be seen as responsible not just to their victims or to the community (horizontal, dyadic relations) but to external authority, to the prince (vertical, or triadic, relations).111 Russkaia pravda owes nothing to imported Byzantine rule-lists. Its provisions bear some resemblance to early medieval Germanic codes, to which in distant origin some of its norms may perhaps be related, but in context and immediate origin it is entirely local. The linguistic register is a terse, formulaic East Slavonic, by contrast with the more ‘bookish’ register of the translated codes.112 Its sanctions are financial, according to emerging princely custom, not physical (death, mutilation) according to Byzantine legislation, and the Rus were well aware of the distinction.113 To some extent, then, Russkaia pravda represents the colonisation of custom by law, the appropriation of the oral by the written. However, the fact that Russkaia pravda is rooted in custom does not mean that it merely transcribes custom into written form. Its provisions reflect administrative change, and the decision to resort to writing is itself an aspect of that change. The relationship of text to custom was inevitably selective, normative. It also grew in part by appropriating agreed versions of custom: that is, by turning precedent into norm, which in effect 111 112 113

See especially Kaiser, The Growth of the Law; also Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 217–24. See above, p. 87. See e.g. PVL I, pp. 86–7 (Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 122), the Primary Chronicle’s anecdote of Vladimir’s brief experiment in Byzantine-style punishment. L. V. Milov, ‘Vizantiiskaia Ekloga i “Pravda Iaroslava” (K retseptsii vizantiiskogo prava na Rusi)’, in GENNADIOS: k 70-letiiu akademika G. G. Litavrina (Moscow, 1999), pp. 129–42, argues speculatively that Iaroslav’s first code was introduced precisely to emphasise a rejection of Vladimir’s alleged Byzantine-style sanctions.

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amounts to legislative innovation (for example, article 23 of SP, setting the sum of 80 grivnas for the murder of the prince’s senior stablemaster, ‘as Iziaslav established when the people of Dorogobuzh killed his stablemaster’).114 The status of Russkaia pravda in the early period is elusive. Unlike canon law, or Imperial law in Byzantium, it did not stimulate the production of para-legal texts, of explication and commentary, of theoretical reflection or of documentary judgement-transcripts. Birch-bark letters reveal instances of dispute-resolution which seem to correspond with those of Russkaia pravda,115 but they do not reveal to what extent the procedures are such because they follow the code, or the code is such because it follows the procedures. In other words, while notionally more and more aspects of more and more people’s lives were brought into the scope of written rules, we have few means of discovering the depth of impact of the written rules: whether they were mainly tools for the prince’s own agents, with the wider population merely perceiving the agents’ actions as backed by the prince’s authority; or whether there was some stirring of a notion of a code-based authority above and beyond (as was the case in the Church) the ephemeral decisions of the powers of the day. Who would have possessed a copy of Russkaia pravda? Who would have referred to it for authority, in what circumstances? How widely, and by what means, were its provisions made known? In stark contrast to the multiple references to the authority of canon law in an ecclesiastical context, no source makes any mention of how, or when, or whether, the text of Russkaia pravda was consulted. In a territory as huge and diverse as Rus, communal custom was far from uniform, and the profusion of autonomous princes hardly provided the most propitious grounds for legislative and administrative coordination. Political circumstances in Rus – in particular the absence of a unitary structure of authority – would seem more conducive to a diversity of administrative practices than to a unitary system of customary rule-enforcement. Nevertheless, in fairly lengthy hindsight, viewed through the prism of the multiple copies from the Muscovite era, the success of Russkaia pravda was remarkable. It did eventually acquire a kind of ‘constitutional’ aura as a unitary written rule-code which was formed and maintained in a land without a unitary structure of authority. In the 1280s it was included in a Novgorod manuscript of the kormchaia (incongruously, since it has nothing whatever to do with the Church), and shortly afterwards 114 115

ZDR, p. 48; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 17. See L. V. Cherepnin, Novgorodskie berestianye gramoty kak istoricheskii istochnik (Moscow, 1969), pp. 36–112; among the earliest letters see esp. no. 109: A. A. Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow, 1995), pp. 235–7.

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it became part of the compilation known as the Measure of Law (Merilo pravednoe).116

In a society without writing, written codes were by nature intrusive, and responses to the intrusion varied according to the social and cultural context. The evidence of the rule-lists, meagre and ambiguous though it is, should make one wary of any attempt to generalise the status of any written code ‘as such’, in and for itself. The status and functionality of a code was not determined merely by the fact that it was written down. The survey of codes suggests what may initially look like paradox: that the use of writing as the authoritative reference-point for social behaviour was most acceptable where it was most intrusive, rather than where it blended most easily with custom. Written authority, or at any rate the idea of written authority, was an intrinsic part of the imported Faith and its associated institutions. Those who consciously identified themselves as Christians (and we must bear in mind that the Faith spread slowly) ipso facto acknowledged the fundamental authority of Holy Writ and of the institution’s accumulated written rules and rulings as assembled in canon law. There were, however, degrees of directness, stages in the appropriation of textual authority. While the idea of textual authority was intrinsic to the Faith, practical authority based on an assumed knowledge of the rule-lists was at first probably restricted to intermediaries: to Byzantine churchmen trained in Greek. The earliest recorded ‘formal’ adoption of a complete set of rules in Slavonic translation was for an enclosed and artificial textual community, a cenobitic monastery. Yet the Stoudite Rule adopted by Feodosii for the Kievan Caves monastery in the second half of the eleventh century was still somewhat remote: a translation of an integral Byzantine document, not (on the textual level) an engagement with Byzantine codifying practices or an assimilation of a Byzantine code to local conditions. The twelfth century yields rather more evidence for local engagement with translated rule-lists in pastoral and disciplinary matters, and for local polemics on issues covered by canon law; but not until the late thirteenth century did the Rus begin fully to integrate themselves as participants, so to speak, into the process of authoritative rule-making, through the rapid dissemination and editing of the revised kormchaia and the inclusion of local texts as standard. The closest match between rule and practice was probably in the cenobitic monastery and in the liturgy. Elsewhere, as in Byzantium, the codes were opaque or inconsistent enough to allow 116

On the Measure of Law see above, pp. 139, 142.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

a flexible accommodation with custom: acknowledged in principle, axiomatically; applied or interpreted according to circumstance. Secular regulation, unlike ecclesiastical regulation, had existed in Rus without writing. The idea of written authority was not a prerequisite, not intrinsic to the idea and identity of princely rule. Nor, give or take bits and pieces of experimentation, was it practicable (even if it had been reckoned desirable) to import institutions and written rules of government along with institutions and written rules of the Faith. One area of princely written rule-making involved secular legislation for the Church, allocating and delineating its social and economic powers. The remainder – Russkaia pravda, princely secular codes for secular society – is minuscule in textual and behavioural scope by comparison with the Byzantine or ecclesiastical equivalent. To some extent the appearance and gradual growth of Russkaia pravda represents a colonisation and normalisation of custom, an appropriation of the unwritten to the written, a sign of a slow infiltration of central, rule-bearing authority into communal relations. Yet, in a mirror-reversal of the status of writing in the Church, there is no evidence that the idea of a written basis for princely rule ever became particularly strong. No Christian could be unaware, and no clergyman would think to conceal, that behind the authority of the intermediaries (the priests, the monks, the bishops) lay the ultimate authority of the writings. The Church thus constituted a broad and expanding textual community, which also encompassed several smaller overlapping textual communities. In a secular context the chain of prestige was reversed: behind the authority of the writings lay the authority of the prince.117 Through the growth of Russkaia pravda more areas of behaviour notionally fell within the scope of textual regulation, but it is not at all clear how many people would even have been aware that this was the case, nor that there was any significant spread, in secular life, of a writing-based consciousness which suggested that a given action was to be undertaken or avoided because a rule-list said so. There is, in other words, little evidence of a broad textual community defined by an acknowledgement of written princely codes, of any strong notion equivalent to that of the ennomos arche, let alone ennomos politeia, though doubtless at least some princes might have wished to hasten its formation. Contingent writing: documents in administration He who arranges the seating-plan has immense power to bruise or inflate sensitive egos. The status of a functionary, diplomat or guest is measured 117

See, however, the ‘special case’ of Novgorod’s written contracts with its princes: below, pp. 175–6.

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in the minutiae of protocol, and the hierarchy of the feast or reception – who sits where, next to whom, opposite whom – is a statement about the hierarchy of the world. At the Byzantine court the official in charge of these delicate arrangements was the atriklines, and the main qualification for the atriklines was that he should know intimately the rank and station of every courtier, bureaucrat and visiting dignitary. There were even special manuals – taktika, or kletorologia – produced for the purpose, listing officials in order of precedence. For the historian no other written source provides such a detailed and systematic account of the Byzantine bureaucratic hierarchy. The longest surviving kletorologion, produced in 899 by the protospatharios Philotheos, runs to over seventy-five pages in the modern printed edition.118 The imperial household and chanceries, the fiscal officials, the military and provincial administration, list follows list follows list. ‘Six types of dignitary are subordinate to the quaestor: the antigrapheis, the skribas, the skeptor, the libellesios, the protokankellarios, the kankellarioi; seven types of dignitary are subordinate to the logothete of the stratiotikon: the chartoularioi of the sekreton, the chartoularioi of the themes, the chartoularioi of the tagmata, the legatarioi, the optiones, the protokankellarios, the mandatores.’119 And so on, and so on, in the numbing, repetitive poetry of protocol. We discover, for example, that chartoularioi and notarioi of the sekreta were to be counted among the fourth rank of officials, and about the size of bonuses which they might expect to receive on special occasions, or that the most senior of the archivists and notaries – the chartoularioi ton megalon sekreton and the basilikoi notarioi – were ranged along the side-couches at the emperor’s Christmas banquet.120 No administrative department in Philotheos’s lists is without its officers responsible for the paperwork (or parchment-work). The apparatus of government in Byzantium assumed the presence of a documentproducing bureaucracy, with long-established personnel and procedures for issuing, validating, copying, storing, verifying and retrieving written records.121 Thus it had always been in the Empire of the Rhomaioi, a 118 119 120

121

N. Oikonomides, Les listes de pr´es´eance byzantines des IXe et Xe si`ecles (Paris, 1972), pp. 81–235 (with parallel French translation). Oikonomides, Les listes de pr´es´eance, p. 115. Oikonomides, Les listes de pr´es´eance, pp. 155, 227, 169. On various grades of chartoularios see Rodolphe Guilland, ‘Chartulaire et Grand Chartulaire’, Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Europ´eennes 9 (1971), 405–26; repr. in the same author’s Titres et fonctions de l’Empire byzantin (London, 1976), no. XVIII. On Byzantine administrative documents see Franz Dolger ¨ and Johannes Karayannopulos, Byzantinische Urkundenlehre. Erster Abschnitt: die Kaisererkunden (Munich, 1968); I. P. Medvedev, Ocherki vizantiiskoi diplomatiki (chastnopravovoi akt) (Leningrad, 1988); also I. P. Medvedev, Pravovaia kul
tura vizantiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 2001), esp. pp. 254–392.

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defining characteristic, from time almost immemorial. One can legitimately debate the extent to which Middle Byzantine bureaucracy was or was not directly derived from its Late Roman or Early Byzantine equivalent: the shape of administration changed, as did many of the functions even when labels for offices were ostensibly preserved; but it was simply an inherited axiom that written procedures were integral to government and to the normal and proper conduct of official transactions.122 Public bodies – the imperial and patriarchal administration – produced and preserved written records as a standard practice, and documentary methods were also routinely available, through notaries, to private individuals and institutions. Documents had a place in judicial processes, with procedures to guard against forgery or to determine the status of claims supported by documents which turned out to have been stolen. Documentation was a habit, a tradition, a normal expectation, a way of thought.123 Not so in Rus. There could be no question of importing the whole package of Byzantine secular administrative methods, institutions and assumptions along with the importation of the Faith. The Rus were quick to recognise the sheer convenience of writing in the conduct of their affairs: as a means of communicating with others at a distance, for example, or with oneself over time, or as a sign of an object’s owner or contents or value. Writing was used in the buying and selling of goods, in the issuing of orders, in disputes and complaints. Writing was a familiar part of the graphic environment of significant numbers of people engaged in such activities, and was exploited by them in the course of such activities. However, we should make a distinction between the ephemeral and the formal, between writing as communicative convenience and writing as official record or as required administrative procedure. The fact that the Rus wrote about formal transactions (as in birch-bark letters threatening legal action, for example), or even in formal transactions (such as the inscriptions on the wooden cylinders, or on seals, or tally-sticks, or the lead ‘Drogichin seals’)124 does not yet imply that the writing itself was a necessary, obligatory, component of the transaction. Ephemeral administrative writing was common, but the Rus were strikingly less receptive to the formal administrative potential of the technology. 122

123

124

For the earlier periods see T. F. Carney, Bureaucracy in a Traditional Society: RomanoByzantine Bureaucracies Viewed from Within (Lawrence, Kans., 1971); C. M. Kelly, ‘Late Roman Bureaucracy: Going through the Files’, in Bowman and Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, pp. 161–76. See Medvedev, Ocherki, pp. 182–223; on stolen documents see the Peira (excerpts from verdicts by the 11th-century judge Eustathios Rhomaios): J. and P. Zepos (ed.), Jus grecoromanum, IV (Athens, 1931), p. 227; cited in Deno John Geanakoplos, Byzantium. Church, Society and Civilization Seen through Contemporary Eyes (Chicago, 1984), p. 82 See above, pp. 49–50, 79–81.

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In this section we shall focus on formal contingent writing, since it is the more problematic of the two. However, in considering the pattern of evidence for formal contingent writing, we shall inevitably cross from time to time into the murky border-zone where the ephemeral and the formal become hard to distinguish from one another, where the status or typicality of a given text is hard to discern. Very few formal administrative documents survive in the original: a couple from the twelfth century, perhaps a dozen from the thirteenth century, depending on dating and definitions. Much of the discussion will therefore depend on indirect and ambiguous evidence.

Dealing with outsiders: external trade and diplomacy The Primary Chronicle records four formal agreements between the Rus and Constantinople, dated 907, 911, 944 and 971.125 The agreement of 907 sets out some basic conditions for Rus traders in the Byzantine capital: they were to enter the city through one gate, unarmed and escorted, in groups of no more than fifty, and they were to reside near the church of St Mamas; they would receive provisions during their stay, and for the journey home; and they could have as many baths as they wanted. This text seems to be the chronicler’s paraphrase or reconstruction, but the three subsequent agreements are unquestionably derived from authentic formal written documents. Although they only survive in the late manuscript copies of the Chronicle’s Slavonic versions and cannot be assumed to preserve intact every detail of the tenth-century originals, nevertheless their structures and formulae clearly show that they were framed according to the practices of the Byzantine chancery.126 The agreements of 911 and 944 amplify the terms for Rus residence and trading: for example, on penalties for violence or theft committed by the Rus against ‘Christians’ or by ‘Christians’ against Rus; on mutual assistance for ships blown off course; on redeeming captives and slaves. The 971 agreement deals with politics rather than trade. Drawn up after Byzantium had, with great difficulty, repulsed Prince Sviatoslav’s attempt to move his base of operations from Kiev to the Danube, the document is a written pledge 125

126

PVL I, pp. 24–5, 25–8, 34–9, 51–2; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 64–5, 65–8, 73–7, 89–90; text and translations also in Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 1–13. The agreement of 911 appears in the article usually labelled ‘912’, but the text shows that it dates from the start of the Byzantine ‘September’ year beginning in September 911; the agreement of 944 appears erroneously in the entry for 945. For ‘diplomatic’ analysis see Jana Malingoudi, Die russisch-byzantinischen Vertr¨age des 10. Jhds. aus diplomatischer Sicht (Thessaloniki, 1994); S. M. Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika. Akty X–XVI vv. (Moscow, 1996), pp. 4–57. See also A. N. Sakharov, Diplomatiia Drevnei Rusi IX–pervaia polovina X v. (Moscow, 1980).

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by Sviatoslav to refrain from undertaking or inciting any further military activity against the Emperor’s possessions.127 If we were to accept the Chronicle’s text at face-value, much of our caution about early Rus documentary practices would be misplaced. The treaties of 911 and 944 both specify that two documents were produced: each side set forth its own obligations and undertakings, and the final ratified text conflated the two.128 Sviatoslav’s 971 undertaking is entirely in his own name.129 Rus emissaries and merchants were to arrive with a letter from the prince to the Emperor, confirming how many ships he had sent; and those who arrived without such a document were to be held by the Byzantine authorities until their status had been ascertained.130 The 911 treaty affirms that if one of the Rus dies in Constantinople having left a written testament, his property will be disposed of according to that testament. Monthly provisions would be given only to those of the Rus whose names had been written down by the Emperor’s agent. The prince would comply with a written request from the Emperor to provide troops. The Rus were permitted to export silks only after the Emperor’s agent had affixed his seal to confirm that the quota was not exceeded. Rus emissaries and merchants were to arrive with their own gold and silver seals as identification. Sviatoslav affirmed his written pledge with his seal.131 These treaties, produced well before the official Conversion to Christianity, seem thus to imply not only that the Rus were in regular close contact with Byzantine document-producing bureaucracy, but that, at least when dealing with Constantinople, they were obliged to produce formal documents of their own. On closer scrutiny, however, the obvious conclusions turn out to be not at all obvious. The original treaties were in Greek. The Rus who dealt with Constantinople in the early to mid-ninth century were predominantly Scandinavian, as the lists of their names in the treaties show. The Slavonic versions were used by a chronicler only in the early twelfth century. If they wished to deal with Byzantium, the Rus had to observe Byzantine rules of procedure, including the production of formal documents, but the 127 128

129

130 131

On the context see Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 145–51. Malingoudi, Die russisch-byzantinischen Vertr¨age, pp. 43–6, 69–70. Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika, pp. 11–13, differs from Malingoudi in certain details, but agrees that the final text was the result of a sequence of formal written communications. Note, however, that there is dispute as to whether a further sequence of written documents preceded Sviatoslav’s pledge: see Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika, pp. 15–33, and A. N. Sakharov, Diplomatiia Sviatoslava (Moscow, 1982), pp. 183–203. In Kaiser’s numeration (The Laws of Rus
, p. 9) article 2 of the 944 treaty. In Kaiser’s numeration (The Laws of Rus
, pp. 6, 9–10, 11, 13) article 13 of the 911 treaty; articles 2a and 15 of the 944 treaty; article 4 of the 971 treaty.

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Byzantines are hardly likely to have required documents in a Slavonic or Scandinavian language. If Greek documents were needed, then Byzantine emissaries or clergy could have seen to the formalities, since we have no reason to posit the existence of a tenth-century native Rus ‘chancery’. The Slavonic versions were probably produced much later132 (perhaps not until shortly before their inclusion in the Primary Chronicle),133 translated not from the originals but from a Byzantine chronological collection of diplomatic documents.134 The tenth-century Rus–Byzantine treaties thus tell us little or nothing about local Rus habits of formal documentation. Yet they do show, very clearly, a context in which the Rus came into close contact with such practices – practices in which they were to some extent obliged to participate themselves. Their response to the saturated graphic environment of Byzantium was selective. The Rus could meet Byzantine formal documentary requirements if necessary, without adopting the procedures for themselves; yet it is more than likely that in this commercial context some of the ephemeral uses of writing (such as labelling and quantifying goods) became habitual and were assimilated, as is suggested by several of the earliest specimens of native Slavonic writing. From Sviatoslav’s peace-pledge to the next reasonably reliable surviving text of a formal document in Rus foreign relations, there is a gap of more than two hundred years. Not that trade, war and diplomacy had suddenly ceased: on the contrary, foreign relations intensified and diversified through the growing network of regional centres, and diplomatic correspondence was probably quite common.135 We might guess 132

133

134 135

S. P. Obnorskii, ‘Iazyk dogovorov russkikh s grekami’, in the same author’s Izbrannye raboty po russkomu iazyku (Moscow, 1960), pp. 98–120, attempted to show that the translations were contemporary with the events. Few would now accept that such a nuanced chronology can be established on linguistic grounds alone. See A. A. Shakhmatov, ‘“Povest
vremennykh let” i ee istochniki’, TODRL 4 (1940), 111–22; O.V. Tvorogov, ‘Povest
vremennykh let i Nachal
nyi svod (Tekstologicheskii kommentarii)’, TODRL 30 (1976), 3–26. See Malingoudi, Die russisch-byzantinischen Vertr¨age, pp. 79–87. See, for example, the cluster of communications from rulers of Hungary to princes of Kiev and Galich reported in mid-twelfth-century narratives of the Kievan chronicle: V. I. Franchuk, Kievskaia letopis
. Sostav i istochniki v lingvisticheskom osveshchenii (Kiev, 1986), pp. 180–1; A. V. Iurasovskii, ‘K voprosu o stepeni autentichnosti vengerskikh gramot XII v. Ipat
evskoi letopisi’, DGTSSSR 1981 god (1983), pp. 189–94. See also below, pp. 173–4, on a context for krestnye gramoty in the middle of the twelfth century. Of the thirteen items of correspondence listed in Ia. N. Shchapov (ed.), Drevnerusskie pis
mennye istochniki X–XIII vv. (Moscow, 1991), pp. 26–7, six are ecclesiastical and only one of the remainder is dated to before the thirteenth century. Note the surviving Papal letters (in Latin) to princes in Rus: from Gregory VII to Iziaslav Iaroslavich in 1075; letters from Innocent IV in 1246–8, or the exchanges involving Alexander IV in 1257: see Athanasius G. Welykyj (ed.), Documenta Pontificum Romanorum historiam Ucrainae illustrantia (975–1953) I (Rome, 1953), pp. 5–6, 28–43, 49–51; also

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that commercial and diplomatic correspondence also spawned documents such as assurances of safe passage for merchants and emissaries,136 but direct evidence (such as the text of a treaty) is absent.137 We might guess that some of the foreigners required formal documents from the Rus to accord with their own practices, as had the Byzantines in the tenth century, but we simply do not know when or to what extent the formal uses of writing became assimilated into the Rus native requirements in foreign relations. When the trickle of formal agreements resumes at the end of the twelfth century, it flows through quite a different cultural landscape from that of the early encounters with Byzantium: no longer to the ‘Greek’ south, but to the ‘Latin’ north and west, linking cities such as Novgorod, Polotsk and Smolensk with their trading partners on the Baltic. In 1229 Pantelei and the priest Ieremei, envoys of Prince Mstislav Davidovich of Smolensk, travelled to Riga and Gotland to negotiate a formal agreement on terms and conditions of trade. The result was a detailed treaty which served as the stable foundation for mercantile relations, reaffirmed by successive princes at least until the end of the century. The 1229 treaty is thus more than a single act, a single document, an event; it was accorded a kind of constitutional authority, acknowledged and maintained for generations. It is also by far the best attested document of its kind of its age: five thirteenth-century Slavonic copies survive (all in the archives of Riga), plus a sixth from the fourteenth century.138 Three of the copies derive from the version drawn up in Gotland, and are usually reckoned to have been translated from a Low German original. The others derive from the version drawn up in Riga, and are usually reckoned to have been translated from a Latin original.139 A further document, issued by an unnamed prince of Smolensk, differs significantly in its provisions. 136

137

138 139

S. A. Bol
shakova ‘Papskie poslaniia galitskomu kniaziu kak istoricheskii istochnik’, DGTSSSR 1975 god (1976), pp. 122–9. For a hypthetical agreement – or at any rate a guarantee of safe passage – between Rus and Norway in the mid-1020s see E. A. Mel
nikova (ed.), Drevniaia Rus
v svete zarubezhnykh istochnikov (Moscow, 1999), pp. 537–41. The eighteenth-century chronicler Vasilii Tatishchev in his Istoriia rossiiskaia II, ed. S. M. Valk and M. N. Tikhomirov (Moscow, Leningrad, 1963), pp. 69, 282, mentions an agreement between Vladimir Sviatoslavich and the Volga Bulgars, such that Rus merchants travelled to the Volga Bulgars with seals and (in one MS variant) documents, but Tatishchev should not be regarded as reliable: see S. L. Peshtich, ‘O “dogovore” Vladimira s volzhskimi bolgarami 1006 g.’, Istoricheskie zapiski 18 (1946), 327–35. Iu. A. Limonov, ‘Aktovo-pravovoe oformlenie vneshnepoliticheskikh otnoshenii vladimiro-suzdal
skoi Rusi s Volzhskoi Bolgariei (opyt rekonstruktsii)’, DGVEMI 1991 god (1994), pp. 259–64, treats the information as authentic, though (without explanation) he dates it a century later. Full texts plus descriptions of the manuscripts: SG, pp. 18–62. L. V. Alekseev, Smolenskaia zemlia v IX–XIII vv. Ocherki istorii Smolenshchiny i Vostochnoi Belorusii (Moscow, 1980), pp. 27–9; A. A. Zimin in PRP II, pp. 54–6. T. A. Sumnikova

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Some would see this anonymous document as a draft predecessor of the 1229 treaty, to be dated to the mid-1220s, but the more plausible view, based on analysis of its attached seal as well as of its contents, is that it represents a rather later (mid-thirteenth-century) draft alternative to the 1229 treaty.140 The 1229 treaty opens with a note of grand pessimism even about the efficacy of writing: ‘What is done in time, passes away in time, whether it be entrusted to men of standing, or confirmed by written document so as to be made known to all.’141 Then, after the formal preliminaries, comes the code itself, the pravda.142 Some historians routinely refer to the 1229 treaty as the Smolenskaia pravda, implying a closer generic association with Russkaia pravda than with trade documents, and indeed the stipulations begin very much in the vein of the princely rule-list, with a set of fixed penalties for offences committed by one side against the other, whether in Smolensk or in Riga or in Gotland: 11/2 grivna for assault; 3 grivna for damaging a tooth, 5 for an eye, and so on. Next come articles on financial protection: for example, if the prince confiscates the property of a man indebted to a ‘Latin’ merchant, he must first pay the man’s debt. Then there are rules and procedures for resolving disputes and for defining jurisdiction. The treaty specifies, for example, that disputes must be resolved in the presence of at least one witness from each side; that the local authorities shall not intervene in internal disputes among foreign merchants; that court decisions in one jurisdiction are binding and not subject to retrial in the other. Finally, before the closing formalities, the treaty sets out conditions of trade, such as the guarantee of safe passage, the freedom to buy and sell and export, the tariffs for portage, the dues to officials (esp. the ‘weigher’) on purchases (but not on sales). Broadly similar issues are covered in Novgorod’s Baltic tradeagreements from the same period, but the Novgorodian tradition is textually less compact. While the 1229 Smolensk treaty presents in one document a complete code for mutual relations, a code which thereafter remained broadly stable, the sequence of Novgorodian documents implies a more troubled and dynamic evolution. The sequence begins earlier, in 1191–2, when Prince Iaroslav Vladimirovich, ‘having conferred with Miroshka the posadnik and with Iakov the tysiatskii and with all the Novgorodians’, concluded an agreement with Gotland and with ‘all’ 140

141 142

and V. V. Lopatin in SG, pp. 18–19, prefer the hypothesis that Slavonic texts are not translations but are derived from Slavonic originals. Text and arguments for dating the document 1223–5 in SG, pp. 10–18; on the seal as mid-thirteenth century: APDR II, pp. 92–8. Alekseev, Smolenskaia zemlia, pp. 26–7 also dates the document later than the treaty of 1229. SG, p. 20, cited from manuscript A of the Gotland redaction. SG, p. 21, line 14.

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Germans and ‘Latins’.143 The comparatively brief stipulations (again, pravda) of the 1191–2 agreement relate only to penalties and judicial procedures: payments for murder and assault, compensation for ripping the headcloth from a man’s wife or daughter so that she appears bareheaded, on the local validity of judgements made in other cities, on drawing lots to determine who is right if a Novgorodian and a German quarrel without witnesses, and such like. The second Novgorodian agreement follows after a gap of some seventy years, in approximately 1259–63, when Prince Aleksandr Iaroslavich – better known as Aleksandr Nevskii – and his son Dmitrii (‘with Mikhail the posadnik and with Zhiroslav the tysiatskii and with all the Novgorodians’) reached an accord with emissaries from Gotland and Lubeck, ¨ with a ‘German’ emissary, and with ‘all the Latin tongue’.144 Aleksandr’s treaty is a short miscellany of individual and general provisions (about dues on sales and purchase, on safe passage and residence). This is not a new full treaty, but a set of additions to the 1191–2 treaty, which is at the same time explicitly confirmed: explicitly, because its text is added at the end, by the same scribe. Moreover, in a passage which reveals much about the state and extent of documentation, the earlier treaty is introduced thus: ‘This is our old code and document ( pravda i gramota), on which your fathers and ours kissed the Cross . . . And we have no other document, nor have we hidden one, nor do we know of one. On this we kiss the Cross.’145 In 1268–9 trade relations between Novgorod, Gotland and Lubeck ¨ were renegotiated on a grander scale, resulting in the most extensive document in the sequence: mainly on jurisdiction and procedures, but also with some additional fixed penalties for offences. Better still, we have not one document but two: a draft and the agreed version. Neither of the two survives in Slavonic, though presumably a Slavonic translation was made: the 1268 draft proposal is in Latin, and the only extant text of the agreed version of 1269 is in Low German.146 The sequence of Novgorodian trade agreements is thus represented by three extant documents, one in each of three languages: a single Slavonic document with the texts of two 143

144 145

146

GVNP, no. 28; on the dates, here and subsequently, I follow V. L. Ianin, Novgorodskie akty XII–XV vv. Khronologicheskii kommentarii (Moscow, 1991), pp. 81–6, in preference to the dates suggested by the editors of GVNP. GVNP, no. 29. GVNP, 57. This is our only source for the text of the 1191–2 treaty, which does not survive separately. The treaty of Aleksandr and Dmitrii is thus the earliest extant original document in Novgorodian trade-relations with northern Europe. A. L. Khoroshkevich, ‘O proiskhozhdenii teksta drevneishikh novgorodsko-gotlandskonemetskikh dogovorov kontsa XII i serediny XIII v.’, Novgorodskii istoricheskii sbornik 6(16) (1997), 128–34, argues that the surviving copy of both treaties was made in 1270 and sent to Riga together with the khan’s guarantee of safe passage (see below, n. 150). LUB I, no. 413; GVNP, no. 31.

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agreements (of 1191–2 and of 1259–63); and Latin and Low German documents each with stages of the text of a single treaty (of 1268). The substantive provisions should not, of course, change across languages, but for practical purposes some aspects of the translations were cultural as well as linguistic. It is interesting to note, for example, that the fixed penalties for offences are given in grivnas and nogatas and vekshas on the Slavonic texts, but in marks and farthings (verdhinge) in the Low German text (though the Low German treaty lists payments for local Rus services – portages, for example, or for pilots along the Neva – in cunen, or even in ‘marks of cunen’).147 Occasionally metrological equivalencies have to be explained: ‘a kap
contains eight Livonian pounds’.148 Besides the treaties, the diplomatic ‘archive’ for the period also includes smaller documents: from Smolensk, a formal adjudication by Prince Fedor Rostislavich in a dispute between a local man and a German, and a letter confirming terms of trade for German merchants, both documents written out by ‘Fedorko, the prince’s scribe’, and both dated 1284;149 from Novgorod, a guarantee of safe passage for merchants from Riga, issued c.1266–72 by Prince Iaroslav Iaroslavich on the authority of the Tatar Khan Mangu Temir,150 and a letter of 1299–1300 from the archbishop, the posadnik and the tysiatskii demanding the return of goods stolen in Riga;151 and from Polotsk a letter announcing the conclusion of a treaty with Riga and Livonia, and a letter with proposals for a treaty with Riga.152 These Polotsk negotiations are dated 1263 and 1265. Their chronological proximity to the Novgorod/Smolensk cluster is surely no 147

148 150 151

152

GVNP, pp. 59–60. Note that the texts of the internal rules for the German merchant colony in Novgorod use the same units of currency, silver marks, farthings, and cunen: e.g. W. Schluter, ¨ Die Nowgoroder Schra in sieben Fassungen vom 13. bis 17. Jahrhundert (Dorpat, 1911), p. 64. The etymology of the slavonic kuna (marten skin; unit of currency) is unclear: see Etimologicheskii slovar
slavianskikh iazykov. Praslavianskii leksicheskii fond, ed. O. N. Trubachev, vol. XIII (Moscow, 1987), pp. 102–4; P. Ia. Chernykh, Istoriko-etimologicheskii slovar
sovremennogo russkogo iazyka I (Moscow, 1993), pp. 454–5; Omeljan Pritsak, The Origins of the Old Rus
Weights and Monetary Systems. Two Studies in Western Eurasian Metrology and Numismatics in the Seventh to Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 40–1. 149 SG, pp. 62–6. See below, p. 181 and plate 14. GVNP, p. 61. GVNP, no. 30. GVNP, no. 36; on the date see Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 84–5; note, however, doubts as to Ianin’s criteria for re-dating this document, in J. H. Lind, ‘K voprosu o posadnicheskoi reforme Novgoroda okolo 1300 g. i datirovke novgorodskikh aktov’, DGVEMI 1995 god (1997), pp. 263–70. A Latin document specifying boundaries between Novgorodian and Norwegian tribute-gathering areas has been linked by some to a hypothetical treaty between Novgorod and Norway in 1251 (see Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, p. 82). However, J. H. Lind, ‘“Razgranichitel
naia gramota” i novgorodskonorvezhskie dogovory 1251 i 1326 gg.’, Novgorodskii istoricheskii sbornik 6(16) (1997), 135–43, persuasively dates this document to the fourteenth century, while still allowing that there was a treaty in 1251 (deduced from an allusion in one of the sagas). A. L. Khoroshkevich, Polotskie gramoty XIII–nachala XVI vv., I (Moscow, 1977), nos. 1, 2 (pp. 35–7).

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coincidence. In the northern Rus cities in the middle of the thirteenth century, everybody was getting in on the act, so to speak. The trade treaties of the Rus, whether concluded with the ‘Greeks’ to the south in the tenth century or with the ‘Latins’ to the north-west in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are very different in genre from a trade treaty as we might imagine it today. Some of the concerns are comparable – stipulations on tariffs and quotas, for example – but the main focus is on people rather than on money and goods; on the treatment of and conditions for traders rather than on the substance of their trade. In effect and for the most part the treaties are, once more, rule-lists, codes of behaviour for a particular social context and group: written frames of reference appropriate to the merchant, just as a monastic Rule was a written frame of reference appropriate to the monk, or as the earliest Russkaia pravda was a written frame of reference largely appropriate to the men closest to the prince, or as the expanded Russkaia pravda includes rules relevant to internal commerce. It is no accident that Smolensk and Novgorod documents use the word pravda – a rule-code – to refer to the regulatory sections of the treaties. Like the codes issued by and for the Church, and the princely ‘statutes’ issued to define the economic and jurisdictional behaviour of the Church, the merchant-codes arose where traditional communal boundaries were breached. They deal only with contacts and possible conflicts between communities, without encroaching on internal disputes within one or other community. The Smolensk treaty even specifies: ‘if Latin merchants fight among themselves in the land of the Rus . . . the prince should not judge, but they should judge among themselves; similarly if Rus merchants fight among themselves in Riga or Gotland, the Latins should not judge them, but let them settle things themselves’.153 In Novgorod the German merchant community had its own written code for internal selfregulation, the Schra, whose earliest version arose at approximately the same time as the surviving written treaties.154 Once more, then, the context for fixed written rule-lists is one of social intrusion, where a wedge is driven into the circle of self-contained custom. Added together the written regulations for outsiders in Rus, and for the Rus abroad, are longer than the totality of written secular regulations for the Rus in Rus. The Rus were technologically reactive, responding to what their partners required of them rather than assimilating it for their own regular use. The tenth-century treaties with Byzantium, though eventually translated 153 154

SG, p. 22, lines 37–9. Schluter, ¨ Die Nowgoroder Schra, pp. 52–66. E. A. Rybina, Inozemnye dvory v Novgorode XII–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1986), pp. 31–2: the earliest surviving Schra, with nine articles, cannot be earlier than 1225, but its preamble refers to previous rules.

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and recorded in the Rus chronicles, did not in their own time stimulate equivalent native procedures. Responsiveness to external requirements and habits may be part of the context for the thirteenth-century documents as well. The German merchant colony’s written self-regulation originates at about the same time. The thirteenth-century Smolensk documents are dated anno domini, according to ‘Latin’ custom.155 However, this does not yet fully explain why the documents appear when they do. Trade was hardly new. The Rus themselves were originally long-distance traders, and Novgorod owed its prominence and prosperity to its multifaceted trading links which pre-date the first extant formal documents by three or four hundred years. Either a continuous documentary tradition has simply been lost, or else we have to account for the rise of formal documentation in activities which had for years been conducted without it. A massive loss of centuries-worth of formal documents is unlikely. No chronicle refers to written trade agreements with ‘Latins’ before the thirteenth century. More important, even if documents were regularly produced, they were not systematically stored. We recall the statement in Aleksandr Nevskii’s treaty of 1259–63, that he neither possessed nor knew of any previous document apart from the appended text of 1191–2. For the moment, without straining for specific explanations, it is enough to note that, superficially at least, the chronology of formal documents in external relations roughly matches the chronology which we observed with regard to formal written codes. In both cases the evidence for native engagement with formal written administrative procedures becomes significantly stronger around the mid- to late thirteenth century. Internal diplomacy Prince Vsevolod Iurevich ‘Big Nest’, long-reigning ruler of Vladimir and Suzdal, died in 1212. For the next four years his sons wrangled and skirmished over their shares of his inheritance, over who would rule where. The climax of the disputes was a major set-piece battle at the river Lipitsa on 21 April 1216, and on the eve of the battle two of the younger brothers, Iurii and Iaroslav, conferred together in a tent to parcel out the spoils which they expected to gain after defeating their older brother Konstantin: ‘And Iurii said, “Brother Iaroslav, I shall have the lands of Vladimir and Rostov, and you shall have Novgorod, and our brother Sviatoslav shall have Smolensk, and we shall give Kiev to the princes of Chernigov, and we shall have Galich for ourselves”. And they both kissed the Cross, and 155

SG, p. 25 (the 1229 treaty), 63 (Fedor Rostislavich’s adjudication), 66 (the same prince’s affirmation of safe passage). The Novgorod documents are undated.

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they wrote documents (gramoty) so as not to transgress this.’ The ceremony was a moment of pure hubris. In the battle, Iurii and Iaroslav were ignominiously vanquished, leaving behind them the shameful evidence of their ambition: ‘after the victory the men of Smolensk found the documents in Iaroslav’s camp, and gave them to their own princes’.156 The narrative of this episode is typical and exceptional. It is typical in its theme. The chronicles of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries overflow with accounts of the family squabbles among members of the ever-expanding ruling dynasty. In a sense, no area of Rus life is more amply and continuously documented than inter-princely diplomacy and conflict. In most of the annals of the Rus, for most of the time, most of history is political history, and most of political history is dynastic history. In a society where routine record-keeping and archival habits were thin or patchy, the chronicles were the cumulative written record of the disputes and negotiations and agreements of the Rus elite. However, a record of agreements is not the same as an agreed record. The chronicles are diverse, sometimes discordant, selective, sometimes tendentious, representing the view from the institution or location where, or the patron for whom, they were maintained. Thus, for example, the central sections of the twelfth-century Kievan chronicle clearly derive from sources close to Prince Iziaslav Mstislavich; the Novgorod chronicles were maintained under the aegis of a succession of archbishops of the city; the most voluminous thirteenth-century chronicle, appearing in manuscripts as a continuation of the Kievan chronicle, celebrates Prince Daniil of Galich; the migratory tale of the Lipitsa battle of 1216 probably originated in Smolensk.157 The chronicles are works of implicit interpretation and justification. They may sometimes draw information from primary documents, or cite primary documents (the extent of the chronicles’ documentary sources is hypothetical and disputed),158 or refer to primary documents, but a chronicle is not itself an archive of primary documents. The chronicles are ‘official’, in that they tended to be produced under some form of princely or ecclesiastical sponsorship rather than by privately curious individuals; but their fabric is woven in retrospect. 156

157

158

PSRL I, cols. 495–6, a version of the ‘Tale of the Battle on the Lipitsa’, found in many chronicles: see also BLDR V, p. 78. On the political situation see John Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304 (London, 1983), pp. 45–51. The best general survey remains D. S. Likhachev, Russkie letopisi i ikh kul
turnoistoricheskoe znachenie (Moscow, Leningrad, 1947); also M. D. Priselkov, Istoriia russkogo letopisaniia XI–XVI vv. (Leningrad, 1940; repr. with enhanced apparatus, St Petersburg, 1996); see also, on the Novgorod chronicles, A. A. Gippius, ‘K istorii slozheniia teksta Novgorodskoi pervoi letopisi’, Novgorodskii istoricheskii sbornik 6(16) (1997), 3–72. See above, n. 135; also Simon Franklin, ‘Literacy and Documentation in Early Medieval Russia’, Speculum 60 (1985), 17–24.

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The episode of the hubristic agreement between the brothers Iurii and Iaroslav Vsevolodovich in April 1216 is, then, a broadly typical specimen of chronicle narrative, with just a hint of gloating at the princes’ pompous vanity. Yet this episode is also exceptional. It is the first occasion on which a chronicle brings together in a single description three elements of a pact between princes: oral assertions; the ritual act of kissing the Cross; and the reinforcement of the statements and the ritual through the production of a written document (gramota). Separately these elements had appeared before. The direct speech of princes or their envoys had been a standard feature for as long as chronicles had been compiled, and it has been argued that some, at least, of the reported speeches reflect written messages.159 The ritual of kissing the Cross, as the concluding act of a peace-agreement, is alluded to in the context of the tenth-century treaties with Byzantium and is a common element of native narratives from the middle of the eleventh century (first mentioned in the Primary Chronicle’s entry for 1059).160 A hundred years later, sporadically from the middle of the twelfth century, we find the first allusions to ‘documents of the Cross’ (krestnye gramoty): in chronicle entries for the years 1144, 1147, 1152, 1190, 1195 (x 2) and 1197.161 The narrative of 1216 finally sets out the full sequence, from the terms through the ritual to the document, and even states what the written document was thought to add to the oral and ritual elements (so that they should not be ‘transgressed’). It is the document which affirms the ritual, not the ritual which affirms the document. Dynastic peace agreements were protected by the power of the Cross. At a gathering of princes at Liubech in 1097 the rulers – as in the narrative of 1216 – parcelled out the various lands and then kissed the Cross: ‘“And if any henceforth shall turn against another, then we all and the Holy Cross shall turn against him”.’162 We have no hard evidence that the ritual was affirmed in writing before the middle of the twelfth century, although it is quite plausible that the practice originated earlier. Yet from the hundreds upon hundreds of dynastic negotiations and agreements reported in the chronicles, not one authentic ‘document of the Cross’ survives. Why not? Because written confirmation was rare? Because in time the chronicles substituted for an archive? Or perhaps because dynastic ‘documents of the Cross’, whether rare or routine, probably had a rather limited shelf-life. The most consistent feature of dynastic alliances 159 160 161 162

See D. S. Likhachev, ‘Russkii posol
skii obychai XI–XIII vv.’, Istoricheskie zapiski 18 (1946), 42–55; also Franchuk, Kievskaia letopis
, pp. 109–81. See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 254–5. PSRL II, cols. 315, 346–7, 461–2, 670, 686, 693; PSRL I, cols. 412–3. PVL I, p. 171; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 188. On this accord and its context see Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 245, 265–77.

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among the Rus was their mutability. The Cross protected an alliance until the next round of musical chairs,163 when the piece of parchment passed its ‘use by’ date. Not all ‘documents of the Cross’ were as short-lived as that which affirmed the agreement of April 1216 and which was abandoned in the deserted camp after barely a day, but this story does suggest that respect for the document did not outlive the period of its relevance to current politics. This is not to say that either the ritual or the document were treated lightly. On the contrary, even their transience acquired its own formalities, and solemnities of transgression emerged to balance and preserve the solemnities of the original agreement. Every one of the twelfth-century references to ‘documents of the Cross’ in fact relates to the ritual of transgression. An envoy accuses a prince of failing to observe the agreement, and ritually ‘casts’ the documents before him: a gesture tantamount to a declaration of war, and of course a mortal blow to any aspiring archivist. Later sources also mention that, prior to ‘casting’ the parchment, a prince might get a clergyman formally to nullify even the act of Cross-kissing, to relieve him of the sanction of the Cross.164 Internal diplomacy extended beyond the dynasty. As if it was not enough to have to deal with the jostling throng of brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews, a prince in Rus often had to reach an agreed understanding with those over whom he ruled. Although the political customs of the Rus were far from democratic in any modern sense of the word, princely rule did incorporate, to varying degrees, an element of consent from those upon whom the prince most directly relied for support: his own retinue and servitors, and the urban leaders. And here the sources indicate a rather neater evolution and chronology of diplomatic procedures from oral pagan pledges through oral Christian ritual to formal written document. Narratives about events of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries present retinues and townspeople either receiving or not receiving a prince ‘with their hearts’. To receive the prince ‘with one’s heart’ was, in effect, to pledge loyalty, to accept his rule.165 By the early twelfth century the ritual and the nature of the pledge had changed. According to the Novgorod chronicle, in 1117 a delegation of Novgorodians indicated their submission to Prince Vladimir Monomakh by kissing the Cross.166 In 1146, according to the Kievan chronicle, the dying Prince 163 164 165 166

See H. W. Dewey and A. M. Kleimola, ‘Promise and Perfidy in Old Russian CrossKissing’, Canadian Slavic Studies 3 (1968), 327–41. NPL, p. 389, in the Novgorod First Chronicle’s entry for 1397. See PVL I, pp. 54, 90, 170; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 92, 126, 187; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 196–7. NPL, pp. 21, 205; cf. ibid., p. 22.

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Vsevolod Olgovich summoned the Kievans and had them kiss the Cross to signify their loyalty henceforth to his younger brother Igor: after kissing the Cross they declared to Igor, ‘You are our prince.’167 Cross-kissing by townspeople to prince is a fairly regular occurrence in Novgorodian narratives from the early thirteenth century, but in the Novgorod First Chronicle’s entry for 1218–19 the procedure takes on a new aspect. Prince Sviatoslav Mstislavich sent his tysiatskii to the assembly of townsmen (the veche), informing the Novgorodians that he was removing Tverdislav from the office of posadnik. The Novgorodians object: ‘Prince, you kissed the Cross to us [undertaking] not to deprive a man without blame.’168 So Tverdislav kept his job. But the new element is not that the townspeople overruled the prince, but that they did so with reference to his sworn obligations to them: here the prince has kissed the Cross to the townspeople rather than (or, by implication, as well as) the reverse. Moreover, the prince’s obligations, reinforced by Cross-kissing, are rather specific, not general promises of money or protection or of just rule, but precise conditions. Precise conditions are prime material for written records, and, sure enough, later in the century – by 1264 – we have the first in a series of surviving written contracts between the Novgorodians and their princes. Three of the contracts fall within the thirteenth century (1264, 1268, 1296),169 and the series accelerates thereafter. The practice of drawing up formal contracts must have begun earlier, since the 1264 contract, with Prince Iaroslav Iaroslavich of Tver, refers to a gramota of the prince’s father Iaroslav Vsevolodovich (d. 1246),170 while the entry in the Novgorod First Chronicle for 1229–30 relates that successive candidates for the throne were required to kiss the Cross ‘on the whole liberty of Novgorod and on all the gramoty of Iaroslav’.171 The contract of 1264 affirms that the prince has kissed the Cross on the terms which it sets forth. The main thrust of the document is to restrict and delineate the prince’s authority over Novgorodian possessions, and one of the first conditions, echoing the words of the chronicle’s narrative of 1218–19, requires that the prince ‘is not to deprive a man of his possessions without blame’.172 167

168 169 170 171 172

PSRL II, cols. 320–1. The enforced Cross-kissing turned out to be worthless: after Vsevolod’s death the Kievans quickly deposed Igor and transferred their support to a different branch of the family. NPL, pp. 59, 260. GVNP, nos. 1–2, 3, 4–5. On nos. 1 and 2 as variants of the same proposal, and on the date of nos. 4 and 5, see Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 142–6, 150–1. GVNP, p. 11: the contract affirms the prince’s right to collect dues in honey and fish from Ladoga. NPL, pp. 67–8. The chronicle does not specify which Iaroslav. See V. L. Ianin, U istokov novgorodskoi gosudarstvennosti (Novgorod, 2001), pp. 3–5 GVNP, pp. 9, 11; it would be pleasantly coincidental if volost
here could be interpreted as ‘power’, ‘office’ (including, therefore, the office of posadnik), but the context makes

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Novgorod was as vulnerable as anywhere to the fluctuations of dynastic politics, and to this extent their ‘documents of the Cross’ were as fragile as their intra-dynastic equivalents. Yet the equivalence is not precise, and the documentary form had an important additional function in this context. The ‘documents of the Cross’ between Novgorod and its princes did not just bind the two sides in peace and loyalty. Part of the function of the document was precisely to ensure the relative stability of the conditions of princely rule in an unstable political environment, to divorce urban government – and particularly the landed property of the urban dwellers – from the fluctuations of dynastic politics. Each new ruler bound himself to observe the previous contractual arrangements, and the written document served to promote continuity, to protect the past and the future from the whims of the present. Within his agreed limits the Novgorodian prince assumed the dignity of rule, and by the midto late thirteenth century that dignity was sustained in the formal issuing of documents. Witness the cluster of documents associated with Iaroslav Iaroslavich in the mid-1260s: a contract with the city; the longest of the trade treaties with the Baltic; the letter of safe passage on the authority of the Mongol khan; and a brief ‘statute’ of internal administration, apportioning responsibilities for the maintenance of roads.173 Internal administration In internal administration, formal contingent documents may be produced in three contexts: Church business, princely business, and ‘private’ business; or in combinations thereof. Byzantine churchmen were accustomed to bureaucratic procedures, and expected or encouraged written modes even in the unpropitious surroundings of Rus. In 1156, after the controversial Metropolitan Klim had been deposed, his Byzantine-sanctioned successor, Konstantin, decreed that all Klim’s ecclesiastical appointments were invalid unless the

173

it clear that volost
must refer to landed property: see also the commentary by A. A. Zimin in PRP II, pp. 144–5. An earlier entry in the Novgorod First Chronicle narrates how in October 1207 Prince Vsevolod Iurevich rewarded Novgorodian soldiers, who had joined him in a campaign against Chernigov, by granting them ‘the statutes (ustavy) of the earlier princes’: NPL, pp. 50, 248; on the events see Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, p. 52. It is not clear whether these are written documents; or, if they are, whether they imply special treaties, or simply an affirmation of a general code such as Russkaia pravda. DKU, pp. 149–52. The extant version, whose earliest manuscript is from the fourteenth century, is most plausibly dated to the reign of Iaroslav Iaroslavich, although there is some dispute as to whether this is the ‘original’ version. See also Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 146–7.

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appointees submitted written denunciations of Klim.174 To demand such procedures within one’s own jurisdiction was perhaps straightforward enough, but to require them of laymen was more problematic. For example, in 1228 Germanos II, Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Kirill I, Metropolitan of Rhosia, about certain alleged practices in the Rus Church. Among his concerns were reports that slaves were being trained for the priesthood. This, Germanos insists, is unacceptable, unless the slave’s master has first guaranteed his freedom in writing.175 But mere patriarchal instruction was not enough to transform local habits, and fifty years later, at the synod in Vladimir in 1273, Metropolitan Kirill II apparently felt impelled to reiterate the requirement: a slave may only become a priest after his master has freed him ‘with a written document in front of many witnesses’.176 Thus even at the end of the thirteenth century churchmen could be vexed by the persistence of traditional oral modes of transaction. Nevertheless the Church did have some success in persuading laymen to resort to formal written modes, especially when it was itself the beneficiary. All the surviving formal administrative documents from the twelfth century (whether originals or copies) concern gifts or other allocations to the Church or to monasteries. These documents reflect, in a sense, an extension of the kind of activity that we have observed in relation to normative codes issued by or for the Church: carving out space, allocating income, using the technology of record to fix the memory of the pledges through which the Church secured its intrusive claims to a portion of secular wealth and property. One group of four documents (in much later copies) relates to the eparchy of Smolensk: a very detailed charter from Prince Rostislav Mstislavich, setting forth exactly which sums from which regions are to be allocated to the bishopric on its foundation in 1136; a brief written affirmation of the terms of the charter, from Bishop Manuil, the first incumbent; an additional donation from Rostislav, dated 30 September 1150; and a further supplementary donation which probably dates from the second decade of the thirteenth century.177 In 1136 or 1137, at almost exactly the same time as Rostislav gave documentary fixity to his allocations in Smolensk, and even using some of the same formulae, Prince Sviatoslav Olgovich issued a charter specifying (much more briefly) aspects of the tithe for the bishop of Novgorod.178 As for the monasteries: also from the 1130s, four 174 176 178

175 RIB VI, col. 82. PSRL II, col. 485; see also above, p. 146. 177 DKU, pp. 140–6; also, with commentaries, ZDR, pp. 212–23. RIB VI, col. 90. DKU, pp. 147–8; with commentaries, ZDR, pp. 224–32; see also Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 138–42. A more substantial charter on ecclesiastical courts, ostensibly issued by Prince Vsevolod Mstislavich (d. 1138), probably dates from later than the period

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documents – including the oldest to be preserved in the original – record princely allocations (mainly of land) to the Iurev and Panteleimon monasteries just outside Novgorod;179 from about the same time, we have (in a later copy) a donation – plus disciplinary instructions – from Antonii ‘the Roman’ to the Novgorodian monastery of which he was the superior;180 around the turn of the thirteenth century a certain Varlaam Mikhalevich donates quite substantial lands to the monastery of the Saviour in Novgorod.181 In princely secular administration – dealing with laymen rather than with the Church – signs of formal contingent document-production are more enigmatic. One measure of princely document-production might be the presence of seals. From sporadic and obscure beginnings princely seals appear regularly and in increasing numbers from the middle of the eleventh century onwards.182 Seals, one should assume, were originally attached to pieces of parchment bearing written messages in the prince’s name, but no extant seal from before the thirteenth century survives attached to its original document, and the seals themselves do not specify which types of document they served to validate. Some types of princely writing are reasonably well attested: diplomatic and other correspondence, the ecclesiastical grants, the normative codes, the treaties. But the surviving seals – about 1200 of them – hugely outnumber the surviving documents, and one can only speculate as to the likely pattern of use. The fashion for Greek inscriptions in the mid- to late eleventh century perhaps suggests dealings with the Church or with Byzantium. I suspect that a fair number of the seals were used in internal dynastic correspondence, but no hypothesis is particularly cogent in the absence of supporting evidence.183 More specific clues about formal contingent princely document-production begin to appear from the late twelfth

179

180

181 182 183

covered by the present survey, as (arguably) does Vsevolod’s charter relating to clergy and merchants at the church of St John: DKU, pp. 153–8, 158–65, although the latter document may date from towards the end of the thirteenth century. See also, with commentaries, in ZDR, pp. 249–61, 262–92. GVNP, nos. 79–82 (no. 81 is the original). None is precisely dated: for conjectures see Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 135–8; also S. M. Kashtanov, ‘Zhalovannye akty na Rusi XII–XIV vv.’, Srednevekovaia Rus
2 (1999), 21–45; on the formal aspects see Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika, pp. 69–71. GVNP, no. 103; an apparently associated document (no. 102) is now generally reckoned to be a late forgery: see Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 206–7, 354–7, and the same author’s ‘Novgorodskie gramoty Antoniia Rimlianina i ikh daty’, Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, ser. 8. Istoriia (1966, no. 3), 69–80. GVNP, no. 104; Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 207–11. See above, pp. 48–9. For other suggestions see e.g. APDR I, pp. 157–9; III, pp. 8–9; S. M. Kashtanov, ‘Drevnerusskie pechati (razmyshleniia po povodu knigi V. L. Ianina)’, Istoriia SSSR (1974, no. 3), 182–3.

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or early thirteenth century. The clues are widely scattered and rarely self-explanatory, but they accumulate at a rate too rapid to be accidental, and the chronology again fits the pattern which we have come to expect. In the eleventh century the short version of the Russkaia pravda had contained an article (article 9) specifying dues to be paid locally to support the virnik on the prince’s business: cheese on Wednesdays and Fridays, as much bread as he can eat, two chickens a day, and so on.184 The expanded version, reflecting provisions accumulated over the twelfth century, repeats these specifications, but adds another article (article 74) to deal with a larger group of fine-collectors: so much for the otrok; and, noteworthy for the present purposes, ‘ten kunas for the scribe’.185 Thus at some time in the gap between the short version and the surviving expanded version of Russkaia pravda, dues levied by the prince’s peripatetic agent came to be recorded, perhaps routinely, in writing by an expressly designated member of the judicial staff. The first of the extant contracts between Novgorod and its prince – the 1264 agreement with Iaroslav Iaroslavich – lays down restrictions on the new prince’s disposal of land: ‘you are not to annul gramoty; nor are you to deprive a man of his possessions without blame [or ‘without cause’]; and, Prince, without the posadnik you are not to distribute possessions, nor grant gramoty’.186 What were these gramoty? One editor of the treaty interprets them broadly as ‘written judicial decisions’,187 but the context suggests a more specific meaning: that the gramoty were written allocations of land or of the income from land. In the continually mobile and shifting dynastic politics of the Rus, the peregrinations of princes could have knock-on effects lower down the scale: a new prince brought with him his new men, or was supported by a new sub-section of the local population, and needed to carve out space for their sustenance as well as for his own. One of the main concerns of the Novgorod treaties was precisely to limit and delineate the prince’s sphere of action with regard to local lands, to insure against the periodic disruption caused by changes of ruler. The 1264 treaty proposal shows that by the middle of the thirteenth century allocations of Novgorodian land were backed by written documents. The treaty implies that the issuing of such land-titles had become normal practice, the standard mode. We cannot tell when the 184 185

186 187

ZDR, p. 49; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 18–19. ZDR, p. 69; Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, pp. 28–9. Kaiser identifies the otrok as the bloodwite-collector’s deputy, while the editors of ZDR (pp. 108–9) argue that this article refers to the levying of judicial fines. GVNP, p. 9; cf. the variant phraseology in the second version of the treaty: ibid., p. 11. A. A. Zimin in PRP II, p. 143.

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practice began (there is no reference to it before the 1264 document).188 A century or more later such gramoty were routinely used as evidence in court cases involving disputes over property.189 The townspeople of Bereste might have envied the urban clout wielded by the Novgorodians. In 1288 they backed the wrong side in a conflict between Prince Mstislav Danilovich of Vladimir (in Volynia) and his nephew Iurii Lvovich. Iurii was ordered to leave Bereste by his own father. Early in 1289 Mstislav arrived at the town and determined the obligations to be imposed: ‘and he ordered his scribe to draw up [the following] document: Behold I, Prince Mstislav, the king’s son and Roman’s grandson, am levying a hunter’s tax on the people of Bereste forever because of their rebellion: from every hundred two kegs of mead, two sheep, fifteen tens of flax . . . And I have had their rebellion written into the chronicle’.190 The text, and the accompanying narrative, do indeed appear in the Volynian chronicle, which also includes the last will and testament of his predecessor (and the chronicler’s main hero) Prince Vladimir Vasilkovich, concerning the disposition of his lands.191 At one level Vladimir Vasilkovich’s testament is a traditional type of text for a chronicle, following the venerable precedent of the Primary Chronicle and its text of the testament of Iaroslav the Wise.192 However, the Primary Chronicle gives no indication of how Iaroslav’s testament was drawn up, and we cannot be sure that it ever existed as an independent written document outside the chronicle. The late-thirteenth-century chronicler, by contrast, takes extraordinary pains to stress that Vladimir’s testament was written down under his personal direction, indeed in triplicate: ‘Vladimir ordered his scribe Fedorets to draw up the following gramoty. In the name of the Father . . . I bequeath all my land and cities to my brother Mstislav after my death . . . And I have written another such gramota, the same as this, for my brother, and I shall write another, identical, for my princess.’ Vladimir’s brother Mstislav, possessor of one of the three copies, clearly treated Vladimir’s written testament as the basis of his own claim to rule, and he had it publicly read out in the main 188 189

190 191 192

Unless we interpret in this context the Novgorod First Chronicle’s reference to ustavy in its entry for events of 1207: see above, n. 172. See Iu. G. Alekseev, Pskovskaia Sudnaia gramota i ee vremia (Leningrad, 1980), pp. 111–16, also stressing that documentary methods in land allocation are not simply new means for old business, but that they arise (and intrude) from the margins: ‘historically and topographically the document arises at the boundaries of community’ (p. 114). PSRL II, col. 932; ZDR, pp. 209–11; cf. George A. Perfecky (transl.), The Hypatian Codex II. The Galician-Volynian Chronicle (Munich, 1973), pp. 114–15. PSRL II, cols. 903–4; PRP II, pp. 27–8; Perfecky (transl.), The Galician-Volynian Chronicle, pp. 101–2. See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 246–9.

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church of the city.193 We can contrast this with the similarly elaborate attempts of Vsevolod Olgovich, prince of Kiev, to ensure his own brother’s succession in the middle of the previous century: again there was a sequence of private and public declarations, but the earlier attempt had relied entirely on Cross-kissing, with no hint of documentation.194 The ostentatious emphasis on formal documents in the final section of the Volynian chronicle (1288–9) looks to be a deliberate and perhaps innovative initiative. By the late thirteenth century such sources, though hardly common, have begun to appear in a range of contexts. An original document, complete with seal, dated 1284 (one of the pair written out by ‘Fedorko, the prince’s scribe’), records an adjudication of Prince Fedor Rostislavich of Smolensk in a commercial dispute between a German merchant and a Smolensk merchant.195 This is the earliest extant authentic formal record of a court judgement. Also from the late thirteenth century (probably, but perhaps later) comes a curious forgery: a detailed instruction, ostensibly attributed to the twelfth-century prince Vsevolod Mstislavich, on the dues and obligations relating to Novgorodian merchants and priests at the church of St John.196 Forgeries indicate not only the lack of the required original, but also – more significantly – the perceived value and status of a formal document. Also in the mid- to late thirteenth century we begin to find authentic formal documents which, though still in some respects linked to Church or prince, also relate to private secular transactions and disputes. The earliest surviving authentic will, produced by a Novgorodian named Kliment, was probably written c.1255–70.197 Kliment’s main aim is to leave his possessions to the Iurev monastery, so in a sense this document could be grouped together with other written records of gifts to the Church. But Kliment’s will is not quite a straightforward deed of gift. Though he has neither brothers nor a son, he does have obligations. First, he has already pledged part of his property to others: a village each to Kalist and to Andrei Voinovich (the latter in return for paying the ‘Lithuanian ransom’); a stallion for Volodislav Danilovich. Then he has to provide for his wife: she is to receive his townhouse plus half of his cattle and sheep and pigs. And most awkwardly, the bulk of his money is out on credit, so that a fair chunk of the will consists of a list of his debtors from whom the monastery can claim. ‘And if anybody should infringe this gramota he will answer before God not only to me but to all 193 194 195 197

PSRL II, col. 905. See above, n. 167; also Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 347–8. SG, pp. 62–3. See above, p. 169. 196 ZDR, pp. 262–92; cf. PRP II, pp. 173–85. GVNP, no. 105; Ianin, Novgorodskie akty, pp. 211–12.

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my clan.’ It has been plausibly suggested that Kliment chose to make his arrangements in writing because he had no close male relatives, who in normal circumstances would have taken over responsibility for his property according to custom.198 Kliment’s will is roughly contemporary with the earliest surviving formal parchment record of the resolution of a dispute between private individuals: Iakim and Teshata, in Pskov, agree that Teshata can claim back a piece of jewellery from Iakim’s wife.199 It is unlikely that the dispute was reckoned entirely private. The document, drawn up in the presence of seven named witnesses (the list starts with a priest), was written by ‘Dovmont’s scribe’: that is, by the scribe of Prince Dovmont, who ruled Pskov from 1266 to 1299. On all sides, therefore, the general chronological pattern for the assimilation of formal contingent administrative writing seems to be reinforced. However, neat though these coincidences may be, they do not necessarily represent the full picture. Besides the ‘real’ evidence of surviving documents we should consider the indirect evidence, the hints and allusions, the ambiguous fragments. In November 1207 Novgorod unseated its posadnik Dmitr Miroshkinich, in a coup partly engineered by the Prince of Suzdal, Vsevolod Iurevich. In the following February Vsevolod’s supporters in the city ‘kissed the cross’ to his eleven-year-old son Sviatoslav, and ‘gave Sviatoslav Dmitr’s tablets (d

shchky), and on them was [written] incalculable [wealth?]’.200 What were these ‘tablets’, or ‘boards’? From a later period (the late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century) we have quite detailed information. The Pskov Judicial Charter refers to the recording of property on doski.201 From the context it is clear that doski, though carrying some status as record, specifically do not have the authority of formal written documents (rukopisanie; zapis
).202 If the text of the Novgorodian chronicle’s entry is reliable, therefore, it provides evidence for the use of doski to record debts or exchanges nearly two centuries before the word next appears in a judicial or financial context. Clearly the Novgorodians in February 1208 treated Dmitr’s doski as authoritative, as carrying real value. But what did they record, and what was their form? Were they records of Dmitr’s debtors, the equivalents of promissory notes?203 Or simply inventories of Dmitr’s own possessions? Were they in the form of 198 199 200

201 202 203

Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika, p. 89. PRP II, cols. 277–80; Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika, p. 89. NPL, p. 51: biashe na nikh beshchisla; cf. the addition of pisano in a variant, ibid., p. 248. On the political background and chronology see John Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia, pp. 52–3. ZDR, p. 333 (articles 14, 19). See Alekseev, Pskovskaia Sudnaia gramota i ee vremia, pp. 73–8. I. Ia. Froianov, Miatezhnyi Novgorod. Ocherki istorii gosudarstvennosti, sotsial
noi i politicheskoi bor
by IX–nachala XIII stoletiia (St Petersburg, 1992), pp. 247–8.

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waxed wooden tablets?204 Or were they notched wooden tally-sticks?205 Whatever the answers, the reference to Dmitr’s ‘tablets’ in the chronicle entry for 1207 indicates that a type of written (though non-parchment) record of property was regarded as functionally valid, had acquired formal status. The most intriguing non-parchment ‘archive’ is of course the birchbark documents. Birch-bark writing in our period was ephemeral, not formal.206 Birch-bark was a medium for writing which might be intended to affect behaviour (‘From Ignat to Klimiata. Take three and a half grivnas from Dushila Fominich and buy a woman’s overcoat of good cloth’),207 but it was not created, preserved or retrieved as a record of behaviour. Birch-bark writing was used by people who were involved in formal transactions, but the birch-bark letter was not part of a required documentary procedure. Indeed, many of the letters indicate precisely the opposite: that the formal procedures were oral: letters which instruct their recipients what they are to say while making a complaint, for example; or letters which reveal confusion due to a lack of recorded information.208 Yet on some occasions – few but perhaps significant – birch-bark letters appear to suggest (or at any rate to leave open the possibility) that some kind of more formal documentation lies behind them: that the birch-bark letter might be an ephemeral by-product of a formal procedure. The clearest clue is in a long missive from ‘Kuzma and his children’ to a certain Raguil ‘the elder’, from the middle of the twelfth century. Kuzma and Raguil are embroiled in a dispute over who has cheated whom. Both the bishop and the mayor ( posadnik) have become involved in the conflict. After setting out his own grievance, Kuzma adds a note: ‘and you, Stepan, copy onto parchment and send . . . ’209 Copy what? Send to whom? The text breaks 204 205

206

207 208

209

A. A. Medyntseva, ‘O “doskakh” russkikh letopisei i iuridicheskikh aktov’, SA (1985, no. 4), 173–7. See Ianin in NGB IX, pp. 81–2; also Thomas S. Noonan and R. K. Kovalev, ‘What can Archaeology Tell Us About How Debts Were Documented and Collected in Kievan Rus
?’, Russian History 27 (2000), 124. Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu, pp. 336–7, also identifies as doski the izvet of NGB, no. 531 (from Anna to Klimiata, late eleventh or early twelfth century); cf., however, Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 345, who more plausibly renders ‘s izvetom’ as ‘with a public declaration’. The restriction is temporal, not material. Several of the later Novgorod documents are more formally structured, with many petitions, for example, or a cluster of documents (NGB, nos. 519–21) related to a formal will; cf. also S. Z. Chernov, ‘Moskovskaia berestianaia gramota no.1 – pervyi akt Moskovskoi Rusi na bereste’, RA (1997, no. 2) 123–49. NGB, no. 381; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 273–4. See e.g. NGB, nos. 531, 550. Note also the graffito in St Sophia in Kiev, probably from the twelfth century, recording the sale of ‘Boian’s land’, in documentary form, dated to the month and day, with twelve named witnesses; but the document’s preservation as a graffito merely highlights its non-typicality, the lack of a ‘normal’ archival context: Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 60–71 (no. 25). See below, plate 8. NGB, no. 831: see the commentary in VopIaz (1999, no. 4), pp. 9–10.

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off, but the implication is that an ephemeral message on birch-bark is to be written out on parchment for formal purposes; that the birch-bark version is a rough draft. The hint at a hidden world of parchment in Kuzma’s letter opens possibilities for the analogous interpretation of other birch-bark documents. A letter found in the south-western settlement of Zvenigorod, near Galich, archaeologically dated to the first half of the twelfth century, conveys a complaint and a threat: ‘From Goven’s widow to Nezhenets: give sixty kunas for the boat. [Thus] Goven stated before his death, and the priest wrote it down. Give [the kunas] to Luka. If you do not, then I will fetch an officer [otrok] from the prince and it will cost you even more.’210 Other birch-bark letters, too, threaten to invoke outside authority to enforce payment of a debt,211 but no other letter (so far) invokes the authority of a written statement (or, by extension, of the priest who wrote it down) as evidence that a debt was due. The letter from Goven’s widow is so brief and so isolated that we can barely guess at its procedural context. Was Goven eccentric in getting a priest to write down what he was owed, or was this common practice? Was the (hypothetical) document an ordinary list of debtors, or – since the widow stresses that Goven’s statement was made as he was dying – should it be regarded as a specific genre, Goven’s last will and testament? A Novgorod fragment from the mid- to late twelfth century states: ‘5 kunas and a grivna from Peskovna, 5 kunas from Fima, 5 grivnas from Zavid, 4 grivnas of silver hidden: all this I give to my brother’.212 A rough draft of another will, to be formalised on parchment? The general picture of predominantly oral procedures is unchanged, but such hints in the birch-bark letters suggest a hidden landscape not quite so barren of formal documents as the visible surviving evidence would lead one to suspect. In small ways, inconspicuously, some formal written procedures were beginning to become assimilated even into ‘private’ life.

What was the status or authority of the written word as a tool to facilitate the organisation of behaviour? Our survey shows that the simple question 210

211

212

Zvenigorod birch-bark letter, no. 2: Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, pp. 291–2. For the metaphorical meaning (‘before death’) of the phrase ida na sud, rather than its literal meaning (‘going to judgement’) see A. A. Gippius, ‘“Ida na sud . . . ” (Kommentarii k berestianoi gramote No. 2 iz Zvenigoroda Galitskogo)’, in Semiotika kul
tury. III Vsesoiuznaia letniaia shkola-seminar, 15–20 sentiabria 1991 g. Tezisy dokladov (Syktyvkar, 1991), pp. 3–5. E.g. NGB, nos. 155, 235, 241; cf. no. 644. On debt-collecting see also V. G. Mironova, ‘Iz istorii iuridicheskoi praktiki Drevnei Rusi’, in Istoriia i kul
tura drevnerusskogo goroda (Moscow, 1989), pp. 66–8. NGB, no. 818. Commentary in VopIaz (1999, no. 4), 5–6.

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has no simple or single answer. Writing ‘as such’ had no special social authority. The medium was accorded vastly differing degrees of status, depending on its institutional and temporal contexts. Ephemeral writing spread rapidly, was easily absorbed into a range of traditional urban activities, and is widely attested as routine from at least the middle of the eleventh century. Formal and normative administrative writing was very much slower to take root. Sporadic evidence of attempts to promote normative codes can be seen from the eleventh century onwards, as can sporadic evidence of formal documents from the twelfth century onwards, but signs of a more regular, active and diverse engagement with normative and formal administrative writing only begin to appear over the course of the thirteenth century. Ephemeral and formal writing differ profoundly in their sociocultural dynamics. Ephemeral writing requires no special conditions apart from some knowledge of the technology. It can be adopted into traditional activities without significantly altering the structure of the activities themselves. The adoption of normative and – especially – of formal contingent administrative writing implies the creation of special structures for its use: approved procedures, specialist personnel; a bureaucracy; change in the institutions and methods of social control. The muted Rus reception of formal administrative writing is probably due to the relative resilience and stability of traditional modes of social control. Effective and quite elaborate systems of regulation could be sustained without the necessary recourse to formal written procedures.213 Formal administrative writing therefore tended to appear and establish itself mainly from the margins: in dealing with outsiders for whom such uses of writing were already habitual (foreign trade and diplomacy); in dealings within and for ‘intrusive’ institutions which cut into traditional property relations, or which sought to change traditional modes of behaviour or traditional means of resolving disputes (the Church, monasteries; to some extent the prince). It marked social and cultural boundaries rather than norms. Slowly the marginal activities seeped towards the centre, began to become established. Despite the fact that ephemeral administrative writing is among the earliest attested uses of the written word in Rus (e.g. the inscribed wooden cylinder-seals, or inscribed tally-sticks), the advancement of formal documentation, albeit limited, was probably due above all to the consolidation of written administrative practices within and around the Church:214 codes for internal use; codes for pastoral reference; codes defining ecclesiastical authority in the ‘secular’ sphere (the 213 214

See e.g. Noonan and Kovalev, ‘What can Archaeology Tell Us . . . ?’, 119–54. It might be tempting to posit Mongol administrative influence behind the thirteenthcentury increase in formal documentation. However, the process began before the Mongol conquests.

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princely statutes); documents affirming gifts to monasteries, and so on. The documentary habits promoted by the Church – reinforced by analogous requirements in foreign relations – created a very muted (though just about audible) echo in local secular administration, and even perhaps for some individuals in the arrangement of their private affairs. However, there is little to suggest that, even by the end of the thirteenth century, formal documentation had become obligatory in any significant range of transactions.215 Arrangements for storage or retrieval are nowhere mentioned, let alone any hint of anything as systematic as an archive. Most of the Novgorodian trade documents are preserved in the Riga archives, while the very text of the single Slavonic specimen admits that the local cupboard was all but bare. We are still a very long way from the intricate hierarchies of administrative quill-pushers which so complicated the job of the contemporary Byzantine atriklines as he made the arrangements for the feast; a long way even from the eleventh-century typikon of Gregory Pakourianos’s monastery, which lists (apart from more than a couple of dozen documents held in the monastery itself) nineteen chrysobulls, five other documents on properties, and sixty-five Imperial pittakia (brief imperial documents) copied for safe keeping and stored in the Great Church in Constantinople.216 Yet equally clearly a process had begun: a general process, not limited to one place or one circumstance, mostly visible in Novgorod, but with analogous signs in Smolensk, Pskov, Volynia in the far west, and Vladimir in the north-east. In this chapter we have explored the evidence for the long and uneven transition from nothing to something, from a total absence of administrative writing to the stirrings of a diverse and growing interest in the formal administrative uses of writing, the beginnings of a momentum. The next phase – the subsequent emergence of more regular bureaucratic methods and structures – is beyond the scope of the present inquiry.217 215

216 217

On the formal document as an optional component during the initial phase (which may be a very long phase) of its use, see M. B. Sverdlov, ‘Drevnerusskii akt X–XIV vv.’, VID 8 (1976), 50–69. P. Gautier, ‘Le typikon du s´ebaste Gr´egoire Pakourianos’, REB 42 (1984), 125–31 (lines 1767–844). See e.g. Kashtanov, Iz istorii russkogo srednevekovogo istochnika; Iu. G. Alekseev, U kormila rossiiskogo gosudarstva. Ocherk razvitiia apparata upravleniia XIV–XV vv. (St Petersburg, 1998).

5

Writing and learning

In this chapter we consider aspects of the ‘idea’ of writing: writing as a topic in itself, writing in its own contexts. The approximate scope of the topic can be indicated in terms of a series of loosely connected questions. What was writing, as an object, and as an activity? What was an alphabet? What kinds of writing highlighted the alphabet, and to what purpose? What was thought to be the relationship between script and language? And – since the greatest volume of parchment writings consisted of translations – what were reckoned to be the problems of rendering writings from one script and language into another? How were the literate skills acquired? What was the status of a ‘writer’, of one who produced writings? And what was the status and expertise of the ‘bookman’, of the expert on writings? The subsections of the chapter follow roughly the same sequence as these questions: starting with the alphabet, and expanding into the world of ‘book-learning’; from letters in the narrowest technical sense to letters in the broadest cultural sense. Such themes appear to be self-evidently central to any study of the culture of the written word. But that which appears to be self-evident is not necessarily supported by real evidence. The theme of writing ‘as such’ is not nearly as prominent in the native sources as we, from the outside, might wish it to be. The relevant sources are almost all (with some significant exceptions) limited to parchment literacy; and the most eloquent and substantial texts, though they survive in East Slav manuscripts, are not of East Slav origin. In the previous chapter the main point of comparison was Byzantium. Here it is Bulgaria. Writing ‘as such’ is a notable theme in the works of early Bulgarian bookmen, and the history of the theme in Rus is to a significant extent the history of the Rus reception of ideas inherited from Bulgaria. Writing about writing: the alphabet What was an alphabet? What did letters signify? We can approach such questions from two angles: by looking at the more or less explicit 187

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Functions and perceptions of writing

treatment of script as a theme in the written sources; or by looking for implied meanings in the ways in which written objects were used. The latter will figure in later chapters (on writing and pictures, and on writing and magic). Here we concentrate on the former, on script as a theme in articulate ‘bookish’ sources from the world of parchment literacy. In the first generation or two after the official conversions to Christianity, Slav bookmen reflected on and gave shape to the achievements of their founding fathers, constructing a cultural and historical context to dignify and legitimise their own endeavours. In Kiev, writers such as Metropolitan Ilarion and the contributors to the Primary Chronicle wrote of the Conversion of the Rus under Vladimir and of the origins of the ruling dynasty. In Bulgaria a central theme was the Cyrillo-Methodian mission and the invention of Slavonic letters. Like Slav script itself, reflections about Slav script reached Rus from Bulgaria, and a consideration of the Bulgarian writings is an essential prelude to a consideration of what script might have been thought to mean in Rus. Slavonic script figures as a theme in three main types of work: (a) narratives of the CyrilloMethodian mission; (b) analysis of the nature of Slavonic script; and (c) less directly, works in which the alphabet is highlighted as a compositional device (i.e. acrostic composition). Tales of the invention of Slavonic letters The Vita Constantini (VC ) records the following curious exchange between Constantine (i.e. Cyril)1 and the Emperor Michael III. Michael had received a request from Rastislav of Moravia to send a teacher to explain the Christian faith in the Moravian (Slavonic) language. Michael delegates Cyril, a veteran diplomat and missionary, as the only man up to the task. ‘And the Philosopher answered, “though I am weary and weak in body, I shall go there gladly if they have a script (bukvy) for their language”.’2 The Emperor replies that, despite generations of searching, no such script has been found, to which the Philosopher’s response is: ‘Who can write a language on water and acquire a heretic’s name?’3 Thus both Cyril and the Emperor are represented as sharing an axiomatic assumption: that to write in a distinct language one needs 1

2 3

Constantine took on the name Cyril when he became a monk, shortly before his death. Both names appear in the sources. For consistency (and sometimes at the expense of strict accuracy) we refer to him as Cyril throughout, except in direct quotations from sources which use the name ‘Constantine’. VC XIV.9; transl. Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 67. na vodu besedu pisati: a phrase calqued from the Greek eis hydor graphein, of anything untrustworthy.

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a distinct script. The mechanics of producing the script are supremely simple: Cyril prayed, and ‘God soon appeared to him, and immediately Cyril composed letters (slozhi pismena) and began to write the language of the Gospel.’4 The Emperor is satisfied, and writes to Rastislav assuring him that ‘God has revealed a script (bukvy) for your language.’5 Thus the Slavonic alphabet is a product of inspiration rather than perspiration. Divine benevolence solves all, as perhaps it should in a hagiographic account, and the prosaic, human questions (what did it look like? why the particular choice of forms? what was the philological basis for the analysis of sounds? etc.) remain unanswered. The brief account in the vita of Methodios is similar: the brothers prayed, and God ‘revealed’ the Slavonic script (knigy), and immediately Cyril arranged the letters (ustroiv

pismena).6 In the VC, part of the hagiographer’s consistent purpose is to stress Cyril’s exceptional (and divinely assisted) linguistic ability, to emphasise that for him an alien script was but a small hurdle to overcome on the track towards using the written language. Only once is this process broken down into stages. On a previous mission, to the Jewish Khazars, Cyril had been confronted with Scriptures in a series of Semitic languages, each of which he mastered with astonishing speed. First he ‘learned the Hebrew language and scriptures and translated the eight parts of grammar’; then he locked himself in his room with the Samaritan scriptures until, with God’s help, he, ‘began to read them without error’. And finally he tackled the Gospel and Psalter written in Syriac letters:7 he found a native-speaker and ‘acquired the force of his speech’ (i.e. learned to understand meaning), and he compared it (speech?) to his own language and ‘distinguished the letters, vowels and consonants’ so that – again after a prayer – ‘he soon began to read and speak it’.8 Thus when learning an alien language, Cyril is described as engaging in a form of comparative phonological analysis of speech, in a way which implies an equivalence between sounds of speech and graphic representation (vowels, consonants, letters). Presumably the invention of an alphabet requires an analogous procedure; plus, in both cases, divine assistance. By and large, the vitae stress the speed and miraculousness of the process, and pass straight on to the results (book-learning) rather than 4 5 7

8

VC XIV.14: ‘language of the Gospel’ – a not entirely satisfactory rendering of besedu euaggelsku: perhaps here ‘discourse’ rather than ‘language’. 6 VM V.11; transl. Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, p. 111. VC XIV.16. The text of this notorious passage appears to say that the books were in ‘Rus letters’; ‘Syriac’ corresponds to the most widely accepted emendation: see the summary by B. N. Floria, Skazaniia o nachale slavianskoi pis
mennosti (St Petersburg, 2000), pp. 223–7; also above, pp. 90–1. VC VIII.10–15; transl. Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, p. 43.

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lingering on the mechanisms and the tools. Nevertheless, despite the lack of philological detail, they clearly reflect an assumption that different languages need different scripts, and that letters adequately correspond to and differentiate between sounds. The treatise On Letters attributed to the monk Khrabr In the early Cyrillo-Methodian corpus just one work is devoted specifically to a discussion of the Slavonic alphabet as such:9 the treatise On Letters (O pismenekh), conventionally attributed to ‘the monk Khrabr’. As so often in the Slavonic tradition the identity of the ‘real’ author is debatable. I continue to refer to the author as Khrabr for the sake of convenience, though the word may in fact be an epithet (‘bold’) rather than a personal name, or may even refer to the inventor of the alphabet rather than the author of the work.10 The first version of On Letters was most likely written in Preslav, in Glagolitic script, in the late ninth or early tenth century.11 The text is brief, somewhat less than a thousand words in length, a short essay rather than an extended argument. Yet its modest scope should not be taken as a measure of its significance. On Letters is not merely the closest witness to the terms in which an alphabet might have been conceived at the time when Slavonic script was invented; it was also copied, adapted, abridged, distorted and cited in scores of manuscripts over hundreds of years throughout the lands of the Orthodox Slavs.12 On Letters is an apologia: a justification rather than a systematic theory, analysis in the service of eulogy. The author asserts the value of Slavonic letters against possible and/or actual objections. The point at issue, ostensibly, is: by means of which system of graphic signs can or should 9

10 11

12

The theme was picked up again, in more detail, in the later Middle Ages. For a compendium of texts spanning eight centuries see V. Jagi´c, Codex slovenicus rerum grammaticarum. Rassuzhdeniia iuzhnoslavianskoi i russkoi stariny o tserkovnoslavianskom iazyke (Berlin, 1896; repr. Munich, 1968). See e.g. Floria Skazaniia o nachale, pp. 339–42. For a summary of the evidence on time and place see Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 179– 82; also see G. Ziffer, ‘Sul testo e la tradizione dell’ Apologia di Chrabr’, AION – Slavistica 1 (1993), 65–95. For attempts to date the work more precisely see e.g. G. A. Khaburgaev, Pervye stoletiia slavianskoi pis
mennoi kul
tury. Istoki drevnerusskoi knizhnosti (Moscow, 1994), pp. 86–93. For transcriptions of most of the surviving witnesses to the text see K. M. Kuev, Chernorizets Khrab

r, (Sofia, 1967); for a thorough attempt at a synthesis see A. Dzhambeluka-Kossova, Chernorizets Khrab

r ‘O pismenekh’ (Sofia, 1980); on the manuscript traditions see Giorgio Ziffer, ‘La tradizione della letteratura cirillometodiana (Vita Constantini, Vita Methodii, Encomio di Cirillo, Panegirico di Costantino e Metodio, Sulle lettere di Chrabr)’, Ricerche Slavistiche 39–40 (1992–3), 284–5; Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 18–20. Most of the manuscripts are from the seventeenth century. The earliest (Berlin, SBPK, Vuk 48) dates from a decade or two either side of 1300.

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the Slavonic language best be represented? In praising the Slavonic script as the best solution, the author in effect applies two main criteria: its practicality, and its dignity. What might have been the practical alternatives to Slavonic script? One possibility is dismissed in the opening sentence: before baptism the pagan Slavs, being unlettered, had ‘read [or ‘reckoned’] and divined’ by means of ‘marks and notches’ (chr
tami i rezan
mi).13 This reference to ‘marks and notches’ has provoked much speculation: had the Slavs perhaps used a kind of runic script? or ideograms? or some other preCyrillic script?14 It is noteworthy that the author of On Letters assumes a link between ‘marks and notches’ and divination (the Slavs ‘read and divined’). Modern historians might be tantalised, but for the Bulgarian bookman such reminders of the pagan past are not worth dwelling on, and he moves quickly to the main issue, which is: a comparison between, on the one hand, the decision to render the Slavonic language in a new and custom-made script and, on the other hand, the notional alternative of rendering the Slavonic language in a script which other Christians already used, that is, in Latin or Greek letters. The use of Latin script to render the Slavonic language was more than an abstract possibility. One of the very oldest extant fragments of Slavonic, the Freising Fragments from the late tenth century, preserves two confessional formulae, and a homily on penitence, in Latin transcription.15 No comparable specimen of early Slavonic in Greek script has survived,16 but the Greek written language itself had a long history in the lands which became Bulgaria. Significant numbers of ‘Protobulgarian’ inscriptions in Greek survive, including both Greeklanguage inscriptions and Turkic words in Greek script.17 The author of On Letters raises a practical objection: Slavonic speech uses over a dozen sounds which are not matched by Greek letters, and the attempt to render Slavonic speech with Greek script was therefore disorderly, unsystematic (bez ustroia).18 An alphabet is here conceived as a set of distinct graphic 13

14 15

16 17 18

O pismenekh 1:3–4. In referring to the treatise I follow the divisions set out by Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 88–152 (unit by unit with variants and commentary) and 159– 67 (reconstructed text with translation). For the English I mostly follow Veder, with occasional deviations. See above, pp. 90–2. A. V. Isaˇcenko, Jazyk a pˆovod Frizinsk´ych pamiatok (Bratislava, 1943); cf. A. M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic. An Introduction to Slavic Philology (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 300–2 (including photograph). See, however, ‘Slavonic-in-Greek’ in specimens of tertiary writing from the Pontic steppes: above, p. 105. Veselin Beshevliev, P

rvob

lgarski nadpisi (vtoro preraboteno i dop

lneno izdanie) (Sofia, 1992). O pismenekh, 1:9.

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representations of distinct sounds of speech. For well-ordered writing, a language needs a set of letters equivalent to its sounds. If two languages have different sounds, then for practical purposes they require different alphabets. In other words, Khrabr complements the perception of the VC, that the proper understanding of an alphabet is linked to a proper analysis of the sounds of speech. For him, Cyril’s achievement was to recognise this problem and to solve it: some sounds in Greek and Slavonic are shared by both languages, so in Cyril’s Slavonic alphabet some letters do represent sounds equivalent to Greek; but fourteen out of the total of thirty-eight letters represent sounds peculiar to Slavonic. Having dealt with the question of practicality, the author of On Letters devotes the remainder of his essay to the question of dignity. He himself does not define the thematic transition as such. In form, the essay continues as a series of comparisons and contrasts between the Slavonic alphabet on the one hand, and Greek (and to a lesser extent Hebrew and Latin) on the other hand. With each comparison Khrabr seeks to show that the status of Slavonic letters is no lower than the status of the other alphabets, and that by some measures it might even be higher. His criteria are as follows: (i) The sequence and meaning of letters: Khrabr finds significance in the name of the first letter of the Slavonic alphabet (az

, which opens the mouth to instruct those who seek to learn). Just so – as the author adduces from a scholion (commentary, annotation) on the influential second-century grammarian Dionysios Thrax – there is significance in the first letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets (‘aleph . . . means “learn” . . . alpha means “seek”’).19 It is intriguing that Khrabr begins with a point about the significance of names, and frustrating that he does not elaborate with reference to the rest of the alphabet.20 (ii) The number of letters: Greek might appear to be more economical, with 24 letters by comparison with the 38 letters of Slavonic. But this is an illusion, for if you add diphthongs and the letters used only as numerals, then Greek, too, could be said to need 38 letters.21 (iii) Divine sanction for language or letters: it is wrong to regard Hebrew, Greek and Latin as especially favoured just because they appeared 19

20 21

O pismenekh, 3–5. Here and subsequently, on Khrabr’s use of scholia on Dionysios Thrax, see Giorgio Ziffer, ‘Le fonti greche del monaco Chrabr’, Byzantinoslavica 56 (1995), 561–70. Further on the significance of letter-names, see below, pp. 272–3. O pismenekh, 7.

Writing and learning

(iv)

(v)

(vi)

(vii)

(viii)

193

on the inscription on the Cross. All things are from God, including Slavonic letters.22 Antiquity of language: it is wrong to imagine that Hebrew, Greek or Latin were created perfect, by divine hand. Adam spoke Syriac; the other tongues emerged after Babel.23 Cyril’s achievement in itself: the Greeks originally used Phoenician letters, and (as is shown in another scholion to Dionysios Thrax) developed their own alphabet by stages, over many years, the work of many hands; and when the Greeks eventually came round to translating the Scriptures, it took seventy of them to accomplish the task. Slavonic letters and translations were produced by one man, over a few years.24 Cyril’s status in the eyes of God: Cyril was a holy man, Greek letters were devised by pagans. Hence ‘Slavonic letters are holier and more venerable.’25 The status of changes to the alphabet: Khrabr accepts that Cyril’s script had subsequently required modification, but he asserts that this gives no cause for criticism. The Greeks also modified their letters many times, and it is easier to adapt afterwards than to create in the first place.26 Cyril’s status in the eyes of men: few Greek bookmen would know who created their alphabet or who translated the Scriptures into their language; all Slav bookmen know who created the Slavonic letters and Scriptures, and where, and when, and for whom.27

And finally, just in case his readers feel that the arguments are still thin, the author reassures them that ‘there are other responses, which we shall state elsewhere’.28 The context for Khrabr’s comparative assessments is opaque. How concrete, how specifically targeted, are his negative comparisons meant to be? Is his critique of Greek real, or is it rhetorical? Is it part of a genuine argument, or is it merely a literary device. If the critique of Greek is real, it could in principle be directed at any of three notional types of opponent: (a) those who might have objected to Slavonic as a liturgical 22

23 24 25 28

O pismenekh, 8. This is a recurrent theme in Cyrillo-Methodian literature: see Francis J. Thomson, ‘SS. Cyril and Methodius and a Mythical Western Heresy: Trilinguism. A Contribution to the Study of Patristic and Mediaeval Theories of Sacred Languages’, Analecta Bollandiana 110 (1992), 67–122. O pismenekh, 9. O pismenekh, 10–12; cf. the brief text On Script (O gramote), which Veder identifies as of separate provenance: Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 129–39, 158. 26 O pismenekh, 13. 27 O pismenekh, 14. O pismenekh, 12:9. O pismenekh, 15:1–2.

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language; (b) those who, while accepting Slavonic as a liturgical language, might have favoured using the Greek script; or (c) those who sought to replace Cyril’s visually distinctive Slavonic letters (Glagolitic) with an alphabet visually closer to Greek (i.e. ‘Cyrillic’). All three positions are plausible, but none is particularly persuasive. The weakest hypothesis is the first, that the author of On Letters was defending the Slavonic language against a faction pressing for the reintroduction of Greek. Perhaps there still were some people, Slavs as well as Byzantines, who yearned for the Hellenisation of Bulgaria, but the central theme of the treatise is script. Points about language accumulate by association, and sometimes by elision, but they cannot reasonably be stretched to displace script as the focus of the work. The second hypothesis – that the author’s implied opponents accepted Slavonic but advocated a reversion to Greek script – is superficially quite attractive,29 but is wholly unsupported by evidence. The third hypothesis is the most intriguing: that the treatise is a defence of Glagolitic against the incursions of Greek-based Cyrillic.30 However, the treatise deals with alphabets as systems, not about letter-forms as such. In essence the author’s conception of the Slavonic alphabet (as a series of letters which represent sounds common to Slavonic and Greek, plus additional letters to represent sounds peculiar to Slavonic) fits Cyrillic and Glagolitic equally well. Khrabr touches on the number of letters, the meanings of their names and their relations to speech-sounds, but nowhere does he mention their shape or any aspect of their graphic realisation. Indeed, most Slav readers at least from the late eleventh century onwards probably assumed that the treatise was in fact about Cyrillic. All three hypothetical scenarios for a ‘real’ polemic are flimsy. The alternative is that the antitheses in On Letters are primarily rhetorical, designed to magnify Slavonic rather than to tip the balance of debate on any matter of practical choice.31 Doubtless there were Byzantines who continued to be irritatingly supercilious, and the occasional side-swipe at Greek could be an effective device for bolstering Slav self-esteem, but we need read no more into it than that. Literature should not always be interpreted literally, and it can be a mistake to extrapolate structures of life from structures of argument. The treatise On Letters attributed to the monk Khrabr is probably best read as an instructive eulogy to Slavonic 29 30

31

See Floria, Skazaniia o nachale, pp. 336–69; esp. pp. 343–4. See Khaburgaev, Pervye stoletiia, pp. 104–13; S. Iu. Temchin, ‘O razvitii pis
mennoi kul
tury Vostochnoi Bolgarii do 971 goda’, Slavistica Vilnensis 2000. Kalbotyra 49:2 (2000), 61–77. ¨ See Giorgio Ziffer, ‘Zur Komposition des Traktats “Uber die Buchstaben” des Monchs ¨ Chrabr’, Die Welt der Slaven 40, N.S. 19 (1995), 58–75.

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script, not as evidence for live debate on language policy. Its qualities as instructive eulogy ensured its migration to places and ages where the very idea of reversion or conversion to Greek would have been absurd. Letter-games: alphabets and acrostics An acrostic is a composition which may be read in two directions: ‘horizontally’, in the normal way; and ‘vertically’, through a separate text formed by the sequence of initial letters (or sometimes the initial syllables or words) of each section. The alphabet itself can be regarded as a kind of acrostic, in which the horizontal and vertical texts are identical, or in which the horizontal text consists of the names of the letters (in alphabets where the letters have names) and the vertical text consists of the sequence of individual letters.32 Most commonly, however, the horizontal text is in verse, and the vertical text is formed from the initial components in the sequence of lines or stanzas.33 Acrostics by nature focus attention on letters, rather than on words or phrases, since the vertical text has to be deciphered by detaching the initial elements of the ‘normal’ horizontal text. The vertical text may contain any message, but in a common subcategory of acrostic – the alphabetical acrostic – the vertical text consists not of words but of letters in alphabetical sequence. Even when simple to decipher, acrostics are by nature esoteric, a form of graphic encoding, a self-consciously bookish device. With the exception of all but the plainest alphabetic versions, acrostics create a dimension of text which is accessible to the eye but not to the ear. The horizontal text can be shared with an audience or congregation in the ordinary way, but the vertical text is reserved for the private gaze of the lettered reader. The use of acrostics fosters a sense of initiation into the world of letters, from the simplest of mnemonics at the first stage of initiation (learning the alphabet) to highly complex cryptography. Acrostics can be found in many genres and forms of Byzantine writing: in secular eulogies and love-songs as well as in penitential recitations and in hymns; in prose, in classical metres (based on quantity) and in the 32

33

On alphabetical inscriptions see above, p. 98; below, pp. 202–3; also Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, I (Die slawischen Sprachen 36, 1994), 166–7; B. Velcheva, ‘Abetsedar’, in Kirilo-Metodievska entsiklopediia, I (Sofia, 1985), pp. 20–6, with extensive bibliography. For a systematic classification of types of vertical/horizontal combinations see Roland Marti, ‘Texte mit “Alphabet-Akrostichon” in der kirchenslavischen Tradition’, ZSl 42 (1997), 129–45. The idea of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ composition is a device for classification, not always a literal description of the way a given text is arranged in manuscript.

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newer ‘political’ verse (accentual and isosyllabic).34 In hymnography, especially, acrostics became common, even standard. In the kontakia of the most renowned of early Byzantine liturgical poets, Romanos the Melode (mid–sixth century) the first letters of each stanza normally combine to form an acrostic which reveals the author’s name.35 The Akathistos Hymn to the Theotokos, a kontakion composed in the seventh century and subsequently revered among Byzantines and Orthodox Slavs alike, contains twenty-four oikoi (stanzas) the initial letters of which form a complete alphabetical acrostic. In subsequent Byzantine hymnography, as the relatively compact kontakion gave way to the far more extensive kanon, the sequences of acrostic stanzas could be separated from each other both by intervening verses and by significant periods of time in recitation. This gave scope for varying the form, length and content of the acrostic subtext. Besides alphabetical, authorial and ‘occasional’ acrostics, there were some in which the initial letters of the stanzas combined to form metrical lines of their own (in iambics and hexameters).36 Such elaborate lettergames were strictly for bookish initiates, not for the congregation at large. Byzantine acrostics generally ceased to be acrostics in Slavonic translation. The loss of the ‘vertical’ text, like the loss of other formal elements such as isosyllabic metre,37 is hardly surprising, given the technical difficulty of preserving such devices in any transition from one language (and alphabet) to another. Sometimes, indeed, translators show that they were aware of the problem and try to give some indication of what was lost. For example, an eleventh-century East Slav manuscript includes a translation of alphabetical acrostic verses in iambic dodekasyllables by Gregory of Nazianzus. The translation is neither an acrostic nor dodekasyllabic, yet it is headed: ‘Verses of St Gregory the Theologian. An Abecedary (alfavitar
)’. Moreover, each line is preceded by a letter, in alphabetical sequence, in an attempt to make plain the device which is lost 34

35

36 37

See K. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur von Justinian bis zum Ende des Ostr¨omischen Reiches (527–1453) (Munich, 1897), pp. 717–20; Wolfram Horandner, ¨ ‘Ein Alphabet in politischen Versen uber ¨ Schopfung ¨ und verlorenes Paradies’, in Lirica Greca di Archiloco a Elitis. Studi in onore di Filippo Maria Pontani (Padua, 1984), pp. 273– 89; summary and further references by Elizabeth Jeffreys in ODB, I, p. 15. On ‘political verse’ see M. J. Jeffreys, ‘The Nature and Origins of the Political Verse’, DOP 28 (1974), 142–95. See Romanos the Melode, Cantica genuina, ed. P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis (Oxford, 1963); the editors print the deciphered acrostic at the start of each of the fifty-nine kontakia. Note, however (p. xvii), that the presence of an ‘authorial’ acrostic is no guarantee of authenticity. See W. Weyh, ‘Die Akrostichis in der byzantinischen Kanonesdichtung’, BZ 17 (1908), 1–69. See Christian Hannick, ‘Early Slavic Liturgical Hymns in Musicological Context’, Ricerche slavistiche 41 (1994), 9–29.

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in the translation itself.38 Similarly, non-acrostic translations of originally acrostic liturgical hymns can retain the designation ‘acrostic’ (kraegranie, kraegranesie, po azbuke; po glavam azbuki etc.) in their rubrics.39 Though the device in Greek was usually lost in translation, some awareness of acrostics as a device could make its way across the barrier of language. The earliest native Slav writings are conspicuously rich in acrostics: richer than would be plausible either as a spontaneous phenomenon within Slav book culture or as a response to the impoverished acrostics available in translation. The nature of early Slav acrostics strongly suggests that the bookmen who composed them learned the device at source, in Greek. Konstantin of Preslav, an approximate contemporary of Khrabr, is credited with the translation – from Greek – of the Gospel Homiliary (Evangelie uchitel
noe), a set of homilies on Gospel readings.40 The earliest version of the Gospel Homiliary includes two prologues (or a single prologue in two main parts), the first of which is an acrostic known as Konstantin’s Alphabetical Prayer.41 The Alphabetical Prayer is one of a small handful of early Slavonic works written in metrical verse: in regular dodekasyllables, with a regular caesura (word-break) after the fifth syllable of every line.42 A key to Konstantin’s inspiration can be found at the start of the second (prose) prologue: ‘it is good,’ he says, ‘to start with God and end with God; as a certain theologian Gregory said’.43 Gregory had indeed said this: in the opening line of the alphabetical acrostic in Greek dodekasyllables, the acrostic origins of which were so carefully signalled in the earliest manuscript of its no-longer-acrostic Slavonic translation.44 The Alphabetical Prayer has a theme: Konstantin asks for wisdom and strength, that he may virtuously write of God’s wonders and make plain the words of the Gospel. He seeks help with the words to render the 38

39 40 41

42 43 44

Josif Popovski, The Pandects of Antiochus. Slavic Text in Transcription (PK 23–4; Amsterdam, 1989), p. 202, from MS Moscow, GIM Voskr. 30 perg (see SK, no. 24), fos. 309–10; N. Karinskii, ‘Vizantiiskoe stikhotvorenie Alfavitar
v russkom spiske XI v.’, Izvestiia po russkomu iazyku i slovesnosti, III (Leningrad, 1930), pp. 259–68. Christian Hannick, ‘Die Akrostichis in der kirchenslavischen liturgischen Dichtung’, Wiener slavistisches Jahrbuch 18 (1973), 151–62. L. Gracheva, ‘Konstantin Preslavski’, in Kirilo-metodievska entsiklopediia II (Sofia, 1995), pp. 426–40. Az

slovom
sim
moliusia Bogu . . . : text in Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 62–77, 152–5 (Veder divides Konstantin’s prologue into four parts, counting separately its title and a brief doxology). For the individual witnesses in full see K. M. Kuev, Azbuchnata molitva v slavianskite literaturi (Sofia, 1974). On the second main section of the prologue see also below, p. 209. Except in the generally troublesome lines 11–12, 29: see also V. Tkadlˇc´ık, ‘K rekonstrukci Abecedn´ı modlitby Konstantina Prˇeslavsk´eho’, Slavia 61 (1992), 363–73. Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 79–80; cf. Kuev, Azbuchnata molitva, p. 189. See above, n. 38.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

Word: that is, he seeks divine aid in the task of producing the Gospel Homiliary. The acrostic device therefore has at least two functions here. In part it is a rhetorical flourish, a piece of clever display (like the verse form) validated by association with prestigious Byzantine precedent. But in part it is also closely associated with the theme, with Konstantin’s larger endeavour, which is to ‘walk in the tracks of [my] teacher, following his name and work’. The teacher whose ‘name’ Konstantin follows is surely Constantine/Cyril,45 and the ‘work’ is the application of Slavonic letters to make plain the words of Scripture. Konstantin’s display of the Slavonic alphabet, by means of acrostic, thus enhances the ‘Cyrillo-Methodian’ theme, amplifying the status of the letters themselves in the tradition in which he proclaims his desire to participate. The acrostic is integral to the message, part of the theme, and Konstantin’s Alphabetical Prayer joins Khrabr’s essay in the literature of explicit or implied eulogy to Slavonic letters. The theme, language, content and context of the Alphabetical Prayer converge to confirm its place among the earliest of such writings. Authorial marginalia, preserved in one variant of the second prologue, suggest it was written no later than 893.46 Other alphabetic acrostic verses proliferate in late manuscripts. Some of them are surely descended from early archetypes, although dating is more problematic, based on internal evidence alone.47 Yet the richest legacy of early Slavonic acrostics is provided not by these alphabetical sequences of lines or distichs but by the more complex structures of acrostic hymnography. Well over a dozen substantial compositions have been identified, and the number increases steadily as scholars become attuned to the possibility of finding them.48 The occasions range 45 46 47

48

On the primacy of the singular over the dual (implying Cyril and Methodios) see Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 74–6. Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 82, 179–80. See Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 168ff. on the acrostic Az

esm
Bog

; other candidates for early originals include: Az

esm
v
semu miry svet

, attributed in some manuscripts to ‘Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril’, or the dodekasyllable Az

v

skr
sokh

ot

mr

tvyikh

: see A. I. Sobolevskii, Materialy i issledovaniia v oblasti slavianskoi filologii i arkheologii (Sbornik ORIaS 88: 3; St Petersburg, 1910), pp. 1–35; N. S. Demkova and N. F. Droblenkova, ‘K izucheniiu slavianskikh azbuchnykh stikhov’, TODRL 23 (1968), 27–61; Klaus Detlef Olof, Philologische und literarische Aspekte slavischer Alphabetakrostichis nebst einem Exkurs u¨ ber die slavischen Buchstabennamen (Amsterdam, 1973), pp. 23–47; also the penitential acrostic in hendekasyllabic and dodekasyllabic distichs (Az

tebe pripadaiu milostive), preserved in a thirteenth-century manuscript: see below, n. 60. S. Kozhukharov, ‘Pesennoto tvorchestvo na starob

lgarskiia knizhovnik Naum Okhridski’, Literaturna istoriia (1984, no. 12), pp. 3–19; G. Popov; Triodni proizvedeniia na Konstantin Preslavski (Kirilo-Metodievski studii 2; Sofia, 1985); ‘Iz khimnografskoto nasledstvo na Konstantin Preslavski’, Palaeobulgarica 19:3 (1995), 3–31; ‘Novootkrit kanon na Konstantin Preslavski s tainopisno poetichesko poslanie’, Palaeobulgarica 21:4

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across the ecclesiastical calendar: for Epiphany, for the Dormition, for the Presentation, for Lent; for the Archangel Michael, St Andrew, St John Chrysostom. The ‘vertical’ texts of a couple of them are alphabetical, some contain invocations and exhortations (‘Let us praise Christ while singing of the Epiphany’, ‘Holy Trinity, enlighten me’, while others follow the common Byzantine practice of encoding as acrostic the name of the author: Naum, Kliment, Konstantin. Around half of the acrostics include the name ‘Konstantin’, and scholars have tended to ascribe them to Konstantin of Preslav. If Konstantin’s Alphabetical Prayer put the alphabet in the foreground as a structural and thematic feature, the hymnographic acrostics attributed to Konstantin and others tend towards the cryptographic. In a uniquely esoteric specimen, a Lenten cycle by ‘Konstantin’ creates textual messages linking initial letters across almost 450 stanzas distributed over nearly six weeks of services. Early Slavonic letters thus feature as a central theme in early Slavonic letters: in narratives of their invention, in analysis of their nature and significance, through compositional highlighting in acrostics. Most of the key texts were transmitted to the East Slavs, and some of them survive in very early East Slav manuscripts, but the theme was less central to East Slav self-affirmation, and the response in Rus was uneven, rarely active, and generally somewhat muted. The pivotal event in the Rus teleology of history was their own Conversion to Christianity, by which time Slavonic letters had already existed for over a century. However, Rus bookmen acknowledged the community of Slavonic letters and hence the achievements of the CyrilloMethodian mission. A summary of the mission is included in the Primary Chronicle, in its entry for the year 898. Rastislav of Moravia laments to the Byzantine emperor that ‘we understand neither the forms of letters [knizhnyi obraz] nor their meaning [sila]’, so on the emperor’s instructions Cyril and Methodios ‘began to compose alphabetical letters [ pismena azbukovnyia]’, and ‘those letters [gramota] were called Slavonic and are used by the Rus and by the Danubian Bulgars’.49 The story itself is derivative.50 Its significance here lies in its historiographical setting, in

49 50

(1997), 3–17; M. Iovcheva, ‘Novootkriti gimnografski proizvedeniia na Kliment Okhridski v Oktoikha’, Palaeobulgarica 23:3 (1999), 3–30; L. V. Moshkova and A. A. Turilov, ‘“Moravskye zemle velei grazhdanin” (neizvestnaia drevniaia sluzhba pervouchiteliu Mefodiiu)’, Slavianovedenie (1998, no. 4), 3–23. L. V. Moshkova and A. A. Turilov, ‘Neizvestnyi pamiatnik drevneishei slavianskoi gimnografii (kanon Klimenta Okhridskogo na Uspenie Bogoroditsy)’, Slavianovedenie (1999, no. 2), 24–36. PVL I, pp. 21–3; Cross, Primary Chronicle, 62–3. On the disputed origins of this ‘Tale of the Translation of Books’ see e.g. V. M. Istrin, ‘Moravskaia istoriia slavian i istoriia poliano-Rusi, kak predpolagaemye istochniki nachal
noi russkoi letopisi’, Byzantinoslavica 3 (1931), 308–31; 4 (1932), 36–55; A. A. Shakhmatov, ‘“Povest
vremennykh let” i ee istochniki’, TODRL 4 (1940), 80–92;

200

Functions and perceptions of writing

an excursus on the unity of the Slavonic ‘tongue’: although separate Slav peoples have separate names – Czechs, Moravians, Liakhs, Polianians (‘who are now called Rus’) – nevertheless ‘the Slavonic tongue is one’. The function of such commentaries is to guide the imported story in the direction of the Rus, to turn a tale of distant times and places into a relevant link in the chain of events leading to the Rus present. This is consistent with the general approach to imported narratives in the Primary Chronicle, the compilers of which sought not to create a new scheme of world history but to find a place for the Rus within borrowed schemes which had originally failed to take them into account.51 That the Primary Chronicle’s interest is more historical (or teleological) than philological is not surprising, given its genre; but the Rus reception even of the more ‘analytical’ Bulgarian works on Slavonic letters seems to confirm a pattern. Although versions of Khrabr’s treatise On Letters survive in dozens of later East Slav manuscripts, and although the work itself may have been imported and copied quite early, yet it is not cited in native writings, and there is no sign of active engagement with its linguistic content before the late fourteenth century (when it is reflected in the hagiographic account of Stefan of Perm’s invention of an alphabet for the Permians).52 Indeed, it would have been hard to engage directly with Khrabr’s linguistic arguments, since the assumptions on which they were based became rapidly outmoded. Khrabr assumed a one-to-one relationship between letters of the alphabet and sounds of speech. This is flimsy at the best of times (it is manifestly inapplicable, for example, even to the Greek of Khrabr’s own contemporaries), but changes in East Slav speech and writing made it more and more remote from the linguistic realities of Rus. Church Slavonic pronunciation was perhaps conservative and, to a degree, ‘alphabet-led’, but basic phonological changes and regional variations in the East Slav area would have undermined any serious attempt to maintain (except as a vague ideal) the claim that the alphabet was a

51

52

B. N. Floria, ‘Skazanie o prelozhenii knig na slavianskii iazyk. Istochniki, vremia i mesto napisaniia’, Byzantinoslavica 46 (1985), 121–30; R. Jakobson, ‘Minor Native Sources for the Early History of the Slavic Church’, Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954), esp. 39–47; O. Kralik, ‘Povest
vremennykh let i legenda o sviatykh Viacheslave i Liudmile’, TODRL 19 (1963), 177–207. A more radical late reworking has Cyril being taught Slavonic letters by a rusin in Cherson: see F. Mareˇs, ‘Skazanie o slavianskoi pis
mennosti (po spisku Pushkinskogo doma AN SSSR)’, TODRL 19 (1963), 169–76. V. M. Zhivov, ‘Slavia christiana i istorikokul
turnyi kontekst Skazaniia o russkoi gramote’, in L. Magarotto and D. Rizzi (eds.), La cultura spirituale russa. Russkaia dukhovnaia kul
tura (Trento, 1992), pp. 71–125, dates this narrative to the twelfth century, but the arguments for an early date are flimsy: see the critical remarks by R. Picchio in AION – Slavistica 2 (1994), 462–4. See Ia. Trembovol
skii, ‘Drevnebolgarskii pamiatnik “   
  ” na Rusi’, Palaeobulgarica 13:4 (1989), 68–90.

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phonemically consistent set of signs. If Khrabr’s treatise was received and copied in Rus in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, then it may be due more to a general reverence for the Cyrillo-Methodian theme than to an active interest in a specific analysis of Slavonic letters and language.53 The historical slant is confirmed in the Rus reception of Konstantin of Preslav’s Alphabetical Prayer. Several of the manuscripts include a new, local preface which states: ‘In the year 6363 Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, made the script in the Slavonic language, called Lititsa [glagolemuiu lititsu: a corruption of glagolitsu?] in the days of the Greek Tsar Michael, and in the days of Prince Riurik of Novgorod, to whose sons the Rus Land passed. On Script: 7 men made the Greek script: Palamedes, Kadmos of Milete, Simonides, Epicharios, Dionysios.’54 After the acrostic, a Rus colophon states: ‘then, when a few years had passed, the Rus Land was baptised, in the days of the pious Prince Vladimir, son of Sviatoslav, grandson of Igor and Olga who set the start for baptism in the Rus Land, and great-grandson of Riurik, in the year 6377’.55 The new preface seems to reflect Khrabr’s treatise, and indeed both preface and colophon appear as contaminations in late East Slav manuscripts of On Letters.56 One can speculate on the date by which the Alphabetical Prayer was given its new preface and colophon, and on whether this represents direct textual borrowing from On Letters57 or merely the regurgitation of phrases which Khrabr himself had cited as common knowledge, as that which ‘all know and say’.58 In either case what matters here is that the apparent allusion to On Letters relates to its ‘historical’ data, not to its linguistic arguments. The local preface and colophon for the Alphabetical Prayer thus serve the same function as the treatment of the Cyrillo-Methodian story in the Primary Chronicle: not to explain Slavonic letters as such, but to establish a significant historical link between the Cyrillo-Methodian achievement and the sacred history of Rus.59 53

54

55 56 57

58 59

This may, in part, account for the high level of textual corruption: see William R. Veder, ‘Chto takoe russkaia redaktsiia tserkovno-slavianskogo teksta?’, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, 24 (1998), 428–63. From the d version in Veder’s classification: see William R. Veder, ‘Zashto i kak da se rekonstuira ts

rkovnoslavianski tekst. Paradozata na “Prologa” k

m “Uchitelnoto evangelie” na Konstantin Preslavski,’ Preslavska knizhovna shkola 3 (1998), 3–25. Ibid.; note the variant ‘correct’ date ‘6497’; 6377 (869) is the date given in the Primary Chronicle for the baptism of Bulgaria. Cf. O pismenekh, 12:7; 14:11–13, 21, 26–7. Veder Utrum in alterum, pp. 182–4, argues that the new setting for the Alphabetical Prayer was created in eleventh-century Kiev, and that this sets the date by which a text of On Letters must have reached Rus. O pismenekh, 14:9–10. Note that this version of On Letters is generally found in manuscripts of the Paleia, a historical compendium: Veder, Utrum in alterum, 16–17.

202

Functions and perceptions of writing

Alphabetical compositions – acrostics – evoked a similarly muted response in early East Slav writings. Bulgarian acrostics were imported and copied, but there is little sign of a comparable native fashion for playing such letter-games: no sign of the elaborately cryptic hymnographic acrostics; no clear evidence for any native tradition of syllabic verse, let alone of syllabic acrostics;60 no convincing evidence for native acrostics in non-verse forms.61 Although lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack, the consensus is that active interest in acrostic composition – like active interest in Khrabr’s treatise, or active interest in linguistic writings in general – was a relatively late phenomenon in East Slav culture.62 By and large, and by contrast with early Bulgaria, in early Rus, alphabetic script was a received fact, not a current issue; a fact of the Slav Christian heritage, not a topic for learned inquiry or display. For a more direct form of Rus engagement with alphabet-based issues we should turn to a more practical context: not to erudite genres of hymnography or display-poetry or philological tracts, but to school-texts and exercises, to the materials and methods of a literate education.63

Learning about writing: a literate education With or without an erudite interest in the theory of letters, the alphabet – the simplest form of acrostic – was, of course, at the core of the eminently practical process of acquiring the skills of reading and/or writing. The best and most direct evidence for alphabetic and alphabet-related learning is provided by the archaeological and epigraphic sources. Practice alphabets or fragments of alphabets are quite common: preserved on birch-bark, in church-wall graffiti, on a sliver of lead, scored into the outer surface of a 60

61 62

63

See, however, Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, ‘An Alphabetical Hymn by St Cyril of Turov? On the Question of Syllabic Verse Composition in Early Medieval Russia’, Scando-Slavica 44 (1998), 115–30; also V. K. Bylinin, ‘Russkie akrostikhi starshei pory (do XVII v.),’ in Russkoe stikhoslozhenie. Traditsii i problemy razvitiia (Moscow, 1985), pp. 209–43. Despite the ingenious investigations of A. A. Gogeshvili, Akrostikh v ‘Slove o polku Igoreve’ i drugikh pamiatnikakh russkoi pis
mennosti XI–XII vekov (Moscow, 1991). On acrostics in the later Middle Ages see Demkova and Droblenkova, ‘K izucheniiu slavianskikh azbuchnykh stikhov’; Olof, Philologische und literarische Aspekte slavischer Alphabetakrostichis, pp. 71–106; on the broader revival of interest in ‘letters’ from the late-fourteenth century see e.g. Harvey Goldblatt, Orthodoxy and Orthography: Constantine Kosteneˇcki’s Treatise on the Letters (Studia historica et philologica 16; Florence, 1987); B. M. Nikol
skii ‘“O vos
mi chastiakh slova”: problema istochnikov’, in Evoliutsiia grammaticheskoi mysli u slavian XIV–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1999), pp. 9–33. Note that the first East Slav printed acrostic was in Ivan Fedorov’s Primer printed in Lvov in 1574: V. I. Luk
ianenko, ‘Azbuka Ivana Fedorova, ee istochniki i vidovye osobennosti’, TODRL 16 (1960), 208–29.

Writing and learning

203

wooden writing-tablet, on a slate spindle whorl, even on a comb.64 From letters to syllables: alphabetic syllabic exercises, the next stage of acrostic (‘ba va ga da . . . be ve ge de . . . ’ etc.), occur in a cluster of apparently juvenile jottings on birch-bark associated with a certain Onfim from the 1220s or 1230s.65 What next? Did the learner progress from the alphabet, through syllabic exercises, to fully-fledged alphabetic acrostics? The pedagogical setting for some of the later acrostics might suggest that this was so, but the evidence for the early period is indirect. The wood beneath the wax of the early-eleventh-century writing-tablet from Novgorod bears traces of repeated lines beginning with the phrase az esm
(I am); many an acrostic begins with the same phrase. It is possible that the Novgorodian tablet was at one stage used for copying out alphabetical or acrostic exercises, and that what remains are traces of lines starting with the first letter. Still more esoterically, Metropolitan Klim Smoliatich writes of a man who ‘knew his alpha . . . and his beta also, and all the four and twenty letters of the alphabet’, and of those who could ‘repeat in alphas alone not just one hundred but two hundred or three hundred or four hundred, and as many betas’66 – clearly an allusion to alphabet-based learning, but apparently in relation to Greek. Beyond alphabetic, syllabic or acrostic exercises, it is likely that the ‘core curriculum’ included the Psalter. One might deduce as much by analogy with the uses of the Psalter elsewhere, but the inference is also, to some extent, supported by indirect evidence. Fragments of psalms are to be found among Onfim’s birch-bark jottings; and psalms constitute the main surviving text on the early-eleventh-century Novgorod waxed writing-tablet. Where did schooling take place? It is often assumed that churches may have provided a location, but there is no direct evidence.67 An analysis of graphic characteristics of birch-bark letters suggests that some schooling may also have taken place in the home. For example, several groups of 64

65

66 67

NGB, nos. 199, 205, 460, 591, 778, 783; Vysotskii, Nadpisi, II, pp. 12–23 (no. 100); NGB III, pp. 79–81; V. L. Ianin and A. A. Zalizniak, ‘Berestianye gramoty iz novgorodskikh raskopok 1997 g.’, VopIaz (1998, no. 3), 41 (lead document no. 2); A. A. Medyntseva, Gramotnost
v Drevnei Rusi. Po pamiatnikam epigrafiki X–pervoi poloviny XIII veka (Moscow, 2000), pp. 56 (spindle whorl), 214–15 (comb). NGB, nos. 199, 201, 204. On the Onfim cluster see V. L. Ianin, Ia poslal tebe berestu . . . , 3rd edn (Moscow, 1998), pp. 55–70. The assumption that Onfim was a boy rests both on the texts and on his drawings. However, for a different interpretation of Onfim’s and other alphabets (as perhaps magical or amuletic) see below, p. 271, n. 66. N. V. Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie Drevnei Rusi XI–XIII. Issledovaniia, teksty, perevody (St Petersburg, 1992), p. 133; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 47. A Kievan graffito (Vysotskii, Nadpisi II, no. 120) is often cited in evidence, but this interpretation has recently been shown to be based on a misreading: see A. A. Turilov, ‘Zametki o kievskikh graffiti’, in Lingvisticheskoe istochnikovedenie i istoriia russkogo iazyka (2000) (Moscow, 2000), pp. 33–5.

204

Functions and perceptions of writing

birch-bark documents from a single compound, even when written in different hands, often share distinctive features both in the ways in which individual letters are formed and in the choice of morphological variants. Such similarities in manner imply that the writers of these documents received a similar training, perhaps that they were taught by the same teacher. Moreover, since the distinctive features of a given ‘house style’ can be retained over a considerable span of time, it is possible that the literate skills were passed on by domestic instruction from generation to generation within the household.68 Narrative sources, though not reliable purveyors of precise fact, amplify the impressions gained from the archaeological sources.69 The Primary Chronicle asserts that, after the official Conversion, Vladimir gathered children from the best families and ‘gave them over to book-learning’.70 In Rus as elsewhere, lives of saints routinely include a few conventional phrases about their heroes’ exemplary studiousness as children. Thus the young Feodosii, growing up in Kursk, at an unspecified age but at any rate before he was thirteen, ‘wished . . . to be entrusted to a teacher to study the divine books. And so it came to pass. He quickly mastered all the grammar (gramatikiia)’ and was obedient ‘not only towards his teacher, but also to all those studying with him’.71 Kirill of Turov, while still a child, ‘applied himself above all to the study of the divine books’.72 When Avraamii of Smolensk ‘reached the age of reason, his parents gave him over to be instructed in books’.73 The future Metropolitan Petr, ‘having reached his seventh year, was given over by his parents to study books’.74 The geography is pleasingly diverse: Kursk, Turov, Smolensk, somewhere in Volynia (where Petr grew up). 68

69

70 71 72

73 74

A. A. Zalizniak, ‘Problema tozhdestva i skhodstva pocherkov v berestianykh gramotakh’, in Velikii Novgorod v istorii srednevekovoi Evropy. K 70-letiiu Valentina Lavrent
evicha Ianina (Moscow, 1999), pp. 293–328. Cf., from the fourteenth century, NGB, no. 687. For a compilation of the material (in modern Russian) see S. D. Babishin and B. N. Mitiurov, Antologiia pedagogicheskoi mysli Drevnei Rusi i Russkogo gosudarstva XIV–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1985), pp. 90–6. Nearly half of the extracts cited are from the eighteenth-century chronicler Vasilii Tatishchev. For a persuasive critique of the authenticity of Tatishchev’s asides on early education see E. Golubinskii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi. Tom I. Period pervyi, kievskii ili domongol
skii. Pervaia polovina toma, 2nd edn (Moscow, 1901; repr. Moscow 1997), pp. 871–80. PVL I, p. 81; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 117. BLDR I, p. 356; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 37. From the brief synaxarion Life of Kirill: N. K. Nikol
skii, Materialy dlia istorii drevnerusskoi dukhovnoi pis
mennosti (Sbornik ORIaS 82; St Petersburg, 1907), p. 63; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 169. BLDR V, p. 32; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 137. In G. M. Prokhorov, Povest
o Mitiae. Rus
i Vizantiia v epokhu kulikovskoi bitvy (Leningrad, 1978), p. 205. The Life was written by Kiprian in the late fourteenth century, but refers to Petr’s childhood in the second half of the thirteenth century. Here, in a variant of the convention, we learn that the young Petr was not initially a diligent student, but that he became exemplary after seeing a vision in a dream.

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And that is just about that. Taken together, the archaeological and narrative sources do not amount to very much. On the contents, organisation and methods of education, for example, the corpus of sources is too thin to provide a clear or consistent picture. Lack of sufficient evidence is rarely a deterrent to hypothetical reconstruction, and there is no shortage of modern systematic accounts of early Rus education. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, Nikolai Lavrovskii wrote a doctoral dissertation arguing that shortly after the official Conversion, primary schools became widely established and that they were run by the clergy to train their pupils in reading, writing and liturgical singing.75 Lavrovskii’s rather tentative scheme was given bolder form towards the end of the century by S. Miropolskii, who perceived a dense network of specifically ‘parish schools’ being formed in the aftermath of the Conversion.76 The robustly sceptical church historian Golubinskii objected to such an ‘institutional’ view and insisted that almost all education in literacy was provided by private teachers (whether clergy or laymen), most likely in their own homes.77 Subtler nuances emerged from V. P. Vinogradov’s attempts to extrapolate from over forty vitae from the eleventh century right through to the seventeenth.78 Vinogradov discerned ‘a significant network of primary schools’, each with just one teacher but with up to eleven pupils.79 The historian George Vernadsky speaks of ‘both elementary and higher schools’, of ‘theological seminaries’, and the ‘academy’ founded by Iaroslav in the middle of the eleventh century.80 Soviet investigations became still more ambitious. Downplaying the role of Christianity, V. M. Petrov discovered a two-tier system of education as early as the ninth century(!): ‘democratic schools’ where ‘masters of literacy’ taught the basic skills to the offspring of merchants and craftsmen, and higher institutions for the elite.81 S. D. Babishin likewise denies that the Church was the prime mover, reaffirms the notion of a network of private primary schools, and posits a double system of further education, with monastic schools for the study of religious books and princely schools offering the very latest 75 76

77 78 79 80 81

Nikolai Lavrovskii, O drevnerusskikh uchilishchakh (Kharkov, 1854). S. Miropol
skii, Ocherki istorii tserkovno-prikhodskoi shkoly ot pervogo ego vozniknoveniia na Rusi do nastoiashchego vremeni. Vypusk I. Ot osnovaniia shkol pri sv. Vladimire do mongol
skogo iga (St Petersburg, 1894). Golubinskii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi. Tom I, pp. 721–7. V. P. Vinogradov, Ustavnye chteniia. Vypusk tretii. Ocherki po istorii slavianskoi tserkovnouchitel
skoi literatury (Sergiev Posad, 1915), pp. 33–72. Vinogradov, Ustavnye chteniia, pp. 61–3. George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (New Haven, 1948; Paperback edn, 1973), pp. 277–80. V. M. Petrov, Vospitanie i obuchenie v drevnerusskom gosudarstve IX–XV vekov (Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata pedagogicheskikh nauk; Moscow, 1982).

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curricula to international standards, such that Kiev was ‘acknowledged to be one of the major European centres of culture and enlightenment’.82 None of these assertions – one hesitates to label all of them ‘hypotheses’ – is founded on anything more solid than wishful thinking. Obviously training was available in the literate skills. We can characterise the substance of such training by surveying its results (the sum total of surviving specimens of writing, the graphic environment), but its processes remain opaque. ‘Equi-valent’ writing: language and translation The book known as Ecclesiasticus was written in Hebrew in the early second century  by Jesus Ben Sira (or Sirach), but the complete work survives only in a Greek translation by his grandson, who wrote thus in his Prologue to the translation: let me entreat you to read [this] with favour and attention, and to pardon us wherein we may seem to lack force83 with regard to some words which we have laboured to interpret; for the same things uttered in Hebrew, and translated into another tongue, have not the same force in them. And not only these things, but the law itself, and the prophets, and the rest of the books, have no small difference, when they are spoken in their own language.

Even at their most successful, as Ben Sira’s grandson recognised, translators are doomed to a kind of failure. Since no language is a perfect replica of another (formally a language is identical only to itself ), translators constantly have to make choices and compromises, aware that they can scarcely avoid the anxiety of betraying either the original text, or the reader’s trust, or both. All translation is, in a sense, mistranslation. Post-medieval literary translators are free to pluck virtue from necessity by vaunting their ingenuity, the creativeness of their distortions, the challenge of their role as virtual co-authors. Medieval ecclesiastical translators, like their deuterocanonical predecessor attempting to render Hebrew wisdom in Greek, had no such solace. They were trapped: their task was a pious duty, its fulfilment was corrupt (both in the textual and in the moral sense). The dilemma was especially acute for translators of Scripture and liturgy, and one can understand the scepticism of those who were reluctant to see a multiplication of liturgical languages. For the Orthodox Slavs the basic choice was clear: as a point of faith 82 83

S. D. Babishin, Osnovnye tendentsii razvitiia shkol i prosveshcheniia v Drevnei Rusi (X– pervaia polovina XIII vv.) (dissertation abstract, Kiev, 1985). Greek adynamein: the Authorised Version (followed by Brenton in his translation of the Septuagint) renders as ‘to come short’, thus missing the etymological link with the following phrase (ou gar isodynamei . . . ).

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the Holy Spirit was multilingual and the true word of God was spoken in many tongues. Faith was a necessary supplement to linguistic skill (or vice versa), but in mundane practice neither faith nor linguistic skill could insure the translator against all the perils inherent to his task. Orthodox Slavonic book culture was predominantly a culture of translations. Historians of that culture tend to put their standard questionnaire: when was which translation produced? where? by whom? for whom? and why? To the plain questions there are few plain answers. The participants in Orthodox Slavonic book culture were more interested in truth than in context. Explicit information about – or by – translators is very rare indeed. Modern scholarship thus tends to work against the grain of medieval culture, seeking to localise and particularise that from which medieval bookmen sought to generalise. Few translators are known, fewer still are known from their own words. We can assess their achievements with modern tools of translation-analysis, but we have very little opportunity to hear what they thought they were doing, how they viewed the task of transferring the written word from one language into another. Third-party accounts of translation are unhelpful. The narratives on Cyril and Methodios present translation as an accomplishment, both learned and miraculous, but do not dwell on the nature of the process. The Vita Constantini, for example, is a sustained argument for translation as opposed to non-translation, and perhaps for that reason does not dwell on the awkward practicalities: the saint prays, God shows him the way, the saint composes the alphabet and writes the words of the Gospel starting ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Simple, really.84 Other translators’ names are sporadically noted by scribes. A fifteenth-century manuscript preserves the colophon of the scribe Tudor, written in 908: Tudor informs us that the work which he has copied out – the Discourse against the Arians by Athanasios of Alexandria – had been translated by Bishop Konstantin in the previous year, on the orders of Symeon, ruler of Bulgaria.85 A note embedded in a thirteenth-century historical compendium (surviving in two later manuscripts) identifies a certain Grigorii as the translator of one of its Old Testament components, perhaps the Octateuch.86 Even blander are the accounts of how the Kievan monastery of the Caves received the Stoudite monastic Rule. According to Nestor’s Life of Feodosii 84 85 86

VC XIV.14; transl. Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, p. 67. A. Vaillant, Discours contre les ariens de Saint Athanase. Version slave et traduction en français (Sofia, 1954), pp. 6–7. V. M. Istrin, Khronika Ioanna Malaly v slavianskom perevode, repr. and ed. M. I. Chernysheva (Moscow, 1994), p. 117. The notice has occasionally been wrongly associated with the sections of the chronicle of John Malalas which follow it, rather than with the Old Testament narratives which precede it and to which it explicitly refers.

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it was ‘copied out’ (ispisav) by a Caves monk sent to Constantinople for the purpose; according to the Primary Chronicle it was obtained from a Stoudite monk who had come to Kiev in the metropolitan’s entourage, whereupon Feodosii ‘copied it’ (spisa).87 Neither version so much as mentions the transition of the Rule from one language into another, though early manuscripts of the Slavonic version do survive. These thirdparty accounts treat translation as an accomplished fact. Its adequacy is taken for granted, while its technical and semantic problems are ignored: ‘and the Slavs rejoiced, for they heard God’s greatness in their own tongue’.88 On the rare occasions when translators can be heard to speak for themselves, they are more circumspect. Five such statements exist, differing widely in length and detail. None was written by an East Slav, although one was written for an East Slav patron and others survive in East Slav manuscripts. The texts are:89 (1) John the Exarch’s preface to his translation of John of Damascus’s De fide orthodoxa.90 This is by far the most substantial piece, an essay of about 900 words. (2) A poorly preserved anonymous text on a single eleventh-century parchment leaf known as the Macedonian Folium.91 This appears to be part of the preface to a translation of commentaries on the Gospels. Sections of it are almost identical to John the Exarch’s preface, which can be used to help reconstruct defective lines. It has been conjectured either that John’s preface was a source for this text, or that this was a 87 88 89

90

91

BLDR I, p. 278; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 53; PVL I, p. 107; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 142. PVL I, p. 22; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 63; cf. e.g. VC XV.3; transl. Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, p. 69. I do not take into account what purports to be a copy of a twelfth-century translator’s colophon in a fourteenth-century East Slav manuscript collection of saints’ Lives: L. V. Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi XI–XIV vekov na pergamennykh kodeksakh (Moscow, 1998), pp. 289–91, includes this in her edition of twelfth-century colophons, but seems to accept the more general view that the colophon is a forgery. On the manuscript see Rukopisnye knigi sobraniia M.P. Pogodina. Katalog. Vypusk 1 (Leningrad, 1988), pp. 61–2 (no. 71b). Linda Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes tes orthodoxou pisteos, ¨ in der Ubersetzung des Exarchen Johannes (Monumenta Linguae Slavicae V; Wiesbaden, 1967), pp. 2–28 (with German translation); see also Khristo Trendafilov, ‘Predislovie Ioanna Ekzarkha Bolgarskogo k perevodu Bogosloviia (Nebesa) Ioanna Damaskina v drevnerusskoi rukopisnoi traditsii’, in V. M. Zagrebin (ed.), Rus
i iuzhnye slaviane. Sbornik statei k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. A. Moshina (1894–1987) (St Petersburg, 1998), pp. 305–13. A. Vaillant, ‘La pr´eface de l’Evang´eliaire vieux-slave’, RES 24 (1948), 5–20 (with French translation). For emendations to Vaillant’s text see A. Mincheva, ‘Za teksta na Makedonskiia list i negoviia avtor’, Starob

lgarska literatura 9 (1981), 3–19.

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source for John, or that John was the author of both. The claim that it is Cyril’s own preface to the Slavonic Gospels is unsustainable.92 (3) The colophon to a translation of Athanasios’s Life of Antony, ascribed in one of the manuscripts to ‘John the Presbyter’:93 a much shorter piece, of about eighty words, with a terse statement of the problem but without any elaboration or example. (4) Konstantin of Preslav’s second preface (after the Alphabetical Prayer) to his translated Gospel Homiliary, again consisting of a brief apology for the translator’s unworthiness.94 (5) Feodosii’s preface to a translation of Pope Leo I’s Epistle to Flavian.95 The translation was commissioned by Prince Sviatoslav (‘Sviatosha’) Davidovich, who had become a monk at the Caves monastery, under the name of Nikolai. The translator is normally reckoned to have been a Greek-speaking immigrant, not to be confused with the Caves’ very own eleventh-century saint Feodosii.96 Preface or colophon, long or short, the game had rules. All five translators declare themselves inadequate for the task, whether on account of their innate defects such as stupidity and sloth, or because they are too ignorant and uneducated to undertake the specific job of translating Greek. Konstantin writes of the ‘anxiety of words above my incomprehension and my strength’. For Feodosii, rendering Greek into Slavonic is ‘a thing loftier than my mind’, a deed properly done by others who (unlike himself ) ‘from their earliest youth have studied Homeric and rhetorical books’, a deed which he performs reluctantly, ‘knowing the feebleness of my learning, and not attaining the loftiness of the words, and not understanding the magnitude of their meaning’. God forbid that anybody should think the translators eager to display the products of their unworthiness. They translate only with reluctance, at the bidding of others: John the Exarch was persuaded by the monk Douks (or Doks),97 John the Presbyter was ‘compelled’ by his bishop, Feodosii was ‘compelled’ by 92

93 94 95

96 97

See, in particular, Ernst Hansack, ‘Das Kirillisch-Mazedonisches Blatt und der Prolog zum Bogoslovie des Exarchen Ioannes’, Die Welt der Slaven 31 (1986), 336–414; D. Freydank, ‘Bemerkungen zum Text des Kirillischen mazedonischen Blattes’, Symp. Meth., pp. 599–605. There is considerable variation between the six published manuscripts: for all versions see B. Angelov, Iz starata b

lgarska, ruska i sr

bska literatura, II (Sofia, 1967), pp. 112–15. Veder, Utrum in alterum, pp. 79–87, 155–7; also Kuev, Azbuchnata molitva, p. 189; see above, p. 197. Text in O. Bodianskii, ‘Slavianorusskie sochineniia v pergamennom sbornike I. N. Karskogo’, Chteniia v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete 3:7 (1848), d–e. The date of Sviatosha’s death is often given as 1142 or 1143. See T. V. Bulanina, ‘Feodosii Grek’, in SKKDR I, pp. 459–61. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 6.

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his patron Nikolai/Sviatosha, Konstantin’s reluctance was ‘overcome by certain pious men’. And if human pressures were not enough, there was divine pressure: Konstantin and Feodosii both fear divine punishment for ‘disobedience’ if they refuse to translate; John the Presbyter, more optimistically, hopes for divine reward for obedience, while John the Exarch devotes almost a third of his essay to justifying his audacity, with reference to the parable of the Lord’s talents. Thus the translators ostentatiously divest themselves of responsibility for the unavoidable shortcomings. And thus, between the lines, they declare their piety and humility, which they hope will earn them indulgence and forgiveness from God and men. Aside from scribal decorum, translators had – and have – good reason to fear censure. John the Exarch states the problem succinctly: ‘The Greek language cannot be rendered identically when it is translated into another language; this is so for any language when translated into another.’98 The translators are at pains to stress that adjustments are unavoidable. As the author of the Macedonian Folium puts it: ‘the reader should understand that this is done by necessity, not through wilfulness’.99 What kind of adjustment is implied? The fundamental choice is between form and sense. The ideal would be for form and sense to coincide, for a translation to preserve both the formal properties and the meaning of its original.100 Or at any rate, this is the ideal which the translators impute to their implied readers, and which they apologise for their failure to fulfil. Their own central assertion is that it is simply not possible always to preserve both form and sense, and that, where there is a conflict, sense – not form – is paramount. John the Presbyter states that he has not sought to conserve the image of Greek words, because ‘the Slavonic language does not have the image (obraz) of those words’, but that he has striven for meaning, for understanding, for the sense (razum).101 John the Exarch is crisply programmatic: ‘it is not possible everywhere to conserve the Greek word, but it is necessary to preserve the sense (razum)’.102 The paramount practical aim, therefore, is semantic equivalence: equivalence, expressions having the same force. English uses the Latin calque 98

99 100

101

102

Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 24. See also an English version of part of John’s preface in Francis J. Thomson, ‘John the Exarch’s Theological Education and Proficiency in Greek as Revealed by his Abridged Translation of John of Damascus’ “De Fide Orthodoxa”’, Palaeobulgarica 15:1 (1991), 35–58 (esp. 40–1). Vaillant, ‘La pr´eface’, 8 (lines 19–20). See Francis J. Thomson, ‘Sensus or proprietas verborum. Mediaeval Theories of Translation as Exemplified by Translation from Greek into Latin and Slavonic’, Symp. Meth., pp. 675–91. The manuscripts vary in the precise expression here, but all of them make the same point, with the same key words: see Angelov, Iz starata b

lgarska, ruska i sr

bska literatura, pp. 112–15. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 26.

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from the Greek (isodynamia; adj. isodynamos, or homodynamos). The word has been a translators’ favourite for centuries. It is used in the translator’s preface to Ecclesiasticus cited at the start of this section.103 It is used in the principal Greek source for John the Exarch and the Macedonian Folium, an extract from the treatise On Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, who criticises those who ‘do not wish to know what a given word means, and how it should be clarified through other equi-valent (homodynamon) and plainer words’.104 John the Exarch was particularly keen on the term. He calques it in the direct quotation105 and uses it twice more in his own argument: first he picks it up as the main point when introducing the quotation (the reader will find ‘equi-valent sense’, for, as Dionysios says . . . );106 then he reiterates it in his closing summary (if on occasion he has departed from the true words, he has done so to render ‘true equi-valent sense’).107 Thus far the statements seem quite anodyne, even familiar. Many a modern translation is prefaced with a variant of the disclaimer to the effect that the translator has striven to stick as close to the original as is consistent with sense, to place semantic equivalence above formal correspondence. But the similarity of formula is deceptive. Some general problems of translation remain constant, but the specific issues are not necessarily apprehended in identical (or even equi-valent) ways. In modern usage ‘equivalence’ is a catch-all term to justify virtually anything that the translator chooses to do. It sanctions ‘free’ translation, as opposed to ‘literal’ translation. The contrast is in any case suspect: a ‘free’ translation may take liberties with some of the structures of the original language, but a ‘literal’ translation can take liberties with the conventions of the host language. Is a translation of rhymed and metrical verse more ‘free’ if it modifies images and sentence-structures in order to preserve rhyme and metre, or if it abandons rhyme and metre in order to preserve imagery and sentence-structures, or if the translator decides that the true flavour of the original is more faithfully conveyed through quite a different metre or through quite different types of sentences in the host language? And whatever the answers for our own times, the early Slavonic 103 104 105

106 107

Here the verb: isodynamei. See Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 21. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 20: tozhdemogushchimi (glagolmi ), printed by Sadnik as two words (adverb + participle), but perhaps to be regarded as a single compound calque. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 20: razum tozhdemoshch
n

; here the adjective. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 26: razum istovyi tozhdemogushch
; again the participle from the calqued compound (or, in Sadnik’s version, adverb + participle).

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translators would certainly not have wished to claim that the search for ‘equi-valence’ entitled them to ‘freedom’. Quite the opposite: freedom was licence, licence was pride. They made their choices out of necessity alone. Or so decorum, ethics and the prevailing values required them to say.108 But what did such formulae mean for them? What did they understand by the ‘image’ of words? What, to them, were the vital ingredients of ‘sense’ that distinguished it from nonsense? What was the measure of equi-valence? Answers vary. The author of the preface to Ecclesiasticus categorically denies that equi-valence can be achieved: ‘the same things uttered in Hebrew, and translated into another tongue, have not the same force in them’. More to the point, however, are the remarks by Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite. John the Exarch and the author of the Macedonian Folium cite Pseudo-Dionysios as their principal authority on equi-valence, and from him (or, more likely, from an intermediary source containing the relevant extract) they calque the term into Slavonic. And yet the cited extract from Pseudo-Dionysios is not really to the point, or not really to the same point. The Slavonic prefaces cite out of context. In the first place, Pseudo-Dionysios was not actually writing about translation but about equivalent expressions within the same language, in effect about synonyms. He ridicules those who would savour the sounds without apprehending the ‘force’ of the words; those whose absurd (alogon) and obscurantist (skaion) view leads them to deny that one word can be substituted for another, as if it were improper to indicate the number ‘four’ by saying ‘twice two’, or ‘motherland’ by ‘fatherland’.109 Secondly, the immediate purpose for Pseudo-Dionysios’s remarks is to defend a method of interpreting Scripture: a method which may depart from, or substitute, the precise Scriptural expressions (here a discourse on the love of God as eros instead of agape).110 Though scriptural interpretation might indeed be viewed as a kind of translation, the Slavonic prefaces do not imply that the occasional ‘necessity’ for lexical change in translation extends to changing scriptural expressions in one’s own language. Thirdly, PseudoDionysios’s wider argument is theological. We apprehend words through the medium of our senses; the senses prompt the intellect, the intellect prompts the soul; the words which we use should be the clearest available, 108

109

110

See D. M. Bulanin, ‘Drevniaia Rus
’, in Iu. D. Levin (ed.), Istoriia russkoi perevodnoi khudozhestvennoi literatury. Drevniaia Rus
. XVIII vek. Tom I, Proza (St Petersburg, 1995), pp. 17–73, esp. 17–25. Bulanin, ‘Drevniaia Rus
’, pp. 20, 22; also Pseudo-Dionysios, De divinis nominibus, IV.11: ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Corpus dionysiacum I; Patristische Texte und Studien 33; Berlin, New York, 1990), 156.2–13; English translation by Colm Luibheid with Paul Rorem in Pseudo-Dionysios, The Complete Works (London, 1987), p. 80. Pseudo-Dionysios, De divinis nominibus, ed. Suchla, 156.1–2.

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but the soul, once moved to intelligent understanding and to some apprehension of the Divine, no longer needs the senses, hence no longer needs words, which are in themselves inadequate to express their own true meanings.111 Paradoxically, therefore, the statement on the equi-valence of words one to another serves an argument on the limitations of words in general. Fourthly, Pseudo-Dionysios creates a distinctive additional context for the adjective homodynamos: it refers to all the unsaid words which might be equi-valent to those which have been said.112 In the Slavonic prefaces the idea of equi-valence is distinguished from the idea of a consistent, one-to-one relationship between a word in one language and a word in another language. The one-to-one relationship produces the ‘true word’, the ‘exact word’, the ‘authentic word’ (istovoe slovo, istovyi glagol ). Ideally the ‘true word’ in translations would be semantically the same as the word in the original language, and where this is perceived to be the case the two languages are regarded as, in effect, identical in all but sound:113 ‘where Greek and Slavonic are in accord with one another, we have rendered with the same word’, claims the author of the preface in the Macedonian Folium.114 The issue of ‘equi-valence’ arises when the ‘true word’ is not perceived to be identical with its original. Thus the issue of equi-valence does not relate to synonymy within a language (as in Pseudo-Dionysios), or to direct synonymy across languages (as denied in Ecclesiasticus and perhaps implied in Pseudo-Dionysios). Equivalence here becomes an issue and an option when the ‘true word’ – the existence of which is not questioned – does not convey the ‘true sense’ (istovyi razum): ‘on occasion we have abandoned the true word and have rendered the true and equi-valent sense, for we translate these books for their sense and not merely for the sake of the true words.’115 Neither John the Exarch nor his anonymous colleague indicate what ‘true words’ are, but they do give examples of what they are not: of types of non-identity between Greek and Slavonic, when translators are forced to resort to equi-valence. Their examples can be split into two categories: one is at the crossroads between semantics and aesthetics, and the other is morphological. On the semantic or aesthetic issue: ‘a word may be 111 112

113 114 115

Pseudo-Dionysios, De divinis nominibus, ed. Suchla, 156.16–157.3; cf. 230.6–8; transl. Luibheid, pp. 80–1; cf. 130. See his concluding remarks to De divinis nominibus XIII.4, ed. Suchla, 230.15; also ibid., 208.6; and likewise the concluding remarks to Pseudo-Dionysios, De coelesti hierarchia, ed. Gunter ¨ Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter (Corpus dionysiacum II; Patristische Texte und Studien 36; Berlin, New York, 1991), 59.12; transl. Luibheid, pp. 115, 130, 191 (although Luibheid misses the lexical repetition). See Thomson, ‘Sensus or proprietas verborum’, p. 676. Vaillant, ‘La pr´eface’, 8, lines 25–8. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 26.

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elegant in one language but inelegant in another, ugly in one language but not ugly in another, respectable in one language but disreputable in another’.116 These are standard problems of cultural semantics, familiar to translators everywhere, but perhaps especially acute when the translators are themselves involved in trying to create the norms of written expression rather than simply following a well-established idiom. The examples of morphological difficulties, however, bring into sharper focus what might have been meant by the ‘true words’. John the Exarch continues: ‘a noun may be masculine in one language but feminine in another; thus in Greek batrakhos, potamos, but in Slavonic zhaba, reka; or the nouns thalassa, hemera, anatole, feminine in Greek but masculine in Slavonic – more, d
n
, v

stok

.’117 Apparently the preservation of the ‘true word’ implied the preservation of morphological gender. And of number: the Macedonian Folium, here with the remnants of a slightly fuller list, adds that ‘in Greek we say panta tauta [‘all these things’; neuter plural], in Slavonic v
se se [neuter singular]’.118 And of word-length: ‘where the [Greek] word was longer [than the ‘true word’ in Slavonic] we have rendered it with another word so as not to depart from the sense’.119 To the modern eye this is literalism taken to grotesque extremes; or, more precisely, it is an apology for the translator’s inability to observe a consistent literalism, for the impossibility of translating entirely with ‘true words’ which would correspond to their originals in form (number, morphological gender, length) as well as in meaning. In fact it was not so unusual for medieval or late-classical translators to fret over the maintenance of morphological categories such as gender, number and word-length. Aquila, translating the Old Testament into Greek in the second century, had tried to preserve both gender and word-length,120 and Slavonic translations themselves quite often reflect similar concerns.121 More fundamental, however, is the translators’ general approach to the nature of their 116 117 118 120

121

Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, p. 24; cf. Vaillant, ‘La pr´eface’, 9, lines 2–5v. Sadnik (ed.), Des hl. Johannes von Damaskus, Ekthesis akribes, pp. 24, 26. On the notion that more was masculine, see below, n. 120. 119 Vaillant, ‘La pr´ Vaillant, ‘La pr´eface’, 9, lines 9–13v. eface’, 8, lines 27–9. E. N. Gordeeva, ‘Makedonskii listok – istochnik Prologa Ioanna Ekzarkha Bolgarskogo’, Byzantinoslavica 60 (1999), 539–54, argues plausibly that John the Exarch’s reference to ‘sea’ is not drawn from his own experience as a Slav translator but is a conventional example reflecting a Greek text on the problems of translation from Hebrew. See e.g. the examples in K. Trost, ‘Die ubersetzungstheoretischen ¨ Konzeptionen des cyrillischen-mazedonischen Blattes und des Prologs zum Bogoslovie des Exarchen Joann’, in J. Holthusen, E. Koschmieder and R. Olesch et al. (eds.), Slavistische Studien zu VII. Internationalen Slavistenkongress in Warschau 1973 (Munich, 1973), pp. 497–525.

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task. They assume that a translator works by focusing on how to render individual words, or, at best, small syntactic units. Broadly speaking, the prefaces and colophons imply a word-by-word approach to translation, or at any rate an approach which focuses on small semantic units (which might include noun + adjective or noun + verb combinations) rather than large semantic structures.122 The word-by-word approach implied by the prefaces and colophons is matched – again, broadly speaking – by the practice of early Slavonic translators. Sometimes scholars distinguish between ‘free’ and ‘literal’ Slavonic translations, but the distinction lies mainly on the balance of choices between ‘true words’ and ‘equi-valence’ within the word-by-word (or small unit by small unit) sequence. At the formal level the kinds of variant might include, for example, the use of a noun in an oblique case in place of a prepositional phrase, or the use of an adjective in place of a noun in the genitive case.123 At the lexical level translators could be remarkably consistent in maintaining a one-to-one relationship between particular Greek and Slavonic words: that is, they stuck to the ‘true word’. But they could also choose different Slavonic words, probably (at least in some cases) on grounds of contextual ‘equi-valence’ rather than inattention or intra-lingual synonymy.124 In a modern context if we say a translation is ‘free’ we imply that quite substantial structures – up to and beyond full sentences – may be recast. Medieval translators worked within a narrower concept of the discipline, even if some of their generalisations sound familiar. The translators had to believe that equi-valent translation was, fundamentally, possible. If God could not speak authentically via Slavonic, then their entire enterprise lost its justification. Although they cannot quite confront the idea that all complex translation involves interpretation and semantic change, nevertheless they acknowledged both the predicament inherent in their task (such that they had to make awkward choices) and their own fallibility.125 Yet we cannot account for translators’ 122 123

124

125

See Bulanin, ‘Drevniaia Rus
’, pp. 25–32: arguing that the word-by-word approach was not a ‘theory’ but a ‘doctrine’. See e.g. E. M. Vereshchagin, Istoriia vozniknoveniia drevnego obshcheslavianskogo literaturnogo iazyka. Perevodcheskaia deiatel
nost
Kirilla i Mefodiia i ikh uchenikov (Moscow, 1997), pp. 12–23; A. A. Alekseev, Tekstologiia slavianskoi Biblii (St Petersburg, 1999), pp. 77–80. See e.g. C. M. MacRobert, ‘Translation is Interpretation: Lexical Variation in the Translation of the Psalter from Greek into Slavonic up to the 15th Century’, ZSP 53 (1993), 254–84. On errors see e.g. Francis J. Thomson, ‘Towards a Typology of Errors in Slavonic Translations’, in E. Farrugia, R. Taft, G. Piovesana (eds.), Christianity Among the Slavs. The Heritage of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Acts of the International Congress held on the

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choices in linguistic or theoretical terms alone. Equi-valent translation was supposed to convey the ‘true meaning’ (istovyi razum), but meaning is not immanent in language. There is always an implied context of communication. The translators focus on internal communication, from the Greek original to themselves as readers of the Greek and writers of Slavonic; but their Slavonic text must also be directed outwards to an implied audience or readership. For example, one might perhaps expect missionary translations, for an untutored audience, to veer towards the more explanatory end of the scale of equi-valence, while a translation aimed primarily at monks might expect the audience to cope better with the ‘true word’. Thus the very earliest translations are sometimes held up as models of clarity, while later translators, writing for a more experienced audience, are sometimes accused of precisely the kind of stilted and in places apparently nonsensical over-literalism which John’s preface seems to reject. Here, too, we should be wary of assuming uniform criteria, and of imposing modern criteria. None of the prefaces and colophons suggest that reading should be easy.126 Articulate discussion of translation, like articulate discussion of the alphabet, survives mainly from the South Slav milieu. East Slav manuscripts transmit some of the discussion, but native East Slav writers of our period add nothing to it. East Slav sources, of course, celebrate the translation of books, alongside the invention of Slavonic letters, but do not appear to dwell on translation as a practical or theoretical issue until a much later age. This silence could be a mere accident of survival, and in itself it adds nothing to the arguments as to whether the Rus did or did not produce translations of their own. However, the balance of surviving sources does add to the general impression, formed also on other grounds, of a broad contrast between bilingual Bulgarian bookmen with an immediate technical and intellectual interest in the nature and emergence of Slavonic writing, and Rus bookmen who celebrated their Cyrillo-Methodian heritage but took its philological specifics somewhat for granted. The issue of ‘equi-valence’ is only relevant to the producer of a translation, or to those who might wish to collate a translation with the source language. For most consumers – those operating within the ready-formed Slavonic tradition – the relevant issue is not ‘equivalence’ but simply ‘valence’, the ‘force’, or meaning, of the received writings.

126

Eleventh Centenary of the Death of St Methodius. Rome, October 8–11, 1985 (OCA 231; Rome, 1988), pp. 351–380. On reading see also below, p. 225. Note that the context-free citation from PseudoDionysios might appear to advocate the virtues of simplicity and accessibility, but in fact the writings of Pseudo-Dionysios are to the modern eye notoriously convoluted and obscure.

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‘Writers’ Answer the following multiple-choice question: Roughly how many named East Slav writers are known from the period up to c.1300? (i) about a couple of dozen; (ii) at least a couple of hundred; (iii) perhaps a couple of couples. Or, to put the question in another way: which of the following is the most accurate list of named East Slav writers from the period up to c.1300? (i) Daniil (the Pilgrim); Daniil ‘the Exile’; Dobrynia Iadreikovich; Efrem; Feodosii of the Caves; Foma; Georgii of Zarub; German Voiata; Iakov; Ilarion; Ioann of Novgorod; Kirik of Novgorod; Kirill of Turov; Klim Smoliatich; Moisei; Nestor; Nifont; Petr Borislavich; Polikarp; Serapion of Vladimir; Simeon of Tver; Simon; Vasilii; Vladimir Monomakh. (ii) Afanas; Andrei; Andronik; Aleksa; Aleksei; Anna; Anna; Anton; Avimia; Avraamii; Avram; Bogsha; Boriata; Boris; Borz; Bratilo; Bratiata; Chernek; Daliata; Daniil; Daniil; Daniil; Daniil; David; Dedila; Demka; Dmitr; Dmitr; Dobrilo; Dobroshka; Dobrynia; Domachko; Domaneg; Domazhir; Domka; Domoslav; Dristiv; Droben; Drochila; Drochka; Efrem; Efrem; Efrem; Evsevii; Feodor; Feodor; Fedorets; Fedorko; Feodos; Feodosii; Feodosii; Flar; Foka; Foma; Georgii; Georgii; Georgii; Georgii; Gerasim; German; Giurgii; Glebko; Glebko; Goroden; Gostiata; Gostil; Grigorii; Grigorii; Iakim; Iakov; Iakov; Iakov; Iakov; Iakov; Ianka; Iarila; Ignat; Ilarion; Ilia; Ilmer; Ioakim; Ioann; Ioann; Ioann; Ioann; Ioann; Ioann; Ioann; Iov; Iov; Ivan; Ivan; Ivan; Ivan; Ivan; Ivanko; Izosima; Kharitaniia; Khoten; Khotets; Khotets; Khrestil; Khudych; Kirik; Kirik; Kirill; Kirill; Kirill; Klim; Klisha; Kokhan; Konstantin; Ksniatin; Kulotka; Kulotka; Kuzma; Kuzma; Lavrentii; Lazor; Levkii; Liudota; Maksim; Maneil; Matfei; Mestiata; Mikhail; Mikhail; Mikhal; Mikula; Mina; Mina; Mirslav; Moisei; Moisei; Negl; Nestor; Nezhata; Nezhka; Neznanka; Nifont; Nosko; Olisei; Onfim; Oreshko; Petr; Petr; Petr; Petr; Petr; Petrok; Pishchan; Pobratoslav; Polikarp; Polochko; Proksha; Putiata; Putko; Putsha; Radko; Radko; Radko; Rozneg; Savatiia; Savva; Semiun; Semko; Serafian; Serapion; Sezhir; Simeon; Simon; Smolig; Solmir; Sozont; Stanimir; Stavr; Stefan; Stefan; Stepan; Stepan; Stoineg; Sudilo; Sudisha; Timofei; Torchin; Tudorok; Tuna; Tverdiata; Tverdiata; Tverdila; Tvorimir; Tvorimir;

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Upir; Vasil; Vasilii; Vasilii; Vasilii; Viacheslav; Vladimir; Vlas; Voineg; Vorishko; Voron; Zakhariia; Zavid; Zavid; Zavid; Zhaden; Zhadko; Zhiriach; Zhiriata; Zhiriata; Zhirko; Zhirovit; Zhiznomir. (iii) Fedorets; Fedorko; Grechin; Zakharii. The choice is too easy, and too difficult: each of the answers is both correct and incorrect, depending on how one interprets the wording of the question. List (i) presents names of ‘writers’ in the sense most likely to occur first to a modern audience: named authors, people who produce written ‘works’ of some substance, people whose creations constitute that subcategory of written culture which we tend to label ‘literature’. List (ii) presents names of ‘writers’ in the literal (rather than literary) sense: people who wrote. It imposes no hierarchy, and includes graffitoscratchers alongside hagiographers, birch-bark memo-jotters alongside sermonists and chroniclers. List (iii) presents names of ‘writers’ in the only sense properly sanctioned by the sources: people who are explicitly labelled ‘writer’ ( pisets). The multiple-choice question plays a cheap trick with vocabulary, but the very ease of the trick should also serve as a warning, a reminder of how easy it is to filter the past through the potentially distorting prism or our own terminology. ‘To write’ ( pisati ) was to engage in activity which resulted in the production of graphic signs: to depict, or to cause to be depicted, hence to copy, to note down, to paint, to compose, whether in one’s own hand or by instructing others. All our three lists include people who ‘wrote’. However, to engage in an activity is not the same as to be labelled and defined by the fact of that engagement. The verb is vastly more common than the noun. ‘Writers’ in list (i) – those whom we would most naturally label as writers – take the physical act for granted. Their comments on their own activity (when they comment at all) focus on the manner, the context or the content. ‘We do not write for the ignorant’, Metropolitan Ilarion flatters his audience, ‘but for them that have feasted to fulfilment on the sweetness of books’.127 ‘You write so as to glory yourself ’, complains Foma to Metropolitan Klim Smoliatich.128 Writing in this sense should be for the glory of God, not that of the ‘writer’, and the commonest form of authorial statement is the ‘modesty topos’ or ‘humility topos’, the writer’s assertion of his own unworthiness and inability. ‘My dumb mind toils, poor in its understanding’, wails Kirill of Turov, ‘unable to express the words in their proper order; like a blind bowman held to ridicule, unable to hit the target’; ‘Do not rail at my coarseness, brethren, 127 128

BLDR I, p. 28; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 4. Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie, p. 124; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 31.

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that my manner of writing is so ill-figured.’ ‘I entreat you, beloved’, begs Nestor in his Life of Feodosii of the Caves, ‘not to despise my crudity’. Abbot Daniil, ‘the worst among all monks’, anxiously assures us that ‘I have described (ispisakhom) this journey [to Jerusalem] and these holy places not elevating myself or boasting of the journey as if I had done something good on this journey. Not at all. I have done nothing good’.129 Safest of all is to deny that the writer is really the writer. Our category (i) is defined by a modern notion of creativity, but personal creativity is the very last thing which these ‘writers’ would wish to claim for themselves: ‘I have interpreted these things not according to my own invention, but from Holy Writ. This is not a homily of my own.’ ‘I have assembled all these words from books, not from myself.’ ‘Like a bee that descends on the various flowers and collects [for] its honeycomb, so I, gathering the verbal sweetness and sense from many books, have assembled them together.’130 Where books were not available, the ‘writer’ notes down the words of other people: ‘the life of our blessed father Feodosii from his youth until he came to the cave was related by his mother to a brother named Feodor, who was cellarer under our father Feodosii. I heard all these things first-hand from him and wrote them down (vpisakh) for the recollection of all those reading them’.131 ‘In this year [1106]’, we read in the Primary Chronicle, ‘Ian [Vyshatich] passed away . . . from whom I heard many discourses which I wrote down in this chronicle.’132 Where nobody else can take responsibility, the ‘writer’ may be forced back on the evidence in front of him: ‘I have written down all that I saw with my own eyes.’133 Or, as an alternative to self-abasement, he may practise selfdenial: most chronicle-writing is entirely anonymous. The one thing the writer must not do is claim to invent, to create, to indulge in innovation or originality. The writer is the one who puts things together, the compiler or com-poser. Once established and approved in retrospect, named writers can be cited as the prime utterers of authoritative words, but in selfpresentation the writer/com-poser is more likely to claim that he is, in effect, just a conscientious reader. The humility topos is, of course, merely a device. We need not assume that literary decorum is always an accurate mirror of true feeling. To illustrate from quite another context: until quite recently, writers of letters 129

130 131 132

I. P. Eremin, Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo (Monuments of Early Russian Literature 2; Berkeley, 1989), pp. 34, 36; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. 56, 61; BLDR I, p. 354; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 35; BLDR IV, p. 26. Eremin, Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo, pp. 40, 54; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. 70, 96; BLDR IV, p. 282. BLDR I, p. 368; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 45. 133 BLDR IV, p. 26. PVL I, p. 186; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 203.

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to The Times newspaper would routinely, by generic custom, sign off by declaring to the editor that they ‘have the honour to remain, sir, your humble and obedient servant’. Rarely if ever were such correspondents in fact the editor’s servants, nor had they ever been so (hence they could not ‘remain’ so), nor were they necessarily humble or obedient (the letters were just as likely to reveal them as arrogant and obstreperous), nor would they have regarded servile status as an ‘honour’. Tokens of piety do not depend on factual accuracy in order to be authentic. Doubtless the epistolary formulae in The Times provide interesting material for the historian of social attitudes, but an over-earnest literal reading would be plain wrong. Daniil the Exile’s modesty carries about as much conviction as the after-dinner clich´e ‘unaccustomed as I am to public speaking’, surrounded as it is by preening self-promotion: ‘I have written this, fleeing from the face of my destitution . . . Though I be poor in clothing, yet I am rich in intelligence . . . In thought I could soar like an eagle through the air.’134 The author of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, exceptionally, stresses that he will not follow the manner of his predecessor Boian.135 Entertainment and confident display were perhaps better appreciated at court than in the monastery, but such exceptions are notable mainly for their rarity, and they do not dent the predominantly ecclesiastical and monastic norms of parchment literacy. The humility topos is specific to the culture of parchment manuscripts, extending to the writers-out of copies, who make up part of list (ii).136 While com-posers reap more retrospective prestige, com-position was an activity for a very small minority, and the vast majority of parchment manuscripts were – or were meant to be – copies. The task of com-posers and copyists was far more complex than that of other ‘writers’ in list (ii): their texts are longer, the scope for error was therefore greater and – crucially – they operated in a cultural medium where error mattered, at least in principle. The ‘writer’ had a responsibility under the wider authority of Writ, and any deviation, deliberate or accidental, was hazardous. The problem was that fully exact copying is virtually unattainable. No two manuscripts are completely identical in every particular. To copy is to change, changes range from trivial details of orthography right through to significant textual corruption or alteration, and there is not always a clear boundary between error and attempted correction, between text-editing and what one might anachronistically term copy-editing. The humility 134 136

135 BLDR IV, p. 254. BLDR IV, pp. 268, 276. For a thorough account of colophon formulae for the period see L. V. Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi XI–XIV vekov na pergamennykh kodeksakh (Moscow, 1998), pp. 74–104; cf. Stoliarova’s full edition of the twenty-four scribal colophons (whether originals or copies) which she dates to before 1300: ibid., pp. 274–321.

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topos ensures a sense of decorum, for a decent copyist would be well aware that even his best efforts were more than likely to fall short of the ideal. Most ‘writers’ of manuscript books in early Rus fall somewhere on a scale which ranges from conscientious copyist at one end to active composer at the other end. Divisions along this scale are not always sharply defined. One conscientious copyist has a lapse of concentration leading to a serious muddle in the text; another copyist conscientiously preserves the muddled words; a third conscientiously (but often mistakenly) intervenes to explain or undo the muddle; a fourth conscientiously interpolates a passage from a different work which clarifies or supplements his text; a fifth takes this composite text and copies it into a collection of similar texts. Modern ‘textology’ tries to unravel and assess the stages of transmission, but the writers-out of manuscript books do not present their activity in such terms. Although copyists share the humility topos with com-posers, they also have something in common with non-parchment writers in list (ii): a tendency to bring to the fore the physical fact and act of writing. Copyists may fret about their unworthiness and about the possibility of error, just as their marginalia convey in less reverential form the drudgery and difficulty of their task (‘Efrem, don’t let your mind wander’, ‘Efrem, you sinner, don’t be lazy’),137 but the explicit message of a copyist’s colophon in a parchment manuscript is to record the fact of the manuscript having been written. Notwithstanding the humility topos, the writer does get the chance to insert his own name in a prestigious setting. Most graffiti (apart from votive or commemorative graffiti) are strictly gratuitous, irresponsible, by nature indecorous (even if not indecent). The graffitist’s act of writing is the very opposite of humility. One of the most common types of graffito, is the plain self-referential statement of the writing’s own creation, ‘X wrote [this]’, or occasionally in a more emphatic version ‘X wrote [this] writing’.138 Birch-bark letters are orientated more towards the textual message than the act of producing it, but self-abasement similarly has no part in the writers’ epistolary etiquette. List (iii) includes those named individuals who are actually designated by the word ‘writer’ ( pisets) in the sources and the immediately striking feature of the list is its extreme brevity: just four names. The word pisets (and associated vocabulary) is not in itself rare. It occurs in Church Slavonic translations, in citations therefrom, and from time to time as an 137 138

L. V. Stoliarova, Svod zapisei pistsov, khudozhnikov i perepletchikov drevnerusskikh pergamennykh kodeksov XI–XIV vekov (Moscow, 2000), pp. 95–7 (nos. 82–5). See above, chapter 1, n. 249; also T. V. Rozhdestvenskaia, Drevnerusskie nadpisi na stenakh khramov. Novye istochniki XI–XV vv. (St Petersburg, 1992), pp. 81–3.

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anonymous term in native sources.139 The rarity is in the application of the term as a specific label for the activity or function of a named individual. And to complicate matters, the four individuals in list (iii) were not engaged in identical activities. Zakharii was a copyist of manuscript books. He wrote out a Psalter for a certain Princess Marina in 1296, and he refers to a Gospel Lectionary which he had been commissioned to copy for the abbot of a monastery.140 Fedorets and Fedorko wrote out documents for their prince, also at the end of the thirteenth century.141 But the pisets Grechin was a ‘writer’ of sacred pictures.142 Thus the noun pisets still bore the semantic range of its parent verb ( pisati ). Though we would tend to render it as ‘scribe’, it had not crystallised into a specific occupational or social term. Many people wrote, few were ‘writers’. In secular life, the scribe as a designated functionary begins to appear sporadically in the latter part of our period: the scribe who accompanies the collector of dues, as specified in the ‘long’ version of Russkaia Pravda; the princely scribes (Fedorets and Fedorko) mentioned in documents from Smolensk and Vladimir-in-Volynia in the 1280s; ‘Dovmont’s scribe’ who wrote out the agreement between Iakim and Teshata in Pskov between 1266 and 1299.143 These are significant beginnings, but the scale of formally designated scribal activity is not remotely comparable to that of contemporary Byzantium,144 or England, or Rome, or indeed later Muscovy. The scribe was not the guardian of the voice of civil authority, nor the necessary intermediary between ruler and ruled. In ecclesiastical life the writer-out of parchment manuscripts is of course a necessary intermediary between the word and its receivers. He is also privileged, in the sense that convention allows him to state – in a colophon – his own role in the production of a book, much as the craftsman might scratch his name on the base of a goblet or gouge it into a mould. But despite 139

140 141 142

143 144

For pisets and related words ( pisal
nik, pisatel
, pisatel
nik, pischii ) see SRIaz XI–XVII vv., XV, pp. 50–6; ‘many scribes’ collectively, see PVL I, p. 102; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 137 (Iaroslav gathered ‘many scribes’); BLDR V, p. 34 (Avraamii of Smolensk copied out texts, ‘some in his own hand, some through many scribes’); Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 140; in citation, see e.g. BLDR IV, p. 268 (from the Psalter, cited by Daniil the Exile). ‘Zakharii the Scribe’, in Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, no. 24 (p. 316). See above, pp. 180–1. In Novgorod at the end of the twelfth century: NPL, p. 42. Note that the archbishop ‘wrote out’ the church (ispisa – i.e. he commissioned the painting), while the ‘writer’ (or ‘depicter’) was Grechin. See above, pp. 33, 179, 182. An awareness of Byzantine practices is reflected in the Primary Chronicle: the preamble to the Byzantino-Rus treaty of 971 states that the Emperor John Tsimiskes ‘ordered a pisets to write all Sviatoslav’s speeches on parchment. The envoy began to speak all the speeches, and the pisets began to write . . . ’: PVL I, pp. 51–2; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 89.

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this responsibility and privilege, even manuscript copyists do not seem to have acquired status as a homogeneous group. Insofar as one can judge from the scanty information which they provide about themselves, their self-designations were based mainly on their ecclesiastical office or status: priest, deacon, sacristan, presbyter, monk, priest’s son, even ex-priest.145 That is to say, though they engaged in scribal activity, not one of them defines or labels himself primarily as a ‘writer’ until (again) the very end of the thirteenth century.146 Access to the technical skills was relatively open, but – or perhaps in consequence – those who possessed the skills did not constitute a privileged or even a clearly identifiable caste or profession. The late emergence of formal scribal terminology is consistent with the late engagement with documentary habits in administration. Writing about learning: ‘bookmen’, ‘philosophers’ ‘Scribe’ is not the only word with misleading social and cultural connotations. The vocabulary of ‘letters’ in general is slippery. Just as in English to be ‘literate’ (or ‘illiterate’) in something can imply a range of competencies, from a basic knowledge of the technical skills to a mastery of the material produced through the use of those skills, so in other languages and across languages. In Latin, litteratus and illitteratus span a similar range, as (less symmetrically) do grammatikos and agrammatos in Greek.147 The Greek grapheus (‘one who writes/depicts’) means primarily a painter, then a scribe or functionary. The Latin scriba is a public official, closer to the Greek grammateus (one whose job is to do with letters). Extending the sense of being ‘lettered’ from the professional to the learned, the ‘scribes’ (scribae, grammateis) of the New Testament doublet ‘Scribes and Pharisees’ (or ‘Scribes of the Pharisees’)148 were no mere professional scribblers and copyists but men skilled in the knowledge and interpretation of the Law.149 And in Slavonic this kind of ‘scribe’ 145

146

147 148 149

N. N. Rozov, Kniga Drevnei Rusi. XI–XIV vv. (Moscow, 1977), pp. 95–108, 154–5 argues for a high proportion of laymen; see, however, Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, pp. 79, 87–8, 96; also Stoliarova, Iz istorii knizhnoi kul
tury russkogo srednevekovogo goroda XI–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1999), pp. 13–19. Cf., however, the impersonal phrase in the colophon of Konstantin-Dobrilo in a Gospel copied by him in 1164: ‘as the bridegroom delights in the bride, so the scribe [pisets] delights when he sees the final leaf ’: Stoliarova, Drevnerusskie nadpisi, p. 293 (no. 10). In meanings of litteratus and illitteratus see e.g. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307 (London, 1979), pp. 177–85. See e.g. Mark ii.15, vii.1 Luke v.30; Acts xxiii.9, etc. See e.g. James Hastings, A Dictionary of the Bible IV (Edinburgh, 1902), pp. 420–3; Bruce Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York, Oxford, 1993), p. 684–5. Cf. the paean to the learned grammateus in Sirach 38:24–39:1. On the authority of such interpreters see M. D. Goodman, ‘Texts, Scribes

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becomes not a pisets (one who writes), but a knizhnik.150 The knizhnik is one who knows his knigi. Knigi, both in Slavonic translations and in some native works, are ‘letters’ (rendering Greek grammata or graphe), but eventually and more commonly knigi are the large agglomerations of letters put together to form ‘books’.151 The knizhnik is therefore litteratus in the learned sense: a man of letters, a bookman. The bookman has mastered the study of books, or book-learning (uchenie knizhnoe). The books that he studies are above all the books, in Greek ta biblia, Scripture. The range of books might also extend to a certain amount of Biblical commentary, homiletics and hagiography, but not to the literature and sciences that were part of a Byzantine curriculum of higher learning.152 Here at last, by contrast with the analysis of writing or translation, was a borrowed theme which Rus men of letters could take up and develop with enthusiasm. Insofar as book-learning was, in a sense, synonymous with authoritative Christianity, it too was initially intrusive: according to the Primary Chronicle, when Vladimir Sviatoslavich recruited children from distinguished families to study book-learning, their mothers, who were not yet firm in the faith, ‘mourned for them as for the dead’.153 Yet book-learning became self-evidently central to the value-system of those who were engaged in book culture, and eulogies to bookmen and book-learning are among the prominent commonplaces of chronicles, sermons and saints’ Lives.154 The first requirement from the bookman was, naturally, knowledge: he had to know what the books said. But knowledge in itself was not enough, not in itself a guarantee of wisdom or true understanding. Nikita, a monk of the Caves monastery, knew the Old Testament so well that ‘nobody could dispute with him’, yet his knowledge was corrupt. The abbot of a monastery in Smolensk was ‘skilled in the divine books . . . so that nobody dared to argue about books in front of him’, yet he failed to recognise the qualities of a saint in

150

151 152

153

154

and Power in Roman Judaea’, in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 99–108. On knizhnik (or knigchii ) as the standard early Slavonic rendition of grammateus see Irina Liusen [Lysen], Grechesko-staroslavianskii konkordans k drevneishim spiskam slavianskogo perevoda evangelii (codices Marianus, Zographensis, Assemanianus, Ostromiri) (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis; Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 36; Uppsala, 1995), p. 64. See e.g. Sreznevskii, Materialy, I, cols. 1391–7; A. S. L
vov, Leksika ‘Povesti vremennykh let
’ (Moscow, 1975), pp. 330–4. On the this and the following two paragraphs see, in more detail, Simon Franklin, ‘Booklearning and Bookmen in Kievan Rus
: A Survey of an Idea’, HUS 12–13 (1988– 9; publ. 1990), 830–48. PVL I, p. 81; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 117. For a general study of book-learning in this wider sense – in effect a study of accommodations between paganism and Christianity – see M. S. Kiseleva, Uchenie knizhnoe: tekst i kontekst drevnerusskoi knizhnosti (Moscow, 2000). Franklin, ‘Booklearning and Bookmen’, 833, n. 12.

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his own monastery. Klim Smoliatich, metropolitan of Kiev in the middle of the twelfth century, scornfully rebuked a critic by telling him that diligent rote-learning was all very well, but one must ‘consider carefully, and understand’.155 The true wisdom of books was not always plain for all to see, knowledge of their words alone could still be a form of ignorance, and unbalanced or eccentric erudition was downright dangerous. The real skill of the bookman thus lay in his ability to read: to read properly, truthfully, to discern what lay behind the surface of the letters. True reading is an act of piety requiring proper spiritual preparation: ‘when you sit down to read the words of God, first pray to Him that He will open the eyes of your heart’.156 Once the ‘eyes of the heart’ are opened, we can read according to the exhortation of Kirill of Turov: ‘let us not merely speak what is written, running over it with the tongue; but rather let us discern and absorb’.157 To absorb takes time, and one reading may not be enough: ‘Do not try to read through quickly until the next chapter, but understand what the Scripture and the words mean, turning to one chapter even three times.’158 The guardians and intermediaries of the written word (of parchment literacy) are therefore urged to exploit precisely the opportunities provided by the technology of writing, by the existence of the word as object: to ‘listen’ in their own time (instead of being bound to the speaker’s time), to look, to ‘investigate in detail’,159 to discern, to consider, to repeat. The encouragement of book-learning was not, however, an open-ended invitation to pursue and investigate written words at will. Beyond booklearning, overlapping with it only in part, lay ‘philosophy’. In Byzantine writing, ‘philosophy’ and related words ( philosophia; philosophos; the verb philosophein etc.) had an extraordinarily wide range of meanings, many of which were incompatible with each other.160 155 156

157 158

159 160

BLDR IV, p. 394; Heppell, Paterik, p. 144; BLDR V, p. 36; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 141; Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie, p. 133; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 47. William R. Veder, ‘Three Old Slavic Discourses on Reading’, in M. Colucci, G. dell’ Agata and H. Goldblatt (eds.), in Studia slavica mediaevalia et humanistica Riccardo Picchio dicata, (Rome, 1986), p. 724. Eremin, Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo, p. 33; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 55. Izbornik 1076 goda, ed. S. I. Kotkov (Moscow, 1965), p. 152; transl. William R. Veder, The Edificatory Prose of Kievan Rus’ (HLEULET VI; Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 3; see also Veder, ‘Three Old Slavic Discourses’, pp. 717–30. The phrase is vigorously defended by Metropolitan Klim Smoliatich: see Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie, p. 125; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 32. See A.-M. Malingrey, ‘Philosophia’. Etude d’un groupe de mots dans la litt´erature grecque, des Pr´esocratiques au IVe si`ecle apres J.-C. (Paris, 1961); F. Dolger, ¨ ‘Zur Bedeutung von philosophos und philosophia in byzantinischer Zeit’, in the same author’s, Byzanz und die europ¨aische Staatenwelt (Ettal, 1953), pp. 197–208; cf. G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), pp. 1481–3.

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‘Philosophy’ could refer to classical thought or to Christian thought, to paganism or to monasticism, to piety or to heresy, to biblical exegesis or to the study of secular writers. A ‘philosopher’ might be involved in any of these pursuits; or, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ‘philosopher’ might be a professional title, a job description, referring to a teacher at the Patriarchal School in Constantinople. Most of the meanings of ‘philosophy’ are represented in the Greek originals of texts which were translated into Slavonic, but in the Slavonic versions the ‘philosophical’ presence is somewhat diluted. This is because of the methods used by translators. A single Greek form ( philosoph-) could be rendered into the host language in three different ways: it could be transliterated ( filosof-), or calqued (that is, rendered with a compound word whose components translate the components of the original; hence liubomudr-, mudroliub-; ‘wisdom-love’); or it could be translated, rendered as a non-compound word with a Slavonic root (usually mudr-; ‘wisdom’). Translators used all three of these methods, without any obvious general system or consistency, with the result that only some parts of the relevant passages retained a marked link with Greek philosoph-, while other parts became assimilated to Slavonic wisdom-vocabulary.161 Nevertheless, even the residue – the uses of the philosoph-based forms in transliteration – preserves something of the range of Byzantine meanings. In native Rus usage, words based on the transliterated form filosof- are not frequent. The connotations are still quite varied,162 yet there is consistency of a kind: words based on the form filosof- almost always imply non-native qualities. Such words seem to carry connotations of a certain ‘foreignness’. Most obviously, the filosof is usually identified (whether with approval or with disapproval) as a foreigner, as someone from outside. The Primary Chronicle refers to ‘philosophers’ who advised the Byzantine Emperor Michael III, to the two ‘philosophers’ from Thessalonike (Cyril – regularly known as ‘the philosopher’ – and Methodios), to the ancient magician Apollonios of Tyana who ‘had philosophical skills’, and to the ‘philosopher’ who came from ‘the Greeks’ to explain Christianity to Prince Vladimir.163 In an account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early years of the twelfth century the abbot Daniil mentions the study of ‘philosophy’ in Beirut.164 A set of seven homilies in Slavonic is attributed 161 162

163

On this and the following points see, in more detail, Simon Franklin, ‘O “filosofakh” i “filosofii” v Kievskoi Rusi’, Byzantinoslavica 53 (1992), 74–86. See M. N. Gromov, Struktura i tipologiia russkoi srednevekovoi filosofii (Moscow, 1997), pp. 41–52, listing twenty types of meaning, although many of Gromov’s examples come from a later period. 164 BLDR IV, p. 84. PVL I, pp. 22, 31, 60–1.

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to ‘Grigorii the Philosopher, who came from Constantinople’.165 Daniil the Exile implies that, if he had been taught by ‘philosophers’ (which he had not), he would have had to have travelled ‘beyond the sea’, or (in a variant) to have grown up in Athens.166 Kirill of Turov berates the ‘philosophers’ of the Council of Nicaea.167 Klim Smoliatich implies that, if he had ‘written philosophically’ (which he semi-denies), this would have involved quoting from writers ‘who were renowned in the colonnades of the Hellenes’.168 In the surviving literature only three local figures are described as ‘philosophers’. All three references occur in the Hypatian Chronicle. And all of them, in a sense, are exceptions which prove the rule, for they merely reinforce the ‘foreignness’, the unfamiliarity of the notion in an East Slav context. In the chronicle’s narrative for 1147 Klim is praised as a ‘bookman and philosopher such as there has never been in the Land of the Rus’.169 A eulogy to Prince Riurik Rostislavich in the entry for 1197 lists the prince’s many virtues, ‘and thus philosophising he would pray every day’.170 The unique verb ‘to philosophise’ (= here ‘to live virtuously’), together with other oddities of vocabulary,171 suggest that the eulogy’s author was deliberately making the passage strange, creating an aura of foreignness. Nearly a century later, in the entry for 1288, Prince Vladimir Vasilkovich is described, like Klim, as a ‘great bookman and philosopher, such as there has never been throughout the Land, nor shall be after him’.172 Here, for once, the word apparently lacks the sense of marked foreignness, perhaps because its meaning in context is limited to the safe and conventional virtue of knowing one’s Bible: Vladimir ‘spoke clearly from Scripture, for he was a great philosopher; and he was a brave and skilled huntsman.’173 A good all-rounder; nothing in excess. 165

166 167 168

169 171 172

See A. A. Turilov, ‘The Homilies on All the Days of the Week by Grigorij the Philosopher’, in Veder (ed.), Edificatory Prose, pp. xli–liii; on the status of the heading see Simon Franklin, ‘Annotationes Byzantino-Russicae’, in GENNADIOS. K 70-letiiu akademika G.G. Litavrina (Moscow, 1999), esp. pp. 226–30. M. Colucci and A. Danti, Daniil Zatoˇcnik, Slovo e Molenie (Studia historica et philologica IV, Sectio Slavica 2; Florence, 1977), pp. 163, 174. PSRL II, cols. 340, 913; Eremin, Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo, p. 87; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 152. Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie, p. 124; Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. lviii–lxiv, 31; for another, more conventional denial of a ‘philosophical’ training see the account of the saint’s childhood in the Life of Feodosii of the Caves: BLDR I, p. 354; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 36. 170 PSRL II, col. 710. PSRL II, col. 340. The unique usage of the transliterated form gazofilakiia; the rare (in this period) calque mudroliubie. 173 PSRL II, col. 921. PSRL II, col. 913.

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The ability to read or write does not in itself figure as an accomplishment worth noting, and for most of our period there was little social scope for the emergence of the scribe ( pisets) as a member of a distinct social or professional group. Nobody who writes outside the context of parchment literacy, and nobody who com-poses within it, is ever designated a ‘writer’ in native sources. Towards the end of our period we begin to see evidence of incipient professionalisation as expressed in a terminology for scribes, as people who make the appropriate graphic signs (be they for ecclesiastical manuscripts, or for princely documents, or for church paintings) to order. Those who merely use alphabetic script for their own purposes have no special designation, do not exist conceptually as a group. The bookman, the man of letters (knizhnik) is a skilled reader and interpreter. The ability to read with discernment, and to explain that which was read, was an admired attribute, although idiosyncratic erudition could be viewed as suspect. ‘Philosophy’ could in some contexts be respected, in others condemned, but in any case it was generally presented as a quality specific to outsiders, not a normal component of, or aspiration for, native Christian culture.

6

Writing and pictures

These days culturological vocabulary lumps together almost any mode of visible expression or behaviour as ‘text’. Medieval vocabulary fuses writing and images as ‘depiction’, applying the same verbs (Greek graphein, Slavonic pisati ) to both. The medieval fusion can cause modern confusion, in an essentially meaningless worry over whether the implication is that icons are ‘written’ or that words are ‘painted’ (both, and neither). While we should be careful not to over-interpret the lexical overlap (Greeks and Slavs were well able to make lexical distinctions between images and letters if they wished), the relationship between pictures and written words is important, and multi-dimensional. Both are forms of graphic sign, and hence they jointly constitute the ‘graphic environment’ which we have hitherto characterised largely on the basis of alphabetic script. As graphic signs, script and pictures each have both visual and textual (communicative, interpretative) functions, and in their contexts and uses the two interact closely and diversely with one another. Reading pictures: (i) some traditional views ‘What writing offers to those who read it,’ Pope Gregory the Great famously declared in a letter to the Bishop of Marseilles in October 600, ‘a picture offers to the ignorant who look at it . . . in it they read who do not know letters; whence especially for gentiles a picture stands in place of reading.’1 So, pictures are letters for the unlettered, an alternative or complementary writing, a poor but useful substitute with a cognitive or educative function, valid as a means of conveying Writ to those who lack direct access to it. Compare, in the Christian East, the more directly supercilious remarks of Hypatios of Ephesos, written about sixty 1

‘quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus . . . in ipsa legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est’: Gregory the Great, Registrum epistularum, ed. Dag Norberg (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina CXLA; Turnhout, 1982), XI.23–6 (p. 874). For an exposition of Gregory’s assertions in their proper context see Celia M. Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and Image 6 (1990), 138–53.

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years earlier: ‘We ordain that [the love of God and the examples of the saints] should be celebrated in sacred writings, since, for our part, we take no pleasure whatever in any sculpture or painting. However, we permit simple folk, inasmuch as they are less than perfect, to learn such things in an introductory manner by means of sight.’2 Neither Gregory nor Hypatios mention listening. In principle ‘the ignorant’, ‘gentiles’ and ‘simple folk’ did not need to ‘know letters’ in order to have access to what was written, in that they could (and in Church they did) have Writ read to them and explained to them. Gregory and Hypatios tacitly acknowledge, however, the affinity between writing and pictures as, specifically, graphic devices. Hitherto we have stressed the importance of access to the written word, regardless of the individual’s ability to read, but seeing and listening are not the same. A word in the air is replaced by the next word and so disappears. A picture, like a word on a page, can be contemplated, examined, subjected to secondary explanation. That pictures can supplement written (or spoken) instruction hardly needs proof in any age, let alone in an age of multimedia lecture theatres and ‘virtual’ campuses on CD-ROM and the Internet. That pictures could be reckoned especially effective as a means to bring the message to ‘gentiles’ and ‘simple folk’ is evident in some of the highest-profile narratives of early Slav Christianity, as a topos of tales of Conversion. The tenth-century Byzantine chronicle of Theophanes Continuatus, in its account of the Conversion of the Bulgarians, describes how Khan Boris accepted baptism after being inspired to the fear of God by an icon of the Last Judgement.3 The same topos crops up in the tale of the Conversion of the Rus, in the Primary Chronicle’s narrative for the year 986, when a visiting Byzantine ‘philosopher’ attempts to impress Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich by showing him a picture of the Last Judgement.4 The late-twelfth-century monk and preacher Avraamii of Smolensk reportedly used icons of the Last Judgement, painted by himself, as visual adjuncts to his sermons.5 Yet Gregory and Hypatios were not merely asserting that this was one of the functions of religious pictures, nor were they simply snobs in implying that pictures were inferior to writings in a cultural hierarchy. What they – in particular Gregory – were offering was actually a defence and justification of religious pictures against people 2

3 4 5

F. Diekamp, Analecta patristica. Texte und Abhandlungen zur griechischen Patristik (OCA 117; Rome, 1938), p. 128, lines 1–5; transl. Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1986), p. 117. Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1838), IV.15 (p. 164); transl. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, pp. 190–1. PVL I, p. 74; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 110. BLDR V, p. 40; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, pp. 143–4.

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who might have wished to abolish them altogether. Religious pictures were permissible because they were a form of reading for the unlettered. By the time of the Conversions of the Slavs, after the bitter controversies surrounding iconoclasm, Orthodox churchmen had developed more robust justifications for sacred images: absolute justifications, rather than contextual excuses. To depict Christ, and to revere the depicted Christ, was to affirm the incarnation: ‘By denying that Christ can be circumscribed in the flesh, [the iconoclasts] are proved to be as impious as those who believed that God came down to earth only by way of appearance and illusion . . . If reverence towards the image of Christ is subverted, Christ’s incarnation is also subverted.’6 Pictures demanded full and reverent respect in themselves, by right, from the lettered as well as from the unlettered. But their theological significance did not render redundant their role as an effective means of communication, supplementary to writing. Indeed, by contrast with Gregory the Great or Hypatios of Ephesos, the iconophile theologian John of Damascus allows that pictures can legitimately substitute for writing among the lettered and the unlettered alike: ‘Since not everyone knows how to read or has leisure for reading, the Fathers saw fit that these things [the earthly deeds of Christ] should be represented in images . . . to serve as brief reminders.’7 Gregory’s ‘ignorant’ viewer is joined by the lettered viewer who merely lacks leisure. Pictures are permissible in order that the unlettered might read; pictures are necessary in themselves, and may be read by the lettered and the unlettered. To complete the sequence of implied readers, consider an episode from one of the most prestigious narratives in the Slavonic Christian tradition, the Vita Constantini. In 843 John VII ‘the Grammarian’, the last iconoclast patriarch, was deposed. The Emperor Michael III arranged for a dispute between John and the young ‘philosopher’, whose brief was to win the argument or else see John restored to office. The succinct polemical dialogue in the VC includes the following exchange: ‘The old man [i.e. John] said, “Why do we bow to a cross without an inscription, though there are other crosses? Yet if an icon has no inscription with the name of whose image it is, you do it no honour?” The Philosopher answered: “Every cross has an image like the cross of Christ, but icons do not all have the same image.”’8 In order to read the picture the viewer 6 7 8

Theodore of Stoudios, Epistola de cultu sacrarum imaginum, PG 99, col. 504; transl. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 174. John of Damascus, De fide Orthodoxa, IV.16: PG 94, col. 1172; transl. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 170. VC V.19–21; transl. Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 35.

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must first know what is depicted, and the way to know what is depicted is to read the caption, the inscription, the script within the picture. The potential absurdity of a reliance on captions was noted (independently of the VC ) in the anti-iconoclast Libri Carolini, which pointed out that one and the same image would be venerated if the caption said ‘Mother of God’ but reviled if the caption said ‘Venus’.9 But such dependency on the naming of a picture is only absurd if one reckons that pictures should be assessed according to their visual properties alone, and not ‘framed’ by knowledge or assumptions brought to them by the viewer. We are all probably familiar with the gallery-browsing tendency to look at the labels before looking at the pictures, and with the label’s capacity to condition a viewer’s inner state of receptivity towards a picture (whether the label says ‘Rembrandt’, or ‘School of Rembrandt’, or ‘Copied from an Original by Rembrandt’, or ‘Forgery in the Style of Rembrandt’). In the dialogue from the VC the crucial piece of non-pictorial knowledge concerns the identity of what (or who) was depicted, not the identity of the depicter, but in either case the caption or label gives assurance of authenticity and legitimises (or directs) the viewer’s response. The picture must have a label and the implied ‘reader’ ought to be lettered. None of these implied readers is real. Or all of them are real. The schematic survey serves to remind us that, although theologians and hagiographers may have their preferences, any single theory of ‘the’ implied reader of pictures is inadequate. What they share, however, is the assumption that pictures should exist for a reason, that pictures need a non-decorative, non-aesthetic justification, and that in order to be justified a picture must have some relationship to approved writing, whether or not the person who reads the picture is also equipped to read the writing. This is of course a highly reductive notion of ‘reading’ a picture (though it happens to fit well with the theme of the present chapter). Here the ‘reading’ of a picture is not a matter of elucidating its purely visual semantics, and not in the first instance its social or political semantics, but of relating it to written texts: texts which are part of the picture (the captions) and texts which are ‘behind’ the picture (the story, the episode, the life of the person). In the present context the implied reader is Christian, or putatively or potentially Christian, and the very existence of pictures is justified by their links with Christian writings: principally with the Bible, sometimes filtered or elaborated through homilies,10 and increasingly – as the 9

10

See Michael Camille, ‘Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy’, Art History 8 (1985), 27–49 (see 33–4). Camille’s influential study is limited mainly to Western manuscript illuminations. See Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981).

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ranks of saints swelled – through hagiography. It does not have to be thus. Byzantium inherited a Graeco-Roman tradition of pictorial representation linked to writing: invisible writing which can be assumed to lie ‘behind’ the picture (narratives to which pictures appear to allude), and visible writing which accompanies or is included in the picture itself. Mythological allusions in general, and Homeric or quasi-Homeric allusions in particular,11 were the assumed background for enormous numbers of illustrations in virtually all forms of ‘classical’ art. Pictures also routinely included writing in the form of captions or labels: from Attic black-figure and red-figure vases through to late antique mosaics, from glass medallions to manuscript miniatures, from the wall-paintings of Pompeii to the rock-cut tombs of Egypt and the Levant.12 In Rus there was no native pre-Christian tradition which linked the two types of graphic sign (the alphabetic and the pictorial). The association of image with writing was imported with Christianity and remained almost exclusively within the sphere of explicitly Christian cultural production. If early Christian and Byzantine culture appropriated the classical devices in part by changing the written texts which justified the images, in Rus the very presence of a written text (visible or implied) was emblematic of – could be ‘read’ as a reasonably sure sign of – the image’s Christian context.13 The multimedia graphic environment: reading a church The links between pictures and writing were given legitimacy by the Church, and the physical church provided the most complex and saturated environment for the interplay of graphic signs, the densest concentration of text-related pictures and picture-related texts. To see something of the range of such interrelationships it would be as well to take a brief tour of a church, preferably during a service. For this purpose we select an imaginary church, since no single real church survives fully intact and no service is taking place at this moment. The imaginary church – in effect 11 12

13

Perhaps more ‘quasi-’ than ‘Homeric’: see A. M. Snodgrass, Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art (Cambridge, 1998). See, in general, Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (eds.), Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge, 1994). Note that captions in Roman pictures are less frequent than in Greek, and where they occur they tend to reflect a fashion for Greek stylisation: see e.g. Roger Ling, Roman Painting (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 108–12, 163, 165, 183, 212–13; cf. the rarity of such inscriptions in, for example, Roman mosaics from Britain: David S. Neal, Roman Mosaics in Britain. An Introduction to their Schemes and a Catalogue of Paintings (Britannia Monograph Series I; London, 1981) records only one such inscription, on the Rudston mosaics (p. 92 and plate 66). See above, pp. 68–70, 103–5 on patterns of secondary writing.

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a composite church with features taken from several real examples – is perhaps even more appropriate than any single real specimen. If we were to focus on a real church, we might be tempted to dwell on how to ‘read’ its particular iconographic programme, whereas the point here is not the individual programme but the relationships between script and picture in general. However, the composite church is not built out of nothing. Its fixed decoration is loosely based on that of the eleventh-century St Sophia in Kiev, with features or alternatives freely borrowed from other buildings where necessary or appropriate.14 Begin under the central dome and look upwards. Christ stares down from his roundel at the highest point of the heavens, his right hand blessing, his left hand clasping a (closed) book, his identity indicated in bold lettering on either side of his head. Around him, still in the dome, four extravagantly winged archangels carry banners with words of praise from the Book of Revelations: ‘Holy, holy, holy [Lord God Almighty . . . ]’.15 Beneath Christ and the archangels, between the windows around the drum that supports the dome, letting light into the microcosm, stand the apostles, labelled, holding (closed) books (or prophets with open scrolls);16 and in the four pendentives17 that support the drum, the four evangelists: labelled, seated, writing, with their respective Gospels open on lecterns in front of them. The whole composition, and its location, leaves little doubt as to the source or status of the words of the Books. And below this central ensemble, spreading out into the vaults and walls of the nave and transepts, are pictures of the things of which the evangelists wrote: a pictorial narrative of the life and sufferings of Christ. In St Sophia the narrative can be ‘read’ clockwise, in three tiers, though sequential chronology is not always the governing principle.18 14

15

16

17

18

On surviving church decoration see above, pp. 60–2. On the Middle Byzantine context see e.g. Henry Maguire, ‘The Cycle of Images in the Church’, in Linda Safran (ed.), Heaven on Earth. Art and the Church in Byzantium (University Park, Penn., 1998), pp. 121–51. Revelations iv. 8. See V. N. Lazarev, Old Russian Murals and Mosaics (London, 1966), pp. 224–5. The form of banner is a labarum, perhaps devised by Constantine the Great as a Christian military standard: see ODB II, p. 1167. Prophets with scrolls: see e.g. V. N. Lazarev, Freski Staroi Ladogi (Moscow, 1960), pp. 36–8 and figs. 33–46; V. Putsko, ‘Nadpisi na svitkakh prorokov v kupol
nykh rospisiakh Sofii Novgorodskoi’, Cyrillomethodianum 7 (1983), 47–70. On the construction of pendentives in Byzantine churches see Cyril Mango, Byzantine Architecture (London, 1986), p. 11; also the distinction between pendentive and squinch, in J. Arnott Hamilton, Byzantine Architecture and Decoration (2nd edn, London, 1956), pp. 46–55. Compare the fairly sequential cycles at the Mirozha monastery in Pskov, the mildly sequential church of St George at Staraia Ladoga, and the apparently un-sequential church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa: Lazarev, Old Russian Murals and Mosaics, pp. 21, 32–5, 99–107, 116–30; Lazarev, Freski Staroi Ladogi, pp. 17–22; L. I. Lifshits, ‘Ob odnoi ktitorskoi kompozitsii Nereditsy’, in Drevnii Novgorod. Istoriia, iskusstvo, arkheologiia. Novye issledovaniia (Moscow, 1983), pp. 188–96; N. V. Pivovarova, ‘Ktitorskaia tema v ikonograficheskoi programme tserkvi Spasa na Nereditse’, VID 23 (1991), 144–55;

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If the narratives emanate from the Word descending from the dome via the apostles and evangelists, the other main set-piece composition is the central apse, above and around the sanctuary, the focal point of the human re-enactment of the divine mysteries. In later medieval churches the sanctuary is completely cut off from the congregation’s view by the multi-tiered icon-screen, which enhances the symbolic division of internal space at the expense of architectural space. There is some evidence that icon-screens were beginning to grow upwards almost as soon as masonry churches made their appearance in Rus, but at least in some churches the view from the central nave still culminated in the pictures in the apse at the eastern end of the building.19 Most commonly – as spectacularly exemplified in the surviving mosaics of St Sophia – the conch of the apse is dominated by the full-length, full-face figure of the Mother of God (labelled, of course), although in the Mirozha monastery the space is filled with a grandiose version of the ‘Deesis’ – John the Baptist and the Mother of God entreating Christ (here enthroned, with a closed book in his left hand).20 Below the conch, around the curvature of the apse, Christ’s disciples queue to receive the Eucharist from Christ himself: the representation serving as an appropriate backdrop to its reenactment by the clergy. And Christ ‘speaks’ to his disciples in writing which spreads across the full width of the composition: ‘Take, eat, this is my body . . . Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood.’21 Below the disciples are the disciples’ disciples: bishops, patriarchs, Fathers of the Church, each labelled with his name, many of them also holding books, collectively lending authority to their own latter-day disciples, the priests who serve under their gaze. Flanking the entrance to the apse is a dramatically split scene of the Annunciation with inscribed dialogue: from one column the Archangel Gabriel addresses the future Mother of God, ‘Hail, thou art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee’; and from the opposite column Mary responds, ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’22 Turn around, face the exit. As likely as not, on your passage back into the outside world you will be confronted by a vivid warning, a picture of the Last Judgement filling the western wall, or the vaults under the

19 20 21

22

T. V. Shulakova, Pskovskii Spaso-Mirozhskii monastyr
. The Saviour Monastery on the Mirozha in Pskov (Moscow(?), 1991). See above, p. 63. V. D. Sarab
ianov, Freski Drevnego Pskova. The Painting of Old Pskov (Moscow, 1993), pp. 8, 10. A. A. Beletskii, ‘Grecheskie nadpisi na mozaikakh Sofii Kievskoi’, in V. N. Lazarev, Mozaiki Sofii Kievskoi (Moscow, 1960), pp. 159–92; esp. 166–70; cf. Matthew xxvi.26– 28. The quotation is not directly from the Gospel but copied from Byzantine iconographic convention. V. N. Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski XI–XV vv. (Moscow, 1973), plates 52–5.

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gallery.23 Again, writing and picture reinforce one another. In the church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa, for example, the various torments are helpfully labelled: ‘impenetrable darkness’, ‘gnashing of teeth’ etc. And the scene even contains a dynamic dialogue. The rich man appeals to Abraham, across an expanse of wall, in large letters across the top of the scene, to send Lazarus with a drop of water to moisten his tongue; meanwhile a demon, standing close in front of the suffering rich man, brings home the harsh reality in intimate small letters next to his face: ‘rich friend, drink some burning flame’.24 If you have access to the more privileged, more restricted spaces, you could ‘read’ the narrative cycles in the side-apses reserved for the clergy: scenes from the life of the Mother of God in the diakonikon (vestry) to the south, and scenes from the life of John the Baptist in the prothesis (for the preparation of the eucharistic bread) to the north.25 Or you could remain in the public space of the naos and contemplate the mass of other images covering the arches, columns and lower walls: perhaps a donor portrait, perhaps another scene or narrative cycle, but mostly the massed ranks of portraits of saints, each with his or her proper attributes, and each properly identified and labelled. This is only the beginning. The writing within the overall decorative scheme is only one part – the most prominently visible part – of the interrelationship between script and representation in the complex graphic environment of the church. Look more closely at the walls at normal eye-level, and a different kind of writing comes into focus, emphatically not part of the patron’s design, but a living response and contribution from those who use the church: the scratched graffiti.26 We tend to think of graffiti as a form of vandalism, a defacement and defilement; all the more so in a church with floor-to-dome decoration, where the graffitist can hardly avoid cutting into sacred images. Many of the graffito-writers of Kiev and Novgorod do indeed seem to have been indifferent to any damage (physical, aesthetic or moral) that may be inflicted by their selfassertive scratchings. The common formula ‘[X] wrote this’ looks to be as casually impervious then as it is now: a useful reminder that not everybody always treated sacred images with undiluted solemnity and reverence. Yet 23

24 25 26

See e.g. the church of St Nicholas in Novgorod, the church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa, the church of St George at Staraia Ladoga, the church of St Cyril outside Kiev: Lazarev, Freski Staroi Ladogi, pp. 48–53, figs. 62–9; Lazarev, Old Russian Murals and Mosaics, pp. 127–8; T. Iu. Tsarevskaia, ‘Nikolo-dvorishchenskii sobor v Novgorode: novye otkrytiia rospisei XII veka’, in A. L. Batalov and L. A. Beliaev (eds.), Sakral
naia topografiia srednevekovogo goroda (Moscow, 1998), pp. 204–6. Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski, p. 50 and plate 267; below, plate 11. See e.g. T. Iu. Tsarevskaia, Freski tserkvi Blagoveshcheniia na Miachine (v Arkazhakh) (Novgorod, 1999), pp. 38–80, English summary pp. 176–80. See above, pp. 71–4.

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a significant number of the graffiti, far from being deliberately vandalous or merely insensitive, are ostentatiously deferential towards the very images which they, in a small way, help to destroy. These are the votive graffiti, the pleas for intercession addressed to the saint depicted in the image.27 A spoken prayer is heard once. If you want to make sure you catch the saint at a moment when he is listening, leave your voice with him, within his very image. From the writing on the fixed images on the walls we move to the semi-fixed images. In Suzdal we could spend a long time ‘reading’ the cycles of images and their sometimes wordy inscriptions on the luxurious fire-gilt south and west doors.28 And then there are the panel icons: individual labelled figures,29 maybe holding closed books or open scrolls,30 or surrounded by a border filled with smaller labelled figures;31 or perhaps set-piece scenes such as the ‘Ustiug’ Annunciation from the Tretiakov Gallery, where the lettering occupies the central space between the head of the Archangel and the head of the Mother-to-be of God, or the positively inscription-cluttered Veneration of the Cross from the church of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin.32 Then we come down to the smaller, moveable objects, also with images and writing: perhaps a processional cross or altar-cross; pectoral crosses; vestments or altar-cloths; chalices; reliquaries.33 And finally the heart and justification of the entire building and the events that take place there, the Book itself, the Gospels. For most of those present the Book is visible as closed object, a focus of veneration, held up for display or paraded round the church at strategic moments, known through its magnificent silver and jewelled binding which itself may contain embossed or inlaid inscribed images. Most esoteric of all, part of the graphic environment only to the few who can open the book, the actual written text of the Gospel, now with the reverse relationship of script to picture: script dominates, occasionally accompanied by pictures (miniatures of the evangelists, labelled and writing, as in their 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

E.g. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, nos. 39–48; II, nos. 110, 119–226. See above, pp. 65–6. E.g. V. N. Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
ot istokov do nachala XVI veka (Moscow 1983), no. 24 (the Archangel Michael). E.g. Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, nos. 23 (the Saviour), 28 (the Mother of God with Saints Antonii and Feodosii of the Caves); below, plate 12. E.g. Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, no. 9 (St Nicholas the Wonder-Worker). Note that, although borders with several individual saints are not uncommon, the surviving panel icons from this period do not include any with narrative hagiographical scenes around the borders (and text to match). Lazarev, Russkaia ikonopis
, nos. 4, 5. On the inscriptions on these and other icons see M. G. Gal
chenko, Nadpisi na drevnerusskikh ikonakh XII–XV v.v. Paleograficheskii i grafiko-orfograficheskii analiz (Moscow, 1997), pp. 47–62; below, plate 13. See above, pp. 56–9.

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larger images on the walls) and from time to time sprouting pictures itself (decorative initial letters). From the Book the written words go outwards, in their spoken form, via the living and moving picture that is the performance of the liturgy, into the body of the church, holding together the portraits and cycles and labels and narratives and quotations covering the vaults and walls and columns and doors and the smaller objects which are part of the performance. And through the smaller objects the images and the writing on them go outwards into the world beyond the church, into the city, the streets, the home: not just through explicit portable reminders of the faith such as miniature portable icons or pectoral crosses, but to secular functional objects such as coins and seals, which announce their spiritual authority by displaying miniature replicas (labelled, of course) of images sanctioned by their presence in the church.34 Picture and script travelled together. As we have seen, the combination of script and picture was in itself a sign of Christian provenance. There were many kinds of writing without pictures, many kinds of pictures without writing, but the combination of the two was specific to – a guarantee and assurance of – the Christian graphic environment, an extension of the graphic environment of the church. First directly, then by association, the church and church-related objects define the contexts for the links between writing and pictures in early Rus. Before we consider more closely the nature and functions of these links, we should pause to check whether the contexts really were so limited. It seems very odd that the two graphic modes – the pictorial and the alphabetic – should have been combined only in such specific circumstances. Are there really no exceptions, no areas of the graphic environment where script and picture were used together in ways which owe nothing to ecclesiastical precedent? Was the idea of combining script with pictures really not transferred to any autonomous, non-traditional areas of representation? The rule needs to be tested against apparent exceptions, for apparent exceptions can be found: portraits of secular rulers, whether as ‘donors’ or on coins; secular scenes in manuscript illustration and marginalia; and the distinct genre of representations which can sprout from decorative initial letters. How do such pictures challenge or confirm the general pattern? Donor portraits in fact present no anomaly. They are explicitly linked to acts of Christian piety, and were part of the received tradition of church and church-related illustration.35 Coin-portraits might seem more problematic. Although ruler-portraits on coins had the broad sanction of 34 35

See above, pp. 48–57. Apart from St Sophia in Kiev, see the inscribed donor-portraits in the church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa; donor-portraits in manuscripts: SK, nos. 4 (Sviatoslav and

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Byzantine precedent, nevertheless pictures of a seated prince with the caption ‘Vladimir on the throne’ or ‘Sviatopolk on the throne’ hardly rate as ecclesiastical.36 Yet the apparent exception confirms the rule, for the significant point about these local coin-portraits is that they failed to establish themselves as a tradition. Though they are the earliest surviving East Slav combinations of writing with pictures, they were produced only for a limited period in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, after which this experiment in the local iconography of rulership was abandoned. Even before the abandonment of local coin-production itself, the labelled portrait of the ruler had begun to be replaced by a labelled portrait of a saint. Parchment manuscripts, though by nature the most enclosed (and hence for present purposes the least significant) part of the graphic environment, traditionally allow more scope for the interplay of script and picture. At one end of the scale, in a kind of fusion between script and representation, individual letters may take on pictorial form. It would be hard to insist on an ecclesiastical subject for the faces and monster-heads which sprout from some of the initial letters of the Ostromir Gospel, for example – though of course the context (a Gospel lectionary) is as centrally ecclesiastical as one might wish.37 At the other end of the scale are occasional pictorial marginalia which need have nothing to do with the main text. For example, an early manuscript of a monastic typikon includes seven line-drawings in the margins, among them a remarkable sketch of a workman in repose: dressed in a long-sleeved belted tunic, he reclines under a tree on a gentle hillside, propping himself up on one arm while the other is draped lazily across his stomach. A quasi-scriptural label (‘the husbandman has laboured’) lends dignity to the doodle, and again the setting is pious enough, though in an early Rus context the image is close to solecism.38 Between the decorative initial and the autonomous marginal scribble lie the text-related miniatures and illustrations. Most types broadly correspond to what one might find in the fixed and moveable pictures in a church, but the neatness of the scheme is to some extent breached by illustrations of secular events from local history. It is far from clear whether native secular narrative illustrations existed at all in East Slav

36 37 38

family in the 1073 Izbornik), 118 (Khan Boris in the Gospel Homiliary), 129 (damaged, unidentified), as well as the Trier Psalter (see chapter 1, n. 222). DRM, nos. 1–51, 177–205. See also above, pp. 50–2. Ostromirovo Evangelie. Faksimil
noe vosproizvedenie (Moscow, 1988), fos. 6, 9v, 17, 18v, 19, 20, 22v, 25, 27, 54, 63v, 131v, 146v, 266v, 267v, 274v, 290v. MS from the Tret
iakov Gallery, K–5349; SK, no. 50; see G. I. Vzdornov, ‘Risunki na poliakh Tipografskogo ustava’, in O. I. Podobedova and G. V. Popov (eds.), Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo. Rukopisnaia kniga (Moscow, 1972), pp. 90–104. On the inscription, cf. 2 Timothy ii.6.

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manuscripts of the early period.39 If they did, then clearly they make a small breach in the ecclesiastical cocoon for the combination of script with picture, though again there is the safe authority of Byzantine (hence pious) precedent. Yet even here the pattern formed by habit is confirmed. The copious narrative illustrations in the fifteenth-century manuscript of the Radzivil Chronicle, which conceivably reflect an older illustrated prototype, are linked to text in two ways: to the main narrative of the book, and to labels and captions tied to the pictures. But these latter texts produce a curious pattern. Label-inscriptions appear on or beside all the miniatures on the first eight folia (sixteen miniatures), but on none of the subsequent 237 folia (597 miniatures) except where an image-within-animage presents a traditional ecclesiastical type. The initial and rapidly discontinued sequence includes such non-traditional secular captions as ‘Great Novgorod’, ‘They engaged in lawlessness’, or ‘The Varangians exacted tribute’. The sporadic subsequent captions are entirely traditional: labels for Christ and the Mother of God, writing on scrolls.40 Again a notable feature of the non-traditional inscriptions is not that they were attempted (if, that is, they do derive from an early original), but that they were rapidly abandoned. The exceptions do little to shake the general rule: a combination of script and pictures was specific to the graphic environment of the church and to images which derive therefrom, or (to accommodate a very few apparent exceptions) to areas where the combination of script and picture was authorised by Byzantine precedent. Our virtual tour therefore shows an adequately representative sample. The virtual tour also shows that, despite the restricted context, relationships between script and pictures are diverse, and that it would be foolish to speak of a relationship, in the singular. The church includes primary writing (manuscript books; and the spoken words derived therefrom) which justifies and explains the pictures, secondary writing which is produced as part of the pictures, and tertiary writing (the graffiti) which is not part of the ‘normal’ picture and may be produced either despite or because of the presence of the image. Visually the lettering ranges from the monumental to the barely perceptible, from the ostentatiously public to the esoteric, from dominance to reticence and all points between. The tour thus far has focused on the superficial, on the appearance, with occasional assumptions about the intended general meanings of, for example, 39 40

See above, p. 67. See Radzivilovskaia letopis’. Faksimil
noe vosproizvedenie rukopisi. Tekst. Issledovanie. Opisanie miniatiur, ed. M. V. Kukushkina, 2 vols. (Moscow, St Petersburg, 1994): the ‘traditional’ inscriptions and representations of writing, fos. 13, 58, 62v, 88, 93, 111, 154; also books carried by bishops, fos. 119v, 120, 130, 143, 221v.

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the hierarchies of pictures on the walls. But the diversity of the scriptimage relationships leads to more subtle semantic issues, and returns us again to the question of implied ‘readers’. Reading pictures: (ii) implicit readings? In principle the ‘readings’ of the script-image combinations may lie on a scale between two extremes, from a wholly verbal to a wholly visual perception of the lettering. At one extreme the letters serve the normal function of alphabetic script and are simply read as words; at the other extreme the letters derive significance from their role in a visual design, in which they function more as pictograms or ideograms. Any individual perception is likely to include a mixture of both. Given our lack of access to an adequate range of real readers, for the moment we can only explore some of the notional possibilities implied by specific features of the objects themselves. This is a risky procedure, highly speculative, a means of generating suggestions rather than conclusions. We start at the verbal level, by assuming that the texts mean what they say. What at this level are the implied communicative dynamics? In the written texts which accompany images, who is ‘speaking’, from where, to whom? Crudely, the material can be divided into three types: messages about the picture; messages from or within the picture; and messages to the picture. The first category – messages about pictures – consists mainly of the almost ubiquitous labels and captions, ostensibly fulfilling the role ascribed to such writing in the anecdote from the Vita Constantini: to identify who or what is depicted. The identifying label was an attribute of the picture just as much as the distinctive visual attributes of its iconography. Where a surviving religious image lacks a label, the label is more likely to have been lost than to have been lacking in the original. Label-inscriptions vary in form, in number, in design and in length. Christ and the Mother of God are normally identified by no more than the abbreviations for the Greek Iesous Khristos (I
C
) and Meter Theou (MR QU). Individual saints, where space is available, tend to be flanked by vertical columns of lettering: on the left the Greek ho hagios (‘saint’, ‘the holy’) or its monogram abbreviation in the form of an ‘a’ inside an ‘o’ (or rather, an alpha inside an omikron), and on the right the saint’s name.41 Longer, narrative 41

Cf. also the labelled mock-ups for icons, with inscriptions (one on birch-bark, one on wood) showing the names and lay-out of the figures in the intended composition: texts to label images which have not yet been made. See B. A. Kolchin, A. S. Khoroshev, V. L. Ianin, Usad
ba novgorodskogo khudozhnika XII v. (Moscow, 1981), p. 48–52 (concerning NGB, no. 553), 145–7 and figs. 16, 72.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

labels can refer either to the whole picture or to elements within it, and are placed accordingly. Thus, for example, on two of the manuscript miniatures of St Luke the intrusion of a calf in the top right-hand corner – a calf which carries a scroll – is adjacent to the inscription ‘in this image of a calf the Holy Spirit appeared to Luke’,42 whereas the narrative labels on the south ‘golden doors’ in Suzdal (‘the Angel of the Lord drives Adam and Eve from paradise’; ‘the Angel of the Lord submerges Sodom and Gomorrah’) occupy the upper central space of their respective panels.43 Besides messages about the subject of the picture, the texts can – far more rarely – convey messages about the picture’s production, or about the production of the object of which the picture is part: who commissioned it, who made it. In the few cases where all three are identified, the type and arrangement of the lettering indicates a clear hierarchy of status, from the religious subject at the top, through the patron in the middle, to the maker of the image at the bottom. For example, the outer surfaces of two large twelfth-century silver goblets are dominated by four full-length embossed images: on one of them Christ, the Mother of God, St Peter and St Barbara, on the other the same but with St Anastasia instead of St Barbara. Large labels flank each image. More discreet, set apart from the image, around the base of the goblets, but still on the outer surface, are the names of the patrons: ‘this is the vessel of Petrila and his wife Varvara’, ‘this is the vessel of Petr and his wife Maria’. Under the base, hidden from ordinary view, are the names of the makers: ‘Lord help thy servant Flor. Bratila made [this]’, ‘Lord help thy servant Kostantin. Kosta made [this]’.44 A similar hierarchy can be seen on the luxurious reliquary altar-cross commissioned from the master Lazar Bogsha by Princess Evfrosiniia of Polotsk in 1161. The faces of the cross display labelled enamelled portraits and also (more unusually) inset relics also labelled, with lettering deeply incised in the silver. Around the narrow outer rim, prominent enough but not competing with the sacred images, runs Evfrosiniia’s detailed donor inscription. And near the base of the 42

43

44

Ostromirovo evangelie, fo. 87v: in O. Popova, Les miniatures russes du XIe au XV si`ecle (Leningrad, 1975), p. 15 (plate 2); also the Luke miniature of the Mstislav Gospel, ibid., p. 23 (plate 6). Again parchment manuscripts allow other arrangements. In the Kiev Psalter (1397, but perhaps from an earlier prototype – see above, p. 67) thin red lines run from the marginal illustrations to the words in the text to which they refer. The indicated words thus serve a dual function: as ordinary components of a continuous written text, and as visually highlighted labels to pictures. This is a convenient device for marginal illustration. However, the marginal representations of the signs of the Zodiac in the 1073 Izbornik each have their own labels: Izbornik Sviatoslava 1073g. Faksimil
noe izdanie (Moscow, 1983), fos. 250v–251. For plates and analysis see A. A. Medyntseva, Podpisnye shedevry drevnerusskogo remesla (Moscow, 1991), pp. 91–108. The goblets also have a fourth level of inscription: the eucharistic formula (‘Drink ye all of it’) around the upper rim.

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cross, on the face but in almost microscopically small lettering, each letter barely more than a millimetre in height, is the maker’s own inscription.45 In a monumental construction such as a church, the contrast is still more striking. The walls are dominated by the labelled religious images; a donor portrait may occupy a subordinate but still prominent space. The artists, if they leave their names at all, leave them in as invisible a way as possible: in St Sophia in Kiev, as graffiti scratched into the damp plaster before it was painted; in St Sophia in Novgorod, as graffiti in the dark of the staircase tower, outside liturgical space.46 The spatial and formal hierarchy of such ‘identifying’ inscriptions on and around images nicely conveys the hierarchy of status between craftsmen and their paymasters or paymistresses, in their relative proximity to the divine images and their relative prominence to the eye of the human viewer. The second category of ‘verbal’ communication consists of messages from or within the picture. Besides identifying what is depicted, words issue forth from or (more rarely) are exchanged within the depiction. Images spoke volumes. Fathers of the Church such as John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzos, Gregory of Nyssa, Clement, Nicholas and others are regularly shown holding (closed) books, whether in monumental compositions such as the St Sophia mosaics or in miniature forms like seals or enamels.47 The archangels surrounding Christ Pantokrator in the dome of St Sophia in Kiev carry banners praising the Lord with the trisagios (while Christ himself holds a closed book). The prophets around the base of the dome in St Sophia in Novgorod hold open scrolls, as do Saints Feodosii and Antonii in a thirteenth-century panel icon. The evangelists in the Kievan mosaics and in manuscript miniatures are shown to write real words, and in some compositions words are also delivered to them in physical form, on a scroll from above.48 Spoken communication – usually with written authority – is less frequent but also prominent: the eucharistic formulae around the apse, spoken by the depicted Christ; the dialogue between Mary and Gabriel across the entrance to the apse; the dialogue between the rich man and Abraham in the fresco of the Last 45 46 47

48

RDN, plates XXXI, XXXII. Vysotskii, Nadpisi I, pp. 251–6; Medyntseva, Drevnerusskie nadpisi novgorodskogo Sofiiskogo sobora, pp. 32–61. Eight of the ten figures in the row of patriarchs in the apse of St Sophia: Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski, plates 41–2; roundel of St Basil on the large Novgorod Sion: Medyntseva, Podpisnye shedevry, p. 88; Peter and Paul in the roundels on the arms of an encolpion: illustrated in Rybakov, Prikladnoe iskusstvo, plate 99; for enamels see e.g. T. I. Makarova, Peregorodchatye emali Drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1987), plate 22; seals: APDR I, nos. 241, 295–7 (pp. 269, 274). Archangels and evangelists in St Sophia: Lazarev, Drevnerusskie mozaiki i freski, plates 11, 17; evangelists in miniatures, Popova, Les miniatures russes, plates 1–6, 11; Prophets’ scrolls: see above, n. 16; the Feodosii and Antonii icon: Lazarev, Russkaia iconopis
, plate 28; below, plates 2, 12.

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Judgement in the church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa; a dialogue between Christ and the donor in the donor-fresco in the same church.49 Not only were Christian images identified and authenticated by the presence of script; they also displayed continual affirmations of the authority of Scripture and of written and oral teachings derived therefrom. Pictures speak: implicitly in images, explicitly in written words. The third category of communication flows in the opposite direction: messages addressed to the image (or, more properly, to the person represented) from outside. As we have seen, votive inscriptions ‘Lord/Mother of God/St X, help thy servant X’) are quite common in tertiary writing, among graffiti, reflecting the active intervention of ‘real’ readers of the images. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, votive inscriptions addressed to the image could also be ‘ready-made’, as secondary writing, produced as part of the object which bore the image. Apparently there was a market for small images with pre-inscribed votive texts, such as the inscription ‘Holy Mother of God, help’ beside an image of the Mother of God on a type of encolpion.50 Alternatively, a patron could order an image complete with his or her own customised personal prayer. Several of the ‘snake amulets’ have customised inscriptions: for Vasilii (the ‘Chernigov grivna’), for Maria (the ‘Suzdal amulet’), for Petr, for an anonymous female, for Andrei.51 In the twelfth-century inscriptions on the massive ‘Dvina stones’, Boris/Rogvolod seeks help from the Lord as symbolised in the image of the Cross,52 while a miniature version of the equivalent invocation, from a certain Vlasii, is found on a slate cross from Iaropolch Zalesskii in the north-east.53 The image was a channel for written messages both ways. For our ‘ideal’ lettered reader, operating at a purely verbal level, the script which accompanies pictures in the graphic environment of the church generates multiple layers of communication through its explicit 49

50

51

52

See above, nn. 21, 22, 24; on controversies surrounding the Nereditsa donor-portrait and dialogue see Kolchin, Khoroshev, Ianin, Usad
ba novgorodskogo khudozhnika XII v., pp. 158–9 and figs. 79–80; F. K¨ampfer, Das russische Herrscherbild von den Anf¨angen bis zu Peter den Grossen. Studien zur Entwicklung politischer Ikonographie im byzantinischen Kulturkreis (Recklinghausen, 1978), pp. 136–9. See Collection B. Khanenko. Antiquit´es russes. Croix et images (Kiev, 1899), pp. 9–10, 42, plate II; M. D. Poluboiarinova, Russkie liudi v Zolotoi Orde (Moscow, 1978), pp. 110– 11 and fig. 37; RDN, no. 41 and plate XXXIII.3–4; Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (eds.), The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD ˇ cenko, 843–1261 (New York, 1997), pp. 303–4; cf. the note of scepticism in Ihor Sevˇ ‘Observations Concerning Inscriptions on Objects Described in the Catalogue “The Glory of Byzantium”’, Palaeoslavica 6 (1998), 249. T. V. Nikolaeva and A. V. Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amulety-zmeeviki (Moscow, 1991), nos.1, 42, 3, 7, 37; cf. also the anonymous Greek votive inscriptions to the Mother of God on nos.15, 16 and 17, presumably in direct imitation of Byzantine prototypes. 53 Medyntseva, Podpisnye shedevry, pp. 127–9. See above, pp. 74–5.

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meanings. At the opposite end of the scale, for the ‘ideal’ unlettered reader, operating at a purely visual level, messages are generated not by the articulated meanings of the written words but by the presence of writing itself, by writing not just with image but as image. The sacred space is saturated with images of writing, with graphic reminders of the authority of the written word: the books held by the Pantokrator and the bishops, the prophets’ scrolls, the evangelists’ lecterns, the lettering that runs like a frieze across the apse, that flanks every saint, that clutters every free surface of cult objects such as crosses or reliquaries or portable miniature icons. And all this mirrors the authority of the central object in the ritual, the silver-bound Book treated with such reverence by the clergy, held up to witness, ceremonially opened that the priest might speak its words. For those unable to decipher the particular written messages, the graphic environment of the church reinforces visually the general status of Writ. These two notional extremes help us to mark out the field, but each is in itself unreal, partly because it is unrealistic in practice to draw such a sharp distinction between verbal and emblematic reading, and partly because aspects of the material suggest that such a sharp distinction is inappropriate to the way in which the medium was conceived. Compounding one fiction with another, let us revisit our imagined church in the imagined persona of a viewer who can read Slavonic. Our virtual tour was roughly based on St Sophia in Kiev. Look again at the writing around the images on the walls. Ignore the graffiti. All the inscriptions are in Greek. This is not a complete barrier: Cyrillic and Greek share the majority of their letters, so we can probably decipher a fair number of the name-labels on the portraits of saints; but continuous texts such as the eucharistic inscription in the apse, or the dialogue in the Annunciation mosaics, or the texts being written by the evangelists, are accessible only at the emblematic level, as to the unlettered viewer. One must suppose that the decorators of St Sophia were more concerned that it should have the right kind of prestigious graphic appearance than with verbal communication through the written texts. So we move to another church. The fashion for public Greek display was transient.54 Leaving aside this peculiarity of St Sophia, can we now proceed to read the Slavonic? Yes, and no, and it depends what one means by reading. For example, the equivalent eucharistic inscription in the apse mosaic of the church of the Archangel Michael in Kiev – in Slavonic, one might suppose, for the sake of verbal accessibility – contains elementary errors which render it incomplete and, at the end, incomprehensible: one word is repeated, and 54

See above, pp. 103–5.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

the final four words of the full formula are missing.55 We can speculate as to how the errors arose (a Byzantine craftsman who did not recognise proper Slavonic, perhaps? or a semi-literate assistant miscopying? or a simple misjudgement of space?),56 but the more important fact is that the mistakes were allowed to remain, that at some level they did not matter, or did not matter enough to be worth the trouble of altering. Even with the transition to Slavonic, visual aspects of the writing appear to take precedence over the strictly verbal message. Turning to the name-labels on portraits, we find that the significance of the pictorial, of the visual, is if anything even more pronounced. The first impression is of a kind of linguistic anarchy. The names themselves were written in Greek, or in Slavonic, or in their Greek forms using Cyrillic letters, or in any number of hybrid combinations. The reasons vary from object to object, and may include ignorance, miscopying, hypercorrection, perhaps mere aesthetic preference, but the variability of forms is not necessarily a barrier to the verbal reading of the labels. The more revealing elements, paradoxically, are those which are relatively stable: the standard abbreviations labelling Christ and the Mother of God, the epithet for ‘saint’ or ‘holy’, the legend ‘Jesus Christ is victorious’ which accompanies the image of the Cross. Even where the standard language of the graphic environment is Slavonic, these standard forms remain consistently Greek: (I
C
; MR QU; O AGIO
or the monogram of an alpha within an omicron; NI KA).57 Thus the most common of all image-labels retain their nonnative forms. By verbal logic the words signified by these abbreviations ought to have been appropriated into native usage, along with large numbers of other words and terms specific to the imported faith. Instead, these graphic formulae in effect cease to function as alphabetic script and turn into ideograms. A wholly unscientific survey in a modern church shows that a large proportion of viewers have no difficulty affirming that the graphic sign MR QU ‘means’ Mother of God, but that very few could decode it as an abbreviation of the Greek Meter Theou. Familiarity cancels out difficulty. Images of Christ and the Mother of God were familiar enough to be recognised along with their appropriate graphic emblems of identity, and the gap in perception between our notional ‘lettered’ and ‘unlettered’ viewers is diminished almost to nothing, since both might 55 56

57

See V. N. Lazarev, Mikhailovskie mozaiki (Moscow, 1966), p. 43. Lazarev, Mikhailovskie mozaiki, p. 43, ascribes the incompleteness (if not the errors) to a miscalculation of space. However, the equivalent Greek inscription in St Sophia was likewise incomplete at the end of the line, but the artists found a simple solution: to add the last few words below the line! See above, p. 105; also Simon Franklin, ‘Greek in Kievan Rus
’, DOP 46 (1992), 80–1. The abbreviation for Christ (I
C
) could be identified with either language.

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‘read’ these inscriptions in the same way. The correct writing is that which is correct as part of the picture, not necessarily that which gives the ‘correct’ letters for the words as articulated in the native language. Graphic formulae establish their own visual language, and these standard abbreviations are common enough to sustain standard readings. However, they are by no means the only kinds of deviation from normal, verbally readable Slavonic script in combination with images. If the main purpose of inscriptions is that they be read as words, then a remarkable proportion of them are flawed or useless, with features veering from the difficult to the utterly nonsensical. On cast or stamped images, for example, mirror-reversal of the lettering is common. Two of the most widely distributed types of encolpia have all or some of their inscriptions in mirror-reversal.58 There are mirror-inscriptions on a number of seals.59 For persistent inconsistency it would be hard to beat the earliest coinmakers: five out of the six versions of Vladimir’s gold coins are inscribed with mirror-writing,60 as are six variants of his type-I silver coins.61 One is tempted to dismiss the errors as aberrations. After all, it is easy to see how the mistake is made: the letters are copied onto the mould or die in their ‘correct’ form, and hence turn out in mirror-form in the casting or stamping. Sometimes the master was simply not very masterly. Mistakes happen. Junk the faulty product and do better next time. What is notable, however, is not that the errors occurred, but that nobody seemed to mind. The product was not junked, nor rejected either by the craftsman or by the market. Image-bearing objects with mirror-writing were acceptable, reproduced, sold and distributed. This is not cryptography, nor a form of alternative orthography.62 It seems like an indifference to the function of alphabetic script as alphabetic script. The extreme version of such indifference is the open representation of script which is not script at all: of nonsense, of imitation writing, of letterlike signs, reminders of writing without any pointers towards a verbal 58 59 60 61

62

M. V. Sedova, Iuvelirnye izdeliia drevnego Novgoroda IX–XV vv. (Moscow, 1981), p. 56, fig. 18.3. e.g. APDR, nos. 12a, 36b, 89, 124, 195, 196, 198, 220, 348, 372, 373; cf. nos. 4, 5 in mirror-Greek! DRM, pp. 19–24: all except no. 5. DRM, nos. 17, 28, 29, 30, 37, 38. On other minor inconsistencies such as the reversal of individual letters, or of the image of the prince, see Sotnikova’s chapter on the paleography, ibid., pp. 219–33. The phenomenon discussed here is quite different from the graphic phenomenon in some birch-bark documents, where a mirror form seems to have been an acceptable alternative for certain letters: see Dean S. Worth, ‘Mirror Reversal in Novgorod Palaeography’, in Benjamin A. Stolz, I. R. Titunik and Lubomir Dolezel (eds.), Language and Literary Theory. In Honor of Ladislav Matejka (Papers in Slavic Philology 5; Ann Arbor, 1984), pp. 215–22.

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articulation. Nonsense-writing, squiggles and signs which look like writing or which merely represent writing, can be found across the full range of image-bearing objects, from the simplest and smallest to the largest and most opulent: on coins, on ‘snake amulets’, in manuscript miniatures, in monumental mosaics.63 Here even the pretence at alphabetic script is all but gone. The mock-writing is as articulate as the closed books: no longer writing in or on a picture, but a picture which signifies writing. This series of speculations, guided to an extent by features of the material, does not help us to know how any individual viewer read any particular combination of script and picture: as emblem, as verbal message, as a general sign and affirmation of Christian identity, as a sign of the status of the written word within that identity, as means of conveying necessary factual information, as a feature of design, as a component of the complex verbal and visual interplay between building, objects, and performers in the multimedia performance in church, or any combination or intermediary nuance of such perceptions. We have not yet met any ‘real’ readers, apart from the graffitists engaged in their own dialogue through the image; and apart, of course, from those who produced the images, the craftsmen themselves. The major source for images was images, and the major source for combinations of script and picture was combinations of script and picture. The craftsmen – be they monumental mosaicists, or metalworkers, or painters, or stone-carvers, or enamellers, or gilt-engravers – were all in a sense the ‘readers’ of their models. Some were skilled, articulate, lettered, precise; others were cruder, unlettered, making ‘mistakes’ which reveal a purely visual treatment of the script. The range of their work is already a range of readings, and goes some way towards justifying the otherwise completely conjectural possibilities outlined here. Real readers? Writing about pictures Some writings lie ‘behind’ pictures, as authoritative sources on the persons or events which the images depict. Other writings appear with pictures, inhabiting the same graphic environment. And finally, there are the writings which are generated by pictures, in response to pictures, writings about pictures. Thus far we have considered native ‘readings’ on the basis 63

E.g. coins: DRM, pp. 111–14, 200–1 (nos. 211–18); cf. the nonsense Greek (!) on cast pendant imitations of Iaroslav’s silver coins: P. G. Gaidukov and A. S. Khoroshev, ‘Novye nakhodki privesok – litykh kopii s monet tipa “Iaroslavle srebro” v Novgorode’, DGVEMI 1994 god. (1996), p. 209; amulets: Nikolaeva and Chernetsov, Drevnerusskie amuletyzmeeviki, nos. 20, 43; manuscript miniature: Ostromirovo evangelie, fo. 87v (the scroll being handed to the evangelist); mosaic: Beletskii, ‘Grecheskie nadpisi na mozaikakh Sofii Kievskoi’, 152 (the scroll on St John’s knee).

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of secondary writing (labels, captions etc., made by the pictures’ producers) and tertiary writing (the votive graffiti). It remains to consider native primary writing on the subject of pictures: pictures as a theme in works by native authors. The theme is not particularly prominent in the literature of early Rus. Indeed, as an autonomous theme it does not exist. On the theoretical side, the Rus received the basic justifications for Christian images along with the rest of their pre-packaged Christianity. The odd phrase or two, sometimes distorted, turns up in native writings,64 but without any sense of an active theoretical engagement. On the descriptive side, the classical and Byzantine genre of ekphrasis – rhetorical description, particularly of pictures or buildings65 – is most unlikely to have been part of a bookman’s training in Rus, and we have no separate works specifically devoted to the theme. References to pictures are embedded in works which are basically about other things: in chronicles, in hagiography, in sermons, in penitentials, and (somewhat more centrally) in pilgrims’ tales and miracle-tales. Yet although such references appear fragmentary, they are not necessarily random. Certain broad patterns of form and substance do emerge, which allow a degree of generalisation about the native articulate bookish responses to pictures. What qualities or attributes of pictures were thought noteworthy? Very little that would fit a modern notion of ‘art appreciation’. Qualities of form, or composition, or expression, or even of colour, are barely registered at all. In most cases it would be impossible for us to tell, from the written descriptions alone, what any given picture looked like. The main reason, of course, is that in most cases a contemporary reader would already know what any given picture looked like, without a written description: a picture looked like its prototype, like its subject, like other pictures of the same subject. To name the subject is already to give an adequate statement of the essentials of the picture’s composition. That was what made a picture an icon. Formal description is, for the most part, redundant for the purposes of identification and recognition, so written references tend to focus on other things. These ‘other things’ can in effect be reduced to a menu of four aspects of a picture, four types of quality, 64 65

E.g. PVL I, p. 79; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 115. Exmples of ekphrasis in its broadest sense (rhetorical description) reach Rus through translated homilies, and some notable passages inspired local emulation: see, for example, the evocation of spring in a homily by Gregory of Nazianzos, which lies behind a similar passage in Kirill of Turov’s sermon for Low Sunday: Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, pp. 108–15; on this theme in Byzantine painting see Maguire, Art and Eloquence, pp. 42–52; more extensively on Kirill’s rhetoric see Ingunn Lunde, Verbal Celebrations. Kirill of Turov’s Homiletic Rhetoric and its Byzantine Sources (Slavistische Veroffentlichungen ¨ 86; Wiesbaden, 2001); but there is little to suggest a local tradition of ekphrasis in the narrower sense, relating to buildings and pictures.

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which the written descriptions highlight in various combinations. The four aspects are: lifelike accuracy (the only ‘formal’ property; a small but significant exception to the above rule); richness; miraculousness; and a distinguished provenance.66 To modern sensibilities it might seem strange that medieval writers should describe their devotional images as accurate and true to life, since nowadays icons are more commonly regarded as a stilted, stylised, symbolic medium. Clearly icons do not strive for a warts-and-all naturalism. Yet an insistence on lifelike qualities is a recurrent feature of Byzantine descriptions of icons67 – indeed, it is essential to the very idea of an icon as a true likeness – whence it was appropriated into native Rus writing. The abbot Daniil, writing of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early 1100s, enthuses over a mosaic of the Crucifixion at Golgotha, where Christ is shown ‘just as if alive . . . just as He was then’.68 Conversely, if icons are lifelike, life can be icon-like. Efrem, hagiographer of Avraamii of Smolensk, describes his hero’s physical appearance in iconographic terms: when Avraamii was clothed in priestly garb he was ‘the image and likeness of Basil the Great, with just such a black beard, though with a bald head’.69 Efrem assumes that his readers know what Basil the Great looked like. They know it from pictures, and their assumed pictorial knowledge is invoked in order to sharpen a written description. In a sense, the picture becomes part of the writing. That is as far as native writers go in their attention to the visual qualities of the image itself: it is a likeness, accurate by definition, definitive because accurate. The second noteworthy quality – richness – relates as much to the object as to the image itself. Not that richness was an intrinsic quality of image-bearing objects: the focus on richness reflects the contexts in which particular image-bearing objects tend to make their way into written sources. Writers note the noteworthy, the prominent, the special, the public, the splendid. Thus the Suzdal chronicle, in its entry for 1155, tells of how Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii adorned the famous icon of the ‘Vladimir’ Mother of God with ‘more than thirty grivnas of gold, not to mention the silver, and precious stones, and pearls’, while in 1160 he completed the church of the Mother of God in Vladimir and ‘beautified it wondrously with many and various icons, and with precious stones 66 67

68

For a more detailed account of the following paragraphs see Simon Franklin, ‘Perceptions and Descriptions of Art in Pre-Mongol Rus
’, Byzantinoslavica 56 (1995), 669–78. See e.g. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, pp. XIV–XV; also V. V. Bychkov, ‘Traditsii simvolizma v drevnerusskoi estetike,’ in G. K. Vagner (ed.), Vizantiia i Rus
(Moscow, 1989), pp. 133–8. On likeness and convention see Gilbert Dagron, ‘Holy Images and Likeness’, DOP 45 (1991), 23–33. 69 BLDR V, p. 40; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 145. BLDR IV, p. 38.

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without number’.70 In 1185 thirty-two churches are reported damaged by a fire in Vladimir, but the only specific losses worth mentioning are ‘vessels of gold and silver, vestments threaded with gold and pearls, wondrous icons fitted with gold and precious stones and great pearls’.71 In 1231 Bishop Kirill of Rostov ‘beautified the holy church of the Mother of God with costly icons such as it is impossible to describe’: indeed, among the crowds who came to Kirill’s inauguration, ‘some came to hear Kirill’s teaching from the holy books, while others came because they wanted to see the decoration’.72 The honour paid to the saints through their images was material as well as verbal.73 It is part of the two-way process of observation: through the image the viewer observes the saint; and through the image the saint observes the viewer, hears his prayers, reads his votive graffiti, receives the precious gifts. And through the image, in response to the prayers and gifts, the saints work miracles. The saints behind the images are not just silent witnesses but active participants. One of their main functions – their distinguishing quality – is that they can intervene and intercede. Or, in theologically dubious but devotionally widespread shorthand: the images work miracles. In 1164 the richly adorned ‘Vladimir’ Mother of God helps Andrei Bogoliubskii to defeat the Volga Bulgars, and subsequently it intercedes regularly for the city,74 just as Bishop Kirill hoped that his richly adorned icon of the Mother of God would give ‘protection to the city of Rostov, and to its Christ-loving prince . . . and to all who come in faith to the holy church’.75 Through the images the saints intercede in earthly affairs. A common extension is for the saint to respond in the image, as the image, materially and visibly: thus, after the Suzdalians ravaged the lands of Novgorod in 1169, in three Novgorodian churches icons of the Mother of God were seen to weep.76 And to complete the transfer from image to material, wonders are sometimes worked through the very components of icons, without the visible presence of any image: the eleventh-century icon-painter Alimpii cures a leper by daubing his face with the paints which he uses for his icons.77 In more restrained mode, the Novgorodian 70 73

74

75 76 77

71 PSRL I, col. 392. 72 PSRL I, col. 458. PSRL I, cols. 346, 351; cf. 367, 383. On the decoration of icons see I. A. Sterligova, Dragotsennyi ubor drevnerusskikh ikon XI–XIV vekov. Proiskhozhdenie, simvolika, khudozhestvennyi obraz (Moscow, 2000), esp. pp. 28–90. PSRL I, cols. 352–3, 380; for early miracle-tales of this icon see the text and analysis by V. A. Kuchkin and T. A. Sumnikova, ‘Drevneishaia redaktsiia Skazaniia ob ikone Vladimirskoi Bogomateri’, in A. M. Lidov (ed.), Chudotvornaia ikona v Vizantii i Drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1996), pp. 476–509. PSRL I, col. 458. PSRL I, cols. 361–2. An epidemic of weeping icons broke out in Russia in the late 1990s. BLDR IV, p. 460; Heppell, Paterik, pp. 194–5. See also below, p. 256.

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Dobrynia Iadreikovich (the future Archbishop Antonii), writing of his pilgrimage to Constantinople in 1200, reports that the oil used for the anointing of children at baptism was heated with the wood of old icons ‘on which one can no longer recognise the saints’78 – a kind of re-cycling of beneficial materials. In principle the correctness of the image is enough to ensure the saint’s presence and the possibility of two-way observation and communication through the object. In a modern church a photocopy can – and sometimes does – serve in place of a painted likeness. The ‘Vladimir Mother of God’ is both a specific object and a type of image, a composition valid in any number of reproductions. In devotional practice, however, special honour tends to accrue to particular image-bearing objects, and in the early written sources prestige was enhanced by provenance, by where the object was located or brought from. The most authoritative and noteworthy image-bearing objects were in, or came from, or were inspired by, the most prestigious holy places, and the most prestigious holy places were located outside the lands of the Rus. We can discern a kind of hierarchy of distance. At the top of the hierarchy are the wondrous objects of the Holy Land and Constantinople, as witnessed and described by travellers from Rus (the abbot Daniil; Dobrynia Iadreikovich). Next in line are objects imported from such places; then objects produced locally by masters from such places; then objects produced by locals trained by such masters; and finally, objects produced by locals and approved and admired by outsiders. In local ‘sacred space’ prestige was enhanced through an association with Kiev. The larger context for such chains of association is a set of ‘iconic’ relations far broader than the painted image or the image-bearing object: all Christian cities were in some sense likenesses of Jerusalem, Kiev in the eleventh century was deliberately adorned with reminders of Constantinople, and many of the later regional centres were deliberately adorned with reminders of Kiev.79 In some texts we find a pleasingly complete chain of succession: from Constantinople, through Kiev, to the regional cities; from foreign masters to local application and dissemination. Thus the chroniclers make sure to point out that the Vladimir Mother of God (the particular imagebearing object) had been brought to Kiev from Constantinople, and then transferred to Vladimir.80 The painter Alimpii of the Caves derived his 78 79 80

Antonii of Novgorod, Kniga Palomnik. Skazanie mest sviatykh vo Tsaregrade ed. Kh. M. Loparev, in Pravoslavnyi Palestinskii Sbornik LI (1899), p. 8; above, p. 65. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 209–17, 352–63. PSRL I, col. 346; cf. col. 301.

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skills from his apprenticeship with the ‘Greek’ icon-painters who had been miraculously summoned from Constantinople; thus inspired, he performed his own miracles with paint in Kiev; and then one of his icons – of the Mother of God – was taken from Kiev to Rostov, where it showed its miraculousness by surviving as two churches were destroyed around it.81 And praise from ‘Greeks’ was a sign of approval for local workmanship: the adornments to the sarcophagi of Boris and Gleb were so fine that ‘many people came, even from the Greeks’ to behold and admire.82 Native writers about images thus tend to highlight one or more of four main properties of an image: its accuracy, its rich adornment, its miraculousness, and its prestigious provenance. However, these writers about images were also readers of other writers about images. Their words should not necessarily be taken as direct responses to visual stimuli. Their brief phrases are repetitive, echoing one another, echoing equivalent phrases in Byzantine writing, echoing the Bible. To allude to a church as being like ‘heaven on earth’, or to an icon as being adorned with ‘gold and silver and precious stones’ is to produce a prompted response, an appropriate response.83 A prompted response can of course still be a genuine response, as training is assimilated into habit. Even in a modern context, amid the rampant cult of individuality, people like to be told how to look. In a cult of canonicity the prompted, appropriate response may be the only proper response, and the repetitive phraseology serves as a verbal sign of authenticity, as much to reassure as to inform. The words about pictures are selected to be accurate likenesses of other words about pictures. Uncertainty, ambiguity, the disorientation of the individual unprompted ‘reader’ – such things are, for the most part, well hidden. Just occasionally we catch a glimpse. For example, to have icons in the home is obviously both a mark of piety and a practical benefit, one’s own little two-way channel of communication, but the watching saint can be disconcerting. What are the bounds of respectful behaviour in his presence? In a penitential from the middle of the twelfth century, a priest asks his bishop whether it is acceptable to have icons in a room where a man lies with his wife. The bishop’s job is to supply the prompting, the reassurance of what is appropriate: yes, for to lie with one’s wife is no sin; but if the icon be in a room where a bachelor lies with a woman who is not his wife, 81 82 83

BLDR IV, pp. 458, 464; Heppell, Paterik, pp. 192–3, 197–8. Usp.Sb., fo. 24c.1–6; cf. Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 131. On these and more elaborate examples see Franklin, ‘Perceptions and Descriptions of Art’, 675–8.

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that indeed is a sin.84 Sparse though the sources may be, we are clearly a very long way from the abstract ruminations on images as letters for the unlettered, beyond even the idea of the image as a devotional object. For these ‘readers’ the image was a means to living interaction, a material object which granted access to the world beyond matter, an object with properties close to what we (not they) might regard as ‘magical’. But thoughts of the ‘magical’ lead us to a different theme. 84

RIB VI, col. 52; cf. ibid., col. 37 (on whether it is permissible to bury an icon with the corpse of its owner); also, in a different penitential, Smirnov, Materialy, p. 67.

7

Writing and magic

Perspectives and definitions The writing of meaning is only one of the meanings of writing. We have seen in the previous chapters – if it was not already obvious from the beginning – some of the ways in which the semantics of a written object need not be limited to its verbal message, that the verbal message is often not the most important message, that sometimes the writing does not translate directly into a verbal message at all. Thus far we have tended to refer to the non-verbal messages and functions as ‘emblematic’ or ‘symbolic’, but should we instead be describing them, or some of them, as ‘magical’? In principle the introduction of alphabetic script provides opportunities for magical usage in three ways: in form, as a set of graphic signs which might be thought to have magical properties; in content, as a means for creating texts which expound magical knowledge; and in function, when objects with writing serve magical purposes, as talismans or amulets. However, in order to consider how writing might be associated with magic we first have to consider what we might take ‘magic’ to be. Which of the following should be classified as magic? A cult whose followers do honour to a particular configuration of bits of wood, who wear such bits of wood (or a representation of the same form in metal) around their necks to ward off ills, and who routinely speak of the ‘lifegiving wood’? A woman who is cured of colic by drinking a potion made from water and the powder of plaster scraped off a painted wall? A man who heals a leper by daubing him with special pigments? A woman who heals her child with a herbal infusion? The answers, of course, are: all, or some, or none. ‘We’, now, are likely to reckon the herbal infusion the most unmagical, the most natural and potentially explicable, yet in early Rus the infusion is the most likely to be condemned as sorcery. The wearing of a cross as protection, and the use of phrases such as ‘the lifegiving wood’ were ordinary tokens of mainstream Christianity. The paintcure is recounted among the deeds of the illustrious monks of the Caves 255

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monastery, securely presented as miracle, not magic.1 The plaster-andwater cure is closely analogous: the woman had scraped the plaster with her fingernails from the images of saints Kosmas and Damian painted on the wall of her bedroom.2 What mattered was not the appearance, or even necessarily the type of action, but the cultural context in which it was performed and, crucially, the powers which were thought to lie behind it. Is magic, therefore, a ‘thing’, or is it merely a word with a history? Is a history of magic a history of the concept, as variously interpreted at various times? Or is it a history of practices which we, from the outside, choose to define as magical, regardless of whether the practitioners at any given time would have agreed? As a concept, magic tends to imply the ‘other’, that which ‘we’ do not fully accept. The label suggests an alluring but spurious claim to control over – or at least access to – hidden forces, especially in relation to time (knowledge of the future, divination) and health (cures, prophylaxis, curses). Insofar as it may invoke or appear to invoke supernatural forces, one person’s magic is another person’s religion. Insofar as it may invoke the properties of matter, one person’s magic is another person’s science or medicine. To label something as ‘magic’ tends to reveal as much about the viewpoint of the one who applies the label as about the thing to which the label is applied. The modern ‘magician’ is a trickster in collusion with his audience, one who seems to have access to non-rational forms of cause and effect without actually challenging the beliefs of a rationalminded viewer. The ‘magic’ of children’s stories is a charming world of make-believe which appeals to the imagination of the innocent but which ‘we’ know to be untrue. To the atheist all religion may be merely an attempt at magic, and Christianity is no exception, with its formalised incantations aimed at warding off evil, and with the ritual ingestion of substances believed to be the flesh and blood of a long-dead divine man. In softer focus, non-standard practices within the Christian tradition may be circumscribed as ‘popular’ religion: anthropologically interesting, culturally authentic, but not fully representative of the proper version of the Faith. To the Protestant, medieval Christianity is in many of its practices closer to magic than to religion, with its emphasis on the power of 1 2

See above, p. 251. Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1986), p. 139; see Henry Maguire, ‘Magic and the Christian Image’, in Henry Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Magic (Washington, DC, 1995), p. 66. Note, however, that the context for this Byzantine example reveals a hint of an awareness that the episode might be open to a different interpretation. The miracle was cited in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and the vocabulary makes it plain that the cure was actually effected by the ‘visitation’ of the saints themselves.

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intercessors (angels, saints), who may be contacted through physical objects (images, relics).3 To the medieval Christian, magic was associated with pagan practices, or with demonic.4 One has to go back to Late Antiquity to find magic represented as a respectable and autonomous sphere of knowledge. Such semantic relativism leaves us with three choices: (a) to assert on principle that magic is not really a subject at all, since it is neither a neutral descriptive term nor a stable concept; (b) to explore the perspectives on magic suggested by the relevant sources of a given period (here, to consider ‘writing and magic’ as the theme might have been conceived in early Rus);5 or (c) to turn magic from a time-specific concept into a ‘thing’ of our own choosing, to explore practices which we wish to regard as magical, however they are viewed in the sources. ‘Option (a)’ is tempting. It offers a principled escape from an unresolvable dilemma; but it is also unproductive, an evasion of genuine issues. ‘Option (b)’ and ‘option (c)’ can both be useful, so long as the distinction between them is maintained. On the face of it ‘option (b)’ should be straightforward. All extant writings from early Rus were produced and principally used by people who would have regarded themselves as Christians, all could be justified in Christian terms if necessary, therefore ipso facto none is magical. However, such simple sophistry would not have slipped past an alert theologian. The twelfth-century Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon cites John Chrysostom on precisely this point, with reference to the use of amulets and incantations: You commit the worst form of fraud if you . . . defend yourselves by saying: ‘This woman who is singing charms is a Christian and does not do anything else but invoke God’s name.’ Exactly for this reason I hate her all the more and turn away from her, because she blasphemously misuses God’s name by claiming to be a Christian and acting like a heathen. For the demons also invoked the name of God and were nevertheless demons.6

For Balsamon magic is not defined either by the appearance or by the consciousness of the practitioner. It is a matter of substance, of the essence. 3

4

5 6

The classic work by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), though hardly a Protestant tract, nevertheless imposes roughly this distinction, between medieval ‘magical’ and Early Modern ‘religious’ sensibility. See, however, David Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery. Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Medieval Cultures 25; Minneapolis and London, 2000), on magic as a metaphor for the activities of the bookman. Cf. Richard Kiekhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), who tries to look through the eyes of medieval ‘intellectuals’. See Marie Theres Fogen, ¨ ‘Balsamon on Magic: From Roman Secular Law to Byzantine Canon Law’, in Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Magic, pp. 105–6.

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The act may look Christian, may even be believed to be Christian, but is still magical (here = demonic, heathen). Magic is not a semantic problem (what does the word mean?) but a hermeneutic problem (how do we recognise ‘it’?). Option (b) is therefore not so far removed from option (c). Balsamon (and Chrysostom) regarded magic as a ‘thing’ irrespective of the selfdefinition of those who engaged in it. Modern scholars, too, can devise ways of objectifying magic for their own purposes. Robert Mathieson, in his introductory survey of medieval Slav magic, contrasts magic with science, technology and religion as modes of knowledge: like religion, but unlike science and technology, magic need not be empirically verifiable; like technology, but unlike science and religion, magic need not stem from true/false propositions (that is, magic can be a practice without a framework of explanation). The difficulty here is, first, that magic is again delineated in terms of what it need not be, rather than what it is; and second, that this approach depends on our seeing into the mind of the practitioner, which would mean that a great deal of the actual evidence is bound to remain ambiguous. Mathieson has to admit that ‘it becomes very hard, perhaps impossible, to decide in every case whether some text is religious or magical’.7 Which leaves us back where we started. By contrast W. F. Ryan, in his comprehensive compendium of Russian magic, prefers a more inclusive approach. He classifies activities as magical according to what he perceives to be their nature and purpose, irrespective of the belief-systems with which their practitioners might justify them. Thus much of what might be reckoned mainstream Orthodox practice, such as the wearing of pectoral crosses (as amulets), or the cult of miracleworking icons, is appropriated to magic.8 Only the central rituals and the principal canonical texts appear to be off-limits. No solution is fully or consistently defensible. The one consistently acknowledged fact is that consistent differentiation is a problem. So let us not attempt to be consistent. Within our own imposed limits (this is not a history of magic, but a study of the social and cultural dynamics of writing) we start with ‘option (b)’, a survey of early Rus writing about what the writers deemed to be magic. We then change perspective and switch to ‘option (c)’, to consider writings which expound upon knowledge which may be deemed magical in some modern definitions. Finally we consider the extent to which writing and written objects themselves were treated as having magical properties and functions (from either perspective). 7 8

Robert Mathieson, ‘Magic in Slavia Orthodoxa: The Written Tradition’, in Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Magic, pp. 155–77 (esp. 158–62). W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight. An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Stroud, 1999), e.g. pp. 228–40.

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Writing about magic In this section, magic is that which is deemed to be so in the written sources. That which is not presented as magic is not magic. And in the written sources the principal property of magical practices is that they are not Christian. There is no evidence that any of our sources was written by anybody who thought of themselves as anything other than Christian. In strong contrast to the Greek and Latin traditions, the Slavs had no native tradition of learned, non-Christian written culture. Non-Christian beliefs and practices may have been reflected in the graphic environment through a range of signs and motifs and representations (though it is hard to know when any given motif is ‘read’ in relation to a particular set of beliefs, and when it becomes purely decorative),9 but not through articulate use of alphabetic script. Books were a Christian monopoly, a distinguishing feature, non-‘magical’ by definition, and the main point of raising the issue of magic in writing was to delineate and affirm a sense of difference, to distinguish the Christian ‘us’ from the magical ‘them’, to affirm the superiority of book over non-book. Magic is what ‘we’ don’t do, or shouldn’t do, or what some of ‘us’ might do but must be told to stop. Writing about magic represents a use of the technology to reinforce correct behaviour and ideas, a proper concern for the producers of formal codes, of pastoral admonitions,10 and of more general edificatory writings. ‘Magic’ was not, however, simply a synonym of ‘pagan’. The words for ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ (mainly volkhvovanie, volkhv, and a cluster of related forms)11 were not interchangeable with ‘pagan’ ( poganyi ), and the difference in emphasis helps to clarify the implications of each. The word poganyi could, on occasion, be used in relation to personal beliefs, to the non-Christian religious status of the individual, as when Princess Olga (in the story in the Primary Chronicle) tells the Byzantine emperor ‘I am a pagan [az pogana esm
]; if you wish to baptise me, baptise me yourself ’.12 Yet poganyi tends to be used more generally to denote groups of outsiders, not just non-Christians but non-Rus such as Polovtsy and Mongols.13 The Novgorod Chronicle’s Tale of the Capture of Tsargrad by the Latins even refers to the ‘town of Bern [= Verona], where the foul pagan Dedrik 9 10 11 12 13

For the most thorough – and imaginative – exploration of this see B. A. Rybakov, Iazychestvo Drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1987). See above, pp. 149–52. For the extraordinary range of words from the same roots see e.g. SDIaz (XI–XIV vv.) II, pp. 164–7; SRIaz XI–XVII vv., III, pp. 13–16. PVL I, p. 44; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 82. Slovar
-spravochnik ‘Slova o polku Igoreve’, ed. V. L. Vinogradova (Leningrad, 1965– 1984), IV, pp. 101–4.

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[= Dietrich = Theodoric] had lived’.14 I doubt whether many or any of the Tale’s readers knew or cared that Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, had been an Arian Christian tolerant of Orthodoxy. The general sense of poganyi as ethnic – or cultural, or ethno-cultural – outsider is reinforced by the fact that in Slavonic translations it serves to render the Greek barbaros.15 If poganyi tended to denote a somewhat generalised outsider; a volkhv tended to be closer to home, the enemy not at the gate but in your own village and perhaps sometimes in your own person. Greek writings about magi, to some extent conveyed in Slavonic translations, reflect a diverse set of traditions. Straightforward condemnation was of course the norm, but many Byzantine writers were aware of – and even quite comfortable with – contexts in which magi were learned men whose skills could be effective, and who might on occasion even act with a measure of divine permission or approval. The Wise Men who followed the star to Bethlehem were magoi (volkhvy in translation).16 The story of Apollonios of Tyana, famed for his effective talismans, made its way via a translated Byzantine chronicle into the Primary Chronicle.17 Klim Smoliatich, Metropolitan of Kiev in the middle of the twelfth century and an advocate and imitator of Byzantine models of allegorical commentary, stresses God’s agency, but in a way that acknowledges effective magic: ‘Some magicians [here charodei ] can often tame wild dogs and beasts by their magic arts. But when Daniel was cast into the den with the beasts, no magic skills (volshebnaia khitrost
) or sorcery stopped the mouths of the Assyrian beasts, but rather the almighty and omnipotent power of God made them as lambs to the prophet.’18 The Fiziolog (Physiologos), an assemblage of allegories showing how the behaviour of animals contains hidden lessons in piety, includes a tale of a cunning volkhv who tricks and slays the dreaded Gorgon (the lesson: ‘direct your thoughts to the Lord and you will with ease overcome the forces against you’ – since the serpent-haired Gorgon appears to be diabolical, the volkhv provides the positive exemplar!).19 But while magoi in parts of the Greek written tradition could be learned and even prestigious, in normal 14 15 16

17 18

19

NPL, p. 49; BLDR V, p. 72. See e.g. SRIaz XI–XVII vv., xv, p. 181, under poganin and poganskii as well as poganyi; cf. also poganomyslenii for the Greek ethnophrones. Matthew ii.1; see e.g. Aprakos Mstislava Velikogo, ed. L. P. Zhukovskaia (Moscow, 1983), p. 242 (fo. 181a). In translations volkhvovanie and related words normally render the Greek mageia, manteia, goeteia. PVL I, pp. 30–1; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 69–71. N. V. Ponyrko, Epistoliarnoe nasledie Drevnei Rusi XI–XIII. Issledovaniia, teksty, perevody (St Petersburg, 1992), p. 135; ibid., pp. 102–14 on links between Klim’s Epistle to Foma and commentaries by Niketas of Herakleia on sermons of Gregory of Nazianzos; transl. Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric, p. 50. BLDR IV, p. 408.

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Rus vocabulary (including translations and citations from some of these very texts) the label volkhv was neither neutrally descriptive, nor merely derogatory; it implied a more active, personal, insidious presence of the diabolical. Formally, magic was an offence under the jurisdiction of the Church. Translated codes of canon law prescribe severe penalties for practices such as those outlined in canon 61 of the ‘Quinisect’ Council in Trullo, convened by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II in 691–2: Those who expose themselves to soothsayers (manteis) or to the so-called ‘centurions’ . . . are to be subjected to six years of penance . . . To the same penance one must submit those who drag a bear or similar animal after themselves for the enjoyment and damage of simple-minded people and who foretell the future . . . The same is true for interpreters of the clouds, sorcerers, furnishers of amulets, and soothsayers. We decree that those who continue doing so, who show neither penance nor avoid these destructive and pagan (hellenika) customs, shall be totally expelled from the Church . . . ‘For what communion has light with darkness?’20

Vladimir’s Statute, reflecting in effect the foundation charter for the new religious institution in Rus, lists magical practices among the activities over which the prince gave the Church power to judge. The exact list of offences varies from manuscript to manuscript – ‘witchcraft, knot-magic, herb-magic’; ‘witchcraft, herb-magic, charms, sorcery, volkhvovanie’ – so that little specific information can be gleaned beyond the general principle.21 Iaroslav’s Statute, which deals with specific penalties for specific actions, is notably reticent on the topic of magic. The ‘short redaction’ mentions no magic-related offences at all, while the ‘expanded redaction’ merely mentions that ‘if a woman be a maker of charms, or a witch, or a volkhva, or a maker of herbal potions, then her husband, having caught her, punishes her, but does not separate from her’.22 Apparently in this early period the secular authorities concerned themselves with anti-magical action as little as possible, perhaps because practices were too pervasive for any general prohibition to be enforceable;23 which left the onus on the clergy, as guided by the codes and penitentials. 20

21 22 23

Text and translation see Fogen, ¨ ‘Balsamon on Magic’, p. 100; with early Slavonic translation in V. N. Beneshevich, Drevne-slavianskaia Kormchaia XIV titulov bez tolkovanii, I (St Petersburg, 1906), p. 182. The Greek manteis here become volshby and volshv
bniki in translation. The origins of ‘centurions’ (hekatontarchoi > sotniki ) in this connection seems to have been as mysterious in Byzantium as it doubtless was in Rus. See ZDR, pp. 140, 149; also Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 43. On knot-magic see Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 221–3. ZDR, pp. 191 (article 38); cf. Kaiser, The Laws of Rus
, p. 48 (in a version where this is article 40). On the Church Statutes see above, pp. 153–6. On the much fuller (and much more fully documented) involvement of the secular authorities in the Muscovite period see Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 408–33.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

‘If a person goes to volkhvy for the sake of spells . . . let him eat neither meat not milk for forty days, then bread and water for two years . . . since he has abandoned the help of the Most High and turns to demons . . . ’24 ‘If women do something for the sake of their children – if when they fall ill they take them to volkhvy and not to the priest for prayers – then six weeks’ [penance], or three if they are young. And six weeks if they take the children to a Frankish priest for prayers.’25 ‘Those who indulge in magic and sorcery (volkhvovanie, charodeianie), be they men or women, should be persuaded with words and admonition to desist from their evil; if they do not desist from the evil they must be severely punished so as to prevent the evil; but they should not be put to death.’26 Such references are intriguing, but again, as in the codes issued by princes, they are relatively scarce. Again the inference is perhaps that magical practices were far too common, too habitual, too deeply embedded, for either Church or prince yet to have the administrative means to address them in any effective or systematic way. Written prescription did not greatly intrude into such areas of traditional life. Volkhvy loom larger in narrative sources than in quasi-legal sources. Chronicles are not concerned with village custom, but they do from time to time take note when magic intrudes into politics. Thus the Primary Chronicle includes several accounts of volkhvy, prompted in the main by clashes of authority. It was one thing to cast spells and prescribe healing potions. Monks and princes may well have disapproved (though one would not be surprised to learn that at least some of the Christian elite occasionally had recourse to such remedies themselves). But it was quite another thing for volkhvy to challenge – or to be perceived to challenge – the secular powers, especially in the exercise of their ‘legitimate’ tribute-gathering authority. Entries for 1024 and 1071 tell of volkhv-led ‘rebellions’ in the north-east. On both occasions there appear to be economic implications: in 1024 the volkhvy are blamed for a famine, such that the people turned to the Volga Bulgars for supplies, and in 1071 the volkhvy are blamed for exploiting a famine to foment violent unrest aimed against the better-off.27 On the first occasion the ‘rebellion’ was quelled by Prince Iaroslav, on the second occasion by the prince’s tributegatherer, Ian Vyshatich. Civil strife in Novgorod in the 1070s apparently 24 25 26 27

Smirnov, Materialy, p. 65 (= Ashche dvoezhenets, article 10). Smirnov, Materialy, p. 10 (Voproshaniia Kirika, 12). RIB VI, col. 4 (the Canonical Responses of Metr. Ioann II). PVL I, pp. 101–2, 117; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 134–5, 150–1. On the ‘real’ practices perhaps reflected in these and related narratives see Brian P. Bennett, ‘Divining History: Providential Interpretation in the “Primary Chronicle” of Kievan Rus
’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago (1999), pp. 187–99.

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set ‘all the people’ on the side of a troublesome volkhv, against the prince, his retinue and the bishop.28 In these narratives the volkhvy are defeated by physical force, but the manner of their defeat is recast in quasi-theological terms, mainly as a form of ‘combat by prophecy’ in which the volkhv falsely predicts his own survival before his conqueror kills him. Only God knows the future, magic is not only ineffectual but blind, a demonic delusion. Such an insistence on the falsity of magic leads the chronicler into potential difficulty when he relates the ancient tale of how Oleg, one of the renowned early (pagan) rulers of Kiev in the early tenth century, was correctly told – by volkhvy – that his death would be caused by his horse: on hearing the prediction, Oleg banished the horse from his sight. Four years later, on hearing that the horse had died, he went to see its corpse and, in mockery of the volkhvy and their false prophecy, he placed his foot on the animal’s skull – whereupon a snake crept out of the skull and bit him, and he died.29 A digression, consisting of a substantial quotation on the subject from a translated Byzantine chronicle, tries to explain the paradox: how it is that, though magic is false and blind, it does sometimes appear to work. The argument takes examples from ‘bookish’ history, and is ultimately derived from Byzantine patristic writings. Although it represents an acknowledgement that the apparent powers of the volkhvy are not always refutable by the simple expedient of killing them, that God may allow magic to work, nevertheless the explanation in the translation and Primary Chronicle is reproduced in much cruder terms than had been the case in the Greek original. The volkhv becomes a much more negative figure, an aberration to be explained rather than a theological curiosity.30 The chroniclers are interested in how magic can be defeated, or explained away, not in what it is. What we might regard as distinct categories of behaviour tend to be conflated. Any form of perceived deviance – political, confessional, behavioural – can be branded as magical. Magic becomes virtually an all-purpose negative label: not a thing in itself but an attribute or potential attribute of things that were not Christian. In these tales pagan magic is fused with notions of the demonic. A sorcerer among the northern Chud was renowned for his volkhvovanie, which involved summoning his ‘gods’, yet his description of the ‘gods’ makes it clear to the enlightented reader that they are demons.31 The notorious Vseslav, 28 29 30

31

PVL I, p. 120; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 154. PVL I, pp. 29–30; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 69. On the semantic shifts in this passage in Greek and Slavonic see Simon Franklin, ‘The Reception of Byzantine Culture by the Slavs’, The 17th International Congress of Byzantine Studies. Major Papers (New Rochelle, New York, 1986), pp. 372–83. PVL I, p. 119; Cross, Primary Chronicle, p. 153.

264

Functions and perceptions of writing

Prince of Polotsk in the second half of the eleventh century and catalyst for civil and inter-princely strife, acquired a ‘magical’ reputation.32 In the tale of Ian Vyshata’s contest with the northern volkhvy, the magical blends with the heretical: Ian’s opponents are said to have stated, under interrogation, that they believed in the Antichrist, who dwelt in the Abyss.33 In other words, the bookmen who wrote the chronicle were not interested in understanding magic by its own criteria but in filtering it into the bookish terms which enabled them to take control of its explanation. Magic was – literally – demonised, not so much to make it alien as to make it familiar, to subjugate it to a safe Christian interpretative framework. In a sense, then, the title of the present subsection is misleading: ‘writing about magic’ is notably absent in the sources, since writings ostensibly about magic are in fact concerned not to be about magic as a distinct phenomenon, but rather to dissolve any consistent differentiation between magic and other manifestations of demonic deviance, while reaffirming the distinction between all such deviance and Christianity. On one level, writing about magic defines magic as that which is outside true writing. On another level, writing about magic appropriates magic to the approved written framework of interpretation. Magical writings Imagine that we are defining what constitutes magic. In this section we shall consider two categories of writings. The first category includes writings in which the contents might be thought magical: writings which expound on invisible properties of visible phenomena, as aids to divination, or to healing, or simply to better living. The second category consists of written objects with functions which might be thought magical: in particular, objects which might be used as talismans or amulets, to provide protection or relief from harm.34 The Rus received and produced a limited range of writings concerned with interpreting hidden significances in the natural (‘created’) world. Apart from the compendious and theologically scrupulous commentaries on Creation in the Hexaemeron by the Bulgarian John the Exarch, 32 33

34

See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 250–5. PVL I, p. 118; Cross, Primary Chronicle, pp. 151–2. See also V. V. Mil
kov, Drevnerusskie apokrify (St Petersburg, 1999), pp. 81–123: Mil
kov groups together the Primary Chronicle’s accounts and labels them collectively the ‘Tale of the Volkhvy’, which he analyses in relation to Christian apocrypha. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, p. 218 makes a convenient terminological distinction: a talisman is an object thought to help avert evil or illness or to bring good luck; an amulet is a talisman worn about the person.

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and the somewhat more heterogeneous assemblage of narratives and interpretations covering similar ground in the Paleia, a few ‘specialist’ translated texts were available. A weak case for ‘magical’ contents could be made for the Fiziolog, which presents nature and animal behaviour as a store of moral allegories for the good Christian. For example, ‘the third quality of the lion: when the lioness runs away she sweeps her tracks with her tail so that the hunter will not discover her traces. Thus, man, you also: when you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand does, lest the devil prevent the doing of what you intend’.35 The created world teaches us simple lessons in piety. More securely ‘magical’ in its potential ramifications is the brief treatise on precious stones by Epiphanios of Salamis, found in the Izbornik of 1073 and also (in more or less elaborated versions) embedded in several other translated works. The treatise includes practical rather than moral guidance. Precious stones, it seems, have healing properties: agate is a cure for scorpion-stings and snake-bites, chrysolith helps heal internal or uterine disorders, jacinth may help women in labour.36 Several passages in the Primary Chronicle treat unusual celestial phenomena as signs or omens, though their decipherment is notably vague (usually such signs are for the worse, though God may turn them to the better).37 These and equivalent fragments of arcane interpretation of the visible world are strewn sparsely and unsystematically across manuscript compilations in which they are not the central concern. There is no trace of an ‘alternative’ library of specialist books at this stage. Translated Byzantine lists of ‘true and false books’ do appear in miscellanies and in the canon law collections, but significant local editions and additions proliferate only in Muscovite times.38 Non-canonical narratives which we tend to lump together as ‘apocrypha’ are not especially relevant to the present context, since in the pre-Mongol period ‘apocrypha’, especially as components of world-historical narrative compilations, seem not to have been treated as 35 36

37

38

BLDR IV, p. 402. Izbornik Sviatoslava 1073 g. Faksimil
noe izdanie (Moscow, 1983), fos. 153v–4. On Epiphanios’s treatise here and elsewhere see Iu. D. Aksenton, ‘Svedeniia o dragotsennykh kamniakh v Izbornike Sviatoslava 1073 g. i nekotorykh drugikh pamiatnikakh’, in B. A. Rybakov (ed.), Izbornik Sviatoslava 1073 g. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1977), pp. 280–92. See Franklin, ‘The Reception of Byzantine Culture by the Slavs’, pp. 388–90; Bennett, ‘Divining History’, pp. 80–124; cf. the solar omen in the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, BLDR IV, p. 256. On the early tradition see B. A. Semenovker, Bibliograficheskie pamiatniki Vizantii (Moscow, 1995), pp. 129–54; on the fuller manuscript history of such books in Rus see N. A. Kobiak, ‘Indeksy otrechennykh i zapreshchennykh knig v russkoi pis
mennosti’, in D. S. Likhachev (ed.), Drevnerusskaia literatura. Istochnikovedenie. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad, 1984), pp. 45–54.

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more suspicious or revealing than any other narrative source.39 Only one native source, the thirteenth-century Life of Avraamii of Smolensk alludes to the possible use of some kind of esoteric book, but in terms too vague to offer much scope for hypothesis.40 The spread of ‘specialist’ omenbooks on divination according to, for example, phases of the moon, or thunder, or bodily trembling, or the conjunction of feasts and days of the week (lunniki, gromniki, trepetniki, koliadniki and such like)41 is a much later phenomenon. For evidence of divination with books, however, we do not need to look for specialised or esoteric tracts. We find it instead right at the heart of official book culture, in well-attested uses of perhaps the most wellthumbed of all books, the Psalter. One of the very earliest of the surviving East Slav manuscripts, the ‘Bychkov Psalter’, is a ‘divinatory Psalter’, with brief divinatory phrases appended at the foot of each page where a psalm begins.42 The phrases are in much the same banal genre as fortune cookies or popular newspaper horoscopes: ‘many afflictions rise against you’; ‘woe will pass to joy’; ‘be patient, good will come to you’.43 First-hand confirmation of a similar use of the Psalter appears in the Testament of Vladimir Vsevolodovich Monomakh (prince of Kiev 1113–25). Vladimir finds a theme for his thoughts by opening a Psalter at random and citing the first verse he sees.44 This is private divination. Yet the most vivid account of what might be reckoned a divinatory practice takes us right to the central, solemn, official, public rituals of the Church. In May 1193 the archbishop of Novgorod died, and the prince and the cathedral clergy and the abbots and the leading Novgorodians met to decide on who should succeed him. They could not agree on which of three possible candidates to choose, but they did agree on a device to resolve the conflict: ‘“Let us place three lots on the altar in St Sophia.” And they placed the lots there, and ordered a liturgy to be sung, and on the completion of the service they sent a blind man from the town square . . . and by God’s grace the lot of Martirii was drawn.’45 The oddity here is not the use of a liturgy to invoke 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

The bulky study by Milkov, Drevnerusskie apokrify is vitiated by the assumption that apocrypha always represented a forbidden tradition which took root despite the Church’s best efforts to prevent it doing so. BLDR V, p. 42; Hollingsworth, Hagiography, p. 146. See Mathieson, ‘Magic in Slavia Orthodoxa’, pp. 163–72. SK, no. 28; see Mosh´e Altbauer with Horace G. Lunt (eds.), An Early Slavonic Psalter from Rus
(Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Altbauer and Lunt (eds.), An Early Slavonic Psalter from Rus
, pp. 27, 80, 83. PVL I, p. 153. On various modes of divination with the Psalter see Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 312–13. NPL, p. 232; note, however, that this anecdote is not in the earliest and best manuscript of the chronicle (cf. ibid., p. 40).

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divine aid in difficult times, but the casting of lots (with the names of the candidates written on them?) on the altar, and the device of bringing in a blind man through whom the Divinity would make His choice known.46 Magic, when invoked with the aid of the books, was not magic. And in this period there is little sign of bookish magic with the aid of any other books. By contrast, talismanic inscriptions and inscribed objects with broadly talismanic functions are very common. Indeed, most of the main types of non-parchment Christian writing can be viewed in this light. Writing serves as a device by which the person retains potential access to protective powers. On the one hand, writing at sacred sites ensures the physical presence of the writer’s voice in his absence: a widespread practice, typified in Rus by the votive graffiti in churches, and in some ways comparable to Buddhist prayer-flags and prayer-wheels, or to the prayer-tags at Shinto shrines. On the other hand, portable inscribed objects allow their bearers continual contact with the sacred powers whether within or at a distance from the sacred sites, so that any kind of portable inscribed Christian image (inscribed because Christian) might perhaps be perceived to have some talismanic, protective function: miniature enamel or stone icons, or pectoral crosses, reliquaries, textiles, goblets, the inscribed images on coins or seals, the sign of the Cross which precedes the message in several birch-bark letters, or (at a distance from the church, though hardly portable) the large, fixed, carved stone crosses. In administrative life, the sanctio spiritualis – calling down God’s punishment on anyone who breaks the terms of an agreement – could be reckoned a magical device, as distinct from the sanctio temporalis, the threat of punishment by secular authorities: all the (very few) administrative documents of the period seek to secure their effectiveness through the sanctio spiritualis. And if we allow such broad notions of the talismanic within mainstream Christian devotion, it would seem inconsistent to ignore the central rituals: most conspicuously, for example, the talismanic functions of the Gospel book (as object rather than as text) in divine worship; or indeed, if we were to indulge in reductio ad absurdum – or perhaps that should be amplificatio ad absurdum – the talismanic function of the church building, whether for the donor who piously paid for its construction in the hope of gaining some benefit for his soul, or for local inhabitants who could see its reassuring presence protecting their city. However, to say that all such inscribed objects may have talismanic functions is not quite the same as to say that they all are talismans to the same degree. Several of them serve a range of functions, of which 46

An analogous procedure (with the prince’s son drawing the lots, rather than a blind man from the town) is reported for the election of Archbishop Spiridon in 1229: NPL, pp. 68, 275. Cf. above, p. 168 on the juridical use of lots.

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the protective magic of the inscribed image is only one. In the case of a pectoral cross, for example, the protective function is close to the object’s main purpose. A coin or seal is primarily a coin or seal, and the protective authority of the inscribed image is supplementary.47 Such objects are multifunctional, and we have no means of knowing which of the possible functions was more significant or less significant for any given user at any given time. The problem is nicely typified in the zmeeviki (‘snake amulets’), discs showing a saint or saints on one side and a Gorgon-like image on the other, with standard label and votive inscriptions accompanying the saints, and with a cryptic incantation (originally a uterine charm, sometimes in Greek, sometimes in Slavonic) accompanying the Gorgon-like image.48 On the one hand, the uterine incantation is notable as a votive inscription not addressed to God or approved intermediaries, and would appear to suggest pagan origins and practices. On the other hand not merely are zmeeviki quite common luxury objects among the Christian elite of the Rus; they derive from an equivalent Byzantine tradition. We can read a great deal into the uterine charm; or not. The zmeeviki are emphatically not expressions of a local pagan–Christian synthesis: if the uterine charm is magical, then it is long-approved and imported (hence respectable) Christian magic, backed up by the Christian image and the very presence of writing. But we cannot generalise about how ‘magical’ even these objects actually were: about the balance, for any given user, between talismanic and decorative functions.49 The further we move into the realm of the ‘other’, away from familiar Christian objects, the more speculative is the assessment of the object’s semantics in local use over time. For example the early runic inscriptions on Islamic coins seem to indicate that the coins could acquire some talismanic significance.50 But when Islamic coins are pierced and bunched together as pendants, to what extent, when and for whom were they amulets, or signs of wealth, or merely decorative pendants? Other early 47

48 49

50

A. V. Nazarenko, ‘O drevnerusskikh pechatiakh s nadpis
iu “D
NESLOVO”’, in Vostochnaia Evropa v drevnosti i srednevekov
e: Iazychestvo, khristianstvo, tserkov
(Moscow, 1995), pp. 49–51, argues that some seals are primarily talismanic; for a negative response see Ianin in APDR, III, p. 40. D. M. Bulanin, ‘Der literarische Status der Novgoroder “Birkenrinden-Urkunden”’, ZSl 42 (1997), 159. suggests that the inscribed spindle whorls were amulets. See above, pp. 52–3; below, plate 3; Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 241–53. Note, however, the misnamed ‘Suzdal zmeevik’, most likely from south-west Rus, where the personalised inscription – to grant Georgii and Khristina repose and to ‘extinguish the fiery force’ (= fever?) – leaves little doubt as to the amuletic function. See A. A. Gippius and A. A. Zalizniak, ‘O nadpisi na suzdal
skom zmeevike’, Balto-slavianskie issledovaniia 1997. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow, 1998), pp. 540–62. See above, pp. 112–4.

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runic finds are clearly definable as amulets,51 but are there any grounds for assuming that unfamiliar scripts (runic, Kufic, Glagolitic, mirror-writing, Greek) automatically retained a magical aura?52 In its most acute form the difficulty applies to mute, non-inscribed objects: to decorative motifs which some speculate might have derived from pagan symbols; or to the multiplicity of pendants – keys, knives, spoons, combs, horse-heads, axes, birds, fish – which turn up in excavations all over Rus.53 To put it crudely: when is a squiggle on a pot a mode of calendrical divination,54 and when is it just a squiggle on a pot? The less the object ‘says’, the more freely modern interpreters speak for it. Yet some objects do speak for themselves. Thus far we have considered potentially magical functions of secondary and tertiary writing, in multimedia or multifunctional contexts: where the lettering is part of some other graphic or sculpted design (a picture, a cross), or part of an object which may have other principal functions (e.g. a seal, a spindle whorl, a coin). Inevitably we have found that decoding such objects is fraught with nuance and uncertainty. Are there no ‘purely’ textual amulets? No specimens of amuletic primary writing, uncluttered by additional functions and components, plainly stating their purpose? In the museum at Silistra, in the extreme north-eastern corner of Bulgaria, is a small sliver of lead, inscribed on both sides in Cyrillic letters dating from the tenth century. The message is direct: ‘Flee, fever (triasavitsa), from this man, the Lord will drive you out. Flee, fever, from this man . . . the Lord will drive you out. Flee, fever, from this man, the Lord will drive you out.’55 Every element here is a classic example of its type: the use of lead, reminiscent of the tradition of lead amulets (defixiones) going back to Greek antiquity;56 the threefold repetition; the direct address to the personified ‘fever’ found also in later Slav folk magic;57 the simple Christianising device whereby the triasavitsa becomes a kind of petty demon to be expelled by the Lord, rather than an autonomous power. Nor is this object unique in the early Bulgarian context. Textual lead amulets, while not widespread, are frequent enough to 51 53

54 55 56 57

52 See below, pp. 272–4. See above, pp. 112–3. See esp. L. A. Golubeva, ‘Amulety’, in B. A. Kolchin and T. I. Makarova (eds.), Drevniaia Rus
. Byt i kul
tura (Moscow, 1997), pp. 153–65, 339–42; E. A. Riabinin, Zoomorfnye ukrasheniia Drevnei Rusi X–XIV vv. (ASSSR SAI E1–60; Leningrad, 1981); also Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 218–28. See e.g. Rybakov, Iazychestvo Drevnei Rusi, pp. 164–94. Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, I (Die Slawischen Sprachen 36, 1994), pp. 237–9. John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York, Oxford, 1992). See Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 244–51.

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form a distinctive subgroup among the oldest surviving Cyrillic inscribed objects. Some of them contain quite elaborate narratives, the common element being the conquest of a personified spirit of disease, usually by Christ or the Archangel Michael: dialogues between Christ and Disease (Nezhit), in which the latter is prevented from entering humans and is banished to a barren place;58 the conquest of fevers (triasavitsa, ogninitsa) or a witch (veshchitsa) by the Archangel Michael.59 Sometimes the plain text is presented together with elements of esoteric paraphernalia, such as a bilingual (Slavonic plus Greek-in-Cyrillic) invocation to Christ as conqueror, or a pair of invocations (Greek and Slavonic) to Christ and the Cross, both in mirror-writing.60 Nothing like this was known from pre-Muscovite Rus, until the discovery of a series of birch-bark documents in Novgorod in the early 1990s. Document no. 715, from the thirteenth century, reads: ‘Thricenine angels, thrice-nine archangels, deliver God’s servant Mikhei from fever (triasavitsa) by the prayers of the Holy Mother of God.’61 This find was shortly followed by another, no. 734, from the middle of the twelfth century: ‘Sichael, Sichael, Sichael; Angel, Angel, Angel of the Lord; thrice the name of the Angel’, also an invocation against fever.62 And then another: a fragment of a Germanic birch-bark document, apparently to ward off an ‘arrow’ (= lightning?);63 one is reminded of the Finnic (in Cyrillic) birch-bark document which evokes protection against ‘God’s arrow’ (lightning).64 Such objects tend to confirm the amuletic interpretation of no. 674, a fragment of Psalm 54 in mirror-writing, on a 58

59 60

61 62

63 64

Popkonstantinov and Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, pp. 113–15, 123–5; for other references to Nezhit as personified disease see SDRIaz (XI–XIV vv.), XI, pp. 112–13; on Byzantine story-magic on amulets see Anastasia D. Vakaloudi, ‘The Kinds and the Special Functions of the epodai (epodes) in Apotropaic Amulets of the First Byzantine Period’, Byzantinoslavica 59 (1998), 236–7. Popkonstantinov and Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, pp. 19–21, 119. On Ogneia as one of the twelve fevers see Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, p. 248. Popkonstantinov and Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, pp. 113, 141. Note also a hybrid Cyrillic/Glagolitic lead amulet, invoking the devil not to enter man, found in 1998 (announced by K. Popkonstantinov at conference in Sofia, August 1999). NGB X, pp. 14–15. NGB X, p. 33. Note here also a schematic outline of the Cross, along with its standard legend (‘Christ conquers’). The name Sichael does not figure in the fullest Byzantine lists of angels, but he does appear – alongside Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael – in a treatise on Magic: see A. Delatte, Anecdota atheniensia. I. Textes gr´ecs in´edits relatifs a` l’histoire des religions (Li`ege, Paris, 1927), p. 99 (line 17); cf. ibid. line 1 for the seven zalai, perhaps to be associated with triasavitsa (who also overlaps with pyretos, rigos, rigopyretos etc.); also Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight, pp. 246–8. NGB, no. 753. See above, pp. 108–9. NGB, no. 292; see above, p. 116; also Eve Levin, ‘Lay Religious Identity in Medieval Russia: The Evidence of Novgorod Birch-Bark Documents’, General Linguistics 35 (1997), 135.

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271

tightly rolled piece of birch-bark which was probably meant to be carried as an amulet.65 Other early birch-bark documents have talismanic elements, such as signs of the Cross and votive formulae,66 but these recent finds are exceptional as integrally talismanic textual objects. Purely textual amulets remain extremely rare. Talismanic writing was usually part of an image-bearing object. In early Rus Christianity, as in wider Christian culture, there was no standard textual amuletic practice comparable to, for example, the Orthodox Jewish obligation to bind tefillin (phylacteries containing scrolls) to the arm and forehead every day, or to fix a mezuzah (a case containing a scroll with scriptural verses) to the doorpost of every Jewish home. Although ultimate authority derived from the words of the Book, amuletic powers resided principally in the combination of textual and non-textual representations. Thus, on a fairly broad, externally imposed definition of magic, most forms of writing, from the most prestigious to the most ephemeral, could have magical functions. The less predictable conclusion, however, is that ‘marked’ magical uses of writing in this period are highly conservative. ‘Magic’, for many who refer to it, tends to be associated with notions such as ‘pagan’, ‘popular’, ‘subversive’; magical and talismanic features are therefore often thought to reflect the infiltration of paganism, a synthesis of imported Christianity and native paganism, the ‘deformation of Christianity under the influence of pagan superstition’, a ‘combination of a Christian sacred text and the devices of pagan magic’, and hence an example of ‘dvoeverie, typical of early Rus’.67 In fact, it seems that the opposite is the case. Written practices which are compatible with broad definitions of magic are socially inclusive (as inclusive as access to written culture, from prince to birch-bark scribblers). More significantly, all of the ‘marked’ magical uses of writing have precedents and parallels within imported Christianity. Psalmomancy, psalm amulets, invocations against personified fevers, even cryptic uterine formulae surrounding Gorgonlike figures – these are all firmly within long-established traditions of Christian written magic, alongside routine talismans such as the sign of the Cross, votive inscriptions, or the sanctio spiritualis on written documents. They were not local inventions. They came with authoritative 65 66 67

Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow, 1995), pp. 378–9. On psalm amulets in early Byzantium see Vakaloudi, ‘The Kinds and Special Functions of the epodai ’, 235. Bulanin, ‘Der literarische Status’, argues that inscribed personal names and letters of the alphabet should be regarded as talismanic. Bulanin, ‘Der literarische Status’, 162; Zalizniak, Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt, p. 379. For an effective critique of the concept of dvoeverie (‘double belief ’) as used in modern historiography see Eve Levin, ‘Dvoeverie and Popular Religion’, in Stephen K. Batalden (ed.), Seeking God. The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), pp. 29–52.

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precedent, like other manifestations of written culture. The notable feature of these uses of writing is that they were not, in our period, to any appreciable extent infiltrated by local custom. Instead, the imported traditions became local custom. Not only did the Rus import their Christianity; they also imported their written modes of Christian magic. Writing itself was the marker. Of course the Rus continued to use traditional native pagan amulets, and doubtless to practise traditional native forms of magic. Of course in Rus – as everywhere – syntheses emerged, whereby originally non-Christian practices were absorbed into a Christian identity. But not, in early Rus, in writing. We have already noted that the traditional pagan amulets remain traditionally uninscribed, so that the presence of writing acts as a token of Christian provenance and significance.68 A fairly effective and instinctive barrier seems to prevent conventions from crossing in either direction, so that there was extraordinary little cross-contamination: local pagan magic does not make its way into Christian written magic, and writing does not spread into local pagan practice.

Writing as magic? Written objects could serve magical purposes, and the presence of writing marked such purposes as safely Christian (according to our external definitions of magic). But what if we remove the objects and focus simply on the properties of the graphic signs? Was writing itself magical? It is possible to assemble a plausible dossier of evidence which suggests that the answer should be ‘yes’, that writing, as sign and object, was regarded as possessing magical (or, if we prefer, sacral) properties. In historical and ideological discourse the status of Slavonic letters is not in doubt. They were devised by a saint, with divine guidance. Khrabr, in the treatise On Letters, writes of the significance of the names for the first letter of the alphabet in Hebrew, Greek and Slavonic. While he does not continue through the full alphabets, his remarks imply an acceptance of the esoteric significance of letter-names.69 The names of Slavonic letters are not only words with meanings in themselves, but in sequence they can be construed as forming a continuous cryptic message.70 By extension, alphabetical acrostics (especially those which contain the sequence of letter-names, rather than just the sequence of letters) are ripe for esoteric 68 69 70

See above, pp. 69–70, on secondary writing in general, and on inscribed images. See above, p. 192. E.g. Kyra Ericsson, ‘The Slavonic Alphabet: a Credo’, in Das Heidnische und Christliche Slaventum (Wiesbaden, 1970), pp. 105–20; also L.V. Karpenko, ‘Semiotika glagolitsy’, Slavianovedenie (1998, no. 6), 61–78.

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interpretation.71 The letters of the Slavonic alphabet also represent numbers, so that magic meanings can be sought on one or all of three levels: letter-magic, name-magic, and number-magic.72 Churchmen condemn any disrespectful treatment of letters: damage to books was of course prohibited in the received codes, but Kirik of Novgorod, writing towards the middle of the twelfth century, also wonders whether it is more generally a sin to trample letters (gramoty) underfoot.73 All this looks plain enough. Letters were magic signs, objects with letters were magic objects, an alphabet could be an amulet. However, the dossier is not as persuasive as it might appear. All the inferences are speculative. Perhaps alphabets could be talismanic; but where are the native texts confirming such usage or perception, and where are the signs which show that any of the scratched alphabets actually does have a talismanic function and is not just a scratched alphabet? Letternames and letter-name acrostics could give scope for esoteric interpretation; but where is the contemporary evidence that such interpretation was widely acknowledged?74 A churchman wants to condemn those who litter the ground with gramoty and walk all over them; but surely this shows precisely that reverence for letters as objects was nowhere near as widespread as the churchman might have wished it to be. By comparative criteria the evidence for a general magical status of letters is notably weak. Furthermore, it is weak even where one might expect it to be strongest. If a Hebrew scribe makes a mistake when copying out the Torah, the scroll is invalid (the relevant sheet of parchment must be copied anew). The Rus scribe copies out the Gospels as conscientiously as he can, but (following normal Byzantine practice) he guards against the consequences of error with a simple apology in his colophon. The errors remain. Accuracy was prized, but practice suggests no extreme fetishisation of the letter of the law.75 71

72

73 74

75

See Roland Marti, ‘Texte mit Alphabet-Akrostichon in der kirchenslavischen Tradition’, ZSl 42 (1997), 129–45. For a wide-ranging survey of number-symbolism in early Rus see V. M. Kirillin, Simvolika chisel v literature Drevnei Rusi (XI–XVI veka) (St Petersburg, 2000). For a recent enthusiastic attempt at decoding, largely unencumbered by evidence, see A. Zinov
ev, Tainopis
kirillitsy (Vladimir, 1998), esp. pp. 49–64; cf. Vasil Ionchev, Azbukata ot Pliska, Kirilitsata i Glagolitsata (Sofia, 1997). Smirnov, Materialy, p. 12. On this and the texts requiring respect for church books see Bulanin, ‘Der literarische Status’, 153–4. On inconsistency in letter-name acrostics, and on the debate over whether the acrostics are based on established letter-names or vice versa, see N. S. Demkova and N. F. Droblenkova, ‘K izucheniiu slavianskikh azbuchnykh stikhov’, TODRL 23 (1968), 50–2; Klaus Detlef Olof, Philologische und literarische Aspekte slavischer Alphabetakrostichis nebst einem Exkurs u¨ ber die slavischen Buchstabennamen (Amsterdam, 1973), pp. 51–61. See also P. E. Lukin, ‘Fetish ili sviatyniia: k voprosu o vospriiatii sv. teksta v srednevekovoi vostochnokhristianskoi kul
ture’, AION – Slavistica 5 (1997–8; publ. 2000), 337–54, who adduces theological arguments on this issue.

274

Functions and perceptions of writing

While not denying that letter-magic, or script-magic, might have existed, we should be very cautious about broadly ascribing magical properties to letters as such. Occasionally we find ‘marked’ magical forms of script, like the mirror-writing in the birch-bark psalm amulet, and perhaps the graphic distortions on the ‘Suzdal zmeevik’.76 But these are rare exceptions. Mirror-writing itself is common, usually as a plain error in manufacture. Objects with mirror-writing and other ‘improper’ representations of writing may well be talismanic,77 but the form of script is not normally the marker of the objects’ esoteric function. Cryptography and other ‘marked’ magical uses of script alone are very rare in this period. Writing seldom means only what it ‘says’. Indeed, the non-verbal message is often more powerful than the verbal. In early Rus perceptions, the non-verbal meanings of writing could not by definition be magical, since magic was almost by definition something outside written culture. In modern, more inclusive definitions a few early writings had magical contents, and a very large number of written objects served magical functions; but few magical practices exploited writing alone, nor was writing alone widely treated or represented as a medium with magical qualities. 76

See above, n. 49.

77

See above, pp. 70, 245–8.

8

Afterword: on the social and cultural dynamics of writing

In Chapter 3 we summarised the chronology of the spread of writing in Rus, and of the formation of the graphic environment, based on the surveys in Part I. Here we draw together the threads from Part II and consider some of the dynamic aspects of written culture: the functions and status of the technology, its social and institutional semantics, and the relations between written and non-written modes. After its long gestation period, writing proliferated rapidly from the middle of the eleventh century. In purely quantitative terms written culture continued to expand thereafter, reaching more people in more places, tracking the general proliferation and expansion of urban settlements in the lands of the Rus. But in terms of types of usage, and in terms of the contexts for usage, the basic patterns were set by the end of the eleventh century and remained remarkably stable over the next couple of centuries. The stability, or conservatism, of the early-established patterns is most clearly apparent in relation to what did not happen. Despite the ease with which primary writing was adopted into local urban activities, secondary writing did not spread to local traditional manufactured objects but remained tied to types of object which were originally imported. Despite the example of Byzantium, writing did not become a required component of formal administrative procedures, nor did Rus education institutionally support a rhetorical or philosophical elite trained in ancient rhetoric. Despite the example of Bulgaria, bookmen in Rus reflected on the Cyrillo-Methodian achievement in historical and providential terms, not in linguistic and philological terms. Despite widespread talismanic and emblematic uses of written objects, the ‘magical’ potential of writing in itself was not exploited to a significant extent. Although by no means all writing was markedly Christian, no writing was markedly non-Christian. And so on, and so on. These and other individual non-occurrences can be subsumed into two larger non-occurrences. In the abstract one might have predicted that the uses of writing would develop according to one or both of two models: either the model generated by the implicit ‘logic’ of the medium (that is, by 275

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the logic which modern historians ascribe to it); or the model provided by the principal contemporary exemplars, Byzantium or Bulgaria. Neither type of development took place. The Rus did not systematically test and apply, over time, the full range of capacities of their acquired technology, nor did they simply transfer and retain patterns of written culture from Byzantium or Bulgaria (the repertoire of translations was largely shaped by the wider Cyrillo-Methodian context, but the pursuits of native bookmen were distinct, as were the uses of non-parchment writing). Explanations for the patterns of written culture in Rus must be sought in its local sociocultural dynamics. The twin catalysts for the spread of writing in Rus were, on the one hand, the Church, and on the other hand commerce and financial dealing and administration. These were the two contexts in which writing flourished from the beginning. Yet the two are asymmetrical in their relationships. Church writing was institution-based; commercial writing and most contingent administrative writing was activity-based (even when produced within some institutional context). As an institution, the Church derived its authority from the written word. To accept Christianity meant, necessarily, to accept Writ. Founded on writing, the Church also brought with it the habitual use of the tools of writing in the conduct of its own business. If the language of the Church had been Greek or Latin, perhaps that would have been the sum of written culture, the preserve of a privileged caste of clerics as the specialist intermediaries for access to the written word. Slavonic as a language of writing, though originally designed for church use, circumvented any potential for an ecclesiastical monopoly. Vernacular writing was a given, not a puzzle or a struggle. It was readily adapted by laymen in the conduct of their ordinary business. But not by all laymen, and not for all business. Lay Slavonic writing was a practical convenience, not an institutional imperative. Its proliferation was not due to policy or to regulation, but to an accumulation of spontaneous decisions by individuals. The asymmetry between institution-based writing and activity-based writing should not be mistaken for a simple division between ecclesiastical writing and secular writing. Book culture was indeed largely the institutional preserve of the Church, but it spawned many informal derivatives, from seal-inscriptions to graffiti to birch-bark formulae of salutation. When the first birch-bark letters were discovered, part of their novelty was that they revealed a hitherto unsuspected level of the use of writing among laymen for secular purposes, but precisely because such writing was not institutionally generated, it was not and could not be exclusive. Although activity-based writing thrived in an urban secular environment, messages

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on birch-bark and other media provide ample evidence that active access to activity-based writing was open, that bookmen could write informally, that components derived from book culture could easily migrate to the less formal contexts. Migration in the opposite direction was more difficult. Although access to the words and contents of book culture was of course open to all who heard and saw, production at the core was institutionally defined. Writing flourished in activities which touched the concerns of secular institutions (as evidenced by, for example, the inscribed wooden cylinderseals), but the formal institutionalisation of secular writing during the entire period was minimal. Despite limited attempts to appropriate the authority of the written word to the central secular institutions of power (Russkaia pravda), no secular apparatus emerged whose authority and functioning were based on written precept and procedure. This is not a sign of institutional backwardness or weakness. Rather it testifies to the resilience of traditional social relations, to a perceived functional adequacy of traditional non-written modes, to a self-sufficiency and resistance to the kinds of structural changes which the ‘logical’ (or Byzantine-style) institutional uses of the technology might have required. Formal writing was required in institutional dealings with outsiders for whom formal writing was institutionally habitual, in trade and diplomacy. Activity-based writing was assimilated rapidly and easily into core areas of urban life. Institution-based writing spread very slowly, from the margins: from the examples of trade and diplomacy; and perhaps especially from those areas where the Church encroached or sought to encroach on traditional privileges (princely statutes granting the Church an income and jurisdiction; land-grants to monasteries etc.). Only from about the middle of the thirteenth century did the sporadic institutional borrowings begin to acquire a semblance of autonomous momentum, though the routine administrative requirement for written procedures was still a long way off. Traditional belief-systems and practices should perhaps be regarded in the same light as traditional modes of dispute-resolution and the exercise of power, as institutions resistant to technological intrusion. It has become a modern truism that elements of traditional belief and practice were assimilated into Rus Christianity. In my view the truism is less true than is often assumed. In the present context, with regard to the uses of writing, cross-contamination was virtually non-existent: no signs that non-Christians took up Slavonic writing to serve their own beliefs; and a consistent (if invisible) barrier which prevented the spread of writing to traditionally non-Christian cult objects even when used by Christians.

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Functions and perceptions of writing

Technological resilience – or resistance – was not limited to secular institutions. As a sacral device, Slavonic writing was associated exclusively with Christianity in its received graphic forms. The asymmetry between institution-based writing and activity-based writing also helps to explain aspects of the status of the written word and of those who produced it. Writing flourished at the extremes: on the one hand in the most solemn and formal rituals of Faith; and on the other hand in humdrum and informal urban financial or even domestic dealings. The space between the two, while not completely barren, was sparsely inhabited. In such a situation it would be hard to see how writing could acquire uniform status. Bookmen were esteemed within book culture, as the experts on parchment literacy, and written objects which served as reminders of book culture could command appropriate reverence. But the relatively open access to informal writing militated against the emergence of any privileged status for ‘writers’ as such, or indeed for writing as such. The technology in itself does not seem to have been widely regarded as innately esoteric or magical. Within book culture the writer – he who makes the graphic signs – is barely visible, subordinate to the authority of the words, to the original author (such as the evangelists, or authoritative Church Fathers) and perhaps to the patron. Paradoxically the writer is most prominent in the least authoritative types of church-based writings: in the votive inscriptions, where the whole point was to leave a personal reminder of the writer’s presence. In informal activity-based writing the named writer is ubiquitous, for here, too, his or her presence is vital to the function of the message, part of its contents. In no context is it implied that the writer acquires any kudos for being able to write. How, then, did the adoption and spread of the technology relate to social and cultural change? The glib answer is that, since writing is a cultural phenomenon, the adoption and spread of writing was itself a fact of cultural change: if the acquisition of writing is a marker of cultural progression, then the facts speak for themselves. But facts which speak for themselves can rarely produce more than a value-laden tautology. Strip away the assumption that the primary significance of writing lies in its intrinsic cultural value, and the answer to the question must be that the relations between technological change and social and cultural change were uneven. The spread of institution-based writing was part of a process which involved very substantial changes in many areas of social and cultural life. The adoption and spread of Christianity – with Scripture as its justification and script as one of its tools – had far-reaching consequences for the economy, for structures of authority, for international politics, for political ideology, for the urban environment, for aesthetic standards, for public

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and private behaviour, for language and the means of expression, for ways of thought, and so on and so on. Writing was a necessary condition and component of at least some of these interlinked changes, part of the sociocultural package, a crucial enabling device; but we cannot realistically claim that in itself it was the agent or the cause of change. The weakness of a narrowly technocentric approach is still more apparent with respect to activity-based writing, where the ease with which the technology spread seems to be due precisely to the fact that no major disruption of traditional behaviour was implied or required. Nor does such writing seem to have functioned like the Trojan horse, with hidden consequences unsuspected at the time of its reception. The patterns of informal writing remained notably stable for generations, with little sense of a technology-driven impetus towards change, or even of much interest in the additional capacities which the technology might provide. On the contrary, in core areas of traditional activity where the adoption of writing is likely to have involved a change in traditional modes of conduct, writing tended to be resisted. The technology was not stronger than the social institutions which justified it, or which remained impervious to it. The spread of institution-based writing was ‘top-down’, facilitated by sustained political and economic support for the (initially intrusive) Church. It was an effective device for the furtherance of social and cultural integration, but only to a limited extent (through the codes) or indirectly (through the Church) for the exercise or consolidation of secular power. The spread of activity-based writing was ‘bottom-up’, facilitated by ready access to the technology and the absence of any obvious conceptual or institutional barrier. The interaction of the two produced the distinctive patterns in the uses of writing in early Rus. The genre of summary is conducive to over-simplification, and these contrasts are somewhat stark. The day-to-day social and cultural semantics of the graphic environment were of course more complex and nuanced than the schematic r´esum´e, both with regard to individuals and with regard to the overlapping textual communities formed through the uses of the written word in its various contexts and functions. The ‘ecology’ of communications technologies in Rus was, of course, less rigid in detail than in overview. I hope that the briskness of a summary is at least to some extent offset by the more circumstantial explorations in the foregoing chapters.

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Index

Abraham 236, 243 Achilles Tatios, 29 acrostics, 195–202, 203 Bulgarian, 196–9 Byzantine, 195–6 Rus, 201–2, 272–3 types, 195 Acts and Epistles, 28, 31, 33, 136 Adam, depiction of, 242 language of, 193 administrative writing (see also bureaucracy) and spread of writing, 6, 129–30, 157–9 classification of, 130–2 ‘contingent’ (see also land titles; testaments; treaties) definition, 130–1 ‘ephemeral’, 131, 162–3, 185–6, 276 ‘formal’, 131, 162–84; diplomatic and commercial, 163–71; dynastic, 171–4; ecclesiastical, 176–8; in Byzantium, 13, 35, 161–2, 164; princely, 81, 174–6, 178–81; private, 181–4, 186 ‘normative’ (see also codes; law) definition, 130–1 survey, 132–60, 178 status, 131, 158–60, 181, 184–6, 275–6 survival, 34–5, 178–84 Aeneid, 42 Africa, 130n. Akathistos hymn, 197 akribeia (rigorousness), 150 al-Nadim, 91–2 Aleksa Petrov, icon painter, 64 Aleksandr Iaroslavich ‘Nevskii’, prince, 168, 171 Alexander, emperor, 133 Alexander IV, pope, 165n. Alexander the Great, 69 Alexios Aristenos, 135, 138

Alexios the Stoudite, patriarch, 144–5 Alimpii, icon-painter, 251, 256 alphabet (see also script; writing), 21, 51, 60, 79, 89–90, 92 as theme in Bulgaria, 187–95, 216 in Rus, 199–202, 216 in acrostics, 195–9 inscribed, 38, 95, 98, 113, 202–3 non-alphabetic functions, 105, 109, 116, 247–8, 272, 273 relations to speech, 2–3, 188–90, 191–2, 200–1 amphorae, 76, 113 ampulla, 58 amulets (see also ‘snake amulets’), 255 alphabet as, 203n., 273 Balsamon on, 257 definitions, 264n. dirhams as, 116n. Jewish, 271 pagan pendants, 269 psalm amulets, 270–1, 274 runic, 112 spindle whorls as, 268n. with imitation writing, 248n. with secondary writing, 48, 244 Anastasia, St, 58, 242 [Pseudo-]Anastasios of Sinai, 22 Anastasis (Descent into Hell), 55 Andrei: see Vsevolod Iaroslavich Andrei Iurevich ‘Bogoliubskii’, 250, 251 Andrei Voinovich (beneficiary of will), 181 Andrew, apostle, 199 Angel of the Lord, 242 Anglo-Saxons, 114 Anna (in birch-bark letter), 39 Anna (wife of Semiun), 73 Anna Iaroslavna, princess, 108 Annunciation church of (Novgorod), 62, 236n. depiction of, 235, 237, 245

309

310

Index

Antichrist, 264 antimension (altar cloth), 58, 237 Antiochos the Monk, 26 Antoniev monastery (Novgorod), 62, 151, 178 Antonii (Dobrynia Iadreikovich), archbishop of Novgorod cross of, 58n., 64 writings, 217, 252 Antonii of the Caves, 243 Antonii ‘the Roman’, 178 Antony, St, 209 apocrypha, 265–6 Apollonios of Tyana, 226, 260 apostles, depiction of, 57, 234 Apostolic Canons (see also Rules of the Holy Apostles), 134 Apostolic Constitutions, 134 Aquila, translator, 214 Arabic, 116–17, 120 Archangelsk, 58 Arians, 227, 260 Aristotle, 29, 102 Arkazhi, church at, 62 Asia Minor, 27 Athanasios of Alexandria, 207, 209 Athens, 12, 74, 130, 227 Athos (mountain), 28, 103 atriklines (Byzantine functionary), 161, 186 Avraamii of Smolensk, 204, 222n., 230, 250, 266 axes, 59 Azov sea, 55 Babel, 193 Baltic sea, 120, 122, 167, 176 Balto-Finnic, 116–17 Barbara, St, 58, 242 barbaros, in Slavonic translation, 260 barmy (decorations), 54 Basil I, emperor, 133 Basil the Great, 22 church of (Vladimir in Volynia), 95 depiction of, 52n., 59, 243n., 250 Basilics (law code), 133, 139 Batavians, 43–4 beasts, 65, 68–9 Beirut, 226 Belarus, 56 Belgorod, 73, 76, 113 Beloozero, 76, 78 Belsk, 30 Bereste, 180 Berestovo, 62, 71 Berezan, 113, 114

Bethlehem, 260 bindings, 24–5, 28, 30–2, 126, 237, 245 birch bark, writing on, 15, 20, 22, 35–45, 86, 126 alphabets, 98, 202 amuletic, 267, 270–1, 274 and education, 203–4 and Latin tablets, 42–5 and law, 158, 162, 183–4 and papyri, 40–2 chronology, 123–5 ‘codex’, 41 contents, 38–40, 126–7, 277 dissemination, 37–8 icon labels, 241 language, 87–8, 99–100, 247n., 276 Balto-Finnic, 116, 270 Germanic, 108–9 Latin, 108 runic, 113 social basis, 39 status of writer in, 221 techniques, 37 birds, 65, 68–9 Black sea, 14, 114, 116 Blasios, St, church of, 73 Bogoliubovo, 55 Bogunka (sender of wine), 75 Boguslav (commemorative cross to), 55 Boian (bard?), 220 ‘Boian’s land’, 183 books access to, 277 and ‘authors’, 22–3 and the Church, 256, 276 as objects, 25, 237–8 as Scripture, 224 authority of, 31, 245 damage to, 31, 273 depiction of, 60, 234–5, 237, 242–3 devotional function, 26, 28, 31 illustrated, 66–8 (see also miniatures) in graphic environment, 68, 126 in Rus, 22–35 inventories in Byzantium, 27–30, 34, 57 patronage, 30–2 study of, 204, 223–5 survival, 24–6 ‘true’ and ‘false’, 265 types of writing in, 66 value, 31–4 waxed tablets as, 46 Book of the Eparch, 135n., 141 Book of Veles (forgery), 92–3 book-dealers, 31

Index ‘book-learning’, 187, 189, 204, 224–5, 228 ‘bookmen’, 31, 224–5, 249, 277–8 Books of Law (Knigi zakonnye), 139, 142 Boris: see Rogvolod Vseslavich Boris, khan of Bulgaria, 106, 230, 239n. Boris and Gleb (martyred princes) church of (Kideksha), 62 depiction of, 53, 54, 57 sarcophagus of, 253 bracelets, 69 Brahmi script, 91 Bratila, craftsman, 58, 242 bricks, 59–60 Buddhism, 267 Bulgaria, 28, 97, 138, 191, 264, 276 amulets, 269–70 and Byzantium, 106, 136 and Rus, 187, 202 baptism of, 201n., 230 Greek in, 97, 106, 194, 216, 270 translations from, 102, 208–9 writing in, 13–14, 96, 97–8, 121 on Slav letters, 188–200, 275 bureaucracy, and writing, 6, 129, 185–6, 277 Byzantium (see also Constantinople; ‘Greeks’) bureaucracy, 13, 35, 141, 161–2, 163–4, 176, 185–6, 222, 277 churchmen in Rus, 101–2, 107, 137, 150, 159, 176, 226, 230 craft production, 49, 50–1, 53–4, 58, 60, 65, 67, 78, 244 craftsmen in Rus, 30, 55, 57, 60, 64, 101, 105, 246, 252–3 education, 34–5, 87, 135, 194, 224 law, 132–5, 140, 154–5, 158–60 monasticism, 144–5 pictures, 67, 69, 233, 250, 252–3 Rus in, 101, 163–4, 259 trade: see Rus–Byzantine treaties writing, 12–13, 35, 132, 195–6, 257–8, 260, 265, 270n., 275–7 canon law, 31, 133–4, 140, 265 texts in Rus, 136–9 use in Rus, 145–56, 158, 159–60 Carlisle, 45 Casimir I, Polish duke, 108 Catterick, 45 Caves, monastery of (Kiev) (see also Alimpii; Antonii; Dormition; Feodor; Feodosii; Grigorii; Ilarion; Nikita; Spiridon) books in, 30–1, 102, 224

311 ‘Greeks’ in, 30–1, 102, 209 Stoudite Rule in, 137, 144–5, 159, 207–8 chalices, 58, 126, 237, 241 chartoularioi (Byzantine functionaries), 161 Chernigov, 30, 58, 59, 112, 118, 171, 176n. ‘Chernigov grivna’ (snake amulet), 104, 244 ‘Chernigov-type grivna’ (ingot), 77 churches, 62, 125 Cherson, 200n. children, 38 China, 117 Christ (see also Saviour) admonishes lawyers, 134 and justification of images, 231 captions on images, 74, 103–5, 240–1, 246 depictions of, 52–9, 69, 81, 234–5, 240–6, 250 Pantocrator, 243, 245 dialogues of, 270 monastery (Constantinople), 27 chronicles Byzantine, 19, 29, 230, 263 Rus (see also Novgorod; Primary Chronicle; Suzdal; Volynia), 19, 24, 63, 137, 249 as record, 172–3, 180 language, 88 chrysobulls, 186 Chud (Finnic tribe), 263 Church, in Rus and spread of writing, 10, 12, 22–3, 29–30, 122–7, 130, 132, 159, 185, 204, 276–9 codes and rules, 145–56, 185, 261 powers and status, 151–6 churches as graphic environment, 63, 125–6, 233–41 talismanic function, 267 Church Slavonic, 10, 84–9, 200, 221 Clement, St, 58, 81, 146, 243 Clement III, pope, 149 codes (see also administrative writing; law) authority of, 158–60, 185–6, 259, 261–2, 273 Codex (Byzantine law code), 133 codicology, 18 coins (see also deniers; dirhams) portraits on, 238–9 talismanic function, 267–9

312

Index

coins (cont.) with secondary writing, 20, 48, 50–2, 120–2, 238 language, 88, 103 with tertiary writing, 76–8, 82 colophons, 23, 68, 95, 208n., 215, 273 composition, 219–21 Constantine/Cyril (see also Cyrillo-Methodian mission), 198, 201 and Slav script, 13, 89, 92–4, 188–90 and translation, 207, 209 death, 13 on script and images, 231–2 ‘philosopher’, 226 Vita Constantini, 90–1, 188–90, 192, 207, 231–2, 241 Constantine the Great, emperor, 58, 62, 234n. Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, emperor, 135, 259 Constantinople (see also Byzantium; Tale of the Capture of Tsargrad ), authority of, 104, 121, 145–6 Church, 12, 136 Council, 134 enamels from, 32 icons from, 64, 252–3 monasteries, 27, 30, 144–5 Patriarchal school, 226 pilgrimage to, 64, 252 regulation, 135 runes in, 111 Conversion to Christianity of Bulgaria, 230 of Rus (see also Vladimir Sviatoslavich), 10, 82, 85, 136, 144, 151, 164, 188, 204, 230 theme of, 199 Councils, Church Ecumenical, 31, 134, 256n., 261 Rus, 146, 147 courts ecclesiastical in Rus, 153, 155 written rulings, 131, 169, 181, 182 Court Law for the People (Zakon sudnyi liudem), 139–42 Crete, 92 Crimea, 90 crosses altar, 54n., 58 126, 237, 242 depictions of, 49, 54, 105n., 137, 231, 244 eulogies to, 55, 68, 270 kissing of, 168, 181, 182

languages on, 107, 118, 192–3 monumental, 55–6, 74, 122 pendant/pectoral, 48, 56–7, 68, 105, 126, 237–8, 268 protective function, 255, 258n., 267–8, 271 Crucifixion, 58, 250 cryptography, 97, 195, 199, 202, 247, 274 cuneiform, 45 custom, 139–40, 142–3, 148, 150–1, 157–8, 170, 261–2 cylinder-seals, 80–2, 121, 124, 162, 185, 277 Cyril, missionary to Slavs, see Constantine/ Cyril Cyril of Alexandria, 22 church (Kiev), 61, 71, 236n. Cyril of Jerusalem, 26 Cyrillic, 83, 91, 121, 125 hybrid spellings with Glagolitic, 95–7 with Greek, 245–7 in Bulgaria, 97–8, 270 letters and orthography, 98–100 origins, 97, 194 ‘proto-Cyrillic’, 93 relations to Glagolitic, 93–4 transcription into from Balto-Finnic, 116 from Latin, 108 Cyrillo-Methodian mission as theme in Bulgaria, 188–90, 198 as theme in Rus, 199–202, 275 translations, 84, 102, 276 Czechs, 200 Damian, St, 53, 256 Daniel, prophet, 260 Daniil, abbot (pilgrim), 107, 217, 219, 226, 250, 252 Daniil Romanovich, prince of Galich, 172 Daniil ‘the Exile’, 217, 220, 222n., 227 Danube (river), 163, 199 David, king, 62n., 67 Dead Sea Scrolls, 41 Deesis (iconographic subject), 57, 58, 235 defixiones (curse tablets), 269 Demetrios, St, 58, 61n. church (Vladimir on the Kliazma), 62, 69 Demetrios Chomatenos, 135 demons, 236, 257–8, 260, 263–4, 269 dendrochronology, 38, 123 deniers (Western coins), 50–1, 109, 122 dialogue, depiction of, 235, 236, 243–4

Index Digest (Byzantine law code), 132 diglossia, 87–8 Dionysios, 201 (Pseudo-)Dionysios the Areopagite, 211–13, 216n. Dionysios Thrax, 192–3 dirhams (Eastern coins), 50–1, 116 as pendants, 268 graffiti on, 77–8, 112, 114–15, 122, 268 divination, 191, 264, 266, 271 Dmitr Miroshkinich, posadnik of Novgorod, 182 Dmitrii Aleksandrovich, prince, 168 D
NESLOVO (seal inscription), 50, 268n. Dnieper (river), 54, 113, 114, 117 Dobroshka (in birch-bark letters), 39 Dobrudja, 97 Dobrynia Iadreikovich, see Antonii, archbishop of Novgorod ‘documents of the Cross’, see krestnye gramoty Don (river), 105 donor inscriptions, 58–9, 61, 67, 78, 242, 244 donor portraits, 67, 69, 236, 238–9 Dormition, churches of Chernigov, 62 Constantinople, 144 Kiev, 30, 61, 71, 144 Moscow, 237 Vladimir on the Kliazma, 62, 250 Dorogobuzh, 158 doski (‘boards’, ‘tablets’), 182–3 Douks, monk, 209 Dovmont, prince of Pskov, 182, 222 Drogichin seals, 50, 81, 162 Drutsk, 78 druzhina (princely retinue), 115 Dushila Fominich, 183 ‘Dvina stones’, 74–5, 244 ‘dvoeverie’ (‘double-faith’), 271 Ebla, tablets from, 4 Ecclesiasticus, 206, 211, 212–3, 223n. Ecloga (Byzantine law code), 133, 139, 140–2 Edessa, 28 education in Byzantium, 34–5, 87, 135, 194, 224 in Rus, 102, 202–6, 275 Efrem, hagiographer, 217, 250 Efrem, scribe, 221 Egypt, 36, 40, 130, 233 ekphrasis (descriptive writing), 249 Eletskii monastery, 62

313 emets (Rus functionary), 80 enamels in bindings, 28, 31–2 inscriptions in, 104 medallions, 33–4, 69, 242 talismanic function, 267 encolpia, see crosses, pectoral England, 130, 222 ennomos politeia (Byzantine legal concept), 132, 160 Epanagoge (Byzantine law code), 133 Ephesos, 53, 229–31 Ephrem the Syrian, 26 Epicharios, 201 epigraphy, 18, 82 Epiphanios of Salamis, 22, 265 Esther, book of, 119 Etruscan, 92, 110 Eucharist depiction, 235 inscription, 235, 242, 245–6 euchologia (books of prayers), 28, 31 Eusebios, 22 Eustathios, protoproedros, 50 Eustathios Boilas, 27–9 Eustathios Rhomaios, judge, 135, 162n. Evangelists (see also Matthew; Mark; Luke; John) depiction of, 60, 67, 234, 242, 245 writings, 278 Eve, 242 Evfrosiniia of Polotsk copying books, 33 monastery of, 58, 71 reliquary cross of, 54n., 58, 242 famine, 75 Farman, otrok (in graffito), 72 fasts, 145–6, 149 Fedor Rostislavich, prince of Smolensk, 169, 171n., 181 Fedorets, scribe, 180, 222 Fedorko, scribe, 169, 181, 222 Feodor, cellarer, 219 Feodosii of the Caves, 118, 209, 217, 219 depiction of, 243 Life of, see Nestor monastic regulation, 25, 137, 144–5, 159, 208 Feodosii ‘the Greek’, translator, 209–10 Feognost, bishop of Sarai, 146 fevers, 269–71 Finnic, 116, 270 Finno-Ugrians, 116, 120 fire-gilding (see also Golden Doors), 65

314

Index

Fiziolog (Physiologos), 260, 265 Flavian, emperor, 209 Flavius Cerialis, 43 Flor, craftsman, 242 Foma, monk, 217, 218, 260n. forgery, 162, 178n., 181, 208n. France, 108 Freising Fragments, 191 frescoes, 60–2, 63, 104, 126 furs, 51 futhark (runic alphabet), 110–11, 113 Gabriel, archangel, 54, 58, 235, 237, 243, 270n. Galich, 165n., 171, 172, 184 churches, 73 graffiti in, 71, 73 Galicia, 37, 113 Gallia Belgica, 43, 44 Gaul, 43 Genesis, 67 George, St churches Iurev-Polskoi, 56, 57–8, 62 Liuboml, 30 Novgorod (Iurev monastery), 62, 71 Staraia Ladoga, 62, 234n., 236n. depiction of, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 62 offices for, 31 George Choiroboskos, 22 George the Monk, chronicler, 67, 139 Georgii (Rus magnate), 115n. Georgii of Zarub, 217 German Voiata, 217 Germanic documents, 108, 166, 168–9 inscriptions, 108, 109–10, 122 merchants in Novgorod, 169, 170–1 peoples, 43, 107, 166 Germanos II, patriarch, 146, 147, 177 Gertrude (Olisava), princess (see also Trier Psalter), 66n., 72, 108 Glagolitic and Cyrillic, 94 and Greek, 94 in Rus, 94–7, 121 Khrabr on, 190, 194 magical(?), 269 origins, 93–4, 201 Gleb (in graffito), 72 Gleb Sviatoslavich, prince, 75 Gleb Vladimirovich, prince and martyr (see also Boris and Gleb), 49n. Gnezdovo, 76, 98, 121 goblets (see also chalices), 48, 59, 78

‘God’s arrow’, 109, 116, 270 gold, 18, 48 amulets, 52–3 coins, 51–2 icon-mount, 250–1 in bindings, 30, 32 medallions, 53, 69 reliquaries, 58 seals, 49, 164 ‘Golden Doors’ (or ‘Suzdal Doors’), 65–6, 237, 242 Golden Gates (Kiev), 71 Golden Horde, 57, 146 Gomorrah, 242 Gorgon, 260, 268, 271 Gorodishche (Novgorod), 78, 104, 112, 114 Gorun (inscribed name?), 76 Gospel depiction of, 234 donations of, 30–1, 222 lectionaries (see also Ostromir Gospel ), 24–5, 28, 32, 237, 239 talismanic function, 267, 273 translations, 90, 99, 136, 189, 208–9 Gospel Homiliary, 197–8, 209, 239n. Gothic, 111 Gotland, 57, 107–8, 166–70 Goven, widow of, 184 graffiti alphabets, 202–3 as tertiary writing, 20, 70 authorial, 72 chronology, 124 commemorative, 72–3, 81 ‘documents’, 73, 183n. formulae, 73, 276 Glagolitic, 95–6 Greek, 76, 105 in churches, 71–2, 236–7 indecorous, 221 ‘literary’, 73–4 relation to pictures, 104, 240 runic, 51, 76, 113–4 votive, 72, 237, 244, 267 grammar, 189, 204 gramota ‘document’, 168, 171–3, 175, 179–80, 181 ‘letters’, 199, 273 Grani, inscription to, 113, 114 Grechin, painter, 222 Greece, inscriptions in, 21n. Greek, 147, 276 creation of, 201 in Bulgaria, 13–14, 97, 106, 191, 197

Index in diplomacy, 90, 164–5 in Rus, 101–6, 122, 159, 203, 269 chronology of, 103–5, 245–6 hybrids wth Slavonic, 70, 246–7 imitation, 248n. primary writing, 30, 101–3 secondary writing, 70, 103–5, 241, 244, 246–7; on amulets, 53, 268; on coins, 51–2; on crosses, 74, 107, 192–3; on miniatures, 108; on mosaics, 60, 245; on seals, 49, 178 tertiary writing, 76 letter forms, 100n. letter names, 192, 273 pre-Christian tradition, 259, 269 relation to Church Slavonic, 85, 87 spoken, 87, 98–9, 107, 200 transcription from Cyrillic, 270 transcription of Turkic, 191 translation from, principles, 209–16 translation into, 193, 206, 212, 214 vocabulary of learning, 223–4, 225–6 ‘Greeks’(see also Byzantium), 12, 76, 122, 136, 226, 253 Greenland, 111 Gregory VII, pope, 165n. Gregory of Nazianzos, 22, 26, 196–7, 240, 249n., 260n. Gregory of Nyssa, 22, 243 Gregory Pakourianos, 25n., 28, 34, 186 Gregory the Great, pope, 26, 229–31 Grigorii, monk of the Caves, 32n. Grigorii, ‘philosopher’, 227 Grigorii, scribe, 33 Grigorii, translator, 207 grivnas (see also silver), 51, 78, 184, 250 fines in, 154, 158, 167 graffiti on, 76–8, 115 weight, 77 Grodno, 78 gusli (musical instrument), 81, 125 Hagios Germanos (Greece), 97 healing guides to, 264 herbal, 255, 261–2 with paint, 255–6 with stones, 265 with textual amulets, 269–70 Hebrew, 87, 272 in Kiev, 117–19, 120, 122 on Cross, 107, 118, 192–3 translation into Greek, 189, 206, 212, 214 heirmologia (devotional books), 28, 31

315 Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, 58, 62 ‘Hellenes’, 147, 227, 261 helmets, 48, 59 Henry I, French king, 108 heresy, 226, 227, 260, 264 Hesychios, 22 hetoimasia (iconographic subject), 54n. hexaemera, 29, 264 Hippolytos of Rome, 22, 26 Holy Land, 107, 226, 250, 252 Holy Sepulchre, 55, 107 Holy Spirit, 207, 242 Homer, 102, 209, 233 horologia (devotional books), 28 ‘humility topos’, 209–10, 218–22 Hungary, 122, 165n. hymnography, 196, 198–9, 202 Hypatian Chronicle (see also Kiev; Volynia), 227 Hypatios of Ephesos, 229–31 Iakim (in graffito), 74 Iakim, litigant, 182, 222 Iakov, brick-maker, 59, 68 Iakov, monk, 149 Iakov, tysiatskii of Novgorod, 167 Iakov, writer, 217 Ian Vyshatich, tysiatskii of Kiev, 219, 262, 264 Ianka (name on spindle whorl), 79 Iaropolch Zalesskii, 244 Iaroslav Iaroslavich, prince of Tver and Novgorod, 169, 175, 176, 179 Iaroslav (Pankratios) Sviatoslavich, prince, 104 Iaroslav Vladimirovich ‘the Wise’, prince of Novgorod and Kiev building programme, 104 Church Statute, 136, 153–6, 261 coins, 51–2, 68, 103, 109, 248n. dynastic ties, 108 patron of books, 30, 205 quells revolt, 262 seals, 49n., 103, 124 testament of, 180 Iaroslav Vladimirovich, prince of Novgorod, 167 Iaroslav Vsevolodovich, prince, 171–3, 175 Iaroslavl, 45 Iaved, seals of, 50 ibn Fadlan, 90 icon-mounts, 58, 63, 250–1 icon-painters, 64, 73, 81, 252–3 iconoclasm, 231, 232

316

Index

iconostasis, 63, 235 icons (see also pictures) and intercession, 257, 258 and secondary writing, 48, 63–5, 125, 237–8 Vita Constantini on, 231–2 burning, 64–5 Byzantine descriptions of, 250 decay, 64–5, 149 embroidered, 63 in home, 253 justification of, 229–31, 249 qualities noted in Rus writing accuracy, 249–50 miraculousness, 251–2 provenance, 252–3 richness, 250–1 stone, 54–5, 63–5, 245 ideograms, 2–3, 60, 70, 105, 191, 241, 246–8 Ieremei, envoy, 166 Ignat (in birch-bark letter), 183 Igor, pagan Rus ruler, 201 Igor Olgovich, prince, 175 Ilarion, metropolitan, 102, 188, 217, 218 Ilarion, monk of the Caves, 25, 30 Ilia, bishop of Novgorod, 147 imitation writing, 53, 70, 247–8 India, 91 ingots, see grivnas; silver ink, 18, 22, 32 Innocent IV, pope, 165n. inscriptions (see also secondary writing; tertiary writing) as category of source, 16–18 Institutes (Byzantine law code), 133 Intercession of the Veil (Pokrov), church (on the Nerl), 55, 62n. intrusiveness of writing, 140, 159–60, 170, 177, 185–6, 262, 277–9 Ioann II, metropolitan, 102n., 146, 149–51, 153, 262n. Ioann of Novgorod, 217 Iosippon, 119 Ireland, 111 Irenaeus, 22 Isaac of Chernigov, 118 Isaac of Russia, 118 Isaia (in graffito), 73 Isidore of Pelusium, 22 Islam, 116 isodynamia, see translation, equivalence Italy, 110 Iurev monastery (Novgorod), 62, 71, 95, 178, 181

Iurev-Polskoi, 56 Iurii Lvovich, prince, 180 Iurii Vsevolodovich, prince, 171–3 Ivan (commemorated), 55 Ivan (in graffito), 72 Ivanko, maker of spindle whorl, 79 Ivanko Pavlovich, 55 Ivanko Zakharich, 39 Izbornik of 1073, 23, 239n., 242n., 265 Izbornik of 1076, 225n. Iziaslav Iaroslavich, prince, 66n., 108 and Russkaia pravda, 156, 158 correspondence with pope, 165n. Iziaslav Mstislavich, prince, 172 Iziaslav Vladimirovich, prince, 49n., 124 James, apostle, 23 Jerusalem, 107, 252 Jesus Ben Sira, see Ecclesiasticus Jews, 271 in Rus, 117–19, 122, 189 John III Scholastikos, patriarch, 136n. John IV ‘the Faster’, patriarch, 152 John VII ‘the Grammarian’, patriarch, 231 John, evangelist (‘the Theologian’), 23 monastery of (Patmos) book inventories, 28–9 John, monk (Byzantine), 27 John, praepositos, 27 John Apokaukos, 135 John Chrysostom, 22, 26, 199, 242, 257 John Klimax, 26, 28 John Malalas, chronicle of, 207n. John of Damascus, 22, 26, 208, 231 John Skylitzes, chronicle of, 29 John the Baptist church (Novgorod), 181 depiction of, 54, 56, 58, 235, 236 hand of, 146 John the Exarch Hexaemeron of, 264 on translation, 208–16 ‘John the Presbyter’, translator, 209–10 John Tsimiskes, emperor, 222n. John Zonaras, 135, 138 Josephus Flavius, 29 Jude, 23 Justin the Philosopher, 22 Justinian I, emperor, 132, 139 Justinian II, emperor, 261 Kadmos of Milete, 201 Kalist (beneficiary of will), 181

Index kanon hymn, 196 rule, 133–4 kap’ (Rus measure), 35–6, 169 Kerch, 75, 105 Kharitaniia (in birch-bark letter), 35 Khazars, 76, 117–18, 120, 122, 189 Khrabr, monk On Letters, 90, 92, 190–5, 272 reception in Rus, 200–2 Kideksha, 62 Kiev, 10, 12, 30, 45, 77, 95, 103, 138, 146, 163, 165n., 175, 208, 225, 252, 260, 266 chronicles (see also Primary Chronicle), 172, 174–5 churches, see Cyril; Dormition; Michael; Mother of God; Saviour; Sophia coins, 50, 112 crafts, 54, 56, 65, 69, 78 graffiti, 71–4, 76, 112, 236 languages in, 116–9 Kiprian, metropolitan, 204n. Kirik of Novgorod, 151–2, 153, 217, 262, 273 Kirill I, metropolitan, 146, 177 Kirill II, metropolitan, 73, 137–8, 147–9, 177 Kirill of Rostov, 251 Kirill of Turov, 202n., 204, 217, 218–19, 225, 227, 249n. kletorologion (Byzantine manual of protocol), 161–2 Klim Smoliatich, metropolitan, 146, 176–7, 203, 217–18, 225, 227, 260 Kliment, testament of, 181–2 Kliment, boiar, 30 Kliment, Bulgarian writer, 199 Klimentii, abbot, 73 Klimiata (in birch-bark letter), 183 Klimiata (in birch-bark letters), 39 knigi (letters, books), 189, 224 knizhnik, see bookmen Konstantin I, metropolitan, 176 Konstantin of Preslav, 26, 197–9, 201, 207, 209 Konstantin Vsevolodovich, prince, 171 kontakarion (liturgical book), 67, 196 Kormchaia (collection of codes), 136n., 137–8, 148–52, 155–6, 159 Efremovskaia, 137n. name, 138n. Novgorod, 138, 149n. Riazan, 138

317 Russkaia pravda in, 158 Serbian, 138, 147 Ustiug, 136n. Kosmas, St, 53, 256 Kosta, craftsman, 58, 242 Kowel, 111n. krestnye gramoty (‘documents of the Cross’), 173–6 Kuchkov, 45 Kufic (script), 51, 269 kunas, 32–3, 36, 151, 169, 179, 184 Kursk, 204 Kuzma, icon-painter, 73 Kuzma (in birch-bark letter), 183–4 Kuzma (in graffito), 74 Kuzma, presbyter (in graffito), 72 labarum (banner), 234n., 243 label inscriptions, 60, 115 enamels, 54 ‘Golden Doors’, 66 helmet, 59 hybrids, 246–7 justification, 231–2 miniatures, 67, 240 monogram, 53–4, 57, 65, 70, 241, 246–7 mosaics and frescoes, 234–5, 245–6 panel icons, 65 seals, 49, 103–5 stone, 55 types, 103–5, 241–3 land titles, 179–80, 277 languages, see, Arabic; Balto-Finnic; Church Slavonic; Etruscan; Finnic; German; Greek; Hebrew; Latin; Slavonic; Syriac; Turkic Last Judgement, 230, 235–6, 243–4 Latin, 86, 111, 192, 259, 276 in Cyrillic, 108 in Moravia, 13 letter forms, 100 meanings of word, 106–7 on Cross, 107, 192–3 script in Rus, 106–10, 115 coins, 51, 120 dating style, 171 papal correspondence, 165n. sword-blades, 109–10, 122 treaties, 166, 168, 169n. Slavonic in, 191 Vindolanda tablets, 44 ‘Latins’, 106–8, 166–70 Latvia, 112

318

Index

law (see also canon law; nomokanon) Byzantine, 24, 132–5, 157 in Rus, 136–43 Germanic, 157 Rus (see also Russkaia pravda), 156–60 language, 87, 157 lawyers, 134 Lazar, commemorative cross to, 56 Lazar Bogsha, craftsman, 58, 242 Lazarus, 236 lead, 36, 58 amulets, 269–70 inscribed alphabet, 202 Leo I, pope, 209 Leo III, emperor, 133, 139 Leo VI, emperor, 133 Leo of Pereiaslavl, metropolitan, 102n. Lepesovka, 111n. letters (see also alphabet; script) significance of names, 187, 192, 271–3 words for, 223–4 Libri Carolini, 232 Linear A, Linear B, 92 Lipitsa (river), 171–2 literacy acquisition of skills, 10, 39–40, 44, 202–6 historical approaches to, 3–9 in Rus, 9–11 meanings, 3–4, 223–4 ‘literary language’, 86–8 ‘literature’, 12, 218 Lithuania, 1–2, 181 Liubech, 173 Liuboml, 30 Liudota, blacksmith, 68, 110 Livonia, 169 London, 45 lots, drawing of, 168, 266–7 Lubeck, ¨ 108, 166–9 Luka (in Zvenigorod birch-bark letter), 184 Luka, bishop of Belgorod, 73 Luke, evangelist, 23, 242 Luke Chrysoberges, patriarch, 146 Macedonian Folium, 208–15 magi, 260 magic (see also amulets; divination; talismans), 149, 154, 258 as demonic, 257–8, 260, 263–4 as ‘other’, 256–7, 259 canon law on, 261 ‘Christian magic’, 271–2 definitions of, 255–8

functions of script, 255, 272–5, 278 alphabets as magical, 203n., 272–3 in secondary writing, 267–72 non-Slav scripts, 112–15, 116 topic in primary writing, 259–67 Maksim (on stone mould), 81 Mamas, St, church (Constantinople), 163 Mangu Temir, Mongol khan, 169 Manuel I, emperor, 146 Manuil, bishop of Smolensk, 177 manuscripts (see also books; miniatures), 16–20, 23–4, 239 Marfa (name on whetstone), 81 marginal illustration, 67, 239 Maria, princess, 244 Maria, wife of Petr, 242 Marina, princess, 222 Mark, evangelist, 23 ‘marks and notches’, 90–2, 191 Marseilles, 229 Martirii, archbishop of Novgorod, 266 Maskovichi, 113 Matei (in birch-bark letter), 35 Matthew, evangelist, 23 Maximos the Confessor, 22 Measure of Law (Merilo pravednoe), 139, 142, 159 mechnik (Rus functionary), 80–1 medallions (see also enamel) classical, 233 with secondary writing, 53–4 Mediterranean sea, 14 Melissa (Greek miscellany), 29 menaia (devotional books), 28 menologion (devotional book), 31 Mesopotamia, 92 Methodios (see also Cyrillo-Methodian mission), 13, 89, 136–7, 148, 207, 226 Vita Methodii, 136, 189 Michael III, emperor, 188, 201, 226, 231 Michael, abbot, 27 Michael, archangel churches of Golden Domed (Kiev), 61, 104, 245–6 Ostersk, 62 Vydubichi monastery (Kiev), 71 depiction of, 53, 54, 58, 59, 65, 81, 237n. dialogue on amulet, 270 hymns to, 199 Michael Attaleiates, 27–30 Michael Synkellos, 22 Mikhail, posadnik of Novgorod, 168

Index Mikhal (in birch-bark letter), 35 Mikita (in birch-bark letter), 39 miniatures, 233, 239–40 and secondary writing, 48, 66–8, 104, 237–8, 242 with imitation writing, 246 Minsk, 58n. miracles, and images, 251–2, 258 and magic, 256, 258 Miroshka, posadnik of Novgorod, 167 Mirozha (river), monastery on (Pskov), 61, 234n., 235 mirror writing, 70, 247–8, 269, 270, 274 Mitrofan, archbishop of Novgorod, 50 Moisei (writer), 217 molitvennik (prayer book), 31 monasteries and book-production, 33 Byzantine, libraries of, 27–30 gifts to, 177–8, 186 Rule, 143–5 money (see also coins; deniers; dirhams; silver) and tallies, 80 as theme, 35–6, 39 spindle whorls as, 79 Mongols (see also Golden Horde) administration, 169, 176, 185n. invasions, 1–2, 61, 126, 148 ‘pagans’, 259 Moravia, 13, 89, 97, 188, 199, 200 mosaics, 48, 60–1, 104–5, 233, 243, 248, 250 Moscow (and ‘Muscovy’), 1–2, 67, 116, 261n., 265 administration, 101n., 158, 222 birch-bark document, 37, 45 museums, 61, 62, 237 Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nesiah, 118 Mother of God churches (see also Annunciation; Dormition; Intercession), Birth of (Antoniev monastery, Novgorod), 62 Birth of (Suzdal), 62, 65 Rostov, 251 ‘Tithe’ church (Kiev), 61, 153 depictions (see also Vladimir), 53–8, 65, 69, 235–7, 240–6, 250–3 labels on, 103–5, 232, 241, 246 hymns to, 196 invocations, 49–50 moulds, inscribed, 81, 113, 115, 222 Mstislav Danilovich, prince, 180

319 Mstislav Davidovich, prince of Smolensk, 166 Mstislav Vasilkovich, prince, 180 Mstislav Vladimirovich, prince, 32 Mstislavl, 37 Naslav, author of colophon, 32 Naum, hymnographer, 199 Naum, owner of goblet, 78 Naupaktos, 135 Nereditsa, church of Saviour on (Novgorod), 61, 71, 234n., 236, 238n., 244 Nerl (river), 55, 62n. Nestor, monk of the Caves, Life of Feodosii of the Caves, 25, 137, 144n., 207–8, 217, 219, 227n. Neva (river), 169 New Testament (see also Acts and Epistles; Gospel), 23, 31, 223 New York, 71 Nezhenets (in Zvenigorod birch-bark letter), 184 Nezhit (personified disease), 270 Nicaea, 134 Nicholas, St, church (Novgorod), 62, 236n. depictions of, 55, 57, 64, 237n., 243 Nifont, bishop of Novgorod, 59, 146, 217 Nikephoros, patriarch, 19, 22, 29 Niketas of Herakleia, 260n. Nikita, monk of the Caves, 224 Nikolai, see Sviatoslav Davidovich Nikon of the Black Mountain, 26, 135, 137 nomokanons (see also: Kormchaia), 140, 150 in Byzantium, 134, 153, 155 in Rus, 136–8, 152, 154 nomophylax (office at law school in Constantinople), 135 Nomos georgikos (‘Farmers’ Law’), 133, 139 Nomos nautikos (‘Rhodian Sea Law’), 133 Nomos stratiotikos (‘Soldiers’ Law’), 133 Northumbria, 15, 40, 42 Norway, 109, 166n., 169n. notaries, Byzantine, 161 ‘novels’ (imperial edicts), 133 Novgorod, 55, 56, 77, 122, 126, 151, 171, 182, 186, 201, 251 archaeology, 36, 123 birch-bark documents 15, 36–45 bishops, 58n., 59, 64, 169, 172, 177, 183, 266–7 chronicles, 172, 174, 176n., 180n., 182–3, 259

320

Index

Novgorod (cont.) churches (see also Antoniev monastery; Arkazhi; George; Iurev monastery; John; Nereditsa; Nicholas; Panteleimon; Sophia), 62, 125, 251 contracts with princes, 160n., 174–6, 179–80 crafts, 54, 56, 78 depiction, 240 German merchant colony in, 169n., 170–1 governance, see posadnik; tysiatskii graffiti, 71–4, 95–6, 236 kormchaia, 138, 149n. language, 85 pagan-led strife, 262–3 pre-Christian writing(?), 93 runes, 113, 114 tallies 80 townspeople, 167, 168, 174–5, 180 trade and diplomacy, 108, 166–70, 186 wooden tablets, 46–7 ‘Novgorod Sion’, 57, 243n. Novogrudok, 76 number-magic, 273 Octateuch, 207 Ohrid, 135 oikonomia (discretion in interpreting rules), 134 oil, 75–6 oktoechos (liturgical book), 25, 28, 31 Old Testament, 28, 29, 31, 207, 214, 224 Oleg, pagan Rus ruler, 263 Oleg Sviatoslavich, prince, 51–2, 124 Olga, regent, 201, 259 Olisava, see Gertude Olisei Grechin, 39 Onega, region of, 32 Onfim, birch-bark exercises of, 203 ‘orality’, 4, 8 ostrakon, 74 Ostromir Gospel, 25, 26, 33, 239 otrok (officer), 179, 184 Ovruch, 78 ownership marks, 21, 68, 80–1 Oxyrhynchus, 36, 40–1 paganism, 75, 150, 191 and ‘magic’, 257, 268–9, 171–2, 277–8 pendants, 269 ‘philosophy’, 226 pledges, 174 vocabulary for, 259–60 palaeography, 38, 71, 81, 82, 100

Palamedes, 201 Paleia, 207n., 265 Pantelei, envoy, 166 Panteleimon, St church (Galich), 73 monastery (Novgorod), 178 Pankratios, see Iaroslav Sviatoslavich Pantocrator, see Christ paper, 28, 29, 32 papyrus, 29n., 36, 40–2 parchment and administrative documents, 183–4 cost, 32–3, 46 ‘parchment literacy’ (see also book-learning), 17, 18, 22, 34–5, 40, 123, 125 paroimiaria, see Old Testament paterika (tales of monks) 19, 24, 28, 115n. Paul, apostle, 23 depiction of, 54, 57, 64, 243n. Peira (record of adjudications), 135, 162n. penalties, 153–4, 157, 163, 167, 168–9 penitentials (see also Ioann II; Kirik), 135, 137–8, 146, 149–54, 249, 261–2 Pereiaslavl, 45 Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, 62 Peritsos (Bachkovo), 25n., 28 Permians, 116, 200 Persepolis, 45 Peter, apostle, 23 depiction of, 52, 54, 57, 58, 64, 242, 243n. Petr, metropolitan, 204 Petr, owner of goblet, 242 Petr, sub-deacon, 73 Petr Borislavich, 217 Petrila, owner of goblet, 242 Phaestos disk, 92 Pharisees, 223 Philip I, French king, 108 philosophy, 102, 225–8, 230, 231–2 Philotheos, protospatharios, 161 Phoenician, 193 Photios, patriarch, 133 pictograms (see also ideograms), 2, 90 pictures (see also icons; mosaics) and primary writing relation to writing, 249–54 writing about, 237–40 and secondary writing, 48, 125, 229–48, 249 and tertiary writing, 236–7, 243–4, 249 classical tradition, 233 narrative, 65 uninscribed, 68–9

Index Pinsk, 76, 78 Pipe Rolls, 118 pisets (‘writer’, ‘scribe’), 218, 221–2, 224 pittakia (Byzantine documents), 186 pledges, 174–5 Pogodin Folia, 96 Pokrov, see Intercession of the Veil Poles, 73, 108, 110n., 122, 200 Polianians, 200 Polikarp, contributor to paterik, 217 Polotsk, 33, 54, 113, 114, 242, 264 birch-bark, 45 churches (see also Evfrosiniia: Sophia), 58, 62, 71, 125 graffiti, 71 monumental stones, 74–5 trade, 166, 169 Polovtsy, 259 Pompeii, 71, 233 popes, correspondence with Rus, 107, 165–6 posadnik (Novgorod governor), 167–9, 175, 182, 185 pots, graffiti on, 75–6, 82, 105, 120–1, 124 pravda (see also Russkaia pravda), 167, 168, 170 prayers, in graffiti, 73 praxapostolos, see Acts and Epistles Pregradnoe cross, 55–6 Preslav, 26, 97–8, 190 Prilep, 97 Primary Chronicle, 173, 180 components, 18, 219 on Conversion of Rus, 107, 188, 230 on Cyrillo-Methodian mission, 199–201 on education and learning, 95, 204, 224, 226 on law and custom, 139–40, 142 on magic and divination, 260, 262–4, 265 on relations with Byzantium, 90, 163–5, 259 on Stoudite Rule, 144, 208 primary writing, 48, 275 amuletic, 269–71 chronology of, 123–7 definitions, 20 Greek in Rus, 101–3, 104 in church, 240 survey, 21–47 Prochiron (Byzantine law code), 133, 138, 139, 142 prophetologia, see Old Testament prophets, depiction of, 234, 243, 245 Protobulgarian inscriptions, 97, 191

321 Prus, 35 Psalter, 28–9, 90, 96, 189, 222 copies of (see also Trier Psalter) Bychkov Psalter, 266 Evgeniev Psalter, 96n. Khludov Psalter (Greek), 67 Khludov Psalter (Slavonic), 67 Kiev Psalter, 67, 242n. Simonov Psalter, 67 Sinai Psalter, 96n. divination by, 25, 266, 270–1 illustrations, 25, 66–7 learning, 25, 47, 203 translation of, 136, 215n. Pskov, 50, 54, 182, 186, 222 birch-bark, 37, 45 Mirozha monastery, 61, 234n. Pskov Judicial Charter, 182 quills, 18, 22, 32 Radhanites, 117–19, 122 Radzivil Chronicle, 67, 240 Raguil (in birch-bark letter), 183 Raphael, archangel, 270n. Rastislav, ruler of Moravia, 188–9, 199 Ratibor, seals of, 50 reading of pictures, 229–33 of script in monastery, 30, 34 methods, 219, 225 status, 228 relics, 101, 257 reliquaries, 48, 57–8, 126, 237, 245, 267 Revelations, 234 Rhaedestos, 27 Rhine (river), 44, 109 Rhomaioi (Byzantine self-designation), 13, 136, 161 Rhosia, metropolitanate of, 12, 103, 149, 177 Riazan, 65, 69, 78 graffiti, 71, 76 kormchaia, 138 riddles, 73 Riga, 107–8, 166–7, 169, 170, 186 Riurik, alleged ancestor of Rulers, 201 Riurik Rostislavich, prince, 227 Rogvolod (Vasilii) Rogvolodovich, prince of Polotsk, 75 Rogvolod (Boris) Vseslavich, prince of Polotsk, 75, 244 Roman Britain, 36, 42–5, 233n. Roman law, 132

322

Index

Roman Mstislavich, prince, 180 Romania, 92 Romanos the Melode, 67, 196 Rome, 13–14, 222 administration, 130, 162 Church of (see also Latin), 106, 149 inscriptions, 21n., 55 Rostislav Mstislavich, prince, 177 Rostov, 45, 171, 251, 253 Rule, monastic, 144–5 Rules of the Holy Apostles (spurious canons), 152 runes, 56n., 91, 120, 191 amuletic, 112–13, 268 in Rus, 110–15 on dirhams, 77, 122, 268 tertiary writing, 112–13 Turkic, 117, 120, 122 Rus–Byzantine treaties, 90, 101n., 163–5, 170, 173, 222n. Russkaia pravda (Rus law code), 156–9, 170, 176, 179, 222, 277 safe passage, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171n., 176 Samaritan, 189 sanctio spiritualis/temporalis, 267, 271 Sanskrit bark codices, 41n. Sarai, 146 Sarkel, 105 Saviour, churches of Berestovo, 62, 71 Chernigov, 62 Novgorod, 61, 71, 178, 234n., 236, 238n., 244 Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, 62 Polotsk, 62, 71 Pskov, 61 Scandinavia coins, 109, 114 runes in, 111 trade with, 77 Scandinavians and Rus elites, 14, 90–1, 111, 164–5 in Rus, 113–5 schematologia (liturgical books), 28 schools, 203–6 Schra (rules for German merchant colony), 169n., 170 scribes, 99, 168, 184 Byzantine, 161–2, 223 Hebrew, 273 in New Testament, 223 In Rus (see also pisets) and birch-bark writing

as functionaries, 221–3 colophons, 23, 68 employed by princes, 31n., 179, 180, 182 fees, 33 script (see also alphabet; ideograms; letters; writing) as image, 245, 247–8 as theme, 188–95, 199–202 as magical, 269, 272–4 emblematic functions, 68–70, 103–5, 233, 238, 240, 247–8, 268 Scripture, authority of, 143, 224, 234, 244–5, 276, 278 seals and secondary writing, 18, 20, 47–50, 124, 238, 276 Greek, 103–5 documentary functions, 162, 164, 178 talismanic functions, 267–8 secondary writing, and pictures, 48, 68–70, chronology, 124–7 definitions, 20, 55, 74, 78 Greek in Rus, 103–5 in church, 240 Latin in Rus, 109–10 limitations, 68–70, 81, 275 non-verbal functions, 70, 267–9 survey, 47–70 techniques, 48 types of text, 241–8 Sefer has-hoham, 118 Semiun (in birch-bark letters), 39 Serapion of Vladimir, 217 Serensk, 81n. Serbia, 136 kormchaia, 138–9, 142, 147 Serenus of Marseilles, 229 Sevastian, monk, 73 sexual behaviour, 150–6 Shinto, 267 Sichael, angel, 270 Sicily, 28 signature, 3, 108 sila (‘meaning’), 199 Silistria, 269 silver, 68, 120 amulets, 53 bindings, 28, 31–2, 245 bracelets, 69 coins, 50–2, 76–8, 82 goblets, 59, 78, 242 helmet, 59 icon-mounts, 58, 63, 250–1

Index ingots (see also grivnas), 51, 76–8, 82, 115, 122, 124, 126 inscriptions in, 18, 48, 76–8, 104 liturgical, 57–8, 242 medallion settings, 53–4 seals, 164 value, 32, 33 Simeon, bishop of Tver, 217 Simeon, monk (Novgorod), 56 Simon, bishop of Vladimir, 217 Simonides, 201 Sinai, 91 slate, 78–9, 244 Slavon, carver, 55 Slavonic languages (see also Church Slavonic), in Greek transcription, 76, 270 varieties, 13, 83–9, 157, 276 script (see also Cyrillic; Glagolitic) as theme in Bulgaria, 188–95; in Rus, 199–202 chronology in Rus, 121–7 compared to Greek, 192–4 ‘pre-Cyrillic’, 89–93, 191 status, 192–4, 198 Slavs, 229, 259 East contact with Turkic peoples, 116, 117 language, 83–9 scripts, 93 translators, 101–3 in Byzantine Empire, 13–14 Orthodox, 190, 196, 206, 208, 231 pre-Christian, 89, 93, 120, 191, 194 South (see also Bulgaria; Serbia), 84–5 West (see also Moravia; Poles), 84 Slovisha (name on gusli ), 81, 125 Smolensk, 38, 54, 76, 171–2, 250 birch-bark letters, 37, 45, 113–15 bishopric, 177 graffiti, 71, 81 schooling in, 204, 224 trade and treaties, 107–8, 166–71, 181, 222 ‘snake amulets’, 52–3, 68, 69, 103–4, 244, 274 and Byzantine tradition, 268 with imitation writing, 248 Sodom, 242 Sofiia (in birch-bark letter), 35 Sophia, St, churches Kiev books in, 30 decoration, 60–1, 234–5, 237n.

323 secondary writing, 60–1, 103–4, 245 tertiary writing, 71–4, 124, 183, 243 Novgorod, 32, 58n., 266–7 decoration, 62, 234n. tertiary writing, 71–4, 95–6, 124, 243 Polotsk, 71 Soviet Union, 11 spindle whorls, 78–9, 113, 124, 126, 203, 268n. Spiridon, archbishop of Novgorod, 267n. Spiridon, monk of the Caves, 25 Spirko (in birch-bark letter), 35 Staraia Ladoga, churches, 62, 234n., 236n. tertiary writing, 71, 112, 114 Staraia Russa, 37, 39n. Stavr Gorodiatinich (in graffito), 72 Stefan (in graffito), 72 Stefan of Perm, 200 Sterzh (lake), 55 sticheraria (liturgical books), 28 stone crosses, 55–6 icons, 54–5, 267 inscriptions in, 21n., 97–8, 114 magical properties of, 265 monumental, 74–5 Stoudite Rule, 144–5, 159 on care for books, 31 ordered from Constantinople, 30, 137, 207–8 stylus, 22, 37, 46, 121 Sulpicia Lepidina, 43–4 Sumeria, 45 Suzdal (see also Golden Doors), 36, 45, 54, 78, 171, 182, 237, 242 chronicle, 250 churches, 62, 65–6 runes in, 111, 113–15 zmeevik, 268n., 274 Svetoslav, despot of Vidin, 138, 147 Sviatopolk Iziaslavich, prince, 49n., 72, 239 Sviatopolk Vladimirovich, prince coins, 51–2, 88 seals, 49n., 124 Sviatoslav (Nikolai) Davidovich (‘Sviatosha’), prince and monk, 30, 209–10 Sviatoslav Iaroslavich, prince, 104n., 156, 238n. Sviatoslav Igorevich, prince, 49n., 124, 163–5, 201 Sviatoslav Mstislavich, prince, 175 Sviatoslav Olgovich, prince, 177

324

Index

Sviatoslav Vsevolodovich, prince, 56, 171 Sweden, 109, 114 sword-blades, inscribed, 48, 59, 109–10, 115, 121–2, 124 syllabaries, 90, 91, 92, 203 Symeon, ruler of Bulgaria, 106, 207 synaxarion, 31, 135 Syntagma of Fourteen Titles (canon law collection), 137, 138, 148 Syria, 45 Syriac, 189, 193 taboularioi (Byzantine functionaries), 141–2 taktika, 161 Tale of Igor’s Campaign, 220, 265n. Tale of the Battle on the Lipitsa, 172 Tale of the Capture of Tsargrad by the Latins, 259–60 talismans (see also amulets), 108, 255, 260, 264n., 267–8 tallies, 79–80, 82, 121, 124, 162, 183, 185 templon (sanctuary barrier), 63 Terebovl, 78 tertiary writing characteristics, 82–3 chronology, 124–6 definitions, 20, 55, 74, 78 in church, 240, 244 survey, 70–82 Teshata, litigant, 182, 222 testaments, 30–2, 57, 164, 180–1, 184, 227 tetrabasileia, 29 textiles and secondary writing, 48, 58–9, 126, 267 ecclesiastical, 54 textual communities, 6, 131, 143–52, 160, 279 Theodore Balsamon, 135, 155n., 257 Theodore of Rhaithou, 22 Theodore of Stoudios, 144–5, 231n. Theodore Stratelates, 53, 59 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 22 Theodoric, king of Ostrogoths, 259–60 Theophanes Continuatus, chronicle, 230 Theotokos, see Mother of God Thessalonike, 13, 226 Times, The (newspaper), 220 Timothy, canon of, 152 Tmutorokan, 51, 76, 105, 124 Tmutorokan Stone, 75

Torzhok, 37 trade, 14, 99, 116, 118, 125 as context for writing, 76, 82, 120–2, 130, 166–70, 277 at Vindolanda, 43 coins and, 50–1, 77 documentation in, 163–71, 181, 185–6 Viking, 50–1, 113–15 with ‘Greeks’, 75–6, 101, 105, 163–6, 170 with ‘Latins’, 107, 166–70 translation, Slavonic adaptation in, 31, 139–43, 169, 212, 223–4, 226, 260 concepts and methods of, 141n., 206–16 repertoire of, 13, 19, 26, 102, 119, 196–7, 207 translators, 207–9 treaties inter-princely, 171–4 Kiev, see Rus-Byzantine treaties Novgorod, prince and town, 160n., 174–6, 179–80 with German merchants, 108, 167–9, 171, 186 Smolensk, 107–8, 166–7, 169–71, 181, 222 Tretiakov Gallery, 237 triasavitsa (fever), 269–70 trident sign, 49, 51, 59, 80 Trier Psalter, 66–7, 108, 239n. triodion (liturgical book), 25, 31 Tudor, Bulgarian scribe, 207 Tungrians, 43–4 Turkic in Bulgaria, 97, 191 in Rus, 116–7, 122 Turov, see Kirill of Turov Tver, 37 Tverdislav, posadnik of Novgorod, 175 Tyana, 226, 260 typikon, 18n., 137, 144–5, 186 tysiatskii (Rus functionary), 167, 168, 169, 175 Uglich, 45 ‘ULFBERHT’, 109–10 Upir, scribe, 95 Uriel, archangel, 270n. ustav as palaeographic term, 100 as document (monastic Rule; Church Statute), 152–5, 176, 180n. Ustiug, 54, 136n., 237

Index Varlaam Mikhalevich, 178 Varvara, wife of Petrila, 242 Vasilii, see Vladimir Vsevolodovich Vasilii, writer, 244 veche (gathering of townspeople), 175 Venus, 232 Verona, 259 verse, 195–9, 202 Vidin, 138, 147 Vikings (see also Scandinavians), 90, 111, 114, 120, 122 Vindolanda, 15, 42–5 virnik (Rus functionary), 179 Vitebsk, 37, 78 Vladimir (in Volynia), 30, 138, 188, 222 church of St Basil, 95 Vladimir (on the Kliazma), 118, 138, 171, 186 churches, 62, 250–1 crafts, 54, 56, 65 Mother of God of, 64, 250–1, 252 synod, 147 Vladimir Davidovich, prince, 59, 68 Vladimir Sviatoslavich, prince, and Conversion of Rus, 10, 107, 125, 136, 188, 201, 230 and education, 62, 204, 224 church-building, 61 Church Statute, 136, 153–5, 261 coins, 51–2, 88, 121, 239 diplomacy, 166n. penalties, 157n. Vladimir Vasilkovich, prince testament of, 30–2, 57, 180–1, 227 Vladimir (Vasilii) Vsevolodovich Monomakh, 73, 115n., 156, 174, 217, 266 Vlas (in graffito), 72 Vlasii, owner of cross, 244 Voimeritsy cross, 255–6, 115n., 122 Volga (river), 55, 57, 90 Volga Bulgars, 116, 166n., 251, 262 Volkhov (river), 101 volkhv (magician, sorcerer), 259–63 Volkovysk, 78 Volodislav Danilovich, beneficiary of will, 181 Vologda, 54 Volynia, 30, 32, 95, 204, 222 chronicle, 30, 57, 180–1

325 Vseslav Briacheslavich, prince of Polotsk, 263–4 Vsevolod Iaroslavich, prince, 73n., 156 Vsevolod Iurevich ‘Big Nest’, prince, 171, 176n., 182 Vesvolod Mstislavich, prince, 177n., 181 Vsevolod Olgovich, prince, 175, 181 Vydubichi monastery (Kiev), 71 Vyshgorod, 78 wax (see also wooden tablets), 32, 35–6 Western Europe (see also England; Germany; Latins; Rome etc.), 11, 14, 80 wine, 75–6 witnesses, 141–2, 167, 177 wooden tablets, waxed alphabet on, 202–3 from Novgorod, 46–7 from Vindolanda, 42n. with primary writing, 20, 22, 32, 124, 183 ‘writers’ in Rus (see also scribes) concepts, 217–20 of pictures, 222, 229 status, 222–3, 228, 278 writing (see also primary writing; secondary writing; tertiary writing) and social change, 5–6, 275–6 categories, 16–21, 105–6 functions, see alphabet; letters; script in Rus, ‘activity-based’, 276–9 concept, 217–23 ‘institution-based’, 276–9 origins and chronology, 10, 120–7 properties of, 2–6, 20 York, 45 Zakharii, copyist, 222 Zavid, owner of comb, 81 Zhar-ptitsa, journal, 92 Zhirka, name on spindle whorl, 79 Zhiroslav, tysiatskii of Novgorod zmeeviki, see Snake Amulets zodiac, 242 Zvenigorod birch-bark, 37, 184 runes, 113, 115

1. Hebrew document from Kiev, with Turkic inscription appended; late 9th–early 10th century, now in the Cairo Genizah collection in the Cambridge University Library (MS T-S/Glass/12.122). See pp. 117.

2. Mosaic of St Mark writing his Gospel, in the church of St Sophia in Kiev; mid-11th-century. All the inscriptions (the evangelist’s name, and the text of his Gospel on the lectern) are in Greek.

3. ‘Snake Amulet’ (the Chernigov Grivna), probably from the late 11th century. The inscriptions are in two languages: Slavonic (around the ‘Gorgon’s head’) and Greek (around the figure of the Archangel Michael). See pp. 52–3.

4. Stone icon of St Symeon the Stylite and St Staurakios, with hybrid inscriptions: Greek words (o agios) in Cyrillic lettering (the final reduced vowel); 4.3 × 5.8 cm; Novgorod, 13th century.

5. ‘Dvina Stone’ no. 2, with Slavonic votive inscription (‘Lord, help Thy servant Boris’) and a formulaic cross-inscription derived from Greeks (I[isu]S Kh[risto]S NIKA ). 1128(?). See pp. 74–5.

6. Wooden cylinder-seal from Novgorod, probably used to secure bags of goods. Dating perhaps from the 970s or 980s, this is one of the very earliest East Slav inscribed objects. See pp. 80–1.

7. Graffiti in the church of St Sophia in Kiev; 12th century. The two graffiti are linked: ‘Lord, help Thy servant Stavr, Thy unworthy servant’, and ‘Stavr Gorodiatinich wrote [this]’.

8. Graffito in the church of St Sophia, Kiev: apparently a formal document recording the purchase of ‘Boian’s land’ by a princess (‘Vsevolod’s [wife or widow]’) for seventy grivnas of sables, in the presence of the priests, on 20 January. See p. 183.

9. Novgorod birch-bark letter no. 109, from Zhiznomir to Mikula: a dispute over the purchase of a stolen or fugitive slave; 20.2 × 10.7 cm; c.1100.

10. Novgorod birch-bark letter no. 147, to Filip from an official: an apology for the late dispatch of fish; 14.4 × 2.5 cm; 1220s–1230s.

11. ‘The Rich Man in Hell’: part of the Last Judgement fresco (1199) from the church of the Saviour on the Nereditsa near Novgorod, with inscribed dialogue with the rich man and the demon. See p. 236. The photograph was taken before the church was substantially destroyed in 1941.

12. Panel icon of the Mother of God with Saints Antonii and Feodosii of the Caves displaying inscribed scrolls; 67 × 42 cm; 12th–13th century.

13. Panel icon of the Veneration of the Cross, with the archangels Michael and Gabriel, the sun and the moon, cherubim and seraphim; all components labelled with inscriptions; 77 × 71 cm; Novgorod, 12th– 13th century.

14. Document confirming terms of trade between Smolensk and merchants from Riga and Gotland, dated 18 May 1284, and written by ‘Fedorko, the prince’s scribe’. See p. 169.