THE PRINCE’S FAMILY LINE AND MARRIAGE
It takes a lifetime to forget cruelty. According to the chronicler Nestor’s Tale of Bygone Years, our hero, Prince Ihor, was an inadvertent witness to military violence when he was barely five years old. In 882 Prince Oleh of Novhorod came to Kyiv with his armed retinue and holding the infant Ihor in arms, ordered the Kyivan princes Askold and Dir to be put to death. The chronicler recounts what Oleh said to his victims just before their execution. “You are neither princes nor nobles, while I am the prince,” and showing Ihor to them, added, “Here is the son of the Riuryks!”
Then the soldiers raised their swords, and Askold and Dir fell lifeless at Oleh’s feet. In all probability, this demonstration of the power of the sword left a lasting imprint on the five-year-old Ihor’s mind. It is clear from Oleh’s words that Ihor was the son of Riuryk, the Prince of Novhorod, from 862 until 879 and founder of the Riurykide dynasty. The historian Vasiliy Tatishchev claims in his study On the History of Joachim that on his mother’s side Riuryk was a grandson of Hostomysl, Prince of Novhorod. One of Riuryk’s wives, and presumably Ihor’s mother, was Efanda, the daughter of an Uman prince, who descended from the Norwegian royal family.
The future prince Ihor was born in 877, so when Oleh came to Kyiv in 882, Ihor was only five years old. Some historians suggest that Prince Oleh was the brother of Ihor’s mother and cared for the infant Ihor, fulfilling the will of Riuryk, who died in 879, when Ihor was two.
Neither Nestor nor any other chroniclers wrote anything about Ihor’s childhood and adolescence. Nikolai Karamzin notes: “Taught to be obedient from childhood, Igor did not dare claim his part of the inheritance from the power-thirsty ruler (Prince Oleh — Author) who bathed in the radiance of victorious conquests and was surrounded by gallant comrades.” According to Nestor, in 902 Oleh selected a young Pskov woman named Olha, who was “endowed with female charms and good disposition,” to be Ihor’s wife.
Other sources say that Olha was a granddaughter of Hostomysl and a daughter of Prince Oleh. In Nestor’s chronicle, Olha is the daughter of an ordinary village boatman, a fact confirmed by the detailed description of Ihor and Olha’s first meeting in the following episode. One day when Ihor was hunting, he asked a young and beautiful girl — in a facetious way — to carry him to the other side of the river. When Olha gave him a very witty reply, she won his respect, and later he appreciated not only her wisdom but also her youth, beauty, modesty, and dignity. In 903 Ihor Riurykovych married his beloved Olha Olehivna.
When Oleh the Seer went on an expedition to Byzantium in 907, he left the young prince Ihor behind in Kyiv, because he wished to share neither dangers nor glory with him.
PRINCE IHOR’S FIRST MILITARY EXPEDITIONS
When Ihor became a full-fledged prince of Kyiv after Prince Oleh’s death in 913, he tried to unite all his tribes. This was a difficult task because the Slavic tribes were accustomed to freedom and self-rule, and were unwilling to bow to Kyiv’s authority. The Derevlianians, taking advantage of Oleh’s demise, were the first to rise up and close their towns to Prince Ihor. Ihor and his military retinue mounted an expedition against them, and after their defeat he imposed a much larger tribute on them than Oleh had.
In 914 Ihor waged a war against the Ulychians, a tribe inhabiting the southern steppes on the Black Sea coast between the rivers Buh and Dnipro. Under Oleh, the Ulychians were not subjects of Kyiv: they were simply allies, who did not hinder the navigation of Oleh’s merchant ships down the Dnipro. Laying siege to their capital Peresichna, Ihor’s troops succeeded in seizing this fortified town after three years, forcing the Ulychians to pay tribute to Kyiv. But soon enough, in 915, new enemies — the Pechenegs, — who were notorious for their audacious forays and looting, appeared in great numbers on the territory of Rus’-Ukraine.
Karamzin says that “the Pechenegs may have contemplated sacking Kyiv but encountered a strong army. So they decided not to try their luck in a battle and retreated peacefully to Bessarabia or Moldova, where their fellow tribesmen had been holding sway.” Then the Pechenegs, already the scourge of all the neighboring peoples, formed an alliance with Ihor and did not harass Ihor’s state for a period of five years. Nestor notes that the first genuine war with the Pechenegs began in 920, but he says that the account did not provide him with any information about its outcome.
Thereafter, local wars frequently broke out on the country’s steppe frontiers. It was relatively calm in other parts of Rus’- Ukraine at the time, for power in large towns was held by Riuryk’s descendants. For example, Ihor ruled in Kyiv, his wife Olha in Vyshhorod, and their son Sviatoslav in Novhorod. Other towns were ruled by Prince Ihor’s nephews Yakun and Ihor, as well as a host of other kinsmen.
PRINCE IHOR’S WARS AGAINST BYZANTIUM
As Ihor attempted to assert himself on the Black Sea coast, he faced stiff resistance from the Byzantine colonies and, above all, the Korsun fishermen. There was a dispute over fishing rights in the Dnipro estuary and the Crimea. In its struggles with Ihor, the Byzantine Empire began to use the Pechenegs, who made frequent forays into Ukrainian lands. Ihor tried to live in peace with the Greeks. If Nestor’s account is accurate, in 935 Ihor’s ships filled with warriors set out on a joint expedition with the Greek fleet against Italy.
Nevertheless, there were increasingly more conflicts with Byzantium, and in 941 Ihor, at the head of 10,000 boats carrying about 40,000 warriors, entered the Black Sea. The Bulgarians, who were allies of Byzantium at the time, informed the Greek emperor that Ihor was marching on the Byzantine capital of Tsarhrad (Constantinople).
Ihor’s troops landed and after laying waste to the Asian shores, they reached Constantinople. The Greeks could not engage the sizable force in battle because their main fleet was heading for the Arab lands. With his ships riding at anchor near the lighthouse, Ihor prepared for battle. He was so certain of victory that he ordered his warriors to spare the lives of their enemies and take them prisoner. But his hopes were thwarted. The Greek army came up from the east and completely surrounded Ihor’s troops.
After consulting with his warriors, Ihor attacked the Greeks and, to quote Nestor, “after a fierce fight, the Greeks were barely able to achieve victory.” Ihor’s troops boarded their ships at night and decided to put out to sea. But the Greek fleet, under the command of Theophanos Protovestiarios, equipped with the so- called “Greek fire,” set Ihor’s vessels ablaze, which the warriors interpreted as “heavenly lightning in the hands of the embittered enemy,” Nestor wrote. The surviving Rus’ ships and remaining troops sailed to the coast of Asia Minor, only to encounter an elite Greek infantry force. Threatened by the Greek fleet on the sea, the Greek infantry on land, and widespread starvation among his troops, Prince Ihor returned to his native land with great losses.
Byzantine and other historians wrote about Ihor’s ill-fated expedition. For example, Liutprand, Bishop of Cremona, quoted his stepfather, the ambassador to Constantinople, who declared that he “saw with his own eyes the execution of many of Ihor’s soldiers taken prisoner by the Greeks: horrible barbarity!” And, apparently reaching a conclusion about Greek customs, he says, “Coddled in luxury, the Greeks feared dangers, not perfidy.”
Back in Kyiv, Ihor decided to take revenge on the Greeks. He began to muster a large new force, invited the Varangians from across the sea, and hired the Pechenegs. In 944 Ihor, at the head of a large fleet and cavalry, again went to Greece. When the residents of Korsun learned about this, they sent a message to the Greek Emperor Roman, telling him that “the Rus’ are coming: they have an unfathomable number of ships that have covered the entire sea.” When the Greek emperor Roman received this message, he sent his closest associates to Ihor, pleading, “Do not come here, but instead accept the tribute that Oleh used to take. I will also add to this tribute.” Ihor’s troops had already reached the Danube when he received the Greek emissaries with a message from the emperor.
Ihor summoned his retinue to discuss the Greek emperor’s proposals. According to Nestor, his warriors said to Ihor, “If the emperor says so, then what more do we need? We will take gold, silver, and costly textiles without a battle. For no one knows who will win — we or they. You cannot strike a deal with the sea — we are walking now on the sea bottom, not on land, and here death hangs over us.” Ihor heeded his troops’ advice. After dispatching the Pecheneg warriors to fight in Bulgaria, Ihor took the Greeks’ gold and textiles for all his soldiers and returned to Kyiv.
In 945 a new treaty was signed with the Greeks, but it was not as favorable as the one that Oleh had concluded. The treaty was sealed with a mutual oath. Since Ihor’s retinue consisted of both pagans and Christians, they took the oath separately. The pagans, including Ihor, went to a hill where the idol of their god Perun stood and recited their oath. The Christians swore in the name of their God at St. Elias’s Cathedral. The peace treaty with Byzantium was not very advantageous to Kyiv. Ihor had to drop his claims to the Crimea and the Dnipro estuary, and reduce his trade in the Greek lands. Still, it was a peace treaty and commercial agreement, which left Ihor free to perform his other political duties.
PRINCE IHOR’S CASPIAN EXPEDITION AND DEATH
Like Oleh the Seer before him, Prince Ihor decided to send his troops east to the Caspian Sea, where there were rich Arab markets. But the troops marched along the Caucasus, not across the Khazar land, where the Alans and the Lezgins joined them. In Derbent the troops boarded boats and sailed on the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the Kura past the Caucasus. Their destination was Berdaa, the largest trading center in Transcaucasia. Ihor’s troops attacked the city, killed the guards, and seized the outskirts. The residents were treated well at first, but later, when an uprising began, the warriors ravaged the city and took the residents captive.
The Arab ruler of neighboring Azerbaijan offered resistance to Ihor. The pendulum of battles swung to and fro, but Ihor held out. When an epidemic broke out among Ihor’s troops, the prince chose immediately to leave the unhealthy locality. The winners returned with enormous spoils, following the same route, and no one dared stop them. Soon Ihor’s troops began to complain that he did not care about them because in the last years of his rule he had stopped going to exact tribute, sending instead a nobleman named Sveneld. The prince’s retinue had thus become poorer than Sveneld’s.
Ihor heeded his warriors’ wishes and went with them to extort excessive tribute from the Derevlianians. But he was not satisfied and demanded twice as much tribute. After he sent the bulk of his troops and Sveneld back to Kyiv and returned to the Derevlianians with a small number of guards, the tribesmen killed the guards and Ihor without great effort. According to a Byzantine historian, the Derevlianians tied the hapless prince to two bent trees and then released them. Prince Ihor was torn apart. This was the tragic end of the 32-year-long rule of Ihor Riurykovych, the Prince of Kyiv.
According to Nestor’s Tale of Bygone Years, Ihor’s faithful and loving wife, Princess Olha, wreaked terrible vengeance on the Derevelianians for the death of her husband by burning their capital Korosten to the ground and massacring all its residents. This was in keeping with Oleh’s pagan law: death for death.
