Back Roes (volk) Afrikaans شعب الروس Arabic Rus (xalq) Azerbaijani Рус Bulgarian Rus (poble) Catalan Rus (národ) Czech Rws Welsh Rus (folk) Danish Rus (Volk) German Ρως Greek

Rus' people

For other uses of "Rus", see Rus (disambiguation).

Map showing the major Varangian trade routes: the Volga trade route (in red) and the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks (in purple). Sufficiently controlling strongholds, market places and portages along the routes was necessary for the Scandinavian raiders and traders.

The Rus',[a] also known as Russes,[2][3] were a people in early medieval Eastern Europe. The scholarly consensus holds that they were originally Norsemen, mainly originating from present-day Sweden, who settled and ruled along the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the 8th to 11th centuries AD.

The two original centres of the Rus' were Ladoga (Aldeigja), founded in the mid-8th century, and Rurikovo Gorodische (Holmr), founded in the mid-9th century.[4] The two settlements were situated at opposite ends of the Volkhov River, between Lake Ilmen and Lake Ladoga, and the Norsemen likely called this territory Gardar.[5] From there, the name of the Rus' was transferred to the Middle Dnieper, and the Rus' then moved eastward to where the Finnic tribes lived and southward to where the Slavs lived.[5]

The name Garðaríki was applied to the newly formed state of Kievan Rus',[6] and the ruling Norsemen along with local Finnic tribes gradually assimilated into the East Slavic population and came to speak a common language. Old Norse remained familiar to the elite until their complete assimilation by the second half of the 11th century,[7] and in rural areas, vestiges of Norse culture persisted as late as the 14th and early 15th centuries, particularly in the north.[7]

The history of the Rus' is central to 9th through 10th-century state formation, and thus national origins, in Eastern Europe. They ultimately gave their name to Russia and Belarus, and they are relevant to the national histories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Because of this importance, there is a set of alternative so-called "Anti-Normanist" views that are largely confined to a minor group of Eastern European scholars.

  1. ^ Rosenwein, Barbara H. (14 February 2014). A Short History of the Middle Ages, Volume I: From c.300 to c.1150, Fourth Edition. University of Toronto Press. p. 121. ISBN 978-1-4426-0616-6.
  2. ^ Dolukhanov, Pavel (10 July 2014). The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus. Routledge. p. 182. ISBN 978-1-317-89222-9.
  3. ^ Magill, Frank N. (12 November 2012). The Middle Ages: Dictionary of World Biography, Volume 2. Routledge. p. 803. ISBN 978-1-136-59313-0.
  4. ^ Duczko 2004, p. 60, These two original centres of Rus were Staraja Ladoga and Rurikovo Gorodishche.
  5. ^ a b Duczko 2004, p. 60.
  6. ^ Duczko 2004, p. 1, The state of the Eastern Slavs—Russia, or Rhosia according to the Byzantines of mid-tenth century—was called in the medieval Norse literature Gardariki, or in the earlier, Viking-age sources just Gardar, a term originally restricted to the non-Slav territory of Ladoga-Ilmen.
  7. ^ a b Melnikova, E.A. (2003) The Cultural Assimilation of the Varangians in Eastern Europe from the Point of View of Language and Literacy in Runica – Germ. – Mediavalia (heiz./n.) Rga-e 37, pp. 454–465 Archived 15 February 2022 at the Wayback Machine.


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