Vadas Ferenc (szerk.): A Wosinszky Mór Múzeum Évkönyve 15. (Szekszárd, 1990)

Handelsbeziehungen - Thomas S. Noonan: Scandinavian-Russian-Islamic trade in the ninth century

Scandinavian-Russian-Islamic trade in the ninth century* THOMAS S. NOONAN, MINNEAPOLIS During the early middle ages, some of the great trade routes of western Eurasia led from the Islamic lands of the Near East and Central Asia through European Russia to the lands bordering upon the Baltic Sea and especially Sweden. Since this trade has been connected with the eastward expansion of the Vikings, with the formation of the first Russian or Rus' state, and with the Pirenne thesis, it usually is mentioned, if only briefly, in studies of eastern and northern Europe during the early medieval era. Most accounts of this famous commerce tend to present a composite picture drawn primarily from tenth and eleventh century Islamic written sources. This situation is quite understandable. While a number of Islamic geographers and writers of the tenth-eleventh centuries described this trade from an Arab perspective and Ibn-Fadlan even provided an eye-witness report on its operation along the middle Volga in the year 922, only two Islamic geographers (Ibn Khurdadhbih and Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani) mentioned the Scandinavian-Russian-Islamic commerce as it operated in the ninth century. The Scandinavian-Russian-Islamic trade of the early medieval era was very dynamic and experienced a number of major changes. One of the most fundamental of these changes took place in the late ninth and early tenth century when Islamic trade with European Russia shifted from the c

Abbasid lands of Iraq and Iran to the Samanid lands of Central Asia. Thus, the ninth-century Islamic-Russian-Scandinavian commerce differed in several important ways from the tenth-century trade described in most primary sources and secondary works. The purpose of this essay is to describe the Scandinavian-Russian-Islamic commerce asit existed in the ninth century, i.e., before its main routes shifted eastward to the Samanid lands in Central Asia. There are two basic types of sources for this study. First, we have a reconstructed text of the common source for the reports of Ibn Khurdadhbih and Ibn al-Faqih which was prepared some time ago by Omeljan Pritsak (PRITSAK 1970,241-259). Second, there are the numerous hoards of Islamic silver coins or dirhams imported from Iran and Iraq into European Russia and the Baltic in order to pay for the goods exported to the c

Abbasid caliphate from the north. These two basic types of sources complement each other very well. To the literary evidence of Ibn Khurdadhbih and Ibn al-Faqih, which describes the trade at one point in time, we can add the material evidence of tens of thousands of * The research for this study was assisted in part by a generous grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. 53