Ask the Way in Erzurum, End Up in Kyiv

The history of Erzurum—Theodosiopolis to the Byzantines, and today a provincial capital in eastern Türkiye—has an incorrigible habit of entangling itself with matters that ought to be none of its business. In the third quarter of the tenth century it played host to a rebellion, as it periodically did, this one raised by the general Bardas Skleros—the Hard, and he had every intention of living up to it.

The name will mean nothing to most readers, which is a pity, because Skleros is the man who fought Sviatoslav of Kyiv—son of Princess Olga (Helga) and Prince Igor (Ingvar) of the house of Rurik, and not, one must insist, the Igor of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and Borodin’s opera, who arrived two centuries later and with rather better publicity. Sviatoslav’s war bands got as far as modern Lüleburgaz, which is uncomfortably few days’ march from Constantinople, before the Byzantines persuaded them to reconsider. Going home, he was ambushed by the Pechenegs at the Dnieper rapids and killed; his line, less easily disposed of, ran on to Vladimir Monomakh.

The connection, moreover, may not be one of parallel chronology alone. The first wife of the future emperor Constantine IX Monomachos was a kinswoman of Bardas Skleros; a daughter of Constantine’s was married to Vsevolod Yaroslavich, and became the mother of Vladimir Monomakh. Proof there is none—the Byzantine sources maintain a dignified silence about the princess, and the whole edifice rests on a byname inherited through the female line. But if it stands, then the first Byzantine drop in the Rurikid bloodstream arrived by way of Theodosiopolis and the Skleros family.

The byname is worth a moment of its own. Monomachos is the single combatant, the man who fights alone: for Constantine an ancestral surname, for Vladimir a souvenir of his mother. One word, two entirely separate histories.

But we were speaking of Erzurum. When Skleros rose against Emperor Basil II—not yet, at that stage of his career, the Bulgar-Slayer—Theodosiopolis became one of the mainstays of the revolt, and suppressing it required help from the neighbours. The emperor paid for that help with the city itself, which passed to the Georgian ruler David III Kuropalates. David, who understood an opportunity when one was handed to him, consolidated his position and, with the Armenian king Gagik I, destroyed the forces of Mamlan the Rawwadid, emir of Iranian Azerbaijan—an Arab or a Kurd, according to taste. In the same years he took Manzikert, the modern Malazgirt, a name that would acquire a very different meaning within the century: in 1071 the Seljuks annihilated a Byzantine army on that ground and let themselves into Anatolia.

The eastern frontier, in short, was now being held by other people’s hands—which left Basil free for the Balkans and for the affairs of the north. Including the affairs that would draw Rus into the Byzantine orbit altogether.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch some considerable distance to the north, the East Slavic lands were quietly arranging themselves. By the end of the tenth century Kyiv was the capital of Vladimir the Great, Novgorod the trading and political heart of the north, Rostov and Suzdal the future spine of the northeast, Chernihiv and Polatsk principalities with views of their own. And in 988 Rus was baptised—in the very years when Skleros, by then an old man, rose for the second time.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)