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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 6505403" data-attributes="member: 6779310">Nope. The Rus WERE those early viking traders. More viking traders continued to come through after Gengis Khan made them a principality of the Golden Horde, but the Rus themselves were not Slavs, but Northmen (Norsk) or Sweedes. And, pretty much, from that point on, the Russian nobility were and remained mostly foreigners to the peasantry. There was much hybridizing, however, of the Rus' and pre-Rus Slavic cultures. One of the big differences was that the Kyïvan Rūs' was christianized a century before the other Northmen, and that the relations with the slavs themselves generally weren't hostile; other places where the Vikings went were somewhat less happy - Ireland, Scotland, England all have horrible runs with "are they here to trade to raid today"... and the difference often was a matter of "Are the locals demands in trade insulting?" and "is the church undefended?"But you must also remember: Viking is a verb... to wander. With connotations of "to wander looking for trade and/or plunder".... and the culture that sent them out starts around 700AD, flourishes from 800 until Harald Christianizes the Danes (1104) and the Norwegians and Sweedes follow suit within 70 years, and declines slowly through to the 1400's, when the Christian subcultures within those lands become firmly dominant.  Their own name for themselves as wanderers is just the norse form of "Those who wander"...I highly recommend Basil Dmytryshyn's Medieval Russia: A Sourcebook.</blockquote>

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