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those in the south. They lived by trade and plunder. Active in the Baltic, they had come into contact with the Finns and Slavs of northwest Russia. From them they learned about the river routes to other Slav communities far to the south and to the Khazars’ territory beyond. Through forays into the Mediterranean they already knew that the Khazars held the gateway to the riches of both the Orient and the Mediterranean world. It was in order to capture some of this trade that they decided to build a base at Ladoga, and then another close to what was to become the city of Novgorod.
    This was a bleak region with very poor soil and very sparse settlement, inhabited by Finno-Ugrian fishermen, themselves not very long established, and by a few Russians who had come in later. It was here that the classic trading city was developed. The Vikings who made a base at the site now known as Old Ladoga in the 750s were trader-warriors dealing in furs, beads and blood. They built a fort there to protect themselves, their craftsmen and their wares. Archaeologists who have carefully investigated the remains of the settlement have found and dated wickerwork walls and conclude that the building of such a fort required labour in the form of slaves. The Vikings either brought these with them or found them locally. But if there was an initial labour shortage, it did not last long.
    Once the fort was in existence people came from afar to marvel and to sell fish or other food or a few pelts gathered in the forests, and so an emporium of sorts arose, which became something of a magnet for Slavs migrating from the south. 23 But the Viking settlers were interested in more than petty local trade. Their eyes were set on the long-distance trade in more valuable commodities — honey, weapons and above all slaves to trade in Byzantine markets for the silks, spices and precious stone of the Orient. It is likely that, in time, traders came from as far afield as the Caucasus and Caspian.
    The archaeologists’ finds are puzzling, because they comprise the remains of not one settlement but two. Like the first scraps of information found in the Latin and Arabic sources of the period, these have been seized on by scholars, who like few things better than a good dispute. The result has been a sizeable literature on the origins of towns in Russia, and an impressive variety of theories. Did towns develop from tribal centres or from fortified strong-points? Or were they created from scratch because of a sudden need? Were they formed by nobles, or by traders and artisans? The consensus seems to be that most of these elements played a part. Still, the fact that Novgorod boasted two such settlements within a mile or soof each other by the river Volkhov is intriguing, and excavations at Kiev and Smolensk have revealed that these cities also grew from two distinct but associated settlements. Perhaps the two settlements had different functions. At any rate ‘Riurik’s town’ or hill settlement
(gorodishche
in Russian, or
holmgarthr
in Scandinavian), sited close to the point where the river Volkhov flows out of Lake Ilmen, was much the more important of the two. Twenty-five acres in area, Riurik’s town was the more easily defensible site and stood clear of the spring floodwaters (which persuaded an Arab visitor that it was in fact an island in the river). 24
    If the cities of the Russian south originated as tribal headquarters and agricultural centres, the city of Novgorod owed its origins to trade and was associated with the Vikings. The Vikings had been trained in a hard school. They knew that they must expand their trade, their settlements and their conquests or perish. And they represented the commercial world at its most ruthless and greedy. ‘Even the man who has only modest wealth,’ remarked the tenth-century Arab writer Ibn Rusta, ‘is…envied by his brother, who would not hesitate to do away with him in order to steal it.’ 25 Their intelligence system