Rus' Khaganate

9th century

Capital

Not specified

Languages

Old East Norse, Old East Slavic

Religion

Norse religion, Slavic religion

Government

Monarchy

Historical era

Early Middle Ages

•

Established

ca. 830

•

Disestablished

ca. 882-899

Today part of

Russia

Ukraine

The Rus' Khaganate is the name applied by some modern historians to a polity that was postulated to exist during a poorly documented period in the history of Eastern Europe, roughly the late 8th and early-to-mid-9th centuries AD.

It was suggested that the Rus' Khaganate was a state, or a cluster of city-states, set up by a people called Rus', described in all contemporary sources as being Norsemen, somewhere in what is today European Russia, as a chronological predecessor to the Rurik Dynasty and the Kievan Rus'. The region's population at that time was composed of Baltic, Slavic, Finnic, Turkic, Hungarian, and Norse peoples. The region was also a place of operations for Varangians, eastern Scandinavian adventurers, merchants, and pirates.

In sparse contemporaneous sources, the leader or leaders of Rus people at this time were referred to by the Old Turkic title Khagan, hence the suggested name of their polity.

This period is thought to be the times of the genesis of a distinct Rus' ethnos, which gave rise to Kievan Rus' and later states from which modern Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine evolved.

The title of "khagan" for a leader of some groups of Rus' people is mentioned in several historical sources, most of them foreign texts dating from the 9th century, while three East Slavic sources date from the 11th and 12th centuries. The earliest European reference related to the Rus' people ruled by a khagan comes from the Frankish Annals of St. Bertin, which refer to a group of Norsemen who called themselves Rhos (qui se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant) and visited Constantinople around the year 838. Fearful of returning home via the steppes, which would leave them vulnerable to attacks by the Magyars, these Rhos travelled through the Frankish Empire accompanied by Greek ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor Theophilus. When questioned by the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious at Ingelheim, they stated that their leader was known as chacanus (hypothesized to be either the Latin word for "Khagan" or a deformation of Scandinavian proper name Håkan), that they lived far to the north, and that they were Swedes (comperit eos gentis esse sueonum).

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Wikipedia