Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence of Rus’-land, Sixth to Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Migrations in the intercontinental macro-region have been studied as proto-Slavic early settlement; as transit zone for Varangian-Arab trade and Byzantine-Kiev interactions; as space of Mongolian intrusion and as a territorially integrated Muscovite state with rural populations immobilised as serfs. This article integrates migrations from and to the neighbouring Scandinavian, East Roman, and Steppe macro-regions up to the fifteenth century and, more briefly, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In these poly-ethnic worlds, resident and in-migrant cultural groups adapted in frames of intercultural contact, migration, hierarchies, processes of power imposition and of exchange. An important facet is the ‘small numbers-large impact’ character of many migrations before the advance of Mongol/Tatar armies. From the fifteenth century, elites of the new Muscovite state such as traders and colonisers moved east into Siberia’s societies and attracted technical and administrative personnel from German-language societies. The traditional historiographical narrative, centred on an east-west perspective, is expanded to include the north-south axes of migration and cultural contact.