International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Mari H. Isoaho
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland;
[e-mail]
A Byzantine Look at 
οἱ Ῥῶς
– The New People with an Apocalyptic Burden
Byzantine authors proclaimed and cultivated “mimesis”, the principle of imitation of the classical 
past. This principle is reflected in the words of Theodore Metochites in his famous statement: “
Everything 
has been said and nothing remains for us
”. This meant that classical patterns and strong stereotypes 
influenced the descriptions and interpretations of historical events. The 
Primary Chronicle of Kiev 
is a 
manifest to the birth of a new nation, Rus’, and its state. But the people called Rus’ had a heavy burden 
on their shoulders, as for centuries in Constantinople was held the idea of the apocalyptic barbaric 
nation called Rhos – οἱ Ῥῶς. The roots of the imagery of Rus’ in Byzantium reach all the way back 
to Herodotos and the classical idea of the Scyths and Tauroscyths. Until the writing of the 
Primary 
Chronicle
in the 1110s, the image of northern barbarians had developed in the writings of numerous 
Byzantine church fathers, sermons and chronicles. This presentation studies the ways in which the 
Byzantines looked at the northern barbarians and how this was met in Kiev.
This paper argues that the Primary Chronicle of Kiev reconstructed its presentation of world 
history in order to show how the earlier Byzantine notions of Rus’ – οἱ Ῥῶς – were erroneously 
constructed. In order to understand the mental imagery with which the 
Primary Chronicle
worked, 
it is essential to take into account the long Greek tradition of confronting the Northern barbarians, 
for especially the beginning of the annalistic part of the 
Chronicle 
placed Rus’ in the sphere of 
written historical records via its confrontation with the Byzantine Empire. In order to show that 
the Byzantines were wrong, the 
Primary Chronicle
had two main objectives. First, it showed how 

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the 
Rus’
people were not filthy and pagan barbarians whose role was to ravage the world in these 
events, but instead it depicted how the 
Rus’
became the New People as they stepped into the light of 
Christian belief. On the other hand, it had the need to express how the scourge of God, the pagan 
nation whose wars were to be felt bitterly by the Christians, existed elsewhere, and attempted to 
show how this role belonged to the nomad people of the 
Polovtsy
.