OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 153 At the first island below the falls, the Russians celebrated the festival of their escape ; at a second, near the mouth of the river, they repaired their shattered vessels for the longer and more perilous voyage of the Black Sea. If they steered along the coastj the Danube was accessible ; with a fair wind they could reach in thirty-six or forty hours the opposite shores of Anatolia ; and Constantinople admitted the annual visit of the strangers of the North. They returned at the stated season with a rich cargo of com, wine, and oil, the manufactures of Greece, and the spices of India. Some of their countrymen resided in the capital and provinces ; and the national treaties protected the persons, effects, and privileges of the Russian merchant.™ But the same communication which had been opened for the Navai cxpedi- benefit, was soon abused for the injury, of mankind. In a period Russians* * of one hundred and ninety years, the Russians made four at- sl^tinopie tempts to plunder the treasures of Constantinople ; the event was various, but the motive, the means, and the object were the same in these naval expeditions.^ The Russian traders gives the Russian and Sclavonic names ; but thirteen are enumerated by the Sieur de Beauplan, a French engineer, who had surveyed the course and navigation of the Dnieper or Borysthenes (Description de Ukraine, Rouen, 1660, a thin quarto), but the map is unluckily wanting in my copy. [See Appendi.x 15.] ™ Nestor apud Levesque, Hist.de Russie, torn. i. p. 78-8o[caps. 21, 22, 27, 35]. From the Dnieper or Borysthenes, the Russians went to Black Bulgaria, Chazaria, and Syria. To Syria, how? where? when? May we not, instead of 'S.vpia, read 'S.va.via ? (de Administrat. Imp. c. 42, p. 113). The alteration is slight ; the position of Suania, between Chazaria and Lazica, is perfectly suitable ; and the name was still used in the xith century (Cedren. tom. ii. p. 770). [Four treaties are cited in the old Russian chronicle : (i) a.d. 907 (Nestor, c. 21) with Oleg; (2) A.D. 911 [ib. c. 22) with Oleg; (3) A.D. 945 (/i^. c. 27) with Igor; (4) A.D. 970 [ib. c. 36) with Sviatoslav. There is no doubt that the texts of the last three treaties inserted by the chronicler are genuine. According to custom, duplicates of the documents in Greek and in the language of the other coiitracting party were drawn up. These treaties have attracted much attention from Russian scholars. Two investigations deserve special mention : a paper of Sergieevich in the January No. of the Zhurnal Minist. Nar. prosv., 1882, and an article of Dimitriu in Viz. Vremenn. ii. p. 531 sqq. (1893). The transaction of A.D. 907, before the walls of Constantinople, was merely a convention, not a formal treaty ; and Dimitriu shows that the oegotiation of a.d. 911 was doubtless intended to convert the spirit of this convention into an international treaty, signed and sealed. But he also makes it probable that this treaty of A.D. 911 did not receive its final ratification from Oleg and his boyars, and consequently was not strictly binding. But it proved a basis for the treaty of 945, which was completed with the full diplomatic forms and which refers back to it.] "1 The wars of the Russians and Greeks in the ixth, xth, and xith centuries are related in the Byzantine .A.nnals, especially those of Zonaras and Cedrenus ; and all their testimonies are collected in the Nussica of Stritter, tom. ii. pars ii. p. 939- 1044.
