To the elements that have obtained a permanent foothold on the soil of modern Russia and affected the Slavs in a greater or less degree, a new one must now be added in the Varango-Russians. The brave inhabitants of Sweden and Norway, who were known in western Europe under the name if Northman or Normans, directed their first warlike expeditions against their Slavonian and Finnish neighbours. The flotillas of the vikings were directed to the shores of the Baltic, and _austrvegr_--the eastern route--was the name they gave to the journey into the country of the Finns and Slavs on the gulf of Finland and further inland. _Gardar_ was the name they gave to the Slavo-Finnish settlements, _Holmgardar_ was their name for Novgorod, _Kaenungardar_ for Kiev. _Mikligardar_, for Constantinople, shows that the Normans first learned to know that city through the eastern Slavs. The Slavs, on the other hand, called those Scandinavians by a name given to them by the Finns--Rus. The Scandinavians who sent their surplus of fighting men to Russia and were destined to found the Russian state, lived--as we learn from the form of the names that have come down to us--in Upland, Södermanland, and Östergötland, that is, on the east coast of Sweden north of Lake Mälar. In these lands and throughout the Scandinavian north, men who were bound to military chiefs by a vow of fidelity were called _vaeringr_ (pl. _vaeringjar_, O. Sw. Warung), a name changed by the eastern Slavs into _variag_. It was these Russo-Varangians who founded the state of Old Russia.[g] At the call of the Slavs of Novgorod and their allies, three Varangian brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor (Scand. Hrurekr, Sikniutr, Thorwardr), gathered together their kindred and armed followers, or _drujina_, and established themselves on the northern frontiers of the Slavs: Sineus to the northeast, on the White Lake; Rurik, the eldest, in the centre, on Lake Ladoga near the Volkhov River, where he founded the city of Ladoga; and Truvor to the northwest, at Izborsk, near Lake Pskov. The year 862 is usually assigned as the date in which the Varangians settled in Russia, and it is the official year for the founding of the Russian empire; but it is more probable that they had come before that date. [Sidenote: [865-907 A.D.]]