The origin of the word Rus’ is obscure but we can trace it back in history well before the Christianization of the country, for it appears in the records of the Byzantine Empire early in the ninth century A.D., and the treaties made between the Emperors of Constantinople and the Princes of Rus’ show that the name referred to a very definite political entity, but as they do not concern questions of boundaries, we are not able to define accurately the territory to which they refer. Yet it is clear that Rus’ in its essence referred to the valley of the Dnyeper River, the southern part of the Varangian Road by which the Scandinavian Vikings penetrated from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. For centuries scholars have been debating the origin and meaning of the name. Since the earliest passages that are preserved in the Rus’ language are clearly old Scandinavian, there has been a prevailing opinion that Rus’ was the name of one of the Scandinavian tribes that spread over Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries. They appeared along the Dnyeper about the same time that the Normans were settling in France, and like them they adopted the language of the population, which in this case was a race speaking an East Slavonic language. Historians have been inclined to connect this with the old legend of the conquest of Kiev and Novgorod by Rurik and his two brothers, who were invited to rule the country because it was a rich land and there was no order in it. It is an old fable common to many lands and places, but there is no evidence as to its truth and if there were, we would still be far from knowing the actual meaning of the word. A not less vocal group has felt that this story was not too dignified and has sought some other origin. Many have regarded it as a Slavonic borrowing from Iranian or they have tried to find some place name which could serve as a source. It is all in vain and for all intents and purposes we can only go back to recorded history and accept the fact that when that history first became definite, the word Rus’ was applied to the population of the Dnyeper valley and of the valley of the Volkhov that formed the northern end of the Varangian Road. Kiev on the south and Novgorod on the north were the two fortresses on this line of transport and they formed the two centres of the earliest Rus’. Yet even then Kiev was the more important of the two, for it lay not only on the north-south route but also on the east-west road from central Asia. It was then called the capital of Rus’ and as we learn more of the settlement of the country, we realize how the area of Rus’ expanded until it covered with rare exactness the territory between the Carpathians and the Don that forms the modern Ukraine.