>>This is all quite interesting. I remember some bits of that part of the history, the Kiev empire and then later Novgorod and much later Moscow, but have completely lost the Scandinavians from the picture. The people were traveling then a lot then, it seems :).
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>Am I right also in that the word "slav" comes from the Latin for "slave", that part of Europe being their main "crop" for "harvesting" slaves whenever they needed them?

Deja vu. I wrote about this already. "Sloviti" (or another dozen verbs with the same root across languages) means "to speak", "slovo" means a word, a letter, speech (as ability and as an oratory torture of audience) etc, then "slava" (glory, celebration) and other derivatives. Basically, there were the "sloven" (another coincidence), i.e. the speaking people, and the "nemec" (nemac, niemiec, even német in Hungarian (!)) - the mutes, aka Germanic tribes, who couldn't speak (the language).