Byzantium

Michael Ennis Byzantium

The gods make mighty him who bows to their yoke.

Homer, The Iliad

Foreword

In the first half of the eleventh century, while Europe lumbered fitfully towards the end of the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Empire stood at the apex of its power. Direct heir to the might and glory of ancient Rome, the Empire of Byzantium already could look back on seven uninterrupted centuries of world dominion. The hub of this enduring and seemingly invincible power was Constantinople, the magnificent fortress capital founded in AD 330 by Constantine I, the first Christian Emperor of Rome. Invulnerable behind miles of towering walls, the Queen of Cities was a luxurious metropolis of a million inhabitants at a time when London and Paris were squalid, overgrown villages of ten or twenty thousand.

Presiding over the splendour of Byzantium was the most powerful man on earth. Lord of the Entire World, the Byzantine Emperor was thought to rule literally side by side with the Lord of the Universe, Christ the Pantocrator. But the Emperor’s divine prerogative was coveted by many, and this all-too-fallible mortal often feared for his life even in the staggeringly opulent sanctuaries of his vast palace complex. For this reason the Byzantine emperors surrounded themselves with an Imperial bodyguard of Viking mercenaries, men of unquestioning loyalty and unyielding ferocity. Known and feared throughout the world as Varangians, these few hundred Viking warriors became essential to the stability and survival of the world’s mightiest empire.

The most famed of all Varangians was a young Norwegian prince named Haraldr Sigurdarson, who would play one of the most fateful roles any man has ever undertaken on the stage of history. This is his true story.

While this is a work of fiction, it has been based very carefully on historical fact, a truth more extraordinary than any fiction. All except the most incidental characters actually lived and died almost a thousand years ago, and all of the major events actually took place.

In the interest of authenticity, various measurements and terms actually used in the eleventh century have been retained here. The units of measurement most commonly used by the Norse were the thumb, about an inch; the ell, a span of eighteen inches (based on the measurement between the elbow and forefinger); the bowshot, a distance of roughly two hundred yards; and the rowing-spell, a distance of about seven miles. The Byzantines used the fathom – six feet – as well as the Roman foot. The stade, a measurement based on the length of the hippodrome track, was about two hundred yards.

The Vikings of the eleventh century never referred to themselves by the sobriquet they earned in later centuries; they called themselves simply Norsemen, while the word viking described an activity roughly translatable as ‘adventuring in search of wealth’. The word Varangian, which was widely used in Scandinavia as well as Byzantium, literally meant ‘pledgemen’, as the Norse warriors obeyed an inviolable pledge to defend one another, and their sworn leader, to the death. The Norsemen called the Byzantines Griks and their Empire Grikkland or Grikia; the city of Constantinople was often called Miklagardr, the Great City. But the Byzantines, who in fact spoke the Greek language and incorporated all of Greece in their Empire, emphatically considered themselves and their Empire ‘Roman’; Constantinople was often referred to as New Rome. The Byzantines frequently referred to Norsemen in general as Rus, because the Norse usually reached Byzantium by a route that took them through Rus Land, which later became Russia. In elegant court circles, Norsemen were also known as Tauro-Scythians, a condescending and affected anachronism that meant Scythians, (i.e. savages) from beyond the Taurus Mountains. Of course, in the eyes of the Byzantines all foreigners, regardless of status or place of origin, belonged in one basic category: barbaroi, or barbarians.

Prologue

Stiklestad, Norway 31 August 1030

Reduced to predawn embers, the hundreds of camp-fires speckled the still-darkened meadow like a constellation of dying stars. Each was the site of an anxious communion, as a thousand men whispered a question only one man could answer: Will we fight today? The cumulative sound of this hushed speculation was an eerie, detached sibilance, as if giant wings slowly fanned the darkness above.

The King of Norway stared into the faintly pulsing coals at his feet and repeated the name he had murmured a moment before. ‘Ingigerd.’

Jarl Rognvald brushed the shag of frost-white hair from his forehead. The Jarl was well into his sixth decade, his walrus-tough skin slit with deep creases. Like the King sitting beside him, he was dressed for battle, in a knee-length coat of chain mail called a byrnnie. ‘My King?’ he asked absently.

King Olaf sat erect; the links of his byrnnie chinged in a tiny, sad note, the instrument and its music suited to the man. Olaf was thirty-five, huge, with the face of a scowling, oversize boy who had shed his baby fat and become a tough, overbearing bully. And yet his painfully blue eyes were gentle and haunted; not a sensitive boy’s eyes but those of a man long pursued by an unkind fate. ‘The last time I saw Ingigerd,’ said the King, ‘I promised her that before I died, I would hold her in my arms again.’ He stirred the coals with his boot, and sparks flew up as if sucked by the vast whisper in the air. ‘I held her in my arms last night. A dream so real that I could taste her flesh and feel her heart beneath mine.’

Jarl Rognvald knew then that the King had made his decision. Ingigerd, the King of Sweden’s daughter, had been the love of Olaf’s youth; though Olaf had never admitted it, Jarl Rognvald was certain that they had slept together. Perhaps for that reason the King of Sweden had always despised Olaf, and had married Ingigerd to Yaroslav, Great Prince of the Rus. Olaf and Ingigerd had not seen each other for almost twenty years.

‘Where will we fight them?’ asked Jarl Rognvald.

‘Here. When they see how few we are, they will come down from the high ground.’

The two men stood and looked to the east. The forest began on a small slope at the edge of the meadow where Olaf had encamped his army; it seemed filled with an unnatural, incandescent orange mist that illuminated the bases of the pine trees. All night long Olaf’s scouts had gone out into that forest and returned with a grim accounting of their enemy’s strength, so evident in the massed light of their campfires. They were seven times as many men as Olaf had mustered, a mercenary mob hired by an unlikely coalition: the owners of Norway’s largest estates, who envisioned a Norway fractured into their own sovereign principalities, and Knut, King of Denmark and England, who envisioned a Norway shackled to his empire. And once Norway’s King was out of the way, Knut could easily impose his vision on his erstwhile allies.

‘We could still pack our gear bags and leave this field before dawn,’ Olaf said, ‘and live to meet them at a time of our choosing. But as word spread that King Olaf had run, their ranks would increase. We would simply die on another day, but in retreat, rather than with honour. No king could ever follow me, except a foreign king.’ Olaf turned to face the Jarl. ‘My choice is simple. If I live to fight again, Norway will die. If I die today, Norway lives.’

Jarl Rognvald removed the conical steel helm from his leather gear bag and cradled it in his hands, his rough fingers tracing over the intricately scrolled dragons engraved round the rim. The Dragon of Nidafell, the Jarl silently noted, the giant-taloned serpent that would fly in the last black night of the world. The creature with the