them to “the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.” The fact that Procopius describes the arrival of the treasures in Constantinople suggests that the account is authentic, as many of his intended readers would themselves have witnessed the triumph, but his story of their return to Jerusalem seems implausible and a typical embellishment to highlight Justinian’s Christian virtues. There is no credible evidence that the menorah was ever again in Jerusalem after AD 70-71.
The Fourth Crusade.
The lost treasures of the Jewish Temple may therefore have survived hidden away in Constantinople into the medieval period. The survival of many other antiquities in the city is attested by the list of objects destroyed or looted by the Crusaders in 1204, including the famous quadriga, shipped to Venice to become the Horses of St. Mark’s. Some of the Crusaders would already have been on pilgrimages to Rome, and it is possible that their leader, Baldwin of Flanders, had seen the extraordinary image on the Arch of Titus and had read Procopius. Contemporary accounts of the sack of Constantinople are overlain by pious justifications, but the truth may be that the allure of loot proved too great, and Baldwin desperately needed to find a way to pay the Venetians for shipping his Crusaders towards the Holy Land.
Harald Hardrada.
Whether the Jewish treasures survived in Constantinople as late as 1204 is an open question. A century and a half before the Fourth Crusade, the fabled Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor had been led by the towering figure of Harald Sigurdsson, known to history as Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” “the ruthless.” Harald was a Viking mercenary, the exiled son of a king of Norway who would return to claim the throne and become the most feared of all the Norse warlords. During his years with the Varangians he became a latter-day Belisarius, campaigning for the emperor in Sicily and North Africa and amassing a huge personal fortune. To the Saracens he was “Thunderbolt from the North,” and he succeeded where the Fourth Crusade would not: he entered Jerusalem, pacified the Holy Land, bathed in the river Jordan and gave treasure to the shrine at Christ’s grave. The expedition to Jerusalem probably took place in 1036 or 1037, making Harald Hardrada the first and most successful of all the Crusaders, albeit on behalf of the Byzantine emperor rather than the Church in the West.
Back in Constantinople, Harald was allowed to take part in palace-plunder, helping himself to treasure as a reward for his endeavours. One night in 1042 he kidnapped the empress Zoe’s niece Maria-whom he had wished to marry, but been refused by her aunt-and escaped with his Varangian companions in two ships over the great chain that bound the entrance to the Golden Horn, the harbour of Constantinople. The sole account of this escapade has Maria being returned to the city once they were safely out, but perhaps she did accompany Harald back to Norway and through the rest of his extraordinary life, including his marriage to the Kievan princess Elizabeth and his relationship with at least one other woman, Thora, which produced his son and heir, Olaf. According to his biography, Harald had a “daughter,” oddly enough called Maria, who accompanied him on his last voyage and supposedly died suddenly “on the very day and at the very hour that her father had been killed” (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 98).
Almost everything we know about Harald Hardrada comes from the Heimskringla, an account of the Norse kings written in the early thirteenth century by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). Eagle and wolf imagery abound in the passages of verse included in the text. The Heimskringla and a few sentences in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide virtually all we know of the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York, where a Norwegian army under Harald was defeated on 25 September 1066 by the English King Harold Godwinsson, who in turn was defeated a few weeks later by the Normans. Stamford Bridge was a catastrophe for the Norse and to many signalled the end of the Viking Age; of some three hundred ships that had sailed to England, only twenty-four are said to have returned. The last description of Harald Hardrada alive is of him fighting “two-handed” in the thick of the battle, perhaps wielding a great battle-axe of the Varangians, surrounded by his loyal bodyguard.
Two of Harald’s Varangian companions who escaped with him from Constantinople were Halldor and Ulf, both Icelanders. Another may have been Halfdan-perhaps even Harald’s brother of this name-whose runic graffito can be seen on a balustrade inside the church of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. Fragments of the chain that crossed the Golden Horn still exist. Elsewhere evidence for Harald’s exploits is elusive, but there is enough to give substance to the life recounted in the Heimskringla. In Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I have seen a cross carved in the rock that seemed to have the shape of Mjollnir, Thor’s hammer, a symbol that remained potent for the Norse under Christian domination as far away as Iceland and Greenland, kept alive along with all the legends of Loki and Fenrir and Valhalla.
The Mappa Mundi.
The wonderful thirteenth-century map described in Chapter 2 can be seen today in a purpose-built museum next to Hereford Cathedral, alongside the famous chained library. When I first visited the cathedral as a boy, the library was still in the muniment room above the north transept aisle, where archives and treasures were stored at the time the map was drawn. The apparent absence of a spiral staircase in the northeast corner of the transept leading up to the gallery has always struck me as odd, so that is where I have placed the fictional discovery in this book. Richard of Holdingham was a true historical character, named in the lower left-hand corner of the map, though very little is known of his life. I have imagined him “apprenticed” in the fictional felag to Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, also a true-life character. Richard’s absence at the dedication of the map is indicated by the mis-labelling of Europe and Africa, a glaring error that a scholar of his calibre would surely never have tolerated.
A felag, or fellowship, was a Viking institution, and could be a band of warriors owing allegiance to a lord, bound by oaths of loyalty. Sworn enemies could suffer the dreaded blodorn, the “blood-eagle.” Snorri Sturluson, thirteenth-century biographer of the Norse kings, described how one victim had an eagle carved on his back by an enemy, who “stuck his sword into the body next to the spine, cut away all the ribs down to the loins, and dragged out his lungs.” The idea of a secret felag in medieval England is based on the antipathy of the English towards their Norman overlords, and on the Norse heritage which remained strong in parts of Britain where the Vikings had settled. One area where this influence was clearest was the western isles of Scotland, and today on the holy isle of Iona you can see the gravestones of Viking lords among the early Christian relics of the monastery.
The fascination of the Nazis with the Vikings is well known. The ultimate Nazi felag was the SS, complete with the infamous double-sig runic insignia. The mission of the SS became the subjugation of eastern Europe, of the lands once ruled by the Viking kings of Rus and Kiev, where the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen-some of their members locally recruited-included the murder of over a million Ukrainian Jews. The Einsatzgruppen “Operational Situation Report USSR No. 129a” quoted in Chapters 12 and 20, is a fictional addendum to true-life Report No. 129, with the wording changed only to include mention of the fictional Reksnys and his death toll. The Nazi atrocity in this novel is based on my visit to the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev, where thousands of Jewish families were stripped and shot, and on images and eyewitness accounts in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kiev. Today Babi Yar is a beautiful children’s park, surmounted by a giant stone sculpture of the menorah.
The SS Ahnenerbe, the “Department of Ancestral Heritage,” existed as described in this novel. In recent years, extraordinary new evidence has come to light concerning Ahnenerbe activities in the 1930s, including expeditions to South America and Tibet, where Nazi scientists carried out craniological measurements. They believed that remote populations might preserve evidence of an Aryan master race, one they associated with the legend of Atlantis and the bizarre Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory. Heinrich Himmler, architect of the SS, believed that the Aryan birthplace was Iceland, and Ahnenerbe expeditions were sent there in 1936 and 1938. The Ahnenerbe expedition to Ilulissat in this novel is fictional, as are its two members, but Greenland is only one step from Iceland, and Himmler would undoubtedly have been intrigued by the accounts of the famous Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen and his studies of Inuit culture.
The Ilulissat icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site along with L’Anse aux Meadows and Chichen Itza, may provide one of the clearest indications of global warming today, and has been extensively studied by glaciologists and climatologists. The ancient Inuit site of Sermermiut, “the place of the glacier people,” exists as described in this novel, along with K?llingekloften, “suicide gorge.” The description of the iceberg is based on my own experience at the Ilulissat icefjord and diving under ice in Canadian waters. Divers have entered natural fissures inside icebergs, and the technology exists for the kind of penetration described in this novel.
Timbers, textiles and gilded metal can survive almost indefinitely in ice. The idea that a Norse warrior might
