However, there were one or two adventurous spirits from the North who made it that far, and further, during this period. The earliest reference I found was a short tale entitled Eireks Saga Ví∂förla, the text of which dates from around AD 1300 but refers to the journey of two men who travelled from Scandinavia via Constantinople and onward as far as the Yemen (or perhaps India) at some point in the mid-eighth century. Their names were Eirek the Traveller (a Norwegian) and Eirek the Dane. The fact that the two protagonists shared a forename lends the story a ring of truth, at least to my mind. They paid court to the emperor at the time – possibly Leo the Isaurian himself given the dates of his reign, or else his son. There the Northmen heard all about the Christian faith, picked up the Greek tongue, and impressed the emperor with their intelligence and manly bearing, before continuing onwards on their quest to find Údáinsakr – the Deathless Acre. This was a mystical place said to lie beyond the limits of Mi∂gard, the world of men, and appears to be a conflation of a Norse pagan concept with the Christian conception of heaven. Be that as it may, Eirek the Traveller’s quest to find the Deathless Acre was the result of a bet made during a particularly heavy drinking session with his Norwegian mates.
Plus ça change. . .
The route that Erlan and then Lilla and her companions take south is more or less the same route that came to be favoured by traders between the Baltic and the Black Seas. From the Gulf of Estonia, this followed the Dvina river (which I call by its older name, the Dagava), then branched into a tributary of this called the Kasplya leading to an overland portage that linked up with the larger Dnieper river roughly where the city of Smolensk is situated today. The route would still have been relatively uncharted at this point and was probably known only to the most enterprising and pioneering of northern skippers. It was only with the establishment of a Viking settlement at the site of Kiev and the draw of the slave market (and silver) of Baghdad in the ninth century that the trade route began to flourish.
The episode of the couple caught in adultery, while rather grisly, was not entirely my own invention but was adapted from an account in Ibn Fadlan’s adventures two centuries later in a region a little further to the east. He describes witnessing the summary judgement of a couple condemned for adultery. The wretched transgressors were despatched in turn by bending two young saplings to the ground and tying their limbs to each, then cutting the restraints so that the trees sprang upright. The end result was much the same.
Cometh the hour; cometh the man.
Emperor Leo III, the ‘Isaurian’, was indeed the man, and for the empire the hour was desperate. A brilliant soldier, strategist, diplomatist and spymaster, he was exactly what the Romans/Byzantines needed at this moment in their history. There is no doubt at all that the empire faced an existential threat from the ascendant Umayyad Caliphate; a hundred years after Mohammad burst out of the desert, the Muslim conquests seemed destined to win to their cause the whole world. Moreover, the early eighth century was a time of huge internal instability within the Byzantine Empire, even as the Arab threat grew. The imperial crown changed heads no fewer than seven times in the span of two decades – known as the Twenty Years’ Anarchy. Only with Leo’s usurpation of the throne from its former occupant, an accountant named Theodosios III (himself a usurper installed by one faction of the army), did the purple of imperial office come to rest on the same shoulders for a while. And not a moment too soon, as far as the empire was concerned; the Arab host appeared before the walls of Constantinople less than five months after Leo’s coronation.
The year before he took the throne, when still Strategos of the Anatolikon Theme and the empire’s most powerful general, Leo had deceived the Arab General Maslama in a secret meeting somewhere near the city of Amorium in central Anatolia. Leo somehow convinced Maslama that, if the Arab withdrew his troops south from Amorium for a while, this would enable Leo to march unchallenged on Constantinople and take the throne as emperor, on the understanding that he would then meekly submit to the sovereignty of the Caliph Sulayman. Of course, Leo had no intention of honouring this agreement. Once he had taken the throne, he set about preparing the city’s defence. In spite of this it seems that Maslama was remarkably reluctant to acknowledge that he had been tricked. Leo’s boast that, were Maslama a woman he would do whatever Leo wanted, comes – perhaps tellingly – from an Arab source recounting the events of the siege.
All the historians I have read of this period are agreed: had Constantinople fallen, there would have been little to stop the Umayyad dynasty swallowing up the rest of Europe in their ever-burgeoning empire. The acquisition of an asset as valuable and strategic as Constantinople would likely have strengthened the Umayyad Caliphs beyond challenge. As it was, their eventual downfall came from within.
The events of the siege itself are much as I described. The Arab land forces arrived on 15 August AD 716 to the west of the city. The Arab fleet arrived two weeks later on 1 September. However, the land walls and the so-called ‘Greek fire’ proved insurmountable obstacles to their success.
There had been a prophecy among the mystics of Damascus: that the toppling of the old Christian order and Islam’s assumption of its place as the hegemon of the age would come to pass
