Harald Hardrada (13 page)

During the last twenty-five years of his reign, Vladimir erected some 300 miles of these defences, known as the Snake Ramparts, which were raised just too high for a steppe pony to clear at its full speed and so intended to slow down the nomad horsemen, denying them the advantage of a surprise attack and obstructing their line of retreat while Rus warriors came in pursuit. Fortified strongpoints were added to this defensive network, similarly constructed as earthwork with timber reinforcement and built at points along the line of ramparts, some of which were large enough to accommodate a cavalry squadron, which itself attests the new accomplishment of the Rus in mounted warfare. Within this defended region of the middle Dnieper, Vladimir established a number of fortified towns as well as unfortified settlements, all of them peopled with thousands of settlers brought in from subject and conquered tribes such as the Slovenes and the Chuds.

Impressively reassuring as they must have been to the Rus and their settlers, the Snake Ramparts would seem to have offered as much a provocation as a deterrent to the Pechenegs, who considered the Dnieper valley their own summer grazings, so their incursions continued and with a renewed vigour during the wars of succession which followed Vladimir's death. In consequence, and despite his preference for Novgorod and the north, Jaroslav's attention was drawn down to his southern frontier along the Dnieper where he followed his father's example in extending the Snake Ramparts and establishing new townships, such as those along the Ros where he settled prisoners from his Polish conquest. Relocation of prisoners of war, and presumably in some numbers, was a military operation requiring larger forces than the
druzhina
, who would probably have considered it a duty beneath their dignity anyway. Neither was it a short-term operation, because the newly settled communities would probably need some measure of supervision and no less a measure of armed protection should Pechenegs make an appearance. The solution, as always for Jaroslav, would have been to recruit Varangians and so Harald and his company, not only veterans of the Polish campaign but also experienced in dealing with subject peoples, would have been the ideal choice. To which can be added just one key fragment of evidence and it is supplied by Adam of Bremen, probably Harald's most hostile historian but who can still offer occasional items of information preserved in no other source, such as his reference to Harald having ‘fought many battles with the Saracens by sea [in Byzantine service] and the Scythians by land'.

The Scythians were one of the very earliest steppe warrior peoples, although of Iranian rather than Turkic origin, and first recorded north of the Black Sea in the seventh century
BC
, flourishing thereafter until they were displaced by the Sarmatians three hundred years later. Although there had been no Scythians around for fourteen centuries by the time Adam was writing, the name was still retained in literary currency as a generic term for ‘barbarians'. Byzantine writings, for example, are known to refer to Varangians as ‘Tauro-Scythians', meaning ‘northern barbarians', but in its eleventh-century usage the term ‘Scythian' almost invariably meant Pechenegs. Even though it is not entirely beyond possibility that Harald could have encountered Pechenegs during the earlier years of his Byzantine service, he was very much more likely to have done so in Russia on the Dnieper and there, while he would certainly have run the risk of ambush on the way to Byzantium, his greatest likelihood of meeting them in ‘many battles' was while engaged on the Ros and the Snake Ramparts.

For all Jaroslav's efforts, the Pecheneg menace remained undiminished through the mid-1030s, coming to its point of crisis in 1036 when the death of Mstislav left something of a hiatus on the middle Dnieper. Jaroslav was in the north and more immediately engaged with the installation of his eldest surviving son, Vladimir, as prince of Novgorod, when a Pecheneg host seized the opportunity to besiege Kiev. In response, ‘Jaroslav gathered a large army of Varangians and Slovenes' (according to the
Primary Chronicle
) and came south to lift the siege. In a ferocious battle fought into the evening on the fields outside the city he inflicted a crushing defeat which effectively marked the end of the Pecheneg ascendancy because within twenty years they had been driven from the Russian steppe by the next wave of Turkic warrior nomads, a people known to the Rus as Polovtsy and to the Byzantines as Cumans, although they called themselves the Kipchaks.

This triumph over the Pechenegs would have served as a fitting climax to the ten ‘arrow-storms' in which Rognvald Brusason is said to have fought so valiantly for Jaroslav, had not the Orkneyman returned with the young prince Magnus who had been invited back to Norway as his father's successor the year before. Neither could the saga-makers include the victory at Kiev among Harald Sigurdsson's Russian battle-honours because by 1036 he had already been some two years in Byzantine service.

It was love for a woman which prompted Harald's departure for Constantinople, at least according to the ‘Separate' version of his saga in
Flateyjarbók
which tells how he was refused the hand in marriage of Jaroslav's daughter Elizaveta until he had won greater wealth and glory. More recent historical opinion casts doubt upon the dating of the
Flateyjarbók
story, because Elizaveta – who is known in the sagas by her Norse name-form of
Ellisif
and called ‘the bracelet-goddess in Gardar' in Harald's own poetry – was scarcely ten years old in 1034. Nonetheless, the couple were eventually to be married, although not until Harald had returned from Constantinople a full decade later, so there may indeed have been some sort of prior arrangement because Jaroslav evidently made a habit of marrying his daughters to foreign magnates and Harald was, by that time, preparing his return to claim kingship in Norway.

Whatever promises might have been made to him in 1034, the more immediate motive behind Harald's further venture along the east-way was assuredly his great desire (a greed freely admitted in his sagas) for fame and riches which, as he would have heard from others returned from Varangian service in the east, were generously available to a warrior such as he in the land of the Greeks. The promise of such wealth would likewise have been the lure for his comrades-in-arms, because Snorri's
Harald's saga
tells of his arrival in Constantinople ‘with a large following' of fighting-men, which would have comprised his Varangian troop in Russia, probably still including those of Olaf's housecarls who had come to Russia with Rognvald and been recruited alongside Harald into Eilif's forces.

For these men, Harald Sigurdsson would surely have also offered a natural leader and not only by reason of his kinship to Olaf and descent from Harald Fair-hair, because he would by now have been a truly formidable fighting-man in his own right. Harald is well known to have been exceptionally tall (even allowing for exaggeration in the saga estimate of his height at ‘five ells' or seven feet six inches). Although he was scarcely nineteen years of age when he left Russia, it is salutary to remember that Cnut had been much the same age when he fought his way to kingship of England in 1015 and, in strictly military terms, Harald was the more widely experienced of the two. He had been just fifteen when he fought at Stiklestad and there is nowhere any indication of his being discouraged by what he had seen there of the realities of warfare, although there can be little doubt that the death of Olaf – which Harald himself may well have witnessed at first-hand – assuredly cut a long, deep scar in his psyche. Both mentally and physically then, he was ideally equipped by nature for the profession of arms and, while his first experience of battle would have corresponded to the expectations instilled by the heroic culture in which he had been raised, a more expansive education – and not only in the way of the warrior – awaited him in Russia.

While the distinctly Scandinavian atmosphere in Novgorod and Ladoga – where, for example, the Norse tongue was to be heard spoken – would not have been so very unfamiliar, he would have been increasingly aware of the advance of Slavic influence on the Rus, and not least in the orbit of Jaroslav's court. Not so much farther afield, he would have encountered the Balt and Finno-Ugrian peoples, while further south – as, for example, on the Polish campaign – Harald was to become much more widely acquainted with the variety of cultures which had already exerted their influence on the Rus, and not least in the military sphere. There is, of course, no way of knowing the extent to which Harald himself was similarly influenced, in particular as regards his weaponry and war-gear, although it was usually characteristic of the mercenary employed abroad to bring his own style of arms and armour with him and afterwards to return home with those of the warriors with whom he had fought. Harald may very well have brought a sword to Russia, but probably little else unless he had been supplied with a helmet and mail-coat at the Swedish court. It is more than likely, of course, that he would have equipped himself with new war-gear among the Rus, where the more fashionable members of a
druzhina
displayed the influence of both Byzantium and the steppe in their adoption of
lamellar
armour (formed of upward-overlapping metal, horn or leather plates laced together with leather thongs), in the decorated metalwork of their helmets, or even in their use of the typically Turkic single-edged curved sabre.

Interestingly though, Varangian warriors would seem to have stayed loyal to the ring-mail, the double-edged straight-bladed sword and, most especially, the characteristic battle-axe they had known and used in the northland, so it can be fairly safely assumed that Harald and his troop would have been similarly armed when they left for Byzantine service. The most likely Russian influence would probably have been on their more basic clothing, where straight-legged Scandinavian trousers would long since have been replaced with the baggy Slav style adopted by the Rus, while fur cloaks which had proved their worth in sub-Arctic winters would soon realise a new value in the marketplaces of Grikaland.

As to Harald's choice of route to Byzantium, the version of his saga in
Morkinskinna
supplies its own unfortunate illustration of the hazards awaiting a saga-maker who misunderstands the evidence he finds in skaldic poetry. Having read Thjodolf's description of Harald's march through ‘the land of the
Langbards
' and Illugi Bryndælskald's mention of his combat with Franks, the author of the
Morkinskinna
saga picked up other skaldic references to construct a route which took Harald from Russia, through Wendland in northern Germany, to France and on to Lombardy in the north of Italy before he reached Constantinople. Thjodolf's apparent reference to Wends has already been considered here, but his reference to
Langbardaland
actually meant the Byzantine province of
Longobardia
in southern Italy and not Lombardy in the north. Similarly, by
Frakkar
, or ‘Franks', Illugi was referring to the French Norman mercenaries who mutinied from Byzantine forces in Sicily to join a revolt raised against imperial lordship in the south of Italy. Thus neither skald was referring to the route of Harald's journey to Constantinople in 1034, but both were actually celebrating his service with the Varangians of Byzantium in the southern Italian campaign of 1040.

Although no saga source specifically says as much (perhaps because the voyage to Byzantium was considered insufficiently remarkable for the skalds to notice in such detail), it is virtually certain that Harald's way to Constantinople followed the same Dnieper route taken by the Rus merchant fleets which he would have seen being assembled when he looked down from the Snake Ramparts raised to protect the fortified marshalling yard at Vitichev some 28 miles downriver from Kiev. The most thorough description of this Dnieper route is that contained in
De Administrando Imperio
, a treatise written for the education of his son by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the mid-tenth century, which tells how tribute-collection began in the November of each year and how the furs and slaves thus acquired were brought down the various rivers flowing into the Dnieper around Kiev. There the tribute became the cargo loaded aboard the
monoxyla
, similarly brought to Kiev where they were sold to the Rus by Slav boat-makers, which formed the merchant fleet setting out downriver in June and bound for the Black Sea.

The one item of closely contemporary evidence for Harald's arrival at Constantinople is found in a strophe by the skald Bolverk which would fully correspond to his having followed the Dnieper route, and yet unmistakably indicates his ships having been of Scandinavian type, possibly including
knorr
if they were also shipping any quantity of goods for trade, but with warrior crews and rather more dignity than would have attended the barge-like
monoxyla
. Even so, their own craft would still need skill and care in the handling, especially when they reached the notorious stretch of rapids along the lower Dnieper, some of which required crews to climb overboard so as to manhandle their vessels between rocks and others where the cargo had to be unloaded and the boat carried along the bank by its crew while guards kept careful watch for a Pecheneg ambush.

Steppe raiders were still a hazard on the passage through the last of the rapids, fast flowing but also fordable and vulnerable to attack from archers on the overlooking cliffs. Beyond this point and out of danger from predators, the craft could be brought to shore and their crews rested on St Gregory's Island before continuing out into the Black Sea where the course held close to the shoreline until it reached the Danube estuary and there turned southward across open sea to the Bosporus – and it would seem to be this passage which is described by Bolverk in his strophe celebrating Harald's first sight of the Byzantine capital:

Bleak gales lashed prows
hard along the shoreline.
Iron-shielded, our ships
rode proud to harbour.
Of Miklagard, our famous prince
first saw the golden gables.
Many a sea-ship, fine arrayed,
swept toward the high-walled city.