Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (33 page)

The
Varangian
Guard

Basil II made good use of Vladimir’s 6,000 Varangians, throwing them into battle against the rebels almost as soon as they arrived in Constantinople in the summer of 988. Their ferocity impressed Basil so much that he decided to create an elite unit of imperial lifeguards to be manned exclusively by Varangians, his own Greek lifeguards having proved disloyal. The Varangian Guard subsequently fought in every major Byzantine campaign until Constantinople was captured by crusaders in 1204. Early recruits to the guard were mostly Swedes and Rus, but by the early eleventh century Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders were making the long journey through Russia to Constantinople, attracted by the generous pay. Regarded as outstandingly loyal, Varangian Guardsmen were the highest paid mercenaries in Byzantine service, receiving the equivalent of between 1⅓ to 2½ pounds of gold a year, a one-third share of the Byzantine army’s war booty, and frequent gifts of treasure and fine clothing from the emperors. They even got to wear silk clothes when off-duty: this at a time when a king back home in Scandinavia would have been satisfied with decorative silk trim on his best clothing. With incentives like these, the emperor could afford to be fussy. Applicants had to prove that they were men of substance by paying an entry fee, and they needed to prove their battle skills by serving in a regular army unit before being admitted to the guard. Appearance mattered too, as the emperor wanted to surround himself with tall, well-built men who would look both magnificent and intimidating.

The most famous member of the guard was Harald Hardrada, a future king of Norway, who served as an officer from 1034 to 1043 on campaigns in Sicily, Bulgaria, Anatolia and the Holy Land. Harald’s saga probably exaggerates the favours shown to him by the emperors to flatter the Norwegian monarchy with this tenuous imperial connection, but he certainly made enough money during his service to finance his successful bid to seize the Norwegian throne. Few others did quite so well but even ordinary guardsmen like the Icelander Bolli Bollason (d.
c.
1067) could cut quite a dash when they returned home:

‘Bolli rode from the ship with eleven companions. His companions were all wearing scarlet and rode in gilded saddles; they were all fine looking men, but Bolli surpassed them all. He was wearing clothes of gold-embroidered silk which the Greek emperor had given him, and over them a scarlet cloak. He was girt with the sword ‘Leg-Biter’, its pommel now gold-embossed and the hilt bound with gold. He had a gilded helmet on his head and a red shield at his side on which a knight was traced in gold. He carried a lance in his hand, as is the custom in foreign lands. Wherever they took lodgings for the night, the womenfolk paid no heed to anything but to gaze at Bolli and his companions in all their finery.’ (
Laxdaela
Saga
, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Penguin, 1969.)

The Varangian Guard probably had a formal establishment of 6,000 men, divided into twelve divisions of 500. Strict discipline was imposed by a regimental tribunal. The guard’s commander, the Akolouthos, was usually a Greek. His status reflected that of the guard itself; he held the first rank in the hierarchy of imperial offices and in processions he walked immediately behind the emperor himself. The Varangians were not encouraged to learn Greek – it probably suited the emperor to maintain a communication barrier between the guardsmen and his Greek subjects – so commands were relayed through a corps of interpreters. The guard’s primary function was to protect the emperor, wherever he was. When he was based in Constantinople the guard also acted as a special police force, suppressing civil unrest and arresting suspected traitors, killing, torturing or blinding them as required by the emperor. Having no local sympathies, the Varangians could be trusted to carry out their duties without regard to the rank or family connections of their victims. If the emperor went on campaign, part of the guard was always left behind to garrison Constantinople. In camp, the Varangians’ tents surrounded the emperor’s tent; if the emperor was staying in a city, the keys to its gates were entrusted to the Varangians. In battle, the emperor kept the Varangians with him to the rear of the main battleline, holding them in reserve until the battle reached a critical point. The Varangians made highly effective shock troops, fighting on foot using traditional Viking weapons and tactics. The two-handed broadaxe was their favoured weapon and because of this they were often described as ‘the emperor’s axe-wielding barbarians’ (or, on account of their heavy drinking, ‘the emperor’s wine-swilling barbarians’). The Varangians’ reputation for ferocity and their disregard for the pain of wounds in battle suggests that many must have been practicing berserkers.

In 1071, the Byzantine army suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Seljuq Turks at the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt, Turkey). The emperor Romanos IV was wounded and captured and most of the Varangian Guard were killed, remaining loyal to the emperor after most of the Byzantine army had fled the battlefield. The depleted ranks of the guard were filled, in part, by English warriors who had gone into exile following the Norman conquest. The Varangian Guard still remained attractive to Scandinavians, however. When the Danish king Erik the Evergood visited Constantinople in 1103, many of his retinue stayed on and joined the guard. The same thing happened when King Sigurd of Norway stopped by in 1110 on his way home from a crusade in the Holy Land. When jarl Rognvald of Orkney set out for the Holy Land in 1153, six ships broke away from his fleet as soon as it entered the Mediterranean and went straight to Constantinople where their crews joined the guard. The guard survived until 1204, when Constantinople was captured by crusaders. The guard’s final hour was not its finest: the Varangians refused to fight the crusaders until they were offered an extortionate pay rise. After 1204, English and Scandinavian mercenaries, described as Varangians, continued to serve in Byzantine armies but they were treated no differently to any other mercenaries. The ranking of the Akolouthos says it all – he had fallen in rank from first to fiftieth.

Yngvar
the
Widefarer

By the later tenth century, the Islamic world’s silver mines were becoming exhausted and the flow of dirhems through Russia gradually declined. Fewer and fewer Scandinavian merchants came east to trade but the memory of Serkland’s fabulous wealth lingered on to inspire a new generation of adventurers. Around 1041, Yngvar the Widefarer, a Swede, led an expedition east to try to re-open the trade routes, but he met with disaster somewhere in the Caspian region and he and most of his men were killed. Yngvar’s expedition is known from a group of twenty-six rune-stones in central Sweden that commemorate men who ‘fell in the east’ with Yngvar. A highly fictionalised account of Yngvar’s expedition survives in the thirteenth century
Yngvars
saga
víðförla
(‘The Saga of Yngvar the Widefarer’), a translation into Old Icelandic of a lost twelfth-century Latin work by an Icelandic monk Odd Snorrason. The Yngvar of the saga is a warrior in the service of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (r.
c.
995 – 1022). When the king refuses to grant Yngvar a royal title, he raises an expedition to go to the east in search of a kingdom for himself. Yngvar goes first to the court of kniaz Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019 – 54) in Russia and after three years presses on with thirty ships along an unnamed river into the east. From this point onwards, Yngvar’s adventures become increasingly fantastic, with encounters with giants, dragons, witches and, inevitably, a beautiful queen, Silkisif of Gardariki, who falls in love with him. Finally, Yngvar dies in an epidemic that decimates his expedition and his body is returned to Silkisif, who sends the survivors home with instructions to send missionaries to convert her country to Christianity. According to the saga, Yngvar died in 1041 aged twenty-five, in which case he would have been no more than six when he set out from Sweden.

It is almost impossible to disentangle fact from fiction in Yngvar’s saga, but events during Yaroslav’s reign provide it with a credible context. Jaroslav was the last ruler of Kievan Russia to maintain close links with Scandinavia. One of Vladimir’s many sons, Yaroslav, was appointed governor of Novgorod by his father. After his father’s death in 1015, Yaroslav’s older brother Sviatopolk murdered three of their brothers and seized power in Kiev. Supported by the people of Novgorod and an army of Varangians, Yaroslav defeated and killed Sviatopolk in 1019 to establish his rule over Kiev. In the same year Yaroslav married Ingigerd, the daughter of King Olof Skötkonung, establishing an alliance with Sweden. When his brother Mstislav challenged him for control of Kiev in 1024, Yaroslav was able to call on the support of his brother-in-law King Önund Jacob (r. 1022 – 50), who led an army of Varangians over from Sweden. Many other Varangians broke their journeys to Constantinople at Yaroslav’s court at Novgorod, often signing on in his
druzhina
for a few years before moving on. One of these was Harald Hardrada, who spent three years (1031 – 4) in his
druzhina
before he left to join the Varangian Guard. When he returned to Russia in 1041, on his way to claim the Norwegian throne, Harald married Yaroslav’s daughter Elisleif (Elizabeth). Yngvar is likely to have been one of these adventurers, like Harald, who served Yaroslav for a number of years before travelling on. But where did Yngvar go? Several of the Yngvar runestones state that he and his men died in Serkland. This is usually taken to mean the Abbasid Caliphate, but it may be that in this case it means the kingdom of Georgia. Georgian chronicles state that in 1042 a group of Varangians landed at the mouth of the River Rioni on Georgia’s Black Sea coast and joined the army of King Bagrat IV (r. 1027 – 72), who was fighting a civil war against a rebel general. The rebels defeated Bagrat and his Varangian allies at the Battle of Sasireti in the Caucasus Mountains. The defeat was so severe that Bagrat lost control of half his kingdom and it is likely that his Varangians suffered heavy casualties. The date of the battle is so close to the date given for Yngvar’s death in the saga that there must be a possibility that this was the disaster that cost him and so many of his men their lives. However, the saga says that Yngvar died of sickness. This was the fate of another Varangian, Önund, a son of King Emund of Sweden (r. 1050 – 60), who, according to Adam of Bremen (d.
c.
1080) was sent overseas ‘to extend his dominions’. Önund fell ill and died in ‘the land of the Amazons’, which in the Middle Ages was thought to be on the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, after drinking from a well that had been poisoned by the warrior women. Are Yngvar and Önund the same person, or has the saga conflated the stories of two separate ill-fated Varangian expeditions to re-open the routes to the east?

Fading contacts

While Yaroslav’s Scandinavian connection was important to him, it is also very clear that there was no longer a special relationship. The relations he cultivated with other European states, such as the Byzantine Empire, Germany, France and Hungary, were just as important to him as those with Scandinavia. After Yaroslav’s reign, the links between Russia and Scandinavia faded. Aspiring Scandinavian recruits for the Varangian Guard began to travel to Constantinople by sea or through Germany and Hungary rather than by the old river route through Russia. The last time Varangian mercenaries fought in any numbers for the Rus was during an unsuccessful attack on Constantinople, commanded by Yaroslav’s son Vladimir in 1043. Just as in 941, the Rus fleet was destroyed by dromons spewing Greek Fire. Changing trade patterns also weakened the links between Scandinavia and Russia. Novgorod went from strength to strength as Russia’s main outlet to the west, but by the thirteenth century German merchants from Baltic cities like Lübeck had taken control of its trade, excluding Scandinavians through monopolistic practices.

Ultimately, the Viking contribution to the development of Russian civilisation was very slight. Tellingly, despite over 200 years of close interaction, less than a dozen Scandinavian loan words were adopted into the developing Russian language. Nor did the Vikings leave any clear genetic traces in the modern Russian population. Probably, the most important Viking impact was on urbanisation. Many of the eastern Slavs’ fortified settlements were already beginning to develop into towns by the beginning of the Viking Age, but there can be no doubt that the arrival of Scandinavian merchants gave the process enormous impetus by greatly expanding east–west trade links, turning small towns like Kiev into prosperous cities in less than a century. Far more significant to the development of early Russia, was Vladimir’s adoption of Orthodox Christianity, which opened Kievan Russia to the powerful influence of Byzantine civilisation. Byzantine culture shaped Russia for centuries to come and, just as significantly, created an ideological barrier between it and the Catholic west. Kievan Russia’s alphabet, art, architecture, law, music and political ideologies were all essentially of Byzantine origin. Tsargrad (‘city of the emperors’), as Constantinople came to be known to the Russians, was regarded as the cultural and religious capital of the world. When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks in 1453, the Russians were entirely justified in seeing themselves as its cultural and political successors.

CHAPTER 8

T
HINGVELLIR
, B
RATTAHLID AND
L’
ANSE AUX
M
EADOWS

T
HE
N
ORSE IN
THE
N
ORTH
A
TLANTIC
835–1000