553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
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What is the story of Harald Hardrada's escape from Constantinople?
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Long had the snake lived in the dungeon, coiled in the black and filthy water, bloated from feasting on the Empress's prisoners. It was a colossal, greedy, pitiless thing, a creature of nightmares. Already it had sensed their presence, and even now it was rising for the kill. Its cruel head loomed from the shadows. Its yellow eyes glittered with hatred. Its fangs glistened with beads of poison. Its forked tongue flickered with pleasure. Harold moved fast, groping among the corpses, scrabbling through the filth.
His fingers found a broken piece of wood. But the monster was faster. Suddenly it was on him, its horrible coils winding around his chest, pulling him down towards the water, squeezing the very last breaths from his lungs. So that was J.R.R. Tolkien in his brilliant book, Adventures in Time, Fury of the Vikings, a chapter entitled The Return of the King. And obviously, Dominic, it wasn't really J.R.R. Tolkien, was it? It was you! It was an even better writer. It was an even better writer. Yeah. And you are describing there one of the countless thrilling scenes in the epic life of Harold Hardrada. fugitive from Norway, mercenary captain for the Grand Prince of Kiev. And now he has come to the golden city of Caesar, Constantinople, and he is a recruit in the Varangian Guard. And we will be finding out how giant serpents feature in the story later on. But for now, we are in 1035. And what is going on?
So we left Harold in the last episode at the point in which he has just enlisted in the Varangian Guard, this kind of special forces unit of largely Scandinavian mercenaries. Very baggy trousers. With great silk trousers, exactly. Now, no sooner has he enlisted, Tom, the news reaches the imperial city that Arab corsairs have sailed into the Aegean, raiding the towns of the Greek islands and carrying the men, women and children. off into slavery. And so for Harold Hardrada, the adventure begins. Brilliant. Very exciting. So actually, he's now going to be on campaign for the next six or seven years. Can't be sure exactly how long, but let's say roughly six or seven years. As that Adventures in Time book, which I recommend to our listeners, describes his life is a blur of action, racing into battle on the deck of a war galley, storming ashore on an island at dawn, scaling the walls of an enemy castle, dealing out death with a sweep of his sword.
Now, actually, the truth is we're getting most of this from the Icelandic sagas, which, as we said last time, were written down at least 200 years later. by people living in a different world. I mean, living in Iceland, I couldn't really be further away from Constantinople and still be in Europe. That's right. And they're also much more obviously Christian. And they are doing an awful lot of projection. There's a lot of fictionalization. And there is a lot of use of literary formulae, which means it is very difficult for us to be certain, to have any degree of certainty about what he did. However, we have what people at the time would have called Roman sources, what we would call Byzantine sources.
They give a sense of the kind of campaigns the empire was fighting. So we can sketch out a very tentative narrative, I think. We do know that they did fight pirates in the spring of 1035. So Snorri Sturluson's saga, King Harold's saga, which is part of the cycle called Heimskringla, That tallies with the account of a Greek chronicler called John Skylitzes, who talks about ships from North Africa attacking the Cyclades. So there probably was a bit of action in the Aegean. And then probably later that summer, 1035, the Varangians are sent to the far eastern borderlands of the empire, so Armenia, where the imperial army is besieging a city called Berkri on the shores of Lake Van.
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