A History of the Vikings
Chapter 5
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at the luckless Russian raid upon Constantinople in 1043; but he was able to escape and to make his way back to Yaroslav in Kiev, to whom he had already despatched a great part of the booty won by the prowess of his arms.
But the Varangian Guard was not dissolved either by the shattering disaster of the revolution or by Harald's departure, for fresh adventurers continued to arrive from the north to swell their numbers, and the corps remained a permanent and privileged part of the army.
These Varangians were known to the Greeks as the 'axebearing barbarians', and more than once Anna Comnena refers to them by this name in the Alexiad, the ponderous biography that she wrote of her father the Emperor Alexius (1081-1118). She paid a high tribute to their loyalty, saying they deemed themselves bound to the emperor's service by inviolate ties that were already an ancestral tradition among some of them, being handed down from father to son, and she declared that they would not hearken to a single treacherous word; (1) she tells also of their foolhardy gallantry at the battle of Durazzo (1082), when the Varangian corps under a captain named Narbites was cut to pieces. (2) Another historian, Zonaras, describes the loyalty of the Varangian guard to their master Alexius at the time of his death, (3) yet it seems that there was some reason to suspect that the fidelity of this illustrious corps was not always unshakeable; for it is certain that the Varangians mutinied in the reign of Alexius's predecessor, Nicephorus III Botaniates (1078-1081), (4) and Alexius himself on the occasion (1103) when he entertained the Danish king Eric I is said to have been seriously afraid that the Varangians would transfer their allegiance to the northern king who could address them in their own tongue. (5) He took considerable precautions to prevent this, but Eric, when at last he was allowed to address some of the guard, congratulated them on having attained the highest honour to which a northerner could aspire; they were, he said, far more fortunate than their stay-at-home brethren and therefore he charged them to fit themselves for their high office by the constant practice of virtue and sobriety. To his own countrymen he promised rewards upon their return commensurate with their services to the Byzantine emperor,
1. Alexiad, C.S.H.B., 25, i, p. 120 (II, 9: 62).
2. Ib., p. 211 (IV, 6: 116).
3. C.S.H.B. 29, iii, p. 763 (Epit. XVIII, 29, 1-10).
4. Ib. p. 722 (Epit. XVIII, 7-8).
5. Saxo, ed. Müller, XII, p. 610. Cf. Knytlingasaga, ed. Petersens and Olson, 81, p. 192, where the incident is not mentioned.
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while if they fell in battle he pledged himself to take care of their families.
At first these Northmen of the guard were well paid, for quarters and food were free and each man received as much as 10 to 15 gold solidi for a month's service, together with various special grants and prize-monies, so that soon the Scandinavians and other northerners who came to Constantinople with the intention of joining this favoured band of foreigners had to pay heavily for their commission in the guard. Of its normal strength and of its officers little is known, but in the field the corps was commanded by a chieftain (¹ge mèn) of Varangian blood, while in the palace the chief authority was vested in an official
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probably a Greek, known as the pansebastos and megalodiermeneutes, who, as the title of his office explains, was the supreme officer-in-command and principal interpreter of the corps, and one whose duty must have been the administration of the regiment on behalf of the Byzantine government. An impression in lead of the seal (Fig. 23) of one of these civil administrators, a man named Michael, still exists (1); upon the obverse is the figure of his patron the archangel and on the reverse are his titles 'pansebastos, sebastos and megalodiermeneutes of the Varangians' with a representation below this of the famous axe that gave the Varangian Guard their sobriquet of pelekufÒroi, the 'axe-bearers'; but this seal is probably no earlier than the thirteenth century, and though the blade of the axe is not unlike those of the late Viking Period that have been found in the north (cf. Pl. V), the weapon here is probably meant to be a version of some special variety of medieval pole-arm that resembled the Scottish lochaber in appearance; or, perhaps, as the drawing on the seal
1. A. Mordtmann, Archives de l'orient Latin, I (1881), p. 698; G. Schlumberger, Sigillographie de l'empire byzantin, Paris, 1884, p. 350.
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suggests, it was a short-handled battle-axe of eastern European variety. (1)
The fighting skill of the splendid northern warriors and their own adventurous spirit was sufficient to ensure that these vikings in the service of the Greek emperor were not merely household troops and guards of parade. They fought abroad when their master willed it and many were their adventures. The disastrous and complete annihilation of the Varangian section of the Greek army at the battle of Durazzo, the result of their improvident ardour in the fight, is described in the Alexiad, but the most remarkable witness to the exploits of the Scandinavians in the Greek world is not to be found among the writings of an historian; it is the great white marble lion that now stands sentinel, with three companions, outside the gates of the Arsenal in Venice (Frontispiece). The two largest of these four lions are known as the Piraeus lions because they were brought back to Italy in triumph from the Piraeus harbour (2) of Athens by the Doge Francesco Morosini at the end of the seventeenth century; the bigger of the two, a huge beast squatting on his haunches and measuring about 12 feet in height, is a Greek carving probably of the second or third century A.D., and near to it when it stood in its original position in Greece some Scandinavian soldiers upon at least one occasion were encamped; for its two flanks are defaced by ribbons of their ugly runes. The carving of this inscription on the lion was done, as its style shows, in the second half of the eleventh century and there is little doubt that it is the work of Swedes. (3)
Except in the illustrious instance of the Norwegian Harald Hardradi, little or nothing is known of the names or deeds of the Scandinavians who served in the Varangian Guard and who took part in the emperor's wars; for it is likely that most of them,
1. Miss Katherine Buck has shown me a picture of a Frankish polearm that should be compared with the axe on the seal. It is figured in H. Testard ed. of Thierry, Recits des temps mérovingiens, London, 1888, frontispiece, and has a curved blade like a hockey-stick with an axe projecting from the side (all cast in one piece).
2. For the original position of the large lion, see C. C. Rafn, Antiquités de l'Orient, Copenhagen, 1865, p. 62 ff.
3. Eric Brate read the inscription as a memorial to the Swede Horsa (Haase), already commemorated on an Uppland rune-stone as an adventurer who went to Greece to win fame and fortune; for this and for earlier readings see A.T.S., XX (1919), 3, and for an English rendering of Brate's version see E. V. Gordon, Intr. Old Norse, Oxford, 1927, p. 172. Brate claimed that he read the runes under exceptionally favourable conditions, but there is little doubt that the inscription, except for a few isolated phrases, is really illegible. Haakon Shetelig (Fornvännen, 1923, p. 201) was brave enough to declare that this is so, and though Brate, just before his death, defended his reading (ib., p. 222), and though archaeologists have been warned not to meddle in the domain of the runologist, I must also state that after a careful examination of the lion under varying lighting conditions I came to the opinion that only by supernatural inspiration can sufficient characters be recognized among these worn and feeble letters to make an intelligible legend.
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since the route to Constantinople lay along the waterways of Russia, were Swedes whose Swedish sagas had no interest for the Icelandic historian of later days. But on rune-stones in Sweden there are inscriptions telling of a few of these men, and the best known is one at Ed near Stockholm that commemorates the mother of a man named Ragnvald who had been a military chief in Greece. (1) From the style of the runes it is clear that Ragnvald must have served in Constantinople during the days of the earlier Comneni, either in the reign of Isaac or Alexius, and perhaps was in the city in that fateful year of 1058 when the Varangian Guard, acting under the orders of the Emperor Isaac, arrested the Patriarch Michael Cerularius.
As an episode in viking history the story of the Varangian Guard is but of slight interest after the middle of the eleventh century; for when Maniaces returned to Constantinople from his short governorship of south Italy in 1042 he brought with him many Norman adventurers who were recruited for the Greek army and subsequently drafted into the guard. Indeed, after 1066 the ranks of the guard were filled not so much by Scandinavians as by the numerous Englishmen and Danes who fled from England after the Conquest and by discontented Norman soldiers who deserted from France or Italy to Greece; so it came about that it was as an English and Norman-French body rather than as a Scandinavian corps that the guard ended its short but eventful history at the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204. (2)
In addition to the Scandinavian visitors in the Greek capital who came either to soldier or to trade, there were many other Northmen who found their way thither when the call to the crusades provided the spirited folk of Scandinavia and Denmark with a new field for adventure. It was a party of these 'Jerusalem-farers', men of Norway,
1. á Gríklandi liðsforungi (A.T.S. 10, p. 84); the usual translation 'chief of the bodyguard' is a trifle bold.
2. For references to the English in the Varangian Guard see Vasilievsky, op. cit. (p. 170), and also G. Buckler, Anna Comnena, Oxford, p. 366, n. 1. Mr. Robert Byron makes an interesting reference to the often-mentioned tombstones of the Varangians on p. 147 of his Byzantine Achievement (London, 1929).
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Orkney, and Shetland, who, halting in the Orkneys in the first winter of their expedition (c. 1152), broke into the huge prehistoric cairn of Maeshow and scratched many lines of feeble runes and a little drawing of a wounded dragon upon the walls of the magnificent, but empty, burial-chamber that they found. Many crusaders were illustrious folk whose names are familiar in northern history, (1) and the most famous of them were King Eric of Denmark and King Sigurd Magnusson (Jerusalem-farer) of Norway, who both arrived in Constantinople during the reign of Alexius Comnenus, Eric, as was told above, about the year 1103 and Sigurd some eight years later. This Norwegian king left his country in 1108, spent the winter in England, and then journeyed with his host to France and Spain, passing his second winter in Galicia; in 1110 he sailed for the Mediterranean and arrived in the Balearic Islands, where he inflicted a heavy defeat upon the Saracen population; thence he went to southern Italy, where the Normans showed themselves willing to take him for their chief, but Sigurd remained faithful to his purpose and in the same year he reached Palestine. In 1111, after fighting in the Holy Land, he came to Constantinople and there he was received at the Golden Gates by the emperor himself, who welcomed him with all the prodigal and glittering magnificence of Byzantine state ceremonial. It was a visit never to be forgotten by the Norsemen in Sigurd's train; they were housed in splendour, overwhelmed with costly gifts, and entertained with banquets and with games in the great hippodrome where these simple souls took the statues for gods. Sigurd left for the north again as a devoted adherent of the emperor and at their parting gave to him the dragon-head from the prow of his own ship, a work of northern craftsmanship that was once erroneously believed to have found its way back from the warm south and to be none other than the dragon that to this day scowls down from its cold belfry-summit in Ghent over the roofs and gables of a Flemish city.
1. The evidence is set forth in the notable work by Paul Riant, Expéditions et pèlinerages des Scandinaves en Terres Saintes, Paris, 1865.
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