River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  Yet despite this seemingly friendly cooperation, the Byzantines kept a watchful eye on their guests. Once in Constantinople, they were to reside only north of the Golden Horn, in the area of St Mamas’s – outside the city walls – and when entering the city, they were allowed through one particular gate only. They weren’t permitted to bear arms and a maximum of fifty could enter the gate at any one time, and only if they were accompanied by an imperial agent. The treaties also dictated a number of rules for how conflicts were to be resolved: a victim of theft, for example, had the right to slay a thief caught red-handed immediately.

  It is easy to imagine Vikings there, in Miklagard, waiting for the right weather conditions before embarking on the long and hazardous journey home; killing time by wandering through the bazaars, bartering some silver for one of those translucent orange beads that had become so popular.

  CONSTANTINOPLE

  Constantinople had been founded in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine the Great as the ‘Second Rome’, the new capital of the Roman Empire. As a part of this move, a large-scale public works programme was started. In what is now the district of Sultanahmet – the main tourist strip in today’s Istanbul – he built a new imperial residence, the Palatium Magnum or ‘Great Palace’. This became not just the emperor’s residence, but the seat of government, a function it retained throughout the Byzantine period.

  While only some of the original palace remains have been excavated, much about it is known from the Book of Ceremonies that was commissioned by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. It was clearly a magnificent complex. The palace stretched between the hippodrome and the church of Hagia Sophia all the way down to the Bosphorus waterfront. The site incorporated churches and gardens, courtyards, throne rooms and baths, apparently built on six separate terraces to adapt to its height of thirty-two metres above sea level. Subsequent emperors had rebuilt and extended the palace grounds. A traveller from the north who was allowed into these hallowed surroundings would surely have been impressed by the fine mosaics adorning the palace floor, from detailed depictions of hunting scenes and exotic creatures to the humorous image of a donkey kicking its owner and the mythological eagle-headed griffin engaged in a bloody attack on a deer. And, surrounding it all, the almost impenetrable city walls.

  The walls of Constantinople were infamous, and for good reason: their design and maintenance meant that they would be able to keep the city largely safe from attack for almost a millennium. Even today large sections of the walls remain, though it is hard to tell which of the brick and stone features are part of the structure that was created by the emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century, as subsequent rulers, including the Ottomans in the Middle Ages, continued to repair, extend and preserve the defences. At one point there were ninety-six towers protecting the walls and a number of heavily defended gates. The construction featured three levels, including a moat.

  If this wasn’t enough, the Byzantines had an infamous deadly weapon that successfully defeated and deterred many attackers: Greek fire. In an account of a later, tenth-century raid by the Rus’ on the city, Liutprand of Cremona described it as follows: ‘The Greeks began to fling their fire all around; and the Rus’ seeing the flames threw themselves in haste from their ships, preferring to be drowned in the water rather than burned alive in the fire.’ Greek fire appears to have been some sort of heated liquid, probably a form of crude oil mixed with resin, forced through a tube and fired at the enemy, with impressive results. This is what the Vikings would have been faced with when attempting to attack the city and it’s not difficult to understand why they failed to besiege it successfully. Even if they had, the emperor himself would likely have remained safe, as the Great Palace’s defences included underground corridors that connected it to the hippodrome and Hagia Sophia, along with hidden passageways down to the docks.

  The visitor to the city could also visit the hippodrome, an immense horse-racing track that was the bustling social and ceremonial centre of Constantinople. It was a spectacular sight, with its obelisks and serpent-headed column in the middle. The importance of this space is manifested in one of those monuments, the obelisk of Theodosius: the magnificent stone had originally been carved by Thutmose III of Egypt in 1450 BC and was brought to the city by Constantine the Great, before finally being erected in the hippodrome by Theodosius I.

  The drama of events at the hippodrome would have been intoxicating (disregarding any wine that you might have been able to obtain). There would have been chariots pulled by thundering horses, hurtling around the tight corners of the central spina dividing the track into two. Or perhaps you were there to watch a fight, or performances with acrobatics and exotic animals; you would have sat in the stepped wooden seats built up around the 429-metre-long arena. It’s estimated that the hippodrome could hold thirty thousand spectators, or maybe even more, typically joined by the emperor who would be seated in a VIP box to one side that he could enter directly from the imperial palace. Such was the enthusiasm for the races that in the ninth century Emperor Theophilus himself took part after one of the teams, the blues, were instructed to let him win.

  If we fast forward to the year 944, another treaty in the Primary Chronicle (probably made to re-establish diplomatic relations after new attacks by the Rus’) fills in and repeats much of the information known previously and includes more on the type of goods that were traded. This and the earlier treaty detail what was to be done with stolen or escaped slaves. A runaway slave who was not found should, according to this treaty, be compensated for at the rate of two pieces of silk. However, if the Rus’ were found to be trading in slaves originating from within Byzantine territories, those slaves could be freed by payment at different rates: young men and adult women were the most valuable and the ransom was placed at ten bezants (gold coins). For middle-aged slaves, the ransom was eight bezants and the least valuable were young children, who were worth only five.

  We also hear more in the treaties about silk: specifically, that the Rus’ were not allowed to buy silks that were worth more than fifty gold coins, known as solidi. Any silks purchased had to be shown to an imperial officer who would stamp them before they could be exported. This demonstrates clearly just how important silk was in Constantinople.

  While it originated in China, the precious fabric had been coveted in the eastern Mediterranean possibly as far back as the Bronze Age and had been imported widely from the east for centuries. According to a medieval legend, two Christian monks had observed silk-making in China around the year 552 and smuggled silkworm eggs inside their hollow bamboo canes back to the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Under his supervision, the eggs kick-started a silk business that was to prosper enormously.

  While the story is unlikely to be true, the emperor did successfully establish a silk industry in Constantinople, planting thousands of mulberry trees to sustain the silk moths. Soon Byzantine silk – often dyed a highly desirable purple hue – became an important commodity. As is seen in the tenth-century treaty, this trade was very heavily controlled even centuries later. There were also restrictions on foreign silks coming into Constantinople; in the tenth century Syrian merchants brought silk and clothing from Baghdad to the city but there were restrictions forbidding Bulghar merchants from buying Persian silks of higher value when they were in the city.

  Silk was also one of the vital riches that made it all the way back to Scandinavia, as a symbol of wealth and access to the exotic. In the Norwegian Oseberg ship burial, over a hundred fragments of silk were found, belonging to many different garments, with at least fifteen different fabrics represented. Based on the method of weaving, it seems that the majority were made in central Asia, with two possibly from Byzantine workshops. At Birka, forty-nine graves contained silk and there too both Byzantine and central Asian types were found, but in one grave excavators found something unusual: a two-coloured silk damask with a pattern of stars and dots, likely to have been produced in China. Crucially,
the date of 834 for the Oseberg burial means that such trading networks must have been open by this date, corroborating the early date of contact between east and west suggested by the Ingelheim story.

  Silk fragments have even been found in England and Ireland: almost a hundred pieces at Viking Age sites in places like Dublin, Waterford, York and Lincoln. The latter of these was large, twenty centimetres wide and sixty centimetres long, and almost certainly would have been used as a headscarf, with a weave that matches Byzantine silks very closely. Even more remarkably, it is so similar to a piece found in Coppergate, York, that it’s likely the two came from the same roll of cloth. This could be taken to suggest that the fabric was acquired through trade rather than being the personal possession of someone who had travelled, but we do have indications that some items were kept for the travellers themselves, too: in the Laxdæla saga, the flamboyant character Bolli Bollason (dubbed Bolli the Magnificent) returns home to Iceland from a stint in the Varangian Guard – the personal bodyguard to the Byzantine emperors – wearing nothing but the finest clothes made of scarlet and fur, clothes given to him by the emperor, and weapons and armoury decorated with gold.

  GRAFFITI

  The most spectacular sight for any foreign visitor to Constantinople may well have been the church of Hagia Sophia, commissioned by Emperor Justinian and consecrated in 537, one of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture. Those who came here from the north would never have seen a building on this scale before. Even today its immense exterior dominates Istanbul’s skyscape. Stepping through the doors for the first time, the visitor from the north couldn’t help but be awed both by the building’s shape and its artwork (although the current peculiar mix of Islamic art and Christian architecture takes some getting used to – the church was converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453). And here we find the only certain example of something that Viking visitors left behind.

  When you enter Hagia Sophia (or Ayasofya, to give it its Turkish name) today, you go in through a large marble entranceway with a deeply worn step known as the ‘Emperor’s doorway’. As its name suggests, this was the emperor’s main entry through to the nave. Once inside, you see the vast dome with its decorations and arched windows around its lower edge bringing beams of light into the central space. If you didn’t enter as part of the emperor’s entourage, you would instead have used a side door, walking up a series of ramps. Here a gently sloping, paved floor of uneven-sized stones spirals upwards through a dark and narrow corridor, taking you to the upper galleries.

  It is in these galleries, which give you a perfect view of the church below and all around, that there is a marble railing which bears a type of graffiti you’d be forgiven for thinking a fake: an inscription with the name ‘Halfdan’ and several more indecipherable runic characters, apparently the early medieval equivalent of incising ‘Halfdan was here’. This runic inscription was discovered in the 1970s and not long after another, shorter inscription, possibly of the name ‘Arni’, was discovered too. Graffiti appears throughout the church: everything from Cyrillic to Greek, Armenian and Latin inscriptions can be found. Where dates can be estimated, most were made between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries and include names as well as pictures of animals, weapons and coats of arms. Halfdan was a common Scandinavian name and this runic script could date to anywhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

  Excitingly, in 2009 a new discovery was made.[2] A team of Russian researchers were looking for more Cyrillic inscriptions, painstakingly taking photographs of every possible surface that could have been written on and scrutinising the pictures. Anything that looked like it could be runes was sent to a runologist, Elena Melnikova, and eventually she came up trumps: a third runic inscription that says ‘Arinbarðr cut these runes’ was found on a marble windowsill in the northern gallery. Looking at the specific ways in which the runes had been cut, Melnikova proposed that they dated to between the early eleventh and twelfth centuries, right at the end of the Viking Age.

  That’s not all, as yet another discovery has since been made in the church. Investigating more than thirty graffiti-figures of vessels, researcher Thomas Thomov determined that four were depictions of Viking ships.[3] The most convincing is found on a column at the corner of the same gallery as Halfdan’s inscription, only ten metres or so away. You have to look carefully to find it, scratched into the stone, just below eye level. One part is unmistakable: the head of a dragon facing left, a single eye looking forwards. Its neck curves down and turns into the hull of a slender ship, with proportions that are instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen a Viking ship. Thomov also identified a mast and two circles along the side as shields attached to the side. This, then, is a dragon-headed warship. On the other side of the column, another sketch shows what may well be two more ship bows lying side by side in a harbour. These drawings are convincing and there is no reason to think they are fake; they were almost certainly made by someone familiar with Viking ships’ shape and proportions.

  Word of these splendid sites – the palaces and churches decorated with gold, glorious architecture separating the sacred from the profane – evidently reached home with those who travelled back to the north. In fact, it’s very possible that these places directly inspired the way in which the homes of the Viking gods were described in later sources. The only accounts we have of Asgard, the world of the Norse gods, come from sources written down from the eleventh century onwards, most of them even later. This makes it unclear how much relates directly to belief structures dating to the Viking Age. Yet what is clear in these sources is that although the halls and buildings fit in with Scandinavian architecture on a general level, their descriptions must have been inspired by eastern splendour. Take, for instance, Glitnir, the hall of Forseti, the Norse god of law and justice, whose visitors would be dazzled by the sight of golden pillars and a roof set with silver. Could the inspiration behind this description have come from Byzantium?

  There are other links to the east in northern origin myths too. Snorri, for example, explicitly spelt this out both in the thirteenth-century Prose Edda and the Ynglinga saga. The gods, he says, lived in the capital city east of the ‘Fork of the Don’, which presumably meant somewhere either near Volgograd in south-west Russia or even further east towards what is now Kazakhstan (although Snorri may not have meant it quite that literally). He states that there was a mountain range that separated Greater Svitjod from the rest of the world and to the south of these mountains, a short trip would take you to Tyrkland or the ‘Land of the Turks’. There, apparently, ‘Odin had large possessions’.

  To cut a long story short, in his telling of the Norse creation story, the gods moved north from this homeland. Eventually, they arrived in Scandinavia, where Snorri lays out the history of their descendants who became the Scandinavian royal families. Similarly, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus stated that Odin originally lived in Byzantium, most likely Constantinople. While it is tempting to place such worldviews within a Viking Age framework, it is important to remember that these sources relate to medieval literary traditions, postdating the Vikings by several hundred years. For this reason, the links to the more easterly parts of Europe may reflect the significance placed on this region in a Christianised Europe for which pilgrimage to Jerusalem formed an important part of religious life.

  By the end of the Viking Age, the journey to Miklagard had become so popular that special laws were imposed to govern what happened to your wealth back at home when you were abroad. The Norwegian Gulatingslov law code, for example, stated that your wealth could be managed for you for three years before it would go to your successors. But if you went to Byzantium, it would be given to them straight away.

  Much of the fame of Miklagard that was transmitted back to the homelands related to a very particular segment of society: the Scandinavians became an even more crucial element in Byzantine affairs between the tenth and fourteenth centuries as they formed the majority
of the Varangian Guard, a specialist mercenary unit founded in the latter part of the tenth century by Emperor Basil II to work as personal bodyguards to the Byzantine emperors. This had been instituted after a call for help by Basil to the ruler of Kyiv, Vladimir (grandson of Igor), in 987. Following a rebellion in Constantinople, a rival by the name of Bardas Phokas had claimed Basil’s throne. Vladimir responded by sending a force of six thousand Rus’ to help, in return for which he was offered the emperor’s sister as his wife. The only caveat was that Vladimir had to convert to Christianity, something he agreed to do. With the help of the Rus’, Basil succeeded in defeating the rebels and recaptured the throne.

  However, it seems that Basil’s request hadn’t quite come out of the blue. In the Primary Chronicle, the treaty of 945 between the Rus’ and Byzantium included the following statement: ‘If our government shall desire of you military assistance for use against our adversaries, they shall communicate with your Great Prince, and he shall send us as many soldiers as we require.’ If this part of the treaty is genuine, Basil was merely following up on an agreement made almost half a century earlier. The help from the north so impressed the Byzantines that it became a permanent fixture in the form of the elite guard. From then on, Varangians could be seen both in battle and at the Great Palace, working directly to protect the emperor and his family.

  Had Halfdan and Arinbarðr been members of the Varangian Guard? Over the decades a stint working in Miklagard would become popular among Scandinavian men, not least because of the riches you could acquire. The most famous to do it was the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, who worked for the Byzantine emperor for nearly a decade after fleeing Norway following his defeat at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, where his older brother Olaf was killed. Harald gained notoriety and respect in Constantinople for his military prowess (though also, briefly, imprisonment). He served Empress Zoe, whose golden image adorns the upper gallery of the Hagia Sophia, directly, before returning home and eventually attempting to win the English throne – unsuccessfully – at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.