by Ben Thompson
Pretty much immediately, the northern half of England revolted. Obviously Will wasn’t going to stand for this crap, so he endeared himself to his new subjects by beating the rebellious territories into submission, burning everything in sight, killing bucketloads of people, and salting the earth so no crops would grow. This was pretty effective at deterring future rebellions, and by 1072 all of England was firmly in the palm of his ever-clenching iron fist. William ruled for another fifteen years, abolishing slavery, building castles, and bringing the feudal system to England. He died on September 9, 1087, when he was thrown from his horse while riding through the charred ruins of a rebellious town he had just finished razing to the ground. At least he died doing what he loved.
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Before William came around, Matilda was madly in lust with some prissy nobleman named Bihtric, but when she confessed her undying love to him he told her to get bent. Matilda’s first act as queen of England was to confiscate all of Bihtric’s land and chuck his ass in prison, where he eventually died.
Many modern gangs such as the Crips and Bloods owe a lot to the Normans, who were the first group to hold their bows sideways just because it looked cooler. I think that’s why they developed the crossbow. Many years later the bow has been replaced by the gat, but the premise basically remains the same.
William’s story is masterfully illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry; the medieval version of a badass graphic novel. This four-hundred-foot-long handwoven tapestry depicts the duke of Normandy doing awesome stuff like killing peasants with a sword, slapping Nazis in the face, doing keg stands, and ordering people around from a throne made out of human skulls.
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16
HARALD HARDRADA
(1015–1066)
Now when King Harald Sigurdson saw this, he went into the fray where the greatest crash of weapons was, and there was a sharp conflict, in which many people fell on both sides. King Harald then was in a rage, and ran out in front of the array, and hewed down with both hands; so that neither helmet nor armor could withstand him, and all who were nearest gave way before him.
—SNORI STURLUSON, HEIMSKRINGLA
HARALD SIGURDSON WAS THE LAST OF THE VIKINGS AND ONE OF THE MOST INSANELY BADASS ADVENTURERS TO EVER SAW A DUDE IN HALF FOR LOOKING AT HIM CROSS-EYED AND THEN DRIVE OVER HIS CORPSE WITH A RIDING LAWN MOWER. While his half brother, Olaf the Holy, is a Roman Catholic saint whose blood is said to have been able to cure blindness, Harald’s story is less about the Holy Spirit manifesting itself in his hemoglobin and a lot more about lacerating the atria of his enemies and turning thousands of enemy soldiers into unwilling organ donors with a giant two-handed battle-axe.
St. Olaf was the king of Norway for a while, until one day some blue-balled dick-monkey named Knut the Great decided to show up, beat the hell out of Olaf, and pry the crown from his cold, dead fingers with a bloodstained crowbar. So at an age when most guys are worried about pimples and back hair the fifteen-year-old Harald was impaling Vikings with his bloodthirsty spear, fighting the Danish armies of Knut at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. During the bloodbath Harald was badly wounded by a goddamned broadsword-swinging sociopath, and the armies of Olaf the Holy were turned into the armies of Olaf the Holy Crap We Just Got Our Asses Kicked.
As soon as he was able to stand upright without passing out from the blinding pain associated with having a seven-foot-tall Norseman attempt to disembowel him, Harald and some of his followers left Norway for Russia. There they performed daring quests of heroic awesomeness for King Jaroslav: raiding dungeons, battling orcs, leveling up, and accumulating a vast stockpile of magical items and weapons. The exiled Viking also took the opportunity to hit on Jaroslav’s hot daughter, Princess Elizabeth, whenever possible.
Eventually, Harald’s adventures brought him south to stand before the towering spires and the golden-domed basilicas of the wealthiest and most magnificent city in the medieval world—Constantinople, the glittering capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was here that the Norse nobleman built up his wealth and prestige, particularly through his service in an infamous mercenary organization under the employ of the Byzantine Empire—a terrifying outfit of head-cleaving Viking warriors known as the Varangian Guard. The men of the guard, known alternatively as “the axe-bearing foreigners” and “the emperor’s wine bags,” faithfully served the Byzantine emperors for centuries, and were renowned for their ability to drink enough ale to drown a small army and then pummel their enemies to death with the empty kegs. Thanks to Harald’s noble birth and his legendary skills as a face-demolishing ass-kicker, he quickly rose through the ranks to become the commander of this elite and colorful unit.
In the service of the emperor, Harald and the Varangian Guard crushed the enemies of Byzantium across the Mediterranean. They fought scurvy pirates off the coast of Greece, stormed castles in Sicily, and vanquished armies in North Africa. It was on the battlefield that Harald truly excelled, and his Viking warriors swept across the landscape plundering, looting, burninating, pillaging, and smashing people in the face with meat cleavers in the name of the Byzantine Empire. He tunneled under the walls of well-defended cities, sacked the treasuries of some of Europe’s most imposing castles, and kicked in the gates of seemingly impenetrable fortresses.
One story claims that Harald faked his own death and then had his followers take his body to the gates of an impenetrable Sicilian stronghold. The Varangians offered the lord of the castle a large sum of money to allow them to give their leader a good Christian burial in the palace chapel. The lord agreed, and as soon as the pallbearers processed through the massive iron gates of the citadel, Harald punched through the lid of the sealed coffin like a reanimated zombie, leapt out of the pine box in full battle gear, and immediately started killing everyone he saw and eating their brains. The Vikings left Sicily with more wealth than they could fit into the cargo holds of their massive dragon-headed long-ships.
In 1040 the Bulgars decided to be total dicks and revolt against Byzantine rule. Under the command of a guy known as Peter Delyan they destroyed a bunch of Greek garrisons and told the emperor to go hump a donkey. Well, when that crap went down, the emperor knew who to call. The Varangian Guard parachuted into Bulgaria, knocked every trace of the rebellion face-first into the dirt, and then elbow-dropped them from the top rope like the “Macho Man” Randy Savage (ooh yeah). Harald personally performed some major elective surgery on Peter’s face, and from that point on became known as the “Devastator of Bulgaria,” which is a seriously harsh nickname.
After kicking ass in the Middle East, defeating brigands in Jerusalem, getting it on with the empress of Byzantium, and subsequently escaping from a Constantinople prison, Harald’s next destination was the city of Novgorod, on the Caspian Sea. There his mission was to hook up with Princess Elizabeth, the mega-hottie he had developed a massive crush on while he was chilling out in Russia. On the way out he composed an entire album of power ballads so face-meltingly awesome that when he wailed them out on his Flying V guitar her clothes just burst into flames on the spot. (I’m told his love for her was “like a truck.”) The two were married, and with his adventures complete, Harald decided to head back to Norway to reclaim his throne. Along the way he sacked a bunch of towns on the coast of Sicily just to be a dick.
Harald and his Varangians landed in Norway, raised an army, and reclaimed the throne without encountering any significant resistance. Harald’s over-the-top comic-book-style adventures serving three different Byzantine emperors and wrecking faces all across the known world had made him incredibly popular among the people of Norway, many of whom subscribed to the podcast of his voyages, and his people received their king with open arms. As King Harald III, he ruled for twenty years, earning the nickname Hardrada—which is the Norse word for “hardass.” He built churches, founded the city of Oslo, defeated the Danes in several wars, ruled firmly but justly, and spent his summers loading up longboats and personally going out on raids.
; When the aforementioned King Edward the Confessor died and everybody was running around all over the place trying to assert their claim to the throne of England, Harald decided that he was going to try to get in on all the action as well. He had even less of a claim to the throne than our friend William the Conqueror, but it wasn’t like he really gave a flip. In 1066 he set out with three hundred ships loaded to the brim with ill-tempered Norsemen and sailed to the British Isles on a river of blood.
Initially, the forces of Harald Hardrada met with success, handily defeating the combined armies of two Saxon earls at the Battle of Fulford and ravaging the countryside like they did back in the good old days when you had to destroy your enemies by marching twenty miles through the snow (uphill both ways). However, the Saxon king Harold Godwinson launched a surprise attack on the Viking army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, catching them with their loincloths down (figuratively, not literally). Many of Harald’s men didn’t even have time to get their armor strapped on before they were assaulted by pissed-off Saxons, but the Viking king didn’t go and get addicted to Prozac just because a couple of Brits waved some spears in his face. He pulled out two swords, activated his blood-lust rune power, and waded through the enemy, dual-wielding death in a wrath-flavored manslaughter spree. The fifty-one-year-old sea king was finally killed in battle when some cowardly donkey-porker shot him in the throat with an arrow, going down in a blaze of glory and dying a death worthy of Valhalla.
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It’s kind of a funny story how the Vikings ended up discovering North America. First, Erik the Red’s family was evicted from Norway because they killed a bunch of people. They fled west to Iceland, where Erik—whose nickname comes from the color of his hair and not from his penchant for killing everything with a pulse—was exiled for murdering several of his neighbors with a broadsword. Now banished from Norway and Iceland, Erik just got in his boat and sailed west, where he discovered Greenland. His son, Leif Eriksson, didn’t have to go much farther west before he hit Canada, and the rest is history.
The Battle of Bravoll in 700 CE featured the greatest assortment of Viking names ever assembled. Among the combatants that fateful day were such warriors as Thorleif Goti the Overbearing, Hrolf the Woman-Loving, Odd the Wide-Traveling, Grette the Evil, Hothbrodd the Indomitable, Dag the Stout, Svein Reaper, Harald Wartooth, and Hadd the Hard.
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THE DANISH AXE
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Vikings were big dudes, and nothing allowed them to utilize their massive size better than the fearsome Danish war axe. This enormous, single-bladed weapon was wielded with two hands, and a frenzied Norseman was more than capable of striking with enough force to chop through steel helmets, shields, and armor. During the Viking age it was often used to perform amateur brain surgery on unsuspecting enemy foot soldiers.
At the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, a lone Norse berserker with one of these man-slaughtering weapons single-handedly held a narrow bridge against an entire army of pissed-off Saxon warriors. This axe-swinging maniac killed more than forty of the enemy and wounded dozens more in a bloody, hate-fueled, murderous rampage. He was finally slain when a Saxon soldier drifted down the river in a barrel and thrust his spear up through the planks in the bridge, striking the battle-raging Viking in his lone weak point: the ball sack.
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17
EL CID CAMPEADOR
(1040–1099)
Two with the lance and with the sword five of the foe he slew. The Moors are very many. Around him close they drew, They did not pierce his armor, though they laid on strokes of power.
—THE LAY OF THE CID
RODRIGO DÍAZ DE VIVAR WAS BORN IN THE SPANISH KINGDOM OF CASTILE IN THE EARLY ELEVENTH CENTURY. During his adventures dominating faces across the Iberian Peninsula he would come to be recognized as a peerless warrior, a ball-grabbingly tough military commander, and one of the most valiant and legendary knights to ever live.
Rodrigo’s dad was a big dog under King Ferdinand the Great of Spain, and the two often spent their days together watching bullfights, drinking sangria, and trying to push the Moors out of Iberia in a series of excruciatingly bloody wars known as the Reconquista. When Ferdinand eventually kicked the bucket, instead of having one of his sons or daughters claim the throne of Spain, the Spanish king decided it would be an incredibly brilliant idea to divide the country into several different kingdoms, with each one ruled by one of his offspring. Obviously, Ferdinand’s oldest son, Sancho, got the royal screw job (no pun intended) in this deal, and so of course the slighted prince immediately decided to reclaim all of Christian Spain for himself and rule the kingdom that he believed was rightfully his. His first acts as king were to appoint young Rodrigo as standard-bearer of his army and immediately declare war on all of his younger siblings at the same time.
The first time El Cid shows up in history in any meaningful capacity is during the Battle of Graus in 1063, when the army of King Sancho of Castile was trading face-kicks with the knights of Aragon. El Cid fought bravely, but really got a chance to display his badassery when the champion of the Aragonese army came forward to try to gank Cid’s flag away from him. El Cid simply smashed this jerk knight in the sternum with the back end of his flagpole, whipped out his sword, executed a 360-degree jump-spinning maneuver known as the Whirlwind Slash, and sliced this supposedly hardcore warrior up like a band saw going through a can of Thanksgiving Day cranberry sauce. From that day forth, Rodrigo was known by his countrymen as “El Campeador,” meaning “the champion.” He was promoted to commander in chief of King Sancho’s army, and would go on to lead Castilian troops to victory in battle time and time again.
As commander of the knights of Castile, Cid went up against seemingly impossible odds, and conquered the kingdoms of León, Galicia, and Toro. He also besieged and captured the stronghold of Zamora in 1072, but unfortunately, right as his men were seizing final victory from the hands of his much-hated siblings, King Sancho’s cardiovascular system was seizing up as a result of multiple stab wounds to the back from a murderous assassin.
After Sancho died, the next heir to the Spanish throne was his brother Alfonso of León—a dude who’d already had his head caved in by Mr. El Cid and who had spent the past few years living in exile in Toledo (Spain, not Ohio, but still equally as boring). Alfonso returned to accept his coronation as the new king of Spain, but El Cid wasn’t the sort of dude who was going to sit around and watch a potential injustice being committed; rumors had been circulating that Alfonso was behind the assassination of Sancho, and El Cid demanded to know the truth—he was too noble and honorable to kneel before a corrupt ruler. At a time when all the other sniveling spineless nobles lacked the cojones to stand up and say something, El Cid kicked down Alfonso’s door, grabbed him by the arm, dragged him to the Burgos cathedral, and made him publicly swear on the Bible in front of statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary that he had nothing to do with Sancho’s murder. Alfonso swore it, so El Cid decided to let him live and pledged his allegiance to him. And that, mis amigos, is how badasses handle things.
Well, you can pretty much guess that Alfonso wasn’t a huge fan of being called out in front of all of his subjects. He also wasn’t superfond of El Cid having shoved a sword up his ass and forced him into exile a few years earlier either, so it shouldn’t come as an earth-shattering surprise that Cid was promptly replaced as commander in chief of the army and relegated to menial bitch-work throughout the kingdom.
On one such occasion in 1079, El Cid was sent to the Moorish kingdom of Seville to collect tribute from the emir. While Cid was in town, Seville was invaded by the kingdoms of Granada and Barcelona. Being the die-hard warrior that he was, El Cid took command of the heavily outnumbered army of Seville, went up against the combined might of two armies, and took them down like a back-alley knife fight between a rugby hooligan and a couple of third-graders. He humiliated the enemy generals, crushed their armies, captured their booty, and took some of Spain’s gr
eatest champions prisoner. Not long after this, the kingdom of Toledo started talking all kinds of smack to Cid, so he marched his troops out on a punitive expedition, plundered a couple of towns, and made off with a bunch of money and prisoners there as well.
Even though randomly inserting yourself into a couple of vicious blood feuds just for the sake of beating people up is damn awesome, King Alfonso pretty much blew a gasket anyway and sent Cid off into exile for going nuts and arbitrarily launching unauthorized attacks on neighboring kingdoms for no good reason. This sucked a bag of dicks, but it takes more than exile to keep a dude like El Cid down, so he decided to go around the country like a wandering Dungeons and Dragons-style adventurer, taking quests at the local heroes’ guild, following up on leads he received from shady innkeepers, and rescuing damsels in distress from the clutches of two-headed ogres and magical fire-breathing red dragons. He eventually signed on as a mercenary working for the Moorish kingdom of Saragossa in 1081, where he defended the borders against hostile invasion, horsecocked the enemies of the emir up and down the Spanish countryside, and earned the nickname by which he is best known today: “El Cid” comes from the Arabic al-sayyid, meaning “chief” or “lord.”
In 1086 Spain was invaded by a group of people called the Almoravids—hardcore Berber Muslim warriors from present-day Morocco. Out of nowhere, the Almoravids swept across Gibraltar and started kicking the holy living ass of everyone they came across. Our good friend King Alfonso went out to face them and wound up getting his entire army of armored knights killed in the span of a couple of hours. As he limped back home, he knew there was only one bastard in Spain who could lead the Christians to victory against the Almoravids, and that was El Cid Campeador. He immediately sent a messenger to get on his hands and knees and beg Cid to come back.