Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

from across the North. Olaf Trygvasson, for instance, was said to have travelled there as a boy after having been ransomed from slavery, and to have met with his original captor in the town’s market place, where he killed him on the spot with an axe. Then, in 1028, another celebrated Norwegian exile had made for Novgorod. Olaf Haraldsson, ‘the Stout’, as he was known, had been a Christian king very much in the tradition of Trygvasson. Brutal and domineering, and ‘with eyes as hard as a serpent’s’, he had passed a rumbustious decade browbeating his various rivals and committing spectacular atrocities, all in the name of Christ – until at length, wearying of his bullying, the Norwegian lords had invited in Canute.

Two years later, impatient to be revenged on his enemies, Olaf the Stout had returned across the Baltic. This was a doomed throw — for not even the installation as regent of Canute’s English wife Aelfgifu had been sufficient to provoke the Norwegians into resuming their support for their exiled king. While still in Novgorod, it was said, Trygvasson had appeared to Olaf in a dream, and reassured him that ‘it is a glorious thing to die in battle’—which was just as well, for in the summer of 1030, at a village named Stiklestad, his ragtag gang of clansmen and desperadoes had been cut to pieces. Olaf himself, crippled by an axe blow just above his knee, and skewered through with a spear, had been finished off by having his neck hacked open to the vertebrae. And meanwhile, above the battlefield, it was claimed, the sky itself had begun to bleed.

Yet though the scene of slaughter had been monstrous, not everyone in Olaf’s retinue had fallen. Enough of them had survived to spirit their lord’s corpse away, and to help the more prominent among the wounded to escape. Among the fugitives had been the king’s half- brother: Harald Sigardurson. Only fifteen years old at the time, he had a lust for glory and a taste for violence that had already served to mark him out as an authentic chip off the old block. Just as Olaf had done two years previously, so now, after Stiklestad, the princely refugee had skulked his way over mountains and through dripping forests; and just like Olaf, he had ended up in Novgorod. There, treading the planks laid down across oozing mud that constituted the city’s high street, he had made his way to the palace - the ‘kremlin’, as it was termed by the Rus - and begged for asylum. Yaroslav, evidently a dab hand at spotting potential, had promptly recruited the exile to serve him as a Varangian.

For three years, the increasingly hulking Harald had applied himself to becoming ‘the king of warriors’: smiting the sledded Polacks and winning golden opinions of his patron. Not quite golden enough, however: for in 1035, when Harald asked for the hand of Elizabeth, one of Yaroslav’s daughters, the father had turned him down flat. It was a measure of how dazzlingly the prestige of the Rus had come to blaze that their princesses were by now reserved only for the very cream of European royalty – and Harald, as a Varangian captain, had hardly measured up. Only the prospect that he might achieve things worthy of Elizabeth – and secure sufficient gold to impress her notoriously grasping father – had served to leave him with cause for hope. And so it was, resolved to make a name for himself before his intended could be handed over to some more prestigious suitor, that Harald had headed south. Leaving Yaroslav’s court, he had known that he had only a narrow window of opportunity: for Elizabeth, by 1035, was already ten years old.

All the more fortunate for Harald, then, that his destination had effectively chosen itself. Even though the Vikings in Russia had long been regular visitors to ‘Serkland’, where the dark-skinned Tartars and Saracens lived, and even though they had brought back treasures garnered from the very limits of the horizon, whether silver dirkams from Baghdad, or golden tableware from Egypt, or idols of a peculiar god named the Buddha from strange realms unheard of, all along they had never doubted where the surest wellspring of riches lay. To the Northmen, Constantinople was, quite simply, the capital of the world: ‘the Great City’, ‘Miklagard’. For almost two hundred years it had glittered in their dreams, ‘tall-towered Byzantium’, a repository of everything that was most beautiful and wondrous on Middle Earth. Indeed, imagining how Odin’s stronghold in the heavens might appear, the Northmen could do no better than to picture it as a city much like Caesar’s golden capital, roofed with precious metals, gleaming with splendid palaces, and encircled by a giant wall.

Of Constantinople’s own impregnability, they had few doubts: for at regular intervals the Rus had set themselves to capturing it, and been repeatedly rebuffed, their longboats either sunk in mysterious storms whipped up by the prayers of the defenders, or else incinerated by sinister weapons of fire sprayed from Byzantine warships. Even Yaroslav, in 1043, would have a crack at capturing the Great City – and end up losing his entire fleet for his pains. Yet though these eruptions from the Dnieper were periodic, and thoroughly alarming to the Byzantines themselves, who would invariably be taken by surprise by the sudden appearance of barbarians in the Bosphorus, the truth was that they were little more than the spasming of a cultural cringe. The Rus might have been Swedish in origin, and Slavonic by adoption – and yet deep in their heart of hearts, where inferiority complexes invariably lurk, they yearned to be Byzantine.

Which was why, as the princes of Kiev set about the task of fashioning an empire of their own, imitation had increasingly superseded intimidation. Back in 941, during one of their abortive assaults on the Great City, the Rus had amused themselves by using monks for target practice and hammering nails into