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

the foreheads of priests; forty-odd years later, and Prince Vladimir had agreed to be baptised. Cannily, however, before taking the plunge, he had made sure to evaluate the opposition. Embassies had duly been dispatched to investigate the mosques of the Saracens and the cathedrals of the Germans. ‘But we saw no glory there.’ Then they had visited Miklagard; and been led into the city’s churches. ‘And we knew not whether we were on heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty. We only know that God dwells there among men.’ Such had been the awestruck verdict delivered back to Kiev. ‘We cannot forget that beauty.’

This, even by the standards of the great game that Byzantine diplomats had been playing with such proficiency for centuries, had ranked as a signal coup. So much so, indeed, that the Basileus, swallowing his instinctive distaste for marriage alliances with barbarians, had sent Vladimir his own sister: the very ultimate in Christian queens. A grim fate for any princess brought up in Constantinople – and yet the new ‘tsarita‘, even as she settled into her new quarters beside the Dnieper, had at least been able to console herself that her sacrifice was not in vain. No matter that the Rus had remained prone to the occasional lurch into lunatic aggression: at least they were no longer pagan, nor in league with the Saracens, nor beholden to the Germans. Harald, making his way southwards to Miklagard, would have found in Kiev many a tribute raised to the abiding allure of the Queen of Cities. Palaces and domed churches, gateways and mighty walls: here, set upon a landscape that barely a century before had been mere featureless savagery, were the unmistakable stamps of the New Rome.

Not that the trade was all one way. Merchants arriving from the Dnieper, loaded down with any number of exotic treasures, whether walrus ivory, or amber, or fish glue, or wax, continued to flock to the lantern-lit markets of the Great City. Even with all the various indignities imposed on them by the imperial bureaucracy, all the quotas, and registration forms, and quality-control inspections, the skimmings to be had in Miklagard remained the stuff of avaricious report across the North. Furs, in particular, still garnered fabulous profits. Hardly fabulous enough for Harald, however. Not for him the option of becoming a ‘skin’, as merchants were dismissively known. He was, after all, a warrior, and the brother of a king. Toweringly as he loomed, and with a self-regard to match, only one profession had been worthy of his talents. ‘Fierce, proud warriors standing up to ten feet in height’ were the kind of mercenaries that the Byzantines had always prized. As a consequence, Varangians were even more in demand in Constantinople than in Kiev or Novgorod. Only tame a Northman, a succession of emperors had found, and all the qualities that rendered him so alarming as an adversary — his animal savagery, his proficiency with an axe, his ferocious beard — could serve to make of him a truly pedigree bodyguard. Like house-broken attack dogs, Varangians were famed for their loyalty. Seventy of them, it was said, in their mortification at having failed to prevent the murder of Nicephorus Phocas, had opted to fight to the death rather than make an accommodation with his assassins. No wonder, then, at the most awesome moment in any emperor’s life, when he stood beneath the flickering gold of the dome of Hagia Sophia to be crowned God’s viceroy, and to take up for the first time the attributes of his new majesty, the sceptre and the purple cloak, the sword and the scarlet boots, that there, massed all around him, their axes slung over their shoulders, their outfits chillingly barbarous, would be serried a posse of Varangians. To guard a Caesar was a truly awesome charge. Indeed, a responsibility that might be worthy of a prince.

Admittedly, enthusiasm for the Varangians among imperial circles was not universal. ‘Wine-hags’, they were nicknamed in the palace: testimony to a taste for late-night revelling that weary courtiers had learned to dread. Never, however, had there been a Varangian who generated quite the noise that Harald did. Brags about his exploits in the imperial service would end up echoing as far afield as Iceland. ‘Harald,’ as one overexcited flatterer put it, ‘you forced all the lands of the Mediterranean to submit to the Emperor!’ A claim that would certainly have been news to the Basileus himself, let alone the Saracens—but tribute, nevertheless, to the unprecedented strut and clamour that Harald had brought to the business of being a Varangian. In Sicily, it was claimed, he had captured no fewer than eighty towns. In the Holy Land, he had bathed in the River Jordan, and conquered Jerusalem – ‘an easy task for Harald’. In Constantinople, he had been thrown into prison by a lovelorn empress, helped to blind an emperor and fought with a dragon. The plausible and the utterly fantastical, in the rumours of Harald’s deeds, were promiscuously mixed. And to sensational effect – for in the North he was soon a living legend. Even Yaroslav had ended up impressed. As well he might have done – for he had been sent the hard proof of his would-be son-in-law’s achievements. Piled up for safe keeping in an island compound outside Novgorod was a great heap of treasure, ‘a hoard of wealth so immense that no one had ever seen its like before’: Harald’s winnings.

Finally, by 1044, with Constantinople growing increasingly too hot for him, and the still single Princess Elizabeth turned nineteen, the conquering hero had felt that the time was ripe to head back north to claim his by now nubile prize. Loading up his coffers with yet more gold, and making a spectacular getaway in a stolen galley, he had duly returned up the Dnieper to Yaroslav. And so at last, with the New Year, it had come