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

about: the consummation of all his hopes. ‘The warlike king of Norway won the match of his desire.’ So one poet celebrated the occasion. ‘He gained a princess — not to mention a hoard of treasure.’

Yet for all the dash that Harald had no doubt cut on his arrival in Novgorod, with ‘his clothes of silk, given him by the King of Miklagard’, mere glamour on its own, no matter how spiced up with gold, would hardly have been sufficient to win him Yaroslav’s daughter. During the decade and more of his absence from Scandinavia, however, his prospects had spectacularly improved: for he had become the brother of a saint, no less. Olaf the Stout, whose attempt to reclaim Norway had ended amid such bloody ruin, had been splendidly compensated for the loss of his earthly throne with one in heaven. A most improbable elevation, it might have been thought—and yet a succession of miracles had served to prove Olaf’s sanctity beyond all doubt. For even with the carnage of Stiklestad reeking in the nostrils, it was said, his blood had served the wounded as a curative; and a whole year after his death, when his corpse was dug up from a sandbank, it had been found miraculously intact, with hair and nails still growing. Transferred to a church altar in the port of Trondheim, a foundation of Olaf Trygvasson, the relics had continued to heal the sick and injured at a prodigious rate. By the time of Harald’s return to the North, his brother’s death had been transfigured into a martyr’s ‘passion’. Across the whole span of the Viking world, from Novgorod to Dublin, a brutal warlord had begun to be venerated as a ‘holy king’. This startling turnaround was vivid testimony to the yearning among the Northmen, even as they turned their backs on their ancient gods, for a saint whom they could hail as their own.

Good news for Harald, certainly, as he set off for home, ‘freighted with hard won honour and gleaming gold’. But he was not the only beneficiary of his dynasty’s new-found association with the heavenly: for Magnus, the young king who had expelled the Danes from Norway, was St Olaf’s son. In 1045, he stood at the summit of his power: King of Denmark as well as of Norway, thanks to the treaty he had signed back in 1039 with Harthacanute, and with a claim to the rule of England too. These were just the kind of pickings to whet the appetite of a predator such as Harald; and sure enough, no sooner had he set foot on his native soil than he was throwing his weight around, and demanding a share of his nephew’s lands. Magnus, who was hardly the man to be intimidated by anyone, not even a celebrated hero such as his uncle, refused to give way; and for the next two years, amid a bewildering welter of compacts signed and broken, the two of them circled each other, sniffing for advantage. Then in 1046, Magnus died unexpectedly while out on campaign; and Harald succeeded uncontested to the rule of the lands he had fled sixteen years before. ‘Who knows,’ he had reassured himself then, while on the run from the killing fields of Stiklestad, ‘my name may yet become renowned far and wide in the end.’ And so it had proved.

Nor, having won his throne, did he intend ever to be forced into exile again. Harald’s record as king over the two decades of his reign would be a ruthless one. ‘Hardrada’, his subjects came to call him: ‘Hard-Ruler’. Funded by his plentiful stock of treasure, he threw himself with his customary swagger into all the traditional activities of a Viking king: slapping down his rivals among the local chiefs, waging pointless wars against his neighbours, incinerating their towns, and menacing their coastlines with showy dragon-ships. Even as the cult of St Olaf went from strength to strength, and Trondheim began to swell with pilgrims drawn from across the Christian world, Harald remained wedded to the old ways, in which Christendom existed primarily as a resource to be plundered. Inevitably, then, as his reservoirs of Miklagard gold finally began to run out in the mid-1060s, he did as generations of Viking warlords had done before him: look around for a foreign milch-cow. Specifically, he looked to England.

As well he might have done – for the English by now were as rich as they had ever been. Although Edward had proved to be a doggedly unsensational king, pallid even, his reign had nevertheless served to provide his subjects with something truly precious: a respite from upheaval. Prosperity had returned to the kingdom: its trade had swelled, its wealth had grown, its towns had boomed. To be sure, there had been the odd alarm. In 1045, for instance, nervous of Magnus’s intentions, Edward had assembled a massive fleet to patrol the coastline of Kent. Then, early in the 1050s, a rupture between the king and the Earl Godwin had appeared to threaten civil war. But men on both sides, rather than storming headlong over the abyss, had opted instead to pause and draw back. ‘For they reflected that it would be a great piece of folly if they joined battle, for in the two hosts there was most of what was noblest in the kingdom, and they considered that they would be opening a way for their enemies to enter the country and to cause much ruin.’ Relations between Edward and Godwin, however uneasily, had been patched up. Even though the earl himself had died soon afterwards, concord between his heirs and the king had been preserved. Edward, devoting himself to the pleasures of the hunt and to the occasional miraculous cure of the sick, had increasingly been content to leave the running of the kingdom to Godwin’s sons. And to two of them, in particular. One, Tostig, had been appointed to the rule of Northumbria; his elder, Harold, had inherited