Harald Hardrada Read online

  HARALD

  HARDRADA

  IN MEMORY OF KNAP

  HARALD

  HARDRADA

  THE WARRIOR’S WAY

  JOHN MARSDEN

  First published in 2007

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © John Marsden, 2007, 2012

  The right of John Marsden, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7444 1

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7443 4

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Sagas, Skalds and Soldiering

  An introduction to a military biography

  I Stiklestad

  Norway, 1030

  II Varangian

  Russia, 1031–1034

  Byzantine Empire, 1034–1041

  Constantinople, 1041–1042

  Russia, 1042–1045

  III Hardrada

  Scandinavia, 1045–1065

  IV Stamford Bridge

  England, 1066

  Land-ravager

  An afterword from west-over-sea

  Genealogies

  Notes and References

  Select Bibliography

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  A book written in English for a non-academic readership and yet drawing on source material originally set down in Old Norse, Byzantine Greek, Russian, Anglo-Saxon and Latin does require a note as to its policy in the naming of names. As there appears to be no standard form of English spelling of early Scandinavian names, I have used whichever form seems the most appropriate in the historical context and the least intimidating for an English reader. Similarly, the title of ‘earl’ is spelled in that English form where it occurs in England, but in its original Old Norse form as jarl in a Scandinavian context. Sometimes names and terms are also given in their original spelling – set in italics and usually in parentheses – so it might be helpful to explain that the Norse character ð is pronounced ‘th’ (as in rather). I should also mention my specific use of the term viking in its original sense of ‘sea-raider’ as distinct from the modern usage of ‘Viking’ as a generic term for anyone (or anything) associated with early medieval Scandinavia.

  Notes have been kept to a minimum and most often used to acknowledge references to or quotations from the work of others, but there are two such authors to whom I owe a more prominent acknowledgement because Sigfús Blöndal’s The Varangians of Byzantium in the English edition revised and translated by Benedikt S. Benedikz was the work which played a greater part than any other in developing my interest in the man who forms the subject of this book. A more personal acknowledgement is due to my friend John Hamburg of Carrollton, Kentucky, whose unfailing enthusiasm for the same subject played its own part in encouraging this attempt at a biography of Harald Hardrada.

  J.M.

  Maps

  1 Harald Hardrada’s World

  2 Scandinavia

  3 Russia

  4 Byzantine Empire

  5 Constantinople

  6 Stiklestad

  7 Stamford Bridge

  MAP 1

  MAP 2

  MAP 3

  MAP 4

  MAP 5

  MAP 6

  MAP 7

  Sagas, Skalds and Soldiering

  AN INTRODUCTION TO A MILITARY BIOGRAPHY

  When he is remembered only as a Norwegian king slain in battle at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, where his invading army was crushed just three days before the arrival of the conquering Normans, the place of Harald Hardrada in the mainstream of English history amounts to little more than that of the ‘third man’ of the undeniably memorable year 1066. He spent no more than eighteen days on English soil, after all, and the subsequent events of that fateful autumn have left him overshadowed, first by the English Harold and ultimately by William the Norman, thus obscuring his reputation – acknowledged by historians ancient and modern – as the most feared warrior of his world and time.

  If Stamford Bridge is set into a wider context than that of Anglo-Saxon England, however, it comes into a very different focus as the last of innumerable conflicts fought out along a warrior’s way that had ranged across most of Scandinavia and eastward by way of Russia to the far-flung empire of Byzantium through the three and a half decades since a sturdy youngster stood with his half-brother, the king and future saint Olaf, in the blood-fray at Stiklestad in the west of Norway. The most comprehensive accounts of that great arc of warfaring are found in the thirteenth-century collections of sagas of the Norwegian kings, of which the most respected is the one known as Heimskringla and reliably attributed to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson. His version of Harald’s saga is described by the editors of its standard modern English translation as ‘a biography which in Snorri’s hands becomes the story of a warrior’s progress. Essentially it is the life and career of a professional soldier, starting with a battle – the battle of Stiklestad where Harald, aged fifteen, is wounded and his brother the king killed – and ending in battle, thirty-six years later, at Stamford Bridge.’1

  It was that observation which first suggested Harald Hardrada to me as the subject for a military biography, most especially because of its use of the term ‘professional soldier’. While there are warrior kings aplenty throughout the history of the early medieval period, and not least in the northern world, Harald can be said to stand almost, if not entirely, alone among them in having spent all the years of his young manhood on active service as a professional soldier – and, quite specifically, in the modern understanding of the term.

  Within a year of his escape from the field of Stiklestad, he had crossed the Baltic and found his way into Russia where he reappears among the Scandinavian mercenary fighting-men employed by the Russian princes to whom they were known as Varjazi or ‘Varangians’. In that capacity and apparently as a junior officer, he is known to have taken part in a major campaign against the Poles, but assuredly also came up against the subject peoples of the northern forests and the steppe warriors to the south along the Dnieper. Some three years later he arrived in Constantinople, not yet twenty years old but already a battle-hardened commander of his own warrior company, to enter imperial service with the Varangian mercenaries of Byzantium.

  During nine years of service under three emperors, Harald saw action at sea in the Mediterranean against Saracen corsairs and on land against their shore bases in Asia Minor, led his troop on escort duty to the Holy Land and took part in the Byzantine invasion of Arab-held Sicily, before being despatched against rebellions in the south of Italy and in Bulgaria. His accomplishments in the Sicilian and Bulgarian campaigns earned him promotion to the emperor’s personal Varangian bodyguard in Constantinople where he was almost unavoidably – although very probably not innocently – caught up in the whirlpool of Byzantine politics. Subsequently falling from imperial favour, he was briefly imprisoned before escaping in time to play his own grisly p
art in the downfall of an emperor amid the bloodiest day of rioting ever seen in the city. Shortly afterwards Harald’s ambitions turned back towards his homeland and, despite having been refused imperial permission of leave, he launched his ships in a daring departure from Constantinople to begin the long journey north.

  From the Black Sea he made his way up the Dnieper and back into Russia, assuredly bringing military intelligence to the Grand Prince in Kiev whose daughter he was to marry before moving north to assemble the great wealth he had acquired in the east and is said to have sent on to Novgorod for safe-keeping. So it was that Harald provided himself with the personal treasury which was later to assume legendary proportions in the hands of the saga-makers but still must have been more than sufficient to fund the force of ships and fighting-men that he would need to challenge his nephew Magnus’ sovereignty over Norway and Denmark. By the spring of 1046 he was back in Scandinavia, forging a short-lived alliance with the claimant to Danish kingship and raiding around Denmark on a campaign of intimidation. Before the end of the year, the Danish ally had been discarded and the nephew had accepted his uncle into an uneasy joint kingship, which was to extend only until the following autumn when the sudden death of Magnus left Harald in sole possession of the Norwegian kingdom.

  Thus, within less than eighteen months of his return from the east, the professional soldier had emerged in his perhaps more familiar guise of warrior king, and one whose reign was to be almost entirely taken up with conflict – seventeen years of sporadic war on the Danes, interspersed with bitter suppression of recalcitrant Norwegian factions and their Swedish allies, leading finally to the doomed invasion of England – all in seemingly voracious pursuit of dominion, vengeance and conquest.

  Even that drastically abbreviated synopsis can leave scarcely any doubt of Harald Hardrada’s potential as the subject of a military biography. Indeed, it might be thought to preclude the possibility of any account of his life not dominated by warfaring, and yet the approach to be taken here will still be at some degree of variance from the customary biographical format. While, of course, it will seek to offer a realistic portrait of the man himself – and of other remarkable individuals who played influential roles in his story – its first intention will be a reconstruction in some detail of the extraordinary military career by which he acquired his awesome reputation. Beyond that central concept, however, there lies a broader scope of interest, because to trace the course of Harald’s warrior’s way would seem to offer an exceptional, even unique, opportunity for exploration of the wide spectrum of warrior cultures – from Bulgar rebels to Norman mercenaries and Pecheneg steppe warriors to Anglo-Saxon housecarls – which he encountered across the greater extent of Scandinavian expansion at its high peak in the first half of the eleventh century.

  From that perspective, Harald’s mercenary soldiering in the east might be seen as an especially fitting education for a man said to have wanted to become a warlord since infancy. If the teenage years in Russia can be taken to represent a privileged apprenticeship and the wide-ranging experience in Byzantine service his time as a journeyman, taken together they assuredly informed, and in some measure shaped, his return to the northland as a warrior king. Thus the subject and structure of this book are also intended as ‘the life and career of a professional soldier . . . beginning with a battle, the battle of Stiklestad . . . and ending in battle, thirty-six years later at Stamford Bridge’, and so Snorri Sturluson’s version of Harald’s saga would seem to offer itself as my first choice of working template. Such a choice, however, raises all the scholarly doubt as to whether a saga set down in Iceland some two hundred years after the events it describes can be taken as reliable historical evidence for an eleventh-century Norwegian king. There was a time, even as recently as the earlier decades of the twentieth century, when the konunga sögur (or ‘kings’ sagas’) – and especially those forming Snorri’s Heimskringla cycle – were accorded all the respect due to impeccable sources of historical record, but modern scholarship has cast so much doubt on their reliability as to greatly diminish the esteem in which they were formerly held.

  The historian’s raw material for an understanding of the past is its surviving written record, so the first measure of any document’s historical value must usually be its proximity in time and place to the events it describes, and yet in the case of Harald Hardrada the most closely contemporary documentary record cannot be considered any better than uneven. While his invasion of England is properly entered in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1066, his earlier presence in Russia would seem to have entirely escaped the notice of the Kievan monks who were setting down the annals now known as the Russian Primary Chronicle within a decade of his death, and yet his service with the Varangians of Byzantium is fully confirmed by a generous notice in a Byzantine document dated to the last quarter of the eleventh century.

  As to the early sources originating in the Scandinavian and Baltic world, the most closely contemporary is the work of a German churchman, Adam of Bremen, whose History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen was written in Latin and completed by 1075. Adam’s account of Harald, while hardly much better than fragmentary, is almost unrelentingly hostile, and understandably so when its author had derived so much of his information by way of personal contact with Harald’s discarded Danish ally and subsequent lifelong enemy, Svein Estridsson. Nonetheless, Adam of Bremen does offer his own acknowledgement of Harald’s warlike reputation when he refers to him as the ‘thunderbolt of the north’ and, on occasion, can also supply interesting detail to be found in no other source.

  The earliest history actually written by a Scandinavian does not appear until at least a hundred years after that of Adam of Bremen from whose work its author, known as Saxo Grammaticus, evidently borrowed material. Saxo’s Gesta Danorum (or ‘Acts of the Danes’) is another Latin history, although one more probably written by a lay clerk than a monk, because Saxo was of a Danish warrior family, a background which may well account for the unswerving loyalty he shows to Svein Estridsson; it would also account for the rather different light he might be thought to throw upon the saga record of warfare between Svein and Harald. The first historian of the Norwegian kings generally believed to have been himself a Norwegian was a contemporary of Saxo known only as ‘Theodoric the Monk’ whose Latin Historia, written around the year 1180, is dedicated to the archbishop of Nidaros (now Trondheim). It is a work which shows extremely scant respect for Norway’s royal house and is thus thought likely to have provoked the ruling Norwegian king Sverri Sigurdsson, himself the subject and patron of the first saga set down in writing, to encourage the composition of a history more sympathetic to his ancestors and one which would serve as a counter to Theodoric’s Historia.

  This was to become the work now known as Ágrip or ‘Summary’, an abbreviation of Ágrip af Nóregs konunga-sögum (‘Summary of the sagas of the Norwegian kings’), a title applied only in the last few centuries, and which reflects the incomplete state of the sole surviving manuscript copy while doing less than justice to the landmark significance of the long-lost original. Probably composed as early as the 1190s, and by an Icelander living in Norway, Ágrip is the oldest surviving history of Norwegian kings written in the Old Norse vernacular and was extensively used as a source by saga-makers in the thirteenth century, although they were certainly working from a fuller and better text than that preserved in the surviving manuscript. Of no less importance here, though, is its anonymous author’s use of material from the oral tradition to expand upon that found in the Latin histories, because it is just this approach which points the way, followed in subsequent decades by the authors of the more expansive saga histories – and especially those bearing on Harald Hardrada.

  Variant versions of Harald’s saga are found in the three oldest collections of konunga-sögur – the Morkinskinna, the Fagrskinna and Heimskringla – while another, sometimes known as the ‘Separate’ Harald’s saga, is found in a later manuscript volume known as the Flateyjar
bók. Reference will be made to all of these saga sources throughout the following pages and so this might be a useful point at which to introduce them.

  Of the four named above, only the Flateyjarbók survives as an original manuscript, the largest of all Icelandic parchments, of which the core was set down by two known Icelandic scribes in the later fourteenth century. A number of further folios, including the text of the ‘Separate’ Harald’s saga, had been added by an unknown hand when it reappeared in a later ownership on the island of Flatey (hence its name, meaning ‘The Book of Flatey’) in the second half of the fifteenth century. The three earlier saga collections have all been dated to the first few decades of the thirteenth century, even though none survive as original manuscripts but only as copies of various dates and in no less various conditions.

  The collection called Morkinskinna (‘mouldy vellum’) was written around the year 1275 by Icelandic scribes reworking an older text – now lost, but referred to as the ‘Oldest Morkinskinna’ – which has been dated to at least fifty years earlier, with one scholarly estimate even placing its composition as precisely as the period 1217–22. It was this original text of Morkinskinna, containing sagas of the kings reigning between 1035 and the latter half of the twelfth century, which appears to have been the source of later sections in Fagrskinna and in Heimskringla and so might be taken to represent the earliest of the thirteenth-century collections unless, of course, all three were drawing upon an unknown common source.

  Fagrskinna (‘fair vellum’) is a title applied through the last few hundred years to a work surviving only in copies deriving from an early thirteenth-century original which is thought to have been written earlier in Nidaros, or the surrounding Trondelag region, and probably by an Icelandic author. Apparently known in medieval times as Nóregs konunga tal (‘List of the Kings of Norway’), it is a collection of kings’ sagas beginning in the ninth century with Halfdan the Black, father of Harald hárfagri (‘fair-hair’), and extending to the year 1177, which was probably also the terminal point of the original Morkinskinna as it certainly was of the third konunga sögur collection – and the one of first importance here – which is, of course, the Heimskringla attributed to Snorri Sturluson.