Harald Hardrada (22 page)

While in exile on Lesbos Constantine Monomachus had enjoyed the company of his long-standing mistress, a granddaughter of Bardas Sclerus who had been the second pretender (alongside Bardas Phocas) challenging Basil II at the time of his formation of the Varangian Guard in the later 980s. This lady was soon to follow her lover to the capital where Zoe would seem to have had no serious objection to sharing her new husband and so it was that the ‘Sclerena' (as she is said to have been universally known) became a fixture in court circles. Outside the palace confines, however, the Sclerena became widely unpopular, although not so much in her own right as on account of her avaricious relatives who took every possible advantage of her new semi-imperial standing. Of these kinsfolk, it was her brother Romanus whose activities were to prove most disastrous for the course of Byzantine history, initially because his estates adjoined those of Georgios Maniakes in Anatolia where the two men had become bitterly hostile neighbours.

Since his restoration by the former emperor and subsequent return to Italy in April 1042, Maniakes had suppressed a revolt in Apulia with a devastating, but nonetheless effective, campaign of appalling savagery before he once again fell prey to typically Byzantine political intrigue when the Sclerena's brother contrived to have the general recalled and replaced – or would have done so had Georgios not refused to submit to a second dismissal from imperial favour. The officer sent to Italy as his replacement was seized upon arrival, disgustingly tortured and summarily executed. Having firmly asserted himself in command, Maniakes led his troops across the Adriatic in the early spring of 1043 and began his advance upon the capital until confronted by the greatly superior numbers of an imperial army near Ostrovo in Macedonia. Maniakes had his army acclaim him emperor before the battle began and Psellus describes his defiance in the front line of the first onslaught against the enemy lines: ‘Thundering out commands as he rode up and down the ranks, he struck terror into the hearts of all who saw him, while his proud bearing overwhelmed our vast numbers from the very outset. Circling around our legions and spreading confusion all about, he had but to attack before the ranks gave way and the wall of troops pulled back.' At which point the battle-god who had favoured him on so many fields would seem to have turned away at just the same moment a thrown lance found its mark and delivered his death-wound to the mighty Maniakes. Decapitated on the battlefield, the head of the greatest Byzantine soldier of his time was brought back to the emperor in Constantinople, where it was paraded around the Hippodrome by the returning army and impaled high on a spike in full view of the populace.

While the annals assign no precise date, the death of Georgios Maniakes is usually and reliably placed in February/March of 1043, but what can be said with greater certainty of his last battle is that the imperial forces sent against him did not include Harald with his Varangians. Had it been otherwise, the saga-makers would have made every imaginable claim for Harald's achieving ultimate victory over the greatest personal enemy of his career in imperial service; and if he was not with the emperor's army in that battle then he had most certainly made his escape from Constantinople before February 1043. The long voyage across the Black Sea and up the Dnieper was hazardous enough in any season, but in the winter months it would have been a venture of utter folly, so Harald's journey from Constantinople to Kiev can be placed with all possible confidence in the autumn of 1042.

Particular attention must be paid to the date of events through this passage of Harald's warrior's way as a precaution against the misleading chronology of the saga narrative. Snorri's casual assignment of events to ‘that winter' or ‘the following spring' gives the impression of Harald having spent barely a year in Russia and yet some three full years must have passed between his arrival at Kiev in the autumn of 1042 and his departure for Scandinavia which could not have been made before the later autumn of 1045. While there is no absolute certainty that Snorri is to be trusted when he tells of Jaroslav having given Harald his daughter in marriage in the winter following his return from Constantinople, there is no real reason to doubt him in this instance. So the wedding to the princess Elizaveta was probably consecrated around the time of the winter festival which is more closely related with the feast of Epiphany in the Orthodox calendar and might be dated – although still with due caution – to the earliest weeks of the year 1043. Snorri's saga goes on to quote a half-strophe from the skald Stúf which speaks of Harald's marriage having brought him ‘gold aplenty as reward [presumably a generous dowry] and a princess too' – and one whose distinguished parentage (of the Rurikid line and the Swedish royal family) would have conferred its own measure of new prestige upon a man with his own ambitions on kingship.

For Jaroslav, on the other hand, his immediate return on investment of that dowry would have been the detailed military intelligence Harald had brought with him along the east-way, because his predominant concerns in the new year of 1043 must have centred on plans for the great expedition he intended for the coming summer. Even though events in Byzantium had been moving on apace in Harald's absence, he would surely have had a useful working knowledge of the numbers and deployment of Byzantine land forces around the capital and elsewhere across the empire, although it would have been some months yet before he learned of the fate of his old enemy
Gyrgir
. The item of most immediate concern to Russian tactical planning and the one on which Harald may very well have been able to offer valuable information was the disposition of the imperial fleet, because its great warships armed with the empire's celebrated secret weapon of ‘Greek Fire' represented Constantinople's first line of defence.
¹⁴
If, for example, Harald could report the empire's naval forces being ‘below strength [with] the fireships dispersed at various naval stations', then he would have supplied the most reliable intelligence because those details are quoted from Psellus' account of shortcomings in marine defences available to the emperor when the Russian fleet did appear in the Bosporus. Sadly for Jaroslav, however, no military intelligence reports could have warned him of the sudden Black Sea storm which would seem to have been the decisive factor in the crushing defeat of his great enterprise.

Despite the inevitable discrepancies between accounts of the same event preserved in the Russian
Primary Chronicle
and the contemporary Byzantine record – as set down by Psellus and the annalist Cedrenus – all those sources agree on the outcome having been a disaster for the Rus. The strength of their fleet, led by Jaroslav's son Vladimir of Novgorod and an experienced
voevodo
by the name of Vyshata, is estimated at some four hundred ships (of a type resembling the Scandinavian longship, but reflecting Slavic influence in its broader beam and more heavily timbered hull), most of which were destroyed by a combination of storm at sea and enemy incendiary assault.

Psellus writes proudly of the emperor's assembly of an impromptu warfleet – three ‘triremes' (or
dromoi
) with incendiary siphons aboard, some transport vessels and old hulks made as seaworthy as possible – to present ‘the barbarians' with the semblance of a defensive naval cordon. He tells of the Byzantine warships engaging with the enemy fleet and throwing it into disarray with Greek Fire just before the onset of a hurricane force easterly completed the work of destruction. Yet his story is so suspiciously reminiscent of the defeat of a Russian attack of a hundred years before, when an earlier emperor achieved unexpected triumph with a similar scratch naval force, that the
Primary Chronicle
might be thought more trustworthy when it describes a storm playing havoc with the Russian fleet on the sea-crossing from the Danube to the Bosporus before fourteen Byzantine warships emerged to drive off such vessels as were still capable of flight.

Nonetheless, the Greeks did not have everything go their way. When Prince Vladimir's own ship was crippled, he and some of his
druzhina
managed to escape to the Bulgarian shore aboard another, presumably one of those which had survived the initial maelstrom well enough to be capable of destroying four enemy vessels off the Thracian coast. Vyshata, however, was less fortunate, because it was he who took command of those warriors who had managed to get ashore and led their retreat overland until it was cut off by Byzantine troops. Those not slain were taken prisoner, many of them said to have been mutilated in captivity, and three years were to pass before negotiations secured the return of Vyshata and his fellow survivors to Russia. While Cedrenus' claim for fifteen thousand Russian corpses washed up on the Bosporus shore is clearly a gross exaggeration, grievously heavy casualties must have been suffered when the
Primary Chronicle
admits barely six thousand survivors from a force which had set out with more than ten thousand fighting-men, of whom some number are said both by Russian and Byzantine sources to have been Varangian mercenaries. If so, then this was to be the last occasion on which Jaroslav is known to have employed the Varangians who had for so long been his principal source of mercenary recruitment, as they had for his father before him.

This year of 1043 can be seen as a landmark in the military history of the Rus – and on two counts. Not only does it effectively represent the end of the long-standing tradition of Varjazi mercenaries serving as the sword-arm of Russian princes, but it also marks the end of an era in Russo-Byzantine relations because Jaroslav's venture into the Bosporus was the last of a long history of Russian assaults on Tsargrad, of which the first is said to have been launched by Oleg, a kinsman of the founding dynast Rurik, in 860. Yet the question remains as to why Jaroslav made the attempt in the first place. His motive is said by the Byzantine sources to have been the death of a Rus merchant – ‘a barbarian nobleman' according to Psellus – in a market brawl in Constantinople, which would seem to have been a mere pretext for an invasion which had been at least two years in the planning, even though Cedrenus tells of a demand for compensation in the sum of 3lb weight in gold for every man in the Russian fleet. Psellus, on the other hand, notices at least one Russian ship laden with a ‘rampart', presumably meaning some structure intended for assault on city walls and yet those surrounding Constantinople had withstood such attempts by Persians, Avars and Arabs – as well as Rus – for more than half a millennium and it is almost inconceivable that Jaroslav actually intended the seizure of the city.

No less puzzling is the fact of the expedition being launched at the same time as Jaroslav's magnificent Hagia Sophia – the largest surviving Byzantine-style church of the eleventh century, even decorated with inscriptions in Greek rather than Church Slavonic, and unrivalled as the most visibly imposing feature of a far wider Russian cultural flowering – was under construction in Kiev. Interestingly, the authors of a highly respected recent history of early Russia have found no ‘necessary contradiction between the demonstratively Constantinopolitan style of Jaroslav's public patronage and his campaign against Constantinople in 1043', going on to suggest his entire cultural programme having been directed
against
Constantinople as an assertion of Kievan equality and a reaction against Byzantine ‘imperial pretensions'.
¹⁵
In fact, there is much in Psellus' account to support that explanation, especially when he refers to the expedition as the ‘rebellion' inspired by the furious rage harboured by a ‘barbarian race for the hegemony of the Romans'.

A closely similar view underlies the suggestion made by another historian, and one of pre-eminent authority, that ‘it is quite possible that Psellus was alluding to the traditional Byzantine claim to political sovereignty over Russia'.
¹⁶
Thus Jaroslav's enterprise of 1043 must be seen as an extravagant gesture in defiance of imperial influence north of the steppe, and its apparent contradictions as a reflection of the paradox attendant upon the man himself. The ‘Jaroslav the Wise' surrounding himself with ‘the sweetness of books' while ushering in the ‘Golden Age of Kiev' was the same Jaroslav Vladimirovich who had succeeded his father, ‘Vladimir the Saint', as supreme ruler of the Rus only after two decades of bitter internecine warfare which had left all but one of his brothers dead – usually in violent circumstances – and the one survivor consigned to incarceration. His first importance in these pages, though, lies in his far-reaching influence on a future king of Norway, because there will be a number of occasions throughout the course of Harald's reign when the man called
Jarisleif
by the saga-makers can be recognised as his principal exemplar in the art and practice of kingship.

It is unfortunate, then, that the saga record preserves so little detail of the three years Harald spent in Russia before making his return to Scandinavia. Snorri Sturluson records the marriage to the princess Elizaveta, of course, but he would seem to know nothing else of his activities through this period other than his gathering together all the gold and treasure he had sent ahead from Byzantium into the celebrated hoard ‘greater than had ever been seen in the north in one man's possession'. Snorri makes so many references to Harald's treasury that his claims cannot have been without a substantial core of truth – especially when they have been supported by archaeological evidence of coin finds in Scandinavia – and yet it is still curious that the
Morkinskinna
or
Fagrskinna
versions of the saga have nothing to say on the subject.

While considering the saga accounts of Harald in Russia, it should be noted that they all identify Jaroslav's capital as
Holmgarð
– by which, of course, is meant Novgorod and it is true that Novgorod had formerly been his preferred power base, even after the agreement with his brother Mstislav had granted him Kiev. On (or even shortly before) Mstislav's death and most evidently after his own decisive defeat of the Pecheneg siege in 1036, Jaroslav moved to establish Kiev as his new capital. Thus it would have been to Kiev rather than Novgorod that Harald had sent his profits from the east into Jaroslav's safe-keeping and in the orbit of the Kievan court that he would have spent the greater part of his stay in Russia after his return from Constantinople.