by John Marsden
That particular estimate of timing is fortuitous here, because it would also have been in August when imperial authority passed to the new emperor Constantine Monomachus and so it would have been to him that Harald brought his request for leave of departure. In the event, of course, it was refused – and for good reason in the light of subsequent developments – but Harald’s own reason for departure was of the greatest urgency. Even in August, there was little enough time left to prepare for the crossing of the Black Sea and long journey up the Dnieper back to Kiev, which was indeed Harald’s intended destination.
Snorri tells how Harald and a select company of his comrades took two of the Varangian galleys and rowed them out until they came to the iron chains slung across the entrance to the harbour. On approaching this obstacle, the oarsmen were commanded to pull with all strength while others of the crew, heavy-laden with their gear, were ordered to the stern of the ships as they ran up to the chains. At which point, as the craft lost momentum to hang over the chain barrier, the crewmen were ordered back to the bows, their weight tilting Harald’s galley forward into a slide down from the chain and into open water. The same tactic was followed by those aboard the other galley, but without the same success because their keel stuck fast on the chain and the ship broke its back, allowing only some of its crew to be pulled to safety aboard Harald’s galley while others were lost beneath the waves.
Thus Snorri tells of Harald’s escape from Constantinople with no lesser authorities than Blöndal and Benedikz pronouncing the story ‘in all probability . . . correct in its essentials’. That credibility is only fractionally defrayed by the inclusion of ‘a silly, romantic fable’ dragging the aforementioned ‘Maria’ into the story when she is forcibly abducted, taken aboard one of the galleys and rowed out into the Black Sea before being set ashore with a retinue who were to escort her back to Zoe as proof of Harald’s ability to do just as he chose.12 When that unlikely element is set aside, the technical detail is certainly unusually convincing when compared with that found in many of the anecdotes included in Snorri’s saga, as also is the specific reference to Harald’s galley sailing ‘north to Ellipalt’ (identified as a lagoon in the mouth of the Dnieper) and on from there ‘through the eastern realm’ (meaning Russia). There certainly was a great iron chain supported on rafts across the Golden Horn (and another across the Bosporus, but that is not known to have been in use until a century after Harald’s departure) floated out through the hours of darkness to provide a defence for the Harbour of Neorion where the imperial fleet was berthed beside its arsenal and store-houses, while the Varangian galleys were moored by the Tower of St Eugenius which also secured the southern end of the chain across the Golden Horn.
It should be said that at least one authority has suggested this episode as a ‘borrowed tale’ akin to the siege stories (a similar escape from the harbour at Syracuse being known from Roman times), but the authenticity of the saga account is too well supported for such doubt. Not only does the Advice confirm Harald’s departure from Constantinople by stealth, but Snorri illustrates that stealth with detail so convincing as to indicate his original source having been the first-hand recollection of Halldor Snorrason who was certainly aboard the galley which brought Harald to Kiev on this first passage of his long journey home to the northlands.
Russia, 1042–1045
It was while on voyage up the Dnieper that Harald is believed to have composed sixteen strophes of verse recalling his Varangian exploits, each one ending with the same refrain: ‘Yet the bracelet-goddess in Gardar still refuses me’.13 Although most of these Gamanvísur have long since been lost, Snorri Sturluson does preserve one complete strophe which is quoted in his Harald’s saga by way of conclusion to his account of the escape from Constantinople – and with a note identifying ‘Ellisif, the daughter of King Jarisleif in Holmgarð’ as the ‘goddess in Gardar’ to whom all this poetry was addressed.
Whether or not these verses really were composed aboard ship – as they may well have been when they were evidently intended for presentation to the princess he was to marry shortly after his arrival at the Russian court – the lines preserved in the saga represent a fragment of immediately contemporary evidence containing more than one point of interest. First of all, they effectively discredit the earlier saga claim for his marital ambitions regarding the (presumably fictional) ‘Maria’, and also carry a curious echo of his revered half-brother Olaf, whose one recorded attempt at the skaldic art comprised similarly intended verses written for Ingigerd, the Swedish princess who was later to become the bride of Jaroslav of Kiev and the mother of his daughter, the Elizaveta known in the sagas, and presumably also to Harald, by her Norse name-form of Ellisif.
Elizaveta had been little more than a child, of course, when Harald set out for Byzantium eight years earlier and the marriage of any daughter of a Russian Grand Prince to a mere Varangian mercenary would have been virtually unthinkable anyway, but now an eighteen-year-old Kievan princess would represent an eminently suitable prospective wife for a wealthy Scandinavian prince whose ambition was turning towards kingship in the northlands. Just such a possibility may have been long in Jaroslav’s mind, because he was in the habit of arranging politically strategic marriages for his offspring. His younger son Vsevolod was to be wed to a daughter of the Byzantine Monomachus family, while Elizaveta’s two sisters made still more impressive marriages when they became the queens of Hungary and France. If Jaroslav had already recognised Harald’s potential as a warrior king and suspected – or actually known – something of his ultimate ambition while he was still in Constantinople, it is not at all unlikely that the prospect of so prestigious a bride might have been offered to lure him back to Russia. All of which might be perfectly plausible and yet still does not explain why Harald was so anxious to leave imperial service or why he should have been refused permission to do so.
The homesickness implied in Snorri’s claim that Harald was eager to see Norway again hardly corresponds to the apparent urgency of the situation and the further claim for Harald ‘having heard’ of his nephew Magnus adding the sovereignty over Denmark to his kingship in Norway clearly defies credibility. Magnus had remained in Russia while his father set out on the journey back to Norway which was to bring him to his death in battle at Stiklestad. Thereafter, the young prince stayed at Jaroslav’s court until brought back to Norway as his father’s successor in response to popular demand shortly before the death of Cnut in 1035. On the death of Cnut’s son Hardacnut some seven years later, ‘Magnus the Good’ extended his sovereignty to Denmark, once again by apparent popular acclaim, and yet Hardacnut died in England – where he was buried at Winchester on 8 June 1042 – so it is scarcely possible that news of Magnus’ succession as king of Denmark could have reached Constantinople until very much later in that year, by which time Harald had already made his escape to Kiev. The factor of most ominous significance in the sphere of Russo-Byzantine affairs at just that time is nowhere mentioned in the sagas and yet could only have had its own crucial bearing on Harald’s situation because, by the spring of 1042, Jaroslav was already advanced in building the warfleet with which he was planning to launch an expedition against Constantinople in the following year.
According to Michael Psellus, Byzantine military intelligence would seem to have known something of these suspicious developments in Kiev even while Michael IV was still alive, although the brief but disruptive reign of his successor and the cataclysm surrounding his deposition must have proved a serious distraction from the forward planning of imperial defence policy. Even so, there is every likelihood that anxious fears of impending Russian hostilities lay behind his successor emperor Constantine’s refusal of permission for Harald to leave Constantinople, and especially so when he would surely make his way directly to Kiev. To allow a widely experienced officer of the Varangian Guard to share his inside knowledge of the deployment and weaknesses of Byzantine forces with a likely aggressor would have been incautious to the point o
f irresponsibility, so the emperor’s response to Harald’s request for leave cannot be considered either unreasonable or unjust. In fact, it was particularly astute because Harald must have maintained contact with Jaroslav throughout almost all his years in imperial service if – as the saga claims – he had been sending his plunder ‘in the care of trusted men to Holmgarð’ and into the Grand Prince’s safe-keeping. Such ‘trusted men’ would have been accomplished in evading the scrutiny of Byzantine officialdom – not least when the export of gold and currency from Byzantium was forbidden – and thus equally qualified for service as trustworthy message-bearers.
So too, it would surely have been similarly ‘trusted men’ arriving in Constantinople with the annual trading fleet in the summer of 1042 who brought Harald the tidings which called him back to Russia, and the most likely reason for that urgent summons would have been Jaroslav’s requirement for detailed military intelligence to guide his planning of the intended assault on Tsargrad (as Miklagarð was called by the Rus). All historical opinion is agreed that Harald was gone from Constantinople by the time the Russian expeditionary force appeared in the Bosporus (presumably the later spring or early summer of 1043), so his date of departure is usually placed between the second half of 1042 and the earlier months of the following year – and yet, when other salient factors are brought into consideration, the date of his return to Russia might be fixed more precisely still. Not least among those factors is another threat which was about to be presented to the new emperor, and this one posed in the formidable form of Georgios Maniakes.
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 Jarosl
av’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.
