Harald Hardrada (17 page)

Snorri's version of the story tells how Halldor himself was wounded in the fighting, suffering a deep gash to his face which left him marked with ‘an ugly scar for the rest of his life' and it seems very likely that his scar might have prompted a variety of tales explaining how it came to be inflicted, each one including his sharp retort to the king as its punch-line. None of which lends especial credibility to Snorri's story of the ‘Varangian games', which may even have been contrived for inclusion in the saga as a convenient opportunity to introduce the genuinely historical characters of Halldor and Ulf, both of them reliably identified as sons of prominent Icelandic families, into the narrative of his
Harald's saga
.

There is nowhere any indication of when these two remarkable men first joined Harald's retinue, although it is not impossible that they might have been among those Icelanders who fought in Olaf's army at Stiklestad and afterwards followed Harald to Russia and Byzantium. It is just as likely, though, that they were already employed in Byzantine mercenary service (possibly in company with their fellow-Icelander, Bolli Bollason, whose Varangian career is well-known from
Laxdæla saga
) when they joined Harald's troop, perhaps attracted by its reputation for profitable plundering or accepting personal invitations which might well have been offered to fighting-men of the outstanding quality described by Snorri. However and whenever they were first recruited into Harald's company, Halldor and Ulf evidently rose swiftly to become his principal lieutenants by the time of the Sicilian campaign, afterwards accompanying the rise and fall of his career in the Varangians of the City before returning with him to Scandinavia.

While Ulf spent the rest of his life in Norway where he was made a lenderman, and in Harald's service where he held the premier military post of king's marshal (or
stallari
), Halldor would seem to have settled uneasily into life at court and chose to go home to Iceland sometime around 1051, bearing with him all the tales of Varangian adventure which were to establish his reputation as a storyteller of outstanding authority. As the favourite son of a famous chieftain of Helgafell, Halldor makes appearances in a number of Icelandic sources, but the most impressive testimonial to his renown as a teller of tales is found in
Morkinskinna
, where the
Tale of the Story-wise Icelander
tells of a young man who came to King Harald in Norway where his storytelling kept the court enthralled through all twelve days of Yule. Harald himself was particularly impressed by the performance and so asked the young Icelander where he had learned the story he told. ‘It was my custom in Iceland to journey each summer to the
Althing
and it was there that I learned the story, piece by piece each year, from the telling of Halldor Snorrason.' ‘In that case,' said Harald, ‘it is little wonder that your knowledge is so excellent, and good fortune will attend you now.'

It should be said, of course, that Halldor's reminiscences are unlikely to have been preserved intact and uncorrupted through almost two hundred years of oral transmission, and even then that they represented only a small proportion of the Varangian lore – assuredly including many even taller tales – which found its way into Icelandic tradition and thus provided Snorri with his reservoir of source material. Consequently, Halldor is not necessarily to be blamed for those occasions when the saga's chronology becomes unhelpfully confused or when its aggrandising enthusiasm bursts the bounds of historical credibility. Nonetheless, such passages from the saga are still of interest when they might reflect something of the feelings of Varangians about their commanders, as appears to be the case in Snorri's chapter which contrasts Harald with Georgios Maniakes in the context of a campaign only loosely identified and yet bearing unmistakable resemblance to aspects of the Sicilian invasion.

Snorri claims that Harald tried always to keep his own men out of the heat of battle when the forces were in action together and yet drove them fiercely against the enemy whenever they were engaged as a separate unit. Thus victories were won when Harald was in sole command and the troops acclaimed him as a better commander than Maniakes, who countered that the Varangians were not giving him their full support and responded to the criticism by ordering Harald to take his men off on their own while he himself remained in command of the rest of the army. When Harald did so, Snorri tells of his taking not only his Varangians, but also a contingent of ‘Latin-men', by which must be meant Norman mercenaries, and this reference alone would associate the story with the Sicilian campaign where Byzantine forces did include a Norman contingent, although Snorri's narrative places it earlier, presumably in Asia Minor, and probably conflates tales told of more than one theatre of operations.

Of key significance in Snorri's account is the passage telling of ambitious young soldiers leaving the main army to join Harald's troop when they learned of the greater booty being shared by the men under his command, because the most usual source of contention between Maniakes and his mercenaries in Sicily is known to have been the sharing of plunder. When disputes of this sort are set beside Maniakes' code of iron discipline, it is not difficult to imagine the sort of problems which would have been presented by a contingent of northmen under their own young officer, brimming over with self-confidence and mercenary avarice.

So too, the Normans – who had proudly aristocratic commanders of their own – are known to have clashed with the heavy-handed Georgios over battle-booty in the Sicilian campaign, but one thing of which Maniakes cannot be accused is failure in pursuit of victory. Within two years of campaigning in Sicily, he had reclaimed virtually all the island from a Saracen enemy possessed of superior numbers. The Byzantine army certainly included first-class fighting-men in its Norman and Varangian mercenaries – and likewise in the force of sturdy Armenians led by Katalokon Cecaumenus (who has been suggested as one possible candidate for authorship of the account of Harald in the
Advice
) – but others, such as the reluctant Longobard recruits from Apulia, were of lesser quality and so the elite units must have borne the heat and burden of the day in the fiercely fought battles which led to the defeat of the Saracen commander Abdallah at Traina in 1040.

The immediate aftermath of Traina heralded Maniakes' dramatic fall from imperial favour – and entirely as a consequence of his own fearsome temper. He was never going to be well-disposed towards the naval commander assigned to the Sicilian invasion, because the admiral Stephen had been a caulker in the shipyards of Constantinople until his brother-in-law the emperor Michael appointed him to the rank of
patricius
and to command of the fleet which brought Maniakes' army to the shores of Sicily. Having accomplished that duty, presumably to the best of his modest abilities, Stephen was later held personally responsible for allowing Abdallah to escape by ship to Tunis in the wake of the defeat at Traina. So explosive was Maniakes' rage at this oversight that he actually took a whip to the unfortunate admiral, provoking Stephen's bitter complaint to the emperor accompanied by allegations of treason on the part of the general, charges sufficiently serious to prompt the recall of Maniakes to the capital where he was to spend most of the next two years in prison.

Before his loss of command, Maniakes was to assert his arrogance of power over his subordinates with disastrous consequences, first causing affront by seizing a fine warhorse which had been chosen as his own prize by Arduin, commander of the Longobard contingent, and then by denying the Normans the full share of booty which they believed to be their due. As a result, the Norman mercenaries defected to join the latest rebellion brewing up among imperial subjects in the south of Italy, thus depriving the Byzantine forces of their best mercenary cavalry just as Maniakes was replaced in command by the scarcely comparable admiral Stephen. In the event, Stephen was dead within the year and replaced in his turn by an obscure eunuch known only as Basil who soon managed to lose almost all that had been won in Sicily, leaving Messina as the one remaining imperial possession on the island.

It does seem very likely that the defection of Norman mercenaries who felt themselves to have been short-changed by the overbearing Maniakes might have formed the subject of a story brought back to Iceland – quite possibly by Halldor – and thus found its way into Snorri's saga in the form of his reference to ‘Latin-men'. While there is good reason to believe the Varangians having similarly resented Maniakes, there is no question of Harald and his troop having followed the Normans, either in their defection or in their alliance with the Italian rebellion, because it is perfectly clear from the evidence of the skalds alone that when Harald and his troop were despatched to Italy they were fighting against the same Normans who had earlier been their comrades-in-arms in Sicily.

There had been trouble already in Byzantine Italy, where rebels had seized the town of Bari in 1038, and there was still greater trouble ahead through the three decades which it took the Normans to break the last imperial hold on the Italian mainland in 1071. In 1040, however, the empire was still prepared to put down any insurgency in its Italian provinces. Indeed, Bari was retaken in that same year just before a new rebellion broke out in Mottola where it claimed the lives of the catepan and other imperial officials before the rebel leader made his peace and submitted to the emperor. A newly appointed catepan arrived towards the end of the year with the support of a force of Varangians, some of whom must have been assigned to him from the army in Sicily because they included the troop commanded by Harald, who ‘led the march in the land of the Longobards' – according to the skald Thjodolf – when a separatist revolt in Apulia had Norman cavalry as its cutting-edge.

Norman mercenaries had first emerged in Italy in 1015, when a band of young pilgrims had been recruited to fight for the Longobards against imperial forces. When word of this new source of demand for fighting-men got back to Normandy, other young warriors looking for action and profit made their way south until a steady tide of Normans was flowing down into Italy. Eventually Norman mercenaries were also to be found in Byzantine forces – being available, as was ever the way of the professional, to fight for whichever paymaster might be recruiting – engaged against the Saracens in Sicily and Pechenegs in the Balkans.

Already in the later 1030s, the sons of Tancred de Hauteville, who himself had been just another knight in the service of the dukes of Normandy, can be recognised as the first representatives of a formidable Italo-Norman dynasty. William (called ‘Iron-arm') and his brother Drogo led the Norman contingent with Maniakes in Sicily in 1038, while their more famous brother – the afore-mentioned Robert called
Guiscard
, or ‘the crafty' – was to be appointed by the Pope to new dukedoms of Apulia and Calabria in 1059, as also of Sicily which he first invaded with his younger brother Roger in 1061 and which was finally wrested from the Saracens in 1072.

Only recently mercenaries in imperial service, these Normans now presented the most serious opposition facing Byzantine forces in Italy. It has been suggested that it was their highly effective development of the close-formation cavalry charge which gave the Normans the edge over the Byzantines, ‘who hated the solid lines of horsemen with levelled lances',
⁸
and this may well have brought them the victory over superior numbers of imperial troops in the two major battles fought in southern Italy in the spring of 1041. Varangians served with the Byzantine forces in both of these conflicts and are said by the Greek annalists to have suffered heavy losses first at Olivento in April and again in the second battle fought early in the following month at Montemaggiore, where a great part of the catepan's army was drowned in the full flood of the Ofanto river.

The skald Illugi tells of Harald's going early ‘to disturb the peace of the Frakkar', by whom can only be meant the Normans, and so it would seem likely that he and his troop would have been engaged in the fighting on at least one of these occasions. Nothing more is known of Harald's part in this Italian campaign, other than that he clearly came out of it alive and with full honour on the evidence of his subsequent promotion to the rank of
manglavites
. His was not the only contingent of Varangians serving in Italy, because others are mentioned by the annals when Harald is known to have been already on campaign with the emperor against the Bulgars, so it is not impossible that he and his troop may have been withdrawn to the capital before the more serious of the defeats inflicted on Byzantine forces in that spring.

Snorri himself has nothing to say of Harald in Bulgaria, because the solitary reference to that campaign found in his saga is a single phrase in a strophe from the skald Thjodolf quoted at the foot of its opening paragraph. Thjodolf's verse is principally concerned with the battle of Stiklestad, although set down many years after the event, and yet refers to Harald as
Bolgara brennir
or ‘burner of the Bulgars', thus supplying the only fragment of skaldic testimony to corroborate the eminently authoritative evidence of the
Advice
for his part in the emperor Michael's final suppression of the Bulgar rebellion in 1041.

An outline of the background might be helpful at this point, because there has been little reference to Bulgaro–Byzantine relations here since the Bulgarian tsar Samuel destroyed the emperor Basil's army at Trajan's Gate in the year before the foundation of the Varangian Guard. Basil had sworn to take his revenge on the Bulgars for that devastating defeat and, although it took him a full twenty-five years to do so, that vengeance was terrible indeed. Having rebuilt the Byzantine military into a war-machine capable of outfighting the Bulgars in their own rough Balkan terrain, Basil had already reclaimed most of the eastern extent of the peninsula for the empire by 1004. Ten years later, he defeated a Bulgar host in the narrow pass of Cimbalongus north of Serrae and earned himself enduring infamy after the battle when he put out the eyes of 15,000 prisoners, leaving one out of every hundred with the sight of a single eye so as to be able to lead their comrades home. When the tsar Samuel, already a sick man by that time, beheld the return of so many grievously mutilated warriors, he is said to have suffered an apoplexy and died a few days later, yet his people fought on for four more years until finally surrendering to Basil the Bulgar-slayer in 1018.