Hasting and his men immediately started running through the streets, waving their swords around willy-nilly and screaming about how they’d just captured Rome, but it turned out they were getting a little overexcited—because oops, guess what, this wasn’t Rome. It was just some one-horse Italian town called Luna that nobody outside Italy had ever heard of before. When Hasting figured this out, he got so mad that he ordered the entire population either killed or enslaved. Then he sacked the Italian towns of Pisa, Arno, and Fiesole and wrote some angry poetry before heading off to the eastern Mediterranean, possibly making it as far as Alexandria, Egypt.
Content with their adventures, Hasting and Bjorn Ironside finally headed back to Denmark in 861, their sixty ships completely loaded up with two years’ worth of the plundered riches of the Mediterranean.
When they reached the Strait of Gibraltar, they were met with a rude surprise: a full-scale Muslim war fleet that had been built specifically for the purpose of making the Vikings wish they’d never seen a mosque before.
With nowhere to run, Hasting and Bjorn Ironside attacked, charging their ships into the Muslim fleet. Viking longships didn’t have any weapons, so the Viking style of naval combat was to crash into the enemy vessel, tie the ships together, then send all the warriors running onto the enemy’s boat to kill everyone they could catch.
Unfortunately for the Vikings, the Muslims never let them get that far. They’d developed a secret weapon—the flamethrower.
Adapted from a weapon invented by the Byzantines (who possibly got it from China), the Muslim flamethrower was a heavy metal tube filled with flammable liquid that was hand-cranked like a Super Soaker—except instead of water, it shot a burning stream of flaming oil that stuck to anything it touched.
Of the sixty ships in Hasting’s fleet, only twenty made it through the wall of fire-spewing Muslim warships. On the way home, upset about their defeat and looking for something to vent their Viking rage on, the Norsemen attacked the Spanish town of Pamplona, captured the king of Navarre (a region in northern Spain), and ransomed him for seventy thousand gold coins. The Scandinavians would not attempt another expedition to Spain for four hundred years.
This adventure, however, was an incredible success. When Hasting and Bjorn Ironside returned home, they were greeted as heroes, and every man in their crew became known as one of the bravest warriors the Viking world had ever seen. Tales of their adventures would be told among skalds for centuries, and their daring raid deep into unknown waters would truly be one of the most amazing adventures of the Viking Age.
Hasting would continue to wreak havoc in Europe, like the time in 869 when he attacked Brittany, the land in the northwest of France, and the people there offered him five hundred cows if he promised to leave them alone. He and Bjorn both also show up in England later on—Bjorn as part of a force that includes his brother Ivar the Boneless in 865, and Hasting with a group that faces off against Alfred the Great in 892—but I’ll cover both those tales a little later.
KNOW YOUR VIKINGS
NAME:
Hasting
RANK:
Viking war chief
RELIGION:
Pagan
BORN:
Denmark, possibly around 820
DIED:
Unknown; disappears from history after 896
AREAS OF OPERATION:
England, France, Spain, North Africa, Italy
NOTEWORTHY:
One of the most successful and ferocious war leaders in Viking history; led his men as far as Italy in his quest for plunder