20

WILDFIRE

Why is it no one trusts the eunuch?

—VARYS

Rome did not die. In the fifth century, while the West was overrun by Lombards, Vandals, Goths, Franks, and Saxons, in the East the Empire and people survived and thrived, and would continue for another thousand years, in a new city that was for many centuries the beating heart of Christendom. Its magnicifent churches would marvel blond-haired barbarians from the north, its greatest jewel being the Hagia Sophia. It is said that envoys of the Grand Prince of Kiev, upon entering the basilica, were moved to tears and could not tell whether they were on heaven or earth. Constantinople was the greatest city that was or ever will be.

Sick of the corruption in Rome, in the early fourth century the Emperor Constantine had sought a new capital. He chose a spot close to the Black Sea on the site of the old fishing village of Byzantium, founded in 658 BC by a semi-mythical Byzas and colonists from Megara, thirty miles west of Athens. The city was in a prime location, controlling the Bosporus waterway that led from the Black Sea to the Aegean, but it had never been able to grow because of the lack of available fresh water. Roman engineering was able to solve that problem and it grew to become the largest city in the world, initially called New Rome, but inevitably better known after its founder. At one point it would be home to more than a million people.

The city Constantine built was laid out “in a grid of colonnaded streets, flanked by public buildings with elegant columns, great squares, gardens and triumphal arches.”1 The streets were lined with statues and monuments from around the classical world, “a city of marble and porphyry, beaten gold and brilliant mosaics,” and gigantic in comparison to anything in the west.² It had imperial palaces and churches “more numerous than days of the year,” westerners observed, calling it “the city of the world’s desire.”³

The Queen of Cities had street lighting, sewers, drainage, hospitals, “orphanages, public baths, aqueducts, huge water cisterns, libraries and luxury shops,” as well as seven palaces, among them the Triconchus roofed in gold.4 It was the crossroads of Europe and Asia, between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Bosphorus bringing icy winds down from Russian steppes, clouding the city in winter with fog and snow. As Pierre Gilles, a French traveler of the fifteenth century, wrote of Constantinople: “with one key it opens and closes two worlds, two seas.”⁵

Straddling Asia and Europe, it was the finest city the world had ever seen, but its position made it vulnerable to attack from numerous nomadic tribes, among them the Huns, Goths, Slavs, Gepids, Tartars, Avars, Turkic Bulgars, and the Pechenegs. They came down from the steppes of Asia, the forests of Russia, the Balkan mountains and the plains of Hungary. In 626, the city was attacked by Avars from the north while the Persians stormed the frontiers of the east; the Bulgars, another Turkic tribe, mounted sieges in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries; then there was Prince Igor the Russian, who came in 941, leaving a trail of devastation.

It was also engaged, in the seventh century, in a seemingly never-ending conflict with the Persian Empire. And almost unseen, a new threat emerged from the south, a nomadic tribe who emerged out of the desert with devastating momentum. The Arabs, united by a new religion brought to them by the prophet Muhammad, swiftly overran the ancient cities of Damascus, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, and even mighty Persia. In line with prophecy, they now had their sights on the mightiest of jewels—Constantinople. From 672, Arab ships secured the coast of Asia Minor and two years later they launched their attack on the Queen of Cities; against the onslaught of the most successful conquerors in history, its cause looked hopeless.

THE GREATEST CITY THAT EVER WAS OR WILL BE

Constantinople is obviously very similar to Qarth, one of the world’s great ports and filled with rich merchants trading in silks, spices, and other exotic goods from further east.⁶ Qarth’s harbor was “a riot of color and clamour and strange smells. Winesinks, warehouses, and gaming dens lined the streets, cheek by jowl with cheap brothels and temples of peculiar gods. Cutpurses, cutthroats, Spellsellers, and moneychangers mingled with every crowd. The waterfront was one great marketplace.”⁷ In the show it looks like Petra, the desert city in Jordan, but in every other way it resembles Constantinople,⁸ including its position on the Straits of Qarth connecting the Summer and Jade Seas.

Qarth’s Spice King is very wealthy, despite his grandfather being only a humble pepper salesman, and in real life spices were extremely lucrative in the Mediterranean and silk road trade between Europe, the Near East, and China. The Spice King is part of the Thirteen, a sort of city elite made up of traders; another member, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, is a merchant prince and also fantastically rich, owning eighty-four ships; he allows Daenerys to stay at his absurdly enormous palace, which makes Magister Illyrio’s manse in Pentos resemble “a swineherd’s hove,” and has gardens “full of fragrant lavender and mint, a marble bathing pool stocked with tiny golden fish, a scrying tower and warlock’s maze” and floors made of green marble and walls drapped with silk.9 While she is there he gives her perfume, monkeys, ancient scrolls from Valryia, a snake, a litter for her to be carried in, and two bullocks to pull it, as well as a thousand toy knights made of “jade and beryl and onyx and tourmaline, of amber and opal and amethyst,” covered with shining armor made of gold and silver. The point is that Qarth is a very, very rich place.

As the odd-looking warlock Pyat Pree says to Daenerys: “Qarth is the greatest city that ever was or ever will be. It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison.”¹⁰

Compare this with Fulcher of Chartres, a Frenchman who came to visit Constantinople in the eleventh century, and said:

O what a splendid city, how stately, how fair, how many monasteries therein, how many palaces raised by sheer labour in its broadways and streets, how many works of art, marvellous to behold: it would be wearisome to tell of the abundance of all good things; of gold and silver, garments of manifold fashion and such sacred relics. Ships are at all times putting in at this port, so that there is nothing that men want that is not brought hither.¹¹

It was a golden metropolis that, in the words of historian of John Julius Norwich, conjured in the western mind “visions of gold and malachite and porphyry, of stately and solemn ceremonial, of brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, of sumptuous mosaics dimly glowing through halls cloudy with incense.”¹²

Since the early medieval period Byzantium inspired a lurid fascination among jealous, impoverished Latin Christians. Nothing in their world could compete with the Emperor Theophilius’s Triconchose, or Triple Shell, supported on pillars of porphyry and with huge slabs of colourful marble. Its silver doors opened to reveal a semi-circiular hall, lined with marble, in which the fountains flowed with wine. To the north was the Hall of the Pearl, “its white marble floor richly ornamented with mosaic, its roof resting on eight rose-pink marble columns.”13

Close to this was the Kamiles, “in which six columns of green Thessalian marble led the eye up to a field of mosaics depicting a fruit harvest and on to a roof glittering with gold.”¹⁴ To the north was the Palace of the Magnaura, built by Constantine, and where Theophilus installed mechanical birds by the imperial throne, around which were lions built of gold; at a given signal the birds would burst into song and the lions roar, after which a golden organ would sound.

In the center of Constantinople there stood the “Million,” marking the foundation of the city and consisting of four triumphal arches forming a square and supporting a rounded dome, above which stood a piece of the True Cross on which Jesus died.¹⁵ The equally grand Serpent Column was brought by Constantine from Delphi where it had been erected in the Temple of Apollo by thirty-one Greek cities in gratitude for victory against the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC.

More important than all of New Rome’s palaces were its walls, built of concrete, brick, and locally-quarried limestone. The first line was constructed in 413 under the Emperor Theodosius and was enough to put off Attila the Hun, “the scourge of God,” when he attacked the city in 447. That year the wall collapsed after a severe earthquake while Attila was in nearby Thrace, and sixteen thousand of the city’s citizens rebuilt the structure in record time, adding an outer wall with a series of towers and a brick-lined moat, the fosse. During its height the city was also protected by 192 towers, part of a defensive system that comprised five zones, each one a hundred feet high and two hundred feet apart, with sentinels scanning the horizon in all directions. The towers had chambers with siege engines capable of throwing rocks and the city’s infamous secret weapon, Greek Fire.

No army arriving from the land could break the city walls, and many had tried. The Avars had brought their sophisticated stone-throwing machines. The Bulgar khan Krum tried performing human sacrifices to aide his hoped-for conquest, all to no avail. Even Rome’s enemies suspected that God protected the city, and until the catastrophe of 1204, the walls were never scaled.

With its vast wealth, its palaces, its technology, and trade, the Great City awed a Latin world which had been plunged into darkness. It also disgusted them, becoming symbolic of duplicity; Italian bishop Liudprand of Cremona described Constantinople as “a city full of lies, tricks, perjury and greed, a city rapacious, avaricious and vainglorious.”16 For people from small towns and villages, such a large city with its court tensions and intrigues must have seemed poisonous—“Smoke, sweat, and shit. If you have a good nose you can smell the treachery too.”¹⁷ And perhaps nothing puzzled them more than its eunuchs.

A MAN MAY HAVE WITS, OR A BIT OF MEAT BETWEEN HIS LEGS, BUT NOT BOTH

Constantine had only established himself as undisputed ruler after having two rivals, Licinius and Martianus, killed, rather setting the tone for court politics in the city. Constantine also had his son Crispus arrested and then put to death by slow poison; a few days later he had his second wife Fausta suffocated by steaming in the bath-house, or calidaroim.¹⁸ Possibly she had falsely accused her stepson of trying to seduce her and when her husband realized the truth of her lies had her killed too; alternatively Crispus may have plotted the emperor’s overthrow. Afterwards both their names were eradicated from all records and inscriptions, a common Roman practice called the Damnatio memoriae, or “condemnation of memory.”

Constantine had legalized Christianity and eventually installed it as the official religion before converting on his deathbed when he could be fairly certain he wasn’t going to be killing anyone else. He planned his own modest grave to be built alongside twelve sarcophagi, sacred pillars to represent the twelve Apostles, in the center of which would be his. Constantine, not a man lacking in self-confidence, had even adopted the title “Equal of the Apostles,” which later emperors were to use.

He was succeeded by his second son Constantius, who lost little time in removing his rivals—first inventing a rumor that a scrap of parchment had been found in Constantine’s fist accusing his two half-brothers of poisoning him. They were soon brutally murdered, along with another leading figure, Julius Constantius, who was butchered alongside his eldest son, and likewise another rival, Delmatiuys, with both his sons.

This became a running theme throughout the empire, with figures such as Emperor Zeno, who died before long “by homosexual excesses and venereal disease.”¹⁹ Zeno became obsessed with a prophecy that he would be overthrown by one of the thirty picked officials in his entourage, and so for no particular reason picked on one, Pelagius, a popular figure who was immediately arrested and strangled.*

Eunuchs were often at the forefront of these court feuds. Emperor Arcadius, ruling from 395 to 408, was a weak figure dominated by a courtier called Rufinus, who wished to marry his daughter to the emperor. However, he had a rival in the “Superintendent of the Sacred Bedchamber” (Praepositus Sacre Cubiculi), an elderly eunuch named Eutropius.

Eutropius had an egg-bald head and wrinkled yellow face, was not an impressive figure to look at, and had worked first as a male prostitute and then pimped out younger boys for powerful officials, before entering the Imperial Household. But “he was intelligent, unscrupulous and ambitious; he too wished to control the Emperor, and to that end he was determined to thwart his enemy in every way he could.”²⁰ To stop his rival, Eutropius had arranged an imperial marriage between Arcadius and a Frankish girl called Eudoxia.

“Beautiful, worldly and ambitious,” Eudoxia was rumored to have had enjoyed a number of lovers, one of whom may have been the father of her son, the Emperor Theodosius. She owed her position to the eunuch but had grown jealous of his influence over her husband and after four years, her marriage with Arcadius had descended into “mutual loathing.” In 399, Eutropius ended up consul, much to the outrage of the aristocracy who could not bear to see the prestigious title taken by a former male prostitute and eunuch. Later that year his enemies engineered his arrest and he was exiled to Cyprus and then beheaded.

However, his rival Rufinus ended up cut down by his own troops, his body mutilated beyond recognition and his head put on a stick and paraded through the streets. The men who once fought for him chopped off his right hand and walked around the city, having it open and shut to passers-by, calling out “Give to the insatiable.”

Constantinople was not the only city to employ eunuchs, who also appear at the courts of ancient Egypt, China, Japan, and the Umayyad Caliphate. Back in 210 BC, a eunuch called Zhao Gao had ruthlessly taken over the Chinese court after the death of the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. Zhao Gao forged documents suggesting the old man had wished for all of Gao’s court rivals to commit ritual suicide, before maneuvring to have his own protégée installed as emperor, and then later having him assassinated. He was eventually murdered, too, rather inevitably. In ancient Greece a eunuch called Hermias had become tyrant of Assos, off the coast of Turkey, and offered his sister Pythias’s hand in marriage to the philosopher Aristotle; he accepted, and they lived happily ever.

The Romans had used castration clamps, with which priests of the goddess Cybele would remove their own testicles in her honor. Some early Christians had gone in for self-mutilation, including the third century scholar and ascetic Origen, although he later regretted it—rather understandably. The Church was not keen and the council of Nicaea in 325 banned self-castration, although the Greek Orthodox church allowed castrated men to become priests and some rose high.

Eunuchs were highly prized, so that when in 949 the Italian king Berengar sent his emissary Liutprand to Byzantium, the latter brought four young eunuchs as a gift to the emperor, along with two silver gilt cauldrons and nine high quality armored breasplates. At the start of the tenth century an embassy from Tuscany to Baghdad brought the caliph some twenty Salvic eunuchs alongside beautiful slave girls, swords, shields and hunting dogs.21

Merchants brought slave boys and girls from across Europe to Constantinople and carried out castration on arrival. One Arabic author advised that if you took Slavic twins and castrated one he would become more skilful and “more lively in intelligence and conversation” than his brother, an interesting science experiment no longer available to academics today. Castration was belived to be good for the “Slavic mind” but supposedly had the opposite effect on black Africans. The Arabic word for eunuch—siqlabi—comes from their ethnic term for Slavs—saqalibi.²²

The minority of eunuchs who had lost both testicles and penis, the carzimasia, were even more valuable, since the operation was very dangerous; the boy would only survive if covered with black pitch or hot sand immediately to cauterize the wound and stem the bleeding.

Castration of both kinds is common in Essos, and almost unknown in Westeros where, like in western Europe, the practice was considered immoral. Eunuchs were exotic, and carry a particular image in the modern mind, in the words of one historian “invariably a fat, sly, lazy, scheming, untrustworthy, cowardly, epicene and unmanly monstrosity”, like Varys. But in fact “in Byzantine days, they often proved themselves to be highly intelligent, brave, hard working, and as open and honest as any other human being.”23 Also like Varys, a eunuch, without family to promote, was far more dedicated to the state itself rather than individual faction of family, and his position could not become hereditary. Indeed, eight official positions in Constantinople were reserved for eunuchs, one of which was the parakoimomenos, a highly-trusted official who slept across the door of the emperor’s bedchamber.²⁴

Eunuchs could become very powerful and influential, employed to guard the empress, and also as high officials in the state; Justinian II’s tax-collectors included Stephen of Persia, “a huge and hideous eunuch never seen without a whip in his hand.” They even became generals and high-ranking statesmen. With eunuchs so prized, many families willingly castrated a younger son in order to speed his career in the imperial service—although castration was also carried out as a punishment on the sons of disgraced emperors or rebels.

In the Known World, eunuchs comprise the most powerful of armies, the Unsullied, but in reality, they didn’t make very effective fighters because of reduced testosterone, the hormone responsible for aggression in male mammals—something understood in medieval times, even if the exact medical reasons were unknown. Eunuchs could lead armies, however, among them perhaps the most celebrated of all Byzantine generals, Narses (478–573), who fought the Goths in Italy and was said to be good at strategy “for a eunuch.” In fairness he did conquer Rome, although this was because he was good at logistics and administration, had self-discipline, and also didn’t drink to self-destruction, as with many army leaders.

Among the most famous of Chinese admirals, the fifteenth-century Zheng He was a eunuch (and, incidentally, a Muslim); and in the tenth century the castrated Peter Phokas headed the Byzantine imperial guard under Emperor Nikephoros II. Phokas was possessed of almost superhuman strength, and when challenged to single combat threw a lance at the Russian leader, splitting his body in two.

A WALL OF RED-HOT STEEL, BLAZING WOOD, AND SWIRLING GREEN FLAME

And so, in 677, after three years of grueling siege, it appeared that the prophecy would be proven true and the Arabs would take Rûm (Rome), as they called the Byzantine capital. The Saracen ships brought heavy siege engines and huge catapults to break the walls, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers who had experienced only victory in their rapid conquest of the Near East. But then, as the enemy ships closed in on the city, the Romans unleashed their secret weapon, a hellish stream of liquid fire. The flames landed on the water’s surface between the Arab ships, where to their horror they appeared to set fire to the sea. More flames shot out from the Roman towers, fire that seemed to shoot horizontally, and with the blaze came the deafening, terrifying noise, louder than thunder, and the smoke and gas. All around them the Arabs in their ships saw an inferno on the surface. The burning liquid shooting at them did not just engulf the water; it stuck to their ships, their masts and hulls, the wood burning like tinder and the flesh with it. The terrified crews were burned alive, screams filling the air as thousands died. The followers of the caliph Yazid had met a terrible fate, helpless against this bizarre, terrifying weapon, unlike anything they’d ever seen.

The Arabs had been introduced to Greek Fire.

Perhaps the most dangerous weapon in Westeros is wildfire, a flammable substance impervious to water that may have been developed by the Targaryens. It is used with devastating effect at the Battle of Blackwater, where thousands of Stannis’s troops die, Davos recalling: “A flash of green caught his eye, ahead and off to port, and a nest of writhing emerald serpents rose burning and hissing from the stern of Queen Alysanne.”25

The real wildfire would have been equally terrifying, and bizarre, and so effective it remained a state secret. “Greek Fire” was developed in 672 by chemists in Constantinople, a sort of Guild of Pyromancers, but it was probably originally brought to them by a Greek refugee from the Muslim invasion by the name of Kallinikos. He came from Syria with “a technique for projecting liquid fire through siphons,” using the black petroleum found throughout the Near East, which is refered to as far as back as the fifth century BC, although its raw power was not realized until the modern age.

The core ingredient was crude oil from the Black Sea, mixed with wood resin, which made it adhersive. The Byzantines had found a way to heat this compound in sealed bronze containers, pressurizing it and then releasing the liquid through a nozzle and igniting it. It took great skill and engineering, especially onboard wooden boats, but then the Byzantines were Romans after all.

The French chronicler Jean de Joinville described facing Greek fire when it was used against Crusaders in 1249:

From the front as it darted towards us it appeared as large as a barrel of verjuice [highly acidic juice from unripe grapes], and the tail of fire that streamed behind it was as long as the shaft of a great lance. The noise it made in coming was like that of a thunderbolt falling from the skies; it seemed like a dragon flying through the air. The light this huge, flaming mass shed all around it was so bright that you could see right through the camp as clearly as if it were day.26

The weapon was brought aboard hundreds of flame-throwing dromons, or war vessels, either sprayed using a pump or put in boxes and catapulted at the enemy; unmanned fireboats were also used, if the wind was right.²⁷ In 2006, academic John Haldon published an account of an attempt to recreate it, photographs showing heated liquid coming from a narrow tube “with a loud roaring noise and a thick cloud of black smoke.”²⁸ With a reconstructed siphon and oil from Crimea, flame was projected ten to fifteen meters and was “so intense that in a few seconds it completely burned a target boat.”

After getting battered by Greek fire, the Arabs fell victim to a freak autumn storm on their return home. Not to be put off, they attacked again in 717, and this time did no better. In 814, the Bulgars were poised to attack Constantinople after defeating a Byzantine army, their leader Krum having had the Emperor Nicephorus’s body exposed naked on a stake, before turning his skull into a drinking cup. As the Bulgar army approached, rumors spread throughout the city of the weapons these barbarians would bring, of gigantic battering rams. However, on April 13, Holy Thursday, as he was about to attack, Krum had a sudden seizure, blood poured out from his mouth, nose, and ears, and he dropped dead.

In the summer of 860, the people of the city endured another terrifying ordeal; on June 18, soon after the emperor had led a force on campaign against the Saracens, a fleet arrived from the Black Sea at the mouth of the Bospherous and headed toward the city, burning monasteries and pillaging towns, before arriving and casting their anchors by the Golden Horn. No one had even seen these people before, and the Patriarch asked who these “fierce and savage” warriors were, “ravaging the suburbs, destroying everything . . . thrusting their swords through everything, taking pity on nothing, sparing nothing.”²⁹

They were the Rus, the Vikings of the east, who, carrying their longships across the Great European Plain and down to the Black Sea, had come to a city so large it barely seemed to be of this earth. Urgent messengers were sent to Emperor Michael to alert him, but by the time he arrived the Rus had left, which many attributed to the intercession of the Virgin and her robe which had been carried shoulders-high around the city walls. Others said the Patriarch dipped the robe in the sea and a tempest destroyed the Russian fleet. The more prosaic explanation is that, finding the walls too difficult for their primitive technology to break into, they just gave up to pillage elsewhere.

It was part of a great adventure for the Norsemen in the east; Scandinavians’ grave epitaphs back home in their runic alphabet boast of travels as far south as “Serkland,” the land of the Muslims (Saracens), and they traveled so far that a semi-permanent Viking colony may have even been established as far away as the Persian Gulf.30 They became a regular presence in the Queen of Cities, familiar but always feared. In Qarth, only a “few Dothraki” are permitted inside the city at one time, afraid of what large numbers might do; likewise, a maximum of fifty Rus were allowed into Constantinople at any one time in the tenth century. However, eventually they were incorporated into a guard for the emperor, called the Varangians, from the old Norse word for “pledged faith.” (The imperial palace itself was protected by the Vigla, or Watch, and among the highest positions in Constantinople was the droungarios tes Vigles, commander of the Watch.)³¹ Today in the Hagia Sophia, now a museum in Istanbul, one can see on the upper story graffiti left by these Vikings, the Norse name “Halfdan” being identifiable.

So the Byzantines had tamed the Rus, although at huge sacrifice to one individual. The barbarian leader, Vladimir, had in 988 arrived as part of a military treaty in which he would send a force of six thousand fully-equipped Varangians. In return, he asked for one thing only, Emperor Basil’s sister Anna, prized even more for being porphyrogenita, “born in the purple” (i.e. when her father was ruler). Vladimir already had four wives and eight hundred concubines and ruled a people beyond the borders of civilization. When told of her fate, the princess wept bitter tears, accusing her family of selling her into slavery, and yet a young princess had little choice if her brother required her to marry a savage, especially a savage with an army behind him. The marriage agreement was honored—otherwise their new friends might soon become enemies. Reluctantly she went to the boat that would take her to the Rus city of Cherson, and the six thousand troops returned to Emperor Basil. The prince of Kiev was baptized and the Rus, who might have turned to Islam, fatefully adopted Christianity. Vladimir, despite his hundreds of concubines, became a saint on account of his work promoting Christianity; his Byzantine bride helped to build a number of churches, although she never bore him a child.

Soon afterward, one of the most sordid figures in Byzantine history appears, the “strange and sinister figure of John the Orphantorophus,” a eunuch “who had risen, through his own intelligence and industry, from obscure and humble origins in Paphlagonia to be a highly influential member of the civil bureaucracy.”32 The eunuch had become director of the city’s principle orphanage, and had four younger brothers, of whom the two eldest were eunuchs too. They were money-changers and forgers, but despite this were also charming and handsome; the youngest, Michael, was in 1033 brought by his brother to meet the Emperor Romanos and his consort Zoe in formal audience where Zoe instantly fell in love, as his eunuch brother had planned. An affair began, which Romanos remained oblivious to, even after his sister had warned him.

By this stage, among the most famous of all Varangians had turned up, the exiled half-brother of King Olaf of Norway. Olaf the Fat had become part of English folklore after pulling down London Bridge in 1014, and later he returned home and won praise from the Church as a great Christian ruler despite relentless fornication. Olaf’s policy of Christianization, however, had been bitterly resisted by some noblemen and, in 1028, he was defeated and killed in battle by an alliance led by the Danish king Canute. The defeat put Olaf’s fifteen-year-old half-brother Harald in mortal danger; he had been seriously wounded, but after escaping in the cold had come to the home of a peasant couple who took him in. Hunted in his native home, he had fled east and followed the Viking route down the rivers of Russia to Constantinople.

Harald Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” as he was later known, grew into a 6’6” man-monster known as the Thunderbolt of the North. He was a brutal and enthusiastic fighter who took great pleasure in his acts of daring do, but was also an eccentric man who loved poetry almost as much as he loved fighting, which was a lot; he had one eyebrow higher than the other, blond hair, a long moustache, and huge hands and feet. (Likewise the Iron Born had a similar-sounding leader, Harwyn Hardhand, of whom it was said: “Tempered in the Disputed Lands, he proved to be as fierce afoot as he was at seat, routing every foe.”)³³

Harald became a noted warrior in Byzantium and there are many stories attached to his time there, and some of them may even be true. He battled with a lion in an arena after seducing a noblewoman, but heroically slew the animal, as he did with a giant serpent he encountered. He also left a trail of destruction across southern Italy fighting on behalf of the empire, an adventure he seemed to hugely enjoy.

Yet when Harald returned to court he was drawn into imperial intrigue. Zoe and her young lover Michael had begun to openly flaunt their adultery and soon her husband was found dead in the bath; indecently soon afterwards Michael was crowned emperor and the couple married that same day. And yet the new leader was cursed, and as his epilepsy grew more serious he withdrew into a monastery, refusing to see his wife. John the eunuch, unwilling to lose power, insisted that Zoe replace Michael IV with his nephew, Michael V, who she adopted as her son. It was not long before the two tired of each other, and in 1042 when the young emperor had his new “mother” banished from her court her supporters had him blinded, along with his surviving uncle Constantine. Harald, who had fallen out of favor with the young emperor, took both their eyes out.34

And yet the giant Viking soon found himself in trouble, for reasons that remain unclear, and was forced to flee. In the Battle of the Blackwater, Tyrion Lannister uses a giant chain to trap the fleet of Stannis, another historical tactic borrowed from the Byzantines. While Constantinople had depended on her walls, it was also protected by a great chain fixed across the Golden Horn that separated the city from the Genoan colony of Galata on the other side. Only one man is known to have broken the chain—Harald Hardrada, after breaking out of prison and taking Maria, a beautiful young relative of Zoe, who may or may not have been his lover.

Harald and a group of Varangians seized two galleys in the Golden Horn and sailed off determined to jump the chain, with Maria as their hostage. Sailing toward the chain, Harald ordered for the oarsmen to sail full speed while the crew ran to the back, tilting the ship up so that it leaped into the air, before quickly running forwards to lean it back. The Vikings sailed into the Black Sea and freed Maria on the banks of the Bospherus, to be safely escorted back to the Byzantine court; a second galley failed to repeat the trick and its men were lost.³⁵

With Canute and his sons now dead, Harald finally made it home, where he edged his brother Olaf’s son Magnus off the throne. But there was one last adventure waiting for Harald, for Magnus had long before made a pact with Canute’s son Hardicanute, king of England, that whoever died first would leave the other his kingdom. Canute was dead, Hardicanute was dead, and now Magnus was dead, but the deal, in Harald’s mind, was still binding, and England his by right. And then, at the beginning of 1066, King Edward was dead too—and so began the war of the three kings.

*Zeno was obsessed with an early form of backgammon and is best remembered for having once landed the most unlucky hand in history, which was recorded and reconstructed in the 19^th century.