The Vikings did not only go west, towards England and North America. Many went east, up Russian rivers, and reached Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which the Norse called Miklagard, the Great City. There, some became the emperor’s soldiers.

The road of rivers

Emperor Constantine VII described, around 950, how the Rus, groups of Scandinavian origin who ruled the Slavic towns, travelled down the Dnieper to the Black Sea. They used boats hollowed from tree trunks and, at the rapids, came ashore and carried or dragged the boats overland. Constantine noted the names of the rapids in two languages, one of them of Norse origin.

In Russian tradition the route came to be called the road from the Varangians to the Greeks. Varangian comes from a Norse word linked to oath and service.

The emperor’s guard

According to chroniclers, in the late 980s Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent about six thousand warriors to Emperor Basil II, who needed reinforcements in a civil war. The agreement included Vladimir’s marriage to the emperor’s sister and the prince’s baptism.

These men formed an elite unit, the Varangian Guard, which accompanied the emperor and protected him. Its reputation was for loyalty to the sovereign personally, not to the state. The guards carried broad-bladed axes, and the princess and historian Anna Komnene, in the 12th century, called them axe-bearing barbarians. They were well paid, and the post attracted adventurers from the North.

The prince who came back a king

According to the sagas, the future King Harald Hardrada served in the Byzantine guard around 1034 to 1042, and returned to Norway with riches. He reigned from 1046 until he died at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, when he tried to conquer England. Norse tradition remembers him as the king who had been in Miklagard.

After 1066, many English people who fled the Normans joined the guard. It lasted about three centuries, and its makeup changed over time.

Runes in Hagia Sophia

Direct evidence of the Norse presence is inside Hagia Sophia itself. In a gallery of the church, runes are carved in the marble. Most are nearly worn away, but one fragment reads ftan, which is taken to be the end of the name Halfdan. The rest would follow the common formula of inscriptions, something like “so-and-so carved these runes”.

In Sweden, runestones commemorate those who went east and did not return. One of them speaks of men who went far in search of gold and died in the east. The rivers and the city were a destination of wealth and of risk.

To feel the work of dragging a ship overland, play Drag the ship.

Sources.

• Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, *De Administrando Imperio* (c. 950)
• Russian *Primary Chronicle*, attributed to Nestor (c. 1113)
• Anna Komnene, *Alexiad* (c. 1148)
• Snorri Sturluson, *Heimskringla*, saga of Harald Hardrada (c. 1230)