Chapter VII Byzantium, Islam, the Vikings \u0026 the end of the Dark Ages

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Chapter VII

Byzantium, Islam, the Vikings & the end of

the Dark Ages

It could be conjectured with some degree of certainty that there is

continuum in our civilisation from the founding of the Roman republic

until the present day. The renaissance in the Italy of the middle ages

was pushed forward and vitalised by the diaspora of the intellectual

elite from Constantinople. They left that much diminished and

doomed city before or just after it was conquered. This capital of the

Eastern Roman Empire finally fell to the giant cannons of the Islamic

Turks in 1435; over a thousand years after the last Roman legions left

the British Isles. The people of what is often referred to as the

Byzantium Empire counted themselves right up to the end as being

Romans, even though as time went by Greek became the real lingua

franca and they no longer spoke or used Latin in everyday

transactions. The largest Roman building ever built is still to be found

Chapter VII – Byzantium, Islam, the Vikings & the end of the Dark Ages

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in Istanbul, which during the Byzantine Empire was known as

Constantinople. The awe inspiring Hagia Sofia basilica (pictured on the

previous page) was inaugurated over 100 years after the end of the

Roman occupation of Britain in 537. It has survived nearly 1500 years

in good condition in spite of earthquakes and invasions; even today it

is a stunningly large building. It was used for Christian prayer and

imperial ceremonies for 900 years before being turned into a mosque

by the Turkish invaders; who then added the minarets. Today, for the

moment at least, the Turks have made it a museum and left in place

untouched the beautiful Romano Christian mosaics inside the building.

John Julius Norwich’s masterful three part work “Byzantium” explains

in great detail the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. He makes it

clear that there was continuity between Rome and Constantinople. He

explains that Roman civilisation, all be it falteringly at the end, went on

for nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman

Empire. Although it’s relatively easy to find the abridged version of this

work, procuring the three out of print volumes proved a little bit more

difficult; you will see that it helped with some references. It isn’t my

aim to recount Byzantium history in detail; I leave that to Mr. John

Julius Norwich and other experts who have done an excellent job. In

“Byzantium” John Julius Norwich takes us from the town’s Mythical

Greek foundation by Byzas in 657 BC, through its period as the

Greco/Roman city of Byzance. He then covers in infinite detail, right up

to its fall to the Turks in 1435, the history of over a thousand years of

its existence as the city called Constantinople. Since its fall, with its

new name of Istanbul, it has become one of the largest cities in the

world with a population today of 14.1 million people.

It may seem strange but I believe that the Byzantium Empire had

profound effects on the history of the British Isles both in the depths

of the Dark Ages and again in the late Dark Age/early medieval period.

In both cases I conjecture that it was the slave trade that drove the,

albeit indirect, commercial relations between the Byzantium Empire


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and our part of the world. There is more on this subject below in this

chapter as well as in the conclusion.

What we are interested in when it comes to Byzantium is to

understand what drove a need for more slaves in the Eastern Empire;

this is the part of Byzantium history that we will examine. There were

two periods in the history of the Byzantium Empire when it faced total

collapse. In the first instance in the loss of North Africa to the Persians

in the war from 611-617 AD this occurred at the same time they were

being attacked by the Avars, under the Avar Khan on a broad front in

the Balkan Peninsula, modern day Bulgaria and Romania. By 629 AD

order had been reestablished throughout the Empire (except in Spain

which was lost definitively) and the territories in North Africa had been

recuperated; however not for long. Constantinople was a very large

city with an associated large need for food, at the time when North

Africa was lost for the first time in the early 7th

century the population

of Constantinople was around half a million people. There would have

been a panic and risk of famine in that large city, new slave farms

would need to be created in the lands left to Byzantium; slaves would

have had to be procured. Sutton Hoo has been dated to 625AD. Could

it be possible that all that Byzantine silver and copper bling plus

Merovingian gold coins found in the burial were payment for several

rush shipments of slaves? Frankish/Frisian merchants would have

brought them to the French coast of English Channel, then they would

be transported across France and then by sea across the

Mediterranean. Once landed in Constantinople they would be sent to

slave on large estates in modern day Romania and Bulgaria to produce

the food and wine that previously came from Egypt.

The Rise of Islam

Mohamed Ali died of a fever in 632 AD only two years after his march

on Mecca from Medina; his march in fact ended in a military coup

d’état that made Islam the predominant religion in the Arab peninsula.

He was succeeded by a faithful old disciple Abu Bakr who was the first

Caliph (successor); he wasn’t young and only lived two years before

dying and being succeeded by Umar in 634 AD. During Bakr’s reign the


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Islamic general Khalid successfully put down an anti-Islamic revolt in

the Arab peninsula and started raiding the Byzantine Empire. The new

young Caliph Umar along with the general Khalid set out from Medina

in 634 AD on their Jihadi conquests. Less than three years later the

best Byzantine regiments had been defeated in modern day Syria and

Palestine; Jerusalem was lost to Christendom until the crusades. Egypt

was lost in 639 AD to a young Islamic general, ibn’Amr al-‘As, with only

4000 troops. The port of Alexander, in spite of a defiant valiant

defence by Byzantium legions, was lost to ibn’Amr in 641 AD; the rest

of North Africa under Byzantine control fell quickly to Islamic armies.

This loss for the Byzantium Empire came only ten years after Egypt was

recuperated from the Persians; this time the loss was definitive and

had profound consequences as we will see below. What began with

the conquest of Mecca was followed by a hundred years of breakneck

expansion of Arabian controlled Islamic territory which was only finally

stemmed by the Frankish general Charles Martel at the battle of

Poitiers in France in 732 AD. In the intervening hundred years they had

taken over all the Arabian Peninsula, what had been the Persian

Empire, all of North Africa, most of the Iberian Peninsula and parts of

Southern France.


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This very rapid expansion was based partly on the conversion of

conquered native peoples, irregardless of their skin colour or origins,

to Islam; these converts often rapidly became the soldiers who helped

the Islamic Empire grow. Even in the initial periods of Islamic

expansion there were converted Roman and Persian army deserters in

the Caliph’s regiments. Another major reason for the rapid expansion

was religious toleration; both Judaism and Christianity were tolerated

under Islam as faiths of the book. On payment of a small

supplementary tax they could practice their religions in their own

synagogues and churches. Muslims recognise the Old Testament as

part of their belief system; Abraham and Christ are revered as

prophets by the Islamic religion. However, in spite of this tolerance the

Christians in Islamic lands weren’t allowed to be part of the Greek

Orthodox or Roman Catholic Church organisations.

This toleration of the other two closely related monotheistic religions

continued in Islamic counties right up until the creation of the state of

Israel in 1948 and even longer in some Islamic countries. When

Cordoba in Spain, the final Islam enclave, fell to the Christians in 1492

the large Jewish community preferred to emigrate than to stay on.

They migrated happily to Islamic North African countries and Turkey

rather than be oppressed, discriminated against or perhaps even

executed (convert or die) by the triumphant Christians for their

religion. We can but conclude that Islamic states were once

established relatively free and tolerant civilised societies in comparison

to contemporary Christian states in Europe. Here the Catholic Church

encouraged Western European kings to be intolerant and oppressive

towards other religions and not just Paganism, Judaism and Islam.

They were also intolerant on an ongoing basis of other Christian

groups such as the members of the Orthodox Church, the Coptic

Church and the Cathars. This intolerance lasts in the Catholic Church

mild forms even until today against Protestants, Copts and the

Orthodox Church. We cannot forget the reaction of the Catholic

Church in history against Luther’s protestant beliefs. This intolerant

rejection of any heresies led to two hundred years of bloody wars

across Europe that cost millions of live on both sides. Northern Ireland


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today is the last rumbling on of those deadly internecine Christian

conflicts which weakened and slowed the development of civilisation

in Western Europe for two hundred years.

Rise of the Vikings

We will look now at the Byzantines and their relationship with the

Vikings, and how this affected the British Isles and Northern Europe.

This has a lot to do with commerce. Vikings get a bad reputation for

their raiding activity but they were merchants as well. It was always a

dilemma for Vikings when they met a new people; did they barter with

them or batter them. A lot of the background to understand where the

Vikings fit in is to be found in previous chapters, especially V The

Frisian Enigma and VI Dark Age commerce. As we have seen in Chapter

V from page XXX we learn of the greatness of Charlemagne and of his

conquests, but the truth is that the first 150 years of the Carolingian

dynasty from 752-900 AD was the closest that France got to having a

“Dark Age”. We see towns which had been occupied since early Gallo-

Roman times being abandoned. We see civic life disappearing,

commerce with the Byzantium Empire ended. We see a return to

feudal subsistence farming. We see the rise in power, omnipresence

and above all wealth of an increasingly interfering Catholic Church.

Finally, we see the humiliation of the Frankish regional capital of Paris

at the hands of the Danish Viking Sigfrid in 885 AD, this was just 85

years after Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor in Rome and only 70

years after his death. In 911 AD we see the leaguing of Normandy to

the Viking Rollo, who had been part of Sigfrid’s army in 885, by the

Carolingian king Charles III le Simple. As part of the armistice

agreement Rollo was baptised and took the title of Richard 1er

duc de

Normandie, he was the great-great-great-grandfather of William the

Conqueror. We see from the end of the 8th

century AD that it was the

Vikings that were becoming more and more the predominant force in

the North Sea, the English Channel and the Baltic rather than the

Franks, the Frisians and the Flemish.

The next time that Northern Europeans would trade with the

Byzantine Empire would be along the rivers of present day Russia and


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the Ukraine. These intrepid traders would be the Swedish Vikings;

more correctly the Rus who were a mixture of Vikings and modern day

Slavic peoples. Once again with the Viking/Rus, as with the

Merovingians, we can perhaps see the ugly slave trade as being a

driving force in this commerce, with perhaps a little trade in furs, iron

and North Sea and Baltic amber thrown in. It appears that there is a

gap of well under a hundred years between the end of the commerce

between the Merovingian Franks and the Byzantine Empire and the

first contacts and commerce between the Vikings and Constantinople;

this occurred towards the end of the 8th

century AD.

We looked at when the peoples around the North Sea acquired sail in

chapter II, The wrong kind of Teutons and we saw: The Gokstad ship

used as an example of bracing for masts of Viking sailing ships. There is

another example of mast bracing in the same chapter, with a photo of

the remains of a ninth century Viking sailing ship in the Göteburg

museum. Both of these ships date from the late 9th

century I believe

that the Vikings acquired sail technology from the Byzantines in the

late 8th

century. The Oseberg1 Viking ship finds are much older than

the other two aforementioned ships; it was used for a high status

funeral for a queen and probably her servant in 834 AD. This wasn’t a

new ship or one that was specially built for the occasion, as in the case

of Sutton Hoo, it was a ship that was at the end of its useful life. It had

been modified for its final purpose with a funerary chamber being built

just behind the mast. This ship was almost old enough to have been

used in the Lindisfarne raid in 793 AD and, if we believe that sail was

new for the Vikings around this time, then it must have been one of

the first examples of a Viking sailing ship. This is what Magnus

Magnusson says on the subject of the Oseberg ship in his work “The

Vikings” published by The History Press.

The ship itself is also invaluable as an example of the evolution of

Viking ship technology. Oseberg has been interpreted as being a state

barge, a royal yacht; it may well have been used for that purpose in its

old age, but it was originally built as an all-purpose vessel at the time

of the earliest Norwegian raids on Lindisfarne and other holy places. It


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represents a distinctly earlier stage in shipbuilding than Gokstad,

which was built fifty years later and had clearly learnt from Oseberg’s

mistakes. For instance, the mast-fish on the Oseberg shows signs of

emergency repairs at sea; in Gokstad, that inherent weakness of

design had been noted, and circumvented. The early raiders had come

back with a number of technical problems to solve regarding the

seaworthiness of their ships, Gokstad was the culmination of what

Oseberg had begun.

What is difficult is for us to determine is when the first contact took

place between the Vikings and the Byzantines. What may be an

indicator is the Oseberg royal ship burial, we have seen above that it

was one of the first generations of Viking vessels to have sail and a

mast fitted. There has been a newer discovery about the two women

found in the ship burial that is even more surprising. The two bodies

were found on a raised bed in the ornate funeral chamber; one of a

woman of approximately 80 years and the other approximately 50

years. The older woman was apparently royalty in view of the richness

of the burial I quote from the UiO Museum of Cultural History website;

see bibliography for website address and QR code.

The Oseberg burial

In the year 834, two prosperous women died. The Oseberg ship was

pulled ashore and used as a burial ship for the two ladies. A burial

chamber was dug right behind the ship's mast. Inside, the walls were

decorated with fantastic woven tapestries and the dead women lay on

a raised bed. The women had a number of burial gifts with them.

There were personal items such as clothes, shoes and combs, ship's

equipment, kitchen equipment, farm equipment, three ornate sledges

and a working sledge, a wagon, five carved animal heads, five beds and

two tents. There were fifteen horses, six dogs and two small cows.

Investigation of the skeletons showed that the older woman was

about 70 to 80 when she died, probably of cancer. The other woman

was younger, a little over 50. We do not know what she died of.


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Both of them must have held a special position in the community to

have been given a grave such as this; were they political or religious

leaders? Who was the most prominent person in the grave? Was one a

sacrifice, to accompany the other into the kingdom of the dead? Were

they related? Where did they come from? The two women from the

past remain a mystery, but continued research may tell us more.

The two bodies were recently exhumed so that DNA samples could be

taken for analysis from both of the women; unsurprisingly the older

woman was of pure Norwegian stock. However, the younger woman’s

DNA2 indicated that she originally came from the area what is modern

day Iran/Iraq. This as you can imagine came as something of a

bombshell in the historical community. Perhaps one understanding of

this could then be that the younger lady was the servant of the older

woman. Or maybe, much more likely she was the treasured personal

slave who was killed to accompany her mistress to the place just

downstairs from Valhalla where high status Viking women went when

they died. I don’t think that Viking queens would buy a 40 year old to

be their personal servant or slave; the woman would probably have

been with her from a very young age of say 16-18 years old. This would

mean that she would have arrived in Norway around 800 AD. This

meant that what became known as the Varangian (Viking/Rus) trade

routes were already in operation as bringing a live slave from Iran to

Norway is no mean logistical feat. I have added a map on the next

page which I have taken from the “Trade route from the Varangians to

the Greeks” article on the Wikipedia website. As you can see there

were two routes both radiating from Uppsala: one going to

Constantinople along the Dnieper River and through the Black Sea. The

second followed the Volga River valley down to the Caspian Sea and

then across it via Baku and on to Baghdad which is where our second

lady in the ship burial came from. This puts us in the time frame of

first contacts with the Byzantines and Arabs around 750 AD; I believe

that it may be even earlier.

By the time the Byzantines were getting to know the Vikings the first

shock of Islamic expansion into Byzantine territory had been partially


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countered by two phenomena: The recourse, against an exchange of

land, to Southern Slavic, Bulgarian and Turkish military aid. This was

coupled with the diminished expansive invasive fervour within Islam

itself caused by myriad splits that had developed between different

factions within the religion.

Using these allies to push back the Islamic Jihadis sowed the seed for

future problems and in a far off time the eventual demise for the

Eastern Roman Empire. Byzantium had definitively lost to Islam the

province of Egypt which was their main source of grain to feed the

population of the huge city of Constantinople. On a less important

note, wine from the Gaza strip, a product of great renown in antiquity,

would also have disappeared from the patrician tables in

Constantinople as well. They desperately needed to have farms

producing food in the land that was left to the Byzantine Empire. We

must remember that these people thought of themselves as being

Romans; whose use of slave plantations to produce agricultural


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produce went back over a thousand years. They had enough good land

in Europe and Anatolia, what they needed was a new supply of slaves

now that those supplied previously by amongst other the Merovingian

Franks had dried up.

It is no coincidence that the Vikings called the peoples in modern day

Russia, the Ukraine and Eastern Europe and the Northern Balkans

“Slavs”, it meant slaves in their tongue as it almost does in English. The

Viking treasure hordes found in Sweden contain many more Arabic

coins than they do Byzantium or Western European coins. The trade

they carried on therefore involved slaves, furs, iron bars and probably

amber. They didn’t mind who they traded with, or perhaps if the

opportunity arose who they stole from. Equally, the Vikings/Rus were

happy to fight as mercenaries for the Byzantines; later in time they

even had their own regiment within the imperial army called the

“Varangians”. The Arabic silver found in Scandinavian hordes may have

been obtained through trade (Islamic culture allowed slavery) or in

raids on Islamic occupied territory for the account of Constantinople.

This famous oriental picture of the Vikings shows them in their easily

recognisable boats without sail, although they do have oars.


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What other things could the Swedish Vikings learn from a contact with

a civilisation, which by comparison with theirs, was as technologically

and intellectually advanced as the Eastern Roman Empire? Maritime

technology is a possibility.

The Vikings/Rus installed in fortified towns along the Russian rivers,

Novgorod and Kiev are good examples. By the year 839 emissaries of

the Viking/Rus, probably from Novgorod or Kiev, were negotiating for

a trade treaty with the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. This

doesn’t mean that there wasn’t contact before this. The explosion of

Viking raiders crossing the open sea to raid North Western England in

793 AD is tantalisingly close in time to the first contacts between the

“Rus” and the Byzantines. By 880’s AD a Swedish Viking, Garda

Svarssson, had circumnavigated Iceland and return home safely.

As we have seen in chapter II the elegant and efficient clinker built

boats found in communities all around the North Sea were eminently

seaworthy but they didn’t have sail until the end of the 8th

century AD.

The Vikings were excellent seamen but as far as we can ascertain

before the end of the 8th

century they didn’t cross open water, they

needed reference to land to reach their destination. Navigating by the

sun and stars in the cloudy and foggy North Sea and Northern Atlantic

would be a very much hit and miss business. Is it possible that there

was a transfer of technology from Byzantium to the Viking/Rus which

was then propagated back to Scandinavia? A captured Byzantine boat

would have taught their shipwrights the secrets of attaching a mast to

the frames of their boats. The rigging of the sales on Viking boats

resembles quite a lot the rigging on Byzantine ships of the period.

Once you have a sail properly fixed on a ship it’s relatively easy to learn

how to sail.

The Byzantines knew how to sail across open water probably using a

basic compass. It’s really easy to make such a piece of equipment, just

hammer a small strip of iron for a quarter of an hour then attach it to a

string and it will orient itself North-South. It doesn’t take a doctor’s

degree in physics to make a compass, but it does take a big leap from

the basic physics of a compass to understanding how to apply this


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science to guiding a boat under cloudy skies in a constant westerly or

easterly direction. Could it be that the young son of a senior Viking/Rus

trader was left in Constantinople for a period of years as a hostage to

maintain his father’s good behavior; this was not an unusual thing

amongst the Romans. Being a seaman’s son he would have been

interested in how the Byzantines sailed their ships. When his father

returns and he gets to go back to his people he could have taken the

secrets of navigation across open water with him; which would have

spread like wildfire amongst these sea going peoples. For me it’s far

too much of a coincidence that all of sudden in a timeframe that could

coincide easily with first contact with Constantinople that the Vikings

can suddenly sail backwards and forwards directly across the North

Sea. Finding year after year places to raid and then returning to their

homes in Scandinavia with uncanny accuracy. It made raiding, raping

and pillaging something that even a Scandinavian farmer could do,

he’d plant his crops in the Spring go with his buddies on a little cross

sea foray and be back well in time even with the short Nordic summer

to harvest his crops before the Autumn.

The fact is that within 60-70 years of the first raid on Britain the

Vikings are navigating at ease around all the British Isles accurately and

then across the Northern Atlantic as far as Iceland, Greenland and

eventually North America. I think that it is even less of a coincidence

that the first Viking to circumnavigate Iceland was a Swede as they

were the people trading with and fighting for the Byzantines.

We have already seen in chapter IV and V how trade between the

Byzantium Empire and Merovingian France continued right up to the

early part of the 8th

century AD. We saw in the last chapter how the

Sutton Hoo treasure proved the great reach of the Frankish/Frisian

Northern trade networks.

It is generally agreed that the end of the Dark Ages in England cannot

be given a precise date, but we can see in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle

that from about 675 AD onwards there are much fuller entries. We are

able to define the lineage of the kings of most English kingdoms from

about the middle of the 7Th

century as well. We could therefore define


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the Dark Ages as being roughly a period of just over two hundred years

that stretched from 407 AD when the last Roman armies left Britannia

to about the time when the royal burial took place at Sutton Hoo in

about 625 AD. We have seen how during this period trade continued

between the North Sea and Baltic rim, including England and the

Merovingian Franks, probably using the Frisians as their maritime arm.

The Franks in turn traded through the Mediterranean with Byzantium

in the East, bringing sumptuous Roman luxuries such as silver

tableware from Syria as far north as East Anglia. The exotic Byzantine

contents of the Sutton Hoo burial show this trade was in full swing in

the early 7th

century. Maybe it was even a factor in England beginning

put behind it the period of historical occlusion called the Dark Ages.

This trade continued until the rise of Islam made it impossible in the

late 7th

and the mid-8th

century AD. If as we have conjectured with

some certainty that there was no mass Anglo-Saxon invasion then the

period after the emergence of England from Dark Ages was one of ever

increasing prosperity; by reason of an innovative economic and

monetary union between kingdoms. All this economic and cultural

progress was stopped abruptly and it must be said brutally in its tracks

a couple of hundred years later by the arrival of the Vikings in massive

numbers in the early 9th

century. As far as the South, North East and

East of England were concerned these Viking raiders, who went on to

become settlers and traders, originated mostly from modern day

Denmark. The Danish Vikings undertook a series of ever larger raids

that led to occupation of half of England and a mass migration from

Denmark. But before this in the period of relative peace of the early

7th century AD we see a period of coalescence of the smaller English

kingdoms into to two larger ones through war and dynastic

intermarriage. England came to be dominated by 650 AD by the

kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, which together covered with

some exceptions most of modern day England and parts of South East

Scotland. However, the story for the period of the early 5th

to 9th

century AD was different in the South West of England, modern day

Devon and Cornwall, and in Wales. In both places a quasi if much

diminished Roman civilisation continued with most of the peoples

speaking Latin tinted versions of Gaelic right through the Dark Ages in


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England. These regions of the Southern and Western part of the island

of Britain continued commercial and affective contacts with the

independent Duchy of Brittany. Brittany had been one of the rare

regions of modern France not to become part of the Frankish

Merovingian kingdom from the end of the 5th

century onwards.

Although the Dukes of Brittany were often allied in common cause

with the Frankish kings they retained their independence. After 407

AD in the chaos following the departure of the Romans from Britannia

Brittany had seen substantial migration from the South West of

England. The old Breton language was like old Welsh or old Cornish a

very similar and mutually understandable Latin tinted form of Gaelic.

In modern French Great Britain and Brittany are called simply “Grand

Bretagne et le Bretagne”. From the time of the collapse of the Roman

Empire in the West in the early to mid-5th

century AD the Bretons

knew 350 years of independence until becoming a province of

Charlemagne’s empire in the 780’s AD. In the South West of England

an independent Cornwall held out against a rampant Wessex until the

850’s AD. Wales remained independent in one form or another until

the late 11th

century when the Norman conquerors acquired by

conquest all but a small rump of North West Wales. If we discount

William of Orange landing in England and the glorious revolution of

1688, then the last successful invasion of England was William the

conqueror in 1066, as we saw above he was descended from the

Vikings that had taken Normandy from the Carolingians. That fateful

year is often taken to be the end of the Viking age. The failed attempt

by Harald Hardrada, King of Norway in September to wrench the

crown from Harald Godwinson’s3

head ended in his and his brother

Tostig’s death at Stamford Bridge. We now entered a period of relative

peace for England once the bloody harrying of the North was finished;

the Normans, those Frenchified Vikings, settled down to milking their

new Anglo/Frisian speaking subjects dry for the next 200 years.


285

Bibliography Chapter VII – Byzance, Vikings & Islam

1. Oseberg ship site

http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/viking-ship-

museum/exhibitions/oseberg/

2. Younger Oseberg woman from Middle East

http://studgen.blogspot.fr/2007/03/oseberg-woman-stems-from-middle-

east.html

3. 1066 and all that, from eyewitness to history.

Extract - The third rival for the throne was Harald Hardrada, King of Norway.

His justification was even more tenuous than William's. Hardrada ruled

Norway jointly with his nephew Mangus until 1047 when Mangus

conveniently died. Earlier (1042), Mangus had cut a deal with Harthacut the

Danish ruler of England. Since neither ruler had a male heir, both promised

their kingdom to the other in the event of his death. Harthacut died but

Mangus was unable to follow up on his claim to the English throne because he

was too busy battling for the rule of Denmark. Edward became the Anglo-

Saxon ruler of England. Now with Mangus and Edward dead, Hardrada

asserted that he, as Mangus's heir, was the rightful ruler of England. When he

heard of Harold's coronation, Hardrada immediately prepared to invade

England and crush the upstart.


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The Invasions of England, 1066

Hardrada of Norway struck first. In mid September, Hardrada's invasion force

landed on the Northern English coast, sacked a few coastal villages and

headed towards the city of York. Hardrada was joined in his effort by Tostig,

King Harold's nere-do-well brother. The Viking army overwhelmed an English

force blocking the York road and captured the city. In London, news of the

invasion sent King Harold hurriedly north at the head of his army picking up

reinforcements along the way. The speed of Harold's forced march allowed

him to surprise Hardrada's army on September 25, as it camped at Stamford

Bridge outside York. A fierce battle followed. Hand to hand combat ebbed and

flowed across the bridge. Finally the Norsemen's line broke and the real

slaughter began. Hardrada fell and then the King's brother, Tostig. What

remained of the Viking army fled to their ships. So devastating was the Viking

defeat that only 24 of the invasion force's original 240 ships made the trip

back home. Resting after his victory, Harold received word of William's

landing near Hastings.

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bayeux.htm

4.

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Chapter VII Byzantium, Islam, the Vikings \u0026 the end of the Dark Ages