Varangian Guard

The Varangian Guard was the Byzantine emperor's household regiment of Norsemen — founded when Vladimir of Kiev sent six thousand warriors to Basil II in 988, and maintained for centuries on a simple logic: foreigners with no stake in Constantinople's endless palace conspiracies made the most trustworthy bodyguards in the empire.

Recruits came down the river roads from Scandinavia and Kievan Rus, and after 1066 increasingly from England — Anglo-Saxons displaced by the Norman Conquest. They fought in the northern manner the Byzantines found gloriously barbaric: mail, round or kite shields, and above all the great two-handed axe that made 'axe-bearing barbarians' the guard's standard description in the sources. Pay was lavish, plunder rights formal, and a tour in the Guard was the recognized path to wealth — Harald Hardrada, later king of Norway, banked a fortune from his Varangian years fighting in Sicily and the Holy Land.

The Guard's record runs from Basil II's Bulgarian wars through the disasters and recoveries of the twelfth century; they died hard at Constantinople's walls in 1204 when the Fourth Crusade stormed the city. Runic graffiti scratched into the Hagia Sophia's marble remains their most personal monument — Halfdan was here, in the greatest church of Christendom, on guard.

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