The World

Rurikovichi and the House of Basil

THE MAGIC: RURIK AND THE VIKINGS – BERSERK WAR, GROUP SEX AND HUMAN SACRIFICE

Abd al-Rahman II built a fleet to repel the Vikings, using Greek Fire, but al-Andalus was not the only region suffering. The Vikings attacked north Africa too, yet the most intense raids were already hitting the Frankish and British coasts.

In 793, a flotilla attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, ravaging Northumbria and the sacred island of Iona, before returning to assault Scotland and Ireland. Charlemagne himself witnessed the first raids on his shores, and was able to strike back. Now, in 845, a fleet of 120 longships carrying 5,000 Vikings sailed up the Seine and attacked Paris. The invaders sacrificed Frankish prisoners to their god Odin and departed only when the king of West Francia, later emperor, Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson, paid them Danegeld of 7,000 livres of silver and gold.

The war bands, led by lords and kings, had originally sought slaves and loot, but now they started to settle, founding kingdoms in Dublin, the isles of western Scotland, and York, the start of an advance into England that threatened the existence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The king of Wessex, Alfred, was driven by them into the Somerset marshes, but in 878 he defeated a Viking army, becoming strong enough to divide the island with the Danes, whose leader Guthrum he helped convert to Christianity. In 886, after merging Wessex with Mercia, Alfred called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons,^* but the Vikings now ruled much of Britain and Ireland, and were soon attacking Francia again.

Who were they? They were Scandinavians who shared a worldview and cosmology based around their gods led by the one-eyed god of war Odin, who appeared as a warrior adventurer, and by Thor, god of farming. Theirs was a cult of war and heroism,^* whose followers worshipped at annual festivals where horses and humans were sacrificed, the latter hung from trees – which had a special place in their beliefs – or torn apart by bending a tree back and releasing it. Their heroes and exploits were celebrated in epic stories and engraved runestones, their dead burned in or buried alongside their superb longships.

Arabs called them al-Madjus, fire worshippers, because they burned their dead; Europeans called them Norsemen; and they may have called themselves Vikings or Vikingr, the ‘men of vik’ – that is, of the inlets or fjords. They were raiders but also traders, specializing in slavery, and they were remarkable navigators, visiting America centuries before Columbus.

No one knows why these Scandinavians embarked on their adventures at this moment: a rising population maybe created competition for land; civil strife made life difficult; their ritual exposure of female babies may have created a shortage of women that required bride stealing. They initially took a delight in killing priests and raiding churches, revenge perhaps for Frankish atrocities, but the original motive was treasure, and then slaves – the grandees of Baghdad, Constantinople and Cordoba craved their furs and slaves. But perhaps the chief reason for launching their raids was that they could. Their improved shallow-draught, full-sailed ships, guided by lodestones, meant they could travel across oceans and up rivers. They were led by warrior kings yet they were partly governed by things – quasi-democratic assemblies, led by elected lawspeakers – and their elites were literate readers of sagas and runestones.

How they really lived is mysterious enough that modern historians can project just about anything – including wild drug taking and transvestism – with the clues that have been left us. In battle they fought with a frenzy that may or may not have been stimulated by a hallucinogen – sticky nightshade. They were polygynous; some women may have been warriors, given that a very few female tombs contain broadswords – though it may be that everyone was buried with swords. Christians and Muslims were certainly amazed by their lack of sexual inhibitions.

In 862, a Viking chieftain named Rurik, the founder of a family that would rule Russia until 1598, led a war band southwards from Scandinavia down the Dnieper into an ever-changing riverine borderland where Turkic and Slavic pagans, dominated by a rising Turkic khanate, the Khazars, vied for the rich prizes of trade with Constantinople and Baghdad. At this time, Arab writers mention a grouping called al-Rusiyya – the Rus, probably derived from the Old Norse roa (to row) – connected to the Scandinavian raiders and traders who starting from their trading station Staraia Ladoga in the north had long been plying the great rivers, the Volga and Dnieper. It is likely Rurik was one of these Rus.

As they rowed south, Rurik’s men first had to deal with the Khazars, who since the break-up of the western Turks around 650 had ruled from central Asia to Ukraine, fighting the Arabs for fifty years while enjoying good relations with Constantinople’s emperors, two of whom married Khazar princesses. Ruled by two kings, a khagan and an isa, from a palace on the Volga island, Atil, the Khazars worshipped Tengri, the sky god of the steppes. But holding the line between Christian Constantinople and Islamic Baghdad, their khagan Bulan converted to Judaism, confirmed by coins dated 837–8 and inscribed Mûsâ rasûl Allâh (‘Moses is the messenger of God’, echoing the Islamic shahada). Bulan’s son Obadiah built synagogues, but not all Khazars practised Judaism.

These Jewish khagans controlled the riverine trade. Rurik and his federation of Slav, Viking and Turkic peoples traded furs, amber, wax, honey, walrus tusks and slaves, for which they received payment from Khazars, Romans and Arabs in silver dirhams, the dollars of the day, which allow us to imagine trade routes that extended from India to Britain. Hoards of the caliph’s coins – 100,000 so far – have been discovered in Sweden, as has a small bronze Buddha cast in Kashmir, while in Britain Mercian kings adapted dirhams, still marked in Arabic, for local use. But the chief Viking merchandise was human: Slavs were sold so widely through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean that the very word for slave was named after them.

Both Baghdad and Constantinople bid for the support of the Khazars and other tribes in these turbulent borderlands, dispatching brave envoys to treat with these terrifying barbarians. Meeting the Rus, Ibn Fadlan, a caliphal envoy, was as excited as he was disgusted: ‘I’ve never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy,’ he wrote. Their chieftain sat on his throne surrounded by 400 warriors and forty slaves ‘destined for his bed’.^*

Ibn Fadlan witnessed the group sex and human sacrifice of a young intoxicated enslaved girl at a chieftain’s funeral supervised by a female shaman, the Angel of Death, ‘a strapping old woman, fat and louring’. Ibn Fadlan was surely relieved to make it back to Baghdad.

Rurik, a semi-mythic hero of whom we know little, ruled a fiefdom from Gorodische, or the Town, a trading settlement, later refounded as New Town, Novgorod. His successors expanded southwards. His descendant Igor was brought to the Slav town Kyiv on the Dnieper, founded around the sixth century, later making this the headquarters for trading furs and slaves to Constantinople where Rus – known to the Romaioi as Varangians – often served as elite guards.

The Great City was a tempting prize: Igor launched two raids during which his longboats were torched by Greek Fire. Later, he was captured by a Slav tribe who tied him to two branches which were then released, tearing him in half. Yet his widow Olga defeated his Slavic enemies, then travelled to Constantinople, where she was baptized after meeting the emperor. The empire was resurgent thanks to a remarkable Armenian peasant whose career was made by his buff physique, grim charms and skill with horses.

CONSTANTINOPLE AND ROME: BASIL THE UNIBROW HORSE WHISPERER AND MAROZIA THE SENATRIX

Basil’s rise started when, as a young servant, he encountered the richest woman in the empire, Danielis, a widow who owned 3,000 slaves and eighty estates and became his patroness – and surely his lover. It may be that he spent many years with her before she introduced him to the courtier who brought him to the notice of young Emperor Michael III, an expert on horseflesh, who hired him as a groom, then as a bodyguard, then as a chamberlain. Michael restored Roman rule in Greece and, guided by his mother, ended the iconoclastic agony, but he was infatuated, probably sexually, by the heft of the muscled Basil, thirty years older than him. Born in Thrace, known as the Macedonian but probably an Armenian, Basil was the ‘most outstanding in bodily form and heavy set; his eyebrows grew together, he had large eyes, a broad chest’ and a morose expression. The emperor enjoyed watching him in wrestling bouts with Bulgarian champions. When Michael resented his influential uncle, Basil executed him, leaving the unibrowed horse whisperer as his omnipresent parakoimomenos – He Who Sleeps Beside (the imperial chamber). While his marriage was childless, Michael had a son by his mistress, Eudokia Ingerina, whom he soon shared with Basil (Basil seems to have been irresistible to men and women). To legitimize this son, Leo, he ordered Basil to marry Eudokia and crowned him co-emperor, giving him his own sister Thekla as mistress. When Michael, boozing hard, widely nicknamed the Drunk, had second thoughts and plotted his favourite’s murder, Basil got in first, assembling a family hit squad (including his father and brother) that broke into the imperial bedchamber, stabbed the inebriated emperor and sliced off his hands – possibly vengeance for the unchristian homosexual side of their relationship.

It was an unlikely rise, but the uneducated Basil turned out to be a serious and intelligent basileus,^* fighting the Arabs, codifying the laws and striking the Bulgars. He was never quite sure whether Leo was his or Michael’s and disliked the nerdy boy. Basil died in 886 at the age of seventy-five after a hunting accident which saw him dragged for miles, his clothes having been snagged in a stag’s antlers: his groom was executed for cutting the emperor’s belt to free him from the antlers (it was illegal to bare a blade in front of the emperor). When he died, Emperor Leo too was unsure who his father was, but he honoured the giblets of Michael, which he buried in the Church of the Apostles along with Basil.

Talented, scholarly but tormented, Leo the Wise held back the Arabs in the east but lost his last strongholds in Sicily to Arab invaders, who then landed in southern Italy and threatened not just his last territories but Rome itself.

In 846, Arab raiders had landed at Ostia and then struck Rome, looting St Peter’s. Now that they were advancing again, Pope John VIII, who had seen the Arabs assault Rome, alternately begged Emperor Leo and the Carolingian kings to send help. Constantinople had traditionally selected and menaced popes, and Justinian had kidnapped one. Now the popes were on their own: the chaos in Italy, the loss of papal incomes to the Arabs, the fall in prestige and the rise of voracious Italian barons undermined John VIII, who was poisoned then bludgeoned to death by his own clergymen. Thus opened a bloody new era, dominated by a single extraordinary woman: Marozia. If Cleopatra can be regarded as a feminist heroine, so should Marozia, ruler of Rome, and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, lover and murderess of a succession of popes and princes.

The turmoil that had started with the killing of John VIII culminated in the trial of a dead pope. In January 897, the corpse of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for over a year, was exhumed, dressed in its papal robes, enthroned and then placed on trial for perjury and violation of canon law before a synod in Rome, chaired by his successor Stephen VI, with a deacon representing the cadaver as its lawyer. Found guilty, Formosus was stripped naked, the three fingers he used for papal blessing were cut off and his body was flung into the Tiber. The motive for this necrospectacle was to undermine the legitimacy of a predecessor and so enhance the legality of the new pope. But it did not work: Stephen was strangled, and three popes were then elected by different factions. But one, Sergius III, managed to win the backing of Teofilatto, Marozia’s father, and they murdered the other two.

Elected consul for the year 915, Teofilatto ruled Rome alongside his wife Theodora, appointing their nominees to the papacy. Teofilatto – Theofylactus – was one of the rising warlords who treated the papacy as just one of the urban offices through which they could control a Rome already divided into armed camps, the ancient monuments such as the Colosseum or Hadrian’s mausoleum now serving as fortified strongholds. If the reality resembled gang warfare, the titles were still dazzling: Eminentissimus, Magnificus, consul and of course pope.

When the Arabs seized Minturno, a town eighty miles south of Rome, Christians panicked. Yet Teofilatto could not control Rome alone: the papacy was spiritual leader of western Christendom; Italy was strategically vital, with the Arabs and Romaioi in the south and, in the north, ever since Charlemagne, the kings of East Francia (Germany) had a big stake.

Teofilatto consolidated his power by marrying off his daughters. His wife Theodora was a ‘shameless whore who exercised power over the Roman citizenry like a man’, wrote Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, a retainer of the family’s chief enemy, Otto of Germany: his claims are often German propaganda and male chauvinism.

In 909, Teofilatto married Marozia to a rival warlord, Alberic, margrave of Spoleto, with whom she had several sons. She may have become the mistress of Pope Sergius and have had a son with him too. Her sister was also married off. But unusually Marozia started to exert her own political power in a way that alarmed Liutprand, who called the pair ‘the sister whores’ dominating the papacy in a ‘pornocracy’ – rule of prostitutes. Actually they were potentates and women were more powerful in Rome than anywhere else at the time.

In 915, Alberic, Marozia’s husband, now elected as patrician – Patricius Romanorum, one of many titles borrowed from ancient times – joined forces with Teofilatto and the pope to expel the Arabs from Minturno. In 924, when her husband was assassinated and her father died, Marozia, in her mid-thirties, assumed leadership of the faction as domina, senatrix and patricia, ruler of Rome. After an affair with Pope John X, who then tried to assert his own control, Marozia married Guido, margrave of Tuscany, great-grandson of Charlemagne, who fell in love with her beauty as much as with her power.

In 928, the couple attacked and arrested John X; imprisoned in Hadrian’s mausoleum, now fortified as Castel Sant’Angelo, the pope was later suffocated. Guido himself died soon afterwards. Meanwhile Marozia placed her son by Alberic (if not by Pope Sergius) on the papal throne as Pope John XI, aged only twenty. Her other son, Alberic II of Spoleto, now believed he should succeed his father as ruler of Rome. Marozia resisted, but a woman of power needed male help: she negotiated a marriage with Hugh of Provence, a Charlemagne scion, king of Italy, who duly arrived in Rome.

Many sons have loathed their mothers’ new husbands but few have stormed the wedding reception. Marozia’s son Alberic II launched a wedding coup and besieged the wedding party in Castel Sant’Angelo; the bridegroom abandoned the bride by shinning down a rope; Marozia herself was arrested and imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo, where she later died. Alberic II ruled Rome as princeps for the next twenty years, marrying his new stepsister, the daughter of King Hugh and portentously naming their son Octavian. On his deathbed in 954, Alberic persuaded his magnates to appoint Octavian as princeps and then as Pope John XII. This overpromoted teen popinjay became tyrant of Rome. His sins, even listed by the panting Liutprand, sound unremarkable except for the surprising absence of sodomy: ‘He had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father’s concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him’ and ‘he toasted the devil with wine.’ But struggling to defend Rome, in 962, John XII called in the East Francian king Otto I, who marched south, accompanied by Bishop Liutprand, to protect him in return for his own coronation as Roman emperor. Unsurprisingly John fell out with the Germans but perished – characteristically – during a bout of adulterous sex.

Otto and his imperial sons regularly stormed down to Rome but were unable to gain control of the papacy for long. In 974, Crescentius, Marozia’s great-nephew, seized Rome for the Marozians and overthrew the German-backed popes, strangling several inconvenient pontiffs. The family appointed popes until 996, when Emperor Otto III, who was just sixteen, famed for his classical intellect, swooped on Rome and deposed Crescentius. Otto then had him beheaded, his wife gang-raped and his pope, the Marozian cousin John XVI, blinded, with his nose, ears and tongue cut off. Otto, assuming the titles Emperor of the World and Consul of the Romans, planned to rule his German empire from his new Roman palace, only to die at just twenty-one.

The Crescentians still dominated the old Rome when in the eastern New Rome, Leo the Wise’s illegitimate son Constantine VII, born in the porphyry chamber of the Great Palace where empresses gave birth, asserted his legitimacy with the title Porphyrogennetos. A scholar and writer, he focused on the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity. In 957 it was Constantine who welcomed Olga of Rus on the first Russian state visit: she was baptized with Porphyrogennetos as her godfather. The Slavs claimed he fell in love – an unlikely event for the fastidious Porphyrogennetos – but he encouraged her Christian tendencies and granted trading rights.

The Rus now challenged the Khazars. In 971, Prince Svyatoslav attacked and burned their capital Atil and then, blessed by Constantinople, he attacked the Bulgars with 60,000 troops, routing them and seizing their capital and so much of Bulgaria that the Roman emperor was alarmed and orchestrated his assassination. In the ensuing chaos, Svyatoslav’s youngest son by a concubine, Valdemar, who had been driven out of Novgorod, was given troops by his cousin, the king of Norway. He then defeated all his brothers to seize Kyiv.

Valdemar kept a harem of 800 girls, took seven wives, several bearing him children, and worshipped the pagan gods Dazhbog, Stribog and Mokosh, celebrating his victories by sacrificing two children. But his envoys were overwhelmed by the Christian magnificence of the Great City and its Hagia Sophia – ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth’ – and when Valdemar himself realized the benefits of conversion, his timing was excellent. The latest of the Macedonian dynasty, Basil II, faced a rebellion and needed help.

The thirty-year-old Basil was a force of nature: ‘From the day that the King of Heaven called upon me to become the Emperor, overlord of the world,’ he wrote for his own epitaph, ‘no one saw my spear lie idle.’ In a city of berobed luxury, scented eunuchs and Byzantine intrigue, he was a compact, plainspoken swordsman, a pious ascetic uninterested in women and probably homosexual.

Valdemar sent the new emperor a unit of Varangians as a present with the warning, ‘Don’t keep them in your city or they’ll cause you harm – and don’t allow a single one to return this way.’ The Kyivan next demanded marriage to a sister of the emperor. This was an impertinence, but Basil, recognizing Kyivan power, agreed, provided the grand prince of Kyiv converted and helped retake his Crimean colony, Chersonese. Valdemar played his part, but when Basil delayed sending his sister, Valdemar kept Chersonese; Basil immediately dispatched his sister. In 988, Valdemar, taking the name Vladimir or Volodymyr, was baptized according to the rites favoured in Constantinople, a decisive moment in world history which, together with the Bulgar conversion, ensured Russia and eastern Europe would develop their own distinctive rituals and doctrine – later known as Orthodox.^* The emperor’s sister Anna Porphyrogenita dreaded her marriage to an oafish barbarian, but Basil begged her: ‘God turns the land of Rus to repentance through your agency and you’ll save Greece from the danger of grievous war.’ God’s work was hard to refuse.

PAGAN CONVERTS: VLADIMIR AND ROLLO

Poor Anna sailed for Crimea to wed Vladimir, who returned Chersonese to Basil II as ‘a bridal gift’. Vladimir converted his Rus Land with characteristic energy – concubines were retired, pagan statues beaten with rods, and churches founded. Kyivans were ordered to attend a mass baptism on the banks of the Dnieper: ‘Whoever doesn’t turn up, rich, poor or slave, shall be my enemy.’ His new conquests and his Roman connection helped make him a European potentate, and three of his daughters married monarchs.^* After his death in 1015, his son Yaroslav the Wise presided over Rus at its height, ruling from a Kyiv filled with churches. But its apogee was short. After Yaroslav, Rus fragmented into smaller principalities, always ruled by Rurikovichi,^* one of whom would built a small fortress beside the River Moskva – Moscow. Having won Kyiv for Christ, Basil rushed southwards to stop a new Arab advance in Syria, fighting from the Caucasus to the Balkans, a warrior emperor, who shared rations with his men and several times was almost killed in battle, always saved by his 6,000 Varangian guards.

As many a Viking headed southwards to serve Basil, other compatriots raided Francia where Charlemagne’s heirs – whose epithets, the Fat, the Simple, the Stammerer, reveal their weaknesses – made at least thirteen Danegeld payments. Emperor Charles the Fat had managed to reunite the entire empire of his great-grandfather – from Italy to East and West Francia – but he lacked the killer instinct to keep it. In 885, a Viking fleet under several chieftains sailed up the Seine and besieged Paris. One of the Vikings was a young warlord named Rollo. The small city – just 20,000 inhabitants – was held by the emperor’s young barons Odo, count of Paris, and his brother Robert, sons of a self-made warlord, Robert the Strong, who begged for his help. Instead Fat Charles paid 700 pounds of silver to the Vikings, an appeasement so brazen that Odo was elected king of West Francia. His reign was short but he founded a new dynasty and a kingdom that evolved into France. Odo’s was not the only family hacking out a new realm.

As for the Norse raider Rollo, the battle of Paris made him too. In its aftermath, he stole a Frankish count’s bride, Poppa of Bayeux, with whom he founded a dynasty that in some ways still endures. So hulking that no horse would hold him, Rollo the Walker, now captured Rouen, then in 911 attacked Paris again. The Carolingian king of West Francia, Charles the Simple, bought him off with a deal to keep his lands provided he converted to Christianity, and repelled Viking raiders and overmighty barons. Rollo agreed: he and his Norsemen became known as Normans, his duchy as Normandy; his descendants conquered England, and today’s British monarchs are descended from him. In 922, after deposing Simple Charles and fighting Rollo, Odo’s brother Robert was elected king: his descendants, would be kings of France as Capets, Valois and Bourbons (with a few interludes) until 1848 – almost a millennium.

Yet the Normans did not give up raiding: Rouen was famed for its slave market and they needed Islamic slaves to sell. They were still raiding al-Andalus during the 950s but encountered the great monarch of the west who now had his own fleets that he used to raid the shores of Francia and Africa.

CALIPH OF CORDOBA

Seethingly vigilant and ferociously martial, Abd al-Rahman III was muscular with short legs, blond, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, his grandmother being a Christian princess, Onneca Fortúnez, daughter of the king of Pamplona; his mother was an enslaved Slav, one of thousands traded by the Vikings from Russia. The Umayya court was a bearpit – his father murdered by his uncle, and his uncle by his grandfather – but he was trained for power by his tough aunt Sayyida.

In 912, within a week of inheriting at the age of twenty-one a kingdom beset with rebellions and challenges, Abd al-Rahman III was displaying the head of the chief rebel to the people of Cordoba. But it took twenty years to restore Umayya power, striking north at the Christian kingdoms and south into Morocco. In 929, Abd al-Rahman assumed the caliphate, a celebration of military success and disdain for the frayed caliphs of Baghdad. He liked to receive Christian visitors seated in plain robes on a linen mat with just a Quran, a sword and a flame before him, offering them either the Quran or the sword followed by the fire.

Yet he was a European titan, receiving ambassadors from the two Christian emperors, a humanistic patron of the arts with the greatest library outside Constantinople. Cordoba was now the biggest city in Europe along with Constantinople: its emperors sent gifts, marble fountains and Greek classics which the caliph had translated into Arabic. He built a new palace complex, Medina al-Zahra, probably named after a slave girl and modelled on the Umayya palace in Damascus, six miles outside Cordoba, with a colossal throne room built around a huge mercury pool, a menagerie of lions (a gift from his African allies) and one of Europe’s first flushing bathrooms at a time when London and Paris were tiny towns with open sewers. His court was cosmopolitan: his guards and concubines were Slavs, his viziers often Jewish or Christian. His Jewish doctor Hasdai ibn Shaprut served as ambassador and treasurer, corresponding with popes and with German and eastern emperors, as well as with the Jewish khagans of Khazaria.

Yet neither caliphal grandeur nor adab diminished Abd al-Rahman’s sybaritic ferocity. He presided over a harem of 6,750 females and 3,750 male slaves. A female slave who betrayed him was fed to the lions; a Christian boy – later St Pelagius – who rejected his advances was dismembered. These may be stock anti-Muslim stories, but he certainly relished his lack of ruth. His executioner, always ready with sword and leather mat, grew rich. Once, while he was beheading a concubine, her jewellery fell out of her hair and the caliph let him keep it. When one of his sons conspired against him, he publicly executed the boy himself.

He launched annual invasions of the north, always leading his own armies, until he was almost killed in battle. When the Vikings attacked al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman repelled them with his fleet, while he expanded along the European and African coasts, establishing a Côte d’Azur pirates’ nest at Fréjus and campaigning in Morocco, where his general was a Slavic eunuch nicknamed the Castrated Cockerell. His capture of Ceuta and Tangier gave him access to the trans-Saharan caravans, but just as he hoped to control the trans-Saharan trade, the caliph was foiled by a messianic dynasty that arose in an oasis halfway between Morocco and west Africa. The caliph^* would scarcely have believed that this obscure desert uprising would tilt the balance of Afro-Asia, challenge Constantinople, Cordoba and Baghdad and lead to the founding of the greatest Arab city of all: Cairo.

* The sole British king to be known as the Great, Alfred ruled only the south-west. Wales was divided between the Celtic kingdoms of Deheubarth, Powys and Gwynedd; Scotland was divided between the Celtic realms of Strathclyde and Alba and the Viking kingdom of Man in the western isles; the rest was ruled by the Vikings.

* Their conception of the human self was singular: they believed each person was divided into a hamr (the physical body), the hugr (the essence), the hamingja (the personification of luck) and the fylgja (a female spirit that was within even the most virile man).

* The Rus were traders, as one told the Arab envoy: ‘O my Lord, I have come from a far land and have with me such and such a number of girls and such and such a number of sables.’ Their hygiene shocked the envoy: ‘They’re the filthiest of God’s creatures – no modesty in defecation and urination, nor do they wash after orgasm, nor wash their hands after eating – like wild asses.’ Then there was the group sex: ‘Each man sits on a couch. With them are pretty slaves for sale to merchants: a man has sexual intercourse with his slave while his companion looks on. Sometimes whole groups come together in this fashion in the presence of others. A merchant who arrives to buy a slave from them may have to wait and look on while a Rus completes the act of intercourse with his slave …’

* Basil not only welcomed his patroness, Danielis, to court, he raised her to the title of Emperor’s Mother (basileometor) which says much about their relationship. The Greek-speaking Romaioi now called the empire Basileia Romaion – Roman monarchy and their emperor basileus – king.

* The early work of two missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, who had translated the Greek Bible into Slavic script, later developing into Cyrillic, meant these newly Christian people could understand the new services.

* Little is really known of Vladimir, beyond a priestly chronicle, Tale of Bygone Years, written three hundred years later. Most of the story is a myth but Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century used it to justify his wars to ‘regather’ western lands. Peter the Great adapted the word ‘Rus’ to create the name of his new empire, Russia. Russian nineteenth-century Slavophiles and twenty-first-century believers in ‘the Russian World’ – such as President Vladimir Putin – used it to promote the myth of a Russian nation, encompassing the peoples of Russia and Ukraine. For Ukrainians, the story of Volodmyr is the founding myth of their nation.

* Two of Vladimir’s sons, Boris and Gleb, were killed in the struggles after their father’s death and became the first saints of the new church, seen as sacrifices for this new sacred land, Holy Rus, and launching the sacralization of the rulers of Russia.

* ‘I’ve now reigned over fifty years in victory or peace,’ Abd al-Rahman mused on his deathbed in 969, ‘beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies and respected by my allies. I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, don’t place confidence in this present world!’