Byzantine Culture

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The Varangian Guard

Scandinavians and later Anglo-Saxons served as the Byzantine emperor's bodyguard for four centuries. Recruitment, pay, famous members like Harald Hardrada, and the runes they left behind.

For roughly four hundred years the emperor of the Romans was guarded by men from the far north of Europe who spoke no Greek when they arrived, carried long-handled axes, and had a reputation for drinking that Byzantine writers recorded with a mixture of disapproval and affection. Michael Psellos called them the emperor’s “axe-bearing barbarians”; the twelfth-century historian Niketas Choniates noted that their axes rested on their right shoulders as a matter of drill.

The Varangian Guard was created for a specific political reason and kept for the same reason throughout its existence. Native Byzantine regiments had a habit of making emperors, and the great families of Anatolia had clients inside them. Foreigners with no local connections, paid directly by the palace and dependent on the reigning emperor for everything, were a different proposition. They were, in the words used by more than one modern historian, insurance against the empire’s own army.

Origins

The word Varangian (Greek Varangoi, Old Norse Væringjar) derives from a root meaning something like sworn companion or member of a pledged band. Scandinavians had been travelling the river routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea since the ninth century, trading furs, wax, amber and slaves, and serving as mercenaries on the way. A treaty between Byzantium and the Rus of Kiev in 911 already includes provisions for Rus serving in the imperial forces, and individual northerners appear in Byzantine armies in the tenth century.

The Guard proper dates to 988. Basil II, facing the revolt of Bardas Phokas described in Basil II, obtained six thousand Rus warriors from Vladimir of Kiev in exchange for his sister Anna’s hand and Vladimir’s baptism. The Rus destroyed Phokas’s supporters at Chrysopolis; Basil kept them. From that point the guard is a permanent institution.

Who Served

The composition changed over time in a way that tracks northern European politics rather neatly.

c. 988–1050: Rus and Scandinavians. Swedes above all, along with Norwegians, Danes and Icelanders, arriving by the Dnieper route through Kiev.

c. 1050–1204: increasingly Anglo-Saxon. After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, displaced English warriors arrived in numbers; by the twelfth century Byzantine sources sometimes call the guard “the axe-bearing Britons,” and a Latin source of the 1080s already notes English serving the emperor. A tradition preserved in a late Icelandic saga has an English colony planted by the emperor on the Black Sea coast and called New England, which may be legend but is not impossible.

After 1204: a much reduced body, increasingly ceremonial and of mixed origin, surviving in the records of the Palaiologan court into the fourteenth century.

Duties

The guard’s core function was the physical protection of the emperor. They stood at the doors of the Great Palace, escorted him in procession, guarded the treasury and the prisons, and attended ceremonies in Hagia Sophia — the Book of Ceremonies records them acclaiming the emperor in their own language, which by the eleventh century must have been mostly incomprehensible to the court.

They were also a field unit, used as shock troops where the fighting was heaviest. They fought in southern Italy against the Normans, in Sicily under George Maniakes, in the Balkans against the Pechenegs and Bulgars, at Manzikert in 1071, and at Dyrrachium in 1081, where they charged Robert Guiscard’s Normans, pushed them back, became separated from the Byzantine line and were destroyed almost to a man in and around a chapel where they took refuge.

A less glamorous duty: they served as the emperor’s enforcers in political arrests. When Michael V attempted to depose the empress Zoe in 1042 and the city rose against him, it was Varangians who were involved in the violent end of the affair.

Pay and Plunder

Service was extremely lucrative, which is why men crossed a continent for it.

Wages were paid in gold, the guard shared in imperial donatives at accessions, and there was a recognised custom the Norse called polutasvarf — usually understood as a right to go through the palace and help themselves at the death of an emperor. There was also plunder on campaign and a share of the goods of condemned traitors.

The evidence for the wealth is physical. More than thirty Swedish runestones commemorate men who went to Greece; one from Ed in Uppland was cut on the orders of a man named Ragnvald who had commanded a company in Greece. Another, from Veda, records that a man bought his farm with the pay he earned in the east. Byzantine gold coins turn up in Scandinavian hoards, and a small piece of graffiti in the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia, incompletely legible, appears to be a runic inscription reading something like “Halfdan carved these runes” — a bored guardsman during a long liturgy.

Harald Sigurdsson

The most famous Varangian is Harald Sigurdsson, later king of Norway as Harald Hardrada. He arrived around 1034, aged about nineteen, after fleeing Norway and spending time in Kiev, and served roughly a decade. He fought in Asia Minor, in Sicily under Maniakes, in Bulgaria, and possibly in Jerusalem. He left with a fortune, married a daughter of the prince of Kiev, took the Norwegian throne, and died at Stamford Bridge in September 1066 invading England — three weeks before William of Normandy landed.

The Norse saga account of his Byzantine service, in Heimskringla, is full of picturesque episodes that the Byzantine record does not support, including an affair with the empress Zoe. But Harald is independently attested: the Advice to an Emperor (the Strategikon of Kekaumenos), written by a Byzantine officer in the 1070s, mentions “Araltes, son of the king of Varangia,” describes his service and his loyalty, and notes that he was given the court rank of spatharokandidatos and later manglabites. Very few figures from saga literature can be checked against an independent bureaucratic source; Harald is one.

Discipline and Reputation

Byzantine writers consistently describe the guard as loyal, brave and drunk. The historian Michael Attaleiates notes their reliability; the Alexiad of Anna Komnene calls them men who regard loyalty to the emperors as a family tradition handed down from father to son. The wine ration and its consequences are mentioned often enough that the phrase “the emperor’s wine-skins” was apparently current.

They were an oath-bound body, and their oath was to the reigning emperor personally. This produced an awkwardness at every usurpation, and Byzantine political practice adapted: guards who had sworn to a deposed emperor generally transferred their oath once the change was accomplished, on the logic that the office rather than the man held the loyalty. There is no recorded instance of the Varangians initiating a coup, which is precisely what they were hired to avoid.

The End

The guard survived 1204, when its remnants fought in the defence of Constantinople against the Fourth Crusade, and reappears in the restored empire after 1261. By then it was chiefly ceremonial: sources of the fourteenth century describe axe-bearers at imperial functions and keepers of the palace keys, with names that are no longer Norse. The last unambiguous references date from the 1360s.

What the Guard Tells Us

Three things, mainly.

First, the reach of the Byzantine economy. A gold coin struck in Constantinople could pull a Swedish farmer’s son across two thousand miles of river and steppe, and send him home rich enough to buy land.

Second, the empire’s approach to manpower. Byzantium bought what it needed and integrated it without requiring assimilation — Varangians kept their language, their weapons and their drinking habits, and were valued for the difference.

Third, how much of northern European history ran through Constantinople. Harald Hardrada’s claim on England, the Christianisation of the Rus, the wealth that flowed back up the Dnieper — all of it connects to a palace guard on the Bosphorus. The wider consequences of the Kievan connection are traced in Byzantine legacy in Russia.

The Runestones

The most unusual evidence for Byzantine history sits in Swedish fields, and it is worth setting out because it is independent of every Greek source.

Roughly thirty surviving runestones, almost all in Uppland and Södermanland, commemorate men who went to Greece — Grikkland — in the eleventh century. They are memorials raised by families, not accounts of service, and they are laconic in the way runic inscriptions always are.

The Ed stone in Uppland was raised by a man named Ragnvald who states that he commanded a company in Greece. The Veda stone records that its subject bought the farm with the wealth he earned in the east. Several stones commemorate men who died in Greece; others were raised by men who returned.

A related body of inscriptions commemorates the disastrous expedition of Ingvar the Far-Travelled to the Caspian region around 1041 — some twenty-five stones, the largest group connected to a single event in the runic corpus.

The graffiti go the other way. In the upper south gallery of Hagia Sophia, on a marble parapet, is a damaged runic inscription usually read as containing the name Halfdan; a second, fragmentary one has been identified elsewhere in the building. A Byzantine guardsman scratching his name during a long service is not a document, but it is a person.

Taken together this material shows something the Greek sources never state: the scale of the traffic, the wealth it generated, and its effect on communities two thousand miles from the Bosphorus.

Equipment and Fighting Style

The guard’s weapon was the long-hafted axe, and Byzantine writers treat it as their identifying mark — they are the pelekyphoroi, the axe-bearers.

The weapon was almost certainly the Danish axe: a broad thin blade on a haft of perhaps a metre and a half, swung two-handed, capable of splitting mail and a shield in the same stroke. It is a shock weapon with no defence, which is why the guard fought in a formed body with shields and secondary weapons — sword or seax — for close work.

Byzantine sources describe them in mail, with shields, in a dense formation, deployed where the fighting was expected to be decided. At Dyrrachium in 1081 they charged the Norman line on foot, broke it, pursued too far, became separated from the Byzantine army and were destroyed — a defeat that illustrates both the shock value and the tactical limitation.

Anna Komnene notes that they regarded loyalty to the emperors as a family inheritance handed down from father to son, and the phrase is probably close to how they thought of it: a professional body with its own traditions, its own language and its own sense of what it was for.

The English Chapter

The Anglo-Saxon influx after 1066 is well enough attested to be more than legend.

A Latin source of the 1080s notes English serving the Byzantine emperor. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Byzantine writers increasingly describe the guard as British or English rather than Scandinavian. Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy in the 1120s, says that many English left the country after the Conquest and took service with the emperor at Constantinople.

The Icelandic Játvarðar Saga, much later, adds the colourful detail of an English colony planted by the emperor on the northern Black Sea coast and named New England, with towns called London and York. No independent evidence confirms it, and it is not impossible — Byzantium settled foreign populations as frontier colonists routinely.

What the English element does confirm is the guard’s function. A body of displaced foreigners with no stake in Byzantine factions, dependent entirely on imperial favour, was exactly what the institution had been created to provide, and the Norman Conquest supplied a fresh batch at a convenient moment.

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