Who can be trusted to guard a king?  An age-old question, to be sure, but one that posed serious problems for any number of ancient and medieval civilizations.  What soldier, or leader, could ever be considered above the politics?  And if no one fit that description, wouldn’t kings and emperors simply die one after another in rapid succession, eliminating any stability that a unified kingdom or empire offered its disparate parts?

Well, with rare exception, we know that didn’t happen.  Kings ruled their kingdoms, emperors their empires, often over lengthy periods of time that seem to indicate that, yes indeed, there would always be men who could be trusted to protect one’s leaders.  Where does one find such people—men, and occasionally women—who were formidable enough in appearance to discourage attack, and skilled enough with arms to defeat any such attempt? 

Well, for a great number of rulers throughout history, the most trustworthy of bodyguards would come from beyond their own borders.  Foreigners, sometimes even mercenaries, who otherwise had no ties to the endemic politics that threatened even the sagest and most beloved rulers.  Today I’d like to talk about one such group, an intimidating and thoroughly effective military unit that inspired terror in the enemies of the empire they served—though were not subjects of—for nearly 500 years. 

Let’s look backward in time to the year 700 A.D.  The Byzantine Empire, wealthy and powerful half remnant of the once mighty Roman Empire that gave it life, was in trouble, split by numerous crises of succession, the Emperor Basil II feared he might lose the throne.  He appealed to the recently Christianized Kieven Rus, a people closely related to the Danes, Swedes, and other Norse groups.  In response, Vladimir I of Kiev, dispatched 6,000 Norse warriors as part of a wider military pact with Basil.  Not trusting the Byzantine palace guard, whose loyalty, it seems, shifted with the political winds, Basil dismissed them and replaced them with the tall, blonde, axe-wielding Norsemen, instituting what came to be known as the Varangian Guard in 988.

From that point until the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 which essentially ended the Byzantine Empire, the Varangians would play a significant role in the defense of their adopted state.  Not once in all that time would palace intrigue be blamed on the foreign soldiers, even though their ethnic make-up changed with the times.  Rather, a case could be made that the Varangian Guard greatly contributed to the stability within the highest echelons of Byzantine leadership, facilitating one of the world’s longest-lived empires.

The Varangians began as Rus, but over time, their ranks came to be filled with Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and, after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, displaced Anglo-Saxons.  Yet the quality of their service never changed, whether measured in loyalty to the Imperial throne, or as shock troops in battle.  The Byzantines, for their part, seemed to have quickly recognized the value of these strange warriors and their stranger customs, and granted the Varangians the unique right of “sacking” the palace treasury to celebrate the death of an emperor.  It seems the men were allowed to take whatever they could carry, leading many Norse warriors to go home rich, which, of course, only encouraged others to seek their fortunes in the elite organization.

Their conduct within the palace and the capital at Constantinople aside, it was their performance on the battlefield that gave the Varangians their reputation as fierce warriors.  Generally held in reserve to be fed into a battle at the most decisive point, the Norsemen never let their emperor down.  Time and again they eagerly surged into the bloodiest and most hopeless of fights with all the reckless abandon with which their raiding kinsmen were already infamous across Central and Western Europe.  And they were every bit as successful.

The Varangians brought with them their ardor for battle, unaltered even by the acceptance of Christianity.  And berserkers would be excitedly noted within the Varangian ranks at many of the battles in which they engaged.  These men—if indeed they were mere men—were absolutely terrifying to the peoples of the Mediterranean, far less used to dealing with them in the smaller numbers found in Viking raids far to the north.  The Varangians could deploy in numbers that dwarfed most Viking engagements, and their bloodlust and love of carnage was proportional to the size of their force.

The Varangian Guard participated in the Battle of Chrysopolis in 989, the Sicily campaign in 1038, numerous Byzantine adventures in Italy throughout the 11th Century, the Battle of Beroia in 1122, and defended against the crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204.  At Chrysopolis, the Varangians were noted for the viciousness with which they pursued their fleeing enemy after the rebel leader died of a stroke in full view of the enemy.  An understandable reaction, perhaps, to seeing Varangian ranks standing ominously across the battlefield.  At Beroia, the Varangians put their axes to good use hacking clean through a Pecheneg wagon fort, breaking the enemy lines and almost single-handedly securing victory for Emperor John II Komnenos.

Over time, the Varangians attained a reputation and functionality well beyond their original intent as bodyguards for the Emperor, and often, Byzantine armies would be stiffened with a detachment from the elite force.  These stiffening elements could be quite large at times, numbering as high as 700 warriors. 

Yet the Varangians tasted defeat as well, a contingent dying to the last man around their emperor during the catastrophic defeat at Manzikert in 1071.  It may well have been that the disastrous civil war which followed, weakening the empire enough to make it a tempting target for the powerful Seljuk Turks, was only possible because so many of the emperor’s fierce bodyguards had fallen.

Those losses would be replaced to some degree, though the Byzantine Empire, and its ferocious Norse warriors, was by that point firmly in the decline.  The last historical reference to the Varangian Guard was the Battle of Pelagonia in 1259, but individuals described as “Varangian” continued to be found in Constantinople well into the 15th Century.

Regardless, the thought of wild Viking warriors serving the Byzantine Emperor for half a millennium really sets the imagination running.  These furious and fearless warriors, fighting alongside the orderly, disciplined cohorts of the Eastern Roman Empire, must have presented an incredible tactical problem for any enemy general.  Given the Varangian Guard’s record of success on the battlefield, however, there was little chance that one might learn lessons fighting them that could be applied in the future.  Generally speaking, if you fought the Varangians … you had no future. 

M. G. Haynes