War Fought Over a Bucket, and Other Medieval Warfare Facts

20. The Viking Conquest of Medieval Russia

The Viking Age, from the late eighth century to the eleventh, witnessed an onslaught of Scandinavians from seemingly nowhere to terrorize, devastate, and settle in much of Europe. In their homes, the Vikings were farmers, fishermen, traders, and the like. When they took to the sea in groups made up of clan leaders and chieftains, accompanied by their retainers and adventurers in search of booty, they morphed into raiders and pillagers. From their longships, they appeared suddenly along coasts and the banks of navigable rivers in hit and run attacks that left widespread havoc in their wake.

The raiders burned, plundered, and slaughtered on a massive scale that earned them the name vikingr, which meant “pirate” in contemporary Scandinavian languages. They greatly impacted European history. Vikings settled and at times dominated the British Isles, Normandy, the Baltic, and much of modern day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Their reach extended beyond Europe, and their lethal raids terrorized the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. Pants-soiling scary to contemporaries, the Vikings began to be viewed through a romanticized lens of noble savages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the West, the Vikings are best known for what they did in Britain and Western Europe. However, the greatest Viking success story is what they did in Russia, whose origins can be traced back directly to Viking conquerors. The story of Russia literally begins with the Vikings. Specifically, Rurik (circa 830 – 879), a Viking chieftain who gained control of the town of Ladoga near today’s Saint Petersburg, around 855. He then built a settlement named Holmgard near Novgorod, founded the Rurik Dynasty, and his descendants conquered a vast region from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That territory encompassed most of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia’s western parts.

19. The Birth of Russia

Rurik’s descendants divided the dynasty’s conquests amongst themselves into states that came to be known collectively as Kievan Rus – Russia’s historic heartland. Our knowledge of Rurik comes from a twelfth century Rus history, The Russian Primary Chronicle, written by a monk named Nestor. It states that Novgorod’s Eastern Slavs had warred with invading Vikings and defeated them. However, the Slavs then fought amongst themselves, and to end their civil strife, they changed their minds about the Vikings, and decided to invite a Viking chieftain named Rurik to rule them. So Rurik showed up with two brothers and a Viking entourage, to rule Novgorod and its environs. At least that is how early Russians liked to imagine how they came to be ruled by Vikings.

Few serious scholars believe the story that the Slavs had “invited” Rurik to rule them, or accept it at face value. It is viewed instead as a face saving invention by Slavs who came to live under Viking domination. The natives preferred to imagine that they had voluntarily invited their foreign rulers, instead of the more bitter reality that they had been conquered and subjugated by them. After he conquered Ladoga around 855, Rurik pushed southwards, and by 862, he had mastered Novgorod and its vicinity.

Rurik fortified Novgorod – whose name means “New City” in modern Russian, but meant “New Fortification” in Medieval Russian – and used it as a base of operations and expansion. He ruled his new realm until his death in 879. Rurik bequeathed his realm to his kinsman Orvar of Holmgard – later Russified into Oleg of Novgorod – and entrusted to him the care of his young son, Igor. Oleg continued Rurik’s expansionist policies, and eventually seized Kiev from his brother Askold, who himself had only recently seized it from the local Slavs, and solidified the Rurikid Dynasty’s control over what became Russia.

18. Mongols Feasted Over the Bodies of Their Defeated Foes

In 1223, Genghis Khan sent a Mongol expedition of about 20,000 men to raid into the Caucuses and southern Russia. Led by generals Subutai and Jebe, the force defeated all in its path, including the Cumans, allies of the Kievan Rus. The Rus came to the Cumans’ aid, and a vast army set out after the raiders. The Mongols retreated, and their foes pursued. For nine days, Subutai and Jebe led their pursuers on a merry chase across the Steppe, then suddenly turned on their by-then strung out enemies at the banks of the Kalka River. In the resultant battle, fought on May 31^st, 1223, the Mongols annihilated their erstwhile pursuers. Things went from bad to worse for the captured enemy commanders when the Mongols decided to celebrate their victory by dining over their captives.

The Mongols’ reputation for cruelty and bloodthirstiness was well deserved. While those who surrendered immediately often found the Mongols to be decent rulers, woe betide those who resisted. It is estimated that the wars of Mongol conquest might have killed up to 60 million people. The Mongols liked to make examples out of their defeated foes. After their victory at the Battle of Kalka River, captured enemy commanders were laid on the ground. A huge board was then placed over their bodies, over which the victors sat to eat, drink, and celebrate their triumph, while slowly crushing and suffocating the men beneath to death.

17. When Castles Dominated the Medieval Landscape

Castles dominated settled landscapes throughout much of Eurasia, until gunpowder technology made them obsolete.  Although they are best known as defensive structures, sheltering those within from more powerful foes without, castles also served offensive purposes: they provided a base from which raids could be launched. No castle was completely impervious to attack. Provided they were sufficiently numerous, determined, and willing to pay price in blood, attackers could escalade castles and storm their walls, batter their gates, or breach their fortifications. More often, if a castle was particularly formidable, enemies besieged them, cut them off from resupply, and hoped to starve out the defenders. Often, sieges were coupled with attempts to tunnel beneath and undermine a castle’s walls from below.

Location was key to a castle’s strength. Often situated on high ground, they had high walls, strong gates, and sometimes a surrounding moat filled with water. To maximize their defensive capacity, castle builders often incorporated ingenious innovations into their designs, to make storming them as dangerous as possible. One of the nastier design features was murder holes. As their name indicates, murder holes were intended to, literally, murder people. Passageways through the walls – often behind the main gate – would have holes up above. Through those openings, defenders could stab attackers below with spears, riddle them with arrows or crossbow bolts, or pour unpleasant things on them, such as boiling water, heated sand, or quicklime. Contrary to common perception, hot oil was almost never poured over attackers. Oil was expensive, and besieged defenders cut off from resupply were more likely to hoard, rather than throw away, such a precious commodity. 

16. Overcoming Castles’ Defenses

In addition to murder holes were machicolations: openings in the corbels, or the parts jutting out from the top of walls. As with murder holes, stones, boiling water, heated sand, quicklime, and other unpleasant things could be dropped from machicolations on enemies at the base of the wall. Machicolations originated in the Middle East, and their designs were brought back to Europe by Crusaders. By the thirteenth century, their use was widespread in the West, especially in France. While larger castles featured traditional machicolations all around the walls and towers, a variant known as the box machicolation became widespread in smaller fortresses, especially atop the castle’s gates.

Treachery aside, the quickest way to seize an enemy castle was to storm its walls by attackers using ladders and siege towers. However, that was often hazardous, and cost dearly in attackers’ lives. One alternative was to try and batter down the walls, either from a distance with catapults and trebuchets, or up close with battering rams. Catapults were deployed since ancient times against castles and city walls. They used tension or torsion to slowly build up and store energy in a device, before rapidly releasing the stored energy via an arm that flung a rock at a targeted wall. In the later medieval era, catapult technology took a leap forward with the development of trebuchets – the most effective weapon against castle and city walls until the arrival of gun powder.

15. Castle Defenders vs Attackers

Catapults relied on torsion or tension to store energy prior to release. By contrast, trebuchets relied on gravity: a heavy weight on one side of a pivot, with a long arm from which a stone was flung on the other side. Trebuchets were faster and easier to construct, and used relatively few expensive materials, such as the pricey elastic ropes needed for torsion catapults. On the downside, trebuchet ranges were shorter than those of torsion catapults. However, trebuchets made up for that with consistency. Torsion catapults were not consistent, with factors such as rope dampness or loss of elasticity causing the impact ranges to vary. Trebuchets by contrast relied on the constants of gravity and a fixed weight for energy. Once ranged in, they would hit the same spot if given the same weight projectile.

Tunnels were often used to defeat castles and other fortifications. Tunneling was particularly effective against walls that were not built atop solid rock. Besiegers would dig beneath the walls either to bypass them and allow attackers to emerge on the other side, or to undermine and collapse the walls. When undermining the walls, besiegers would tunnel until they got beneath the foundations of a wall section. As they excavated a space beneath the foundation, they would use temporary wooden props to keep the walls up. Once a sufficiently large space was dug beneath the walls, the besiegers would burn the props, causing them to collapse, along with the section of wall above them. The defenders, always on the lookout for such attempts, often dug counter tunnels in an attempt to intercept and destroy the underground attackers.

14. A Decades’ Long War Over an Injured Camel

In pre-Islamic Arabia, Kulayb ibn Rabiah (440 – 494) was a chieftain of the Taghlib tribe. A warrior and poet of great renown, Kulayb was even better known for his pride (or arrogance) and fondness for asserting his dominance and preeminence over others. At pain of death, none could graze their camels, water their flocks, or hunt in any land claimed by him without his permission. While others defined their territory with physical markers, Kulayb chose another method. His first name, which means “little doggie”, was a nickname bestowed because of a little dog he kept in front of his tent. He defined his territory by the radius of the sound of its barking. If you could hear Kulayb’s dog, you were in his territory. His followers and fellow tribesmen ate up Kulayb’s exaggerated machismo. Others were not so thrilled.

Kulayb’s wife was Jalilah bint Murah, a beauty from the frenemy Bakr tribe, with whom the Taghlibs traded and sometimes raided. He asked her if she knew of a prouder man than him. She replied that she did: her brother, Jassas. Kulayb didn’t like that, and set out to punk his brother-in-law. Jalilah’s aunt, Al Basus, had a favorite camel that accidentally wandered into grazing lands claimed by Kulayb. So he shot and wounded it with an arrow. When Basus saw what Kulayb had done, she raised a fuss, and berated her nephew Jassas for allowing his aunt and the Bakr tribe to endure such an insult. Stung, Jassas stabbed Kulayb with a spear, and mortally wounded him. The dying Kulayb wrote a message on a rock with his blood, demanding vengeance. The result was the Basus War between the Taghlib and Bakr tribes, which lasted for forty years.

13. The Vikings and Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon England witnessed some violent stretches in the Dark Ages. In 655 Penda, a warlike king of Merica, one of several rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, breathed his last. Everybody breathed a collective sigh of relief, because Penda’s era had been one of widespread warfare. It was followed by a stretch of relative peace. The post-Penda years came to be seen as an Anglo-Saxon golden age. It was a period of economic expansion, which produced a surplus that helped fund a growing number of monasteries – centers of learning in the early medieval era. In 669, the Archbishop of Canterbury founded a school in his city – the first school in England. The Venerable Bede described it six decades later as having “attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome knowledge“.

Some of them, who survived into Bede’s own day, were as fluent in Greek and Latin as they were in their native English. Other academic institutions produced scholars and poets who wrote in Latin. One of them, Aldhelm, pioneered a grandiloquent style that became the dominant Latin style for centuries to come. Anglo-Saxon scholars were the most highly respected throughout Europe in this period. Bede himself was one of the foremost scholars and men of letters in Christendom. Unfortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings were about to wreck their golden age.

The Anglo-Saxons initially spoke distinctive dialects. However, those different strains melded into each other over time, and evolved to form a common language, known as Old English. It lent itself to an exceptionally rich vernacular literature. Examples include the epic poem Beowulf, and a collection of manuscripts about the early history of England, known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Unfortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, the very prosperity and plenty that fueled their golden age led to its sudden end. Anglo-Saxon England’s wealth, and especially the wealth of its monasteries, attracted the covetous attention of Viking raiders.

12. Medieval England’s Most Unpleasant Surprise

In the late eighth century, the Vikings erupted from Scandinavia to terrorize Europe and the Mediterranean world. They nearly brought the Anglo-Saxon era to a premature end. What came to be known as the Viking Age began in 793, when raiders struck the great monastery at Lindisfarne, massacred the monks, and seized its riches. After generations of peace, the destruction of Lindisfarne was a shock probably equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one. Unlike the US, the Anglo-Saxons lacked the means to strike back, and were unable to even defend their shores from further raids.

Anglo-Saxon England was unprepared for the Vikings. Ironically, it was quite similar to the Anglo-Saxon onslaught upon Roman Britain centuries earlier. In the decades after they destroyed Lindisfarne, the Vikings continued to raid England. Their assaults were marked by a wanton savagery, and gratuitous destructiveness that terrorized all and sundry. For decades, the raiders retreated after they struck, wintered in their homeland, and returned the following spring. By 850, however, they had had grown sufficiently disdainful of Anglo-Saxon resistance to overwinter in England for the first time, in the island of Thanet off Kent.

The Vikings repeated that in subsequent years until, in 865, they switched from raids to outright conquest. That year, Vikings gathered into what came to be known as “The Great Heathen Army”, landed in East Anglia, and marched northward into Northumbria. There, they established the Viking community of Jorvik – modern York. It was the first Viking settlement in England. The Anglo-Saxons couldn’t stop the invaders. By 867, the Vikings had conquered what came to be known as the Danelaw – a territory that eventually stretched from London and the Thames to north of York, into Northumberland. In 871, the Great Heathen Army, reinforced by a newly arrived Viking army known as the “Great Summer Army”, invaded Wessex, the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

11. The Turk Bodyguards Who Ruled an Empire

The Abbasid Caliphate (750 – 1258) was the second of two hereditary dynasties that claimed suzerainty over the Islamic world. At the height of their power, the Abbasids’ realm stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of China, and from Central Asia to India’s borders. Things fell apart when shortsighted caliphs hired Turkish mercenaries, then failed to control them. It began in the ninth century, with al Mu’tasim, a younger son of the dynasty’s most famous caliph, Harun al Rashid – a contemporary of Charlemagne and a recurring character in the Arabian Nights fables. Al Mu’tasim created a private army of Turkish mercenaries and slaves, and formed them into a Turkish Guard that helped him secure power in 833. Unfortunately, the Turks engaged in widespread robberies and assaults that made them hugely unpopular with the civilian population.

To reduce the friction between his subjects and soldiers, al Mu’tasim relocated his capital in 835 from Baghdad to a new city, Samarra. That calmed things down for a while, but did not solve the core conundrum of how to control the Turkish mercenaries. In 861, things came to a head in what came to be known as “The Anarchy at Samarra”. It began when the Turkish Guard murdered the caliph al Mutawakkil, and replaced him with his brother, al Muntasir. The new caliph lasted for six months, before the Turks did him in. They then held a conference to appoint a successor, al Musta’in. He escaped in 865, but the mercenaries pursued, captured, and put him to death. The Turks then appointed another caliph, al Mu’tazz, but he bucked. So they deposed and killed him in 869, and replaced him with another puppet, al Muhtadi.

Al Muhtadi also tried to assert his authority, only to get murdered by the mercenaries and replaced in 870. The anarchy finally ended with the appointment of a caliph who realized that power no longer lay with himself, and accepted his role as a puppet. The Abbasid Caliphate stumbled on for another four centuries. It survived as a shadow of what it had once been, with its caliphs as playthings of strongmen and sultans. It finally came to an end in 1258, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad. They rolled the last caliph inside a rug, then trampled him to death beneath their horses’ hooves.

10. The Scariest Medieval Conqueror

It is commonly assumed that Genghis Khan was history’s scariest conqueror. However, while Genghis is one of history’s scariest people, he was not as lethal as an even deadlier medieval warrior: Timur (1336 – 1405). Byname Timur Link, which means “Timur the Lame” in Turkish, he was the last of the great Eurasian Steppe conquerors to terrify the civilized world with widespread devastation and butchery. He is chiefly remembered for his savagery and his wide-ranging rampage, from India to Russia and the Mediterranean and points in between. Timur killed about 17 million people, or about 5 percent of the world’s population at the time. That would be equivalent to almost 400 million people in 2024. A Muslim Turko-Mongol who claimed descent from Genghis Khan, Timur was born in the Chagatai Khanate in today’s Uzbekistan, ruled by Genghis’ descendants at the time.

Timur’s rise began in 1360, when he led Turkic tribesmen on behalf of the Chagatai Khan. However, the Khan was murdered by rivals, and that triggered a struggle for power. When the dust settled, Timur had emerged as the power behind a throne occupied by a figurehead Chagatai puppet, through whom Timur ruled. Timur’s supposed descent from Genghis Khan might have been dubious. That did not stop him, however, from using it to justify his conquests as a restoration of the by then-defunct Mongol Empire. He claimed that his conquests were a re-imposition of legitimate Mongol rule over lands that had been wrongfully seized by usurpers. With those justifications, Timur spent 35 years roiling the medieval world. In that stretch, he earned a reputation for brutal savagery as he brought fire and sword to the lands between the Indus and Volga rivers, the Himalayas and the Mediterranean.

9. The Clash of Sultans

Among the cities Timur left depopulated and in ruins were Damascus and Aleppo in Syria; Baghdad in Iraq; Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, and Ryazan, bth in Russia; India’s Delhi, outside whose walls he massacred over 100,000 captives; and Isfahan in Iran, where he massacred 200,000. Timur liked to pile up pyramids of severed heads. He also liked to cement live prisoners into the walls of captured cities, and erected towers of his victims’ skulls as object lessons and to terrorize would-be opponents. Timur’s most dramatic victory came at the expense of the Ottoman Turks. A rising power in their own right, the Ottomans were as exuberantly confident in their prowess as was Timur. For years, heated letters were exchanged between Timur and the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid, until Timur finally showed up with his army in 1402, crushed Bayezid, and took him captive.

In one of history’s greatest acts of ownage, Timur humiliated his prisoner by keeping him in a cage at court, while Bayezid’s favorite wife was made to serve the victor and his courtiers, naked. Timur’s decades-long rampage finally ended in 1405. As he prepared to invade China, he took ill, and died before he could launch the campaign. His grave was reportedly cursed. His body was exhumed by Soviet anthropologists on June 19^th, 1941. Carved inside his tomb were the words “When I rise from the dead, the word shall tremble“. Two days later, the Nazis launched the largest military operation of all time against the USSR, and the Soviets survived only by the skin of their teeth. Just to be on the safe side, in November, 1942, shortly before Operation Uranus which led to the first major Soviet victory at Stalingrad, Timur was reburied with full Islamic rituals.

8. The Birth of England in Reaction to Vikings

After they settled in Britain, the Anglo-Saxons divided their lands into disparate kingdoms that often fought against each other. It took the Vikings, who extinguished some of those kingdoms outright and brought the rest to the brink of extinction, to unify the Anglo-Saxons into the single country of England. That unification was conducted by Alfred the Great (849 – 899) and his successors. Alfred was the youngest son of King Aethelwulf of Wessex, who set up a succession whereby the throne would get inherited by each of his sons, from oldest to youngest. It was a departure from the primogeniture, where the throne passed from father to son, not from brother to brother. However, Wessex faced an existential threat from the Vikings, and Aethelwulf’s system sought to prevent a child from inheriting the throne in such a dangerous time.

As a result, Aethelwulf was succeeded by Alfred’s older brothers Aethelbard, then Aethelbert, then Aethelred. In 868, King Aethelred of Wessex and his younger brother Alfred tried, and failed, to keep a huge Viking host, known as the “Great Heathen Army”, out of the neighboring kingdom of Mercia. By 870, Wessex was the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, when it was attacked by the largest Viking army assembled to date. King Aethelred and his brother Alfred led the Anglo-Saxons in a series of battles with varying outcomes. Victory in an early skirmish was followed by a severe defeat a few days later. That was followed by a brilliant victory in the Battle of Ashdown, January 8^th, 871, in which Alfred played a leading role. Ashdown was followed by two defeats, Aethelred died soon thereafter, and Alfred finally became king of Wessex.

7. The Great Alfred

King Alfred’s reign had a rough start, with two defeats. The second defeat in particular, at Milton in May, 871, was a bad one, and it smashed all hopes of driving the Vikings from Wessex by force of arms. Alfred was thus forced to make peace with the invaders, and had to pay them a hefty sum to withdraw from his kingdom – which they did, by the autumn of 871. The Vikings returned in 876, and Alfred was forced to make a new peace with them, whose terms the invaders soon violated. In 878, a sudden Viking onslaught overran Wessex, and forced Alfred to flee to the marshes of Somerset. He led a guerrilla resistance, before he emerged in May, 878, to rally the surviving Wessex forces and lead them to a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington.

The victorious Alfred then pursued and besieged the Vikings at Chippenham. He starved them into surrender, and forced their leader, Guthrum, to convert to Christianity. In 885, Vikings from East Anglia attacked Kent, but Alfred defeated them, then launched a counteroffensive that captured London. That victory led all Anglo-Saxons not under Viking rule to accept Alfred as their king – a major step towards the unification of England. London acted as a springboard and base of operations for Alfred’s successor, his son Edward the Elder (reigned 899 – 924). By the end of his reign, Edward had decisively defeated the Vikings, and extended his authority over nearly all of today’s England.

6. A Fierce Medieval Female Warrior

France’s national heroine Joan of Arc, also known as the Maid of Orleans (1412 – 1431), is the world’s most famous female warrior. As a teenager, she personally led French forces into combat. She won a series of miraculous victories that revived the national spirit, and turned the tide of a war that until then had been going badly for France. Born into a peasant family in Lorraine, Joan was noted for her piety since childhood. In her teens, she saw visions from various saints, who directed her to save France from English domination. At the time, France was exhausted, downtrodden and reeling from a series of massive defeats at the hands of the English. The French crown was also in dispute between the French Dauphin, or heir to throne, and the English monarch, Henry VI.

Joan left home at age sixteen, and led by voices and visions from the saints, travelled to join the Dauphin. In 1429, she convinced the French heir to give her an army, which she took to relieve the city of Orleans, which was besieged by the English. Endowed with remarkable mental and physical courage, Joan of Arc led her men in a whirlwind campaign against the invaders. She lifted the siege in nine days, and put the English to flight. It was a momentous victory that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France. Then Joan, now known as “The Maid of Orleans”, convinced the Dauphin to crown himself king of France. She was then sent on various military expeditions, but in one of them in 1430, she was thrown off her horse and captured by the Burgundians.

5. France’s National Heroine

Joan’s captors kept her for several months, then sold her to the English, who were eager to get their hands on the girl who had caused them so much trouble. Although she had saved her country, she was now abandoned by her countrymen to fend for herself. The English and their French collaborators accused her of heresy and witchcraft, and locked her in a dark and filthy cell to await trial. Manacled to her bed with chains, she was incessantly harassed by her inquisitors at all hours of day and night in an effort to break her will and spirit. Joan of Arc adamantly refused to confess to any wrongs, and her accusers were unable to prove either heresy or witchcraft. In frustration, they turned their attention to the way in which she had dressed in male attire on the field of battle.

Her captors claimed that such cross dressing violated biblical injunctions, and convicted her on those grounds. On May 30^th, 1431, she was taken on a cart to Rouen, where the nineteen-year-old Maid of Orleans was burned at the stake. Two decades after her death, an inquisitorial court was ordered by a new pope, to reexamine Joan’s trial. The court debunked all the charges against her, cleared her posthumously, and declared her a martyr. In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte made her a national symbol of France. She was beatified in 1909, then canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Church in 1920. Today, Saint Joan of Arc is one of the patron saints of France, and the most famous female warrior of all time.

4. Vikings in Constantinople

The Viking reputation for ferocity made them ideal mercenaries. Mercenary units tend to be ad hoc affairs of adventurers from all over, gathered together under a captain for a specific mission, campaign, or war. As such, mercenary units seldom last for more than a few years before they are disbanded, once the conflict that gave rise to their creation is concluded. The Varangian Guard were an exception. Their history as a mercenary unit lasted for hundreds of years, from the early tenth to the fourteenth centuries. As seen above, Viking adventurers from what is now Sweden had penetrated deep into what are now Russia and the Ukraine in the ninth century. By 850, they had formed their own principalities in Kiev and Novgorod. From there, they dominated the region’s Slavs as a ruling caste of a new civilization that came to be known as Kievan Rus.

Rus princes often hired new Viking fighters from Scandinavia, who were known as Varangians. The term means a stranger who had taken military service, or a member of a union of traders and warriors. By the early 900s, some of these Varangians had ventured further south, sailed across the Black Sea, and raided Constantinople and the Byzantine lands. Some, however, took service with the Byzantine emperors as mercenaries. As early as 902, contemporary records describe a Viking force of about 700 Varangians that took part in a Byzantine expedition against Crete. In 988, Byzantine Emperor Basil II sought military aid from his ally, Prince Vladimir I of Kiev. The Rus ruler sent 6000 of his most unruly Viking warriors, whom he had been unable to pay anyhow. The emperor put Vladimir’s discards to good use against his enemies, then organized them into what became the nucleus of the Varangian Guard.

As foreigners, the Vikings had no local ties, and thus few political links that could enmesh them in the Byzantine court’s intrigues and cabals. That made them suitable as bodyguards. They were not just palace soldiers, however. They accompanied the emperor on campaign, and formed the Byzantine army’s shock infantry. The Varangians proved themselves in battle time after time, and their unit became an elite outfit whose members received higher pay than the rest of the army. In addition to higher pay, they were often granted the privilege to loot first after victory. Another informal privilege, which fell into their lap as the main armed force in the imperial palace, was the privilege to plunder the emperor’s possessions after his death.

3. A Formidable Medieval Empress

Empress Matilda (1102 – 1167) was heir to England’s throne, but when her father the king died, the magnates who had sworn to support her decided they did not want a female monarch. So they reneged, and supported a rival claimant. Matilda did not meekly accept such treachery. She raised an army and fought for her right, plunging England into a period of strife so awful that it came to be known simply as The Anarchy. As a child, she had been betrothed to Henry V, King of Germany, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1111 to 1125. Her father sent her to her future husband in Germany when she was eight, and the couple were married six years later.

Their reign as emperor and empress was turbulent, marked by rebellions and wars in both Germany and Italy, which Matilda governed for some years as regent. The couple were childless, and Matilda’s reign as empress ended in 1125 when her husband died. In the meantime, back in England, Matilda’s brother and heir to the English throne had gotten himself killed in 1120 in a drunken ship race. That left Matilda’s father without a male heir, and try as he would to sire another legitimate son, he was unsuccessful. When the widowed Matilda returned to England in 1125, her father declared her his heir. In 1126, the realm’s barons were assembled at Westminster, were they swore to support Matilda.

The following year, Matilda was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, heir to the Count of Anjou. When her father died in 1135, Matilda prepared to ascend England’s throne. Unfortunately, the nobles reneged on their oath, and threw their support to her cousin Stephen of Blois, who was crowned King Stephen I. Matilda did not accept that. She was pregnant at the time, but soon as gave birth in 1136, she raised her forces, and for the next three years, fought Stephen in Normandy. By 1139, she had secured Normandy, and then set her eyes on England.

2. The Fierce Matilda

In 1139, Matilda and her illegitimate half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed in England, and plunged it into civil war. Early on, King Stephen besieged and trapped her in Arundel Castle, but she negotiated an exit. She established her court at Gloucester, and the two sides settled down to a series of castle sieges. Things improved dramatically for Matilda in 1141, when she defeated and captured King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln. The throne was in her grasp, but then she blew it. Matilda entered London to be crowned later that year, but treated the locals so disrespectfully that they rose up in revolt and chased her out of the city. She retreated to Oxford, where she was besieged in the winter of 1142. Trapped, she climbed down the city walls in a snow storm, then crossed the frozen Thames River on foot to safety.

In the meantime, her half-brother had been captured, and to secure his release, she exchanged him for King Stephen. The war then entered a stalemate, but Matilda kept up a fight that threw England into lawless chaos that came to be known as The Anarchy. It finally ended in 1153, when a truce was finally brokered, whereby King Stephen was allowed to keep the throne, in exchange for recognizing Matilda’s son Henry as his heir. Although Matilda did not become queen, her son became King Henry II, and founded the Plantagenet Dynasty that ruled England for centuries. Matilda was never liked, but her feistiness and determination were grudgingly respected. In World War II, Britain fielded not one, but two tanks named after her, the Matilda I and the Matilda II – the latter, the only British tank to serve throughout the entire war.

1.     The Caliph Who Dined Over His Enemies

As seen in a previous entry, the Mongols liked to make examples out of their defeated foes. After their victory at the Battle of Kalka River, captured enemy commanders were laid on the ground. A huge board was then laid over their bodies, over which the victorious Mongols sat to eat, drink, and celebrate their triumph. Meanwhile, the men beneath were slowly crushed and suffocated to death. The Mongols’ feast over the bodies of defeated commanders was not the first time that vanquished leaders had faced such a fate.

The first Abbasid Caliph Abul Abbas (722 – 754), nicknamed Al Saffah (“Blood Shedder”), did the same after he defeated and displaced the Ummayad Dynasty of Caliphs. Al Saffah initiated a revolt against the Ummayads, and crushed them in a climactic battle in 750. He then tracked down and killed as many members of the defeated dynasty as he could. In 751, Al Saffah declared an amnesty, and eighty surviving Ummayad princes emerged from hiding to receive their pardons at a banquet. Mid-feast, he had them seized, stabbed, and covered their quivering bodies with leather rugs. He then bade the other guests to sit down and enjoy their food and drink atop them.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ancient Origins – Vikings in Byzantium: The Varangians and Their Fearless Conquests

BBC History – Alfred the Great

Britain Express – Edward the Elder

Brown, Reginald Allen – English Castles (1976)

Cracked – The Medieval Italian Battle Seemingly Fought Over a Bucket

Devries, Kelly – Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (2003)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Alfred, King of Wessex

Encyclopedia Britannica – Rurik

Gabriel, Richard – Subotai the Valiant: Genghis Khan’s Greatest General (2004)

Glubb, John Bagot – A Short History of the Arab Peoples (1969)

Gonick, Larry – Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (2002)

Gordon, Matthew – The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra, AH 200-275/ 815-889 CE (2001)

Grunge – How One Camel Caused a Ruthless 40-Year War

Hall, Richard Andrew – The World of the Vikings (2007)

Hanley, Catherine – Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior (2019)

Hildinger, Erik – Warriors of the Steppe: Military History of Central Asia, 500 BC to 1700 AD (1997)

History Collection – Medieval Practices That Seem Too Strange to be True

Lamb, Harold – Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker (1929)

Liddiard, Robert – Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism, and Landscape, 1066 to 1500 (2005)

Love British History – 9 Times the Empress Matilda Was a Total Badass

Manz, Beatrice Forbes – The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (1999)

Marozzi, Justin – Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (2006)

Medieval Chronicles – Castle Murder Holes

Military History Now – Beyond the Pail: The Unbelievable War of the Oaken Bucket

New World Encyclopedia – Kievan Rus

Richey, Stephen Wesley – Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint (2003)

Robinson, Paul – Military Honour and the Conduct of War (2006)

Sawyer, Peter Hayes – The Age of the Vikings (1972)

Science Daily – Trebuchet

Soldiers of Misfortune – The Varangian Guard

Woods, John E. – The Timurid Dynasty (1990)