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.
