The Last Viking by Don Hollway

Author:Don Hollway
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781472846532
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

A delegation was immediately sent from the capital to fetch this Maria, who had been anxiously awaiting word of the imperial decision regarding her fate. The natural assumption was that she would be seen as a threat to the imperial marriage. “Dreading the empress, she anticipated terrible vengeance and expected the worst,” wrote Psellos, “when suddenly messengers arrived with an imperial bodyguard, begging her to return to Byzantium.”

This messenger was probably Zoe’s eunuch again, Stephen Pergamenos, who had originally been sent out for Constantine, thereby beginning his own rise to some power. And it is a good bet his bodyguard was led by none other than Harald himself. Zoe would have every reason to get her lover out of the city while she went about the business of taking a new husband. On June 11, 1042, she and Constantine were wed. Because of the third-marriage business, the patriarch Alexios abstained from presiding over the ceremony, leaving it to one of his lesser priests. The next day, however, he crowned the new emperor Constantine IX Monomachos.

Sending Harald out on this chore would have the added benefit, from Zoe’s perspective, of making clear to her Varangian just where he stood in the new pecking order. If Harald ever had any aspirations to the imperial throne, being sent as an errand boy to fetch his new master’s strumpet – actually, not even that, but merely serving as guard for the errand boy and strumpet – should have put an end to them.

But then, it seems, something happened that nobody expected, when Harald met Maria.

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