side story The Vikings came thru russia via rivers and one morning they were surrounding the harbor of Istanbul. The sultan came out and gave them gold to go away. Has anyone heard or read about this.
RE: The Vikings came thru russia via rivers and one morning they were surrounding the harbor of Istanbul. The sultan came out and gave them gold to go away. Has anyone heard or read about this.
If these Viking warriors were so fearsome that even the Sultan who conquered Constantinople would not want to confront them, the most interesting question for me is this -— HOW WERE THESE WARRIORS CHRISTIANIZED?
Never heard that one, but centuries before the Ottomans conquered it, the vikings who were the leaders of the Kievan Rus did sail down through Russia to Constantinople to sack it but they couldn’t overcome the walls. The story goes that after they left, the patriarch of the city sent missionaries to follow them home and convert them to Christianity, so that Constantinople wouldn’t have to worry about them coming back every year.
It wasn’t the Sultan. It happened when Constantinople was still Christian and under the Byzantine Emperors. Eventually a bunch of them became the Imperial Varangian Guard...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard
Vikings were extinct by the time of Turkish Constantinople’s takeover.
The story is probably based on a Russian-Byzantine war. It has ended in 907 ad with Russian victory in Constantinople then capital of East Roman Empire but the war was actually about a trade dispute so the Russians didn’t occupy the city. There was a little pillage in suburbs after Roman army was crushed by the Russians but Byzantines agreed to remove tariffs on Russian trade and agreed to pay reparations. Then Kievan Prince Oleg symbolically nailed his shield to the city gates to show who is boss and the Russians went home.
Turks weren’t anywhere near at the time.