When the Viking Rus’ attacked Constantinople

Here’s an interesting article on the Rus’ attacking Constantinople in AD 860. Constantinople was almost defenseless at that time as the Byzantine Emperor Michael III was with his army fighting in Asia Minor against the Abbasid Caliphate while the Byzantine navy was in the Mediterranean Sea fighting Arab pirates.

The Rus’ were originally Norsemen, mainly from present-day Sweden who settled and ruled the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the 8th to 11th centuries AD (Source: Wikipedia). The Rus’ gave their name to the Russians and Belarus.

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The Rus’ Khaganate, also Russkiy Kaganate was a state, or a cluster of city-states in present-day Russia, comprised of a multi-cultural society consisting of Slavic, Turkic, Baltic, Finnic, Hungarian, and Norse peoples, although the scholarly consensus suggests that the Rus’ originated in eastern Sweden around the eighth century, and that their name has the same origin as Roslagen in Swedish derived from an Old Norse term for “the men who row”.

In AD 860, a fleet of around 200 Rus’ vessels carrying up to 5,000 soldiers sailed into the Bosporus and started attacking the suburbs of the imperial capital. According to an oration written by the ecumenical patriarch Photios I of Constantinople, the attack by the “unknown people” or the “obscure people” was “like a thunderbolt from heaven”, and was as sudden and unexpected “as a swarm of wasps”.

 

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/06/the-viking-russ-siege-of-constantinople/139507

For some reason, I never imagined that these Viking ancestors had attacked Constantinople. Here's a good article about the interactions between the Rus' and the Byzantines both as enemies and even allies.

Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sofia 

Globetrotting Vikings: The Quest for Constantinople | HISTORY

It is interesting to see that the Rus later formed some of the most loyal military and security forces for the Byzantines by the late 10th century. Along with other Scandinavians, they formed the Varangian guard. Being from outside the Byzantine Empire, the Varangians were supposedly more loyal and trustworthy than the often-treasonous Byzantine military. 

Here is an excellent video summarizing this transformation:
 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard