King Halfdan of Ruthenia
Born: 864
Reigned: 903 - 925
King Halfdan was often called the last Viking of Kiev. He was old enough to remember standing with his father at Jól in the winter while men were sacrificed to Odin, and hearing him offer the traditional toast, “for a good year and frith.” One imagines Halfdan reflecting on this memory when, later in life, he would listen to his father pledge his sword to defeat the pagan chiefs. Whatever the reason, Halfdan Dyrovich Oskyldr cared little for religious observance. He was a man of large appetites, he spoke with a warrior’s candor and with a warrior’s rough humor, and he desired nothing so much as meat and beer and battle and song.
While many in Ruthenia would come to rue his ascension, even Halfdan’s fiercest critics agreed that he took the reins admirably in a challenging time. He took command of the army in Moldavia quickly and decisively, and swore that he would not rest until the enemy had bent the knee. At the same time, he sent a messenger to the enemy at Suceava, striking a conciliatory note. Vasilko would be allowed to offer his surrender in private, and might thereafter be seated on Halfdan’s council as an esteemed high chieftain. Halfdan even hinted that he would not be overly concerned if the Moldavian lords continued their Slavic rites in private.
The king was operating in the spirit of pragmatism, of course, but his affection for the Moldavian king as an honorable enemy seems quite sincere. How else to explain Halfdan’s decision, in 904, to name his first son and heir Vasilko? [1] The elder Vasilko was touched by this gesture, in any case, and it more than anything convinced him of his enemy’s good intentions. Vasilko would surrender two weeks later, putting an end to six years of bloody war. He came to regard his namesake like a son, and it was the younger Vasilko who finally convinced him to adopt the Sunni faith some seventeen years after his surrender.
Halfdan would spend the next few years assuaging the wounded pride of his new Moldavian subjects, particularly the restive Vlach tribes. However, his taste for battle eventually got the better of him. Even in peacetime, he and his marshal, the fearsome war-chief Dobrynia Mstislavich of Volodymyr, spent many days poring over maps and planning campaigns that never happened. By 911, he marched against the lands of Pinsk to his north. The High Chieftess of Pinsk was no warrior and a woman besides, so Halfdan brusquely declared that she must be protected from the treacherous White Rus’ and led five thousand warriors to do just that.
As soon as Chieftess Tatyana Dregovich was subjugated, Halfdan and Dobrynia were sailing off to war again. Emir Jaffar II of Palermo was the last Muslim prince in Sicily, and when he wrote Kiev proposing a joint invasion of Benevento Halfdan was only too happy to agree. The Ruthenians launched two hundred longships to Italy, and smashed the Christian army at Palermo before laying siege to Benevento. On October 16, 915, the city fell to the Muslim armies, and Halfdan and Emir Jaffar celebrated the great victory for Dar al-Islam.
As soon as the muezzin led the call to prayer in Benevento, however, Halfdan and Dobrynia were sailing back to Ruthenia to plan another war. The once-mighty Khazars were at war with the treacherous King Ruslan of the White Rus’, and Halfdan saw an opportunity to grab the Ruthenian lands of Romen. The king was in notably high spirits during his many foreign adventures, and his men would long remember the ferocious grin he made when the enemy was spotted, and the roar of laughter that they could hear over the din of battle.
The war with the Khazars would ultimately prove successful, but it came at a grievous cost for the realm: Dobrynia of Volodmyr fell in battle on March 1, 920. Halfdan was heart-broken to have lost a friend, but more significantly, Dobrynia was a vital voice in military councils. He could be the voice of caution for his headstrong monarch when Halfdan would listen to no one else. The king would struggle without him.
As Halfdan ascended to the throne, some began to believe that Ruthenia may fall away from Dar al-Islam and return to Dar al-Harb. In Baghdad, rumors began to fly that Halfdan had returned to the worship of Odin, while in Byzantium the Ecumenical Patriarch funded a new mission to Kiev in hopes of converting the new king. However, these outside observers did not understand Halfdan. Apostasy requires its own sort of piety, and Halfdan had little enough of that. He hoped to leave the religious order untouched and go about his business. This soon proved impossible.
Halfdan’s impiety, and in particular his drinking, would have set Ibrahim’s teeth on edge in the best of times. However, a generation after Dyre’s conversion found Islam in Ruthenia at a crossroads. With King Dyre’s support, Ibrahim and his ‘Alexandrine’ coterie of conservative clerics had successfully steered the development of Russian Islam in line with the orthodox Sunni teachings promulgated by the caliphate. Among the peasantry, Muslim practice mixed liberally with older Slavic rituals and folklore, but the ulema largely sang from the same hymn sheet, as it were.
However, Ibrahim’s belief that Russian believers must align themselves with Arabian practices as he defined them began to rub some Russian clerics the wrong way. By the early tenth century, Ruthenia was a powerful and ascendant power on the Black Sea, and her people began to carry themselves with a confident frontier swagger. Surely Ruthenia’s success meant that Allah had shown her people favor? Surely the internal chaos of the caliphate showed that they still had some things to learn? Openly questioning the authority of the caliph was dangerous stuff, but for some younger Russians a slight note of skepticism could be heard when they spoke of the Caliph. Dyre was able to tamp down the factionalism, but Halfdan was scarcely interested in trying.
A rising clique of Russian clerics began to push back against Ibrahim’s authority, the most prominent of which was Gleb of Chernobyl. A chief’s son with a gift for languages, Gleb had once been one of Ibrahim’s star pupils. The older cleric had even arranged for Gleb to go on the hajj and then study in Baghdad. While in Baghdad, however, Gleb learned that the debates between Islamic scholars were broader and more far-ranging then he ever could have imagined. The intellectual ferment was intoxicating to him, and it made Ibrahim’s propriety seem narrow by comparison. Furthermore, it was patronizing to assume that young Russian clerics like Gleb and his compatriots were incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, and thus needed to be protected. Gleb returned to Kiev convinced that Ibrahim’s time was past.
This brings us back to Halfdan’s drinking habit. Dyre had banned alcohol at royal feasts as well as abstaining himself, a gesture that made it easier for Ibrahim to overlook occasional indiscretions by the boyars. Halfdan had no interest in such niceties, and in fact his drinking and feasting only increased with age. Ibrahim could not ignore a violation that was shoved into his face, and so relations deteriorated between the king and the allamah. Once again, it seemed like the throne would cast off Islam entirely. Halfdan’s senior wife, Queen Jaida, was concerned enough about the situation that she reached out to Gleb to find a solution.
Gleb won the queen over by arguing that Ibrahim’s interpretation was far too strict. Gleb had been heavily influenced by Imam Abū Ḥanīfa, the respected Persian jurist, and in accordance with Abū Ḥanīfa’s teachings on
khamr (i.e., intoxication), he argued that the Qu’ran only prohibited alcohol fashioned from grapes or date palms, not that derived from honey, grain or millet. If the king wished to continue drinking beer or vodka, this would be permissible so long as he didn’t descend to a state of near annihilation. Jaida immediately saw how this tactful compromise would allow Halfdan to reconcile with the ulema without losing face. So it was, then, that Ibrahim was expelled from the court at Kiev, and the young Russian
‘alim ascended in his place.
The rise of Gleb of Chernobyl did not stop the religious division within Ruthenian Islam. His relaxed approach to religious debate permitted a great flourishing of Islamic thought. Members of disfavored sects, like the once-powerful Muʿtazila and the Shi’a Zaydi school, flocked to Kiev where they were able to debate their ideas in relative peace. While Gleb and his fellow reformers welcomed this diversity, his conservative opponents insisted that he was introducing error and confusion to a people who had not yet properly internalized proper Islam in the first place. Meanwhile, some among the reformers continued to question the authority of the distant Caliph, wondering if perhaps Ruthenia had found a better way.
These tensions did not have a chance to spill over into something more significant, however. Soon war with the Catholic powers of Europe would unite the Muslim word in defense of the holy places.
In 921, Pope Clemens proclaimed a great holy war for Jerusalem. His Holiness was deeply concerned by the ascent of Islam in the past fifty years, particularly in Ruthenia. The persistent issue of safety for pilgrims in the Holy Land provided a potent rallying cry for a war to check the enemies of Christendom. In Dar al-Islam, men from all factions and peoples were enraged by this blatant act of Christian aggression, and a great push to defend Jerusalem attracted supporters as far east as Sindh.
In Ruthenia, there was no question that King Halfdan would lead his warriors into battle against the papal forces. He may not have been pious, but he had grown to admire the Palestinian warriors while fighting in Moldavia and he could not resist a foreign adventure. However, when the Abbasid caliph wrote to call all Muslim forces to Jerusalem itself for a cautious war of defense, Halfdan was dissastified. It was not in his nature to wait patiently for the enemy to approach, and in the biggest war in living memory he was not about to start.
Halfdan summoned his warriors together for another, bolder plan: an advance on Rome itself. He had campaigned in italy already, and felt that he understood the terrain well enough. The king reasoned that they might strike after the papal forces had departed for Jerusalem, giving Ruthenia time to seize Rome before anybody could respond. Beyond that, sacking Rome would be a fear on par with his father’s sacking of Constantinople sixty years earlier.
In times past, Halfdan would have proposed this idea to his marshal, and Dobrynia would have listed all the risks of the assault. With Dobrynia gone, however, Halfdan was free to be the bold adventurer that he always wished to be. So it was, then, that the Ruthenians set sail for Italy again in 923, this time to attack Rome itself.
When their army arrived, Halfdan received word that the papal forces had already taken ship to the east. Reassured, he ordered that his forces be split into two armies of 3500 warriors each, one under his command and one under Prince Vasilko’s, and set about sieging the papal lands. However, his intelligence was wrong--the papal forces had departed for Napoli to sail east, but the ships that they arranged had failed to arrive. As a result, Pope Clemens and fifteen thousand men were waiting in southern Italy when they heard about the Slavic invasion.
On January 29, 924, Halfdan got word that the papal army was still in Italy, on the march to Rome. He prudently ordered a retreat to the longships, but disorder in the ranks delayed his departure. Vasilko and his army were able to retreat in good order, but Halfdan’s army was caught in Velletri by the papal army on February 26, 924. The Ruthenians were caught out of position and heavily outnumbered, and Clemens’s army simply smashed them. According to legend, only two Russians survived the attack: a young stripling boy who played dead on the field, and King Halfdan himself, who was taken as hostage to a minor Slovenian count.
The loss was utterly shattering--half of the Ruthenian forces were dead in a day, and the capture of the king created a power vacuum at the worst possible time. Prince Vasilko repeatedly offered to ransom his father, but there could be no ransom for the notorious Muslim warlord--not in the middle of a crusade. Halfdan himself made an abortive escape attempt, but that only made his captor more insistent on holding him. The king would spend the last year of his life rotting in a Slovenian cell, while his shattered army limped back to Jerusalem to assist in the caliph’s strategy of defense. Word finally came to them that King Halfdan had suffered a fatal heart attack in his cell on April 15, 925. He was 61 years old, and had once been a prodigious warrior.
[1] The real answer is of course that I didn’t notice until I was writing this AAR.