Sigurdr II Mjóvi (821-876)
Despot of Byzantium: 841-857
Count of Lori: 852-855
Count of Derbent: 853-857
Jarl of Derbent: 857
Har Konungr of Byzantium: 857-876
Sigurdr II
In 857 Sigurdr declared his eldest son, Kjartan, Despot and the Designated Regent. In 858 Kjartan married Gudrun Åkesdottir Mjóvi. Kjartan was then anointed Jarl of Derbent in 860 and was proclaimed King of Georgia by Har Konungr Sigurdr II in 865. During this period Georgia dominated the eastern regions of the Empire.
Immediately after ascending the throne Sigurdr tore up his father’s treaty with the Addauids and attacked their last strongholds in the area surrounding Aleppo. In 858 the Abbasid Caliphate joined the defence of the Addauid emirate. In the battle of Aleppo the Byzantine forces were soundly beaten by the Abbasid forces, over six-thousand killed, twice as many as the Abbasids. In response he rallied the largest Byzantine army seen since 817, numbering up to fourteen-thousand men making the combined forces deployed by the Emperor during the war twentyfour-thousand man. In January 859 a hard fought victory was won against a large Abbasid army in the battle of Latakiah.
R. The battle of Aleppo. L. An Imperial Soldier surveys the aftermath of the Battle of Latakiah
In May 860 the Addauid emirate surrendered with most of its holdings having fallen. It was one of the most brutal wars of the ninth century, twenty-thousand byzantine soldiers had lost their lives and fifteen-thousand Arabs had died in battle, not counting the other fifteen-thousand killed by both sides in the sacking of villages and towns, for example Antioch was badly damaged for a second time in a decade which was followed by a few days of terror perpetrated by the Abbasid forces, the same thing had occurred in Aleppo after the Byzants captured it a few years earlier.
R. Imperial troops in the 1st Sack of Antioch, L. An Orthodox priest intervenes during the 2nd Sack of Antioch
Sigurdr II purchased a holy relic in 861, but rarely used it or showed it off, so when a local Friar asked for Sigurdr to give it to the church, seven years later, he gladly agreed.
In early-863 Sigurdr declared war on Armenia with the intent of capturing the county of Vaspurkan. In August an Armenian army was destroyed at the battle of Bastam. When a second Armenian host was defeated, in the battle of Takht-e Suleiman, Melik Tatoul II was left without much choice and surrendered Vaspurkan to the Byzantines in May 864.
Following private wars waged by the Lords of Dorostotum and Naissos, for Nikopolis and Vidin respectively, the Pannonians, formerly the Bulgarians, were pushed from the southern side of the Danube in 864. The fall-back of the Pannonians from the southern bank brought an end to the Mjóvi-Bulgaria Wars, a series of conflicts that stretched back almost a century. Ragnarr restarted the Slavic Wars in 865 when he invaded Croatia, forcing them to cede their entire coastline in 868.
Following a war, on the Melikdom of Armenia, waged by the King of Georgia, Kjartan Sigurdrsson Mjóvi (heir apparent to the Byzantine Empire,) the Empire came to be bordering only the Abbasid Caliphate in the southeast in 873.
Due to the pressures put upon the Iconoclast minority across the empire by the policies implemented during the reign of Ragnarr II, flare ups in the otherwise icy relationship between the Har Konungr and the Iconoclasts became more and more common during the early part of Sigurdr’s reign. Most notably a large host of five-thousand iconoclasts rose up in war-torn Cherson, who was suffering from an inheritance dispute, in 870, and again in 874 when another host of six-thousand rebels rose up in Ikonion. Both attempts were aiming to bring about a change in policy, but if anything the attitude hardened due to the increased instability caused by the uprisings. The increase in hostility between the factions within the Eastern Orthodox Church led to the establishment of an Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchy in 872, meaning that from then on there was two Ecumenical Patriarchs serving the Har Konungr, although one more loyally than the other.
In 875 the Empire was dragged into a war between the Kingdom of Galicia (whose Queen was allied too Sigurdr) and the Umayyad Sultanate, with the Umayyads seeking the destruction the northern Iberian kingdom. In early 876 a six-thousand strong force gathered in Constantinople with the aim of heading to the Iberian Peninsula to fight and in March it sailed for Iberia. Unfortunately a Tengri uprising began before the fleet had even rounded the Greek peninsula which forced the fleet to turn around to help defend the empire from the infidel rebels. Before the uprising had even been put down the Umayyad forces had overrun the Kingdom of Galicia, further strengthening their rule of Iberia.
In the 870’s the Mjóvi dynasty was granted a blessing with the election of Kjartan Dyresson Mjóvi as Captain of the Varangian Guard, making him the first Mjóvi, but not the last, Captain.
Sometime during the late 850’s SIgurdr came to suffer from paranoia which led to him spending a lot of time improving defences, both his personal and that of the rest of the realm. In 861 Sigurdr came to believe he was being poisoned, as it turned out it was only the cook using some spices, admittedly poisonous in large quantities, but the cook was imprisoned without trial and with no chance of a pardon. Sigurdr is known for having picked up the mildly distasteful habit of burning those branded as Heretics, unfortunately some of these “heretics” were just former allies or people that Sigurdr didn’t trust anymore.
One of Sigurdr II's infamous pyres
Then he also had the habit of believing even the most preposterous accusations if it was against someone he didn’t trust, which happened to be just about everyone. Therefore the number of courtiers who died in Constantinople’s dungeon without any form of trial is truly staggering, several landed lords of varying ranks even spent several years in jail. In 873 Sigurdr went into hiding after coming to believe rumours that there was a plot on his life, but this could have been more than paranoia as later on in the year Sigurdr suffered a stroke, which was suspected by some of his contemporary chroniclers to be the result of a poisoning. The stroke rendered the aging monarch incapable of ruling in his own name, leading to a regency council being formed to rule in his stead. In 874 a group of lords involved in the regency, amongst them King Kjartan and Regent Anlaufr, tabled a motion for a new Crown Law, affectionately named Sigurdr’s Law Code after the ailing Har Konungr who had been discussing and formulating it since the mid-860’s up until his stroke a year earlier. Unfortunately Sigurdr would die before the motion was passed by the Senate, leading his successor to shelve it for the foreseeable future.
In 876 King Kettil of Serbia, known as the Old, convinced the regency council that King Kjartan, Sigurdr’s son, was plotting the Har Konungr’s downfall. This led to Kjartan being imprisoned at the orders of the regency council, who saw it as an opportunity to remove a powerful opponent to their unfettered rule.
In September 876 Har Konungr Sigurdr II Mjóvi died in a coma aged 55. His son Kjartan, already known as the Wise before his ascension to the Throne, succeeded him, aged 35, after a brief political struggle, resulting due to his imprisonment a few months earlier which some claimed disqualified him. Sigurdr II’s early-rule are seen as years of plenty, with the continuing strengthening of the religious orthodoxy during his reign. Another important event was the emergence of the Norse culture as the dominant language and culture in certain areas of Serbia, although a separate style of Norse than that of those who came trading from the North, a culture which would in the centuries to come become a major influence on the Empire and change it forever. All this is overshadowed by his paranoia and the misrule of his regency period. The reign of Sigurdr also saw a great increase in the number of chariot races occurring, due to the increasing wealth and optimism of the Empire and its population.
Following the instability related to both Sigurdr’s reigns, in the case of Sigurdr I it was due to mismanagement and in the case of Sigurdr II it was due to the terror that he and his advisors caused, it may not be surprising to find out that the Sigurdr name became less popular within the Mjóvi dynasty.
The regents of Sigurdr II: Jarl Anlaufr Sålder of Dalmatia (873-874), replaced because of court intrigue in favour of his successor, he was also deposed as Jarl not long after, it has long been theorised that his support for Sigurdr’s Law Code may have been the catalyst which led to his downfall; Count Damianos Skleros of Hellas, one of the last Iconoclasts in a position of power at the time, (874-876.)
