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]]> This Viking ruler begged to be dismembered – but his rival had something far worse in mind https://www.historyextra.com/membership/viking-leaders-orkney/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:30:39 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/viking-leaders-orkney/ Are two leaders better than one? Not if Viking Orkney is anything to go by. Judith Jesch journeys back to an earldom in which the practice of appointing co-rulers produced a cycle of treachery, intrigue and death It’s Easter time, 1116. Hardly a fitting moment for an act of great treachery. Yet this was medieval Orkney, and treachery was very much on the menu.

That spring day 910 years ago, two powerful men came face to face on the island of Egilsay, in order to seal a peace agreement. Magnús Erlendsson and Hákon Pálsson were cousins and co-rulers of the Earldom of Orkney, and had been for years. But things were about to change.

Hákon had decided that he’d had enough of sharing power with his cousin, and so he lured Magnús into a trap. After a period of escalating tensions, Hákon had arranged what was ostensibly a peace meeting between the two rulers. But when Magnús arrived, he swiftly realised that he was outnumbered by eight warships to two – and that Hákon harboured violent intent.

• Read more | The real Viking Age: when did the era of Norse expansion start and end?

Magnús knew that he had been outwitted. And so he made Hákon three offers in an attempt to save his life. Firstly, Magnús offered to go to Rome and Jerusalem to “redeem both our souls” and never return. This was refused. Then he suggested going into captivity in Scotland. This, too, was turned down.

Then Magnús made a third offer: to be dismembered, or blinded, and imprisoned. Hákon was at first inclined to accept this bid. But Orkney’s chieftains were having none of it.

“We must kill one or the other of you now,” they declared. “And you shall not both rule the lands from this day forth.”

“Kill him then!” said Hákon. “Because I want to rule the territory and the lands before I die so suddenly.”

The killing of Magnús Erlendsson is arguably the central episode in The Saga of the Earls of Orkney, a narrative history of the Orkney and Shetland islands and Caithness in the medieval period, embellished with layers of fantasy.

In the Saga’s telling of this 12th-century showdown between co-rulers, Magnús’s martyrdom – not to mention a series of miracles attributed to him – led to his recognition as a saint two decades later. Over the following decades, Orcadians’ reverence for Magnús only grew – as did a building constructed to house his relics. That building, St Magnus Cathedral, still stands in the town of Kirkwall: Scotland’s oldest and most northerly cathedral and an impressive, Romanesque tribute to the slain earl.

The aftermath

Given Magnús’s status, it’s hardly surprising that the Saga was full of praise for his capabilities as a ruler. He was, we’re told:

“The most outstanding person, imposing in size, manly and intelligent-looking, well-mannered in his conduct, victorious in battles, wise in his understanding, eloquent and imperious... He gave many gifts to chieftains and powerful men, and yet he often showed the most care for poor people.”

But what of Hákon? Perhaps surprisingly, the Saga doesn’t paint the architect of Magnús’s death as wholly evil. After a brief period of oppressing Magnús’s followers, Hákon, we’re told, had a change of heart. He travelled to Rome and Jerusalem and bathed in the river Jordan. On his return to Orkney he became “a good ruler and brought peace to his territory... At this his popularity began to grow; in the end, the Orcadians wanted nothing more than to have Hákon and his offspring as their chieftains.”

So what was going on here? Why was the Saga willing to give Hákon, slayer of the saintly Magnús, such a positive press? The answer lies in the distinctive way power was inherited in the Earldom of Orkney.

Royal support

The origins of the earldom lie in the Viking Age settlement of parts of what is now Scotland in the ninth and tenth centuries. This meant that the earldom developed in a Norwegian tradition of inheritance, in which territory was divided between family members who had equal claims to it.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Earldom encompassed Shetland and Caithness as well as Orkney. It was soon established as a Christian polity presided over by earls who owed their power to the king of Norway. And because of that Norwegian inheritance system, there were often two or more earls, usually close kinsmen, ruling together.

• Read more | Meet the mysterious leaders of the Vikings’ most fearsome army

This was the context confronting the authors of the Saga when, in the early 13th century, they described Hákon’s deeds. The elevation of Magnús to sanctity suggests some disapproval – at least from the church – of such political killings. But the attitude of the chieftains, and Hákon’s popularity, opens a window on an alternative viewpoint in the Saga: that peace and prosperity could only be achieved when there was a single ruler.

The history of the Earldom of Orkney suggests that this viewpoint had more than a little merit. The death of Magnús at the hands of his cousin and co-earl is the best-known example of such a killing in the Saga. Yet it was far from the only one. In fact, the Saga is studded with examples of co-rulership ending in violence.

A beginner's guide to The Saga of the Earls of Orkney How do we know so much about the exploits of the rulers of early medieval Orkney? The answer lies in The Saga of the Earls of Orkney, otherwise known as the Orkneyinga Saga. The sagas are long, prose narratives of varying types. But those written with historical intent focus on the Viking Age (c750–1100) and the following centuries, and are mostly set in Iceland or Norway. The Saga of the Earls of Orkney is the only one of these set largely in the British Isles, reflecting the fact that parts of what is now Scotland then belonged culturally and politically to that Scandinavian world. It tells the story of the rulers of northern Scotland and their henchmen, taking the reader on a journey from their ancestry in Norway through to the beginning of the 13th century. Its account, particularly of the 11th and 12th centuries, presents a plausible, though certainly partial, outline of the main events of that time. Most of the action takes place in Orkney and Caithness, with occasional forays to Shetland. Readers are also taken to Ireland, and even the Holy Land via Galicia and Narbonne. The narrative is predominantly realistic, but it also has supernatural elements and a host of weird and wonderful characters. The Saga was compiled in Iceland in the early 13th century. It is, however, clearly based on the testimony of informants knowledgeable about northern Scotland, and on traditions from across the Viking diaspora. These traditions include the poetry quoted in the Saga, composed at the time of the events described. The narrative is firmly situated in the landscape of northern Scotland. As such it mentions locales that, in many cases, visitors to this beautiful part of the world can still see in the landscape today.

It all started in the early 11th century – decades before the rise of Hákon and Magnús – when the earldom was ruled by three of five brothers: Sumarliði, Einarr and Brúsi. When Sumarliði died, the youngest brother, Þorfinnr, staked his claim. Einarr was eliminated and Brúsi died of natural causes, leaving Þorfinnr to share power with his nephew, Rǫgnvaldr Brúsason.

But Þorfinnr was not inclined to rule alongside his nephew. And so, like Magnús in the following century, Rǫgnvaldr was killed by a follower of his co-earl – this time on the island of Papa Stronsay. And like Hákon, Þorfinnr went on to become a successful sole ruler, known as the ‘Mighty’.

Þorfinnr was succeeded by his sons, who got along just fine before their own sons – Magnús and Hákon – grew up. The Earldom of Orkney continued to follow the Norwegian model of co-rulers, and so the cycle of internecine violence was fated to continue.

As Magnús had no children, the rule then reverted to Hákon’s sons (by different mothers), Páli and Haraldr. This time, the elimination of one of the co-earls, Haraldr, happened by accident when he put on a deadly linen garment intended by his mother for his half-brother Páli.

Páli ruled alone until his second cousin, Rǫgnvaldr (Kolsson), emerged to claim his part of the earldom. He was the son of St Magnús’s sister and had been brought up in Norway. His role in the capture and elimination of Páli by an enigmatic Saga character called Sveinn Ásleifarson is not clear, but it undoubtedly benefited him, clearing his way to the earldom.

But Rǫgnvaldr (Kolsson) was not to rule alone. Páli’s sister, Margét, saw an opportunity for her son, Haraldr Maddaðarson, to replace Páli and rule as co-earl with Rǫgnvaldr (Kolsson), who was persuaded by a couple of bishops to agree to this. The bishops perhaps did not anticipate any problems, as Haraldr was only three at the time. And the two earls ruled together quite successfully for 20 years. But then events took a familiar turn.

In 1158, Rǫgnvaldr (Kolsson)’s life was brought to a violent end by a man called Þorbjǫrn, kinsman of Haraldr. In the Saga’s telling of events, Þorbjǫrn acknowledged his guilt but told Haraldr it was for his benefit:

“This deed that I have done is a great crime, and I am responsible, but all the territory has fallen into your power.”

Þorbjǫrn was right. Haraldr went on to become sole earl, ruling alone for 48 more years. However, unlike Hákon and Þorfinnr before him (those other earls who went on to enjoy long tenures in power following the deaths of their co-rulers), Haraldr didn’t get a particularly sympathetic hearing from the Saga. Other sagas show that he was also responsible for losing half of Caithness to the king of Scotland.

As for Rǫgnvaldr (Kolsson), he fared a lot better in the Saga’s pages. Like his uncle Magnús, he was venerated as a saint:

“His death was much lamented, because he was very popular there in the isles and widely elsewhere. He had been of assistance to many people, generous with money, calm and loyal to friends, a man of many skills and a good poet.”

This was high praise indeed. But such praise was rarely lavished on the earls’ henchmen. In fact, in a trope widely found in medieval literature, the Saga repeatedly attributes the earls’ murderous actions to the malign influence of their advisers.

Of the bust-up between Þorfinnr and Rǫgnvaldr Brúsason, the Saga writes:

“There was always a good relationship between the kinsmen when they met, but if worse men intervened, then there were differences.”

The same applies for Magnús and Hákon. These co-rulers are shown to have cooperated in the defence of their lands, but “when the kinsmen had ruled the land for some time, then it transpired as it more often and regularly does that many ill-intentioned men took to destroying their relationship”.

Despite the Saga’s misgivings, power-sharing persisted until the early 1200s, a century after Magnús’s death. So what are we to make of the system of co-rulership practised in the Earldom of Orkney? Was it always destined to end in bloodshed? And why did it endure so long? To answer these questions, we need to look to the realm that exerted such power over the earldom in the Viking Age: Norway.

Single and stable?

In the 11th and 12th centuries, Norway was also often ruled by co-kings, always close relatives, often brothers. Some historians have argued that such power-sharing arrangements led to more stable societies than those in which power was concentrated in single hands.

However, just as it sets out the challenges presented by co-rulership in the Earldom of Orkney, so the Saga describes the spectacular breakdown in relations between Norwegian kings. For example, in an episode set in the 1130s, the Saga notes that:

“Magnús and Haraldr [who were nephew and uncle] were kings of Norway for three winters, while their agreement could be said to hold, but in the fourth summer they fought at Färlev.”

Whatever the pros and cons of co-rulership, by the mid-13th century Norway had adopted a sole monarchy, bolstered by detailed legislation, primogeniture and the support of the church. The Orkney Earldom could not go down this road as it was never a kingdom nor powerful enough to become one. Yet it’s hard not to conclude from the Saga that power-sharing usually worked for a time, but always ended badly.

• Read more | The Vikings brutalised our ancestors. So why do the English still love them?

Overall, there is a sense that neither the Icelandic compilers of the Saga nor their informants from Scotland were impressed by the earls, whether ruling jointly or singly.

What the general population thought of their rulers is harder to discern. The Saga tells us that when Earl Hákon Pálsson was struck down by disease, “people thought that was a great shame because it was very peaceful in his latter days and the householders were doubtful of any co-operation between the brothers Páli and Haraldr”. But the Saga focuses mainly on the doings of the earls and their closest associates. The ‘little people’ remain largely anonymous.

The last co-earls mentioned in the Saga were Haraldr Maddaðarson’s sons, Davíð and Jón. But Davíð died in 1214 and the Saga ends with Jón as sole earl of the Orkneys. By then, the islands were a part of a Norwegian empire that had also experienced its own period of civil wars, but had come through to establish a strong monarchy.

The earls of Orkney continued to wield a degree of power. But, over the following centuries – increasingly living in the shadow of the kingdoms of Norway and Scotland – that power would wane.

Judith Jesch specialises in Old Norse language and literature, and the Viking Age. Her translation of The Saga of the Earls of Orkney was published by Birlinn in 2025.

This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> America's anti-Chinese laws: a forgotten history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/americas-anti-chinese-laws-forgotten-history-podcast/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:12:36 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/americas-anti-chinese-laws-forgotten-history-podcast/ Historian Beth Lew-Williams explains her work uncovering legislation that contained and controlled the lives of Chinese people in the USA in the 19th century From the middle of the 19th century, Chinese people in the United States found themselves increasingly policed, as legislation was introduced that contained and controlled their economic and cultural lives.

Historian Beth Lew-Williams tells Elinor Evans about her work uncovering this wide-reaching set of laws for her book John Doe Chinaman, and reveals how Chinese people resisted and avoided discrimination.

Beth’s book is a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize – you can find more details at cundillprize.com.

Find out more about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

]]> The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason why https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:30:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Shirley Ann Brown examines Nazi attempts to establish a Germanic presence in the celebrated chronicle of the Norman conquest On 1 August 1944, two SS officers drove a pair of trucks into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris, and headed straight for the Louvre. These men were on a top-secret mission – one assigned to them by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.

Himmler had tasked the two men with descending into the bowels of the world-famous art museum, seizing the Bayeux Tapestry and spiriting it away to a “safe place” far from the grasp of the Allies’ rapidly advancing armies.

After 15 years as the head of one of the most feared paramilitary organisations in history, Himmler was used to getting his own way. Yet in this case he was to be disappointed. A few days earlier, a group of local resistance fighters – tipped off by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park – had learned of the SS men’s mission and rushed to the Louvre to protect the iconic embroidery. Warned at the last minute that any attempt to ‘liberate’ the tapestry would be met with a hail of bullets, the SS officers gave up on their mission.

The Nazi proclivity for buying, extorting and confiscating Europe’s greatest artworks is well documented. But there was more to Himmler’s desire to seize the Bayeux Tapestry than an acquisitive lust for one of France’s foremost cultural treasures. In the celebrated images of Norman knights putting Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers to the sword he saw evidence of medieval Germanic supremacy.

The Nazi fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry can, perhaps, be traced back to 1 July 1935 when Himmler – along with fellow Nazi ideologues Richard Walther Darré and Herman Wirth – created Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Germanic Heritage. Ahnenerbe was founded to promote archaeological investigations of sites that could be associated with early Germanic settlement, and to study, in situ, works related to the history of the Aryan race. It wasn’t long before its leading lights had turned their attention to the celebrated 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry as a national historical monument since the early 1700s, but the Nazi regime had an alternative theory. In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic. The idea that they were French, Altheim argued, was based on a 200-year-old lie. At the bottom of his note he wrote: “I emphasise the importance of this study.”

In July 1939, when Altheim penned his memo, the idea of a team of ardent Nazis poring over one of the most iconic artefacts in French history in an attempt to establish its Germanic origins would have been anathema to the people of France. But the fall of their nation to German forces in June 1940 rendered their opinions all but irrelevant.

And so, in the aftermath of the French surrender, Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University – and a loyal Nazi – was appointed to head a team of experts tasked with studying the artefact in the northern French town of Bayeux. Jankuhn offered a clue as to what he hoped to achieve when declaring: “For general Germanic studies, the Tapestry’s visual representations, through the recording of Germanic legends and traditions, provides a very valuable source for this early period.”

• Why did Hitler choose the swastika, and how did a Sanskrit symbol become a Nazi emblem?

Photographic evidence

Jankuhn’s first task as leader of Special Assignment Bayeux was to study the hanging, and gather information so that further studies could be carried out by research scholars after the embroidery had been moved to safe wartime storage. The ultimate aim was to produce a multi-volume publication of their findings, featuring a photographic replica of the tapestry. By examining representations of everything from boats and weapons to costumes, they would provide irrefutable scientific evidence that the tapestry was a testament to Germanic hegemony in early medieval Europe.

Jankuhn couldn’t complete such a weighty undertaking alone. He was accompanied by Dr Karl Schlabow, textile expert and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, whose job it was to scrutinise the fabric and take careful measurements. Rolf Alber, photographer and war reporter, was to shoot new images of the tapestry, in both black-and-white and colour. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was the only member of the Bayeux team who wasn’t a member of the Nazi party or the SS. His task was to create a series of accurate, full-size drawings and watercolours of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, under Jankuhn’s guidance.

First, though, they had to gain access to the embroidery – and that would prove surprisingly problematic. In September 1939, with war clouds gathering, the French authorities had rolled it up on a bobbin, placed it in a padded, zinc-lined wooden case and deposited it in a concrete bunker in the basement of Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen.

• Read more | What do the Bayeux Tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?

Since the fall of France, German officers had peppered Bayeux’s authorities with requests to see the tapestry – a process that meant repeatedly manhandling the fragile, 900-year-old artefact. The French were reluctant to allow this to continue and, in a classic delaying tactic, began insisting that all permissions to view the tapestry be signed by the proper authorities in Paris. As a result, following their arrival in Bayeux on 8 June 1941, Jankuhn and his team would have to wait days before beginning their work.

At first, they examined the embroidery in the Hôtel du Doyen’s Bishops’ Gallery – but this entailed unrolling and rolling the tapestry every day. So, on 23 June, it was moved in a truck – accompanied by Rene Falue (the tapestry’s official guardian), three French customs officials and a lone German policeman – to the Monastery of St Martin at Mondaye, five miles south of Bayeux, where a large section could be left unrolled.

Summoned to fight

Working seven days a week, Jankuhn’s team set about studying, drawing and photographing all 70 metres of the embroidery. They hit a stumbling block on 29 June, when Alber returned to military service. A replacement photographer, Ursula Uhland, was summoned but, because women weren’t allowed in the monastery’s cloister, the tapestry had to be transported to its public gallery.

Despite this setback, Jeschke had completed his sketches by the end of July, and the project’s last week was taken up with Uhland’s work and with shooting propaganda films for Wochenschau, a newsreel series released in the cinemas.

On 1 August, the tapestry was returned to its concrete bunker in Bayeux. A few days later it was moved again – to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.

The first stage of Special Assignment Bayeux may have come to an end, but the Nazi obsession with the Bayeux Tapestry was showing no signs of abating. Dr Hermann Bunjes, head of the German Art Historical Institute in Paris, now became the project’s guiding spirit, assembling a group of academics to bring the multi-volume book on the artefact to fruition.

They set about comparing Jeschke’s drawings with Germanic and Viking artefacts in museums, and considered the photographs taken by Uhland and Alber. They envisaged a book that would present essays on the past scholarship of the embroidery, its physical details, its historical authority, its significance for the history of culture. The book would also contain a study of the fabric and embroidery, and an analysis of its material and colour.

One study ‘proved’ the early Germanic origin of the wooden houses depicted; another emphasised the similarity of English and Norman boats to Viking ships.

All of this was undertaken with one overriding ambition: to prove that the Normans were still true, untainted Vikings – representatives of the pure Nordic Aryan race.

Herbert Jankuhn had little doubt that Special Assignment Bayeux had achieved just that. “The Bayeux Tapestry is not only a king’s saga of purely Germanic imprint, but also constitutes the documentary justification of William’s claim to England,” he declared in December 1942. “His actions appear to us… as the execution of his given right and the punishment of unforgiveable perjury and unfaithfulness according to the Germanic viewpoint. The tapestry not only exudes genuine Germanic joy in the tradition of heroic deeds, but also the statesmanlike desire to justify the campaign in England as a legal operation and political necessity.” Propaganda magazines agreed wholeheartedly, running articles that eulogised the tapestry’s celebration of “the joy of the Germanic tradition of great acts of war”.

In short, Special Assignment Bayeux was to reclaim the tapestry as a perfect fit with Nazi pan-Germanic ideology, since it bore witness to the early unification of the Germanic cultures of Scandinavia, Normandy and England. It would also serve as a precedent for the Nazis’ desire to recreate Germania, a homeland for all Germanic peoples.

Glorious warfare

This sentiment would certainly have struck a chord with Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry’s imagery of medieval knights and glorious warfare. Over Christmas 1942, the head of the SS was presented with a bound volume of photos and drawings of the embroidery – a gift that delighted him so much that he sent a thank-you note to Wolfram Sievers in which he noted “the significance that this Bayeux Tapestry has for our glorious and culturally rich German history”.

The Allied invasion of western Europe on 6 June 1944 merely sharpened Himmler’s desire to secure the tapestry for the Third Reich. His fear that it would fall into enemy hands became apparent on 27 June, when the Gestapo moved the embroidery – without notice and despite local French protest – from Sourches to the basement of the Louvre. This would be followed, little more than a month later, by the two SS officers’ attempt to spirit the embroidery away to a “safe place”, only to be thwarted by fast-acting resistance fighters.

What had been Himmler’s intentions when he ordered the tapestry moved from Paris? What would he have considered a “safe place” in June 1944? One possibility is Wewelsburg Castle in central Germany, which had been chosen by Himmler as the location for his training centre, the home of the cult of the SS – a place where officers were taught how to recreate the lost world of the ‘Nordic race’.

Obsessed with the idea that the SS was a revival of the medieval Teutonic knights, Himmler imagined the castle as the home of modern Nazi Knights of the Round Table. The crypt, designed to hold the ashes of SS leaders, was named Valhalla. Himmler installed his own collection of ancient and medieval weapons in the castle, and indicated he wanted tapestries hung on the walls. This would have been an apt location for the Bayeux Tapestry, which he considered a great testament to an earlier Germanic-Nordic-Aryan triumph.

If Wewelsburg Castle was a safe place in June 1944, it certainly didn’t remain so. On 31 March 1945, with US forces closing in, Himmler ordered the castle dynamited, along with its contents.

Fortunately, the Allies had already found the Bayeux Tapestry safe in its temporary home in the basement of the Louvre. On 2 March 1945, after going on display in an exhibition in the art museum, it was returned to Bayeux.

Were the Nazis wrong to attempt to divine a Viking presence in the Bayeux Tapestry? No. It has long been accepted that the Scandinavian influence on both English and Norman societies was significant – seen, for example, in ships, ship-building tools and some decorative elements. This influence can be traced back to the Viking occupation of vast swathes of England (the so-called Danelaw), and the ceding of what became Normandy to the Vikings in 911.

All three groups – English, Normans and Scandinavians – may be considered, to some extent, Germanic. But surely Ahnenerbe would have had finally to admit that, even if the Normans were still Vikings in 1066, they were French-speaking ones.

Shirley Ann Brown is professor emerita of art history at York University, Toronto, a member of the Bayeux Tapestry Advisory Committee, and author of The Bayeux Tapestry: A Sourcebook

This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> Bollocks, bastards and broad arses: the filthy medieval names that expose the real story of 1066 https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:17:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1066-bayeux-tapestry-names-of-norman-conquest/ The names of people involved in the events around the battle of Hastings tell us far more than simply who was who, says James Chetwood – they reveal how cultures overlapped, how colonisation impacted lives, and how people viewed one another The Bayeux Tapestry (at the time of writing wowing visitors to the British Museum) is thronged with characters – warriors, of course, but also monarchs, dukes and bishops, plus countless unnamed figures. This famous embroidery helps us think about the people caught up in the events depicted – and examining their names opens a window onto a world in which English, Scandinavian and Norman cultures met, melded and clashed, how conquest and colonisation influenced lives, and how colourful nicknames can preserve glimpses of the way medieval people saw one another at all levels of society.

Ælfgif... who?

The Bayeux Tapestry features only 15 names – and, typically for this period of history, those of women are largely excluded. Curiously, the only woman actually named in the embroidery can’t be identified – a mysterious figure labelled ÆLFGYVA, or Ælfgifu. She is pictured in an interaction with “a certain cleric”, an encounter that may have been innocent – though the depiction of a naked man in the border below her suggests that it may not have been, and could be a reference to a scandalous liaison of some kind.

The fact that we don’t know who this Ælfgifu was can be explained partly by the fact that hers was such a common name in 11th-century England. There had already been three queens named Ælfgifu by the turn of that century, the consorts of Edmund I (ruled 939–46), Eadwig ‘All-Fair’ (r955–59) and Æthelred the Unready (r978–1013 & 1014–16). When Æthelred married the illustrious Emma of Normandy, the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, she was given a new English name. You’ve guessed it: Ælfgifu.

• Read more | Cnut's invasion of England: setting the scene for the Norman conquest

After Æthelred’s death, Emma (or Ælfgifu) effortlessly switched sides, marrying England’s new Danish king Cnut in 1017. In doing so, she replaced Cnut’s previous wife, another Ælfgifu. To add to the general sense of confusion, the Anglo-Saxon Earl Harold Godwinson had a sister called Ælfgifu. Any of these women could be the ÆLFGYVA named in the Bayeux Tapestry – the chances are that we’ll never know for certain – but the use of her name suggests that the story surrounding her was common knowledge at the time, even if it’s no longer familiar to us today.

The mystery of Edith Swanneck

Another question mark lingers over Harold’s ‘unofficial’ wife, Edith Swanneshals (‘Swanneck’) who, we are told, identified the dead English king’s body on the battlefield at Hastings. However, her identity is still disputed. She is often assumed to be the woman recorded in Domesday Book as Edeva Pulchra (‘The Fair’), partly based on the assumption that this epithet, like ‘swan-neck’, referred to beauty, as well as the fact that the woman in William’s survey was listed as being incredibly rich. But this identification is by no means certain.

Again, the confusion is partly down to the prevalence and ambiguity of monikers. By the 11th century, a number of distinct names had come to sound similar: Eadgyth (Edith), Eadgifu (Edeva), Ealdgyth (Aldith) and Ealdgifu (Aldeva). Even then, some of these might well have caused confusion, particularly amongst Norman scribes recording unfamiliar English names. And later writers have tended to merge all of these into one modern name, ‘Edith’.

This similarity still causes problems today. In the 2025 BBC drama King and Conqueror, three Ediths were renamed to avoid confusing viewers. Edith Swanneck kept her forename but Harold’s sister, Edith of Wessex, was renamed Gunhild, and his official wife, Edith of Mercia, became Margaret. The irony is that not all three of these shared that name in the first place: Edith Swanneck was probably Eadgifu (Edeva), while Edith of Mercia was called Ealdgyth (Aldith). Edith of Wessex was definitely known as Eadgyth (Edith), but even she may have been known by a different name – Gytha – before she married Edward the Confessor.

A tale of two Harolds

Hastings was the last of three major battles that decided the fate of England in 1066. While William was readying his troops to cross the Channel, England was already under attack from the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). The fact that two rival kings bore essentially the same name tells us a lot.

The Viking raids that began in the eighth century may have been dramatic, but it was the long-term influence of interaction and intermarriage of English natives and Scandinavian settlers that had the greatest impact on the land, its language and its names. Scandinavian names became widely used across England ¬– not only by Viking newcomers but also by English people.

This only increased after Cnut conquered England in 1016. His right-hand man here was Earl Godwine, father of the man who became King Harold II (who was quite literally ‘Godwin’s son’), whose family is a great example of Anglo-Scandinavian integration. Godwine and his Danish wife, Gytha, gave their children a mix of Scandinavian names – including Harold, Sweyn, Gunhild and Tostig – and English, including Wulfnoth, Ælfgar and Eadgifu.

In practice, many of these names may not have been considered ‘Scandinavian’ by the people who used them – they were deemed just as English as any other. But one thing we do know is that 1066 marked an abrupt shift in the political and cultural world that England inhabited, as its influences shifted from the North Sea to the English Channel.

Tostig no more

This is epitomised by the fate of the name of another of Godwine’s sons, Tostig. Harold’s brother infamously betrayed Harold by supporting Harald Hardrada in 1066, so played a key role in the end of Anglo-Scandinavian England. His name seems to have been one of those Scandinavian names that had become popular in the 11th century – perhaps partly because of his own fame.

After the conquest, once-popular Anglo-Scandinavian names were quickly discarded in favour of those brought to England by its new Norman overlords. We have a first-hand account of this process in action through the story of a boy named Tostig in the early 12th century. We are told that his childhood friends teased him so remorselessly that he took it upon himself to change his unfashionable name, insisting on being called William instead.

Most people didn’t change their own names, but the speed of the shift more widely was dramatic, with parents swapping English names for Norman ones. William became rapidly popular, thanks to the influence of the hundreds of Williams who came to England after the Conquest. There were almost as many Richards and Roberts, as well as a large number of Walters and Ralphs (and a surprising scattering of Wazos and Bosos).

William the Bastard

The most famous of the new Williams was, of course, the one we know as ‘the Conqueror’, duke of Normandy and king of England. But William wasn’t known by this byname during his lifetime, as far as we can tell. Rather, he was dubbed by contemporaries as William ‘the Bastard’ (through the Latin terms bastardus and nothus).

This wasn’t a judgement on his character but reflected his illegitimacy. Although many noblemen had unofficial partners before taking an official bride, the fact that William was illegitimate clearly mattered, judging by the wide use of this nickname and the fact that his mother, Herleva, was never named as such until after his death.

By the time of the Conquest, the practice of using additional bynames to add detail to the lives and identities of individuals was becoming more common on both sides of the Channel. As William’s nickname shows, these were usually not chosen by the bearers themselves but instead offer us a glimpse into the judgment of other people.

Black beards, barrel cats and broad arses

Bynames were often merely bland descriptors referring to visual characteristics – Burewold Crul (‘Curly’) and Brunstan Blachebiert (‘Blackbeard’), for example. Or they might refer to the occupation of the bearer, such as those of Bernard Faber (‘the Smith’) and William Bruwere (‘the Brewer’). But there were a lot of names that were much more evocative, some of which were mildly insulting – perhaps partly humorous descriptions of someone’s physical appearance, social status or personality traits.

• Read more | The Anglo-Saxons’ last stand

The meanings of some of these names were obvious, but for others we have to read between the lines. Alestan Braders (‘Broad Arse’), Willelm Pinguis (‘the Fat’) and the man just known as Porcel (‘Little Pig’), are likely to have been overweight. Alric Penipurs (‘Pennypurse’) was almost certainly tight with his money. Lewin Gulee (‘Big Mouthful’) probably had a foul mouth. And we can assume that Lefstan Bittecat (‘Barrel Cat’) liked a drink. But how Edwin Wridel came to be known as ‘the Wriggler’ remains a mystery.

A load of Ballocs

The creation and use of derogatory nicknames might have been done in good humour, or could have served a community-building function. However, some of the names from 11th-century England sound downright offensive to modern ears.

In Winchester around 1050, we know of at least three men whose names referred to testicles. There was an Alfred Taddeballoc (‘Toad-bollock’), a Lefwin Balloe (‘Bollock’), and one man known simply by the name Balloc (‘Bollock’). Even if the sexually explicit nature of these names was not as taboo in medieval England as it is today, the use of these names must have still been unpleasant for the people who had to live with them.

This must certainly have been true in the case of Godwinus Clawcunte (‘Scratch-c*nt’), whose name conjures up an image of a man with some sort of unfortunate groin-related ailment.

An artificial divide

The names of English people in the 11th century can tell us a huge amount about their world and how it was changing. Some of this was, undoubtedly, a result of the Norman conquest, but other aspects of its transformation likely reflected longer-term shifts within English society. In fact, names might be linked to the apparent divide evident between the world that came before 1066 and the one that came after.

Names that were popular in England a century after the Conquest could equally be plucked from any census over the past 900 years: William and Richard, Alice and Matilda. They are recognisably English, recognisably modern. In contrast, the Æthelwulfs and Ælfgifus of pre-Conquest England seem alien and unfamiliar. They create an air of fantastical detachment – more like characters from Game of Thrones than the direct ancestors of modern Englishmen and women. And they can create a false sense that the people of England in 1066 were far more different from those that followed them than they really were.

For more detail on the Bayeux Tapestry, you access our HistoryExtra Academy series on the subject: a six-part video lecture series, in which the majesty and mystery of the Tapestry is explored in full.

]]> How Alfred the Great saved the Anglo-Saxons from the Vikings https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-alfred-great-saved-anglo-saxons-from-vikings-podcast/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:00:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-alfred-great-saved-anglo-saxons-from-vikings-podcast/ Dr Eleanor Barraclough tells the story of Alfred the Great's journey from his lowest ebb, to his ascent to reclaim his throne As the Viking Great Heathen Army advanced to the borders of Wessex, the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England appeared all but complete.

In the third episode of this four-part series on the Viking invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in the latter half of the ninth century, James Osborne is joined by historian Dr Eleanor Barraclough to examine how Alfred the Great rose from the cusp of defeat, to a stunning military victory at the battle of Edington.

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Want to know more about the struggle between Alfred and the Vikings? James Osborne rounds up essential reading from the HistoryExtra archive that explores this pivotal moment in Viking and Anglo-Saxon history – including insights into Viking culture, the everyday experience of Anglo-Saxon communities, Alfred’s use of religion and learning as tools of political renewal, and the long legacy of the Danelaw on English identity and culture. Go beyond the podcast

]]> An African king in the Roman empire https://www.historyextra.com/membership/an-african-king-in-roman-empire-podcast/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:44:23 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/an-african-king-in-roman-empire-podcast/ Andrew Kenrick unravels the amazing life of a young North African prince who went on to marry a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and rule an African kingdom He was barely a toddler when he was paraded as a captive in a Roman triumph in 46 BC, but young North African prince Juba went on to marry a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and rule an African kingdom. Andrew Kenrick, author of Rex Juba: 15 Glimpses of an African King, unravels his amazing life, in conversation with David Musgrove.

]]> Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/monsters-rome-emperors-reputation-tom-holland/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:30:02 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/monsters-rome-emperors-reputation-tom-holland/ Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, a key source for the early Roman emperors, has been translated by historian Tom Holland. He reveals what insights it yields into these titans of ancient history Rob Attar: Could you please begin by introducing Suetonius and his best-known work, The Lives of the Caesars?

Tom Holland: Suetonius is probably the most famous of all the ancient biographers. He was secretary to the emperor Hadrian, so was right at the heart of imperial power. He’d also worked as an archivist and librarian in the imperial palace, and therefore had access to all kinds of historical documents.

He drew on these to write [in around AD 121] the biographies of the rulers who had come to be known as the 12 Caesars: the 11 emperors from Augustus to Domitian and, before them all, Julius Caesar – the adoptive father of Augustus. The Lives has had a massive influence on how people understand the Roman empire.

• Read more | Everything you wanted to know about the Roman emperors

Of all ancient classical texts, this is probably also the most influential on modern culture. It inspired Robert Graves, who would later translate the Lives for Penguin Classics, to write I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), which were then adapted into the celebrated 1976 BBC drama series [starring Derek Jacobi].

And that series inspired all kinds of US dramas, ranging from Dynasty in the 1980s, to The Sopranos in the 1990s and 2000s, and Game of Thrones in the 2010s. You could say that Suetonius is the godfather of the murderous dynastic drama.

As a historian yourself, do you consider that Suetonius was doing something similar to what you do today?

It’s important to say that Suetonius wasn’t actually a historian – he was a biographer. He was not aiming to do what Tacitus, his great contemporary, was doing – creating a record of the whole sweep of Roman history.

But of course, because the emperors are so important to our understanding of how the Roman world operated, his work does offer a sense of the Roman empire in the first century BC and the first century AD. That was a period of convulsive change: the Republic collapsed, Augustus established an autocracy, and then there was a process of evolution over the first century AD.

After Augustus died in AD 14, Rome was ruled by his family – the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero – after which that family went extinct. There was then a murderous bout of civil war in AD 69, notorious as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ – Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian – whose lives were among the 12 related by Suetonius. Vespasian, who established his own dynasty, was succeeded by his eldest son, Titus, who was then followed by his younger brother, Domitian. The lives of those three emperors are covered by Suetonius as well.

What approach did Suetonius take to writing these biographies?

His range seems to have been very extensive. From surviving fragments of his other works, we get a sense that he was interested in what today we might call social anthropology: customs, habits, the things that people do. Aside from his biographies of the Caesars, he wrote a collection of the lives of the great courtesans – and sex is also an obvious theme that runs throughout The Lives of the Caesars.

But he also wrote about children’s games, and about the insults that people give one another. He wrote about clothing, and about all kinds of aspects of social life – and these in turn informed his portraits of the emperors. He wrote about what they did as children, their appearance, their sexual habits. For Suetonius, this provided windows onto their characters and the way that their reigns were shaped. It enabled him to situate the emperors more clearly in the social, political and cultural context of the world that they ruled.

• Listen | An episode of BBC Radio 4’s Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics on Suetonius

Why and how did you go about translating The Lives of the Caesars?

I was asked to do it because it was felt that the translation done by Robert Graves many decades ago was a bit old fashioned. There are certain problems, I think, with his work.

One strange choice he made was that, instead of using Roman military terms such as centurion or tribune, he gave characters titles such as ‘sergeant major’ or ‘colonel’ or whatever. That’s perhaps unsurprising, because Graves fought in the First World War, but it gives his text a slightly postwar, 1930s flavour. I’m sure that in maybe 60 or 70 years, my translation will seem very 2020s, but I hope that I’ve been truer to the Latin text than Graves was.

One other stylistic quirk of Suetonius’s I noticed was that, when writing about an individual emperor, he almost never mentioned them by name – it’s always “he” did this, “he” did that. Suetonius might introduce, say, Augustus by name at the beginning of that Life, but, from that point on, it is assumed that any third person verb will be referring to Augustus.

And the effect is very powerful. By not drawing attention to the emperor’s name, it becomes kind of omnipresent: this emperor is so significant that you don’t even need to name him – everything is revolving around him. I hope that, even in English, the reader will find this stylistic effect striking.

Did you have to make any difficult decisions when translating the text?

Purely in terms of how to render Latin – and, indeed, Greek, because there’s quite a lot of Greek in the Lives, too – the huge problem is always puns. Meaningfully translating Suetonius’s linguistic puns is always a challenge. One of them revolves around oral sex, and that touches on another, slightly more moral problem: there are passages within Suetonius that are shocking. And these passages have always been shocking.

There’s a tradition that, in the 15th century, Gilles de Rais – a Frenchman fighting the English during the Hundred Years’ War – was seduced into becoming a child killer by reading Suetonius. The Marquis de Sade reputedly owned a copy of the Lives. Then, in the Victorian period, school copies featured large chunks that were just replaced with asterisks.

Even though today, in the 21st century, we might pride ourselves on being more permissive and less easily shocked, the fact remains that there are repellent passages. The question of what to do with them was a moral consideration, but in the end I decided that I wanted to give as accurate and complete a rendering of Suetonius’s language as I could.

On that point, the Lives features some truly remarkable stories about some of the emperors’ debauched behaviour. How seriously can we take these?

I would like to focus on two of those emperors, because in some ways their reputations for debauchery reflect very different Roman cultural traditions. The first of these was Tiberius. Near the end of his life, when he was about 70, he retired to the island of Capri.

Suetonius gives us completely shocking details of what Tiberius is supposed to have got up to there: child sex, brothels, all kinds of things. Tiberius was then succeeded by Caligula – perhaps the most notorious of all of the Caesars. Rather than retiring to a private island, Caligula staged his sexual depravities on the most public of stages, according to Suetonius.

• Listen | Rome’s most scandalous emperors: hear more from Tom Holland’s interview about Suetonius

The temptation is to take these accounts absolutely at face value: to assume that Tiberius was a hideous pervert, and that Caligula was such a sexual terrorist that he was in fact insane. But I think there are different layers in how you can respond to these stories. One of these is to recognise that the Roman understanding of what was shocking and scandalous about sexual behaviour is not the same as ours.

Let’s think about Tiberius. He was the emperor – and an emperor should not retire. The only conceivable reason, in a Roman’s opinion, for doing that was because the person doing it was an absolute pervert.

So you can see why Tiberius’s retirement was framed by people hostile to him as reflecting his desire to do disgusting things that he couldn’t do while he was in Rome leading a public life. The fact that Tiberius was a very old man, and that statesmen who had attained a certain age were entitled to a dignified retirement, was ignored – because Tiberius was emperor, and shouldn’t have done it.

As for Caligula, he was taking to the public stage and rubbing the noses of his enemies in the Senate in the fact of their impotence. Both Augustus and Tiberius had shown the Senate respect, but Caligula had a different strategy. He wanted to demonstrate that he was the master, and that the senators were a bunch of lickspittles, nobodies. I think that the sexual abuse to which he submitted senators – and, notably, their wives – was a way of making that point.

That was very brutal and shocking, and why Caligula became such a notorious figure, but there was perhaps an element of strategic thinking that Suetonius didn’t acknowledge. Caligula clearly wasn’t a liberal – he wasn’t Justin Trudeau – but there was probably method behind the seeming madness.

This is part of the fascination of studying the lives of these emperors. There’s the shock appeal of the stories, and there’s the fascination of working out exactly how and why Roman attitudes to sexuality were different from ours. And then there’s the possible political context that was unspoken and unacknowledged by Suetonius, but which might nevertheless explain what is going on.

Was something similar happening with Nero, who was another really notorious figure of this time? Did he get an unfairly bad press from Suetonius?

No, because Nero brought it on himself. And, as with Caligula, I think it was a deliberate political strategy. There were really two traditions in Roman politics that the emperors inherited from the age of the Republic. There was the traditionalist approach, showing respect for the traditions of the state and traditional elites.

And then there were populares – leaders who looked over the heads of the traditional elites to appeal to the masses of the people. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius were all essentially traditionalist in their approach, whereas Caligula and Nero were both populares. They scorned the Senate and wanted to make themselves the darlings of the people.

Because they were emperors, they had opportunities to do that in ways that, in the Republic, not even the most flamboyant nobleman would have had. And I think that’s what Nero was doing. He was clearly the most tremendous showman in a way that was calculated to be shocking to his senators. Emperors were not meant to tread the boards on stage. They were not meant to play musical instruments. They were not meant to compete in the Olympics.

But Nero did all that – and he did it sufficiently well that people quite admired it. It’s as though a US president were to star in an Oscar-winning film, headline Glastonbury, or win a race in Formula 1.

And even with the most shocking crime of his reign, the murder of his own mother, Nero very pointedly didn’t try to disguise it. Instead, he drew attention to it – and I think that’s because murdering your mother was the kind of thing that a hero would do in a Greek tragedy. Nero was casting himself as literally being ‘Augustus’, someone midway between heaven and earth. He was essentially presenting himself to the Roman people, and the world beyond, as a figure from myth – as a throwback to the ancient days of someone like the notorious matricide Orestes.

• Read more | The worst Roman emperors: 8 of the bloodiest from ancient Rome’s history

This policy undoubtedly caused collateral damage, and explains why Nero’s reputation was so bad in the wake of his death. And Suetonius was clearly drawing on those traditions. After all, Suetonius was working for an imperial system founded on the ruins of Nero’s reputation and career, so there was nothing for him in trying to redeem Nero’s reputation. Again, I think – as with Caligula and Tiberius – Suetonius’s portrait of Nero gives the historian enough clues to enable them to work out what Nero was doing, what he was up to. But you’ve got to read between the lines.

In your introduction, you suggest that these rulers are both familiar and strange to us at the same time. Could you elaborate on that point?

I think they’re familiar to us because Suetonius’s biographies give us details about these individual emperors to a degree that we simply do not have for comparable imperial figures from Near Eastern and Mediterranean ancient history. Think of the pharaohs, or the kings of Assyria or Babylon or Persia: these were autocrats ruling empires and civilisations that were just as sophisticated as the Roman empire. Compared with the portraits we have of Augustus or Nero, however, they seem anonymous.

The whole point of royal iconography in Egypt or Persia was to anonymise the pharaoh or the great king. Thanks to Suetonius, though, we know how the emperors had sex, how they went to the toilet, what they looked like, the hairstyles they wore, their bodily blemishes, and so on. We know the most intimate details about them – and that makes them seem vivid and alive and familiar to us in a way that is fairly unique in ancient history. It explains, I think, why imperial Rome tends to fascinate the general public in a way that other civilisations don’t.

At the same time, I hope you will get a sense from what I’ve been saying that ancient Rome was a very alien civilisation. The codes of behaviour that governed not just the emperors but also Romans generally were very remote from ours.

And it’s that strange blend of the familiar and the weird that I think explains why Rome is so fascinating. There’s a kind of science-fiction quality to it. If you think of science fiction as being a mixture of what is familiar to us with worlds that are utterly alien, then that is what ancient Rome gives us.

Of all of the weird and wonderful stories within this book, are there any that particularly stood out for you?

One of the things that becomes very evident when you read the biographies in their entirety is that, even as Suetonius was clearly getting stuck into archives, he was also situating the stories in a dimension in which the supernatural was very vivid.

One of the most dramatic and celebrated moments in Suetonius’s Lives is Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon [the river that marked the boundary of the area controlled directly by Rome]. Caesar sent his legions ahead of him, then travelled in secret through the night from Ravenna up to the frontier. He stood on the bank. He hesitated. And then, Suetonius tells us, a great ghostly figure snatched a trumpet and blew it. This served as the signal to Caesar that he should cross the river.

The dice were thrown. The Rubicon was crossed. History changed – and the fact that there is this weird supernatural element, and it’s introduced exactly as though Suetonius is describing something completely everyday, is often written out of the story. For instance, I did not include that in my earlier account of the crossing of the Rubicon, but looking back at it now, perhaps I should have done.

Throughout all of these stories, there is a sense that what was happening was being governed by fate – that the gods were always watching down, and that it was possible for mortals who could read these signs correctly to intuit what was going to happen. This is a really important part of the universe that Suetonius has bequeathed us.

If, through some miracle of technology, you could interview one of the 12 Caesars on your podcast The Rest Is History, who would you choose?

Julius Caesar – simply because his combination of an extraordinary life and piercing, ruthless intelligence would make him incomparably the most interesting guest to interview. I think, though, for my own selfish purposes – for wanting to understand how the Roman world ticked and how the course of Roman history was changed – I would choose Augustus. He was probably the most remarkable political operator, not just in Rome but in the whole of western history – maybe even world history.

• Read more | Who are the most underrated Roman emperors?

Tom Holland is a historian, author and broadcaster who co-hosts The Rest Is History podcast with Dominic Sandbrook. His translation of The Lives of the Caesars was published by Penguin Classics in 2025.

This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> In 197 BC, the Romans faced their greatest enemy. You won't believe what they did next https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-197-bc-the-romans-faced-their-greatest-enemy-you-wont-believe-what-they-did-next/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:20:11 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-197-bc-the-romans-faced-their-greatest-enemy-you-wont-believe-what-they-did-next/ When an ambitious Seleucid king marched his vast army into Europe to challenge the Roman Republic for control of the Mediterranean world, it looked set to spark a violent clash of the ancient titans. Instead, as Michael Economou reveals, the cunning Romans deployed another potent weapon: diplomacy In the spring of 197 BC, a vast war host rumbled west through the mountains of Asia Minor – the region now known as Anatolia, Turkey. Among its ranks were men assembled from across the known world. Clattering columns of Macedonian pikemen marched alongside auxiliaries from Syria, Palestine, Iran and central Asia, while glittering horsemen in heavy armour rode forward in the shadow of Indian war elephants.

This colossal, multi-ethnic army was united by its charismatic leader, Antiochus III, king of the Seleucid empire and one of the ancient Mediterranean’s most ambitious rulers. The Seleucids, a Macedonian dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals, already held sway over an enormous realm stretching from the east of what’s now Turkey to the edge of India. The aim of Antiochus’s expedition, according to the Roman historian Livy, was to “drag all of the cities of Asia Minor into the structure of [his] empire”, then push across the Hellespont (Dardanelles) into Europe itself.

These territories, which today comprise western Turkey and eastern Greece, encompassed fertile valleys, vibrant commercial hubs and vital axes of communication between Europe and Asia – a tempting prize for a great conqueror. For the Seleucids, it also had symbolic importance. The founder of the dynasty, Seleucus I Nicator, had conquered much of Asia Minor after Alexander’s death but, over recent decades, the empire had been losing ground to other regional powers. Antiochus’s march west was not simply an imperialist grab for valuable territory but an attempt to reclaim lost Seleucid territory and establish himself as the successor to Alexander the Great.

• Read more | Alexander the Great's empire crumbled into chaos after his death. How did it fall apart so quickly?

Opposing forces

As Antiochus bore down on the Aegean from the east, however, another power was pushing from the west: the Roman Republic. After decades of costly wars – most consequentially with Carthage under the military leadership of Hannibal, who’d invaded Italy via the Alps with his war elephants – by the end of the third century BC, Rome had emerged as the dominant force in the western Mediterranean. In 200 BC, less than a year after its victory in the Second Punic War, Rome’s battle-hardened legions had crossed the Adriatic and clashed with the armies of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s former homeland.

Within three years, Macedon had been defeated and its king, Philip V – once a charismatic, expansionist ruler in the mould of Antiochus III – was reduced to a compliant Roman puppet. The Greek city-states ringing the Aegean basin had mostly been Macedonian client states, and were now liberated from foreign rule and granted independence under Roman protection. As Rome set about enforcing its new order in the region, the stage was set for a titanic clash between the Republic and the approaching Seleucid juggernaut.

Yet the seemingly inevitable military confrontation didn’t transpire – not immediately. For the time being, the conflict was fought not by soldiers and ships but through treaties, embassies and public proclamations aiming to win the allegiance of local powers and sketch out competing territorial claims. This struggle – famously described in the 1950s by historian Ernst Badian as a “cold war” – is not only a fascinating story of ancient superpower rivalry but a revealing case study of the more subtle dimensions of Roman imperialism.

Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean is often portrayed simply as a triumph of an unstoppable war machine. But the legions were often preceded by diplomats and administrators who cultivated alliances, gathered information and disseminated propaganda. It was these methods – which might be termed ‘soft power’ – that Rome used first to challenge Antiochus’s advance and cement its influence in the Aegean.

Imperial expansions

At the turn of the second century BC, the Seleucid empire was the largest power in the eastern Mediterranean. Antiochus III himself had done much to augment the empire’s size and prestige during his 25-year reign. Self-styled as Antiochus the Great, he had spent years dashing across the known world dispatching rivals and seizing new lands. In 200 BC, he struck the Ptolemaic Kingdom, then in the midst of a major uprising, and claimed a sizable chunk of territory encompassing much of the Levant. So, as the Seleucid army marched west in 197 BC, he had good reason to feel confident of another spectacular victory.

At first, Antiochus’s forces advanced virtually unopposed, steamrolling the city-states and petty dynasts of the Anatolian interior as his navy swept across the southern coast and captured vital ports. That summer’s campaign concluded with a final, glorious victory when Antiochus captured the ancient and strategically vital city of Ephesus in south-west Asia Minor. As the army wintered in the city and its hinterland, Antiochus and his generals made plans to strike north in the new year and complete their expedition.

Most coastal settlements in Asia Minor waited anxiously for the Seleucid hammer-blow to fall, and were prepared to surrender without a fight. A few brave cities, however, took the bold decision to resist Seleucid domination – most notably the great commercial centres of Smyrna (now İzmir) and Lampsacus on the Dardanelles. Knowing that they had little prospect of survival on their own, they turned to the other great power of the region for support, dispatching embassies to secure Roman guarantees for their independence.

• Read more | It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – so why was it destroyed three times?

Unfortunately for the Smyrnaean and Lampsacene ambassadors, diplomacy in the Mediterranean in the early second century BC was usually improvised and ad hoc, and it was difficult to discern exactly whom they should petition for Roman support. The circuitous journey of the Lampsacene ambassador, Hegesias, has been preserved in a public inscription erected by the citizens of the city to thank him for his efforts. First, Hegesias sailed to mainland Greece and spoke to Rome’s naval commander in the region, who responded with encouraging but vague assurances of support.

He then ventured to Massilia (modern Marseille) – a prosperous Greek colony that was one of Rome’s closest and most loyal allies – where he successfully petitioned the city assembly to help him contact the Senate. Then, with a group of Massiliote advisors in tow, Hegesias travelled to Rome and received an audience with the Senate, which promised to make provisions for Lampsacus in any agreement it reached with Antiochus. On the way home, he made one final stop in Corinth, where he met with the principal Roman official in Greece, Flamininus, and beseeched him to protect Lampsacus’s welfare.

In 196 BC, partly as a result of these panicked embassies, the Roman Senate decided to make a bold declaration. As Antiochus was pressing north and moving to complete his conquest of Asia Minor, the Senate proclaimed that “all of the Greeks in Asia Minor and Europe should be free and self-governing”. The official purpose of this decree was to formally dismantle Macedonian control over the Aegean, and to establish a new status quo in which the autonomy of the Greek city-states was guaranteed by Rome. In reality, however, it was clearly intended as a challenge to Antiochus III, whose expedition aimed to bring these cities under Seleucid control. This is made clear by the text of the decree, which explicitly mentions several cities that had already been taken by Antiochus the previous year.

A roar of cheers

Rome reaffirmed this declaration later that year at the Isthmian games, an important Panhellenic festival held near the city of Corinth. The Greek historian Polybius described how, with “the most distinguished men from almost the whole world” in attendance, Flamininus announced that Rome would withdraw its armies from Greece, leaving the cities “without garrisons and subject to no tribute”. At this, the crowd erupted in ecstasy, letting out “such a mighty roar of cheers… that those who listen to the story now could hardly imagine it” and almost killing Flamininus as they showered him with crowns and ceremonial diadems. For the Greeks, the Roman proclamation felt like the end of a nightmare that had begun when Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II of Macedon, had subjugated them almost 150 years ago.

For the Romans, the declaration – and the theatrical way it was presented to the Greeks by Flamininus – was a masterstroke that established them as the protectors of Greece and cast Antiochus as an oppressive tyrant who threatened to extinguish the cities’ newfound freedom. It had also immediately created a network of grateful allies in Greece whose infrastructure, manpower and support were more strategically useful (and cheaper) than a permanent Roman garrison.

European ambitions

Yet even as Rome’s propaganda war began to bear fruit, Antiochus was pressing on with his campaign, seeking to create facts on the ground that would be difficult for Rome to challenge through diplomatic manoeuvring. Striking north from Ephesus, he crossed the Dardanelles and marched into Europe. His first act was to restore the Thracian city of Lysimachia, which had recently been destroyed by Rome’s allies during the war against Macedon, and establish it as his primary base in the region. Rebuilding Lysimachia was a clear declaration to Rome that Antiochus intended to remain in Europe and would not meekly accept the diktats of the Roman Senate.

Rome then sent an embassy to Lysimachia to treat directly with Antiochus in a semi-public diplomatic exchange. The Roman case was simple: Antiochus should withdraw from the cities he had taken – which had been open to conquest only because Rome had defeated Philip V – and stop threatening Roman security by pushing into Europe.

According to Polybius, Antiochus contended that the territory had been rightful Seleucid soil since Seleucus I conquered it decades earlier. As such, Antiochus was not “taking them [the Greek cities] by exploiting Philip’s difficulties, but retaking them in accordance with his rights”. Antiochus also refused to engage the Romans in a performative contest over who was the true ‘liberator’ of Greece. Though in theory he did not object to autonomy for the cities of Asia Minor, he argued that it was his gift to bestow, not the Romans’. As such, he deftly recast ‘freedom’ not as an absolute right granted by the Romans but a privilege that only he could afford to the cities under his control.

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Antiochus’s intransigence left Rome in a diplomatic and strategic bind. To declare war would be both a naked act of aggression and an unwelcome new drain on the Republic’s resources. On the other hand, if Rome did not declare war, it would have little choice but to honour its promise and withdraw its forces from the Aegean, leaving it open to further Seleucid attacks.

In the short term, Rome resolved this dilemma by declaring war on Sparta. The city’s new king, Nabis, had been aggressively reasserting Sparta’s position in southern Greece, and Rome’s allies in the region had been asking Flamininus to intervene for some time. The war provided a convenient pretext for Rome to keep its army in the region for another season of campaigning without breaking the commitments it had made at the Isthmian games. However, it did not resolve the deeper strategic problems posed by Antiochus.

Hannibal bites back

In 195 BC, an explosive new factor disrupted the delicate diplomatic balance. Exiled from his native Carthage, Rome’s most feared enemy, Hannibal, had made the long journey across the Mediterranean to the court of Antiochus III, where he offered his services. Though Antiochus received Hannibal with little more than respectful courtesy and gave him no major land commands, the news provoked horror among the Roman people, who feared that Hannibal was poised to harry Italy again with a Seleucid army at his back. Over the following two years, the Romans made military plans to defend Sicily and Italy from a potential invasion (though in hindsight such a scenario was highly unlikely).

While some feared that the return of Hannibal would coerce Rome into maintaining its garrison in Greece, the Senate decided to fulfil its promise and withdraw the legions. That said, Rome continued to make its presence felt in the Aegean by establishing itself as a local mediator and guarantor of civic autonomy.

These interventions did not respect the boundaries of Antiochus’s empire. For instance, a 194/193 BC inscription from the city of Teos on the Ionian coast, then firmly under Antiochus’s control, notes that the Romans officially granted the city exemption from tribute during this period. The Romans euphemistically described these activities as “making friendships”, but Antiochus understood them as a grave threat: they compromised the monopoly on generosity that underpinned Seleucid royal ideology.

That winter, Antiochus sent envoys to Rome in a last-ditch attempt to reach an accord. The discussions followed the same pattern as before, with the Romans (led by Flamininus) insisting that Antiochus evacuate Europe and confine himself to Asia, and Antiochus claiming that Thrace was historic Seleucid territory that he could not abandon. Flamininus, ever the showman, then took the discussion public, delivering a speech affirming that Rome would use force to keep Antiochus out of Europe if he refused their demands.

By this stage, it was becoming clear that only outright war could break the deadlock. On the way back to Antiochus’s court, the nonplussed Seleucid ambassadors paid a visit to the Aetolian League, an alliance of Greek cities that had been Rome’s allies in the war against Philip V but which had been disappointed by the terms of the subsequent peace settlement. Encouraged by the prospect of Seleucid support, the Aetolians put out diplomatic feelers to neighbours in an effort to build an anti-Roman coalition of Greek states. When this proved mostly unsuccessful, the Aetolians began attacking surrounding cities, bringing them into direct conflict with the nearby Achaean League, loyal allies of Rome.

The Aetolians lost on most fronts but were able to seize Demetrias, a strategically vital fortress-city in Thessaly, and invited Antiochus to occupy it as his new base in Europe. Recognising that war was now inevitable, Antiochus decided that he could not waste the opportunity, and dispatched his army to Demetrias. For Rome, this further incursion into Europe was impossible to ignore, and legions began swarming back across the Adriatic to meet Antiochus. The ‘cold war’ was over, and the real struggle for the Aegean had begun.

Rome and its coalition of allies outnumbered even Antiochus’s enormous war host, an imbalance that only worsened when Philip V of Macedon entered the war against him. Hoping to negate this disadvantage, in 191 BC Antiochus chose to meet the Romans at Thermopylae, the narrow, highly defensible pass where Leonidas I of Sparta had made his heroic stand against the Persian empire almost 300 years earlier. After resisting several waves of Roman attacks, the Seleucid force was ambushed by a flanking manoeuvre through the surrounding heights. Antiochus’s army disintegrated and he was forced to scurry across the Aegean back to Asia Minor and regather his forces. The Roman legions pursued and ultimately defeated him in a decisive battle near the city of Magnesia.

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Antiochus was compelled to sign a humiliating peace agreement, the Treaty of Apamea, which stripped his empire of its territories west of the Taurus Mountains and parcelled them out to Roman allies. Even more ruinously, the treaty forced the empire to pay a crippling annual indemnity to Rome amounting to perhaps 10 per cent of the Seleucids’ revenues. The resulting financial crisis drove the Seleucids to squeeze new revenues from their beleaguered subjects, prompting waves of rebellions and political instability.

Antiochus himself was killed by an angry mob while looting the temples of Elam in south-west Iran – an astonishingly grubby end. A few decades later, Seleucid attempts to extract money from the city of Jerusalem and its rich temple prompted the uprising known as the Maccabean Revolt – the context for the story of Hanukkah, still commemorated by Jews today.

As the Seleucid empire entered into a death spiral and disintegrated over the following decades, Rome continued to push east. The Republic used the same diplomatic toolkit it had deployed against Antiochus as it spread its influence: guaranteeing the autonomy of its allies, establishing itself as the arbiter of local disputes, and threatening potential rivals with overwhelming punishment. It was by these methods, as much as through military force, that Rome finally established itself as sole master of the Mediterranean world.

Michael Economou is a historian and author

This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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