IVAR the BONELESS was PRINCE IVAR (Igor) of KIEV and his son

SVEIN ‘the OLD’ IVARSON was PRINCE SVEINALD (Sviatoslav) of KIEV

I have just posted a first draft of Chapter 9,  ‘PERESLAVET AND THE BATTLE OF SILISTRA’ of “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson” Book to the website SeiberTeck.com under the Book Heading of that name.

Princess Sviataslava of Constantinople

Book 4, Chapter 9, PERESLAVET AND THE BATTLE OF SILISTRA  (Circa 967-968 AD): 

Prince Svein was paid twenty thousand pounds of gold and a co-Emperorship by the Eastern Romans to attack Bulgaria so, he took four Hraes’ legions from Tmutorokan across the Black Sea for a lightning attack on Pereslavet on the Danube River and he took the city in a day and captured eighty Bulgarian cities on the Danube over the summer.  Bulgarian captives made up a large portion of the slaves that the Hraes’ sold in Baghdad and Constantinople that trading season.  There were so many Bulgarian captives that Prince Hraerik had to take a large number of them for sale in India to prevent collapsing the middle eastern slave market (which had only happened once before when the Romans captured Dacia centuries earlier).  Then their legions hunkered down in Silistra for an expected Bulgarian counterattack.

Prince Hraerik’s wives bought him a captive Khazar princess to sleep with him while he was at sea because he was haunted by the Army of the Impalers and many Hraes’ veterans were being adversely affected by the horrors they had witnessed in Wallachia.  Certain aspects of the Mediterranean slave trade are explored as Hraerik deals with the trauma and the Wee Folk syndrome of the Irish slave trade is examined next in what can only be described in modern terms as disturbing.

Over the Yulefest Holiday of 967, Prince Svein accidentally got Princess Malfrieda pregnant.  He returned to Pereslavet with Prince Hraerik and they waited with their legions for the inevitable Bulgarian attack.  In early spring thirty thousand Bulgarian troops came from Preslav to Silistra for a classic battle in which Hraerik managed to emulate Hannibal’s strategy at the Battle of Cannae and the Hraes’ victory was quite complete and many Bulgarian captives were once more sold into slavery in the markets of Baghdad and Constantinople.

Book Four, “The Saga of Svein ‘the Old’ Ivarson,” demonstrates how Prince Svein ‘the Old’ (Slavic: Sviatoslav ‘the Brave’) of Kiev later moved to Norway and fought to become King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark.  But before being forced out of Russia, he sated his battle lust by crushing the Khazars and attacking the great great grandfather of Vlad the Impaler in a bloody campaign into the Heart of Darkness of Wallachia against the Army of the Impalers and their 666 salute.  The campaign was so mortifying that the fifteen thousand pounds of gold that the Emperor of Constantinople paid him to attack them seemed not nearly enough, so Prince Svein attacked the Eastern Roman Empire itself.  He came so close to defeating the greatest empire in the world, that later Danish Christian Kings would call his saga, and the sagas of his kin, “The Lying Sagas of Denmark” and set out to destroy them.