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 10,  ‘THE SIEGE OF KIEV’ 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 10, THE SIEGE OF KIEV  (Circa 968-969 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 to Bulgaria and conquered it.  Then Prince Svein and Princess Svia toured through Constanza and Messembria on their way to Constantinople and were given celebratory feasts all along the way.  Once in the Imperial City, Svein requested his co-Emperorship as agreed upon and Emperor Nikephoros had one small request before he could grant the boon.  “I need Tzar Peter’s head,” he said.  “I need his head on display for the people of Constantinople or they will riot if I make a Hraes’ prince a co-Emperor”.

Svein and Svia celebrated the great Bulgarian victory feasts with the Romans and then returned to Bulgaria to get Tzar Peter’s head.  The Hraes’ legions laid siege to Sophia and reduced the defensive walls with their trebuchets until Tzar Peter asked for terms.  When Svein offered him the standard terms of ancient Roman conquests, whereby half the citizens of Sophia would be enslaved and the other half would remain in the city, Tzar Peter countered with a quarter to be enslaved.  This told Svein that Tzar Peter cared for his people so, he accepted the counteroffer.  Once the city was occupied, Svein gathered a quarter of the citizens together and Tzar Peter asked if he could ransom them to get them back.  Svein told him he would only accept a head-ransom, Tzar Peter’s life for the lives of twelve thousand of his citizens.  As Tzar Peter was old, having already suffered a stroke, and he truly cared for his people, he agreed to the head-ransom.  Prince Svein had Tzar Peter kneel down in the central square of Sophia, just in front of the palace, and he struck the Tzar’s head off with the stroke of his sword and as it rolled, Svia caught it up in a black leather bag and they took the head to Constantinople.

At fourteen years of age, Princess Svia had been raped by bishops in a Greek Orthodox nunnery, but she also had learned her Roman history under the tutelage of horny little rapist priests and monks and she figured out why Nikephoros the Second really wanted Tzar Peter’s head.  A hundred and fifty years earlier a cruel Bulgarian Tzar Krum had defeated an even crueller Emperor Nikephoros the First in battle and had him beheaded and turned his skull into a gold encrusted drinking cup.  She put one and two together and suspected that Nikephoros the Second wanted to turn Tzar Peter the first’s skull into a drinking cup in revenge for what had happened to Nikephoros the First’s head.  She told her husband about it, leaving out the horny little rapist priests and monks’ part, of course, and Prince Svein decided he would make a gold plated baptismal ewer out of Tzar Peter’s pate and give it to the Emperor as a gift.  So, Tzar Peter’s head spent its days on display in front of the Milion at the center of the city, and nights in a crafter’s shop where the top of the skull was removed and turned into a gold and jewel encrusted cup.

While in Constantinople, Prince Svein learned that Kiev was under siege by mounted Pecheneg warriors who had surrounded the city and were starving it into submission.  The Romans had learned that the Khazars had paid the Pechenegs to attack the Hraes’ because the Romans had paid the Hrae’s to attack the Khazars so, Emperor Nikephoros offered Svein twenty thousand pounds of gold to crush the Khazar Empire.  Svein accepted the offer, but had to rush off to save Kiev before he could be made co-Emperor, so, they agreed that Khazaria would be crushed first and then Svein would return to Rome to receive his laurels.

Prince Hraerik returned early from Baghdad and relieved the siege of Kiev by befriending Kagan Kurya of the Pechenegs and warning him to return east before Prince Svein returned with his legions.  This allowed Prince Svein to immediately attack the Khazars and he caught them by surprise and crushed them completely.  Not one vine or grape was left in the vineyards of Khazaria.  But some of Emperor Nikephoros’ Armenian generals were against allowing a Rhos prince to become a co-Emperor of Rome and were soon plotting against him.

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.