One viking family — One kingdom of Christ

Starting from the Viking families of a small island off the coast of Norway, this book follows their descendants southwest to Normandy and England, east to the Rurikids and Romanovs, south into the Habsburg and Carolingian world, and into the royal houses of Christian Europe.

In 1044, in a town in Russia, a Norwegian prince married a princess from Kyiv. Under which country’s history does that wedding belong? Norway claims him. Ukraine and Russia claim her. England touches it at the far end, because he died at Stamford Bridge three weeks before Hastings.

The answer is that it belongs to none of them — and that filing it under a country is what has kept the real story invisible for a thousand years. It belongs to all of them.

This is a book about who married whom, and what happened next.

It starts on a small flat island off the west coast of Norway, two kilometres of grass and rock with a marble church on it. In the ninth century it belonged to a chieftain called Rognvald Mørejarl, as the Giske patriarch. One of his sons sailed south, took a piece of France, and founded Normandy. Five generations later his descendant crossed the Channel and became William the Conqueror.

That is one son. The book follows the rest.

Where the marriages lead:

A daughter of Kyiv married into Poland in 1039 — and her descendants ended up on the Habsburg throne four centuries later. Norman brothers from the same small Norman peninsula that produced William took Sicily and ruled it in Arabic, Greek and Latin. A Swedish king’s daughter married the Grand Prince of Kyiv in 1095, and carried a Norwegian bloodline into the dynasty that would rule Russia for the next five hundred years.

A Polish princess married the last pagan ruler in Europe in 1386, on the condition that he be baptised — and Lithuania became Christian as her wedding present.

Catherine the Great, a German princess with no right to the Russian throne whatsoever, turned out to descend from its founder by more routes than almost anyone who did have a right to it.

The surprise is who was doing the connecting.

Not the kings. The kings stayed where they were, held their land, and passed it to their sons.
It was the daughters — sent away at twelve, fourteen, sixteen, to countries whose language they didn’t speak, to marry men they had never met. Every single point where these four great families cross into one another is a woman who left home. Nine of them, across nine hundred years. Three of the nine, we cannot even be sure who their parents were.

One of them was Queen of Sweden for twenty years, and nobody knows her name.

A history of medieval and modern Europe told through its marriages, based on a genealogical database of 147,000 people