On the 18th of October, 1081, a battle was fought outside the walls of the Byzantine city of Diracchium,

then the capital of the Imperial province of Illyria, and one of the most important seaports on the Adriatic.

On the one side stood the recently appointed Eastern Roman Emperor Alexius Connenus, a former army officer who had forced his way into power just six months previously amidst catastrophic invasions from opportunistic enemies on all sides of the realm.

Ever since the terrible defeat at Manzacurt in 1071, where the Eastern Romans had lost practically

all of their lands in Asia Minor to the Seljuk Turks, the Empire had stood on the verge of

collapse. Yet the Turks weren't the only enemy that Comnenos faced. Another opportunistic

group had recently made themselves known on his western borders.

Unlike the Turks, these warriors were Christians, yet they were no less concerned with the

long-time survival of the Empire as the Turks were, and possibly even more obsessed with

looting, plundering and carving out Byzantine lands for themselves.

So it was, on that fateful day in October 1081, that Robert Giscard, the foremost commander of the Normans in Italy,

engaged Alexius Comnenos in battle. Just as the Normans, many of whom were in fact conscripted Italians and Lombards,

forced to fight for their new overlords, looked like they were ready to break in the face of the

Imperial army, the elite Byzantine Varangian guard charged forwards to mop up the enemy. Armed with

huge battle axes, the Varangians had traditionally been made up of Scandinavian

and Rus adventurous in the pay of the emperor. But in recent years, since the Norman conquest

of England in 1066, large numbers of them were in fact Anglo-Saxons exiled from their homeland.

It was then, just as the battle looked to be turning in the favour

of the Byzantines, that a devastating Norman cavalry charge thundered into the now-separated

Varangians. In a tragic repeat of the events of Hastings some 15 years before, for at least some of those

present on both sides, may have actually

fought. The Ferangians were massacred to a man. Allegedly, a few survivors made it into the church

...