The Lion of Piraeus
A marble statue in Venice bears witness to Europe’s long history of brave defeats and fruitless victories.
King Charles II 1649-1685
© Didier Descouens, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of four lions at the Venetian Arsenal, two of which were looted from Athens by Francesco Morosini in 1687, during the Great Turkish War. The one shown above is remarkable for the Norse runes scratched into it, dating back to the time of the Norman Invasion in 1066, left by Scandinavian mercenaries as a memorial to a fallen comrade.
Introduction
The Piraeus Lion has seen some remarkable history pass before his eyes, from the days when Scandinavian and English mercenaries were taking the fight to the Normans in Italy, to the day when the Turks came knocking imperiously on the doors of Vienna.
THE Arsenal at Venice is graced by two marble lions looted by Venetian commander Francesco Morosini from Piraeus, near Athens, in 1687. The lions, already a feature of the Greek port for fifteen centuries, were his trophies following a brief liberation of Athens and the Peloponnese from the Ottoman Empire.
After capturing Constantinople in 1453,* the Ottoman Turks advanced steadily beyond Greece into central Europe, as far as Poland and Austria. Defeat at Vienna in 1683, and an alliance of Christian states, the ‘Holy League’, forced them to retreat, ceding the Peloponnese to Morosini, and signing the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.
One of the Piraeus lions is etched with ornate though badly-worn lettering, not in Greek or Arabic, but in Norse runes. Shortly after William of Normandy conquered England in 1066,* Scandinavian and English mercenaries were resisting another Norman invasion in Italy, as members of Constantinople’s elite Varangian Guard.* Some evidently passed through Piraeus, leaving a touching memorial to a fallen comrade, Horsi.*
See The Fall of Constantinople. Constantinople was the capital of the Roman Empire from 330 to 1453, during which time the empire was predominantly Christian.
English kings recruited Scandinavians for the elite corps of the ‘Thingmen’ in London, from Canute (r. 1016-1035) to the Norman Conquest, and about twenty years after the Conquest thousands of Englishmen sailed away to the Byzantine Empire, and enlisted in the Varangian Guard. See Welcome to Micklegarth. For another story about the Vikings in Greece, see The Luck of the Draw.
The Norse runes are so worn as to be barely legible, and much educated guesswork is required to fill in the blanks. The reconstructions of Carl Christian Rafn (1795-1864) and Erik Brate (1857-1924) are almost entirely different. Rafn’s version suggests bragging graffiti; Brate’s suggests a tribute to ‘a good warrior, Horsi’, cut down in the midst of his forces. For a map of the Europe-wide spread of the Vikings from the eighth century to the eleventh, see Voyages of the Vikings. The city on the Black Sea marked Miklagard is Constantinople, or Istanbul.
