You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled ‘The Body of Leo V is Dragged to the Hippodrome through the Skyla Gate’ organized by the Department of History.
Date: 4 March 2026, Wednesday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: C Block Amphitheatre
Title: The Body of Leo V is Dragged to the Hippodrome through the Skyla Gate
Speaker: Gianluca Raccagni, University of Edinburgh
Abstract:
Harald Hardrada is especially well known for his exploits as king of Norway, including the failed invasion of England that earned him the epithet ‘the last Viking’. On the otherhand, ‘A Viking in the Sun’ is an international, collaborative, and interdisciplinary project that wishes to highlight Harald’s surprisingly unsung status as best documented ‘Viking’.
visitor to the Mediterranean, and to use it as a common thread to explore themes relating to Mediterranean societies and their connections with the Nordic world during the liminal period between the late Viking age and the eve of the Crusades. This paper illustrates the project and discusses the great variety of sources on Harald’s Mediterranean encounters (including Old Norse, Latin, and Greek texts covering a geographical span from Iceland to Byzantium) as well as outline some of the challenges that these sources present.
Bio:
Gianluca Raccagni is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Director of the History and Games Lab at the University of Edinburgh. He is the principal investigator of the collaborative international project A Viking in the Sun: Harald Hardrada, the Mediterranean, and the Nordic World between the Late Viking Age and the Eve of the Crusades. He graduated in medieval history at the University of Bologna and pursued his postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he was also British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, joining the University of Edinburgh after a brief spell as Canon Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Occidental History of the University of Tokyo.