Previous Posts In This Series

1.   Donn Othna in “The King’s Service”

2.   Donn Othna: From Chalons to the Gulf of Cambay

3.    The Foreign Rajah of Nagdragore

4.    REH’s Lost Kingdom of Nagdragore

Caveat: This is supposition and fancy, embroidering on a fragment of Robert E. Howard’s.

When Donn Othna and his Saxon captors sail storm-driven and battered into the harbour of Nagdragore on the Gulf of Cambay, after a voyage for which epic is an understatement, the Briton’s sword hums faintly. Donn Othna explains that it sings because it’s coming home. “It was here that my sword was born from furnace and forge and wizard’s hammer, dim ages ago. It was once a great saber belonging to a mighty Eastern emperor … ”

Donn Othna might well believe the sword, if Indian, was a work of wizardry. The original Damascus steel was developed in India, and it was long centuries before such superb blades were able to be made in the Middle East. Persians and then Syrians did eventually learn the art, but they couldn’t equal the results without importing the raw steel from India to work with. It’s likely that the iron ore from certain mines in southern India contained a particular combination of trace elements — vanadium, nickel and others — that made the blades unique once they were forged with painstaking art to produce high-carbon steel.

We can assume the “great saber” was a typical Indian tulwar. Who the “mighty Eastern emperor” could have been is a matter for guesswork, but the blade’s history makes it clear that he lived before Alexander the Great. Maybe he was Darius I of Persia. Darius conquered the Indus valley shortly before 500 B.C. The various kingdoms of northern India at the time — the sixteen mahajanapadas or “great countries” — would have become worried by that. Despite their name, none was so great or powerful next to the Persian Empire. One of them, Avanti, lay squarely where the much later “Nagdragore” was situated, east of the Gulf of Cambay.  Another kingdom, Saurashtra, though not one of the sixteen, lay on the Gulf itself.  Nagdragore probably combined the former territories of both.

Perhaps Avanti sent an embassy to Darius, protesting great friendship, with the usual rich gifts, one of them a superb tulwar that would surely have delighted a warrior king from a race of horsemen.

I’m not certain that genuine damascene blades were being made even in India, as early as that. The raw material from India was called “ukku” by the Indians themselves, and later became known to Westerners as “wootz.” Aristotle is supposed to have known about it and commented on its amazing qualities as early as 400 BCE. The technique appears to have existed by 300 BCE, anyway — in India, that is, but it probably didn’t reach Persia until later, and certainly not Damascus before our era.)

Later, the sword would have been carried by Darius III, the Persian king who was overthrown by Alexander. Unlike the first Darius, he was an average fellow, who had been installed on the throne — at the age of 46 — by a rascal named Bagoas who wanted a puppet ruler. He wasn’t equal to resisting the Macedonian. (But who was?) So the sword came into Alexander’s hands. He bore it until his death and — we can suppose — left instructions that it should be taken to Egypt, where he had been deified as Pharaoh when he conquered that land. He’d also had himself declared a son of Jupiter at the oasis shrine of Amon, now called Siwa, which is where the tulwar remained until the Romans conquered the Ptolemies. Cleopatra VII gave it to Julius Caesar.

Now Donn Othna says to Athelred aboard the Saxon’s ship that “Alexander took it with him into Egypt where it abode until the Romans came and a consul took it for his own. Not liking the curved shape, he had a sword-maker of Damascus reshape the blade — for the Romans used straight thrusting swords.”

I’m taking that to be an essentially correct but abbreviated tale. Long centuries had gone by, and Donn Othna’s knowledge of the blade’s history wasn’t likely to be complete. When he says “a consul took it for his own” he apparently doesn’t know which consul. Gaius Julius Caesar had been one twice, and made Cleopatra his mistress during his second consulship. (He’d resigned as dictator of Rome after eighteen days.)

Caesar, though, was a cynically pragmatic fellow, and middle-aged at the time. Romans weren’t sentimental about swords. They were mere tools to them. It’s unlikely that Caesar regarded the sword as anything but a charming souvenir, and improbable that he went to the trouble of having it reforged as a straight blade. That almost certainly came later.

Donn Othna tells the Saxon Athelred that the sword “came into Britain with Caesar”, but if he means Julius Caesar, he must be mistaken. Caesar’s two brief forays into Britain took place years before he overthrew the Ptolemies and had his fling with Cleopatra. Donn Othna, living in the fifth century, may have believed it was Julius Caesar who had conquered Britain, instead of the forces of Claudius, almost a hundred years later. Legend and popular belief have a way of compressing events together.

I’d suppose it more likely that, after Caesar’s murder, Mark Anthony gained possession of the blade and carried it, until he was defeated at the Battle of Actium and died in Egypt.

Some of the Caesars gave it as a mark of special trust and favour to their generals to bear on certain important campaigns. In the reign of Claudius, the commander in chief of the expedition that conquered Britain, Aulus Plautius, took it across the Channel with success. Later it passed to Vespasian, who had served under Plautius as commander of the Second Augusta Legion in Britain, with such distinction that he was awarded a Triumph and two priesthoods. He carried the sword to Judea to put down the uprising known as the First Jewish-Roman War, in command of three legions and a large number of auxiliaries, in 67 A.D. There had been two disastrous Roman defeats the year before, but in two swift campaigns, Vespasian won almost all Judea.

My surmise is that it was Vespasian who had the great Indian tulwar re-forged in Damascus as a straight double-edged blade. Syrian swordsmiths, particularly those of Damascus, may have mastered the mysteries of Indian and Persian sword-making by then — provided they had Indian steel with which to work. That material, in the form of cakes of raw steel, was a valued import to the Roman Empire. But the question of when smiths of Damascus had advanced to that level of skill, and whether they had really done it by Vespasian’s day, is beyond my qualifications to answer.

Vespasian, bearing the re-forged sword, made a bid for the purple in the Year of the Four Emperors. After the deaths of Galba, Otho and Vitellius, he came out of it as the survivor and founded the Flavian dynasty. He regarded the sword as a sign of Jupiter’s favour, and a superstition began that it always brought victory. It became famous as the sword of Darius, Alexander and Caesar, the blade that had conquered Britain and Judea. (Men selectively forgot that it hadn’t brought victory to Darius III or Mark Anthony.)

Agricola carried it back to Britain when he was appointed the island’s governor. Belief that it conferred invincibility was strengthened when Agricola crushed the Ordovices in Wales and the Caledonians at Mons Graupius. He was even planning the conquest of Ireland, but the Emperor Domitian recalled him in 83, perhaps deciding that he didn’t want Agricola to enjoy that much success in case he rebelled.

That made the second time the sword had come to the island. It was nearly two hundred years before it returned again. In between, Trajan, as a general, bore the weapon on the German frontier, in crushing the revolt of Saturninus, and as Emperor, against the Dacians, Nabataeans and Parthians. The general Lucius Verus carried it in the Parthian War of 161-66, and Marcus Aurelius took it to the German frontier when he smashed the great invasion of the Marcomanni and their allies between 170-72.

There is little record of anybody’s doing much with the sword from then until Aurelian’s time. Most emperors up until then were either men of small martial distinction, or had notably short reigns, or both. The reign of Aurelian (270-75) wasn’t a long one either, but he was nevertheless one of several highly successful soldier-emperors who helped restore the Roman Empire’s power in the late third century and early fourth. The damascene blade was seldom out of his hand.

He became Emperor after fifteen years of bloody rebellion and conflict — and ineptitude on the part of the Empire’s guardians — had lost two thirds of Roman territory to the Gallic Empire in the west and Zenobia’s Palmyrene Empire in the east. Barbarian invasions placed what was left of Rome in great danger, but in his first year Aurelian led a campaign against the Vandals, Juthungi and Sarmatians, driving them back over the Roman borders. The next year, he crushed the Alamanni after they swarmed into Italy. After that he led a campaign into the east and subjugated Palmyra. Then he marched west against Tetricus, ruler of the Gallic Empire that included Gaul, Spain, Britain and a large part of Germany. He defeated Tetricus in 274. A grateful Roman senate awarded him the title Resitutor Orbis — Restorer of the World. But Aurelian was assassinated in 275 while on his way to campaign against the Sassanid Persians, then ruled by Bahram I.

Constantine the Great carried the sword. He first employed it in Gaul, after being acclaimed Emperor. The Franks invaded Gaul in 306 when they heard of his new status, but moving from his base at Trier, Constantine drove them back across the Rhine and captured two of their chiefs along with many of their warriors. Constantine had them fed to beasts in the amphitheatre during his victory celebrations.

Constantine had to battle his competitor Maximian and his son Maxentius to secure his imperial position. In 312 he faced the forces of Maxentius, which were twice as strong as Constantine’s. The legend that he had a vision of the cross and heard a divine voice saying, “In this sign you will conquer”, is well known. It was probably revised by Christian writers later. Constantine regarded his divine patron as being Sol Invictus, and his dream, as I’m supposing he had it, showed him not the cross, but the great cross-hilted sword, and he heard the voice of Sol Invictus say, “By this you will conquer.”

He did.

It’s definite fact that he supported the Christian church throughout his reign, and promoted Christians to high office without prejudice, but he was and remained pontifex maximus, head of the pagan priesthood. He revered the cult of the Unconquered Sun and ordered (in 321) that Christians and non-Christians alike should observe its sacred day. The Arch of Constantine was dedicated in 315, and the carvings on it show sacrifices to Apollo, Hercules and Diana.

He ordered (this is my version of history for fictional purposes; it isn’t history) the sword that brought him triumph given a spendid new ivory hilt and a golden pommel representing the sun. 

Julian the Apostate did not carry the by now famous blade.  Perhaps he associated it with the rise of Christianity in the Empire, and didn’t care for it on that account.  It’s matter of record that he didn’t have much success, either.  He died during a failed campaign against the Persians.

Then the sword made its third journey to Britain. The notorious Barbarian Conspiracy took place. In 367 the garrison on Hadrian’s Wall rebelled.  In concert, and by pre-arrangement, the Picts, Atecotti, Irish and Saxons made a massive incursion.  They spread fire and slaughter all the way to the southern coast. The Count of the Saxon Shore was killed.  Theodosius was appointed Count of Britain, sent to restore order — and given the sword to bear during the assignment.

He succeeded. He turned back the barbarians and saved Roman Britain, for the time being.  I assume, though, that in a desperate fight at the western end of the Wall he was wounded and almost killed.  Count Theodosius’s men rescued him from the thick of the battle.  However, the sword was seized by a Pictish chieftain and taken north of the Great Glen where no Roman or southern Briton could regain it.

My own ideas about the Picts, or Cruithne, are a bit different from Howard’s. But since this background comes from a Robert E. Howard fragment, the Picts of North Britain, in this context, are his Picts — the gnarled stunted giants we all know, who had declined from their days of racial greatness and worshipped “strange, abhorrent gods.”  This would have been a couple of centuries after Bran Mak Morn’s time, and even in his day, he was the last or almost the last representative of the ancient, straight-limbed type of Pict.

Some time after that, the sword must have passed from Pictish hands into Irish.  Donn Othna says that he slew a “king of Erin” in a “sea-fight off the western coast”, by which it seems to me he’d have meant the western coast of Britain, and took the sword from his dead and bloody grasp.  The most likely way for the sword to move from Pictish hands into Irish ones would have been by way of the kingdom of Dalriada, founded by Irish settlers in southern Scotland.   The early nucleus of that kingdom lay in the Kintyre peninsula and the Isle of Arran, in a migration of the Dal Riata tribe from Antrim, starting before the year 400 A.D. — maybe as early as 300.  As the first Scottish kingdom grew, clashes with the Picts would have been unavoidable. The redoubtable cross-hilted blade would have changed hands again in such a battle.

The precise identity of the “king of Erin” who owned it, and whom Donn Othna killed in a sea-fight, makes an interesting riddle. He says the man’s name was Eochaidh mac Ailbe.  Eochaidh, or Eochaid, was a common Irish name in those days, and at least four kings of Dalriada carried it.  The first one, Eochaid Munremar, lived at the right time.  His dates have been estimated at 385 to 439, but like most dates in dark age annals, and most dates calculated from such records, they are uncertain.  Munremar may have died a decade later than that.  (His son Erc died in 474.) 

Yes, but if Eochaid was king of Dalriada in southwest Scotland, he couldn’t have been king of Erin, right?

Ah!  Being lord of Scottish Dalriada means he was also king of those Dal Riata who had stayed behind in their ancestral territory of County Antrim across the water.  Ties between the two territories had not been broken, and the same king held authority over both.  That situation stayed the same until it was shattered once and for all — in a battle, as usual –  at Mag Rath in 637 A.D., or that’s my impression.  A man who knows a lot more about it than I, Ewan J. Innes, MA (Hons Scot. Hist.) FSA Scot, thinks so too.  So while Eochaid Munremar wasn’t the king of Erin, we can rate him as a king of Erin without stretching the truth.  There were numerous minor kings in the Emerald Isle at the time.

Was he Eochaid mac Ailbe, though?  Munremar was a sobriquet, a by-name, not a parental name.  Some Irish heroes bore matronymics instead of patronymics — King Conchobar mac Nessa, for instance, who ruled Ulster in the time of Cuchulain.  Ailbe is a woman’s name.  Eochaid Munremar’s mother could have been named Ailbe for all we know.

Being an Irish kinglet in a time when Irish pirates and land-grabbers were a plague to Britain, he was very likely a pirate himself.  Sea-raiding has been an ancient and aristocratic sport from the eastern Mediterranean to the Irish Sea since Jason and the Argonauts at least.  Eochaid’s realm was surrounded by salt water, the immemorial highway to loot.  It’s easy to picture him making one raid too many on the shores of Wales, and losing both the sword, and his life, to Donn Othna, when they met in a deadly grapple on the tossing water.

And there’s yet another possibility.  The sword may not have passed directly from Eochaid Munremar’s hands to Donn Othna.  Niall of the Nine Hostages, a greater, more formidable king and pirate than Eochaid, may actually have been the one Donn Othna slew and relieved of the blade.

It doesn’t seem possible, on the grounds that Niall’s name wasn’t Eochaid, and his mother was one Cairenn Chasdub (Chasdub meaning curly black), not Ailbe.  There is also disagreement as to the date of his death.  The annals place it in 405, well before Donn Othna was born, by my estimate.  However, the annals in question were not written until well after Niall’s time — and they are in question. All the known historical people with whom Niall was associated have deaths dating to the second half of the fifth century. The dates given for his supposed sons and grandsons also support this. Niall’s death may well have occurred circa 450, and that would fit Donn Othna’s dates. 

Besides, while not named Eochaid, Niall is closely associated with at least two Eochaids, one of them his father,  Eochaid Mugmedon, which would make Niall’s patronymic Niall mac Eochaid.  The man who slew Niall is named in all known sources as Eochaid mac Enna, son of the king of Leinster.  He’d become Niall’s bitter enemy, the story goes,  because Niall had exiled him to — wait for it — Scotland.  There was also that third Eochaid, Eochaid Mumremar (mac Ailbe?) of Scottish Dalriada, who may have been Niall’s ally on a number of pirate raids, a drinking pal in between, and even been killed by Niall in the end, if they had quarreled and become enemies.  That may be how Niall came to possess the sword, if he did.

Or perhaps they remained friends and were together in the same fatal sea-fight that finished Niall … were even both killed on the same gory occasion.  In the struggle and fury, men meeting in red combat and being swept apart, faces spattered with gore and contorted in rage, it would have been hard to ascertain later who had slain whom. Even Donn Othna might have made a mistake. If the Briton believed he had been the one to slay the mighty Niall, he would surely have said so.

And Eochaid mac Enna of Leinster?  The Eochaid who is generally alleged to have been Niall’s slayer?  Perhaps he was a braggart and liar who stole Donn Othna’s credit. It’s the Irish version of events that says he did it, after all.

*Art by Kirsi Salonen and Frank Frazetta