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  Even though his soldiers were doing an excellent job of turning wild hordes of rampaging savages into ground beef and the ruler of the most powerful nation in the Islamic world was sending him a fat welfare check every month, Justinian II was still pretty much utterly despised by the tightwad dickhead senators of the Byzantine Empire. First off, they didn’t really dig Justinian’s economic strategy, which basically involved taxing the ever-loving pants off the citizenry and then using that money to build incredibly huge buildings and massive statues of himself punching the Minotaur in the face or wrestling a fire-breathing three-headed dragon. On top of that, the populace was also a little upset that Justinian once tried to have the Pope arrested for disagreeing with him on religious matters. I suppose this is understandable, but I also think pretty much everyone can agree that signing an arrest warrant for the Pope because he doesn’t agree with your interpretation of Christianity takes some seriously colossal steel testicles.

  Unfortunately, the citizens of Constantinople didn’t really have an appropriate appreciation for such flagrant displays of testicular fortitude, so the Senate convened an emergency session to do what senators do best—plot an underhanded coup d’état and depose the emperor. In 693, the Byzantine general Leontius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and several senators busted into the imperial throne room and tackled Justinian like an overenthusiastic narcotics task force taking down a fleeing methhead on Cops. This group of usurpers roughed the emperor up, punched him in the stomach a couple of times, cut off part of his nose, slit his tongue down the middle, executed his closest advisors by burning them alive, and forcibly exiled Justinian to the craphole village of Cherson.

  Well, not only did it suck that Justinian had just been humiliated and mutilated by a bunch of dillholes who were supposed to have pledged loyalty to him, but since the emperor was supposed to be flawless and perfect in every way, his new disfigurement meant that he was pretty much out of the running to ever regain his throne. But screw that. Justinian wasn’t going to let something like a botched nose job stand in the way of his Palpatinian ambition. His first order of business was probably to get a custom-made gold plate to cover his hacked-up nose, which I imagine made him pretty much always look like a mix between Rip Hamilton and the Phantom of the Opera.

  Years passed, but Justinian never forgot what happened to him. He just became more and more bitter. Every day for eight years he sharpened his sword, muttered under his breath, listened to pump-up music, and waited for his chance to strike.

  Meanwhile, back in Constantinople, General Leontius was overthrown, exiled, and replaced by another usurper emperor named Tiberius. Tiberius correctly decided that it was too dangerous to have a ruthless, vengeful bastard like Justinian hanging around being not dead, so he sent some dudes to bring him in for a proper execution. Justinian figured out what was going on and was like, “Screw that”—he fled Cherson to go live with the Khazars, an unruly tribe of Jewish-Turkic nomads known for being hardcore all of the time and for eating (kosher) meat right off the bone. In the short time he was there, Justinian’s bow-hunting skills, nunchuck skills, and bench-pressing ability impressed the Khazar tribal leader so much that he happily offered his own sister to Justinian in marriage. In 703, Justinian was wed to the Khazar princess, a woman named Theodora, and was starting to adapt to life amongst these tough warrior nomads. It should also be mentioned that they lived in the town of Phanagoria, a place so barbaric that the magazine Fangoria may well have been named after it.

  Emperor Tiberius was still determined to turn Justinian into shark food, however, so he got in touch with the Khazar leader and together they conspired to put a hit out on him. Two goons busted into Justinian’s bedroom in the middle of the night to kill him, but Justinian got the drop and choked them both to death with his bare hands. He then stole a fishing boat from the pier in the middle of the night and set out to seek his vengeance.

  After crossing the treacherous Black Sea in a driving thunderstorm at the helm of a leaky wooden ship, Justinian arrived in the land of the Bulgars, an even more vicious race of lawless, barbaric killmongers. Justinian made peace with the Bulgar khan and promised him truckloads of money and hookers in exchange for his help reclaiming the throne that was rightfully his, so the khan quickly assembled a well-trained, sufficiently frenzied force of bloodthirsty cavalrymen ready to kick serious ass. Together with his new allies, Justinian rode out for the gates of Constantinople. His force was too small to penetrate the massive walls of the heavily fortified city, but like any good diabolical madman hell-bent on the destruction of his enemies, Justinian had a plan. He knew about an old abandoned aqueduct that ran into the heart of downtown Constantinople, so in the middle of the night he and his men snuck into the city through a series of secret passages and immediately started hacking up disloyal soldiers, burning stuff, and generally just causing more havoc than a punch bowl of Red Bull at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. The next morning, ten years after he had been deposed, Justinian once again took a seat on his blood-soaked throne.

  Now the people who had messed with Justinian were humped, and by humped, I mean seriously humpty-humped. The senators and revolutionaries who had plotted against Justinian were sewn up into burlap sacks and thrown in the ocean. He arrested the false emperor Tiberius and sent his men to the farthest reaches of the earth to find that bastard General Leontius and drag him back to Constantinople in chains. Once he had both of these men firmly in his kung fu grip, Justinian slashed their noses and tongues just as they had done to him, had them bound and trussed, and then sat on his throne watching chariot races while using these men for footstools. When he got bored of resting his feet on the backs of his enemies, he had them publicly executed for treason. Justinian also tracked down the Patriarch who was responsible for his ordeal, stripped him of his rank, and put out his eyes with a really sharp number two pencil. Then he burned the town of Cherson to the ground and executed or enslaved everyone in the city, because it sucked being exiled there for like eight years.

  Unfortunately, Justinian spent so much time exacting cruel retribution on everyone who had ever messed with him that he kind of lost track of what was going on in the empire. Towns revolted against him, foreign invasions threatened the borders, and he was eventually captured and executed by a bag of douches. His severed head was placed on display outside the city of Rome (which is actually kind of awesome when you think about it) and his infant son was murdered in an effort to erase this bastard’s bloodline from history forever.

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  Greek fire was a badass version of medieval napalm used by the armies of Byzantium to turn their enemies into giant walking third-degree burns. This mysterious weapon, described only as “liquid fire,” was generally deployed either in grenade-style bombs or by a flamethrower-like weapon attached to the front of a warship. The sulfurous fluid ignited on contact with the air, stuck to whatever it hit, and could not be extinguished even by complete submersion into water.

  In the year 811 the Byzantine Empire invaded the land of the Bulgars and torched their capital to the ground. The Bulgar khan, a dude named Krum, got super pissed off and triggered a landslide that demolished most of the Eastern Roman army. Then he lopped off the head of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros, scooped out his brains, and turned the emperor’s skull into a decorative wine goblet.

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  13

  CHARLES MARTEL

  (688–741)

  The men of the North seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords they hewed down the Arabs. Drawn up in a band around their chief, the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Their tireless hands drove their swords down to the breasts of the foe.

  —ISIDORE OF BEJA’S CHRONICLE

  BACK IN THE DARK AGES, THE KINGS OF THE FRANKS WERE COMPLETELY USELESS. Worthless, overweight, no-talent inbred sacks of solidified drunken apathy sitting on thei
r giant gold-plated diamond thrones while skanky bimbettes fed them, these lazy bastards completely detached themselves from reality and generally just lived the vapid, mind-numbingly uninteresting lives of modern-day celebrity debutantes with more money than sense. During these times, the real power over the Frankish kingdom lay in the hands of an epic spine-breaking killmaster known as the Mayor of the Palace—the administrative mastermind responsible for running pretty much every aspect of the government and picking up all the slack while the syphilitic king was off lounging around on an inflatable pool float, sipping piña coladas, soiling himself, and complaining about the weather.

  One such Mayor of the Palace was a dude named Pippin. Pippin’s primary claim to fame is that he once impregnated some random peasant chick he hooked up with in a club one night, and his one-night-stand-gone-wrong ended up producing an illegitimate son named Charles. Despite the unfortunate situation surrounding his parentage, Charles was eventually accepted into Pippin’s family and served as a captain in the Frankish army. He grew to be a mighty warrior known for his bravery and skill on the battlefield, and his uncanny ability to tenderize the faces of his enemies with a giant-ass mallet earned Charles the awesome nickname “Martellus,” which is Latin for “the Hammer.”

  Pippin eventually beefed it in 714. Before his cadaver was room temperature, Pippin’s bitchy wife seized control of the mayoralty and chucked her stepson Charles into prison like he was some kind of two-bit bastard son of a crackhead. He was shipped off to a maximum-security dungeon facility located deep in a remote part of the kingdom, a foul cesspool of wickedness and villainy known as the dread city of Paris. Well, hardcore ass-beaters with sick nicknames like the Hammer can’t be contained by something as trivial and petty as a hellacious medieval torture chamber, and so the twenty-five-year-old Charles was able to bust out pretty much immediately by ripping the bars out of the wall with his teeth, shoving the warden face-first into a garbage disposal, and then head-butting ten guys so hard that their brains exploded out the backs of their heads. He escaped to the countryside, put together an army of grim, vengeance-seeking warriors, and went off to show his stepmom who the baddest mother in town really was.

  The warlike, head-splitting armies of Charles Martel met little resistance as they dominated faces across Gaul and Germany. Despite his father’s dying wish—“Please, Hammer, don’t hurt ’em”—Charles deposed his evil stepmother, regulated on a couple of rebellious Frankish provinces, and introduced several unruly bandit confederations to the true meaning of “Hammer Time.” After securing his own borders, he launched campaigns against the pagan German barbarians to the east, pummeling them into giant heaping mounds of severed limbs and severely bludgeoned craniums and then sending St. Boniface out to baptize anything that happened to be left standing.

  Despite being harder than volcanic rock and more than willing to take down all comers with a series of vicious running ball-knocks, Charles Martel was still quite concerned about the growing Muslim threat sweeping across the globe. Even as Charles consolidated his power in Europe by relentlessly pulverizing anybody who failed to recognize him as being totally awesome, the Muslims were blitzing into Spain, severing the heads of any Christian warriors they came across, and generally just pwning everything in their paths. Martel knew it wouldn’t be long before a zerg rush of Moors would be kicking down the gates of his castle, and he wanted to make sure that they ran full throttle into a frothing-at-the-mouth, too-legit-to-quit horde of really pissed-off Germans waving ten-foot-long spears in their faces. He assembled a grizzled assortment of full-time veteran soldiers, organized them with rigorous drilling and training, and gave them valuable battle experience by campaigning against the barbarian tribes of the East.

  In 732, the crimson tide of Islam came pouring over the Pyrenees on an avalanche of blood, trampling everything in front of it and tearing ass through western Gaul like a badass El Camino with a spoiler and a racing stripe. The mighty duke of Aquitaine marched out to face this massive invading army with a large force of Christian foot soldiers and ended up having his brain amputated by a razor-sharp scimitar. His regiments were smashed, and the Moors swept across the countryside, burning churches, looting, and capturing prisoners to sell into slavery. They easily sacked the Christian stronghold of Bordeaux and made their way toward the strategically critical city of Tours.

  Charles was off in Germany sucker-punching godless pagans in the balls and smashing their heathen stone altars into dust with his forehead, but as soon as he heard that the duke of Aquitaine had just had his face exploded by the Muslims, the Hammer of Christendom slammed on the emergency brake, turned his army around, and burned rubber back home. Now, it’s important to note that Tours was the home of the Basilica of St. Martin—the holiest place in the entire Frankish kingdom—and Charles would have rather passed a baseball-sized kidney stone made out of broken glass than allowed that blessed cathedral to be plundered and defiled by infidels. He crossed the entire length of Gaul, slowing down only to stop off at peasant villages and recruit volunteers to help him in his crusade, and somehow managed to take a defensive position outside the city before his enemies were able to reach it.

  Now, the strength of the Muslim army was the Moorish heavy cavalry, a crotch-thumping unit of superpumped-up mounted warriors with great stats who had been trampling the crap out of the Christian knights in Spain and bringing pain and suffering to anybody misguided enough to face them. Nobody had yet been able to stand up to these fearsome warriors without having their gallbladders utterly flattened, but Charles Martel had a plan. He positioned large masses of heavy infantry along the forest at the top of a large hill, forcing the enemy to fight on terrain that favored the Frankish men-at-arms. He had his spearmen form up into defensive squares to protect themselves from being outflanked and lock their shields to create an unbreakable wall of unforgiving steel. The Moors went lance-first into these formations several times but were unable to smash their way through this unyielding hedge of armor and spears. Once the enemy was worn down, Martel himself, uttering his battle cry of “Stop—Hammer Time!” led the decisive charge that shattered the Muslim army and left their commander coughing up his own prostate. The Saracens fled the field, leaving behind their plundered loot and prisoners.

  Martel chased the Moors back into Spain before returning home and being honored by his subjects and his peers as the greatest champion and hero of Western Europe. He dedicated the rest of his life to securing his borders against the Muslims in the West and beating up and/or baptizing the godless pagan barbarian tribes in the East, and his actions paved the way for his grandson, the emperor Charlemagne, to bring the Frankish kingdom to prominence as the most powerful European civilization of the early Middle Ages.

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  After personally seeing Moorish heavy cavalry stomp bozaks on the field of battle, Charles Martel began to incorporate squadrons of well-armored mounted troops into his own army—these dudes would be the precursor to European knights.

  The Frankish kingdom under Charles Martel was made up of present-day France, western Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, western Austria, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg.

  The Carolingian Dynasty really wasn’t particularly inventive in their naming conventions. In the span of just a few generations they produced Charles the Hammer, Charles the Great, Charles the Fat, Charles the Bald, Louis the Pious, Louis the Second, Louis the Third, Louis the Child, Louis the German, Pippin of Heerstal, Pippin the Short, Pippin the Elder, and regular Pippin (the Nothing).

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  14

  WOLF THE QUARRELSOME

  (c. 1014 CE)

  Wolf the Quarrelsome cut open Brodir’s belly, and led him round and round the trunk of a tree, and so wound all his entrails out of him, and he did not die before they were all drawn out of him. Brodir’s warriors were slain to a man.

  —THE STORY OF BURNT NJAL

  KNOWN AT THE TIME AS THE BIGGEST AND MOST CROTCH-CLUBBINGLY FEROCIOUS BARBARIAN ON TH
E PLANET, WOLF THE QUARRELSOME WAS AN ELEVENTH-CENTURY IRISH WARRIOR AND BROTHER OF THE LEGENDARY IRISH HIGH KING BRIAN BORU. Wolf’s mother was killed by a Norse raiding party while he was still young, allowing him to cultivate an unending hatred for everything Viking-related, and while Wolf honed his ability to crack people’s heads open with a gigantic face-cleaving axe and slam their hands shut in car doors, Brian made a name for himself by uniting all the Irish peoples under one banner and standing up to the combined forces of Viking jackasses across the island. You see, back in the day Ireland was divided into a bunch of puny little kingdoms, pointless city-states, and other such garbage, so Brian put together a giant army, kicked the snot out of a few dozen rival warlords, and unified the country—breaking the political hold the Scandinavian nations had over Ireland in the process.

  Well, apparently not everyone realized how totally sweet it was to be ruled by Brian Boru, so some whisky-swilling turf cutters from the province of Leister decided to be complete dicks and revolt. In order to help them kick Irish ass they called in their BFFs, a horde of goddamned bloodthirsty Viking pillagers. Tens of thousands of Vikings, Irishmen, and other assorted Celtic and Gaelic warriors met at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and immediately proceeded to beat the crap out of each other with swords, hammers, axes, fists, tin pots, shields, stray cats, lead pipes, pitchforks, stun guns, shopping carts, bread, very small rocks, a duck, and whatever the hell else they managed to bring along with them. It was at this point in history that Wolf the Quarrelsome proved himself to be the hardest-core badass in an arena filled with hardcore badasses.

  Now, in order to fully appreciate the importance of his actions, let’s take a moment to examine Wolf the Quarrelsome from a historical perspective. First off, his name is Wolf. You don’t get to be called Wolf by being a seventy-pound nerd who gives himself a hernia trying to pick up a box of file folders. Wolf is a serious name. In the Viking histories his first name is translated as Ulf, and as we all know Ulf is the sort of name that’s reserved for guys who eat entire chickens in one sitting, drink their weight in beer, grow beards at the rate of one inch per hour, wail death metal on guitars shaped like lightning bolts, play professional ice hockey, and are so ripped that every time they flex their pecs their shirt explodes and flies off into the atmosphere. Ulf isn’t a name; it’s the guttural sound that your enemies make when you punch them in the stomach with enough force to make Rocky Balboa cough up blood. As if this isn’t enough, his epithet is “the Quarrelsome,” and you can be pretty damn sure that you don’t get an epithet like “the Quarrelsome” by taking crap like an overworked fecal analysis technician. Quarrelsome by definition means that you completely destroy anyone who messes with you, so we can assume that this guy was so good at putting bitches in their place that his name became synonymous with beating the hell out of people for little to no reason. That’s pretty epic. Since Wolf was champion of the Irish forces, you also have to assume that he was even more hardcore than the biggest, meanest, axe-swinging, Guinness-chugging, shillelagh-toting hooligan bastard rugby player you’ve ever seen. The guy probably drank whisky by the barrel and then went out into the woods to chop down trees with his crotch so he could whittle the ends into points with his teeth and hurl them at enemy castles.