Sigurðr Jórsalafari (the Crusader)

Sigurd the Crusader — Jórsalafari, the Jerusalem-farer — was the first king in Europe to lead a crusade in person, and he carried the Norse world to its farthest stretch. With sixty ships he sailed from Norway the whole length of the known world: wintering in England, fighting his way down through Christian and heathen Spain, past the Strait of Gibraltar and the Moorish coast, to Sicily, to Jerusalem — where King Baldwin rode with him to the Jordan and gave him a splinter of the True Cross — and at last to Constantinople, where the Greek emperor staged the games of the Hippodrome in his honour and Sigurd, offered gold or the spectacle, chose the spectacle. He gave the emperor his whole fleet and rode home overland across Europe, his men staying behind in the Varangian Guard. His stay-at-home brother Eystein matched his every boast with the quieter glory of law and good rule, in the sagas' famous debate on what a king is for. From a bare Atlantic island to the centre of Christendom — the corpus at its widest reach.