"Sithence King Olaf came to Garth-realm he had great imaginings, and turned it over in his mind what rede he had best take. King Jarisleif and Queen Ingigerd bade King Olaf dwell with them, and take over the dominion called Vulgaria, and that is one part of Garth-realm; and there in that land the folk was heathen. King Olaf bethought him in his mind of this offer; but when he laid it before his men, they all were loth to take up their abode there, and egged the king on to betake himself north to Norway to his own kingdom. The king would be still further thinking of this, to lay down his kingdom, and fare out into the world unto Jerusalem, or into some other holy places, and there to go under the Rule."[137] Not infrequently the Norse passed through Russia to the great metropolis of the eastern world (whence Russia had received her faith), New Rome, or Constantinople itself. So much were they impressed by that splendid city that they knew it as Micklegarth. The stalwart arms of the Norsemen, organised in the Vaeringian Guard, propped the Byzantine Empire against its Asian foes and gained for the Scandinavians much wealth. Among others the founder of Oslo (p. 95) had in that realm gotten enormous riches. "But when Harald came to Holmgarth, King Jarisleif gave him a wondrous good welcome, and there he tarried the winter over, and took into his own keeping all the gold which he had sent afore thither from Micklegarth, and many kinds of dear-goods. That was so mickle wealth, that no man in northern lands had seen such in one man's owning. Harald had three times come into palace-spoil whiles he was in Micklegarth. For that is law, that whenever the king of the Greeks dies the Vaerings shall have palace-spoil; they shall then go over all the king's palaces where are his wealth hoards, and there each one shall freely have for his own whatso he may lay hands on."[138] Strangely similar, both in weakness and in strength, were Alexander and Peter, both of them most justly surnamed Great. Each was born to a kingdom, each had marvellous foresight and each had imperial ideas. Semi-barbarous sceptres they both inherited, and they realised how much might be done by importing the civilisation of sea-powers further west; each was a worker with his own hands, each cared much for the science and art of his generation, but neither was superior to amusements of the grossest and pastimes of the beastliest. Both drank themselves into the other world at an untimely age, leaving their work half done. Each is commemorated by a city placed on the sea with the express purpose of attracting foreign influence, beyond the ancient limits of the country whose capital it became. More attractive in some ways the career of the Ptolemaic successors of Alexander at Alexandria than that of the immediate Romanoff descendants of Peter at Petersburg, but the story of an ancient nation ruled from a corner of its territory by a half foreign court is in both cases very much the same.