The Saddle and the Sword: The Wild Ride of Sviatoslav the Brave, the Last Pagan Prince of the Rus (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798183944617)

He slept on the bare ground with his saddle for a pillow, ate his meat off the open coals, and owned nothing he couldn't carry on a horse. When he meant to make war, he sent his enemies three words first - I am coming at you - and then he came. Before he was thirty, Sviatoslav the Brave had torn down the Khazar Empire, humbled Byzantium, and made himself the most feared warlord between Kiev and Constantinople.

But this is not only the story of his conquests. It is the story of how he built himself - long before anyone knew his name.

The Saddle and the Sword follows the last pagan prince of the Rus from a fatherless boy at the head of his mother's army to a leader that hard, dangerous men would follow to the edge of the world. It answers the question every young man is really asking: how do you become someone worth following when you have nothing yet?

Sviatoslav's answer is carved into the way he lived. He put himself under harder men and refused to flee the forge. He built a brotherhood instead of buying a payroll. He kept his hand open and his word unbroken until both became a kind of power. He stood at the front, where it cost something. And he never wore a face that wasn't his own - not even for the mother he owed everything.

Each chapter tells one episode of his life as a cinematic story, then draws out a single hard rule - the Code of the Saddle - that a man can use today, from exactly where he stands:

• Begin before you're ready.
• Never live softer than the men you want to follow you.
• Generosity is a weapon; a closed fist empties the hall.
• Your name is built one kept word at a time.
• A short life lived upright beats a long one lived bent.

This is narrative history with the blood left in - heroic but honest, grounded in the Primary Chronicle, Leo the Deacon, and the Arab geographers, with the real cost of conquest shown rather than scrubbed. For readers drawn to the Stoics, the Spartans, and the Vikings - for any young man ready to stop waiting and start building.

The empires Sviatoslav tore down are dust. The man endured. Learn how he was made - and how you might be.