![]() In September 1066, the English king Harold Godwinson marched his army north to Yorkshire, where he defeated the invading Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. He already had the Pope’s backing to invade England, and this sign assured him that God would back his claim to the English throne. When it first appeared over England and Normandy in April 1066, Duke William of Normandy is said to have remarked ‘It is a wonderful sign from Heaven’. William of Jumièges, a Norman monk, described it as having a ‘three-forked tail’, and suggested that it ‘portended, as many said, a change in some kingdom’. Halley’s Comet made an appearance before another significant battle – Hastings. The Visigoths fled into Spain, and Western Rome would not survive the century. Though Attila would be repulsed at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains by the Romans and Visigoths, the damage done by this invasion was immense. The sighting of strange and mysterious events in the sky, including Halley’s Comet, only added to the aura of terror surrounding Attila. Earlier in the 440s, a solar eclipse had turned the Sun black, and the subsequent lunar eclipse turned the Moon red ‘like blood’. He was nicknamed the ‘Scourge of God,’ and many Christian theologians at the time thought that he was sent by God as an instrument of destruction against sinners. ![]() Within 3 weeks, Attila the Hun invaded Roman France, and the Roman world trembled before him. Reports in the 440s describe a lunar eclipse, whereby the Earth casts a reddish shadow over the moon the Northern Lights were seen much further south than usual and to cap it all off, in June 451 a red point of light appeared with a fearsome tail streaming behind it – Halley’s Comet. Cosmic portents of doom were all too apparent in the 5th century.
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