Charlemagne’s only surviving son, Louis the Pious, inherited the empire intact in 814, but conflict broke out among Louis’ three sons even before his death in 840, when full-scale war erupted. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 formalized division of the empire into East Frankia (German lands) under Louis the German, West Frankia (the future kingdom of France) under Charles the Bald, and a middle kingdom extending from the Low Countries through Burgundy and into Italy, called Lotharingia after Lothair, who took the imperial title. But the treaty failed to stop the warfare among the brothers and their descendants. Over the next fifty years, treachery, shifting alliances, and the movement of the imperial title undermined central authority throughout Carolingian lands. Regional officials and powerful magnates increasingly pursued their own interests, building local power bases virtually independent of royal control. But they, too, had to contend with the unruliness of their subordinates in troubled times.
Figure 7.2 The Siege of Europe
Carolingian internal strife opened the door to external threats, which exacerbated the decline of royal authority and added to the insecurity of the age. Three main threats emerged (Figure 7.2). The Vikings were pagan seaborne raiders whose origins and methods are described more fully in Chapter 10. Their raids began around 800 and lasted more than a century, peaking in the 860s-880s. Initially, they launched small-scale raids, but larger Viking forces began establishing fortified camps and wintering in their target areas, and some even turned from pillage to permanent conquest.
Saracen pirates established bases in the Balearic Islands and along the coast of southern France, whence they preyed on shipping and raided into Italy and south France. Their operations, too, began early in the ninth century, reaching their worst in the last third of that century but continuing longer than those of the Vikings, well into the eleventh century. They were part of a larger pattern of Mediterranean amphibious warfare also described more fully in Chapter 10.
The Magyars were a pagan people, another among the Central Asian nomads whose interactions with the civilized world so influenced this age throughout Eurasia. Typically of such peoples, their military forces consisted of light cavalry armed with bows. Driven west by pressure from other nomads, they moved in the 890s into the plains of the middle Danube. Once settled, they launched widespread destructive expeditions throughout the first half of the tenth century into neighboring Slavic lands, and into much of Germany, northern Italy, and eastern France.
Mobile Raiders
The military challenge presented by all three invaders was their mobility. The Vikings and Saracens used the sea and rivers as highways for rapid movement and withdrawal, striking where defenses were weak or nonexistent. The Magyar light horsemen were capable of rapid overland marches that could bypass or outrun local defenses. Monasteries, unguarded storehouses of wealth, were the favorite targets of all three. This habit and their non-Christian religions make them loom as especially terrible threats in the chronicles of the time, which were written mostly by monks. But we should not overrate their military abilities. The level of their threat reflected the weakness of the defenders as much as the strength of the invaders.
None were much good at siege warfare—their very mobility precluded the regular transporting of siege engines with their forces. In any case, sieges were difficult, and the aim of their raids was easy plunder. Some Viking armies did besiege strongholds (see the Highlights box “The Siege of Paris, 885,” page 188), but rarely successfully. The lack of siege capability limited the invaders’ opportunities for permanent conquest. Where Vikings did make permanent conquests, the areas generally lacked sophisticated fortifications, as in Ireland and Russia, and had loose political structures into which Viking bands could insert themselves as local rulers.
Nor were any of the invaders especially well armed and armored or tactically sophisticated. If they could be brought to battle, they could sometimes be defeated—the problem was they could not easily be pinned down for a battle. By the time defensive forces could gather in response to a raid, the raiders were long gone. The weakness and division of Carolingian central authority made this problem acute when the invaders first appeared.
Political Impacts
The invasions thus stimulated a process of political fragmentation and localization that internal strife had set in motion. In the absence of strong central leadership, localities were often left to devise their own defenses against the raiders. But central authorities did play some role in devising defenses, and, therefore, regional responses varied, as did the effects of the invasions.
The West Frankish kingdom (France) suffered the worst breakdown under the pressure of the invasions. Viking bands used islands off the coast and in rivers as semipermanent bases for raiding. Charles the Bald (843-877), preoccupied with wars against his brothers and rebellious nobles, at first could do little against Viking raiders. When he could turn his attention to them, he followed a strategy of building fortified bridges designed to block the fleets’ passage up or down rivers, with some success. But he often simply purchased peace with tribute, and dynastic chaos after his death reopened the door to massive sustained ravaging. Royal authority virtually collapsed, to be rebuilt only very slowly from a restricted base around Paris.
Vikings in England pursued a strategy of conquest, and out of a number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the early 800s, only Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons under Alfred the Great, remained independent of Viking rule by 870. In the course of a bitter struggle, Alfred reorganized his kingdom’s defenses around a system of fortified towns, or burghs, manned by the fyrd, the forces of the Saxon landholders and their followers. Fyrd service was reorganized so that part of the force was always available for garrison duty and part for field service. Mounted for mobility (though fighting on foot) and based in the burghs, the fyrd could effectively limit the ability of Viking forces to raid and conquer. Wessex not only survived but, in the century after Alfred’s death in 899, went on to reconquer most of the Danelaw, the half of England under Viking rule. Viking invasion had resulted in a unified and relatively strong English monarchy—the opposite of its effect in France.
The East Frankish kingdom (Germany) suffered little from the Vikings but by 900 had become little more than a collection of ethnic duchies, suffering much the same fragmentation as West Frankia. But Henry of Saxony, elected king in 919, and his son Otto (936-973) prevented further fragmentation and even rebuilt royal prestige in the fight against the Magyars. Like Alfred, Henry contained his foe with a combination of fortifications and a reorganized and strengthened field army. Infantry played their role in the army, but the spearhead was a force of heavily armed cavalry, drawn from the nobility and mobile enough to keep up with the Magyars while possessing a decisive advantage over them in armor and weapons for close fighting. Under Otto, German forces not only defeated the Magyars at the Lechfield in 955, effectively ending their raiding days, but also pushed into Slavic territory and conquered north Italy. The Italian expeditions added prestige and a renewed imperial title to the German king’s portfolio. However, although its prestige was high and the territories it ruled were vast, the German kingship lacked well-developed mechanisms of power within Germany itself. Italian cities retained significant freedom of action even under imperial rule, and it was their independent initiative at sea that turned the tide against the Saracen pirates (see Chapter 10).
Despite different styles and very different results for the central authorities of the affected areas, some common themes clearly emerge in the responses to the invasions. Fortified strongpoints were the lynch- pin of each defense strategy. The invaders, as noted, had little ability to overrun a fortified position, provided its defenses were in good repair and it was adequately manned. Forts could thus act as places of refuge when a raiding force swept through. But they allowed more than passive defense: Forts restricted the scope of raiders’ possible targets, and the forces manning them could harass and ambush enemy forces on the march. Raiders were particularly vulnerable on their return march, when they were loaded with booty and so were slower and perhaps less vigilant. As Alfred’s system of burghs shows, forts could also act as the bases for strategic offensives, gradually hemming in raiders and winning back control of territory they had occupied.
Fortified strongpoints went hand in hand with some sort of system for maintaining a substantial force of well-armed men for both garrison duty and field operations. The measures adopted here varied widely, with some having a more public character than others. But in all areas, wealthy landholders were the backbone of any system of maintaining military forces, given the continuing financial and administrative limitations of governments of the age. The invasions, therefore, further highlighted the importance of a warrior elite in Latin European civilization. (Whether the members of this elite were always, or even primarily, the benevolent protectors of the weaker members of the culture is another question, which we will explore more in Chapter 12.)
In every case, nonmilitary measures complemented armed defense. Especially early on, the most effective local defense measure was simply to buy off the invaders. Paying tribute was clearly only a temporary solution and tended simply to shift the assaults elsewhere, but it could buy valuable time. The paying of tribute again reminds us not to overrate the military effectiveness of the defense measures. So, too, does the fact that, in the cases of the Vikings and to a lesser extent the Magyars, the invasions ended as much for reasons internal to those two societies as to military defeat: Both societies seemed to settle down and become “normal” after years of plundering expeditions. Conversion to Christianity contributed to this process and was often linked to military measures. Alfred baptized the Viking leader Guthrum after defeating him at Edington, for example. Once again, the ideological and cultural dimension of armed conflict was of central importance to the warfare of this age. Conversion was less of an option against Muslim foes. But against pagans, the sword and the Word were two sides of a broad process of taming dangerous enemies and bringing their peoples into the Christian community of nations, a process that would turn increasingly outward after the invasions ended.