In contrast and sometimes in direct opposition to the great defensive naval establishments of the Byzantine and Chinese empires stood the decentralized but devastating seaborne raiders of the age of migration. The Vikings are undoubtedly the prototypical popular image of a predatory seagoing folk.
Origins and Types
The reasons for the sudden irruption of Viking raiders out of Scandinavia in the late 700s have long been a matter of scholarly dispute, complicated by arguments about how large an irruption it actually was. Given the limits of even the best Viking maritime technology, the total numbers of explorers and settlers was probably fairly small. This casts doubt on population pressure as a major factor in the rise of Viking activity.
Rather, two factors seem most important. First, Scandinavian naval technology improved in the mid- 700s. Sail power now complemented the traditional oars, and hulls got larger and more seaworthy. Neither change was revolutionary and probably only brought Viking technology up to the prevailing Baltic-North Sea standard, but together they made possible longer, more profitable voyages over more open seas. Second, political developments in Scandinavia probably provided the most important motive for the raids. As kings began to attempt to assert greater control over their kingdoms, local aristocrats and their followers decided that foreign adventure was preferable to restricted opportunities at home. Plunder was an attractive source of income not subject to royal taxation, one that gave the raid leader the wealth and prestige to attract followers. Exile could also be an escape from legal trouble. Christianity was often supported by and favorable to centralizing monarchs; abroad, missionaries need not be respected, and churches, in fact, provided a rich source of booty. In other words, centralization and aristocratic competition at first pushed the most troublesome elements of Scandinavian society onto the outside world. (The word Viking was originally a verb: Togo viking meant “to go raiding,” so, like Muslimghazis, Vikings were raiders whose bands were often composed of different Scandinavian ethnic groups.) Later, as kings gained greater power, they launched expeditions of plunder and conquest, which served to harness and direct the warlike energies of the aristocracy and, through the distribution of plunder, bind their loyalties to the monarchy.
Thus, Viking warfare fell into several different categories: small-scale fights and feuds, mostly internal to Viking society; small private raids with the boatload as the basic military unit; larger, more extended raids of a dozen to several hundred ships, sometimes under royal or pseudoroyal leadership (the leader of a major and successful excursion might claim the title “king”); and full royal expeditions of conquest. Generally, the smaller raids and larger but still nonroyal campaigns took place from the late 700s to the early 900s. Such forays were as likely to be defeated as not and resulted in little permanent conquest. Then, from about 900 to the mid-1000s, expeditions were increasingly royal— whether Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish—and saw greater success in conquest. We include all these different peoples under the loose heading of Vikings.
Viking Military Forces
Viking boats came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a definite difference between the deep-draught, round merchant sailing ships and the famous longboats—narrow, shallow- draught ships with oars as well as sail—used for war. The difference is similar to, though not quite as pronounced or specialized as, the Mediterranean ships of the day, for similar reasons. The warships’ chief advantage was tactical maneuverability and speed, and, for battle, they carried a large crew relative to their cargo capacity.
The Oseberg Ship
Recovered by naval archaeologists, this partial hull (note that the sides were originally built up higher) shows the long, lean lines and high stem and stern typical of Viking longships.
A typical warship might be 18-20 meters in length, with room for 24-30 oars. Loaded for battle it could conceivably carry as many as 100 men, but as few as 30 would be more common for sailing any distance, as a large crew was logistically difficult to sustain and made the boat far less seaworthy. A similar tradeoff applied to ship size. Some warships reached 29 meters in length, with room for 52 oars, and might carry up to 300 men in battle. The size of the crew and the size of the boat, especially the height of the gunwales, made such monsters formidable in a sea fight, but their strategic range was much more limited because of their crew size.
Despite a formidable modern reputation, Viking navigation was not terribly advanced. Longboats were shallow, open vessels with little cargo space, so almost all Viking voyages were coastal, or at best one- or two- day hops between known islands and landfalls. Only the trip to Iceland required significant sailing out of sight of land (even the Iceland-to-Greenland crossing is visible from both ends because of the height of the mountains on each); the Iceland voyage was not made by huge numbers of settlers, and the island remained fairly isolated once settled. But Europe’s long coastline and many navigable rivers, for which Viking boats were also well suited, put nearly the whole continent from Russia to Spain and into the Mediterranean within reach.
Given the limits of ships’ size and navigation, Viking armies never numbered more than a few thousand at their largest, and a typical raiding party might range from a few score to a couple hundred. Viking warriors were armed with spears, axes, swords, and bows, and they carried round shields. Some wore chain-mail shirts, but many did not, especially at sea. They were too expensive for many Vikings, and they made rowing difficult and swimming impossible. Thus, Viking armies ashore had no particular advantage over their enemies in armor or arms, and indeed were often at a disadvantage in the latter, as indicated by the Frankish origin of many Viking swords. Nor were Viking armies unusually formidable in terms of organization, tactics, or morale. It was their ships, and thus their strategic mobility, that made them terrifying. Overall, as engineers, the Vikings were capable but limited, inventing little. Good at creative ways of moving ships overland, they proved far less successful at building siege engines.
Viking Warfare
The aim of Viking warfare was economic gain, as well as enhancement of a warriors’ prestige. If the warrior were a king, his success could help strengthen the state—certainly, the distribution of plunder bound the ruling class together more tightly. But that again comes back to economic gain. Vikings could therefore be traders, pirates, raiders, or conquerors interchangeably, depending on the opportunities and the capabilities and strength of any opposition. In any of these roles, it was their ships, and thus their mobility, as noted already, that was their key capability. Any place within reach of a beachable coastline or impression river was vulnerable to sudden attack.
Viking raiders recognized the need for mobility on land as well and so took to seizing herds of horses when they established a beachhead, so that they could then roam farther over the countryside in search of loot. The aim, whether by land or water, was to hit soft, rich targets and avoid a major fight. Monasteries were ideal targets, and the fact that monks wrote the only chronicles of the times accounts in part for the pagan Vikings’ reputation for brutality and the perhaps exaggerated impression of the extent of their depredations.
Battles with local defense forces could not always be avoided, however, and major Viking armies sometimes even sought battle to further territorial conquest, or at least accepted it when defending armies moved to relieve a city or fort under Viking attack.
But success or failure in battle was a less important limitation on Viking strategies of conquest than was their weakness in siege warfare (see the Highlights box “The Siege of Paris, 885”). Siege engines could not be carried aboard ship and proved difficult to improvise on the spot, nor were Vikings enthusiastic miners. Viking forces most often resorted to sudden surprise attacks, treachery, or, failing all else, blockades to take fortified cities. Not surprisingly, then, the most successful Viking conquests came in areas where fortifications were either few in number (Anglo-Saxon England) or virtually nonexistent (Ireland, Russia).
Given Viking weakness in siege warfare, systematic programs of fortification were the best defenses against their raids. Charles the Bald of France ordered the construction of fortified bridges to restrict the mobility of Viking fleets. But none of the powers facing the Vikings managed to sustain such a campaign for long, save for England under Alfred, whose system of fortified burghs and field armies turned the tide in his wars with the Danes (see Chapter 7).
When it came to battle, Viking land tactics were unexceptional for their age. They fought in a shield- wall sometimes divided into one to three divisions or lines, with warriors grouped around their immediate chiefs—groupings probably carried over from shipboard to land. The formation in defense might offer refused flanks or even all-around defense, and, in attack, the Vikings at times used a sort of wedge formation, with the best-armed and most enthusiastic warriors leading the way. But Viking armies were capable of little in the way of tactical maneuver once a battle was under way. The only other tactic of note among Viking armies was berserking—a battle frenzy that could carry a warrior to seemingly superhuman feats of strength and endurance even with major wounds. Again, Viking berserkers have a fearsome modern reputation, but similar sorts of behavior are attested not just in other ancient and medieval armies from heroic societies (the Iliad offers fine examples) but in modern wars as well, where it is seen as a form of temporary insanity often associated with posttraumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which can also be seen in Viking accounts of strange warrior behavior after battles. What seems most unusual about Viking berserking is not the behavior itself but the degree to which the culture celebrated and even encouraged it. But even berserking did not make Viking armies invincible. Viking forces lost battles more frequently than they won them.
Viking tactics at sea are better documented than their land tactics, despite the fact that sea battles were far rarer than land battles. Like Mediterranean galleys, the longboats’ striking power was centered in their bows; tapping the longboat’s mobility, the Vikings could pick a vulnerable target and aim the ship at it. As a result, when faced with battle, the defenders (often the weaker or smaller fleet), if they were unable to avoid the fight, would try to lash their ships together in line abreast, bows to the attackers, presenting as solid a target as possible. Creating one large fighting platform out of a line of ships also allowed reinforcements to be moved most easily to threatened spots in the line. Where possible, one end of the line would be anchored to rocks, protecting that flank.
The attacking longboats, operating individually, rowed to the attack, attempting to pick off isolated defending ships, if any, or to concentrate their attack on the weakest point in the line and get around the flanks. As the ships came in range of each other, missile fire opened the battle, followed by attempts on the part of the attackers to grapple and board the defenders. When the battle reached this stage of hand-to-hand fighting, the architecture of the ships played a crucial role in the outcome. It was here that big ships had a definite advantage. For one thing, their larger crews could wear down the less numerous crew of a smaller ship. For another, their higher gunwales provided better protection against enemy arrows and an advantageous platform for firing and boarding. (Shields were hung over the sides of the ships only for ceremonial entrances and exits from harbor, and so would not have added to the defensive value of the gunwales.) Warriors on a small ship might have trouble boarding a large ship at all. Also, larger ships could stand rougher conditions at sea. As a result, the number of ships in a fleet or even the number of men in a fleet might not be an effective measure of its strength: at Roberry around 1044, thirty large ships defeated sixty smaller ships, for example. Especially large and strong boats might even be barded—sheathed in iron at the bow, increasing the strength of the ship at that vital spot. But, like larger crews, barding was a tactical device that entailed strategic penalties in terms of range and seaworthiness, as well as being quite costly.
Viking sea tactics were designed to capture ships, not to sink them. A ship was valuable in itself and was likely to be carrying valuable cargo. Viking tactics were effective in their home waters, mostly against other Vikings. But when Viking fleets, admittedly of smaller ships, reached the Black Sea in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Byzantine navy was capable of dealing with them without much trouble (see above). Scandinavian warriors were useful enough to the Greeks to form the backbone of Basil II’s Varangian Guard, which drew Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to imperial service for a century after the 980s, but their utility was as much in their lack of political connections as their fighting ability.
The Vikings’ Impact
The Vikings certainly wreaked havoc through much of Europe for almost 200 years, but the extent of their depredations is easy to exaggerate. They conquered only in areas that were politically weak or disorganized, and they left only minor cultural imprints in areas they ruled or settled. Their lasting influence was much more in the creation and expansion of a vast maritime trade network stretching from Ireland through Russia to Byzantium. The Baltic Sea and North Sea ships that continued this trade past the Viking age would contribute significantly to later European naval development.
The major maritime power in Southeast Asia for much of this period was Srivijaya. Centered on the east coast of Sumatra and the port of Palembang, the Srivijaya state flourished from the 600s into the 1000s (Figure 10.2). Its broad influence over the coasts of the region and the maritime trade that flowed through it, the profits of which were essential to Srivijaya’s existence, have led historians to refer to it as a thalas-socracy, that is, an imperial naval state like the classical Athenian empire. Unfortunately, the sources for Srivijayan history are scant and unclear, and projecting the image of Athens on these sources is probably unwarranted. Srivijaya was almost certainly not a centralized naval empire on the model of classical Athens. But as a looser polity, it did exercise naval power effectively for several centuries.
The rise of Chinese-centered maritime trade under the Tang dynasty stimulated the formation of port-states along the route from the Mediterranean, Arabia, and Persia to Canton, especially in the area of the Straits of Malacca (Melaka), an important layover and transshipment point because of the monsoon weather patterns. The ports also served to link their hinterlands to the international trade routes. Competition among such states resulted in the triumph of a center around Palembang, which then brought the other ports into a hierarchical confederation and focused trade on a few favored ports; the resulting polity became known as Srivijaya.
The military power of the Srivijayan ruler resulted from his ability to integrate forces from the hinterlands under the command of regional warlords and aristocrats with the naval resources of the nomadic sea peoples of the area. Careful alliance making backed by powerful religious sanctions helped create and maintain the system. Srivijaya’s ability to suppress piracy and provide a safe haven for merchants allowed it to extend its influence over coastal entrepots (trade cities) from Java to the Malay Peninsula. Once established, Chinese recognition and the resulting prestige of the Srivijaya name reinforced the ties binding the state together, as did the distribution of profits from the center to the component parts of the state.
Figure 10.2 Srivijaya and the Chola Kingdom, c. 1000.
Little can be said of the details of Srivijayan military methods. Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean ships were well but relatively lightly constructed, so that ship-to-ship action was unlikely to have played a major role in Srivijayan warfare. Amphibious operations were more the norm, especially as control of a port brought economic control, or at least influence, over the port’s hinterlands, and so raids and military operations could be focused on concentrated targets.
As long as management of coastal competition and suppression of piracy were its chief military responsibilities, Srivijaya thrived. But from the middle of the tenth century, the spreading overseas trade brought increasing competition for its riches at the same time that it helped stimulate the growth of new land-based powers in the region. This exposed the weaknesses of the Srivijaya polity. In the eleventh century, Srivijaya would prove incapable of containing the threats to its naval hegemony.
Origins and Structure The crucial challenge came from the Coromandel coast of south India, home of the expanding Chola Empire (see Figure 10.2). Initially, the focus of Chola activity was land-based, as it carved a place for itself between hostile established powers starting in the 700s. The state that emerged was not especially strong or centralized. Chola kingship had significant ritual elements: Influence over outlying provinces and regional elites was often fairly nominal and was exercised through religious symbolism. There was little in the way of a royal bureaucracy. As a result, the state was held together by its expansionism: Raiding expeditions brought plunder to the royal house, which distributed it to its followers as a demonstration of the kings’ wealth and prestige. Permanent conquests provided not just plunder but lands. Thus, Chola warfare was politically motivated and primarily economic in its aims, even though it was mostly touted as religiously based. Raiding expeditions whose benefits were obscure to the larger population were justified as “quests for relics,” the successful capture of which was broadcast as the result of such raids.
The economic aim of Chola warfare became important in maritime terms because of the nature of the empire’s mercantile links with the wider world. Local production was tied to regional and overseas trade routes through temple centers where merchant associations operated. These merchant associations were virtually independent powers, maintaining operations around the Bay of Bengal. As Chola power expanded, both the royal government and the merchants saw benefits in an aggressive assertion of Chola might along the main trade routes.
Naval raiding increased the royal government’s mobile wealth, already established as the source of their prestige; trade goods and centers were particularly suitable targets in this regard. Naval raids also provided, perhaps in even better form, the political advantages of land raids. By drawing local elites and their military forces into such activity, Chola kings both integrated the elites more tightly into their own power network and displaced their aggressive, predatory tendencies to areas outside the kingdom. Overseas expeditions had the additional benefit of creating concentrations of such forces far enough away to reduce the threat of internal discord or revolt. Finally, reasonable calculations of political advantage pointed to expeditions of plunder or conquest as an offensive defense: Carrying war to Sri Lanka, for example, forestalled Sri Lankan raids on Chola lands. To all of these push factors impelling Chola naval forces outward was added the pull factor of political instability or weakness in the main target areas, especially Sri Lanka.
Chola naval activity reached its peak between 985 and 1070, under the kings Rajaraja and his son Rajen- dra. Rajaraja was the innovator, initiating the naval strategy, forging the internal alliances, and amassing the forces necessary to carry out this new aggressive strategy. Rajendra reaped much of the glory from his spectacular exploitation of the system his father created, but he also inherited the growing problems the strategy created. It is an exaggeration of both Chola power and the naval technology of the time to say that during this time the Bay of Bengal was a Chola lake, but the sense in terms of prestige and impact is not far off the mark.
There were two major landmarks of Chola naval activity in this period. The conquest of northern Sri Lanka was the more conventional: Ships ferried troops to the island, where they waged a campaign of conquest. Of greater regional significance was a set of raids clear across the Bay of Bengal into the heart of the Srivijayan sphere of influence. In 1025, Rajendra launched a major expedition that ravaged the northeastern Sumatran coast, finally sacking the Srivijayan capital. Cholas inscriptions memorialize the “conquest” of Srivijaya; the Cholas did not actually take over and administer the Srivijayan state, but they did become significant political players in the straits for another fifty years. More important, the blow to Srivijayan prestige and their reputation for securing trade routes and centers was devastating, and trade patterns began to diffuse more widely through Southeast Asian waters as competition for the lucrative business intensified. A Chola raid in 1067 on the Srivijayan-influenced coast of the Malay Peninsula completed the work, and the Srivijaya thalassocracy collapsed. Political and economic patterns in the area would remain fragmented until the rise of Malacca in the fifteenth century with the assistance of the great Ming treasure fleets under Zheng He (see Chapter 15).
Despite the 1067 expedition, Chola activity decreased after Rajendra’s death in 1044, and for the rest of the century, the Chola rulers attempted to shift from an exploitive raiding strategy to regular administration of their conquests, especially in Sri Lanka. However, continued guerrilla resistance by the islanders created a steady drain on Chola resources, exactly the sort of outflow of treasure the Chola polity was unable to sustain. By the 1070s, Chola forces were already withdrawing from Sri Lanka, and the empire thereafter went into decline.
Chola Warfare
We have much less information about the details of Chola warfare than we do for the Vikings. The campaigns are well chronicled, though the sources are heavily biased, the “conquest” of Srivijaya being typical of the presentation of Chola feats of arms by official sources. But they provide few practical details of the basic military organization and technique. Nonetheless, some broad outlines are discernible.
The army consisted of a combination of forces. At the core was the body of royal troops maintained permanently by the king as an imperial guard, ceremonial corps, and personal warband. This small force was supplemented by mercenaries and by the warbands of powers subordinate to the king. The bulk of such forces came from the landed elites, but a significant number of soldiers were maintained as mercenary warbands by the merchant associations, and these, too, joined royal expeditions, emphasizing the economic aims of Chola warfare. Almost all the troops were infantry armed with spears and bows. South India was poor country for raising horses and mounting cavalry operations, and on overseas campaigns, horses would have been difficult and expensive to transport. Chola forces, like armies throughout the subcontinent in this period, included war elephants. But their use in naval or amphibious warfare was out of the question The army as a whole was thus a composite force assembled for particular campaigns, not a standing force except for a small core of royal household troops. Likewise, there was no royal navy, only ad hoc armadas drawn from the south Indian merchant community.
Chola strategy was straightforward: Pick a convenient or symbolically significant target, and make the raid. That there was little actual planning to the minimal strategy behind Chola naval activity is demonstrated by the difficulties the empire encountered in trying to manage the transition from raids to conquest to administration in Sri Lanka—the weakly centralized Chola state was not built for careful planning and systematic assimilation of new territory.
Tactically, the Cholas were similar to the Vikings in that there was nothing particularly innovative or effective about their methods of waging war. What made their raids effective was the seaborne mobility that gave them the element of surprise. As for naval tactics, ship-to-ship encounters were even rarer than for the Vikings—the navy was essentially an amphibious landing force. The hulls of the ships of the Indian Ocean were usually sewn together with coconut husks rather than nailed to frames, a lightweight but effective method for cargo carrying but one that made the ships unsuitable to be used as weapons themselves. The economic motive behind Chola warfare would in any case have tended toward the capture rather than the sinking of shipping, just as for the Vikings and the Srivijayans.
Like the Vikings and Srivijaya, Chola military techniques were conventional, and the political and military impact of their raids and conquests was transient. The limited naval technology at their disposal did not allow much more. The main impact of Chola naval operations was on patterns of trade, not on patterns of warfare. The decentralization and diffusion of southeast Asian trade stimulated by the Chola raids on Srivijaya had consequences as important and lasting as the Viking impact on trade in northern Europe. What the operations of all the predatory sea peoples show is the connection through maritime activity of world trade and state building. The wealth generated as goods flowed between the Mediterranean and China, and beyond in every direction, often proved decisive in bringing a higher level of political organization to areas that tapped into that wealth, whether through plunder, piracy, or commerce. This connection would continue to tie trade, piracy, and naval war closely together, and would help generate a new model of naval power in subsequent centuries.
Between 865 and 895, Viking forces in western Europe concentrated into a Great Army of several thousand men supported by several hundred ships. The Great Army operated initially in England, successfully pursuing a strategy of conquest and eliminating every Saxon kingdom save Alfred’s Wessex. After a crisis in the mid-870s, Alfred defeated the Great Army and its king, Guthrum, at Eddington in 878. Contained by the Saxons, the Great Army received reinforcements and moved to the Continent, where growing political chaos after Charles the Bald’s death in 876 beckoned. For several years after 879, the Vikings ravaged in the valleys of the Scheldt, Rhine, and Meuse rivers, seizing or establishing fortified bases each winter from which to plunder the surrounding territory on horseback. But, by 885, the area had been picked bare, and the army briefly split up in early 885, with part of the fleet going to Kent.
The West Frankish ruler Carloman had died without an heir in December 884, and the Great Army reunited in July on the Seine, whose valley had been untouched for nearly twenty years. Sailing upriver, the fleet forced a passage past the weakly held fortified bridge at Pont de l’Arche and arrived at Paris in the late fall. The city stood on an island in the middle of the river, connected to the banks by two bridges guarded by unfinished forts. Frankish forces were led by Count Odo of Paris and probably numbered several hundred. The Great Army was estimated at 40,000 men and 700 ships by Abbo, an eyewitness who memorialized the siege in a long poem, but was undoubtedly at least an order of magnitude smaller.
In late November, the Vikings attempted to storm the northern fort but were repulsed. With winter approaching, they established a fortified camp from which to blockade the city and ravage the surrounding territory. Active siege operations resumed in the spring, as rogue Frankish engineers helped the Vikings build siege towers and catapults. At one point, the Vikings sent a fireship against the bridge. But the attempt to burn the bridge was unsuccessful, and, through the summer, every assault on the forts failed. Furthermore, the Vikings were unable to maintain a complete blockade of the city. Several times, small relief forces and fresh provisions made it into the city either by river or by land. But larger relief efforts led by Henry of Saxony and Charles the Fat were both defeated by the Vikings, who remained secure in their fortified camp.
The Vikings kept the pressure on into the following fall. Charles the Fat, facing another winter of plundering in the heart of his kingdom, finally ended the stalemate by paying a huge bribe to the Great Army to move on, offering them passage past the fortified bridge at Paris. This opened up Burgundy, Champagne, and the upper Loire valley to the raiders. The fortifications at Paris thus saved the city but failed strategically to guard the territories upriver, which suffered several years of raiding that led to the deposition of Charles.
The Great Army operated until 892 in parts of Frankia. It met increasing resistance and more numerous fortifications but ultimately left only because of famine. Returning to England, it met further effective resistance from Alfred’s reorganized kingdom and finally broke up in 896. The Siege of Paris was probably the high point of the first phase of Viking activity. The campaigns and the history of the Great Army show clearly both the strengths and the weaknesses of Viking warfare.