Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
In AD 793, while Charlemagne was doing his best to rule his vast kingdom in Europe and while the Abbasid Caliphate was blossoming in the East, a group of sea warriors – or Vikings – from Scandinavia landed on the small island of Lindisfarne off the east coast of England. After summarily butchering the local population and robbing the monastery of its treasures, they departed. This marked the beginning of a large number of raids throughout Europe, raids that gradually grew in both magnitude and frequency.
The key advantage the Vikings had was the element of surprise; their boats had shallow keels, allowing them to penetrate farther up rivers than other boats of the time. Not only were they skilled sailors, but also ruthless warriors.
The Vikings were also explorers, traders and settlers, and in their wanderlust they travelled farther afield than any other Europeans, discovering Greenland and Iceland and even establishing a short-lived settlement on the northeast coast of America around AD 1000. This made the Vikings, not Columbus and his men, the first Europeans to land in America. In general, those travelling west – from present-day Denmark and Norway – were driven by the search for loot and conquest, while those travelling south – generally from present-day Sweden – were driven predominantly by trade, venturing south along the great rivers that conveniently flowed in a north-south direction and linked the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas.
Those travelling south were known to the Arabs as the ‘Rus’, and were instrumental in establishing the principalities of Kiev in present-day Ukraine and Great Novgorod in present-day Russia. The development of trade around these cities laid the foundation for the Russian nation. The city of Kiev dominated the state of Kievan Rus for the next two centuries, and its trade links with Constantinople played a significant role in bringing the Eastern Orthodox religion to the area in AD 988.
Vikings from Norway established a Norse kingdom in Ireland and a few decades later Danish conquerors settled in eastern England. Such were the attacks on France that, in AD 911, a Viking leader named Rollo, who had previously conquered parts of northern France, was bribed with even more land to protect the Franks against further Viking incursions. This land eventually became Normandy and served as the launch pad for the invasion of England by Rollo’s great-great-great grandson, William the Conqueror, in 1066.
Despite the valiant efforts of King Alfred34 of England to defend the island in the 9th century, the Anglo-Saxons were so weak that the Danish king, Canute, was able to combine the crowns of Denmark, Norway and England and create a large northern empire during the early part of the 11th century; however, as with most over-extended empires, that of Canute became too large to manage. When a Viking invasion force tried to invade northern England after the death of King Edward in 1066, it was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and expelled.
The problem for the English was that the Battle of Stamford Bridge against invading Vikings in the north took place in the same month as the attack on England by the Normans in the south. William, the Duke of Normandy, had come to claim his right to the English throne. After defeating the Danes, Edward’s successor, King Harold, had to rush 200 miles south in order to defend the island against the Normans at the Battle of Hastings. Had the two invasions not occurred within one month of each other, the English may well have had a stronger and less exhausted army, thereby increasing their chances of repelling the Normans. But they didn’t. Harold was struck in the eye by an arrow, the English were defeated and a battle which involved only a few thousand men changed the course of English history, earning William of Normandy the epithet ‘William the Conqueror’. Importantly, 1066 was the last time the English fought a battle on their own soil against a European enemy.
England became ruled by the Normans, who built a network of castles across the country from which to rule. They were not popular; after all, they spoke French, followed Frankish and Viking customs, and set aside huge tracts of useful land for hunting. On the mainland, however, their renowned fighting skills endeared them to any ruler looking for hired help. In one instance they were engaged by the Pope to free Sicily and Southern Italy from Islamic domination and ended up ruling Sicily as a Norman kingdom for several generations.