Chapter 8

Invading from the North: The Vikings

In This Chapter

● Figuring out the origins of a civilisation

● Raiding and plundering with the Vikings

● Living like a Viking

● Tracking a global legacy

Between approximately 800 and 1050, Western Europe experienced a new and dangerous threat. Fierce warriors from the extreme north of Europe raided and plundered their way around the coastline before moving inland to tackle towns and cities. These invaders travelled far and wide across the globe - west into the snows of Greenland, east as far as Kiev (in modern-day Ukraine) and south into the western Mediterranean.

The Vikings had a massive, lasting impact on Western Europe, and their expansion and colonisation was ultimately responsible for a great deal more, such as the creation of the state of Normandy and William the Conqueror (see Chapter 10 for more details). These Vikings are what this chapter is all about.

Transitioning from Norsemen to Vikings

The Vikings truly were ‘men from the north’ or ‘north men’, which is the origin of the word Norsemen. They were nomadic warriors from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) whose incredible success in piracy and trading led to them dominating more than 150 years of medieval history.

The word viking first appears in Old Norse (the language that the Vikings spoke) and is spelled vikingr. In Old Norse stories, known as sagas, the word vikingr was used to mean one who travelled overseas. At some point during the ninth century the term wicing appears in the Anglo-Saxon language and refers to a pirate - although wicing may originally have meant going to a wic, or a trading place. Whatever the exact source of the word viking, people with two different languages used the term to refer to the activities of overseas raiders, and viking was originally used as a verb, not a noun. By the way if you want to try out ‘Old Norse’ today the closest modern equivalent is Icelandic!

The Vikings didn’t refer to themselves as such. They thought of themselves as Norsemen. But some of them certainly engaged in ‘viking’ activities!

Career change?

One of the big unsolved mysteries of medieval history is why so many Scandinavian people suddenly turned from their traditional occupations of trading and fishing to piracy. One theory is that the population had outgrown the agricultural potential of their mostly wooded homeland. Even today Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) is a heavily wooded place, thick with forests.

A more interesting theory, however, is that Scandinavian traders suffered hugely from troubles that hit the silver trade during the 820s. Many Scandinavians had profited hugely from purchasing the silver of the Muslim Abbasid Empire (which I discuss in Chapter 7) from towns in Russia and bringing it to the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (see Chapter 5). When the silver trade dried up, the people of the north used the geographical knowledge they'd gained from trading to become successful pirates.

Even if problems in Arabia didn't motivate the shift to piracy, the Scandinavian people's worldly experience aided their transition from Norsemen to Vikings. And their extensive travels show just how international the medieval period actually was.

Attacking the British Isles

Historians consider the Viking Age to date from 800 (the time of Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor; flip to Chapter 5 for more) to 1066 (the Norman conquest of England; turn to Chapter 10 for all about the Normans). The fact that such an important period in medieval history is known as ‘The Viking Age’ reflects the huge impact of the Vikings.

The first recorded Viking attacks were on the northeastern coast of Anglo-Saxon England. Early Viking raiders targeted monasteries because of the wealth they held. Between 793-795, the monasteries of Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona were attacked and badly damaged. In the next few years, many more monasteries were attacked and for a time they ceased to exist in northeastern England. Viking raiders also attacked Irish monasteries with similarly disastrous effects.

The Viking attacks were devastating, particularly because they were made on holy sites. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle regarded 793 as being full of portents of doom:

This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians [northeastern England], terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.

All the early Viking raids followed a pattern: small numbers of ships raiding targets close to the coast that were easily accessible. The raiders almost completely destroyed their targets because they didn’t intend to return and wanted to take as much booty as one trip would allow and do as much damage as possible.

Raiding farther afield

By the first half of the ninth century, the Vikings were raiding farther afield and more ambitiously. Mainland Europe was their next target and during the 830s, the empire of Louis the Pious (described in Chapter 6) came under serious attack. The important trading centre of Dorestad in northern Germany was a popular early target, as well as towns and ports along the northern coast of France.

Springtime in Paris

Many of the popular stories and ideas concerning the Vikings are untrue. (I bust some of the biggest myths in the later section 'Dispelling misconceptions about the Vikings'). However, one episode that historians have verified is the Viking attack on Paris.

In 841, a Viking fleet sailed up the river Seine, threatening towns hundreds of miles from the coast. After four years of rampaging, they threatened Paris in 845. The Carolingian mayor of Paris eventually bought them off with a payment of 7,000 pounds of silver. A second attack took place in 885, but the invaders were driven back, this time for good.

Due to the extended distances that the raiders were travelling, they began to push farther inland. Raids in Ireland went towards the centre of the island, and the raiders spent the winter there in 841-842, consolidating their position. In fact, the encampment that the Vikings established carried on after they left and eventually became the settlement that is now known as Dublin. The Vikings also wintered elsewhere in France and England.

Although Viking raids were widespread, they weren’t random attacks by barbarian hordes. The Viking people were traders for centuries before becoming raiders and they knew markets and areas that were popular with merchants. As their piracy affected trading patterns, they kept up with economic changes and political changes throughout Europe.

The Holy Roman Empire was racked with civil war under Louis the Pious (as I describe in Chapter 6), and the Vikings took advantage of this instability. Eventually, in the 860s, the Empire recovered, but over the next 150 years the Vikings periodically took advantage of political crises in Western Europe to increase their raiding activity.

Sailing Far and Wide

The Viking attacks on England, Ireland and mainland Europe were only the beginning of their adventures: few places in the Medieval World escaped the Viking influence. As Figure 8-1 shows, they went an awfully long way in search of plunder and riches.

Figure 8-1: The routes taken by Viking raiders 790-1050

Taking long journeys on longships

The ships they travelled in, known as longships, were integral to the success of the Vikings. The Scandinavians had originally developed these vessels for long-distance trading, but the Vikings managed to adapt them easily for their new purposes.

Two different kinds of Viking ships eventually emerged:

The drakkar was the traditional Viking longship. The name comes from the Norse word for dragon and was given to the boats because of the large pointed construction that jutted out from the prow. These boats had very long, narrow hulls that enabled them to sail in shallow water and easily land on shore for attacks. The ships were large and carried up to 100 men (see Figure 8-2).

Drakkars were equipped with both oars and sails, allowing greater freedom of travel because the crew didn’t have to rely on the wind. In fact, with the use of a specially adapted spar, called a beitass, which was mounted on to the sail, they were able to sail against the wind.

The knarr was a more traditional type of merchant vessel with a much broader hull and deeper draft than the drakkar. Not as manoeuvrable, knarrs were mostly used for transporting supplies on journeys and bringing booty home. Very often knarrs towed smaller boats behind them in order to land people and supplies closer to shore.

Figure 8-2: A Viking drakkar

Despite carrying the crew hundreds of miles across rough seas, Viking vessels were hardly first-class ocean liners. With no real cover on the longships, passengers were exposed to the elements and got what sleep they could by huddling around the benches. Storage space was limited, and supplies were very basic. Often the sailors existed on little more than dried fish.

Colonising: Creating a new home away from home

Viking raiders weren’t the only Scandinavians who made incredibly long journeys by boat. Increasingly in the ninth century, Vikings settled in other parts of Europe. Entire families travelled together and shared the hardships and exposure to the weather.

One of the first of the new settlements was made by a group of Scandinavians who sailed up the Rhine and its tributaries in the 850s. Led by a man from Denmark called Harald and his nephew Roric, this group negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor, Lothair I (turn to Chapter 6 for more on Lothair). He allowed them to settle around Dorestad in northern Germany on condition that they defend his kingdom from further attack - probably by raiding Vikings!

In 866, a Viking force seized the English city of York and settled there, but further attacks south were driven back and eventually defeated by Alfred the Great (Chapter 6 contains all the details of Alfred’s campaign). The settlement at York (known as ‘Jorvik’) was a success though, remaining under Scandinavian control for the next 200 years until England was conquered by William of Normandy in 1066 (see Chapter 10).

The last successful colonisation came in 911 when a group of Vikings were granted territory by the Frankish king Charles ‘The Simple’. Led by a man called Rollo, the descendants of this Viking group became the fearsome Normans. See Chapter 10 for the full story!

Shifting from raiders to traders

The Vikings led relatively simple lives, and the booty they took was often used for legitimate trade. Their longstanding interest in travel and commerce meant that the new Viking settlements quickly became busy medieval trading centres.

One of the Vikings’ most profitable lines of business was the slave trade, which was practised throughout Europe and linked with Muslim traders in the Mediterranean (see Chapter 7 for more on this practice). Prisoners taken by the Vikings in northern England, for example, potentially ended up as slaves in Arabia.

In addition to taking booty, the Vikings also ran a kind of protection racket where the payment of a tribute protected an area from further attack. The fact that they then ploughed their ill-gotten gains into legitimate business activity is somewhat reminiscent of organised crime!

Reaching into Russia

Some of the longest Viking voyages were to the east. As traders, the people of Scandinavia had made connections with towns in Russia during the eighth century. In 860, a Norseman called Rurik followed trade routes and settled in Russia, near the town of Novgorod.

As with other Viking colonies in Europe, the population in Russia prospered, and the descendants of Rurik journeyed farther south, gaining control of the city of Kiev under the leadership of two men called Askold and Dir. The descendants of these people became know as Varangians and held power in various parts of Russia all the way through until the seventeenth century.

Did the Vikings discover America?

An enduring question is whether the Vikings ever reached mainland North America. Consensus among historians is that they did indeed sail that far from their Scandinavian homeland.

In the tenth century, Vikings led by Erik the Red had colonised Greenland, forming small communities that acted as staging posts for journeys farther west. The most successful of these journeys were led by a man called Leif Eriksson, who at the beginning of the eleventh century journeyed as far as Newfoundland, the island to the east of Canada. The area Eriksson reached became known as Vinland, a Norse term that meant 'pasture land' or 'meadow land'.

Evidence suggests that the settlers in this colony travelled even farther, perhaps to the North American mainland. If they did, they reached there nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus. When you consider what conditions must have been like crossing the Atlantic in longboats, this feat is absolutely incredible!

Connecting with Constantinople

Vikings even made their presence felt in the Mediterranean. During the ninth century longships had sailed around the Atlantic coast of Spain to attack ports in the western Mediterranean, but the Vikings in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople were far more unusual. These Vikings had made their way to the eastern Mediterranean via Russia and the Black Sea. Even more intriguing - they quickly found work in Constantinople.

The huge, tall and blond-haired Scandinavian warriors must have seemed fairly remarkable to the eastern Greeks. Various Byzantine emperors recruited them into their armies during the tenth century. Eventually, in 998, the emperor Basil II brought in some 6,000 Viking mercenaries to form the core of what eventually became known as the Varangian Guard. This elite unit served as personal bodyguards to the emperor. The Varangian guard continued until late into the fourteenth century and took part in all the major conflicts of the Byzantine period, as well as the crusades (which I write about in Part III).

Living the Viking Life

Viking society was organised much like that elsewhere in the Medieval World.

A king ruled over all the other people, who were divided into three distinct social groups:

● Jarls were members of the aristocracy. Like earls in other medieval societies, jarls owned a great deal of land and were the only people other than the king permitted to have an armed force or hird.

● Karls were land-owning farmers and the majority of people in Viking communities. Socially this group was extremely broad and diverse, with wealth and relationship to the aristocracy determining a person’s level of influence.

● Thralls, or slaves, were the lowest social class, working as unpaid labourers for the farming class. Trade in slaves was one of the Vikings’ biggest businesses. As the Vikings were non-Christian, they were initially unaffected by the Church’s ban on slavery and continued a healthy trade. (See the later section ‘Stopping the slave trade’ for information on the gradual decline of trading.) Thralls had absolutely no rights and were kept by the owners in the same fashion as their livestock.

Many thralls were prisoners taken from other countries, but native Scandinavians lived as thralls if they were homeless and starving. The life of a thrall was incredibly hard and manumission (release from the bonds of slavery) was extremely rare.

Examining Viking religion and beliefs

The Vikings were a pagan people whose beliefs formed what modern scholars call a folk-religion - one that isn’t centrally organised. Individual Viking tribes and peoples had slightly (or sometimes wildly) different beliefs and worshipped in their own ways instead of through a prescribed code from formal religious leaders.

Norse mythology served as the basis for their beliefs. This collection of stories is chock full of gods, heroes, legends and sagas - rather like ancient Greek mythology. Norse mythology is a massive subject and too big to go into here, but the most important point is that it valued the role of the warrior and placed huge emphasis on bravery and success in war - an important factor in ensuring a successful afterlife.

The power of life and death

Masters had the power of life and death over their thralls and it seems to have been put to use through the process of human sacrifice. Viking funerals were spectacular affairs, and according to legend, thralls were often sacrificed so that they were able to continue serving their masters in the next life. Female slaves suffered terribly, being repeatedly raped and then strangled and stabbed. The multiple rapes were supposed to ensure that the slaves' bodies transported 'life force' to their dead masters.

Norse saga poems regularly mention human sacrifice. In one poem, when the hero Sigurd dies he is followed to death by the sacrifice of others:

Bond-women five shall follow him, And eight of my thralls, well-born are they, Children with me, and mine they were. As gifts that Buthli his daughter gave.

Scholars long thought that human sacrifice was present only in myths and sagas, but archaeological discoveries in Jutland (in modern Denmark) have revealed bodies of people who were strangled as part of some kind of ritual, leading some scholars to suggest that human sacrifice was all too real.

According to Norse belief a deceased person could progress to three possible destinations:

● Valhalla: Valhalla was the destination for great heroes who died in battle or in a heroic way. The word translates as the ‘hall of the chosen ones’ where heroes would feast in eternity.

● Hel: Hel, which translates as the ‘covered hall’, was the middle ground for people who had neither excelled or disappointed. Norse belief was that people would be reunited with their loved ones and relatives there, but it wasn’t seen as a nice or magical place.

● Nifhel: The place where you really didn’t want to go, nifhel was the ‘dark hall’ occupied by people who had broken oaths or not lived up to the ideals set up by Norse mythology.

Like most pagan religions, Norse religion didn’t offer specific ethical or moral rules to live by, as other religions do; it just offered possible venues for the afterlife. Instead, Vikings looked to the words of their poets and writers for examples to aspire to.

Poetic sagas were popular works that featured the escapades of heroes, as well as some moral instruction. For example, The Sayings of Odin (the king of the Norse gods) contains the following advice:

Be a friend to your friend; match gift with gift. Meet smiles with smiles, and lies with dissimulation. . . . Generous and brave men get the best out of life; they seldom bring harassments on themselves. But a coward fears everything, and a miser groans at a gift.

The poem contains 164 stanzas - all containing similar advice. Viking lives were a curious mix of this simple ethical code and incredibly savage warfare and piracy.

Grinding their axes: Viking Warfare

Norse sagas contain many accounts of the exploits of heroes and warriors, and the majority of them are broadly similar.

From their first appearance to their eventual decline, Viking warriors fought in roughly the same way and with the same weapons. Any ‘free’ Norseman was required to own weapons, and their quality was an important marker of social status. The main weapons included the following:

● Axes are the weapons for which Vikings are most famous. Originally the same implement that was used to chop wood, battle axes developed into true weapons with longer shafts and heads measuring up to 50 centimetres, or 20 inches. Axes were less effective in battle than swords because they were cumbersome and difficult to manoeuvre among tightly pressed bodies on the fighting fields.

● Swords were the most expensive weapon that Vikings used, so your sword was seen as a real symbol of prestige. Made of refined carbon steel, the sword was the work of a genuine craftsman. The majority were manufactured outside of Scandinavia and imported or stolen during raids. Typically only around 80 centimetres, or 31 inches, long, Viking swords were quite short weapons, rather like the spatha that the Roman army used. A sword was highly manoeuvrable - particularly when compared with an axe.

● Spears were used for thrusting as well as throwing. They were considered cheap weapons, commonly available and easy to replace.

● Knives, particularly the seax, were quite large weapons, almost the size of small swords. They were usually employed as secondary weapons or side-arms, particularly during close quarters in battle.

All Viking warriors protected themselves with oval shields made of wood and wore some kind of armour, typically made of thick leather. Although examples of Viking chain mail have been found, they were very unusual and would have been extremely expensive. As with all medieval warriors (see Chapter 11 for more on ‘knights’), the owner’s wealth and status determined the type and quality of armour.

Visiting the Vikings: Ibn Fadlan

One of the reasons why historians know so much about the Viking world is a travel memoir written by a man called Ibn Fadlan. The Abbasid caliph (flip to Chapter 7 for more on the Islamic caliphs) sent Ibn Fadlan on a diplomatic mission in 921, during which he visited a Viking colony on the Volga River in modern-day Russia.

His resulting document is a fascinating account of two very different civilisations coming together. The Volga Vikings were traders rather than raiders, but their lifestyle was likely to be similar to other Viking communities. As a Muslim, Ibn Fadlan was fastidious about cleanliness and was appalled by what he saw as the dirtiness of Viking society (although, in fact, the Vikings were comparatively clean-living for medieval times).

He is also the main source for information on Viking funerals, including very detailed descriptions of an elaborate ceremony involving the burning of a ship that held the body of a deceased Viking chieftain.

Dispelling misconceptions about the Vikings

The Vikings were a brutal people who practised human sacrifice and whose economy was based on rape, pillage and the slave trade; so, unsurprisingly, lots of myths and misconceptions have grown about them over the centuries.

Here are a few of the best-known Viking tales - along with the facts:

● Horned helmets: Many modern illustrations and representations of the Vikings show them wearing horned helmets, but the vast majority of them probably didn’t do so, possibly aside from at occasional religious ceremonies. This type of headgear would have been incredibly cumbersome in battle and probably quite dangerous to their own side! As for

a horde of rampaging Vikings charging up a beach wearing horned helmets - it never happened!

● Lack of hygiene: Blame anti-Viking propaganda for the idea that the Vikings were smelly savages who lived filthy lives. In fact, the Scandinavian peoples were more fastidious about washing than most of their contemporaries, insisting on bathing one day a week and regularly washing their hair. For one thing, completing the incredibly long sea journeys that Vikings embarked on would have been impossible without massive disease problems - if the Vikings hadn’t been concerned with cleanliness.

● Skull cups: Another enduring Viking myth is the notion that they turned human skulls into drinking vessels. Yes, ritual drinking was a big part of Viking life, but no evidence survives to suggest that they drank from the skulls of their enemies.

● The Blood Eagle: The Blood Eagle was a particularly savage form of execution that appears in Norse saga poetry. The process involved cutting into a victim’s ribs by the spine and then breaking the ribs so they looked like blood stained wings. The lungs were then pulled out and salt was poured into the open wounds. Most modern scholars believe that technique was hardly ever used and is probably quoted by Christian sources in anti-Viking propaganda.

Although the Vikings were a savage and violent people, they quickly adapted to their surroundings and integrated with indigenous peoples. A lot of recent scholarship has focused on this flexibility, and suggests that by the eleventh and twelfth centuries Viking people were almost indistinguishable from their neighbours, leading the quiet and peaceable lives of farmers with only their Scandinavian names to distinguish them.

Viking women?

Although the history of the Viking world is dominated by men, it's important to emphasise the role that women played in the civilisation. Technically, no such thing as a Viking woman existed as the word vikingar is only used to describe men, but none of what I describe in this chapter could have been achieved without women.

Typically in the Norse world, women were in control of the hearth and home, with a particular focus on the food supply (including responsibility for animals and the dairy) and the provision of clothing. These two responsibilities were absolutely vital in the processes of immigration and colonisation that many Norse communities went through. Norse society changed with these processes and also with the coming of Christianity, and women's roles changed as a result. Suddenly women began to have a political influence as Norse women married foreign nobles to cement alliances, and also started to be more publicly involved in religion.

One rune stone from Sweden shows a Norse woman called Ingirun who travelled to Jerusalem on pilgrimage - an amazing journey, and one that was much longer than those undertaken by many of her male vikingar forebears!

Declining and Leaving a Legacy

Historians generally consider that the Viking Age lasted for around 150 years, up to the middle of the eleventh century. At no single point did the Viking civilisation die out, but about this time they cease to appear as frequently in chronicles and narratives.

Changing with the times: Testaments and trade bans

Part of the reason for this gradual disappearance may be because many Viking peoples had emigrated and effectively integrated, living relatively peaceful lives in places such as France and Russia. Other factors, however, may also have contributed to the change, as the following sections reveal.

Getting religion

The coming of Christianity to Scandinavia was one of the major factors in the decline of the Vikings. Christian missionaries first began to make successful inroads into the northern reaches of Europe in the eleventh century, and the new religion quickly took hold of people’s imagination.

As a result, the old pagan ways fell out of favour. Viking civilisation was tribal, and the decision of the king or chieftain was final. Those chiefs who converted to Christianity violently enforced their new faith on everyone. Non-believers were driven out or killed and with them went many tribal traditions, in particular the demands of the warrior culture for conquest, booty and glory.

Chief among the leaders bringing change was Olaf Haralddson, the king of Norway from 1015-1028. Although some conversion had already taken place in Scandinavia, historians consider Olaf the main reason that Norway converted to Christianity.

Olaf’s methods of conversion were notably bloodthirsty and similar to those he used to punish military enemies. Conversion worked, however, and the Norwegian Church was founded in his lifetime. After his death Olaf was made into a saint by the Catholic Church. (For information on the spread of Christianity elsewhere, see Chapter 9.)

Stopping the slave trade

The spread of Christianity also affected the slave trade. During the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the Catholic Church made a number of pronouncements on slavery, in particular banning the trade of Christian people as slaves (see Chapter 7 for more details). These pronouncements presented serious problems for slave traders, not so much because of a lack of supply but due to a fall in demand. In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church completely banned slavery in all Christian countries.

Evading raiding

Raiding became more difficult, too. The gradual settling of the medieval kingdoms such as France and England into large states with strong and consistent rule meant that these territories became significantly better organised and able to defend themselves.

As raiding became more difficult and the profits dried up, the practice eventually died out. By the thirteenth century, the Vikings were taking part in crusades sponsored by the Catholic Church (see Chapter 14), and Denmark and Sweden were involved in the creation of the biggest medieval trading guild - the Hanseatic League (see Chapter 18). The Viking Age was truly at an end.

Reaching far and wide

The Vikings are dominant figures in medieval history. Their impact was varied and widespread, and their regular appearance in medieval chronicles show how much of an influence they had on their contemporaries.

One major impact arose from the Vikings who eventually settled in Northern France. Led by a man called Rollo, these Norsemen were the founders of Norman civilisation. The huge warriors who helped William of Normandy invade England in 1066 were pretty much Vikings through and through. Read all about them in Chapter 10.

Another noticeable impact of the Viking world is the huge population movements that the civilisation inspired. Viking communities settled all over the world, as far apart as Newfoundland and Kiev and in places as diverse as Iceland and modern-day Turkey. These people didn’t just keep to themselves: they slowly integrated and became part of their wider communities.

Researchers using genetic techniques to trace population movements have closely followed a genetic class known as ‘Haplogroup 11’, a group whose Y-chromosome indicates that they link back to the original Vikings. Unsurprisingly, of course, about 40 per cent of adult males in Scandinavia belong to the group, but significant populations also appear all around the world, in America as well as Europe. One study in Liverpool suggests that males born in families who had lived in the city for more than 200 years were 50 per cent more likely to have come from Haplogroup 11. Whatever else the Viking Age produced, it may be that one of the Beatles was a Viking descendant!

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