20

Outer Europe

Anskar was a missionary sent by Louis the Pious to evangelize the Danes and Swedes, which he attempted off and on between 826 and his death in 865. His saint’s life, written by a well-informed younger contemporary, Rimbert, is a rare account of an unsuccessful conversion process. In Denmark, Anskar might have got somewhere, thanks to the patronage of kings Horic I (827-54) and Horic II (854-c. 870), not Christians but not unsympathetic either. But the mission only had patrons (both royal and aristocratic), not any powerful and committed converts, except among some of the merchants of Hedeby, and in the confusion after Horic II’s death it folded. In Sweden, Anskar’s main attempt, probably in the 840s, involved a meeting with King Olaf at the trading town of Birka, in which Olaf said he could not accept the mission without asking his own gods through drawing lots, and without asking the assembly (placitum in Rimbert’s Latin) ‘for it is the custom for [the Swedes] that any public business is more in the will of the unanimous people [populus] than in [that of] royal power’. The lots were negative, but an elder in the assembly argued that the Christian god might help in the face of dangers at sea, and the populus agreed to accept the mission. Olaf agreed to ask another assembly in his kingdom to accept it as well. This assembly politics seems to have been more powerful in Sweden than in Denmark (though there were certainly assemblies there too), but we must note that in both kingdoms the discussion was only about whether to accept a Christian mission, not about whether actually to convert en masse, which did not happen in either. Even if kings were personally Christian, as Håkon I (c. 934-61) was in Norway, they could not easily demand conversion from their countrymen, and Håkon is praised for not trying to do so in a probably contemporary poem. The wider conversion process only began in the late tenth century in Denmark, and later still in Sweden and Norway: it was, in part, a consequence of stronger kingship, although, by Continental European standards, only a little stronger.

When trying to understand European societies outside the ex-Roman and Carolingian kingdoms of the West and South (and, eventually, their Anglo-Saxon offshoot), we need to recognize the weakness of political structures straight away. Royal politics did not delineate the history of the Scandinavians or Slavs with any consistency until the late tenth century. Indeed, it is not clear, despite the certainties of external texts like the Life of Anskar, that rulers had any consistent ‘kingly’ titles; jarlar, jarls or earls, were independent powers in the northerly Trondheim district of Norway until after 1000, for example, and the Slavs seem to have had a very eclectic set of titles for rulers. It may be that there was as yet no clear distinction between ‘kings’ and leading ‘aristocrats’ in either, that is, between independent rulers, nominally dependent but autonomous rulers, and more subject political leaders; aristocrats, too, were probably leaders of followers rather than landlords of tenants for a long time. In Wales, Scotland, and Ireland before 800, as we saw in Chapter 7, rulers were regularly called ‘kings’, but the reges of our sources ruled tiny kingdoms (except in Scotland), and their power was more easily assimilated to that of the small-scale rulers and leading aristocrats of Scandinavia than even to Anglo-Saxon kings, never mind Frankish ones. Some of these regions were beginning to move towards more centralized political systems with stronger rulers by the very end of our period, 950-1000: Poland, Bohemia, the core lands of what is now Russia, and Denmark. Conversely, this process of ‘state- building’ was still highly incomplete in Norway, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; and in Sweden (as in some of the smaller Slav communities) it had hardly started.

These were slow developments, and by no means consistent; kings were stronger in Denmark, for example, in 800 than in 900. But they do act as a guide to comparison, in these non-Carolingian regions. They also give a justification for my decision to consider such heterogeneous cultures together. I do this partly to avoid a set of fragmented chapters, each of them short because the evidence for each region is so very much thinner in the pre-1000 period than it is for Francia, Italy, or England. But the ‘outer European’ lands do have features in common, as we shall see. So also does post-Visigothic northern Spain, which had very different antecedents, but some parallels all the same, and this region is considered here too. One of these common features was the Vikings, who had a major effect in Russia and in Scotland, Ireland and Wales (as also in England, as we have seen). Scandinavia’s internal history cannot be reduced to the Viking label, but it is undeniable that the Vikings at least came from there. We shall start with Scandinavia, therefore; we will then move to the Sclavenian or Slav lands, before moving westwards to Britain, Ireland and Spain.

Denmark is in agricultural terms by far the richest part of Scandinavia - it is an extension of the North European Plain, and is not heavily forested, as are Sweden and Norway - and it was both economically and politically the most complex northern region until well past 1000. Already in the fifth and early sixth centuries it had some very rich centres, as archaeology shows, particularly Gudme on the central island of Fyn, where several dozen houses and a large hall have been excavated, and also a wealth of gold finds, in cemeteries and elsewhere, so far unparalleled in northern Europe. Some of these were locally made; others were imported from the Roman empire. It is most likely that Gudme was a royal or princely centre: not the only one in Denmark, but one which well shows the wealth that Danish rulers could already lay their hands on, at least in the period of west Roman crisis.

This concentration of wealth fell back after 550, and in the next hundred and fifty years Denmark shows more muted, and probably more fragmented, power structures, focused on isolated ‘magnate farms’ and villages. Around 700, however, we can see signs of a larger political system in the south of the Jutland peninsula, in western Denmark; a central power of some sort created Ribe, a trading town parallel to the king-centred emporia of eighth-century England, in 705-10, and in 737 the Danevirke, a defensive wall across the south of the peninsula, was substantially rebuilt. (These unusually exact dates by archaeological standards are based on tree-ring dating.) Southern Jutland was the political zone of the reges Danorum, which Frankish sources begin to name from the 770s; by the time of Godofrid (c. 800-810), the kings seem to have had a hegemony extending throughout the territory of medieval Denmark (which also included modern southern Sweden), and also north into Vestfold around Oslo in southern Norway and south into the territory of the Sclavenian Abodrites. Godofrid even faced off Charlemagne, attacking Frankish Frisia; he founded his own trading town at Hedeby, too. Horic I was his son; it took fifteen years of instability and infighting for him to establish himself, but his opponents all seem from their names to be relatives, indicating a relatively solid hegemony for the family. After the 870s, however, the Danish kingdom broke down, and we hardly even know the names of rival kings for over half a century. It is entirely likely that the unity of the previous century dissolved. Gorm (d. 958) and his son Harald Bluetooth (958-c. 987) had to start again; they were also based in southern Jutland (at Jelling, where Harald set up a large and boastful runic grave-monument for his father), but were probably not from Godofrid and Horic’s family. Harald managed to recreate the Denmark-wide power of the latter, all the same; and his polity was by now notably more organized; nearly identical circular military camps survive in four or five sites in the kingdom, datable to around 980, which show a regularity of military and naval obligation almost certainly invented by Harald himself. Harald claimed hegemony in Norway too; and it was he who was both baptized a Christian (in c. 965) and also began to impose Christianity on his whole kingdom. His son Svein (987-1014) was the conqueror of England, in 1013, as we saw in the last chapter, a clear sign that the military reorganization of his father was more than wishful thinking; and his son Cnut, ruler from England to Norway, was in the 1020s-1030s second only to the German emperors as a western European power.

Norway and Sweden did not match this development, Sweden least of all. The Swedish kings we know of were based in the old ceremonial and cult centre of Uppsala (not far from the rich trading town of Birka, which they also controlled), but they cannot be said to have ruled much outside this area. We do not know the names of most of them up to 1000, and it is likely that even in their core area, not to speak of the rest of the (future) Swedish lands, rulers of different types coexisted with the assembly-based politics which Anskar found. This was also the case in Norway. Norway is very mountainous, and communications between its few fertile areas (Vestfold, the south-west fjords, the Trondheim area) were generally by sea. These areas seem to have had very different histories for a long time, with independent rulers and assemblies; some of these polities must indeed have been very small, as both local ecology and archaeological finds imply. The Danes, who were also seaborne (Denmark being composed largely of islands) could all the more easily establish local hegemonies in parts of Norway, which can be documented more on than off from Godofrid to Cnut. Only in the period of Danish weakness did a Norwegian king, Harald ‘Finehair’ (d. c. 932), try to do the same, extending his hegemony from the south-west to the whole of Norway up to Trondheim, and demanding tribute. It is highly unlikely that Harald had all that much power, and his sons and grandson were locally contested or expelled: Eirík Bloodaxe (c. 932-4) finished his career as king of York (948-9, 952-4), and his brother Håkon I was killed by his nephew, who was himself killed around 970. Later Norwegian kings were adventurers, Olaf Tryggvason (995-1000 - he died in battle against Svein of Denmark) and his cousin Olaf Haraldsson (1015-30 - he died in battle against Norwegian opponents of his centralizing ambitions, who were supported by Cnut). These kings also coexisted with powerful jarls, notably the already-mentioned jarls of Hlaðir in the Trondheim district, dominant in the later tenth century, who were happier with the loose Danish hegemony which was the alternative to local kingship. The Olafs did bring Christianity to Norway, but a stable and uncontested Norwegian kingship did not exist until the mid-eleventh century, or even later.

It is interesting how much opposition these kings in Norway generated. Indeed, later Icelandic traditions consistently ascribe the Norse settlement of Iceland itself to men fleeing Harald Finehair’s tyranny. This is chronologically impossible, for that settlement began around 870, when Harald cannot yet have begun his career, quite apart from the unlikelihood that he was so very powerful. But it is at least true that the Icelanders, who were largely from western Norway (or from its offshoots in Scotland, bringing Irish slaves with them too), set up a political system in their newly settled island in the early tenth century which clearly sought to make difficult any permanent accumulation of power. This system consisted of a hierarchy of legal assemblies, thingar in Old Norse, with an annual all-Iceland assembly (the Althing) at the apex. Each assembly was dominated by three or four locally based political and religious leaders, goðar, who were hereditary, and were certainly the most powerful and the richest local figures; each goðihad free dependants, thingmenn, whom he represented at the assembly. But thingmenn could leave their goði and transfer their loyalty to a rival, thus preventing leaders from throwing their weight around too much. Later Icelandic narratives make it clear that powerful goðar(like Snorri goði in the west, Hall of Sida in the east and Guðmund ‘the Powerful’ in the north, leaders around 1000, the year Iceland accepted Christianity), only established temporary hegemonies based on their charisma and political skill, which would drop back on their deaths. The slowly developing Christian church came largely to fit this political pattern too.

Norway had more stable aristocratic power than this, but later laws, of the Gulathing of the western fjords and the Frostathing of the Trondheim area, show the centrality of assemblies once again, set against a hierarchy of aristocratic (and royal) patronage. It may be best to see the political hierarchy as one of patronage everywhere, in the Norwegian lands as in Iceland, with aristocratic patrons (called variously jarlar, hersir, hauldar, thegnar, goðar), and clients who were generally independently owning free peasants. This was not an egalitarian society, and the free peasantry had slave farm-labourers and servants as well, but royal ambition was external to it, and was resisted for a long time. It is likely, indeed, that this also explains the temporary failure of Danish royal power in the late ninth and early tenth century. Denmark did, at least, have influential local political or ritual leaders, sometimes called goðar in runic inscriptions, as further north. These were probably more subject to kings (and perhaps already had greater tenurial control over their dependants) than in Norway, but were probably also still capable of going it alone if they got the chance - but as patrons, not, as yet, as landowning or seigneurial lords.

Norse literature is late (thirteenth-century for the most part) but sometimes preserves earlier material: exactly how early is much discussed. The practical advice contained in the Hávamál, a set of verse proverbs, probably from Norway, dating quite possibly to the tenth century, conveys some of the values which run through all our sources. ‘Before you walk forward, you should look at, you should spy out, all the entrances; for you can’t be certain where enemies are sitting ahead in the hall.’ ‘The foolish man thinks that everyone is his friend who laughs with him; but then he finds when he comes to the assembly that he has few to speak on his behalf.’ ‘No man should step one pace away from his weapons on the open road.’ ‘He should get up early, the man who means to take another’s life or property.’ ‘Such is the love of women with false minds: it’s like driving a horse without spiked shoes over slippery ice (a frisky two-year-old, badly broken in), or like steering a rudderless boat in a stiff wind, or like trying to catch a reindeer on a thawing hillside when you’re lame.’ This careful, suspicious, macho, pragmatic, peasant culture marked Scandinavia in later centuries, and all the signs are that it did so already.

But Scandinavia also produced the Vikings; they were its best-known export in the ninth and tenth centuries, as they are, overwhelmingly so, today. It would be wrong to see them as too different from the cautious peasants of the Hávamál and later prose sources (such as the Icelandic family sagas); peasants will often happily grab property from the defenceless, especially if they are quick to arms, as Scandinavians generally were. It is best to see the raiding of Viking groups in the two centuries after 800 as the product of several different factors, all of them internal to Scandinavian society. One crucial element is that ship technology improved; the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were all reliant on ships for basic communication between localities, but sails and better keels made ocean-going ships steadily more feasible. The Norwegians used this technology in the early ninth century to colonize the islands of Scotland (lightly settled, so unable to resist), and then in the late ninth and early tenth the almost uninhabited coasts of Iceland. From their Scottish base, the Norwegians then, especially from the 830s or so, raided beyond Scotland to Wales, and, above all, Ireland, where they also found relatively politically weak polities, highly susceptible to hit-and-run seaborne assaults. At roughly the same time, from the 830s, Danish pirate ships (víkingr simply meant ‘pirate’) followed the trade routes from Ribe and Hedeby down to Dorestad, London, York, and began the raids on Francia and England that we looked at in Chapters 16 and 19.

It is wrong to see merchants and pirates as too sharply distinct; any raider becomes a trader if the port is too well defended, and many traders (all necessarily armed, to hold off other pirates) will readily raid if the port, or other coastal settlement, seems weak, and then sell off the booty elsewhere. The merchant-pirate link could thus be seen as a second cause of Viking raiding, in that it could in part simply be traced to the mercantile desire for profit, set off in the case of Francia by the political difficulties of the period after 830, when the attention of Frankish armies was elsewhere. This also fits the Swedish political expansion into Russia, which was the work of trading colonies in the north Russian river systems seizing their chances, as we shall see in a moment, although this involved less raiding of a Viking type. Ships could, in addition - a third element - take away from Scandinavia (and its Scottish and Icelandic colonies) young men anxious for glory and loot before they settled down on their fathers’ farms as peasants again; and also, from Denmark in particular - a fourth element - exiles, political losers in the struggles for increased royal power in the time of the Horics, keen to try their luck abroad. The existence of such exiles, essentially aristocrats or princes and their entourages, was in the ninth century specific to Denmark; they perhaps had a more violent (or ‘heroic’) ethos, and they contributed to the larger size of Viking armies in Francia and England (armies were never so big in Ireland), but they were only an addition to a desire for easy profit that any trader, or even peasant, could relate to. All these elements had plenty of parallels inside Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society, however; it was only ships (and thus surprise, and speedy retreat), and perhaps the absence of royal direction, that made the Vikings different. It was this which justifies Peter Sawyer’s well-known description of Viking raids as ‘an extension of normal Dark Age activity made possible and profitable by special circumstances’.

Viking raiding had very different effects in different areas, all the same. In Ireland, where the Scandinavians were not numerous enough for large-scale territorial conquest, their raids resulted in the formation of a network of trading towns, inserted into the fragmented hierarchies of petty kingdoms that already existed. By contrast, in Russia, where the incoherence of local political structures was even greater, relatively few Scandinavians could eventually establish themselves as a new ruling class. In Francia and England, however, raiding itself developed into a life-choice for many of the Viking leaders of the mid-ninth century, and then, above all in England, into full-blown conquest after 865. We have seen that this, too, did not require huge numbers - thousands rather than tens of thousands - but it was certainly a considerable advance in scale from the raids of previous decades.

This was where the Vikings moved away from simply being a seaborne extension of more ‘normal’ early medieval border relationships, and bid for power on their own behalf. It is significant that it was around then that the Danish kingdom itself failed for two generations; we do not know why in detail, but it is entirely likely that the by-now professional fighters of the river-mouth colonies of the Seine or Loire or Thames had as negative an effect on royal stability in their homeland as they did in eastern England. It is in this context, too, that we hear of our first family of Scandinavians who aimed for political power exclusively abroad, Ívar (d. 873) and his heirs (called by the Irish the Ua hImair), Ívar probably being one of the leaders of the Great Army in England in the 860s, who also ruled in Dublin, the major Norse-founded trading town in Ireland already from the 850s; his descendants held Dublin until 1036 or 1052, and also controlled York and southern Northumbria for much of the early tenth century. Ívar and his most successful emulator in the West, Rollo of Normandy after 911, were new figures, in that they broke the geopolitics of the early Middle Ages by simple force of arms, without a political base. They could also be seen as being in a way throwbacks to the fifth century, for their real counterparts as innovators were arguably Geiseric and Clovis.

This was a genuinely new contribution to the political development of this period. But, all the same, it was a restricted one. Outside the areas of mass settlement and cultural takeover in northern Scotland and Iceland, only Dublin and Normandy survived as Viking political creations, folded into the socio-political realities of Ireland and west Francia/France respectively, and soon culturally almost indistinguishable from them. Arguably, the main political legacy of the Vikings was actually developed in direct opposition to them: the invention by Alfred and Edward the Elder of the kingdom of England. The other two major Scandinavian political interventions, the temporary Danish conquest of England in the 1010s-1040s and the formation of Rus, in modern Russia and Ukraine, were not Viking operations, the former being a straightforward takeover of one kingdom by another, the latter being the crystallization of political power by merchant adventurers along Turkic models. It is true that for a time, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Scandinavians could travel through polities governed by Norse speakers or their immediate descendants from the Arctic Circle nearly to Constantinople, and did so on occasion, as with Harald III Hardráði, ‘Hard-ruler’, king of Norway (1046-66), who had served with the prince of Rus and the Byzantine emperor, and who died attempting to conquer England. But this internationalism soon receded; by now Scandinavian power-politics was more normally focused only on Scandinavia, and Viking exploits became only a romantic memory.

The Slavs present more of a problem than the Scandinavians. They came to cover a vast region of central and eastern Europe, but when and how they came there is hardly documented, either historically or archaeologically. Furthermore their origin has been an ideological football for rival national communities, in most of the zones of the most fervent (and most violent) nationalist disagreement in Europe across the last century. Here, more than elsewhere, we have to make distinctions: between the distribution of people called Sklavnoi/Sclaveni/Sclavi or variants by both Greek and Latin authors; the distribution of common archaeological culture-elements across the zone stretching from the Elbe in the west to the Dniepr in the east and the lower Danube in the south; and the distribution of people speaking early versions of Slavic languages. These three are not the same, however often they have been intermingled. In particular, what languages people spoke in most parts of eastern and central Europe is effectively irrecoverable before the ninth century or so. But language, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, is in any case no guide to identity in our period, and is the least important of these three categories. It is best simply to see Slavic speakers as only one section, although a substantial one, of a set of small-scale communities of settled agriculturalists in the wide territories from the Baltic to the Danube, and moving southwards into the Byzantine Balkans. Nearby groups will have spoken other languages, Germanic, Romance (in parts of Romania and elsewhere), Greek (in the southern Balkans), Baltic (in Belarus and northwards), Finnic (in north-western Russia), and others again, without necessarily being very different the one from the other in material terms.

What can be said, on the other hand, is that from the sixth century a distinct set of related archaeological characteristics can be found increasingly widely in this large region. These included villages of a few houses each, single-roomed houses with partly sunken floors and a stone oven or hearth, simple handmade ceramics (these however have parallels in other small-scale early medieval societies), bow fibulae and head-dresses for women, a tendency to cremation burials, and a relative absence of signs of social differentiation. The lands in which these broad common elements (with substantial local variation) are found steadily became more extensive; in parts of the Elbe valley, for example, villages with sunken-floored houses are first found in the late sixth or seventh centuries, and in many places they succeed settlements with cemeteries more similar to those in Frankish/Saxon/Aleman areas. It is likely that the communities which lived like this had weak social and political hierarchies; this fits the absence of strong archaeological differentiation, and also the persistent stress by east Roman/Byzantine writers of the sixth century and later on the weakness of political leadership among the Sklavnoi living on the Balkan frontier of this culture-area. This doubtless means that they operated in very small political-social groups or tribes, and we know some (though only some) of their multifarious and ever-changing names. As with the Germani north of the Roman empire in the fourth century and earlier (see above, Chapter 2), only external observers, far from well informed, saw them as a whole; a common ‘Slavic’ identity did not ever exist, either in the early Middle Ages or later, and local tribal loyalties were in our period what guided them. What links them all together is simply the network of the common material culture just described. On the other hand, these small groups were not militarily or politically ineffective, as their expansion shows. In the west, they may have been moving into relatively underpopulated areas, until by the seventh century they were on the fringes of the Merovingian world; in the south, however, they took over a good part of the Balkans from the Byzantine state itself after 600, as we saw in Chapter 11.

These peoples are simply called ‘Slavs’ by most scholars. This, however, seems to me as problematic as calling the Germanic-speaking, or, more widely, ‘barbarian’, peoples of the fifth century ‘Germans’: these are later terms, which introduce concepts of language and identity that are anachronistic in this period. As in previous chapters, I here use the term ‘Sclavenian’ to cover all of the lands of the material culture discussed in the previous paragraph. This reflects the fact that both Franks and Byzantines did indeed know their neighbours collectively as Sclaveni, even if not all the Sclavenian communities as defined here would have necessarily been called by such a term even by the Franks and Byzantines, and even though none of the Sclavenians would have used the term themselves. Slavic languages did however spread across most - never all - of this wide culture-area in the end, of course. Already in the early ninth century Einhard claimed that the peoples on the Carolingian borders ‘almost all speak a similar language’, presumably Slavic; by the tenth century we can be surer that Slavic languages were a common feature of the culture-area, and for this period and later I use the term ‘Slav’ more freely. (‘Slavic’ will only be used for the language-group. Slavic languages, particularly in the south and east, are also often called ‘Slavonic’, but that term is used here only for the liturgy introduced by missionaries from Byzantium.)

The Sclavenians remained a large set of tiny polities into the eighth century, and often beyond. The zoupaniai on the Adriatic coast mentioned by Constantine VII in the mid-tenth century, some by now crystallized into Croatia though some not, had hardly more than a score of villages each, or indeed less. Tribes of this kind formed temporary alliances to make military attacks, as with the five separate named groups who besieged Thessaloniki in the 610s, much as Germanic tribes had done in the late Roman empire. Their rulers seem to have been chieftains at best, maybe only ‘big men’ or local leaders/patrons, like Icelandic goðar, subsisting on small-scale tributes. By the later eighth century, particularly in what is now eastern Germany, Poland and western Ukraine, strongholds begin to appear in the archaeology, with earth and timber ramparts, indicating more elaborate organizational hierarchies, although not necessarily larger-scale, or with permanent leaders. This fragmented political structure made Sclavenian society vulnerable once Frankish power developed in what is now central and southern Germany in the later sixth century, and even more so when Pippin III and Charlemagne revived Frankish aggression in the eighth, pushing their borders up to the edge of the Sclavenian culture-area right across Europe, from the Abodrites on the Baltic coast to the Carantani on the Adriatic. Although the Carolingian Franks never attempted permanent conquests of Sclavenian groups, they raided constantly; it was in the Carolingian period that the word sclavusbecame a new word for ‘slave’, and slave trading, to the Arab world in particular, became a major economic feature of the ninth century - it underpinned the prosperity of the Adriatic’s new major seaport, Venice, as we shall see in Chapter 22. At the same time as this, the Byzantines re-formed their own power structures, and, from the mid-eighth century, began to make inroads on the Sclavenian communities of the central and southern Balkans. Faced with these new threats, if the Sclavenians did not organize themselves more effectively, they would be in serious trouble. They did so in two ways: by accepting external overlords, and by reorganizing themselves internally in the direction of stronger political structures, often under the influence of their Byzantine and Carolingian neighbours and enemies. Let us look at these in turn.

There had always been the possibility of wider hegemonies in the Sclavenian world, usually established by Turkic-speaking nomadic groups coming west from central Asia into the south Russian/Ukrainian steppe lands and then, sometimes, into the Danube basin, who could be militarily very effective for short periods. As we have seen, the Huns were the first in the period of this book, at a time when Gothic tribal groups predominated in this part of Europe; in the sixth and early seventh century, it was the turn of the Avars, who had a wide domination over Sclavenian tribes in the Balkans, and who besieged Constantinople in loose alliance with the Persians in 626. This Avar power was, like that of the Huns, temporary, and already by the mid-seventh century it was restricted to the core Avar territory, the Pannonian plain, modern Hungary. In the eastern Balkans it was replaced by that of the longest lasting of these Turkic groups, the Bulgars, whose hegemony south of the Danube began in 680 and developed into a permanent state in the ninth century. As we saw in Chapters 11 and 13, the Bulgars borrowed political practices wholesale from the Byzantines; Constantinople was very close to them, so this was relatively easy, and, if they did not do so, the resurgent Byzantines would be bound to undermine their power. This did indeed happen in the end, with Basil II’s conquest in 1014-18; but Bulgar survival until then (and revival two centuries later) was in great part due to direct imitation of their stronger neighbours. Their Sclavenian subjects were presumably happy for the Bulgar khagans (after c. 913, tsars) to do this; it was preferable to external attack, rapine and enslavement.

Non-Turkic hegemonies occurred as well. The first and briefest was that of Samo, the Frankish merchant who united some west Sclavenian groups roughly in the area of the modern Czech Republic for a generation in the seventh century in the face of both the Avars and Dagobert I and his heirs. Samo’s power disappeared after his death, and it is not even really certain where his base was (his people are called Wends in Frankish sources, but this is almost as generic a word as Sclavenus); but it is clear that his hegemony was largely a reaction to Frankish danger, and it is significant that even a temporary larger-scale political structure in the west of the Sclavenian lands was the work of a foreigner, at least in this early period. The Hungarians need recognition in this respect, too, as the next major nomadic group to reach Pannonia, in the 890s, for they were Uralic-speaking, not Turkic, although in many respects they replicated Avar hegemony for a long time. They were more long-lasting as a cultural presence than the other external ruling groups discussed here, however, for when they settled down in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and began to organize a political system along Bohemian/Polish (and thus, by extension, Frankish) lines, they continued to speak a Uralic, not a Slavic, language, and still do.

By far the most successful non-Turkic hegemony in the long run was that of the Rus. They began as Swedish merchant groups settled in the river valleys behind modern St Petersburg, and their trading settlements have been found at, above all, Staraya Ladoga in the eighth century and Gorodishche in the ninth (the latter, after the mid-tenth century, replaced by nearby Novgorod), with artisanal goods similar to those of sites like Birka. These Swedish settlers must have been the communities referred to in the Annals of Saint-Bertin for 839, and by Byzantine sources of the next century, as Rhos; the Saint-Bertin annalist also called the Rhos Swedes, and ‘Swede’ in Estonian, the nearest Finnic language, is Root’si. They specialized in the fur trade, taking advantage of the presence of valuable fur-bearing animals in the Russian forests, and were middlemen, along with the Bulgar merchant settlements on the Volga, for an increasingly important trade in fur and, soon, slaves along the great rivers of Russia to Iran and what is now Uzbekistan, in return for Islamic silver coins, which can be found in substantial quantities in Sweden. They had a chacanus in 839, that is, a khagan, a standard Turkic word for ruler, and thus some local political organization, presumably already including a hegemony over some of the local tribes (who were probably Finnic-speaking in this area). The Rus were ambitious; it is not clear when they turned their buying of furs into a tribute of furs from an increasingly large tract of forest land, but this was probably well under way when they launched an unsuccessful but extremely daring surprise attack on Constantinople itself - a long way from these northern rivers - in 860. They also extended their hegemony southwards into Slavic-speaking areas (east was blocked by the Volga Bulgars), first to Gnëzdovo (close to modern Smolensk) and then, by 900 or so, to Kiev, further south down the Dniepr on the river route to Byzantium, with which they signed very profitable trading treaties in the tenth century.

It is as rulers of Kiev that named kagani or knyaz‘i, generally translated ‘princes’, of the Rus first begin to be reliably documented in the tenth century, in contemporary Byzantine and Frankish sources, as also in the perhaps late eleventh-century, and certainly early twelfth-, Russian Primary Chronicle: Igor (d. c. 945), who attacked Constantinople again in 941; his widow Ol’ga, ruling for her son Svyatoslav (c. 945-65); Svyatoslav as an adult ruler (c. 965-72); and his most successful son, Vladimir (c. 978-1015). By then, they ruled from Novgorod to the edge of the Ukrainian steppes, and were attacking eastwards to the Bulgars on the Volga, southwards to the Khazars on the Don and into Balkan Bulgaria, and westwards to Polotsk (where Vladimir removed a rival Scandinavian, Rogvolod) and in the direction of what is now Poland. Vladimir died in control of a very large area, around the size of Ottonian East Francia, although including a far smaller population, for the area was and is mostly forest, except for settlements along the rivers. And this hegemony, unlike most others just discussed, remained stable. Vladimir’s numerous heirs maintained an exclusive family dominance over this core Russian territory until the Mongol invasion of 1237-40; no matter how many principalities they created and fought over, no non-family-member ruled anywhere in the Russian lands after Rogvolod until the Mongol Batu. The dominance of Igor’s family indeed went back to the earliest period they are documented, for Ol‘ga’s long rule askniagina, only nominally associated with her son, seems to have been uncontested and effective, indicating an unchallenged dynastic stability - out of all the female rulers of different kinds in tenth-century Europe, from Marozia through Theophanu to Æthelflæd, Ol’ga may well have been the most powerful.

There cannot have been many Scandinavians in most of the territory of Rus: outside the northern trading towns, only some of the immediate entourage of the tenth-century princes had Scandinavian names, and after Igor (Ingvar) and Ol‘ga (Helga) the princes themselves used East Slavic, that is, Old Russian/Ukrainian, names. All our evidence indicates that East Slavic was the dominant language in Kiev, and it steadily spread northwards; by the time of our earliest birchbark letters and documents, found by archaeologists in excavation levels starting in the eleventh century, it was dominant even in Novgorod. The Scandinavian elements in Rus probably simply consisted of the tightness and ambition of the ruling dynasty, which acted as a catalyst for a wider territorial crystallization. The core techniques of rule over that territory, by contrast, seem essentially to have been taken over from contemporary Turkic hegemonies, the Volga Bulgars and the main seventh- to tenth-century rulers over the southern steppes, the Khazars: the title khagan was borrowed from either the Bulgars or the Khazars, and the basic pattern of rule over dependent Finnic- and Slavic-speaking tribes, the extraction of tribute, was also a long-standing Turkic tradition; aristocratic or royal landownership of a type recognizable in western Europe was only a much later medieval development. The construction of an extensive network of long-distance defensive ramparts in the Kiev region under Vladimir (something which shows his control of local manpower) has Bulgarian parallels, too. The systematic foundation of large fortified towns as regional political centres from the late tenth century, which earned Rus the name of Garðaríki, the ‘land of towns’, in some Scandi navian texts, seems however to have had Sclavenian antecedents, as implied by the western Sclavenian fortresses already mentioned. So may have been the druzhina or military entourage that every rival prince had and which acted as the basic underpinning of all princely power, although such entourages were common features of all such societies, and had plenty of Germanic and Turkic parallels. But, of course, once the Rus polity developed past a simple military hegemony, it would inevitably draw more on the social structures of the main body of the population, which was increasingly clearly Sclavenian/Slav. This it did ever more steadily henceforth.

It can finally be added that, towards the end of our period, yet another political resource was added to the Kievan principality, Byzantine Christianity. The Rus, after their initial raids southwards, were more fully accepted into the Byzantine diplomatic network. As we saw in Chapter 13, it is entirely likely that Svyatoslav’s attacks on Bulgaria in 967 were initially encouraged by Constantinople; Vladimir’s troops were, furthermore, essential to Basil II’s political success in 989. This was the setting for a religious shift as well. The Khazars had Jewish rulers; this already provided a model for taking on a new faith, but it is likely that the Rus felt they needed a different religion from the Khazars, and they were anyway close enough to the Byzantines politically for Orthodoxy to be a logical next step. Ol‘ga had been personally converted in Constantinople around 955; Vladimir, for his part, formally accepted Christianity for his whole people in about 988. The conversion process was very slow to extend outside the court, but this moment of acceptance allowed the institutions of the church, and a Christian imagery of legitimate rulership, to take root in Rus and steadily to spread. The churches of Kiev were impressive, and the early eleventh-century building of St Sophia, built by Byzantine craftsmen, still stands as the largest and most completely decorated Byzantine church of that century. Administrative and artisanal traditions were borrowed from Constantinople and developed in Kiev, too. The Rus took on these Byzantine influences without any of the dangers the Bulgars faced, as they were too far away for Constantinople to take them over, and they could thus be as creative as they liked with them. This hybrid power, Turkic, Sclavenian and Byzantine, with a dash of Scandinavian, maintained an essential stability from now on, as eastern Europe’s most effective political player.

The western Sclavenian peoples did not have these external hegemonies, but in the ninth and tenth centuries they too, on the basis of internal developments, began to organize themselves into rather larger political groupings than had existed hitherto. The first of these was Moravia, the major sparring-partner of the East Franks in the ninth century, as we saw in Chapter 16; the Moravians are first referred to in the 820s, and three generations of powerful rulers, Mojmír (c. 830-46), Rastislav (846-70) and Sviatopluk or Zwentibald (870-94), extended their power widely in what is now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and further afield still. Where their political centre was has been debated recently, with arguments proposed, on the basis of Constantine VII’s ethnographic writing and the wars described in the Annals of Fulda, for a core Moravian principality located as far south as Sirmium, in modern northern Serbia. But the concentration of large ninth-century fortified settlements in modern Moravia (the eastern part of the Czech Republic), notably Stare Mesto and Mikulice, with gold and silver finds and a more complex production of iron and pottery, is a fairly clear sign of a strong political power and of developed social hierarchies, so this traditional location for ninth-century Moravia continues to seem the most plausible. The material basis of Moravian power was a development out of the smaller-scale stronghold societies of the previous century, with autonomy made possible by now by the end of the last vestiges of Avar hegemony. All the same, the impetus for this level of political aggregation must have been the Frankish threat, which presumably legitimized more stable and ambitious political hierarchies. Frankish emulation led also to the adoption of Latin Christianity from the 830s onwards, apart from a brief flutter in 863-85 with Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodios; see Chapter 13. The Moravian principality could well have developed into an organized state along Carolingian lines, however hostile it was to Carolingian political influence, just as, in the Byzantine orbit, did Bulgaria. It is increasingly clear that the same is true of the smaller Croat duchy/principality which developed in the 820s or so on the Dalmatian coast in modern south Croatia, this time under direct Carolingian patronage; ninth-century Croat material culture, notably more complex than earlier, as in Moravia, shows a strong influence of Frankish metal-working and Italian stone-carving techniques, and a handful of Latin documents from the 840s onwards show Italian influence even over concepts of landowning, as well as Carolingian-style court officials. The Hungarians destroyed Moravian power between 894 and 905, but the Croat principality continued, and Tomislav (c. 910-29) was even recognized as rex, king, by Pope John X in 925.

Bohemia, the core of the Czech lands, was closer to Francia than was Moravia, but was protected and given geographical identity by thickly forested mountains to the west, which have in fact been a political border more or less without a break from the seventh century to the present day. This region, too, shows a steady increase in hill-fort strongholds in the ninth century, implying increased social stratification, and then a move towards unification under Moravian patronage by Boivoj I (d. c. 890). This early Czech polity crystallized around Prague in the early tenth century, and hesitantly (with several changes of direction) accepted Latin Christianity, especially under Václav I (921-c. 930, ‘Good King Wenceslas’) and his brother and murderer Boleslav I (c. 930-72). Boleslav’s power extended into Moravia and modern southern Poland too, although it broke up again under his heirs, largely because of aristocratic resistance, in this case to the (temporary) benefit of the Poles. Václav was forced to accept East Frankish hegemony, which led to his death, whereas Boleslav resisted it. Either way, however, Bohemia was marked by a Latin ecclesiastical politics and by intermittent recognition of Ottonian-Salian overlordship.

To the north of Bohemia, the next polity to form was that of the Poles. The territory occupied by modern Poland had many tribes, as elsewhere in the Sclavenian (we can now say Slav) lands; the peoples of central Poland around Gniezno and Pozna were not particularly special among them. But under Mieszko I (c. 962-92) they rapidly achieved a dominance which extended up to the Baltic. This was a more sudden shift towards political aggregation than in Moravia or Bohemia. The abandonment of many of the ninth-century tribal strongholds of the future Polish lands in the late tenth century shows a sharp change in the structure of political power; Mieszko and his heirs, the Piast dynasty, built new ones. Mieszko was keen to ally with the Ottonians and their Saxon dukes and marquises, who were less of a threat than in Bohemia, as his power-base was set back from the areas of tenth-century Saxon conquest; he accepted Christianity in 966, with a bishop in Pozna in 968. This alliance continued in the era of the western Slav revolt against the Saxons in 983 and onwards; by then it was a cover for further Piast political expansion, and under Bolesław Chrobry, ‘the Brave’ (992- 1025), Piast power extended into Bohemia, eastwards towards Rus, and by the 1000s was explicitly directed against the marches of Saxony. As in Moravia and Bohemia, this hegemony did not last, and the Piast polity was already in trouble by the 1030s, although Mieszko’s dynasty continued until the fourteenth century, by which time Poland was a more coherent and long-lasting kingdom.

Each of these three, Moravia, Bohemia and Piast Poland, probably expanded too fast for their fairly simple political infrastructures, essentially based on tribute to the ruler and his druzhina, to cope. They were notably less stable than the otherwise similar Rus polity; it is likely that the Turkic models the Rus followed were more successful, but it also may be that stresses and dangers to political authority were greater in the western Sclavenian/Slav lands, given the Frankish threat there. The establishment of church hierarchies would nonetheless add eventually, after 1000, to the infrastructural resources available to these rulers, and so would more elaborate networks of political dependence, and the establishment of privately owned landed estates as the basis of aristocratic and royal or princely wealth, all of these developments being influenced by Frankish (we can now say German) example. It is significant that later attempts at unification in the eleventh century were more successful, both in Bohemia and (more uncertainly) in Poland. It is only then, in fact, that Bohemia and Poland can really be separated out at all; ‘Poland’, in particular, was invented by the Piasts out of a network of tribal groups with no natural boundaries separating them off from their neighbours.

The slow development of stable hierarchies was a common feature of the Slav world by 1000, and it extended to Hungary too, with Isztván (Stephen) I (997-1038) in the role of Mieszko and Vladimir as a Chris tianizer and organizer. Leaders turned into lords, chieftains into princes or kings, strongholds into towns, tribute into rent. We saw this process earlier in the western Germanic lands and in Anglo-Saxon England, and it was matched in the tenth and eleventh centuries by slower but parallel developments in Denmark and Norway too. These hierarchies and governmental systems were generally influenced, often quite heavily, by neighbours, whether Byzantine, Frankish or Turkic. They were often a direct response to Byzantine or Frankish threat, as in Moravia and Bohemia, in Bulgaria, and in part also in Denmark; we can also add here Celtic-speaking Brittany, whose mid-ninth-century independent kings, notably Salomon (857-74), clearly used Frankish techniques of government, until the kingdom went under as a result of Viking raids. But they were often also a more internal, even if often quite sudden, development, the work of ambitious political leaders riding on a tide of military success inside territories less menaced from outside, and stabilizing power using external models as a follow-on from that, as in Rus, in Poland, and, in the Germanic world, in Mercia and perhaps in Norway.

It can be added, finally, that in some places, in Bohemia and Poland, and also in Norway, this political aggregation was also resisted, at least when territorial expansion ran into difficulties: either by other leading families, or by smaller tribes reluctant to lose their own identity and traditions. In Poland, indeed, the 1030s saw a resurgence of tribal identity, and the abandonment of Christianity in some areas. This resurgence had already been presaged by the Slav revolt in the 980s, in which the Liutizi, a tribal confederation on the Baltic coast around the mouth of the Oder, threw off Saxon tribute-taking, church landowning, and all elements of Christianization. Thietmar of Merseburg indignantly recounts details of their pagan cults, and also describes their reliance on assembly politics and their avoidance of single rulers; this is significant, for by now it represented a resistance not only to Saxon rule but also to the developing hierarchies of the Slav lands themselves. Such a resistance has parallels in Iceland, as we have seen, but Iceland was safely far away in the north Atlantic; the Liutizi were under threat from both sides, from both Saxony and Poland. All the same, the Baltic coast remained a zone of relatively weak political institutions into the central Middle Ages.

The Scandinavian and Sclavenian/Slav lands were Christianized late, and our information about them derives from either Frankish/Byzantine sources or from archaeology; a survey of them has to be a rather external construct, from scattered evidence. The Celtic-speaking lands of Britain and Ireland were different from this; they were solidly Christian well before 800, when we can take up their history here, and they have their own documentation, although this is scarce for Scotland. They show parallels, all the same, to the sorts of development we have been looking at here, in particular with regard to Brittany.

In Chapter 7 we left the Welsh with four major kingdoms in 800, but with very simple politico-administrative structures, based on small-scale wars, a feasting culture linking kings to their entourages, and the taking of (probably fairly restricted) tributes from dependants and from subject territories. In the next two centuries this basic pattern continued, but with developments that went in two, opposite, directions.

The first is the evidence we have for political aggregation. The Welsh seem by now to have seen themselves as a conceptual unity, the Cymry, however politically divided. The Great Prophecy of Britain, Armes Prydein Vawr, a south Welsh text dating to around 930, prophesies the uniting of the Welsh and the expulsion of the English with great enthusiasm: ‘The Cymry will prevail through battle, well equipped, unanimous, one in word and faith’, and, with the help of the Irish, Scots and Dublin Vikings, will reunite Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall under their rule. This sense of identity was a cultural one (it has parallels with the Angli of Bede and the all-English church hierarchy of Theodore of Tarsus), but it can be widely found in our sources. The Welsh probably gained definition because of the English danger, and indeed they generally saw themselves as being entitled to the whole of Britain, from most of which they had been unjustly expelled: eleventh-century Welsh prose literature, however fantastic in format, routinely centres itself around kings of ‘this island’, ‘the island of Britain’.

Hence or otherwise, from the ninth century we find kings with rather more extensive territorial ambitions than before. Rhodri Mawr, ‘the Great’ (844-77), was the mould-breaker: based in Gwynedd in the north-west, long the most influential kingdom, he took over Powys in the east in 855 and Ceredigion in 872, thus coming to rule half of Wales, and raided extensively in the south. Although he was exiled to Ireland after defeat by the Vikings in 877, and was killed by the English a year later, his hegemony continued under his sons, led by Anarawd (d. 916). Anarawd’s nephew Hywel Dda, ‘the Good’, ap Cadell (d. 950), married into the dynasty of Dyfed in the south-west and in 904 was recognized as king there; he fought his Gwynedd cousins thereafter, and in 942-50 took over their lands, thus controlling three-quarters of Wales. This hegemony was probably re-established by his grandson Maredudd ab Owain in 986-99, and certainly in 1055-63 by a later king of Gwynedd, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, whose father had married Maredudd’s daughter (Welsh genealogical legitimacy accepted female-line succession more easily than that of either England or Ireland). Gruffudd also subjected south-eastern Wales, hitherto independent of the Rhodri dynasty, in 1055, so for eight years was the first Welsh king of all Wales - and the only one ever, apart from Henry VII.

A storyline can thus be (and has been) created of steady national unification, only spoilt by the English (Harold Godwineson destroyed Gruffudd ap Llywelyn’s hegemony in 1063) and, later, the Normans. This increasing royal power could be said to be reinforced by law; Welsh law, although only surviving in thirteenth-century and later texts, systematically attaches itself to Hywel Dda as a legislator, a tradition which may well be in some way authentic (though the content of the law is certainly later) - Hywel spent time in the English royal court, and could well have picked up ideas from, for instance, Æthelstan. Our church documentation, too, shows a few signs of a greater coherence of rulership by the end of the tenth century, with local military service, perhaps more systematic tribute-taking, judicial rights, from which churches such as the south-eastern bishopric of Llandaff sought to gain exemptions. The Welsh might then match the Danes, Bohemians and Bulgars as a people learning techniques of rule from the example of a much more powerful and dangerous neighbour, although one of these techniques was not, of course, the Christian church, for Wales had always been Christian.

All the same, this greater coherence had not got very far by 1000 (or 1063); and it was matched by opposite tendencies. One is that the wider hegemonies listed above were all very short; no king after Rhodri Mawr passed his conquests to his heirs, and most hegemonic rulers spent their lives fighting to maintain their power. Another is the interference of outside forces. For all the anti-Englishness of the Armes Prydein, kings of its writer’s era were routinely subject to the king of England and paid him tribute; that was one of the reasons for the poet’s anger, and also for Hywel Dda’s presence in the English court. English kings from Alfred to Edgar (though not Æthelred II or Cnut) expected it. The Vikings sometimes took tribute, too; although Rhodri Mawr’s fall was a chance event, Viking coastal raids were regular, and there is some evidence for a full-blown hegemony by the Norse rulers of Dublin or the Isle of Man over parts of Gwynedd in the late tenth and early eleventh century. A third development is a growing incoherence in the titles of rulers; quite unlike the trends in the Scandinavian and Slav worlds, fewer rulers are called rex in Latin sources after 950 or so, and a greater array of terms appear in Welsh texts from then on; the tendency of Welsh rulers to call themselves ‘princes’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was beginning here, although the greatest rulers, like Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, could certainly still use (or be ascribed) the title of ‘king’.

This shift away from royal titles is not a sign of Welsh subjection. Rather, it marks confusion: as Welsh polities became larger, they did not become markedly more stable and better organized. Kings and their retinue (teulu) remained at the centre of kingdoms; there were also mercenaries, but few local officials. Justice, even if more tightly organized, was still for the most part in the hands of local elders and notables, with, it would seem, more of an input from local churches than from most kings (much of our knowledge of the righting of wrongs comes from ecclesiastical narratives of churches and their saints, calling kings themselves to account for their misdeeds). Given a general lack of infrastructure, the growing claims to wide but temporary hegemonies after 850 or so were a cause, not of centralization and pacification, but of instability. In this sense Wales did not fit the Danish model; this would only come later, in strategically much more difficult times, after around 1200, when the princes of Gwynedd borrowed consistently from English practice.

Scotland had a larger core kingdom, Alba, taken over in the 840s by Cinaed mac Ailpín (Kenneth I) as we saw at the end of Chapter 7, and extending throughout most of the Scottish mainland from the Firth of Forth northwards. We know the names of its kings, all descendants of Kenneth except one (Macbeth, 1040-57), though fighting it out in Irish fashion across two or three rival lines. Its heart was the old Pictish kingdom (the name ‘Alba’ only appears in 900), but from the 890s or so we can see more and more signs of Irish culture and Irish church organization, and the Pictish language seems to have fallen out of use. The kings of Alba did not control the whole of modern Scotland, however. The islands and far north were all by now under Scandinavian rule, and the Orkneys and Shetlands (with Caithness) were wholly Scan dinavianized; the jarls of Orkney were from the tenth century serious players, notably Sigurd ‘the Stout’ (d. 1014), and his son Thorfinn ‘the Mighty’ (d. 1065), who ruled south to the Isle of Man. South of the Forth and Clyde, there were Welsh and English polities too, the Welsh kings of Strathclyde in the Glasgow region and the south-west, and the kings of Northumbria, later lords of Bamburgh, in Lothian. These ceded ground to the Scottish kings, however; Scotland stably included Lothian after perhaps the 970s - the 1010s at the latest - and the kings of Strathclyde are not certainly heard of after 1018. By then, the mainland kingdom of Scotland was largely formed, the work of influential and long-lived kings like Constantine II (900-943), Kenneth II (971-95) and Malcolm II (1005-34).

Here, too, however, we must be cautious. We know almost nothing of the inner workings of the Scottish kingdom. Its northern third, Moray, certainly had semi-independent ‘mormaers’ (sometimes also called ‘kings of Alba’ in Irish sources) with their own dynasty - Macbeth was one of them, in fact. Mormaers appear elsewhere as local aristocrats and military leaders, too; it cannot be said how autonomous or how dynastic (or how Pictish) they were, but it would be unwise to assume full royal control over them. The early Scottish kingdom was very large by Irish (or indeed Welsh) standards, and also by and large internally stable, notwithstanding succession disputes; but it is hard not to feel that the near-total absence of documentation for it betrays a relative evanescence of royal authority. Again, more coherent political power structures belonged to a much later period, in this case the twelfth century, and were associated with a conscious policy of acceptance of English (or ‘Norman’) influence and even settlement: the Danish or Bohemian model again, although this time attached to a secure political system which had already achieved its basic territorial expansion.

Of these Celtic-speaking political systems, Ireland is the best documented - in fact, in many ways it is the best-documented society in this chapter - but that does not make it straightforward to read. Here, the network of tribal hierarchies, unstable, but at least unstable according to recognizable political rules in each of the five provinces of Ireland, was beginning to come apart by the eighth century, thanks to more ambitious kings (as described in Chapter 7), and here the impact of the Vikings was to pull it further apart. Eighth-century kings were beginning to attack the major centres of wealth and power that the greater monasteries had become; over-kings were beginning to take the dependence of lesser kings for granted as a permanent part of their political base (in Latin annals, after 750 some lesser kings are beginning to be called dux rather than rex). In some areas, too, successful kingdoms were not just demanding tribute and hostages from lesser kingdoms, but appropriating their territory, as the Uí Briúin Bréifne did as they spread east and north from their base in southern Co. Leitrim into Co. Cavan in the late eighth century, or as the Déis Tuaiscirt (later called Dál Cais) did as they spread north from eastern Co. Limerick to eastern Co. Clare a generation earlier. These were both minor kingdoms, operating outside the main political networks of the Uí Néill of western Ulster and Meath and the Éoganachta of Munster, and the scale of their expansion was pretty small, but they show that the tribal kingdom map of Ireland was not written in stone.

On one level, the Vikings simply showed these processes more clearly. Initially, after 795, they just plundered coastal settlements, largely monasteries. Even when their attacks expanded in scale in the 830s, they resembled the annual inter-kingdom raiding which the Irish were very familiar with. Then, when they began to over-winter in the 840s, on Lough Neagh in Ulster, in Dublin in Meath and on Lough Ree in the centre of the island, and even more when they founded more permanent settlements, as Dublin became, followed by Cork, Waterford, Limerick, they resembled the rougher end of the small-scale ambitious kingdoms just described; indeed, the Limerick settlement largely just displaced the southern half of the Déis Tuaiscirt/Dál Cais kingdom, pushing them north into Clare. Dublin was the most powerful and dangerous of these new polities, and in the 850s it became the focus of substantial reinforcements, but the Vikings never engaged in large-scale territorial conquest in Ireland. It was too difficult, with all those tiny kingdoms, and also not hugely remunerative, as there were too few stores of movable wealth (as in eastern Europe, slaves were Ireland’s most valuable exportable commodity). Dublin’s main political ambitions looked westwards, to the Irish Sea and York (above, Chapter 19). By the 860s the Dublin Vikings were already integrated into Irish political alliances, and there they remained, apart from a brief period, 902-17, in which they were expelled altogether. A revival of raiding in the 910s-920s followed the same trajectory. Dublin’s other, and perhaps major, role (matched on a lesser scale by the other Viking settlements) was as Ireland’s first proper town, an important trading settlement, some of which has been excavated, showing intense artisanal activity in bone, leather, wood (including ship-building) and cloth: Ireland’s answer to York and Hedeby.

In political terms, however, the Vikings were a catalyst in two ways. The first was that in order to defeat them, wider alliances were necessary than had been needed by province-level wars in the past, thus reinforcing the pre-existing tendency of the most ambitious kings to make their own rules of engagement. The second was that Dublin happened to be situated in one of the traditional (and also agriculturally richest) heartlands of Irish politics, Meath, the area of operation of the southern Uí Néill kingdoms. This long-term strategic weakening of the power-base of the southern Uí Néill in the end caused their eclipse, although that was not until the eleventh century. In the meantime, if the paramount dynasties of the province, notably in this period Clann Cholmáin, were to maintain their importance in insular politics, then they would have to be even more creative.

This was the background, then, for some kings to move in new directions. Let us look at three examples, to show some of the parameters now possible. The first is Feidlimid mac Crimthainn (d. 847), from the Éoganacht of Cashel, who had taken the kingship of Cashel (that is, the paramount kingship of Munster) in 820; he established unusually wide alliances in west Munster and also Leinster, and by 830-31 was attacking northwards into Connacht and Meath; by 840 he was ravaging Meath, and camped at Tara itself, locus of the Uí Néill paramount kingship, a sign of new ambition for a Munster king. Feidlimid also realized the importance of ecclesiastical politics, and attempted to form links with the major monastic centre of Armagh in northern Ireland; he became abbot of Cork in 836, and of Clonfert in Connacht in 838, and was a major patron of the ascetic Céli Dé movement. Conversely, he was ruthless with rival ecclesiastical powers, burning the monasteries of Durrow and Kildare, and, above all, Clonfert’s neighbour Clonmacnois, on three or four occasions. Feidlimid was later seen as pious, and, by Irish royal standards, may well have been; but what he was doing was creating his own politico-religious structures in his own image, and was indeed, it seems, aiming at nothing less than the high-kingship of Ireland itself.

The high-kingship was a new concept; it is barely attested before this period. Exactly what it entailed was equally unclear: certainly hegemony over both Cashel and Tara, the old symbolic centres of Éoganachta and Uí Néill rule, but then what? Submission from every Irish king? Feidlimid did not securely gain even the former, still less the latter, but the idea was by now on the cards. Máel Sechnaill I mac Máele Ruanaid (d. 862) of Clann Cholmáin, king of Tara and thus hegemonic over the Uí Néill from 846, was the first king to make the claim more or less real, in the next generation. Máel Sechnaill had a powerful track record as an opponent of Vikings (unlike Feidlimid), sacking Dublin itself in 849 and fighting off their reinforcements in the 850s; he was therefore in a good position to gain submission from both Leinster and Connacht, and also, unusually, the Ulaid kingdoms of eastern Ulster, who were at risk from Viking attack. The king of Brega joined the Vikings; Máel Sechnaill executed him in 851 by the ‘cruel death’ of drowning, as he had done the Viking leader Turgéis (Thorgils) in 845. And he moved from the north and east into Munster, several times, taking hostages from all the province in 856, and reaching the sea in 858. It is because of all this that the Annals of Ulstercall him ‘king of all Ireland’ at his death four years later: less innovative than Feidlimid, but more complete in his hegemony, he shows, like his predecessor, the new possibilities of the period.

A further step was taken by Brian Bórama - Brian Boru in common parlance - mac Cennétig, king of the Dál Cais from 976 to 1014. Leading Uí Néill kings since Máel Sechnaill I had operated as more or less major figures, more prominently than most kings of Tara in the eighth century, though less than Máel Sechnaill; Brian, however, re-created the latter’s power and went beyond it, even though starting from one of the smallest autonomous kingdoms in Ireland, connected to neither of the great paramount dynasties. Brian’s rise is enthusiastically and fancifully chronicled by the War of the Gaedhil [Irish] with the Gaill [Vikings], written in the early twelfth century, around a century after Brian’s death, for his grandson; the main lines of the narrative are confirmed by more sober (and duller) annals. He fought Vikings a lot, as is unsurprising for one of the closest kingdoms to Limerick, which he, with his brother and predecessor Mathgamain (953-76), sacked in 967. As king, he fought neighbouring Munster kings and their Norse allies, and seems already to have seized paramountcy over Munster from the Éoganachta dynasties in 978, perhaps following his brother. The Clann Cholmáin/Uí Néill king of Tara, Máel Sechnaill II mac Domnaill (980-1022), himself one of the more powerful over-kings of the century, laid Dál Cais waste in 982 as a preventive move, but Brian moved into Connacht in the early 980s, and attacked Máel Sechnaill back. He built up his authority in Connacht and also Leinster in the next decade, an authority recognized by Máel Sechnaill himself in 1002. Finally, he moved into Ulster, gaining submission from most of their kings in 1005-8 and, last of all, the Cenél Conaill in 1011. Brian was thus, for the first time, recognized by everyone as ‘king of Ireland’; indeed, in a highly ceremonial visit to Armagh in 1005 his secretary had recorded his presence there as ‘emperor of the Irish’. But revolts started as soon as the following year, in Leinster this time, and in 1014 Brian, with a much reduced army (the Uí Néill kings did not support him), faced an army from Leinster and Dublin, with reinforcements from as far away as Orkney, at the Battle of Clontarf. Brian’s side won, but the seventy-year-old king was killed, as were the leading king of Leinster and Jarl Sigurd of Orkney. Dál Cais hegemony collapsed instantly, and Máel Sechnaill II took back the kingship of Tara until his death.

I have recounted this career in more detail than usual (though leaving out much: Brian often fought two or three wars a year) just to show how much work was involved in establishing - really, inventing - a hegemony over Ireland, which anyway did not, could not, last. Brian is not recorded as developing any new techniques of government. He used the wealth and men of Limerick and Dublin after their subjection, but Dublin had its own political agenda, and helped to end his rule eventually. The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill eagerly recounts the benefits of Brian’s brief hegemony: peace, justice, much tribute; the restoration of churches, learning, roads and fortresses; and hospitality. The learning has a twelfth-century feel to it, and so do the fortresses, but even here the imagery is old; the rest is wholly traditional. Brian’s remarkable career was mostly important in that it showed that skill and ruthlessness could open up an all-Ireland stage for political ambition, and could, furthermore, do so for any king. The following two centuries proved that, with Leinster and Connacht providing claimants to Irish hegemony for the first time, in rivalry with Brian’s descendants and with the northern Uí Néill. But, in the absence of solid political structures, this simply replicated the instability we have already seen for Wales. Slowly, we do see more royal officials in the larger kingdoms in the eleventh century, and some interest in local territorial administration in the twelfth; more and more small kingdoms lost their autonomy and identity. Nonetheless, Ireland was still an island of many kingdoms when English invasion finally came in 1169.

‘State-building’ had different bases again in Christian Spain, the narrow band of polities along the northern edge of the peninsula left unconquered by the Arabs in the 710s. This northern fringe had been politically marginal already in the Visigothic period (above, Chapter 6): the only major Visigothic centre south of the Pyrenees not to be in Muslim hands in the early ninth century was Barcelona, thanks to Charlemagne’s conquest of what is now northern Catalonia in 785-801. Apart from that Catalan enclave, governed by a local dynasty of counts from the late ninth century onwards, two independent kingdoms existed to the west, that of Pamplona or Navarre, and that of Asturias. The small Pyrenean kingdom of Pamplona is first documented in the early ninth century under Iñigo Arista (d. 851), a Christian relative of the neighbour ing Muslim dynasty, the Banu Qasi of the upper Ebro valley; kings of Pamplona were for a century little more than a Christian version of the autonomous Muslim lords of the marches of al-Andalus (above, Chapter 14). The kingdom of Asturias started small, too, around 720, in a revolt against the Muslims in the remote northern mountains by an aristocrat called Pelagius (Pelayo in Spanish; d. 737). His second successor Alfonso I (739-57), founded a dynasty which lasted until 1037, and which was generally on rather more hostile terms with the Arab powers of the south.

The Asturian royal line started with very flexible inheritance practices. Alfonso I’s son Fruela (757-68) was succeeded by his cousin, his brother-in-law, his half-brother, and another cousin, before his son Alfonso II (791-842) was allowed to take over, and father-son succession did not take root until 850. The eighth-century kings ruled from small centres in the Asturian valleys; Alfonso II, however, turned his political base, Oviedo, into a capital aimed at imitating Visigothic Toledo, with ambitious palace buildings and churches, some of which still stand, and his successor Ramiro I (842-50) built others. The kings of Asturias spent this first century of their existence extending their authority east and west across the northern mountains, from Álava in the upper Ebro and the northern core of the later county of Castile, in the east, across to Galicia in the north-west of the peninsula. They also raided southwards over the mountains into the broad frontier-lands of al-Andalus when they could get away with it, that is, in periods of Arab political trouble; Alfonso I raided particularly systematically during the Arab civil war of the 740s. After that civil war, the Arabs no longer seem to have controlled the wide plateau-land of the Duero valley, just south of Asturias, and it remained outside anyone’s visible political domination for over a century.

Ordoo I (850-66) was the first Asturian king to move south of the mountains permanently, taking León and other cities in the 850s. His son Alfonso III (866-910) pushed systematically down to the River Duero, a push which doubled the size of the kingdom; the Duero remained more or less the boundary with al-Andalus until well into the eleventh century. As the kings moved south into the rich Duero plains, they spent less and less time in Oviedo. After Alfonso III’s sons overthrew their ageing father in 910, León became the main centre of the kingdom, which tends from now on to be called the kingdom of León; it soon acquired an array of buildings matching or surpassing Oviedo as well. Alfonso had been able to expand his lands because of the next round of civil wars in al-Andalus, but these ended in the 920s, and his heirs found themselves on the defensive for the rest of the century. Ramiro II (931-51), the most successful, at least held off the new caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman III in 939-40, actually winning a pitched battle against him at Simancas in 939; but after an attempted coup in 959 Sancho I (956-66) owed his throne to ‘Abd al-Rahman, who could regard León as his client as a result. In 981-1007 the Arabs under al-Mansur moved onto the attack, sacking León in 988 and the major cult-site of Santiago de Compostela in 997. If the caliphate had not dissolved in civil war after 1009, the survival of the kingdom might have been in doubt. Actually, it was the king of Navarre, Sancho III (1004-35), who took the initiative most quickly during that civil war, partly at the expense of the kings of León - he absorbed the county of Castile, now covering all the upper Duero valley, into his kingdom. His son Fernando I, count of Castile (1028-65), took over León itself in 1037, and his kingdom of León-Castile, enriched by large tributes from warring Muslim Taifa kingdoms, was poised for serious conquest for the first time, in the late eleventh century.

The kings of Asturias and León show us a double face. One was that of Visigothic tradition. Once the kings settled in Oviedo, they adopted all they could of the imagery and architectural display of Toledo as a capital. This does not mean that tiny Oviedo in any way resembled the latter city, even stylistically (Oviedo’s churches at best represent a provincial tradition, although one with obvious late Roman roots); all the same, its surviving buildings are remarkable for such a small and agriculturally poor kingdom. Santiago, too, which had developed as a pilgrimage centre around the supposed tomb site of St James the Apostle from the early years of the ninth century, was built up, especially by Alfonso III; so was León in the next century. The new Duero territories were taken over through a network of urban foundations, on Roman sites such as Astorga, Visigothic sites such as Zamora and new sites such as Burgos, and also an array of rapidly expanding monasteries such as Cardeña, Sahagún and Celanova, who were soon the patrons of ambitious manuscript production. The kingdom regarded itself as being governed by Visigothic law, as also did Catalonia (Navarre is less clear here), and the elaborate procedures of Visigothic legal practice - more elaborate than those of either Francia or Italy - survive in both Catalan and Leonese documents, which start to be numerous in the tenth century. The kings had a palace entourage, too, which, although actually very small in size, at least nominally mirrored that of Toledo. Unlike any of the other polities described in this chapter, that of Asturias-León was also characterized by a political balance between king and aristocrats which doubtless had Visigothic antecedents, and which resembled that of the contemporary Frankish world; there were Alavese and Galician factions, and in the tenth century Castilian factions too, which kings had to contend with, and the tenth-century counts of Castile (particularly Fernán González, 931-70) were classic over-mighty subjects, willing to go it alone. As north of the Pyrenees, the politics of land played its part here, with royal cessions of property to aristocrats and monasteries prominent in our documentation, although - as indeed with the Carolingians - kings could confiscate from the disloyal too, and visibly did so. In these respects, then, Asturias-León could be seen as similar to tenth-century England, or to the principalities of southern Italy, in following lines parallel to those of Francia, although modified substantially by separate and earlier roots, in this case in the most Romanized of all the Romano-Germanic kingdoms.

But this is not the only way of seeing Asturias-León. Had it been, the kingdom would have been better discussed in Chapter 18; but the power-base of both kings and aristocrats was less certain than the preceding paragraph implies. Under the Visigoths, Asturias was remote and poor, and less Romanized or urbanized than most of the rest of the peninsula - perhaps than anywhere, with the exception of the nearby Basques, whom the Visigoths never fully conquered. Navarre was in part a Basque kingdom, although a relatively Romanized (or Visigothic) one; to its west, some Basque tribal communities remained independent into the eleventh century, and to their west some of the mountain valleys nominally subject to Asturias may have had a tribal social structure too. Even in the core areas closer to Oviedo, where Roman-style property law was certainly normal, our early (that is, ninth-century) documents show very small-scale aristocracies, and a substantial presence of a landowning peasantry.

In the new Duero lands, this was still more true in the next century. The view that the Duero valley was depopulated until a colonizing process was set in train by Ordoño and Alfonso III (the theory is above all associated with the mid-twentieth-century historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz) has now been abandoned, in the face of increasing archaeological and topographical demonstrations of settlement continuities. All the same, the valley had no organized political system for a long time, and when it emerges into the light of the documentation in the tenth century it is also a region of landowning peasant communities, organized through coherent village societies, sometimes with their own decision-making bodies, concilia. If there was a political structure that linked all these lands, it was probably organized through a network of fortified settlements, called castros in modern Spanish (and sometimes in the Latin of our period, too), which had at least some form of collective element to their social structure. This peasant-based, partly collective, society was given more strength the further south one went, for the southern frontier of the kingdom had to be defended. Peasants had military roles in southern León and southern Castile- as also southern Catalonia - for a long time, which reinforced their political and economic autonomy. The fuero (royal-granted customs) of the Castilian fortified settlement of Castrojeriz, dating probably to the early eleventh century in its present form, gave to all the male inhabitants considerable privileges (including immunities from tribute) in return for frontier defence; so did that of Cardona in Catalonia in 986, which contains the memorable line, paraphrased from the Gospel of Luke, ‘if anyone wants to make himself superior [maior] among you, let him become inferior [iunior]’. It is not helpful to call the Duero societies, or even most of the Asturian societies, ‘tribal’, but at least they had unusually flat social structures by the standards of Francia or, by now, England, with autonomous peasantries who had more in common with those of Scandinavia or some of the Slav lands than with those of the Carolingian world.

There has been a historiographical war between historians who stress the Visigothic (or Catholic) side of the Asturian kingdom and those who stress its de-Romanized (or tribal) nature. Both views are valid, however. It is fair to see the kings, at least from Alfonso II onwards, as strikingly ambitious, given the material they had to work with. And, although the peasant basis of their kingdom was strong at the start, it weakened fast. King Aurelio (768-74) quelled a peasant revolt, somewhere in the Asturias, which must show some shift in power relations. Galicia was already a region with a relatively visible aristocracy in the ninth century, and, in the tenth, aristocrats there operated a landed politics just like that of their peers north of the Pyrenees, as with the church foundations and family manipulations of Ilduara (d. c. 960), an influential aristocratic widow from Lugo, who built the monastery of Celanova and put her son Bishop Rosendo (d. c. 980) in as its first abbot. In southern León and Castile, aristocratic power was newer; it largely derived from royal cessions of land and rights to magnates or seniores - and to monasteries - over the heads of the peasantry, including rights to local tributes which often turned into rents, as in ninth-century England; it also derived from the increased local influence of the richest and most militarized peasant stratum, which could soon turn into local dominance. Lesser aristocrats (infanzones), coming from the entourages of greater magnates or from families of rich peasant milites, or both, gained in the eleventh century a hereditary right to privilege over their non-aristocratic neighbours. The villages of the Duero had to be subjected, and sometimes resisted; they often maintained unusually coherent identities well into the central Middle Ages, for that matter. But already by the eleventh century the kingdom of León-Castile had a powerful and many-levelled aristocracy, based on rights of landownership, and also holding down roles in local government for the kings: it was ready to draw the maximum benefit possible from the weakened kingdoms of al-Andalus.

The shift to a landowning and office-holding aristocratic hierarchy, largely completed in the tenth century, thus brought the kingdom still more closely into line with the post-Carolingian world; in this respect, too, León-Castile followed, a century later, some of the developments we saw in Chapter 19 for England. But in Christian Spain the borrowings of governmental structures and political hierarchies were not from external powers, Francia or al-Andalus, as were those of the developing states of the rest of this chapter; they were largely from the Visigothic past, which had not been wholly forgotten.

The political and social systems described in this chapter covered half of Europe, and were very diverse. The Sclavenian/Slav lands were particularly extensive, and only a near-total lack of documentary or narrative detail about their affairs until very late in our period justifies treating them so summarily. Overall, however, there are common trends in all the societies described here. Kings and princes were in every region more ambitious around 1000 than they had been around 750: they often ruled wider areas, or at least were aiming at wider hegemonies, and sometimes had more elaborate structures to underpin that rule as well; they were often more relevant to local societies, too, thus ruling more deeply as well as more widely. The differences in our evidence from polity to polity sometimes stress one element in this, sometimes another. So in northern Spain there was a tendency for aristocrats to root themselves as locally powerful landowners, which has English parallels. This process was less complete in the Celtic, or Scandinavian, or Slav lands, where aristocrat-peasant relationships were more often those of patron and client, or tribute-taker and -payer, or both, until after our period ends. This was a real difference, although it may seem more acute because our documentation for landowning is far better for Spain (and England) than for elsewhere; it is quite possible, for example, that in a region like Bohemia aristocrats were already becoming landowners too in the tenth century, as not long afterwards they certainly would. We cannot tell in this case, for our sources are as yet inadequate; but we certainly have signs that this was so for Croatia, another Frankish borderland. Overall, however, the trend to wider and deeper political power seems to have been based on two sorts of developments. The first was the development of aristocratic power, and therefore of the possibility of hierarchies of political dependence extending from kings and princes down into the localities. The second was the development of techniques of rule and of control, usually (except in Spain and Ireland) borrowed from neighbouring powers: more specialized royal officials, a more complex and more top-down judicial system, the ability to demand military service from the population, the ability to exploit manpower to build fortifications of different types, and, in newly Christianized areas, the development of tighter official hierarchies of the church. We have seen some sign of each of these in different regions, although it would take another book to tease out the fragmentary evidence for their development as a whole.

Broadly, the more of these developments a ruler had access to, the more stable his power was, and the more ambitious he (in Rus, once, she) could be. Political aggregation was perhaps greatest in Rus, and also, in a smaller compass, Bulgaria, Denmark and Asturias-León; it was beginning, however, to crystallize in Croatia, Bohemia, Poland and maybe Norway by the end of our period as well, in a less stable and more contested way, and also (the obscurest of all) in Scotland. In Wales and Ireland, however, and also Sweden, royal ambition did not yet have an adequate infrastructural development behind it, and the expansion of kingdoms promoted instability more than solid bases for government (this was partly true of Bohemia and Poland as well); and in some places, on the Baltic coast or in Iceland (as also sometimes in Norway) such expansion was successfully resisted for some time. These represent different paths to increased political power, which was not inevitable anywhere - and also, of course, not necessarily desirable, at least if one was part of the peasant majority, for whom stronger government universally meant tighter control and more exploitation.

It is, all the same, despite these differences, striking how general the move to increased political power was across this wide swathe of Europe in the second half of our period. In 400 strong and stable political systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border of the Roman empire. In 750, too, they hardly extended further, except in the parts of central and southern Germany under Frankish hegemony; and in the Balkans and in Britain they had actually retreated. But in 1000 recognizable polities had crystallized in most places in Europe, west of the Volga and south of the Finnic-speaking hunter-gatherer zone of the far north: weaker than the Roman empire, certainly, but with a certain staying power - half the modern European countries, indeed, and most of the larger ones, can trace themselves, however misleadingly, back to the kingdoms and principalities that existed by then. Such a widespread development must, surely, have at least some common root? One important feature of the period after 750 is that the most powerful political systems in Europe, Francia and Byzantium, regained their stability and began to expand; they were both threats to their immediate neighbours, who would have to become stronger or else succumb, and also models, for all the techniques of government just mentioned were more developed there. England used Francia as a model, and by the tenth century it was itself both a threat and a model to its Celtic neighbours; Denmark crystallized in response to Frankish pressures and influences, and by 1000 it too was both a threat and a model, inside Scandinavia. The Khazar hegemony in the Ukrainian steppes had a similar effect on Rus. The patterns of more powerful rule thus finally leapt over the Rhine-Danube line and moved steadily outwards, north, west and east. This development was not simple, and had other roots as well; it was also not continuous, as the history of (for example) Denmark shows. But it underpinned more local developments, and gave them a continent-wide coherence which would, eventually, last.