The Vikings (14 page)

The
Royal Frankish Annals
, which chronicle events involving Frankish rulers from 741 to 829, record a number of diplomatic contacts between the Franks and the Danes as they struggled to keep track of the changing status quo. In 782, the year of the massacre at Verden, the Danish King Sigfrid, who was then sheltering his Saxon brother-in-law Widukind from the Franks, sent an emissary named Halptani (Halvdan) to Charlemagne for formal political discussions at which a number of other Saxon leaders were also present.
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Sigfrid is noted as receiving an envoy from Charlemagne in 798 but then disappears from the record. In 799 the first Viking raid within Frankish territories was recorded, an attack on the monastery of Noirmoutier in the Vendée, in the Loire region of western France. It is likely the raiders were Norwegians who had taken the
vestrveg
from Ireland. In response Charlemagne ordered the building of a fleet specifically to counter the attacks of the Northmen. The ships were to be built and berthed ‘near to the rivers which flow out of Gaul and Germany into the North Sea’. Ports and the mouths of all rivers large enough to give access to foreign ships were also reinforced.
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Sigfrid was succeeded by King Godfrid, who in the course of a short reign developed what often seems like a personal rivalry with Charlemagne. He makes his first dramatic appearance in the
Royal Frankish Annals
in 804, arriving in Schleswig on the border between Danish and Saxon territory in 804 with his fleet and his entire cavalry for an apparently straightforward exchange of envoys with the emperor. In 808 he attacked his wayward tributaries the Obodrites to punish them for allying with Charlemagne, and destroyed their trading settlement of Reric. Reric’s traders were forcibly relocated within his own territory at Hedeby, a nascent trading settlement at the neck of the Jutland peninsula. The Franks reacted, and in the subsequent fighting Godfrid’s relative Reginold was killed. Still fearing the potential threat from a military alliance between Saxons and Danes, or even a direct attempt to take Saxony by Godfrid, Charlemagne had all the Saxons living close to the Danish border transported into Francia.

Godfrid continued to make his presence felt in the region. Well aware that it was a provocation, at about this time he ordered the reinforcement on his southern border of the Danevirke, a massive rampart some 14 kilometres long that straddled the Jutland peninsula from the marches of West Jutland to the town of Schleswig. Raised some seventy years earlier as a protective measure against Obodrite and Saxon raids, and linked to the horseshoe-shaped defence surrounding Hedeby, its very size remains a witness to the organized nature of Danish society at this time.

According to Einhard, Godfrid was ‘so puffed up with empty ambition that he planned to make himself master of the whole of Germany. He had come to look upon Frisia and Saxony as provinces belonging to him; and he had already reduced the Obodrites, who were his neighbours, to a state of subservience and made them pay him tribute.’
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Einhard even claims that his plans to march on the imperial capital at Aachen with a large army were at an advanced stage when, in 810, he was murdered by one of his own followers.

Godfrid’s joint successors were the brothers Harald, known as Klak-Harald, and Reginfrid, who may initially have been regents for the late king’s young son.
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In 813 an army under these two made its way to the Norwegian Vestfold, ‘an area in the extreme north-west of their kingdom whose princes and people refused to submit to them’.
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It sounds as if the purpose of this expedition was to re-impose a tributary status that had been neglected. The Norwegian archaeologist Bjørn Myhre has advanced a theory that the ritual damage done to the grave-mounds in the great Heathen burial centre at Borre in Vestfold may have been carried out by these two kings on this occasion, to punish the local people and reassert Danish power.
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The rebellion itself may have been another result of the general breakdown in regional stability caused by Charlemagne’s war against the Saxons. A further result may have been the emergence, as a coastal power centre a few decades later, of Avaldsnes on Karmøy, the regional home of the first wave of Vikings who raided west across the North Sea in England and the islands of Scotland and Ireland.

It was unwise to be long away from home in such unstable times. When the brothers returned they faced a large army raised by the sons of the late King Godfrid and were easily driven from the land. Reginfrid was killed in 814 trying to regain the throne, leaving Harald as a diligent and persistent pretender. With the death of Charlemagne a few months later, in January 814, the stage was set for a chaotic century during which his empire slowly disappeared, lashing and plunging like some great leviathan as it sank beneath the waves, goaded towards extinction by the ceaseless jabbing and thrusting of those seaborne northern warriors whose manifestation in southern Gaul had so distressed him. The chaos was compounded by the fact that the Danish royal families too were, for much of the time, engaged in dynastic struggles of their own, in the course of which it becomes very difficult to keep track of a meaningful distinction between, on the one hand, violent activity that might have been part of a coherent ‘foreign policy’ decided upon by a legitimate monarch and his advisers and carried out by a ‘national’ army; and, on the other, those actions - often the work of the same kings - which were nothing more than privateering on the grand scale.

 

In his attempts to reclaim the Danish crown after the coup by the sons of King Godfrid, Harald began a long association with the Franks. The Obodrites, apparently once again under Frankish control, were ordered by Charlemagne’s successor Louis the Pious to help him, and in 819 the sons of Godfrid - always a corporate identity in the annals - allowed him to join them on the throne. The unstable arrangement lasted only until 823, when the brothers once more drove Harald out. Again Harald applied to Louis for help.

Louis’ response was to send Harald back to Denmark, accompanied by emissaries who were to investigate the nature of the dispute, ‘as well as the condition of the whole kingdom of the Norsemen’, and report back to him.
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The sequence of events thereafter forms the first important narrative thread of Rimbert’s
Vita Anskarii
, his ‘Life’ of St Anskar, the ‘Apostle of the North’ and the missionary most closely associated with early attempts to curb Viking violence by bringing their Scandinavian communities into the fold of Christian peoples. Encouraged by the successes of Ebbo of Reims, who had preached among the Danes ‘and baptized many converts to the faith during the previous summer’, Louis suggested to Harald that he convert to Christianity.
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Such a move, he assured him, would lead to ‘a more intimate friendship between them, and a Christian people would more readily come to his aid and to the aid of his friends if both peoples were worshippers of the same God’.
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The offer of the political benefits of the adoption of Christianity was one that would be repeated many times by rulers in the Christian world who found themselves under attack by Vikings.

Like his father Charlemagne, Louis used the Church as an instrument of government. At a ceremony in Rome, on Christmas Day in 800, Charlemagne had been crowned first emperor of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire. Contemporaries perceived this ‘empire’ as identical with western Christendom, though no such geographical entity existed. The symbolic significance of the ceremony was that Charlemagne became the pope’s designated partner in the promotion of Christianity, and the protector of the Church; and that he shared the Church’s vision of Christendom as a single community, ruled, under God, by a single spiritual ruler, with a single temporal ruler as his right hand. The arrangement has been called a dyarchy of pope and emperor.
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The political implications of this were well understood in the Europe of the time, by Viking leaders in their Scandinavian homelands as well as by tribal leaders in territories to the east of the empire. In the course of the ninth and tenth centuries the dynasties of Great Moravia, Bohemia and Hungary all requested a missionary presence to help their applications to join what was, in effect, a primitive form of European cultural union, with Christianity as its common spiritual currency. In 821 the exiled Obodrite prince Slavomir submitted to baptism prior to embarking on a campaign to claim his crown, no doubt for the same reasons as Harald signalled his agreement to Louis’ suggestion.
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Anxious not to be outmanoeuvred, the sons of Godfrid sent envoys to Louis in 825 requesting a peace agreement, and this was duly arranged in October. The following year envoys from the Danish kings attended the imperial assembly at Ingelheim to ratify the agreement. But now Harald, in the company of his wife, brother, ‘and a large number of Danes’, arrived at St Alban’s in Mainz and on 24 June submitted to baptism.
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The immediate political rewards for his conversion included a gift of the coastal county of Rüstringen in Frisia, between the rivers Ems and Aller, which was intended as a safe haven for him in times of trouble, and Louis’ renewed promise of friendship and help to recover the throne.

Louis’ political aim had been the pacification of his Danish neighbours under the rule of his Christian ally, Harald. If, as a pious man himself, he secretly hoped for genuine conversion and not merely the cultural accommodation of Christianization then he presently had good cause to doubt the likelihood. Having promised the emperor that they would ‘obey him always and everywhere and in all matters’, Harald’s newly christened Danes found themselves adopted by the nobles of the royal palace, ‘almost as if they had been children’ as Notker writes, a line that recalls the strange enchantment worked by the pre-Lindisfarne pagans on the Northumbrian aristocrats at Athelstan’s court. Each catechumen received a white robe from the emperor’s wardrobe, and from his sponsors a full set of Frankish garments, with arms, costly robes and other adornments. This happened repeatedly, says Notker:

More and more came each year, not for the sake of Christ but for mundane advantages. They used to hurry over on Easter Eve to pay homage to the Emperor, more like faithful vassals than foreign envoys. On one occasion as many as fifty arrived. The Emperor asked them if they wished to be baptized. When they had confessed their sins, he ordered them to be sprinkled with holy water.

On one occasion when there were not enough linen garments to go round, Louis ordered some old shirts to be cut up and stitched together. Confronted with his, one old Dane regarded it suspiciously for some time before complaining to the emperor that he had gone through the procedure some twenty times now and always before been given a splendid white suit for his troubles. This was just an old sack. It made him feel like a pig-farmer, not a soldier. Having taken away his own clothes they’d left him with the choice of wearing this or else going about naked. As far as he was concerned they could keep their Christ, and their old rags too.
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Obviously some rudimentary notion of what it meant to be Christian would have to be conveyed if Christianization were to work as an effective political tool. Anskar was detailed to accompany Harald on his journey back to Denmark, to be his Christian conscience and help him bring the rest of the Danes to Christ. Extreme danger attached to the venture: the
Vita Anskarii
reports that Anskar and his companion Autbert had to make the journey without servants because none dared accompany them.
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Louis provided the mission with writing cases and tents.

Treated by his Danish travelling companions with indifference or contempt at first, Anskar’s status rose after the bishop of Cologne made him a present of a fine boat with its own comfortable sleeping quarters. It is not clear from Rimbert’s account whether or not the party was actually allowed to enter Denmark. He writes that Harald was stopped at the Danish border, but goes on to describe two years spent by Anskar preaching among the Danes. If Harald did return to power it was a brief and conditional return and not the Christian wedge into Denmark that Louis had been hoping for.

At this point Klak-Harald drifts out of Rimbert’s narrative and his later career is uncertain. The
Annals of St-Bertin
mention a certain ‘Harald, who along with other Danish pirates had for some years been imposing sufferings on Frisia and other coastal regions of the Christians’, and appear to identify him with Harald, a king without a territory, bound to a cycle of eternal raiding so that he could reward his men for their loyalty to him, so that they would follow him on his next raid, so that he would reward them for their loyalty.
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If this identification is correct, then he is also the apostate leader whose Viking activities in the region around what are now the Netherlands proved so disruptive to Louis’ son Lothar that he tried to buy him off with the gift of the province of Walcheren, in the mouth of the Scheldt estuary, a move that seemed to the annalist

an utterly detestable crime, that those who had brought evil on Christians should be given power over the lands and people of Christians, and over the very churches of Christ; that the persecutors of the Christian faith should be set up as lords over Christians and Christian folk have to serve men who worshipped demons.
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Saxo Grammaticus, in the
Gesta Danorum
, is more generous in his assessment. Only after describing what looks like a sincere but failed attempt on Klak-Harald’s part to introduce Christianity to the Danes does he turn to condemning him as a ‘notorious apostate’.
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The
Annals of Fulda
carried a notice of his death on the Danish border in 852 at the hands of a Frankish border patrol, in which he is recalled as a ‘person of doubtful loyalty and a potential traitor’.
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In his pragmatic acceptance of baptism for political ends, Klak-Harald set an example that other leaders would follow for much of the Viking Age, to the endless frustration of their Christian godfathers.