The Vikings (15 page)

The last decade of Louis the Pious’ life brought him many disappointments, though he was in many ways the author of his own misfortunes. In 814, the year of his father’s death, Louis had made a division of the imperial territory among his sons that favoured Lothar with Bavaria and Pepin with Aquitaine. Three years later he confirmed Pepin in his possession of Aquitaine, gave Bavaria to another son, Louis, known as ‘the German’, and invited his eldest son Lothar to join him as co-emperor. His own father had been seventy years old and within months of his death before Louis had been similarly elevated; for Louis to have followed suit while his son was still only twenty-three was to prove a disastrously precipitate move. His anxious haste to secure the future of the empire was cruelly exposed when his second wife, Judith of Bavaria, bore him a son Charles, later ‘the Bald’, in 823. Under Judith’s influence Louis revoked the agreement of 817 and in 829 brought the child into the equation of his inheritance by giving him Alemannia. The immensely complex civil wars known as ‘the wars of the three brothers’ ensued. Lothar rebelled, and with the support of his brothers by Louis’ first wife, Irmengard, deposed his father. Louis was restored in 830 and attempted to mollify Lothar by giving him Italy in 831. In 832 he took Aquitaine from Pepin and gave it to young Charles, at which his older brothers revolted. Once more the emperor was deposed. Restored in 834, he made his peace with Pepin and Louis the German. Later that same year Lothar, who nursed the greatest grievance against his father, again rebelled. He stood alone this time, and his failure obliged him to retreat to Italy. Louis’ gifts of more territory to Charles in 837-8 were grudgingly accepted by the older brothers. Pepin’s death in 838 should have simplified matters but did not. Louis offered the three surviving sons a fourth partition in 840, dividing the empire between Lothar and Charles and leaving Louis the German with Bavaria. Dissatisfied, Louis rose against his father, but the challenge came to nothing. In an attempt to put an end to the chaos Louis summoned his sons to an assembly at Worms in July 840, but died before it could take place. At Verdun in 843 the brothers signed a treaty intended to bring order to his problematical legacy. Western Francia went to Charles, Eastern Francia to Louis the German, and a middle kingdom, Lotharingia, was created and named for Lothar. Western Francia may be identified roughly with the territory of present-day France, Louis’ share with modern Germany, and Lothar’s unnatural slice of territory, extending from the North Sea to Italy, with almost nothing at all. The arrangement did not put an end to the wars between the brothers.

As well as he was able, Louis had carried on the pursuit of his father’s goal of a Europe united under one, Christian culture. The creation of an episcopal see at Hamburg for the specific purpose of promoting missionary activity among the Scandinavians in the far north was, in this respect, his most significant achievement. In 829, with Anskar and Klak-Harald encamped on the Danish borders pending Harald’s hoped-for return to power among the Danes, messengers had arrived at Aachen from the trading town of Birka in the Mälaren district of Sweden requesting that Christian missionaries be sent to instruct the local people.
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Anskar was recalled and asked to undertake the mission. On the way his party was attacked by pirates and robbed of all their possessions, including a library of some forty books. Anskar continued on his journey and was well received at Birka by the local leader, King Bjørn.

The Carolingian empire following the division between the sons of Louis the Pious after 843.

Rimbert’s near-contemporary account describes Anskar’s mission to the Swedes as successful. He mentions in particular a man close to King Bjørn, a certain Herigar, who was baptized and presently built a church on his own property.
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After two winters in Birka, Anskar returned to submit a report to the emperor. Louis thereupon ‘began to enquire by what means he might establish a bishop’s see in the north within the limits of his own empire’, a place that might be used as a centre for the bishop appointed to make ‘frequent journeys to the northern regions for the sake of preaching the gospel, and from which all these barbarous nations might easily and profitably’ come to Christianity.
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His advisers replied that his far-sighted father had already made plans for such a see. When Charlemagne

had subdued the whole of Saxony by the sword and had subjected it to the yoke of Christ, he divided it into dioceses, but did not commit to any bishop the furthest part of this province which lay beyond the river Elbe, but decided that it should be reserved in order that he might establish there an archie piscopal see from which, with the Lord’s help, the Christian faith might successively spread to the nations that lay beyond.
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In 831 the see of Hamburg was duly created, with Anskar as its first bishop. Already the time had passed when a Frankish emperor might have been able to impose Christianity on the Scandinavians by force, and the imperial decision to place the monastery of Turholt, in the presumed security of Flanders, at the disposal of Hamburg, ‘inasmuch as this diocese [Hamburg] was situated in dangerous regions, and it was to be feared that it might come to an end in consequence of the savagery of the barbarians by which it was threatened’, shows a recognition of the fact that a dark and dangerous future loomed:
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Walafrid Strabo, the scholar who wrote the verse account of Blamac’s martyrdom on Iona in 825, was a court favourite of Louis, just as Alcuin had been a favourite of his father, and the dreadful story of Blamac’s death would have been familiar enough at Aachen.

 

For much of the period during which the Frankish empire suffered ‘the wars of the three brothers’, effective power among the Danes seems to have been in the hands of the astute King Horic. He was probably the last surviving of the ‘sons of Godfrid’, and held on to the crown more or less consistently from 814 until his death in 850. He turned out to be considerably more successful than Klak-Harald in juggling the double role of Viking and legitimate king.

A lull in Viking raiding after the 799 attack on the monastery at Noirmoutier was broken in 820 by thirteen Danish ships that attacked the coastal settlements of Flanders. Driven off, they had turned their attention to the mouth of the Seine, where they were once again repelled, with the loss of five of their men. From here they sailed up the coast of Aquitaine, successfully plundered the village of Bouin and returned home ‘with immense booty’.
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The Frisian trading town of Dorestad near Nijmegen, despite the protection of water, palisades and a fortress, was attacked and burnt in 834. So was Antwerp. When Dorestad was devastated for a third time two years later Horic sent envoys to the imperial assembly at Worms soliciting peace and friendship with the emperor. At the same time he formally complained about the murder near Cologne of a previous group of his envoys.

In 837 the exposed territory of Frisia was again attacked and the island of Walcheren plundered, the Vikings appearing ‘with their usual surprise’. Like his father Godfrid before him, Horic was unwilling to abandon the power exercised by Danes in the region before the advent of Charlemagne and in 838 he sent emissaries to Louis the Pious requesting recognition for his overlordship of the Obodrites and the Wilzes.
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His presumption seemed to Louis so inappropriate that the emperor simply ignored it. Yet the same emissaries also brought the emperor news that as a sign of King Horic’s friendship and good will he had captured and killed most of the pirates who had lately been troubling Louis’ territory. Horic’s gesture asked Louis to make a distinction between the activities of a legitimate royal house, and the embarrassing and entirely private doings of a large and unruly group of his subjects.

In 841, with the fortifications built by Charlemagne at the turn of the century to protect his rivers against just such raiding probably destroyed long before by his sons’ and grandsons’ warring, a fleet led by a Norwegian named Asgeir sailed up the Seine and captured and burnt Rouen. Asgeir’s army plundered its way up the Seine and burnt the wealthy monastery at Jumièges. Nearby Fontenelle was also attacked, sixty-eight monks taken prisoner and ransomed. Nantes was hit in 843 by a fleet of sixty-seven Norwegian Viking ships which probably set out from a
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base in Ireland. The bishop of Nantes was among those killed, in one account while taking Mass. Others were captured to be sold abroad as slaves. From their experiences in Ireland the Vikings had learnt that Church festivals were among the most profitable times to attack, and Nantes was terrorized in late June, on the feast day of St John the Baptist. Nearby Noirmoutier - Francia’s Iona - had been attacked so often that in 830 the emperor gave his permission for it to be fortified. For a while the monks abandoned the island in the summer and returned in the winter when the danger of attack was less. In 836 the monks were forced to abandon the monastery altogether, taking with them the relics of the founder, St Philibert, and retreating further inland. Some thirty years later, the monk Ermentarius described their fear of the wilful blasphemy of the Vikings:

But in truth this is what they feared most: that the faithless men would dig up the grave of the blessed Philibert and scatter whatever they found in it hither and yon, or rather throw it into the sea. This was known to have happened in the region of Brittany to the remains of certain holy men; this we were told by those who had seen it and had fled before the most oppressive rule of these men.
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The Nantes Vikings, meanwhile, made camp on the island and used it as a base from which to terrorize the regions of the Loire and Aquitaine.

In late March of 845 a fleet of 120 ships appeared in the Seine, ‘laying waste everything on either side and meeting not the least bit of opposition’, and presently threatening Paris.
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The Annals of St-Bertin
name its leader as Reginfred, a figure sometimes identified with the Danish chieftain, Ragnar Lodbrok, meaning ‘Hairy-Breeches’, whose role as a Viking Age legend we shall examine in more detail later. The army of Charles the Bald fled before this force and in desperation Charles offered them 7,000 pounds of silver to leave. This is the first recorded example of the danegeld payment, a money-with-menaces tactic that the Vikings would later employ with great success in England. In their own way these Vikings kept their word, heading ‘back down the Seine to the open sea’, raiding, looting and burning as they went. As they were heading for home, their ships laden with booty, the annalist recorded a divine retribution that struck them in the form of a severe illness, very likely dysentery.

In the same year, King Horic sent an enormous fleet of ships up the Elbe to attack the eastern Frankish territories of Louis the German. This sounds like a ‘legitimate’ royal enterprise, one king waging war on another; but once the fleet was repulsed the soldiers donned Viking caps and turned their fury on Hamburg. Again there was the familiar slaughter of monks, the burning of churches and monasteries, and the inescapable sense of
overkill
that characterized Viking violence against manifestations of institutional Christian culture. Anskar was in Hamburg at the time and with characteristically obstinate courage tried to persuade people to resist until reinforcements arrived. But perceiving the futility of it, he gathered what relics he could and fled. Alas for the monks of Hamburg, at the division agreed between the three brothers at Verdun in 843 the see had lost possession of their ‘safe haven’ monastery at Turholt and the monks were left with nowhere to go. Eventually a benefactress gave them a property about fifteen miles from Hamburg, and it was from here that Anskar gradually began the work of reviving the community. Horic, meanwhile, after the failed raid up the Elbe, turned himself back into a legitimate king again. He sent envoys to Louis the German with an offer to release all the captives taken by the invaders of 845, and promised he would try to recover the stolen treasure and return it to its rightful owners.

Some revision of Charlemagne’s original plan would have to be made if the campaign to Christianize the north were to continue. The devastations of 845 made it clear that the Hamburg site was simply too vulnerable. The solution approved by Anskar’s new patron, Louis the German, was to appoint him to the vacant see of the more easily defensible Bremen. After some bureaucratic manoeuvrings, Bremen was presently joined to Hamburg in 847-8 to create the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, though papal ratification of the joint see was not forthcoming until 864. Anskar was its first archbishop; Rimbert, his biographer, was his successor.

 

Birka, the island town where Anskar seemed to have given Christianity a first frail foothold among the northern Heathens, was for much of the Viking era one of the most important trading centres in northern Europe. Situated in the Mälaren region of south-central Sweden between the territories of the Goths and the Svear, it was founded on royal initiative sometime in the middle of the eighth century and subsequently patterned after the trading centres of the Carolingian empire. One theory is that it came into being after the Islamic expansion of the seventh century had disrupted traditional trade routes between east and west in the south via the Mediterranean. From Birka it was only five days’ sailing across the Baltic to Russia and the great southbound rivers that gave access to markets all the way down to Constantinople. Adam of Bremen tells us that it was also only a five-day journey by sea from Hedeby, the market town created by Godfrid from the remnants of Reric.