Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (16 page)

Since his own troops were only good for fighting peasants, in 860 Charles agreed to pay 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of silver to Volund, the leader of a Viking army that was ravaging the countryside around the River Somme, to attack the Vikings at Oissel. Volund took the money and left to invade England and only after the English defeated him in battle did he remember his deal with Charles. The following year, Volund sailed up the Seine with a fleet of 200 ships and laid siege to Oissel. In addition to the silver he had already given Volund, Charles levied another payment of 6,000 pounds (2,722 kg) of silver on his subjects and ordered them to supply his army with grain and cattle, ‘so that the realm should not be looted.’ Attracted by the generous payments, another Danish fleet of sixty ships came to join Volund. Where Charles had failed, Volund succeeded. Starvation forced the Danes on Oissel to surrender and hand over to Volund 6,000 pounds of gold and silver. The two forces then combined and set out for the open sea. It was now late in the year and winter storms prevented their departure. The army split up into its component fellowships, which were billeted on towns and monasteries along the whole length of the Seine as far as Paris and beyond to the fortress of Melun. Splitting up like this made provisioning the army easier, but it also made the isolated groups of Vikings more vulnerable to Frankish attack, so the arrangement must surely have been made with Charles’ agreement.

Charles used the winter respite to position troops along the Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and Oise, to prevent the Danes plundering. This foresight won him a bloodless success when the Danes wintering at Fossés near Paris took a few ships early in 862 and set out to plunder Meaux on the Marne. Unable to catch them, Charles built a barrier across the river behind them to block their escape. Trapped, the Danes gave hostages, released all the captives they had taken and agreed to leave the Seine or help Charles fight any other Danes who failed to keep the agreement made the previous year. About three weeks later Volund and other Danish leaders met with Charles and renewed their oaths to leave. As winter drew to a close, the Danes withdrew as far as Jumièges to repair their ships and, after the spring equinox, the traditional beginning of the sailing season, they returned to the open sea, split up and went their separate ways. Some Danes went to Brittany and allied with Duke Salomon to fight the Franks again. Others went to the Loire and allied with Robert the Strong to fight the Bretons. Volund stayed on the Seine with his family, converted to Christianity and entered Charles’ service. He was killed in 863 in a duel with another Dane who had accused him of treachery.

Building bridges

By summer 862, Charles had seen off or outlived his most dangerous dynastic rivals and now began to take the Viking threat more seriously. Charles did not mind too much if Vikings ravaged the lands of his rebellious vassals, but now that they were at the gates of Paris, his own royal estates in the Île de France were acutely vulnerable. Something had to be done. Charles called an assembly at Pîtres, on the Seine just south of Rouen and ordered the construction of a fortified bridge across the river at nearby Pont de l’Arche. Forts of stone, earth and timber were to be built at each end of the bridge for permanent garrisons to bar the passage of Viking fleets up- or downstream. Orders were also given for the construction of fortified bridges on the Marne, Oise and Loire rivers. Arguments about who should build the bridges and garrison them meant that Charles’ orders were not carried out. Charles held another assembly at Pîtres in June 864, where he issued the same proclamation. At the same time he ordered towns to pull down any walls they had built to protect themselves from Viking attack. From Charles’ perspective it was safer to leave a town exposed to Viking attack than to run the risk that a rebel vassal might hold it against him if it was fortified. This time work on the bridge at Pont de l’Arche seems actually to have started, but it was still incomplete the next summer when it was seized by the Danes. In September, the Danes sent a 200-strong raiding party to Paris in an unsuccessful quest to find supplies of wine. In October, they again sailed up the Seine and sacked the abbey of St-Denis, just outside Paris. They were duly punished for their impiety with an outbreak of dysentery. And in January 866, the Danes sailed right past Paris to attack Melun again. A Frankish army sent to stop them just ran away without fighting.

Charles once again resorted to payments of tribute to get rid of the Danes. This time it was 4,000 pounds (1,814 kg) of silver, as weighed on their own scales, and a supply of wine. To raise the money a levy was imposed on every household in the kingdom. The free paid six denarii, serfs three (a denarius was a silver coin weighing about 0.06 of an ounce/1.75 g: it could purchase twelve two pound (900 g) wheat loaves), merchants the equivalent of one tenth of their goods, and even priests had to pay. Various other taxes were also raised to help pay the tribute. In addition any captives who had been enslaved by the Danes and had been lucky enough to escape were to be returned to their new masters or ransomed at a price set by the Danes. Charles also agreed to pay compensation for any Danes who had been killed by Franks during the campaign. It took until June to raise the silver, but once they had been paid the Danes kept their side of the unequal bargain, set sail down the Seine and reached the open sea in July. Charles followed them as far as Pîtres, taking with him workmen and carts to complete the bridge at Pont de l’Arche ‘so that the Northmen might never again be able to get up the Seine beyond that point’. Those who lived downstream from the bridge must have watched the construction work with mixed feelings: they were being taxed to pay for the bridge but were, essentially, being abandoned to the Vikings in future. All too typically, work on the bridge once again languished and it was not actually completed until 873. Fortunately for the Franks, England became the main focus of Viking attentions for the next decade.

In the same year that the bridge at Pont de l’Arche was completed, Charles inflicted a severe defeat on the Loire Vikings at Angers, which bought several years’ peace to the region. However, Charles’ interest in fighting Vikings was short-lived: playing dynastic politics suddenly promised to be much more rewarding. When his nephew Louis II, the king of Italy, died in 875, Charles invaded, seized control of his kingdom and was crowned emperor in Rome. While crossing the Mont Cenis pass in the Alps on his way home from Italy in autumn 877, Charles fell ill and died. Charles’ last wish was to be buried at the abbey of St Denis, which a few years earlier he had fortified to protect it from Viking raids, but his followers were forced to bury him hurriedly at Nantua Abbey near Lyons, because the stench of his rotting corpse had become unbearable.

Though he had succeeded in defending his throne, Charles’ reign was an almost unbroken series of disasters for his people: even those who weren’t raided by Vikings were punitively taxed to buy them off. Charles has come in for plenty of criticism over the centuries for failing to make combating the Vikings a priority. In his own defence, Charles would probably have argued that if he had succeeded in his goals of re-establishing royal authority and reuniting the empire, dealing with the Vikings would have been easy. He might have been right but his failure to protect his subjects left royal authority in freefall.

Following Charles’ death, the Frankish empire was divided between his sons and nephews. They died one by one, young and heirless, until by 882 the sole survivor, Charles the Fat, became the first ruler since the death of Louis the Pious forty years before to rule the whole empire. Charles went so far as to issue coins with the Latin legend
Carolus
Magnus
, ‘Charles the Great’, but he was not destined to be the second Charlemagne his supporters hoped. His ineffectiveness in dealing with raids by Viking and Arab pirates quickly destroyed what little prestige was retained by the Carolingian dynasty.

Flanders ravaged

The Vikings were not people to let a good crisis go to waste. In 878, a new army of Danish Vikings arrived in England, just in time to learn about Alfred the Great’s decisive victory over Guthrum at Edington. Clearly, the days of easy pickings in England were over so, after spending the winter in a camp at Fulham on the Thames, the Danes crossed the Channel to Flanders, hoping to take advantage of the dynastic instability in the Frankish kingdoms. For the next ten years the lands between the Seine and the Rhine were devastated with an intensity so far not seen anywhere. In the next four years: Thérouanne (twice), St Bertin, Ghent, Tournai, Marchiennes, Condé, Valenciennes, St Quentin, Laon, Reims, Courtrai, Arras, Cambrai, Péronne, St Omer, Cassel, Amiens, Corbie, St Valéry, St Riquier, Tongres, Liège, Maastricht, Neuss, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, Trier and Metz, in roughly that order. Even Charlemagne’s favourite residence, his palace at Aachen, was plundered and burned. The chronicler of the abbey of St Vaast at Arras, an eyewitness to the devastation wrought by the Danes, wrote:

‘The Northmen did not stop capturing and killing Christians or destroying churches, pulling down fortifications, or setting villas on fire. The corpses of clerics, laymen, nobles, women, young people and children were lying on every road. There was no road or place in which the dead did not lie and lamentation and sadness filled everyone, seeing that Christians were massacred.’

Monasteries, already sorely battered by years of Viking raiding and pervasive insecurity, virtually collapsed across the whole of northern Francia. The modest revival of cultural life fostered by Charlemagne fizzled out.

The Vikings seemed able to roam at will, seldom meeting organised resistance. Impressive Frankish victories at Saucourt in 881 and at Avaux, near Reims, in October 882 were not followed up and the plundering continued unabated. On one occasion the Danes mocked a Frankish army for its reluctance to join battle with them, saying: ‘So why did you come to see us? It was not necessary. We know who you are and what you want, so let us visit you. Let us do that for you.’ But even this did not goad the Franks into action and the army returned home ‘in great shame’. In the summer of 885 the Danes moved south to the Seine valley, which had had ten years to recover from the Danes’ earlier depredations and was now ripe to be plundered again. The Danes occupied Rouen on 24 June and built a fortified camp on the opposite side of the river from the town. A Frankish army confronted them there but after Ragnold, the duke of Le Mans, was killed with a few of his men in a skirmish, the rest of the army withdrew, a testament, perhaps, to the effectiveness of Viking field fortifications as much as to the lack of resolve of the Franks. The presence of the army had at least restrained the Danes; now that they had fled, they could plunder wherever they wished. The Franks built fortifications by the Seine to impede the progress of the Danish ships upriver, but their garrisons’ lack of resolve meant that they were useless. Archaeological excavations have shown that the bridge at Pont de l’Arche was burned around this time, as was another fortress built to block the River Oise at Pontoise.

The Vikings besiege Paris

On 24 November, the Danes arrived outside Paris. The Danes probably expected a rapid capitulation, that was what they had come to expect, but they became bogged down in a year-long siege, which, in retrospect, came to be seen as the turning point of the Frankish struggle against the Vikings. A monk, Abbo the Twisted, who was present in Paris throughout, later wrote a detailed and colourful account of the siege in Latin verse. The day after their fleet arrived at Paris, the Danes’ leader Sigfred approached Gauzelin, the city’s bishop, to negotiate free passage upstream. According to Abbo, Sigfred pleaded with Gauzelin to spare himself and his flock the horrors of war. If he granted the Danes free passage so that they could ravage the countryside beyond Paris, Sigfred promised that they would do no harm to the city and respect all property. Gauzelin refused. He had been made responsible for the city’s defence by his king Charles the Fat, he told Sigfred, and he would not betray that trust. When Gauzelin asked him rhetorically what treatment he thought he would deserve if it was he who had been entrusted with defending the city and tamely allowed an enemy to pass, Sigfred told him: ‘I should deserve that my head be cut off and thrown to the dogs. Nevertheless, if you do not give in to my demand, I must tell you that tomorrow our war machines will destroy you with poisoned arrows.’

Gauzelin’s defiance was more than simple bravado. In the years of peace since Paris was last attacked by the Danes, Gauzelin had overseen the construction of substantial fortifications. At this time Paris was mainly confined to the Île de la Cité, a long narrow island in the Seine. The island was protected by walls so the Danes could not easily land on it. A wooden bridge, the Grand Pont, linked the island to the north bank of the Seine. The approach to the bridge was protected by a still incomplete stone tower. Another wooden bridge, the Petit Pont, connected the island to the south bank. The approach to this bridge was protected by a wooden tower. Together the two bridges completely blocked the river to all shipping. The defence of the city was led by its count Odo, the son of Robert the Strong. Odo commanded only a small garrison of 200 soldiers, but he was an inspiring leader and just as determined not to give in as the bishop was. The defenders also possessed mangonels (giant catapults) and balistas (giant crossbows). The size of the Danish army that opposed them is unknown. According to Abbo, the Danes came in 700 ships and were 40,000 strong, but this number must be a gross exaggeration. No other chronicler of the period records such large fleets and it would, in any case, have been impossible to keep such an enormous force in the field for so long under early medieval conditions. The army was certainly not large enough to invest the city completely because messengers were able to leave and return throughout.

Knowing that mobility was the key to their success, Vikings generally avoided sieges. But the Franks had not held any fortification against them for long, so Sigfred probably expected Paris to fall quickly. True to his word, Sigfred launched an assault on the city at dawn on the day after his meeting with Gauzelin. The Danes concentrated their attack on the incomplete tower that guarded the Grand Pont, battering it with catapults and battering rams. The battle raged all day, and count Odo, his brother Robert and another count, Ragenar, were always in the thick of the fighting encouraging the defenders. Gauzelin planted a crucifix on the ramparts and fought with a bow and an axe, in spite of his priestly vows, which forbade the shedding of blood. Gauzelin probably felt that pagan blood did not count. An abbot, Ebolus, was wounded by an arrow fighting on the ramparts. At nightfall the Danes withdrew carrying their dead with them. The tower had suffered serious damage and Odo and Gauzelin worked through the night organising repair work and adding an extra storey in timber so that when the Danes renewed their assault the next day they found it half as high again as it had been originally. This time the Danes first attempted to set fire to the tower and then tried to undermine its foundations by digging. The diggers fled when the Franks poured a mixture of boiling oil, pitch and wax onto them. Some of them tore their scalps off in agony and many died from burns. A single bolt from one of the Franks’ balistas reportedly skewered seven Danes together. When the dispirited Danes retreated, the jeers of their wives and concubines sent them back to try again but at nightfall they gave up the assault. The presence of women in a Viking army was not unusual. Though they did not fight, the women made life in camp bearable, cooking, washing and repairing clothes, and caring for the sick.