The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (57 page)

56.1: The Treaty of Verdun

Between 858 and 860, Viking fleets made continual raids on the southern and eastern coasts of Hispania. Other Viking ships sailed into the Mediterranean and harassed the Italian coast; some even made it all the way across the Mediterranean and tried to raid Alexandria. In 859, Viking invaders tried again to take over Pamplona. By this time, Inigo I was dead (an ill-planned rebellion against the emir of Cordoba had left him badly wounded and paralyzed for some time before his death), and his son Garcia I, the former Viking hostage, was ruling Pamplona. Together with Ordono I of Asturias, the northwest Christian kingdom once recognized by Charlemagne, Garcia of Pamplona turned back the bulk of the Viking invaders.
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Charles the Landless was less successful. Vikings kidnapped his chaplain and forced him to pay a ransom to get the man back. They burned the great church at Poitiers and roamed through his northern land. Every time he paid them off, they would leave; but they always came back, and this made Charles less and less popular with the people who paid taxes into the Frankish treasury. “I do not think,” fumed the cleric Paschasius Radbertus, “that even a few years ago any ruler on earth would have imagined…that a foreigner would enter Paris…. Who would have thought that such a glorious kingdom, so strong, so vast, so populous, and so vigorous would be humiliated and smeared with the filth of such people?”
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In 860, Charles began to build fortified bridges at the rivers to block Viking invaders. The first bridges on the Seine proved so useful in slowing down the Viking longboats that flimsy barriers were soon going up all around the country, and Charles had to issue an edict forbidding such “unauthorized strongholds” to be built. His own fortifications turned out to be a very long-term project; it would be years before the bridges were completed. Meanwhile the farms on the lowland near the mouths of the rivers remained completely vulnerable to the unexpected Viking attacks that broke out of the morning mist without warning.
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F
ARTHER EAST, THE
V
IKING INFLUX
caused a ripple that washed up and broke against the walls of Constantinople.

Even before the ice had begun to melt, Scandinavian merchants had struck out from their homes, sailed across the Baltic Sea, and built settlements along the opposite coast. The settlements had remained small, the lands around them largely unconquered, but for three hundred years traders had used them as stopping places on their journeys farther east. During the caliphate of al-Rashid, this trade had grown even busier; more and more silver dirhams had moved westward, as luxurious northern furs moved east. Bands of Scandinavian merchants made their way towards the port of Derbent, on the Caspian Sea, where they traded with Khazar and Muslim merchants.
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The lands through which they travelled were populated by tribes who spoke a set of related languages known to linguists as Finno-Ugrian. The Finno-Ugrian villagers didn’t trade far away, nor did they use the rivers as roads as the Scandinavians did. They called the travellers who came through their villages
Rhos
, or Rus—the word may mean “red,” referring to the foreigners’ ruddy coloring.
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Apparently some of the travellers adopted this word for themselves. A Frankish chronicle tells us that back in 839, the Byzantine emperor had sent a friendly embassy to Louis the Pious to reaffirm the treaty sworn out in the days of Michael Rangabe and Charlemagne. The Byzantine ambassadors were accompanied by strangers: “men who said that their people were called Rus, and had been sent to him by their king, whose name was the Khagan, for the sake of friendship.” To Louis the Pious, they looked like Swedes. He knew who Swedes were, and he suspected that the men were spies.
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But they were neither spies nor Swedes. They were traders who had settled down and intermarried with the Finno-Ugrian natives, and who now lived in a newly coalesced state ruled by a
khagan
, a borrowed word for “king.” Their little nation was probably centered around the village of Gorodishche, on Lake Ilmen, at the southern end of the Volkhov river.
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Whoever the khagan of the Rus was, he exercised only loose and informal control over the mix of Scandinavian newcomers and Finno-Ugrian natives who lived around him. But sometime around 860, as the Vikings spilled out of their native lands into the surrounding waters, a sizable party of them appear to have made their way across the northern waterways, down into the land of the Rus, where they found their distant cousins settled and prospering in trade.

This was a setup for disaster, but the khagan of the Rus knew more about Scandinavian ways than Charles the Landless. Rather than trying to drive the Vikings out and starting a minor war, he suggested that they head downriver towards Constantinople, where they would find richer targets to raid. In all likelihood, he sent a few of his own men to accompany them.
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Constantinople was by now under the rule of Michael III, grandson of the ambitious and capable general Michael II, who had seized the throne for himself in 820 by assassinating Leo V during Christmas mass. Michael III had inherited the Byzantine crown in 842, at the age of two, but his mother and uncles held the real power in Constantinople.
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Like Charles the Landless, the regents were helpless in the face of the onslaught. Two hundred ships sailed down into the Black Sea, filled with thousands of raiders who came ashore, burned and plundered everything outside the walls of Constantinople, and shook their swords at the terrified people lining the walls. They came, said the patriarch Photius afterwards, “like a thunderbolt from heaven,” unlike any other attack in history in its sudden, harsh savagery:

The raids went on for a little over a week before the raiders sailed away from Constantinople’s locked gates. Michael’s regents immediately claimed that fear of the Byzantine reprisals had driven the enemy away. But raiding and retreating was what the Vikings did best; it was their natural pattern to arrive, plunder, and leave.
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Ruins along the Volkhov river hint that the Viking visitors may have fallen out with their Rus hosts, before returning home. Just a year or two after the attack on Constantinople, fires destroyed part of Gorodishche and all of the nearby village of Staraia Ladoga.

The
Russian Primary Chronicle
, written 250 years later, says that in 862, the Viking warrior Rurik settled in Europe and built himself a kingdom among the native Slavs, with his capital at Novgorod. The
Chronicle
adds that he had to fight other Vikings for control of the subject Slavs. Rurik is probably legendary, but his tale gives us a glimpse of what may have been a real struggle between the Viking newcomers and the Rus who had already settled down along the Volkhov.
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It seems that the resident Rus eventually came out on top; but their numbers seem to have swelled suddenly, suggesting that at least a few of the Viking newcomers also settled down and stayed. The wooden buildings of Gorodishche were repaired; Staraia Ladoga was rebuilt, this time in stone. The Rus, resisting and adapting at the same time, had absorbed the Viking wave. It was a flexibility that neither the emperor of Constantinople nor the kings of the Frankish empire possessed.

I
N THE NORTH OF
I
NDIA
, three kingdoms touched edges at the city of Kannauj. Three strong and long-lived kings, each the son of a strong and long-lived king, ruled over the intersecting realms. The Pala were ruled by Devapala, who had inherited from his father Dharmapala a realm swelled by captured territory; the Pratihara, by Nagabhata II, whose father Vatsaraja had, in a thirty-year reign, managed to strengthen and establish the Pratihara as a power to be reckoned with. And in 814, the thirteen-year-old king Amoghavarsha received from his father, Govinda III, the enormous Rashtrakuta empire.
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Kannauj, filled with Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries, had been the capital city of the great king Harsha two centuries earlier. It had grown into a metropolis, and all three kings coveted it. Already the city had passed back and forth between the Pala and Pratihara kings, much to the dismay of the citizens, who had to flee for cover whenever a new army stormed through the gates. It was extremely uncomfortable to live in a symbol of dominance.

In 814, the city was in the hands of the Pala king, Devapala. But the Pratihara king, Nagabhata II, planned to take it away. Nagabhata II was in his ninth year of reign. He had already campaigned successfully against the Pala king, annexing some of the northern Pala lands (the old territory of Magadha) for his own. He had also driven off a Muslim attempt to storm across the Sindh into his land and capture his capital city of Ujjain. “He crushed the large armies of the powerful Mleccha king, the destroyer of virtue,” his inscription at the city of Gwalior tells us, using the traditional Indian name for these Arabic-speaking invaders.
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By 820—perhaps earlier—Nagabhata II had driven the Pala forces out of the city of Kannauj and was holding court there himself. “Nagabhata…alone gladdens the heart of the three worlds,” his inscriptions boast. “He revealed himself, even as the rising sun, the sole source of manifestation of the three worlds, reveals himself by vanquishing dense and terrible darkness…. The kings of Andrah, Sindhhu, Vidarbha, and Kalinga succumbed to his youthful energy, as moths do to fire.” The inscriptions are undoubtedly political spin, but if there is any truth in them at all, then the Pratihara empire of Nagabhata II had not only pushed into Pala territory but also taken land away from the Rashtrakuta empire.
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The Rashtrakuta domain had shrunk since Govinda’s death. The teenaged Amoghavarsha, barely old enough to inherit, had been forced to spend the first decade of his reign putting down rebellions against his power. In fact, revolt had grown so pervasive that in 818, Amoghavarsha fled from his own country and left his elderly cousin Karka to deal with the problems on his own.
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Karka not only did so, but—once the king had returned and the Rashtrakuta empire was back under control—retired to his family lands on the western coast instead of seizing the throne for himself. Unfortunately for Amoghavarsha, Karka’s son Dhruva was not as loyal; as soon as the old man died, Dhruva declared his own independence, and Amoghavarsha spent the next twenty years fighting him into submission. Thanks to all these domestic troubles, Amoghavarsha had been in no position to resist the Pratihara attacks.
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Given the essential likeness of the Indian kingdoms across the subcontinent (they had, more or less, the same governments, armies, and military playbooks), their fates were decided by two interlocking qualities: the spark of ambition in each king, and that king’s ability to stay on the throne long enough to fan the spark into fire. Amoghavarsha, king of the shrinking Rashtrakuta realm, was not essentially a warlike ruler. He built a beautiful new cave-temple in the city of Ellora, wrote poetry, dabbled in art, and left defense of the realm to his generals. But he sat on the throne long enough to give his kingdom a stability that resisted complete conquest. The Pratihara were temporarily dominant, but the Pala were still strong, and the Rashtrakuta did not dwindle completely away.
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The triumphant Nagabhata II died in 833, and the Pratihara fortunes wavered a bit; his short-lived son and successor spent only three years on the throne before dying, and his grandson Mihirbhoj had to beat off a Pala attempt to invade. Mihirbhoj’s first forays against the Pala king Devapala were triumphant, but then the tide began to turn against him. Devapala was in the third decade of a forty-year reign, and his experience allowed him to resist the attacks of the younger Pratihara king with increasing success. His own inscriptions claim that he reconquered land from the Himalaya down to the Vindhya range, poetically described as “piles of rock [which are] moist with the rutting juice of elephants.” “Devapala,” another inscription boasts, “brought low the arrogance of the lord of the Pratihara.”
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57.1: The Rise of the Chola

But the coincidence of long life, which had led first the Pratihara and then the Pala into victory, abruptly abandoned the Pala. Devapala died in 850 and was succeeded by short-lived rulers incapable of following up on his conquests. Mihirbhoj of the Pratihara, who would remain on the throne for another thirty-six years, pushed back into the lost territory: “He wished to conquer the three worlds,” an inscription notes. Slowly the pendulum swung back to the west. In Mihirbhoj’s final years, the Pratihara kingdom grew to enormous size; the Pala were reduced to a minor tributary in the east.

Mihirbhoj was still on the Pratihara throne when Amoghavarsha of the Rashtrakuta finally died in 878. He had reigned for an astounding sixty-four years, and although he had none of the aggressive campaigning skills of his neighbor, his longevity had lent the Rashtrakuta kingdom a tenacious coherence. But Amoghavarsha’s son and successor Krishna II, no more warlike than his father, lacked his father’s tough resilience. Almost at once, the Eastern Chalukya, who had been weak and fragmented for decades, showed new strength and declared their opposition to Krishna II; and the Pratihara launched new attacks against his borders.
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Krishna II, troubled in the north, was equally unsuccessful in the south. He had the misfortune to lie between two energetic ambitious kings; Mihirbhoj in the north, and a newly crowned southern ruler named Aditya.

The far south of India had been in the hands of two competing powers, the Pallava and the Pandya, for centuries. Aditya belonged to a clan that had been subject to the Pallava, the Chola clan. His father, the Chola warlord Vijayala, had been permitted by the Pallava king to attack the city of Thanjavur and take it as his headquarters. In Thanjavur, the Chola chief then took advantage of the ongoing preoccupation of the Pallava and Pandya kings with each other and conquered a kingdom.

Aditya, coming to his father’s throne in 871, would rule for nearly forty years: another long-lived king with ambitions. His tenure allowed his Chola domain to grow stronger and richer. Chola merchants carried on active sea trade to the east, sending ships across the Indian Ocean to the island of Sumatra. After the disastrous eruption of Krakatoa in 535, the people of Sumatra had slowly returned to rebuild their villages and replow their fields; the Sumatran village of Jambi had grown into a city and spread its authority across the water to the eastern parts of Java, and by the ninth century, Java, Sumatra, and the peninsula that jutted down from the Asian mainland were all under the rule of a single king. The Chola knew this as the Srivijayan empire, a wealthy and powerful trading partner that could help the Chola rise to dominance in the south.

By the end of the ninth century, Aditya had killed the Pallava king and claimed his land, and had begun to chip away at the southern border of the Rashtrakuta.
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Like the Pratihara kings far to the north, his long life had allowed him to realize his ambitions: the foundation of a new dynasty. Whatever legitimacy a king claimed for himself—whether he announced that his right to rule came from blood or bone, from the anointing of priests or the possession of a Divine Mandate—that legitimacy only mattered as long as the king lived. And in India, over the course of the ninth century, the life spans of the rulers had determined the advance and retreat of power.

At the beginning of the century, the struggle in India had been centered in the north, with armies fighting for dominance from east to west and back again. But by the century’s end, the axis of conflict had shifted; the struggle was a vertical one now, with the Pratihara on the north, the Rashtrakuta in the center, and the Chola in the far south all positioned for conquest. The king of the Rashtrakuta sat in the most precarious place: sandwiched between two tenacious neighbors who could reach each other only by going through him.