The Vikings (16 page)

Birka’s location on the island of Björkö made it an attractively safe harbour, but its developing importance and wealth rapidly made it a natural target for pirates. A hill-fort and a semi-circular rampart 350 metres long and 3 metres wide was built, crowned by a wooden walkway and turrets that gave a commanding view of the surrounding waters. Similar semi-circular ramparts have also been found at Hedeby, Århus in Denmark, and Ipswich in England. Adam tells us that among its other defences was an enormous underwater stone wall, and archaeologists have found the remains of a barrier of wooden stakes anchored in the clay bed of the lake that forced ships into a narrow approach lane and made it hard to approach the town unseen. Excavations undertaken in the 1930s of the area north-west of the hill-fort and the finds of very large numbers of arrow- and spearheads, chain mail and shield bosses, as well as a section of lamellar armour, thin, flat and layered, confirm that this was a vibrant centre that required the protection of a sizeable military presence. A population of somewhere between 700 and 1,000 was concentrated in the harbour area, living and working in small, square timber-framed buildings with wattle-and-daub walls, and wooden, thatched or turf roofs, two to a plot on each side of a system of plank-laid tracks. The so-called Warriors’ Hall built on the upper terrace of the garrison area was huge by comparison, 19 metres long and 9.5 metres wide, with two entrances and double-vaulted walls which provided good insulation. This hall-house was divided into two tall rooms with a fireplace in each. Locks, keys and chest fittings, spearheads and shield bosses were found along the walls. In the western part of what was almost certainly the town’s main hall, at which the king would be received when visiting, were found, among other things, a dragon’s head made of bronze, slivers of glass from goblets and two sword handles. Some forty comb-cases were also found for the combs that warriors would wear suspended from their richly decorated belts.
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The garrison warriors and probably many of the craftsmen were resident in Birka all year round. Others used the town only during the summer trading months. Raw materials such as iron, furs and horn were worked by craftsmen for local use as well as for export, jewellers had workshops there, as did smiths who made swords for export to the east. Much of the huge quantity of silver from the Islamic world was brought by merchants into the west via Birka. The town was also the centre for a slave-trade that was probably the most lucrative Viking Age business of all. When we reflect that the later African slave-traders made a profit of 600 per cent on the purchase price of slaves in Africa, and that the Vikings did not even buy their slaves but simply captured them, the proceeds of the trade must have been enormous. The islands of Britain were one source, the Slavic regions of eastern and eastern-central Europe another. Mainly the prey of the eastern-orientated Vikings of Sweden, these populations were captured for sale and dispersal on such a scale that their ethnicity became synonymous with their fate and the word ‘slave’ passed into the English language as the generic term. Rimbert writes of the joy of those Christians among the Birka slaves when Anskar’s arrival there in 829 gave them chance to celebrate again the proper rites of their religion. Anskar may even have bought their freedom for them, something Rimbert tells us he did whenever he was able.

The wealth attainable by the town’s most successful inhabitants is obliquely reflected in finds from some of the 3,000 or so graves located on the site. The richest of them, dated to the early years of the ninth century, was the last resting place of an aristocratic woman whose grave-gifts included gold- and silver-plated bead necklaces, silver clasps in the shape of horse heads, bowls, beakers and a glass funnel, and a glass smoother and whalebone plaque for her to iron her clothes with. A key opened a small chest that contained an exquisitely decorated comb.
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A literary reflection of the town’s wealth is found in a story of uncertain date that Rimbert tells in the
Vita Anskarii
about a deposed Birka king named Anund, who had taken refuge among the Danes. Anund made a deal with a local band of Vikings that he would leave Birka and all its merchants and silver open to them, if they would place their ships at his disposal and help him regain power. The town would be more or less undefended, he said, and at very little personal risk they would become very rich indeed. A fleet of thirty-two ships then descended on Birka, forcing the inhabitants to flee to the safety of nearby Sigtuna. From here they sent a message to Anund, asking his price to return Birka to them. Anund’s demand of 100 pounds of silver was met, and in turn he agreed to keep his part of the bargain. He thus crossed the line again and was a king once more, not a Viking. His Danish allies were furious at this sudden access of decency. They scorned the ransom he had demanded, claiming that ‘each individual merchant in the place had more than had been offered to them’. They threatened to pillage and burn Birka to the ground, and then do the same to Sigtuna. Anund played his double role well. Persuading the Vikings that there was some doubt about their chance of success he suggested they cast lots to see the will of the gods. The results were interpreted, the attack was doomed to fail, and the Vikings departed. So that their journey would not have been entirely in vain they sacked a town on the Slav border as they made their way back to Danish territory. Anund afterwards returned the ransom money to the Birka merchants.
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Birka lay not far from the temple centre of Uppsala, where Heathen culture was at its strongest, and it is no surprise that, at about the same time as Anskar and the other Hamburg exiles were wandering with their relics in search of a new home, the inhabitants of Birka should have turned against Gautbert, the bishop he had left behind to guide them in the ways of the new faith. They killed his chaplain Nithard and several others with him, robbed the bishop and drove him out of the country ‘with insults and abuse’. On this point Rimbert is insistent: ‘This was not done by command of the king, but was brought about by a plot devised by the people.’
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The reaction left the Church without a presence in Birka for some seven years, until 851. Rimbert learnt later of the hostility endured by the converted Herigar. During a general discussion about religion at an Assembly meeting, defenders of the old faith had reproached him for having accepted, alone, a creed that seemed to the rest of them worthless. His greatest crime was cultural treason, that in choosing Christianity he had ‘separ ated himself from them all’.
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All the sweeter, then, for Anskar to have finally baptized a reigning Danish king. In a rare moment of unity Lothar, Louis and Charles had sent envoys to Horic in 847 ordering him to stop his people from attacking Christians and threatening him with war should he fail to do so.
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But Adam of Bremen tells us that the Danish Vikings paid what amounted to a licence fee to their king for the right to raid, and the profession of seaborne violence was by now so profitable that control of it was no longer in Horic’s hands. Pragmatist and survivor that he was, he submitted instead to baptism by Anskar as the missionary was passing through his territories on the way back to Birka. Horic later built a church in Schleswig and permitted the practice of Christianity throughout his territory, without making it compulsory.
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With Horic’s conversion, the Danish dynastic conflict that flared up again not long afterwards acquired, if only incidentally, a religious dimension when it pitted him against his Heathen nephew, Guttorm. Both were killed in circumstances which are unclear and the throne passed to another Horic, known as the Younger. This youth at once began to persecute those who had converted to Christianity under the liberal regime of his predecessor, driving out the priests and closing down the churches.
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The charismatic Anskar travelled to see him, struck up an immediate rapport with him and presently converted him. Rimbert credits Horic the Younger with the building of a church at Ribe, the second in Denmark after the Schleswig church.

Anskar died of natural causes in Bremen in 865 and was canonized a few years later. It was, Rimbert tells us, a matter of regret to him that he had not died the death of a martyr. But, as the record of his fearless engagement shows, the failure was no fault of his. The archaeological record makes no unequivocal statement about the success of his Birka mission. Mere burial and the fact of the east-facing orientation of the buried individual are no longer regarded as an infallible indication that he or she was a Christian, buried thus for a first sign from the east of the Second Coming. Indeed, as the Oseberg and Gokstad burials show, inhumation was practised as often as cremation by Heathen Vikings. In general it would seem that the syncretism characteristic of most cosmopolitan centres typified the funerary practice of the inhabitants of Birka. A richly furnished double burial containing the familiar weapons, jewellery, tools, food and bowls, as well as a single cross pendant and a single Thor’s hammer pendant, is one example.
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The fact that Rimbert singles out two Birka women, Frideborg and Katla, as being notably good Christians may hint that Christianity was especially attractive to Heathen women. The possibility is reinforced when we consider that all ten cross pendants found in Birka, including the one in the double grave, were located in graves in which women had been buried.

It might seem as though Christianity had made little headway in Scandinavia in the ninth century, despite the efforts of Anskar, Ebbo, Gautbert, Herigar and the other priests, missionaries and converts who preached among the Danes and Swedes.
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But, just as the early, sporadic Viking raids prepared parts of the British isles and northern France for future colonization, so might Anskar’s missionary activity have prepared the ground in the Scandinavian homelands for a coming sea-change in religious belief.

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When, as part of the baptism deal of 826, Louis the Pious handed territory over to Klak-Harald he set a volatile and unpredictable precedent for his sons. Lothar had employed the tactic again in 841 to buy off (probably) the same Harald with Walcheren, though the annalist calls that a gift ‘to secure the services of Harald’. Rorik, a nephew of Harald, inherited the gift and the relationship. In 850 he broke it off and with an enormous number of ships attacked Frisia and the Betuwe region of what is now the Netherlands, between the Waal and the Rhine. Unable to deal effectively with him, Lothar made him a gift of lands including Dorestad, in effect washing his hands of it. Like other trading towns, it had become a favourite target for Viking raiders.

Charles the Bald had made payments to Reginfred to buy off a force besieging Paris in 845 and, as we have seen, other payments in 857 or 858 to a Viking named Bjørn who had fortified himself on the island of Oissel and was using it as a base for raiding in the surrounding countryside.
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Bjørn’s army seems not to have honoured its side of the bargain on this occasion, for in 861 Charles had to pay another 5,000 pounds of silver to a fleet of Vikings, led by Weland, to dislodge them. This they did; but the success of the tactic was only apparent, for the displaced Oissel army then attacked Meaux in an attempt to win back what they had lost. A large part of one or both of these armies then became directly involved in Charles’s dispute with King Salomon of Brittany over the possession of Anjou. Salomon was already using an army of Viking mercenaries, and Robert the Strong, the Frankish commander in Neustria, now offered an army of Seine Vikings 6,000 pounds of silver to join him in fighting against them. The upshot was that, by the Treaty of Entrammes in 863, Charles the Bald recognized Anjou as part of Brittany. He resorted to payments again in 866 and 877, on both occasions because his army proved incapable of matching the Viking armies on the Seine.

A thread that runs through most of the ninth century links some of these Frankish concessions of money, and sometimes land, to the ambition originally attributed by a mocking Einhard to Godfrid, king of the Danes, that he wished to challenge the Carolingian empire itself. Louis the Pious’ support for Klak-Harald, and the intermittent acceptance of his claims by the sons of Godfrid to be joint ruler of the Danes, suggest there was a genuine basis to his claim. Information in the sources about Danish dynasties is sparse from the death of Godfrid until the rule of Gorm the Old over 100 years later. We know that Klak-Harald had a son whom he named Godfrid. If he was following a dynastic naming practice in this, it may imply that the Godfrid whom he succeeded in 811 was his father, so that he was an older and perhaps illegitimate half-brother of the ‘sons of Godfrid’ and that this was the basis of his claim. His son, the second Godfrid, was paid by Charles the Bald in 853 to defect from an alliance with Lothar. Afterwards he raided in Frisia in the area around the Scheldt, and finally threatened the lands around the Seine. An entry in the
Annals of Fulda
says that Charles also gave him ‘land to live on’.
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He in turn had a son, also named Godfrid, who became heavily involved in the Carolingian power struggle in the 880s that followed the death in 882 of Louis III, a grandson of Charles the Bald and king of the western Franks, and the crowning of Charles the Fat, brother of a grandson of Charles the Bald, as emperor. In the notably chaotic year of 882 a Frankish army was defeated by a force under this third Godfrid. The
Annals of Fulda
tell us that the Vikings followed after the retreating Franks ‘and burnt with fire all that they had previously left intact, as far as the castle of Koblenz, where the Moselle enters the Rhine’.
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They attacked Trier, drove off or killed the inhabitants, and on 5 April burnt it to the ground. They took control of the monasteries nearby, and also the monasteries at Liège, Prüm and Inden. The greatest insult came when they took ‘even the palace at Aachen and all the monasteries of the neighbouring dioceses’, most of which they burnt.
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The end of the Carolingian dynasty could not be far away when Charlemagne’s capital, the seat of power in what had once been an unassailable empire, could not be protected against the invaders. Charles the Fat appeared willing to head a major attempt to get rid of the menace before it was too late. An army of Franks, Bavarians, Alemans, Thuringians and Saxons, large enough ‘to be feared by any enemy, if it had a suitable leader and one it agreed on’, marched on the Vikings’ fortification of Asselt.
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Things seemed to be going the way of this besieging force when, to the annalist’s disgust, Charles was persuaded to offer terms to Godfrid - ‘the emperor received him as if he were a friend and made peace with him; and hostages were exchanged’. To show their sincerity the Vikings gave what was obviously a familiar signal and ‘hoisted a shield on high after their fashion and threw open the doors of their fortress’. Curious, probably hoping to do some trading, Charles’s soldiers entered the camp, at which the Vikings ‘reverted to their usual treacherousness’, lowered the shield, closed the gates and killed or captured the trapped soldiers. Charles’s position may have been weaker than the annalist knew. Instead of avenging the slaughter the emperor then ‘raised the aforementioned Godfrid from the baptismal font, and made the man who before had been the greatest enemy and traitor to his kingdom into a co-ruler over it’. Godfrid was given the territories and benefices previously handed over to Klak-Harald and his brother Rorik by Louis the Pious. Using money obtained from Church funds Charles also paid his army a large sum of money. To complete their humiliation, the Franks had to look on as the Vikings loaded their ships with booty and hundreds of captives for sale as slaves. Charles’s desperation, the sheer military power of this Viking force, and Godfrid’s high ambition are all reflected in a marriage agreement that formed part of the settlement in which Godfrid was given Gisela, a daughter of Lothar II, king of Lotharingia. But in what looks like a last attempt to realize in full the dreams of power attributed to the first in this line of ambitious God frids he threw it all away in 885, renounced his faith and set off up the Rhine at the head of a great army on a campaign of major conquest. He too, however, like that first Godfrid, was murdered before he had made a real start on his campaign.