The Vikings (17 page)

It seems obvious now that policies of appeasement and alliance with individual Viking leaders only encouraged them to push harder. The tactics employed by Louis the Pious, Lothar, Charles the Bald and Charles the Fat established clear precedents for the gift of lands around Rouen and the lower Seine made to the Viking leader Rollo in about 911, which eventually led to the creation of the duchy of Normandy. Even so, it is hard not to sympathize with them, in particular with the two Charleses who made the most active use of the policy, or to see what alternatives they had. From about 840 onwards Paris was under more or less constant threat from Viking armies of a size that dismayed Frankish observers into what may sometimes have been exaggeration but what must always have been, on any account, terrifying manifestations. The monk Abbo de St Germain, in his epic Latin verse
De bellis Parisiacae
, written in the early 890s, gives us a vivid literary reflection of what the Parisians were up against, trebu chets or ‘engines of war’ and all. It also shows how much the western Franks needed a hero and how, with the great siege of Paris in 885, they got one in Count Odo. Prior to the attack, writes Abbo, 700 sailing ships and an undisclosed number of smaller ships packed the Seine for a distance of more than two leagues, ‘so that one might ask in astonishment in what cavern the river had been swallowed up, since it was not to be seen’.
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The engagement that followed was regarded by contemporaries as crucial. In his letter to Charles the Fat, Archbishop Fulk of Reims wrote of Paris as the ‘head and key’ of the western Frankish kingdoms of Neustria and Burgundy. If it fell to the Danish invaders, he predicted, it would spell the end of France.
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The Danes, under the command of Sigfrid, arrived on 25 November and made their demands for tribute. According to Dudo of St Quentin, Rollo, the founder of the duchy of Normandy, was another of the leaders, though most historians doubt this. The demand was rejected. After a scene-setting prelude, Abbo’s account of what followed places us memorably at the very heart of a Viking Age battle:

The second day after the fleet of the Northmen arrived under the walls of the city, Sigfrid, who was then king only in name but who was in command of the expedition, came to the dwelling of the illustrious bishop. He bowed his head and said: ‘Gauzelin, have compassion on yourself and on your flock. We beseech you to listen to us, in order that you may escape death. Allow us only the freedom of the city. We will do no harm and we will see to it that whatever belongs either to you or to Odo shall be strictly respected.’ Count Odo, who later became king, was then the defender of the city. The bishop replied to Sigfrid, ‘Paris has been entrusted to us by the Emperor Charles, who, after God, king and lord of the powerful, rules over almost all the world. He has put it in our care, not at all that the kingdom may be ruined by our misconduct, but that he may keep it and be assured of its peace. If, like us, you had been given the duty of defending these walls, and if you should have done that which you ask us to do, what treatment do you think you would deserve?’ Sigfrid replied. ‘I should deserve that my head be cut off and thrown to the dogs. Nevertheless, if you do not listen to my demand, on the morrow our war machines will destroy you with poisoned arrows. You will be the prey of famine and of pestilence and these evils will renew themselves perpetually every year.’ So saying, he departed and gathered together his comrades.

In the morning the Northmen, boarding their ships, approached the tower and attacked it. They shook it with their engines and stormed it with arrows. The city resounded with clamour, the people were aroused, the bridges trembled. All came together to defend the tower. There Odo, his brother Robert, and the Count Ragenar distinguished themselves for bravery; likewise the courageous Abbot Ebolus, the nephew of the bishop. A keen arrow wounded the prelate, while at his side the young warrior Frederick was struck by a sword. Frederick died, but the old man, thanks to God, survived. There perished many Franks; after receiving wounds they were lavish of life. At last the enemy withdrew, carrying off their dead. The evening came. The tower had been sorely tried, but its foundations were still solid, as were also the narrow bays which surmounted them. The people spent the night repairing it with boards. By the next day, on the old citadel had been erected a new tower of wood, a half higher than the former one. At sunrise the Danes caught their first glimpse of it. Once more the latter engaged with the Christians in violent combat. On every side arrows sped and blood flowed. With the arrows mingled the stones hurled by slings and war-machines; the air was filled with them. The tower which had been built during the night groaned under the strokes of the darts, the city shook with the struggle, the people ran hither and thither, the bells jangled. The warriors rushed together to defend the tottering tower and to repel the fierce assault. Among these warriors two, a count and an abbot, surpassed all the rest in courage. The former was the redoubtable Odo who never experienced defeat and who continually revived the spirits of the worn-out defenders. He ran along the ramparts and hurled back the enemy. On those who were secreting themselves so as to undermine the tower he poured oil, wax, and pitch, which, being mixed and heated, burned the Danes and tore off their scalps. Some of them died; others threw themselves into the river to escape the awful substance . . .

Meanwhile Paris was suffering not only from the sword outside but also from a pestilence within which brought death to many noble men. Within the walls there was not ground in which to bury the dead . . . Odo, the future king, was sent to Charles, emperor of the Franks, to implore help for the stricken city. One day Odo suddenly appeared in splendour in the midst of three bands of warriors. The sun made his armour glisten and greeted him before it illuminated the country around. The Parisians saw their beloved chief at a distance, but the enemy, hoping to prevent his gaining entrance to the tower, crossed the Seine and took up their position on the bank. Nevertheless Odo, his horse at a gallop, got past the Northmen and reached the tower, whose gates Ebolus opened to him. The enemy pursued fiercely the comrades of the count who were trying to keep up with him and get refuge in the tower.
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The siege went on for about eight months. By the time it ended Sigfrid had already accepted a paltry ransom in silver and led his men away. Twice Odo had managed to slip through the Viking lines and urge Charles the Fat to come to the rescue of the Parisians. In the summer the remaining Vikings, weary of the wait, their morale ebbing, made another desperate attempt to breach the walls. When it failed, still more of them gave up, dispersed and set about looting the surrounding countryside. Charles arrived in October with the imperial army and surrounded the remaining force. The stand-off lasted until the spring of the next year, when Charles’s offer of 700 pounds of silver was accepted. Deposed in 887 and dead in 888, Charles was replaced as king of the western Franks by the heroic Odo and for the first time the crown passed out of the hands of the Carolingian dynasty. Over the next century it would pass back and forth between the Robertians, named for Odo’s father Robert the Strong, and the Carolingians, but with the accession of the Robertian Hugh Capet in 987 the great dynasty finally and permanently lost its hold on power. The Vikings did not cause this break-up of Charlemagne’s empire and the demise of his dynasty. Responsibility for that lay squarely on the ceaseless disagreements between Louis’ sons, ‘the three brothers’, but Viking military activity made these disagreements hard to resolve, and the presence, throughout the long crisis, of mercenary groups of skilled warriors, prepared to fight alongside whoever made them the best offer, was a temptation the brothers too often failed to resist.

6

Across the Baltic

An entry in the
Annals of St-Bertin
tells us that, on 18 May 839, a group of envoys from the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus arrived at Ingelheim and presented themselves at the court of Louis the Pious. Their purpose was to confirm a treaty of ‘peace and perpetual friendship and love’ between the two emperors. Attached to their party were a number of men who described themselves as belonging to a group or tribe that called itself ‘Rhos’ or Rus. They presented a message of friendship from their own leader and a letter from Theophilus requesting that Louis give them safe conduct through his territories on their homeward journey north. The letter explained that the reason these men were taking such a roundabout route was that on their outward journey to Constantinople they had encountered a number of dangerous and threatening tribes whom they wanted to avoid on the way back.

Louis distrusted these Rus. He suspected them of spying. On closer investigation, the annalist tells us, the emperor learnt ‘that they belonged to the people of the Swedes’. Since Anskar’s first mission to Birka in 829, the Franks had learnt enough about travelling Swedes to distrust them, and to associate them with the attacks on their territories by other northern pirates. With these in mind, Louis may well have found their claim to be seeking protection from ‘primitive tribes that were very fierce and savage’ an ingenuous one. In his reply to Theophilus he said that he would detain the men at his pleasure, pending a further investigation of them. Should this prove satisfactory he would give them the help requested. Should they fail to pass his tests he would send them back to Theophilus for the emperor to deal with as he saw fit. Disappointingly the story ends there and we learn nothing more about the fate of these travellers. A particular frustration is that we do not know whether they were making their way back to Birka and Sweden, or whether their goal was a settlement already established on the far side of the Baltic, possibly at Gorodische at the northern end of Lake Ilmen.
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This is the first reference in the written sources to that group of Vikings from the eastern side of the Scandinavian peninsula who crossed the Baltic in search of wealth, trading opportunities and new lands to settle. Several explanations have been advanced for the name by which they became known, the Rus. One is that their tribal home was Roslagen, an old name for the coastal stretch north of Stockholm.
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Another relates it to
ruotsi
, a name by which Finns refer to present-day Sweden and which, in former times, meant ‘men who row’. The early history of the Rus is shrouded in mystery, for the tribes they encountered in these regions were as little literate as themselves, and the scholars and historians of the Islamic caliphate and of the Byzantine empire met them too infrequently to provide a coherent record of their provenance and their doings. But from the material in Snorri Sturluson’s
Ynglingasaga
it is clear there was a long tradition among Scandinavian kings of piracy and land-taking across the Baltic dating back to a time long before the appearance of the Rus at Louis’ court in 839. Snorri summarizes Sweden’s legendary past as a series of power struggles that usually ended with the flight of the defeated candidate. Some of these dispossessed or landless leaders went west into Norway and became kings there. Others became the kind of hybrid he calls ‘sea-kings’. ‘At that time,’ he writes, ‘kings, both Danes and Norsemen, were harrying in Sweden. There were many sea-kings, who had great armies but had no land.’ One he names was Salve, son of a king from the Naumdal district of Norway, who began his career harrying in the Baltic before an attack on Sigtuna won him the kingship of the Swedes on land.
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The enterprise of such leaders often led them east, to try their luck on the far side of the Baltic. The long and partly legendary succession of the Yngling kings was finally ended by Ivar the Far-Travelled, whose territories, according to Snorri, included all of Sweden and Denmark as well as parts of Saxony and the Baltic provinces. Snorri’s belief that the Caucasus was the ancestral home of the Swedes seems to have derived, in part at least, from stories that connected certain of these early and legendary kings with the region, to which he afterwards added the homophonic ‘proof’ of
Aesir
and
Asia
. He tells us of a Swedish king named Svegdir who crossed the Baltic on a sort of pilgrimage in search of ‘the Godheims and Odin the Old’, the home of the gods and Odin.
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He stayed away five years and eventually reached ‘the land of the Turks and Sweden the Great, and found there many kinsmen’. Tjodolf of Hvin described in verse the result of his search. Very drunk and on his way to bed one evening, he saw a dwarf sitting under a large stone. The dwarf lured him inside with a promise that he would meet Odin. Svegdir accepted and was never seen again.

The site of Svegdir’s supposed disappearance was a town in Estland called Stein, and this strip of Baltic coastline between Estland on the Gulf of Finland and the territory of the Couronians bounded in the west by the river Niemen became, for obvious geographical reasons, the first focus of interest for Swedes travelling east. A series of excavations, begun in 1929 by the Swedish archaeologist Birger Nerman near the Latvian city of Grobin, some 15 kilometres inland from the coast, showed that a Scandinavian colony had existed in the Couro nian region of the Aland river for some 200 years, from about 650. Nerman associated this colony with the expulsion of one-third of the inhabitants of Gotland, as a result of the famine described in the
Gutasaga
. Three burial grounds in particular show signs of Scandinavian burial customs. Many of the graves in level ground were those of women, whom their belt-buckles and so-called disc-on-bow brooches identified as natives of Gotland. Women in such numbers are unlikely to have crossed the sea alone, and it seems probable they were members of a community which had settled in the area. The grave-mounds housed predominantly men, very often accompanied by typically Scandinavian weaponry. In one grave a picture-stone depicting two duck-like birds was found. These picture-stones were unique to Gotland, and evolutions in their shapes and motifs over the centuries date this Grobin stone to the sixth or seventh century. The importing of picture-stones was not unheard of; one that has since been lost was recorded in the churchyard at Norrsunda, Uppland, in 1632. Two others turned up on the island of Oland.
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