Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (15 page)

When not distracted by his troublesome sons, Louis did his best to shore up the coast defences and put diplomatic pressure on Danish kings to restrain their subjects, with some success: in 836 and 838 King Horik executed the leaders of Viking raids against the empire (see ch. 11). After the first Viking attack on Dorestad, Louis ordered the construction of forts to protect the Frisian coast and the Rhine delta. One of these forts, on the island of Walcheren, was captured by the Vikings in 837 while on their way to sack Dorestad for the fourth time. Frankish casualties were heavy and two dukes and other men of rank were captured. Louis cancelled a planned trip to Rome, so seriously did he take this setback. An enquiry into the disaster pinned the blame on the local Frisians for ignoring their military duties and not opposing the Vikings. Fortunately in 838, a fifth attack on Dorestad was prevented when the Viking fleet was destroyed by a storm before it got there. By this time, however, Vikings were active along the empire’s entire northern coastline.

The Frankish defences collapse

Vikings were never slow to exploit political weakness and their raids intensified during the civil wars between Louis’ sons. The monk Ermentarius described how the strife: ‘gave encouragement to the foreigners. Justice was abandoned, and evil advanced. No guards were mounted on the ocean beaches. Wars against foreign enemies ceased and internal wars raged on. The number of ships grew larger, and the Northmen were beyond counting. Everywhere there were massacres of Christians, raids, devastations and burnings.’ Of the three kingdoms set up by the Treaty of Verdun, it was Charles the Bald’s kingdom of West Francia that was most vulnerable to Viking raids, having a coastline that extended from Flanders to the Pyrenees and many navigable rivers, including the Seine, Loire and Garonne. Lothar’s kingdom extended from Rome to the North Sea and included Frisia and the Rhine delta and was therefore also vulnerable to raids. Louis the German’s kingdom of East Francia lay between the Rhine and the Elbe and was the least vulnerable to Viking raids, having only a short coastline on the North Sea: apart from frequent raids on the important military and ecclesiastical centre of Hamburg, it was relatively untroubled by the Vikings.

Lothar (r. 840 – 855) attempted to solve his Viking problem by using fire to fight fire. In 850 Roric, a Danish Viking leader, brought a fleet to Frisia. Unable to expel him, Lothar granted Roric part of Frisia and the town of Dorestad as a fief, making him responsible for defending it against other Vikings and collecting the taxes and handing them over to the royal treasury. There was nothing nationalistic about the Vikings. They were quite happy to fight other Vikings if the price was right. It is questionable how effective an ally Roric proved to be – Vikings ravaged Frisia in 851, 852 and 854, and in 857 when Dorestad itself was sacked yet again – but his loyalty seems never to have been seriously questioned by any of the four kings he eventually served. At some point Roric converted to Christianity and one of the empire’s most important churchmen, archbishop Hincmar of Reims, took a personal interest in his spiritual welfare. In 855, Lothar supported Roric in a bid to seize the Danish throne but was unable to establish himself and was back in Frisia by the end of the year. Roric’s greatest failure came in 863 when a fleet of 252 Viking ships sailed down the Rhine as far as Cologne, sacking Dorestad on the way. Roric negotiated the Vikings’ withdrawal but a rumour spread that he had colluded with the raiders and in 866 the Frisians rebelled and drove him out. However, he kept the confidence of his lord, who by now was Lothar’s son Lothar II, and he was soon restored to his fief. When Lothar II died in 869, Roric’s fief was divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German, but he reached agreements with them both despite the brothers’ mutual antipathy. Roric is last heard of in 873 and it is not known when he died. The experiment was obviously deemed a success by the Franks because, by 882, the new emperor Charles the Fat (r. 881 – 7) had granted Roric’s lands to another Dane called Godfred. This turned out to be a mistake. Despite being baptised and married into the royal family, Godfred did nothing to prevent Viking raids and was murdered at the instigation of a group of local nobles in 885. By this time Dorestad was largely deserted. Viking raiding was probably not the critical factor, however. Dorestad’s position in a conflicted borderland between the East and West Frankish kingdoms disrupted trade even more than Viking raids, while the shifting course of the river left the town high and dry.

A question of priorities

Charles the Bald’s (r. 843 – 77) authority was the most precarious of Louis’ three sons. Throughout his reign Charles had to contend with the hostility of his brothers and rebellious counts, as well as intensive Viking raiding, problems he dealt with in roughly that order of priority. This may seem puzzling but Charles was determined above all to defend his throne and, judged from this perspective, his policy towards the Vikings becomes more comprehensible. Viking raids, no matter how destructive, would have been of little consequence to him if he had allowed his brothers or vassals to depose him. Unfortunately, the way Charles protected his throne just made life worse for his subjects. Charles often paid tribute to the Vikings, to buy them off while he dealt with more direct threats to his authority, but this simply encouraged more raids, and made him unpopular with his subjects, who were doubly impoverished by being both taxed and plundered. He refused to allow the building of castles and city walls, which would have given protection to his subjects from Viking raiders, because of a well-justified fear that they might also be used against him by his rebellious counts.

The counts were central to Charles’ problems. The county was the basic administrative subdivision of the Frankish kingdoms. Each count was responsible for administering justice, collecting tax revenues on behalf of the crown, and for mobilising and leading those freemen liable for military service in wartime and supplying troops for the royal army as required. Under Charlemagne, counts were usually appointed for life but as royal authority waned after his death the office became hereditary, passing from father to son. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the county: often the best candidate for the job would be the son of the old count. He had been brought up in the area, knew the land, and knew, and was known by, the people. For the king, however, it represented a loss of control and patronage if he could not dismiss an ineffective or disobedient count, or reward a loyal vassal by promoting him to county. Once their office became hereditary, counts treated their counties as if they were their own personal principalities. They were reluctant to send troops to join the royal army and leave their own lands exposed to attacks by Vikings or, indeed, neighbouring counts who saw a chance to expand their lands at someone else’s expense. This trapped Charles in an ever-tightening vicious circle. The king relied on the counts for troops. Without their co-operation, Charles could depend only on the resources of his own personal estates. With limited forces at his command, the king could neither combat the Vikings nor enforce his authority over disobedient counts. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that Charles was also very reluctant to confront the Vikings in battle. A defeat would not only allow the Vikings to plunder the countryside at will, it might also encourage a rebellion or an attack by his dynastic rivals while his forces were weakened. However, unavoidable though they were, Charles’ policies were ultimately self-defeating. Protection was the most important thing that medieval people expected of their kings and his failure to provide it only accelerated the decline of royal authority.

Though few parts of the West Frankish kingdom escaped raids – Vikings even attacked its Mediterranean coastline – the Vikings concentrated their activities on the rich and easily accessible lands of the Loire and Seine river valleys. The Seine was the first to be penetrated by Vikings. In May 841, while the civil war raged between Charles the Bald and his brothers, a Norwegian Viking leader called Asgeir took a fleet up the Seine and sacked Rouen, together with the wealthy abbeys of Jumièges and Fontanelle, where sixty-eight monks were captured and ransomed for 26 pounds (11.8 kg) of silver. The whole campaign took just two weeks. In 842, Vikings sailed down the river Canche, further north along the coast from the Seine, and sacked Quentovic, after Dorestad the most important trade centre in the Frankish lands. Some of the town’s inhabitants saved their property by paying ransom to the Vikings. Like Dorestad, Quentovic survived the raid and when it was finally abandoned in the tenth century, it was because the river on which it lay had silted up.

Exposed islands off the mouth of the Loire had been targeted since the earliest days of Viking raiding. In 830, the abbot of St Philibert’s on Noirmoutier built a castle as refuge for his monks, so often had it been raided. Soon after this the monks began to retreat to the mainland during the summer raiding season, returning to their island monastery only in the winter when they hoped bad weather would keep the Vikings away. By 836, the abbey had been raided so often that the monks dug up the precious body of their patron saint and, to prevent its desecration by the pagan Vikings, abandoned Noirmoutier and fled with it to find a new home on the mainland. In 843, Vikings sailed up the Loire for the first time. On 24 June a fleet of sixty-seven ships fell upon Nantes while the population were celebrating the feast of St John the Baptist. Vikings burst into the cathedral during a service and massacred the congregation, killing bishop Gunhard at his altar. The timing of the attack is unlikely to have been a coincidence: attacking during a religious festival, when the population would likely be off guard, was a stratagem the Vikings used more than once. The people of Nantes had felt secure from Viking attack, believing that no strangers could navigate their way through the maze of shoals in the Loire’s estuary. However, these Vikings had been supplied with a pilot by Lambert, a local count, who was in rebellion against King Charles and hoped the Vikings would help him get his hands on Nantes. Lambert got his city, or what was left of it anyway. It was a hundred years before Nantes recovered its former prosperity. The Vikings spent the rest of the summer plundering the Loire valley before withdrawing to the security of Noirmoutier where, for the first time, they wintered in Francia. Many of the Vikings had brought their families with them and clearly meant to stay long-term: the Loire would not be free of Vikings until 939.

Charles’ defence of the Loire was frequently undermined by rebellious vassals. In 844, Charles’ nephew Pippin, the sub-king of Aquitaine, guided a Viking leader called Oskar up the Garonne to help him capture Toulouse. Oskar also scouted the area for opportunities for plunder and in 845 returned and seized Bordeaux. Unfortunately for Pippin, this damaged his credibility and in 851 he was captured and handed over to Charles, who imprisoned him in a monastery. Pippin escaped in 854 and tried again to seize Aquitaine. While Pippin and Charles were fighting, the Loire Vikings plundered the countryside at will, sacking Poitiers, Angoulême, Périgeux, Limoges and Clermont. Pippin failed to establish himself securely and in 864 threw in his lot with the Vikings. A Frankish chronicler even accused him of giving up his Christian faith and becoming a devotee of Odin. If true, Odin proved to be no help. Pippin was captured by Charles later in the year and died in prison. For Nomenoë, the duke of Brittany, the Vikings were a welcome distraction. Vikings often raided Brittany’s long, indented coastline but it was a poor country and Vikings found the rich lands of the Seine and Loire much more attractive. The Bretons were unwilling subjects of the Franks and in 845-9, Nomenoë took advantage of Charles’ many distractions to assert his country’s independence. Even the most effective defender of the Loire, Count Robert the Strong of Angers, who inflicted many defeats on Viking raiding parties, was in rebellion against Charles between 856 and 861. Robert was eventually killed fighting an alliance of Bretons and Vikings at Brissarthe in 866.

The threat to Paris

In 845 the Vikings returned to plunder the Seine valley with a fleet of 120 ships under a leader called Ragnar, who is perhaps the most credible prototype for the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok of the saga traditions. King Charles at least tried to stop the Vikings, stationing troops on both sides of the river just downstream from Paris. Ragnar attacked the smaller of the two Frankish forces with his whole army, which is likely to have been 3,000 – 4,000 strong given the size of his fleet, and routed it. Ragnar took 111 of his prisoners to the riverbank and hanged them in full view of the other Frankish force, who promptly got the message and fled. Ragnar moved on to sack Paris, at that time just one of many market towns along the Seine, not yet the capital city it would one day become. Early medieval kings spent their lives moving with their courts from one estate to another so no one place was crucial to the administration of a kingdom: the government was wherever the king was. Charles did not think Paris was worth fighting over, he wanted to husband his troops to fight the rebellious Bretons, and simply paid the Danes 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg) of silver to leave the city. While Charles may not have been over-concerned about the Vikings, God, so monkish chroniclers believed, was and He sent an epidemic to punish them for plundering so many holy places. Over 600 of them died according to the
Annals of Xanten
. According to another monastic tradition, an impious Viking who had plundered the abbey of St Germain outside Paris died after his bones miraculously shriveled away.

This divine intervention may have deterred the Vikings for they kept away from the Seine until 852, when a large fleet under Godfred, a son of the Danish king Harald Klak, plundered Frisia and Flanders before settling down for the winter at Jeufosse, mid-way between Rouen and Paris. Charles laid siege to Godfred’s camp, but his troops refused to fight and at New Year he withdrew leaving the Danes to ravage the countryside savagely. In July, Godfred moved on to the Loire, sacking Nantes again and raiding upstream as far as Tours. Danes again returned to the Seine in August 856 and plundered their way upstream, re-establishing their winter camp at Jeufosse. Then, on 28 December, they attacked Paris again and burned it. Every church was destroyed except St Stephen’s cathedral, the church of St-Denis, and the church of SS-Vincent and Germain, which were saved when the clergy paid a large ransom in cash. Abbot Louis of St-Denis and his brother Gauzlin, who were captured by the Danes, were themselves ransomed for the incredible sum of 686 pounds (311 kg) of gold and 3,250 pounds (1,474 kg) of silver. Following the attack, the Danes established a new and more secure camp on the island of Oissel, in the Seine 8 miles south of Rouen. There they held out against King Charles, who besieged them fruitlessly for three months during the summer of 858. By this time the peasants of the lower Seine had had enough, both of the Vikings and of their own ruler’s failure to defend them. They formed armed bands and began to fight the Vikings, with some success. However, for Charles and his nobles alike, peasants taking the law into their own hands was an unacceptable challenge to their authority. The peasants’ reward for resisting the Vikings was to be slaughtered by their own lords. The sense of despair permeated throughout society. The theologian Paschasius Radbertus wrote mournfully: ‘Who among us would ever have believed or even imagined that in so short a time we would be overwhelmed with such fearful misfortunes? Today we tremble as we think of these pirates arrayed in raiding bands in the very vicinity of Paris and burning churches along the banks of the Seine. Who would ever have believed, I ask, that thieving gangs would perpetrate such outrages? Who would have thought that a kingdom so glorious, so fortified, so large, so populous, so vigorous would be so humiliated and defiled by such a base and filthy race.’ Then in his early seventies, Paschasius was old enough to remember the glory days of Charlemagne.