Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  Russian river systems, too, took a huge amount of working out. In the mid-eighth century, it seems, all the Norse were doing was pushing up the rivers that flow into the Baltic in search of more chunks of fur-producing forest. From this it was a huge leap to finding out where their tributaries led, what possible further connections might be made, and how, eventually, you might end up in Baghdad. Rapids had to be avoided, shallows and sandbanks noted, and portages established between the headwaters of the different river systems. All of this required a huge amount of information and organization, not to mention changes of boats. Round about Ladoga it was necessary to change from ocean-going ships to riverboats, and archaeological evidence has shown that some of its inhabitants made their living by servicing this need. Elsewhere, the biggest problem was organizing the labour for portages. Although the requirement that the population of Smolensk pay its dues to medieval Russian kings in portage work is found only in a charter of 1150, this is the earliest charter to survive from the area and may well reflect long-established practice. When you stop to think about all the information that needed to be gathered, the two-generation time lag between establishing Staraia Ladoga to serve western markets, and the first evidence of contact with the Muslim south, becomes entirely explicable. The large amount of detailed geographical knowledge that the Scandinavian adventurers needed to acquire in every geographical quarter in which they operated is reflected in the geographical texts of medieval Scandinavia. These are full of classically and biblically derived knowledge, as you might expect of a learned tradition perpetuated by monks, but they combine with this specific and accurate information reflecting the practical intelligence built up over centuries of voyaging.61

  Economic information was also critical. Without a detailed understanding of markets and of the almost unlimited demand for northern forest products represented by the Muslim world, trading down the Russian river systems could never have gathered momentum. An entirely different kind of economic information came to be understood early on by western raiders, namely that Christian monasteries were centres for precious metals, and sometimes too, especially in Ireland, for valuable human beings. Also fundamentally economic in nature was the growing appreciation of the value of different areas’ landed resources which fed more directly into the later settlement processes.

  Political understanding, too, was vital, not least when it came to settlement. Given that Scandinavian migrants were looking to settle as relatively wealthy, socially dominant landholders, they had to understand existing sociopolitical structures at their chosen points of destination. Before setting out, they had to be certain that they could oust the sitting elite, either on their own or with the help of a few retainers – as was the case, it seems, in the northern and western isles. Either that, or they had to work out how much force was required to achieve a similar result in areas of greater social and political cohesion, such as Anglo-Saxon England and northern Francia, and put together sufficient military manpower for the job. Whether this was their intention from the outset is unclear, but one key point about the Great Armies is that they were large enough to destroy the military and political capacity of targeted Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And without this destruction, the reallocation of estates could not have followed. Sometimes, too, political knowledge of a more specific kind is evident. It would beggar belief to suppose it a coincidence that, having gathered in East Anglia, the Great Army then headed off for Northumbria. Any direction (except east – they would have got wet) was available to them, but they went north. And Northumbria was in the middle of a civil war. In similar vein, the switching of Viking forces in the decades either side of the year 900, backwards and forwards from England and Ireland to the continent, as opportunities arose and then were cut off, similarly reflects the impact of more particular intelligence.

  We have, of course, encountered the necessity for active fields of information in every pulse of first-millennium migration. That operating in the Viking era was more complicated, and took much longer to build up than some of the others because of the huge distances and wide variety of locations it encompassed. It is over five thousand kilometres from Reykjavik to Baghdad even as the crow swims, with a hell of a lot of dangerous water, shorelines and riverbanks in between. For the same reasons, the Viking diaspora involved more complicated logistic problems than any other of the migration flows we have so far encountered.62

  Aside from the prevalent emphasis on wealth generation – or perhaps one should say wealth gathering, since there was not much generation involved in sacking monasteries – the other unifying feature of the Viking diaspora is that all of its many and varied activities were waterborne. Trading, raiding, even settlement: all of these were based on the exploitation of the sea and of river systems. Access to the relevant mode of transport – ships – was of critical importance, therefore, and ships were not cheap. Only with the advent of the transatlantic liner – particularly its capacious steerage class – in the late nineteenth century did it become possible to transport vast masses of humanity overseas at relatively low cost. Before that, sea passages were too expensive to make mass waterborne migration for the poor a practical possibility, unless states decided to provide subsidized transport for their own reasons, whether free passages for workers required in new colonies, or convict fleets bound for Botany Bay. The few pieces of evidence we have all highlight the costs of shipping in the Viking Age. It was for this reason, as the sagas and other Icelandic texts suggest, that colonization of the North Atlantic was led by aristocrats – even if relatively minor ones. Only they could afford the necessary ships, although they brought their less well-off retainers along to provide the military manpower required either for subduing Picts and Scots, or for clearing the land and starting up farms in the Faroes and Iceland. The kings who came later into western waters presumably fitted out, in part, their own fleets, as well as hiring in those who already had their own transport. When an ex-King of the Swedes returned to re-establish himself in Birka, for instance, he had eleven ships of his own and hired in twenty-one others. Serving in the retinue of a king or jarl who could afford an entire fleet must have been one way for poorer men to get overseas, and presumably represented the path to eventual success taken by many a Danelaw sokeman.

  An alternative approach for those who were less well off but had some wealth was to buy a share in a ship. A runestone from Aarhus records one Asser Saxe, who owned a part share in a merchant ship. The same stone records that he was also a lithsman – a member of the company of a warship – and it may be, too, that some raiding ships were fitted out on a part-share basis. One Frankish source refers to the Viking companies overwintering on the Seine in 861/2 as ‘brotherhoods’: sodalitates. This fascinating word perhaps indicates that each ship represented a small jointly owned raiding company. A similar conclusion is also suggested by the runestones from southern Sweden commemorating those who had failed to return from Ingvar’s Russian expedition. That their families – presumably – could afford to raise the stones again suggests that they were not from the poorest stratum of society.63

  Access to shipping, then, was the key logistic problem, even if the boats required were not all the same. There’s a famous passage from Egil’s Saga that you often see quoted. It records that Egil sometimes went trading and sometimes went raiding. Asser Saxe of runestone fame confirms that the substance of this report, while deriving from an entirely post-Viking source, is not at all inconceivable, and even traders went armed. On his first visit to Denmark, St Anskar hitched a ride with some merchants who had the capacity to fight all day when pirates attacked. But the two activities – trading and raiding – required different types of ship (hence, perhaps, the runestone’s noting that Asser Saxe had an interest in both). Warships carried more men to row and fight, and had a shallower draft for penetrating further upstream on river systems. Merchantmen were broader of beam so as to carry more goods. At certain points, too, ships had to be swapped en route for riverboats. In Russia, as we hav
e seen, Slavs provided the rivercraft – monoxyla, the word implying that they were constructed from a single tree trunk – used on the Dnieper.64

  Scandinavian migration in the Viking era was strongly influenced, therefore, by the logistic problems it encompassed. Sheer cost is an important factor in explaining why the migration units involved were smaller than many of their counterparts of the so-called Völkerwanderung. Sailing may have been quicker than walking, but it was also much more expensive, and it seems highly unlikely that poorer Scandinavians could have afforded to take up any of the exciting and profitable new opportunities. This, it seems to me, is another reason for not believing in a large-scale migration of Scandinavian peasants into the Danelaw after the Great Army era settlements. Why would anyone have bothered to pay their transport costs, when there was a plentiful and thoroughly subdued Anglo-Saxon labour force already available for nothing? This may also be relevant when considering how many women and dependants are likely to have accompanied the warriors westwards. As we have seen, the explicit evidence isn’t good, but, again, if women were available locally, then transport costs may have been one factor that reduced the number of Scandinavian females taking part in the action.

  There is, moreover, a second hugely important fact to recognize about the naval technology that lay at the heart of the Viking diaspora. Not only was it expensive – much of it was also new. Sea-going naval technology had existed in the Mediterranean and even the Channel and the North Sea for many centuries by c.800 AD. But while inshore boats of skilful design had long been in use in the Baltic region, sea-going ships were a new phenomenon there at the start of the Viking period. Characteristic of Baltic waterborne transport in the late Roman period is the famous Nydam boat. Constructed in 310/20 AD, it was essentially a war canoe, powered by fourteen pairs of oars. It was found in the mid-nineteenth century, ritually sacrificed along with the equipment of the raiders who had manned it, in the same kind of bog deposit that has given us so much information about military retinues (Chapter 2). Its existence is a sign, presumably, that its former owners made one raid too many. For our purposes, though, the point is that it is an inshore boat. Lacking sails, its range was limited, and its hull design would not have been seaworthy in open waters. Up to the eighth century, moreover, nothing changed. No Scandinavian wrecks designed for sea work dating from earlier than c.700 have been pulled up by underwater archaeologists. A second famous source confirms the point. Amongst its other treasures, the island of Gotland is home to a series of picture stones, some of which portray Baltic shipping. No stone dating before the eighth century pictures a boat with sails.

  It is impossible to be certain of the exact chronology, but from c.700 this changed. Pictures, the occasional fabulous burial such as the Gokstad ship as well as wrecks, not least the five Skuldelev ships which, when worn out, were used to block one of the sea lanes into Roskilde Fjord, document the critical revolution in naval technology. The new design had two basic components. First, the hull was made strong enough for the open sea. Clinker-built strakes combined with a one-piece central keel and elevated prow and stern to create a hull with sufficient freeboard, and which was both strong and flexible enough to plough through ocean waves without either foundering or being battered to pieces. Like modern skyscrapers that can sway up to six metres each way at the top in high winds, flexibility meant survival, where a rigid hull would have broken apart. Second, sail technology appeared. This involved learning not just about the sails themselves, how to make them and use them to tack against the wind, but also all about masts and how to fix them to the hulls. By the early eighth century all of this had come together, and ocean-going ships superseded inshore war canoes. The whole Scandinavian diaspora would have been impossible without this technological revolution, and it began to work itself out less than a century before the first Viking raiders exploded into western waters.65

  This observation begins to answer some of the key questions about what precisely triggered the Scandinavian flow of migration in the late first millennium. In a real sense, the Viking period began when it did, and not before, because the developing naval technology of the Baltic made it possible for it to do so. But that is only half the answer. Why should this technology, readily available nearby for centuries, have been imported into the Baltic only around the year 700?

  No shipwrights’ diaries are available, but a broader run of evidence allows us to make a pretty good guess as to what was going on. The collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century caused a huge amount of disruption in established interregional trading structures in northern Europe. By the seventh century, however, trade flows were strong enough again for kings to establish trading centres. The deal was straightforward. The king guaranteed protection for all mercantile activities taking place at the market he established, and in return charged the merchants a percentage in the form of tolls and customs dues. A still-growing body of archaeological evidence has started to document the revolution that followed, as one trading centre after another – they are generally called emporia in the scholarly literature – sprang up along the Channel and North Sea coasts. The first to be excavated was Dorestad, already known to have existed from its coinage, hidden a little way upstream at the mouth of the Rhine (Map 20). The wood cut for its ship quays shows that it was in action by 650 AD. It was one among many important trading centres on the north coast of the continent: Quentovic, upstream from modern Boulogne, for instance, and the emporium on the Dutch island of Walcheren. North of the Channel, Hamwih – old Southampton – came into operation just a touch later than Dorestad, by 675; and Londonwic, the Middle Saxon trading port upstream of the old Roman city of London, has been identified as running along the Thames, behind the line of what is currently the Strand. The new trade network started in the Channel/North Sea zone, but quickly spread to Jutland and then on into the Baltic. Ribe, an emporium on the west coast of Jutland, was in operation by the year 700, and through the eighth century other markets opened up around the Baltic circle: Birka and Reric earlier on, Hedeby slightly later. It was also precisely to serve the growing western European demand represented by this chain of markets that Staraia Ladoga was founded.66

  It is just about possible that the chronology is coincidence, but I greatly doubt it. Human beings generally make technological leaps when there is a clear motivation for doing so. There is an overwhelming likelihood that the Scandinavians developed ocean-going naval technology precisely to grab a share of all the new wealth being generated by the burgeoning north European trade network. The chronology works, and the motivation is right too.

  The texts suggest that much of this traffic was originally dominated by Frisian traders, but in the longer term they would lose out to their Scandinavian rivals. And it is always the middle-men, not primary producers, who make most of the money from any exchange system. The switch began in the eighth century when Scandinavian merchants started to get hold of ships that would allow them actually to traffic in goods, and not act merely as suppliers of raw materials to others. This marked the beginning of a major reorientation in trading patterns. The Norse raiders and traders of the Viking period not only took the trade into their own hands, but also redirected it through centres under their control. Sacking the old emporia was a game enjoyed by all self-respecting Vikings, and by the tenth century the only ones still in operation, which included Rouen, York and Dublin, were under Scandinavian control. Whether there had been a conscious plan to wipe out the competition represented by the non-Viking trade centres is impossible to prove, but this outcome is deeply eloquent.67 The whole Viking diaspora of the ninth and tenth centuries must be seen as a consequence of the emporia network of the seventh and eighth. The powerful stimulus provided by the new riches flowing through northern waters made Scandinavian shipbuilders extend their skills dramatically, and eventually lured Scandinavian merchants and adventurers out beyond the inshore waters of the Baltic.

  MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT

  So far, the
evidence has been mounting up for the ‘positive’ – that is, the economic – motivations underlying the various activities of the Viking diaspora, whether trading, raiding, or actual settlement. In this sense, the migration element within it conforms to the classic pattern whereby major wealth differentials function as one of the prime motors behind human displacement. The word ‘positive’, of course, is jargonese from modern migration studies, and applies to the perspective of the Vikings themselves, the ones who were making most of the money. Those dispossessed of their lands, those raided, or those dragged away from loved ones to a miserable life of slavery would have had a very different point of view. But even from the perspective of those Scandinavians who were participating, a much more negative, political motivation did underlie some of the activities, often – as in modern migration flows – operating simultaneously with and alongside the positive drives.

  A case in point is the settlement of Iceland. As we have seen, the early Icelandic accounts insist that settlers went there from about 870 onwards to escape the growing political power of the Norwegian monarchy. The culprit was probably the Earldom of More on Orkney, but in any event the Icelandic texts can be believed in reporting a negative political element to settlement. There are some very good reasons for thinking that such political motivations in fact applied much more generally to the Viking period, at least from about 850 onwards. In a rightly famous paper, Patrick Wormald suggested some years ago that the armed exodus from Scandinavia, which is such a feature of the period, was a sign of considerable political crisis within the region. The evidence in favour of such a view is compelling. Its origins are more than a little obscure, despite the progress made in recent years, but a powerful ‘Danish’ monarchy had come into existence in southern Jutland and some of the adjacent islands by c.700 AD. From the middle of the eighth century it commanded enough authority to undertake major public works, erecting a huge ditch and earthwork along its southern boundary – the Danevirke – and cutting a canal through the island of Samsø. In Carolingian texts of c.800 we meet one of its kings, Godfrid, who could assemble ships in the hundreds and warriors in the thousands, and who was capable of relocating – whether they liked it or not – merchants from adjacent Slavic territories to his own newly planned emporium at Hedeby, presumably because he wanted their customs dues.