The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  These were slow developments, and by no means consistent; kings were stronger in Denmark, for example, in 800 than in 900. But they do act as a guide to comparison, in these non-Carolingian regions. They also give a justification for my decision to consider such heterogeneous cultures together. I do this partly to avoid a set of fragmented chapters, each of them short because the evidence for each region is so very much thinner in the pre-1000 period than it is for Francia, Italy, or England. But the ‘outer European’ lands do have features in common, as we shall see. So also does post-Visigothic northern Spain, which had very different antecedents, but some parallels all the same, and this region is considered here too. One of these common features was the Vikings, who had a major effect in Russia and in Scotland, Ireland and Wales (as also in England, as we have seen). Scandinavia’s internal history cannot be reduced to the Viking label, but it is undeniable that the Vikings at least came from there. We shall start with Scandinavia, therefore; we will then move to the Sclavenian or Slav lands, before moving westwards to Britain, Ireland and Spain.

  Denmark is in agricultural terms by far the richest part of Scandinavia - it is an extension of the North European Plain, and is not heavily forested, as are Sweden and Norway - and it was both economically and politically the most complex northern region until well past 1000. Already in the fifth and early sixth centuries it had some very rich centres, as archaeology shows, particularly Gudme on the central island of Fyn, where several dozen houses and a large hall have been excavated, and also a wealth of gold finds, in cemeteries and elsewhere, so far unparalleled in northern Europe. Some of these were locally made; others were imported from the Roman empire. It is most likely that Gudme was a royal or princely centre: not the only one in Denmark, but one which well shows the wealth that Danish rulers could already lay their hands on, at least in the period of west Roman crisis.

  This concentration of wealth fell back after 550, and in the next hundred and fifty years Denmark shows more muted, and probably more fragmented, power structures, focused on isolated ‘magnate farms’ and villages. Around 700, however, we can see signs of a larger political system in the south of the Jutland peninsula, in western Denmark; a central power of some sort created Ribe, a trading town parallel to the king-centred emporia of eighth-century England, in 705-10, and in 737 the Danevirke, a defensive wall across the south of the peninsula, was substantially rebuilt. (These unusually exact dates by archaeological standards are based on tree-ring dating.) Southern Jutland was the political zone of the reges Danorum, which Frankish sources begin to name from the 770s; by the time of Godofrid (c. 800-810), the kings seem to have had a hegemony extending throughout the territory of medieval Denmark (which also included modern southern Sweden), and also north into Vestfold around Oslo in southern Norway and south into the territory of the Sclavenian Abodrites. Godofrid even faced off Charlemagne, attacking Frankish Frisia; he founded his own trading town at Hedeby, too. Horic I was his son; it took fifteen years of instability and infighting for him to establish himself, but his opponents all seem from their names to be relatives, indicating a relatively solid hegemony for the family. After the 870s, however, the Danish kingdom broke down, and we hardly even know the names of rival kings for over half a century. It is entirely likely that the unity of the previous century dissolved. Gorm (d. 958) and his son Harald Bluetooth (958-c. 987) had to start again; they were also based in southern Jutland (at Jelling, where Harald set up a large and boastful runic grave-monument for his father), but were probably not from Godofrid and Horic’s family. Harald managed to recreate the Denmark-wide power of the latter, all the same; and his polity was by now notably more organized; nearly identical circular military camps survive in four or five sites in the kingdom, datable to around 980, which show a regularity of military and naval obligation almost certainly invented by Harald himself. Harald claimed hegemony in Norway too; and it was he who was both baptized a Christian (in c. 965) and also began to impose Christianity on his whole kingdom. His son Svein (987-1014) was the conqueror of England, in 1013, as we saw in the last chapter, a clear sign that the military reorganization of his father was more than wishful thinking; and his son Cnut, ruler from England to Norway, was in the 1020s-1030s second only to the German emperors as a western European power.

  Norway and Sweden did not match this development, Sweden least of all. The Swedish kings we know of were based in the old ceremonial and cult centre of Uppsala (not far from the rich trading town of Birka, which they also controlled), but they cannot be said to have ruled much outside this area. We do not know the names of most of them up to 1000, and it is likely that even in their core area, not to speak of the rest of the (future) Swedish lands, rulers of different types coexisted with the assembly-based politics which Anskar found. This was also the case in Norway. Norway is very mountainous, and communications between its few fertile areas (Vestfold, the south-west fjords, the Trondheim area) were generally by sea. These areas seem to have had very different histories for a long time, with independent rulers and assemblies; some of these polities must indeed have been very small, as both local ecology and archaeological finds imply. The Danes, who were also seaborne (Denmark being composed largely of islands) could all the more easily establish local hegemonies in parts of Norway, which can be documented more on than off from Godofrid to Cnut. Only in the period of Danish weakness did a Norwegian king, Harald ‘Finehair’ (d. c. 932), try to do the same, extending his hegemony from the south-west to the whole of Norway up to Trondheim, and demanding tribute. It is highly unlikely that Harald had all that much power, and his sons and grandson were locally contested or expelled: Eirík Bloodaxe (c. 932-4) finished his career as king of York (948-9, 952-4), and his brother Håkon I was killed by his nephew, who was himself killed around 970. Later Norwegian kings were adventurers, Olaf Tryggvason (995-1000 - he died in battle against Svein of Denmark) and his cousin Olaf Haraldsson (1015-30 - he died in battle against Norwegian opponents of his centralizing ambitions, who were supported by Cnut). These kings also coexisted with powerful jarls, notably the already-mentioned jarls of Hlaðir in the Trondheim district, dominant in the later tenth century, who were happier with the loose Danish hegemony which was the alternative to local kingship. The Olafs did bring Christianity to Norway, but a stable and uncontested Norwegian kingship did not exist until the mid-eleventh century, or even later.

  It is interesting how much opposition these kings in Norway generated. Indeed, later Icelandic traditions consistently ascribe the Norse settlement of Iceland itself to men fleeing Harald Finehair’s tyranny. This is chronologically impossible, for that settlement began around 870, when Harald cannot yet have begun his career, quite apart from the unlikelihood that he was so very powerful. But it is at least true that the Icelanders, who were largely from western Norway (or from its offshoots in Scotland, bringing Irish slaves with them too), set up a political system in their newly settled island in the early tenth century which clearly sought to make difficult any permanent accumulation of power. This system consisted of a hierarchy of legal assemblies, thingar in Old Norse, with an annual all-Iceland assembly (the Althing) at the apex. Each assembly was dominated by three or four locally based political and religious leaders, goðar, who were hereditary, and were certainly the most powerful and the richest local figures; each goði had free dependants, thingmenn, whom he represented at the assembly. But thingmenn could leave their goði and transfer their loyalty to a rival, thus preventing leaders from throwing their weight around too much. Later Icelandic narratives make it clear that powerful goðar (like Snorri goði in the west, Hall of Sida in the east and Guðmund ‘the Powerful’ in the north, leaders around 1000, the year Iceland accepted Christianity), only established temporary hegemonies based on their charisma and political skill, which would drop back on their deaths. The slowly developing Christian church came largely to fit this political pattern too.

  Norway had more stable aristocratic power than this, but later laws, of th
e Gulathing of the western fjords and the Frostathing of the Trondheim area, show the centrality of assemblies once again, set against a hierarchy of aristocratic (and royal) patronage. It may be best to see the political hierarchy as one of patronage everywhere, in the Norwegian lands as in Iceland, with aristocratic patrons (called variously jarlar, hersir, hauldar, thegnar, goðar), and clients who were generally independently owning free peasants. This was not an egalitarian society, and the free peasantry had slave farm-labourers and servants as well, but royal ambition was external to it, and was resisted for a long time. It is likely, indeed, that this also explains the temporary failure of Danish royal power in the late ninth and early tenth century. Denmark did, at least, have influential local political or ritual leaders, sometimes called goðar in runic inscriptions, as further north. These were probably more subject to kings (and perhaps already had greater tenurial control over their dependants) than in Norway, but were probably also still capable of going it alone if they got the chance - but as patrons, not, as yet, as landowning or seigneurial lords.

  Norse literature is late (thirteenth-century for the most part) but sometimes preserves earlier material: exactly how early is much discussed. The practical advice contained in the Hávamál, a set of verse proverbs, probably from Norway, dating quite possibly to the tenth century, conveys some of the values which run through all our sources. ‘Before you walk forward, you should look at, you should spy out, all the entrances; for you can’t be certain where enemies are sitting ahead in the hall.’ ‘The foolish man thinks that everyone is his friend who laughs with him; but then he finds when he comes to the assembly that he has few to speak on his behalf.’ ‘No man should step one pace away from his weapons on the open road.’ ‘He should get up early, the man who means to take another’s life or property.’ ‘Such is the love of women with false minds: it’s like driving a horse without spiked shoes over slippery ice (a frisky two-year-old, badly broken in), or like steering a rudderless boat in a stiff wind, or like trying to catch a reindeer on a thawing hillside when you’re lame.’ This careful, suspicious, macho, pragmatic, peasant culture marked Scandinavia in later centuries, and all the signs are that it did so already.

  But Scandinavia also produced the Vikings; they were its best-known export in the ninth and tenth centuries, as they are, overwhelmingly so, today. It would be wrong to see them as too different from the cautious peasants of the Hávamál and later prose sources (such as the Icelandic family sagas); peasants will often happily grab property from the defenceless, especially if they are quick to arms, as Scandinavians generally were. It is best to see the raiding of Viking groups in the two centuries after 800 as the product of several different factors, all of them internal to Scandinavian society. One crucial element is that ship technology improved; the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were all reliant on ships for basic communication between localities, but sails and better keels made ocean-going ships steadily more feasible. The Norwegians used this technology in the early ninth century to colonize the islands of Scotland (lightly settled, so unable to resist), and then in the late ninth and early tenth the almost uninhabited coasts of Iceland. From their Scottish base, the Norwegians then, especially from the 830s or so, raided beyond Scotland to Wales, and, above all, Ireland, where they also found relatively politically weak polities, highly susceptible to hit-and-run seaborne assaults. At roughly the same time, from the 830s, Danish pirate ships (víkingr simply meant ‘pirate’) followed the trade routes from Ribe and Hedeby down to Dorestad, London, York, and began the raids on Francia and England that we looked at in Chapters 16 and 19.

  It is wrong to see merchants and pirates as too sharply distinct; any raider becomes a trader if the port is too well defended, and many traders (all necessarily armed, to hold off other pirates) will readily raid if the port, or other coastal settlement, seems weak, and then sell off the booty elsewhere. The merchant-pirate link could thus be seen as a second cause of Viking raiding, in that it could in part simply be traced to the mercantile desire for profit, set off in the case of Francia by the political difficulties of the period after 830, when the attention of Frankish armies was elsewhere. This also fits the Swedish political expansion into Russia, which was the work of trading colonies in the north Russian river systems seizing their chances, as we shall see in a moment, although this involved less raiding of a Viking type. Ships could, in addition - a third element - take away from Scandinavia (and its Scottish and Icelandic colonies) young men anxious for glory and loot before they settled down on their fathers’ farms as peasants again; and also, from Denmark in particular - a fourth element - exiles, political losers in the struggles for increased royal power in the time of the Horics, keen to try their luck abroad. The existence of such exiles, essentially aristocrats or princes and their entourages, was in the ninth century specific to Denmark; they perhaps had a more violent (or ‘heroic’) ethos, and they contributed to the larger size of Viking armies in Francia and England (armies were never so big in Ireland), but they were only an addition to a desire for easy profit that any trader, or even peasant, could relate to. All these elements had plenty of parallels inside Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society, however; it was only ships (and thus surprise, and speedy retreat), and perhaps the absence of royal direction, that made the Vikings different. It was this which justifies Peter Sawyer’s well-known description of Viking raids as ‘an extension of normal Dark Age activity made possible and profitable by special circumstances’.

  Viking raiding had very different effects in different areas, all the same. In Ireland, where the Scandinavians were not numerous enough for large-scale territorial conquest, their raids resulted in the formation of a network of trading towns, inserted into the fragmented hierarchies of petty kingdoms that already existed. By contrast, in Russia, where the incoherence of local political structures was even greater, relatively few Scandinavians could eventually establish themselves as a new ruling class. In Francia and England, however, raiding itself developed into a life-choice for many of the Viking leaders of the mid-ninth century, and then, above all in England, into full-blown conquest after 865. We have seen that this, too, did not require huge numbers - thousands rather than tens of thousands - but it was certainly a considerable advance in scale from the raids of previous decades.

  This was where the Vikings moved away from simply being a seaborne extension of more ‘normal’ early medieval border relationships, and bid for power on their own behalf. It is significant that it was around then that the Danish kingdom itself failed for two generations; we do not know why in detail, but it is entirely likely that the by-now professional fighters of the river-mouth colonies of the Seine or Loire or Thames had as negative an effect on royal stability in their homeland as they did in eastern England. It is in this context, too, that we hear of our first family of Scandinavians who aimed for political power exclusively abroad, Ívar (d. 873) and his heirs (called by the Irish the Ua hImair), Ívar probably being one of the leaders of the Great Army in England in the 860s, who also ruled in Dublin, the major Norse-founded trading town in Ireland already from the 850s; his descendants held Dublin until 1036 or 1052, and also controlled York and southern Northumbria for much of the early tenth century. Ívar and his most successful emulator in the West, Rollo of Normandy after 911, were new figures, in that they broke the geopolitics of the early Middle Ages by simple force of arms, without a political base. They could also be seen as being in a way throwbacks to the fifth century, for their real counterparts as innovators were arguably Geiseric and Clovis.

  This was a genuinely new contribution to the political development of this period. But, all the same, it was a restricted one. Outside the areas of mass settlement and cultural takeover in northern Scotland and Iceland, only Dublin and Normandy survived as Viking political creations, folded into the socio-political realities of Ireland and west Francia/France respectively, and soon culturally almost indistinguishable from them. Arguably, the main political legacy of the Vikin
gs was actually developed in direct opposition to them: the invention by Alfred and Edward the Elder of the kingdom of England. The other two major Scandinavian political interventions, the temporary Danish conquest of England in the 1010s-1040s and the formation of Rus, in modern Russia and Ukraine, were not Viking operations, the former being a straightforward takeover of one kingdom by another, the latter being the crystallization of political power by merchant adventurers along Turkic models. It is true that for a time, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Scandinavians could travel through polities governed by Norse speakers or their immediate descendants from the Arctic Circle nearly to Constantinople, and did so on occasion, as with Harald III Hardráði, ‘Hard-ruler’, king of Norway (1046-66), who had served with the prince of Rus and the Byzantine emperor, and who died attempting to conquer England. But this internationalism soon receded; by now Scandinavian power-politics was more normally focused only on Scandinavia, and Viking exploits became only a romantic memory.