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

by Chris Wickham

  On one level, the Vikings simply showed these processes more clearly. Initially, after 795, they just plundered coastal settlements, largely monasteries. Even when their attacks expanded in scale in the 830s, they resembled the annual inter-kingdom raiding which the Irish were very familiar with. Then, when they began to over-winter in the 840s, on Lough Neagh in Ulster, in Dublin in Meath and on Lough Ree in the centre of the island, and even more when they founded more permanent settlements, as Dublin became, followed by Cork, Waterford, Limerick, they resembled the rougher end of the small-scale ambitious kingdoms just described; indeed, the Limerick settlement largely just displaced the southern half of the Déis Tuaiscirt/Dál Cais kingdom, pushing them north into Clare. Dublin was the most powerful and dangerous of these new polities, and in the 850s it became the focus of substantial reinforcements, but the Vikings never engaged in large-scale territorial conquest in Ireland. It was too difficult, with all those tiny kingdoms, and also not hugely remunerative, as there were too few stores of movable wealth (as in eastern Europe, slaves were Ireland’s most valuable exportable commodity). Dublin’s main political ambitions looked westwards, to the Irish Sea and York (above, Chapter 19). By the 860s the Dublin Vikings were already integrated into Irish political alliances, and there they remained, apart from a brief period, 902-17, in which they were expelled altogether. A revival of raiding in the 910s-920s followed the same trajectory. Dublin’s other, and perhaps major, role (matched on a lesser scale by the other Viking settlements) was as Ireland’s first proper town, an important trading settlement, some of which has been excavated, showing intense artisanal activity in bone, leather, wood (including ship-building) and cloth: Ireland’s answer to York and Hedeby.

  In political terms, however, the Vikings were a catalyst in two ways. The first was that in order to defeat them, wider alliances were necessary than had been needed by province-level wars in the past, thus reinforcing the pre-existing tendency of the most ambitious kings to make their own rules of engagement. The second was that Dublin happened to be situated in one of the traditional (and also agriculturally richest) heartlands of Irish politics, Meath, the area of operation of the southern Uí Néill kingdoms. This long-term strategic weakening of the power-base of the southern Uí Néill in the end caused their eclipse, although that was not until the eleventh century. In the meantime, if the paramount dynasties of the province, notably in this period Clann Cholmáin, were to maintain their importance in insular politics, then they would have to be even more creative.

  This was the background, then, for some kings to move in new directions. Let us look at three examples, to show some of the parameters now possible. The first is Feidlimid mac Crimthainn (d. 847), from the Éoganacht of Cashel, who had taken the kingship of Cashel (that is, the paramount kingship of Munster) in 820; he established unusually wide alliances in west Munster and also Leinster, and by 830-31 was attacking northwards into Connacht and Meath; by 840 he was ravaging Meath, and camped at Tara itself, locus of the Uí Néill paramount kingship, a sign of new ambition for a Munster king. Feidlimid also realized the importance of ecclesiastical politics, and attempted to form links with the major monastic centre of Armagh in northern Ireland; he became abbot of Cork in 836, and of Clonfert in Connacht in 838, and was a major patron of the ascetic Céli Dé movement. Conversely, he was ruthless with rival ecclesiastical powers, burning the monasteries of Durrow and Kildare, and, above all, Clonfert’s neighbour Clonmacnois, on three or four occasions. Feidlimid was later seen as pious, and, by Irish royal standards, may well have been; but what he was doing was creating his own politico-religious structures in his own image, and was indeed, it seems, aiming at nothing less than the high-kingship of Ireland itself.

  The high-kingship was a new concept; it is barely attested before this period. Exactly what it entailed was equally unclear: certainly hegemony over both Cashel and Tara, the old symbolic centres of Éoganachta and Uí Néill rule, but then what? Submission from every Irish king? Feidlimid did not securely gain even the former, still less the latter, but the idea was by now on the cards. Máel Sechnaill I mac Máele Ruanaid (d. 862) of Clann Cholmáin, king of Tara and thus hegemonic over the Uí Néill from 846, was the first king to make the claim more or less real, in the next generation. Máel Sechnaill had a powerful track record as an opponent of Vikings (unlike Feidlimid), sacking Dublin itself in 849 and fighting off their reinforcements in the 850s; he was therefore in a good position to gain submission from both Leinster and Connacht, and also, unusually, the Ulaid kingdoms of eastern Ulster, who were at risk from Viking attack. The king of Brega joined the Vikings; Máel Sechnaill executed him in 851 by the ‘cruel death’ of drowning, as he had done the Viking leader Turgéis (Thorgils) in 845. And he moved from the north and east into Munster, several times, taking hostages from all the province in 856, and reaching the sea in 858. It is because of all this that the Annals of Ulster call him ‘king of all Ireland’ at his death four years later: less innovative than Feidlimid, but more complete in his hegemony, he shows, like his predecessor, the new possibilities of the period.

  A further step was taken by Brian Bórama - Brian Boru in common parlance - mac Cennétig, king of the Dál Cais from 976 to 1014. Leading Uí Néill kings since Máel Sechnaill I had operated as more or less major figures, more prominently than most kings of Tara in the eighth century, though less than Máel Sechnaill; Brian, however, re-created the latter’s power and went beyond it, even though starting from one of the smallest autonomous kingdoms in Ireland, connected to neither of the great paramount dynasties. Brian’s rise is enthusiastically and fancifully chronicled by the War of the Gaedhil [Irish] with the Gaill [Vikings], written in the early twelfth century, around a century after Brian’s death, for his grandson; the main lines of the narrative are confirmed by more sober (and duller) annals. He fought Vikings a lot, as is unsurprising for one of the closest kingdoms to Limerick, which he, with his brother and predecessor Mathgamain (953-76), sacked in 967. As king, he fought neighbouring Munster kings and their Norse allies, and seems already to have seized paramountcy over Munster from the Éoganachta dynasties in 978, perhaps following his brother. The Clann Cholmáin/Uí Néill king of Tara, Máel Sechnaill II mac Domnaill (980-1022), himself one of the more powerful over-kings of the century, laid Dál Cais waste in 982 as a preventive move, but Brian moved into Connacht in the early 980s, and attacked Máel Sechnaill back. He built up his authority in Connacht and also Leinster in the next decade, an authority recognized by Máel Sechnaill himself in 1002. Finally, he moved into Ulster, gaining submission from most of their kings in 1005-8 and, last of all, the Cenél Conaill in 1011. Brian was thus, for the first time, recognized by everyone as ‘king of Ireland’; indeed, in a highly ceremonial visit to Armagh in 1005 his secretary had recorded his presence there as ‘emperor of the Irish’. But revolts started as soon as the following year, in Leinster this time, and in 1014 Brian, with a much reduced army (the Uí Néill kings did not support him), faced an army from Leinster and Dublin, with reinforcements from as far away as Orkney, at the Battle of Clontarf. Brian’s side won, but the seventy-year-old king was killed, as were the leading king of Leinster and Jarl Sigurd of Orkney. Dál Cais hegemony collapsed instantly, and Máel Sechnaill II took back the kingship of Tara until his death.

  I have recounted this career in more detail than usual (though leaving out much: Brian often fought two or three wars a year) just to show how much work was involved in establishing - really, inventing - a hegemony over Ireland, which anyway did not, could not, last. Brian is not recorded as developing any new techniques of government. He used the wealth and men of Limerick and Dublin after their subjection, but Dublin had its own political agenda, and helped to end his rule eventually. The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill eagerly recounts the benefits of Brian’s brief hegemony: peace, justice, much tribute; the restoration of churches, learning, roads and fortresses; and hospitality. The learning has a twelfth-century feel to it, and so do the
fortresses, but even here the imagery is old; the rest is wholly traditional. Brian’s remarkable career was mostly important in that it showed that skill and ruthlessness could open up an all-Ireland stage for political ambition, and could, furthermore, do so for any king. The following two centuries proved that, with Leinster and Connacht providing claimants to Irish hegemony for the first time, in rivalry with Brian’s descendants and with the northern Uí Néill. But, in the absence of solid political structures, this simply replicated the instability we have already seen for Wales. Slowly, we do see more royal officials in the larger kingdoms in the eleventh century, and some interest in local territorial administration in the twelfth; more and more small kingdoms lost their autonomy and identity. Nonetheless, Ireland was still an island of many kingdoms when English invasion finally came in 1169.

  ‘State-building’ had different bases again in Christian Spain, the narrow band of polities along the northern edge of the peninsula left unconquered by the Arabs in the 710s. This northern fringe had been politically marginal already in the Visigothic period (above, Chapter 6): the only major Visigothic centre south of the Pyrenees not to be in Muslim hands in the early ninth century was Barcelona, thanks to Charlemagne’s conquest of what is now northern Catalonia in 785-801. Apart from that Catalan enclave, governed by a local dynasty of counts from the late ninth century onwards, two independent kingdoms existed to the west, that of Pamplona or Navarre, and that of Asturias. The small Pyrenean kingdom of Pamplona is first documented in the early ninth century under Iñigo Arista (d. 851), a Christian relative of the neighbour ing Muslim dynasty, the Banu Qasi of the upper Ebro valley; kings of Pamplona were for a century little more than a Christian version of the autonomous Muslim lords of the marches of al-Andalus (above, Chapter 14). The kingdom of Asturias started small, too, around 720, in a revolt against the Muslims in the remote northern mountains by an aristocrat called Pelagius (Pelayo in Spanish; d. 737). His second successor Alfonso I (739-57), founded a dynasty which lasted until 1037, and which was generally on rather more hostile terms with the Arab powers of the south.

  The Asturian royal line started with very flexible inheritance practices. Alfonso I’s son Fruela (757-68) was succeeded by his cousin, his brother-in-law, his half-brother, and another cousin, before his son Alfonso II (791-842) was allowed to take over, and father-son succession did not take root until 850. The eighth-century kings ruled from small centres in the Asturian valleys; Alfonso II, however, turned his political base, Oviedo, into a capital aimed at imitating Visigothic Toledo, with ambitious palace buildings and churches, some of which still stand, and his successor Ramiro I (842-50) built others. The kings of Asturias spent this first century of their existence extending their authority east and west across the northern mountains, from Álava in the upper Ebro and the northern core of the later county of Castile, in the east, across to Galicia in the north-west of the peninsula. They also raided southwards over the mountains into the broad frontier-lands of al-Andalus when they could get away with it, that is, in periods of Arab political trouble; Alfonso I raided particularly systematically during the Arab civil war of the 740s. After that civil war, the Arabs no longer seem to have controlled the wide plateau-land of the Duero valley, just south of Asturias, and it remained outside anyone’s visible political domination for over a century.

  Ordoo I (850-66) was the first Asturian king to move south of the mountains permanently, taking León and other cities in the 850s. His son Alfonso III (866-910) pushed systematically down to the River Duero, a push which doubled the size of the kingdom; the Duero remained more or less the boundary with al-Andalus until well into the eleventh century. As the kings moved south into the rich Duero plains, they spent less and less time in Oviedo. After Alfonso III’s sons overthrew their ageing father in 910, León became the main centre of the kingdom, which tends from now on to be called the kingdom of León; it soon acquired an array of buildings matching or surpassing Oviedo as well. Alfonso had been able to expand his lands because of the next round of civil wars in al-Andalus, but these ended in the 920s, and his heirs found themselves on the defensive for the rest of the century. Ramiro II (931-51), the most successful, at least held off the new caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman III in 939-40, actually winning a pitched battle against him at Simancas in 939; but after an attempted coup in 959 Sancho I (956-66) owed his throne to ‘Abd al-Rahman, who could regard León as his client as a result. In 981-1007 the Arabs under al-Mansur moved onto the attack, sacking León in 988 and the major cult-site of Santiago de Compostela in 997. If the caliphate had not dissolved in civil war after 1009, the survival of the kingdom might have been in doubt. Actually, it was the king of Navarre, Sancho III (1004-35), who took the initiative most quickly during that civil war, partly at the expense of the kings of León - he absorbed the county of Castile, now covering all the upper Duero valley, into his kingdom. His son Fernando I, count of Castile (1028-65), took over León itself in 1037, and his kingdom of León-Castile, enriched by large tributes from warring Muslim Taifa kingdoms, was poised for serious conquest for the first time, in the late eleventh century.

  The kings of Asturias and León show us a double face. One was that of Visigothic tradition. Once the kings settled in Oviedo, they adopted all they could of the imagery and architectural display of Toledo as a capital. This does not mean that tiny Oviedo in any way resembled the latter city, even stylistically (Oviedo’s churches at best represent a provincial tradition, although one with obvious late Roman roots); all the same, its surviving buildings are remarkable for such a small and agriculturally poor kingdom. Santiago, too, which had developed as a pilgrimage centre around the supposed tomb site of St James the Apostle from the early years of the ninth century, was built up, especially by Alfonso III; so was León in the next century. The new Duero territories were taken over through a network of urban foundations, on Roman sites such as Astorga, Visigothic sites such as Zamora and new sites such as Burgos, and also an array of rapidly expanding monasteries such as Cardeña, Sahagún and Celanova, who were soon the patrons of ambitious manuscript production. The kingdom regarded itself as being governed by Visigothic law, as also did Catalonia (Navarre is less clear here), and the elaborate procedures of Visigothic legal practice - more elaborate than those of either Francia or Italy - survive in both Catalan and Leonese documents, which start to be numerous in the tenth century. The kings had a palace entourage, too, which, although actually very small in size, at least nominally mirrored that of Toledo. Unlike any of the other polities described in this chapter, that of Asturias-León was also characterized by a political balance between king and aristocrats which doubtless had Visigothic antecedents, and which resembled that of the contemporary Frankish world; there were Alavese and Galician factions, and in the tenth century Castilian factions too, which kings had to contend with, and the tenth-century counts of Castile (particularly Fernán González, 931-70) were classic over-mighty subjects, willing to go it alone. As north of the Pyrenees, the politics of land played its part here, with royal cessions of property to aristocrats and monasteries prominent in our documentation, although - as indeed with the Carolingians - kings could confiscate from the disloyal too, and visibly did so. In these respects, then, Asturias-León could be seen as similar to tenth-century England, or to the principalities of southern Italy, in following lines parallel to those of Francia, although modified substantially by separate and earlier roots, in this case in the most Romanized of all the Romano-Germanic kingdoms.

  But this is not the only way of seeing Asturias-León. Had it been, the kingdom would have been better discussed in Chapter 18; but the power-base of both kings and aristocrats was less certain than the preceding paragraph implies. Under the Visigoths, Asturias was remote and poor, and less Romanized or urbanized than most of the rest of the peninsula - perhaps than anywhere, with the exception of the nearby Basques, whom the Visigoths never fully conquered. Navarre was in part a Basque kingdom, although a relatively Romanized (or Visigothic
) one; to its west, some Basque tribal communities remained independent into the eleventh century, and to their west some of the mountain valleys nominally subject to Asturias may have had a tribal social structure too. Even in the core areas closer to Oviedo, where Roman-style property law was certainly normal, our early (that is, ninth-century) documents show very small-scale aristocracies, and a substantial presence of a landowning peasantry.

  In the new Duero lands, this was still more true in the next century. The view that the Duero valley was depopulated until a colonizing process was set in train by Ordoño and Alfonso III (the theory is above all associated with the mid-twentieth-century historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz) has now been abandoned, in the face of increasing archaeological and topographical demonstrations of settlement continuities. All the same, the valley had no organized political system for a long time, and when it emerges into the light of the documentation in the tenth century it is also a region of landowning peasant communities, organized through coherent village societies, sometimes with their own decision-making bodies, concilia. If there was a political structure that linked all these lands, it was probably organized through a network of fortified settlements, called castros in modern Spanish (and sometimes in the Latin of our period, too), which had at least some form of collective element to their social structure. This peasant-based, partly collective, society was given more strength the further south one went, for the southern frontier of the kingdom had to be defended. Peasants had military roles in southern León and southern Castile- as also southern Catalonia - for a long time, which reinforced their political and economic autonomy. The fuero (royal-granted customs) of the Castilian fortified settlement of Castrojeriz, dating probably to the early eleventh century in its present form, gave to all the male inhabitants considerable privileges (including immunities from tribute) in return for frontier defence; so did that of Cardona in Catalonia in 986, which contains the memorable line, paraphrased from the Gospel of Luke, ‘if anyone wants to make himself superior [maior] among you, let him become inferior [iunior]’. It is not helpful to call the Duero societies, or even most of the Asturian societies, ‘tribal’, but at least they had unusually flat social structures by the standards of Francia or, by now, England, with autonomous peasantries who had more in common with those of Scandinavia or some of the Slav lands than with those of the Carolingian world.