The Viking Danes arrived with the so-called ‘Great Army’ of pagan warriors in 865, not to raid, as they had done repeatedly, but to seize a kingdom. A decade later the Danes had conquered Northumbria, East Anglia and the central English kingdom of Mercia. They had been blocked only by the English kingdom of Wessex in southern and southwestern England. The King of the West Saxons from 871 was Alfred, who had become king shortly after defeating the Danes in a major battle at Ashdown in January of that year. But Danish infiltration was difficult to resist. Alfred was forced to raise money to pay off the Danish leaders, an extortion characteristic of Viking warfare and a way of achieving wealth without having to conquer it. In 874, the Great Army divided, some to go north, some to maintain their rule in Mercia, and one part, under Guthrum, to move south. In 875, this Danish army set out from Cambridge to Wareham in Dorset, supported by a Danish fleet sailing along the coast. The fleet was lost in a storm and with it a potentially large Danish army. Guthrum occupied Exeter, where Alfred surrounded him and forced him to agree to leave the West Saxon kingdom. Hostages were exchanged as a sign of good faith, but almost all the chronicles from the time indicate that the good faith of pagans was not to be trusted.
The best accounts of what followed – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun later in Alfred’s reign, and a short account of Alfred’s life written in 893 by the monk Asser – have clearly been embroidered in order to demonstrate that what followed was Alfred’s noble triumph over adversity. It is evident that Guthrum moved away to the Mercian city of Gloucester, but unlikely that he felt bound by any oaths he had made. In the early weeks of 878, the Danes co-ordinated a strike against Wessex, which was designed to bring the kingdom finally into the Danish sphere. The first coup was against Alfred, who was spending Christmas at his estates in Chippenham. Guthrum led a surprise attack and Alfred was fortunate enough to flee without being caught. It was following this flight to the Isle of Athelney in the marshy Somerset Levels that Alfred is supposed to have taken refuge in a shepherd’s hut, where he famously allowed the cakes to burn which he had been told to watch. The story was added later to Alfred’s biography, perhaps to embroider his flight and isolation with an added sense of pathos. Reading behind the near contemporary accounts, it is evident that Alfred’s position was less dangerous than the texts suggest.
Further west, the Viking leader Ubba Ragnarsson led a fleet across the channel from Wales to north Devon to try to encircle the Saxons. His force was defeated by Ealdorman Odda of Devon and Ubba killed. At Athelney, Alfred could rely on his liegeman, Ealdorman EEthelnoth of Somerset, and the levies of Somerset soldiers. In the spring of 878, Alfred sent a summons to the men of Hampshire and Wiltshire and Dorset to assemble at a large rock known as Ecgberht’s Stone in order to do battle with the threatening Danes. The sources are short in detail on what followed. Alfred’s army moved to an old hill fort near the royal estate at Edington and at some point, estimated between 6 and 12 May 878, engaged what seems likely to have been just a portion of Guthrum’s army, sent south from Chippenham. No source records the presence of the Danish king, nor is there any solid evidence of the numbers involved or the tactics employed. The Saxon warriors were armed with a variety of spears and swords, including the aesc, a long pike made of tough ash with a heavy metal blade; the Danes were armed with Viking swords, axes and spears. Whether most of the Danish army was present or only a large warband, it was smashed by the Saxons and driven back to Chippenham, suffering heavy casualties as the Saxons pursued them on horseback and cut them down.
King Alfred sits in the shepherd’s cottage in Somerset where he is scolded for allowing the cakes to burn while he contemplates his Danish enemy. This illustration by James William Edmund Doyle (1822–92) appeared in the Chronicle of England published in 1864.
Guthrum and an unknown fraction of his army took refuge in Chippenham. Alfred invested the town and, running short of food and water, the Danes asked for a truce after two weeks. What followed indicated that, however limited the battle itself might have been, the political aftermath was of real historical significance. The Vikings, who had seemed poised to complete their conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, had been halted, and one of the conditions insisted on by Alfred was that Guthrum accompany him to Somerset, there to be baptized into the Christian church. At Aller, a sumptuous ceremony was performed where the Danish leaders were formally admitted to the church, while a treaty later negotiated at the nearby town of Wedmore confirmed that Guthrum would settle as king in Mercia, respecting Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex. By 927, the whole of England was united under an Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred’s grandson Ethelstan. Ferocious, cruel and deceitful warriors, according to all the ancient accounts, the Vikings had met their match at Edington.
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No. 20 BATTLE OF CLONTARF
23 April 1014
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Like many battles from the early Middle Ages, the exact events that took place on a low plain just north of Dublin on Good Friday, 1014, are shrouded in later legend and obfuscation. What is certain is that the man who claimed the kingship of all Ireland, Brian Bóruma mac Cennetig, better known in the Anglicized form Brian Boru, defeated the combined armies of Laigin (Leinster) and the Dublin Vikings. By the battle’s end, Brian lay dead, but all the later annals of the Irish saw the victory as a hard-won triumph against the looming threat of conquest by what were called the ‘Foreigners of the West’.
There is much to disentangle in the history of the Battle of Clúain Tarbh, or Clontarf, a place not even mentioned in some of the near contemporary annals. Ireland in the early eleventh century was a kaleidoscope of tribal, clan and regional loyalties, broken up into small kingdoms, with settled Viking communities around the coast and the main Viking centre at Dublin. Brian, overking of Dál Cais, king of Munster, who rose to power across the last third of the tenth century, had succeeded by 1011 in imposing some kind of suzerainty on the rulers of much of the island, beginning with his home province of Munster. This was a unique achievement, but the restless, bellicose nature of Irish clan politics doomed Brian to fight in defence of his claim. In 1013, the Leinstermen and the Vikings of Dublin rejected Brian’s authority and embarked on a violent rebellion, pillaging and laying waste territory ruled by Brian’s vassals. Brian was obliged to take up the challenge posed by the Viking king of Dublin, Sigtrygg. He gathered forces from Munster and neighbouring Mide, ruled by Máel Sechnaill, and from among the men of Connacht. They all set out for Dublin, appropriately, on St Patrick’s Day.
Like the conflict between Alfred and the Danes, the subsequent battle was once seen as a decisive turning point in the struggle between the pagan Scandinavians and the Christian Irish, but the truth is certainly more complicated, since the Leinstermen were also Christians, and there were many Viking converts. The real explanation for the legend surrounding Brian’s victory at Clontarf lies in the long list of Viking friends and allies summoned by Sigtrygg once he heard of Brian’s advance. The year was a critical one in Viking history, for Sveinn Tjúguskegg (‘Forkbeard’), king of Denmark, completed the conquest of England and had himself declared king late in 1013, only to die five weeks later and allow the English under Ethelred ‘the Unready’ to reclaim the throne. Sigtrygg summoned Norsemen from as far north as the Orkney Islands and as far south as Brittany in the hope that Ireland too could be conquered as a Viking kingdom. This explains the long list of ‘foreign’ Vikings in the Irish annals, and the fact, generally agreed in most accounts, that at the early morning high tide on 23 April 1014, a fleet of Viking ships disgorged their eager warriors onto the Irish coast between the River Tolka and the Howth Peninsula at Clontarf, a few miles north of Dublin.
A carved bust of the Irish king Brian Boru looks out from the Chapel Royal outside Dublin.
An engraving by Henry Warren (1794–1879) shows the death of the elderly Brian Boru at the hand of Brodar the Dane during the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.
It was here that a large contingent from overseas, tog
ether with men from Leinster and the Dublin Vikings, though not their king, gathered to do battle with Brian’s forces, who had been raiding the surrounding area to squeeze money and food out of the local Christian communities. The only extensive account of the battle comes from the Cocad Gáedel re Gallaib (The War of the Irish with the Foreigners), but it is light on detail. Both sides fought in much the same way, with shield walls to protect the fighting men, and dependence on sheer brute force and savagery. Hardly impartial, the Cocad describes the Viking forces as possessing arrows that were ‘terrible, piercing, fatal, murderous, poisoned’, steeped in the blood of ‘dragons and toads’, while Brian’s Irish wielded swords that were ‘glittering, flashing, brilliant, handsome, straight’. There was, in truth, little difference in the weaponry available to both sides; the difference may well have come in the numbers fielded, but the size of the two armies is simply guesswork.
The rebels were probably drawn up as the annals describe, with the Vikings who had come from overseas in the front, including warriors and commanders from York, the Orkney Islands, the western Scottish coast and the Isle of Man, backed up by the Irish Vikings and finally with the men of Leinster in the rear. The medieval account has Brian’s son, Murchad, leading the men of Munster into the fray, to die in the attempt, supported by some mercenary Norsemen, while the men of Mide under Máel Sechnaill and a reserve from Munster held the rear. But the battle was almost certainly a confused, blood-soaked mêlée as each side endeavoured to encircle and slaughter the other. The clash of mail and armour, the roars and cries of the fighting men and the dying, and the growing mound of gore on the battlefield can be imagined without much difficulty.
After a dozen hours of exhausting combat, Brian’s army won the day. The Viking invaders found that their ships had been dispersed as the tide went out. By the time the battle ended, the tide was high again (a fact confirmed by more modern calculations), cutting off any retreat along the coast. They were pushed back into the sea where, it is to be presumed, many drowned. How many died will never be known, but at the end of a fight in which both sides suffered heavy losses, it is unlikely that quarter was ever considered.
When the fog of battle cleared it was found that Brian’s son Murchad and his teenage grandson Tairdelbach had both been killed, Murchard with his legendary twin swords, hewing Vikings left and right, until one of them disemboweled him with a knife. The principal victim of the battle was Brian Bóruma himself. A man of seventy-three by the time of Clontarf (some annals have him in his eighties), he sat in a tent praying while the battle went on. A band of Danes, wandering from the fight, came across his tent and, according to the Cocad, Brian was killed with an axe through his head, though not before he had cut off his attacker’s left leg and right foot. Brian’s death did not alter the outcome. Sigtrygg remained in Dublin, but his brief ambition to use the arrival of a large fleet of Viking invaders to secure dominance of Ireland, a menace to Irish independence much greater than the threat of a local rebellion, was eliminated in the aftermath of Clontarf and its legendary defence of a fractious Irish liberty.
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No. 21 BATTLE OF LEGNANO
29 May 1176
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Traditional Italian accounts of the battle between a group of northern Italian communes and the famous German emperor-soldier Frederick Barbarossa amidst the woods and vineyards near the town of Legnano in northern Lombardy always held that the Italians were greatly outnumbered by their German enemy and achieved victory only because they were spurred on by a profound Italian patriotism. Recent research now shows the reverse case: an estimated 3,000 German heavy cavalry against 10–12,000 infantry and an unknown number of horsemen. In truth, even with these odds, the two sides were unevenly matched. In late medieval warfare, it was assumed that any disciplined body of professional knights-at-arms would sweep aside a mass of citizen infantry; led by the fearsome Barbarossa, a commander of prodigious reputation, the odds would have seemed more loaded still. The victory did, indeed, defy those odds to demonstrate that motivated foot soldiers could defeat even the most heavily armed and experienced cavalry.
Italy was nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled in the late twelfth century by the German emperor Frederick I, known as ‘Barbarossa’ or ‘Kaiser Rotbart’ after his large red beard. The northern Italian city-communes sought their independence from imperial domination following the sacking of Milan by the emperor in 1161. The cities of Piedmont, Lombardy and Venetia formed the Lombard League in 1167 to give each other mutual support in the contest with Frederick. It was to disrupt and defeat this league that Barbarossa summoned an army of knights from Germany in the spring of 1176. Organized by the Archbishops of Cologne and Magdeburg, around 1,500 heavy cavalry rode with their baggage and servants south over the Alps, where they joined Frederick and his 2,000 knights at Como.
The League had been preparing to defend the town of Alessandria, further to the south, but seeing the threat from Frederick, the Italians moved north past Milan to try to force the Germans back by blocking Barbarossa’s only path south between the Olona and Ticino rivers. Reinforcements arrived from Brescia and the towns of Venetia and a camp was set up just in time at Legnano, since the German cavalry, unencumbered by infantry, could move rapidly and had already reached the town of Cairate, only 14 kilometres (9 miles) distant.
The German army consisted almost entirely of heavy cavalry – knights with lance, shield and a considerable weight of armour. Their battlefield tactic was simple: they would charge in close order to form an irresistible weight of metal and animal designed to smash through the enemy line, exposing the broken infantry to encirclement and annihilation – a medieval version of Blitzkrieg. Frederick was unlikely to be deterred by the sheer size of the infantry units opposed to him because 3,000 knights represented a formidable force of nature. On 29 May, he set out from Cairate towards the League army with a vanguard of 300 of his horsemen riding ahead to spot any dangers.
The League prepared its defences near the village of Borsano, a little to the north of Legnano itself. A site was chosen that gave the defenders considerable advantages: there were natural obstacles to the enemy on either side to prevent encirclement, and a mix of trees and canals in front which made it difficult for Frederick’s cavalry to manoeuvre. The army was drawn up in a number of ranks – four is usually suggested – each armed with long spears, the front rank probably kneeling to maximize the damage inflicted on the oncoming horses. There are few precise descriptions of the battle, but it seems likely that the infantry were spread in the shape of a broad and shallow arc around the most important piece of equipment they had brought with them. On a heavy cart (carroccio) was the image of the patron saint of Milan, St Ambrose, surrounded by the communal banners. It was placed so that all the League soldiers could see it, a sacred inspiration and an indication, so it was hoped, of divine protection.
As Frederick approached, some 700 League cavalry from Brescia and Milan were sent north to scout for his whereabouts. Because of the wooded countryside, the two vanguards ran into each other unexpectedly. Frederick’s 300 horsemen sensibly retreated in the face of their much larger enemy, but the League cavalry pursued them until suddenly they found themselves in front of the main force of 3,000 Germans. After a brief engagement, the League horsemen fled from the scene, riding towards Milan. Frederick and his host rode on until they reached the main lines of League soldiers and there prepared to charge. No doubt the sight of Frederick’s mounted army, its armour and lances glinting in the hot sun, banners flying, must have been daunting indeed for the League foot soldiers. Some of the remaining League cavalry had dismounted and prepared to strengthen the infantry line, where they would fight with sword and axe. A test of two very different styles of fighting was to begin.
This gilded bronze bust of Frederick I Barbarossa was probably made in around 1155 to mark his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick had a formidable reputation as a military commander and spent much of his reign tr
ying to pacify Italy until he met his match at Legnano.
The German cavalry charged, and almost at once disaster struck. The knight carrying Barbarossa’s standard fell from his horse and was trampled to death by the onrushing horses behind him, leaving the banner lying on the ground. The wave faltered and was turned back by the wall of spears bristling in front of it. For hours the German cavalry tried to find a weak point in the line, but the League ranks held sufficiently firm to prevent the breakthrough that Frederick’s strategy required. The Italian soldiers were perhaps buoyed up by the sight of St Ambrose in their midst; they were certainly helped by the fact that they fought with companions from the same city, often from the same parish, which created a greater sense of solidarity and civic pride.
This 1831 painting by the Italian artist Massimo Taparelli Azeglio (1798–1866) depicts the Battle of Legnano in 1176. At the back can be seen the carroccio with the image of Saint Ambrose, who is supposed to have turned the tide of battle in the Italians’ favour.
Gradually as the afternoon wore on, the League could sense a historic victory. Frederick’s men were tiring after six hours of fighting in hot sun and heavy armour when suddenly they were hit by a flank attack carried out by the same cavalry group from Brescia and Milan that had fled from the first encounter. Regrouped and now with fresh courage, this mounted attack divided the German line. Suddenly Frederick himself, the only rallying point after the loss of the standard, had his horse killed under him and fell to the ground. Threatened now from all sides, and apparently leaderless, the cavalry broke and fled, some back to where they had come from, others across the River Ticino, where many were drowned. Those who remained died where they were or surrendered. The losses for both sides seem not to have been computed.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 11