The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  Vladimir had already tried to address this by promoting Thor as the supreme deity, but this ploy had failed miserably. In Kiev he had built a huge temple to house both the Slavic and Viking gods, and had placed a wooden carving of Thor in the center. This was taken as a slight to the other gods, and in the uproar that followed, two men were killed.157 Vladimir stubbornly kept to his worship of Thor, but it was a losing battle.

  This unease with paganism is reflected in a curious story in an early Slavic chronicle with the wonderful name of Tale of the Bygone Years. Convinced that he needed a new religion, Vladimir sent envoys to find out about the world’s major faiths – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Islam was rejected because of its taboo against alcohol, not to mention the less than thrilling prospect of being circumcised as an adult.158 Judaism was dismissed as well because the Jews lacked a homeland – a powerful argument to the medieval mind. That left only Christianity and the choice to follow either western Catholic doctrines or eastern Orthodox ones. That decision became an easy one once his diplomats returned from their missions. The western ones had gone to the Holy Roman Empire and found squat, dark Romanesque churches. Those in the east, however, had attended a full Divine liturgy in the Hagia Sophia. “We didn’t know“, they breathlessly reported to Vladimir, “if we were in heaven or on earth. We only knew that God lived there.”

  The story may be apocryphal, but it captures something of Vladimir’s decision. Kiev was already moving toward Byzantium, and away from the lure of the east.159 Christianity, particularly the Orthodox version, was far more attractive than his native paganism. It had only one God, and an all-powerful one at that. Byzantine autocracy was modeled on this belief in divine authority. Just as there was only one God in heaven, there was only one emperor on earth. God didn’t need permission from his angels or their cooperation. He spoke, and things happened. This was the model that Vladimir wanted to impose on Kiev.

  There were also other reasons to draw closer to Byzantium. He was acutely aware of the limitations of his own power and the deep roots of the great empire to his south. However strong he might appear to be right now, the campaigns of his father had taught him an important lesson. The Rus couldn’t sustain the type of warfare in the Balkans that the Byzantines could. They lacked the organization, the bureaucracy, and the hierarchy to really impose themselves. Without changing that, Kiev’s power was ephemeral and it would suffer the fate of countless other kingdoms of the east – vast today and vanished tomorrow.

  The conclusion to which Vladimir came – to convert to Christianity – was the realization that he could accomplish far more as an ally of Constantinople than as a Viking sea-king. With that step, he spiritually and culturally cut the ties with his Viking heritage.

  A cynical observer, and there were many of them in Vladimir’s time, would say that his conversion was purely a political move, but, strange as it may seem, he appears to have been genuinely changed. The man who had raped his own sister-in-law now organized daily food drives for the ill and destitute. He laid out his own table for the sick, and when told that some were too ailing to make it, he arranged for wagons of bread, fish, vegetables, and mead to be taken to them.

  He dismissed his non-Byzantine wives and his small army of concubines, and ironically – considering the amount of blood that he had spilled – abolished the death penalty. Schools were founded in several cities, and a part of each year’s tax revenue was set aside for alms.

  Judging by Vladimir’s children, the effort to increase literacy was a dramatic success. His amorous activities had resulted in quite a few daughters, which he proceeded to marry off to the various crowned heads of Europe. So many were exported that the ambitious men of Kiev grumbled – undoubtedly under their breath – that there was a shortage of eligible brides. ‘Every king of Europe‘, went the complaint, ‘marries a princess of Kiev‘. Part of the attraction was their learning. Vladimir’s daughter Anna married King Henry I of France and she was familiar enough with the court bureaucracy to act as regent for their son Philip. A document dating from early in her regency was well stocked with the customary crosses and marks of noble French witnesses that couldn’t sign their own names. Only one signature graces the vellum – Anna the Queen – written in proud Cyrillic characters by her own hand.

  Not all of the old Viking traits disappeared, however. Vladimir intended for Kiev to be a Christian city and would not tolerate dissent. His first action upon arriving in his capital was to burn down the temple he had made to the old gods. The carving of Thor was tied to a horse’s tail and dragged down to the Dneiper river where it was symbolically beaten with clubs and then thrown into the water. The entire population of the city was then driven down to the river – at spear point – for a mass baptism.

  On the ruins of his pagan temple, Vladimir built a great church in imitation of those in Constantinople. He named it St. Basil after the Christian name he had adopted, and spent the rest of his reign strengthening the clerical infrastructure of Kiev. By the time of his death, no less than seven bishops were needed to administer the spiritual life of the kingdom.

  Perhaps the most profound effect of Vladimir’s conversion was that it brought with it the Cyrillic alphabet.160 Vladimir needed to use a written language, and Viking runes were unsuitable for long or complex texts. His adoption of Cyrillic opened the Rus up to the deep literary tradition of Constantinople, and further cemented cultural ties with the empire. When Vladimir’s son, Jaroslav, issued Kiev’s first law code, he did so in Cyrillic, and based it on Byzantine and not Viking precedents.

  Physically, the kingdom centered around Kiev even began to look like its southern neighbor. Byzantine craftsmen and artists flowed north, and the wooden halls of the Vikings were replaced by stone buildings. Under Vladimir’s stewardship nearly every town got brick and marble gates in imitation of the imperial capital, and stone churches with onion domes to mimic the arched roofs to the south.161

  Under Vladimir and his son, Russia’s market towns swelled to real cities with populations over sixty thousand. The inhabitants were Slavs, who were no longer seen as targets to be raided, but as Christian subjects to be protected. Even the Viking way of life based on animal husbandry was abandoned in favor of agriculture, and cavalry replaced the shield wall.

  A sentimental connection to the north remained – both Vladimir and his son hosted Viking sea-kings – but they had clearly begun to think of themselves as distinct.162 They no longer used the Norse language or even Viking names and within a generation, they even began to view the Swedes as trading rivals instead of allies.163

  Within a hundred years of Vladimir’s death, the Viking imprint on the east had all but disappeared. Despite the role they played in founding the first centralized state, virtually all that’s left of the Viking legacy in the east is the name ‘Russia’, and Vladimir’s seal on the Ukrainian flag. The Viking roots were scoured away by the cultural pull of the eastern Roman Empire, a process completed in 1472 when the niece of the last Byzantine emperor married Ivan the Great.

  If the Rus became Slavic, however, they also changed the Slavs. They gave the Slavic world its first centralized state and its first lasting dynasty. They brought order to an unstable region, and provided a foundation for the Slavic empire that would come.

  Perhaps it is to be expected that the Viking influence would quickly wane since the Scandinavians were always a tiny majority among a vast Slavic population. At least a part of the reason that it ended when it did, however, was because by Vladimir’s time the Viking world itself was changing. The days of footloose adventurers and prowling sea-wolves were over. Scandinavia had become a land of kings.

  THE HOMELANDS

  Chapter 19

  Viking Kings

  “Our ravens croak to have their fill… the wolf howls from the distant hill”

  - King Harald’s Saga

  The Viking Age is often judged by its impact on other cultures. It’s remembered as a time of destruction – the brutal s
acking of monasteries, the ruin of much of Anglo-Saxon England, Ireland, and the Frankish Empire – but there was creation too. Colonies were founded in Iceland and Greenland, a Duchy was created in Normandy, great trading cities like Dublin and York flourished, and Russia gained its first centralized state. All of this, however, is focused outwards, and neglects the effect the Viking Age had on the Norse homelands.

  The most obvious impact can be seen from the mind-boggling amounts of loot – coins, silver, plate, and slaves. According to the various Frankish chronicles, in the ninth century alone, roughly forty-five thousand pounds of silver was handed over in payments to the Vikings, an amount representing perhaps a third of the total that was carried off.

  The tenth century was even more lucrative. In Anglo-Saxon England, King Athelred the Unready paid a hundred and eighty thousand pounds of silver in bribes. This was something on the order of forty million English silver pennies, an amount that contributed greatly to the king’s unpopularity.164

  The flood of silver coming from England was increased by plunder from Ireland and the two Frankish kingdoms, as well as trade from markets ranging from Greenland to Byzantium. The availability of precious metals led to the development of a coin based economy instead of a barter system, and further integrated Scandinavia into the wider European marketplace. In the great Viking trading towns like Hedeby and Birka, the Vikings even began to mint their own coins based on Frankish, Byzantine, or Anglo-Saxon models.

  Most of this wealth flooded into lands dominated by a warrior culture that prized individual prowess. Great figures built halls and gave generously to their followers. They were described as ‘ring-givers’ and passed out bracelets (or torcs) for the arms and neck, weapons and armor, and ingots of gold, silver, or iron. Plunder was used as personal ornamentation or buried in hoards to burnish reputations. The constant demand spurred the growth of luxury markets, which in turn drove the Vikings to exploit ever more extensive routes of trade.

  This exploration sparked a second, more profound change. During the two and a half centuries of the Viking age, the Norse probably had contact with a wider variety of cultures than any other single people on earth. From Anglo-Saxon England and imperial Byzantium in particular, they picked up models of a centralized form of government, which they brought back to Scandinavia. Returning sea-kings found that their vast resources could be used not only for personal adornment, but to support armed companies of men. These slowly coalesced into royal armies which – supported by a Byzantine style administration – further centralized power. As their wealth increased, so did their ability to do kingly things, like constructing stone buildings, raising walls, and decorating their palaces.

  By the close of the tenth century, this process was nearing completion. Strongmen were being transformed into petty kings who vied for control of the wealthy market towns of Scandinavia. The old Viking dream of the sea-kings – dominance at sea – was vanishing, replaced by men who wanted to gain territory on land.

  Surprisingly, given the size of its coasts, the first to unify was Norway. Unlike the origin stories of most countries, Norway’s founding myth is a love story. Around the year 860, Halfdan the Black, the petty king of an area in the southeast around modern Oslo died, leaving his kingdom to his ten-year old son, Harald Fairhair. According to the Heimskringla, an Icelandic account of the history of Norway, the boy fell in love with a nearby princess, but she refused to marry him until he was king over all of Norway. Harald took an oath not to cut or comb his hair until the job was done, and proceeded to slowly expand his territory.

  A more likely scenario is that the ambitious Harald was simply continuing a process that had been going on for several decades. His particular genius was to use fleets to do so. Each petty sea-king that he conquered boosted the power of his own navy and made it harder to resist. The climactic battle occurred at Hafrsfjord, where the king crushed an alliance of petty kings and jarls and brought western Norway under his control. Although he probably only controlled the southern and western coasts, for the first time it is possible to talk about a kingdom of Norway.165

  It was in Harald’s best interests to suppress the old Viking traditions of sailing out for plunder in the summers, because this in turn created the very sea-kings that he had struggled so long to overcome. Any raiding that took place would have to be either by his authority or permission, a fact that must have rankled many grizzled sea-wolves. Many of them chose to leave Norway for freer lands in Iceland, the Orkneys or the Faeroes, forced out by Harald’s uncompromising control.

  If he had really won Norway for a woman’s love, it was the highest dowry Harald ever paid. Over the course of his fifty years he allegedly collected two hundred wives and had more sons than he knew what to do with. Even three generations later, nearly every jarl in Norway could credibly claim to be related to the first king.

  This tremendous fecundity, however, undid most of Harald Fairhair’s hard work. He chose his favorite son Erik Bloodaxe to replace him and even ruled jointly with him for a few years. This might have proved effective if there had been fewer claimants to the throne, or if his heir had behaved with more restraint. Erik, however, did his best to thin the family ranks – a good amount of the blood on his axe belonged to half-brothers – and lopped off the heads of countless jarls who resisted him as well.166 When a younger half-brother named Håkon the Good, who had been raised in England safely out of reach of Erik’s hatchet, arrived with an English army at his back, Erik gave in without a fight. He was as tired of Norway as they were of him, and left for greener pastures in England.

  Håkon was the baby of the family, and had been born when his father was already an old man. He proved to be a far more competent administrator than this brother, and an innovative general to boot. When the sons of Erik Bloodaxe invaded, he crushed them at a hill which was later named the ‘Blood Heights’ due to all the carnage. When Erik’s nephews tried again two years later, he positioned his army around ten standards spread a massive distance apart along a ridge. This created the illusion that his force was much larger than it in fact was, and the unnerved invaders turned and ran.

  In addition to his martial abilities, Håkon is also responsible for attempting to introduce Christianity to Norway, a religion which would thoroughly change Scandinavia, as it did other lands. The new faith, to which Håkon had probably converted in England, had much to recommend it. Not only did it provide a model of centralized power – as Vladimir had realized, God brooked no challengers to his authority in heaven – but it brought with it literacy as a free gift. A literate king, or at least one who employed literate men, could make his wishes known without face-to-face contact. The old system of personal charisma extended only as far as the king could physically go, but his writ could extend much farther. Literacy meant contracts, uniform laws, and official documents, the glue with which a kingdom was held together.

  Unfortunately for Håkon, and subsequent Norwegian history, the population was firmly pagan and the king’s attempt to impose Christianity only managed to alienate most of his subjects. Perhaps over time he would have had been successful, but in 961 the royal nephews invaded again, and although Håkon’s army was victorious, he was mortally wounded in the struggle.

  Erik’s oldest son Harald Greycloak was chosen as the new king, but he had little real authority. While Norway had been plagued by infighting, powerful kings had risen to the south and united the kingdom of Denmark. It was to these rulers that the sons of Erik Bloodaxe had appealed, and when they invaded Norway it was at the head of a Danish army. Harald Greycloak had won his throne, but the price for Danish aid had been to accept the Danish king as an overlord. After less than a century of independence, Norway had slipped back into chaos.

  Chapter 20

  Harald Bluetooth

  “…Harald who conquered for himself the whole of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”

  - Inscription on the Jelling Stone

  Medieval Denmark was considerably
larger than its modern incarnation. Extending across parts of Germany, Sweden, and Norway, it had the densest population and was by far the most powerful of the Scandinavian kingdoms. Much of its strength was due to a remarkable tenth century family that ruled from their stronghold of Jelling on the eastern side of the Danish peninsula.

  The family patriarch was Gorm the Old who started life as a typical Viking sea-king but managed to kill off or neutralize the surrounding petty rulers to unite most of the Jutland peninsula under his control.167 He was a Viking of the old type, a raucous worshiper of Odin, Thor, and Frey who claimed descent from Ragnar Lothbrok and spent each summer raiding.

  Gorm was generally suspicious of Christians, probably because of the powerful German kingdom directly to his south, and was said to go out of his way to be cruel to them. He had good reasons to be worried. Thanks to the missionary activity inspired by the Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious, a century before, there was a small Christian community in the Jutland peninsula, and they would make a splendid pretext for the German king Henry the Fowler to intervene in Danish affairs.

  Whether Henry used that excuse or another one is unclear, but early in Gorm’s reign a German army was sent over the Danevirke and Gorm was forced to recognize his southern neighbor as an overlord. This hardly checked the king’s raiding activities, although he does seem to have generally avoided German lands. His companion in most of these raids was his oldest son Canute, who was as vigorous a plunderer as he, and the two of them ransacked the coasts of northern France and the British Isles. Gorm’s younger son, Harald Bluetooth, stayed with his mother Thyra, a formidable woman who had led the Danish army against the invading Germans.168 She had a better reputation among Christians than her husband, and although pagan, may have exposed her son to at least a form of the new faith.