Empires and Barbarians

by Peter Heather

  It would be wrong to overstress the degree of political stability enjoyed by this polity. Godfrid himself was eventually assassinated, and Frankish annals from the first half of the ninth century make it possible to reconstruct some of its subsequently rocky political history, as either members of two branches of the same dynasty, or of two different dynasties, fought for its control. In the mid-ninth century, however, the violence exploded beyond the bounds of the normal. On his second visit to Scandinavia, the missionary St Anskar found King Horic II, and everyone else with whom he’d previously had contact at the court, dead, and from c.850 to 950 there is no sign at all of a unified Danish monarchy. It has sometimes been argued that this is an illusion created by the silence of Frankish sources, but the problem went deeper than that. The first really powerful figure to re-emerge in Jutland and the islands is Harold Bluetooth of the Jelling dynasty in the mid-tenth century. And amongst his famous monuments is a runestone on which he claims that uniting the territories under his rule was his own political achievement. I see no reason to disbelieve him, because the claim fits well with all the other evidence. After about a century of impressively documented activity, between c.750 and 850, then, the centralized Danish monarchy collapsed. As Patrick Wormald pointed out, this fragmentation coincided pretty much exactly with the explosion outwards from Scandinavia – eastwards as well as westwards – of higher-status leaders and their retinues. It was this latter phenomenon, as we have seen, that created the Great Army era, and it surely cannot be a coincidence that it occurred as home political structures were collapsing.68

  As we have found with every other migration flow of the first millennium, external political structures affected the action. Development is an umbrella concept that is as much about politics as it is about economics. Greater levels of wealth, or the opportunities for acquiring it, attracted the Norse out of the Baltic circle, but the nature of the political structures at the points where this wealth was to be found dictated the means and mechanisms by which Scandinavian populations could get access to it. As we have seen, local political structures firmly dictated the scale of Norse migration units. Where they were small-scale, the settlers did not have to come in compact masses, whether we’re talking the northern and western isles of Britain or indeed the North Atlantic. This would also have been true of northern Russia if, indeed, there was some land-grabbing there too. Where political structures were large-scale and robust, however, the Scandinavians had either to access local wealth by less direct means, such as trading with the Islamic world rather than confronting it head-on or developing a more symbiotic relationship with the kings of Ireland. Alternatively, they could come in sufficient numbers to stand some chance of winning the battles that had to be fought, which they did with great gusto in the Great Army era in England and northern Francia. Here, settlement on the kinds of terms Vikings were interested in required the prior destruction of local political structures, and the Great Armies provided the necessary vehicle. More short-term political factors also influenced the precise shape of the action. The Great Army attacked Northumbria first because that kingdom was in the grip of civil war, and over the next thirty years the action ebbed and flowed across the Channel in an inverse relationship to the perceived strength of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon monarchies.

  Migration and political development were interacting, however, on yet another level in the Viking era. Returning to Wormald’s argument – what was it, exactly, that caused the explosive political crisis in mid-ninth-century Scandinavia? We have no contemporary Scandinavian accounts, and Frankish chroniclers were much too exterior to the action, so there is no circumstantial narrative to illuminate the situation. It is highly pertinent, however, to think in general terms about what had been happening in Scandinavia in the fifty years or so before the murder of Horic II. As we have seen in some detail, the effect of the Viking period as a whole, with its potent mixture of trading and raiding, was to bring a huge flow of wealth into the region from entirely new sources – Muslim silver, precious metals from the west, the returns on slaves and furs traded in east and west. These wealth flows, moreover, were not under the direct control of the Jutland monarchy. When the Carolingians wished to curb the piracy, they had to persuade the Danish kings to act. Even more important, the wealth generated overseas was sometimes used to further political ambitions at home. The Life of St Anskar reports the highly revealing case of King Anoundas, who had been expelled from Birka but then made enough money in the west to hire himself a big enough force to regain control. A Frankish source also tells us – rather cryptically – that Reginharius, the sacker of St Denis, met his end at the court of Horic, perhaps in response to Carolingian prompting. Maybe so, but Horic will have had his own reasons for making the hit, and this takes us straight to the extra dimension I would add to Wormald’s original argument.69

  It was, I would argue, the huge flow of riches into Scandinavia generated by the first fifty years of the Viking diaspora that actually caused the political crisis that destroyed the Danish monarchy and led so many high-status Scandinavian leaders to turn westwards. As the Anoundas anecdote shows us, wealth was power in a straightforward fashion in the ninth-century Baltic. Gold and silver allowed you to recruit and control larger military followings. The Danish monarchy of c.800, however, was a fundamentally pre-Viking era political construction. Although it was certainly deriving some extra wealth from the economic currents – not least from the emporia trade network, as Godfrid’s construction of Hedeby demonstrates – it was neither in direct control of, nor the main beneficiary of, all the new wealth flooding into the Baltic from Viking activity. These riches, much of them ending up in other hands, were a direct threat to the Danish monarchy. It needed to be the wealthiest body in the region to command the loyalty of enough warriors to maintain its position. Horic surely appreciated this, and may well have scotched the ambitions of Reginharius with this in mind, but so much new silver and gold was coming in that the old power structure, built essentially on Scandinavian sources of wealth, could not maintain itself. Something very similar is seen in parts of the modern developing world where non-state organizations, particularly drug cartels, can sometimes make so much more money than their home state structures are able to from ordinary taxation that they become the real power in all or parts of the territories affected.70 More than that, there was now so much movable wealth, in so many different hands, that the main political effect of the Viking era wealth flows can only have been to stimulate significant competition among Scandinavian leaders.

  In this view, it was the flow of wealth that stimulated the crisis in Baltic politics. And the flood of leaders outwards that marks the Great Army era was caused by an appreciation of the fact that competition at home was now so heated that prospects for a long and prosperous career were much better abroad. There were too many would-be Horics, all so eminently able to buy in warrior support that the attractions of trying to rule in Jutland and the islands were diminishing rapidly. Not only did a more negative, political motivation apply to the settlement of Iceland, therefore, but a good case can be made for seeing the whole Great Army era as the product of a fascinating interconnection of economic and political motives, of migration and development. Certainly the higher-status leaders were coming west in search of wealth, but one of the reasons they were now inclined to stay there rather than return to Scandinavia – a tendency documented in the settlements in Danelaw and Northern Francia – was the fact that the political competition in Scandinavia was so intense as to make carving a niche somewhere in the west (or, indeed, in northern Russia) look comparatively attractive.

  The Scandinavian diaspora of the Viking era again shows us migration and development as two deeply related first-millennium themes, in this case working themselves out rather differently from some of the patterns we have observed in earlier contexts. Although not completely cut off from the rest of Europe, the Baltic had been something of backwater before the later eighth century when it began to be drawn
into the new north European trading networks – initially, it seems, as a source of desirable raw materials. But Scandinavian populations were quick to appreciate the broader opportunities opening up, and the new maritime technology that they developed enabled them to profit more directly and, as a spin-off, to add new markets in the rich Muslim world. Also, the more intensive trade links with the west brought in their wake an appreciation of all the different ways that were now open for making money out of that part of the world too, and the Viking period proper, with its characteristic intertwining of trading, raiding and settlement, got under way.

  As we have seen in so many other cases, a basic imbalance of wealth was the fundamental cause of the human diasporas of the Viking period, and migration towards that wealth was part and parcel of the general response to the original inequality.

  In this era, however, direct relocation by large, mixed population groups into the wealthier regions was a less marked response than we have seen in analogous situations, when groups from the outer periphery of the Roman Empire moved at different points into the wealthier inner periphery, or from the inner and outer peripheries into the Empire itself in the Hunnic period. In the Viking diaspora, at least initially, there was as much removing of wealth back to Scandinavia as there was direct movement to appropriate the assets where they were located. This difference was caused by logistics, which gives the Viking era its particular form.

  The Viking diaspora was all about ships, whose expense posed considerable limitations in terms of scale and access. Even when migration occurred, it could not take the form of massive mixed population groups, as some of the displacements of the fourth and fifth centuries did. As we have seen, some of the groups involved in these earlier eras may have numbered as many as a hundred thousand men, women and children. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Scandinavian kings transported warrior retinues, minor aristocrats with their retainers and some farm workers, while lesser men joined together to buy ships for war and/or trade. But not everyone had access to the necessary transport to participate, and it was just too far – or too wet – to walk.

  When all is said and done, then, we are led firmly back to the ships, and even if they imposed certain limits it is the ships that made it all possible. What we’re seeing here is the full working-out of an early phase of European integration. Moving by land, early medieval populations could hope to manage maybe forty kilometres a day. Viking sailing ships, however, could cover four times that distance or more in twenty-four hours. Measured in human terms, then, the overall effect of importing the new sea-going naval technology into the Baltic in the eighth century was to bring the rest of Europe four times closer to Scandinavia than had previously been the case. It was the Dark Age equivalent of building an airport in or a high-speed rail link to the Baltic. And once the new transport was in place, it didn’t take Scandinavians long to appreciate that, compared with societies nearer home, it was the rest of Europe that offered the really exciting opportunities for acquiring wealth. The end results were excellent for those elements of the Norse population able to benefit, but not so good for those left out in the cold. Not every phase of European integration, you might say, has had such positive effects as the determination to avoid any repeat of the Second World War, which has been so evident since 1945.

  With the working-out of Norse migration, cultural patterns in central and eastern Europe more or less assumed the shape that would characterize them in the year 1000. Compared with the Roman epoch, Germanic (or rather, Germanic-dominated) Europe had shrunk drastically in the second half of the millennium, being replaced by a truly massive Slavic-dominated periphery. Its extent was itself tempered only slightly by Norse expansion into western Russia, because there is no sign that the Scandinavian immigrants there had any desire to absorb indigenous Slavic and other groups into their culture. But if a powerful combination of migration and absorption had finally replaced the cultural patterns of the Roman era with others more directly ancestral to those of the modern day, there is another dimension to the creation of central and eastern Europe that we need to explore. Not only was this region dominated by Slavic-speakers with a seasoning of Norse by the year 1000, but it was also home to powerful state-like structures that had replaced the very small-scale societies typical of the Roman period. What was the nature of these new entities, and why did they now dominate large expanses where previously human beings had tended to operate in groups of a few hundred?

  10

  THE FIRST EUROPEAN UNION

  IN THE WINTER OF 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III left the city of Rome. He was a Saxon, not a Roman, and not particularly holy, but such was the draw of the imperial city that he had made his way there both to make a statement about his own importance, and to use its religious prestige to hold a synod in which to slap down an archbishop who had been causing him the odd problem. This much was more or less standard – if you happened to be an emperor. What’s really striking, however, and the point at which the third Otto’s activities intersect with the focus of this book, is where he went next. Normal imperial activities over the winter might include a spot of hunting, or heading off somewhere pleasant to hold a synod or a council, and/or celebrating one of the major Christian festivals with his great men, ecclesiastical and secular. But Otto did none of these. The emperor had heard of the miracles being performed at the tomb of a recent Christian martyr, the bishop and missionary Adalbert, and had resolved to pay the shrine a visit. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, you might think. First-millennium emperors, Roman or not, all thought they were appointed by God and had a vested interest in manifestations of divine power. But this is where it gets interesting.

  Before turning to the brief and ill-fated missionary drive that led to his death, Adalbert had been Bishop of Prague in Bohemia. Otto, however, was not setting off for Prague, nor in fact for Bohemia at all, but Poland. There the latest representative of its ruling Piast dynasty, Boleslaw Chrobry (‘the Brave’), had ransomed Adalbert’s body and built a magnificent tomb for it at Gniezno. We can pick up the story of what happened next in the words of a contemporary chronicler, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg.

  [Otto] was led into the church where, weeping profusely, he was moved to ask the grace of Christ’s martyr. Without delay, he established an archbishopric there . . . He committed the new foundation to Radim, the martyr’s brother, and made subject to him Bishop Reinbern of Kolberg, Bishop Poppo of Krakow, and Bishop John of Wroclaw . . . And with great solemnity, he also placed holy relics in an altar which had been established there. After all issues had been settled, the duke [of Poland] honoured Otto with rich presents and, what was even more pleasing, three hundred armoured warriors. When the emperor departed, Boleslav and an illustrious entourage conducted him to Magdeburg, where they celebrated Palm Sunday with great festivity.1

  For our purposes, it’s the backdrop to Otto’s imperial progress that is so significant.

  At the start of the first millennium, Poland and Bohemia had been dominated by Germanic-speakers, and the basic pattern of life involved clusters of wooden huts – some larger, some smaller – grouped together amidst the prevailing forests. There were still plenty of trees left at the end of the millennium, but the ruling Premyslid and Piast dynasties of Bohemia and Poland were all Slavic-speakers. The wooden huts had been superseded by castles, cathedrals and armoured knights, which, as we shall see in a moment, had become pretty much standard appurtenances of power right across central and eastern Europe. Not only that, but central Poland had become a destination fit for an emperor, and a suitable location for an independent province of the Christian Church, complete with its own archbishop. There could be no greater symbol, if an imperial visit was not itself symbol enough, that Poland had just been welcomed to the club of Europe’s Christian states.

  Nor was Poland alone. Prague, as we have just seen, had a bishop too, and although Bohemia didn’t yet rate an archbishopric, it too had its fair share of castles, cathedrals and knights. Its P
remyslid dynasty had definitively converted to Christianity in the person, no less, of Good King Wenceslas – or perhaps just Wenceslas, since we are dealing with his historical incarnation – in the 920s. Subsequent members of the dynasty slipped in and out of Ottonian imperial favour, but this would be true of the rulers of Poland too, and doesn’t alter the fact that both these Slavic ruling lines were firmly members of the club. The first Slavic entity to demand and be granted recognition on this higher plane, in fact, had been ‘Great’ Moravia, which emerged from the wreck of the old Avar Empire in the mid-ninth century. It was the first Slavic state to convert to Christianity, receiving in the 860s, amongst other missionaries, the famous Byzantine Saints Cyril and Methodius, who were responsible for the first written form of a Slavic language, produced to translate key Christian materials for their new converts.2