The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Viking Expansion

  Charlemagne’s campaigns to push Frankish rule beyond the Rhine coincided with the start of the period of Scandinavian expansion known as the Viking age. The etymology of “Viking” is uncertain. One theory holds that it comes from the Old English wic, meaning a temporary encampment such as raiders would have established and cognate with the Latin vicus, meaning village. Another explanation is that it comes from Viken, the region around Oslofjord from which the first wave of Norse Vikings in England may have come in order to escape Danish overlordship. This would account for why only the English used the word Viking while others called them Northmen, Danes, Varangians, Rus, pagans, and heathens. Medieval authors did not always specify the origin of different raiders, but the people of Scandinavia were not an undifferentiated mass even though they shared a variety of cultural attributes, including religion and language, and their rulers were often linked by bewilderingly intricate webs of kinship and obligation. Bearing in mind the many exceptions to the rule, Danes tended to go west and south to the Frankish empire, England, and Spain; the Norse west to northern Britain, Ireland, and Iceland; and the Swedes east to Russia and the Black and Caspian Seas.

  The first Viking attack as such—seaborne, swift, severe—was the infamous raid by three ships on the Holy Island monastery of Lindisfarne on the North Sea coast of Northumbria in 793. News of the attack spread quickly, and the Northumbrian cleric Alcuin, whom Charlemagne had recruited as his teacher at Aachen, wrote Æthelred I of Wessex:

  We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible. The church of St. Cuthbart is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans—a place more sacred than any in Britain.

  The claim that “Such a voyage was not thought possible” is difficult to accept; Alcuin certainly knew that Anglo-Saxons had reached England by sea, just as Frisian traders did in his day. But if Anglo-Saxon England had forgotten its origins momentarily, the Viking raids were a sharp reminder that the seas around Britain provided poor insulation against determined invaders.

  Some have proposed that Alcuin meant only that such a voyage was not thought possible in winter, when the prevailing southwesterly winds blow toward Norway. According to a thirteenth-century text, the ordinary sailing season in Norway was from early April to early October, but the Lindisfarne raid took place at the start of the Medieval Warming Period. This lengthened the sailing season and created conditions favorable for the settlement of Iceland and Greenland and long-distance voyaging as well as, perhaps, for midwinter raiding. Landsmen could always hope for bad weather, and a four-line poem penned in the margins of a ninth-century manuscript reveals a scribe’s gratitude for an ill wind that kept marauders from putting to sea or coming safely to shore:

  The wind is fierce to-night

  it tosses the sea’s white mane

  I do not fear the coursing of a quiet sea

  by the fierce warriors of Lothlend [Laithlinn].

  The Lindisfarne raid was followed by attacks on other Northumbrian monasteries and on Saint Columba’s sixth-century abbey on Iona in the Hebrides, but the Norse did not limit themselves to British religious houses. A raid on southwest France six years after the sack of Lindisfarne prompted Charlemagne to erect a chain of coastal guard stations with ships and soldiers at major ports and river mouths. This was widely regarded as a success at the time, and may explain why the first wave of Viking raids on France ended in the early 800s and did not resume in earnest for a generation. The most significant northern threat during Charlemagne’s reign came from Denmark’s King Godfred, who attacked Frisia in 824, perhaps to preempt Carolingian encroachment on Saxony and southern Denmark. Godfred’s most significant action was the sack of the Slav emporium of Reric, which Charlemagne preferred to Saxon or Danish ports, and the relocation of its merchants to Hedeby. The Carolingians nonetheless continued their northward advance and Christianity was pushed beyond the Elbe by Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious.

  In the 820s, a Danish leader from Hedeby named Harald Klak appealed to Louis for support against his rivals. Louis encouraged Harald to convert, which he did because “a Christian people would more readily come to his aid and to the aid of his friends if both peoples were worshippers of the same God.” Harald returned to Hedeby accompanied by a priest named Ansgar on the first of many missions that would earn Ansgar canonization and the cognomen “Apostle of the North.” After establishing a school in Hedeby, Ansgar took his missionary work to Birka, in Sweden, where he converted many people and ministered to Christian captives. Ansgar was serving as archbishop of Hamburg when Eirik I of Denmark sacked the port and leveled many churches, but following a change of heart Eirik allowed him to build a church and school at Hedeby, which “was especially suitable for this purpose and was near to the district where merchants from all parts congregated.” This willingness to accept Christianity proved profitable and thanks to Ansgar’s evangelizing, Frisian, Frankish, and other merchants “made for the place readily and without any fear—something which was not possible previously.” Although the Vikings harassed Europe for centuries, in the end their adoption of southern religion and commercial practices transformed them more than they transformed Europe.

  Even as Ansgar was evangelizing Scandinavia, Norse and Danish Vikings renewed their raids in the west where they struck Dorestad in 834 and the Thames estuary and the mouth of the Loire the next year. Annual attacks over the next fifteen years targeted strategic trading centers including London and York, and Rouen, at the mouth of the Seine, and Nantes on the Loire. Until the 840s, these raids were seasonal events in which the Vikings generally took advantage of fair weather in the summer to sail across the North Sea before running home on the prevailing autumn winds. The whole dynamic of the Viking age shifted dramatically when Scandinavian sailors began wintering abroad, as they did for the first time on Noirmoutier, a center of the salt and wine trades at the mouth of the Loire. This afforded the northerners a year-round home in a more congenial environment than Denmark or Norway, but it also positioned them to raid southern France and the Iberian Peninsula. Arabic accounts record six Viking expeditions against al-Andalus between 844 and 971, two of which reached the Mediterranean. In the first, a Danish fleet of fifty-four ships attacked Lisbon before sailing up the Guadalquivir to pillage Seville. Ambushed by forces from Córdoba, the Danes lost an estimated two thousand men. Most of the survivors withdrew under an armistice and sailed home with only twenty ships, but some converted to Islam and settled down, many as dairy farmers renowned for their cheese. This expedition follows a recurrent pattern found elsewhere: controlling river mouths, attacking inland river towns and their hinterlands, and relying on speed at sea and ashore. But the numbers involved in such operations were too few for a wholly Scandinavian identity to take root, even when Viking chiefs became local rulers.

  A curious upshot of the raid of 844 was Eirik II’s request for diplomatic relations with Abd al-Rahman II, emir of Córdoba, who sent to Jutland one of his foremost diplomats, al-Ghazal, a veteran of negotiations with the Byzantine Empire. Al-Ghazal was welcomed warmly and remained in Denmark for more than a year. The terms of the Danish-Andalusian treaty are unknown, but it did not long survive Eirik, and in 859 sixty-two ships under the Danish prince Björn Ironside and a soldier named Hastein attacked al-Andalus. In the meantime, however, Abd al-Rahman had built a fleet that patrolled as far north as the Bay of Biscay. Andalusian forces captured two Danish ships on the south coast of Spain and prevented any from entering the Guadalquivir. East of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Danes sacked Algeciras before being bested by an Umayyad fleet armed with Greek fire. After a small detachment raided the North African coast, the Danes sailed via the Balearics to southern Gaul and raided up the Rhône as far as Valence
, unopposed because the Franks had abandoned Charlemagne’s Mediterranean fleet. After four years away, Björn and Hastein returned home with a dozen ships and their crews. Although it had virtually no long-term consequences, their undertaking illustrates the Vikings’ mobility, hitting power, and sheer bravado in a long-range expedition with a force that never numbered more than four thousand people.

  Vikings first wintered in the British Isles in 851, on the Isle of Thanet in the Thames estuary. They soon took Canterbury and London, and in 866 they stormed the Northumbrian city of York, which lies on a spit of land between the Fosse and Ouse Rivers 120 kilometers from the sea. As an ecclesiastical center and port of call for Frisian merchants, York boasted extensive ties to the continent and provided many of the earliest evangelists to northern Europe, including Willibrord, “Apostle to the Frisians” and first bishop of Utrecht in 695. From 875 to 954 it was the center of the Norse kingdom of York. Anglo-Saxon resistance to Scandinavian incursions was feeble until the reign of Alfred the Great, who was crowned in 871, the same year that a Danish army under King Guthrum landed in East Anglia. The Danes marched on Wessex but failed to capture the elusive Alfred, who defeated them at the battle of Edington in 878. According to the terms of their treaty, Guthrum and his leading men received baptism in a ceremony in which Alfred became Guthrum’s godfather, an act that made England a second avenue of religious influence into Scandinavia. Their treaty and common religion notwithstanding, Alfred worked tirelessly to assure the defense of Wessex, establishing encampments at the most important crossroads and bridges, organizing a small, mobile army, and launching a fleet of ships to counter the Danes. Seven years after Edington, a second treaty defined the territory under Danish control—the so-called Danelaw, chiefly the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia. This did not result in a complete cessation of hostilities, but it put the rulers of Wessex on an equal footing with the Danes.

  Alfred may have prevented the Danish annexation of Wessex, but the Danes would remain a major force in the British Isles for another 150 years. Nor were they the only foreigners to have settled down, for between 790 and 825 Norse Vikings had formed an independent state, known as Laithlinn, in the Orkney and Hebrides Islands and the neighboring coasts of the Scottish mainland. This became the point of departure for seasonal raids on Ireland, where the Vikings imposed tribute and to which they built a (metaphorical) “bridge of ships from the Hebrides.” (The Strait of Moyle between Northern Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre is only eleven miles across.) In 837, two fleets of sixty ships sailed into the Boyne and Liffey Rivers. Though the Irish defeated them in battle, four years later the Norse of Laithlinn fortified a landing site at Dublin, the first of many longphorts that would ring the coast of Ireland at Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and elsewhere. Dublin, however, remained preeminent, and it became in effect the capital of the Norse British Isles when Ímar, heir to the throne of Laithlinn and “king of the Norwegian Vikings of the whole of Ireland and Britain,” settled there. Irish forces ousted the Norse from Dublin in 902, but fifteen years later one of Ímar’s grandsons retook it before going on to add York and Northumbria to his dominions.

  By far the boldest of the Viking initiatives was their transatlantic venture to Iceland, Greenland, and North America. Although the Norse encounter with Iceland was a natural extension of their westward voyages to the Shetland and Faeroe Islands, which they settled in the eighth century, they may have heard about Irish monks who are believed to have sought solitude there before the ninth century. The Icelandic Book of Settlements relates that before the Norse “there were men there whom the Norsemen style ‘papar.’ These were Christians, and people consider that they must have been from the British Isles, because there were found left behind them Irish books, bells and crosiers, and other things besides.” The written sources have not been confirmed by archaeological finds—one suspects the ascetic monks left little to find—but there are no hard grounds for disputing the claim.

  Iceland’s founding father is generally considered Ingólf Arnarson, who landed in 874 and whose homestead at Reykjavík (Steamy Bay) eventually became the site of Iceland’s capital. The sagas ascribe the major impetus for settlement to a reaction to the authoritarian policies of Harald Fairhair, who united much of Norway for the first time and in so doing amassed considerable power for himself. The pace of colonization was swift; in some years as many as two thousand people reached Iceland with their belongings, seeds, and livestock. By the end of the “age of settlement” in 930, Iceland’s population numbered more than twenty thousand, and it may have trebled by 1100. This is all the more remarkable considering the size of their ships and the distances involved: nine hundred miles from Norway to Iceland, in good conditions a six-day sail across open ocean with no landmarks.

  Varangians, Byzantines, and Arabs

  At the same time that Danish adventurers were raiding al-Andalus and Norse dissidents were settling Iceland, Swedish Vikings—known as Varangians—were on the move along the rivers of eastern Europe in pursuit, ultimately, of the Byzantine and Arab riches of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. This trade seems to have been partly responsible for the growth of Swedish Birka, whose prosperity fostered that of Hedeby and other ports to the west. Wulfstan’s report to Alfred only hints at the vitality of Baltic trade in the late ninth century, and while no contemporary writings enlarge on his account, archaeology does. Moreover, this commerce was not a new phenomenon. The emporium of Birka had been preceded by the nearby Helgö, where archaeological finds have included a fifth-or sixth-century statue of the Buddha from South Asia and a bishop’s staff from Ireland. Strategically situated between Sweden and the Gulf of Finland, the island of Gotland had been a center of trade with the eastern Baltic since the fifth century. Gotlanders dominated the trade of Grobin, in Latvia, from 650 to 800, and they were heavily involved with that of the Lithuanian river port of Apuolé as well.

  By the time Wulfstan sailed for Truso, the increase in trade had sparked the rise of many emporia and port towns along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic. Some of these grew organically from earlier agrarian settlements to accommodate trade and develop various manufactures, but many bear the mark of outside influence, from Danes, Gotlanders, and Swedes. The densest concentration of ports was west of the Vistula delta, including Starigard (Oldenburg) east of Kiel Bay, Ralswiek, on the island of Rügen, Menzlin and Wolin in the Oder estuary, and Kołobrzeg. Located above the mouth of the Vistula near modern Elblag, Truso was well protected from the sea. Wulfstan says nothing about the local population, but archaeological finds suggest that Danish influence was dominant. Truso seems to have been a center of seasonal trade until it became a permanent settlement around 850. Farther east, at the southern end of the Curonian Lagoon, was the site of Kaup (Mokhovoye, Russia), whose prosperity depended on its trade with Birka.

  The real prize in all these ports was their access to trans-European river corridors, and it is not surprising that the most important of these lay not directly on the Baltic but well to the east. In contrast to the litany of Viking raids in the west, accounts of the Scandinavian progress south across Russia, the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine to the Black and Caspian Seas focus not on the plundering of wealthy religious houses—Christianity only took root here later—but on the establishment of trading centers at Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod near Lake Ladoga, and at Kiev on the Dnieper, about nine hundred kilometers south. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, this came about because the Slavs were experiencing a bout of internecine strife. “They said to themselves: ‘Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the Law.’ They accordingly went overseas to the Varangian Russes [and said], ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’ ” Three brothers came, the oldest and longest-lived of whom, Rurik, settled at Novgorod. “On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgorod became known as the land of Rus. The present inhabitants of Novgorod are descend
ed from the Varangian race, but aforetime they were Slavs.” The explanation offered in the Primary Chronicle does not settle definitively the question of why the Varangians originally came to Staraya Ladoga, but it is conceivable that as in post-Roman Britain, local tribes hired foreign mercenaries only to become subject to them. Rurik’s cohorts Askold and Dir continued south from Novgorod and decided to relocate to the Slav settlement of Kiev. Inspired by the site’s more central and commanding location on the heights overlooking the Dnieper, Rurik’s successor, Oleg, transferred his capital from Novgorod to Kiev.

  The Byzantine Empire was the wealthiest and most accessible attraction for the Rus and in 907 Oleg invaded, laying waste the territory outside Constantinople and securing from Leo VI an indemnity of nearly a million silver pieces and a trade agreement giving preferential treatment to Rus merchants. Among its terms was the stipulation that “Whosoever come as merchants shall receive supplies for six months, including bread, wine, meat, fish, and fruit. Baths shall be prepared for them in any volume they require. When the Russians return homeward, they shall receive from your Emperor food, anchors, cordage, and sails, and whatever else is needed for the journey.” Relations between Kiev and Constantinople generally improved, although there were occasional setbacks, notably when the Rus invaded Byzantine territory in 941 and 970. Vladimir the Great did the most to align Rus and Byzantine interests. Scandinavian soldiers had previously served in the Byzantine army, but at the request of Basil II, Vladimir sent six thousand soldiers to help in a civil war. This corps became the genesis of the emperor’s Varangian Guard, an elite force in which many Scandinavians served and that survived through the twelfth century. Rus-Byzantine ties strengthened further when in 988 Vladimir married Basil’s sister (over her strenuous objection) and she convinced him to accept baptism. Given the importance of Byzantium as a political, military, and trading power, this was no hardship for Vladimir (a dubious candidate for the sainthood accorded him by a zealous church in the thirteenth century). Yet his conversion further illustrates the Scandinavians’ flexibility in adapting to the particular circumstances of the lands they settled.