Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  But the love of Christ was not the only focus of devotion within reach of the Byzantine world. History does not accurately record the birth of Muhammad, but according to his earliest Arabic biographer — writing around a hundred years after the event — it occurred sometime around AD 570. So while Hagia Sophia was still settling down upon her foundations, a boy-child was born to poor parents living in the Hejaz, a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia. He grew up surrounded by Christians and Jews following, each in their distinctive ways, the word of God. Muhammad’s people worshipped the same and called him Allah, but had no written scripture to guide them through their lives.

  While he sat in contemplation in a cave near Mecca, Muhammad heard a voice telling him: ‘Recite, in the name of the Lord, who created, created man from a clot of blood.’

  And recite he did, for the next 20 years. By the end his followers had faithfully written down his every utterance — eventually collected into the holy book known as the Koran. It was, at least in the beginning, a faith that championed the individual believer — man, woman or child — and that declared belief superior to blood. For the followers of Islam — a word meaning submission — it was the ties of shared belief rather than kin that bound the community — what Muhammad called the umma — together.

  The Prophet died in AD 632, leaving his followers to bicker about which of them had the right to name himself his successor, or Caliph. Despite the atmosphere of schism, there was nonetheless a will to move upon the rest of the world and persuade every man, woman and child there to turn his or her face towards Mecca.

  It had begun with Muhammad himself. In AD 629 he had dispatched a letter to Emperor Heraclius, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Over a year earlier the Byzantine ruler had defeated Chosroes, the Sassanid King of Persia, at the climactic Battle of Nineveh. From the Persians he had recovered a fragment of the Cross upon which Christ had been pinned with Roman nails — the so-called True Cross — and he was returning it, on foot as pilgrimage demanded, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  He had just arrived in Jerusalem when a messenger pressed the Prophet’s letter into his hands. It read:

  In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah, and His Apostle, to Heraclius, the ruler of Byzantines. Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow upon you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.

  Soon after Muhammad’s death, Caliph Abu-Bakr brought the remaining Arabic tribes to heel. Thereafter it was a mostly irresistible advance — through the Sassanid Persian Empire, then onwards into Iraq and Syria. The city of Jerusalem fell to Islam in AD 638, then Mesopotamia and then Egypt, wrested from Byzantine control. The Arabs took to the sea as well and soon Cyprus was swallowed up, followed by North Africa — even Carthage. More of the Middle East fell next, and then in AD 711 a Muslim army crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe. The advance into Europe was finally turned back at Poitiers, in western central France, by an army of Franks led by Charles Martel. Gibbon liked to imagine that, had it not been for Martel — remembered as the grandfather of the Carolingian Empire and dynasty — scholars in Oxford would have been teaching the Koran.

  The successes of those Muslim armies were nothing less than astounding. Their creed was simple and unifying, their advance the physical manifestation of religious zeal. The Prophet had promised that death on the battlefield, in the face of the infidel, would guarantee an eternity in paradise. Faith, brotherhood, rapture ever after — it was a heady mix for the men from the desert.

  For all their energy and triumph, however, the Arabs did not have everything their own way. Constantinople had been a target since the time of Muhammad himself and in AD 669 a force under Caliph Muawiyyah brought both his army and his navy to bear in a bid to take the city for Islam.

  Constantinople sits on a roughly triangular eminence that pokes its apex out into the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. Across the landward baseline of the triangle stretch the 12 miles of the Theodosian Wall, impregnable to all the weaponry of the day. As well as being triangular, the land occupied by the city also resembles the head of a rhinoceros — the horn suggested by the upturn called Acropolis Point. In the lea of that stump of land is the Golden Horn, a perfect harbour in which sheltered the Byzantine fleet. Of all the great cities of the ancient world, Constantinople was furthest beyond the reach of any would-be invader.

  For five years the defenders weathered that latest siege, enduring attacks from both land and sea. Finally, in 678, the Byzantine navy put to sea and unleashed a weapon that was to become legendary. Special apparatus mounted on the bows of their ships spouted ‘Greek Fire’ — a jet of flame that not only set ablaze everything within reach but also stuck, like napalm, to the hulls and sails of the enemy vessels, and to the men cowering inside them. The Arabs were routed completely, by fear and horror as much as anything else. The remnants of their navy made for home but were mostly sunk by severe storms that dogged them all the way back east. Perhaps it seemed to them — and to the jubilant inhabitants of Constantinople — that the Christian God had made his choice.

  To complete the defeat, the Arab land army was wiped out almost to a man by Byzantine forces sensing outright victory. Muawiyyah died the following year, a broken man. It had been a decisive defeat for the Arabs — even a humiliation — but it did little or nothing to curb their appetite for the city they viewed as the ultimate prize. Christian Constantinople was firmly in Muslim sights — and would remain there for the best part of the next eight centuries.

  There were two great monotheistic religions vying for dominance in Europe and Asia by the early part of the eighth century AD. The Vikings would reach out and touch both, and be touched by them in return.

  It would be impossible to tell the story of the Vikings without reference to Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Christian Emperor of the West. The Frankish tribes had been united first of all by Clovis, who died either in AD 511 or 513. He had been converted to Christianity by his wife Clotilda and his people followed suit. By the time of his death his empire included most of the vast territory that had been known to the Romans as Gaul.

  By bringing previously warring peoples together as one, he laid the foundations for the Merovingian dynasty and also what would become, in due course, the nation state of France. In the short term, the reign of Clovis would be followed by division and disunity.

  Charles Martel — his name an appellation meaning ‘the hammer’ after his defeat of the Muslim Moors at Poitiers in AD 732 — was a subsequent King of the Franks and Charlemagne was his grandson, born in AD 747.

  When the Roman Empire declined in the west, succumbing to the rising tide of change, Christianity might well have foundered along with it. That the religion survived on mainland Europe was due in no small part to the existence of the Frankish kingdom. Stability comes at a price, and the Frankish kings maintained their own version of the peace with behaviour and practices every bit as bloody and horrific as anything perpetrated later by the Vikings. For what it was worth, however, the Franks were Christians — or at least that was how they described themselves — and divinely sanctioned cruelty was always more acceptable than that meted out by pagans. The Vikings could never have seemed so appalling if there had not been Christians to appall.

  Charlemagne (a corruption of the Latin Carolus Magnus, meaning Charles the Great) inherited his forefathers’ enthusiasm for conversion. At the very least he was happy to employ it as a grand excuse for conquest and the fortification of the dynasty to which he would give his name — the Carolingian. There were Saxons to the north-east and these were dominated and brought to Christ between AD 772 and 777. The Lombards of Italy were conquered and converted in AD 773 and the Muslim Moors of northern Spain were subdued and turned in AD 778.

  According to a contemporary biographer, Einhard, Charlemagne was a physically commandi
ng figure. In Vita Karoli Magni, ‘The Life of Charles the Great’, we learn that:

  He was heavily built, sturdy, and of considerable stature, although not exceptionally so, since his height was seven times the length of his own foot. He had a round head, large and lively eyes, a slightly larger nose than usual, white but still attractive hair, a bright and cheerful expression, a short and fat neck, and he enjoyed good health, except for the fevers that affected him in the last few years of his life. Towards the end, he dragged one leg. Even then, he stubbornly did what he wanted and refused to listen to doctors, indeed he detested them, because they wanted to persuade him to stop eating roast meat, as was his wont, and to be content with boiled meat.

  He learnt to read — but not to write — and became a tireless promoter of education. He founded his capital at Aachen and there built his grandest palace and also an academy. It was to this seat of learning that Alcuin of York was drawn — the same who would write in such hauntingly memorable terms about the Viking raid on Lindisfarne.

  Charlemagne was a voracious collector of books and those he acquired he had copied and distributed by his scribes. It was a truly grand contribution, securing the survival of works that would otherwise likely have been lost to us. Latin originals from the Classical world are few indeed — in fact only a handful exist — and it is only copies of the rest that are with us now. All of that collecting and copying — the preservation and passing-on of Classical wisdom and learning — was largely pioneered by Charlemagne.

  Not content with influencing the west, he also reached out towards the east. It was through his efforts — or those of his emissaries at least — that good relations were established with the civilisations of the Middle East. Proof of at least some entente came in AD 798, when the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, sent Charlemagne the gift of a white elephant called Abul Abbas.

  In the absence of the unifying presence of the Roman Empire western Europe had been cut off both from the eastern world and also that of the Classical Mediterranean. Under the influence of Charlemagne old links had been restored. In practical (not to mention geographical) terms he had done nothing less than re-establish the Western Roman Empire. In AD 800 he travelled to Rome — the first to do so as a western emperor in three centuries — and there, Pope Leo III took the monumental step of enthroning him as ruler of a new Holy Roman Empire.

  For all his undoubted reach, two previously Roman territories exceeded Charlemagne’s grasp. One was the larger part of the Iberian peninsula, which was Muslim, the other the British Isles. Cut off from the mainland of Europe since around 6100 BC, Britain was a place apart. There had always been contact — people, ideas and goods moving in both directions across the English Channel and the North Sea — but there was a separation just the same. In their heyday the Romans dominated the southern two-thirds of the largest island, persuading the Celtic Iron Age tribes there to adopt the ways of empire.

  The northern third was inhabited by a disparate collection of tribes the Romans labelled Picts — a soldier’s nickname meaning ‘painted people’ and a reference to their habit of covering themselves in tattoos. Lost along with much else is whatever name those painted people gave themselves. Among what little we can be sure of, however, is the fact that they were the descendants of the hunters who had recolonised the territory after the retreat of the last Ice Age 11,000 years before. The first of them walked dry-shod into what was then a peninsula of northwestern Europe — and stayed for good. The Picts never did succumb to Roman rule.

  Rome had lost her grip on Britannia by the start of the fifth century AD. A province increasingly riven by rebellion and unrest ceased to be worth the expense of its garrisons and governors. The troubles were hardly limited to Britain either, and when Rome chose to withdraw her influence in favour of defending interests elsewhere, the Romano-British population was left to its own devices. These were the people who would be known to historians as the Britons.

  According to the Venerable Bede, the departure of the Romans left the northern Britons — those living immediately south of the wall — at the mercy of the Picts. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People he wrote:

  At length the Britons abandoned their cities and wall and fled in disorder, pursued by their foes. The slaughter was more ghastly than ever before, and the wretched citizens were torn in pieces by their enemies, as lambs are torn by wild beasts. They were driven from their homesteads and farms, and sought to save themselves from starvation by robbery and violence against one another, their own internal anarchy adding to the miseries caused by others, until there was no food left in the whole land except whatever could be obtained by hunting.

  Into this climate of uncertainty stepped the Germanic tribes described by Bede as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The churchman recalled how a British king, Vortigern, invited the first of them to cross the North Sea and help repel the northern barbarians. Finding the place to their liking, they sent word home that Britain was a fertile land inhabited by cowards, and their relatives and neighbours crowded over in such numbers that whole Germanic territories were apparently left entirely empty.

  The archaeological evidence paints a different picture — of gradual colonisation lasting perhaps 200 years. The Britons survived the influx, particularly in the west. But by the time Augustine arrived in Kent, in 597, to begin his mission, the Anglo-Saxons were the dominant political force in southern Britain. The rich early-seventh-century AD ship burial of Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, and the towering literary masterpiece that is the epic poem Beowulf are just two indications of the wealth and splendour of a unique, and ultimately home-grown, British culture.

  Throughout all the travails of invasion and migration that followed Rome’s departure from Britannia, the faint flame of Christianity was carefully tended. Having been brought there by missionaries in the years following Emperor Constantine’s conversion in AD 312, its light was never fully extinguished. The rich fourth-century AD Roman silver hoard found in the Suffolk village of Mildenhall in 1942 includes three spoons bearing the chi-rho symbol.

  By AD 563 the Irishman Columba — Colum Cille, ‘Dove of the Church’ — was building his religious community on Iona, the Holy Island lying off the west coat of Mull, in Argyll and Bute. For the next 400 years that little speck of land would be a focal point for Christianity in western Europe.

  The last of the free — of those left untroubled either by Romans or by Charlemagne — were the Gaels. Almost certainly originating in Ireland, they crossed the thin strip of sea separating them from Scotland and there established a kingdom known in time as Dal Riata. Nothing reliable survives to indicate when this colonisation might have begun. A tenth-century Irish document called Senchus fer nAlban, ‘The History of the People of Scotland’, suggests ancient ties between the Scots and the Gaels of Ireland. More persuasive yet is the ancient legend of a chieftain of the Antrim tribe of Dal Riata called Fergus Mor mac Eirc, who apparently arrived in Argyll in AD 500 in search of land in which to establish a kingdom.

  Whenever the Gaels arrived in Scotland, they came to stay. It seems they converted to Christianity before their neighbours the Picts and this spiritual difference was certainly part of why the two tribes failed to see eye to eye. Eventually the Picts converted too — demonstrated by the appearance, on the enigmatic stones that marked their territory, of Christian symbols. But even a shared faith was not enough and the Picts and the Gaels would fight for dominance for the best part of three centuries.

  All of this was in a time before the existence of the nation states we would recognise as Scotland and England. In the centuries after the Romans withdrew, mainland Britain was a melting pot of peoples: Angles, Britons, Gaels, Picts, Saxons, all vying for land and power. During the seventh century AD Picts and Angles fought bitterly for control of a whole swathe of the middle of the island. The first of the Angles had established the neighbouring kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia and in the early 700s these united as Northumbria. Not content with the territory
they had, the new Northumbrians set about expanding north into the land of the Picts.

  The Aberlemno Stone, in a churchyard in Angus, in Scotland, features a clash between bare-headed, long-haired Picts and iron-helmeted Anglian warriors. Archaeologists have long believed the stone commemorates the climactic Battle of Dunnichen (also known as Dun Nechtain or Nechtansmere). The carvings were likely made a century or more after the fighting, which took place in AD 685. The Anglian army led by King Ecgfrith was lured deep into Pictish territory. King Bridei and his Picts had prepared an ambush and the invaders were finally driven into a loch and slaughtered.

  The centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire saw civilisations wax and wane all across western Europe. In Britain the Anglo-Saxons had built their towns in the shadow of those abandoned by the legions. In mainland Europe other peoples, those once dismissed by Rome as barbarians, did likewise. Charlemagne had emerged as the architect of something new. The edifice he sought to erect was neither as grand nor as elegant as that of the Classical world — but it was enough to shelter Christianity. It also provided a stable centre (stability built on violence) from which the west could reach out again towards the wider world and so eventually regain much of the ancient wisdom of Greece.

  Stubbornly remote, however, was the Byzantine Empire. Her tradition and heritage were in large part Greek as well — her language certainly was. The people were also Christian — but of a distinctly different sort. The threats posed by Islam and by the nomadic tribes of the east were the principal preoccupations of Constantinople’s citizens and not even Charlemagne could reach them. What did reach them was news of the crowning in Rome of a new Roman emperor. This was interesting to say the least, since as far as the people of Constantinople were concerned there was only one Roman emperor — theirs.

  This, then, was the Europe and the Middle East that the Vikings — the first true Vikings — would shortly confront.