III.

Viking Invasions

The Vikings began to raid their southern neighbors seriously and systematically around 800. These raids, and the subsequent invasions, took many forms and reached out in many directions. In the British Isles and the French parts of the Carolingian Empire, there was a fairly uniform evolution; raids gradually changed from hit-and-run attacks to larger and more ambitious forays in which bands of sailor-raiders carved out holdings or base camps where they might spend the winter. Eventually, by the mid- to late 9th century, the armies grew in size. Many of the men became settlers in the lands where they had first appeared as marauders and raiders. They began to convert to Christianity and either brought families from home or intermarried with the local people. In such areas as northern England and Normandy (Normandie), on the coast of what is now France, the combination of peoples and cultures that resulted from these settlements led to a new mix of ethnic stocks, languages, and institutions. Because of their interest in commerce, the Vikings fostered urban growth, founding many cities and towns. Cities founded by the Vikings, such as York in England and Dublin in Ireland, emerged as prominent trade centers.

The motives for the Viking raids are not stated in any explicit or authoritative text. The wealth of the south, long known from trade and travel, was an obvious attraction. By the 8th or 9th centuries population growth was taxing Scandinavia’s limited resources for food, unclaimed land, and opportunities for social mobility and internal migration. Additionally, it is possible that the brutal wars conducted by Carolingian ruler Charlemagne against the Saxons in Germany in the 8th century may have warned the Northmen of a powerful enemy to the south.

These raids may also have been affected by political changes. The emergence in Scandinavia of more centralized monarchies and political institutions may have pushed many lesser chieftains and family leaders, long used to independence and self-reliance, to look for new frontiers. Thus many leaders of war bands took to the seas. When they went they were apt to take their men and families with them.

Around 800, Vikings raided the coasts of the British Isles and the western portions of the Carolingian Empire. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded their arrival: “In this year [793] the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne [Holy Island, off the northeast coast of England], with plunder and slaughter.” The Vikings landed on undefended coasts and attacked churches as well as isolated farmsteads, town, and villages. Their well-constructed longboats could carry 50 or more men, and because of their very shallow draft, these boats were able to travel up rivers to settlements that had seemed immune to maritime attack. Sieges of and raids on Paris from the 840s onward show how deep into the heartland of continental Europe the Vikings could strike. Additionally, the Vikings conquered much of northern England (the Danelaw) in the 9th century, and they established a kingdom in Ireland. The Viking hold on such North Atlantic islands as the Shetlands, Hebrides, and Faroes lasted through and beyond the Middle Ages. However, even in their most predatory days the Vikings had not always been fierce raiders; often a fortified harbor or the presence of soldiers caused them to fall back on their role as traders and merchants.

Until the Viking raids began, Christian Europe had not worried about an enemy from the sea. It took the better part of a century before leaders like Alfred the Great of Wessex (England) and Charles II the Bald and Louis III in France could command their resources to move to fortify their towns, station fleets and naval patrols along the coasts, and organize localized and mobile military forces. Some Christian leaders paid ransom to the larger Viking armies of the 10th and early 11th centuries. Taxing their people to pay the “danegeld,” the tribute to the Vikings, became a regular defensive strategy. But in return for the cash, the Vikings often negotiated peaceful coexistence and conversion. In 911 Charles III the Simple of France ceded Normandy (French for “territory of the Northmen”) to the Viking leader Rollo and his warriors, who became his Christian vassals. In turn they pledged to defend their new duchy against other Vikings.

These Vikings, now called Normans, adopted the French language and ways and organized a strong state in Normandy. In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, led his followers across the English Channel to conquer England. In the same century the exploits of such Norman adventurers as Robert Guiscard created the Norman kingdom of Sicily, at the expense of the Muslims in Sicily and the Byzantine emperor in southern Italy. Normans from Sicily also took part in the Crusades against the Muslims in the Holy Land.

In addition to their role as invaders of settled, Christian lands, numerous bands of Viking adventurers reached Iceland in the mid-9th century, and by 900 their new home had become a center for settlement by Norwegians and Danes. Iceland was a launching point for expeditions and ventures farther out into the North Atlantic. Around 982 Erik the Red led an expedition from Iceland which settled in Greenland. His son Leif Eriksson later landed on North America, which he called Vinland, or Wineland, because of the large numbers of grapes that he and his men found. Archaeological work indicates that the original Vinland settlement was probably at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Literary and archaeological evidence supports the existence of colonies in North America, supplied and populated for several generations before distance and climate proved too much.

The Vikings who went west, across the ocean, and south, to the British Isles and continental Europe, were mostly from Norway and Denmark. Expeditions from Sweden were no less aggressive and vigorous. They turned to the south and east, into and beyond the Baltic, away from the heartland of Christian Europe, and in a world of vast spaces and few people. These people were drawn by trading links rather than a thirst for empty land. They traveled through Russia via the Volga and Dnieper rivers to Constantinople and Baghdad. Along with the native Slavic peoples, the Swedish Vikings influenced the growth of the early Russian state around Kyiv (Kiev). The Swedish Vikings in Constantinople formed the Varangian guard of the Byzantine emperors in the 11th century. As in their western expeditions, they were soldiers, new settlers, and able traders and voyagers.