Authors: Neil Oliver
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 appal.
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 commanding 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 north-western 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 Dál 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 Dál 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.
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Runes appeared during the first and second centuries ad, the earliest of them probably in Denmark. For the most part it seems they were raised in tribute to, or in memory of, loved ones, brothers-in-arms, great chieftains and their retainers. Above all they seem intended to demonstrate continuity. Rune stones were most often erected where they could be seen by all – on high ground or beside roads and river crossings. As well as being engraved, the stones were painted in bright colours. Those who have studied the script believe it was contact with the Latin alphabet – the language of Rome – that inspired peoples in southern Scandinavia to come up with writing of their own in the first place. Just as exposure to artworks, jewellery and high-status symbols arriving from elsewhere is likely to prompt the locals to find a reply, so literacy is capable of spreading like a virus. But it surely says something about unchanging human nature that the first runes were used for little more than writing the names of the people who set in place the stones bearing them. Having acquired the limitless possibilities of the written word, finally given the means to express their deepest thoughts in permanent form, the first statements of the rune-carvers amounted to little more than ‘Kilroy was here’.