Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (28 page)

Hastein’s mistake

According to a colourful but surely legendary account by the Norman monk Dudo of St Quentin, Björn and Hastein landed at the Ligurian port of Luni and mistook it for Rome. Luni had enjoyed modest prosperity in the Roman period as a port for exporting the pure white Cararra marble from the nearby Alpi Apuane, but by the ninth century it was little more than a village and the scant ruins that remain today make it hard to imagine that anyone could ever have mistaken it for Rome. But why spoil a good story? The glory-hungry Vikings were determined to capture the most famous of all cities. Judging the city’s defences to be too strong to storm, Hastein came up with a plan to gain entry by a ruse. Viking emissaries approached the townspeople, telling them that they were exiles seeking provisions and shelter for their sick chieftain. On a return visit the emissaries told the townspeople that their chieftain had died and asked permission to enter the city to give him a Christian burial. The unsuspecting townspeople agreed and a solemn procession of Vikings followed their chief’s coffin to the grave at which point Hastein, still very much alive and fully armed, leapt out of the coffin and slew the city’s bishop. In the resulting confusion, the Vikings sacked the city. When he was told that he had been misinformed, and that he had not after all, sacked Rome, Hastein felt so disappointed that he ordered the massacre of Luni’s entire male population. This story was repeated by many later Norman writers and the same ruse was attributed to later Norman leaders such as Robert Guiscard, Bohemund of Taranto and Roger I of Sicily. It is evidence that medieval warriors admired cunning as much as bravery and skill at arms. The Vikings moved another 60 miles down the Tuscan coast to the mouth of the Arno, sacking Pisa and then, following the river upstream, also the hill-town of Fiesole above Florence. After this the Viking fleet disappears for a year. Björn and Hastein must have wintered somewhere and it may be that they sailed into the eastern Mediterranean to raid the Byzantine Empire. Late Arabic and Spanish sources claim that Vikings raided Greece and Alexandria. If they did it was probably Björn’s and Hastein’s fleet.

The fleet reappears in 861 when it passed through the Straits of Gibraltar again, this time homeward bound. The straits are only 9 miles wide so the chances of the Vikings slipping through unobserved were slim and the Moorish fleet was ready and waiting for them. Of Björn’s and Hastein’s remaining sixty ships, only twenty escaped the ambush the Moors had prepared for them. Björn and Hastein may have been unaware that a strong surface current flows constantly through the straits from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean Sea. During the Second World War, sixty-two German U-boats entered the Mediterranean undetected by riding this underwater current with their engines turned off. Not one was ever able to get out again against the current. Björn and Hastein may have had the same problem, their slow progress against it giving the Moors plenty of time to intercept them.

Undaunted by this disaster Björn and Hastein continued raiding as they sailed homewards. Just before they left Spanish waters, they raided the small Christian kingdom of Navarre and sacked Pamplona. In a spectacular coup they captured its King Garcia I, and ransomed him for the incredible sum of 70,000 gold dinars (approximately 679 pounds /308 kg of gold). The survivors of the expedition returned to the Loire in 862 very rich men. After the expedition, Björn and Hastein split up. Björn headed back to Denmark, perhaps intending to use his wealth and reputation to launch a bid for the throne. He never made it and died in Frisia after losing everything in a shipwreck. Hastein stayed on the Loire: he still had a long and profitable career ahead of him.

The daring nature of Björn’s and Hastein’s expedition secured their reputations as legendary commanders but the cost had been very high: less than a third of those who had set out three years earlier had made it back. This must have given other Vikings pause for thought for, though they continued to raid the Iberian Peninsula until the early eleventh century, there was no return to the Mediterranean. The Straits of Gibraltar had proved to be a dangerous and unavoidable bottleneck for any fleet trying to get into or out of the Mediterranean and in the future the Vikings kept well clear. The Moors defeated major raids in 889, 912 – 13, 966 and 971. The raiders in 889 got as far as Seville before they were defeated, once again, on the fields of Tablada. The survivors of the raid settled in the surrounding countryside and many subsequently converted to Islam. This was the only known Viking settlement in Iberia. During the course of their expeditions to Iberia, Vikings may have accidentally discovered the Atlantic island of Madeira. The evidence for this comes from an unusual source, the DNA of Madeiran house mice, which indicates that they were introduced to the then uninhabited island from Northern Europe, probably as stowaways, some time between around 900 – 1050.

An embassy to the king of the Majus

There probably were also more peaceful contacts between the Vikings and the Moors. There was strong demand in the Emirate of Córdoba and in the Moorish states in North Africa for Frankish, Slavic, English and Irish slaves, and many of these would have been supplied either directly or indirectly through middlemen by Viking slave traders. Many of the younger male captives were destined to be castrated: al-Andalus was famous as the main supplier of eunuchs to the Islamic world. In 845, after the Viking attack on Seville, the emir Abd al-Rahman sent an embassy led by al-Ghazal to visit the king of the Majus with gifts for him and his queen. Al-Ghazal described the land of the Majus as an island, three days journey from the mainland. There were other islands in the vicinity, which the king ruled too. Before his audience, al-Ghazal insisted that he should not be asked to kneel before the king. This was agreed, but when he arrived at the king’s hall he found that the entrance had been lowered so that he would be forced to enter on his knees. The perfect diplomat, al-Ghazal resolved the difficulty by lying on his back and pushing himself in, feet first. This would very likely have impressed rather than irritated his hosts, who would have recognised something of themselves in his determination not to be humiliated. The king’s wife Noud took a fancy to al-Ghazal and seduced him, assuring him that the Majus did not suffer from sexual jealousy and that women were free to leave their husbands at will. Al-Ghazal was correct that Scandinavian women had the right to divorce, but as for the absence of sexual jealousy, this was wishful thinking. A wife’s adultery was usually taken very seriously by her husband and in some parts of Scandinavia he had the right to kill both her and her lover if they were caught together: he may actually have mistaken a favoured concubine for a queen. It is not known which king al-Ghazal visited. If he had mistaken the Jutland peninsula for an island he may have visited the Danish king Horik. Alternatively, he may have visited a Viking warlord in Ireland, possibly Turgeis, whose wife was called Auðr, which is not too different to Noud. The purpose of al-Ghazal’s embassy is not stated either but it was almost certainly to do with trade – slaves if he had gone to Ireland, furs from the northern forests if he had gone to Denmark.

Ultimately the Vikings had no great impact on the Iberian Peninsula. Their raids were bloody and destructive but both the Christians and the Moors were able to contain them. As a result, the Vikings did not act as a catalyst for change by upsetting the local balance of power as they did in so many other places that they raided. Writing in the 1150s, the Andalusian geographer al-Zuhri summarised the Vikings as: ‘fierce, brave and strong, and excellent seamen. When they attacked, the coastal peoples fled for fear of them. They only appeared every six or seven years, never in less than forty ships and sometimes up to one hundred. They overcame anyone they met at sea, robbed them and took them captive’. So, just another bunch of barbarians.

CHAPTER 7

K
IEV
, C
ONSTANTINOPLE AND
B
OLGHAR

V
IKINGS IN
E
ASTERN
E
UROPE TO
1041

It was in the east that the Viking combination of violence and commerce was at its most organised. The great attraction that drew the Vikings east was the
dirhem
, a high quality silver coin minted in huge quantities in the Arab Abbasid Caliphate and other Muslim states. The caliphate’s vast wealth drew in luxury goods from across the known world, including slaves, beeswax, honey and furs from Northern Europe. Arab merchants bought these goods from the nomadic Khazars and Bulgars who lived on the steppes north of the Caspian Sea, paying for them with dirhems. These coins began to circulate among the Slavs, Balts and Finns and by around 780 were beginning to turn up at trading places like Staraja Ladoga on Lake Ladoga and Grobina on the Baltic Sea, where they came into the hands of Swedish merchants. This encouraged the Swedes to begin exploring the river systems of Eastern Europe to try to discover their source. The Swedes may have been motivated by commerce but their expansion in the east was no more peaceful than the Danish and Norwegian expansion in the west because most of their trade goods came from slave-raiding and tribute-gathering.

Because neither the Scandinavians, nor the Slavs, Balts and Finns who inhabited Eastern Europe had literate cultures at that time, we know far less about the Vikings’ military activities in the east than we do about those in the west. The most valuable contemporary accounts come from the writings of Arab geographers and travellers, and Byzantine chroniclers and statesmen, many of which are informed by direct personal experience. Perhaps because they felt less threatened by the Vikings, these writers, especially the Arabs, had a different perspective to western writers, showing much greater interest in Viking customs and trade than in their raids. Viking activities in the east were closely linked to the origins of the Russian state so they were a major theme of the earliest Russian history, the twelfth century
Russian
Primary
Chronicle
. This is a difficult work to use, however, because it contains much material that is clearly legendary, and because its main purpose was to establish the legitimacy of medieval Russia’s ruling Ryurikid dynasty. Viking adventures in the east feature in the Norse saga traditions, but these are the latest of all the main primary sources, not having been written down until the thirteenth century. The only truly contemporary Scandinavian sources for the Vikings in Eastern Europe are ninth–eleventh century Swedish runestones commemorating men who went on expeditions to Russia and Greece.

From Swedes to Rus

By the 830s at the latest, the Swedes had forged trade routes from the Baltic through to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Many had gone much further and sailed across these seas to trade in Constantinople and Baghdad, the capitals of the Greek Byzantine Empire and the Arab Abbasid Caliphate respectively. Along the way the Swedes operating permanently in the east acquired a new name, the ‘Rus’. The origins of this name, from which Russia gets its name, is disputed. The most widely accepted explanation is that it is derived from
Ruotsi
, the Finnish name for the Swedes.
Ruotsi
itself probably derives from Old Norse
roðr
, meaning ‘a crew of oarsmen’. An alternative view is that the term is of Greek origin, derived from literary references to the
Rusioi
(‘blondes’), an alternative name for the well-travelled Heruls from Jutland who served the Byzantine Empire as mercenaries in the sixth century.

The Rus founded settlements or, probably more often, seized control of existing settlements along the trade routes. These gave Russia its Viking name
Garðariki
, the ‘kingdom of cities’. The Rus became the ruling warrior and merchant elite of these settlements, but the majority of their populations were always native Slavs or Finns. The Rus settlements became bases from which to raid the neighbouring Finnish and Slavic tribes for tribute in slaves and furs, both of which the Greeks and Arabs were eager to buy. Arab writers say that the Rus lived entirely by plunder and did not practice agriculture. Winter was the main raiding season, when travel overland was easier because the ground was hard-frozen. Trading expeditions began to gather in the spring, as soon as the ice on the rivers broke up, and returned home in the autumn. The trade routes took the Rus through hostile territory, so they always travelled in groups for safety. The most dangerous places were the portages, places where it was necessary to carry the ships and their cargoes overland to get from one river system into another or to avoid impassable rapids. Because the portages were unavoidable, they made ideal places for ambushes.

The main source of archaeological evidence for a Scandinavian presence in Russia during the Viking Age comes from hundreds of graves furnished with typical Scandinavian artefacts. Both male and female graves have been found, indicating that the Rus travelled in family groups. According to the Arab writer Ibn Hawqal the Rus were divided into three groups, the Kuyavia, Slavia and Arcania, but it is not clear whether he was referring to ethnic or geographical divisions. A group of Rus who visited the court of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious with a Byzantine diplomatic mission in 839 claimed that they were ruled by a ‘khagan’, a Turkic word cognate with khan, which they must have adopted as a result of their contacts with the Bulgar and Khazar nomads with whom they often traded. When the Franks worked out that the Rus were really Swedes, they suspected that they were Viking spies and detained them while they decided whether or not they were bona fide travellers. The Rus might have expected to be greeted with suspicion by the Franks and so have used an exotic title to increase their status or to distance themselves from the Vikings who had so recently sacked Dorestad four times.