Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (43 page)

CHAPTER 10

H
EDEBY
, J
ELLING AND
S
TIKLESTAD

T
HE
S
CANDINAVIAN
KINGDOMS TO
1100

Histories of the Vikings tend to concentrate on their impact on Europe and the wider world. The untold story of the Vikings is the impact that Europe had on them. At the beginning of the Viking Age, Scandinavians were still prehistoric, pagan barbarians: by its end, they were fully integrated into the cultural mainstream of Roman Catholic Christian Europe. For all their energy and aggression, the Vikings did not Scandinavianise Europe; Europe Europeanised the Vikings. This process of assimilating Scandinavia into Christian Europe, which mirrors on a much larger scale the assimilation of Scandinavian settlers into their European host communities, was inextricably linked to the culmination of the state formation process, which saw the emergence of stable kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Just as it was the emergence of states in these countries that triggered Viking exploration and raiding, it was the end of the state-building process, not more effective defences by the Vikings’ victims, that led to the decline of their freebooting ways. Once kings had built effective governments, they could prevent their subjects from causing diplomatic problems with neighbouring states, and they could also offer them alternative routes to social advancement through royal service, so reducing the incentive to go on Viking raids. And because they now had other forms of income from taxation and trade, kings did not have the same pressures to lead plundering raids themselves. As was the case in the Viking colonies, conversion to Christianity was the main vehicle of cultural assimilation.

The Danes and Charlemagne

Because it was blessed with the greatest area of good arable land, Denmark was the wealthiest and most populated country of Viking Age Scandinavia. It was also the smallest and most compact, with good internal communications. The two largest regions of Viking Age Denmark were the Jutland peninsula in the west and the two provinces of Skåne and Blekinge in the east (both of which came under Swedish rule in the seventeenth century). In between them lay a scatter of dozens of low-lying islands, linked rather than separated by shallow, sheltered channels of the sea. Because there were no large forests or high mountains as there were in Norway and Sweden, there were few obstacles to travel on land. Because of its land border with Germany in the south, Denmark was also the Scandinavian country in closest contact with Christian Europe. These geographical circumstances alone made it likely that Denmark would be the first of the Scandinavian countries to be welded into a unified kingdom, but there was also an important external factor driving the Danes towards unity: their powerful Christian neighbour, the Frankish empire.

According to the
Frankish Royal Annals
, the king of the Danes at the time of the earliest Viking raids was Sigfred, who probably ruled from around 770 to 800. The first recorded Danish king since the time of Angantyr, little more is known about Sigfred than his name. Nothing is known about his ancestry – was he a descendent of Angantyr or did he belong to another dynasty? – nor is it known if he ruled all of the Danes or just those who lived in Jutland. Despite that, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the steady expansion of the Frankish Empire towards the Danes’ southern borders caused Sigfred great unease. In 734, the Franks had begun to spread east along the North Sea coast and had conquered Frisia. Then, in 773, the Frankish king Charlemagne began the conquest and conversion to Christianity of the pagan Saxons, whose territory bordered directly on Denmark in the south. The Danevirke, which guarded the Danes’ border with the Saxons, would not have been built if relations between the two peoples had always been friendly. It must have been clear to Sigfred, however, that the mighty Franks would make altogether more dangerous enemies, so he supported the Saxons in their struggle to preserve their independence and provided a refuge for their leader Widukind.

Sigfred’s support was not enough to stop the Frankish steamroller and by the time he was last heard of, in 798, Charlemagne had subjugated all the Saxons who lived west of the Elbe river. Saxon resistance continued north of the Elbe until 804, when Charlemagne finally secured their submission, bringing the Frankish empire to the Danish border. That Charlemagne gave the newly conquered lands to the Abodrites, a Wendish tribe allied to the Franks, rather than incorporate them into his empire (the Wends were a group of Slav tribes whose lands extended along the Baltic coast from the neck of the Jutland peninsula east to the river Vistula), suggests that he had no immediate plans to conquer the Danes but their new king, Godfred, could hardly be sure about that. Charlemagne invited Godfred to a meeting, perhaps to reassure him about his intentions, perhaps not. Godfred brought his fleet and army to the border as a show of strength but came no further. Charlemagne was a militant Christian and he had justified his conquest of the Saxons on the grounds of their paganism as well as their raids on Frankish territory. The Danes were pagans too: would Charlemagne demand Godfred’s baptism and co-operation in evangelising his subjects? If Godfred refused, would Charlemagne see this as a sufficient
casus belli
, especially as his subjects were now launching pirate raids on the Frankish empire? Godfred had good cause to be suspicious of Charlemagne.

In 808, Godfred led a fleet to attack the Abodrites in alliance with one of their Wendish rivals, the Wiltzians. Godfred captured and sacked many of the Abodrites’ fortified towns, levied tribute, and captured and hanged one of their chiefs. It’s very likely that Godfred sacrificed this chief to Odin as hanging was the usual way that the god’s sacrificial victims were killed. Before sailing for home, Godfred destroyed the town of
Reric
, which was one end of an overland trade route between the Baltic and the North Sea. Reric’s location is not known for certain, but it was most likely at Groß Strömkendorf on Wismar Bucht, where the remains of a substantial planned Slavic settlement of the eighth century have been discovered. Reric was under Godfred’s control, and it provided him with substantial income from tolls and taxes, but it was now no longer secure. Godfred ensured that Reric would be of no benefit to the Abodrites by rounding up its merchants and craftsmen and taking them back to Denmark with him: he had plans for them.

Hedeby: the town on the heath

Anticipating Frankish reprisals for his attack on their ally, Godfred set about refurbishing the Danevirke rampart when he returned home. At the same time, Godfred resettled Reric’s merchants and craftsmen at Hedeby (‘heath-town’), at the eastern end of the Danevirke, by the head of the Schlei Fjord, a narrow, reed-fringed, 15-mile long inlet of the Baltic. The feared reprisals fell upon the Wiltzians rather than the Danes and Hedeby quickly began to flourish, becoming the most important town in Viking Age Scandinavia. Hedeby’s location, right at the neck of the Jutland peninsula, made it the natural focus for trade between the southern North Sea and Baltic Sea regions. Merchants could avoid the long and dangerous voyage around Jutland by offloading their cargoes at Hedeby and carting them 9 miles overland to Hollingstedt on the River Treene. Here, cargoes could be transferred to another ship and sailed down the Treene, into the River Eider and so into the North Sea. Some historians have suggested that the ships themselves might have been portaged from one sea to the other, much as the Rus carried their boats from one river system to another in Russia, but there is no hard evidence for this. Hedeby also lay on the
Hærvej
(the ‘Army Road’), an ancient north-south route running from Viborg in north Jutland to Hamburg on the River Elbe. Despite its name, the road was mainly a trade and cattle droving route.

At its peak in the tenth century, Hedeby covered an area of about 15 acres (6 hectares) and had a population of around 1,000 to 1,500 people. The town was protected from attack by land by a semi-circular earth and timber rampart, which was 1,400 yards (1,280 m) long and is still over 10 feet (3 m) high. Today, this rampart is the only visible evidence of Hedeby’s existence. The waterfront was open but the entrance into the harbour was protected by a barrier of wooden stakes that had been driven into the bed of the shallow fjord. A channel through the barrier could be closed off in wartime with chains or floating logs. Such barriers were a common precaution against pirate raids in Viking Age Denmark and Sweden. The Schlei Fjord also gave the town a measure of protection – no pirate fleet would be able sail down its 15-mile length unseen and launch a surprise attack.

On its low-lying site by the fjord, Hedeby was probably a damp and muddy place to live. The small town was laid out in an orderly way on either side of a small stream using a grid of narrow fenced rectangular building plots along two main streets running roughly parallel to the waterfront. Like many other Viking Age towns, the streets were paved with split logs to stop them becoming completely impassable in wet weather. The town’s single-storey houses were built with timber posts, walls of lattices of branches made windproof with a coating of clay, and thatched roofs. A typical house had a single room, which functioned as both family dwelling and workshop. Inside, the houses were dark, with the doorway being the only source of daylight, and smoky. Families lived and worked around a hearth in the centre of the floor and, as there were no chimneys, smoke had to find its way out under the eaves or through the thatched roof. The houses had small enclosed yards containing wells and latrines in close proximity to one another. Many of the buildings were German or Slavonic in style, suggesting that the town had an international population. Hedeby’s houses were not built to last – most would have needed to be completely rebuilt every ten to thirty years. The town’s waterfront was lined with timber quays, some of which extended almost 200 feet (60 m) out into the fjord. The quays were strongly built and many had warehouses and other structures built on top of them. There is archaeological evidence of craft activities, including metal-, bone- and amber-working, glass-making, pottery, weaving and ship repair. By around 825, Hedeby also had a mint, which produced imitations of Frankish silver
deniers
bearing representations of Viking longships and trading
knarrs
.

Apart from a possible toll house near the harbour and a meeting hall, no administrative buildings have been identified in Hedeby. The town was probably governed from the high-status settlement at Flüsing, about 2½ miles away on the north shore of Schlei Fjord, not far from Schleswig. This settlement, which was only about one-fifth the size of Hedeby, focused on a great feasting hall and had a mainly military character. It was probably here that Godfred gathered his forces in 804. The site continued to be occupied until the middle of the tenth century, when the hall burned down. Iron arrowheads embedded in burned timbers show that this was no accident but the result of a violent attack.

Hedeby’s main trade links were with the eastern Baltic and Norway, and with England and the Rhineland. Two merchants who are known to have visited Hedeby were Ottar and Wulfstan. Both men visited King Alfred’s court in England, where scribes wrote down their accounts of the trade routes they followed. Wulfstan, who was probably English, used Hedeby as his base for trading voyages to the Wendish ports along the Baltic’s southern coast. Ottar was from Hålogaland in Arctic Norway and he spent his summers hunting walrus in the White Sea, heading south to Hedeby to sell their ivory teeth. It was a lucrative trade because disruption to Mediterranean trade routes meant that the better quality elephant ivory was almost unobtainable in early Medieval Europe. Some merchants came from much further afield, however. A Jewish merchant from Córdoba, al-Tartushi, who visited around the middle of the tenth century, thought Hedeby a poor and squalid place and he hated the singing of the townsfolk, which he thought was ‘worse than the barking of dogs’. Around this time, his home town of Córdoba was one of the world’s largest cities, with great mosques, palaces, libraries and universities so Hedeby was little more than a farming village in comparison.

A fragile kingdom

Godfred did not live long enough to see his new town flourish. Charlemagne’s response to Godfred’s attack on the Abodrites was to build a fort at Itzehoe, north of the Elbe and less than 40 miles from the Danish border. In 810, Godfred retaliated by raiding Frisia with a fleet of 200 ships. The raid was successful: Godfred extracted 100 pounds (45 kg) of silver in tribute and long before Charlemagne’s forces arrived on the scene he was back home. And then, apparently at the peak of his power, Godfred was murdered by one of his retainers. Events of the next few years fully demonstrated the fragility of the early Danish kingdom. Godfred’s successor, a nephew called Hemming, survived two years and was succeeded by two brothers Harald Klak and Reginfred after a brief civil war that left two other claimants dead. Such arrangements were not uncommon in Viking Age Scandinavia: joint kingship was a practical way of resolving competing claims where two or more claimants had equal support. In 813, a third brother, another Hemming, turned up to share the throne. Hemming had been in the service of Charlemagne and this seems to have made him suspect in the eyes of the Danes, who transferred their allegiance to four of Godfred’s sons, who had been in exile in Sweden. Hemming fled back to the Frankish court, where he was promised help to regain the Danish throne. A long struggle between the two fraternal factions followed until by around 834 all the rivals were dead or permanently exiled bar one, Horik, the last of Godfred’s sons.