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EUROPE from 501 to 1212
While singing about Charlemagne, those in what had been Charlemagne's realm were helpless against those who would be called Vikings. In their low draft boats the Vikings ventured out with swords and battle axes. They raided along a shoreline or up a river and quickly returned to sea before help could arrive. With little or no resistance to their assaults, they were encouraged to launch more and bigger assaults.
The Vikings were responding to economic growth in their own country accompanied by an increase in population. The Scandinavians had increased their trade with other parts of the world. They were aware of the wealth that existed elsewhere, and some were inspired to go out and grab some of it. They were aware that treasury was being stored at monasteries and churches, and these were their usual targets, conveniently located on rivers and near the coast. They raided and returned home, happy with the prestige that their loot inspired, and their success inspired an increase in raiding. They reported that land was available abroad, and with the growth in population having eliminated the availability of land at home, more Scandinavians were willing to venture to distant areas for the purpose of settling down.
The Vikings raided Paris, and they settled in Normandy. These were years of good weather and good sailing, and they ventured beyond Western Europe, and beyond England, Scotland and Ireland, as far as Iceland, Greenland and North America. The Vikings and their animals became Iceland's inhabitants, and between their use of wood and their animals wandering about, all the trees in Iceland would disappear. How far the Vikings could spread was limited by their number, and in North America, where they were greatly outnumbered, their settlements failed and they were forced to withdraw to Greenland.
The Vikings had greater success closer by. They also crossed the Baltic Sea, and in waves they passed down the Dnieper and Volga rivers. They were intent on looting treasure in Arabia but did not make it that far. Instead they conquered Slavs and set up a kingdom at Novgorod and at Kiev.
The Vikings raided England. At places in England their raids turned into conquests. They struck in Scotland, and they overran Ireland. A great army of Vikings came in 865 and overthrew the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia. Alfred the Great of Wessex (871-899) rallied England against the Viking attacks. Vikings settled in East Anglia and Northumbria, while remnants of the Viking "great army" sailed away to the continent. In the next two centuries Vikings would continue to make their way to England, and the English would send them away with a bribe.
From the Hungarian Plain fierce Magyar tribesmen terrorized Europe. They raided isolated villages and monasteries, and in 899 they routed an Italian army at Brenta in the far northeast of Italy.
Constantinople, beginning in 917, supported the Magyars against their enemy the Bulgarians. Constantinople gave the Magyars gold and precious robes to encourage them to attack the Bulgars from the rear. For several years the Magyars raided Bulgaria in force. The Bulgars drove the Magyars from the Black Sea westward. In the 930s the Magyars swept through Germanic lands to Paris and down through and past Rome in the 930s. They took prisoners and sold them to the slave markets of the East.
In 955 the king of Germany, Otto I, devastated the Magyars in battle, the Magyars unable to stand up to frontal assaults from heavy cavalry. And the Magyars returned to the Hungarian Plain, where they ruled over Serbs who farmed.
Order was desired and a defense against marauders -- whomever they were. Local "lords" gave land in exchange for military service. The land was called the fief, and the fighting man was the vassal. The vassal vowed to his lord that he would love what the lord loved, hate what the lord hated and be bound to serve and respect the lord. "Thy friends," promised the knight to his lord "will be my friends, and thy enemies my enemies." Money was not yet the dominant means of exchange, and so few lords could merely buy a small army. The fighting men had the best means of transport on land: horses. Saddles with stirrups had arrived from Asia, and these allowed someone with armor on horseback more stability andthe ability to stand when wielding a sword or lance while carrying a shield. And the horses had iron horseshoes, which allowed them to carry more weight across rough ground.
The new system of defense was at times effective in chasing away marauders. But the little armies were at times also used against hostile neighbors and to settle territorial disputes. A new kind of warfare was coming into being, often involving sieges against neighboring lords holding out behind castle walls.
The vassals were called knights and were always on call for their lord if danger threatened. Otherwise they might be hunting on horseback, both as recreation and military exercise. The knights were a new form of aristocrat. In this new era of danger, common farmers -- called peasants -- joined the system by surrendering their land to a local lord for the protection offered by the lord and his knights -- similar to what had been done in the Roman Empire at the beginning of its decline. It is called the manorial system. The peasant changed from a freeholder of land to a subject of the lord, often bound to the lord for life and under the lord's authority and perhaps supervised by a knight. The lord benefited from the peasant's harvests and sometimes dictated personal matters such as to whom one could marry. Some peasants might be forced into a sort of protection racket of a local lord, much as Hammurabi had around 2,500 years before. But many peasants preferred the protection of the local lord and his knights to being at the mercy of the armed marauders then prevalent in Europe, including those belonging to neighboring lords, whose men could be as ill-behaved as the Vikings.
In Gaul, following Viking intrusions the successors of Charlemagne lost power to local lords. What today is France was back then a patch work of communities and local rule, princes, lords and such. In the late 900s a new dynasty of kings came into being, beginning with Hugh Capet. The Capetian kings ruled from behind the walls of Paris, in drafty, smelly and poorly sanitized castles only a few miles from robber barons. Castles were the defense strategy of the day, barriers against the weapons of the day: swords, knives, pikes, crossbows, spears and the Viking's battle axe.
Without democracy, political power was still based on force of arms. No single independent lord elsewhere in France had the military power or will to overthrow Capet, and they were too independent-minded and fearful of one another to unite as a force against him, leaving Capet on his throne and claiming the support of God.
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Copyright © 2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.