Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 3: Dorestad, Paris and Rouen. The Vikings in Francia 799–939

On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne (r. 768 – 814) Roman emperor in St Peter’s basilica in Rome. According to Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard, the king had no idea what was going to happen and that if he had only known he would never have set foot in the church. However, this was only the formal modesty expected of a good Christian emperor. In reality the event was long planned, Charlemagne having made up his mind to claim the inheritance of the Roman Empire at least a year beforehand. Comprising modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and parts of Spain, Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Charlemagne’s empire, known as the Carolingian empire (from Latin Carolus = Charles), was the largest and most powerful state to have existed in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire over 300 years before. The peace and security that Charlemagne’s rule brought to this vast area led to the growth of trade and a revival of cultural life known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Significantly, this was focussed not on the Mediterranean, the centre of Classical civilisation, but on the north, on the Rhineland, the Low Countries and the fertile farmlands of northern France. The impact of this rising prosperity extended well beyond Charlemagne’s domain, stimulating trade in Britain and Scandinavia as well. It was partly to feed markets in the Frankish lands that Swedes were forging new trade routes along the rivers of Eastern Europe. Many Scandinavian merchants must have seen the empire’s rich and undefended ports and monasteries, and wondered if there weren’t other ways to share in its prosperity.

Charlemagne’s coronation was, of course, a celebration of his achievements but he was well aware that his empire faced many challenges, one of which was the threat of Viking piracy: he had, after all, tried to ransom the monks of Lindisfarne who had been captured by Vikings in 793. As a pious Christian, he must have found this attack on such a holy place as deeply disturbing as any churchman.

The first recorded Viking attack on the Frankish Empire did not come until 799. The raid was not a great success. The Vikings plundered an island off the coast of Aquitaine, probably Noirmoutier, an important centre for the salt and wine trades and home to the important monastery of St Philibert, but some of the Vikings’ ships were wrecked, an occupational hazard, and over a hundred of them were killed by the Franks. This did not make Charlemagne complacent. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, the monk Notker the Stammerer (d. 912), one of Charlemagne’s less reliable biographers, says that the great warrior wept on hearing the news of the first Viking raids on the empire, not because he feared them himself but because he foresaw the trouble they would cause his successors. The story is probably a monkish invention, meant to shame Charlemagne’s less able successors, but his response to the raid was certainly vigorous. In March 800, Charlemagne set out from his palace at Aachen for Boulogne on the Channel coast where he personally oversaw the preparations for defence against the Vikings. Further measures followed in 802, 806 and 810. Showing a clear understanding of the nature of the Viking threat, Charlemagne concentrated his forces – fleets, coastguards and fortifications – at the mouths of the empire’s major rivers. These were highways into the empire’s economic heartlands, lined with towns, monasteries and the richest farmlands. Charlemagne’s defences were intended to deny their use to the Vikings.

However, there was little that he could do to protect the open coastline. An incident recorded in the Royal Frankish Annals in 820 illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Charlemagne’s defences. A fleet of thirteen Viking ships landed in Flanders, but the coastguards drove the pirates off before they could do much damage. The Vikings moved on to the Seine, but the coastguards were ready here too and again they were driven off after losing five of their number in skirmish. But the initiative was always going to be with the Vikings. They moved on and kept probing, eventually plundering the unguarded village of Bouin on the coast of Aquitaine. The empire’s most exposed area was Frisia, which lay only a couple of days’ sail from Denmark. The first recorded Viking raid on Frisia came in 810 when the Danish king Godfred, with a fleet of 200 ships, forced the Frisians to pay him 100 pounds (45 kg) of silver in tribute. On hearing news of the attack, Charlemagne immediately ordered the mobilisation of the fleet and the army, but by the time he reached the area, the Danes had already sailed for home. Frustrated, Charlemagne lamented that God had not granted him the opportunity to let his ‘Christian hand sport with these dog-heads’. Charlemagne was now aged around seventy and this was the last time he would lead an army in person.

Charlemagne’s coastal defences provided a large measure of security for the empire and few incidents are recorded in the twenty years after his death in 814. However, in 834 a large Viking fleet suddenly penetrated over 50 miles into the Rhine delta and sacked the Frisian town of Dorestad, the empire’s most important emporium or trading centre (equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon wic). Near modern Utrecht in the Netherlands, Dorestad was founded in the early seventh century as a beach market outside the walls of a ruined Roman fort at the junction of the Rhine and the River Lek. In the agrarian economy of early medieval Europe, tolls and taxes on trade were one of the few ways a ruler could get his hands on hard cash. Self-interested Frankish kings offered privileges to encourage merchants and traders to settle at Dorestad and by Charlemagne’s time a town stretched for about 2 miles along the bank of the Rhine, covering an estimated area of around 1 square mile. With a population of around 2,000 people, it was probably the largest town in northern Europe at the time. Enough silver passed through Dorestad for it to have its own mint. The town’s silver coins acknowledged its maritime links, carrying stylised images of single-masted sailing ships with strongly curved hulls.

Dorestad’s appearance was typical of the north European trading places of its day, an untidy collection of houses, warehouses and workshops built entirely from wood, clay and thatch, cut by muddy streets roughly paved with split logs. Apart from two wooden churches, no public buildings have been identified. Dorestad was divided into an upper and lower town. The upper town, centred on the old Roman fort, was the administrative centre: governance was shared between a count and the bishops of nearby Utrecht, who owned a large part of the town. The lower town, stretched along the riverbank, was the commercial and industrial quarter. The riverbank was divided into long, narrow plots to give the maximum number of traders access to the river. Causeways of earth and timber stretched out into the river to give access to timber jetties. As the course of the river gradually changed, swinging away from the town, these jetties grew ever longer, eventually stretched over 150 yards from the riverbank. Excavations have uncovered evidence of a wide variety of manufacturing activities. Weavers, metalworkers and jewellers, comb-makers, basket weavers and shipbuilders all plied their trades here. The town’s merchants acted as middlemen, importing high quality lava quernstones, glass, metalwork, wheel-thrown pottery, and wine from the Rhineland, and re-exporting it to Britain and Scandinavia. What they received in return is not known. Baltic amber has been found on the site but most imports were probably perishable goods such as hides and furs. Behind the waterfront was a less densely settled area of farms, which supplied food and other animal products to the town. Just outside the town was a fortified enclosure, protected by a ditch and bank, which may have been a refuge for the townsfolk in times of war or the compound of a local aristocrat. The town itself was not fortified, a sign of the peaceful conditions that prevailed in Charlemagne’s empire.

Exactly how much damage the Vikings inflicted on Dorestad in 834 is unclear. Frankish chronicles paint a familiar picture of burning, killing and captive and tribute taking, but the Vikings thought it worth their while to return again in 835, 836 and 837. Clearly the town was able to recover quickly from Viking raids and output from Dorestad’s mints actually peaked in the period 838 – 40 and continued to be high throughout the 840s. It is quite possible that Dorestad was profiting indirectly from Viking raids elsewhere. As wealth flowed back to Scandinavia from Western Europe it stimulated greater trade, more than compensating for the damage caused to Dorestad itself: the Vikings were great redistributors of wealth.

That Vikings were able to penetrate as far inland as Dorestad is a sign that Charlemagne’s coast defence system had broken down. The reasons for this have little to do with the increasing strength of Viking fleets in this period. They are instead related to internal political developments in the Frankish empire. Frankish tradition dictated that on the death of a king, his kingdom should be divided equally between all his surviving legitimate sons. Since its foundation by the Merovingian dynasty in the fifth century, the Frankish kingdom had experienced frequent partitions, but a vigorous tradition of dynastic murder kept the number of potential heirs in check and prevented it breaking up permanently. When the Carolingians overthrew the Merovingians in the mid-eighth century, they continued the tradition and Charlemagne provided for the empire to be divided between his three sons Charles, Pippin and Louis the Pious after his death. In the event, Charles and Pippin died before their father, so the empire passed intact to Louis the Pious (r. 814 – 840). In 817, following an accident in which he narrowly escaped death, Louis made provision for the succession. Under the influence of the church, which saw the empire as an instrument of God for promoting the unity of the Christian people, Louis broke with Frankish custom and, instead of providing for an equal division of the empire between his sons, he appointed his eldest son Lothar as co-emperor and granted his younger sons Pippin and Louis subkingdoms in Aquitaine and Germany. This settlement unravelled when Louis decided to marry Judith of Bavaria in 819 after the death of his first wife the year before. Had Louis been less pious and made do with mistresses, the future of the Frankish empire might have been much less troubled. In 823 Judith bore Louis another son, Charles (the Bald, as he would later become known).

Louis could only provide Charles with a suitable inheritance at the expense of his elder brothers. When Louis granted Charles his own subkingdom in 829, Lothar, backed by his brothers, rebelled and deposed him. Charles was excluded from the succession but this seemed grossly unjust to Frankish traditionalists. With their support, Louis was restored in 830, but the problem of the succession continued to fester for the remainder of his reign, steadily undermining the strong royal authority on which Charlemagne’s military system was based. Following Louis’ death in 840, a civil war broke out between his three surviving sons, Lothar, Louis and Charles (Pippin died in 838), which resulted in a tripartite division of the empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. This settlement did not bring stability. In the decades that followed, the empire went through a succession of partitions before it broke up for good in 888. Throughout this period, the Vikings often came a poor third in the Frankish kings’ list of priorities: combating dynastic rivals and trying, generally unsuccessfully, to prevent the counts from usurping royal powers always came first.

When not distracted by his troublesome sons, Louis did his best to shore up the coast defences and put diplomatic pressure on Danish kings to restrain their subjects, with some success: in 836 and 838 King Horik executed the leaders of Viking raids against the empire (see ch. 11). After the first Viking attack on Dorestad, Louis ordered the construction of forts to protect the Frisian coast and the Rhine delta. One of these forts, on the island of Walcheren, was captured by the Vikings in 837 while on their way to sack Dorestad for the fourth time. Frankish casualties were heavy and two dukes and other men of rank were captured. Louis cancelled a planned trip to Rome, so seriously did he take this setback. An enquiry into the disaster pinned the blame on the local Frisians for ignoring their military duties and not opposing the Vikings. Fortunately in 838, a fifth attack on Dorestad was prevented when the Viking fleet was destroyed by a storm before it got there. By this time, however, Vikings were active along the empire’s entire northern coastline.

Vikings were never slow to exploit political weakness and their raids intensified during the civil wars between Louis’ sons. The monk Ermentarius described how the strife: ‘gave encouragement to the foreigners. Justice was abandoned, and evil advanced. No guards were mounted on the ocean beaches. Wars against foreign enemies ceased and internal wars raged on. The number of ships grew larger, and the Northmen were beyond counting. Everywhere there were massacres of Christians, raids, devastations and burnings.’ Of the three kingdoms set up by the Treaty of Verdun, it was Charles the Bald’s kingdom of West Francia that was most vulnerable to Viking raids, having a coastline that extended from Flanders to the Pyrenees and many navigable rivers, including the Seine, Loire and Garonne. Lothar’s kingdom extended from Rome to the North Sea and included Frisia and the Rhine delta and was therefore also vulnerable to raids. Louis the German’s kingdom of East Francia lay between the Rhine and the Elbe and was the least vulnerable to Viking raids, having only a short coastline on the North Sea: apart from frequent raids on the important military and ecclesiastical centre of Hamburg, it was relatively untroubled by the Vikings.

Lothar (r. 840 – 855) attempted to solve his Viking problem by using fire to fight fire. In 850 Roric, a Danish Viking leader, brought a fleet to Frisia. Unable to expel him, Lothar granted Roric part of Frisia and the town of Dorestad as a fief, making him responsible for defending it against other Vikings and collecting the taxes and handing them over to the royal treasury. There was nothing nationalistic about the Vikings. They were quite happy to fight other Vikings if the price was right. It is questionable how effective an ally Roric proved to be – Vikings ravaged Frisia in 851, 852 and 854, and in 857 when Dorestad itself was sacked yet again – but his loyalty seems never to have been seriously questioned by any of the four kings he eventually served. At some point Roric converted to Christianity and one of the empire’s most important churchmen, archbishop Hincmar of Reims, took a personal interest in his spiritual welfare. In 855, Lothar supported Roric in a bid to seize the Danish throne but was unable to establish himself and was back in Frisia by the end of the year. Roric’s greatest failure came in 863 when a fleet of 252 Viking ships sailed down the Rhine as far as Cologne, sacking Dorestad on the way. Roric negotiated the Vikings’ withdrawal but a rumour spread that he had colluded with the raiders and in 866 the Frisians rebelled and drove him out. However, he kept the confidence of his lord, who by now was Lothar’s son Lothar II, and he was soon restored to his fief. When Lothar II died in 869, Roric’s fief was divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German, but he reached agreements with them both despite the brothers’ mutual antipathy. Roric is last heard of in 873 and it is not known when he died. The experiment was obviously deemed a success by the Franks because, by 882, the new emperor Charles the Fat (r. 881 – 7) had granted Roric’s lands to another Dane called Godfred. This turned out to be a mistake. Despite being baptised and married into the royal family, Godfred did nothing to prevent Viking raids and was murdered at the instigation of a group of local nobles in 885. By this time Dorestad was largely deserted. Viking raiding was probably not the critical factor, however. Dorestad’s position in a conflicted borderland between the East and West Frankish kingdoms disrupted trade even more than Viking raids, while the shifting course of the river left the town high and dry.

Charles the Bald’s (r. 843 – 77) authority was the most precarious of Louis’ three sons. Throughout his reign Charles had to contend with the hostility of his brothers and rebellious counts, as well as intensive Viking raiding, problems he dealt with in roughly that order of priority. This may seem puzzling but Charles was determined above all to defend his throne and, judged from this perspective, his policy towards the Vikings becomes more comprehensible. Viking raids, no matter how destructive, would have been of little consequence to him if he had allowed his brothers or vassals to depose him. Unfortunately, the way Charles protected his throne just made life worse for his subjects. Charles often paid tribute to the Vikings, to buy them off while he dealt with more direct threats to his authority, but this simply encouraged more raids, and made him unpopular with his subjects, who were doubly impoverished by being both taxed and plundered. He refused to allow the building of castles and city walls, which would have given protection to his subjects from Viking raiders, because of a well-justified fear that they might also be used against him by his rebellious counts.

The counts were central to Charles’ problems. The county was the basic administrative subdivision of the Frankish kingdoms. Each count was responsible for administering justice, collecting tax revenues on behalf of the crown, and for mobilising and leading those freemen liable for military service in wartime and supplying troops for the royal army as required. Under Charlemagne, counts were usually appointed for life but as royal authority waned after his death the office became hereditary, passing from father to son. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the county: often the best candidate for the job would be the son of the old count. He had been brought up in the area, knew the land, and knew, and was known by, the people. For the king, however, it represented a loss of control and patronage if he could not dismiss an ineffective or disobedient count, or reward a loyal vassal by promoting him to county. Once their office became hereditary, counts treated their counties as if they were their own personal principalities. They were reluctant to send troops to join the royal army and leave their own lands exposed to attacks by Vikings or, indeed, neighbouring counts who saw a chance to expand their lands at someone else’s expense. This trapped Charles in an ever-tightening vicious circle. The king relied on the counts for troops. Without their co-operation, Charles could depend only on the resources of his own personal estates. With limited forces at his command, the king could neither combat the Vikings nor enforce his authority over disobedient counts. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that Charles was also very reluctant to confront the Vikings in battle. A defeat would not only allow the Vikings to plunder the countryside at will, it might also encourage a rebellion or an attack by his dynastic rivals while his forces were weakened. However, unavoidable though they were, Charles’ policies were ultimately self-defeating. Protection was the most important thing that medieval people expected of their kings and his failure to provide it only accelerated the decline of royal authority.

Though few parts of the West Frankish kingdom escaped raids – Vikings even attacked its Mediterranean coastline – the Vikings concentrated their activities on the rich and easily accessible lands of the Loire and Seine river valleys. The Seine was the first to be penetrated by Vikings. In May 841, while the civil war raged between Charles the Bald and his brothers, a Norwegian Viking leader called Asgeir took a fleet up the Seine and sacked Rouen, together with the wealthy abbeys of Jumièges and Fontanelle, where sixty-eight monks were captured and ransomed for 26 pounds (11.8 kg) of silver. The whole campaign took just two weeks. In 842, Vikings sailed down the river Canche, further north along the coast from the Seine, and sacked Quentovic, after Dorestad the most important trade centre in the Frankish lands. Some of the town’s inhabitants saved their property by paying ransom to the Vikings. Like Dorestad, Quentovic survived the raid and when it was finally abandoned in the tenth century, it was because the river on which it lay had silted up.

Exposed islands off the mouth of the Loire had been targeted since the earliest days of Viking raiding. In 830, the abbot of St Philibert’s on Noirmoutier built a castle as refuge for his monks, so often had it been raided. Soon after this the monks began to retreat to the mainland during the summer raiding season, returning to their island monastery only in the winter when they hoped bad weather would keep the Vikings away. By 836, the abbey had been raided so often that the monks dug up the precious body of their patron saint and, to prevent its desecration by the pagan Vikings, abandoned Noirmoutier and fled with it to find a new home on the mainland. In 843, Vikings sailed up the Loire for the first time. On 24 June a fleet of sixty-seven ships fell upon Nantes while the population were celebrating the feast of St John the Baptist. Vikings burst into the cathedral during a service and massacred the congregation, killing bishop Gunhard at his altar. The timing of the attack is unlikely to have been a coincidence: attacking during a religious festival, when the population would likely be off guard, was a stratagem the Vikings used more than once. The people of Nantes had felt secure from Viking attack, believing that no strangers could navigate their way through the maze of shoals in the Loire’s estuary. However, these Vikings had been supplied with a pilot by Lambert, a local count, who was in rebellion against King Charles and hoped the Vikings would help him get his hands on Nantes. Lambert got his city, or what was left of it anyway. It was a hundred years before Nantes recovered its former prosperity. The Vikings spent the rest of the summer plundering the Loire valley before withdrawing to the security of Noirmoutier where, for the first time, they wintered in Francia. Many of the Vikings had brought their families with them and clearly meant to stay long-term: the Loire would not be free of Vikings until 939.

Charles’ defence of the Loire was frequently undermined by rebellious vassals. In 844, Charles’ nephew Pippin, the sub-king of Aquitaine, guided a Viking leader called Oskar up the Garonne to help him capture Toulouse. Oskar also scouted the area for opportunities for plunder and in 845 returned and seized Bordeaux. Unfortunately for Pippin, this damaged his credibility and in 851 he was captured and handed over to Charles, who imprisoned him in a monastery. Pippin escaped in 854 and tried again to seize Aquitaine. While Pippin and Charles were fighting, the Loire Vikings plundered the countryside at will, sacking Poitiers, Angoulême, Périgeux, Limoges and Clermont. Pippin failed to establish himself securely and in 864 threw in his lot with the Vikings. A Frankish chronicler even accused him of giving up his Christian faith and becoming a devotee of Odin. If true, Odin proved to be no help. Pippin was captured by Charles later in the year and died in prison. For Nomenoë, the duke of Brittany, the Vikings were a welcome distraction. Vikings often raided Brittany’s long, indented coastline but it was a poor country and Vikings found the rich lands of the Seine and Loire much more attractive. The Bretons were unwilling subjects of the Franks and in 845-9, Nomenoë took advantage of Charles’ many distractions to assert his country’s independence. Even the most effective defender of the Loire, Count Robert the Strong of Angers, who inflicted many defeats on Viking raiding parties, was in rebellion against Charles between 856 and 861. Robert was eventually killed fighting an alliance of Bretons and Vikings at Brissarthe in 866.

In 845 the Vikings returned to plunder the Seine valley with a fleet of 120 ships under a leader called Ragnar, who is perhaps the most credible prototype for the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok of the saga traditions. King Charles at least tried to stop the Vikings, stationing troops on both sides of the river just downstream from Paris. Ragnar attacked the smaller of the two Frankish forces with his whole army, which is likely to have been 3,000 – 4,000 strong given the size of his fleet, and routed it. Ragnar took 111 of his prisoners to the riverbank and hanged them in full view of the other Frankish force, who promptly got the message and fled. Ragnar moved on to sack Paris, at that time just one of many market towns along the Seine, not yet the capital city it would one day become. Early medieval kings spent their lives moving with their courts from one estate to another so no one place was crucial to the administration of a kingdom: the government was wherever the king was. Charles did not think Paris was worth fighting over, he wanted to husband his troops to fight the rebellious Bretons, and simply paid the Danes 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg) of silver to leave the city. While Charles may not have been over-concerned about the Vikings, God, so monkish chroniclers believed, was and He sent an epidemic to punish them for plundering so many holy places. Over 600 of them died according to the Annals of Xanten. According to another monastic tradition, an impious Viking who had plundered the abbey of St Germain outside Paris died after his bones miraculously shriveled away.

This divine intervention may have deterred the Vikings for they kept away from the Seine until 852, when a large fleet under Godfred, a son of the Danish king Harald Klak, plundered Frisia and Flanders before settling down for the winter at Jeufosse, mid-way between Rouen and Paris. Charles laid siege to Godfred’s camp, but his troops refused to fight and at New Year he withdrew leaving the Danes to ravage the countryside savagely. In July, Godfred moved on to the Loire, sacking Nantes again and raiding upstream as far as Tours. Danes again returned to the Seine in August 856 and plundered their way upstream, re-establishing their winter camp at Jeufosse. Then, on 28 December, they attacked Paris again and burned it. Every church was destroyed except St Stephen’s cathedral, the church of St-Denis, and the church of SS-Vincent and Germain, which were saved when the clergy paid a large ransom in cash. Abbot Louis of St-Denis and his brother Gauzlin, who were captured by the Danes, were themselves ransomed for the incredible sum of 686 pounds (311 kg) of gold and 3,250 pounds (1,474 kg) of silver. Following the attack, the Danes established a new and more secure camp on the island of Oissel, in the Seine 8 miles south of Rouen. There they held out against King Charles, who besieged them fruitlessly for three months during the summer of 858. By this time the peasants of the lower Seine had had enough, both of the Vikings and of their own ruler’s failure to defend them. They formed armed bands and began to fight the Vikings, with some success. However, for Charles and his nobles alike, peasants taking the law into their own hands was an unacceptable challenge to their authority. The peasants’ reward for resisting the Vikings was to be slaughtered by their own lords. The sense of despair permeated throughout society. The theologian Paschasius Radbertus wrote mournfully: ‘Who among us would ever have believed or even imagined that in so short a time we would be overwhelmed with such fearful misfortunes? Today we tremble as we think of these pirates arrayed in raiding bands in the very vicinity of Paris and burning churches along the banks of the Seine. Who would ever have believed, I ask, that thieving gangs would perpetrate such outrages? Who would have thought that a kingdom so glorious, so fortified, so large, so populous, so vigorous would be so humiliated and defiled by such a base and filthy race.’ Then in his early seventies, Paschasius was old enough to remember the glory days of Charlemagne.

Since his own troops were only good for fighting peasants, in 860 Charles agreed to pay 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of silver to Volund, the leader of a Viking army that was ravaging the countryside around the River Somme, to attack the Vikings at Oissel. Volund took the money and left to invade England and only after the English defeated him in battle did he remember his deal with Charles. The following year, Volund sailed up the Seine with a fleet of 200 ships and laid siege to Oissel. In addition to the silver he had already given Volund, Charles levied another payment of 6,000 pounds (2,722 kg) of silver on his subjects and ordered them to supply his army with grain and cattle, ‘so that the realm should not be looted.’ Attracted by the generous payments, another Danish fleet of sixty ships came to join Volund. Where Charles had failed, Volund succeeded. Starvation forced the Danes on Oissel to surrender and hand over to Volund 6,000 pounds of gold and silver. The two forces then combined and set out for the open sea. It was now late in the year and winter storms prevented their departure. The army split up into its component fellowships, which were billeted on towns and monasteries along the whole length of the Seine as far as Paris and beyond to the fortress of Melun. Splitting up like this made provisioning the army easier, but it also made the isolated groups of Vikings more vulnerable to Frankish attack, so the arrangement must surely have been made with Charles’ agreement.

Charles used the winter respite to position troops along the Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and Oise, to prevent the Danes plundering. This foresight won him a bloodless success when the Danes wintering at Fossés near Paris took a few ships early in 862 and set out to plunder Meaux on the Marne. Unable to catch them, Charles built a barrier across the river behind them to block their escape. Trapped, the Danes gave hostages, released all the captives they had taken and agreed to leave the Seine or help Charles fight any other Danes who failed to keep the agreement made the previous year. About three weeks later Volund and other Danish leaders met with Charles and renewed their oaths to leave. As winter drew to a close, the Danes withdrew as far as Jumièges to repair their ships and, after the spring equinox, the traditional beginning of the sailing season, they returned to the open sea, split up and went their separate ways. Some Danes went to Brittany and allied with Duke Salomon to fight the Franks again. Others went to the Loire and allied with Robert the Strong to fight the Bretons. Volund stayed on the Seine with his family, converted to Christianity and entered Charles’ service. He was killed in 863 in a duel with another Dane who had accused him of treachery.

By summer 862, Charles had seen off or outlived his most dangerous dynastic rivals and now began to take the Viking threat more seriously. Charles did not mind too much if Vikings ravaged the lands of his rebellious vassals, but now that they were at the gates of Paris, his own royal estates in the Île de France were acutely vulnerable. Something had to be done. Charles called an assembly at Pîtres, on the Seine just south of Rouen and ordered the construction of a fortified bridge across the river at nearby Pont de l’Arche. Forts of stone, earth and timber were to be built at each end of the bridge for permanent garrisons to bar the passage of Viking fleets up- or downstream. Orders were also given for the construction of fortified bridges on the Marne, Oise and Loire rivers. Arguments about who should build the bridges and garrison them meant that Charles’ orders were not carried out. Charles held another assembly at Pîtres in June 864, where he issued the same proclamation. At the same time he ordered towns to pull down any walls they had built to protect themselves from Viking attack. From Charles’ perspective it was safer to leave a town exposed to Viking attack than to run the risk that a rebel vassal might hold it against him if it was fortified. This time work on the bridge at Pont de l’Arche seems actually to have started, but it was still incomplete the next summer when it was seized by the Danes. In September, the Danes sent a 200-strong raiding party to Paris in an unsuccessful quest to find supplies of wine. In October, they again sailed up the Seine and sacked the abbey of St-Denis, just outside Paris. They were duly punished for their impiety with an outbreak of dysentery. And in January 866, the Danes sailed right past Paris to attack Melun again. A Frankish army sent to stop them just ran away without fighting.

Charles once again resorted to payments of tribute to get rid of the Danes. This time it was 4,000 pounds (1,814 kg) of silver, as weighed on their own scales, and a supply of wine. To raise the money a levy was imposed on every household in the kingdom. The free paid six denarii, serfs three (a denarius was a silver coin weighing about 0.06 of an ounce/1.75 g: it could purchase twelve two pound (900 g) wheat loaves), merchants the equivalent of one tenth of their goods, and even priests had to pay. Various other taxes were also raised to help pay the tribute. In addition any captives who had been enslaved by the Danes and had been lucky enough to escape were to be returned to their new masters or ransomed at a price set by the Danes. Charles also agreed to pay compensation for any Danes who had been killed by Franks during the campaign. It took until June to raise the silver, but once they had been paid the Danes kept their side of the unequal bargain, set sail down the Seine and reached the open sea in July. Charles followed them as far as Pîtres, taking with him workmen and carts to complete the bridge at Pont de l’Arche ‘so that the Northmen might never again be able to get up the Seine beyond that point’. Those who lived downstream from the bridge must have watched the construction work with mixed feelings: they were being taxed to pay for the bridge but were, essentially, being abandoned to the Vikings in future. All too typically, work on the bridge once again languished and it was not actually completed until 873. Fortunately for the Franks, England became the main focus of Viking attentions for the next decade.

In the same year that the bridge at Pont de l’Arche was completed, Charles inflicted a severe defeat on the Loire Vikings at Angers, which bought several years’ peace to the region. However, Charles’ interest in fighting Vikings was short-lived: playing dynastic politics suddenly promised to be much more rewarding. When his nephew Louis II, the king of Italy, died in 875, Charles invaded, seized control of his kingdom and was crowned emperor in Rome. While crossing the Mont Cenis pass in the Alps on his way home from Italy in autumn 877, Charles fell ill and died. Charles’ last wish was to be buried at the abbey of St Denis, which a few years earlier he had fortified to protect it from Viking raids, but his followers were forced to bury him hurriedly at Nantua Abbey near Lyons, because the stench of his rotting corpse had become unbearable.

Though he had succeeded in defending his throne, Charles’ reign was an almost unbroken series of disasters for his people: even those who weren’t raided by Vikings were punitively taxed to buy them off. Charles has come in for plenty of criticism over the centuries for failing to make combating the Vikings a priority. In his own defence, Charles would probably have argued that if he had succeeded in his goals of re-establishing royal authority and reuniting the empire, dealing with the Vikings would have been easy. He might have been right but his failure to protect his subjects left royal authority in freefall.

Following Charles’ death, the Frankish empire was divided between his sons and nephews. They died one by one, young and heirless, until by 882 the sole survivor, Charles the Fat, became the first ruler since the death of Louis the Pious forty years before to rule the whole empire. Charles went so far as to issue coins with the Latin legend Carolus Magnus, ‘Charles the Great’, but he was not destined to be the second Charlemagne his supporters hoped. His ineffectiveness in dealing with raids by Viking and Arab pirates quickly destroyed what little prestige was retained by the Carolingian dynasty.

The Vikings were not people to let a good crisis go to waste. In 878, a new army of Danish Vikings arrived in England, just in time to learn about Alfred the Great’s decisive victory over Guthrum at Edington. Clearly, the days of easy pickings in England were over so, after spending the winter in a camp at Fulham on the Thames, the Danes crossed the Channel to Flanders, hoping to take advantage of the dynastic instability in the Frankish kingdoms. For the next ten years the lands between the Seine and the Rhine were devastated with an intensity so far not seen anywhere. In the next four years: Thérouanne (twice), St Bertin, Ghent, Tournai, Marchiennes, Condé, Valenciennes, St Quentin, Laon, Reims, Courtrai, Arras, Cambrai, Péronne, St Omer, Cassel, Amiens, Corbie, St Valéry, St Riquier, Tongres, Liège, Maastricht, Neuss, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, Trier and Metz, in roughly that order. Even Charlemagne’s favourite residence, his palace at Aachen, was plundered and burned. The chronicler of the abbey of St Vaast at Arras, an eyewitness to the devastation wrought by the Danes, wrote:

‘The Northmen did not stop capturing and killing Christians or destroying churches, pulling down fortifications, or setting villas on fire. The corpses of clerics, laymen, nobles, women, young people and children were lying on every road. There was no road or place in which the dead did not lie and lamentation and sadness filled everyone, seeing that Christians were massacred.’

Monasteries, already sorely battered by years of Viking raiding and pervasive insecurity, virtually collapsed across the whole of northern Francia. The modest revival of cultural life fostered by Charlemagne fizzled out.

The Vikings seemed able to roam at will, seldom meeting organised resistance. Impressive Frankish victories at Saucourt in 881 and at Avaux, near Reims, in October 882 were not followed up and the plundering continued unabated. On one occasion the Danes mocked a Frankish army for its reluctance to join battle with them, saying: ‘So why did you come to see us? It was not necessary. We know who you are and what you want, so let us visit you. Let us do that for you.’ But even this did not goad the Franks into action and the army returned home ‘in great shame’. In the summer of 885 the Danes moved south to the Seine valley, which had had ten years to recover from the Danes’ earlier depredations and was now ripe to be plundered again. The Danes occupied Rouen on 24 June and built a fortified camp on the opposite side of the river from the town. A Frankish army confronted them there but after Ragnold, the duke of Le Mans, was killed with a few of his men in a skirmish, the rest of the army withdrew, a testament, perhaps, to the effectiveness of Viking field fortifications as much as to the lack of resolve of the Franks. The presence of the army had at least restrained the Danes; now that they had fled, they could plunder wherever they wished. The Franks built fortifications by the Seine to impede the progress of the Danish ships upriver, but their garrisons’ lack of resolve meant that they were useless. Archaeological excavations have shown that the bridge at Pont de l’Arche was burned around this time, as was another fortress built to block the River Oise at Pontoise.

On 24 November, the Danes arrived outside Paris. The Danes probably expected a rapid capitulation, that was what they had come to expect, but they became bogged down in a year-long siege, which, in retrospect, came to be seen as the turning point of the Frankish struggle against the Vikings. A monk, Abbo the Twisted, who was present in Paris throughout, later wrote a detailed and colourful account of the siege in Latin verse. The day after their fleet arrived at Paris, the Danes’ leader Sigfred approached Gauzelin, the city’s bishop, to negotiate free passage upstream. According to Abbo, Sigfred pleaded with Gauzelin to spare himself and his flock the horrors of war. If he granted the Danes free passage so that they could ravage the countryside beyond Paris, Sigfred promised that they would do no harm to the city and respect all property. Gauzelin refused. He had been made responsible for the city’s defence by his king Charles the Fat, he told Sigfred, and he would not betray that trust. When Gauzelin asked him rhetorically what treatment he thought he would deserve if it was he who had been entrusted with defending the city and tamely allowed an enemy to pass, Sigfred told him: ‘I should deserve that my head be cut off and thrown to the dogs. Nevertheless, if you do not give in to my demand, I must tell you that tomorrow our war machines will destroy you with poisoned arrows.’

Gauzelin’s defiance was more than simple bravado. In the years of peace since Paris was last attacked by the Danes, Gauzelin had overseen the construction of substantial fortifications. At this time Paris was mainly confined to the Île de la Cité, a long narrow island in the Seine. The island was protected by walls so the Danes could not easily land on it. A wooden bridge, the Grand Pont, linked the island to the north bank of the Seine. The approach to the bridge was protected by a still incomplete stone tower. Another wooden bridge, the Petit Pont, connected the island to the south bank. The approach to this bridge was protected by a wooden tower. Together the two bridges completely blocked the river to all shipping. The defence of the city was led by its count Odo, the son of Robert the Strong. Odo commanded only a small garrison of 200 soldiers, but he was an inspiring leader and just as determined not to give in as the bishop was. The defenders also possessed mangonels (giant catapults) and balistas (giant crossbows). The size of the Danish army that opposed them is unknown. According to Abbo, the Danes came in 700 ships and were 40,000 strong, but this number must be a gross exaggeration. No other chronicler of the period records such large fleets and it would, in any case, have been impossible to keep such an enormous force in the field for so long under early medieval conditions. The army was certainly not large enough to invest the city completely because messengers were able to leave and return throughout.

Knowing that mobility was the key to their success, Vikings generally avoided sieges. But the Franks had not held any fortification against them for long, so Sigfred probably expected Paris to fall quickly. True to his word, Sigfred launched an assault on the city at dawn on the day after his meeting with Gauzelin. The Danes concentrated their attack on the incomplete tower that guarded the Grand Pont, battering it with catapults and battering rams. The battle raged all day, and count Odo, his brother Robert and another count, Ragenar, were always in the thick of the fighting encouraging the defenders. Gauzelin planted a crucifix on the ramparts and fought with a bow and an axe, in spite of his priestly vows, which forbade the shedding of blood. Gauzelin probably felt that pagan blood did not count. An abbot, Ebolus, was wounded by an arrow fighting on the ramparts. At nightfall the Danes withdrew carrying their dead with them. The tower had suffered serious damage and Odo and Gauzelin worked through the night organising repair work and adding an extra storey in timber so that when the Danes renewed their assault the next day they found it half as high again as it had been originally. This time the Danes first attempted to set fire to the tower and then tried to undermine its foundations by digging. The diggers fled when the Franks poured a mixture of boiling oil, pitch and wax onto them. Some of them tore their scalps off in agony and many died from burns. A single bolt from one of the Franks’ balistas reportedly skewered seven Danes together. When the dispirited Danes retreated, the jeers of their wives and concubines sent them back to try again but at nightfall they gave up the assault. The presence of women in a Viking army was not unusual. Though they did not fight, the women made life in camp bearable, cooking, washing and repairing clothes, and caring for the sick.

Having failed to intimidate Paris into surrender or take it by a quick assault, the Danes set up a fortified winter camp at the abbey of St Germain l’Auxerrois on the north bank of the Seine, not far from the bridgehead of the Grand Pont. It was not until the last day of January 886 that the Danes launched another attack. This time the Danes divided their forces into three groups. One group attacked the bridgehead tower on the Grand Pont while the other two attacked the bridge itself from ships. The Danes fought for three days to capture the tower, trying to fill its moat in with earth, logs, straw bales and even the bodies of dead animals and captives so that that they could push three mobile siege towers close enough to storm the ramparts. The defenders sallied out and destroyed two of the towers but a few Danes managed somehow to break into the city, only to be quickly killed. The Danes now tried to break the bridge by sending three fireships crashing against it, but it failed to catch light. The weather seemed to be on the side of the Danes, however. On 6 February the Seine flooded and debris smashed the Petit Pont. During the night Gauzelin sent a hand-picked unit across the river to guard the now isolated tower on the south bank so that they could begin to repair the bridge at first light. They were seen by the Danes who at daybreak began to assault the tower. The rest of the garrison could do nothing but watch helplessly as the Danes set fire to the tower and slaughtered everyone in it before throwing the bodies into the river.

It was now possible for the Danes to sail past Paris on the south side. The Danes moved their camp across the river to the abbey of St Germain-des-Prés, Abbo’s monastery. While part of the Danish army maintained the siege other bands raided far and wide, to Chartres in the west and Evreux to the south. Dismayed by the loss of the bridge, Gauzelin sent messengers out with an urgent appeal for help to Henry of Franconia, the count of Saxony. Henry arrived with an army but his soldiers were weakened by the winter weather and he withdrew after the Danes repulsed a half-hearted attack on their camp. Sigfred was rapidly losing enthusiasm for the siege and he and his personal following left after Gauzelin agreed to pay him a face-saving tribute of 60 pounds (27 kg) of silver. After fighting so long and hard, most of the Danes were not willing to be bought off for so little and the siege continued. No contemporary annal names the leader of these diehards, but according to later traditions it was Rollo, who would become famous as the founder of Normandy.

Like so many of the great Viking leaders, Rollo’s origins are uncertain. In Icelandic saga traditions he was identified with Hrolf the Ganger (‘walker’), a son of the Norwegian jarl Rognvald of Møre, who got his nickname because he was so tall that no horse could be found that could carry him. However, the Norman historian Dudo of St Quentin believed that Rollo was a Dane. According to Dudo, Rollo arrived on the Seine as early as 876 and at some point after that captured Rouen, making it his permanent base.

Hunger and disease began to take a heavy toll on the Parisians in spring 886. By April there was not enough space in the city to bury the dead. One of those who succumbed was Gauzelin, who fell ill and died on 16 April, striking a severe blow to the Parisians’ morale. The Danes must have had sympathisers within the city walls because they heard the news of Gauzelin’s death before most of the townsfolk. Hugh, abbot of St Germain l’Auxerrois, took over spiritual leadership of the city but he too died three weeks later, casting the Parisians into despair. Odo secretly left Paris and rode to meet the emperor to beg him to lead an army in person to lift the siege. Odo received no firm assurances and on his return to Paris was ambushed outside the gates of the battered tower on the north bank, the Danes having learned in advance of his return. Odo’s horse was killed under him but he and the soldiers who accompanied him fought their way through to safety.

It was not until October that Charles, urged on by the archbishop of Reims, who warned him that if he lost Paris he would lose his kingdom, raised an army and marched to relieve the city. On route, Henry of Franconia was killed in a skirmish with the Danes after his horse fell into a ditch. Charles set up camp at the foot of Montmartre but, to the dismay of the Parisians, he simply opened negotiations with the Danes, giving them exactly what they had asked for at the beginning of the siege: permission to sail past Paris and spend the winter ravaging the Burgundians, whose count had proved disloyal. This may have made sense to Charles but it seemed like betrayal to the Parisians and they refused to let the Danes pass (presumably they had repaired the Petit Pont by this time). The Danes were forced to drag their ships overland and launch them back into the river upstream of Paris. Come the spring, Charles made it even less likely that he would get any credit for his relief of Paris when he paid the Danes 700 pounds (318 kg) of silver to leave the Seine. Some of the Danes did indeed leave but a large contingent under Rollo remained behind.

Charles the Fat’s behaviour at Paris left him looking weak and incompetent and he quickly lost support. While he was holding a council at Frankfurt in November 887, Charles was deposed by his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia (r. 887 – 99), who was elected king in his place by the East Franks. Deserted even by his servants, Charles retired to his estate at Donaueschingen in the Black Forest where he died on 13 January 888: it was rumoured that he had been strangled on Arnulf’s orders. Charles’ death triggered the final break-up of Charlemagne’s empire. Arnulf’s coup was recognised only by the East Franks. The nobles of Burgundy, Provence and Italy all elected their own kings, as did those of West Francia, who chose Odo (r. 888 – 98), the hero of the siege of Paris and the first king of the Franks who was not a Merovingian or a Carolingian. West and East Francia would never be reunited, developing instead into the medieval kingdoms of France and Germany.

Arnulf and Odo both proved to be energetic rulers and their reigns saw a marked decline in Viking activity in the Frankish kingdoms. Arnulf won a major victory over the Danes at the battle on the River Dyle, near Louvain in modern Belgium, in September 891. This was the same Danish army that had laid siege to Paris in 885 – 6. The Danes had built a fortified camp on the riverbank. Led by Arnulf himself, the East Franks stormed the camp. The Danes panicked and tried to escape across the river but in the free-for-all hundreds, if not thousands, were crushed to death or drowned, their corpses damming the river ‘so that it seemed to run dry’. Among the dead was a king called Sigfred, but it is not clear if he was the same Sigfred who led the Danes at the siege of Paris. The survivors retreated to Boulogne, from where they crossed to England in 892 in ships provided by the locals, who no doubt thought them a small price to pay to see the back of the Vikings. A factor that is likely to have influenced their decision just as much as defeat on the Dyle was a famine in Flanders, which meant the army could not live off the land. Unfortunately for the Danes, they found England well prepared for them.

Odo was not a Carolingian and their supporters frequently challenged his authority. In 893, the Carolingian Charles the Simple, the posthumous son of King Louis the Stammerer, was crowned king in opposition to Odo. A long civil war followed but the Danes were busy in England and there was no resurgence of Viking raiding. Odo finally triumphed in the war in 897 and Charles withdrew his claim to the throne. However, when Odo died in 898, Charles took the throne without opposition, restoring the Carolingian line. Charles’ kingdom was still host to Viking armies on the Loire and the Seine. The Frankish kings had never regained effective control of either area since Danish Vikings first arrived in force in 841. The Seine Vikings were the greater threat because Rollo’s base at Rouen was too close to Paris and the royal estates in the Île de France. Rollo’s depredations in the area only finally came to an end in 911, when he was defeated in an attack on Chartres. The next year Rollo met with Charles the Simple (whose nickname means ‘sincere’ not simple-minded) at the village of St-Claire-sur-Epte, and the two men negotiated a peace deal. In return for his homage, conversion to Christianity, and agreement to defend the Seine against other Viking raiders, Charles appointed Rollo as count of Rouen. It was a mutually advantageous arrangement. Charles got recognition of his sovereignty over lands he did not actually control, while Rollo’s de facto rule over the lower Seine was legitimised. This was, of course, not the first time a Frankish ruler had come to this kind of agreement with a Viking leader. Charles may have expected that it would prove to be a temporary expedient and that Rollo’s tenure would be as short-lived as Roric’s and Godfred’s had been on the lower Rhine. However, Rollo’s principality, soon to become known as Normandy, from Nordmannia meaning ‘Northman’s Land’, not only survived but flourished, coming to play an influential role in European history as part of the Viking Age’s ‘long tail’.

Rollo stuck to his side of the agreement and kept other Viking raiders out of the Seine, but he was determined to be no more obedient to his king than he really had to be. A story told about the meeting at St-Claire-sur-Epte by Dudo relates that Rollo was required to kiss King Charles’ foot as a condition of the agreement, but he was too proud to do so. ‘The bishops said to Rollo, “you who receive such a gift ought to kiss the king’s foot.” And he said: “I shall never bend my knees to the knees of another nor shall I kiss anyone’s foot”. Compelled, however, by the prayers of the Franks, he ordered another warrior to kiss the king’s foot. This man immediately seized the king’s foot and put it to his mouth and kissed it while the king was still standing. The king fell flat on his back. This raised a great laugh and greatly stirred up the crowd.’ It is easy to read this most likely apocryphal tale as evidence of Rollo’s freebooting Viking spirit, but in his desire to pay no more than lip service to his overlord, he was really no different to any other independent-minded Frankish count. Rollo left Paris alone but he was always on the look-out for opportunities to expand his territories, attacking the neighbouring county of Flanders several times, though without success. In 922, Charles the Simple was deposed and a civil war broke out. The political turmoil gave Rollo an opportunity to secure control of Caen and Bayeux, almost doubling the size of Normandy.

Rollo’s agreement with King Charles gave Danes the security to settle in Normandy and put down permanent roots. The first settlers were Rollo’s own warriors and their families. Rollo distributed the land in much the same way that a Viking leader would have shared the loot from a successful raid, keeping the largest share for himself and giving the more important warriors larger estates than the rank and file warriors. These first settlers were soon joined by others from England, where the West Saxon conquest of the Danelaw was in full swing. One of these refugees was jarl Thorketill, who arrived with his followers from Bedford in 920. Little is known about the nature of the Danish settlement but, as happened in England, they probably took over the abandoned estates of local nobles and monasteries: the local peasants simply got new landlords. It is clear from the distribution of Danish place-names that Danes did not settle in all of the lands granted to Rollo, and that even in the areas they did settle they must have been a minority among the native population. The densest clusters of settlement seem to have been around Rouen and Caen and in the Pays de Caux between the Seine estuary and the fishing port of Fécamp on the Channel coast. The settlers left little archaeological evidence of their presence, indicating that they quickly adopted the material culture and burial customs of the native population. So far, the only certain pagan Viking burials found in France are a female burial discovered near Pîtres and a chieftain’s ship burial on the Île de Groix off the coast of Brittany.

While Rollo was consolidating his position in Normandy, a Viking leader called Rognvald established another Viking colony in Brittany. By the beginning of the tenth century, the Franks were getting the measure of the Vikings, and so too were the English and the Irish. Brittany’s relative poverty had protected it in the ninth century but it now began to look increasingly like a soft target. When the settlement of Rollo and his followers in Normandy in 911 closed the Seine to raiders, the Vikings turned their full fury on Brittany. As monastery after monastery was sacked, Breton monks fled en masse to seek safety in France and England, taking with them whatever books and treasures they could carry. After Rognvald captured Nantes in 919, Breton resistance collapsed completely. The aristocracy followed the monks into exile in France and England and Brittany became a Viking kingdom with its capital at Nantes. Nothing is known about Rognvald’s earlier career, but it is clear that, unlike Rollo, he was no statesman, making no effort either to legitimise or institutionalise his rule. Rognvald seems to have seen Brittany as no more than a base from which to launch plundering raids on Francia. While York, Dublin and Rouen prospered as trade centres under Viking rule, Nantes, whose location at the mouth of the Loire should have ensured its prosperity too, was allowed to become semi-derelict: its cathedral was abandoned and became overgrown with brambles.

In 924 – 5, Rognvald raided deep into the Auvergne but was defeated by the Franks and made a fighting retreat to Nantes where it is thought he died soon after. According to the Miracles of St Benedict, Rognvald’s death was divine punishment for attacking the saint’s abbey at Fleury on the Loire. Fittingly, for a man who had inspired such terror in his lifetime, Rognvald’s death was marked by dreadful portents, lights in the sky, moving rocks and apparitions. It is not known who, if anyone, succeeded Rognvald as leader of the Vikings in Brittany. The pirate state began to unravel. When the Vikings gathered in Nantes to launch a major raid up the Loire, the peasants of Brittany rebelled. Lacking strong leadership and military skills, the peasants were defeated but the revolt encouraged Alain Barbetorte (‘twistbeard’), a Breton noble living in exile in England, to lead an invasion of Brittany in 936 with a fleet supplied by king Æthelstan. Landing from the sea, Alain enjoyed complete surprise, capturing and executing a party of Viking revellers celebrating a wedding near Dol. A Viking fort at Péran, further west along the coast, was destroyed by fire around this time, possibly as a result of fighting during Alain’s reconquest. Alain captured Nantes after a fierce battle in 937 and the Bretons stormed the Vikings’ last stronghold, at Trans, in 939. The destruction of the Viking colony doubly benefited the Franks. The last major Viking threat to the Frankish kingdom was eliminated, while Brittany never fully recovered and drifted permanently under Frankish influence.

Although Rollo was still a pagan when he won control of Rouen, it appears that he allowed what was left of the church to function in the area under his control much as the Danish rulers of York had done. Pagan Vikings were rarely positively hostile to Christianity; sacking churches and monasteries and selling their occupants into slavery was just good business. Even after his baptism in 912 Rollo, like many first generation Viking converts to Christianity, hedged his bets and worshipped the pagan gods alongside Christ. Shortly before he died, Rollo ordered 100 Christians to be beheaded as an offering to the pagan gods, but he also gave 100 pounds (45 kg) of gold to the churches of Rouen. Conversion was the normal price Christian rulers from the time of Louis the Pious onward demanded of pagan Viking leaders and their followers before entering into treaties with them. Many such conversions were probably completely insincere. The custom of giving baptismal gifts of clothes and weapons on these occasions certainly encouraged some Vikings to be baptised more than once. Notker tells the story of a Dane who complained to Louis the Pious about the quality of his baptismal robe, the worst he had ever been given – it turned out that he had been baptised twenty times already. The church was philosophical about this sort of backsliding as it pursued a policy akin to entryism. It was relatively easy for a polytheist to accept Christ as just one more god. Once the convert had got into the habit of believing in Christ, the church could get to work convincing him or her that the old gods were false gods. Most of the earliest Scandinavian converts to Christianity were settlers in countries, like Francia, that were already Christian and baptism marked the first step of their assimilation into the native population.

Rollo died some time around 928 and was succeeded by his son William Longsword (d. 942). As a traditional Viking leader Rollo never imposed his authority on his followers by force – in keeping with Scandinavian custom, their allegiance was entirely voluntary. William took a more forceful line in imposing his authority over the Danish settlers in Normandy. This provoked a rebellion in 933 by settlers who felt that William was becoming too Frankish in his behaviour and was favouring Frankish advisers over Danes. It did not help that he had a Frankish mother, Poppa of Bayeux, and a Frankish name. William reacted forcefully and the rebellion collapsed after he defeated their leader Riulf in a battle near Rouen. William continued his father’s expansionist policy and in 933, King Rudolph granted him the Cotentin peninsula. Cotentin was not much loss to the king as it had not been under Frankish control since 867, when Charles the Bald ceded it to Brittany after his defeat the previous year by a Breton-Viking alliance at the Battle of Brissarthe. The northern part of the Contentin was settled by Norwegians rather than Danes, as in the rest of Normandy. Place-name evidence shows that many of the settlers had previously been living in Gaelic-speaking Ireland or the western isles of Scotland. The arrival of the Norwegians in the Cotentin is undocumented and they may well have arrived before the area formally became part of Normandy. Possibly they were, like the Norwegians who settled north-west England, refugees from the great Irish offensive which saw the Vikings expelled from Dublin and their other bases around Ireland in 902.

Like Rollo, William also aspired to expand into Flanders but he was equally unsuccessful. Tiring of William’s attacks, Arnulf, the count of Flanders, invited him to a parley on an island in the River Somme where Arnulf’s followers ambushed and killed him in December 942. William’s death threw Normandy into chaos. King Louis IV confirmed Richard’s ten-year-old illegitimate son Richard the Fearless (r. 942 – 96) as count but placed him in custody with the count of Ponthieu at Laon as a prelude to restoring full Frankish control of Normandy. Louis occupied Rouen and divided Normandy between himself and the powerful count Hugh the Great of Paris. Some Normans swore allegiance to Louis, others to Hugh, but others remained loyal to Richard. The situation was further complicated by the arrival on the Seine of a new Danish army under Sihtric of Hedeby. This encouraged many Normans to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Louis defeated Sihtric and his pagan Norman allies near Rouen, but his plans began to unravel when he was captured by the Norman leader Harald of Bayeux. Harald handed Louis over to Count Hugh, who only agreed to release him after he had made territorial concessions. While Louis was imprisoned, Richard was rescued from his imprisonment by a group of Normans led by Osmund de Centville. Richard swore allegiance to Count Hugh and with his backing regained control of Normandy by 947. Perhaps because the beginning of his rule had been so turbulent, Richard abandoned the aggressive stance of his predecessors and concentrated on building his own authority in Normandy. Richard repaid Hugh’s early support in 987 by helping his son Hugh Capet seize the throne on the death of the last Carolingian king Louis the Lazy. Hugh’s Capetian dynasty would rule until 1328, ultimately making France (as it is now usual to call the West Frankish kingdom) Europe’s strongest kingdom.

Although Frankish chroniclers described Richard as piratarum dux (‘pirate leader’) it was during his long reign that Normandy began its transformation from a Viking colony into a Frankish principality. Richard introduced Frankish feudal institutions, binding the leading Normans to him as his vassals. Although the archbishopric of Rouen had continued to function at some level through the worst ravages of the Vikings, monasteries across Normandy were abandoned and ruined: Richard refounded them with generous endowments. Apart from a trickle of settlers from England’s Danelaw, Scandinavian immigration all but ceased. However, Rouen retained strong links to the north through trade: coins minted in tenth-century Rouen have been found everywhere along the Vikings’ trade routes from Ireland to Russia. Normandy continued to be part of the northern world under Richard’s successor Richard II ‘the Good’ (r. 996 – 1026), his son by his Scandinavian second wife Gunnor. Richard, the first ruler of Normandy to use the title ‘duke’, was deeply involved in French politics, taking part in King Robert II’s wars with Burgundy, working to reform the Norman church, and forging marriage alliances to bring Brittany within the Norman sphere of influence. However, Richard still maintained strong ties to the north, allowing the Danish king Svein Forkbeard to use Normandy as a base for attacks on England in return for a share of the plunder and recruiting Viking mercenaries into his army. The Norman elite now fought in the French style, as armoured cavalry, however. Norman soldiers also joined Viking armies, fighting in the battle of Clontarf near Dublin in 1014. Richard must have had good contacts in Scandinavia because in 1000 he was able to secure the release of the wife of the count of Limoges who had been captured by Vikings.

In 1002, Richard married his sister Emma to the English king Æthelred, in effect backing both sides in the unfolding Anglo-Danish struggle. After Æthelred’s death in 1014, Emma remained in England, marrying Svein’s son Cnut after he became king of England in 1016. Despite this, relations between Richard and Cnut seem not to have been close and Normandy’s links with the north quickly faded. The last vestige of Scandinavian influence is the visit of Sigvatr, an Icelandic skald (court poet), to the ducal court at Rouen in 1025. Sigvatr’s presence implies that there were still Normans who could understand the Old Norse language but most by now must have spoken French. Most of Rollo’s followers had been single men who, after they took lands in Normandy, had married Frankish women: their children would, therefore, have grown up as French speakers even if they had also learned Old Norse from their fathers. The severing of ties with the north is mirrored in coin hoards from Normandy which, after Richard’s death, mostly contain coins from France and Italy. At the same time, coins minted at Rouen disappear from hoards found in Ireland, England, Scandinavia and Russia. By the time William the Conqueror became duke in 1035, Normandy was culturally and linguistically part of France and the Normans had begun describing themselves as Franci or French.

Following the establishment of Normandy and the failure of the Viking colony in Brittany, Viking activity in the West Frankish kingdom declined rapidly. Occasional raids continued into the eleventh century, but these were mere irritants compared the great raids of the ninth century: by c. 950 the Viking Age in Francia was effectively over. Francia was no longer an easy place to raid. This had nothing to do with a resurgent Frankish monarchy. The authority of the West Frankish kings continued to decline throughout the period. When Hugh Capet seized the throne in 987, his authority did not extend beyond the Île de France. The counts and dukes who ruled the rest of his kingdom paid homage to the king as vassals, but his resources were so slender that he was powerless to enforce their obedience. The counts and dukes ruled their principalities in virtual independence, waging private war on one another, and obeying the king only when it would serve their interests. No Frankish king of the tenth or eleventh centuries could have reconstituted Charlemagne’s coastal defence system, even had they wanted to.

The lack of strong central authority, however, did not mean that the West Frankish kingdom was weak. The decline of royal authority freed the Franks to take their defence into their own hands. Towns were free to build defensive walls (or, often, to refurbish old Roman walls) and small earth and timber castles proliferated across the countryside, providing refuges and secure bases for harassing invading Viking armies. The counts and dukes may have paid scant attention to their kings but they often ruled their own principalities effectively and could react more quickly to an attack than the more centralised Carolingian system. The decline of royal authority was accompanied by the growth of feudalism and the appearance of a new military class of professional armoured cavalrymen or knights. Only the very wealthiest could afford to equip themselves to fight in this way so most knights were vassals of the counts and dukes, who granted them estates for their maintenance in return for military service. In battle, Frankish knights invariably proved superior to even the most determined foot soldiers, as the English would discover to their cost in 1066. It was this combination of castles and cavalry that had turned Francia into a no-go zone for Vikings. How far the Vikings were responsible for the changes in Frankish society is a moot point. The driving force of the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire was dynastic and the Frankish laws of partible inheritance made this more or less inevitable. However, the decline of royal authority that accompanied the empire’s break-up was at the very least accelerated by the Vikings, who time and again had demonstrated the Frankish kings’ powerlessness to defend their subjects.