5

The New Europeans
840–1100

The Vikings are coming

With Charlemagne gone, the concentration of power on which his empire relied went into decline. Towards the end of his life, he was told that a band of ‘Northmen’ had been driven away from a local harbour. The chronicle records him as not rejoicing but gazing out to sea, ‘overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward, and see what evils [the Northmen] will bring upon my offspring and their people’. The Vikings had come. So named from the creeks or ‘viks’ in which they lived, they were outgrowing their fjords and cramped settlements and learning of riches that lay over the seas. They sought new lands to exploit and old wealth to plunder.

The Vikings travelled in long, shallow-bottomed boats with carved prows, oars and sails, an advance on any Europe had seen before. They were not wide-bellied to carry cargo, like the ships of the Mediterranean, but narrow for warrior oarsmen. They could cut through heavy seas at speed and yet drew no more than two or three feet for travel up rivers. They could thus carry their fighters along the shallowest of inland waterways.

The so-called Viking ‘swarmings’ were unlike Charlemagne’s land-based power. They were marauders rather than occupiers of land. They wanted treasure, and showed no conscience or restraint in getting it, killing or enslaving anyone unfortunate enough to encounter them. They first attacked monasteries, as these were undefended and usually wealthy. Vulnerable Lindisfarne off the Northumberland coast was devastated in 793, Iona in Scotland successively from 795. Other Vikings went east, penetrating the inland rivers of Russia, the Dnieper, the Don and the Volga. They reached as far south as the Caspian and Black seas, overwhelming the indigenous Slavs and selling them as slaves (the word derived from Slav) in the markets of Crimea. By the 840s riverside trading settlements had been established and by the 860s the Swedish warlord Rurik had founded colonies at Novgorod and Kiev. His follower Oleg formed the empire of Kievan Rus’. In 860, 200 ‘Russian’ ships arrived outside Constantinople and devastated its surroundings, though the siege of the city was unsuccessful.

Though recent historians have sought to ‘humanize’ the vikings, the reality was that nothing so terrified ninth-century Europe as the sight of a longship sliding ashore on a river bank. The raids spread round the mainland coast. Paris was sacked in 845, the people of Nantes were massacred in 843 and Hamburg and Bordeaux were put to the sword. Initially the victims could save themselves with payments of gold and silver, hence the term Danegeld, but soon the Vikings formed trading posts and sought new homes. They began to settle.

In 865 a Danish fleet landed in East Anglia and the chronicle records ‘a great army’ coming ashore, followed in due course by cargo ships bringing wives and cattle. This invasion was halted in 878 by Alfred, king of Wessex (871–99), at the Battle of Edington in Wiltshire. He drove the Danes from southern England and persuaded their leader, Guthrum, to be baptized a Christian. But Alfred was king only of Wessex. The invaders were left undisturbed in their so-called Danelaw, covering eastern England from London north to York. This third of England remained in Danish hands for half a century.

With the passage of time, Vikings integrated with local populations and adopted local languages. They brought a new commercial energy to the coast of Europe, from the North and Baltic seas to the trading routes of the northern arc through Russia. By the end of the tenth century they had expanded across the then warmer north Atlantic and settled in Iceland. Here in 930 they founded the Althing, Europe’s oldest continuous parliament. In c.1000, Leif Ericsson sailed beyond Greenland and founded a short-lived settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, thereby ‘discovering’ America. In just two centuries, Scandinavian tribes had thrown round Europe a girdle of enterprise. A mobile and aggressive dynamic was injected into Europe’s history.

The Magyars and Otto the Great

As the Vikings started to settle and form colonies, a new migration began from the Ural mountains. The Magyars were first reported in the Crimean peninsula in 860. They came, like the Huns, as mounted warriors, eager for plunder and land. They reached Orléans in France and as far south as Rome. In 910 they defeated a German army, and in 924 devastated Provence. As the Vikings were unstoppable at sea, so the Magyars seemed unstoppable on land. After they had marauded across central Europe for some years, they were confronted by another of the dominant personalities of medieval Europe, Otto the Great of Saxony (936–73), ruler by inheritance of both Germany and Lotharingia. In 955 he assembled an alliance of German duchies to face the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in Bavaria. Otto’s mail-clad cavalry overwhelmed a much larger force of Magyars, and the latter retreated to settle, to this day, in Hungary.

Otto, often seen as the first leader of today’s Germany, showed how crucial to the security of Europe was a strong personality able to attract military support. He reasserted imperial sovereignty in northern Italy and was formally crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 962. He reached ‘tributary’ treaties with Poland and Bohemia. He also reasserted Charlemagne’s supremacy of monarchy over the Roman church. No pope could take office, he said, without swearing allegiance to the emperor. But he also proved vulnerable to his predecessor’s love of Rome. He moved his court to Italy and married his son to a Byzantine princess, in hope of better relations with Constantinople. Pope and emperor cohabiting in the one city did not prove a success, if only because, as John Julius Norwich put it, ‘Otto considered the pope as little more than his chaplain.’

By the end of the tenth century, most but not all of what is now eastern Europe had been brought within the Catholic rite. Ten years after Otto’s death in 973, compulsory Christianization led to an uprising of pagan Slavs known as Wends living east of the Elbe. A series of ‘marches’ were established, fixing the eastern boundary of the Holy Roman Empire, roughly on the line of that river. Paganism survived among the Wends for another two centuries. The boundary later separated the Germany of the Holy Roman Empire (and of West and East Germany) from Saxony and Prussia.

Vladimir and the rise of Russia

By now King Vladimir of Kievan Rus’ (980–1015), who claimed descent from the Viking Rurik, was sovereign over Slav peoples stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Eager to modernize his realm, he in 987 sent emissaries to advise which faith would best suit his people. As a result, Vladimir rejected the Bulgars’ Islam as ‘having only sorrow and a great stench’, and for opposing alcohol, ‘the joy of all Rus’’. Judaism was rejected as having lost its capital, Jerusalem, and thus its god. German Christianity was ‘just churches of no beauty’. But Constantinople greeted the emissaries with a royal welcome, leaving them ‘not knowing whether we are in heaven or on earth’. The dazzling salesmanship succeeded, though Vladimir’s choice of Byzantine Orthodoxy was probably a foregone conclusion.

A year later, in 988, Vladimir married Anna, sister of the emperor Basil II of Constantinople, and brought Russia into the Byzantine church. He led the entire population of Kiev into the river for baptism. Byzantine craftsmen were hired to build churches, including the Church of Tithes in Kiev, making the onion dome a signature Russian style. He also sent his best Varangian (Viking) warriors as permanent bodyguards for the Constantinople court. These contacts greatly improved trade in the region, with Constantinople soon rivalling Baghdad as a focus of Silk Road commerce. A Viking colony has even been found on the shores of the Persian Gulf, while Sweden was an early user of oriental silk. Vladimir wisely saw Russia as a natural ally of Constantinople and later Russians dreamt of Moscow as the ‘third Rome’.

The Northmen come of age

Vladimir’s cousins back in Scandinavia were proving no less enterprising. In 876 a warlord called Rollo, believed to have come from Denmark, raided deep into France and seized the city of Rouen. In 911 the French king, Charles the Simple, finally told him he could keep Rouen and its surroundings, if in return he defended his realm from further raids. He also demanded that Rollo kiss Charles’s foot. Legend has the bodyguard of a reluctant Rollo, a giant of a man, grabbing the proffered foot and raising it to his mouth, tipping Charles to the ground. More diplomatically, Rollo married Popa of Bayeux and founded what became the dukedom of the Northmen, or Normandy.

The Vikings were no less active across the North Sea. The English kingdom of Wessex, which by now had recaptured much of the Danelaw, was in 1015 invaded by a force of 200 ships under the Danish leader Cnut, son of Sweyn Forkbeard and Sigrid the Haughty. This was a full-scale conquest, albeit of lands in which many Danes had already become assimilated. A contemporary history records that ‘in this great expedition there was present no slave, no man freed from slavery, no low-born man, no man weakened by age; for all were nobles’. England’s King Ethelred and his Anglo-Saxons were no match for the newcomers, who swept the country from Wessex north to York in 1017. Cnut married Ethelred’s Norman widow, Emma, and by 1028 had expanded his domain to embrace Norway and part of Sweden. For a quarter of a century, England was thus part of a Scandinavian empire. The devout Cnut visited Rome and dispatched an army of missionaries to Christianize his Scandinavian domain.

Other Normans ventured south round the coast of western Europe and into the Mediterranean as far as Italy. Here they established a strong foothold through Robert Guiscard (1015–85), eventually Duke of Apulia and Calabria. Led by his brother, Roger, the Normans defeated the Muslim Saracens in Sicily, where to this day churches and castles are adorned with Norman motifs. By the twelfth century, all southern Italy had been united into the Kingdom of Sicily, an entrepôt of Norman, Italian and north African cultures.

The Great Schism

In Rome, the papacy was drifting far from Gregory the Great’s ideal ruler of a new European establishment. Popes became corrupt and often incompetent, in ambivalent and frequently hostile dealings with Otto’s descendants in Germany. Regular attempts at reconciliation with Byzantium had been made by Charlemagne and Otto, but without success. Just as westerners saw Byzantines as debauched and enfeebled, so Byzantines regarded westerners as upstart barbarians.

The dispute between eastern and western churches had long been both theological and political. While Frankish monarchs had finally seen Arianism off-stage, new disputes emerged within Christianity. Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father through the Son, or from the Father and the Son? The latter, so-called filioque clause implied an equal rather than sequential role for Christ. To the uninitiated, it was arguing over angels on pin-heads, yet it divided empires. Of immediate concern was whether Rome or Constantinople enjoyed supremacy in regulating church dogma and organization. Rome was hostile to Byzantium’s bouts of iconoclasm, which occurred in 730–87 and 815–43, rooted in the Old Testament prohibition of ‘graven images or any likeness of anything’. These periods led to the destruction of what had been a vast treasury of Byzantine art, leaving church interiors stripped to the bare bricks still seen in older Orthodox places of worship to this day.

In 1053 Pope Leo IX accused his opposite number, the Patriarch of Constantinople, of ‘unexampled presumption and unbelievable effrontery … You place your mouth in heaven while your tongue, going through the world, strives with human arguments and conjectures to undermine and subvert the ancient faith.’ A year later, efforts at compromise ended with abuse hurled at Rome’s emissaries on a visit to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Exasperated, the emissaries laid a papal bull of excommunication on the high altar, shook the dust of the church from their shoes and retreated to their ships. The patriarch excommunicated them in turn. The Christian church was in formal schism, a schism that remains unresolved to this day.

William’s conquest of England

Rome badly needed friends, of whom the most obvious were the emergent Normans. Those in Normandy were naturalized as French, speaking the language, evolving knightly traditions and paying token homage to Clovis’s dynasty in Paris. Their society was ordered on feudal lines, in which land belonged to the duke as sovereign over barons, knights and serfs. The tenancy of land was paid for in taxes and military service in time of war. Only the church, in buildings of ever grander ‘Romanesque’ splendour, enjoyed financial liberty and relative autonomy.

In 1066 the succession to the English throne passed controversially from Edward the Confessor to Harold, Earl of Wessex. The succession of Harold, himself an Anglo-Dane, was challenged by not one but two rivals, Norway’s Harald Hardrada and William Duke of Normandy. The latter claimed, with some plausibility, a formal promise of the crown by the dead Edward, who was a distant relative. Hardrada struck first, invading Northumbria and seizing York. But he was defeated and driven off by Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066.

After weeks of delay, William of Normandy landed in what was then Kent and confronted Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. Here the disciplined Norman cavalry won a crushing victory. Harold was killed and, within a year, England was under William’s control. Despite brief resistance in East Anglia and the north, England proved as susceptible to conquest by Normans as it had by Danes. The conquest was celebrated in narrative form in a tapestry seventy metres long, made in England but displayed in Normandy at Bayeux.

William the Conqueror (1066–87) was crowned on Christmas Day, not in the Saxon capital of Winchester but at Westminster, Edward’s Anglo-Norman abbey outside London. Though the language of England was Anglo-Saxon and of its administration Latin, England’s court under Edward was already speaking and legislating in French. While the Norman conquest is traditionally portrayed as France against England, it was as much a personal struggle between two Viking descendants, an event in European as much as English history.

The nature of William’s conquest was unlike any other. His expedition had been opposed by his barons as a private venture, outside the requirements of feudal loyalty, but he gained legitimation for it from Pope Alexander II, who sent him a ring and papal standard. He said he would not just win the submission of the English but also grant his supporters the entire wealth of Anglo-Saxon England, civil and ecclesiastical. He would plunder England on a massive scale.

William was as good as his word. Within five years, an astonishing ninety-five per cent of England south of Northumbria was in Norman hands, a quarter of it passing to the church. This financed probably the greatest building programme to be undertaken anywhere in pre-nineteenth century Europe. The Normans demolished and replaced nearly every Saxon cathedral and abbey, and built a network of castles and fortified towns. In 1086 a land census, the Domesday Book, was drawn up on a scale not seen elsewhere in Europe until the fifteenth century. Within a generation, taxes were being collected, registered and audited by clerks on an exchequer board. Justice was administered by sheriffs and judges through assize courts. The Normans were no longer wild northern raiders. Though England and, eventually, Wales and Ireland were notionally colonies of Normandy, they became a centralized nation state in embryo. A century earlier, England had been part of a Scandinavian empire. In 1066 it was betrothed to continental Europe.

Henry IV’s investiture controversy

On one matter William never deviated. He knew how much his conquest had owed to Rome, which also approved his reform of the dysfunctional Anglo-Saxon church. He rewarded the Norman church with cathedrals, abbeys and, above all, land, but this in turn assailed the church with pressures created by its burgeoning role in the secular life of Europe. As its spiritual empire grew, it became embroiled with local rulers and inevitably conflicted with them. Since bishoprics and their revenues were a source of local patronage, it was a matter of dispute as to whom this patronage belonged. Who in truth was the Holy Roman Emperor?

The monastic movement was now a major force within the church, and one over which Rome could exercise little regular control. Even the ascetic Benedictines had fallen prey to comfort and corruption. The result was the emergence of new monastic orders, the Cluniacs (910) and the Cistercians (1098), which were to become both popular and a source of ecclesiastical power. They were builders on an imperial scale. The twelfth-century Cluniacs of Burgundy boasted a phenomenal 10,000 monks spread across 1,450 monasteries from England to Poland and Palestine. The abbey at Cluny itself was the greatest church in western Christendom, until the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1073 a Tuscan Cluniac named Hildebrand was elected pope, taking the name and ambitions of Gregory the Great, his sixth-century predecessor. As Gregory VII (1073–85), Hildebrand two years later formulated a statement of policy, Dictatus papae, that was bold to the point of megalomania. It stipulated the absolute supremacy, secular as well as religious, of the Roman church. The pope could depose emperors, appoint and transfer bishops, and ordain priests. Priests were to be celibate. Princes should kiss the feet of the pope. Should there be any doubt, ‘the Roman church has never erred nor, as witness the Scripture, will it ever do so’. Gregory saw himself as the successor not just of Charlemagne but of imperial Rome: Quibus imperavit Augustus, imperavit Christus, where Augustus ruled, Christ ruled. Should anyone disagree, excommunication would follow.

Germany’s new king and Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV (1056–1106), certainly did not agree. He had grown from infant king to headstrong but shrewd ruler. He spent much of his reign fighting Saxons and pagan Slavs across the Elbe border, but his most persistent foe was Gregory. The pope’s Dictatus on the appointment of bishops was a direct assault on Henry’s patronage and authority. In 1076, he summoned a diet of his local bishops and formally declared Gregory deposed.

Thus began the ‘investiture controversy’, a euphemism for what became an often bloody conflict between the papacy and the heirs to Charlemagne’s empire. German kings did not automatically inherit their crowns, but were chosen by a college of princes and bishops, known as ‘electors’. Succession was usually but not always based on family inheritance, influenced by merit and corruption. This in turn enabled Gregory to exploit opposition to Henry among his electors, princes and dukes, backed by the threat of excommunication. He condemned Henry’s ‘unheard of arrogance’, and absolved ‘all Christians from the bond of the oath they have made to him’.

Many of Henry’s supporters were unnerved by this and demanded he seek forgiveness from Gregory, then lodging at Canossa in Emilia. In 1077 Henry capitulated. The celebrated ‘walk to Canossa’ saw him travel to Italy and prostrate himself outside Gregory’s castle, ‘standing barefoot in the snow and clothed in the woollen robe of the penitent’. He stood for three days and nights ‘moaning, weeping and craving pardon’. Eventually, Gregory gave in and allowed him communion. ‘Going to Canossa’ remains a German expression for extreme repentance.

For a man like Henry, such humiliation would not go unavenged. In 1080 he duly raised an army and returned to Rome, where he appointed an anti-pope and toppled Gregory. Gregory pleaded for help from his Norman neighbour, Robert Guiscard of Sicily, who obliged in 1084 by sacking Rome, destroying many of its buildings and slaughtering many of its citizens. Henry retreated and Gregory was restored, but Rome never forgave the pope the manner of his return. He died the following year, a broken man.

Henry’s reign survived another two decades, but the investiture controversy outlived him. A compromise settlement was reached in a concordat at Worms in 1122, whereby church appointments could be made by monarchs, but ‘bishops’ were formally ‘invested’, or installed by the pope with appropriate insignia. It was a compromise in which the church’s lack of worldly power was evident. Worms acknowledged the sovereignty of secular rule, and was a building block in the emergence of states. Henry’s challenge to Rome led Luther to hail him as ‘the first Protestant’.