Empires and Barbarians (86 page)

There is, moreover, a second hugely important fact to recognize about the naval technology that lay at the heart of the Viking diaspora. Not only was it expensive – much of it was also new. Sea-going naval technology had existed in the Mediterranean and even the Channel and the North Sea for many centuries by c.800
AD
. But while inshore boats of skilful design had long been in use in the Baltic region, sea-going ships were a new phenomenon there at the start of the Viking period. Characteristic of Baltic waterborne transport in the late Roman period is the famous Nydam boat. Constructed in 310/20
AD
, it was essentially a war canoe, powered by fourteen pairs of oars. It was found in the mid-nineteenth century, ritually sacrificed along with the equipment of the raiders who had manned it, in the same kind of bog deposit that has given us so much information about military retinues (
Chapter 2
). Its existence is a sign, presumably, that its former owners made one raid too many. For our purposes, though, the point is that it is an inshore boat. Lacking sails, its range was limited, and its hull design would not have been seaworthy in open waters. Up to the eighth century, moreover, nothing changed. No Scandinavian wrecks designed for sea work dating from earlier than c.700 have been pulled up by underwater archaeologists. A second famous source confirms the point. Amongst its other treasures, the island of Gotland is home to a series of picture stones, some of which portray Baltic shipping. No stone dating before the eighth century pictures a boat with sails.

It is impossible to be certain of the exact chronology, but from c.700 this changed. Pictures, the occasional fabulous burial such as the Gokstad ship as well as wrecks, not least the five Skuldelev ships which, when worn out, were used to block one of the sea lanes into Roskilde Fjord, document the critical revolution in naval technology. The new design had two basic components. First, the hull was made strong enough for the open sea. Clinker-built strakes combined with a one-piece central keel and elevated prow and stern to create a hull with sufficient freeboard, and which was both strong and flexible enough to plough through ocean waves without either foundering or being battered to pieces. Like modern skyscrapers that can sway up to six metres each way at the top in high winds, flexibility meant survival, where a rigid hull would have broken apart. Second, sail technology appeared. This involved learning not just about the sails themselves, how to make them and use them to tack against the wind, but also all about masts and how to fix them to the hulls. By the early eighth
century all of this had come together, and ocean-going ships superseded inshore war canoes. The whole Scandinavian diaspora would have been impossible without this technological revolution, and it began to work itself out less than a century before the first Viking raiders exploded into western waters.
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This observation begins to answer some of the key questions about what precisely triggered the Scandinavian flow of migration in the late first millennium. In a real sense, the Viking period began when it did, and not before, because the developing naval technology of the Baltic made it possible for it to do so. But that is only half the answer. Why should this technology, readily available nearby for centuries, have been imported into the Baltic only around the year 700?

No shipwrights’ diaries are available, but a broader run of evidence allows us to make a pretty good guess as to what was going on. The collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century caused a huge amount of disruption in established interregional trading structures in northern Europe. By the seventh century, however, trade flows were strong enough again for kings to establish trading centres. The deal was straightforward. The king guaranteed protection for all mercantile activities taking place at the market he established, and in return charged the merchants a percentage in the form of tolls and customs dues. A still-growing body of archaeological evidence has started to document the revolution that followed, as one trading centre after another – they are generally called
emporia
in the scholarly literature – sprang up along the Channel and North Sea coasts. The first to be excavated was Dorestad, already known to have existed from its coinage, hidden a little way upstream at the mouth of the Rhine (
Map 20
). The wood cut for its ship quays shows that it was in action by 650
AD
. It was one among many important trading centres on the north coast of the continent: Quentovic, upstream from modern Boulogne, for instance, and the emporium on the Dutch island of Walcheren. North of the Channel, Hamwih – old Southampton – came into operation just a touch later than Dorestad, by 675; and Londonwic, the Middle Saxon trading port upstream of the old Roman city of London, has been identified as running along the Thames, behind the line of what is currently the Strand. The new trade network started in the Channel/North Sea zone, but quickly spread to Jutland and then on into the Baltic. Ribe, an emporium on the west coast of Jutland, was in operation by the year 700, and through the eighth
century other markets opened up around the Baltic circle: Birka and Reric earlier on, Hedeby slightly later. It was also precisely to serve the growing western European demand represented by this chain of markets that Staraia Ladoga was founded.
⁶⁶

It is just about possible that the chronology is coincidence, but I greatly doubt it. Human beings generally make technological leaps when there is a clear motivation for doing so. There is an overwhelming likelihood that the Scandinavians developed ocean-going naval technology precisely to grab a share of all the new wealth being generated by the burgeoning north European trade network. The chronology works, and the motivation is right too.

The texts suggest that much of this traffic was originally dominated by Frisian traders, but in the longer term they would lose out to their Scandinavian rivals. And it is always the middle-men, not primary producers, who make most of the money from any exchange system. The switch began in the eighth century when Scandinavian merchants started to get hold of ships that would allow them actually to traffic in goods, and not act merely as suppliers of raw materials to others. This marked the beginning of a major reorientation in trading patterns. The Norse raiders and traders of the Viking period not only took the trade into their own hands, but also redirected it through centres under their control. Sacking the old emporia was a game enjoyed by all self-respecting Vikings, and by the tenth century the only ones still in operation, which included Rouen, York and Dublin, were under Scandinavian control. Whether there had been a conscious plan to wipe out the competition represented by the non-Viking trade centres is impossible to prove, but this outcome is deeply eloquent.
⁶⁷
The whole Viking diaspora of the ninth and tenth centuries must be seen as a consequence of the emporia network of the seventh and eighth. The powerful stimulus provided by the new riches flowing through northern waters made Scandinavian shipbuilders extend their skills dramatically, and eventually lured Scandinavian merchants and adventurers out beyond the inshore waters of the Baltic.

So far, the evidence has been mounting up for the ‘positive’ – that is, the economic – motivations underlying the various activities of the Viking diaspora, whether trading, raiding, or actual settlement. In this sense, the migration element within it conforms to the classic pattern whereby major wealth differentials function as one of the prime motors behind human displacement. The word ‘positive’, of course, is jargonese from modern migration studies, and applies to the perspective of the Vikings themselves, the ones who were making most of the money. Those dispossessed of their lands, those raided, or those dragged away from loved ones to a miserable life of slavery would have had a very different point of view. But even from the perspective of those Scandinavians who were participating, a much more negative, political motivation did underlie some of the activities, often – as in modern migration flows – operating simultaneously with and alongside the positive drives.

A case in point is the settlement of Iceland. As we have seen, the early Icelandic accounts insist that settlers went there from about 870 onwards to escape the growing political power of the Norwegian monarchy. The culprit was probably the Earldom of More on Orkney, but in any event the Icelandic texts can be believed in reporting a negative political element to settlement. There are some very good reasons for thinking that such political motivations in fact applied much more generally to the Viking period, at least from about 850 onwards. In a rightly famous paper, Patrick Wormald suggested some years ago that the armed exodus from Scandinavia, which is such a feature of the period, was a sign of considerable political crisis within the region. The evidence in favour of such a view is compelling. Its origins are more than a little obscure, despite the progress made in recent years, but a powerful ‘Danish’ monarchy had come into existence in southern Jutland and some of the adjacent islands by c.700
AD
. From the middle of the eighth century it commanded enough authority to undertake major public works, erecting a huge ditch and earthwork along its southern boundary – the Danevirke – and cutting
a canal through the island of Samsø. In Carolingian texts of c.800 we meet one of its kings, Godfrid, who could assemble ships in the hundreds and warriors in the thousands, and who was capable of relocating – whether they liked it or not – merchants from adjacent Slavic territories to his own newly planned emporium at Hedeby, presumably because he wanted their customs dues.

It would be wrong to overstress the degree of political stability enjoyed by this polity. Godfrid himself was eventually assassinated, and Frankish annals from the first half of the ninth century make it possible to reconstruct some of its subsequently rocky political history, as either members of two branches of the same dynasty, or of two different dynasties, fought for its control. In the mid-ninth century, however, the violence exploded beyond the bounds of the normal. On his second visit to Scandinavia, the missionary St Anskar found King Horic II, and everyone else with whom he’d previously had contact at the court, dead, and from c.850 to 950 there is no sign at all of a unified Danish monarchy. It has sometimes been argued that this is an illusion created by the silence of Frankish sources, but the problem went deeper than that. The first really powerful figure to re-emerge in Jutland and the islands is Harold Bluetooth of the Jelling dynasty in the mid-tenth century. And amongst his famous monuments is a runestone on which he claims that uniting the territories under his rule was his own political achievement. I see no reason to disbelieve him, because the claim fits well with all the other evidence. After about a century of impressively documented activity, between c.750 and 850, then, the centralized Danish monarchy collapsed. As Patrick Wormald pointed out, this fragmentation coincided pretty much exactly with the explosion outwards from Scandinavia – eastwards as well as westwards – of higher-status leaders and their retinues. It was this latter phenomenon, as we have seen, that created the Great Army era, and it surely cannot be a coincidence that it occurred as home political structures were collapsing.
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As we have found with every other migration flow of the first millennium, external political structures affected the action. Development is an umbrella concept that is as much about politics as it is about economics. Greater levels of wealth, or the opportunities for acquiring it, attracted the Norse out of the Baltic circle, but the nature of the political structures at the points where this wealth was to be found dictated the means and mechanisms by which Scandinavian
populations could get access to it. As we have seen, local political structures firmly dictated the scale of Norse migration units. Where they were small-scale, the settlers did not have to come in compact masses, whether we’re talking the northern and western isles of Britain or indeed the North Atlantic. This would also have been true of northern Russia if, indeed, there was some land-grabbing there too. Where political structures were large-scale and robust, however, the Scandinavians had either to access local wealth by less direct means, such as trading with the Islamic world rather than confronting it head-on or developing a more symbiotic relationship with the kings of Ireland. Alternatively, they could come in sufficient numbers to stand some chance of winning the battles that had to be fought, which they did with great gusto in the Great Army era in England and northern Francia. Here, settlement on the kinds of terms Vikings were interested in required the prior destruction of local political structures, and the Great Armies provided the necessary vehicle. More short-term political factors also influenced the precise shape of the action. The Great Army attacked Northumbria first because that kingdom was in the grip of civil war, and over the next thirty years the action ebbed and flowed across the Channel in an inverse relationship to the perceived strength of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon monarchies.

Migration and political development were interacting, however, on yet another level in the Viking era. Returning to Wormald’s argument – what was it, exactly, that caused the explosive political crisis in mid-ninth-century Scandinavia? We have no contemporary Scandinavian accounts, and Frankish chroniclers were much too exterior to the action, so there is no circumstantial narrative to illuminate the situation. It is highly pertinent, however, to think in general terms about what had been happening in Scandinavia in the fifty years or so before the murder of Horic II. As we have seen in some detail, the effect of the Viking period as a whole, with its potent mixture of trading and raiding, was to bring a huge flow of wealth into the region from entirely new sources – Muslim silver, precious metals from the west, the returns on slaves and furs traded in east and west. These wealth flows, moreover, were not under the direct control of the Jutland monarchy. When the Carolingians wished to curb the piracy, they had to persuade the Danish kings to act. Even more important, the wealth generated overseas was sometimes used to further political ambitions at home. The
Life of St Anskar
reports the highly revealing case of King
Anoundas, who had been expelled from Birka but then made enough money in the west to hire himself a big enough force to regain control. A Frankish source also tells us – rather cryptically – that Reginharius, the sacker of St Denis, met his end at the court of Horic, perhaps in response to Carolingian prompting. Maybe so, but Horic will have had his own reasons for making the hit, and this takes us straight to the extra dimension I would add to Wormald’s original argument.
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