Vikings (14 page)

The settlement remains are unremarkable – the usual longhouses built around frameworks of upright posts – but excavation of the site produced exceptional amounts of gold and silver. Decorations from weapons, gold rings and scrapped gold and silver cut into pieces were recovered in volumes that suggest Gudme was a village like no other at the time. Just three miles from Gudme itself, at a place called Lundeborg, archaeologists discovered traces of a port that appeared to have been used during the months of spring and summer. It was here that goods intended for Gudme arrived and there was also evidence of boat-building and repair. The elite of Gudme had clearly
established their village as a centre for the distribution of high-value goods – likely serving a wide area. Gudme being a focal point for trade, the people there were also engaged in some kind of religious activity. The archaeologists recovered human figures stamped into gold foil – items normally found on sites related to pagan worship. The evidence is slight, but suggestive of a ruling group – perhaps a chief and his family – controlling not just luxury imports and exports but also the spiritual well-being of the surrounding population. It is also tempting to suggest that power was now hereditary, passed from parent to child, so that we also see the seeds of ruling dynasties – families retaining control down through the generations. Gudme after all means ‘God’s home’.

If the first four or five centuries
AD
were a time of relative calm and growing prosperity for the peoples of Scandinavia, much of the rest of Europe was periodically convulsed by seismic change. The Christian religion had begun in the Middle East and by the fourth century
AD
had won over Rome herself. Constantine I, proclaimed by his legions, in York, was the first emperor to embrace the upstart faith. His rise to supremacy was challenged by Maxentius and their opposing factions clashed at Milvian Bridge, outside the gates of Rome, in
AD
312. The story goes that Constantine looked up at the sky on the day before the battle and there beheld a Christian cross. That night Christ himself visited the emperor in a dream and told him, ‘By this sign, conquer.’ So it was that Constantine’s soldiers painted
chi-rho
symbols – the first Greek letters of Christ’s name – on their shields and marched to victory.

When Constantine formally accepted the religion the following year he changed the destiny not just of Christians but also of the Roman Empire itself. For one thing, he ended the Tetrarchy – the rule of the Empire by two
Augusti
and two Caesars.

Perhaps even more significant in the long run, it was
Constantine who made Byzantium his eastern capital in
AD
324, changing its name to Constantinople in the process. By creating a new Rome in the east, the emperor altered the very fabric of Europe. It was as though yet another strong centre of gravity had spun into existence, towards which much else in Europe – and in Asia – began to be drawn. In time the Vikings would feel the pull there too.

Looked at cold-bloodedly, it is easy to see how and why Constantinople came to eclipse mighty Rome. While the old imperial capital was ideally sited to dominate a European world centred on the Mediterranean Sea, the new city straddled the crossroads of an altogether bigger domain. To the west, via the Dardanelles, lay Egypt and the Nile delta; the riches of Crete, Sicily and the Italian peninsula; the sea routes around the Mediterranean coastline and, ultimately, the Straits of Gibraltar and the Atlantic world beyond. Trailing south-eastwards from the city, like threads of a spider’s web, were the ancient overland routes into the Middle East leading to the trading centres of Aleppo, Baghdad and Damascus. Eastwards, beyond the constricting throat of the Bosphorus, lay all the wealth of central Asia . . . furs, gold and slaves from the Russian steppes; amber, ivory and pearls from the Orient; caviar harvested from the giant sturgeons of the Caspian Sea. As well as a nexus of trade routes from far and wide, Constantinople was close to the corn, olive and wine of Anatolia, as well as to all the timber, limestone and marble required for the building of a great city.

While the people of Gudme were in their pomp, her chieftains dispensing both worldly favour and spiritual enlightenment, and while the sun of Constantinople rose like the dawn in the east, Rome’s light began to fade in the west. By the last quarter of the fourth century
AD
the pressure being exerted by the Germanic tribes upon the borders of the Empire became unbearable.

Constantine had reunited the Empire and had championed the establishment of the new city, but it was under the rule of Theodosius I – also known as Theodosius the Great – that Constantinople became the home of emperors. The son of a soldier, Theodosius was the last to rule east and west together, from
AD
379 to 395.

Constantine oversaw the construction of a defensive wall around his city, but during the fifth century the place expanded beyond that original boundary. It was during the reign of Theodosius II (known as the boy emperor, since he ascended the throne when he was just seven years old) that the legendary Theodosian Wall was erected. In its first incarnation this defence would turn back Attila the Hun, in
AD
447 – and when it was razed by an earthquake later the same year, the panic-stricken population turned out en masse to rebuild it in double-quick time.

Soon after the rise of Constantinople came the end of days for old Rome. The teenager Romulus Augustulus, set in place by his father, was the last ruler of the Roman Empire in the west. He played the part for just a matter of months before being deposed in the summer of
AD
476.

Historians have long debated the causes of Rome’s fall; Edward Gibbon needed six volumes for his own version of events. More recently Kenneth Clark claimed that the end of Rome had something to say about the nature of civilisation itself. ‘It shows that however complex and solid it [civilisation] seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.

‘What are its enemies?’ he asked. ‘Well, first of all fear – fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees, or even planting next year’s crops . . . So if one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.’

Constantinople was not only the inheritor of the notion of empire, but also a focal point for the Christian religion. So while it seems distant from the world of the Vikings still it is key to their story. The Europe and Asia the men of Norway, Denmark and Sweden encountered when they put to sea in their long ships and headed west, south and east in the dying moments of the eighth century, were a battleground of faiths. The Vikings are remembered as villains because they set upon those who had recently learnt to think of themselves as good, or at least within reach of goodness. If they were accurately to be described as pagans, it was because they splashed ashore from their long ships and set their Godless feet onto lands only recently purified, in the north and west at least, by a religion that had been spreading like incense smoke from fires in the east.

There was no state-sanctioned Christianity in Rome. It was, as it always had been, a pagan city and Christianity just another faith. Justinian was made emperor in Constantinople in
AD
527 and immediately began sending his soldiers westwards to reclaim Mediterranean Roman territories lost to the Germanic tribes. What he helped create was the Byzantine Empire and he would expend a great deal of its energy and resources in his determination to regain the glories of his predecessors. It took him 30 years, but by the end he had reclaimed most of the Mediterranean world. He also ordained and oversaw the rebuilding of the Church of Hagia Sophia – the Church of the Divine Wisdom – and lived to see its dedication in 537.

But the love of Christ was not the only focus of devotion within reach of the Byzantine world. History does not accurately record the birth of Muhammad, but according to his earliest Arabic biographer – writing around a hundred years after the event – it occurred sometime around
AD
570. So while
Hagia Sophia was still settling down upon her foundations, a boy-child was born to poor parents living in the Hejaz, a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia. He grew up surrounded by Christians and Jews following, each in their distinctive ways, the word of God. Muhammad’s people worshipped the same and called him Allah, but had no written scripture to guide them through their lives.

While he sat in contemplation in a cave near Mecca, Muhammad heard a voice telling him: ‘Recite, in the name of the Lord, who created, created man from a clot of blood.’

And recite he did, for the next 20 years. By the end his followers had faithfully written down his every utterance – eventually collected into the holy book known as the Koran. It was, at least in the beginning, a faith that championed the individual believer – man, woman or child – and that declared belief superior to blood. For the followers of Islam – a word meaning submission – it was the ties of shared belief rather than kin that bound the community – what Muhammad called the
umma
– together.

The Prophet died in
AD
632, leaving his followers to bicker about which of them had the right to name himself his successor, or Caliph. Despite the atmosphere of schism, there was nonetheless a will to move upon the rest of the world and persuade every man, woman and child there to turn his or her face towards Mecca.

It had begun with Muhammad himself. In
AD
629 he had dispatched a letter to Emperor Heraclius, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Over a year earlier the Byzantine ruler had defeated Chosroes, the Sassanid King of Persia, at the climactic Battle of Nineveh. From the Persians he had recovered a fragment of the Cross upon which Christ had been pinned with Roman nails – the so-called True Cross – and he was returning it, on foot as pilgrimage demanded, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

He had just arrived in Jerusalem when a messenger pressed the Prophet’s letter into his hands. It read:

In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah, and His Apostle, to Heraclius, the ruler of Byzantines. Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow upon you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.

Soon after Muhammad’s death, Caliph Abu-Bakr brought the remaining Arabic tribes to heel. Thereafter it was a mostly irresistible advance – through the Sassanid Persian Empire, then onwards into Iraq and Syria. The city of Jerusalem fell to Islam in
AD
638, then Mesopotamia and then Egypt, wrested from Byzantine control. The Arabs took to the sea as well and soon Cyprus was swallowed up, followed by North Africa – even Carthage. More of the Middle East fell next, and then in
AD
711 a Muslim army crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe. The advance into Europe was finally turned back at Poitiers, in western central France, by an army of Franks led by Charles Martel. Gibbon liked to imagine that, had it not been for Martel – remembered as the grandfather of the Carolingian Empire and dynasty – scholars in Oxford would have been teaching the Koran.

The successes of those Muslim armies were nothing less than astounding. Their creed was simple and unifying, their advance the physical manifestation of religious zeal. The Prophet had promised that death on the battlefield, in the face of the infidel, would guarantee an eternity in paradise. Faith, brotherhood, rapture ever after – it was a heady mix for the men from the desert.

For all their energy and triumph, however, the Arabs did not have everything their own way. Constantinople had been a target since the time of Muhammad himself and in
AD
669 a force under Caliph Muawiyyah brought both his army and his navy to bear in a bid to take the city for Islam.

Constantinople sits on a roughly triangular eminence that pokes its apex out into the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. Across the landward baseline of the triangle stretch the 12 miles of the Theodosian Wall, impregnable to all the weaponry of the day. As well as being triangular, the land occupied by the city also resembles the head of a rhinoceros – the horn suggested by the upturn called Acropolis Point. In the lee of that stump of land is the Golden Horn, a perfect harbour in which sheltered the Byzantine fleet. Of all the great cities of the ancient world, Constantinople was furthest beyond the reach of any would-be invader.

For five years the defenders weathered that latest siege, enduring attacks from both land and sea. Finally, in 678, the Byzantine navy put to sea and unleashed a weapon that was to become legendary. Special apparatus mounted on the bows of their ships spouted ‘Greek Fire’ – a jet of flame that not only set ablaze everything within reach but also stuck, like napalm, to the hulls and sails of the enemy vessels, and to the men cowering inside them. The Arabs were routed completely, by fear and horror as much as anything else. The remnants of their navy made for home but were mostly sunk by severe storms that dogged them all the way back east. Perhaps it seemed to them – and to the jubilant inhabitants of Constantinople – that the Christian God had made his choice.

To complete the defeat, the Arab land army was wiped out almost to a man by Byzantine forces sensing outright victory. Muawiyyah died the following year, a broken man. It had been a decisive defeat for the Arabs – even a humiliation – but it did
little or nothing to curb their appetite for the city they viewed as the ultimate prize. Christian Constantinople was firmly in Muslim sights – and would remain there for the best part of the next eight centuries.

There were two great monotheistic religions vying for dominance in Europe and Asia by the early part of the eighth century
AD
. The Vikings would reach out and touch both, and be touched by them in return.