Show 69 - Twilight of the Aesir 05:10:55

Today's show is sponsored by Sega's Company of Heroes 3, available February 2023. This story begins, well, probably like most stories, before this story begins. I mean, what historical account doesn't have its precursors or its backstories or its prologues?

In this case, we had an entire show and an extra show devoted to this very story. We called it Thor's Angels, and you'll hear me say that a couple of times in this discussion upcoming. This is the last chapter in that story involving a people history often calls Vikings, but Vikings are not a people.

And how connected the people in this era are to today's modern day Danes, Norwegians and Swedes is iffy. And the idea of ethnicity and cultural aspects and everything else is fraught with all sorts of baggage. I mean,

This story about who these people were about to talk about really were is buried beneath layer upon layer and century upon century of romanticizing and demonizing and fetishizing and nationalizing of a people that once upon a time were just real folk and converting them into Hollywoodized barbarian tropes. But once upon a time,

There were people all over northern, western and central Europe who had a linguistic affiliation, a cultural affinity and believed in the same sorts of values and deities that these Viking era Scandinavians believed in. And by the time the early Middle Ages rolls around, these people in modern day Scandinavia, maybe just north of Germany, are the only people left who do.

And there's a certain historical irony that the peoples who will put the lion's share of sweat into extinguishing these old gods, these ancient deities, are people who not that long before this time period believed in them themselves.

This is, as the old radio announcer Paul Harvey would have said, that when it comes to the Thor's Angels tale, this is the rest of the story. December 7th, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events...

The figures. I take pride in the words. The drama. Tear down this wall.

The deep questions. It's hardcore history.

One of my favorite quotes in all history, and I'm careful about famous quotes now because so many of the ones in my quote books have been debunked over the years. This one's pretty well attested to. I wouldn't swear by it, but it's pretty well attested to. It involves something said by Joseph Stalin.

autocratic leader of the former Soviet Union, a communist state, right? A state, by the way, that is officially an atheistic state and Stalin himself was probably an atheist. And the reason it matters is because the quote has something to do with that. The circumstances are that he's supposed to be talking to a French politician in the middle 1930s

who in an attempt to solve a problem they're dealing with suggests they might be able to solicit the help of the Vatican, right? The Pope.

And Stalin's response is so cynical, terra firma, rubber meets the road type of an answer that it just sums up the situation perfectly. He's supposed to have said, and he wouldn't have said it in English, which is why you sometimes see different wording. He's supposed to have said, the Pope, how many divisions does he have? You know, meaning armor and soldiers and guns and those kinds of things.

Stalin doesn't want to talk about spiritual help. He wants to know, you know, how many soldiers the pope is going to provide. And of course, the pope can't provide any. The number of divisions that the pope has is zero.

This sums up a problem that has existed for the popes and the center of Catholic authority in Italy since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And the way that they managed to solve this problem goes a long way to explaining why Europe turned out the way it did.

Now, full disclosure, we've already discussed this process in an earlier show called Thor's Angels. We even did an extra show, a Thor's Angels extra, utilizing some of the cutting room floor stuff that we had to cut out. But that show is about what happened to a religion that started off as a minority offshoot religion from Judaism.

goes to a much persecuted religion, a minority religion in the Roman Empire, to eventually getting a Roman emperor converting to Christianity, and then a later Roman emperor converting the whole empire to officially Christian, and you have the Pope and Christianity in a pretty good position until the Roman Empire in the West disintegrates.

which means Roman protection in Italy goes away at a time when the entire Western European area, Italy included, is becoming a very dangerous neighborhood, a time when the Pope really could have benefited from having a few divisions.

The way that successive popes solve this problem of living in a bad neighborhood with no military protection is to form a partnership with some entity that can provide it. That entity turned out to be a people, another one of those people the Romans would have called barbarians, a people known as the Franks.

located in the modern day area of sort of France, just change the soft sea in France to a hard sea and you see the connection, right? Frank, look at the German name for France even today, Frankreich, right? Empire of the Franks.

The Franks were sort of the odds-on favorite to be the up-and-coming people in Europe. And so when the church and the Frankish leaders over generations create this relationship, it becomes a symbiotic one, one that protects and allows the church to develop and expand its authority and the number of its followers and

while at the same time blessing the Franks with a sort of legitimacy that they wouldn't have had otherwise. But this relationship changed both entities and changed Christianity also. The show we did earlier, Thor's Angels, got a little bit farther in the story than the era of Charlemagne. But Charlemagne seems to be a good person to sort of pivot back towards as a pivot point for the rest of the tale.

For those who don't know, Charles the Great, Carl de Rosa, has a lot of names. Charlemagne's how he's known to history, is probably, you could make a very good argument, the most important geopolitical figure in European history after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He's absolutely astoundingly influential and important.

And like so many people like him in history, he's overshadowed his direct ancestors, which if he didn't live, you'd have known about. I mean, the same way you'd know Alexander the Great's father's name if Alexander the Great hadn't been so great. I mean, Charlemagne, his dad Pippin, his grandfather Charles Martel, nicknamed the Hammer. The three of them gave the Franks about 90 years of really energetic, strong life.

leadership that catapulted that people to really the heights of european power and dominance charlemagne will be when he starts out a king of the franks and by the time he ends he's the emperor of a renovated roman empire is the way it would have been seen and the church with him all the way but somewhere along the way

The sword arm of the church, this protection provided to the pope by this Frankish people, turned from defensive in character to offensive in character. And it's hard to know how much the church wanted this or didn't want it. There were some complaints at the time by how this worked.

Situation was actually playing out on the ground, but by the time you get to Charlemagne, the way it's playing out on the ground is genocidal and has a direct bearing on what happens afterwards. Charlemagne was famously involved in a multi-generational war against a people to his east who are called the Saxons.

Now using ancient sources to describe people's ethnicities, cultures, or political affiliations of tribal peoples is difficult because they're not always consistent and people change. The Saxons though were a people that before this period were part of the great immigration of peoples from, you know, Western Europe around the North of Germany and Denmark and those places to England and

And they create a fusion of peoples that history calls Anglo-Saxons. And these Anglo-Saxons will convert to Christianity eventually and then send missionaries from England back to Saxony, where the Saxons are, to try to convert that pagan people. As you might imagine, sometimes the Saxons were amenable to this and sometimes they weren't.

Charlemagne isn't about giving them choices in the matter, though. His wars against the Saxons will go on for like 30 years and get progressively nastier. Saxony's a tough place to fight, by the way. In his book Charlemagne, Father of a Continent, historian Alessandro Barbaro sets up the conflict this way, quote,

It was a ferocious war in a country with little or no civilization, with neither roads nor cities, and entirely covered with forests and marshland. The Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods, as Germans had always done before converting to Christianity, and the Franks did not hesitate to put to death anyone who refused to be baptized." End quote.

That was not normally policy in converting the heathen, but Charlemagne's geopolitical goals and his religious ones dovetailed. And it's hard to know where one ended and the other began. He will famously have 4,500, and you never know about these numbers, 4,500 Saxons beheaded in a single afternoon at the edge of a river,

in a town called verdan because they were allegedly the leaders of one of the many saxon rebellions against him every time he would take his army away from saxony after chastising the saxons and go fight one of his other wars they would rise up and rebel and they would often destroy monasteries and kill monks and raid and all kinds of things

The victory conditions that Charlemagne set up in this war were that the Saxons had to give up their traditional religion. They were going to convert to Christianity or else they were going to die. Now, defenders of Charlemagne will point out that the legitimate reason for this was he planned to conquer Saxony and incorporate it into his kingdom. And his kingdom was Christian and they weren't going to have any pagans in his kingdom. The problem was, is that the way he went about it was so...

draconian and totalitarian that he got many complaints from missionaries whose job it was to go convert these people sort of through good argument and through preaching the gospels and showing the way to the light and the saving of souls and

Charlemagne at some points will have rules in place that say Saxons who won't be baptized are to be killed. Saxons who don't follow the meal restrictions during Lent are to face the death penalty. I mean, it's that heavy duty.

the missionaries that have been going preaching to people like this often were putting their own lives at risk as you might imagine if somebody came into your community and started assailing your religion might not be the safest thing to do and some of these missionaries who are very brave people would go to places like i mean saint boniface famously will try to convert the frisians and will be martyred that's the term that is used right martyred means that

one way or another they killed him a lot of these missionaries will be killed and be martyred trying to convert the germanic type heathen the barbarian heathen my favorite amongst these is a saint called lebuin and lebuin like so many of these other people trying to convert the people in what's now northern germany or the netherlands is from anglo-saxon england and lebuin is not going to

to be martyred. He's going to be one of these ones who survives. He goes to preach to the Saxons. And these guys would come in, by the way, and they would do things like burn or chop down their sacred trees that they believed, you know, like held up the universe or were the pathways from the gods to man. I mean, sacred sites, they'll come in here and chop them down. I mean, what kind of guts do you have to have to be an unarmed cleric

who comes in and does that amongst a warrior people that don't even leave home without weapons. But the story of St. Lebuin involves one of the greatest speeches ever given by a figure in the Middle Ages, if it really happened. And if it really happened, this guy is absolutely one of the more gutsy people you will ever see.

The version I have comes from a book called The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, translated and edited by a guy called C.H. Talbot. He claims that this version of the story of Lebuin is from an unknown author and that a later version that is attributed is simply taken from this version.

But he describes this saint who wasn't a saint at the time, just a missionary named Lebuin, who goes to the Saxons during one of their big assemblies that they have. To call them democratic would be false, but they didn't have a king who ruled over every little thing. They would get together and have assemblies and hash this stuff out. But what that meant is that there's a lot of armed barbarians in a single place at a single time. And this story has Lebuin just sort of appearing amongst them.

it's hard not to see how many of these figures would have made great superheroes in the marvel cinematic universe and you know for reasons of not wanting to be accused of blasphemy i understand why the marvel universe did not include the monotheistic religions like islam and christianity in their universe but they have the norse gods they have the greek gods and yet who wiped out all those gods well

In Europe, it was Christianity that killed pantheism, right? And if you read the account of Lebuin, he sounds like he can make himself invisible. They don't explicitly say that, but he appears out of nowhere, and when they want to kill him, he can manage to disappear. And when he first appears to these people in their assembly, he's wearing his religious vestments, which might have looked like a superhero outfit to these people.

barbarian types he's got the gospels in in the crook of his arm which is like a book of magic and he's got a cross with him which is almost like a religious weapon if you're looking at it from a people who believe heavily in things like magic and according to the unknown author who chronicles lebuin's life this is how it goes quote

Suddenly, Lebwin appeared in the middle of the circle, clothed in his priestly garments, bearing a cross in his hands and a copy of the Gospels in the crook of his arm.

Raising his voice, he cried, "'Listen to me, listen. I am the messenger of Almighty God, and to you Saxons I bring his command.'" The author says, astonished at his words and at his unusual appearance, a hush fell upon the assembly. The man of God then followed up his announcement with these words,

"'The God of heaven and ruler of the world and his son Jesus Christ commands me to tell you that if you are willing to be and to do what his servants tell you, he will confer benefits upon you such as you have never heard of before.' Then he added, "'As you have never had a king over you before this time, so no king will prevail against you and subject you to his domination.'

But if you are unwilling to accept God's commands, a king has been prepared nearby who will invade your lands, spoil and lay them waste, and sap away your strength in war. He will lead you into exile, deprive you of your inheritance, slay you with the sword, and hand over your possessions to whom he has a mind. And afterwards you will be slaves both to him and to his successors."

End quote. Now, I can't figure out if that is a warning or a prophecy or a threat, but that king he's talking about is Charlemagne, and he does just what Lebuin says he will. And when the Saxons are eventually crushed, some of the leaders who fostered the rebellions are

flee to one of the last places they can still practice their traditional religious beliefs, which are being pushed farther and farther to the peripheries of the known world. They flee to Denmark. Denmark during this time period is like the rest of Scandinavia. It is not any kind of a unified kingdom or state of any kind. There are lots of what are called petty kings. Sometimes these sorts of

entities are referred to as chiefdoms i mean norway for example i believe during this period has something like 15 different petty kings who are more like warlords in a lot of these cases

University of Oslo historian and Viking expert John Vidar Sigurdsson estimates the Scandinavian population around this time period to be about 650,000 people, half of which would fall into the realm of what would be controlled by Danish rulers. He says those numbers will rise to about a million. These are just estimates he cautions in the year 1050, so sort of brackets the Viking Age.

But the petty king who's ruling the part of Denmark over by Jutland that butts up against Saxon territory is about to have Charlemagne for his next door neighbor when Charlemagne's conquering the Saxons. So his involvement in this war between Charlemagne and the Saxons may be a little like a proxy war situation where he's hoping to help the Saxons defeat Charlemagne so that he doesn't have to directly fight him.

One of the main leaders in the Saxon rebellion is a hero in Germanic history called Vidukind, who may be married to one of the daughters of one of these Danish petty kings. And when Vidukind is fleeing Charlemagne, he flees to Denmark and is given sort of sanctuary by one of these Danish petty kings.

This is where the story gets interesting, though. And a hundred years ago in his book, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, Sir Charles Oman describes the situation as,

um as it might have been seen from the danish point of view and remember by about this time your history books are going to start labeling this entire era in this region as the viking age and people like the danes are one of the key peoples who make up these so-called vikings who we always think of as aggressive pirates who are on the attack all the time um

but a people that more modern-day historians are starting to see that from their point of view, they may have felt like they were the ones threatened. And interestingly enough, 100 years ago, Sir Charles Oman's already saying stuff like that when he writes, quote,

Perhaps the first seeds of trouble were sown when Vidukind, the Saxon, fled before the swords of the Franks and took refuge in Jutland. We need not doubt that he told his Danish hosts terrible tales of the relentless might, the systematic and irresistible advance of the Iron King of the Franks. He means Charlemagne. The danger was now at their doors. The fate of Saxony might soon be that of Denmark.

The kings of the southern Danes gave shelter to Vitakind, but they sent fair words to Charles and did their best to turn away his wrath. Yet when Vitakind yielded and was baptized in 785, they must have felt like their own turn to face the oncoming storm had now arrived. End quote.

The Danish kings during this era will fortify and perhaps expand an already existing fortification, which separated sort of the territory of the Danes from the territory of the Saxons or soon to be the territory of the Carolingians. It was called the Danewerk or the Daneverka or the Daneverga. And you can still go see the remains, by the way, of that long, long,

i think it's something like it's miles and miles of wall across the entire sort of narrow area of jutland um i believe the last time it was used was in the 1860s against the prussians who will fight the franco-prussian war something like a decade later i mean you're getting pretty modern

And in more modern histories, this point of view of the Scandinavian peoples during the Viking Age is much better examined. For example, historian Neil Price in his book The Children of Ash and Elm suggests that these Danish peoples, these Scandinavians in the Viking era,

felt threatened the entire time and may have thought of themselves the ones who were on the defensive sort of the last stand of the norse gods if you will and he writes quote

notwithstanding the traditional focus on viking aggression for much of the period the peoples of southern scandinavia were under near constant threat from the belligerence of their christian neighbors the frankish empire was being carved out at the point of a sword by charlemagne's expansionist wars in the late eighth century

and the north would have been feeling these social pressures at the time of the first raids the great man he means charlemagne died in 814 decades after the seaborne attacks had begun the ninth century division of the carolingian empire following years of civil war did nothing to alleviate tensions along the danish frontier

And there is little to suggest the slowly expanding Viking polities ever felt entirely safe from Southern assault, even into the new millennium. Scandinavian military endeavors almost always included an element of proactive defense alongside their more immediately mercenary ambitions. End quote. Now, I don't know about you, but I have to really try to get my brain into the right headspace and

to see these Viking warrior raiders whose nickname given to them by the English is the slaughter wolves. To see the slaughter wolves as the aggrieved injured party here, right, lashing out in an understandable way defensively. But there's a lot of advantages to that root cause. And it's been around a long time. We quoted Charles Oman, but there's others.

one of the advantages is it answers a key question in this whole affair the question of why now why do you have the viking age kick off when it does and not a hundred years earlier or not a hundred years later if it's a response to certain actions on the part of a well-armed militant christianity continually moving north well then the reason it happens when it does is due to charlemagne's activity right

We should mention, because it's key to zooming out and understanding the state of affairs, that Viking activity was not something brand new and that piracy was always going on. In the pre-modern world, piracy is pretty much omnipresent. The difference between the Viking era and the one that preceded it is the intensity level.

Piracy in the pre-modern world is best thought of like a campfire maybe. And when there's a lot of root causes and fuel thrown on the campfire, the flames burn brightly and with a lot of heat. But without those things, it can die down to just glowing ash-covered embers.

But those embers always have the potential with more fuel thrown on them to blaze up again, right? Or maybe think about piracy like a stock market.

And sometimes you're trading at low level ranges and then something occurs, you know, the root causes pile on other root causes and you get a spike in the stock market, maybe even an extended sort of bull market. And maybe you could look at the Viking Age as a three or so century unprecedented bull market in piracy.

Another key root cause that's often cited for this era's explosion in piracy is, we'll call it the equivalent of having a place to fence your stolen goods, right? I mean, if you steal something, how do you convert that into cash, for example? Or how does cash get converted into something tangible that's usable? Because during this era, you see the growth of

in these emporiums, these trading centers, these nodes of economic activity in the Scandinavian world that pop up. Places like Berka in modern-day Sweden, which I've been to, but there's several other sites like this that become places that get tied into...

What passes for a global trading network at the time, right? Something that ties you into the trading web that includes Europe and Asia and Northern Africa and the Middle East. Places where you can take stolen goods and fence them. Places where you can convert cash or pretty metals that don't have any other purpose into usable goods.

And Berk is a good example of one of these places where there's a ton of legitimate commerce going on here. If you have a farm in, you know, what's now modern day Sweden and you want your excess food to make you some money or get bartered for something else, you bring it to one of these trade emporiums and you can do it there.

Maybe you've got wood that you've chopped or maybe you have traded with another peoples like the peoples, the indigenous peoples in the north for skins and furs and you want to trade those.

Or maybe you've just gotten back from a raid someplace else and you have slaves or you have silver or something like that that you want to convert into more tangible, usable goods that fit your needs. Will these places crop up and create goods

the economic dynamism that makes this period a little bit of a gold rush era. And that incentivizes people to do things that they might not have been as incentivized to do before, perhaps. It's also possible that all this wealth coming into Scandinavia through piracy is creating a level of inflation. I mean, they're finding...

tons and tons of coins from the Islamic states in Viking era Scandinavia and always have. It may be the largest repository of certain kinds of Islamic coins anywhere.

But that might mean that the cost of everything is going up. I mean, Scandinavia is a society where gift-giving is the road to power, right? Gift-giving is how you create friends and relationships, and friends and relationships are the sort of supporters that propel Scandinavian leaders into rulership roles. According to historian John Vigard Sigurdsson, he says that violence was the Vikings' most important export, but that at home, quote,

They were not particularly bloodthirsty. In most cases, local power games were acted out peacefully as the players competed to display their wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts. Consumption was a Viking's most important virtue. The brutality we usually associate with the Vikings was displayed abroad."

In addition to these trading centers cropping up, you get a lot of people pushing the root cause about the engineering and technological and navigational developments that create a singularity of its own, these incredible Viking ships, which will continue to be enlarged and improved upon during this entire Viking era.

If you go look at pictures of either recreations, artist conceptions, or even the skeletons of these ships that they found, it's absolutely terrifying to think of going into the open sea in these things for days on end.

But not only could you brave the open sea in these incredible engineering marvels, but they could be used in the river systems as well. And during the pre-modern era, you know, when you're talking about before railroads and highways and all these kinds of things, traveling the river system of a place like Europe or Asia or any of those areas is the quickest way to get around. It's like a giant subway system.

And so the use of this naval technology as a way to penetrate deeply through the river systems into all these areas opens the door to the kinds of raiding that might have been difficult, if not impossible, before this era. Also add this...

idea to it too and that's that in the north they didn't previously as i understand it use much in the way of sales it was strictly rowing that got you from place to place but during this era sales are adopted and you get the better ships with the sales and the nodes of trade operation and i mean it starts to come together in a way that you can see what neil price is talking about when he talks about a singularity

And by the way, there are more things that might go into the singularity. We only scratched the surface. I mean, Neil Price brings up new evidence that suggests there might have been volcanically induced climate change working on the Scandinavians during this era, right? Reducing crop yields and things like that and putting more pressure on these societies to get what they needed to survive from farther afield. So there's never any shortage of possible root causes.

I tend to myself always default towards this idea of collective human behavior. And I've talked about this many times. And it's the idea that as individuals, we are unpredictable as all get out. But when you get us in larger groups, we sort of devolve toward the mean. And then our activities become a little bit more

understandable and predictable in advance and can you imagine being in let's just say some small norwegian fishing village during this era with no centralized kingdom where you have hundreds of different

you know, chieftainships. And somebody in your neighborhood, your neck of the woods, is out there in the nice weather one day flashing around a whole bunch of conspicuous wealth, better clothes, wife running around with some very expensive-looking brooches to pin their cloaks with, they paying for everybody's drinks at the tavern with some hack silver and maybe a new slave or two by their side.

you're going to sit there and say, hey, Olaf or Leif or Eric or Harold, where'd you get all that good stuff? And if they say, oh, well, me and the lads joined up with my cousin and their people over at the farming community next door. And we got 40 or 60 guys together, a rich person paid for a big ship. And we went over across the water and took all this stuff from a

mostly undefended monastery, you'd want to get some too, wouldn't you? I mean, wouldn't it be just the most normal thing in the world to say, wait, there's practically free, practically undefended stuff somewhere nearby? Well, count me in. I want to get some stuff too. And the undefended nature of these places is probably another root cause that explains why these happened. It should be pointed out that these pagan heathen as the Christian name

or Islamic for that matter, religious groups would see them, that these people were immune to special protections that kept other people from stealing the same sort of stuff they wanted. I mean, think about these monasteries, which will become the early targets in places like Scotland, Ireland, and England. Oftentimes they're located on islands just offshore. They are...

all at once sites for monkish contemplation and the reading of the sacred scriptures and all that. But many of them are also quite wealthy places that are like minor industries, lots of farming and winemaking and all kinds of other stuff happening. They are extremely tempting targets. But the reason that they're not attacked by people in their own neighborhood is because they have a sort of a magical force field protecting them.

And the force field is that they form the infrastructure of the Christian religion. And if you are a Christian living nearby, one of the worst things you could do in your worldview to imperil your mortal soul would be to go steal stuff from the house of God and kill his servants. That's bad Christian karma any way you look at it.

Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen in Ireland, for example, they did burn religious monasteries sometimes. And it was a classic thing to do if you were a pagan people. The first thing the Saxons used to do when they would have an uprising against Charlemagne, you know, he'd leave, go on some other expedition, they'd have a giant revolt. First thing they do is burn the monasteries and kill the monks. So it's pretty classic.

But because these places didn't need a lot of defenses against Christian people, they had a sort of spiritual armor, a spiritual armor that did not work against pagans. And so a bunch of places that should not have been as easy marks as they were, were. And there's nothing that a potential pirate likes more than an easy score.

Now the first famous raids in your history books are going to happen in the 780s and 790s in England and Scotland and those areas.

bio-archaeology keeps pushing the Viking Age earlier and earlier, and they're finding more and more sites all the time that suggest that the famous, you know, starting gun sounding for the Viking era, you know, which is famously like 793 at Lindisfarne in the monastery up in northeastern Britain, that this is probably a

bit of an illusion created from our lack of knowing about other earlier raids they've found for example a famous now very quickly famous Viking burial in what's now the Baltic area that predates the famous Lindisfarne raid of 793 by decades and so it's pretty possible that this low level of piracy was going on all the time especially in Scandinavia and

And in the 780s and 790s, it moves out of that confined area. In the late 780s, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I think, lists it as 787, but I think most historians think it was 789. You get a famous incident where a bunch of Vikings show up in southern England and

are met by the local authority. He's called a reeve. Think about a sheriff or a trade official who goes there presumably to tell the Vikings, who he thinks are traders, right, merchants, to tell them where to go so that they can pay their tax before they get their trading started. And famously, those traders kill the reeve, right? They murder the king's official. And this is often looked at as the first sign of trouble.

in 793 which is four years later you get the attack at lindisfarne in northeastern britain and it's a famous raid monks are killed stuff is stolen the altar is famously splattered with blood and the god's instruments you know thrown into the dung heap according to a primary source

There is a bit of romanticism sometimes connected to what a Viking raid is like. There was a famous Brady Bunch episode, if you're old enough to remember, where one of the young members of the family was starting to romanticize the

Billy the Kid right the old western outlaw and the way the story wraps up is the father in the family finds someone whose father was actually killed by Billy the Kid an old timer who tells the young boy listen this person you're romanticizing is not worth your romanticizing right they were bad people and this wasn't exciting fun stuff this was murder right

Well, there's a similar sort of point made by historian Neil Price in The Children of Ash and Elm, where he wants us to keep our eyes on the prize when it comes to these Viking raids and not see them as a bunch of dates and locations on a map or a timeline. And he writes, quote,

Before venturing there, however, there is something else, almost a moral imperative. The cartographic Viking Age, the raids as mapped, is a useful but comfortably distant way to approach these events. A violent reality check is needed, a corrective and necessary acknowledgement of what the maze of dates and place names and labeled arrows really meant, he continues, quote.

At their most immediate, on the spot, on the day, for many the raids were the most bitter of endings. Behind every notation on our maps lay an urgent present of panic and terror, of slashing blades and sharp points, of sudden pain and open wounds, of bodies by the wayside and orphaned children, of women raped and all manner of people enslaved.

of entire family lines ending in blood, of screams and then silence where there should be lively noise, of burning buildings and ruin of economic loss, of religious convictions overturned in a moment and replaced with humiliation and rage, of roads choked with refugees as columns of smoke rose behind them, of utter ruthless brutality expressed in all its forms."

Now, if you are made homeless or turned into a refugee or even killed during one of these Viking raids, at least most of your trouble is behind you. The worst is over, maybe. Imagine being taken prisoner and held in slavery by these kinds of people. Imagine being in their total power, you know, tied up, not being able to do anything. A bunch of armed Viking raiders.

I mean, Tom Holland in his book, The Forge of Christendom, which is a great book, by the way, he quotes a Norman poet from after this period who talks about some of this activity and take this for what it's worth, although there's not much that's

unsupportable here I mean they talk about heterosexual gang rape on slaves but that's something that's attested to by eyewitnesses in other sources with the Vikings but also homosexual gang rape and urinating on these recently captured people I mean it's all part of degrading them mistreating them and maybe just you know trying to figure out a way to entertain a bunch of bored Vikings and

It's horrific. It's part of the human condition, though, especially in the pre-modern era. And it's interesting to kind of figure out why that's the case, because it shines a light on why it's so hard to stop things like these Viking assaults. We mentioned earlier that piracy was basically omnipresent in the pre-modern world, but piracy is sort of just a subcategory of raiding. And raiding has been around forever.

Well, at least since Neanderthal, man, I think I'm safe in saying. I mean, if you want to study the roots of warfare, you're going to find that the earliest historical accounts you can find and read about are...

from the middle of the story. I mean, you need to go into things like archaeology and anthropology and stuff like that to try to figure out, you know, where things like raiding starts. And raiding is probably a subcategory of war. So piracy is a subcategory of raiding. Raiding is a subcategory of war. And you need to go back in time to like

you know, what anthropologists do when they study conflict between simians that come together, right? I mean, you know, talking apes, right? That's how the roots of war go. And there's almost a Newtonian reliability in the idea that if you have tons of stuff people want, right? Tons of wealth, whatever counts for wealth, you know, at whatever time period, and you don't protect it, somebody's going to take it.

Not every society is a raiding society, but all that has to happen in your geographical neighborhood, in your historical period, is that somebody in your region needs to be a raiding society, and that's going to change everything. I truly believe...

that raiding is one of those prime movers in human history because of all the sort of the downstream effects it has, right? The Newtonian pinging for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And if you live next to a community of people that raid, you have to defend yourself.

That's the equal and opposite reaction. And you can choose defense, you could choose offense, or you could choose both. But not choosing anything is an option that will get your people wiped out, taken into slavery, absorbed, and eventually have them disappear. Some societies do it defensively, right? Some Native American societies will build these tall buildings.

sorts of abodes or in rock cliffs where they can pull up ladders if the dangerous raiding peoples nearby them show up right so we're just gonna flee and escape them in a you know native american version of a castle and my goodness one of the most obvious examples of a defensive downstream adaptation to dealing with people who want to take your stuff who live near you

are walls i mean walls conserve a lot of purposes obviously but the occams raise a reason that you have them and that you have them from the very beginning of human cities i mean jericho is one of the oldest cities in world history what is it famous for walls so walls is another one of those downstream sorts of

newtonian impacts and you see walls by the way if you go look at drawings and paintings of cities you have walls until cannons started reliably knocking them down so that's one of the adaptations that human beings do when they live near people who raid but most societies include an offensive component if the other guy has warriors

The other society has people who train with weapons and have experience using these weapons and encourage, you know, activity on the part of the people who have experience and training using weapons. Then you're going to have to have people like that.

If you want to live in a Garden of Eden, you can't have a raiding society there because they're going to force everyone else to adapt and that's going to turn everything into the sort of militaristic, counterbalancing force thing we live with today and that people have always had. Well, if you look at the societies in this Viking era, let's call them the haves and the have-nots, there are some very rich societies and it's a hell of a temptation if you want to just go take their stuff.

especially if it seems like an easy thing to do. I mean, think about the temptations that any group of Viking-type pirates would have in the modern world today. We, of course, have piracy in the modern world. International naval patrols go out there and take on these little fast boats with guys armed with AK-47s and whatnot. But it's not like the kind of piracy that you could run into in the Viking era where they're going to bring a lot of people on shore and take stuff on shore.

I mean, try to imagine, and it's impossible to imagine because of all the aspects that make the modern world the modern world, but those aspects didn't exist 100 years ago. So human history up until about 100 years ago was totally open to somebody doing, oh, I don't know, some sort of a raid on a fabulously rich area that was just beckoning people to come and take stuff. How about the area I'm from? Southern California. Yeah.

A place like Laguna Beach or some of these communities, Manhattan Beach, some of these wonderful Malibu coastal communities. Just imagine, and we'll talk a really small force of maybe five Viking ships roll into Emerald Bay or El Morro Bay in Laguna. By the time the first morning light comes up over the horizon, the five ships are there in the cove and guys are jumping out of those ships

I suppose if we're going to make a modern analogy, we'll give them, you know, AK-47s and rocket launchers. And they're going to come and they're going to rush through that community, stealing everything they can get their hands on. By the time the residents wake up, you've got screams and smoke and armed men. And before you know it, there's five guys in your room taking your stuff, stealing your wife into slavery and killing you. 200 Vikings in Laguna Beach would create absolute havoc.

and if they're gone before the sun sets again we don't have very long to respond do you now in the modern age you don't need very long to respond which is why the last hundred or so years is a bit different

in laguna beach they would have known about five viking ships approaching the coast long before they got anywhere near the coast right satellites would have found them aerial reconnaissance would have seen them somebody on a boat somewhere fishing would have you know called in something on their cell phone and then you would have scrambled air assets when you aircraft helicopters you'd be on them before they got anywhere near emerald bay right

And then, of course, you have, you know, naval units. You got them in Long Beach. You got them in San Diego. They're going to converge on that area within an hour, two hours. And it's a suicide mission for any Vikings.

but you take away those modern surveillance and response elements, those military elements. And all of a sudden you have a wildly attractive target that's super rich and that people could get in and out of before the people that would punish you for doing something like that could even arrive on the scene. Military historian Hans Delbrook calls this one of the great, and it's obvious, isn't it? One of the great, um,

that the Vikings have because by the time they strike and get out of there, I mean, it would take you quite a while to get a thousand local people together to fight Vikings. And some of the real nasty reputational aspects of the Viking warrior are because they were often fighting people that were nowhere near their equals.

I mean, if I told you we need 200 people to combat the 200 Vikings that just, you know, landed in Emerald Bay, what kind of 200 people are you going to come up with? In a lot of these communities, it might be peasants, people who sometimes fooled around with weapons. But if you need to have people fast, you get the locals. But the locals can't deal with this. They can't deal with a bunch of people fighting.

who have a religious belief, for example, that creates fearsome warriors, right? A societal element that, well, let me put it to you this way. One of my professors once said, if you want to start to understand, you know, just begin to understand any given people throughout history, look at what the gods they worship want from them, right?

Look at their idea of what the hereafter is and who gets the good seats in the hereafter and who doesn't. And that will give you an idea of what that society creates in terms of individuals. The God that these pagan and heathen version of the Vikings believe in are gods that do this kind of thing too. These are not turn the other cheek gods. These are gods that suggest that they have their

minions watching you when you're fighting and the better you fight the better your chances you're going to be at the important table in Valhalla with Odin the way you handle your weapons matters whether you flee or not matters and the more you gloriously seek out death and don't fear it the better your chances of you know having a place to sit when the music stops at either Valhalla or some of the other places you can go in the Viking and Germanic you know afterworld

You pit those up against a bunch of local peasants are quickly raised to deal with them. A bunch of Laguna beach peasants, if you can imagine, um, who believe in a heaven and a hell. And if they're good, they go to heaven. And if they're bad, they go to hell and they're not completely sure about all. I mean, it's,

It's a recipe for facing a bunch of people who are more likely to run away before you run away. And as we've said before, in a pre-modern battle, but really in any battle, the real killing starts happening once one side begins to flee or rout, right? It's a morale contest until then. And these Vikings live in a system where the societal carrots and sticks encourage fearlessness.

You want to create a real super soldier? Forget about doing what they did with the Captain America comic book character, right? Make him bigger, make him stronger, make him faster, just make him braver. And that will create the super soldier in this era. And most of the time, the armies and troops and soldiers and forces that were arrayed against them when Viking pirates and raiders showed up

were far inferior to them in these categories, which is partly how you get such a fearsome reputation. And let's recall, in these early raids that famously kick off this whole era, a lot of the opponents that are trying to stand up to these fearsome and fearless men

viking warriors are monks and i mean we're not talking shaolin priests in china doing kung fu or anything we're talking about you know the the guys who have their heads shaved with the rim of hair around the edges that uh in the famous artwork the stereotypical artwork but it's not that far from the truth are being shown trying to parry the viking war axes with crosses or

So you get an idea that it's perhaps not the stiffest competition these Viking writers have to face early on. But it's worth pointing out that the ideas of fearlessness and fearsomeness are kind of neutral in terms of what they imply. I mean, you can be fearsome and fearless defending your own family, right? It doesn't mean anything by itself. It doesn't imply aggressiveness. But there are the other elements in this culture that are so fascinating and

And that in some ways, although this may be true for many different cultures out there, but remind me of my own culture in the United States or the traditional one that we celebrate anyway in both good and bad. I mean, you can see one of these elements going on in Viking society that reminds me of the old American trope of go west, young man.

Write that line. And that would apply equally well to young Viking males, too. Right. Go make your fortune. Venture forward. Risk and get reward. Right. You're going to go out there if you're a young Viking male done with your apprenticeship and you're going to take this wonderful adventure on the ship. And it's a little like forging off on a giant grand male bonding expedition with some

threat posed and some challenges faced and some daring do established and some you know treasure looted and you come home and you can afford the wife now and you can put a down payment on the farm and you get your life started right you've made your bones there's a little bit of an element of that in this whole viking sort of culture that encourages people to go out and do something like this and then the fearsomeness and the fearlessness of

well, has a different sort of cast about it, doesn't it? If you're a monk having to try to fend off a Viking axe with your crucifix, their fearlessness and fearsomeness is a little less neutral, right? It's not a quality you want to celebrate. It's something that comes with, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle said, dreadful forewarnings.

You know, immense sheets of light, whirlwinds, dragons, and Vikings. The first years of these Viking raids are all about hitting the easy targets, these monasteries. So from about 793 all through up until the early 800s, England, Scotland, Ireland, the islands around those islands are getting hit a lot.

And we probably only know about the major raids. It's likely there were lots of little attacks. I mean, even if one Viking ship with 30 Vikings in it pulls up near the shore somewhere, that's quite a bit to have to deal with, especially if they're back in their ships in 20 minutes, right? These are devastating and very difficult to defend against raids. And part of the irony of the whole thing, if you look at it from a really wide perspective,

historical lens is that the people during this early time period that are getting hit the hardest right the the Anglo Saxons in England and the Irish for example were in their day centuries before this time period some of the great pirate raiders of their time

I mean, the Irish raided so often into what's now Scotland that the Roman name for some of these Irish, Scoti or Scoti, eventually evolved into the name for the entire region. And of course, the only reason you have Angles and Saxons that gave the name Angland, right, England, to England, is because hundreds of years before, they came over in a very similar sort of wave of Valhalla-ish names.

pantheists arriving on the shores of this island and terrorizing the locals in a very similar way

as Hans Delbruck had written about this time period, and he cast it in sort of cycles. But this is what we talked about in Thor's Angels 2, and he had said, quote, we now see a repetition of the conditions that developed in the Roman Empire after the Lymes were penetrated, end quote. In other words, the Saxon attacks against Roman Britain

you know, in the 300s and 400s are now being repeated by people from even farther north than the Saxons in the realm of the now Christianized Saxons.

the era of very easy targets is going to end in the not too distant future for the reasons we mentioned earlier about for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction there's downstream effects from all this and if you are a monastery like for example Iona right on a Scottish island and you get hit

every couple of years for years i mean in one of the attacks between 60 and 70 monks are slaughtered by the vikings your downstream effect is you're going to move a lot of your operations away from that site and recent evidence suggests that the site was never abandoned like we used to think but you still saw a lot of people say uh the best way for us to respond to this is to leave

by about the early 800s, you can see the targets that the Vikings have been hitting hardening.

which necessitates a higher level of coordination and larger attacks from the Vikings to deal with the fact that their targets are now expecting them. And this is why partly the 800s are going to be this period where the scale and the intensity and the amplitude of these attacks explodes in size. And this is when the

You know, the stock market that measures piracy shoots up to all time highs and the point where piracy on a mass level can actually be civilizationally threatening.

Now, we should point out that some of these areas that had sort of been too strong for the Vikings to want to mess with, right? They're looking for easy targets. They're not looking for Charlemagne's defenses in, you know, the Frankish Empire. But when Charlemagne dies, as we've mentioned, and his son takes over, then his son has the famous problems with his sons and the Carolingian Empire starts, uh,

sort of devolving into civil war and disintegration and all this they have bigger fish to fry than coastal defenses right they're fighting huge wars for the future of the empire which leaves things to sort of fray at the edges and that's just the kind of

sort of a situation that the Scandinavian raiders always took advantage of. This is why some of the historians often think that there weren't Viking traders, you know, merchants and raiders. They were the same thing.

Historian Max Adams in his book, The Viking Wars, points out that if you went to one of these Viking raiders and tried to make the distinction with them between traders and raiders, they might be baffled by the whole thing. Are you a trader or a raider? Yes. Regardless, what it means is if you've got lots of these Scandinavians in all the trading centers in the entire region, you are getting first class traders

you know, information on the ground. We might as well think of a lot of these traders slash raiders as intelligence operatives, right? Or if we're going to stick with sort of the organized crime kind of motif here, think about these guys as inside moles in, you know, the business that the mob wants to take over, feeding them information like when's the night watchman not around? You know, where do they keep the loot? Is the cash register open? Things like that.

But they certainly get the word when the Frankish Empire begins to be undermined after Charlemagne's death. I mean, to give us an idea, and remember, there is stuff going on, almost certainly. You know, you can infer things without knowing things. There's almost certainly raiding going on at beneath the level that gets noticed in the sources. But listen to a standard timeline of Viking activities in the West up to this time, right? So we'll catch us up on what's going on. And I took this

timeline from the book Vikings an encyclopedia of conflict invasions and raids by Tristan Mueller Vollmer and Kirsten Wolfe and so here's where we go from like the establishments of these trading nodes to about the death of Charlemagne and I'm not going to follow or quote the timeline verbatim because frankly I can't pronounce some of the names of the places where these Vikings hit

It's going to be in this early period, the area around Ireland and the British Isles that are the hardest hit areas and arguably the hardest hit during the entire Viking Age.

But I won't follow the timeline verbatim. I was trying to get a sense of the time, though, in how long something takes and what a person alive during the time period might have noticed. And understanding, as we said, that there's going to be a lot of Viking raids that are too small to have been recorded that would have been a part of these people's relationships.

rumor mills and life and sort of you know what do you hear is going on elsewhere kind of information that we don't get today just going from the ones that were big enough to make it into the chronology look at what a person who was let's just say eight years old is that about when memories stick i think that's arguable but let's just say eight for the sake of argument let's say you're an anglo-saxon kid we'll call you ethel dan

And you get apprenticed out to the court of Charlemagne, not an impossible thing to have happen. I put you there so that you'll be able to be one of the few people in this time period that's actually privy to the news, might have heard of all these things, might be getting reports.

And if you're eight years old in 789 and Ethel Dan is in Charlemagne's court, he will certainly hear of that first incident we mentioned earlier. The famous arrival on the shores in England where the Danish men show up. The Reeve, you know, the sheriff, the...

tax official whatever he was goes down to talk to them for a typical merchant agreement and they kill him right so there you go there's your famous kickoff of the viking era and old ethel dan is young he's eight

Now it's four years later, 793, when you have Lindisfarne famously, right? And that's the one that shocks everybody that is the traditional kickoff date for the Viking Age. And Ætheldan here would have gone from 8 in 789 to 12 in 793. So all those Viking raids that were flying under the radar are probably known about, but so four years in this guy's life. That's how long between raids. That's his reality.

According to the timeline, you have more raids in multiple places in the British Isles and Ireland, 794, 795. So while Etheldan is 12, 13, 14, these occasional raids, these places being hit here and there is part of his reality. There seems to be a little bit of a break on the big timeline. And then in 798, 795.

the Vikings raid the coast of Ireland. So Atheldan would be 17 years old when that happens. The very next year, he'll be 18 years old when the Vikings launch a raid large enough to make it into the history books in southern France and Aquitaine.

When he is 19 years old, Charlemagne in 800 will strengthen the defenses, the anti-piracy defenses, the fleet, the coastal watch, all that kind of stuff, right? So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Charlemagne hardens the Vikings' targets.

now of course this can do a number of things can't it the hope is is that it deters the vikings from raiding at all but if the vikings are already addicted to what they're raiding and can get the numbers together well what you're really asking for is a more serious effort if 20 40 60 vikings can no longer get the job done maybe 500 600 2000 vikings can more on that in a minute

When Etheldan is 21 years old, the monastery at Iona in northern Scotland will be raided a second time. Three years later, when he's 24 years old,

in 806 ADCE Iona will be raided a third time and between 60 and 70 monks will be slaughtered by the Vikings so these are all things that Etheldan in his living memory would have known about by the time he's 24 and the next year 25 there are more raids on the Irish coast

This about brings us up to speed to where we were when we started this story, and Charlemagne is defeating the Saxons and finding himself the new next-door neighbor to at least some of the people called the Danes.

And we have to be so careful here. And boy, does it get confusing because the modern day peoples, the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Danes from modern day nation states are not the same people that are sometimes mentioned throughout different sources, including relatively recent ones, including modern ones that people will start calling Swedes and Danes and Norwegians when they mean peoples who live in chieftainships.

The whole question of kings here can get extremely confusing. There was a wonderful footnote attached to my copy of the Adam of Braman primary source materials that was talking about this. And this is the way they put it when they were talking about kings. And they would often use the name kings in quotation marks. And it said, quote, On the use of the expression Danish kings, often so-called,

The early rulers of the Scandinavian countries were, like the Indian chiefs, they mean Native American chiefs, of our early days, often called kings by their contemporaries in more advanced cultures. Some of these, in quotation marks, kings, were merely rulers of a part of the country, struggling for primacy with other, in quotation marks, kings of Denmark.

A genealogical table in this period would be marked by gaps and uncertainties, end quote. Sigurdsson suggests that it's pretty well understood that both the Swedes and the Danes had something akin to a royal family, but that kingship was something that was sort of

if not elected, then appointed by a group of also powerful chieftains or warlords, and they could choose other people from other branches of the, I mean, it's very confusing. But the reason it matters is because the first, if not the first, maybe one of the first of these Scandinavian kings whose name makes it into the history books is this guy that Charlemagne runs into when he conquers the Saxons.

This guy who for five minutes looks like he's going to fight a war against Charlemagne. And the record shows that that's a suicidal thing to do. Charlemagne beat everybody. He came from a time period in Frankish history where they were just badasses and they beat everybody, which is why it's so shocking. It's like Mike Tyson when he eventually loses. It's so shocking when Charlemagne goes away and then all of a sudden this badassery collapses.

But for five minutes, there's this challenge where this king of the Danes, in air quotes, a guy named, you'll see it a bunch of different ways, Godfried, Godfried, Godfried. He will sort of puff up his chest, as Einhardt says, one of the primary sources, and think he can compete with Charlemagne. This is the guy that we mentioned earlier,

had strengthened the old ramparts and walled defenses of Denmark, right? The Dane work and anyone who could get that kind of labor force together and the money and resources required to do a centralized task like that is seen by modern historians as an example of the beginning of the process of

centralization right in a place like denmark it's a spreading disease if you're looking at this from an old-fashioned viking viewpoint who worships the norse gods and believes that you know all vikings are equal there's a famous story of a viking ship pulling up to a port once and the

guardian at the port saying something to the effect of you know who is your leader and the voice coming back yelling we have no leader we are all equal and that's sort of an age-old viking it's a trope but at the same time it's part of their culture mentioned by contemporaries by the way

And yet that's going against the tenor of the times, right? The trends, what's happening in places like the Carolingian Empire. Now that's the trend that's taking over, the one that's the hierarchical society with a king at the top.

you know, in a pyramid position in the state with a powerful church and a hierarchy of classes and a Christian religion. And that's spreading and it's been spreading northwards for generations. And that's what Thor's Angels about. And as we said, we've stumbled back into the middle of a process here. And this process

trend is continuing northward norway and sweden are still farther north from here the first of these scandinavian places to feel the real pressure of living next door to a place that is both centralized and christianized are the danes

And the process that's going on with this guy, Godefried, is he's one of these early Danish kings where it seems like, you know, the process of turning from a place with hundreds of chiefdoms into just a few or maybe even one king is now underway. And it makes them more dangerous to a person like Charlemagne. The Franks love, by the way, to meddle in Danish and Viking leadership contests.

and they like to have a strong leader in these places when that leader's a friend of theirs and they like to instead meddle and create chaos and disharmony and all kinds of things if the leadership is not prone to like them. You can see how dangerous, though, these powerful leaders

viking era kings might be when gottafrid at one point brings an army to negotiate with charlemagne so they have armies facing off and then in 810 famously raids the frisian coast friesland is where um it's mostly the netherland coast today but there's a little bit of germany too and it's right by the viking danish territories but he allegedly and take this number for what it's worth um

has a fleet of 200 Viking ships attack the coast and,

using Roger Collins's conservative way of estimating how many Vikings per ship, because we don't know how big each of these ships were, probably a mix. He estimates 30 is a good conservative number. So if you really had 200 ships, then that's going to be about 6,000 Vikings. And the primary sources at the time period say that these Vikings absolutely scoured the coastline of Frisia, which is Carolingian territory.

So this is asking for war against Charlemagne, isn't it? And this face-off is about to happen. And then all of a sudden, this powerful, sort of unifying, maybe early Viking-era Danish king, Godefrid, gets shanked in the back or something like that by one of his bodyguards, allegedly.

And there's a, you know, a little JFK assassination type speculation going on here about exactly who might be responsible for that. But wouldn't that just be like a Charlemagnian move? Why do I have to fight you when if I just kill you, your relatives will fight over the kingship and dissolve into those same Viking band of, you know, feuding barbarians you always were?

Charlemagne should know because you only have to go back a few generations in his family and they're not that different in the life of Charlemagne the primary source account by Einhard from Charlemagne's era wrote about this this is his entry into the affair we just talked about and he writes quote

the last of these wars was the one declared against the northmen called danes they began their career as pirates but afterwards took to laying waste the coast of gaul and germany with their large fleet

Their king, Godfred, was so puffed up with vain aspirations that he counted on gaining empire over all Germany and looked upon Saxony and Frisia as his provinces. He had already subdued his neighbors, the Abodratai, and made them tributary, and boasted that he would shortly appear with a great army before Aachen, where the king held his court.

Some faith was put in his words, empty as they sound, and it's supposed that he would have attempted something of the sort. If he had not been prevented by a premature death, he was murdered by one of his own bodyguard, and so ended at once his life and the war that he had begun."

Now, if the shoe were on the other foot when it came to an assassination, if that's what this was, if the so-called, in quotation marks, king of the Danes here, Godefrid, had assassinated Charlemagne, you would have seen one of the advantages of one of these centralized hierarchical sorts of societies. You would probably have a stable transfer of power. Now, this is not guaranteed at all.

But you probably would have. I mean, Charlemagne had already sort of set his son Louis up for this gig. The church would have supported it. You have this internal sort of system designed for a peaceful transfer of power. You don't always get it, but it's designed to provide that.

That's not how it is in Viking-era Scandinavia. In fact, it's almost a recipe for the opposite sort of result. So when this Danish king, Godefrid, is done away with,

The place just collapses for a while. Roger Collins has sort of a rundown of how unstable these conflicts between all of these kings was in Denmark after Goddiford died. And he points out that all of the sons of Goddiford were called kings.

So this is like a civil war amongst kings. But listen to how often they're, you know, fighting amongst each other as opposed to what, you know, Charlemagne in a centralized sort of organized state is doing. Collins writes, quote,

It has been questioned whether a single kingdom could have existed in Denmark at this time, but the Frankish chronicles do not refer to rival territorial kingdoms in Jutland and the islands, but rather to civil wars between members of an extended royal dynasty.

Such conflicts are recorded in 812, 813, 814, 817, 819, 823, 827, 828, 850, and 854, and there may have been others, end quote. So if Charlemagne was figuring, again, all conjecture here, that by knocking off this early centralizing figure, things would go back to

sort of retributional, chaotic, barbarian-style violence. Turns out he was right again. But this is sort of built into the system here. It's got its pros and it's got its cons. One of the things it does play into, though, is the whole raiding question because, as we had mentioned earlier, the Vikings have been called a consumption society.

What's really going on here is, you know, if you were to put it into modern terms, these people who gain power, leadership type roles, you know, petty rulerships. These are people who build up large followings of powerful supporters. They're building up posses and they're doing it over the course of their careers.

The problem with the Scandinavian system is that when these people die, their posse just dissolves. It doesn't get transferred to their kid for a stable transfer of power. It just starts over.

which leads to a need to find stuff to give these people because that's why they're your posse generally, right? There's a trickle-down economic effect here that plays into the whole dynamic for why this society can get so addicted to raiding because it becomes addicted to the stuff because the stuff is required to keep your posse happy. And if you don't have a posse,

Well, then you're probably in somebody else's posse in his history, the Viking Wars. Historian Max Adams writes about this perverse, interesting sort of, you know, government by posse. And these posses even have a name. I mean, if you're a fan of the Vikings, you've heard of the Herdmen or the House Carls. That's just a fancy Scandinavian way of saying my boys. Max Adams writes, quote,

By the turn of the 9th century, a network of elite clientele with all its benefits for stabilizing kingship was deeply embedded in the Christian kingdoms.

In the pre-Christian geographically disparate lands of Scandinavia, the state was the king. With his death, it collapsed. Networks of affiliation, loyalty, gift exchange, and obligation built up during his reign were reset to zero. Each new king had to reinvent his kingdom."

historian neil price had a really interesting line that stayed with me too that's also part of this dynamic that sort of addicts these societies to the rating and that's that from the standpoint of a non-powerful person right not not one of these people striving to be a petty king or chieftain or what have you just an average you know scandinavian joe i was going to say but it'd be more like a scandinavian life or something um

Price says one successful raid, if you got lucky, could change your life forever. I mean, that's the equivalent of striking it rich.

the temptation for young men, especially from the poorer communities, must have been intense, right? Not only are you going to get honor, make something of yourself, show off to the Valkyries your prowess to get you a better seat with Odin eventually, but you're going to come back a made man and maybe even, you know, hit the jackpot. I mean, it's something that would attract young enterprising people from all over the world, right? That's part of your dynamic, right?

And truthfully, dynamic is the right word because you can see the same dynamic in a lot of warrior societies that practice raiding. They'll have war leaders or war chiefs or people who become known for being very good at organizing raids, right? They get you back safely. They

They are successful in getting lots of loot. And these people then become the people sought out for these things. And you develop sort of a power base. And Neil Price in The Children of Ash and Elm was talking about what a self-reinforcing prophecy this sort of is.

in the sense that if you're good at this and you lead some successful raids and then decide to take your winnings and reinvest it in the enterprise right by bigger ships more ships acquire a larger entourage with which to carry out these sorts of attacks you can sort of parlay your winnings into sort of a war chief status or something like one of the famous sea kings as they're called

These are people, by the way, and I believe that dozens have been identified that actually are more like your pirates from the 16th and 17th centuries in the Caribbean. People with very small land holdings, maybe an island or a cove or something like that. But they have ships and they have men, right? They've got their herdmen, their housecarls, their ancient Germanic version of a warrior brotherhood, whatever you want to label it.

And the two of those things put together, warriors and ships in this time period, that might be all you need to be a viable economic sort of entity. Now, throughout the course of Charlemagne's lifetime, and as we said several times already, and there's nothing confusing about that, he dies in 814. Up until the end of his lifetime, this Viking problem was at the nuisance level of trouble.

And had there been a continuation of, you know, by 814, you've had almost a century of really powerful Frankish leadership. Had that continued, I don't think you would have had the Viking Age the way you had it. I think you'd have had to have been a history nerd focusing on early medieval studies to have even really noticed the blip in piracy caused by the Viking era if what we've talked about to this point is all there were.

But it's what happens to Charlemagne's empire that opens up the door to something at a much higher level of threat and impact to anything that it's seen, you know, up to this point with monasteries and small towns and things like that, the occasional extra intense attack.

But as we mentioned, if you look at a timeline, there are going to be a period after the initial first 20 years where it seems like things calm down a little bit. But it's only sort of by comparison, right? Compared to the big spike initially, it got quiet again, but it's not going to get as quiet as it was before the Viking Age kicked off. It's going to be, though, in about 830 when things get very serious again, 840, 850, 860. It's

shocking what happens but that's all precipitated by other shocking things that happen in the various places that are going to be victimized by these vikings charlemagne's empire falls apart the wheels completely come off in the next ruler's reign

And he gets a lot of flack for this. It's hard to know now how much he deserves it, because after all, Louis the Pious, as he'll be known, Charlemagne's only legitimate surviving son when he takes over. Louis the Pious has a very different job than his predecessors who had to conquer a place. He has to rule it.

There's a lot of different entities that make up this Frankish empire that don't want to be in this Frankish empire, and Lewis has to deal with them. He also has to deal with a bunch of male relatives, most importantly his sons, who do not like his plan for the inheritance.

A little bit about Louis the Pious now because he's very important, but you wouldn't think inheritance should matter right away after Charlemagne dies. But famously, Louis the Pious has like a near-death experience. A bunch of people are killed in an accident. He's almost killed too, which makes him think right away famously, I better get this inheritance thing in order just in case. So he divides the empire amongst his sons, which is typical Frankish practice.

um unlike typical frankish practice though he's not dividing the family farm here he's dividing a full-blown giant empire the likes of which no one has had certainly no one in frankish history so it's a little bit different so he mandates that even though the division will be the same you still have to have the emperor and it's going to be this son and you all have to give you know your

allegiance to the emperor none of the sons end up liking this and they will cause a lifetime's worth of problems for their father over it the trouble will begin like four years after he takes over and will dog him the rest of his life he will be involved in three civil wars he will be deposed from the throne and returned to the throne multiple times

This is not exactly conducive to stability. And when stability is required to do things like, you know, make sure the coastline is defended from pirate attacks and all this kinds of stuff where you can see how if you're fighting for your existence, right, if it's an existential threat you face as the emperor of the Franks, piracy is going to fall on the triage scale of importance quite a bit. And that's exactly what happens.

In his book, Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones sort of describes a little bit about, you know, what the Carolingian Empire descends into. And he writes, quote, "...between 830 and 840, a series of three major rebellions broke out in which Louis's sons banded together in various combinations to try to improve their portions of the imperial inheritance."

In keeping with Carolingian custom, he writes, many cruel, murderous, and disgraceful deeds were perpetrated, including further, further blindings, drownings, and exilings, accusations of witchcraft and adultery leveled against Lewis's wife and empress, Judith, and a general commitment to naked self-advancement.

In June 833, he writes, at a meeting in Rothfield in the Alsace, Lewis was confronted by his eldest son Lothar, who had proven himself an attentive student of Carolingian family history and persuaded Pope Gregory IV to back him as supreme ruler.

Lothar's play for power spooked Lewis's supporters and almost to a man they abandoned him for his eldest son, an act of collective spinelessness that earned the meeting the nickname the Field of Lies, end quote. The Field of Lies, though, would not end Lewis's career. He would get the throne back, basically forgive the children.

Jones says, and this would be his opinion, but he says that like Alexander the Great before him, Charlemagne had built an empire that quickly proved itself possible only as an extension of one man's political self. Well, this echoes what German historian Hans Stahlbrock had written 100 years ago when he said, quote, Charlemagne's empire had no inner unity. It was the creation of the dynasty, the Arnulf family, end quote.

So if it devolved into a family squabble, I suppose that's somewhat understandable. But Charles Oman pointed out also over 100 years ago that the various sons of Louis were being also used by the component parts, people who represented parts of the empire like the Lombards who didn't want to be a part of the empire. So you use Louis's son as a way to, you know, help break up

or help secure a better portion of the empire for yourself, or whatever it might be. What this means, though, is that every piece of the empire and a bunch of the empires surrounding peoples become like pieces on the chessboard for all these different players in these civil wars to use. The Slavic peoples, for example, will become one of these, you know, pieces on the chessboard, and so will the Danes.

in the same way that the Carolingians had meddled in Danish politics now for a long time, trying to, you know, see if they could get the kind of ruler that they wanted on the Danish throne. Well, now turnabout's fair play and using one of Lewis's sons or having one of Lewis's sons use them, depends on your point of view, they're able to throw their hat in the ring and try to influence a little bit about who the ruler of the...

previously so intimidating and dangerous Frankish Empire is going to be. And that's why you get this next level of the Viking Age when you do, because the former apex predator in the geopolitical environment, right, this Frankish state was so dangerous just, you know, what, a couple decades before when Charlemagne was destroying the Saxons and the Danes felt like they had a gun to their head and now all of a sudden the tables are turned by the 830s?

And if you look at your timeline, the 830s are when the attacks get larger and more sustained. And don't just involve a bunch of Norwegians and sea kings and war chiefs, but start to involve much larger entities like the one Gottfried or Goddefried launched in 810 against the coast of Friesland, right? Big, big endeavors.

unusual before this time period much more usual as we move into it though and if you start to ask why again the primary sources are going to let you down because they're going to simply suggest that these are just bad people motivated by bad things or maybe they'll say that this is god's punishment for the sin of the victims but they generally aren't looking at this from the perspective of

of the Viking attackers themselves. And if they are, they're just going to the most base elements, right? They want loot, they want stuff, they want slaves, as opposed to any sort of larger perspective that might be involved here. But there are ways you can view it from other perspectives and a bunch of histories. Well, ever since I've been around, certainly have, and we quoted some from 100 years ago that gave this perspective from the point of view of the Danes and how they might have felt threatened by the

the Carolingian expansion. But this outbreak of new violence on a higher level and more amplified scale can also be viewed as a sort of a response to a, you know, F around and find out kind of situation. I mean, when Louis the Pious gets on the throne, he continues a lot of the things that his father was doing with the Danes, right? He's pushing his own claimant to Danish kingship, right? The preferred Frankish candidate.

One of these very early Danish names, by the way, to emerge from the mists and the fog of prehistory. A guy named Harald Clack. And Harald is one of those, you know, it's one of the favorite Viking names. You'll run into 10 million Haralds in Viking history. H-A-R-A-L-D. And Harald Clack is this guy who's famous because he becomes famous.

I don't know if you can call him the lapdog of the Carolingian ruler, but he's certainly the one that will do whatever it takes to have the backing of somebody who can help him get an advantage over his enemies.

you know, competitors back in Denmark. And in the late eight twenties, Harold Clark with hundreds of his followers will ostentatiously convert to Christianity right now. He's got something more in common with his benefactor, Louis the pious. And then he's going to eventually go back there and wrestle for the throne of Denmark.

Well, once again, as we had said, there's going to be a lot of people in Denmark that don't look at the idea of having a ruler coming in and maybe looking to convert them from their traditional religious beliefs, perhaps so positively at the same time, by the way, that, uh,

Louis the Pious is converting the guy he wants to be the king of this country next door. He's also sending out missionaries and evangelists, right? These are the, we had said earlier, the sort of a Marvel superhero kind of figure who are going to go into the lion's den, you know, safe comparatively from the damage that these, you know, heathen men can do and bravely convert them. And remember converting them is an interesting thing. If you're looking at this from Louis's perspective, right?

Because from one perspective, he is a devout believer. This is his worldview. It's like science to him. And the idea that he could bring all these people to God is going to, you know, is going to be something God is going to be pleased with. That is a good thing. You can go to your grave feeling like you accomplished good deeds. At the same time, it's been proven, including by the Franks themselves, that the

you know, preferred way to defang these warrior God worshiping barbarians is to make them Christians. So there's a geopolitical advantage here. If you can make these people Christians, you can pacify them and then you can get their country, you know, on the road to modernity. We'll put a King in there, set up a hierarchical system. The church will be there to start writing stuff down for you and you'll become a valued, trusted, and, um,

answerable to authority member of the international community there you go legitimate

The point is, is that when the 830s happen, there's a way to look at this as kind of the equivalent of blowback is with the way we would describe it in a CIA, you know, failed operation when it's taken, you know, over the long haul, right? You try to instill your own ruler and boom, all of a sudden, you know, you've made enemies of the people. Well, it's possible Louis the Pious messing in Danish politics, F around and he found out and the 830s was, you know, his wake up call.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gets dates wrong during this period, so it can become confusing. And it actually makes a lot more sense when you read the corrected dates by historians. They're only off by a couple of years, but it puts everything in the right context because what happens is you start to see a time when, you know, attacks are here and there and then all of a sudden get stepped up in multiple places at the same time, which makes one a little suspicious about, you know, why all of a sudden,

And one of the places that's going to get hit early on famously is going to be one of these places that is never hit. And there's a lot of reasons you wouldn't want to hit it if you were a Viking, including the idea that this is like the best place in Northern Europe if you want to sell stuff.

or you want to fence those slaves you just took or something like that you want to go to dorstad to do that it's in northern europe it's a frankish trading post it is big it is wealthy and nobody touches it normally until 8 34 when all of a sudden somebody does

The annals of St. Burton are kind of like the Frankish Empire's Anglo-Saxon chronicle for this period. All these chronicles, I mean, there's nothing dramatic about them. They're very bare bones. And there's no eyewitness accounts of either the point of view of the raiders or the point of view of the raiders' victims for any of these Viking raids. So it's all a little bare bones. But let's remember that the Viking era is not about

particularly nasty raids it's much more about the quantity of them and when you read sort of a rundown of like 20 years of viking raids it makes your head spin how many places are being hit and sometimes over and over again over what period of time it's a quantity versus quality kind of a phenomenon and in the annals of saint burton for the year 834 it just happens to mention this quote

Meanwhile, a fleet of Danes came to Frisia and laid waste a part of it. From there, they came by way of Utrecht to the emporium called Dorstad. This is a market town like Berka, by the way. Dorstad. And destroyed everything. They slaughtered some people, took others away captive, and burned the surrounding region. End quote. Dorstad is...

For this second Viking phase, what Lindisfarne famously is for the first, one of these moments that just sort of announces in hindsight that everything's about to be taken up a notch. And in The Children of Ash and Elm, historian Neil Price says this, quote,

In the year 834, Dorstad, the wealthy emporium at the Fork of the Rhine, about 100 kilometers from the Dutch coast, was attacked and burnt, apparently by a force from Denmark. It was an astonishing move. This was no monastery or isolated community, but one of the most important places in the trading networks of Northern Europe.

This would be like physically assaulting one of today's great financial hubs. The Vikings slaughtered at will and took shiploads of slaves. The surrounding region was devastated. The same was to happen every single summer for the next four years in the face of ineffectual Frankish responses that included failed peace negotiations.

The Vikings seem to have played a careful hand, combining feigned diplomacy supported by the raiding that they never had any intention of renouncing. End quote. Like tribal raiding societies everywhere, there's a lot of plausible deniability built in here. These rulers can...

They use the fact that they don't control everybody with an iron fist to sort of fob off responsibility for this stuff. Sometimes you saw it in the Native American situation, which is, of course, my favorite thing to compare things to. You saw it all the time. The U.S. or Mexico or Spain would go to some ruler and say, I thought we had a deal. Nobody was going to raid anybody. And they'd say, well, I don't control those people.

And some of these histories refer to elements in the Danish hierarchy as hawks and doves and the king sort of caught in the middle trying to, you know, keep everybody happy. But the way you can tell that this probably isn't just random is all of a sudden at this time period, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, which has been silent about Viking attacks for like half a lifetime, starts cranking it up again.

A lot of historians wonder why that is. Is it hiding the fact that those raids have been going on all the time, but the official chronicle of the House of Wessex doesn't want that told? I mean, there's a lot of theories. I'm certainly one of those people that thinks attacks were still happening just at a lower level.

But why you would all of a sudden, after decades of not saying anything, start saying things again is an interesting question. You know, if we take that made up figure that we had of that kid who was eight years old when the Vikings first showed up in Britain, right? What do we call him? Ethel Dan. Well, if Ethel Dan is eight in 789, by the time the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle starts mentioning heathen men again, he's in his early 50s. Should he live that long?

And as I said, the Chronicle gets the dates a little wrong by a couple of years because Dorstead happens first. But it's like the next year, all of a sudden, that now we have Vikings in England again. And they're not in some out-of-the-way monastery on the edge of, you know, the continent. They're close by the centers of power. And they're Danes, apparently, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, quote.

It says 832 here. I believe the right year is 835, which would make it the year after Dorstad was hit. And the Chronicle says, quote, This year, heathen men overran the Isle of Sheppey. End quote.

now that doesn't sound like such a big deal but the fact that all of a sudden it's talking about heathen men again after all these these years of not saying anything should make your ears prick up and then when you take a look at the satellite view of the island of shepi today and it might be subtly different but this is a 30 mile island just off the coast or really in like a river estuary it's 40 miles from london which is an important center even back in this time period

It looks, even to the untrained eye today, like a base for pirates, doesn't it?

Good site for it. Now, the Chronicle just calls them heathen men, so we don't know who they are, except the very next year, according to the Chronicle, a big battle is fought. Big in early medieval terms is a relative concept, by the way. You could have 2,000 guys on each. You could have, let's put it this way, you could have a bad, disappointing crowd for a community college football game, and that might be a decent-sized early medieval battle in some places, but

but the most powerful king in britain and they had several usually a guy named egbert will face down a force of danes the very year after the island of shepi is overrun so we can assume maybe it's the same group of people and the chronicle says quote

This year fought King Egbert with 35 pirates, that means 35 pirate ships, at Sharmouth, where a great slaughter was made and the Danes remained masters of the field. End quote. That line that the Danes remained masters of the field should be paid attention to. Maybe that's a good way to put it.

Because now you're not talking about a bunch of, let's just say, Norwegian raiders, you know, attacking some island off the north Scottish coast or something and then running away before, you know, the group of townspeople gets together with farm implements to drive them out. You're talking about a group of people that was attacked by the most powerful king in the British Isles with some sort of military force and beat him.

The very next year, according to the Chronicle, a group of unnamed Vikings, but then they named them Danes later, were

has a pretty good sense of the political feel for britain because they apparently land near modern day or in modern day wales the welsh are recently conquered and sometimes not conquered and not happy with these saxon kings in britain and the vikings decide to work with them to maybe help overthrow their overlords and the chronicle says quote

This year came a great naval armament into West Wales, they mean the Vikings, where they were joined by the people, they mean the Welsh, who commenced war against Egbert, the West Saxon king. When he heard this, he proceeded with his army against them and fought with them at Hengistyn, where he put to flight both the Welsh and the Danes, end quote. By the way, I don't know if that

mention in the anglo-saxon chronicle would really mean it was vikings and welshmen it might be vikings and cornishmen i'm not sure so no mention of these people for half a human lifetime and all of a sudden they're back and get multiple mentions multiple years in a row right at the same time dorastad's being hit we've entered into a new phase in this viking era

And in trying to talk about this era and organize it in a way that sort of makes sense and seems to correspond to something that can be visualized,

I realize that this really isn't military history in any real sense of the word, right? Having talked about lots of wars and battles and there's a certain sort of feel and style and approach. And that's not what this is. When you read the accounts of what's to come, this looks like a crime blotter from the

a local police force. I mean, that's what this looks like. These look like if you opened up the, you know, commander's log of the history of the 12th precinct over the last 10 years, and these would be the big notable crimes. But they all read, you know, woman and dog knocked over, purse stolen. And I mean, they all sound like entries into the police blotter. And the interesting thing about it is when you think about

The damage here, unlike, you know, normal military history where wars sort of have consequences and violence is sort of driven towards some eventual political outcome, right? Remember your Clausewitz. That's the whole goal. But that's not what this is at all. This is not only about stealing stuff, but oftentimes these raiders will come into places and refuse to leave. They will terrorize the locals until they're paid off.

This is crime. This is organized crime. And the thing about crime, and it compares very well to this piracy thing that we talked about earlier, is that even in the nicest neighborhoods in the world, you have crime. It's always a question of what level of crime, right? What is your level of insecurity? And that's usually based on what are the chances that you're going to become a victim.

And what becomes apparent reading the equivalent of the geopolitical historical celestial crime blotter here is during the middle 800s to the late 800s, your chances of becoming a victim in the area of the world that has Viking skyrockets. And that creates a sense of insecurity there.

And you can see it in the collapse of some of the local trade routes that will result from the danger of simply trying to ply your trade in an era with the Ashmen. I love that term. That's what Adam of Bremen, who's a famous chronicler from the era, said that the Germans called the Viking, the Nordic peoples, the Ashmen. Probably why Neil Price calls his book The Children of Ash and Elm, right? It's a great term.

So rather than go in order, what I'd like to do is just sort of give a general sense of the police blotter type activity going on in the 800s in the West. Because the 900s are going to be, yet again, a different phase with sort of a different, you know, feel to it. But in the 800s, you're going to go from crime to a lack of enforcement, which encourages even more audacious crime.

And then the traditional Newtonian for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, reaction to the crime, which may indeed make everything even worse. It's not hard to find one of these early equivalents of a police blotter from this era to see the rundown of various attacks and incidents involving crime.

you know, Viking raiders during the Scandinavian age. The problem is trying to figure out which one to use and how much to quote, because you obviously can't run down every incident that made the record books for the 300-year-long Viking age, right? And in fact, even when you read these rundowns, you have to know that incidents that were too small to be mentioned in the chronicles are still happening all the time. But how about 19...

The Age of Faith by Will Durant. And a lot of these old history books are outdated in a lot of respects, but this is the kind of information that isn't

And he does a good job compressing it into a short space. It's just a tiny little slice of the police blotter from the equivalent of one early medieval police precinct. He's not talking about Germany, for example, or areas like that. Just one little area during one little slice and ignoring all of the stuff that's too small to even be noticed. And he writes about this. And by the way, he talks about the death of Louis the Pious, which happens frequently.

in 840 adce and if you thought it was bad during louis the pious's reign in terms of the carolingian state disintegrating it gets worse after he dies and so do the viking raids and durant writing in 1950 giving you a tiny little slice of you know how bad the neighborhood has become says this quote

After the death of Louis the Pious, these raids became great expeditions, with fleets of over a hundred vessels, fully manned with oarsmen slash warriors.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, France endured 47 Norse attacks. In 840, the raiders sacked Rouen, beginning a series of assaults upon Normandy. In 843, they entered another French city, he says. I'm not going to try to pronounce some of these names.

and slew the bishop at his altar in eight forty four they sailed up a particular river to toulouse in eight forty five they mounted the seine to paris but spared the city on receiving a tribute of seven thousand pounds of silver

In 846, while the Saracens were attacking Rome, he says, the Northmen conquered Frisia, burned Dortrecht, and sacked Limoges. In 847, they besieged Bordeaux, but were repulsed. In 848, they tried again, captured it, plundered it, massacred its population, and burned it to the ground. In the following years, they dealt a like fate to, and he mentions six more French cities,

We may surmise, he writes, something of the terror by noting that the city of Tours was pillaged in 853, 856, 862, 872, 886, 903, and 919. Paris, he says, was pillaged in 856 and again in 861 and burned in 865, end quote.

Now, as head-spinning as all that sounds, let's recall that Durant is basically talking about part of the Viking Age and all those attacks he runs down, and only one limited area affected by the Viking Era. So you'd have to do the equivalent of adding up all the logbooks of all the regions touched in the Viking Age together, right, for 300 years to get a full accounting of what's going on here.

And I was trying to think about how to even talk about it. And it occurred to me somewhere along the line that the reason you can't is because it's both...

decentralized and centralized so it'd be like the equivalent of trying to talk about crime and and you have to talk about street crime done at the individual level with a person robbing another person but at the same time you'd also have to include organized crime with you know the mob running something you know at a higher level because it's all going on at once right but some of it's driven and purposeful another is just sort of random so the viking

age lines up similarly and i should warn you now this is the part of the dan carlin version of this story this is what i had to sort of try to internalize to come up with a way to talk about it but there's multiple levels of activity going on here so start at the top one and the one that's easiest to catalog the the viking age equivalent of the mob being involved in some level of crime

Some of these Viking attacks are closer to war than they are to piracy. Take, for example, in 845 ADCE, a particularly tough year to be on the receiving end of Viking raids. The Vikings hit both Hamburg and Paris.

Now, let's not confuse the early medieval towns that these places were with anything like the major cities they are today. Nonetheless, one doesn't expect pirates to be giving places like that much trouble. But these are probably more than pirates, especially in the case of Hamburg. Most of the chronicler's

associate that with something a purposeful state to state type activity like I said closer to war where maybe some of the Danish kings are organizing attacks on the Franks so that's not really the kind of piracy that you're seeing in other places

But it makes it tough to talk about because if that's all that was going on, you could say, you know, that this is a war between the Danes and the Franks. But it's not all that's going on. There's also some other levels. So let's look at the mid-level. The mid-level is something I think a Marxist would probably say involves the people that own the means of production, right?

In this case, imagine some very wealthy Scandinavian men who've over time managed to get their hands on a couple of ships, right, invested in sailing and

and oars and powerful long ships. And every year they have expeditions, right? It's sort of like a limited liability company as far as they're concerned, right? Olofsson, Ericsson, Hackinson, and Ragnar, right? Sign up for us every year reliably. We need a crew. If you're bored, we go someplace every year. This year it's Paris. Next year it's Hamburg.

And everybody gets a share, right? So these things become like business ventures, right? These are entrepreneurs and you can sign up if you want to. And then there's the lower level. Again, compare this maybe to the one-on-one street crime, but there are the people that sign up for this stuff. And as Neil Price said in his book, you know, if you're a person signing up for a raid and the raid goes particularly well, it can change your life, right? Change your economic forecast for the rest of your days.

And I'm addicted to looking for historical analogies. And I mentioned earlier that the Viking Age kind of reminds me in some ways of like the Sea Peoples in the Bronze Age and all that. But there's something at play here by the middle 800s that reminds me of something else. And here's your disclaimer. This is the Dan Carlin version of the story as I try to make sense of it. So I apologize if I'm going off the deep end here, but

There's a, you know, and you've got to gleam it with limited sources, but there's, if you're looking at this from the Viking point of view, one would say it reminds you of like a gold rush period in some places. So I'm from California originally and the gold rush there is famous, but it's famously a time when everybody sort of loses their mind over the potential for an economic score. Yeah.

And in the same way we mentioned, there's those multiple levels of sort of the Viking activity, right? The higher up, the middle level and the lower level. I see the same sort of situation during a gold rush where, you know, some people come in and buy entire mining operations, right? The bigwigs come in and they're the equivalent of like the Royal Danes attacking Hamburg. But there's the mid-level owners of the means of production, too, who come in and pool their resources into a partnership and buy a mine or something.

And then there's the lower level people like the Scandinavian who could change his life with a big score on a raid. They come in and buy a burrow, a pick and a pan, and they go panning for gold or something, try to find a claim somewhere. So, yeah,

it starts attracting regular people. I mean, you don't even need to have some big wig organizing an expedition. There's a level of people showing up at these places that reminds you a little, you know, of like the Grapes of Wrath and the Oklahoman people showing up in the West Coast to pick fruit because there are jobs there, right? I mean, the economic incentive just attracts people. And

It was obviously working because the archaeologists during this time period in Scandinavia are finding tons of stuff and always have from these areas that are being hit with the Viking raids. It's this giant sort of wealth redistribution phenomenon going on during this era where wealth is transferred from the places that do a lot of writing and chronicling and all that sort of stuff to some of the places that don't.

from Christian areas to non-Christian areas, from the center of Europe to its periphery. And an economist would have a field day with this, wouldn't they? Because you can see how the economic incentives change

become ingrained in the culture and the rhythm of life, if you will, because this is the era where many historians believe that the practice of raiding becomes a part of sort of the annual yearly calendar in Scandinavia. It's just a time of year, right? After you get the seeds in the ground for farming, that's raiding time, right? You get your ships out, you get them ready, you go on your raids and you get back before the harvest.

It's sort of the rhythm of life there. Now, again, context. We talked earlier about how the Vikings don't look anywhere near as barbaric and inhumane and bloodlusty when you compare them to the other people in this era. Well, the Carolingians, for example, had a rhythm of life that wasn't that dissimilar either. They didn't call it raiding. They called it the campaign season, right? So we plant our seeds, we go on the campaign season, and then we're back for harvest. So again, perhaps not that dissimilar rhythm of life.

but it shows a dependence and it shows how this has sort of been encoded into their cultural expectations and practices.

I'm reminded of a phrase that an Apache raider had once used to describe what this was. Because, of course, you know, raiding is one of those great human practices, as we said. And Apache's name was Palmer Valor. And he was interviewed, and it's chronicled in a book called Western Apache Raiding and Warfare. He was interviewed in the early 1930s when he was already almost 100 years old.

And he described it as, this is how we made a living. And he said, for example, of raiding the Mexicans. And it sounds a little like this could be a Viking talking about raiding the Anglo-Saxons or the Irish, right? And Palmer Valor said in the early 1930s about his raiding days with the Apaches, quote, "'Our people used to go on raids down into Mexico "'to bring back horses, mules, burros, and cattle.'

This is the way we used to take the property of the Mexicans and make a living off them. There were no white people to take things from in those days. We never used to travel around with the Mexicans because we were always fighting with them. This way, when we fought with them, some of us would get killed and some of them would get killed. It was hard living in those days, and sometimes a raiding party would get nothing in Mexico and come back empty-handed. End quote. I imagine.

If you change the names there, that could sound like a Viking, couldn't it? By the 840s, a change is evident, and the histories will talk about it. Certain elements that had been part of the standard operating procedure in Viking attacks turns into something else, when all of a sudden the hit-and-run aspect of this sometimes turns into a hit-and-stay.

And it starts with sort of overnight winter camps that are meant to perhaps help these Vikings avoid a terrible, rough, you know, worse than usual weather kind of trip home. We'll just stay over the winter maybe to something that evolves into towns over time and then sustained presence in some of these areas.

In other words, we're going from stealing stuff to coming in and stealing stuff and then squatting in your residence too. We're going to stay.

The problem with staying, though, if you look at this from like, you know, and that's what we're doing here because there is no on the ground Viking story. The sources just don't exist. We're looking at this entire phenomenon. And when you look at it from the perspective of the people who are trying to deal with it, there are precious few tools at their disposal. Right. How would you deal with this phenomenon? Right.

How are you going to punish these people who attack you? How are you going to stop them? In the Mediterranean during the Roman era, for example, every now and then they'd conduct like a naval raid to the dens where these pirates sort of had their bases and root them out.

But who's going to be able to do that in this era, right? What, the English kings are going to put together a fleet and sail off into the foggy, icy north and find the Scandinavian layers of these? I mean, once these Vikings get over the horizon after looting someplace, they are home free for the most part, unless you decide to not leave, right? If you decide to stay in the neighborhood of the people that you just robbed, well, that takes away one of your great superpowers, doesn't it?

But in the 840s, more and more Vikings are wintering in winter camps at the places that they're raiding. And then these winter camps will slowly but surely grow into larger, more permanent settlements.

And this creates the beginning of something that you will see all over the Viking world, the fusion of Viking DNA and culture with the locals in a bunch of places that they're hanging out in. I almost named this show after the Beach Boys song, I Get Around, because genetically and culturally speaking, so did the Vikings. It's one of the things they're most known for.

And amongst the many things that I think plays into why the Vikings are so popular today, um,

you know, an enduring sort of interest in them is that we're naturally interested in our own ancestry. And so many of us can trace at least some little DNA in our genetic code to those people because they managed to spread it all over the place. I mean, my family identifies as Irish, even though we're the typical American mongrels.

But it's not just Irish. If you believe any of the genetic stuff from, you know, the people you send genetic stuff away to, I'm not sure I do. But it's Norse-Irish, the ancestry. So there you go. There's a fusion right there.

But once the Vikings insert themselves into the local situation, that means that they are now a part of the local situation. And depending on where you are, that can be a good thing or that can be a problematic thing. Take Ireland that I just mentioned. I love the way in Vikings at War, authors, and I hope I pronounced their names correctly, Kim Hjardar and Vigard Vicke,

describe the Irish situation when the Vikings decide that they're just going to stay for a little while and don't realize what they're getting into because the very thing that makes it easy to sort of shoehorn your way into Ireland traps you once you're there and they write quote

In 797 ADCE, the character of the attacks changed. From carrying out quick, overwhelming raids in search of valuables, the Vikings gradually became more audacious.

When they ravaged Lambay Island outside present-day Dublin, they also took cattle and food stores. They then used the island as a base for raids on the mainland and were soon drawn into Irish internal conflicts. Landing on the Emerald Isle, they write, they were treading on a uniquely complex political viper's nest.

Ireland was divided into over 150 independent kingdoms, which in turn belonged to six supreme kings. They continue a little farther down, quote, The various power groupings were in a constant state of war. Even the smallest disagreement between factions could at any time spark orgies of violence, which would spread throughout the whole island before dying down until the next conflict flared up.

Strong local loyalties, they write, prevented the Irish from coming together in a single kingdom and coordinating their defense against the Vikings. But this also prevented the Vikings from gaining control over large territories in Ireland. The Vikings were both willing and unwilling participants in the never-ending Irish power game. End quote. To show you how crazy you can get at one point in the Irish Viking experience,

There will be Vikings from Norway that the Irish will have one term for and Vikings from Denmark that the Irish will have another term for. All of them fighting in like three-way combinations against each other for control of the territory. I mean, it's crazy. But the bottom line is that by the 840s, you're starting to see a change in the way the Vikings do things. And now they're settling.

They're squatting on your territory, whether you like it or not. And several major modern Irish cities will have started their days as some of these camps that the Vikings would originally use to sort of overwinter and then just never leave. By the time it's happening in Ireland, it's almost certainly happened in a bunch of other islands, small little ones around the British Isles and north of Scotland. By the 850s, you start to see it happening in England, England,

And in none of these cases is this by choice, right? The locals don't want it that way. There's nothing they can do about it. But that's not the only way that the Vikings acquire land during this era, because they'll be given territory or at least control of territory by the various successor kingdoms of Charlemagne, right? Louis the Pious's sons and then their offspring, right?

And by the way, you can see the decline in empire. And it's kind of a joke because, you know, sometimes these words don't translate and things like bald don't mean anything about your geopolitical skills. But you go from being Charles the Great or Charlemagne and his grandfather, right? Charles the Hammer to, you know, Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Pepin the Hunchback.

Louis the stammerer. I mean, not exactly the kind of leadership you probably want confronting the Viking Age. Shouldn't surprise any of us, I suppose, if they violate the, you know, ironclad, supposedly ironclad 1980s rule that you don't negotiate with terrorists because they do all the time.

And one of the things that they do in order to get the protections that they seek is give up land.

Now, before we get carried away, you know, in the same way that these Vikings only appear extra barbarian to us because we're taking them out of their time period, right? Their context and their neighbors were pretty barbaric by our standards, too. The same applies to this famous arrangement that's going to be put in place to try to get the Vikings to help you out, right, by protecting your territory from people just like them.

gets hassled a lot in the sources over time. It's seen as just a suicidally dumb strategy, right? Absolutely negotiating with terrorists. Just give them up your territory and then say, you know, protect me. You know, here, Al Qaeda, take this territory and protect me from ISIS with it.

There is, by the way, a similar sort of dynamic going on here with what you have if you're a ruler trying to deal with this Viking Age phenomenon that you have on your hands. I mean, it's something between a law enforcement problem and a military one. I mean, think of the narco gangs operating in Mexico or something. Or think about the gangs in old Chicago back in the...

Prohibition days, right? Something between a military and a law enforcement problem. And when you don't have the law enforcement in place to

you try all kinds of things that might violate the no-negotiate-with-terrorist idea. One was the same thing that the Romans did when they had a Fyodorati, for example, but other peoples have used some of these Viking leaders would be turned into the equivalent, if we were having this conversation in a 400-year era after this, you'd say dukes or counts or something like that, earls. They're sort of

to govern or control these royal territories for the royal entity right so if vikings come and attack the royal lands you living in these royal lands at our behest will defend these royal lands right this is the same way by the way hundreds of years before this time the franks first sort of made their bones historically speaking they had this same sort of deal going with the romans

And maybe history would teach that because the Franks are still in those territories, the Romans gave to them to govern centuries later. Maybe it's not the best idea. Maybe not going to work out the way you want long term. But here's the thing about that. And I remember a history professor slamming this into our brain all the time. We have the benefit of hindsight when we assess whether a decision made at the time was right or wrong. Also, our interests are different now.

If these people buy themselves a couple of lifetimes of safety because of these deals, then they're going to judge whether they're successful or not differently than we are. If we look at them and go, you know, 300 years after this period, this really worked out badly for them.

Really? Do they care? I mean, if the things once upon a time that they used to think, I think Edward Gibbon used to think, you know, that it was these sorts of arrangements that the Romans made with barbarians that ended up destroying the Western Roman Empire. Yeah, but if it bought you generations of safety before it poisoned the Roman Empire, was that still maybe the right decision for the people at the time to make? Give you another example. In one of the many raids on Paris during this period, the

King will get the Vikings to stop attacking Paris by giving them a lot of silver. This is not just negotiating with terrorists. It's doing so in their favorite currency. And I often think, by the way, the Vikings come to these places and say, we want a certain amount of wealth and we'll take it in slaves of your people. We'll take it in your stuff or you can just pay us. And oftentimes people just paid them.

And one of those famous raids was like 7,000 pounds of silver or something. Every person in the whole empire had to be taxed or something to make this payment. But the problem is, you know, why do you not negotiate with terrorists? Because it encourages more terrorism. Holy cow. You know, you have this going on during the Viking era too. In the Annals of St. Burton, almost side by side, you see two attempts to try to deal with this Viking problem in two different ways.

The first attempt is something that almost makes you sad because it's the equivalent of, you know, if the bad guys take over your neighborhood and turn it into a crime den, maybe the locals all band together, right, in a citizen's organization or a posse or vigilante groups or whatever to sort of

you know, to stick up against the narco-terrorists, you know, who control you or what have you. And in the Annals of St. Burton for the year 859, it recounts one of those situations where that's exactly what happens. In the absence of any sort of federal law enforcement authority, the people just take matters into their own hands and face up to the Danes, as they're called, in the Annals of St. Burton, right, quote.

The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. He means the Scheldt River. Some of the common people living between the Seine and the Loire formed a sworn association amongst themselves and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had been made without due consideration, they were easily slain by the more powerful people. End quote. And he means the Vikings there.

So that's one attempt to try to deal with this difficult problem. The other is to just give in and say, well, if you can't beat them, join them. If we've got to give money to somebody, let's not give it to the people that are extorting from us. Let's give it to someone like them.

and tell them to go get the people that are extorting us. It's a little like having a problem with a mob family controlling your area where you live, and so to deal with them, you go hire another mob family to protect you. And the Annals of St. Burton talks about one of these sons of Louis the Pious, I believe,

deciding that since he can't make a deal with one group of Danes, which may just mean Vikings of any kind, he's going to hire another group of Danes.

And the chronicles say, quote, King Charles, deceived by the empty promises of the Danes on the psalm, ordered a tax to be levied on the treasuries of the churches and all the traders, even very small scale ones, even their houses and all their equipment were assessed so that the tribute could be levied on them.

for the Danes had promised that if 3,000 pounds of silver weighed out under careful inspection were handed over to them, they would turn and attack those Danes who were busy on the Seine and would either drive them away or kill them, end quote.

In Neil Price's book, he mentions that sometimes the Danes would make this sort of deal, take the money, then share it or combine with the group that they were supposed to attack, and then both turn their forces on the very people who paid them. They used to call this era in human history the Dark Ages.

They don't anymore for obvious reasons. There's lots of places that weren't dark during this era. Some places one could make the argument are at the height of their power and wealth and learning and all that kind of

you know, Western European-centric to focus on what's going on in France and Germany and Britain and all that during this Viking era. Nonetheless, if you do look at it from the point of view of the people in the era being touched by Viking raids in the West, it sure looks pretty dark. And the Vikings are exhibit a why,

One can also suggest that the instability caused by, you know, problems with ineffective government is another reason. But there's a symbiotic relationship between the Vikings and governmental instability, as we've been talking about. Chicken and an egg deal going on there. But people who say that this wasn't a dark age for everyone are absolutely right. And one of the societies that they point to as an example of some group of people that are at maybe one of the heights of their

you know powers and civilizational levels are the byzantines the byzantines of course would not have thought of themselves as byzantines they would have thought of themselves as romans who speak greek and whose capital is located in modern-day turkey

And the Franks are set up to kind of be competitors of theirs by the marketing messages, right? I mean, they market themselves as the renovation or the restoration or the rebirth of the Roman Empire. And if you're the Byzantines, you don't think that there needs to be any rebirth at all, right? Don't call it a comeback. We've been here for minute one. We never went away. Who do you think you are? And then there's the Christianity thing.

They're not Catholics and Orthodox Christians yet in terms of being that different. But you can see the divisions, you know, already quite established by this period. Problems over Pope's authority, you know, I mean, frenemies, not a bad word to describe this relationship.

But it will be the Byzantines that introduce the people of the West to the Vikings of the East. And that's the part of the story that comes into play right around where we are. We said 850s Vikings are establishing permanent bases or overwintering in England. Well, that's just before the time period where you start to hear stories about activities that we know now involve Vikings in the East.

and like children acting up for attention or I'm reminded of my television news roots and they used to

slur us by saying that the way we decided about headlines was if it bleeds it leads and they've always said that journalism is the first draft of history and you can see the similarities because sometimes if you're just a peaceful group of people trading with your neighbor is not bothering anyone no one ever hears about you in the history books but you go attack somebody kill a bunch of people or conversely become a victim of somebody who does

Well, then, you know, film at 11. You make the headlines extra, extra. Read all about it. And by 860, the Byzantines are writing about what these people who have a name. Well, that's recognizable today, but in a different way. They're called Rus. R-U-S. You'll see it written R-H-O-S-R-O-S. All those versions. And yes, it sounds like the root word for Russia because it probably is.

But when the Byzantines start writing records that we can still, that were preserved, that made it to today that we can look at about these people, we already have found out about these people because they showed up in Western records first. It's a little ironic, isn't it?

This brand new people, because that's how history always treats it, right? The illusion of the written past. It's like the old parable that if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, did it really make a sound? Well, if the people weren't written about, were they really in existence until somebody chronicled it?

and the first chronicled account that's made it to us today so we can read it, right? Because some things were inadvertently lost, of course, and even the stuff we do have went through permutations and fragments and all this kind of stuff. But in 839, that's when that name gets heard first, right? Ross. And it happens in the court of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, the year before he dies. 839 is right before he dies.

And, you know, we've already told you the kind of life he had. And by 839, most of it's behind him. So this is a guy who's had, you know, his sons deposed him multiple times. He's watched his dad's empire and his inheritance crumble. He's got Vikings nibbling large chunks of his land away. He's got Viking PTSD, let's be honest. And then the Byzantines, his frenemies, show up at his court in 839, which is chronicled in the records, and want his help getting some people back home.

And when he says, who are these people? The Byzantines say the Russ and Louis the Pious in his court have never heard of these people. Thoroughly confused and suspicious because they look at these people. And as I said, he's got Vikings on the brain already. PTSD from Scandinavian raiders. And these look like Vikings to him. And he does a little checking because these Byzantines want

Louis the Pious to help these people get home. He says that there's dangerous, ferocious tribes between Byzantium and where they're from, and they need his help.

He does a little checking and they determined that these people who call themselves Ross are Swedes from one of the groups who live in Viking era Sweden. Louis the Pious and his advisors are suspicious that these people might be spies and they promised the Byzantines that they'll do some checking. And that's the last you ever hear of them in the records anyway.

must have freaked a guy out though who's already worried about where these vikings are going to find vikings appearing at his court coming from a completely unexpected geographical direction what the heck are they coming from byzantium for but you can see how in his head he must think well they must be going in the other direction too and they were

So if you think about like the Baltic Sea as being a Viking lake during this period, well, most of the Vikings we've been talking about take, you know, the direction of the Baltic that exits into the North Sea, right? And then you're in the open road. You're in the Western Highway there. But you don't have to go to that direction. You can go the other direction.

You can put your boats, as many in modern-day Sweden at the time did, and some in Denmark. And, you know, the Vikings could all talk to each other language-wise, so there was a lot of hiring on for jobs. I mean, go read Beowulf and things like that. Lots of soldiers of fortune. So you often had mixed conversations

crews that would do this but generally because of the location it's going to be mostly Swedish groups of Scandinavians who put their boats in the water and go the other way towards what's now like the Baltic coast or Russia up by St. Petersburg or the Polish coast and they get into the river system

And all this happens sort of under the radar. But you can tell, you know, sometimes you can infer that historical things are happening because when they do burst on the historical stage, they're often fully formed. So you can say, well, something was going on in the darkness, you know, so that this could burst on the stage like this. It's like when they find planets because they can sense, OK, we can tell by the gravitational forces there's another planet pulling on them somewhere and then they find it. Well,

You can tell that these Scandinavian peoples were making their way down the river system because you start to see the trading posts either arise or get larger. Right. So we talked about Berka earlier and Hedeby and all these places, you know,

Dorstad, all these places that are these nodes of economic operation. You see this exact same thing in the east right around the same time period. And you can almost track the movement of these Scandinavians down the river systems of the east by decades.

If you want to get a mental image of the area we're talking about, look at Eastern Europe. Look at the modern-day countries of Belarusia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic states, that whole area from about the Baltic Sea in the north where those boats first go in the water all the way down to the Black Sea in the south, which is the major slaving area and, by the way, is alongside Byzantium.

They have found all sorts of bioarchaeological signs that point to interesting things in this area and the

amount of trading is incredible and incredible because of the trading system that was already in place that these scandinavians plug into and we talked about burka in sweden as one of these things that all of a sudden plugged the scandinavians into a system that was you know essentially as far as these people are concerned in this time period worldwide

And I thought historians Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry in their book The Bright Ages did a great job describing what we mean when we say worldwide. And as I said, these Scandinavians, this isn't

stuff that you can go and read in the history books because this was happening in the historical darkness you know about it from things like archaeology and whatnot so when they run into the byzantines and the byzantines write about it you can tell that something's been going on for decades that something is cataloged in the bright ages and those historians write about these you know vikings in the east and the situation in the east quote

The story in Western and Central Asia plays out very differently than in Western Europe because the pre-Viking situation was so distinct. Instead of fragmented states and wealth hoarded in easily ratable religious institutions, Vikings found themselves on the northern edges of scattered settlements within vast trading networks that stretched from China and India to the Mediterranean.

constantinople offered one node baghdad another with perhaps hundreds of cities providing connections across steppe mountain desert and forest the centralized power and military might of these cities and civilizations did not preclude frequent raiding but made a collaborative economic exchange the much more profitable option end quote

Kat Jarman in her book River Kings described the East as being a place for entrepreneurs. And one of the throughput threads she follows in the work is the

transportation of a semi-precious red stone that became all the rage in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. Had to have it, right? Demand was huge, but this stone apparently only came from what's now modern-day northern India and

And so she would follow, you know, the trade route sort of that starts in northern India and finds its way to Viking era Scandinavia. It's fascinating, but it's a sign of exactly how interconnected these trade routes are and how these ideas we had a long time ago of sort of splendid isolation of all these areas, right? All these areas exist in ethnic and cultural and commercial isolation from each other.

was never true and that trading was always going on back to probably Neanderthal times. But as the two historians from the Bright Ages point out, you know, these Vikings are opportunists and they model their approach to the conditions and the conditions in the East are very different than the conditions in the West.

You know, if we talk about organized crime taking over your neighborhood, well, if you live in the West, the neighborhood's easy to take over. The mob moves in and they move in on the territory and there's no strong central government and they can get away with it. In the East, it's much more survival of the fittest already. You have tons of powerful groups of people. We mentioned the Byzantines. There are always steppe tribes that are powerful on the Eurasian steppe, which, you know, pretty much

dead ends on the hungarian plain but if you go east from the hungarian plain it stretches all the way to china and it is always serengeti plains live and die evolution on the step and it's always survival of the fittest and so you have powerful tribes there all the time you know the the step tribe confederation du jour and there's also

multiple large tribes of people. It's an ethno, let's call it an ethno-cultural identity of people we would call Slavs today. Oftentimes this is linguistic and that's how they determined a hundred years ago who all these people were, what was their language, what was their pottery style. And now, of course, you know, you don't have to be a genius to realize, well, wait a minute, anybody can adopt a pottery style and wait a minute, anybody can learn a language. The first time I ever encountered this, it blew my mind because it made me change my

The way I thought about all these groups was when I was doing research on the 1980s on a people called the Goths, not the musical fans, the people that helped overthrow the Western Roman Empire famously, right? The Gothic peoples. And back in the 19th century, they would have told you that the Goths were Germans, right? Ethnically pure, basically Germans, spoke the language, had the culture, had the same basic belief system, had origin myths dating to Scandinavia. Herveg

Wolfram wrote a book. I think he wrote it in the 70s, but it didn't make it into English until the 80s that pointed out what nonsense that this was and that all these groups are multi. The DNA is quite mixed. The ethnicities are quite mixed and have been mixing way into prehistory.

And he explains how groups form based on shared values and ideas and origin myths and language. But this is all stuff people buy into, including, and he was talking about this with the gothics, escaped slaves from all kinds of societies. And then I had another professor once, and I believe we said this maybe even earlier in this conversation about how you cannot really have some ethnically pure society in a slave state because people rape their slaves.

Well, the ethnicity in this region matters more

more than it does in the West. The West has all those white supremacist Aryan sorts of overtones that we've lived with forever, you know, connected to 19th century national origin myths. I mean, it's much debated and talked about. The Nazis didn't do anybody any favors by latching onto it. There's a great letter that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote once spitting mad at the Nazis for ruining, you know, the Nordic history and reputation forevermore, something like that.

But in the East, the ethnicity is important, too, but for different reasons. And in the West, you might want to claim, you know, that you're related to Scandinavians if you're a white supremacist. In the East, traditionally, people like the Russians have wanted to downplay how much Scandinavian blood is in the ethnic mix.

and the reasons there are fascinating too. When I was a kid and there was a Soviet Union, they wanted to downplay it because they didn't want to give any ethnic credit to anybody, but Slavs mainly, right? That was the preferred group of people that they were going to say was the major makeup of the people that became Russians and any other DNA impact from any other groups in the regions, not just Scandinavia, but steppe people, you know, and multiple other groups that all of that stuff was minimal.

And there have been theories, you know, pushing every...

kind of combination or ethnic mix you can think of. Genetics, of course, as you might imagine, and DNA is starting to solve all this stuff. And once again, as you might imagine, people are more mixed than anybody thought. And these regions, I mean, we said the Byzantine Empire was a melting pot, but it's right in this region too. Lots of coming together, lots of slave trading, lots of, you know, you would say in an American town, you say it's four corners where a bunch of places come together.

And the Scandinavians in the east, because it is such a tough neighborhood, do more trading than raiding. But they do raiding, too. I have a I have sort of a mental image of it. These are my numbers are totally made up and not based on anything. But this is just how I think about it. I always thought that, you know, in the West, they're more raider than they are trader. Right. So maybe 60 percent raider ratio.

with weapons taking stuff and 40 percent trader bartering you know selling uh what you stole that kind of thing in the east i flipped those numbers i feel like the the scandinavians mostly from sweden but the ones that went east and that operated in that cutthroat but much more scary world that they're more like 60 percent trader and 40 percent raider and as we said one way or another they're

You could trade for generations and not have anybody write your story in the history books, but you cause problems and you're going to make it into the era's equivalent of the police blotter for acting up. And in this case, in the 860s at the Byzantine precinct, you get an entry on some of these Eastern peoples, probably these Eastern Viking raiders.

There'll be a famous attack on Constantinople in 860 ADCE. Now, I should say to protect my rear end right here, the experts argue about some of this stuff. This is very early in the story in the East, and

And the sources are few. It's difficult to corroborate what your few sources say. And sometimes there are heretics, although when it's this unknown, calling them heretics is probably not fair. There's debate amongst the experts over a lot of this stuff. For example, there is supposed to have been an attack in the 830s in the suburbs of Constantinople by a people that most likely were these Rus, if it happened. Wow.

A lot of people don't think that one happens. Some people don't think the one in the 860s happens. And some people think if it did happen, it might not have been these roast people that did it. I am unqualified to choose between experts. All I can say is I'll read some stuff from some very good books here and we can try to update ourselves on what was likely.

It is a sign, though, isn't it, of exactly how history works and how these things unfold. And I mean, especially in the case of Jacobson, who I'm going to quote in a minute, the detective work involved in piecing together a mosaic here that forms some sort of a picture that you can maybe imagine.

rely on a little bit is amazing and intoxicating. It makes you want to be the Indiana Jones of history, you know, put on the hat, grab the whip and go out there and do some of this stuff. They do as good work as you can do with the amount of sources available. But let me give you an example of what we're talking about.

So in the book Vikings, an encyclopedia of conflict, invasions and raids, Tristan Mueller, Vollmer and Kirsten Wolf have this to say about these early Viking incidents in the Byzantine precinct, if you want to call it that with our crime motif. And they write, quote,

the rus were in frequent conflict with their most powerful neighbor the byzantine empire the earliest recorded raid took place sometime in the eight thirties when the rus attacked the sea of marmara and then several cities along the paphlagonian coast

the life of saint george of amastris documents the campaign and describes the russ as quote now quoting from the source the people known to everyone for their barbarity ferocity and cruelty end quote the authors continue quote in 860 the russ led their largest military campaign against constantinople where they raided the suburbs and burned many buildings

End quote. Now, as I alluded to a second ago, I was just marveling at the job that Icelandic historian, and I hope I pronounce his name right, there's going to be some challenges in this show, Svevrir Jacobson in the Varangians, God's Holy Fire, his ability to try to piece together these pieces and make them into something you can look at and assess is fabulous. And he does it

in this 860 invasion of Constantinople. And he does it by using the main source everyone uses, the emperor's away when this attack happens with the army and the fleet, which is maybe not a coincidence.

and so there's a religious patriarch in charge and he gives some sermons during the time that the raids are happening they go on for over a month and those sermons have come down to us and the information in the sermons is some of the information that makes up the majority of the evidence in the byzantine precinct about this you know crime from these northern peoples in 860 and jacobson writes quote

The attack came suddenly and unexpectedly in mid-June 860. An unknown northern tribe attacked the most holy city of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. It had not experienced such an onslaught in many decades, let alone from a people which had hitherto played an insignificant role within the perspective of the Roman elite."

He then quotes the early sermon by this patriarch who talked about a dreadful bolt fallen on us out of the farthest north. He also talks about a thick, sudden hailstorm of barbarians bursting forth. Jacobson points out a couple of things, though, including the fact that

But there's a certain kind of terror and one we won't experience in the modern world, but that goes back to the Laguna Beach example we used earlier of the ability in the pre-modern world to find yourself attacked as in wartime by somebody you don't even know. You don't even know who they are. Again, this is a more like a crime than a war also, isn't it?

i mean seems pretty rare and weird doesn't it to think you could fight a full-on war with another kingdom or state of some sort and not know who the enemy was but in a criminal situation well that almost seems like the way you plan it out right i mean uh wear a stocking cap over your face don't leave any fingerprints i mean the whole goal is to not have people figure out who you are trace you back to your lair or anything like that eventually prosecute you and put you away

And Jacobson says that the fact that they didn't really know who these people were that descended upon them was part of what made it so scary, as you would imagine. And the patriarch's name, by the way, who gave this sermon is, and I found multiple pronunciations, is Photius, Photios, or Photias.

And Jacob says that he, quote, makes both these points repeatedly, that the attack was unexpected and that the attackers were from lands very far from the empire, lands situated at the end of the earth. The terror associated with these attacks stemmed partly, he writes, for these two reasons. It was the terror of the unknown, of a mysterious enemy that had suddenly revealed himself.

The tenor of the language is similar, he writes, to the descriptions of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne almost seven decades before.

end quote and as many people will suggest that the lindisfarne raid in the 790s kicked off the viking age in the west some suggest that this attack on constantinople in 860 if indeed it really did happen kicked off the viking era in the east but you can tell that if they really were able to put together anything like the 200 rumored ships that are supposed to have shown up um

In 860, then something's bubbling beneath the surface, even if you don't have the primary source material in 850, 840, 830, right? This doesn't just spring out of nowhere.

Although the attack itself, if you believe the sources, did. And that's one of the things that this patriarch writes about, that the fact that these people weren't even seen as a threat and that you didn't have warning that they were on the borders. You wake up one morning and the ships are there. And that's the Viking way, right? The Laguna Beach attack in a nutshell. You wake up first morning light and you see those telltale sails.

And if you believe how many ships were in the Byzantine situation, it's hundreds of ships filled with dangerous, scary warriors that do things that freeze the blood of the locals. Famously in the attack, one of the attacks on Paris.

The Vikings had captured, I think it's 111, which is a very specific number, but more than 100, just over 100 of the defenders and took them to a famous island that's in the Seine, you know, right by Paris. And within view of the countrymen of these captives hung them all. Right. In other words, watch this.

Well, there's a story out of this attack in 860 that sounds a little like that to me. And it involves the Vikings taking a bunch of people onto their ships and then chopping off their limbs with axes. And I imagine it sounds like this is the kind of thing where you would do it in front of people. In other words, you're trying to make a point here.

And this is written by another patriarch who was actually living in eggs, not in exile in retirement. If you could say forced retirement on an island in the same area who saw the same wave of Vikings attack and the life written about him says, quote,

For at that time the bloodthirsty Scythian race called Russians advanced across the Black Sea to the Bosphorus, plundering every region and all the monasteries. And they also overran the small island dependencies of Byzantium, carrying off all the chattels and money, and slaying all the people they captured. In addition, they attacked with barbaric spirit and impulse the monasteries of the Patriarch and

and removed every possession that they found and they seized twenty-two of his most loyal household servants and cut all of them to pieces with axes on the stern of one of their boats you know you never can tell when something is an exaggeration or a fabrication or the truth

But let's just say if something like this did happen and a chronicler saw it or got wind of it, surely that's the kind of things that you'd have written about. You know, if journalism is the first draft of history and if it bleeds, it leads. The history geek in me at this point is all set up for this encounter now. What's going to happen to these alleged Rus people when the Byzantine military shows up and chastises them or tries to?

But this, you know, history geek slash, if it bleeds, it leads former assignment editor need to have this curiosity fulfilled that would take thousands of lives, by the way, to do is thwarted. Because like so many of the Viking raiders in the West, the Rus get away when the authorities come to punish them for their crimes. We never get to see what would happen if the Byzantines and the Rus faced off.

The primary sources say that the Byzantine emperor, once he sort of does his investigation, figures out what had happened, implements what I guess you could call sort of maybe general order number one for the Romans. And remember, the Byzantines are like a continuation of the Romans. General order number one, standard operating procedure, whatever you want to call it. I always like to refer to it when it comes to the Romans dealing with people like this. It's the recipe, right?

This is the recipe. What they're going to do to these Nordic peoples is that they're going to turn them into reputable members of the international community or whatever passes for it in the early medieval world.

version of this part of the world i mean look at the history this is an age-old strategy that has worked on all sorts of peoples i mean to just name a few you could say the visigoths and the ostrogoths and the lombards and the vandals and yes a couple of centuries before this time period even the franks themselves were in this same situation and the romans cooked them using the recipe into nice civilized states

Now, the term cooked is the way the Chinese used to describe this process when they used to do almost the very same thing to the so-called barbarians on their borders.

you know there's a lot of people that believe history has cycles and that's much argued about I don't know if I agree with it or not but it has things that look like cycles and one of those things that look like cycles is the continual recycling of effective ideas certain things tend to work and so you see them brought up again and again in this idea of cooking the barbarians in air quotes next door is something you see over and over in the recipe

is different place to place like the chinese version doesn't include christianity the version here in the european context does and the byzantines do in the east what charlemagne lewis the pious and his sons are all doing in the west he sends out missionaries and evangelists and these people that are going to be the saint bonifaces and the saint lebwins of the east

And they are involved in a long-term strategy here, right? They are planting seeds to be harvested generations from now. And as I think about this, phrases from the war on terror in 1990s era pop into my head, right? A multi-generational war on terror. And that's what this is, right? When the Byzantine emperor sends those, you know, monks northward, he's not expecting instant results from that, right?

But he is hoping to replicate the success that he's seen with this in the past. The Vikings, these Scandinavians, these Rus might specifically, if you believe the sources, and I'm not sure I do, but specifically be a new people to the Byzantines. But they're an old type and they've been dealing with this type for a long time and they know just what to do with them.

What's interesting is the way you frame this can make it seem completely different, right? Because in effect, what the recipe is, is destroying the culture of the peoples you're targeting and then replacing it with one more like your own.

The reasons one can do this with a clear conscience is what makes this sort of a dual use kind of strategy for a Frankish ruler or a Byzantine ruler. And by dual use, I mean there's a wonderful way one can console oneself thinking one is doing a favor for the very people on the receiving end of this treatment.

If you are a Christian ruler, for example, and you are bringing the Christian religion to a bunch of pagans and a bunch of heathens, you are doing them a great deed. This is a gift. You are helping them potentially get into heaven. You are showing them the truth. You are teaching them that the traditional gods that they bury their grandparents in the backyard, you know, using ceremonies and incantations directed towards are instead demons and devils.

You are showing them the error of their ways, and this makes you a better person for doing so. At the same time, this will create conditions on your border that are much more stable, controllable, answerable, and that will long-term eliminate your pirate problem.

That's the second part of this. And this is the sort of things that the Chinese version of cooking, their recipe would entail. But it's taking these places that have no real strong central authority, right? Lots of different chieftains or warlords, you know, calling their own shots and making their own arrangements and policies and moves and consolidating them into a more centralized sort of state someplace with,

you know hierarchy where there's somebody in charge that's answerable right if pirates from this other territory raid your coast you want to be able to go to some place and say hey you better control these people in your territory or you and i are going to go to war right what's the you know international 101 textbook definition of the state right a place that has a monopoly on the use of force

And state building is another one of those words that echoes the 1990s war on terror as part of a long-term solution, right? Nation building is what we called it. You go in there and you destroy the terrorist government and then you build a new one, a nation that will preserve things like freedom and the rule of law and give people the benefits of

you know, our civilization, where you see this same thing going on as a solution to the pirate problem in this era. After all, when you have something that's reached the phenomena stages, as we said, when it's possibly a part of the annual calendar, right? The rhythm of life in some of these Scandinavian communities, right after the seeds are in the ground, we go raiding and get back in time for the harvest. I mean, that's like, well, that's a cultural challenge, right?

And civilizing the Vikings, if that's a phrase I can put in quotation marks, civilizing the Vikings is the long-term way out of this problem as far as these people are concerned. And the recipe for doing that in the West is heavily involved with the Christian religion. And again, if we can make a kind of a comparison with the war on terror, when...

You know, the old governments were thrown out of places and the new governments backed by the West were put into place. All sorts of resources were brought in and experts and consultants and advisors and, you know, people who would do groundwork and organizers. I mean, it was a giant sort of a mass infusion of all this talent and resources and expertise. Well, in this time period, you

Christianity shouldn't be thought of the way somebody might think of it today, like some sort of a merely a spiritual change of focus, right? I'm going to change my belief system from one religion to another, maybe change my moral code slightly, the way I act, my rituals and all that. It is so much more than that in this period. It is truly, let's call it a civilizational commitment.

it is the equivalent and this is one of the big selling points by the way if you're trying to sell this to a potential viking ruler somebody you could back and get behind and say hey let me tell you why you should convert to christianity and why your people should and what's in it for you i mean it is essentially instant legitimacy for a ruler right

instant legitimacy for his dynastic successors so dynastic security instant infrastructure and instant literacy just add jesus we're going to bring in educated people who write they'll start chronicling your story your your history the greatness of your people your crop yields all of that overnight right literacy will arrive

We'll start building things. We'll start teaching your people. I mean, the whole thing is state building in a very real sense in the word. And state building is a little risky because it does create entities that are more powerful. I mean, it's more powerful to have a centralized state with, you know, an organized army and somebody controlling, you know, the government and policy and all that. That's it's much more theoretically dangerous, but it's much more conventional.

You can deal with the state the way states always deal with each other, right? We can threaten to go to war with you if nothing else, right? There's traditional carrots and sticks and pressures and things you can apply, incentives, disincentives. When you're dealing with pirates and raiders and terrorists, I mean, who do you even begin to pressure to get that? I mean, somebody has to have control before you can figure out some sort of deal, right? This is, in my mind, to get back to the crime sort of an idea. I mean, this is, you're trying to make crime families go legit here and then control the

their communities themselves if some pirates raid your coast you want to be able to go to the king of that area and say hey what's up with this you can't keep the people from your territory from attacking me and if you can't i'm going to attack you and hold you responsible

And I can't tell you how many times in the sources you run into the wonderful, plausible deniability of decentralization. Let's call it that. When some Viking ruler who almost certainly is the one doing the raiding will tell some ruler nearby who's calling them on it. Hey, it's not my people. I don't even know what you're talking. I'll be happy to investigate. I'll find out who it is.

In one particular one I was reading, I don't even know how to explain this, but the gist of it was that the Viking ruler was accused by the Frankish king of raiding. He said, it's not me. I don't know who it is, but I'll investigate. Comes back later, says, I investigated these other people. Comes back later and says, I got the other people. I killed them. Now you should reward me for doing this. And meanwhile, he was likely the one doing the raiding himself.

And in fact, the people that he may have killed may have been the allies of the people that he was trying to pressure for money that he was also raiding. I mean, it's let's just put it this way after a while. And as the sources said, you had talked about how how the the Danes weren't keeping their promises and you couldn't negotiate with them after a while. Centralization starts looking like a better deal.

And if you can get some of these Viking warlords or chieftains to convert to Christianity and then swing their people along with them, well, your pirate problem might go away and you might break this cultural phenomenon's momentum in a way that allowed a long-term solution to the problem. And as we said, it's not a theoretical idea. It's one that people like the Byzantines can go check their own records. They've seen it work before.

time and time again. And the Franks know that it works because it worked on them once upon a time. So if that is your multi-generational victory strategy to win a multi-generational war on terror, what do you do in the interim?

I mean, if you're going to solve this three or four generations from now, what about the piracy that's going to happen in your domain next year? And the year after that, I mean, is your are your people even going to be around if this continues to get worse at the pace it's going right now? So, I mean, there's got to be a multi pronged approach, don't you think?

Well, the Byzantines will do a lot of the same things that they do in the West. It's interesting how the strategies sort of parallel. The Byzantines do it in a much more Byzantine way, though. I mean, the word Byzantine doesn't just refer to the Roman Empire's continuation into this era. It also has a meaning connected originally to just how intricate and exquisite Byzantine diplomacy is, right? The highest refinement of the Roman Empire art, right?

Can you imagine them dealing with an unsophisticated people like the roast during this time period? I mean, it would be like a villager coming in for a contract meeting over whether or not, you know, he should sell his property to a high level sports attorney today or something in the same room.

When you'd be selling Manhattan for a bunch of beads again. Here, just put your little X right here and we'll call it. I mean, Byzantine diplomacy is famous. They'll have these people fighting and dying for their empire before this whole thing is over with. And that's a great way to deflect, you know, the attention and,

ferociousness of this people in another direction right maybe even a direction the byzantines would find it to be a positive outlet for their enthusiasm right their murderous enthusiasm here go work off that energy against this uh step tribe for us would you and then there's of course the ultimate answer which is the military response and the military response has two levels doesn't it

One level is the higher level one, right? The strategy level one. And the other level one is the tactical level one. What happens when, you know, your people with axes meet their people with swords, that kind of thing.

The strategy part, you start to see a reaction that's part of that Newtonian thing we were talking about earlier, right? For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Well, if Vikings keep raiding your coast, you're going to start trying to figure out how you can counterpunch or at least defend yourself. And the ways that that cropped up, I want to say organically, but maybe I'm not being a historian, not qualified to go there, but it seems like

feudalism is the outcome how about that 75 years ago when people were much more direct in black and white and said a led to be led to see and it was also easy they would say that the feudal era you know the early knights in the middle ages and feudalism and castles and all that was a direct outgrowth of these viking attacks this is the response right

And it seemed to make sense because, well, it is a pretty good response to the Viking raids, but it's much more complicated, of course, like everything now, including the fact that feudalism is sort of a always around kind of thing, it seems. But in the era following the Viking raids, maybe you could say spikes. Feudalism is like a decentralization.

And you decentralize to try to allow the peoples on the scene to respond to a problem that happens quickly and goes away quickly, right? If you can't respond from the central authority fast enough to do anything about, you know, lightning Viking attacks, you need someone on the scene who can. Count so-and-so, Duke, you know, what's his name? Maybe even...

another one of these Viking people, to guard the territory from other Vikings. This becomes a wonderful tool, as we've said. But strategy-wise during this period, the methods that are eventually adopted and encouraged and the momentum begins to

you know, push, these things will then have an effect on the surrounding society, right? So the response to the Viking raids, if that's what they are, prompt this response. That response then changes society. That society then is like the Middle Ages, right? How clear cut were those wonderful old history books?

But there's enough truth in there for the short-term description to be kind of correct that on the strategy level, looking for ways to respond to attacks that happen really quickly,

becomes paramount and the romans and the byzantines of course had had long had to deal with similar problems and had organized their militaries in ways to be more johnny on the spot to deal with threats that were far too you know quickly manifesting to go ask the central authority for help right so this is not all of these things follow a sort of a rhythm cause and effect threat and response and

And as we had said, all these changes are not just to deal with the Nordic Scandinavian types.

There may be the number one problem if you're a guy like Louis the Pious, but if you're a guy like Louis the Pious, you have raiding and piracy and brigandage nibbling at every border you have. You've got step tribes doing it in the east. You've got Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean raiding all up and down into Italy. You've got problems on the Spanish march continually. So it might make sense to change this organization permanently.

to allow for some sort of flying column ready relief force, whatever you want to say, you know, law enforcement on the scene in general during this time period. Right. But then you get to the second part of this problem. Right. Is that if everything works the way you're hoping it does and you're able to catch these people, what then?

Because traditionally, raiders and pirates and brigands and those types do not give the authorities, in air quotes, whatever the authorities might be, much trouble. You don't generally hear of pirate fleets fighting it out, you know, head on with the navies of states, do you? But it isn't always easy, and it depends on what sort of force shows up. I mean, the Vikings aren't like that.

cornering the fox that stole a couple of hens from your chicken coop. They're more like cornering the bear that kidnapped a family member. And the first part of the battle is cornering the bear. The second part of the battle is fighting the bear. And of course, discussing how to corner the bear is strategy. Discussing how to fight the bear is tactics.

And if you're into war gaming this period, as I am, tactics are what it's all about, right? It's all about what the Vikings do on the field of battle versus their opponents. So let's talk about that for a minute. The first question worth asking about this whole thing is how many people do you have to have to have in a military encounter to call it a battle?

Is there a minimum number? The reason I ask is because this is warfare in the early Middle Ages in the European theater. And in this time and place, the average size of battle seems smaller. Now, it doesn't mean you don't get big battles from time to time. It just means the battles that would be considered smaller.

too tiny to even count as battles in other places and times count i mean you could have 900 guys against 900 guys in anglo-saxon england and that could easily be legit but a thousand years before this period that's a reconnaissance clash between the romans and the carthaginians in one of the punic wars right so this is not exactly the high watermark of the european you know military history section of the history book

It is a great period for other militaries. I mean, China's got a good one in this period. The Persians are always strong. The Islamic areas of the Middle East and in Spain, even in this period, tough, good militaries. But the civilizations in Western Europe during this era can't support the same kind of militaries that they could support in that same region hundreds of years before this time when the Roman Empire was running the show.

not on the strategic level and not on the tactical level and not on the you know whole society level i mean the romans had something nobody knows right something like 500 000 men under arms

Now, that's not on any one battlefield at any specific time, but that's the size of their military. Think about what's involved in a state supporting a military edifice like that and everything that goes with that. They can't do that in Western Europe during this time period, Central Europe during this time period.

Even the great Carolingian state here that has the largest amount of European territories under one ruler that you're going to have until Napoleon's times can't do that. And it can't do it on the micro level either, where, you know, on the tactical level, the Romans can put 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people in the field, right? The Chinese can do that too. How do you feed that? I mean, how do you logistically support that? How do you get what you need to the people who need it?

I mean, that's, again, something they can't do in the European theater in this era, which is why the armies are smaller. 900 guys against 900 guys could be a legit battle in this place in this time. So I'm trying to figure out what even counts. It's worth pointing out that I don't think you have this Viking, in quotes, problem in an earlier era because I think they're just too tiny of a population to do much more than act as a bunch of gnats, right? Just sort of

bothering you as opposed to threatening you. And there was a great question asked in Hans Delbruck's histories of more than 100 years ago. You know, the reason that they still print these histories is not because they're accurate, because they're completely out of date in so many ways. It's because there's certain elements of them that still touch us. H.G. Wells' history from 100 years ago does too. But in Delbruck's piece, he'll talk about

the numbers that the you know the franks under a guy like lewis the pious or charlemagne the kind of numbers that a people like that could theoretically put in the field if this is a modern if it's the first world war you have the frankish empire like this and they can conscript you know this giant amount of their population which is huge they could really just make scandinavia go away

scandinavia's got one what did we say maybe a million maybe a million five hundred thousand people in this era maybe less so the franks should be able to crush these people in scandinavia in this period and delbrook asked the question you know why the millions available to the franks wasn't able to do that and then he answers it and the way he answers it is by talking about the amount of the population that goes to war in these various societies and

The Vikings, he says, the Scandinavians in this period are in a warrior society, military level of development. And in those kinds of societies, it's pretty much every free man is a soldier. And when you show up to the battlefield, everybody brings their own weapons and their own armor and they show up there prepared to fight. It's a big cross section of the adult male part of the population.

But and this is Del Brooks thinking, but it was popular during the time and I'm not so sure it's out of date. But when societies become more specialized and this isn't even a modern thing, you see the same dynamic between, say, the Assyrians in the biblical age and the nomadic and so-called barbarian peoples around them. Once society becomes more modern, it begins to separate into categories and specializations. Right. People do different jobs. Right.

And one of the jobs is soldiering. And the society supports a small segment, an upper crust of the population who does the fighting for them. And then the rest of the population, either through their tax dollars, dollars, you know what I mean, their taxes or their, um,

In the Carolingian state, for example, if you own a certain amount of land, you have to fight and a bunch of other people can then outfit the warrior so that everybody sort of pools their resources and puts a good, well-equipped, well-armored warrior in the field. But it's not the whole population. And so Delbruck says what that means is that on the day of the battle, when everybody shows up to the battlefield, this smaller society, these Danes, for example, are able to put a larger army

percentage of their population onto the field than the people in the Carolingian state they're fighting. Now, here's where I want to break it down a little bit more, because this is where it gets interesting to me. I don't think the Vikings are particularly better as warriors or soldiers or fighters than the best troops of their enemies.

And we should first make a disclaimer that there's basically two stories here. And in the Anglo-American West, we really only followed one probably until the 1980s, 1990s. I mean, you started really getting into it after the fall of the Soviet Union. But there's two Viking worlds, right, as far as we were concerned. And Kat Jarman and River King suggest we should fuse these and start treating them as one Viking world because that's how the Vikings would have treated it. But what's going on in the East is so different than what's going on in the West. The Vikings that went East have to face very diverse cultures.

you know, kinds of armies and not just one of them. I mean, the challenge of facing those nomadic horse archers of the steppe is a very different challenge than facing, you know, Byzantine forces, which are organized a little like the old Romans were in terms of, I mean, they do have a modern style military. They do equip their troops uniformly. They do pay out of a treasury, right? They supply them out of a supply depot. That's not how things work in Western Europe during this period. In fact,

You've probably gone to a party once upon a time where they've said on the invitation that it's BYOB, bring your own beer. In this period, in fact, in most of human history up until modern times, it was much more common to have a BYOG system of warfare rather than be something like the Byzantines or the Romans or the Chinese or the way we are today. BYOG means bring your own gear.

I was trying to imagine if we still did this today or if we had a single event where we had to and they organized a war and they said, we're going to have a big battle in this giant open field, you know, near the hills nearby. Everybody in your whole town has to line up there. You know, all the fighting age males is what they'd say in the old days.

It's B-Y-O-G. Can you imagine what shows up to that field? And you'd line up in my mind's eye. You line up just like they did in the old days, whether you're Vikings or whether you're you're Franks. I mean, they did it by either towns or clans or kin. I mean, but but you were associated with people that live near you. Right. So you'd line up with your neighborhood, maybe.

And you can imagine the differences in the equipment based on any number of factors, right? I mean, certainly the wealthy are going to have nicer stuff than the poorer folk, right? And the people who have a real interest or experience or who do this all the time likely to have better gear than those who don't. So I'm imagining, you know, one neighbor shows up and they're a gun enthusiast and they have an AR-15 with a nice scope, right?

And they come with body armor that they own. And they've got a big truck with a big spotlight up on the top of it. I mean, very useful when you're going to have battle day. And their next door neighbor shows up and they've got the nine millimeter handgun that they keep on the nightstand for home defense and their kids football helmet. And there are other kids hockey and baseball catchers gear for their armor. I mean, that's a little what it's going to look like in this period. There's nothing uniform about a BYOG era battle.

I mean, the kind of equipment someone's going to have is going to be based on any number of factors, including, you know, how many previous engagements they've taken part in. I, you know, it's like a, it's like a Dungeons and Dragons character here. And the amount of quests that you've gone on already kind of impacts what you have to fight with because after, you know, you may start your first campaign with almost nothing. And after a few of those, you come back and

You've gotten some armor from one of these quests that you went on and you made enough money to buy a sword at Berka with another one. And you show up on the day of the battle with better stuff than, you know, you would have shown up with a couple of years previously. Now, in terms of what people are fighting with, this is an interesting aspect too. First of all, let's talk about, you know, how hard it is to get your hands on some of this stuff. Um,

The Franks have, and it's kind of famous, and I find it fascinating personally, they have an arms industry. And I don't mean an arms industry where they're just making weapons and armor and stuff for their own people. They export this stuff. It almost looks modern at times. And you will see the Franks cut off

access to this equipment to peoples that they don't want well-armed. Charlemagne will declare that the, you know, the best swords and the armor that the Franks make in their workshops are not to be exported to the Danes and the Viking peoples.

And then it's Charles the Bald, a descendant of his, I believe, that makes it a capital offense. You'll get your head cut off or you'll get hanged if you give Frankish swords to the Viking peoples, right? Can't give them the best military hardware available. They're dangerous enough without it. And the question of armor is a good one. And this is for geeks like yours truly, but

All during my life, the feeling on how common armor was in this era and in these places has sort of fluctuated and gone through phases. When I was a kid, it was thought to be really rare. And then we went through a period there, I want to say 80s, 90s, where there was this idea that maybe it wasn't as rare as previously thought. And now we're back toward this. It was very rare kind of an attitude.

And I was reading one book where they were trying to come up with an amount of effort required and an amount of time required to make some of this stuff. And they were talking about a male shirt. So think about a standard shirt, not the extra long version that goes down to mid-thigh or down past your elbows for sleeves, just the really, like a T-shirt of interlocking iron rings, right? Male, chain mail. And in the one book that I was reading, it said that it might take...

four smiths right these are trained individuals professionals of their time period craftsmen four smiths 18 months to make a male shirt and you have to add the cost of the metal which was not inconsiderable at that time and then according to a seventh century frankish legal text it was explaining the relative costs of equipment

and it said that a helmet right so you're you know helmet's going to protect your head pretty important in warfare right like a football helmet in football said that a helmet cost as much as a shield spear and sword combined so you can have a shield a spear and a sword for the cost of a helmet and then it said a coat of mail cost twice the price of a helmet it's like an algebraic word problem isn't it um

But so two helmets for a t-shirt of ring mail. So that gives you an idea of how expensive this stuff is and perhaps how rare. Modern testing has shown just how protective a nice, you know, chain mail shirt and a helmet is, especially against sword cuts, which were one of the really common

big threats during this time period and you can always tell what the threats were because you look at the armor and you can see what the armor is built to stop so the helmets that are going to be all the vogue coming into the period and into the next period are the so-called nasal helms the ones that look usually pointed but they can be rounded at the top but they have one piece of metal that extends from the helmet down sort of over the nose and

And it is so clearly designed to stop a sword cut across the face, right? Horizontally across the face.

But these kinds of things, as you could see, would be really important on a field battle. And if some people get to wear, you know, helmets in the football game and some people have to go without, you could see why it would be something that was coveted, whether or not you were stealing it from someone else on a raid or whether or not you're part of that wonderful entourage of the professional elite who serve a warlord or a Viking Jarl or king.

the herdman, the housecarls, the posse, the entourage, or as my army list once referred to them, the warlord's retinue. The historian we quoted earlier said that this was a consumption society and that it was based on gift-giving and power was heavily connected to gift-giving and one of the best gifts must have been military equipment.

And the people who formed these retinues of elite troops who were well-armored and well-equipped and well-trained and very experienced with, you know, elite sort of status. These people formed either the tip of the spear for the Viking forces or you could, and this applies to other forces.

armies in the middle ages as well or you could mix them through the formations of the lower quality troops to stiffen them as it would be called right so these are your first class troops in any viking army

Now, the situation for the Anglo-Saxons in England are going to be like, you know, Vikings sort of organization mixed a little bit with the kind of organization that they would have in the Frankish territories on the continent. Now, let's contrast this for a minute with something like what they do in Charlemagne's realm or Louis the Pious's realm, the Carolingian Franks. There, the central authority is going to set minimum standards for people.

And they're not going to give you equipment the way the Byzantines perhaps will do for their troops. They're going to tell you what you have to show up with. And they're going to tell you if you have this much land, you have to have this kind of equipment, right? So the more land you own, the more likely it is you have to have better gear. And oftentimes a bunch of people will sort of pool their resources to outfit one warrior well. But what that means is generally the Carolingians are going to have better stuff

on more of their soldiers than the Vikings they face, which brings me to this idea of the kind of troops that we're dealing with here. Vikings have a fearsome reputation and they had the reputation at the time. So there's a psychological intimidation question that the best units in warfare have always possessed.

If you're looking for my boxing analogy on this, you look at your Sonny Listons, your George Foremans, your Mike Tysons, and boxing trainers used to say that some of their opponents were defeated before they even came into the ring. Michael Spinks, before he fought Tyson, he's already lost the fight. And the same is probably true on a lot of battlefields. And in fact, as many of you have emailed me, there's a sort of a...

revisionist idea going on right now about whether or not the Spartans in the ancient Greek world were as nasty fighters and as organized and raised the way we thought and always treated them or whether or not they just had a sort of a psychological edge on their opponents. And the Vikings certainly had that. But otherwise, if you were to get an artist rendering

of a Viking, a well-equipped Viking warrior and put it next to an artist rendering of a well-equipped Anglo-Saxon warrior from England or a well-equipped, you know, heavy cavalryman from the Frankish, one of the Frankish kingdoms, put them all next to each other other than the cosmetic differences, right? The hairstyles and those kinds of things and the clothing. From a military standpoint, they are pretty interchangeable, aren't they? I mean, they're all going to have the round shield that's so common in Europe in this era.

They're all going to have some combination of swords, spears, axes. I mean, their weapons are not different, although the Scandinavians make somewhat more use of archery than they do on the continent or Anglo-Saxon England.

conversely on the continent they have true cavalry which they do not use in england or in scandinavia yet i mean they fight from the saddle a lot of people use horses and just dismount on the day of the battle in um you know the frankish world they have proto knights a little bit on that just as an aside because i'm geeking out now and you're stuck with me um but it's a big controversy over when knights first begin when you can confidently label a european heavy cavalryman a knight

I think I'm on safe ground saying that most people will say that the Norman Knights that invaded England in 1066 under William the Conqueror were Knights, early Knights, but Knights. If that's the case, these heavy cavalrymen from central and Western Europe were

in 850 ADCE, say, they're proto-knights to me. Not as nasty as early knights, and early knights were not as nasty as the knights of the high Middle Ages, but if we were going to have a one-on-one battle between a European proto-knight in 850 and a well-equipped Viking warrior in 850, I think that's a toss-up. I mean, these Frankish proto-knights are probably going to have a lot of the best armor and equipment that the Frankish state can provide.

And ironically enough, the same applies to the top of the line Viking first stringers too. They probably have some of the best stuff the Frankish state can provide. But when troops are armed and equipped similarly, when they fight in similar formations, when the tactics are similar, you're reduced in the number of things that can impact the outcome of a battle, which means that the things that are left over are

increase in importance right so in my mind the first stringers from both a viking army and most of the enemies in the west a viking army would face cancel each other out and you start talking about things like you know how many first stringers you have right it becomes a numerical question

So I don't see a big advantage for either side on the first string question. The place where I see the Scandinavian armies in the West having a huge advantage over their opponents, though, is when it comes to the second stringers, because the Viking second stringers seem to be a lot better than most of the second stringers they're going to encounter.

for a couple of reasons, I would say. The first would be a Hans Delbruck kind of reason. He would say, well, you know, these Viking second stringers are still warriors. These are people that go on raids every year, that come from a society that, you know, requires them to carry weapons and know how to use them and know how to take care of them and celebrates their prowess in using them. In their book, Vikings at War, authors Kim Hardar and Vigard Vicka

Describe it this way, based on things that the later sources laid out. And they write, quote,

Free men in the Viking Age were expected to carry weapons. They had both a right and a duty to be armed, and there was a strong obligation on every man to maintain the weapons needed for the defense of the land. The laws required free men to have three basic weapons, spear, shield, and either sword or axe. If a man failed to attend the annual weapons inspection, or if his equipment was deficient, he would be fined.

Now, while that may sound like an early medieval Scandinavian version of the United States' Second Amendment to the Constitution, the right to bear arms in a well-regulated militia and all that, it really is just the sort of requirements that well-regulated militias all throughout history have always had, and most armies throughout history probably could be classified as well-regulated militias.

i mean the ancient greeks of the hoplite era that's not a warrior society i wouldn't consider it one a bunch of farmers but when the collective defense required it they put on armor took spears lined up shoulder to shoulder and fought in phalanxes to protect their land and if somebody shows up with

you know, a bad spear or poor armor, they endanger the safety of the collective whole. So minimum standards in your well-regulated militia just makes sense, right? But clearly all militia armies are not created equal. I remember reading Delbrook and he was talking about the phalanx as a military formation and said that it doesn't really help very much if the people inside the phalanx are all cowards. So there's a combination between

sort of the fighting attitude of the people involved and the way they fight. There are obvious differences between, say, your Greek farmer hoplites and your Viking warriors. And I would say it's very akin to the difference between, say,

an American settler or pioneer or farmer in the old west who probably kept a rifle above the fireplace you know use it whenever something threatens the herd whether human or animal when they can be very dangerous against indigenous natives if push comes to shove but they're not warriors by nature they're warriors by necessity as needed

Their counterparts, though, amongst the Native Americans often are warriors, and it's a part of their makeup personally. And the many steps that one goes through in terms of respectability and building one's reputation over time are military-related. I mean, things like counting coup among the Plains Indians is a perfect example of something that no farmer, you know, amongst the settler population would give a hoot about.

but would be worth somebody risking their lives for amongst the Native American warriors of the plains, right? So just a whole different way your worldview is constructed. And the hoplite farmers are principally farmers who fight, whereas the Viking warriors are warriors who farm. But they have something special attached to them, militarily speaking. And I was trying to figure out how to get into it.

And I thought, you know, I could spend 15 or 20 minutes really trying to explain this, or I could just use a cheap metaphor based on game mechanics that we're all going to understand and go from there. So, of course, being the non-professional, non-historian that I am, I chose the cheap metaphor, of course. And there's a macro and a micro version of this. We'll start with the micro version, the tactical version, the individual version.

If you are playing a role playing game or Dungeons and Dragons type game, or you are playing a computer or miniature figure war game and you are the Viking or playing the Vikings, you're going to expect certain bonuses in the game, aren't you? Die bonuses, pluses, things like that.

the special ability of the Vikings that acts as an equalizer to a bunch of armies that normally you wouldn't think they stood a chance against. But if you've ever done as I have and fight

military encounters outside of your period. Everybody fights with miniatures in the old days, in the pre-gunpowder era, armies from wildly different geographical areas and periods. There's just no way around it. So you'll fight your New Kingdom Egyptians against your Romans and your Romans against your knights and all that's pretty typical. And if you're commanding a Viking army against Romans or Chinese or

step peoples or alexander the greats army you're going to think to yourself well i stand no chance except for the great equalizer that the vikings have in every gaming system known to man and if they didn't have it and you were playing vikings you would think it was a crappy gaming system you're going to get some sort of bonus for some combination i was trying to think of the terms that would apply here and i came up with three and they all happen to start with the letter f but i mean ferocity fanaticism and fearlessness

Some combination of those things are commonly associated with the Vikings and so much so that if you're playing a game and that game mechanism doesn't account for that, you're going to think it's a bad game. So it may be just conventional wisdom on all of our parts. It may be a falsity that we've sort of ingrained into a sort of a stereotype, or it may be reflective of something that was really there. What is that? Give me back up and try it from the macro level.

Another game mechanics question. If you've ever played one of those world-building civilization games in your life, you'll remember that at the very beginning, you have to choose which civilization you're going to play as.

You might choose Russians or Iroquois or Zulu, right, or Aztec. There's a whole bunch of them. And they traditionally all come with some bonus, right? Every society gets their advantage. So this one might be plus two science, another's plus three seafaring, another's plus one commerce, whatever it might be. And usually there's a couple of societies that the special ability that they have is that their culture produces a special kind of entity, maybe a warrior, right?

So if you're playing Japan, for example, during a certain period, you may be allowed to build a unique sort of a unit called a samurai. Just like if you're playing Scandinavians during a certain era, you might be able to build a certain unit called a Viking. These are units that are a facet of the culture. And that's why these societies get them and other societies don't. That's why you don't have a samurai.

German samurai and the Japanese Viking. But again, what is that game mechanics element representing there, right? That something about the culture produces a unique entity that is particularly important

feared or fearsome on the battlefield and it's funny because if you look at samurai or viking i think they both classify as the kind of troop types you would give a special ability to in a game a bonus right and a plus four die roll for fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity even if in my mind it's like a stew with those three ingredients and the viking stew version of the mixture is going to be somewhat different than the samurai version right different uh

ratios of fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity in each and by the way the japanese version isn't even really a period thing because i feel like it lasts until the end of the second world war i mean you look at an imperial japanese army force in 1942 and they are jaw-droppingly willing to sacrifice their lives and and their fearlessness is legendary so much so it shocked their opponents

I mean, a Japanese general gives away a lot of advantages to an allied force, right? Firepower, logistics, all kinds of things. But the one thing he's got in his toolbox that's better than anything they have in theirs is he can order his people to do anything and they'll do it. And they'll do it even if they know it's suicidal. And they'll do it even if they know it will contribute to victory, not one iota. Charge that dug in American fire position? Sure. No problem. Here's the interesting thing, though.

While that's a great tool to have in the toolbox if you're a Japanese general in 1942, there's a lot of things that minimize that advantage, right? Firepower, for example. The fact that your people will go charge into firepower and die to a man might be useful, but it's not effective, right?

doesn't really change as we said alter the victory conditions but you take away a lot of those variables like firepower for example and you equalize a bunch of other factors same armor same weapons same formation same tactics and all of a sudden what's left over can become exalted dominant even including this question of plus four bonus for fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity and i was trying to figure out

what this is, right? This is the twilight zone that I love to play in. And we always use the same example. We'll say toughness, right? Toughness, because it's the same sort of thing. It's this thing that keeps a foot in the academic discipline of the humanities, because what is it? We have no problem calling an individual tough or the opposite. But you start applying that sort of an adjective to societies or peoples, and it starts getting weird.

They didn't have a problem doing that a long time ago. For obvious reasons, they don't do it much anymore, but we're left with this sort of gray area. You know, you don't want to use the old way of doing things. We don't have anything that really represents what that plus four bonus is, so I like talking about it even though there's no answers because I think in the case of the Vikings or a samurai, it's a pretty key issue, isn't it? And unlike the Japanese in 1942 charging that American fire pit money,

suicidally in a battle between say Vikings and Franks with all the other things that are equal in the battle like that like two phalanxes coming together right farmers on each side no other differences what determines the outcome well if one group of people has the plus three fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity bonus and the other side doesn't well that sounds like it could be a pretty dominant thing and I think in this era it probably was

Worth also pointing out that the psychological advantage that happens after many victories would begin to build up. I mean, if the Vikings weren't scary enough to the people like the Franks when they first encountered them after losing to them a bunch of times, you begin to fear them.

You begin to go into the fight like Michael Spinks against Tyson. You begin to go in not with both sides, you know, having an equal chance, but one side disadvantaged psychologically before the combat even starts. Now, it's worth asking another key question about this special ability. Is it really a special ability or is it something that everyone has in warfare and everyone talks about and everyone knows about just turned up to a very high amplitude?

I mean, are we talking about something as simple and basic as morale here? Because as everyone knows, morale is a key element in warfare. Go read your Sun Tzu, go read your Clausewitz, the military maxims of so many generals. Morale is key. When we talk about this plus bonus for samurai and Vikings and others like them, is that simply because they have sky-high morale? Or is this another quality entirely?

Can it exist side by side with morale? One of my war game rules used to refer to it as impetuousness. Interesting adjective. Delbrook referred to it as savage courage. If this is simply morale, well, then that would seem to explain why knights seem to have a similar sort of quality, right? Impetuousness, savage courage.

some sort of die-roll bonus on the fanaticism, ferocity, and fearlessness bonus. But I think we all know, and Hollywood tells us it is so, that there's more of a barbarian, borderline crazy,

edge to the viking version of this savage courage right the knight is at least publicly with the public face of piousness righteousness and justice playing his anointed role in society as the protector of the weak and all that sort of stuff and only when he rips the mask off in battle does he become the pagan savage barbarian butcher again right we channel that violent tendency for the good of all

In this era, there is no mask and the Vikings show everybody exactly what they are. And while I was reading about the teeth grooves the other day, and that would freak anybody out, right? They carve, I guess, would carve like grooves into their teeth and then fill them in with ink or other color. Some of the members of certain brotherhoods. See, this is all the stuff that's just made for Hollywood, isn't it?

teeth grooves but here's the part i always try to remember this isn't a specifically viking thing very little of this is specifically scandinavian stuff

The Vikings are, as I may have already said to me, I see them like the American bison, the buffalo that once upon a time, these Odin worshiping types or these Celtic peoples who had sort of similar cultural values when it came to sort of military stuff had a wide range of habitat.

And then over time, the settled societies of the Mediterranean tamed them, converted them, co-opted them. And now you're down to the last little hinterlands, the last holdouts, the bit of habitat that has not been gobbled up yet in a colonial way and the indigenous people and culture transformed. Wiped out would be the way a member in that culture, a cultural conservative may see it,

civilized might be the way that the church or the king of the Franks might have seen it or emperor of the Franks. It's all a matter of perspective.

in order to prove my point, there is a wonderful source account. And I'm not going to go into deeply into everything that happens when some sort of source in a foreign tongue, at least a foreign tongue to me, arrives in our hands and how many permutations and translations and fragments that are put together go through to make something. But many of you, I'm sure, have read Maurice's Strategicon because it is a rather singular piece of pre-modern military literature

gear for people like yours truly, I guess you could say. And what it is, is it's a sort of a handbook, if you will, for it seems like a general would know more than a handbook like this would help them with. But maybe there's something to it where either the Emperor Maurice or people writing as his ghost writers, I guess, um,

put this account together that is actually so valuable for modern day military historians because it explains a lot of stuff that no other document explains stuff like you know how many ranks of fighters you want here and I mean it's really basic stuff but

But they have several chapters all dealing with different things. And one of them is sort of advice on how to deal with particular enemies, because as they say in boxing, styles make fights. Same thing's true in warfare. There's a very rock, paper, scissors element to some of this stuff. And in the pre-modern era, it was much more diverse than it is now and much more tied to culture now.

Everybody's military is pretty homogenized these days. The Iranian military and the U.S. military today have a lot more in common than they have in terms of cultural differences. Everybody uses, you know, modern military gear. Everyone studies the same military manuals. I mean, you can find cultural differences, but it's nothing like it is in the ancient world or the medieval world where the society and the culture often dictates what kind of warriors you have available to you and how they fight.

And the way your people fight could be very different than the way the people you're fighting fight. A lot of time, these styles last for centuries instead of changing all the time the way our military tactics do, right? Every time there's a war, something's changing. Sometimes if it's a big war, entire military revolutions take place, right? You even have an acronym for that, a Revolutionary Military Affairs, RMA. You didn't have that very often in the pre-modern world.

What that means is the way people fought sometimes stayed the same or relatively the same for generations. And there are regional similarities in styles between

And racists and people like that will sometimes over the eras make this into a racial question. But race has nothing to do with it. It has to do with, you know, your culture, where you develop, how the people around you fight. For example, along the steppe, which is a huge, expansive land, which, as we said, has Europe on one side and China on the other. You have an entire vast population.

you know, gumbo of ethnic makeup, every kinds. I mean, there are Turks, there are Indo-Europeans, there are Europeans, there are Asians, Mongolians, and all mixed together, right? A cultural estuary and ethnic estuary. And they all fight like horse archers.

So something's going on there, right? Well, in the Strategicon, there's a chapter just on how you fight those people. And then there's a chapter on how you fight these people that if not the Vikings, because when this was written in the late 500s, early 600s, the Vikings as the Vikings didn't exist yet. But these people that would be indistinguishable if you showed a photograph of them to the Emperor Maurice did. And

and ironically one of them are the franks long before this charlemagne civilized version of them no and the franks were people that looked exactly like the vikings and worshipped gods with the same names the strategic cons chapter on how you deal with people like that is entitled dealing with the light-haired peoples such as the franks lombards and others like them

Now, let me just say, others like them is where I would put the Scandinavians. Truthfully, before this period, I would also put the earlier Celts, the people that Julius Caesar faced and their ancestors. They're not the same ethno-culturally, maybe you could say, different gods and whatnot, but a sort of a similar military style and approach to the big picture things, right? And the big picture things are where the Byzantine sort of

cliff notes on how you fight these people including you know with a few asterisks i would say and maybe a couple of footnotes talking about you know subtle differences well it's like we're dealing with indigenous native tribes here and we're talking about the differences between you know cherokee and crow right ute and comanche um to an outsider they may all look like indigenous native americans from north america but they can tell each other apart and experts can too

But these Byzantine military cliff notes talk about, you know, an almost movie-like hero here from the Western perspective. It sounds a little like Rambo for a while. And by the way, I should mention that I am using the version of the Strategicon that is translated by George T. Dennis.

And the Strategicon says in fighting the light-haired peoples, quote, "'The light-haired races place great value on freedom. They are bold and undaunted in battle. Daring and impetuous as they are, they consider any timidity and even a short retreat as a disgrace. They calmly despise death as they fight violently in hand-to-hand combat, either on horseback or on foot.'

If they are hard pressed in cavalry actions, they dismount at a single prearranged sign and line up on foot. Although only a few against many horsemen, they do not shrink from the fight. They are armed with shields, lances, and short swords slung from their shoulders. They prefer fighting on foot and rapid charges, end quote. So our Rambo-like character in the movie here sounds just about perfect, right?

But the Byzantines are going to start, you know, there's going to be a tone, I feel like, that comes into the writing here where they're making fun of the barbarians who consider the Byzantines barbarians.

so weak and maybe, you know, so effeminate would be the way maybe they would think about them because they are clever and they don't just get up there and, you know, wrestle in hand-to-hand, mano-a-mano combat. And the Byzantines think that's just stupid and they're going to use all these wonderful Rambo-like qualities against the very practitioners in a very jujitsu-type fashion.

The next paragraph says, quote, Whether on foot or on horseback, they draw up for battle, not in any fixed measure and formation or in regiments or divisions, but according to tribes, their kinship with one another and common interests. Often, as a result, when things are not going well and their friends have been killed, they will risk their lives fighting to avenge them.

end quote again it sounds like the hero in our movies being heroic right

But you get a sense as you get farther into the piece that this is the Byzantines just explaining what sort of cheese you can bait a trap for these people with, right? All you have to do is kill a few of their friends and they'll just throw their lives away to avenge them. This is all stuff a general could use, right? This is how you play, you know, the game of poker here. And these are some inside tricks. Let me tell you about the guy you're playing. It continues, quote,

In combat, they make the front of their battle line even and dense. Either on horseback or on foot, they are impetuous and undisciplined in charging, as if they were the only people in the world who are not cowards. They are disobedient to their leaders. They're not interested in anything that is at all complicated, and they pay little attention to external security and their own advantage.

They despise good order, especially on horseback. They are easily corrupted by money, greedy as they are. End quote. If you're a Byzantine general about to face one of these light-haired peoples or others like them, that's some pretty good scoop there, isn't it? That's something you can use.

The next paragraph is interesting because it defies the stereotype, especially of the Scandinavians, because I can't believe the Scandinavians are more bothered by cold than people from a warm climate like the Byzantines. But maybe they're much more bothered by heat. But this is the next chapter on, you know, how you beat these light haired peoples, how you fight them. Quote.

they are hurt by suffering and fatigue although they possess bold and daring spirits their bodies are pampered and soft and they are not able to bear pain calmly in addition they are hurt by heat cold rain lack of provisions especially of wine and postponement of battle

When it comes to a cavalry battle, they are hindered by uneven and wooded terrain. They are easily ambushed along the flanks into the rear of their battle line, for they do not concern themselves at all with scouts and the other security measures. Their ranks are easily broken by a simulated flight and a sudden turning back against them. Attacks at night by archers often inflict damage since they're very disorganized in setting up camp."

This to me is a graded on a curve sort of situation because sometimes you'll read sources from a part of the world where everybody by Byzantine standards is lax in camp security, right, or scouting. And they'll judge each other based on, you know, how did the Vikings compare to the Anglo-Saxons? But from the Byzantine standpoint, they all suck at reconnaissance, right?

The next paragraph, you know, once again, there's going to be probably more boxing and gaming analogies in this show than anyone we've done, but it always lends itself to it. There was a line Muhammad Ali used as one of his poems about fighting smoking Joe Frazier, who was basically Mike Tyson.

And that's exactly what the Byzantine emperor or his ghost writers is suggesting you do with these people, because like Joe Frazier or Mike Tyson, these Western light haired peoples are ferocious sluggers, head on punchers who disdain any sort of cleverness or cunning.

slickness at all right just come on up here and we'll settle it you know in an arm wrestling match or whatever and they're fighting you know more of an ali type character who said of joe frazier i'll be pecking and poking pouring water on his smoking and that's what the byzantine emperor says you're going to do to these people but just don't get into a slugfest with them early take them into the later rounds and he writes quote

above all therefore in warring against them one must avoid engaging in pitched battles especially in the early stages instead make use of well-planned ambushes sneak attacks and stratagems delay things and ruin their opportunities pretend to come to agreements with them aim at reducing their boldness and zeal by shortage of provisions or the discomforts of heat or cold

End quote. And while these aren't specifically comments about Vikings and they come earlier than the Viking era, there are Byzantine accounts from right after the Viking era from people who are recent descendants of the Vikings that talk about this same sort of plus four bonus thing.

I mean, the Byzantine princess, Anna Comnana, writes about it. And she talks about, she calls them Celts, which I think is wonderful because then we're recycling these old names again. They could be Celts. They could be Vikings. They could be Franks. They could be, I mean, they're just light-haired peoples, right? Latins, they call them sometimes, these Greek-speaking Byzantines.

But she basically describes it as this irresistible force that these Celts have initially, but that if you can withstand that, it diminishes, right? They get tired. They begin to flag. They get discouraged. So if you can survive the initial impetuousness bonus, they return to sort of a normal standard of fighting. After that, it can be defeated in one encounter only.

Camnana says the emperor of the Byzantines ordered his men to shoot the horses out from under the Celts. And then once they fell to the ground with their big shields and their heavy spurs, they lost their impetuousness and were vulnerable.

So this, to me, shows more of a style of fighting than something specifically Viking. But if we want to talk about specifically Viking, because they didn't fight specifically like the Franks, for example, let's turn to historian and Viking expert Neil Price, who wrote The Children of Ash and Elm, and he describes it, and he also says

Taking a shot may be a little strong description here, but points out that so much of what's portrayed as Viking styles of fighting and all this sort of stuff is really based on tenuous information and that we know less than the popular culture would suggest is known. He says, quote,

it is hard to know what a viking age raid or battle was actually like several books have been written claiming to give detailed treatment of tactics battlefield formations and the like

But these are almost entirely drawn from later practice, applied retrospectively, and often from literal readings of textual sources with debatable reliability. In reality, he writes, we know comparatively little other than the impressions of noise, chaos, and violence that are conveyed so vividly in poetry and in the names of the Valkyries."

Then he gives a rundown of kind of what we do know, which is sort of traditional foot warfare in this era in the western, central, northern Europe area. And he writes, quote, The primary battlefield strategy involved the shield wall, in which a force formed up in a line several men deep with overlapping shields.

As a cohesive unit, it could be used to advance and push opponents back by sheer impetus, while spears and knives could be employed to stab forward between the ranks. Swords and axes could also come into play, and the legs of anyone facing a shield wall were especially vulnerable from the underhanded thrust. The formation's strength lay in unity as a collective, and the greater degree of protection afforded from frontal attack."

shields could also be raised to deflect incoming arrows end quote

Now, I love a good Viking shield wall as much as the next guy, but I need to point out for those who might not otherwise know, there's nothing special about a shield wall formation. In fact, I think it's probably, I don't know if I'm safe to say this, but probably the most common formation before gunpowder was invented worldwide all throughout history. I mean, there's Sumerian art that shows Mesopotamian warriors in a shield wall.

And just like all militia armies aren't created equal, all shield walls aren't either. I mean, there have been armies that could turn, you know, their entire force 90 degrees on command, drill-like fashion, you know, in their shield walls. These shield walls are not those.

This is a very primitive sort of level of warfare. But what that means is without anything else to differentiate, you know, one side from another, what's left over becomes even more important. As we said, exalted your morale or your plus four bonuses or whatever it might be. Experience, right? Warriorhood versus farmers, whatever it might be. It's worth asking the question if something like this plus four bonus thing would account for war.

supposed phenomena like the berserkers or the berserks. This is a group of people that's associated with Viking warrior hood and

Let's be honest, though, it's a little dubious. I mean, it comes from the sagas and the poetry, which is, you know, we'll get into it later because it's it's you have to. But in terms of the historiosity of something like this, if anything, it looks to me these berserkers look like outgrowths of the sorts of things that the Romans would have written about Germanic tribes centuries previously. In other words, sort of a known type on the battlefield.

I think one could make a case that when you filter out all this stuff about them being psychotic or using hallucinogenic drugs, which is still an open question, but I think the stuff I've been reading lately seems to trend against it. But all of this could just be simply the descriptions of elite units.

right on the battlefield that were simply known as being like the other great units, but with some, you know, amplification of some of the differences and thinking that you are immune from the enemy's weapons and acting that way is a sort of a psychological self-hypnosis trick that would not be unique to Viking warriors, right? I mean, I think you almost have to work yourself up into something like that sometimes to be the first ones to charge into somebody else's spear points. But, you know, again,

Nothing I know about personally. I think the same holds true for the women warrior idea. There are women warriors throughout history, famously the ones that are

called Amazons who were probably, you know, women from some of these steppe tribes. That seems completely confirmed. But the question of decisiveness and numbers is interesting. I mean, how common was it? I would suggest from what we know now, probably more common, still uncommon, but more common on the amongst the horse archer tribes than in Scandinavia. But they do find women buried with weapons.

But nothing I've read suggests that there would be many women warriors, that it would be a rarity when it happened. And neither the women warriors nor the berserks are likely to play pivotal roles in anything we're talking about here. But worth mentioning during this time period when we're talking about armies and stuff and some of the military side of this.

to me the most interesting aspects of the Viking military stuff though and the stuff that really is different to me obviously the ships and the naval stuff which we'll get into more later but the other thing is that there's this and this may be something that is an illusion from the sources that

But there's this untethered nature to the Viking armies, and especially during this period, where they seem to be able to defy the normal laws of things like supply lines and logistics and all that. I mean, their mobility is crazy. And we think about it being a naval mobility, but think about it this way. If you're looking to move an army during this time period, there's a very sort of a ponderous point-to-point-to-point movement

sort of approach that an advance takes because you're moving from supply hub to supply hub. On land, you want to stay on the road so that your carts and your wagons and your pack animals can go easily with you. If you're being supplied by rivers and stuff like that, you need to be close to the barges and the ships. But it creates a sort of a very slow point-to-point-to-connect-the-dots kind of approach. The Vikings don't do any of this during this era.

Because by the middle 800s in the West, they've ensconced themselves in certain places and they can't be dislodged. It's like gangs. You know, we talked about earlier the police blotter kind of an idea. It's like gangs have taken over certain areas in modern day France and the Netherlands and places like that. And the powers that be can't

dislodge them and they usually try to control these areas where they can where it's right where the rivers and the sea come together so that they have easy access to the you know it's the subway turn styles of these places river transport systems and trying to figure out what viking hosts or armies or mini armies or whatever you want to call them trying to figure out what they're doing is like trying to follow you know gangs

around. During the 850s, 860s, these groups of Vikings will actually get names. You know, there'll be the Army of the Seine, there'll be the Army of the Somme, eventually there'll be the Great Heathen Army and the Great Summer Army. And to think about these as armies is crazy because the first thing in any modern military is when you sign up for a military, you're in. And if you leave without permission, they may shoot you. You're a deserter or

You go AWOL. That's not how these armies work. Kat Jarman, the bioarchaeologist, put it well when she said that these military forces, whatever we want to call them, hosts are the way the primary sources sometimes refer to them, that they could pick up and lose members along the way.

There's going to be a core of people that are there because they have oaths or responsibilities or they're members of a warlord's retinue or entourage. And they're going to, you know, they're going to do whatever they want to do. The warlord says, we're going to raid this area you're in. But there's a whole bunch of people that are sort of following the moving party here.

Like the second group of people that show up in a gold rush or teenagers looking for something to do on a Saturday night and they hear rumors of where the latest parties are and they just show up and they break up the same way in the primary sources of St. Burton. At one point, he talks about armies, Viking armies, splitting up into several different flotillas and

And then he writes that they, quote, sailed off in different directions according to their various choices, end quote. What army does that? But

But it's not like an army. It doesn't act like an army. It acts like a pack of wolves or a bunch of looters or people that are just running around. It's like trying to be the police officer at central command that keeps track of all these groups. And you have multiple groups operating. I mean, one of the histories I was reading is following one of these fleets. And you can trace it because it'll hit

things all along the way. It hits Spain. And then as it goes down to the Mediterranean, it hits, you know, what's now like the southern Spanish coast. And then it hits the southern French coast. And then it sacks cities in Italy. And you can literally follow its progress. In 861, some of these groups burn Paris. Now, Paris is not, as we said, this great city during this time period. It's more of a town. It's not anyone's capital, but it is important.

And it's been hit before, right? This is not unusual by this time period, but it sounds specifically bad and

And Charles the Bald, who is the king of that region, finally does something about it in the next couple of years. He has a bad reputation for how he handles Vikings. He's Charlemagne's grandson, by the way. And in the 840s, Charlemagne's grandson split up his former united empire into a bunch of different parts that morph into modern countries. Charles the Bald rules Francia, which will morph into France.

After Paris is burned in 861, that creates a sort of an equal and opposite reaction on Charles the Bald's part. He puts into place a bunch of rules that we've already covered some of the details of. One of them is the creation of sort of a ready reaction force, a rapid deployment force to try to catch these Vikings in the act and maybe either punish them or prevent them from doing what they want to do.

He prohibits the sale of weapons and armor to these people also because the Franks make, as we said, some of the best stuff, if not the best stuff in this part of the world. And no one wants the Comanches having repeater rifles, except, of course, the Comanches. And apparently whatever his grandfather had put into place was not strong enough because he strengthened all the penalties right now. Now they're going to hang you or cut your head off, as we said.

So he puts that into play at the same time. And then finally, and this is fascinating to me, he finally manages to get whatever needed to get done to get bridges fortified.

Because he's certainly not the first person that ever did this. But for one reason or another, it hadn't happened. Now it's going to happen. You burn Paris, you get everyone's attention. And fortified bridges are like turning bridges into castles. You know, you'll see towers and all sorts of fun things, walls and battlements. And if you're a Viking, that's the equivalent of blocking the turnstiles that let you into the subway.

You put a fortified bridge in a key spot and they can't get into the river system. And that screws up everything when they've already sort of stolen all the easy stuff to steal on the coast, all the good stuff's in the interior. And to block these places is to frustrate and make any Viking ideas about raiding much more risky and costly. But this doesn't make the Vikings stop.

It just sends them elsewhere. If Charles the Bald wants to play Superman and wants to get in front of his people and block the incoming Viking bullets, he needs to understand, or maybe it's not his job to care, that those bullets might bounce off of Superman's chest and kill a bunch of innocent bystanders. In a place like Anglo-Saxon England, for example.

Charles the Bald's response to things like this burning of Paris in 861 is often tied into what happens in 865-866 in another location, England, Britain, really the north of Britain by York now, where they're going to get hit with something that all the histories portray as something out of the ordinary. Well, up until now, soon to be all too ordinary.

a change in the way Vikings do things. And we mentioned it earlier when we said that they were starting to overwinter in the 850s. And the 850s, by the way, it's hard to keep track of all this stuff, isn't it? Look at the scope of what they're doing. In the 850s, they start to take over Ireland. But it's the 860s that this starts to happen in Britain. And it will change the course of everything. And once it gets going, it becomes like a happening.

It's hard to figure out what these things are. We mentioned earlier that there are these entrepreneurs and it seems like they're the ones who call the shots. You know, maybe they own 12 ships and they know another entrepreneur who has 10 up the coast and another one down south who's your cousin who has five ships. And you get these people together. They all bring their entourages and they sort of go to where this year's party is going to be. And then all the other Vikings looking for parties or to pan for gold or to pick friends

fruit in John Steinbeck's version, you know, of the people from the Dust Bowl coming to try to make a living, whatever it might be. Those people show up. They follow the party. They're like Grateful Dead fans who go from place to place following the band, although they look probably a little bit more like Motorhead fans.

In 865, 866, the big party is going to be in Northumbria, and the group of people that shows up to watch and participate in that show is going to acquire a name, which might work for some of the Motorhead get-togethers too. They're going to be called the Great Heathen Army. The origin of the Great Heathen Army is literally legendary. It involves, at least the traditional story involves...

one of these Vikings whose name we have, but that's a rare thing in the middle 800s. Believe it or not, after all this discussion we've already gone through, this is the early Viking age, and it's the next hundred years when the sources are going to comparatively explode.

So even having names during this period to work with is a little problematic. But the most famous name, if you were to talk to people on the street who have no connection to history at all and ask them, do you know any names of any Vikings? The name you would get most of all because of what popular culture has done to this figure is almost certainly Ragnar Lothbrok. And trying to get your mind around who that person was in real life, in history, is...

One of the many things in the story above my pay grade, some people will suggest he never existed at all. I think most of what I read would go to the other direction and say that he did, but like so many figures in early history, you know, ancient or medieval history, he was one of these figures that over time maybe got turned into something like a demigod, a person whose name shows up here and there in historical chronicles.

but is most known because of things written about him in sagas and the epic, etic, and skaldic poetry of Scandinavia, which is what allows the Viking side of this story any interplay in it at all, even with all of its problems. More on that later.

but so who this ragnar luthbrok guy is is hard to figure he's supposed to have been one of the leaders in the great attack on paris in the middle 840s where those guys were slaughtered by the vikings you know hanged in front of their compatriots but on an island in the seine river he was one of those guys

this is a couple decades later and the way this story starts and remember ancient and medieval people love these kinds of things where whole geopolitical conflicts start because somebody steals another guy's wife or something but this supposedly starts because of something done to ragnar lothbrok and because of the thing that was done to him his sons come looking for payback and in a society like scandinavia known for its blood feuds during this era that's not hard to believe

But what they kick off, if that has any connection to truth at all, is

is one of the most important geopolitical events in the Viking age and one that's always taken to sort of kick off a new era in the Viking story, although a case can be made that this is sort of just things sliding into one another, historically speaking, right? What happened the last five years moves into what happens in the next five years, and it just sort of slides to this destination, right?

But regardless, when I was growing up, I was reading things like A History of the Vikings by Gwen Jones. And here's the way Jones describes this era and Ragnar's involvement in it and writes, quote,

We've already seen the nuisance raids of individual leaders develop into big, well-organized expeditions which exploited local divisions and lived off the invaded country for lengthening periods of time. A new stage, he writes, that of conquest and residence now followed.

In 865, a big heathen host or horde, at a guess 500 to 1,000 men, arrived in England to initiate a more sustained and coherent assault than had yet been attempted. Their leaders were Ivar, called the Boneless, Ubba, and the

and halfdan legend tells us that they came from scandinavia and ireland to avenge the death of their father ragnar about whom we know nothing very much after his withdrawal from the sane in 845 that was the attack on paris in 845 which he was supposed to be one of the leaders of with seven thousand pounds of silver and the seeds of plague in his army

save that he was reputed to have come to England with two ships crews and been defeated by King Ella of Northumbria, who had him thrown into a pit and stung to death by snakes. Before he died, he was heard to say prophetically, the piglings would be grunting if they knew the plight of the boar. And suddenly, here they were, snouting and tusking in England.

end quote that's a great story how much of it is true is completely open to question the anglo-saxon chronicle of course is much more dry uh this is not a saga this is not you know the the skaldic poetry this is just the facts ma'am and in 865 according to the anglo-saxon chronicle here were the facts quote

This year sat the heathen army in the Isle of Thanet and made peace with the men of Kent, who promised money therewith. But under the security of peace and the promise of money, the army in the night stole up the country and overran all Kent eastward. End quote. The next year is also...

a continuation of what's going on. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says for 866, quote, and by the way, when they're talking about Ethelred and Ethelbert, they're talking about kings of one of these kingdoms that make up

you know, the British Isles during this period, quote, this year, Ethelred, brother of Ethelbert, took to the West Saxon government. And the same year came a large heathen army into England and fixed their winter quarters in East Anglia, where they were soon horsed and the inhabitants made peace with them, end quote. Horsed, that's a great term, isn't it?

What it means is that deals were struck. The Vikings have this quality of, you know, people who show up in your neighborhood and say something like, you know, "Nice kingdom you have here. Be ashamed if something happened to it. If we had some horses, maybe nothing would go bad for you."

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has this great line, and the people here or there made peace with the Vikings. Well, they didn't just say, you know, you don't hurt us, we won't hurt you. Made peace with the Vikings means, you know, you say, what do we need to give you for you to go somewhere else? And they tell them, and they land in Kent, but they quickly move up into another one of these kingdoms at the time called Northumbria, you know, right around where the major city of York is.

They're using the Roman roads too. Isn't it wonderful that they can just sort of adopt the, you know, the way that the locals get from place to place on these wonderful roads that were made by people centuries ago. And they just use them to get up to Northumbria where the Vikings wonderful intelligence that they always seem to have has told them that there's, you know, civil war problems up North, right? A dynastic struggle. Things are going to be disorganized, chaotic, and that's just the kind of thing that,

that Vikings enjoy, you know, when they're looking for a place to strike, right? Number one thing we're looking for, you're not ready, and it's a bad time for us to do this. And in 865, 866, it's a bad time for the people of Northumbria to get hit with a Viking attack, which coincidentally is exactly when it happens. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles entry for the year 867 talks about this sort of dissension in the royal house of Northumbria.

mentions that the rival claimants to the throne decide to unite though in the face of the viking threat somehow and it doesn't tell you how this happens the vikings get inside the big city or the major city in that part of britain york within the walls occupying the city and then these northumbrian claimants to the throne have to unite and try to retake their own city somehow

I should say that when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle during this period says the army, they mean the great heathen army until later when they'll start calling it the Danes, which will just get more confusing. So according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, though, these rival claimants to the throne are.

"'Return to their allegiance, and they were now fighting against the common enemy, having collected a vast force with which they fought the army at York, meaning the great army, and breaking open the town, some of them entered in. Then there was an immense slaughter of the Northumbrians, some within and some without of the walls.'"

And both the kings were slain on the spot. The survivors made peace with the army. End quote. The survivors made peace with the great heathen army.

this is one of those moments though that you really get these sorts of things in early medieval warfare where the kings fight and at the end of the battle you have dead kings on the battlefield or whatever passes for kings as we said that the whole king thing gets a little bit more exclusive when you get to the high middle ages in this period it was a little bit more democratized you more often uh

he ran into kings in this era but still kings dead on the battlefield to Northumbria and claimants to the throne dead on the battlefield in 867 at the hands of the Vikings is shocking and gives them control of Northumbria which is a very different thing than deciding you're gonna smash and grab and leave or you're gonna overwinter in a little fortified you know long port on the coast this is conquest

And there's always been some sort of inference that some of these kings' deaths at the hands of the Vikings are not in battle, but maybe more like executions, you know, on the field of battle afterwards in cold blood. Several of these kings that the Vikings will kill over their course of time in Britain will be executed, perhaps. Some

In the sagas, for example, if this is the Ragnar story as it was traditionally told, then one of these kings from Northumbria who dies here is the guy who threw Ragnar into the snake pit so his sons find him and carve the old blood eagle on his back. Split his ribcage from behind, pull his lungs out. It kind of looks like a bird's wingspan.

I was reading Max Adams. He had a footnote that just said most historians are very skeptical of anything like that ever happening. But certainly one would imagine given, you know, behavior after this event that it would be in keeping if the Vikings got their hands on one of these kings that they would kill them on the spot. We should go into how many people we're talking about here since my early 1960s Gwyn Jones story.

quote there a moment ago said 500 to a thousand in his mind um i think those numbers are obsolete the closer numbers that i've seen you know with my own biases thrown in right but but people throw around 4 000 or 5 000 vikings and that seems logical for all sorts of different reasons um

But that's a lot of Vikings in one place at one time, even though that's a minuscule army throughout most of history. Again, a sign of the level of warfare and of infrastructure and capabilities and capacities in the early Middle Ages in this part of the world where a 5,000-man Viking army is unstoppable. The contemporary leadership of a place like China

or the empires in India or the Islamic world would consider that number to be something you dealt with as part of a police action. In this part of the world, it is overwhelming. I have read multiple accounts from multiple good people who have different takes on what this is. We used our analogy of a roving party led by some

you know, very organized and targeted and logistically sound leadership. But there are people that will suggest everything from this is a giant raid for looting that just keeps going right until until it gets any natural pushback. It just keeps flowing forward. And others who suggest that this is an outright attempt at conquest conceived as such planned as such and carried out as such.

Now, there's another theory that was floated around for a couple of decades pretty strongly in the last 30 or 40 years, and that's the idea that maybe the violence has been overemphasized in this whole Viking thing, and that maybe they came more as sort of peaceful settlers or immigrants or whatnot. I think that's been discounted at least to a certain degree, but I like the way Neil Price sort of fuses the traditional view of the Vikings as these

you know, conquest-oriented super raiders and people who are, you know, looking for more of a migration and a new life. And he calls it sort of an armed family migration.

And I thought to myself, hmm, there's a lot of times in history where you could describe something as an armed family migration. And there definitely, at least in my mind, seem to be echoes of, you know, the American mythology of the pioneer conquest of the West, you know, with the covered wagon and all that and substitute a Viking longship for the covered wagon. And like I said, you could almost do a little bit of mad living here, a little plug and play with those two societies.

Price also has this absolutely fascinating and difficult to explain easily idea of this being kind of a social experiment, perhaps. These are theories. I mean, he acknowledges all of this, but a social experiment in the same way that someone, you know, traveling out west in the old American mythology might see it as a kind of a social experiment.

We're going to start a new country. We're going to do whatever it might be. And his idea was that during this period, as we've mentioned, where governmental systems are changing. And today we would look at it and say that personal freedom was being under threat because all of these people that were used to having a sort of decentralized farmer base, but everybody sort of gets a vote in the all thing, get together, was being threatened by

consolidation and Scandinavia was going to go all European and become a kingship and well we're out of there we're fleeing to the new world and for them the new world is Anglo-Saxon England amongst other places and they will keep just like the settlers in the old American West they'll keep going farther west won't they as time goes on it's also very possible that this starts one way and morphs into something else

that you get a clash of armed forces here for a while. And then once things settle down, the Vikings who are in Anglo-Saxon England send for their relatives. You know, we've got a little land taken. We're off here in New York. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. There's no glaciers anywhere to be seen. Come on over and bring some of your friends, right? We're going to settle this area. This area initially is going to be Northumbria that the Vikings have just captured.

And Northumbria is going to be sort of ground zero for Vikingdom in this in the British Isles for quite some time. It's a great sort of striking out spot to hit other places. And during this time period, there were four main kingdoms that make up Britain, Northumbria, which the Vikings had just taken.

South of that, Mercia, over to the east of that, East Anglia, where the Vikings had originally landed, made some sort of deal and became Horst, and then Wessex, ruled by King Æthelred. In 868, which is the year after the initial taking of North Umbria, they try to take the next kingdom over, Mercia. They do this now.

by a method the anglo-saxon chronicle is going to say that they do over and over again fixing their winter quarters they call it it's essentially the moving of the concert venue in this sort of grateful dead motorhead analogy thing we have going and everyone comes in they fortify a camp sort of rather quickly and then the crowd moves in and then there they are right in the

The interesting thing about these camps is that they would give no trouble at all to any of the major powers during this era or any earlier ones. It's not that sophisticated, but in this time period and in this geographical area, siege warfare is sort of, you know, at a low point. And if the Vikings decide to, you know, put up some, uh,

earthen mounds and some wood plashing on top of that you might as well just negotiate with them in an 868 uh the king of mercia who had asked for help from the king of wessex and who brought his army and so that both their armies sort of face off with the vikings but the vikings won't come out and play so the mercians pay them to leave and the anglo-saxon chronicle gives the you know devastating you know sentence where it says over and over again by the way in its um

pages the mercians made peace with the army so the vikings go back to their main base which is now northumbria they'd put a puppet king on the throne but they do whatever they want the next year they sort of rest

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says in 869, this year the army went back to York and sat there a year. I have one history book that says this was a key time period for the second wave of this invasion to happen, right? The people that are going to turn conquest into country, come and create the infrastructure, provide, I mean, women, children, the whole thing, right? Movable wealth, who knows?

Then in 870, the Viking army sets out from York, crosses over Mercia, and attacks the place where they originally landed, East Anglia, where they were horsed. So maybe the deal lapsed by now, whatever they were paid, or maybe this is just a breaking of whatever arrangement they had. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that in 870, quote,

this year the army rode over mercia into east anglia and there fixed their winter quarters at thetford and in the winter king edmund fought with them but the danes gained the victory and slew the king whereupon they overran all that land and destroyed all the monasteries to which they came

The names of the leaders who slew the king were Hingvar and Hubba. And at the same time, they came to Medamstead, burning and breaking and slaying abbot and monks and all that they there found. They made such a havoc there that a monastery which was before full rich was now reduced to nothing, end quote.

So they kill another king here. The traditional story for this guy, who he will be canonized and turned into a saint, I believe, is that he was tied up. The Vikings demanded that he renounce his Christian faith when he did, and they shot him full of arrows and cut his head off. As is usual for this era, the evidence is fragmentary on the details. But what's clear is the Vikings have killed yet another king in Britain.

and taken yet another territory so they now have northumbria and east anglia and now they set their sights on wessex before they do in 870 the great heathen army breaks up or at least one chunk of it moves away

that's the chunk that goes northward maybe under Ivar you hear sometimes attacks the Scottish kingdoms and will eventually end up in Ireland fighting against other Vikings it's a wonderful part of the story the Irish as I may have said I don't know that they have names for the different Vikings that they run into because Ireland is originally one of these places that's heavy-duty Norwegian Viking territory and

There's a lot of crossover. I mean, these raiding parties often involve people who are just interested in fighting and they come from all over the place. But basically Norwegians in Ireland and then Danes show up and the Vikings are known to the Irish as the light haired pagans or the dark haired pagans and the light haired pagans are the Norse and the dark haired pagans are the Danes. But they both involve themselves in Irish politics will fight each other. I mean,

The kings of Dublin are Norwegian brothers, I believe. And this part of the Great Heathen Army will head on over to Ireland and fight there. The remaining part will be reinforced. There's going to be another group that shows up called the Great Summer Army. And these people head on over into Wessex to take on what will turn out to be the most formidable of all the kingdoms in Britain.

And 871 is going to be a key year in the whole affair. It's known as the year of nine engagements, and that gives you an idea of how many battles are fought. The Vikings established their camp at a place called Redding.

And then they start facing off against the king of this region called Æthelred and his younger brother, Alfred. Now, the sheer fact that they're mentioning the younger brother of the king as often as they're going to in this document should give us a clue that this document is not exactly an unbiased source. It will actually be compiled a couple of decades after this era and the person who's going to be involved in its

compiling is this Alfred guy. So you already get a sense of, you know, we're shoving a very important person in this later story into this earlier story and making sure you know where he is in the earlier story.

Here's the way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has its entry for 871, which, as you might imagine, is one of its longer entries. It goes on for a minute and then it says, quote, About four nights after this, King Æthelred and Alfred, his brother, led their main army to Reading, where they fought with the enemy. And there was much slaughter on either hand, Alderman Æthelwulf being among the slain, but the Danes kept possession of the field.

And about four nights after this, King Æthelred and Alfred, his brother, fought with all the army on Ashdown and the Danes were overcome. End quote. Then goes on to explain, you know, the tactics of this battle. And apparently the Vikings got the high ground first and separated into two separate divisions, you know, two separate shield walls. And so this was emulated on the other side. And Æthelred commands one shield wall and Alfred the other.

As I was reading this story, it has a sort of, you know, Alfred's a very important figure in British history, arguably the most important. I mean, you could make a case this is the father of England and his story is incredible.

in so many places positively Churchillian, you know, the 1940 version of Churchill, we will fight on the beaches, on the landings, you know, with the Vikings playing the parts of the Germans. And I all of a sudden remembered that Churchill actually wrote about this era, right?

He published something called A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and he covered Alfred the Great in it. And so I thought, well, I wonder if Winston Churchill's portrayal of Alfred the Great in history is Churchillian. Turns out it is. This is Winston Churchill talking about Alfred the Great, and it sounds like he could be talking about himself. He writes, quote,

The results of this victory did not break the power of the Danish army. In a fortnight, they were again in the field. But the Battle of Ashdown justly takes its place among historic encounters because of the greatness of the issue. If the West Saxons had been beaten, all England would have sunk into heathen anarchy.

Since they were victorious, the hope still burned for a civilized Christian existence in this island. This was the first time the invaders had been beaten in the field. The last of the Saxon kingdoms had withstood the assault upon it. Alfred had made the Saxons feel confidence in themselves again. They could hold their own in an open fight. The story of this conflict at Ashdown was for generations a treasured memory of the Saxon writers.

It was Alfred's first battle, end quote. It will hardly be his last. In his classic 1950s work, The Age of Faith, historian Will Durant gives his life the quick rundown when he says, quote, Alfred mounted the throne of West Saxony at the age of 22. Asser, a chronicler, describes him as then illiteratus, which could mean either illiterate or latinless.

he was apparently epileptic and suffered a seizure at his wedding feast but he is pictured as a vigorous hunter handsome and graceful and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill a month after his accession he led his little army against the danes at wilton and was so badly defeated that to save his throne he had to buy peace from the foe

But in 878, he won a decisive victory at Ethenden. Eddington, he says, half the Danish host crossed the channel to raid weakened France. The rest, by the peace of Wedmore, agreed to confine themselves to northeastern England in what came to be called the Dane law, end quote.

I admire Durant's brevity there, but the truth of the matter is the rest of Alfred the Great's life is going to be trying to deal with this arch-nemesis of his, these Viking peoples, either defending his territory from them or trying to reconquer the lands that they took from the English.

Some of the Vikings at this time settled down and the sources talk about the Viking rulers in these territories, parceling up the land and handing them out to, you know, members of these Viking groups that are like Oklahoma Sooners and the ones who want to settle down, get a farm, start a family, do so. The ones who want to continue living the Scandinavian version of La Vida Loca just sort of cross the channel looking for softer targets and

And as fate would have it, just as Anglo-Saxon England's getting tougher, the places that drove them there in the first place, when Charles the Bald played Superman and let those bullets bounce off his chest and hit Alfred's kingdom, now ricochet off of Alfred right back to where they originally came from.

There are some primary source entries and most of the history books I have have suggested that the Great Heathen Army can be tracked as it goes back over the English Channel to the continent and raises hell over there. I've got some other histories that suggest that after the Alfred the Great Treaty, you shouldn't call whatever's left the Great Heathen Army anymore. Because, of course, as we said, these Viking hosts have an organic sort of flash mob kind of feel to them.

and pick up members and lose members all the time make alliances with other groups of vikings that are squatting you know in territories that they move to these groups are very fluid and hard to you know keep track of what they're doing but when these vikings make peace in anglo-saxon england and this is the pattern it the violence just crops up elsewhere

Whether it's the same band doing this or it just so happens, I don't know. Maybe it's all the roving people looking for the next, you know, where's the next oil strike, right? Where's the next gold rush? But in the early 880s, you see it back in Frisia again. And Frisia is always getting hit, right? Because it's the modern day Netherlands, as we said. It's right by Denmark. So you're right there. But this time in the early 880s, the raids moved down into Germany again.

way down into Germany. I mean, places like Cologne and Trier get hit. Famously, ironically, and symbolically, the Vikings will stable their horses in the royal palace at Aachen where Charlemagne, you know, used to rule. All this was recorded by Adam of Bremen a couple hundred years later. He had access to a Danish king and supposedly, you know, this is what the Dane history said from a couple hundred years previously.

but the description follows a similar sort of an account that you would have heard in many of the places struck by the Vikings. And Adam of Braman writes, quote, Then was Saxony laid waste by the Danes and Northmen. Duke Bruno was killed with 12 other counts, and bishops Diethard and Markvard were slain. At that time, Frisia was depopulated and the city of Utrecht razed.

Saint Radbod, bishop of the town, retired before the persecution, fixed his sea at Deventer, and taking his stand there, took vengeance on the pagans with the sword of Anathema. Then the pirates set fire to Cologne and Trier. They stabled their horses in the palace at Aachen. The people of Mains began to erect fortifications for fear of the barbarians. Why say more?

Cities with their inhabitants, bishops with their whole flocks were struck down at one time. Stately churches were burned with the faithful. End quote.

Now, this is an interesting period in Carolingian history at this same time because this is the end of Carolingian history. You get the last guy who tries to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. His name is Charles the Fat, and Charles the Fat gets an army together, goes up to this area, confronts the Vikings in Germany, and gives them like 2,400, 2,500 pounds of silver to stop.

Oh, and some land to settle on. And they're going to convert to Christianity.

If you happen to be a person from Cologne, for example, or Trier or any one of these places who's just had their farm destroyed, all your stuff stolen, family members killed, others taken into slavery, and the emperor shows up with an army that can really deal with these people. And I don't care what size Viking army you have. They do not want to deal with anybody's royal army if they can avoid it.

I'm thinking this is the chance to show you what you get when you mess right with my people. It's payback time. And Charles the Fat essentially looking like he knuckles under here. Obviously, he's not going to play well.

Now, there is a sort of a back channel that there's always been of historical thought that maybe Charles the Fat had something going on here that we don't know about and that maybe this is intelligent behavior. If you understood his position at the time in a way that our sources don't allow us to understand it now, I don't know, but he's got a bad rap.

At least some people have said that. He is one of the most maligned figures in all Viking history because by paying off these Vikings like that, it just displays weakness. And as the evidence has already shown, as it just showed in Anglo-Saxon England, if you calm things down in one area, they're just going to go somewhere else. And it turns out that somewhere else is in Charles the Fat's

empire also so all he's done is remove a problem from one area and send it to paris this time and paris is part of his realm too and paris as we had said had already been hit multiple times in 845 the middle 840s maybe by ragnar lothbrok the 860s it gets hit a couple of times but the

So-called Siege of Paris from 885 to 886 is one of the more famous Viking incidents ever. It is also one where we have an eyewitness account, but it's a really difficult eyewitness account to use. It's from a guy, a monk actually, called Abbo, and he writes a piece that the translator of the version that I have calls a piece of magical realism, right?

where the ordinary he says becomes fully charged with the otherworldly but that's not abnormal for the literature of the time period and this is a poem actually but it's a poem by a guy who watched the siege of Paris it's the first eyewitness account we have but

But it's not all that trustworthy. I mean, when the battle goes bad and the reason it turns around is because a couple of saints intervene, well, you know, you need to take it maybe with a grain of salt, right? A piece of magical realism, but the only piece of magical realism by an eyewitness. So, for example, when Abbo describes a Viking killing

climbing up a ladder, getting a mixture of tar, wax, and oil that has been boiled, poured on his head, and his head explodes. One can say that that's the sort of thing an eyewitness would know, that maybe we can tease out of the rest of the story that might be a little unbelievable. But if you want to see the dilemma-facing story

the Vikings here just go look at a satellite photo right now of the island in the middle of the Seine it's the part of Paris that's the really old part where Notre Dame is and everything else and it's an island right in the middle of this river it's an ancient place recognized as important I mean Clovis the first king of the Franks had his throne there I believe I mean it's it's sort of a seat of power area main sort of center of Paris even back during this time period and

And for 20 years, ever since Charles the Bald had said, you know, we're going to start a ready reaction force. We're going to stop selling best weapons to the pagans and we're going to create fortified bridges. They've been working on fortified bridges, right? And there's one almost done here. And there's another one made of wood that is done. And those two connect this island in the Seine to the two banks of the river. And the Vikings want through there.

Now, Abbo is called by some a surreal exaggerator. Delbrook is merciless in saying his convoluted hexameters are not to be believed in any way, shape or form. But as I said, sometimes you can pull out the little nuggets like what happens to someone's head when you pour boiling oil on it.

he says 700 ships show up in the river uh which is a huge exaggeration no matter how you slice it but these vikings were making deals with local uh viking groups on the scene and they often did these sort of joint expedition arrangements and there may have been eight ten thousand vikings which you know that's a ton of vikings um supposedly they just want passage right to raid down river and

And according to Abba, who may have been in the room again, what can we trust? What can't we trust? He's got his own reasons for writing this. He says that the Viking warlord, who he says is not a king, but does command a lot of warriors, shows up and asks for the deal. And my translation of the Viking attacks on Paris is by Dr. Nirmal Das.

And in it, the bishop spelled differently. I'm just going to give him his traditional name, which is Jocelyn. The other person in the story is Count Odo, who's important to it. And then the Viking leader, Siegfried and Odo.

In the poem, Abbo says of this conversation where the Viking leader shows up and basically says, don't be a fool. Just let us go by. We don't want any trouble with you. I should also point out that Abbo doesn't describe these Vikings as sort of any sort of stereotypical barbarians, loutish, drunk brutes, you know, in uproarious. I mean, he calls them grim several times. That's the translation, grim men. And he writes, quote,

and when in two days these ships made landfall hard by the city siegfried did make his way to the great hall of the famed shepherd though king in name only he still commanded many warriors after bowing his head he addressed the bishop in these words

"'Oh, Jocelyn, show mercy to yourself and the flock given you, "'that you may not come to ruin. "'Grant our plea, we ask you. "'Give us your consent that we might go our way, well beyond this city. "'Nothing in it shall we touch, but shall preserve and safeguard "'all the honors that belong to you and Odo, meaning Count Odo, "'who is the noblest of all counts and who is the future king.'"

that should tell you right there that maybe you shouldn't trust this totally because you know how does siegfried know that count odo is the future king nonetheless it gives you a sense of the feeling and as we said abo may have been there the response from bishop jocelyn and count odo is part of

the French tradition that's similar in vibe to the Alfred tradition in Britain, right? These are the heroes that stand up to the Vikings when the major authorities like Charles the Fat won't, right? This is Batman. And this is the French version of the time period. And it's interesting that they're contemporaries of Alfred, right? And Abba writes, the response was,

the bishop and Odo have to this Viking, this grim man's demand is, quote,

Then the Lord's bishop, in greatest loyalty, offered these words. "'By our king, Charles, have we been given this city to guard. By him whose majestic realm spreads almost over the whole earth, by the Lord's will, and who is king and master of the mighty, the realm must not suffer by the destruction of this city, but rather this city must save the realm and preserve the peace.'

now if by chance these walls were entrusted to you as they are to us and you were asked to do all that you have asked of us would you deem it right and agree and then siegfried answers

By my honor, rather my head were lopped off by a sword and thrown to the dogs. However, if you do not agree to my requests, we shall have our siege engines at daybreak hurl poisoned darts at you. With sunset, you shall know hunger's curse. It shall go on for years. Thus having spoken, he went his way and assembled his men. End quote. Historians have no idea how many people

This warlord commands the translator for my Abbo says that the number Abbo gives his 40,000 Vikings versus 200 defenders should be discounted. It's a religiously symbolic number not to be taken literally. But once again, that leaves us with no numbers. My encyclopedia of military history says this is the high watermark of Viking attacks on the continent, you know, against the formerly or current Frankish Empire.

i don't know if that's exactly true but it's pretty safe to say that this is one of the largest groupings of vikings that the world has ever seen and eight to ten thousand seems very possible and that's a lot of vikings they have a camp nearby we are told by abo that they are raping pillaging taking slaves killing everybody in the vicinity he makes them sound over and over again like tolkien's orcs there's a lot of tolkien in this actually

In the defense of the Vikings, though, this is standard operating procedure in the pre-modern world. Much more normal to have this happen in a siege situation than not. Go back to your ancient Greece, right, where the traditional hoplite deal, unwritten agreement, is that if you hide behind your walls and say, come and get us, we can scour your territory, right, until you decide to come out and fight for it.

The other thing in defense of the Vikings here is that this is an army that has to feed itself. Where are they going to get the food from? These aren't Roman troops or Chinese troops or, you know, troops that are going to have long supply chains that continually feed them from continually reinforced supply depots. These people live off the land. Ask Napoleon and his revolutionary troops what that does to the land.

but these people in paris are kind of shut up especially in the one central island which we should imagine having an entire sort of early medieval stone wall around it with those two bridges that we talked about and the vikings are going to fight essentially a battle against fortifications and fortifications are as we all know a force multiplier so if they outnumber the defenders by quite a bit it's not as big of a deal as if we were talking about a field battle here

And in October, November 885, the Vikings assault these defenses. And if you want a sense of the rhythm, the rhythm is that there are several big pushes over the next 11 months. And in between those pushes, it settles down to sort of a typical blockade situation.

There's a lot of innovation that happens, and a lot of it involves fire. At one point, the Vikings will take, I think the sources say, three big ships, load them with incendiary material, light them on fire, guide them down the river with ropes, you know, on both banks, and try to steer it into the bridge and at least burn up all the defenders.

There may be a clue into the building practices of the early Middle Ages when we find out that they've been working on the defenses here for 20 plus years and they're still not totally completed. They build them really well, but maybe it takes a long time. The stone tower on the stone bridge is not quite done yet and this becomes a focal point in the early battle.

But you will read, Albo says, you'll read about them essentially dropping things on the Vikings all the time as the Vikings have ladders or on ships below the bridge. And they're trying to make their way up at one point, that giant wheel, and it makes it sound like it's massive, is thrown over the side. And Albo says it crushes six Vikings who are then dragged back to the boats where they're apparently keeping the corpses alive.

the mixture of pitch wax and oil that is boiled and thrown over the side. We talked about it earlier. To me, the most interesting part of that part of Abba's poem is that the soldiers on both sides talk to each other during the fighting. And I forget that this happens, but in an era where people were close enough to do that, I guess it's only natural. What would you say to somebody you were trying to kill or that was trying to kill you?

And Abo has another interesting one. I had to read the translation several times, and I hope I got it right. But I had thought it was one person that was yelling stuff from the Christian side to the Viking side. But Abo makes it pretty clear that this is like a group chant, which begs the question, how did these people know what to say?

So they must have said it multiple times. And the way he writes it makes it sound almost like a sports chant, like a soccer chant. And like every time that they throw the cauldron of boiling, you know, pitch or whatever over the side and scorch a Viking, they all yell the same thing.

Here's a taste of the battle as Abba describes it, talking about the Viking assault on that unfinished tower. And they made a lot of progress one day, and then they go to sleep, come back for the next day to continue where they left off, only to find that the people of Paris have come out with their hammers and chisels and nails and everything, and with wood instead of stone, rebuilt a lot of what the Vikings destroyed the day before. So here's how the story goes from Abba. Quote,

Now the tower did not shine forth with all its magnificence, for it was far from finished, but its foundations were solid and stood firmly grounded. Proudly it rose, its krennels were sound. During the night that followed after the battle had ended, a wooden tier was built all the way around the tower, raised atop the old bastion, and half as high as before.

Thus, together, the sun and the Danes beheld this new tower. The latter were soon locked in a frightful fight with the faithful, meaning the Christians. Arrows flew here, there, through the air. Blood gushed and flowed. Darts, stones, and javelins were hurled by ballista and slingshots. Nothing was seen between heaven and earth but these projectiles. The many arrows made the tower, built in the night, grown out."

It was the night that gave it birth, as I have chanted above. Fear seized the city. People screamed. Battle horns resounded, calling everyone to come and protect the trembling tower. Christians fought and ran about, trying to resist the assault. End quote.

He then talks about how amazing, victorious Odo, as he calls the count, was. Again, this is Batman stepping in when the central authority is either too corrupt, too ignorant, or too hapless to step in and do their job. And he comes in and he's everywhere to be seen. Once Bishop Jocelyn dies, apparently of disease, it's Odo all the time. He's, as we said, a little bit like Alfred the Great in England at this moment.

abo says of him he fortified those who were exhausted revived their strength and rushed on about the tower striking down the enemy as for those who sought to dig beneath the walls with iron picks he served them up with oil and wax and pitch

which was all mixed up together and made into a hot liquid on a furnace, which burned the hair of the Danes, made their skulls split open. Indeed, many of them died, and others went and sought out the river. And then our men, with one voice, my emphasis, with one voice, loudly exclaimed, Right badly scorched are you! End quote.

To make matters worse, if you were a blistering, dying Viking and you retire towards your ships in the hopes you can get a little medical attention or whatnot, it turns out, Abo says, their wives are there. But instead of being in a mood to, you know, moisten their brow, give them some water, you know, and comfort them, they're heckling them. Basically saying, what the heck is this? Why are you coming back here? Get back in the fight, you wimp. You know, that kind of thing.

Now, you'd be inclined to discount this as some sort of exaggeration or weird invention of Abba's, except it actually fits as a data point in a long-running amount of historical evidence we have for

for at least pagan Germanic women doing this, and maybe even a broader section of Europeans going back to Celtic times doing this, where the wives and the women of the group are there at the battle. In fact, the Icelandic sagas of the Viking era from later in this period actually say the same thing. So this is another data point that suggests that the wives are there

And in the old Germanic tales by the Romans, there were wagons that were behind the battlefield and the wives were there. Here it's the ships that play the same role. And the

The women have several different approaches they can use. This is the one you see all the time, the heckling. But they also have the ones in the Roman things. They would bear their breasts and tell their loved ones what would happen to them if they lost this battle and the other side conquered them. Right. Think about what will happen to your family that's here. I mean, would you fight harder if your family was at the battlefield you were fighting on?

And finally, the last thing that sometimes the women in these situations do is actually do what you would hope if you were a Viking that they would do. Moisten your brow, give you something cool to drink and maybe give you some food and and nurse your injuries. But not this time. Abbo says that they're heckling sort of goaded the men back into the cauldron and the fight.

There is a ton of almost like commando activity, maybe is the best way to describe it, that happens between the big attacks. You know, people will scale the walls in one spot, you know, a couple dozen, and then a couple dozen of the defenders have to take them on. So there's a bunch of Force 10 from Navarone stuff in this ABO, including the way that they eventually solve the problem because the Batman Count Odo character is going to slip out of the blockade, get all the way back to the command post,

palace of you know the emperor himself charles the factor if you want to be a little kinder charles the stout

says please come and help paris he's inclined not to the sources say but has some advisors say it would look really bad if you just let the vikings do this uh so he goes through the laborious slow process of putting a royal army together the laborious slow process of having it made having it make its way up to where the battle is happening then they establish a camp there and they start killing every viking that they find outside the viking camp and now you have a bit of a face-off

right royal camp with charles the fat viking enclosure nearby and then of course you know paris under siege and bodies rotting in the sun which is going to equal disease you're not going to want to have to sit there very long uh waiting for something to happen when people are dying as i said bishop jocelyn supposedly dies from disease so the vikings make a deal with charles the fat

And it's the exact same sort of deal, it sounds like, that they asked for before this entire 11-month siege even started. In other words, the Vikings got the same deal that they asked for originally, and the emperor gives it to them. Can you imagine how the people of Paris, having endured 11 months of this, feel when the royal army finally shows up and you have a chance to

to chastise the people who've inflicted this pain and suffering on you. And instead he gives them a bunch of silver and lets them continue down past the now broken and destroyed bridges of Paris, down the Seine to raise havoc deeper into the interior of France, right? The things that Bishop Jocelyn Abbot says had said, we have a responsibility. We have to protect France. And the deal the emperor says is I'll give you a bunch of silver and you can go raid these people in Burgundy who are in revolt against me anyway.

This will contribute to the fall eventually of Charles the Fat, whose empire is going to splinter into multiple kingdoms. And the guy who gets to be the king of this part of the former Carolingian empire is going to be Count Odo, who is going to start his own royal line in French history, which is one of the most, again, one can make a case that this is like the founding foundations of France.

Charlemagne would be another one of those possible candidates for that title. By the time Count Odo becomes King Odo in France in the late 880s, the spike in the piracy stock market that we call the Viking Age had been going on for 100 years. And the economic costs are unquantifiable.

If we want to get a little teeny window into what the cost might look like, historian Dan Jones in his book Powers and Thrones quotes another historian who estimates that 14% of all the silver pennies minted by the entire Frankish Empire over the entire century of the 800s went to pay off the Vikings just for protection money.

just for go away funds right doesn't include any of the money the Vikings directly stole or looted in their many many many attacks doesn't include any of the money that the Empire had to spend to defend themselves or fight the Vikings doesn't include any of the lost productivity or emotional costs of all the people the Vikings killed or stole and sold into slavery 14% of all the silver pennies in direct payments for protection and

Sometimes when you see estimates of what organized crime drains away from a society's economy, it kind of looks similar, doesn't it? In some societies, anyway.

nonetheless you would think that with the 900s approaching that finally after a hundred years of steel sharpening steel and weeding out the incompetence and bringing the effective people to the fore that things would look good for the traditional opponents of the vikings here right king odo in france and alfred in anglo-saxon england but by about 900 901 902 both guys are dead

And in fact, you know, the Batman that is King Odo will live to eventually see the hero become the villain when he will disappoint his fanboy, Abo, and pay off the Vikings himself at one point, right? Pulling a Charles the Fat, if you will. It just shows how unavoidable it was sometimes.

But if you're looking at this in 900, you can't help but notice that these Viking groups that had been disjointed, fragmentary groups of people under warlords or chieftains are starting more and more to unite into more

viable larger economic and political entities they're in the process of state building and they're getting stronger all the time it's almost like you can hear the ominous darth vader music in the distance approaching alfred dead odo dead the vikings consolidating the 900s looks particularly scary if you are a viking opponent

The weird part about this era, though, is you could also apply a sort of a Rashomon lens here and say that if you're a Viking, you may be hearing ominous Darth Vader music going into the 900s as well. We quoted a couple of recent historians who point out that the Vikings in this period were well aware that their culture and belief system and way of life was under siege.

They are by 900 an endangered species, the cultural equivalent of a white rhino, a representation of a style of Germanic language paganism on its way out in the last convulsions of its dying days, soon to see its values supplanted and its gods abandoned.

But even if you have mortally wounded a white rhino, doesn't mean you still can't be gored. So far, as far as we've been discussing elves and trolls and sorcery and female spirits inhabiting all Viking peoples...

Don't seem to have played a huge role in the story, but if that's the framework that your reality is constructed upon, it's hard to tease out exactly what kind of an important role it plays in the worldview of a people who in some cases are fighting to preserve a worldview.

The 900s and the period we're entering in now is in books like Gwen Jones's Viking history book, the one I grew up with. This is the period where he really starts the conversation. And everything we've already talked about is almost like prehistory, which should tell you something. In part two, we'll get into a little bit of the material, troubling, difficult, and strange as it is.

that gives the viking soul at least a little bit of a chance to sing that and some runes and a long ship or two and you can get very far in the world and in part two we'll see exactly how far the vikings get before that wave breaks and is rolled over by the exact same opponent that rolled over all of these people's precursors

the end of a process that's been going on since the Roman Republic. All that and more in part two of Twilight of the Eyser.

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