After Charlemagne: The Northmen | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe

Charlemagne’s conquests in Germany had for the first time brought the home ground of many of the barbarians into Christendom. Still outside lay Scandinavia, from whose shores there began in the ninth century a new wave of invasions that hit Britain and the western parts of the Frankish lands with savage force. The Northmen conducted their raids from small ships that could easily sail up the Thames, the Seine, or the Loire.

Their appetite for booty grew with their successes, and soon they organized fleets of several hundred ships, ventured farther abroad, and often wintered along a conquered coast. They ranged as far east as Yaroslavl in northern Russia, as far south as Spain, penetrated into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, and raided Italy. To the west they proceeded far beyond Ireland to reach Iceland and Greenland. About 986 some of them almost certainly sighted Newfoundland (Vinland), Labrador, and perhaps New England.

Desire for booty does not by itself account for the Norse expansions. Polygamy was common among the upper classes of the pagan Scandinavians, and the younger sons of these chiefs probably had to leave home to seek more wives. Like most migrations, however, the chief motivation most likely was to find new lands to settle in the face of growing overpopulation. Cultivable land became scarce, throwing families onto marginal lands to face the fear of famine in a bad year.

The Norsemen’s first captured base was along the lower Seine River, which is still called Normandy after them. In 915 the Frankish king was forced to grant the Norse leader Rolf, or Rollo (c. 860—c. 931) a permanent right of settlement. The Normans became an efficient and powerful ruling class—in fact, the best administrators in the new feudal age. From Normandy soon after the year 1000 younger sons would go off to found a state in the southern Italian and Sicilian territories that belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire and to the Arabs.

And from Normandy in 1066, as we shall see, Duke William and his followers would conquer England. Kinsmen of these Norsemen who had settled in Normandy also did great deeds. In the 860s the first wave of Viking invaders crossed the Baltic Sea to what is now the Soviet Union and penetrated deep inland to the south along the river valleys. They conquered the indigenous Slavic tribes and, at Kiev on the middle Dnieper, consolidated the first Russian state.

Possibly Related History:

1. Charlemagne and the Revival of Empire, 768-814 | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
2. The Franks: The Building of an Empire | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
3. The Breakdown of Roman Civilization | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
4. Visigoths, Vandals, Anglo-Saxons, 410-455 | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
5. Italy from Theodoric to Pepin, 527-768 | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe