Viking Age

The **Viking Age** lasted from about 84 the end of the Early Middle Ages (476-978 AD). It began with the intensification of Scandinavian Viking activities from 840 AD, after the sporadic early raiding that began with Lindisfarne in 793 AD. It then ended with the reign of King Ethelred the Unready of England, which would set in motion the events that led to the Norman conquest of England.

On 8 June 793, the Vikings exploded onto the historical record with their raid on the island monastery of Lindisfarne in north-eastern England. There is nothing very unusual in history about a barbarian peoples erupting from their homelands to devastate a weak but relatively rich society, but a few factors made the Vikings uniquely terrifying. Firstly as pagans, they recognised no special sanctity in Christian churches and monasteries, appearing out of "*the frozen north*" like something out of a nightmare, and showing no mercy. Secondly they were masters of the sea, with their characteristic longships taking them far and wide, and up rivers far inland; since none of the Western realms were confident sailors, raiders could easily outrun pursuit. The third factor that made the Vikings different from other raiders was their ability not just to settle lands but to leave behind lasting communities, based around a well-established tradition of assembly politics known as the *Thing*. At the same time as the Viking were falling time and time again on coast and river valleys of the northern Europe, another group of pagan marauders played a similar role in the east. The Magyars, a pagan people originating north of the Crimea, established themselves on the Hungarian grasslands, and raided west into Germany and Italy, as well as Burgundy and France.

These incursions had a profound impact on the cultures they interacted with; and far from entirely negative. Some of them responded to the threat by drawing together. Anglo-Saxon England is a good example, where only one of the kingdoms could successfully stand up to the wave of Viking attacks and settlement. This was Wessex and it gave England its first national hero, Alfred the Great. In 871 Alfred inflicted the first decisive defeat on a Danish army at Edington, and his descendants went on to consolidate all of England under a single king; it has remained in political unity ever since. Another example is Scotland, where the Celtic peoples were drawn together by constant Viking pressure into a kingdom under the House of Alpin. Others responded to the threat by fracturing, with France being the classical example, where royal authority almost completely collapsed. The great nobles were able to draw more and more power into a dozen or so feudal territories, because they could offer protection against Viking hit-and-run tactics, more effectively than the sluggish royal armies. In 911 Charles III, unable to expel the Vikings, conceded lands in what was later Normandy to them; the Normans would soon become French in speech and law, as one of the most powerful feudal states of Western Europe. Still others were a mix of these two responses. In Ireland, the Vikings founded a number of settlements, the most significant in the long-term being Dublin. Although Ireland was almost drawn together under Brian Boru who broke Viking power at the Battle of Clontarf (1014), he failed to establish a stable dynasty and the country fragmented again. Another example is Germany, where the great dukes recognised the need for a strong leader against Viking and Magyar raiders. One of these, Otto the Great, inflicted a defeat on the Magyars that ended their threat for ever, and went on to forge a vast realm covering much of central Europe into the Holy Roman Empire. It was a remarkable achievement and undoubtedly the most powerful realm in Europe of the 10th and 11th century, but the paradox of a monarch elected by great nobles proved fragile in the long term.

Trade with the Byzantine and Muslim world rather than plunder was the main reason that the Vikings penetrated deep into Eastern Europe via the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers from the 9th-century. There they intermingled with the Eastern Slavs to form the sprawling realm of Kievan Rus, the cultural origins of Russia. It was heavily influenced by the Byzantine Empire, which at the time was enjoying a spectacular *Golden Age* under the dynasty established by Emperor Basil I. The very zenith of Byzantine power came under Basil II, who conquered Bulgaria, establishing the Danube once again as a stable and secure northern frontier. Meanwhile in the east, Byznatines was now the ones on the offensive, the armies of the Prophet retreating as the Muslim world entered a period of decline and regional powers. Perhaps the most spectacular achievement of the Vikings was their colonisation of remote islands. Settlement in Iceland and Greenland placed them in an ideal position for further exploration; historians no longer dispute the evidence that the Vikings reached North America, over five-hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Once the traumas of their raids had passed, what the Viking left behind everywhere was a more developed commercial culture and a vast trading network connecting parts of the world that had previously had little or no connection. Gradually the story of pagan incursions became the story of the Christianisation of northern and eastern Europe, and establishment of stable kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, the Slavs, and Russia all accepted either Roman or Orthodox Christianity by the end of the 10th-century or shortly afterwards.

## History

### The Vikings

On 8 June 793, the monks on the island monastery of Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast of England, were unpleasantly surprised by the arrival of snapping dragon-headed ships. Hulking warriors, armed with broadswords and fearsome battle-axes, rushed into the monastic village, and, in a frenzied fury, slaughtered the helpless monks carried away booty and slaves, and left buildings in flames behind them. The raid on Lindisfarne was not the first Viking encounter, but the attack on "*a place more sacred than any in Britain*" sent a shockwave throughout Christian Europe; and is now often taken as the beginning of the ***Viking Age*** (793-1066). At the time of the first Viking raids overseas, most of the inhabitants of Scandinavia - present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden - were living in small communities. They were isolated by the barriers of mountain, forest, or fjord. The sea was the easiest means of communication between each other and the outside world. One of the most famous images connected with the Vikings is that of the dragon-headed longships, some over seventy feet long, and well-designed to cope with the hazards of the ocean: built of seasoned overlapping oak planks, riveted with iron, and bound to the ribs with tough pine roots, their hulls could not only flex to the swell, but also, thanks to their negligible draught, negotiate shallow rivers. Shallows and waterfalls proved no obstacle; the crews simply carried their longships past such obstructions, or even from one river system to another. However, Viking ships came in many different forms, among which were big-bellied cargo carriers that could shelter large families, their goods and animals for six or seven days at sea. Equipped with these fine technical instruments, the Scandinavians began to move outwards from the eighth century onwards, for reasons which, as in the case of many folk-movements, are by no means clear. Overpopulation likely played a major role. Beginning around 800, the temperatures in Europe had begun to rise; a phenomenon known as the *Medieval Warm Period*. This shift was just a few degrees, but enough to send the cold north, with comparatively little land suitable for farming, from population growth to over-population very quickly. The earliest Vikings were the sons of farmers who had no land of their own and took to piracy as the only route to material wealth and status. At the same time rumours had been sweeping through Scandinavia of Charlemagne's wars of forced conversion against the pagan Saxon. There were no longer any Saxon warships in the North Sea, leaving them masters of the western seas. Very rich pickings were to be had there. Finally, Scandinavia, like the rest of Europe, was in the early stages of state formation during the eight century. Self-sufficient and used to ruling themselves, they were irked by a centralisation of power under powerful kings, such as Harold "Fairhair" of Norway. Pastures new were what they needed, and these they sought with a vengeance. The Scandinavians thrust out across the water for two centuries, and left behind a civilization which, in the end, stretched from Greenland to Kiev. Not all sought the same things. The Norwegians who struck out to the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Iceland, and the far west wanted to colonize. The Swedes who penetrated eastern Europe and survive in the records as the Rus' were much busier in trade. The Danes did most of the ravaging and pillaging the Vikings are remembered for. But all these themes of the Scandinavian migrations wove in and out of one another. No branch of these peoples had a monopoly of any one of them. Since the chronicles were written by monks, the Viking were viewed as black-hearted *barbarians.* Yet there is nothing unusual about a less civilized people, erupting from their homeland to devastate a weak but relatively rich society; we have seen it already with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Vikings had a fascinating mythology and a rich literary tradition, mostly preserved through the *Icelandic Sagas*. They produced some very impressive art, not least their highly decorated longships. They were different from other contemporary raiders largely in their ability to, not only settle lands, but to construct governments; ranging from the *Althing* in Iceland (arguably the oldest surviving parliament in the world), and to the founding what is now Russia. But perhaps their most important contribution to European history was by connecting Western Europe, and soon the rest of Europe and parts of the Middle East, into larger and richer trade networks.

### Vikings in the British Isles

The Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 was a story repeated again and again. Unfortunately for the British Isles, many of her most important monasteries were particularly vulnerable, owing to their founders’ wish for solitude, devoting themselves to worship without outside interference. Situated on small islands and remote coastal areas, they were sitting ducks. The Vikings had no sense of their sacredness, only seeing a conveniently provided concentration of golden chalices and bejewelled *Bibles*. The raids continued in 794, when Viking ships sacked the nearby monastery of Jarrow, birthplace of Bede. The following year, they sailed across the top of Scotland to strike at Iona, off its west coast. This monastery was attacked again in 802 and 806, when sixty-eight monks were massacred in what is now Martyrs' Bay. After this devastation, the monastic community abandoned the site, and fled to Kells in Ireland. In the first decade of the ninth century, they began to attack coastal communities of Ireland and Wales. These early Viking raids were generally small in scale and hit-and-run in nature. in which they quickly approached a vulnerable target, then left as rapidly, before any counter-offensive could be mounted. If a place was fortified, they tended to pass it by. The Viking were not always victorious. For the year 811, the *Irish Annals* tell us tersely, "*A slaughter of the heathens by the Ui Neill"*; which must have been a significant achievement, because the same victory was recorded at Charlemagne's court. But in the 830s, the pattern began to change: raiding parties became more formidable and better organised; settlements further inland along rivers were targeted; and named earls, from the upper echelons of Scandinavian society, crop up as leaders. First on the Scottish islands and in Ireland, the Viking also began to establish fortified encampments (*longphorts*), allowing them to remain throughout the winter. From such settlements they could gain intelligence about their foes, participate in local politics, tactfully choosing sides, and then launch new campaigns.

If the national identity of **England** began as a religious concept, it took political form in response to the new external threat. In 865, a strong detachment of the Vikings, who had been pillaging France, sailed away from the fortified bridges that were increasingly being build to deter them. and followed the sea to easier pickings. What the chronicles called the *Great Heathen Army* landed in East Anglia. It was under the command of three brothers - Halfdan, Ubbe, and Ivar the Boneless - the sons of the legendary Viking leader Ragnar Lodbrok. The origin of Ivar's nickname is not certain, but he may have been the victim of a bone disease; all we know for certain is that he was often carried on a shield into battle, where he fought with a long spear. His arriving hordes flew the *Raven Banner*, a symbol of the high god *Odin*; whose two ravens, *Huginn* ("thought") and *Muninn* ("memory"), fly over the world, and tell him everything they see and hear. The *Raven Banner* was more than a standard. It was a sign of the ancient religion whose power still lingered in Anglo-Saxon memories. England had been officially Christian since the *Synod of Whitby* in 664, but the faith had spread unevenly. As long as the country remained a quilt of independent political allegiances, a strong pagan presence would remain rooted deeply in the wild and hostile places that surrounded the struggling churches of Wessex and Mercia and Northumbria. A victory for the *Great Army* would not merely deprive them of land. It would pull the Anglo-Saxons back into the darkness of the pagan faith. The overwhelming might of the Vikings forced the East Anglian king into a hasty agreement: in exchange for keeping his throne, he would provide food and shelter over the winter, and horses in the spring. When the worst of the cold was over, the *Great Army* began the march north into Northumbria, which had been divided by civil war between a recently deposed king and a usurper. At the new threat, the two men gave up their struggle, united their forces, and turned together to face it. But their cooperation was too little, too late. By the end of 867, the *Great Army* had overrun Northumbria, taken York, and laid waste to the countryside. The monastery at Whitby would lie desolate and ruined for the next two hundred years. This same army then set-off for Mercia, where they captured the city of Nottingham. The Mercian king sent to his southern neighbour for help. King Æthelred of Wessex, who also controlled Sussex and Kent, answered the call, marching north together with his younger brother, a certain Alfred, then about twenty years old. This combined army laid siege to Nottingham with no clear result, so arranged a truce; probably paying the Vikings off. In exchange for temporarily saving Mercia. Alfred got the daughter of the Mercian king as his wife. The *Great Army* returned to Northumbria, and stayed there for most of 869. Having regathered their strength, they went back into East Anglia, killed the king who had provided them with winter quarters, and took it for themselves. Now Wessex itself was in danger. The inevitable attack came in the winter of of 871. Once again, the brothers Æthelred and Alfred attempted to resist the *Great Army* at Reading, but were defeated with heavy losses. Having retreated and regroups, they met them again four days later at Ashdown. This time they were able to halt the Vikings, though Æthelred's victorious army was seriously weakened..Two weeks later the tide turned back, and, in another enormous clash at Basing, the *Great Army* was victorious. The Vikings took over the rule of London, and reinforcements arrived to swell their ranks. Although he continued to resist, Æthelred died of illness at this point, sometime shortly after Easter 871.

Alfred, later **Alfred the Great** (871-899), inherited the kingship of Wessex, the struggling Anglo-Saxon army, and the unenviable task of meeting the *Great Army* in the field. “*He was a great warrior and victorious in virtually all battles,*” wrote his contemporary John Asser: this is clearly hindsight, since Alfred promptly lost another battle, and was forced to buy a peace treaty. During this temporary lull, the *Great Army* firmed up its dominance of Northumbria, and then, in 874, moved back into Mercia and took most of that kingdom for their own. Ceolwulf II, the last Mercian king, was left with a small area to the west of Watling Street, the old Roman road between London and Chester. In these campaigns, Ivar the Boneless died (probably during an expedition to Ireland), while Halfdan seems to have fallen out of favour. But the *Great Army* remain strong, now led by Ubbe and his chief lieutenant, Guthrum, who still had their eye on the rich southern lands. In 876, they broke the peace, slipped past the Saxon army, and marched all the way across Wessex to occupy Wareham and then Exeter, on the south coast. There, the other half of the army was to join them by sea. Fortunately, poor weather played into Alfred’s hands. The Viking fleet was scattered by a storm off the coast of Dorset. Alfred was able to lay siege to the Vikings at Exeter, and force them to accept a peace. This truce was broken in the winter of 878, when a coordinated attack was launched, led by Guthrum from East Anglia, and by Ubbe who appeared in the Severn, not far from the royal stronghold at Chippenham, where Alfred was staying over Christmas. It seemed to be only a matter of time before the entire island fell into Viking hands. So Alfred, in command of an exhausted and ravaged army, went into hiding in the Somerset marshes. “*He led a restless life in great distress amid the woody and marshy places,*” writes Asser, “... *with nothing to live on except what he could forage*”. But all was not yet lost; he was not the only general leading the fight against the Vikings. In early 878, Ubbe was killed at the Battle of Cynuit, possibly while trying to flush out Alfred. The Anglo-Saxon forces were led into this fight by a nobleman (*ealdorman*) named Odda, who not only triumphed over the Vikings but captured the *Raven Banner*, the sign of *Odin*’s power. Perhaps this good omen heartened Alfred, but he didn’t immediately come out of hiding. Guthrum was still at the head of the *Great Army*, which was still in control of the countryside. Alfred had decided to take the long view: he was willing to risk his kingdom so that he could build-up his fighting force. Stories would later multiply around this self-imposed exile, including the most famous tale of all: Alfred, hiding out incognito in a peasant's hut, was told by the housewife to watch the cakes baking on the hearth. So preoccupied was Alfred that he didn’t notice the cakes burn, and was roundly scolded by the woman upon her return. This story was inserted by a clergyman centuries later, though he claimed that it was found in a ninth-century source; it is probably legend, but its essence tells us something about the memory of Alfred, who humbly turns the cakes and doesn’t reveal to the woman that she has just scolded the king of England. Even his contemporaries saw him as virtuous and holy, a God-given deliverer from the pagan menace. In the late spring of 878, Alfred emerged from the Somerset marshes with a strong and desperate army behind him. He met and defeated the *Great Army* of the Vikings at the town of Edington, the key battle of the war. Alfred was finally able to dictate the sort of terms which pleased him, including the conversion of the Viking leader Guthrum to Christianity. He brought thirty of his best warriors with him, and all of them were baptized on the same day. The agreement, the *Treaty of Wedmore*, divided England in two; Alfred ruled the south and south-west, including a shrunken Mercia (now governed by his son-in-law Æthelred); while Guthrum and his Vikings were retained independent control of Northumbria, the eastern coast, and the eastern half of Mercia, which became what is known as *Danelaw* (865–954). Alfred’s victory at Edington may have been decisive, but Viking armies had suffered greater defeats without surrender. The truth was that the Vikings, once raiders and havoc-makers, had now been in England for more than a decade. They had rooted themselves into the English countryside, married Anglo-Saxon women, fathered children, planted homesteads, and lost a little of their piratical edge. They had begun to feel like settlers, not invaders; and were willing to accept the new faith, if that would give them their new lives. As for Alfred, he was able to lay claim to the greatest Anglo-Saxon kingdom yet. In the years after Wedmore, Alfred was forced fight many more battles, driving out another Viking force under a leader named Haesten. But thanks to Alfred, the solitary Anglo-Saxon kingdom survived, and he could turn his attention to securing what he had: dividing his kingdom into about thirty administrative divisions (*shires*), each under a royal official (*shire-revee* or sheriff), and centred on a fortified town (*burh* or borough); ordering the construction of a small navy, no more than a dozen or so ships (this was not, as the Victorians asserted, the birth of the English Navy); issuing an important new law code; and reviving the learning and Christian scholarship that had been destroyed in the Viking attacks. And in 886, Alfred went on the offensive, and recovered the city of London from the Vikings. If we want a birth date for an English kingdom, this is as good as any. So Alfred seem to have thought: shortly after, he began to style himself as "*King of the Anglo-Saxons*".

Alfred was succeeded by a worthy warrior son, Edward the Elder (889-924), who continued the fightback against the Vikings, in partnership with his sister Æthelflæd, who was known as the *Lady of the Mercians* because she ruled in her own right after her husband's death. Together, they inflicted a crushing defeat on a large-scale Viking incursions in 910. By 912, Edward was ready to begin the series of campaigns by which he relentlessly advanced into the Danelaw, securing each advance with shires and fortified town, until he won back Essex and East Anglia. His sister moved similarly into eastern Mercia, before her death in 918. Edward had by then reached the River Humber, but broke off his advance to fully incorporate Mercia into his kingdom. Æthelstan (924-939) succeeded his father, and brought an end to the Danelaw, thus becoming the first king to have direct rule of all England; the ***Kingdom of England*** (927–1707). He was well on his way to wiping out the last traces of the independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that had once carpeted the island, when he face an unlikely alliance of former enemies - Northumbrian Vikings, Irish Vikings, Britons of Strathclyde, the Kingdom of Scotland, and several Anglo-Saxon noblemen - at the Battle of Brunanburh (937); a battle that was still known as "the great war" decades later. But not even this impressive coalition could defeat Alfred the Great’s grandson, This victory gave Æthelstan great prestige both in the British Isles and on the Continent. “*All the race of the Welsh sought him as their lord,*” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, “*... the king of Scots and all the nation of Scots chose him as father and lord"*. The submission of the Welsh and the Scots appears to have been a simple matter of treaties between kings, since Æthelstan was in no position to dictate terms on his fellow kings. Even so, he described himself on his coins as *Rex totius Britanniae* ("King of all Britain"). His sisters were married off to European monarchs; one got the king of France, the other got Otto the Great, the future *Holy Roman Emperor*. But this new English state was still a fragile collection of regional differences. Immediately after Æthelstan’s death in 939, the Irish Viking leader Olaf took Northumbria away. It took another fifteen years to pull Northumbria permanent inside the borders of England, uoon the death of Eric Bloodaxe in 954. The situation remained reasonably stable throughout the long reign of Edgar (959-975). Later chroniclers presented his reign as the *golden age* of the Alglo-Saxon monarchy, before the years of decline under his son Æthelred, famously nicknamed "the Unready".

The Viking legacy to **Scotland** was to be long-lasting. Norsemen wholly replaced the Picts on the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, from which they extended dominion over the Faroes (previously uninhabited except for a few Irish monks), the western isles, and the Isle of Man. From their base on Orkney arose a miniature sea-empire; known as the *Kingdom of the Isles*. Sigurd the Mighty, who fought many campaigns in the north of Scotland, died soon after his Homeric combat with the Pictish nobleman Maelbrigte Tooth; but Torf Einar, who became Earl around 891, established a house which lasted almost three hundred years, till absorbed into Scotland in the middle of the thirteenth century. On the mainland, there was a certain inevitability about the way in which the four peoples of Scotland - Picts, Scots, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons - began to come together against the common Viking threat. The love of early historians for a precise turning point has caused the year 843 to be selected as the starting date of the kingdom of Scotland. It is said to be the year in which Kenneth mac Alpin (840-858), king of the Scots, fell upon the Picts, to whose throne he had a claim through his mother, after the devastated of its aristocracy in a major Viking raid, and, having defeated his rivals, made himself king of everything north of the Forth. In reality, the merging of the two kingdoms seems to have been a gradual process throughout the ninth century. The Scots and Picts had much in common. Both were organized as a collection of tribes and clans, each boasting a certain local power. There are great resemblances between the folklore of all the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, and what evidence there is shows that Pictish folklore was not entirely dissimilar. Conversion to Christianity then gave a new cohesion, for the Pictish Church was very much the same as the Celtic Church. The Scots might seem to predominate, because its king mounted the Pictish throne, and its Gaelic language and customs gradually displaced Pictish ones because of its close connection with Irish learning; but the idea of a Scots takeover of Pictland is incorrect. The significance of Kenneth mac Alpin is that his male descendants, the *House of Alpin* (843-1034), provided kings in Scotland for the next two centuries. It was Kenneth, or one of his immediate successors, who moved the royal seat from Dunadd on the island studded west coast, where Viking raids made life untenable, to Scone (near Perth) in the heart of Pictish territory. This is an indication of the conscious merging of the Picts and the Scots under one rule; Scone had a long association with the Pictish kings; while the sacred coronation stone of the Scots was bought there, known now as the *Stone of Scone* or *Stone of Destiny*. Meanwhile, the relics from the abandoned monastery on Iona - including the bones of St. Columba - were transferred Dunkeld, which became the religious centre of the new kingdom. The long reign of Constantin II (900–943) is often regarded as the key to formation of the Kingdom of Scotland (843-1707). He fought many battles against the Vikings encroaching from the north and the west, and sought repeatedly to conquer the Britons and Anglo-Saxons of the southern lowlands, without lasting success. Meanwhile, the English king Edward the Elder allied with him against the Vikings in disputed Northumbria. But in 934, Æthelstan, having consolidated his position in northern England, lanuched an unprovoked attack on the east coast of Scotland by land and sea; or at least his reasons remain very unclear. Thus assailed, Constantin sought the alliance of his old enemies that ended in disaster at Brunanburgh in 937. The defeat of all he had hoped for his kingdom, and the death of one of his son, seem to have drained the spirit out of Constantin, who soon abdicated and withdrew to monastic life in St. Andrews. It was left to his successors to stem the seemingly irresistible English advance. Yet this proved easy enough, since another Viking leader from Ireland soon reestablished himself at York. Edmund of England sought the friendship of the Scots. In 945, he allowed Malcolm I (943-954) to annex the Brittonic rump state of Strathclyde (the western lowlands); the area was not formally incorporated into Scotland until 1018, upon the death of its last king. Edmund's generosity was not disinterested; his purpose was to block the road from Ireland into Northumbria. The English threat, however, was resumed under the powerful king, Edgar. The *Anglo-Saxon Chronicles* records that, in 973, Kenneth II of Scotland (971–95) and six Welsh kings rowed Edgar on the River Dee as a symbol of their submission. The danger to the Scottish monarchy was unmistakable. Nonetheless, at this conference of kings, Scotland was formally granted Lothian (the eastern lowlands), which had until then been part of Northumbria. So Kenneth II had united under himself a kingdom whose limits, save for the Viking holdings in the north and west, were those of modern Scotland.

The Vikings were able to exploit internal divisions in order to gain substantial territories.in England. As **Ireland** was one of the most politically fractured countries of its time, it became a prime target for early Viking activity. There had been *high-kings* in Ireland since the days of Niall of the Nine Hostages, but none had ever governed the whole island. Ruled effectively by provincial kings and a multiplicity of local clans, frequently in conflict with one another, the Irish were unable to put up a united resistance. The first recorded Viking raid occurred in 795, when Rathlin Island monastery off the Ulster coast was plundered. These raids intensified in the 830s, with roving fleets of fifty ship or more pillaging far inland. Then, from at least 840, the Vikings began to overwinter in Ireland. A year later, they returned; this time to stay. The *Dubhlinn* was a pool on the lowest stretch of the River Poddle, a tributary of the Liffey. Here, they pulled their longships ashore, lashed them down, and erected a stockade for protection; known as a *Longphort*. With the coming of every summer, more bands of Viking arrived and settled there, thus laying the foundation of the city of Dublin. At suitable spots along the southern and eastern coasts – at Wicklow, Waterford, Wexford. Limerick, and Cork - similar colonies arose, and would in time become Ireland’s first true towns. Dublin, however, was always pre-eminent; here the Vikings not only built a city, but gradually incorporated the surrounding area into a coastal petty-kingdom. The Scandinavians brought with them no domestic traditions of city-building. They made their ports sturdy, fortified places because they were obliged to do so. The Irish were ferocious fighters, and the Vikings by no means had everything their own way. Repeated attempts to establish a toe-hold in Ulster were halted by resistance from the Nothern Uí Néill and Ulaid. Turgesius, one of the first named Viking leaders, was captured and drowned by King Máel Sechnaill of the Southern Uí Néil; and later *high-king*. The *Irish Annals* record the death of a Viking leader named Ímar in 873, which more than likely refers to Ivar the Boneless; one of the leaders of the *Great Heathen Army*. The most serious of the Viking reverses came at the beginning of the tenth century. Having shifted their attention to consolidating the Danelaw against an increasing powerful West Saxon rival, *Longphort* after *Longphort* was ransacked by the native Irish; acting, for once, in concord. This culminated, in 902, with their expulsion from Dublin. But Ireland was too valuable a prize to let go easily. After twelve years in exile, a large fleet of Viking ships recaptured Waterford, and began to settle the town intensively. By 917, they were strong enough to sail north and reoccupy Dublin; and shortly after, most of their other former strongholds. This proved the zenith of Viking power in Ireland. They stopped raiding the island, and concentrated more on developing the small territories they had conquered into trading cities. Dublin became a place of wealth and industry by any standards. It lay at the centre of a vast trade network that ran from Constantinople and Russia through the Baltic to Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland: wine and silver from the Mediterranean were funnelled through the city; furs, walrus ivory and amber flowed south through Dublin. Cultural changes were soon felt. The Vikings began to act as economic middlemen between the native Irish and wider markets; and the sharp dividing line between foreigner and native, as delineated by medieval chroniclers, became increasingly blurred. As Christianization and Gaelicization took root, it began to vanish entirely.

In the latter half of the tenth century, the great power game in Ireland began to shift. The Uí Néill retained supremacy across the northern half of the island, with one or other branch having held the *high-kingship* at Tara for centuries; but other figures were eyeing that glittering prizes too. The Dál Cais clan, rulers of a petty kingdom in central Ireland, possessed the great virtue of straddling the Shannon, a river of growing importance in Viking trade; and having observed Viking methods, they had absorbed important lessons. In 976, Mathgamain, leader of the Dál Cais, was assassinated by the Vikings. In retaliation, his brother stormed Limerick. When the city-leaders sought sanctuary in a church, he set aside sacred custom, and slaughtered them all. This was Brian, later known as **Brian Boru** (976-1014); from the Gaelic word *bóruma* ("of the tribute"). Helped by booty siezed at Limerick, Brian began to subdue one clan after clan; and, within four years, he had defeated the long-established Eóganacht, and claimed the kingship of Munster. He then sought to extending his power, sending the Viking ships of Limerick up the Shannon into Connacht and Meath, and entering an alliance with the Vikings of Waterford, to threaten Leinster and Dublin. The Uí Néill and their *high king* Máel Seachnaill obviously perceived the rise and rise of this provincial upstart as a threat. After many battles and campaigns, the two power blocs fought each other to a standstill; and in 997, they conclude a fragile peace. The *Treaty of Clonfert* divide Ireland between them; Brian Boru became effective *high-king of* Munster and Leinster, while Máel Seachnaill retained Connacht, Ulster, and his own province of Meath. However, not everyone accepted this new political order. A year after the treaty, Máel Mórda seized the kingship of Leinster, and launched an open rebellion. Brian’s response was rapid and decisive: he marched his armies through Leinster towards Dublin, then ruled by Sitric Silkbeard, Máel Mórda’s Viking ally and his cousin; a sign of the mingling of the two cultures. Rather than risk a siege, Máel Mórda and Sigtrygg determined to meet him in battle at Glenn Máma (in modern County Kildare), a particularly fierce and bloody engagement. Brian prevailed, and followed up his victory by plundering Dublin and burning its fortress. With the southern half of Ireland now pacified, he turned his attention north. The records are unhelpful at this point: they do not say how or why, but what is known is that, by 1002, Máel Sechnaill had surrendered. The southern branch of the Uí Néill had fallen, and the symbolic seat of power at Tara belonged to Brian. Nearly all of Ireland, however unwillingly, had been subdued, and only Ulster still refused to bow to his authority. It would take a further ten years of campaigning, by land and set, to systematically subdue the province; combined with a large measure of canny politicking. In 1005, for example, Brian gave a generous donated to the monastery at Armagh, and recognized it as the religious capital of Ireland; and Armagh's ambitious clerics in turn named Brian Boru "Emperor of the Irish". In the opening years of the 1010s, then, a semblance of political cohesion existed in Ireland for the first time. The *high-kingship* at Tara had attained a degree of reality; the Vikings of Dublin had been subdued; and hosts of petty kingdoms had been forced to recognize Brian’s authority. The dream begun to unravel in 1013, when it became clear that it was only Brian Boru's military might, not any kind of allegiance, that was holding his island-wide kingdom together. When Sitric of Dublin and Máel Mórda of Leinster launched a second revolt, the leaders of recently conquered Ulster, sensing weakness, refused to provide support. Brian had his armies ravage Leinster, before laying siege to the city of Dublin for four months, until the onset of winter forced him to withdraw. This bought the rebels the time they desperately needed; Máel Mórda dispatched Sitric to seek Viking mercenaries from as far afield as Scandinavia. Thus, in the spring of 1014, when Brian gathered his army outside the walls of Dublin, he found his numerical advantage had been virtually lost. The two armies met at Clontarf on Good Friday, 23 April. Brian, now in his seventies, is said to have prayed in his tent, while his son and heir Murchad led the army out onto the wide, flat fields on the northern bank of the Liffey. The battle was incredibly bloody by all accounts, but, late in the afternoon, the balance began to shift in favour of Brian. His Leinster and Viking opponents attempted to flee for their ships, but the tide was against them; and there, on the edge of the water they were routed. By nightfall, the field at Clontarf was strewn with corpses. High-profile casualties abounded: Máel Mórda, king of Leinster; Sigurd, earl of Orkney; Murchad, son of Brian. Nor did Brian Boru escape: it is said he was struck down in his tent by a fleeing Viking mercenary named Brodir. The assassination of Brian, and his son, at the moment of his triumoh made certain that, contrasting with the situation in England and Scotland, all Ireland would not be ruled by one man. Brian Boru had demonstrated that the *high-kingship* was no mere symbolic office; on the contrary, a man with the will and military muscle could make it a reality. As a consequence, the provincial kings of Ireland now channelled as many resources as possible into fighting each other, in order to follow in Brian’s footsteps. So fierce was their warring that one annalist declared they were making Ireland "*a trembling sod*". This remains the case for more than a century, until a strong group of Viking descents arrived on the Irish coast in 1169; the Anglo-Normans,

### Vikings in France

The first Viking raid on France occurred in 799, six years after the attack on Lindisfarne, which prompted Charlemagne to create a system of defences along the northern coast. This defence system largely held until the mid-830s, when the Scandinavians took advantage of the civil wars around the death of Louis the Pious. Major raids took place on Antwerp, Noirmoutier, Rouen, Quentovic and Nantes, with the activity often alternating between the two sides of the English Channel. In 845, two year after the *Treaty of Verdun*, the Vikings launched a serious invasion of the kingdom of Charles the Bald (840-877). A fleet of a hundred-and-twenty longships, containing more than five-thousand men, entered the Seine under a chieftain named Ragnar; who has often been identified with the legendary *saga* figure Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar's men raided Rouen along the way, and, in response, Charles the Bald mobilized his armies on both sides of the river. The Vikings pulled their ships ashore, routed the weaker of the two detachments, and then hanged a hundred-and-eleven captives on an island in the Seine; both to honour the high god Odin and to incite terror in the remaining detachment. Nothing could now stop them sailing all the way to Paris, reaching the city on Easter Sunday, 29 March. Paris at this time was a small city on the island, known today as Île de la Cité. It was not yet heavily fortified, and easily taken by assault and plundered. The Vikings withdrew only after being paid a ransom of five-thousand pounds of silver; more men had died from an outbreak of plague within Paris than in any form of combat. Vikings returned again and again in the 860s. Each time Charles the Bald paid them off, they would leave; but they always came back. This made the French king increasingly unpopular with the people who paid taxes; "*Who would have thought,*" lamented the cleric Paschasius Radbertus, "*that such a glorious kingdom, so strong, so vast, so populous, and so vigorous would be humiliated and smeared with the filth of such people?*" In the late-860s, Charles the Bald began to build fortified bridges on the rivers to deter these raiding parties. The first two bridges on the Seine proved so useful in slowing down the Viking longboats that such barriers were soon going up all around the country. Meanwhile in 875, Charles the Bald became *emperor* by the most direct means possible; he offered Pope John VIII a huge bribe. This infuriated Louis the German, who thought that the title should have come to him. Their older brother Lothair had died in 855, leaving his son Louis the Younger as king of Italy and *emperor*; Louis the Younger had died earlier in 875, and Louis the German, the oldest Carolingian king left, had expected to be the next *emperor*. While Charles was still in Rome being crowned, Louis revenged himself by storming into the western Frankish lands, destroying and burning in fury. Charles hastily return home, but before the brothers could face off, Louis the German died at the age of sixty-nine. Charles the Bald himself died shortly afterwards, and a complicated mass of Frankish kingdoms devolved onto the surviving heirs; Louis the German’s three sons, and Charles the Bald's two grandsons (after the brief reign of his son Charles the Stammer). While the Carolingian kings negotiated and jousted for position, the *pope* decided to crown Charles the Fat (876-887) as *emperor*. This had less to do with his ability (he was not much of a warrior) than with the fact that he had inherited Italy; and defence of the *papacy* was the purpose of the title. Charles the Fat, the youngest son of Louis the German, had not expected to inherit anything, but soon found himself not only *emperor*, but the most powerful monarch in the west. Between 876 and 884, he gained each of the kingdoms of Charlemagne's old empire, one at a time, upon the death of his various brothers and cousins. But gaining and keeping were two different things. Charles the Fat - weak and inept, with no legitimate son, with no plans for ruling his enormous new empire - almost immediately ran into trouble. The Viking activity, which had been temporarily brought under control by Charles the Bald’s fortified bridges, intensified once again. Not all of the *Great Heathen Army* had settled in England; some of them, not liking the idea of farming, had made their way back to the continent to resume their life of raiding. In late 881, they overwintered on the Rhine delta, and sailed up the river, plundering, or extorting money from, numerous cities, including Cologne, Bonn, Neuss, Jülich, and Andernach. The Vikings had also branched out from raiding by ship; they were now apt to land horses on the coast, and then thunder across the old Roman roads, ravaging and pillaging over a much wider swath. There was no place safe. Even the imperial city of Aachen, where Charlemagne himself was buried, was plundered. Charles the Fat seemed entirely unable to stop the raids. He assembled an army that marched against the Viking camp near Louvain, but, after a siege of some weeks, he shamefully purchased a truce. Four years later, in 885, the Vikings organised a massive incursion up the Seine, for the first time in years; seven hundred ships, carrying perhaps thirty-thousand men. sailed up to the walls of Paris. Charles the Fat was in Italy at the time and Odo, Count of Paris, led the defence of the city. He was low on men, having no more than two-hundred men-at-arms, but managed to repulse repeated Viking assaults. After nine months, as disease began to spread through Paris, Charles finally arrived with an imperial army, that encircled the Vikings. However, he had no intention of meeting the foe in open field. Instead, he offered them seven hundred pounds of silver, and safe passage to ravage Burgundy, which was in open revolt at the time. The Vikings agreed to the bargain, and withdrew from Frankish lands altogether the next spring. But Charles the Fat had lost whatever sympathy his people still had for him; if he was going to bribe the invaders, why had he not done so at the beginning of the siege and spared Paris a great deal of suffering? The Burgundians were particularly furious, and declared themselves independent. Charles’s nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, raised an army, and, in 887, he marched into Germany to remove his uncle by force. In the face of all this hostility, Charles the Fat agreed to abdicate the throne in November; his willingness to surrender may have had something to do with ill-health, because he died just six weeks later. The empire now disintegrated into even smaller pieces than before. “*As though bereft of a legitimate heir,*” writes the chronicler Regino of Prum, “*the kingdoms, that had obeyed him, no longer waited for a ruler given by nature, but each chose to create for itself a kinglet from its own bowels*". Arnulf (887-899) had desired the whole empire, but his coup only brought him to power in Germany. Two Italian noblemen, Berengar of Friuli (d. 924) and Guy of Spoleto (d. 894) , disputed the kingdom of Italy; the latter even made himself *emperor* in 891, a title which, by now, went with the kingship of Italy. Burgundy remained independent under one of its own nobleman, Rudolf of Burgundy (888-912). France saw Odo (888–898), the “saviour of Paris”, elected king by the French magnates, although he was eventually compelled to step aside in favour of a surviving Carolingian, Charles the Simple (898-923). All in all, for a generation and more after Charles the Fat, the political structures of each kingdom were of uncertain legitimacy and highly unstable.

    The French monarchy, thus, started the tenth century in a weak position, and had regular Viking raids to deal with as well. In 911, Charles the Simple, unable to expel them, settled on a drastic solution. He chose to negotiate a deal with a Viking leader who was already known to him: a man named Rollo (d. 928). Rollo had been a junior commander at the Siege of Paris of 885, and had returned on a regular basis ever since; raiding, accepting payment, withdrawing, and then raiding again. Charles offered Rollo a homeland of his own; all the land between the city of Rouen and the mouth of the River Seine. In exchange, Rollo would have to accept Christian baptism, to be the king's faithful vassal, and to protect the realm from other Viking raiders. Rollo (911-928) agreed to the deal, and the *Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte* transformed him into the first duke of **Normandy**. It also transformed him into Charles’ son-in-law; to seal the treaty, Rollo married the king’s daughter Gisela. But signs of trouble were visible even at Rollo's ceremonial pledge of fealty to King Charles. The traditional gesture of respect from a subordinate to the king was to kiss the royal foot. According to contemporary chronicler Dudo, Rollo at first refused, and, when pressed, eventually ordered one of his warriors to do the deed for him. This man complied by grabbing the foot, and yanking it up to his lips, which caused the hapless monarch to topple over backwards. It was, had anybody known, a fitting example of the future relationship between the dukes of Normandy and their French overlords. But for now, Rollo was true to his word; the Viking raids on Paris and its environs ended. His Scandinavian countrymen continued to arrive and settle in Normandy until the end of the tenth century; and yet they adopted the French language, customs, and religion. The descendants of Rollo and his followers became the Normans, who were to have a major impact on European history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries

    While Charles the Simple solved his Viking problem, France remained the most troubled of the Frankish kingdoms. The king only had any real authority north of the Loire, and that was itself a territory in which he had to compete with powerful rivals, the Normans being only one of them; Odo’s "Robertine" family were by now another. Charles’ son Louis IV (936–954) acted energetically to revive the prestige of his dynasty, leaving the crown undisputed to his son Lothar (954–986). Territorially, Lothar was quite helpless, since he controlled only a few counties directly, fewer than the Robertines. France had become a patchwork of independent-minded duchies and counties, with only nominal links to the kings. Nor did this change when the Robertine duke **Hugh Capet** (987-996) definitively took the throne away from the Carolingian dynasty; Charlemagne's blood kin no longer sat on the throne.

    By the reign of Louis IV Carolingian (936–54), the French king controlled only a few counties directly. For the rest, France was divided into a dozen or so feudal duchies ruled by nobles of varying standing and independence. Nor did this change when the Robertian candidate, Hugh Capet (987-996), definitively took the throne away from the Carolingian line. In truth, Hugh and his immediate successors were hardly more than crowned lords of a domain around Paris, and some of his nominal vassals ruled territories far larger. This was hardly indicative of a dynasty that would rule one of Europe’s most powerful countries for the next 800 years, if the cadet branches are included. Yet by a happy accident Hugh Capet's descendants, the Capetian Dynasty (987-1328), would succeed to the French throne without conflict until 1328. This longevity was seminal to the foundation of the nation state of France. These kings would slowly but steadily increased their power, prestige, and influence, until it grew to encompass almost the entirety of the realm during the reigns of Philip II and Louis IX in the 13th-century.

Central authourity crumbled away in the face of their ravages, as men grew increasing resistant to handing over their valuables to royal tax collectors, and looked more and more towards their local lord for protection. Nevertheless, the French did eventually devise a method of stymieing the Vikings. This was with fortified bridges, that prevented their longships from passing without fighting. In 864, two were built in Paris, one on each side of the Île de la Cité. Significantly this was not a royal initiative, for France suffered under a series of short-reigning kings after Charles the Bald, and in 884 the French nobles elected, Charles the Fat, already king in Germany and Italy, as their king. Instead the bridges were commissioned by Robert the Strong (d. 866), count of the region around Paris, and they served admirably in the **Siege of Paris** (885-886). When an unprecedented Viking fleet of 700 longships carrying as many as 30,000 men again attacked Paris, Robert's son and successor Count Odo of Paris (d. 898) refused their demands for tribute, though he could muster no more than 200 men-at-arms. When an initial assault on Paris was repulsed, the Vikings settled in for a protracted siege. For almost a year, they kept-up the siege, periodically attempting assaults. With each failure, the Viking numbers steady dwindled as members drifted way to find easier targets. In October 885, Charles the Fat (876-888), finally arrived with his army and drove-off the last stragglers. His handling of the siege greatly damaged Carolingian prestige, and when Charles died, Odo was chosen by the French nobles to be their king as Odo I Robertian (888-898). Throughout the next century the Carolingian and Robertian lines vied for the French throne, with support for one or other depending on where the great nobles considered their best interests, further undermining royal authority.

### Vikings in Russia

Unusually for the Vikings, trading rather than raiding, was the main reason for their penetration deep into what is now Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Even before the Viking Age, Scandinavians had struck out from their homes, sailed across the Baltic Sea, and built settlements along the opposite coast, where they found amber, furs, honey, wax, and timber products. These settlements had remained small, the lands around them largely unconquered, but, from the late eighth-century, commercial explorers used them as stopping places in their search for new routes farther east. The rivers of Eastern Europe (the Dvina, Dnieper, Volga, and Don), flowing north and south, make it surprisingly easy for goods to travel between the Baltic and the Black Sea, (and, to a lesser extent, the Caspian Sea), where they traded with Byzantine, Muslim, and Khazar merchants. The lands through which they travelled were populated by East Slav tribes, who had been living in the region for several centuries, didn't trade very far afield, nor did they use the rivers as roads. They called the Scandinavian travellers **the Rus'**, a word most likely meaning “red”; referring to the foreigners’ ruddy colouring. Around 860, as the Vikings spilled out of their homelands into the surrounding waters, a sizeable party of them head downriver towards Constantinople. Two hundred ships, filled with thousands of raiders, came ashore, burning and plundering everything outside the walls. The attack took the Byzantines by surprise, "*like a thunderbolt from heaven*", as Patriarch Photius put it. Emperor Michael III was absent from the city, fighting the Arabs in Anatolia; as was the imperial fleet, which was dreaded for its *Greek Fire*. The raid went on for a little over a week, before they sailed away from Constantinople’s locked gates. Michael III immediately claimed that fear of the Byzantine reprisals had driven the enemy away; but raiding and retreating was what the Vikings did best. The origins of the first Russian state, which historians call Kievan Rus (862-1240), are told in the *Primary Chronicle*, written more than two centuries later. This work says that in 862, two after the attack on Constantinople, the Viking leader Rurik (d. 879) and his brothers built themselves a small kingdom among the native Slavs, centred on Novgorod, near Lake Ilmen; a particularly well-favoured spot for a prosperous trading centre, where the Dvina, Dnieper and Volga rivers come closest to each other. There has long been controversy, at least for patriotic Russians, that the founders of this state were non-Slavs; regardless of how quickly they assimilated into Slavic culture. Nonetheless, there is justice in the Rus' giving Russia her name. They brought with them formidable fighting-power, important commercial techniques, great skills in navigation and seamanship, and, it seems, no women. On his death, Rurik left both his kingdom and the regency of his infant son to a kinsman named Oleg (d. 912), who soon took power for himself. He extended his rule down along the Dnieper, and took control of the more centrally located Kiev, one of the tribute cities of the Khazars to the east. Oleg then used his military prowess to once again attack Constantinople in 907, probably to secure trade access. According to colourful but unreliable *Chronicle,* he brought his ships ashore and moved them overland on wheels to outflank the blocked entrance to the *Golden Horn* (the imperial harbour). However he did it (and whether he did it, since Byzantine sources do not mention this attack), Oleg was successful in extracting a pair of highly favourable treaty from the *empire* in 907 and 911, which gave the Rus unusual trading privileges. This makes clear the importance of the commercial life of the new state. By then, a sort of river-federation of fortified city-states ruled by *prince*, under the *grand prince* of Kiev, and stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was a reality.

Along with being the most important trading partner of Kievan Rus', the Byzantine Empire was the most powerful cultural influence. Oleg’s successor, Rurik's son Igor (913–945), led another major attack on Constantinople, probably over trading rights again. This time, the peace treaty included stringent regulations on the conduct of Rus' merchants; one of the earliest sources of Kievan Rus' law. His widow Olga ruled as regent until their son Sviatoslav (945-972) reached maturity. She was the first Rus' ruler to be baptized, and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church; even though the Rus' remained predominantly pagan throughout the reigns of her son and his successor. It was not Olga but **Vladimir the Great** (980-1015), who would convert Russia to Christianity. At the beginning of his reign, Vladimir showed all the ostentatious paganism which became a Viking warlord. Throughout a series of campaigns to secure the frontiers he had pagan shrines erected to honour local or national gods. Then he began to enquire about other major religions of the time: Islam, Judaism, Roman and Byzantine Christianity. Legend says that he sent his envoys throughout the world to assess their merits first-hand. Russians treasure the story that Islam was rejected by him because it forbade alcohol. The Bulgarians, they reported, smelt. The Germans had nothing to offer. But Constantinople had won their hearts. Of the Hagia Sophia, they said in words often to be quoted, "*We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere on earth. We cannot describe it to you; we only know that God dwells there among men".* The choice was accordingly made. Around 986, Vladimir accepted Eastern Orthodox Christianity for himself and his people. The new faith was rapidly imposed upon the Rus' towns; by force if necessary. The inhabitants of Kiev were exhorted to the Dnieper river for a mass baptism. Yet for all the zeal Vladimir showed, it was not only enthusiasm which influenced him. Vladimir had been promised the hand of a Byzantine princess, Basil II's own sister Anna; she may be forgiven her obvious reluctance on her way to her wedding, since her future husband allegedly had eight-hundres concubines. This was an unprecedented recognition of a *barbarian* king; when Otto II, *Holy Roman Emperor*, married a "Byznatine princess", she was in truth the niece of the emperor's predecessor. Arab sources present a clearer story of Vladimir's conversion; Byzantium needed the Rus' alliance against two rebellious generals who had briefly joined forces, and, when negotiations were not going smoothly, Vladimir had put pressure on Byzantine possessions in the Crimea. When the wedding arrangements were settled, Vladimir dispatched six-thousand troops to Constantinople; which was the beginning of the famous "*Varangian Guard*". Whatever the motives, Vladimir’s choice of Eastern Orthodoxy was decisive of much more than diplomacy. Two hundred years later his countrymen acknowledged this, and he was canonized a *saint*.

Tenth-century Kievan Rus' had in some ways a richer culture than most of Western Europe could then offer. Its towns bustled with trade, and a wide variety of crafts. Kiev became famous for the magnificence of its churches, including a thirteen-domed cathedral dedicated, like Justinian's great example, to *Santa Sophia* ("holy wisdom"); one western visitor thought it rivalled Constantinople. In later centuries, as Russia suffered through political absolutism and serfdom, the Kievan period was to acquire something of the aura as a bygone *golden age*. By European standards of the time, it was a relatively free society. With its commercial emphasis, a territorial aristocracy (called *boyars*) would take longer to emerge in Russian than elsewhere. In the cities, princely authority was limited by the power of elected bodies who met in councils called *dumas*. These institutions varied from city to city, leaving some princes significantly more powerful than others. Novgorod's *dumas* was particularly powerful; a special bell, used to call the council into session, became the symbol of the city and of its proud tradition of self-government. The apogee of Kievan Rus' came under Vlaimir's son, Yaroslav "the Wise" (1019-54). Culturally, the first fruits of the Byzantine implantation on Rus' culture were being gathered. Orthodox Christianity brought with it the prayer books and other religious material of the south Slav Church, and the written language in the Cyrillic alphabet. From Yaroslav's reign comes one of the first significant works of literature in Russia, *Sermon on Law and Grace*, written some decades before the *Primary Chronicle*; as well as promulgating its first written law code, the *Russkaya Pravda*..To balance Byzantine influence in Kiev, Yaroslav pursued an active foreign policy. Diplomatic missions were exchanged with Rome and Germany. Members of a harried English royal family, exiled by King Canute, took refuge at his court. And he played the medieval game of matrimonial diplomacy as astutely as any of his contemporaries; having himself married a Swedish princess, he found husbands for the royal women of his household in kings of Poland, France and Norway. Russia was then culturally more open to the outside world that she was to be again for centuries. But neither Yaroslav, who gained the Kievan throne only after a bitter struggle against his brothers, nor his successors were able to provide an adequate system of succession. The Kievan state could not survive endless squabbles within the royal family, which acquired an increasingly pronounced regional and separatist nature. Novgorod, in particular, began to gravitate toward closer relations with the cities of the Hanseatic League, which controlled the Baltic trade. The princes still contested the "*grand prince of Kiev and all the Rus*", but the title became an empty one. This reflected the decline of Kiev's importance in the late eleventh century; endemic conflict took its toll on Kiev’s ability to defend itself against nomadic invaders from steppelands; while Kiev's prosperity was undermined by the Crusades which opened up a more direct trade routes between Western Europe and Constantinople. The last *grand prince* to maintain a united state and hold foreign enemies at bay was Vladimir II Monomakh (1113–1125). After his death. Kievan Rus' fell into a rapid decline, and fragment into roughly twelve different principalities.

Another enduring Slav nation, which began to crystallize at about the same time as Russia, was **Poland**. Its origins lay in the Polanie tribe, based around the fortified settlement of Gniezno, who first appear in the historical records in 963. Mieszko I (d. 992) had become their leader within the past year or two; his descendants, known as the Piast dynasty, would rule Poland for four centuries.  Threatened by the expansive tendencies of German dukes, Mieszko moved with extraordinary speed to secure his territory. In 966, he accepted Christianity for himself, his family and all his people, in order to resist forced conversion by the Germans and the incorporation into the *Holy Roman Empire*; the fate of neighbouring Bohemia. The choice was not, though, as in Russia's case, the Eastern Orthodox Church; Mieszko plumped for Rome. This decision about ecclesiastical authority gave the Polish people a particularly difficult historical destiny, often heroically and tragically fulfilled. As Slavs, they formed a breakwater against the tides of Teutonic immigration; as Catholics, they were an outpost of Western culture in its confrontation with the Eastern Orthodox world. Immediately, it opened a half century of rapid expansion in all directions, up to the Baltic in the north and through Silesia, Moravia and Cracow in the west. Mieszko bequeaths a powerful kingdom to his vigorous son Bolesław "the Brave" (992-1025). He began the creation of an administrative system using the structures of feudal Europe to secure his territory. In 1000, Otto III made a pilgrimage to Poland, paying his respects to St. Adalbert; a Bohemian missionary killed by the pagan Prussians. He permitted the establishment of an archbishopric at Gniezno; and thus a theoretically autonomous Polish church. Then in 1025, Bolesław took advantage of an interregnum in Germany, and crowned himself king. Political setbacks and pagan reactions dissipated much of what he had achieved and there were grim times to come, but Poland was henceforth a historical reality.

### Germany of Otto the Great

East of the Rhine, the story of the Carolingian heritage opens one of the major themes of European history: the long effort to make a reality of the agglomeration which came to be called the "*Holy Roman Empire*". Stronger tribal loyalties than in the west was one obstacle; the *Treaty of Verdun* (843) had formed Eastern Francia. or **Germany** out of the eastern parts of the traditional Frankish heartland of Austrasia, together with recently incorporated Saxony, Bavaria, and Swabia (or Alemannia), where Charlemagne's ideological project had the least traction. Among other obstacles, there were the consequences of geography; most of Germany had never occupied by Roman legions or criss-crossed with Roman roads. Its natural outlets lay to the north, down the Rhine, Weser, Elbe, Oder rivers, and there were still formidable forest barriers in the southern highlands. The long reign of Louis the German (843–876) laid the foundations for a strong royal government, and provided a degree of unity for the peoples of the various regions. His appointment of his sons as sub-kings over regions of his kingdom foreshadowed the later territorial "duchies", and his promotion of missionary activity in concert with punitive actions against the Polabians, Bohemians, Pannonians, and other Slavic tribes inaugurated four centuries of *Ostsiedlung* (German eastward expansion). Arnulf of Carinthia (887–899), a grandson of Louis, became king of Germany after the overthrow of his uncle Charles the Fat (876-887). He managed to keep the kingdom united, while the rest of the old Carolingian empire fell to pieces, by devoting himself to freeing the Germans from the Viking raiders. The Scandinavian activity in Germany was nowhere near as dramatic as in France or in the British Isles, probably because of the shared border with Denmark, which open the possibilities of trade, diplomacy, and, of course, retaliation. This situation changed when the so-called *Great Heathen Army* suffered defeat at Edington in 878, at the hands of Alfred the Great. The defeated Vikings then turned their aggression towards the Rhineland, sailing up the river, and plundering (or extorting money from) numerous German cities, including Cologne, Bonn, Neuss, Jülich, and Andernach. They had also branched out from raiding by ship; and were now apt to land horse on the coast, and then thunder across the old Roman roads, ravaging and pillaging over a much wider swath. In this way, they plundered the imperial city of Aachen, desecrating Aachen cathedral (where Charlemagne himself was buried) and burning the imperial palace to the ground. Arnulf's predecessors had generally managed to buy peace, but the Vikings were still well entrenched among the marshes of the Rhine delta, near Leuven, where Arnulf's best troops, his cavalry, could not reach them. The German king set an example to his army by dismounting and advancing on foot: the Germans followed with such ferocity that the Vikings were driven from their camp, and almost all of them were either slaughtered or drowned attempting to flee the battle. After the Battle of Leuven, Germany was largely free from Viking invasions. Arnulf's success appears to have excited his personal ambition; he determined to become *emperor*. Pope Formosus, not trusting any of the Italian noblemen who disputed the crown of Italy at the time, was willing. But in 896, when he was still subduing Italian resistance, Arnulf fell dangerously ill; as was generally believed, of the "Italian disease", meaning poison. The king returned to Germany, but never recovered, lingering for three years as his kingdom became more and more disorderly. He died in 899, leaving one son, six-year-old Louis the Child (899-911); the last of the Carolingian line. His reign coincided with a gathering storm from the east.

The lower Danube, before the river enters the Black Sea, had long been Europe's doorway to steppe nomads arriving from the east. Here, the Huns and the Avars had first presented themselves to the Roman Empire, requesting or demanding tribute. And here, there arrived, in 895, another group; the **Magyars**. They differed from their predecessors in that they are not Central Asians. They were a Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, who had been living for some centuries near the mouth of the Don, as vassals of the Khazar Khaganate. Around 830, the Magyars separated from the Khazars, and started to move westward. They spent some years in the Balkans, fighting the Bulgarians in the service of Byzantine emperor Leo VI. But if Leo could summon a barbarian tribe to his aid, so too could Bulgarian khan. Beyond the lands of the Magyars dwelt another nomadic tribe, the Pechenegs. Bribed with Bulgar gold, they fell upon the Magyar rear. Unable to remain on the Lower Danube, they had no choice but to continue their westward migration into the great Carpathian basin, the flat lands surrounded by the ring of the Carpathian mountain range; the land we now call Hungary, which is still their home. The Magyars arrived in the form of a strong confederation of tribes under a single leader named Árpád (895-907). His people number no more than twenty-five thousand, but, by 895, they had subdued the scattered population of the territory. So Árpád became the founder of a nation which somehow, in all the upheavals of Central Europe, retained its identity and its language down through the centuries. For several decades, the Hungarians were a profoundly disruptive force in the region, constantly raiding west into Germany and Italy with horrifying speed and ferocity; “*Nothing pleases them except to fight,*” Liudprand of Cremona writes. “*Their mothers cut their boys’ faces with very sharp blades as soon as they come into the world, so that, before they may receive the nourishment of milk, they may learn to endure wounds*”. Louis the Child was neither a hardened soldier nor a strong ruler. Crowned at the age of six, he had given over rule to a regency council of nobles and bishops, and never fully taken it back; his weak reign allowed the lands of Germany, that had once belonged to the Germanic *barbarian* tribes, to regain their character as semi-independent duchies. Each of them was controlled by a powerful family, and the *dukes* (the head of these families) were now forced to defend themselves. They raised their own armies, fought their own battles, ruled their own lands, and paid less and less attention to their supposed king. The land of the Bavarians, which felt the brunt of the Hungarian onslaught with little assistance from the rest of Germany, had become the *Duchy of Bavaria*; the Saxons had lent their name to *Saxony*; a handful of other *duchies* - *Franconia, Swabia, Lorraine* - lay around them. Finally in 910, at the age of eighteen, Louis the Child tried to assert his own power. He decided that forces from all the German *duchies* should come together to make one huge push against the Hungarians. He even threatened with execution those who would not gather under his flag near the city of Augsburg. The Hungarians had learned about his plans, however. They approached through forced march very quickly, totally unexpected by his partly assembled army. Before dawn, their horse-archers made a surprise attack on the king's camp, catching many of the soldiers still in their beds. Hours of fighting followed, with the Hungarians, in small swarming groups, hailing arrows on the Germans, who protected themselves with their shield wall. Towards evening, the Hungarians pretended to retreat; when the German army broke rank and chased after them, they doubled back around and attacked. Louis fled the ensuring rout, but lost almost his entire army; “*the meadow and the fields completely littered with corpses, and river and banks turned red by the blood that mixed in*”. The Hungarian loses were so light that, just ten days weeks later, they managed to annihilate the other half of the German army at Rednitz. Louis did not have to live with his humiliation for long, dying less than a year later.

In the year 911, Charles the Simple, of the Carolingian line, reigned in France, and was Louis the Child's heir; in theory. But the German *dukes* were now independent enough to defy him. They held a *Diet* at Forchheim, and elected as king one of their own; Conrad (911-918), *duke of Franconia*. Conrad was crowned with all of the accompanying pomp of a Carolingian monarch; and tried to act as such. His difficult lay in the fact that he was one of the *dukes*, and, therefore, found it very hard to establish his authority over them. He first lost Lorraine, whose *duke* pledged allegiance to the French crown instead; then quarrelled violently with Henry, *duke of Saxony*; and finally, his struggle against Arnulf of Bavaria cost him his life. Arnulf had defeated a Hungarian invasion near the river Inn, and now felt himself strong enough to demand greater autonomy. When Conrad refused, he called on the Hungarians for assistance in his revolt. After several clashes, Conrad was mortally wounded in repelling one Hungarian incursion. On his deathbed, Conrad persuaded his younger brother and heir Eberhard to offer the royal crown to his old enemy Henry of Saxony; better known as **Henry the Fowler** (919–36), because he was allegedly more interested in bird-hunting when Eberhard arrived to inform him that he was to be *king*. Henry's feigned reluctance for power, together with his decidedly low-key coronation, signalled his intention to bring the German *dukes* into a new political system. He had already been *duke of Saxony* for seven years, and had a keen appreciation for the independence of the *duchies*; he too had resented Conrad’s attempts to rule as a monarch. In the first three years of his reign, he negotiated a series of oaths between himself and the German *dukes*; Arnulf submitted only after Henry led a military campaign to the gates of Regensburg, ducal seat of Bavaria. The oaths of “feudal allegiance” laid out an almost-equal relationship; the *dukes* retained complete internal control over their own lands, as long as they recognised Henry's superior status and supported him in war. Having consolidated his power, Henry's focus turned to Lorraine, which had been lost in 911; and contained Charlemagne's old capital of Aachen. He saw his opportunity in 922, when a succession crisis engulfed France after the overthrown of Charles the Simple. Soon afterwards, a combination of military action, patience and forbearance had brought Lorraine back into the German kingdom; he gave Duke Giselbert of Lorraine his daughter in marriage, thus securing his allegiance. Henry further bound the five powerful *duchies* - Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and Lorraine - under his rule by proving himself a good soldier. From 921, the Hungarian raids into Germany had intensified The walled cities were safe from their attacks, but, in the open field, the Germans dared only to engage in skirmishes with the smaller roving bands. By great good fortune, in one such skirmish, Henry captured a Hungarian prince. A huge ransom was offered, but Henry refused it; instead, he bought a truce of ten-years. This was the bravest and wisest act of King Henry's reign. He took upon himself the disgrace of paying the Hungarians an annual tribute during the truce, and gained the time to institute major military reforms; creating and training an elite force of heavy cavalry (he is often credited with first instituting the jousting tournament); professionalising the infantry by designating one peasant in nine to become a full-time soldier, rather than relying on *ad hoc* conscription; and forcing all his troops to observe a stricter military discipline. Having somewhat accustomed the Germans to this new way of fighting, Henry tested them in actual wars. By 928, he had conquered Polabia (the Slavic lands between the Elbe and Oder rivers); what became the *duchy of Brandenburg* (the basis of Prussia). Most of the inhabitants were slaughtered without mercy, and Germans, spreading eastward, took possession of their vacant lands. Shortly afterwards, he entered Bohemia (modern Czechia and Slovakia), and forced its already Christian ruler, Wenceslaus (d. 935), to become his tribute-paying vassal. In late 932, Henry felt strong enough to renege on the annual tribute to the Hungarians. They began raiding again, as he had anticipated; but the Hungarians seem to have surprised him by undertaking a winter campaign. He did not immediately venture to oppose them, but waited for their forces to scatter in search of plunder, and then fell upon small contingents. In March 933, he met their main army at the bloody Battle of Riade, with infantry at first, followed by a massed heavy cavalry charge. The Hungarians fled the field, leaving their accumulated plunder in Henry's hands, and bringing another temporary truce. After this came a war with the Danes, conquering Schleswig and reminding the Vikings to keep to foreign shores. But Henry was not destined to enjoy the fruits of his achievements A stroke warned him to set his house in order.; so, in the spring of 936, he called together a *Diet* at Erfurt, which accepted his son Otto as his successor. In a decisive break from Carolingian tradition, there was no talk of dividing Germany among the king's four sons.

Otto I, traditionally known as **Otto the Great** (936-973), had a substantial inheritance, and made good use of it. He was crowned at Aachen, Charlemagne's old capital. Not only did he accept the splendid coronation which his father had avoided, but, at the banquet which followed, the German *dukes* acted as his personal attendants in the old Carolingian style. Where Henry had seen himself as the *first-among-equals*, Otto at once asserted royal authority, without concern for the claims and ranks of the nobility. One example of this can be seen in his intervention in a dispute between Eberhard of Franconia (the same who had carried his brother's crown to Otto's father), and a minor Saxon noble name Bruning, who had possessions in Franconia but refused to swear fealty to any non-Saxon ruler. Rather than allowing a *duke* to chastise his own disobedient vassal, Otto called the feuding parties to court, where he found in Bruning's favour; Eberhard was sentenced to pay a fine, and his lieutenants to the humiliating ritual of carrying a dead dog. This sort of high-handedness ensured that Otto faced numerous rebellions, particularly in Franconia and Bavaria. The most troublesome of the rebels was his own brother Henry, who was seven years his junior but saw no reason why he should not be king in Otto’s place. Otto spent the first five years of his reign fighting against these revolts. By 941, he had confirmed, by force and great good fortune, his undisputed authority over the kingdom. Otto was everywhere respected and feared, but he was never loved. He lacked the easy, familiar ways with the magnates which had distinguished his father; he was a cold, haughty man, who surrounded himself with pomp and ceremony. Nonetheless, in disciplining the *dukes*, Otto's punishments were usually mild; Henry rebelled twice and was pardoned twice. And the punished were usually restored to their positions, on the condition that they recognized his sole authority to appoint bishops and abbots within the *duchies*. Under Otto, the German *church* functioned as a tool of royal authority. He routinely appointed ecclesiastical offices to men who would be loyal to him, as a pillar of both the temporal and spiritual control throughout the realm. One method of keeping churchmen in line was to take a strong stand on clerical celibacy; a bishop who married was apt to pass responsibility and land to a legitimate heir, while a childless bishop died and his post automatically reverted to the ruler. Otto treated the *church* like a faithful lieutenant of the king, not as an independent power. Nor was the structure of the kingdom very solid; it rested on the political manipulation of the German nobility, rather than on administration. Where Henry relied upon "feudal allegiance", Otto relied upon family ties. He married his eldest son Liudolf to the daughter of the *duke of Suabia*, and the former soon succeeded his father-in-law; he satisfied his brother Henry's ambition by appointing him *duke of Bavaria*; he gave Lorraine to his son-in-law Conrad the Red; while he retained *Franconia* under his own personal rule. Through these arrangements, Otto ruled a wider, more cohesive realm than his father. By 946, he was able to dabble in foreign affairs, marching at the head of an army to help French king Louis IV (who was married to his sister), in his struggle against Duke Hugo, a powerful pretender to the throne. Although several years elapsed before Hugo was brought to submission, he did succeed in his true object; Louis IV waived his former claim to Lorraine. Under Otto the Great, we have the first sense of something we might call Germany. It might have grown into a distinct "*nation*", such as was to slowly emerge in France, if the good qualities of the Saxon line could have been transmitted without its inordinate ambition.

In the year 951, Otto's attention was directed towards Italy and the imperial crown. Since the collapse of the Carolingian empire, Italy had been ravaged in turn by Italian nobles, Burgundians, Hungarians, and Muslims; the title of *emperor* had not been held by anyone for a generation; and the *papacy* was controlled by a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, who sought to make the *chair of St. Peter* a hereditary dignity. Berengar II, a grandson of former King Berengar, now called himself *king of Italy*. Failing to receive widespread support, Berengar sought to legitimize his rule by demanding the hand of Princess Adelaide, the respective daughter, daughter-in-law and widow of the last three Italian kings. She fiercely refused and was imprisoned, but managed to send a messenger to Germany, imploring Otto's intervention. His own wife, Edith (a granddaughter of Alfred the Great), had recently died: Otto saw, in Adelaide's appeal, an ideal opportunity. Accompanied by his brother Henry and his son Liudolf, he crossed the Alps, defeated Berengar, and assumed the crown of Italy himself. He then asked for Adelaide's hand, which was not refused; and the pair were married with great pomp in Pavia. However, Otto was forced to abandon his intended visit to Rome, because his son Liudolf had immediately returned to Germany, and stirred up disorder. The exact reasons for the Liudolf's action are unclear, and historians have proposed that the young heir had hoped to marry Adelaide himself, in order to strengthen his position within the royal family, in a simmering rivalry with his uncle Henry. The trouble steadily escalated into open civil war, which convulsed Germany for nearly four years. It may have been suppressed earlier, if Otto had been personally popular; but the petty nobles inclined to one side or the other, according to unrestrained self-interest. In this crisis, an old enemy returned. The Hungarians had left Germany alone for over two decades, but now invaded once again. Fortunately, a rumours spread that Liudolf had invited the Hungarians into German, which rapidly turned public opinion to Otto's side. Otto convened a *Diet* at Arnstadt in late 954, where the revolt was brought to an end. The Hungarians, encouraged by their success in 954, came again the next year, in greater numbers than ever; setting up camp on the Lechfeld flood plain, and laying siege to the city of Augsburg. But Otto now marched against them with all the military strength of Germany, and, in August 955, met them in battle. Conrad of Lorraine led the attack and decided the fate of the day, but, in the moment of victory, having lifted his visor to breathe more freely, a Hungarian arrow pierced his neck and he fell dead. Later stories about the Battle of Lechfeld insisted that only seven scattered fugitives returned to Hungary; this is unlikely, but the German attack was absolutely devastating, slaughtering an entire generation of skilled warriors and ending forever the danger they had presented. Although the Hungarian couldn’t quite break the habit of raiding their neighbours, from that day, they settled down in the Carpathian basin, spent more time farming than fighting, and adopted the structures of feudal Europe. Even better, in the next generation, the Hungarians crowned their first Christian king; Árpád’s great-grandson Stephen (997-1038). Otto's victory at Lechfeld convinces his subjects (not to mention the historians who chronicled his reign) that divine favour was on his side. In 962, Pope John XII (d. 964) bowed to the inevitable and crowned him *emperor* in *St Peter's Basilica*. Thus the German and Italian crowns were united in a structure, later called the ***Holy Roman Empire***, which would last for nearly a thousand years. Yet the trouble with the relationship became clear almost immediately. Otto had barely left Rome to reconquer Italy, before the *pope*, who now saw that he had crowned his own master, began to conspire against him. He called on the Byzantine *emperor* for aid, and even encouraged the Hungarians to attack the Germans once more. On discovering this, Otto was not amused. He took Rome by force, deposed Pope John XII, and, on his own authority, appointed Leo VIII (d. 963) as his successor. In the past, the choice of St. Peter’s successors had generally rested within the Christian church itself; as long as the people of Rome didn’t riot. But the *emperor* had now taken this task on his royal and secular shoulders. These new successes seem to have quite turned Otto's mind from the duty he owed to the German land and people; his latter years were spent buttressing his *pope* by force-of-arms, struggling to stabilize his rule over Italy, and demanding the hand of a Byzantine princess for his son Otto II. He was only truly successful with the last; Theophania, a niece of Emperor Nikephoros, was sent to Rome, and she married Otto II in the spring of 973; in return the German *emperor* retreated from the Byzantine possessions in southern Italy. The imperial family then returned to Germany, and celebrated Easter with a grand festival at Quedlinburg. All the *dukes* and *counts* of the realm were present, along with the kings of Bohemia and Poland, and ambassadors from Rome, Constantinople, Bulgaria, Russia, England, Denmark, Hungary, and Muslim Spain. Even Charlemagne had never enjoyed such recognition and prestige. A few weeks later, Otto was at his palace in Memleben, when he became seriously ill with fever. He died in May 973, at the age of sixty-one.

Like his father, **Otto II** (973-983) had to face rebellions when he came to the throne; but he met and carried them to the end, with an energy equal to that of Otto the Great. Bavaria, the most troublesome of the *duchies*, was not pacified until 978. Otto II's victory allowed him to reduce Bavarian influence in imperial politics by splitting-away its southern territory as a separate duchy; which was the beginning of Austria as a new German power. Lothair, king of France, had used this unrest to take possession of Lorraine. The German people were so enraged at this treacherous invasion that Otto II had no difficulty in raising an army of sixty-thousand men, which he marched on Paris in the summer of 978. The city was so well fortified and defended that he found it prudent to raise the siege as winter approached; but Otto II felt his honour was sufficiently restored and opened negotiations. Peace was finally concluded in 980, with Lorraine restored to Germany, in return for Otto II recognizing Lothair's son Louis V as the rightful heir to the French throne. With domestic affairs settled, Otto II went to Italy the next year. Since the 960s, the island of Sicily had been under Muslim rule, as a province of Fatimid Egypt. Abu al-Qasim, the Sicilian *emir* (governor), had conducted raids against southern Italy, and it was Otto II's duty, as *emperor*, to drive him off. His campaign, which quickly expanded into an attempt to incorporate the whole peninsula into the *empire*, was a horrendous failure. Two old enemies, the Byzantines and the Muslims, become allies in order to resist him; while the southern Lombard *duchies* detached themselves from any allegiance to the *Iron Crown*. The war carried on fiercely, without any result, until the summer of 982; then, in July, the imperial army met al-Qasim in battle at Cape Colonna, on the ball of the Italian boot. After much confused fighting, a corps of German heavy cavalry smashed through the Muslim centre, killing the *emir* in the charge; but his troops did not flee the battlefield. Instead, they were able to surround the imperial forces and inflict a severe defeat upon them. Otto II himself only escaped by swimming to a ship which lay offshore. When he was taken on board, he found himself on a Byzantine vessel; whether he was recognized or not, the captain took him to safety. In 983, still claiming to rule Italy, still fighting, Otto II grew ill. He died in Rome, not yet thirty years old. His son, **Otto III** (983-1002), was only three at his accession, but his mother and then grandmother, as regents, maintained the tradition of exercising power on both sides of the Alps until he came of age in 994. Half Byzantine by birth, Otto III saw himself more as a Roman than as a German. Rome seemed to captivate him, and he settled down there. This cast something of a shadow on the *chair of St. Peter*. Otto III, like his father and grandfather, regarded the imperial crown as a mandate to control the *papacy*. He made his own cousin, a young man of twenty-four, the first German pope, following him by appointing the first French *pope*, his former tutor. Through them, Otto III exercised greater control over the *church* than even Otto the Great had decades earlier; but these arrangements were a little too barefaced for the people of Rome. In 1002, the rebellious citizens besieged the *emperor* in his palace on the Palatine Hill, and drove him from the city. Otto III withdrew to Ravenna, summoned his army from Germany, and then laid siege to the *Holy City.* But, before anything was accomplished, he fell feverish and died; probably of malaria from the unhealthy swamps around Ravenna. He was twenty-one years old, and had never married, leaving the empire without a clear heir.

When Otto the Great, towards the close of his reign, neglected Germany and occupied himself with establishing his dominion in Italy, he prepared the way for the rapid decline of the imperial power at home, in the hands of his two immediate successors. The reigning *dukes*, *counts*, and even bishops, no longer watched and held subordinate, soon became practically independent; and thus the growth of a general national sentiment, such as had been fostered by Henry the Fowler. was again lost. Meanwhile, subservience had not been the *papal* intention in reviving the imperial title; a clash was inevitable.

### Vikings Elsewhere

Scandinavian wanderlust touched practically every possible point In the western seas, The Vikings raided the Iberian peninsula from time to time, but accomplished little of permanence. In 959, a large expedition cruised out from their base at the mouth of the Loire river, and raided down the Iberian coast, before fighting their way through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. According to an account by the Norman monk Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the Vikings pillaged the south of France, where the fleet stayed over winter, and then landed in Italy, where they sacked the cities of Luni and Pisa. Flush with these victories, and others around the Mediterranean (including in Sicily and North Africa), the Vikings followed the same route back to French waters in 862, though they suffered heavily at the hands of storms and Arab attacks. Later chronicles say that the leader of this three-year expedition was Björn Ironside, another son of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. It was the Viking colonization of remote islands that was their most spectacular achievement, given the available resources. The most successful colony of all was **Iceland**; previously uninhabited except for a few Irish monks and their sheep. According to the *sagas*, written down more than two centuries after the event, Iceland was discovered by Naddodd, one of the ealiest settlers of the Faroe Islands, who was sailing from Norway to the Faroes but lost his way. A Norwegian chieftain named Ingólfur Arnarson, together with his family, dependents and livestock, came to settle in 874, building his homestead near where Reykjavik now stands. Ingólfur was followed by many more settlers, who stake claim to all the habitable areas of the island. By 930, there were perhaps 10,000 Norse Icelanders, mostly Norwegians fleeing the oppressive rule of Harald Fairhair (d. 932). In that year, the Icelandic state was founded with the establishment of an assembly, the *Althing*, which romantics later saw as the first European "parliament". It was more like a council of chieftains than a modern representative body and it followed earlier Norwegian practice, but Iceland's uninterrupted historical record is a remarkable one, for it continues to meet to this day.

From high ground of western Iceland the peaks of **Greenland** can sometimes be glimpsed across almost one-hundred-and-seventy-five miles of sea. The first Viking to actually land on Greenland, as far as we know, was Erik the Red (d.1003). After being temporarily exiled from Iceland, as punishment for manslaughter, Erik put his family in a longship, together with their retainers and their livestock, and sail towards those distinct peaks. They survived on the southern tip of the island, near what is now Julianehaab, the necessary three years. At the end of his exile, Eric returned to Iceland to persuade more settlers to join him. With a better sense of public relations than accuracy, he named the island "Greenland". The Norse Greenlander colonies survived n this inhospitable climate for almost five-hundred-years, until the climate turned for the worse in the Little Ice Age; the last written record documents a marriage in 1408. Of discovery and settlement further west we can say less. The Icelandic *sagas* give various accounts of how Leif Erikson (d.  1018 ), a son of Erik the Red, comes to spend a winter on coastal **North America*,*** in about the year 1000, at a place he named "Vinland" because vines grew wild there. In some versions, Leif lost his way when returning from Norway, in others he was following up reports made fifteen years earlier by Bjarni Herjolfsson, another Viking blown off course. Either way, the *sagas* state that, a few years later, an Icelandic expedition led by Thorfinn Karlsefni briefly establishes a settlement at Vinland. Archaeology proves that Vikings did indeed reach the Americas; five-hundred years before Christopher Columbus. A site at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, contains the remains of eight buildings constructed with sod over a wood frame in Viking style. It has also yielded more than eight-hundred artefacts of a kind used in Iceland; including a soapstone spindle, suggesting that women were among the settlers. The settlement survived only three winters, before being discouraged by the hostility of the native Americans.

### Decline of the Vikings

Gradually the story of the Vikings became the story of the struggle to establish stable kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and the Christianization of Scandinavia; feasting in Valhalla and the end-of-days vision of Ragnarök were superseded by heavenly harps and the Last Judgement. Missionaries had been at work for a long time but the first Christian monarchs only appear there in the 10th century and not until the next were all Scandinavian kings Christian. Unlike the rest of Scandinavia, **Denmark** has good farmland and can sustain a dense population; already by the 5th-century it had four or five fairly prosperous petty-kingdoms. Frankish sources considered Denmark more or less unified during the reign of Gudfred (804-810) and later his son Horic I (827–54); they certainly had the control of manpower which allowed the building of major earthworks to defend the border with Germany, the Danevirke. But another century passed before we find another king ruling most of Denmark again. Viking activities brought back serious wealth, but also political instability; rival claimants to kingship into the 10th-century were invariably returning Vikings. Some of these kings allowed Chrisian missionaries into Denmark, but did not themselves convert, likely seeing conversion as too close to accepting Frankish hegemony. It was under Gorm the Old (936-958) that all of Denmark was solidly ruled again by a single king, and his son, Harald Bluetooth (958-986), was baptised a Christian some time before 965; in the way of royal converts, he saw this personal event as the conversion of all the Danes. Harald was a contemporary of Otto the Great, and no doubt his reasons were largely political, to neutralise the threat of invasion. These event are commemorated in Denmark's famous Jelling Stones raised by Gorm and Harold. Danish royal power was from now sufficiently solid for Harald's son Sweyn Forkbeard (986-1014) and grandson Cnut the Great (1016-35) to conquer England in 1013, and to establish intermittent hegemony in Norway as well. **Norway** was unified later and unevenly. The *Norse Sagas* associate the first attempt to unify the whole with the semi-mythical Harald Fairhair (872–930), who was apparently spurned by a woman because his kingdom wasn’t even as large as tiny Denmark. After uniting all the Viking settlements of the southern Norway by force, he ruled with so harsh and despotic that many Norwegians left for Iceland, the British Isles, and Greenland. He then had so many sons by his 10 wives that his acheivement descended into anarchy after his death. One son, Eric Bloodaxe (929–934), killed most of his brothers to claim the throne, only to be overthrown, and exiled; he ended up as the last Viking ruler of York in England. The next two kings who tried to establish some level of wider power were Olaf Tryggvason (c. 995–1000) and Olaf Haraldsson (1015–28). Both had become Christian while fighting abroad, and their expansionism was associated with more or less forced conversion. As kings, neither man was successful for long, both brought down by Danish intervention, even though the latter Olaf was regarded as a martyred saint almost immediately after his death; today he is the country’s patron saint. A rising against Danish rule restored Olaf's son Magnus Olafsson (1035-47) to the throne, and his successor Harald Hardrada (1046-66) established a stable kingdom and dynasty, though regional loyalties continued to be powerful; the rule of the kings was never strong, and was contested if too ambitious. **Sweden** achieved similar unity rather later and much of its early history is obscure. The first known attempt to Christianise the Swedes were made by St. Ansgar in 830, who was able to secure permission to build a church in Birka. Her first Christian king was Olof Skötkonung (995-1020) who is said to have been baptised in 1008, and ruled over the kernel of the Swedish state. Two centuries later Sweden was still consolidating and disintegrating over dynastic squabbles. Not until the dynasty established by the statesman Birger Jarl (d. 1266) did the Swedish kingdom have the stature to match Denmark or Norway; he is traditionally credited with founding Stockholm around 1250. In **Iceland** the entire population converted to Christianity at the same moment. Missionaries effects in the 10th century had succeeded bringing some chieftains into the Christian fold. Violent clashes were avoided by the Althing of 1000, where all agreed the incumbent law speaker should decide on the issue of religion. After a day and a night of silently pondering on the matter, he decreed that everyone in Iceland should be baptised, although pagans were allowed to practise their religion in private. Although the Scandinavians became nominally Christian, it took considerably longer for actual Christian beliefs to establish themselves, and the clergy were still condemning paganism well into the 14th-century.

After the Viking Age, Scandinavia tends not to be a major actor in European politics. The story of the intervening 500 years is one of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian dynasties struggling to maintain stable kingdoms, two closely related methods of shifting the balance of power in the region; warfare and dynastic marriages. One such marriage led at last to the personal union of all three crowns; the so-called Kalmar Union (1397-1523) was only briefly a political reality, but remained an aspiration for over a century.

### Byzantine Revival

For the Byzantine Empire, the two centuries before 850 had been effectively one long crisis; from the devastating Roman-Persian War, to the vast territorial losses to the Muslim conquests, from the slow overrunning of the Balkans by the Bulgars and Slavs, to the internal turmoil of the Iconoclasm Controversy. The empire's problems seemed insurmountable, but like Scipio Africanus after Cannae (216 BC), Aurelian during the crisis of the 3rd-century, and Theodosius after Adrianople (378), a dynasty would emerged to drag the Eastern Roman Empire into one last *Golden Age (842-1025).*

**Emperor Michael III** (842-867) himself proved just another in a long series of beastly or incompetent rulers; he was known by his detractors as Michael the Drunkard for his love of wine, women, and song. Nevertheless, his reign saw the first hints at the Byzantine; as historian George Ostrogorsky put it, "*he was not great, but there was greatness in his time*". Ascending to the throne at just 2-years-old, Michael’s minority was dominated by his mother, Theodora, who brought an end to the social and political upheavals of the Iconoclasm Controversy. At the same time, Theodora's gifted minister, Theoktistos (d. 855), was steadily rebuilt the imperial treasury with shrewd and careful policy, as well as fostering the cultural and artistic revival later known as the Macedonian Renaissance. As an adult after 855, Michael’s decision to leave matters of state mostly to his uncle, Bardas (d. 866), was probably one of the best in his reign. The coherence of the Abbasid Caliphate was beginning to slip, with a two-decade-long civil war from 861. Bardas took advantage, leading two seasons of campaigning in eastern Anatolia in which the Muslim governor, Emir Umar, was defeated and slain; thus striking the first blow against the infidel in almost a hundred years. Bardas is also credited with reorganising and enlarging the imperial university in Constantinople, which once again became the leading center of Christian higher education of its day. However, the contributions of these three talents were dwarfed by Photios (d. 893) as archbishop of Constantinople. More than any other single person, he exemplified the cultural rebirth and missionary zeal of a new age. A few weeks before becoming archbishop in 858, Photios wasn't even a member of the clergy; when archbishopric fell vacant, Bardas hurriedly had the respected statesman inducted into the priesthood, and confirmed as the new archbishop of Constantinople. Photios had little real interest in theology and even less ecclesiastical experience, but he came to the office with a remarkably clear vision. As a scholar, we are indebted to Photios' critique for almost all we possess of classical authors such as Ctesias, Memnon of Heraclea, Conon, Diodorus Siculus, and Arrian. But Photios' greatest contributions was commissioning two monks, Cyril (d. 869) and his brother Methodius (d. 885), and sending them to bring Christianity to the Slavs, Bulgars, and the Rus; Eastern Orthodox missionary work cannot neatly be distinguished from Byzantine diplomacy, bringing dangerous neighbours into Constantinople's sphere of influence. These missions would all bear fruit in time, beginning with Bulgaria; the Bulgar Khan, Boris I (d. 889), accepted Christianity in 864, and his government became highly Byzantine in style. The brothers did much more than convert. Realising that the Slavs lacked an alphabet, St. Cyril set to work devising one; the Cyrillic alphabet, commemorating his name, became the basis for many alphabets in the Balkans and Russia. This not only made possible the spread of Christianity, but the crystallization of Slav culture.

Emperor Michael III did make one other consequential decision for himself; befriending an uncouth peasant called Basil. A decision that lead to his own ruin. The life of **Basil the Macedonian** is a classic tale of rags-to-riches. He was born in Thrace near Adrianople; his epitaph comes from an administrative division called Macedonia, rather than the former province. He was apparently of Armenian descent, so his family had probably been forcibly relocated to one of the military theme, as part of a regular Byzantine policy to repopulate frontier regions. Totally illiterate and dirt-poor, Basil sought his fortune in Constantinople, where his skill with horses got him job in the imperial stables. There, he somehow caught the eye of Emperor Michael, a keen charioteer. The emperor's uncle Bardas had recently forced him to give-up his favourite mistress Eudokia, and Michael was looking for a way to respectably keep her at court. On the emperor's orders, Basil was divorced his own wife and married Eudokia, while the emperor kept her for himself. In return, Basil gained a prominent position at court, from which he manipulated his way onto the imperial throne. By far the biggest threat to Basil's position was Bardas, the real power behind Michael's throne. He leaned hard on the emperor's naivety, persuading him that his uncle coveted the throne himself. In 866, Basil personally murdered Bardas on Michael's orders. and thus became the new power-behind-the-throne. He even somehow stepping into the now vacant role of *Caesar* (heir) for the childless emperor. When Michael began favouring another courtier, Basil decided to get rid of his benefactor once and for all, brutally murdering him in his bedchamber. There was little political outrage at the murder of the unpopular emperor, and the next day he was crowned in Hagia Sophia as Emperor Basil I (867-886). Achieving power through a series of calculated murders would seem contemptable, but Basil become a respected and respected emperor. Despite having no formal education, the administrative, legislative, military, cultural and economic situation continued to improve during his 19-year reign. In the east, Basil continued the military success against the Muslims, recovering the city of Divriği; the empire was now the one on the offensive, the armies of the Prophet retreating. In west, Basil carefully rebuilt relations with the Papacy in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor. With their active support, he stemmed the Muslim tide in southern Italy, giving the Byzantines an excellent bridgehead from which virtually all of southern Italy would be conquered by the end of the century; it would remain in Byzantine hands for the next 200 years. Meanwhile, Basil patiently strengthened and modernised the Byzantine navy, which once again became a strong presence in the eastern Mediterranean, clearing the sea of pirates, and paving the way for increased trade and an economic boom. There was suddenly a energy and daring in the air, not seen since the days of Justinian the Great. At home, Basil, like Justinian, introduced a flurry of legal activity, updating the Code of Justinian and producing two smaller legal manuals that made it more accessible to judges and lawyers; ironically work begun under Bardas who was murdered by Basil. Again imitating Justinian, he poured the newly prosperous treasury into a massive building program; buildings, monuments and walls across the capital were given a much-needed revamp after decades of neglect. He also stamped his own mark on the city, personally overseeing the construction of the Nea Ekklesia cathedral (New Church); Basil's Hagia Sophia. Topped by five cascading gilded domes and its inside covered in marble and mosaics, by all contemporary accounts it was a truly remarkable building. Unfortunately for modern tourists, the church was accidentally blown-up by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, who were using it as a gunpowder store. In almost every respect, Basil had had a spectacular reign, bringing miitary glory back to the empire, and spurring a renaissance of architecture, the arts, and learning, that would see the Empire achieve one last great flowering over the next century-and-a-half. But perhaps it was fitting that his reign ended as it had begun; in treachery and murder. To Basil’s great distress, his eldest son by his first marraige died in 879, a blow from which the emperor never fully recovered. He had always hated his younger son, Leo, suspecting, probably rightly, that the boy was actually Michael's son. Relations between the pair deteriorated very badly, and Basil died in mysterious circumstanced in 886. The tale was a tall one even by Byzantine standards; Leo almost certainly arranged for his father to be helped off his throne. Apparently, the 74-year old emperor was hunting alone, when his belt became caught in a stag's antlers, which then dragged him for 16-miles through the woods, to be eventually found dead by the father of Leo's mistress.

Until 1025, Basil's Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056) went on to produce some of the ablest emperors in Byzantine history. For a dynasty that achieved so much, the family was far from untroubled by internal drama; the dynastic principle was never strong in Byzantium. Three of the first seven emperors were usurping generals, who pushed aside a legitimate heir after marrying into the royal family. But the family maintained a legitimacy that was constantly returned to, and the periodic infusion of new blood proved to the long-term benefit of the empire. The first of the generals, Romanos I Lekapenos (920-44), reconquered most of eastern Anatolia and parts of Syria; lands which had fallen more than two centuries earlier, during the first wave of the Muslim conquests. This paved the way for perhaps the two finest generals Byzantium ever produced, who became emperor in turn; Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) and his nephew John I Tzimiskes (969-976). In 962, the great city of Aleppo in Syria was recovered. The Muslims were definitive expelled from Crete in 963 and Cyprus in 965. For 150-years, the Muslims had been effectively using these islands as pirate bases to terrorise the Aegean. Thus, Byzantine naval supremacy was restored in the eastern Mediterranean, allowing trade to flourish once again. This was only the beginning. Nikephoros' crowning achievement was recovering the great city of Antioch in 969, seat of one of the five great archbishoprics of Christendom. His successor, John Tzimiskes, went on to expand the empire well into Syria, taking Damascus, Beirut, Acre, Sidon, Caesarea, and Tiberias. At one point, his army was within sight of Jerusalem itself. On the western front, his achievements were more mixed. Around 927, Bulgaria and Byzantium had entered a long period of peaceful relations. Then in 971, Bulgaria was overrun by the Kievan Rus'. With the Rus amassing forces right on the Byzantine border, John Tzimiskes invaded and compelled them to leave the Balkans in 971. He proclaimed Bulgaria a Byzantine province, but could not hold it, leading to fourty years of increasingly bitter warfare. Despite this setback, Byzantium was resurgent. The empire of the 9th-century looked very different from that of 6th. It was of course far smaller, but what remained was less geographically dispersed and more politically integrated. Its centre of gravity had moved, no longer built on a Constantinople–Egypt axis, but a Constantinople–Italy one. Its economic heartland was the network of commercial exchange across the Aegean and on around the Italian coast, all looking to Constantinople itself, which was still large and economically active as a city. Inland the picture was less bright. Many unfortified cities in Anatolia and the Balkans had been abandoned, and the region had become much less economically complex than in Justinian's day.

During the long-reign of **Emperor Basil II** (976-1025), the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith. Basil was the legitimate heir of the Macedonian Dynasty, but by this time generals expected to become emperor; afterall the last two general-emperors had been supurb rulers. As a result, the first eleven years of his long reign were spent suppressing challenges to his throne against three rivals; two were generals, Bardas Skleros (d. 991) and Bardas Phokas (d. 989), and the third was the capable statesman, Basil Lekapenos (d. 985), who had been effectively running affairs-of-state while John Tzimiskes went on military campaigns. With boundless energy and an iron will, Basil outmaneuvered and outlasted them all. Lekapenos hoped the young emperors would be his puppets, but in 985, he forcefully asserted his independence, accusing him of plotting with the rebellious generals. Basil's first order of business was dealing with Bulgaria, which had reasserted its independence under Tsar Samuel (d. 1014). Samuel had used the troubled succession to raid imperial territory, sacking Byzantine city of Larissa, selling its populations into slavery, and carting-off its holiest relic. Such an insult had to be avenged. Although he had never commanded an army, with boundless self-confidence Basil gathered a 30,000-strong force, and marched into Bulgaria. Unfortunately the soldiers didn't share his conviction. After just three weeks, Basil decided to turn-back for home, concerned at Samual's harrying raids and his own men's wavering loyalty. The wily Tsar chose the perfect moment for an ambush, in a narrow pass called Trajan's Gate. Basil escaped the rout, but this convinced Bardas Phokas, in exile in Baghdad, that the time was right for another bid for the throne. To defeat this final revolt, Basil sought new allies abroad, and found them in Vladimir the Great of Kievan Rus'. In return for the emperor's sister's hand in marriage, Vladimir provided 6,000 Rus-Viking mercenaries; known to the Byzantines as Varangians. As soon as the Varangians arrived, Basil attacked, catching the rebels completely by surprise and routing them. Phokas himself escape to fight another day, but when next they met, he died of a stroke in the midst of the battle, and the rebellion rapidly collapsed in the face of this clearer sign of divine judgement. Meanwhile, the Scandinavians had so impressed Basil, that he organised them into what would become the Varangian Guard, which would faithfully serve the empire for more than 300 years, as both the emperor's personal bodyguard and an elite force capable of turning battles. Perhaps their best-known member was Harald Hardrada (d. 1066), who became rich in Byzantine service, then returned home to claim the throne of Norway, and tried to conquer England in 1066.

In 989, Basil had been on the throne for fourteen years, but had precious little to show for it. Undeterred, he had hardly settled the civil war before he set-off to discipline the Bulgarians definitively. The Byzantine-Bulgarian War (986-1018) was a campaign like no other. Trajan's Gate had taught Basil well, and he would never walk into an ambush again. Instead, this was a slow methodical advance, winter or summer, snow or rain; relentless and absolutely irresistible. Samuel's opportunity to recover ground seemed to come in the fourth years of the war, when Fatimid Egypt invaded Syrian and besieged Antioch. For a man known for his glacial pace, Basil moved with astonishing speed. He mounted his entire army of 40,000 men, and made the 600 mile journey in just 16-day, catching the Fatimid army completely by surprise and routing them. Returning through Anatolia, Basil was not best pleased with what he saw. The wealthy landed aristocracy had become over-powerful, avoiding taxes and expanding their estates at the expense of the free-holding peasantry and tenant peasantry of the theme estates, the backbone of the army. Arriving in Constantinople, he promulgated comprehensive punitive legislation against the landed families, protecting the property right of the lower classes, confiscating illegally seized land, and introducing a new *Allelengyon* tax which obliged landowners to cover the tax-arrears of poorer tenants. Meanwhile, Basil's absence in Bulgaria had allowed Samuel to recover lost ground. Beginning in 1000, the emperor set to work again with grinding persistence, while opening a second front in the war by inviting the Venetians to invade the Dalmatian Coast, whose forests they were eager to exploit for their navy. It wasn't until the 28th years of the war that the decisive battle to place. With the Byzantines taking more and more of his territory, a desperate Samuel staked it all in one last battle, appropriately enough in another narrow ravine in the Belasica Mountains. At the Battle of Kleidion (July 1014), Basil outmaneuvered Samual, finding a narrow path behind the fortified Bulgarian line, and then attacking from both sides. It was a rout from the outset; Samuel himself escaped, but virtually no one else did. It was here that Basil earned the nickname by which he's commonly known to history; *Basil the Bulgar-Slayer.* The emperor, remembering Trajan's Gate, extracted his cruel revenge; he blinded 15,000 prisoners, sending them home in groups of 100, each led by a one-eyed guide. Samuel is said to have died of shock at the sight of his blinded army. If Basil had wanted to break the Bulgarian resistance, it did not work. They fought on for four more years, until finally submitting in 1018. Bulgaria became a Byzantine province once again, where it remained under a relatively light Byzantine yoke for almost 200 years. Basil II continued campaigning until his death in 1025, winning further success in the east, and extending the borders into Armenia.

By force of will alone, Basil had become a brilliant soldier-emperor, expanding the empire more than any man since Heraclius, and reestablishing the Danube as a stable and secure border. Had anyone even half as capable followed him, the empire's prosperity would have been assured. But his successors squandered their inheritance, allowing the empire to fall into the hands of a poisonous court and self-interested nobles, neglecting the army, and engineering in only 46 years such a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) that the empire never recovered. The historian John Julius Norwich (d. 2018) probably said it best, "*Basil II died on 15th December. By the 16th, the decline had already begun*".

### Rise of Regional Muslim Powers

From the 9th century the central authority of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was forced onto the defensive. Even though Baghdad remained preeminent in cultural prestige, important initiatives were being taken from surrounding provinces. The Abbasids were a violent lot, who quickly and ruthlessly quenched opposition and religious nonconformists. Loyalty to the dynasty, rather than the brotherhood of Islam, was increasingly the basis of the empire, which bridled former allies. Moreover, pre-Islamic ethnic and cultural distinctions remained very real. Governorships tended to become hereditary, and exercise a greater and greater power in appointments and the handling of taxation. A civil war between the sons of the fifth Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid (d. 809), weakened the cohesion of the Caliphate. Al-Ma'mun (d. 833) emerged victorious, but much of his reign was consumed by costly campaigns to pacify rebels and the rise of local warlords. He turned to tax-farming as a way to replenish the treasury alienating the subject populations, while he lacked the same respect for his faith losing the support of the devout. The Abbasids gradually lost control of their empire, beginning at the peripheries. It was difficult to exercise effective control over the western half of empire from Damascus, and even harder from Baghdad, which has to its west a broad swathe of desert; the Wadi Rum. Spain was lost to the Abbasids from the start, when an Umayyad prince, who escaped the fate of his house, proclaimed himself Emir (governor) of Umayyad Spain (756–1031). In 788, the local Moorish dynasty of Idrisids (788–974) set up a state from Fez in Morocco, commencing a cycle of rising and falling Moorish dynasties, including the Almoravids (1062–1147) and Almohads (1147–1269). Further east in Tunisia, a family of governors under the Abbasids became increasingly independent until they founded the Aghlabid Dynasty (830–909). The weakness of the Abbasid Caliphs tempted them into a short-sighted measure that only hastened their decline. They acquired slaves from the Turkic steppe nomads of Central Asia and utilized them in their armies. Known as Mamluk, these excellent fighters distinguished themselves in the service of the Caliphate, and were often given positions of military leadership. Thus, *barbarians* were incorporated within the structure of the Caliphates as had been the western *barbarians* within the Roman Empire. Well-placed to advance their own interests, they frequently took the opportunity. One of the first to seize power was the Turkic-Mamluk general Ahmad ibn Tulun (d. 884) who seize control of Egypt as the Tulunid Dynasty (868–905). ibn Tulun went on to rapidly conquering the Mediterranean coast through Palestine and up into Syria, a region easier to effectively control from Cairo than Baghdad. In the eastern half of the empire, Yaʿqub al-Saffar (d. 879), a low-born copperworker turned warlord, seized the province of Sistan, and used as a power-base to conquer Kabul and Herat in the name of Islam; these cities had held for almost two-centuries under Buddhist rulers. He brought back so much plunder from this campaign, that he went on to conquer most of Persia and Afghanistan, before his eventual defeat by the Abbasids. In the aftermath, al-Saffar's shord-lived empire was cannibalismed by two native Persian dyasties, the Samanid Dynasty (892-999) in the east and Buyid Dynasty (934–1062), which presided over the first conscious revival of the Persian language, history, and traditions since the Arab conquest. The loss of Abbasid power was made official in 945, when the Buyids took all of Iraq under their rule, deposed the Caliph and installed a replacement more to their liking. For the next century, Abbasid Caliphs had little political power outside the confines of Baghdad itself, though were still acknowledged as the spiritual leaders of the Islamic world. The situation changed further with the rise of the Fatimid Dynasty (909–1171). Originally from Tunisia, in 969 they conquered Egypt and moved their capital to a newly built city on the Nile, *Al Kahira* ("the victorious"), more commonly known today as Cairo. They were of the Shi'a branch of Islam, rather than orthodox Sunni Islam, and set up their own Caliph. For the next two centuries, the Fatimids would be the chief political and ideological antagonist of the Abbasids, for even nominal authority over the Islamic world. Less conspicuous examples could be found elsewhere in the Abbasid dominions as local governors began to term themselves Sultan or Emir.

Although Abbasid prestige would recover to some degree in the 11th-century thanks to the Seljuk Turks, the great days of Islamic Empire were over. No empire remained to resist the centuries of invasion which followed, beginning with the Crusades and culminating in the Mongols, who slaughtered the last Abbasid Caliph in 1258. Yet we should not rush to label this a political failure; holding together this vast empire stretching from the Atlantic to the border with China for three centuries was already a logistical and organisational triumph, for all its ultimate collapse. Moreover, the various regional Islamic states were more compact and practical to govern, with pragmatic Sultans who continued to patron the culture and learning of the *Islamic Golden Age*. The outstanding example was probably Umayyad Spain (756–1031), one of the most prosperous and spectacular realm of 10th-century Europe. The Umayyads did not have an easy start. Islam had never conquered the whole peninsula, and there were Christian kingdoms in the north always willing to help stir the pot of Arab-Moor infighting, as well as making tentative beginnings at *Reconquista.* Moreover, Spain was one of the only places conquered by the Arabs that did not have a strong system of taxation already in place. Nevertheless, by the 10th-century, Umayyad Spain was fiscally stable, and made use of it to encourage agriculture through the construction of irrigation systems, and commerce by building markets and developing sea-power. Cordoba grew rapidly as a capital, and by 1000 was challenging Constantinople as the largest city in Europe, with a population of over half-a-million. Spanish Islamic culture was at its height in the 11th and 12th century, in a golden age which rivalled that of Abbasid Baghdad. This produced great learning and philosophy, as well as seven hundred exquisite mosques, of which one can still be thought the most beautiful building in the world; the Mezquita of Cordoba. The relative tolerance of Christians within Muslim Spain made it of enormous importance to Europe, a door to the learning and science of the East. Norman Sicily, after the reconquest in the 11th-century, would be another region of positive Christian and Muslim intermingling.

For all the comings and goings of regional rulers and invaders, nothing disturbed the deep-rooted foundations of Islamic society. This unity, of social and cultural institutions, of law, and of certain assumptions, far transcended centuries of political division. It could be illustrated in many ways. It kept women in an inferior position, but gave them legal rights over property not available in most European countries until the 19th-century; even slaves had rights. Inside the community of the believers there was inherited status. Besides having a great political, material, and intellectual impact on Christandom, Islam also spread far beyond the heartland of the Arab Empire, to Central Asia in the 10th-century, to the Niger River and Swahili city-states of Africa, as well as India in the 11th-century. Between the 12th and 16th centuries still more of Africa would become Muslim; Islam remains today the fastest-growing faith of that continent. Thanks to the conversion of Mongols in the 13th-century, Islam would also reach China. By the 16th-century it was carried by merchants across the Indian Ocean to Malaya and Indonesia. There would even be a last, final extension of the faith in south-east Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries under the Ottoman Turks. It was a remarkable achievement for an idea at whose service there had been in the beginning so few resources. But despite this majestic record, no state was ever again to provide unity for Islam after the 10th-century. Even Arab unity was to remain only a dream, though one cherished still today.