Show 69 - Twilight of the Aesir

Today's show is sponsored by Sega's Company of Heroes 3, available February 2023. This story begins, well probably like most stories, before this story begins. I mean, what historical account doesn't have its precursors or its back stories or its prologues? In this case, we had an entire show and an extra show devoted to this very story, we called it Thor's Angels, and you'll hear me say that a couple of times in this discussion

upcoming. This is the last chapter in that story involving a people history often calls Vikings, but Vikings are not a people. And how connected the people in this era are to today's modern day, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes is iffy. And the idea of ethnicity and cultural aspects,

and everything else is fraught with all sorts of baggage. I mean, this story about who these people were about to talk about really worries buried beneath layer upon layer and century upon century of romanticizing and demonizing and fetishizing and nationalizing of a people that once upon a

time were just real folk and converting them into Hollywoodized barbarian tropes. But once upon a time there were people all over northern western and central Europe who had a linguistic affiliation, a cultural affinity, and believed in the same sorts of values and deities that these Viking Eris Scandinavians believed in. And by the time the early Middle Ages rolls around, these people in modern day Scandinavian may be just north of Germany are the only people left who do.

And there's a certain historical irony that the peoples who will put the lion's share of sweat into extinguishing these old gods, these ancient deities are people who not that long before this time period believed in them themselves. This is as the old radio announcer Paul Harvey would have said that when it comes to the Thor's Angels tale, this is the rest of the story. The Summer 7, 1941, its history, a date which will live in infamy.

The events, the figures, not quite the normal world going humanities from this time and place. I take pride in the words, it's been I'm dealing the drama. Now it too has an exposure explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse in the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are corrupt. The deep quest to know if we dig deep in our history and our doctor. And remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

It's hardcore history. One of my favorite quotes in all history, and I'm careful about famous quotes now because so many of the ones in my quote books have been debunked over the years. This one's pretty well attested to. I wouldn't swear by it, but it's pretty well attested to. It involves something said by Joseph Stalin, autocratic leader of the former Soviet Union, a communist state, right? A state by the way

that is officially an atheistic state and Stalin himself was probably an atheist. And the reason it matters is because the quote has something to do with that. The circumstances are that he's supposed to be talking to a French politician in the middle 1930s who in an attempt to solve a problem they're dealing with suggests they might be able to solicit the help of the Vatican, right? The Pope. And Stalin's response is so cynical, terra firma rubber meets the road type of

an answer that it just sums up the situation perfectly. He's supposed to have said and he wouldn't have said it in English, which is why you sometimes see different wording. He's supposed to have said the Pope, how many divisions does he have? You know, meaning armor and soldiers and guns and those kinds of things. Stalin doesn't want to talk about spiritual help. He wants to know, you know, how many soldiers the Pope is going to provide. And of course the Pope can't provide any

the number of divisions that the Pope has is zero. This sums up a problem that has existed for the popes and the center of Catholic authority in Italy since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the way that they managed to solve this problem goes a long way to explaining why Europe turned out the way it did. Now, full disclosure, we've already discussed this process in an earlier show called Thor's Angels. We even did an extra show, a Thor's Angels extra utilizing some of the

cutting room floor stuff that we had to cut out. But that show is about what happened to a religion that started off as a minority offshoot religion from Judaism goes to a much persecuted religion and the minority religion in the Roman Empire to eventually getting a Roman emperor converting

to Christianity. And then a later Roman emperor converting the whole empire to officially Christian and you have the Pope and Christianity in a pretty good position until the Roman Empire and the West disintegrates, which means Roman protection in Italy goes away at a time when the entire Western European area, Italy included is becoming a very dangerous neighborhood. A time when the

Pope really could have benefited from having a few divisions. The way that successive popes solve this problem of living in a bad neighborhood with no military protection is to form a partnership with some entity that can provide it. That entity turned out to be a people, another one of those people, the Romans would have called barbarians, a people known as the Franks located in the modern day area of sort of France, just change the soft sea in France to a hard sea and

you see the connection, right, Frank? Look at the German name for France even today, Frank, Reich, right? Empire of the Franks. The Franks were sort of the odds on favor to be the up-and-coming people in Europe and so when the church and the Frankish leaders over generations create this relationship, it becomes a symbiotic one, one that protects and allows the church to develop and expand its authority and the number of its followers while at the same time blessing the

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

the Great Karl Dargrosa has a lot of names. Charlemagne's how he's known to history is probably, you could make a very good argument, the most important geopolitical figure in European history after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He's absolutely astoundingly influential and important. And like so many people like him in history, he's overshadowed his direct ancestors, which if he didn't live, you'd have known about. I mean, the same way you'd know Alexander the Great's father's

name if Alexander the Great hadn't been so great. I mean, Charlemagne, his dad, Pippen, his grandfather, Charles Martel, nicknamed the Hammer. The three of them gave the Franks about 90 years of really energetic, strong leadership that catapulted that people to really the heights of European power and dominance. Charlemagne will be when he starts out a king of the Franks and by the time he ends, he's the emperor of a renovated Roman Empire as the way it would have been seen and the church

with him all the way. But somewhere along the way, the sword arm of the church, this protection provided to the Pope by this Frankish people turned from defensive in character to offensive in character. And it's hard to know how much the church wanted this or didn't want it. There were some complaints at the time by how this situation was actually playing out on the ground. But by the time you get to Charlemagne, the way it's playing out on the ground is genocidal and has a direct

bearing on what happens afterwards. Charlemagne was famously involved in a multi-generational war against a people to his east who were called the Saxons. Now using ancient sources to describe people's ethnicities, cultures or political affiliations of tribal peoples is difficult because they're not always consistent and people change. The Saxons, though, were a people that before this period were part of the great immigration of peoples from, you know, Western Europe around the

north of Germany and Denmark in those places to England. And they create a fusion of peoples that history calls Anglo-Saxons. And these Anglo-Saxons will convert to Christianity eventually. And then send missionaries from England back to Saxony where the Saxons are to try to convert that pagan people. As you might imagine, sometimes the Saxons were amenable to this. And some times they weren't. Charlemagne isn't about giving them choices in the matter, though.

His wars against the Saxons will go on for like 30 years and get progressively nastier. Saxony's a tough place to fight, by the way, in his book Charlemagne, Father of a Continent historian, Alessandro Barbaro sets up the conflict this way. It was a ferocious war in a country with little or no civilization, with neither roads nor cities and entirely covered with forests and marshland. The Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods as Germans had always done before converting

to Christianity. And the Franks did not hesitate to put to death anyone who refused to be baptized. End quote. That was not normally policy in converting the heathen, but Charlemagne's geopolitical goals and his religious ones dovetailed. And it's hard to know where one ended and the other began. He will famously have 4500. And you know, you never know about these.

There was 4500 Saxons beheaded in a single afternoon at the edge of a river in a town called Verdan because they were allegedly the leaders of one of the many Saxon rebellions against him. Every time he would take his army away from Saxony, after chastising the Saxons and go fight one of his other wars, they would rise up in rebel and they would often destroy monasteries and kill monks and raid and all kinds of things. The victory conditions that Charlemagne set up in this war

were that the Saxons had to give up their traditional religion. They were going to convert to Christianity or else they were going to die. Now defenders of Charlemagne will point out that the legitimate reason for this was he planned to conquer Saxony and incorporate it into his kingdom.

And his kingdom was Christian and they weren't going to have any pagans in his kingdom. The problem was is that the way he went about it was so draconian and totalitarian that he got many complaints from missionaries whose job it was to go convert these people sort of through good argument and through preaching the gospels and showing the way to the light and the saving of souls. Charlemagne at some points will have rules in place to say Saxons who won't be baptized or to be

killed. Saxons who don't follow the meal restrictions during lent or to face the death penalty. I mean it's that heavy duty. The missionaries that have been going preaching to people like this often were putting their own lives at risk as you might imagine if somebody came into your community and started assailing your religion might not be the safest thing to do. And some of these missionaries who are very brave people would go to places like I mean St. Boniface famously will try to convert

the frisians and will be martyred. That's the term that is used right martyred means that one way or another they killed him. A lot of these missionaries will be killed and be martyred trying to convert the Germanic type heathen the barbarian heathen. My favorite amongst these is a saint called lebwin and lebwin like so many of these other people trying to convert the people in what's now northern germany or the Netherlands is from Anglo-Saxon England.

And lebwin is not going to be martyred he's going to be one of these ones who survives. He goes to preach to the Saxons and these guys would come in by the way and they would do things like burn or chop down their sacred trees that they believed like held up the universe or were the pathways from the gods to man. I mean sacred sites they'll come in here and chop them down. I mean how what kind of guts do you have to have to be an unarmed cleric who comes in and does that amongst

a warrior people that don't even leave home without weapons. But the story of saint lebwin involves one of the greatest speeches ever given by a figure in the middle ages if it really happened and if it really happened this guy is absolutely one of the more gutsy people you will ever see. The version I have comes from a book called the Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany

translated and edited by a guy called CH Talbot. He claims that this version of the story of lebwin is from an unknown author and that a later version that is attributed is simply taken from this version. But he describes this saint who wasn't a saint at the time just a missionary and lebwin who goes to the Saxons during one of their big assemblies that they have. To call them democratic

would be false but they didn't have a king who ruled over every little thing. They would get together and have assemblies and hash this stuff out but what that meant is that there's a lot of armed barbarians in a single place at a single time and this story has lebwin just sort of appearing amongst them. It's hard not to see how many of these figures would have made great superheroes

in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And you know for reasons of not wanting to be accused of blasphemy I understand why the Marvel Universe did not include the monotheistic religions like Islam and Christianity in their universe but they have the Norse gods, they have the Greek gods and yet who wiped out all those gods. Well in Europe it was Christianity that killed pantheism

right and if you read the account of lebwin he sounds like he can make himself invisible. They don't explicitly say that but he appears out of nowhere and when they want to kill him he can manage to disappear and when he first appears to these people in their assembly he's wearing his religious vestiments which might have looked like a superhero outfit to these barbarian types.

He's got the gospels in the Crook of his arm which is like a book of magic and he's got a cross with him which is almost like a religious weapon if you're looking at it from a people who believe heavily in things like magic and according to the unknown author who chronicles lebwin's life

this is how it goes quote suddenly lebwin appeared in the middle of the circle clothe in his priestly garments bearing across in his hands and a copy of the gospels in the Crook of his arm raising his voice he cried, listen to me, listen I am the messenger of Almighty God and to use Saxons I bring his command. The author says astonished at his words and at his unusual appearance a hush fell upon the assembly the man of God then followed up his announcement with these words.

The God of heaven and ruler of the world and his son Jesus Christ commands me to tell you that if you are willing to be and to do what his servants tell you he will confer benefits upon you such as you have never heard of before then he added as you have never had a king over you before

this time so no king will prevail against you and subject you to his domination but if you are unwilling to accept God's commands a king has been prepared nearby who will invade your lands spoil and lay them waste and sap away your strength in war he will lead you into exile to prive you of

your inheritance slay you with the sword and hand over your possessions to whom he has a mind and afterwards you will be slaves both to him and to his successors end quote now I can't figure out if that is a warning or a prophecy or threat but that king he's talking

about is Charlemagne and he does just what Lebwin says he will and when the Saxons are eventually crushed some of the leaders who fostered the rebellions flee to one of the last places they can still practice their traditional religious beliefs which are being pushed farther and farther

to the peripheries of the known world they flee to Denmark Denmark during this time period is like the rest of Scandinavia it is not any kind of a unified kingdom or state of any kind there are lots of what are called petty kings sometimes these sorts of entities are referred to

as chiefdoms I mean Norway for example I believe during this period has something like 15 different petty kings who are more like warlords in a lot of these cases the University of Oslo historian and Viking expert John Viddar Sigurdsen estimates the Scandinavian

population around this time period to be about 650,000 people half of which would fall into the realm of what would be controlled by Danish rulers he says those numbers will rise to about a million these are just estimates he cautions in the year 1050 so sort of brackets the Viking age but the

petty king who's ruling the part of Denmark over by Jutland that butts up against Saxon territory is about to have Charlemagne for his next door neighbor when Charlemagne's conquering the Saxons so his involvement in this war between Charlemagne and the Saxons may be a little like a proxy

war situation where he's hoping to help the Saxons defeat Charlemagne so that he doesn't have to directly fight him one of the main leaders in the Saxon rebellion is a hero in Germanic history called Viddukent who may be married to one of the daughters of one of these Danish petty kings

and when Viddukent is fleeing Charlemagne he flees to Denmark and is given sort of sanctuary by one of these Danish petty kings this is where the story gets interesting though and a hundred years ago in his book The Art of War in the Middle Ages Sir Charles Oman describes the situation

as it might have been seen from the Danish point of view and remember by about this time your history books are going to start labeling this entire era in this region as the Viking age and people like the Danes are one of the key peoples who make up these so-called Vikings who we always

think of as aggressive pirates who are on the attack all the time but a people that more modern day historians are starting to see that from their point of view they may have felt like they were the ones threatened and interestingly enough a hundred years ago Sir Charles Oman's already

saying stuff like that when he writes quote perhaps the first seeds of trouble were sown when Viddukent the Saxon fled before the swords of the Franks and took refuge in Jutland we need not doubt that he told his Danish hosts terrible tales of the relentless might the systematic and irresistible

advance of the iron king of the Franks he means Charlemagne the danger was now at their doors the fate of Saxony might soon be that of Denmark the kings of the southern Danes gave shelter to Viddukent but they sent fair words to Charles and did their best to turn away his wrath yet when

Viddukent yielded and was baptized in 785 they must have felt like their own turn to face the oncoming storm had now arrived the Danish kings during this era will fortify and perhaps expand an already existing fortification which separated sort of the territory of the Danes from the

territory of the Saxons or soon to be the territory of the Carolingians it was called the Danes work or the Danavirka or the Danavirga and you can still go see the remains by the way of that long I think it's something like miles and miles wall across the entire sort of

narrow area of Jutland I believe the last time it was used was in the 1860s against the Prussians who will fight the Franco Prussian war something like a decade later I mean you're getting pretty modern and in more modern histories this point of view of the Scandinavian peoples during the Viking

Age is much better examined for example history in Neoprised in his book The Children of Ash and Elm suggests that these Danish peoples these Scandinavians in the Viking era felt threatened the entire time and may have thought of themselves the ones who were on the defensive sort of the last

stand of the Norse gods if you will and he writes quote notwithstanding the traditional focus on Viking aggression for much of the period the peoples of southern Scandinavia were under near constant threat from the belligerence of their Christian neighbors the Frankish empire was being

carved out at the point of a sword by Charlemagne's expansionist wars in the late 8th century and the north would have been feeling these social pressures at the time of the first raids the great man he means Charlemagne died in 814 decades after the seaborn attacks had begun

the 9th century division of the Carolingian empire following years of civil war did nothing to alleviate tensions along the Danish frontier and there is little to suggest the slowly expanding Viking policies ever felt entirely safe from southern assault even into

the new millennium Scandinavian military endeavors almost always included an element of proactive defense alongside their more immediately mercenary ambitions end quote now I don't know about you but I have to really try to get my brain into the right headspace to see these Viking warrior

raiders whose nickname given to them by the English is the slaughter wolves to see the slaughter wolves as the aggrieved injured party here right lashing out in an understandable way defensively but there's a lot of advantages to that root cause and it's been around a long time we

quoted Charles Oman but there's others one of the advantages is it answers a key question in this whole affair the question of why now why do you have the Viking age kickoff when it does and not a hundred years earlier or not a hundred years later if it's a response to certain actions

on the part of a well-armed militant Christianity continually moving north well then the reason it happens when it does is due to Charlemagne's activity right we should mention because it's key to zooming out and understanding the the state of affairs that Viking activity was not something brand new

and that piracy was always going on in the pre-modern world piracy is pretty much omnipresent the difference between the Viking era and the one that preceded it is the intensity level piracy in the pre-modern world is best thought of like a campfire maybe and when there's a lot of

root causes and fuel thrown on the campfire the flames burn brightly and with a lot of heat but without those things it can die down to just glowing ash covered embers but those embers always have the potential with more fuel thrown on them to blaze up again right or

maybe think about piracy like a stock market and sometimes you're trading at low level ranges and then something occurs you know the root causes pile onto the root causes and you get a spike in the stock market maybe even an extended sort of bull market and maybe you could look at the Viking age

as a three or so century unprecedented bull market in piracy another key root cause that's often cited for this era's explosion in piracy is we'll call it the equivalent of having a place to fence your stolen goods right I mean if you steal something how do you convert that into cash for

example or how does cash get converted into something tangible that's usable because during this era you see the growth in these imporiums these trading centers these nodes of economic activity in the Scandinavian world that pop up places like Berkha in modern day Sweden which I've

been to but there's several other sites like this that become places that get tied into what passes for a global trading network at the time right something that ties you into the trading web that includes Europe and Asia and Northern Africa in the Middle East places where you

can take stolen goods and fence them places where you can convert cash or pretty metals that don't have any other purpose into usable goods and Berkha is a good example of one of these places where there's a ton of legitimate commerce going on here if you have a farm in you know what's now

modern day Sweden and you want your your excess food to make you some money or get bartered for something else you bring it to one of these trade imporiums and you can do it there maybe you've got wood that you've chopped or maybe you have traded with another people's like the people the

indigenous peoples in the north for skins and furs and you want to trade those or maybe you've just gotten back from a raid someplace else and you have slaves or you have silver or something like that that you want to convert into more tangible usable goods that fit your needs will these

places crop up and create the economic dynamism that makes this period a little bit of a gold rush era and that incentivizes people to do things that they might not have been as incentivized to do before perhaps it's also possible that all this wealth coming into Scandinavia through piracy is

creating a level of inflation I mean they're finding tons and tons of coins from the Islamic states in Viking era Scandinavia and always have it may be the largest repository of certain kinds of Islamic coins anywhere but that might mean that the cost of everything's going up I mean Scandinavia

is a society where gift giving is the road to power right gift giving is how you create friends and relationships and friends and relationships are the sort of supporters that propel Scandinavian leaders into rulership roles according to historian John the guard Sigerson he says that

violence was the Vikings most important export but that at home quote they were not particularly bloodthirsty in most cases local power games were acted out peacefully as the players competed to display their wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts consumption

was a Vikings most important virtue the brutality we usually associate with the Vikings was displayed abroad end quote in addition to these trading centers cropping up you get a lot of people pushing the root cause about the engineering and technological and navigational developments that create

a singularity of its own these incredible Viking ships which will continue to be enlarged and improved upon during this entire Viking era if you go look at pictures of either recreations artist conceptions or even the skeletons of these ships that they found it's absolutely

terrifying to think of going into the open sea in these things for days on end but not only could you brave the open sea in these incredible engineering marvels but they could be used in the river systems as well and during the pre-modern era you know when

you're talking about before railroads and highways and and all these kinds of things traveling the river system of a place like Europe or Asia or any of those areas is the quickest way to get around it's like a giant subway system and so the use of this naval technology as a way to penetrate

deeply through the river systems into all these areas opens the door to the kinds of raiding that might have been difficult if not impossible before this era also add this idea to it too and that's that in the north they didn't previously as I understand it

use much in the way of sales it was strictly rowing that got you from place to place but during this era sales are adopted and you get the better ships with the sales and the nodes of trade operation and I mean it starts to come together in a way that you can see what Neil Price is

talking about when he talks about a singularity and by the way there are more things that might go into the singularity we only scratch the surface I mean Neil Price brings up new evidence that suggests there might have been volcanically induced climate change working on the Scandinavians

during this era right reducing crop yields and things like that and putting more pressure on these societies to get what they needed to survive from farther afield so there's never any shortage of possible root causes I tend to myself always default towards this idea of collective human

behavior and I've talked about this many times and it's the idea that as individuals we are unpredictable as I'll get out but when you get us in larger groups we sort of devolve toward the mean and then our activities become a little bit more understandable and predictable in advance

and can you imagine being in let's just say some small Norwegian fishing village during this era with no centralized kingdom where you have hundreds of different you know chiefed in ships and somebody in your neighborhood your neck of the woods is out there in the nice weather one day

flashing around a whole bunch of conspicuous wealth better clothes wife running around with some very expensive looking brooches to pin their cloaks with they paying for everybody's drinks at the tavern with some hack silver and maybe a new slavery to buy their side you're going to sit there and

say hey Olaf or life or Eric or Harold when you get all that good stuff and if they say oh well me and the lads joined up with my cousin and their people over at the farming community next door and we got 40 or 60 guys together a rich person paid for a big ship and we went over across the water

and took all this stuff from a mostly undefended monastery you'd want to get some too wouldn't you we wouldn't be just the most normal thing in the world to say wait there's practically free practically undefended stuff somewhere nearby will count me in I want to get some stuff too

and the undefended nature of these places is probably another root cause that explains why these happened it should be pointed out that these pagan heathen as the Christian or Islamic for that matter religious groups would see them that these people were immune to special protections that kept

other people from stealing the same sort of stuff they wanted I mean think about these monasteries which will become the early targets in places like Scotland Ireland and England oftentimes they're located on islands just offshore they are all at once sites for monkish contemplation

and the reading of the sacred scriptures and all that but many of them are also quite wealthy places that are like minor industries lots of farming and winemaking and all kinds of other stuff happening they are extremely tempting targets but the reason that they're not attacked by people in their

own neighborhood is because they have a sort of a magical force field protecting them and the force field is that they form the infrastructure of the Christian religion and if you are a Christian living nearby one of the worst things you could do in your worldview

to imperil your mortal soul would be to go steal stuff from the house of God and kill his servants that's bad Christian karma anywhere you look at it now I'm not saying it didn't happen in Ireland for example they did burn religious monasteries sometimes and it was a classic thing to do if you were

a pagan people the first thing the Saxons used to do when they would have an uprising against Charlemagne you know he'd leave go on some other expedition they'd have a giant revolt first thing they do is burn the monasteries and kill the monks so it's pretty classic

but because these places didn't need a lot of defenses against Christian people they had a sort of spiritual armor a spiritual armor that did not work against pagans and so a bunch of places that should not have been as easy marks as they were were and there's nothing that a potential

pirate likes more than an easy score now the first famous raids in your history books are going to happen in the seven eighties and seven nineties in England and and Scotland in those areas bio archaeology keeps pushing the Viking Age earlier and earlier and they're finding more and

more sites all the time that suggests that the famous you know starting guns sounding for the Viking era you know which is famously like seven ninety three at Lindisfarne and the monastery up in northeastern Britain that this is probably a bit of an illusion created from our lack of knowing

about other earlier raids they've found for example a famous now very quickly famous Viking burial in what's now the Baltic area that predates the famous Lindisfarne raid of seven ninety three by decades and so it's pretty possible that this low level of piracy was going on all the time especially

in Scandinavia and in the seven eighties and seven nineties it moves out of that confined area in the late seven eighties the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle I think lists it as seven eighty seven but I think most historians think it was seven eighty nine you get a famous incident where a bunch of

Viking show up in southern England are met by the local authority he's called a rive think about a sheriff or a trade official who goes there presumably to tell the Vikings who he thinks are traders right merchants to tell them where to go so that they can pay their tax before they get their

trading started and famously those traders kill the rive right they murder the king's official and this is often looked at as the first sign of trouble in seven ninety three which is four years later you get the attack at Lindisfarne in northeastern Britain and it's a famous raid

monks are killed stuff is stolen the altered is famously splattered with blood and the gods instruments you know thrown into the dung heap according to a primary source there is a bit of romanticism sometimes connected to what a Viking raid is like there was a

famous Brady bunch episode if you're old enough to remember where one of the young members of the family was starting to romanticize Billy the kid right the old western outlaw and the way the story wraps up is the father in the family finds someone whose father was actually killed by

Billy the kid an old timer who tells the young boy listen this person you're romanticizing is not worth your romanticizing right they were they were bad people and this wasn't exciting fun stuff this was murder well there's a similar sort of point made by historian neo price in the

children of ash and elm where he wants us to keep our eyes on the prize when it comes to these Viking raids and not see them as a bunch of dates and locations on a map or a timeline and he writes quote before venturing there however there is something else almost a moral imperative the cartographic

Viking age the raids as mapped is a useful but comfortably distant way to approach these events a violent reality check is needed a corrective and necessary acknowledgement of what the maze of dates and place names and labeled arrows really meant he continues quote at their most immediate

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

of people enslaved of entire family lines ending in blood of screams and then silence where there should be lively noise of burning buildings and ruin of economic loss of religious convictions overturned in a moment and replaced with humiliation and rage of roads choked with refugees as

columns of smoke rose behind them of utter ruthless brutality expressed in all its forms and quote now if you are made homeless or turned into a refugee or even killed during one of these Viking raids at least most of your trouble is behind you the worst is over maybe

imagine being taken prisoner and held in slavery by these kinds of people imagine being in their total power you know tied up not being able to do anything a bunch of armed Viking raiders I mean Tom Holland in his book The Forge of Christendom which is a great book by the way he quotes a

Norman poet from after this period who talks about you know some of this activity and take this for what it's worth although there's not much that's unsupportable here I mean they talk about a heterosexual gang rape on slaves but that's something that's attested to by eyewitnesses in other

sources with the Vikings but also homosexual gang rape and urinating on these recently captured people I mean it's all part of degrading them mistreating them and maybe just you know trying to figure out a way to entertain a bunch of bored Vikings it's horrific it's part of the human

condition though especially in the pre-modern era and it's interesting to kind of figure out why that's the case because it shines a light on why it's so hard to stop things like these Viking assaults we mentioned earlier that piracy was basically omnipresent in the pre-modern world but piracy

is sort of just a subcategory of raiding and raiding has been around well at least since Neanderthal man I think I'm safe in sang I mean if you want to study the roots of warfare you're going to find that the earliest you know historical accounts you can find and read about our from the middle of the story I mean you need to go into things like archaeology and anthropology and stuff like that to try to figure out you know where things like raiding starts and raiding is probably a subcategory

of war so piracy is a subcategory of raiding raiding is a subcategory of war and you need to go back in time to like you know what anthropologists do when they study conflict between simmians that come together right I mean you know talking apes right that's how the roots of war go and there's

almost a new toning and reliability in the idea that if you have tons of stuff people want right tons of wealth whatever counts for wealth you know in whatever time period and you don't protect it somebody's going to take it right not every society is a raiding society but all that has to happen

in your geographical neighborhood in your historical period is that somebody in your region needs to be a raiding society and that's going to change everything I truly believe that raiding is one of those prime movers in human history because of all the sort of the downstream effects it has right

the the Newtonian pinging for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and if you live next to a community of people that raid you have to defend yourself right that's the equal and opposite reaction and you can choose defense you could choose offense or you could choose both but

not choosing anything is an option that will get your people wiped out taken into slavery absorbed and eventually have them disappear some societies do it defensively right some Native American societies will build these tall sorts of abodes or in rock cliffs where they can pull up ladders

if the dangerous raiding people's nearby them show up right so we're just going to flee and escape them in a you know Native American version of a castle and my goodness one of the most obvious examples of a defensive downstream adaptation to dealing with people who want to take your stuff

who live near you are walls the walls conserve a lot of purposes obviously but the outcomes raise a reason that you have them and that you have them from the very beginning of human cities I mean Jericho's one of the oldest cities in world history what is it famous for walls

so walls is another one of those downstream sorts of Newtonian impacts and you see walls by the way if you go look at drawings and paintings of cities you have walls until cannons started reliably knocking them down so that's one of the adaptations that human beings do when they live near people who

raid but most societies include an offensive component if the other guy has warriors right the other society has people who train with weapons and have experience using these weapons and encourage you know activity on the part of the people who have experience and training using weapons then

you're going to have to have people like that if you want to live in a garden of Eden you can't have a raiding society there because they're going to force everyone else to adapt and that's going to turn everything into the sort of you know militaristic counterbalancing force thing we live with

today and the people have always had well if you look at the societies in this Viking era let's call them the haves and the have-nots there are some very rich societies and it's a hell of a temptation if you want to just go take their stuff especially if it seems like an easy thing to do

I mean think about the temptations that any you know group of Viking type pirates would have in the modern world today we of course have piracy in the modern world the international naval patrols go out there and take on these little you know fast boats with guys armed with AK-47s

and whatnot but it's not like the kind of piracy that you could run into in the Viking era where they're going to bring a lot of people on shore and take stuff on shore I mean try to imagine and it's impossible to imagine because of all the aspects that make the modern world the

modern world but those aspects didn't exist a hundred years ago so human history up until about a hundred years ago was totally open to somebody doing oh I don't know some sort of a raid on a fabulously rich area that was just beckoning people to come and take stuff how about the area I'm

from southern California place like Laguna Beach or some of these communities Manhattan Beach some of these wonderful Malibu coastal communities just imagine and we'll talk a really small force of maybe five Viking ships roll into emerald bay or al moro bay in Laguna by the time the first morning

light you know comes up over the horizon the five ships are there in the cove and guys are jumping out of those ships I suppose if we're going to make a modern analogy we'll give them you know AK-47s and rocket launchers and they're going to come and they're going to rush through that community

stealing everything they can get their hands on by the time the residents wake up you've got screams and smoke an armed man and before you know it there's five guys in your room taking your stuff stealing your wife into slavery and killing you 200 Vikings in Laguna Beach would create

absolute havoc and if they're gone before the sun sets again we don't have very long to respond do you now in the modern age you don't need very long to respond which is why the last 100 or so years is a bit different in Laguna Beach they would have known about five Viking ships approaching the

coast long before they got anywhere near the coast right satellites would have found them aerial reconnaissance would have seen them somebody on a boat somewhere fishing would have you know called in something on their cell phone and then you would have scrambled air assets when you

aircraft helicopters you'd be on them before they got anywhere near Emerald Bay right and then of course you have you know naval units you got them in Long Beach you got them in San Diego they're going to converge on that area within hour two hours and it's a suicide mission for

any Vikings but you take away those modern surveillance and response elements those military elements and all of a sudden you have a wildly attractive target that's super rich and that people could get in and out of before the people that would punish you for doing something like that could

even arrive on the scene military history and Hansta Brook calls this one of the great and it's obvious isn't it one of the great advantages that the Vikings have because by the time they strike and get out of there I mean it would take you quite a while to get a thousand local people together

to fight Vikings and some of the real nasty reputational aspects of the Viking warrior are because they were often fighting people that were nowhere near their equals I mean if I told you we need 200 people to combat the 200 Vikings that just you know landed in Emerald Bay what kind of 200

people are you going to come up with in a lot of these communities it might be peasants people who sometimes fooled around with weapons but if you need to have people fast you get the locals but the locals can't deal with this they can't deal with a bunch of people who have a religious belief

for example that creates fearsome warriors right it's a societal element that well let me put it you this way one of my professors once said if you want to start to understand you just begin to understand any given people throughout history look at what the gods they worship want from them

look at their idea of what the hereafter is and who gets the good seats in the hereafter and who doesn't and that will give you an idea of what that society creates in terms of individuals the god that these pagan and heathen version of the Vikings believe in are gods that do this kind of thing too these are not turn the other cheek gods these are gods that suggest that they have their minions watching you when you're fighting and the better you fight the better your chances you're

going to be at the important table in Valhalla with Odin the way you handle your weapons matters whether you flee or not matters and the more you gloriously seek out death and don't fear it the better your chances if you don't have a place to sit when the music stops at either Valhalla or some of the other places you can go in the Viking and Germanic you know after world you pit those up against a bunch of local peasants are quickly raised to deal with them a bunch of Laguna beach peasants if

you can imagine who believe in a heaven and a hell and if they're good they go to heaven and if they're bad they go to hell and they're not completely sure about all I mean it's it's a recipe for facing a bunch of people who are more likely to run away before you run away and as we've said

before in a pre-modern battle but really in any battle the real killing starts happening once one side begins to flee or route right it's a morale contest until then and these Vikings live in a system where the societal carrots and sticks encourage fearlessness all right you want to create a

real super soldier forget about doing what they did with the captain america comic book character right making bigger make him stronger make him faster just make him braver and that will create the super soldier in this era and most of the time the armies and troops and soldiers and forces

that were arrayed against them when Viking pirates and raiders showed up were far inferior to them in these categories which is partly how you get such a fearsome reputation and let's recall in these early raids that famously kick off this whole era a lot of the opponents that are trying

to stand up to these fearsome and fearless Viking warriors are monks and I mean we're not talking shawlin priests in china doing kung fu or anything we're talking about you know the the guys who have their head shaved with the rim of hair around the edges that in the famous artwork the

stereotypical artwork but it's not that far from the truth are being shown trying to parry the Viking war axes with crosses so you get an idea that it's perhaps not the stiffest competition these Viking raiders have to face early on but it's worth pointing out that the ideas of fearlessness

and fearsomeness are kind of neutral in terms of what they imply I mean you can be fearsome and fearless defending your own family right it doesn't mean anything by itself it doesn't imply aggressiveness but there are the other elements in this culture that are so fascinating

and that in some ways although this may be true for many different cultures out there but but remind me of my own culture in in the united states or the traditional one that we celebrate anyway in both good and bad I mean you can see one of these elements going on in Viking society that

reminds me of the old American trope of go west young man right that line and that would apply equally well to young Viking males too right go make your fortune venture forward risk and get reward right uh uh you're gonna go out there if you're young Viking male done with your apprenticeship

and you're going to take this wonderful adventure on the ship and it's a little like forging off on a giant grand male bonding expedition with some threat posed and some challenges faced and some daring do established and some you know treasure alluded and you come home and you can

afford the wife now and you can uh put a down payment on the farm and you get your life started right you've made your bones there's a little bit of an element of that in this whole Viking sort of culture that encourages people to go out and do something like this and then the fearsome

ness and the fearlessness well has a different sort of cast about it doesn't it if you're a monk having to try to fend off a Viking axe with your crucifix um their fearlessness and fearsomeness is a little less neutral right it's it's not a quality you want to celebrate it's something that comes

with as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle said dreadful for warnings you know immense sheets of light whirlwinds dragons and Vikings the first years of these Viking raids are all about hitting the easy targets these monasteries so so from about seven ninety three all through up until the early

eight hundred England Scotland Ireland the islands around those islands are getting hit a lot and we probably only know about the major raids it's likely there were lots of little attacks I mean even if one Viking ship with thirty Vikings in it pulls up near the shore somewhere

that's quite a bit to have to deal with especially if they're back in their ships in 20 minutes right that's these are devastating and very difficult to defend against raids and part of the irony of the whole thing if you look at it from a really wide um historical lens is that the people

during this early time period that are getting hit the hardest right the the Anglo-Saxons in England and the Irish for example were in their days centuries before this time period some of the great pirate raiders of their time I mean the Irish raided so often into what's now Scotland

that the Roman name for some of these Irish Scotie or Scotie eventually evolved into the name for the entire region and of course the only reason you have angles and saxons that gave the name anglin right anglin to anglin is because hundreds of years before they came over in a very similar

sort of wave of Valhalla-ish pantheists arriving on the shores of this island and terrorizing the locals in a very similar way as Hans Del Brook had written about this time period and he casted in sort of cycles but this is what we talked about in Thor's Angels too and he had said quote

we now see a repetition of the conditions that developed in the Roman Empire after the limies were penetrated and quote in other words the Saxon attacks against Roman Britain you know in the 300s and 400s are now being repeated by people from even farther north then the Saxons in the realm of

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

Iona right on a Scottish island and you get hit every couple of years for years I mean in one of the attacks between 60 and 70 monks are slaughtered by the Vikings your downstream effect is you're going to move a lot of your operations away from that site and recent evidence suggests that the

site was never abandoned like we used to think but you still saw a lot of people say the best way for us to respond to this is to leave by about the early 800s you can see the targets that the Vikings have been hitting hardening which necessitates a higher level of coordination and larger

attacks from the Vikings to deal with the fact that their targets are now expecting them and this is why partly the 800s are going to be this period where the scale and the intensity and the amplitude of these attacks explodes in size and this is when the you know the stock market that

measures piracy shoots up to all time highs and the point where piracy on a mass level can actually be civilizationally threatening now we should point out that some of these areas that had sort of been too strong for the Vikings to want to mess with right they're looking for easy targets they're

not looking for Charlemagne's defenses in you know the Frankish empire but when Charlemagne dies as we've mentioned and his son takes over then his son has the famous problems with his sons and and the carol engine empire starts sort of evolving into civil war and disintegration and all

this they have bigger fish to fry than coastal defenses right they're fighting huge wars for the future of the empire which leaves things to sort of fray at the edges and that's just the kind of sort of a situation that these Scandinavian raiders always took advantage of they this is why

some of the historians often think that there weren't Viking traders you know merchants and raiders they were the same thing historian max Adams in his book the Viking Wars points out that if you went to one of these Viking raiders and tried to make the distinction with them between traders

and raiders they might be baffled by the whole thing right are you a traitor or a raider yes regardless what it means is if you've got lots of these Scandinavians in all the trading centers in the entire region you are getting first class you know information on the ground we might as well

think of a lot of these traders slash raiders as intelligence operatives right or if we're going to stick with sort of the organized crime kind of motif here think about these guys as inside moles in you know the business that the mob wants to take over feeding them information like when's the

night watchman not around you know where do they keep the loot is the cash register open things like that but they certainly get the word when the Frankish empire begins to be undermined after Charlemagne's death I mean to give us an idea and remember there is stuff going on almost certainly

you know you can infer things without knowing things there's almost certainly raiding going on at beneath the level that gets noticed in the sources but listen to a standard timeline of Viking activities in the west up to this time right so we'll catch us up on what's going on and I took this

timeline from the book Vikings and encyclopedia of conflict invasions and raids by Tristan Muleur Volmer and Kirsten Wolf and so here's where we go from like the establishments of these trading nodes to about the death of Charlemagne and I'm not going to follow or quote the timeline verbatim

because frankly I can't pronounce some of the names of the places where these Vikings hit it's going to be in this early period the area around Ireland and the British Isles that are the hardest hit areas and arguably the hardest hit during the entire Viking age

but I won't follow the timeline verbatim I was trying to get a sense of the time though in in how long something takes and what a person alive during the time period and might have noticed and understanding as we said that there's going to be a lot of Viking raids that are too small

to have been recorded that would have been a part of these people's rumor mills and life and sort of you know what are you here's going on elsewhere kind of information that we don't get today just going from the ones that were big enough to make it into the chronology look at what a person

who was let's just say eight years old is that about when memories stick that gets arguable but let's just say eight for the sake of argument let's say you're an Anglo-Saxon kid will call you Athol Dan and you get a printus out to the court of Charlemagne not an impossible thing

to have happen I put you there so that you'll be able to be one of the few people in this time period that's actually privy to the news might have heard of all these things might be getting reports and if you're eight years old in seven eighty nine and Athol Dan is in Charlemagne's court

he will certainly hear of that first incident we mentioned earlier the famous arrival on the shores in England where the Danish man show up the rive you know the sheriff the tax official whatever he was goes down to talk to them first you know typical merchant agreement and they kill him

right so there you go there's your famous kickoff of the Viking era and old Athol Dan is young he's eight now it's four years later seven ninety three when you have Lindus foreign famously right and that's the one that shocks everybody that is the traditional kickoff date for the Viking age

and Athol Dan here would have gone from eight in seven eighty nine to twelve and seven ninety three so all those Viking raids that were flying under the radar are probably known about but so four years in this guy's life that's how long between raids that's his reality according to the timeline

you have more raids in multiple places in the British Isles in Ireland seven ninety four seven ninety five so while Athol Dan is twelve thirteen fourteen these occasional raids these places being hit here and there as part of his reality there's to be a little bit of a break on the big

timeline and then in seven ninety eight the Vikings raid the coast of Ireland so Athol Dan would be seventeen years old when that happens the very next year he'll be eighteen years old when the Vikings launch a raid large enough to make it into the history books in southern France and

Aquitaine when he is nineteen years old Charlemagne in eight hundred will strengthen the defenses the anti-piracy defenses the fleet the coastal watch all that kind of stuff right so for every action there's an equal an opposite reaction Charlemagne hardens the Vikings targets now of course this

can do a number of things can't it the hope is is that it deters the Vikings from raiding at all but if the Vikings are already addicted to what they're raiding and can get the numbers together well what you're really asking for is a more serious effort if 2040 60

Vikings can no longer get the job done maybe five hundred six hundred two thousand Vikings can more on that in a minute when Athol Dan is twenty one years old the monastery at Iona in northern Scotland will be raided a second time three years later when he's twenty four years old

in eight oh six ADCE Iona will be raided a third time and between sixty and seventy monks will be slaughtered by the Vikings so these are all things that Athol Dan in his living memory would have known about by the time he's twenty four and the next year twenty five there are more

raids on the Irish coast this about brings us up to speed to where we were when we started this story and Charlemagne is defeating the Saxons and finding himself the new next store neighbor to at least some of the people called the Danes and we have to be so careful here and boy does it

kick confusing because the modern day peoples the Swedes the Norwegians and the Danes from modern day nation states are not the same people that are sometimes mentioned throughout different sources including relatively recent ones including modern ones that people will start calling Swedes

and Danes and Norwegians when they mean people who live in chiefed in ships the whole question of kings here can get extremely confusing there was a wonderful footnote attached to my copy of the atom of Braiman primary source materials that was talking about this and this is the way

they put it when they were talking about kings and they would often use the name kings in quotation marks and it said quote on the use of the expression Danish kings often so called the early rulers of the Scandinavian countries were like the Indian chiefs they mean Native American

chiefs of our early days often called kings by their contemporaries in more advanced cultures some of these in quotation marks kings were merely rulers of a part of the country struggling for primacy with other in quotation mark kings of Denmark a genealogical table in this period

would be marked by gaps and uncertainties and quote Sigurdson suggests that it's pretty well understood that both the Swedes and the Danes had something akin to a royal family but that kingship was something that was sort of if not elected then appointed by a group of also powerful chiefdins or warlords and they could choose other people from other branches of the I mean it's very confusing but the reason it matters is because the first if not the first maybe one of the first of these

Scandinavian kings whose name makes it into the history books is this guy that Charlemagne runs into when he conquers the Saxons this guy who for five minutes looks like he's going to fight a war against Charlemagne and the record shows that that's a suicidal thing to do Charlemagne beat everybody

he came from a time period in Frankish history where they were just bad asses and they beat everybody which is why it's so shocking it's like Mike Tyson when he eventually loses it's so shocking when Charlemagne goes away and then all of a sudden this bad assery collapses

but for five minutes there's this challenge where this king of the Danes in air quotes a guy name you'll see it a bunch of different ways got afraid got freed got afraid he will sort of puff up his chest as Ein Hart says one of the primary sources and think he can

compete with Charlemagne this is the guy that we mentioned earlier had strengthened the old ramparts and walled defenses of Denmark right the Danes work and anyone who could get that kind of labor forced together and the money and resources required to do a centralized task like that

is seen by modern historians as an example of the beginning of the process of centralization right in a place like Denmark it's a spreading disease if you're looking at this from an old-fashioned Viking viewpoint who worships the Norse gods and believes that you know all

Vikings are equal there's a famous story of a Viking ship pulling up to a port once and the Guardian at the port saying something to the effect of you know who is your leader and the voice coming back yelling we have no leader we are all equal and that's sort of an age old Viking

it's a trope but at the same time it's part of their culture mentioned by contemporaries by the way and yet that's going against the tenor of the times right the trends what's what's happening in places like the Carolingian Empire now that's the trend that's taking over the one that's the

hierarchical society with a king at the top you know in a pyramid position in the state with a powerful church and a hierarchy of classes and a Christian religion and that's spreading and it's been spreading northwards for generations and that's what Thor's Angels about and as we said

we've stumbled back into the middle of a process here and this trend is continuing northward Norway and Sweden are still farther north from here the first of these Scandinavian places to feel the real pressure of living next door to a place that is both centralized and Christianized

are the Danes and the process that's going on with this guy got afraid is he's one of these early Danish kings where it seems like you know the process of turning from a place with hundreds of sheathdoms into just a few or maybe even one king is now underway and it makes them more dangerous

to a person like Charlemagne the Franks love by the way to metal in Danish and Viking leadership contests and they like to have a strong leader in these places when that leader's a friend of theirs they like to instead metal and create chaos and disharmoning all kinds of things if the leadership

is not prone to like them you can see how dangerous though these powerful Viking era kings might be when God afraid at one point brings an army to negotiate with Charlemagne so they have armies facing off and then in 810 famously raids the Frisian coast Frisland is where it's mostly the

Netherlands coast today but there's a little bit of Germany too and it's right by the Viking Danish territories but he allegedly and take this number for what it's worth has a fleet of 200 Viking ships attack the coast using Roger Collins's conservative way of estimating how many Vikings per

ship because we don't know how big each of these ships were probably a mix he estimates 30 is a good conservative number so if you really had 200 ships then that's going to be about 6000 Vikings and the primary sources at the time period say that these Vikings absolutely scoured the coastline

of Frisia which is Carolingian territory so this is asking for war against Charlemagne isn't it and this face off is about to happen and then all of a sudden this powerful sort of unifying maybe early Viking era Danish king God afraid gets shanked in the back or something like that by one of

his bodyguards allegedly and there's a you know a little JFK assassination type speculation going on here about exactly who might be responsible for that but wouldn't that just be like a Charlemagne move why do I have to fight you when if I just kill you your relatives will fight over the

kingship and dissolve into those same Viking band of you know feuding barbarians you always were and Charlemagne should know because you only have to go back a few generations in his family and they're not that different in the life of Charlemagne the primary source account by

Einhard from Charlemagne's era wrote about this you know this is his entry into the affair we just talked about and he writes quote the last of these wars was the one declared against the Northmen called Danes they began their career as pirates but afterwards took to laying waste

the coast of Gaul and Germany with their large fleet their king Godfred was so puffed up with vain aspirations that he counted on gaining empire overall Germany and looked upon Saxony and Freeza as his provinces he had already subdued his neighbors the Abodratai and made them tributary

and boasted that he would shortly appear with a great army before Aachen where the king held his court some faith was put in his words empty as they sound and it's supposed that he would have attempted something of the sort if he had not been prevented by a premature death

he was murdered by one of his own bodyguard and so ended at once his life and the war that he had begun and quote now if the shoe were on the other foot when it came to an assassination if that's what this was if the so called in quotation marks king of the Danes here Godfred had assassinated

Charlemagne you would have seen one of the advantages of one of these centralized hierarchical sorts of societies you would probably have a stable transfer of power now this is not guaranteed at all but you probably would have I mean Charlemagne has already sort of set his son Lewis up

for this gig the church would have supported it you have this internal sort of system designed for a peaceful transfer of power you don't always get it but it's designed to provide that that's not how it is in Viking-Aryskan, to Navier in fact it's almost a recipe for the

opposite sort of results so when this Danish king Godfred is done away with the police just collapses for a while Roger Collins has sort of a rundown of how unstable these conflicts between all of these kings was in Denmark after Godfred died and he points out that all of the sons of God

Alfred were called kings so this is like a civil war amongst kings but listen to how often they're you know fighting amongst each other as opposed to what you know Charlemagne in a centralized sort of organized state is doing Collins writes quote it has been questioned whether a

single kingdom could have existed in Denmark at this time but the Frankish chronicles do not refer to rival territorial kingdoms in Jutland and the islands but rather to civil wars between members of an extended royal dynasty such conflicts are recorded in 812 813 814 817 819 823 827 828 850 and 854

and there may have been others end quote so if Charlemagne was figuring again all conjecture here that by knocking off this early centralizing figure things would go back to sort of retribution or chaotic barbarian style violence turns out he was right again but this is sort of built into

the system here it's got its pros and it's got its cons one of the things it does play into though is the whole rating question because as we had mentioned earlier the Vikings have been called a consumption society what's really going on here is you know if you were to put it into modern terms

these people who gain power leadership type roles you know petty rulerships these are people who build up large following of powerful supporters they're building up possees and they're doing it over the course of their careers the problem with the Scandinavian system is that when these people

die their posse just dissolves doesn't get transferred to their kid for a stable transfer of power it just starts over which leads to a need to find stuff to give these people because that's why they're your posse generally right there's a trickle-down economic effect here that plays into

the whole dynamic for why this society can get so addicted to rating because it becomes addicted to the stuff because the stuff is required to keep your posse happy and if you don't have a posse well then you're probably in somebody else's posse in his history the Viking Wars historian Max

Adams writes about this perverse interesting sort of you know government by posse and these possees even have a name I mean if you're a fan of the Vikings you've heard of the herd men or the house carls that's just a fancy Scandinavian way of saying my boys Max Adams writes quote

by the turn of the 9th century a network of elite clientele with all its benefits for stabilizing kingship was deeply embedded in the Christian kingdoms in the pre-Christian geographically disparate lands of Scandinavia the state was the king with his death it collapsed networks of

affiliation loyalty gift exchange and obligation built up during his reign were reset to zero each new king had to reinvent his kingdom and quote historian neo price had a really interesting line that stayed with me too that's also part of this dynamic that sort of addicts these societies

to the rating and that's that from the standpoint of a non-powerful person right not not one of these people striving to be a petty king or chiefed in or what have you just an average you know Scandinavian Joe I was going to say but it'd be more like a Scandinavian life or something um price

says one successful raid if if you got lucky could change your life forever I mean that's the equivalent of striking it rich um the temptation for young men especially from the poorer communities must have been intense right not only are you going to get honor make something of yourself

show off to the valkary's your prowess to get you a better seat with Odin eventually but you're going to come back a made man and maybe even you know hit the jackpot I mean it's it's something that would attract young enterprising people from all over the world right at that's part of your dynamic

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

in getting lots of loot and these people then become the people sought out for these things and you develop sort of a power base and um neo price in the children of ash and elm was talking about what a self reinforcing prophecy this sort of is in the sense that if you're good at this and you

lead some successful raids and then decide to take your winnings and reinvested in the enterprise right by bigger ships more ships acquire a larger entourage with which to carry out these sorts of attacks you can sort of parlay your winnings into sort of a war chief status or something like one

of the famous sea kings as they're called these are people by the way and i believe that dozens have been identified that actually are more like your pirates from the 16th and 17th centuries in the Caribbean people with very small land holdings maybe an island or a cove or something like that

but they have ships and they have men right they've got their herdman their house carls their ancient Germanic version of a warrior brotherhood whenever you want to label it and the two of those things put together warriors and ships in this time period that might be all you

need to be a viable economic sort of entity now throughout the course of charlamagne's lifetime and as we said several times already and there's nothing confusing about that he dies in 814 up until the end of his lifetime this Viking problem was at the nuisance level of trouble

and had there been a continuation of you know by 814 you've had almost a century of really powerful frankish leadership had that continued i don't think you would have had the Viking age the way you had it i think you'd have had to have been a history nerd focusing on early emitting evil studies

to have even really noticed the blip in piracy caused by the Viking era if what we've talked about to this point is all there were but it's what happens to charlamagne's empire that opens up the door to something at a much higher level of threat and impact to anything that it's seen you know up to

this point with monasteries and small towns and things like that the occasional extra intense attack but as we've mentioned if you look at a timeline there are going to be a period after the initial first 20 years where it seems like things calm down a little bit but it's only sort of by comparison

right compared to the big spike initially it got quiet again but it's not going to get as quiet as it was before the Viking age kicked off it's going to be though in about 830 when things get very serious again 848 58 60 it's shocking what happens but that's all precipitated by other

shocking things that happen in the various places that are going to be victimized by these Vikings charlamagne's empire falls apart the wheels completely come off in the next rulers reign and he gets a lot of flack for this i it's hard to know now how much he deserves it because after all

Lewis the pious as he'll be known charlamagne's only legitimate surviving son when he takes over Lewis the pious has a very different job than his predecessors who had to conquer a place he has to rule it there's a lot of different entities that make up this frankish empire that don't want to be

in this frankish empire and Lewis has to deal with them he also has to deal with a bunch of male relatives most importantly his sons who do not like his plan for the inheritance a little bit about Lewis the pious now because he's very important but you wouldn't think inheritance should

matter right away after charlamagne dies but famously Lewis the pious has like a near death experience bunch of people are killed in an accident he's almost killed to which makes him think right away famously i better get this inheritance thing in order just in case so he divides the empire amongst

his sons which is typical frankish practice unlike typical frankish practice though he's not dividing the family farm here he's dividing a full blown giant empire the likes of which no one has had certainly no one in frankish history so it's a little bit different so he mandates

that even though the division will be the same you still have to have the emperor and it's going to be this son and you all have to give you know your allegiance to the emperor none of the sons end up liking this and they will cause a lifetimes worth of problems for their father over it

the trouble will begin like four years after he takes over and will dog him the rest of his life he will be involved in three civil wars he will be deposed from the throne and returned to the throne multiple times this is not exactly conducive to stability and when stability is required to do

things like you know make sure the coastline is defended from pirate attacks and all this kinds of stuff well you can see how if you're fighting for your existence right if it's an existential threat you face as the emperor of the Franks piracy is going to fall on the triage scale of importance

quite a bit and that's exactly what happens in his book powers and thrones dan jones sort of describes a little bit about you know what the carolingian empire descends into and he writes quote between eight thirty and eight forty a series of three major rebellions broke out in which

Lewis's sons banded together in various combinations to try to improve their portions of the imperial inheritance in keeping with carolingian custom he writes many cruel murderous and disgraceful deeds were perpetrated including further further blindings drownings and exilings accusations

of witchcraft and adultery leveled against Lewis's wife and empress judeith and a general commitment to naked self advancement in june eight thirty three he writes at a meeting in Rothfield in the al-sas Lewis was confronted by his eldest son loathar who had proven himself an attentive student of carolingian family history and persuaded Pope Gregory the fourth to back him as supreme ruler loathar's play for power spooked Lewis's supporters and almost to a man they abandoned him for

his eldest son an active collective spinelessness that earned the meeting the nickname the field of lies end quote the field of lies though would not end Lewis's career he would get the throne back basically forgive the children june says and this would be his opinion but he says that like

Alexander the great before him charlamagne had built an empire that quickly proved itself possible only as an extension of one man's political self well this echoes what german historian hunts stupbrook had written a hundred years ago when he said quote charlamagne's empire had no inner unity

it was the creation of the dynasty the arnaf family end quote so if it devolved into a family squabble i suppose that's somewhat understandable but charles omon pointed out also over a hundred years ago that the various sons of lewis were being also used by the component parts people

who represented parts of the empire like the lum bards who didn't want to be a part of the empire so you use lewis's son as a way to you know help break up or help secure a better portion of the empire for your suffer whatever it might be what this means though is that every piece of the

empire and a bunch of the empires surrounding peoples become like pieces on the chessboard for all these different players in these civil wars to use the slavic peoples for example will become one of these you know pieces on the chessboard and so will the daines in the same way that

the carolingians had meddled in Danish politics now for a long time trying to you know see if they could get the kind of ruler that they wanted on the Danish throne will now turn about spare play and using one of lewis's sons or having one of lewis's sons use them depends on your point of

view they're able to throw their hat in the ring and try to influence a little bit about who the ruler of the previously so intimidating and dangerous frankish empires going to be and that's why you get this next level of the Viking age when you do because the former apex predator

in the geopolitical environment right this frankish state was so dangerous just you know what a couple decades before when charlowein was destroying the sacksens and the daines felt like they had a gun to their head and now all of a sudden the tables are turned by the eight thirties

and if you look at your timeline the eight thirties are when the attacks get larger and more sustained and don't just involve a bunch of Norwegians and sea kings and war chiefs but start to involve much larger entities like the one godfried or god of freed launched in 810

against the coast of freesland right big big endeavors unusual before this time period much more usual as we move into with though and if you start to ask why again the primary sources are going to let you down because they're going to simply suggest that these are just bad people

motivated by bad things or maybe they'll say that this is god's punishment for the sin of the victims but they generally aren't looking at this from the perspective of the Viking attackers themselves and if they are they're just going to the most base elements right they want loot they

want stuff they want slaves as opposed to any sort of larger perspective that might be involved here but there are ways you can view it from other perspectives and a bunch of histories well ever since I've been around certainly have and we quoted some from a hundred years ago

that gave this perspective from the point of view of the daines and how they might have felt threatened by the carol engine expansion but this outbreak of new violence on a higher level and more amplified scale can also be viewed as a sort of a response to a you know efferound and find out kind of

situation I mean when Louis the pious gets on the throne he continues a lot of the things that his father was doing with the daines right he's pushing his own claimant to Danish kingship right the preferred frankish candidate one of these very early Danish names by the way to remember

it from the mists in the fog prehistory a guy named Harold Clack and Harold is one of those you know it's one of the favorite Viking names you'll run into 10 million heralds and Viking history h-a-r-a-l-d and Harold Clack is this guy who's famous because he becomes

I don't know if you can call him the lap dog of the carol engine ruler but he's certainly the one that will do whatever it takes to have the backing of somebody who can help him get a advantage over his you know competitors back in Denmark and in the late eight twenties

Harold Clack with hundreds of his followers will ostentatiously convert to Christianity right now he's got something more in common with his benefactor Louis the pious and then he's going to eventually go back there and wrestle for the throne of Denmark well once again as we had said there's going

to be a lot of people in Denmark that don't look at the idea of having a ruler coming in and maybe looking to convert them from their traditional religious beliefs perhaps so positively at the same time by the way that Louis the pious is converting the guy he wants to be the king

of this country next door he's also sending out missionaries and evangelists right these are the we had said earlier the sort of a marvel superhero kind of figure who are going to go into the lion's den you know safe comparatively from the damage that these you know heathen men can do and bravely

convert them and remember converting them as an interesting thing if you're looking at this from Lewis's perspective because from one perspective he is a devout believer this is his worldview it's like science to him and the idea that he could bring all these people to God is going to you know

it's going to be something God is going to be pleased with that is a good thing you can go to your grave feeling like you accomplished good deeds at the same time it's been proven including by the Franks themselves that the you know preferred way to defang these warrior God worshipping barbarians

is to make him Christians so there's a geopolitical advantage here if you can make these people Christians you can pacify them and then you can get their country you know on the road to modernity we'll put a king in there set up a hierarchical system the church will be there to

start writing stuff down for you and you'll become a valued trusted and um answerable to authority member of the international community there you go legitimate the point is is that when the 830s happen there's a way to look at this as kind of the equivalent of blowback is with the way we

would describe it in a CIA if you know failed operation when it's taken you know over the long haul right you try to instill your own ruler and boom all of a sudden you know you've made enemies of the people well it's possible Lewis the pious messing in Danish politics um F around and he

found out in the 830s was you know his wake up call the Anglo-Saxon chronicle gets dates wrong during this period so it can become confusing and it actually makes a lot more sense when you read the corrected dates by historians they're only off by a couple of years but it puts

everything in the right context because what happens is you start to see a a time when you know attacks are here and there and then all of a sudden gets stepped up in multiple places at the same time which makes one a little suspicious about you know why all of a sudden and one of the places

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

fence those slaves you just took or something like that you want to go to Dorostad to do that it's in northern Europe it's a Frankish trading post it is big it is wealthy and nobody touches it normally until 834 when all of a sudden somebody does the annals of St. Bertrand are kind of like

the Frankish empires Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for this period all these chronicles I mean there's nothing dramatic about them they're very bare bones and there's no eyewitness accounts of either the point of view of the raiders or the point of view of the raiders victims for any of these

Viking raids so that's all a little bare bones but let's remember that the Viking area is not about particularly nasty raids it's much more about the quantity of them and when you read sort of a rundown of like 20 years of Viking raids it makes your head spin how many places are being hit

and sometimes over and over again over what period of time it's a quantity versus quality kind of a phenomenon and in the annals of St. Bertrand for the year 834 it just happens to mention this quote meanwhile a fleet of Danes came to freeza and laid waste apart of it from there they came by way

of you tricked to the Emporium called Dorostad this is a market town like Berkup by the way Dorostad and destroyed everything they slaughtered some people took others away captive and burned the surrounding region end quote Dorostad is for this second Viking phase what Lindisfarne famously

is for the first one of these moments that just sort of announces in hindsight that everything's about to be taken up a notch and in the children of Ash and Elm historian Neil Price says this quote in the year 834 Dorostad the wealthy Emporium at the fork of the rine about 100 kilometers from

the Dutch coast was attacked and burnt apparently by a force from Denmark it was an astonishing move this was no monastery or isolated community but one of the most important places in the trading networks of northern Europe this would be like physically assaulting one of today's great financial

hubs the Viking slaughtered at will and took ship loads of slaves the surrounding region was devastated the same was to happen every single summer for the next four years in the face of ineffectual frankish responses that included failed peace negotiations the Viking seemed to have played a

careful hand combining fainte diplomacy supported by the rating that they never had any intention of renouncing end quote like tribal rating societies everywhere there's a lot of plausible deniability built in here these rulers can use the fact that they don't control everybody with an iron fist

to sort of fall-bought responsibility for this stuff sometimes you saw it in the Native American situation which is of course my favorite thing to compare things to you saw it all the time the US or Mexico or Spain would go to some ruler and said I thought we had a deal nobody was

going to raid anybody and they'd say well I don't control those people and some of these histories refer to elements in the Danish hierarchy as hawks and doves and the king sort of caught in the middle trying to you know keep everybody happy but the way you can tell that this probably isn't

just random is all of a sudden at this time period the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which has been silent about Viking attacks for like half a lifetime starts cranking it up again a lot of historians wonder why that is is it hiding the fact that those raids have been going on all the time

but the official Chronicle of the House of Westcars doesn't want that told I mean there's a lot of theories I'm certainly one of those people the things attacks were still happening just at a lower level but why you would all of a sudden after decades of not saying anything start saying things

again isn't an interesting question you know if we take that made up figure that we had of that kid who was eight years old when the Vikings first showed up in Britain right what do we call him Ethel Dan well if Ethel Dan is eight in seven eighty nine by the time the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

starts mentioning heathen men again heathen is early fifties should he live that long and as I said the Chronicle gets the dates a little wrong by a couple of years because Dorsted happens first but it's like the next year all of a sudden that now we have Vikings in England again

and they're not in some out of the way monastery on the edge of you know the continent they're close by the centers of power and their daines apparently the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says quote it says 832 here I believe the right year is 835 which would make it the year after Dorsted was

hit and the Chronicle says quote this year heathen men overran the Isle of Shepi end quote now that doesn't sound like such a big deal but the fact that all of a sudden it's talking about heathen men again after all these these years of not saying anything should make your ears prick up

and then when you take a look at the satellite view of the island of Shepi today and it might be subtly different but this is a 30 mile island just off the coast are really in like a river estuary it's 40 miles from London which is an important center even back in this time period

it looks even to the untrained eye today like a base for pirates doesn't it good sight for it now the Chronicle just calls them heathen men so we don't know who they are except the very next year according to the Chronicle a big battle is fought big in early medieval terms is a relative concept

by the way you could have 2000 guys on each you could have let's put it this way you could have a bad disappointing crowd for a community college football game and that might be a decent size early medieval battle in some places but the most powerful king in Britain and they had several

usually guy named Egbert will face down a force of daines the very year after the island of Shepi's overrun so we can assume maybe it's the same group of people and the Chronicle says quote this year fought king Egbert with 35 pirates means 35 pirate ships at Charmouth where a great slaughter

was made and the daines remained masters of the field end quote that line that the daines remained masters of the field should be paid attention to maybe that's a good way to put it because now you're not talking about a bunch of let's just say Norwegian raiders you know attacking some island off

the north Scottish coast or something and then running away before you know the group of towns people gets together with farm implements to drive them out you're talking about a group of people that was attacked by the most powerful king in the British Isles with some sort of military force

and beat him the very next year according to the Chronicle a group of unnamed Vikings but then they name them daines later has a pretty good sense of the political feel for Britain because they apparently land near modern day or in modern day whales the Welsh are recently conquered and

sometimes not conquered and not happy with these Saxon kings in Britain and the Vikings decide to work with them to maybe help overthrow their overlords and the Chronicle says quote this year came a great naval armament into West Wales they mean the Vikings where they were joined by the people

they mean the Welsh who commenced war against Egbert the West Saxon king when he heard this he proceeded with his army against them and fought with them at Hengaston where he put to flight both the Welsh and the daines end quote by the way I don't know if that mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle would really mean it was Vikings and Welshmen it might be Vikings and Cornishmen I'm not sure so no mention of these people for half a human lifetime and all of a sudden they're back and get multiple mentions multiple years in a row right at the same time Doris Stads being hit

we've entered into a new phase in this Viking era and in trying to talk about this era and organize it in a way that sort of makes sense and seems to correspond to something that can be visualized I realize that this really isn't military history in any real sense of the word

right having talked about lots of wars and battles and there's a certain sort of feel and style and approach and that's not what this is when you read the accounts of what's to come this looks like a crime blotter from a local police force I mean that's what this looks like these look like

if you opened up the you know commanders log of the history of the 12th precinct over the last 10 years and these would be the big notable crimes but they all read like a woman and dog knocked over a purse stolen and I mean they all sound like entries into the police blotter and

the interesting thing about it is when you think about the damage here unlike you know normal military history where wars sort of have consequences and violence is sort of driven towards some eventual political outcome right remember your claws wits that's the whole goal but that's not what

this is at all this is not only about stealing stuff but oftentimes these raiders will come into places and refuse to leave they will terrorize the locals until they're paid off this is crime this is organized crime and the thing about crime and it compares very well to this piracy thing

that we talked about earlier is that even in the nicest neighborhoods in the world you have crime it's always a question of what level of crime right what is your level of insecurity and that's usually based on what are the chances that you're going to become a victim and what becomes a parent

reading the equivalent of the geopolitical historical celestial crime blotter here is during the middle eight hundreds to the late eight hundreds your chances of becoming a victim in the area of the world that has Viking skyrockets and that creates a sense of insecurity and you can see it

in the collapse of some of the local trade routes that will result from the danger of simply trying to apply your trade in an era with the ash men about I love that term that's what Adam of Bremen who's a famous chronicler from the era said that the Germans called the Viking the Nordic people

the ash men probably why Neil Price calls this book the Children of Ash and Elm right it's a great term so rather than go in order what I'd like to do is just sort of give a general sense of the police blotter type activity going on in the eight hundreds in the west because the nine hundreds are

going to be yet again a different phase with sort of a different you know feel to it but in the eight hundreds you're going to go from crime to a lack of enforcement which encourages even more audacious crime and then the traditional Newtonian for every action there's an equal and opposite

reaction reaction to the crime which may indeed make everything even worse it's not hard to find one of these you know early equivalents of a police blotter from this era to see the rundown of various attacks and incidents involving you know Viking Raiders during the Scandinavian age the

problem is trying to figure out which one to use and how much to quote because you obviously can't run down every incident that made the record books for the 300 year long Viking age right and in fact even when you read these rundowns you have to know that incidents that were too small to be

mentioned in the Chronicles are still happening all the time but how about 1950s the age of faith by will Durant and a lot of these old history books are outdated in a lot of respects but this is the kind of information that isn't and he does a good job compressing it into a short space it's just a

tiny little slice of the police blotter from the equivalent of one early medieval police precinct right he's not talking about Germany for example or areas like that just one little area during one little slice and ignoring all of the stuff that's too small you know to even be noticed and he writes

about this and by the way talks about the death of Lewis the pious which happens in 840 ADC and if you thought it was bad during Lewis the pious's reign in terms of the you know Carolingian state disintegrating it gets worse after he dies and so do the Viking raids and Durant writing in 1950

giving you a tiny little slice of you know how bad the neighborhood has become says this quote after the death of Lewis the pious these raids became great expeditions with fleets of over a hundred vessels fully manned with oarsmen slash warriors in the ninth and tenth centuries France endured 47 Norse attacks in 840 the Raiders sacked ruin beginning a series of assaults upon Normandy in 843 they entered another French city he says I'm not going to try to pronounce some

of these names and slew the bishop at his altar in 844 they sailed up a particular river to Toulouse in 845 they mounted the same to Paris but spared the city on receiving a tribute of seven thousand pounds of silver in 846 while the serisans were attacking Rome he says the Northman conquered Freesia burned Dortrecht and sacked Limoget in 847 they besieged Bordeaux but were repulsed in 848 they tried again

captured it plundered it massacred its population and burned it to the ground in the following years they dealt a like fate to and he mentioned six more French cities we may surmise he writes something of the terror by noting that the city of tours was pillaged in 853 856 862 872 886 903

and 919 Paris he says was pillaged in 856 and again in 861 and burned in 865 and quote now his head spinning as all that sounds let's recall that Durant is basically talking about part of the Viking age and all those attacks he runs down and only one limited area affected by

the Viking era so you'd have to do the equivalent of adding up all the log books of all the regions touched in the Viking age together right for 300 years to get a full accounting of what's going on here and I was trying to think about how to even talk about it and it occurred to me

somewhere along the line that the reason you can't is because it's both decentralized and centralized so be like the equivalent of trying to talk about crime and you have to talk about street crime done at the individual level with a person robbing another person but at the same time

you'd also have to include organized crime with you know the mob running something you know at a higher level because it's all going on at once right but some of it's driven and purposeful another is just sort of random so the Viking age lines up similarly and I should warn you now

this is the part of the Dan Carlin version of the story this is what I had to sort of try to internalize to come up with a way to talk about it but there's multiple levels of activity going on here so start at the top one and the one that's easiest to catalog the the Viking age equivalent

of the mob being involved in some level of crime some of these Viking attacks are closer to war than they are to piracy take for example in 845 ADCE a particularly tough year to be on the receiving end of Viking raids the Vikings hit both Hamburg and Paris now let's not confuse the

early medieval towns that these places were with anything like the major cities they are today nonetheless one doesn't expect pirates to be giving places like that much trouble but these are probably more than pirates especially in the case of Hamburg most of the chroniclers

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

that's all that was going on you could say you know that this is a war between the Danes and the Franks but it's not all that's going on there's also you know some other levels so let's look at the mid-level the mid-level is something I think a Marxist would probably say involves the people

that own the means of production in this case imagine some very wealthy Scandinavian men who've over time managed to get their hands on a couple of ships right invested in sailing and oars and powerful long ships and every year they have expeditions right it's sort of like a limited

liability company as far as they're concerned right all of some Ericsson hackinson and ragnar right sign up for us every year reliably we need a crew if you're bored we go someplace every year this year it's Paris next year it's Hamburg and everybody gets a share right so these things become

like business ventures right these are entrepreneurs and you can sign up if you want to and then there's the the lower level again compare this maybe to the one-on-one street crime but but there are the people that sign up for this stuff and as Neil Price said in his book you know if

you're a person signing up for a raid and the raid goes particularly well it can change your life right change your economic forecast for the rest of your days and I'm addicted to looking for historical analogies and I mentioned earlier that the Viking Age kind of reminds me in some ways

of like the sea peoples in the Bronze Age and all that but there's something that play here by the middle eight hundreds that reminds me of something else and here's your disclaimer this is the Dan Carlin version of this story as I try to make sense of it so I apologize if if I'm going off

the deep end here but there's a you know and you got to gleam it with limited sources but there's if you're looking at this from the Viking point of view you one would say it reminds you of like a gold rush period in some places so I'm from California originally and the gold rush there's famous

but it's famously a time when everybody sort of loses their mind over the potential for an economic score and in the same way we mentioned there's those multiple levels of sort of the Viking activity right the higher up the middle level and the lower level I see the same sort of situation

during a gold rush where you know some people come in and buy entire mining operations right the big wigs come in and they're the equivalent of like the royal dans attacking Hamburg but there's the middle level owners of the means of production two who come in and pull their

resources into a partnership and buy a mine or something and then there's the lower level people uh like the Scandinavian who could change his life with a big score on a raid they come in and buy a burrow a pick and a pan and they go panning for gold or something try to find a claim somewhere

so it starts attracting regular people I mean you don't even need to have some big wig organizing in expedition there's a level of people showing up at these places that reminds you a little you know of like the grapes of wrath and the Oklahoma people showing up in the west coast to pick fruit

because there are jobs there right I mean uh the economic incentive just attracts people and it was obviously working because the archaeologists during this time period in Scandinavia are finding tons of stuff and always have uh from these areas that are being hit with the Viking raids it's this giant sort of wealth redistribution phenomenon going on during this era where wealth is transferred from the places that do a lot of writing and chronicling and all that sort of stuff to some of the

places that don't from Christian areas to non-Christian areas from you know the center of Europe to its periphery and an economist would have a field day with us wouldn't they because you can see how the economic incentives becoming drained in the culture and the rhythm of life if you will because this is the era where many historians believe that the practice of raiding becomes a part of sort of the annual yearly calendar in Scandinavia it's just a time of year right after you get the seeds in

the ground uh for farming that's raiding time where you get your ships out you get them ready you go on your raids and you get back before the harvest it's sort of the rhythm of life there now again context we talked earlier about how the the Vikings don't look anywhere near as barbaric and in

humane and bloodlusty when you compare them to the other people in this era well the Carolingians for example had a rhythm of life that wasn't that just similar either they didn't call it raiding they called it the campaign season right so we plant our seeds we go on the campaign season

and then we're back for harvest so again perhaps not that dissimilar rhythm of life but it shows a dependence and it shows how this has sort of been encoded into their cultural expectations and practices I'm reminded of a of a phrase that an Apache raider had once used to

describe what this was because of course your raiding is one of those great human practices as we said and the Apache's name is Palmer Valor and he was interviewed and it's chronicle in a book called western Apache raiding in warfare he was interviewed in the early 1930s when he was already

almost a hundred years old and he described it as this is how we made a living and he said for example of raiding the Mexicans and it sounds a little like this could be a Viking talking about raiding the Anglo-Saxons or the Irish right and Palmer Valor said in the early 1930s about his

raiding days with the Apache's quote are people used to go on raids down into Mexico to bring back horses mules burrows and cattle this is the way we used to take the property of the Mexicans and make a living off them there were no white people to take things from in those days we never

used to travel around with the Mexicans because we were always fighting with them this way when we fought with them some of us would get killed and some of them would get killed it was hard living in those days and sometimes a raiding party would get nothing in Mexico and come back empty handed and

quote imagine if you change the names there that could sound like a Viking couldn't it by the eight forties a change is evident and the histories will talk about it certain elements that had been part of the standard operating procedure in Viking attacks turns into something else when all of

a sudden the hit and run aspect of this sometimes turns into a hit and stay and it starts with sort of overnight winter camps that are meant to perhaps help these Vikings avoid a terrible rough you know worse than usual weather kind of trip home we'll just stay over the winter maybe to something

that evolves into towns over time and it sustained presence in some of these areas in other words we're going from stealing stuff to coming in and stealing stuff and then squatting in your residence to that's what we're going to stay the problem with staying though if you look at this

from like you know and that's what we're doing here because there is no on the ground Viking story the sources just don't exist we're looking at this entire phenomenon and when you look at it from the perspective of the people who are trying to deal with it there are precious few tools at their

disposal right how would you deal with this phenomenon how are you going to punish these people who attack you how are you going to stop them in the Mediterranean during the Roman era for example every now and then they conduct like a naval raid to the dens where these pirates sort of had their

bases and root them out but who's going to be able to do that in this era right what the English kings are going to put together a fleet and sail off into the foggy icy north and find the Scandinavian layers of these pivine once these Vikings get over the horizon after looting some place

they are home free for the most part unless you decide to not leave right if you decide to stay in the neighborhood of the people that you just robbed well that takes away one of your great superpowers doesn't it but in the eight forties more and more Vikings are wintering in winter camps

at the places that they're raiding and then these winter camps will slowly but surely grow into larger more permanent settlements and this creates the beginning of something that you will see all over the Viking world the fusion of Viking DNA and culture with the locals in a bunch of places

that they're hanging out in I almost named this show after the beach boys song I get around because genetically and culturally speaking so did the Vikings it's one of the things they're most known for and amongst the many things that I think plays into why the Vikings are so popular

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

though we're the typical American Mongols but it's not just Irish if you believe any of the genetic stuff from you know the people you send genetic stuff away to I'm not sure I do but it's Norse Irish the ancestry so there you go there's a fusion right there but once the Vikings insert themselves

into the local situation that means that they are now a part of the local situation and depending on where you are that can be a good thing or that can be a problematic thing take Ireland that I just mentioned I love the way um in Vikings at war authors and I hope I pronounce their names

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

they write quote in 797 ADCE the character of the attacks changed from carrying out quick overwhelming raids in search of valuables the Vikings gradually became more audacious when they ravaged Lambay Island outside present day Dublin they also took cattle and food stores they then

used the island as a base for raids on the mainland and were soon drawn into Irish internal conflicts landing on the Emerald Isle they write they were treading on a uniquely complex political viper's nest Ireland was divided into over 150 independent kingdoms which in turn belonged to six supreme

kings they continue a little farther down quote the various power groupings were in a constant state of war even the smallest disagreement between factions could at any time spark orgies of violence which would spread throughout the whole island before dying down until the next conflict

flared up strong local loyalties they write prevented the Irish from coming together in a single kingdom and coordinating their defense against the Vikings but this also prevented the Vikings from gaining control over large territories in Ireland the Vikings were both willing and unwilling

participants in the never ending Irish power game and quote to show you how crazy it can get it one point in the Irish Viking experience there will be Vikings from Norway that the Irish will have one term for and Vikings from Denmark that the Irish will have another term for all of them

fighting in like three way combinations against each other for control of the territory I mean it's crazy but the bottom line is that by the eight forties you're starting to see a change in the way the Vikings do things and now they're settling they're squatting on your territory whether you like

it or not and several major modern Irish cities will have started their days as some of these camps that the Vikings would originally use to sort of overwinter and then just never leave by the time it's happening in Ireland it's almost certainly happened in a bunch of other islands

small little ones around the British Isles in north of Scotland by the eight fifties you start to see it happening in England and in none of these cases is this by choice right the locals don't want it that way there's nothing they can do about it but that's not the only way that the Vikings acquire

land during this era because they'll be given territory or at least control of territory by the various successor kingdoms of Charlemagne right Lewis the pious's sons and then they're offspring and by the way you can see the decline in empire it's kind of a joke because you know sometimes these

words don't translate and things like bald don't mean anything about your geopolitical skills but you go from being Charles the great or Charlemagne and his grandfather right Charles the hammer to you know Charles the ball Charles the fat Charles the simple pep in the hunchback

Lewis the stammerer I mean not exactly the kind of leadership you probably want confronting the Viking age shouldn't surprise any of us I suppose if they violate the you know ironclad supposedly ironclad 1980s rule that you don't negotiate with

terrorists because they do all the time and one of the things that they do in order to get the protections that that they seek is give up land now before we get carried away in the same way that these Vikings only appear extra barbarian to us because we're taking them out of their time

period right there context and their neighbors were pretty barbaric by our standards too the same applies to this famous arrangement that's going to be put in place to try to get the Vikings to help you out right by protecting your territory from people just like them

gets hassled a lot in the sources over time it's seen as just a suicide lead dumb strategy rate absolutely negotiating with terrorists I just give them up your territory and then say you know protect me you know here al-Qaeda take this territory and protect me from ISIS with it

there is by the way a similar sort of dynamic going on here with what you have if you're a ruler trying to deal with this Viking age phenomenon the year that you have on your hands I mean it's something between a law enforcement problem and a you know military one I mean think of the

narco gangs operating in Mexico or something or think about the gangs in old Chicago back in the prohibition days right something between a military and a law enforcement problem and when you don't have the law enforcement in place you try all kinds of things that might

violate the known negotiate with terrorist idea one was the same thing that the Romans do when they had a fjodorati for example but other people have used some of these Viking leaders would be turned into the equivalent if we were having this conversation in a 400 year era after this you'd

say dukes or counts or something like that urls they're sort of to govern or control these royal territories for the royal entity right so if Vikings come and attack the royal lands you living in these royal lands in our behest will defend these royal lands right this is the same

way by the way hundreds of years before this time the Franks first sort of made their bones historically speaking they had this same sort of deal going with the Romans and maybe history would teach that because the Franks are still in those territories the Romans gave to them

the to govern centuries later maybe it's not the best idea maybe not going to work out the way you want long term but here's the thing about that and I remember a history professor slamming this into our brain all the time we have the benefit of

hindsight when we assess whether a decision made at the time was right or wrong also our interests are different if these people buy themselves a couple of lifetimes of safety because of these deals then they're going to judge whether they're successful or not differently than we are if we

look at them and go you know 300 years after this period this really worked out badly for them really do they care I mean if the things once upon a time that they used to think I think we're given used to think you know that it was these sorts of arrangements that the Romans made with barbarians that ended up destroying the Western Roman Empire yeah but if it bought you generations of safety before it poisoned the Roman Empire was that still maybe the right decision for the people

at the time to make give you another example in one of the many raids on Paris during this period the king will get the Vikings to stop attacking Paris by giving them a lot of silver this is not just negotiating with terrorists it's doing so in their favorite currency and I often

think by the way the Vikings come to these places and say we want a certain amount of wealth and we'll take it in slaves of your people we'll take it in your stuff or you can just pay us and oftentimes people just pay them and one of those famous raids it was like seven thousand pounds

of silver or something every person in the in the whole empire had to be taxed or something to make to make this payment but the problem is is you know why do you not negotiate with terrorists because it encourages more terrorism holy cow you know you have this going on during the Viking

era too and the annals of saint berthin almost side by side you see two attempts to try to deal with this Viking problem in two different ways the first attempt is something that almost makes you sad because it's it's the equivalent of you know if the bad guys take over your neighborhood

and turn it into a crime den maybe the locals all band together right in a citizens organization or a posse or vigilante groups or whatever to sort of you know look you know to stick up against the narco terrorists you know who control you or what have you and in the annals of saint berthin

for the year eight fifty nine it it recounts one of those situations with that's exactly what happens in the absence of any sort of federal law enforcement authority the people just take matters into their own hands and face up to the Danes as they're called and the annals of saint

berthin right quote the Danes ravaged the places beyond the shelf he means the shelter river some of the common people living between the saint and the law are formed a sworn association amongst themselves and fought bravely against the Danes on the saint but because their association

had been made without due consideration they were easily slain by the more powerful people and quote and he means the Vikings there so that's one attempt to try to deal with this difficult problem the other is to just give in and say well if you can't beat him join him

if we've got to give money to somebody let's not give it to the you know people that are extorting from us let's give it to someone like them and tell them to go get the people that are extorting us it's a little like having a problem with a mob family controlling your area

where you live and so to deal with them you go hire another mob family to protect you and the annals of saint berthin talks about one of these sons of Louis the pious I believe deciding that since he can't make a deal with one group of Danes which may just mean Vikings of

any kind he's going to hire another group of Danes and the chronicles say quote king charles deceived by the empty promises of the Danes on the psalm ordered a tax to be levied on the treasuries of the churches and all the traders even very small scale ones even their houses

and all their equipment were assessed so that the tribute could be levied on them for the Danes had promised that if three thousand pounds of silver weighed out under careful inspection were handed over to them they would turn and attack those Danes who were busy on the same

and would either drive them away or kill them end quote in neoprises book he mentions that sometimes the Danes would make this sort of deal take the money then share it or combine with the group that they were supposed to attack and then both turn their forces you know on the very

people who paid them they used to call this era in human history the dark ages they don't anymore for obvious reasons there's lots of places that weren't dark during this era some places one could make the argument are at the height of their power and wealth and learning and all that

kind of you know western european centric to focus on what's going on in france and germany and britain and all that during this Viking era nonetheless if you do look at it from the point of view of the people in the era being touched by Viking raids in the west it sure looks pretty dark

and the Vikings are exhibit a why one can also suggest that the instability caused by you know problems within effective government is another reason but there's a symbiotic relationship between the Vikings and governmental instability as we've been talking about chicken and an egg deal

going on there but people who say that this wasn't a dark age for everyone are absolutely right and one of the societies that they point to as an example of some you know group of people that are at maybe one of the heights of their you know powers and civilizational levels are the Byzantines

the Byzantines of course would not have thought of themselves as Byzantines they would have thought of themselves as Romans who speak Greek and whose capital is located in modern day Turkey and the france are set up to kind of be competitors of theirs by the marketing messages right I mean

they market themselves as the renovation or the restoration or the rebirth of the Roman Empire and if you're the Byzantines you don't think that there needs to be any rebirth at all right don't call it a comeback we've been here for a minute one we never went away who do you think you are

and then there's the Christianity thing um they're not Catholics and Orthodox Christians yet in terms of being that different but you can see the divisions you know already quite established by this period problems over popes authority you know I mean frenemies not a bad word to describe

this relationship but it will be the Byzantines that introduce the people of the west to the Vikings of the east and that's the part of the story that comes into play right around where we are right we said eight fifties Vikings are establishing permanent bases or overwintering in England

well that's just before the time period where you start to hear stories about activities that we know now involve Vikings in the east and like children acting up for attention or I'm reminded of my television news roots and they used to

slur us by saying that the way we decided about headlines was if it bleeds it bleeds and they've always said that journalism is the first draft of history and you can see the similarities because sometimes if you're just a peaceful group of people trading with your neighbor

who's not bothering anyone no one ever hears about you in the history books but you go attack somebody kill a bunch of people or conversely become a victim of somebody who does well then you know film at eleven you make the headlines extra extra read all about it and by eight sixty the

Byzantines are writing about what these people who have a name well that's recognizable today but in a different way they're called russ are you as you'll see it written are h os r os all those versions and yes it sounds like the root word for russia because it probably is

but when the Byzantines start writing records that we can still that were preserved that made it to today that we can look at about these people we already have found out about these people because they showed up in western records first it's a little ironic isn't it this brand new people because

that's how history always treats it right the illusion of the written past it's like the old parable that if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it did it really make a sound well if the people weren't written about were they really in existence until somebody

chronicled it and the first chronicled account that's made it to us today so we can read it like as some things were inadvertently lost of course and even the stuff we do have went through permutations and fragments and all this kind of stuff but in eight thirty nine that's when that

that name gets hurt first russ and it happens in the court of Louis the pious charlamagne son the year before he dies eight thirty nine is right before he dies and you know we've already told you the kind of life he had and by eight thirty nine most of it's behind him so this is a guy who's had

you know his sons deposed in multiple times he's watched his dads empire and his inheritance crumble he's got Vikings nibbling large chunks of his land away he's got Viking PTSD let's be honest and then the Byzantines his friend of me is show up at his court eight thirty nine which is

chronically in the records and want his help getting some people back home and when he says who who are these people the Byzantines say the russ and Louis the pious and his court have never heard of these people they're really confused and suspicious because they look at these people and as I

said he's got Vikings on the brain already PTSD from Scandinavian Raiders and these look like Vikings to him and he does a little checking because these Byzantines want Louis the pious to help these people get home he says that there's dangerous ferocious tribes between Byzantium and where

they're from and then they need his help he does a little checking and they determine that these people who call themselves russ are Swedes from one of the groups who live in Viking era Sweden Louis the pious and his advisors are suspicious that these people might be spies and they promise

the Byzantines that they'll do some checking and that's the last you ever hear of them in the records anyway must a freak to guy out those who's already worried about where these Vikings are going to find Vikings appearing at his court coming from a completely unexpected geographical direction

what the heck are they coming from Byzantium for but you can see how in his head he must think well they must be going in the other direction too and they were so if you think about like the Baltic Sea as being a Viking Lake during this period well most of the Vikings we've been talking

about take you know the direction of the Baltic that exits into the North Sea right and then you're in the open road you're in the the western highway there that you don't have to go to that direction you can go the other direction you can put your boats as many in in modern day Sweden at

the time didn't summon Denmark and you know the Vikings could all talk to each other language wise there was a lot of hiring on for jobs and we go read Bay of Wolfen things like that lots of soldiers of fortune so you often had mixed crews that would do this but generally because of the location

it's going to be mostly Swedish groups of Scandinavians who put their boats in the water and go the other way towards what's now like the Baltic coast or Russia up by St. Petersburg or the Polish coast and they get into the river system and all this happens sort of under the radar but you can tell

you know sometimes you can infer that historical things are happening because when they do burst on the historical stage they're often fully formed so you can say well something was going on in the darkness you know so that this could burst on the stage like this it's like when they find planets

because they can sense okay we can tell by the gravitational forces there's another planet pulling on them somewhere and then they find it well you can tell that these Scandinavian peoples were making their way down the river system because you start to see the trading posts either

arise or get larger right so we talked about Berkha earlier and head to be in all these places you know Dorostad all these places that are these nodes of economic operation you see this exact same thing in the east right around the same time period and you can almost track the movement of these

Scandinavians down the river systems of the east by decades if you want to get a mental image of the area we're talking about look at Eastern Europe look at the modern day countries of jellarussia Poland Ukraine Russia the Baltic states that whole area from about the Baltic sea in

the north where those boats first go in the water all the way down to the black sea in the south which is the major slaving area and by the way is alongside Byzantium they have found all sorts of bioarcheological signs that point to interesting things in this area and the amount of trading

is incredible and incredible because of the trading system that was already in place that these Scandinavians plug into we talked about Berkha in Sweden as one of these things that I'll of a sudden plug the Scandinavians into a system that was you know essentially as far as these

people are concerned in this time period worldwide and I thought historians Matthew Gabriel and David and Perry in their book The Bright Ages did a great job describing what we mean when we say worldwide and as I said these Scandinavians this isn't stuff that you can go and read in the

history books because this was happening in the historical darkness you know about it from things like archaeology and whatnot so when they run into the Byzantines and the Byzantines write about it you can tell that something's been going on for decades that's something is cataloged

in the bright ages and those historians write about these you know Vikings in the east and the situation in the east quote the story in western and central Asia plays out very differently than in western Europe because the pre-viking situation was so distinct instead of fragmented states

and wealth hordered in easily readable religious institutions Vikings found themselves on the northern edges of scattered settlements with invast trading networks that stretched from China in India to the Mediterranean Constantinople offered one node Baghdad another with perhaps hundreds

of cities providing connections across step mountain desert and forest the centralized power and military might of these cities and civilizations did not preclude frequent rating but made a collaborative economic exchange the much more profitable option end quote cat Jarman in her book

River Kings described the east as being a place for entrepreneurs and one of the throughput threads she follows in the work is the transportation of a semi precious red stone that became all the rage in Scandinavia during the Viking Age had to have it right demand was huge but this stone

apparently only came from what's now modern day northern India and so she would follow you know the trade route sort of that starts in northern indian finds its way to Viking air Scandinavia it's fascinating but it's a sign of exactly how interconnected these trade routes

are and how these ideas we had a long time ago of sort of splendid isolation of all these areas right all these areas exist in ethnic and cultural and commercial isolation from each other was never true and the trading was always going on back to probably me and earth all times

but as the two historians from the bright ages point out you know these Vikings are opportunists and they model their approach to the conditions and the conditions in the east are very different than the conditions in the west you know if we talk about organized crime taking over your

neighborhood well if you live in the west the neighborhoods easy to take over the mob moves in and they move in on the territory and there's no strong central government and they can get away with it in the east it's much more survival of the fittest already you have tons of powerful groups

of people we mentioned the Byzantines there are always step tribes that are powerful on the Eurasian step which you know pretty much dead ends on the Hungarian plane but if you go east from the Hungarian plane it stretches all the way to China and it is always serringetty planes

live and die evolution on the step and it's always survival of the fittest and so you have powerful tribes there all the time you know the the step tribe confederation de jour and there's also multiple large tribes of people it's an ethno let's call it an ethno cultural identity of people

we would call slabs today oftentimes this is linguistic and that's how they determined 100 years ago who all these people were what was their language what was their pottery style and now of course you know you don't have to be a genius to realize well wait a minute anybody can adopt

the pottery style and wait a minute anybody can learn a language the first time I ever encountered this a blew my mind because it made me change the way I thought about all these groups was when I was doing research on the 1980s on a people called the Goths not the musical fans the people that

helped overthrow the western Roman Empire famously right the Gothic peoples and back in the 19th century they would have told you that the Goths were Germans ethnically pure basically Germans spoke the language had the culture had the same basic belief system had origin myths dating to

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

into prehistory and he explains how groups form based on shared values and ideas and origin myths and language but this is all stuff people buy into including and he was talking about this with the gothic escaped slaves from all kinds of societies and then I had another professor once and I

believe we said this maybe even earlier in this conversation about how you cannot really have some ethnically pure society in a slave state because people rape their slaves well the ethnicity in this region matters more than it does in the west the west has all those white supremacist

Aryan sorts of overtones that we've lived with forever you know connected to 19th century national origin myths I mean it's it's much debated and talked about the Nazis didn't do anybody any favors by latching on to it there's a great letter the J. R. R. Tolkien wrote once spitting mad

at the Nazis for ruining you know the Nordic history and reputation forever more something like that but in the east the ethnicities important too but for different reasons and in the west you might want to claim you know that you're related to Scandinavians if you're a white supremacist in the east

traditionally people like the Russians have wanted to downplay how much Scandinavian blood is in the ethnic mix and the reasons they're a fascinating too when I was a kid and there was a Soviet Union they wanted to downplay it because they didn't want to give any ethnic credit to

anybody but Slavs mainly right that was the preferred group of people that they were going to say was the major makeup of the people that became Russians and any other DNA impact from any other groups in the region it's not just Scandinavia but step people you know and multiple other groups

that all of that stuff was minimal and there've been theories you know pushing every kind of combination or ethnic mix you can think of genetics of course as you might imagine the DNA is starting to solve all this stuff and once again as you might imagine people are more mixed than

anybody thought and these regions I mean we said the Byzantine Empire was a melting pot but it's right in this region too lots of coming together lots of slave trading lots of you know you would say in an American town you say it's four corners where where a bunch of places come together

and the Scandinavians in the east because it is such a tough neighborhood do more trading than raiding but they do raiding too I have a I have sort of a mental image of it these are mind numbers they're totally made up they're not based on anything but this is just how I think about it I always thought that you know in in the west they're more raider than they are trader right so maybe 60% raider with weapons taking stuff and 40% trader bartering you know selling what you stole that

kind of thing in the east I flipped those numbers I feel like the the Scandinavians mostly from Sweden but the ones that went east and that operated in that cutthroat but much more scary world that they're more like 60% trader and 40% raider and as we said one way or another you could trade for

generations and not have anybody write your story in the history books but you cause problems and you're going to make it into the era's equivalent of the police blotter for acting up and in this case in the eight sixties at the Byzantine precinct you get an entry on some of these eastern

peoples probably these eastern Viking raiders there'll be a famous attack on Constantinople in eight sixty ADC now I should say to protect my rear end right here the experts argue about some of this stuff this is very early in the story in the east and the sources are few it's difficult to

corroborate what your few sources say and sometimes there are heretics although when it's this unknown calling them heretics is probably not fair there's debate amongst the experts over a lot of this stuff for example there is supposed to have been an attack in the eight thirties in the

suburbs of Constantinople by a people that most likely were these risks if it happened a lot of people don't think that one happens some people don't think the one in the eight sixties happens and some people think if it did happen it might not have been these roast people that did it

I am unqualified to choose between experts all I can say is I'll read some stuff from some very good books here and we can try to update ourselves on what was likely it is a sign though isn't it exactly how history works and how these things unfold and I mean especially in the case of

Jacobson who I'm going to quote in a minute the detective work involved in piecing together Ramo Zea here that forms some sort of a picture that you can maybe rely on a little bit is amazing and intoxicating makes you want to be the indiana jones of history you know put on the hat grab the

whip and go out there and do some of this stuff they do as good work as you can do with the amount of sources available but let me give you an example of what we're talking about so in the book Vikings and encyclopedia of conflict invasions and raids Tristan Mueller, Valmer and Kirsten Wolf have

this to say about these early Viking incidents in the Byzantine precinct if you want to call it that with our crime motif and they write quote the russes were in frequent conflict with their most powerful neighbor the Byzantine empire the earliest recorded raid took place sometime in the

eight thirties when the russ attacked the sea of Marmara and then several cities along the path lagoonian coast the life of Saint George of Amastras documents the campaign and describes the russes as quote now quoting from the source the people known to everyone for their barbarity ferocity and

cruelty and quote the authors continued quote in eight sixty the russes led their largest military campaign against constant to know for where they raided the suburbs and burned many buildings and quote now as I alluded to a second ago I was just marveling at the job that I slandic historian and

I hope I pronounce his name right there's going to be some challenges in this show speverier Jacobson in the verangians gods holy fire his ability to try to piece together these pieces and make them into something you can look at and assess is is fabulous and and he does it in this eight

sixty invasion of constant nopal and he does it by using the main source everyone uses the the emperor's away when this attack happens with the army and the fleet which is maybe not a coincidence and so there's a religious patriarch in charge and he gives some sermons during the time that the

raids are happening they go on for over a month and those sermons have come down to us and the information in the sermons is some of the information that makes up the majority of the evidence in the Byzantine precinct about this you know crime from these northern peoples in eight sixty

and Jacobson writes quote the attack came suddenly and unexpectedly in mid june eight sixty an unknown northern tribe attacked the most holy city of constant nopal the capital of the eastern roman empire it did not experience such an onslaught in many decades let alone from a people

which had hitherto played an insignificant role within the perspective of the roman elite and quote he then quotes the early sermon by this patriarch who talked about a dreadful bolt fallen on us out of the farthest north he also talks about a thick sudden hail storm of barbarians bursting

forth Jacobson points out a couple of things though including the fact but there's a certain kind of terror and one we won't experience in the modern world but that goes back to the lagoon of beach example we used earlier of the ability in the pre-modern world

to find yourself attacked as in wartime by somebody you don't even know you don't even know who they are again this is a more like a crime than a war also isn't it I mean seems pretty rare and weird doesn't it to think you could fight a full-on war with another kingdom or state of

some sort and not know who the enemy was but in a criminal situation that almost seems like the way you plan it out right I mean we're a stocking cap over your face don't leave any fingerprints I mean the whole goal is to not have people figure out who you are trace you back to your layer or

anything like that eventually prosecute you and put you away and Jacobson says that the fact that they didn't really know who these people were that descended upon them was part of what made it so scary as you would imagine and the patriarch's name by the way who gave this sermon is and I

found multiple pronunciations is photos photos or fatias and Jacob says that he quote makes both these points repeatedly that the attack was unexpected and that the attackers were from lands very far from the empire lands situated at the end of the earth the terror associated with these

attacks stemmed partly he writes for these two reasons it was the terror of the unknown of a mysterious enemy that it suddenly revealed himself the tenor of the language is similar he writes to the descriptions of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne almost seven decades before and quote

and as many people will suggest that the Lindisfarne raid in the seven nineties kicked off the Viking age in the west some suggest that this attack on Constantinople in 860 if indeed it really did happen kicked off the Viking era in the east but you can tell that if they really were able to put

together anything like the 200 rumored ships that are supposed to have shown up in 860 then something's bubbling beneath the surface even if you don't have the primary source material in 850 848 30 right this doesn't just spring out of nowhere although the attack itself if you believe

the sources did and that's one of the things that this patriarch writes about that the the fact that these people weren't even seen as a threat and that you didn't have warning that they were on the borders you wake up one morning and the ships are there I mean that's the Viking way right

the Laguna Beach attack in a nutshell you wake up first morning lighting you see those telltale sales and if you believe how many ships were in the Byzantine situation it's hundreds of ships filled with dangerous scary warriors that do things that freeze the blood of the locals famously

in the attack one of the attacks on Paris the Vikings had captured I think it's 111 which is a very specific number but but more than a hundred just over a hundred of the defenders and took them to a famous island that's in the same you know right by Paris and within view of the countryman of

these captives hung them all right in other words watch this well there's a story out of this attack in 860 that sounds a little like that to me and it involves the Vikings taking a bunch of people onto their ships and then chopping off their limbs with axes and I imagine it sounds like

this is the kind of thing where you would do it in front of people in other words you're trying to make a point and this is written by another patriarch who was actually living in eggs not an eggs island retirement if you could say forced retirement on an island in the same area who saw the

same wave of Vikings attack and the life written about him says quote for at that time the blood thirsty schithian race called Russians advanced across the black sea to the boss for us plundering every region and all the monasteries and they also overran the small island dependencies of Byzantium

carrying off all the chattels and money and slaying all the people they captured in addition they attacked with barbaric spirit and impulse the monasteries of the patriarch and removed every possession that they found and they seized 22 of his most loyal household servants and cut all

of them to pieces with axes on the stern of one of their boats and quote you know you never can tell when something is an exaggeration or a fabrication or the truth but let's just say if something like this did happen an a chronicler saw it or got wind of it surely that's the kind of things that

you'd have written about you know if journalism is the first draft of history and if it bleeds it leads the history geek in me at this point is all set up for this encounter now what's going to happen to these alleged roast people when the Byzantine military shows up and chastises them or

tries to but this you know history geek slash if it bleeds it leads former assignment editor need to have this curiosity fulfilled that would take thousands of lives by the way to do is thwarted because like so many of the Viking Raiders in the West the roasts get away when the authorities come

to punish them for their crimes never get to see what would happen if the Byzantines and the roasts faced off the primary sources say that the Byzantine emperor once he in the sorts of does his investigation figures out what had happened implements what I guess you could call

sort of maybe general order number one for the Romans and remember the Byzantines are like a continuation of the Romans general order number one standard operating procedure whatever you want to call it I always like to refer to it when it comes to the Romans dealing with people like this it's

the recipe this is the recipe what they're going to do to these Nordic peoples is that they're going to turn them into reputable members of the international community or whatever passes for it in the early medieval version of this part of the world I mean look at the history this is an

age old strategy that is worked on all sorts of peoples I mean to just name a few you could say the Visigoths and the Austro-Goths and the Lombards and the Vandals and yes a couple of centuries before this time period even the Franks themselves were in the same situation and the Romans cooked

them using the recipe into nice civilized states now the term cooked is the way the Chinese used to describe this process when they used to do almost the very same thing to the so-called barbarians on their borders you know there's a lot of people that believe history has cycles

and that's much argue about I don't know if I agree with it or not but it has things that look like cycles and one of those things that look like cycles is the continual recycling of effective ideas certain things tend to work and so you see them brought up again and again in

this idea of cooking the barbarians in air quotes next door is something you see over and over and the recipe is different place to place like the Chinese version doesn't include Christianity the version here in the European context does and the Byzantines do in the east what Charlemagne

Lewis the Pius and his sons are all doing in the west he sends out missionaries and evangelists and these people that are going to be the Saint Bonifuses and the Saint Lebwin's of the East and they are involved in a long term strategy here right they are planting seeds to be harvested

generations from now and as I think about this phrases from the war on terror in 1990s era pop into my head read a multi generational war on terror that's what this is right on the Byzantine emperor sends those you know monks northward he's not expecting instant results from that

but he is hoping to replicate the success that he's seen with this in the past the Vikings these Scandinavians these Russ might specifically if you believe the sources and I'm not sure I do but specifically be a new people to the Byzantines but they're an old type

and they've been dealing with this type for a long time and they know just what to do with them what's interesting is the way you frame this can make it seem completely different right because in effect what the recipe is is destroying the culture of the people's

your targeting and then replacing it with one more like your own the reasons one can do this with the clear conscience is what makes this sort of a dual use kind of strategy for a frankish ruler or a Byzantine ruler by dual use I mean there's a wonderful way one can console oneself thinking one

is doing a favor for the very people on the receiving end of this treatment if you are a Christian ruler for example and you are bringing the Christian religion to a bunch of pagans and a bunch of heathens you are doing them a great deed this is a gift you are helping them potentially get into

heaven you are showing them the truth you are teaching them that the traditional gods that they bury their grandparents in the backyard you know using ceremonies and incantations directed towards are instead demons and devils you are showing them the error of their ways and this

makes you a better person for doing so at the same time this will create conditions on your border that are much more stable controllable um answerable and that will long term eliminate your pirate problem that's the second part of this and this is the sort of things that the

Chinese version of cooking their recipe would entail but it's taking these places that have no real strong central authority right lots of different chieftains or warlords you know calling their own shots and making their own arrangements and policies and moves and consolidating them

into a more centralized sort of state someplace with a you know hierarchy where there's somebody in charge that's answerable right if pirates from this other territory rage your coast you want to be able to go to some place and say hey you better control these people in your territory or you and I are going to go to war right what's the you know international 101 textbook definition of the state right a place that has a monopoly on the use of force and state building is another one

of those words that echoes the 1990s war on terror as part of a long term solution right nation buildings what we called it you go in there and you destroy the terrorist government and then you you build a new

on a nation that will preserve things like freedom and the rule of law and give people the benefits of you know our civilization well you see this same thing going on as a solution to the pirate problem in this era after all when you have something that's reached the phenomena stages as we said when

it's possibly a part of the annual calendar right the rhythm of life in some of these Scandinavian communities right after the seeds are in the ground we go raiding and get back in time for the harvest I mean that's like well that's a cultural challenge and civilizing the Vikings if that's a phrase

I can put in quotation marks civilizing the Vikings is the long term way out of this problem as far as these people are concerned and the recipe for doing that in the west is heavily involved with the Christian religion and again if we can make a kind of a comparison with the war on terror

when you know the old governments were thrown out of places and the new governments backed by the west were put into place all sorts of resources were brought in and experts and consultants and advisors and you know people who would do groundwork and organizers I mean it was a giant sort of a

mass infusion of all this talent and resources and expertise well in this time period Christianity shouldn't be thought of the way somebody might think of it today like some sort of a merely a spiritual change of focus right I'm going to change my belief system from one religion

to another maybe change my moral code slightly the way I act my rituals and all that it is so much more than that in this period it is truly let's call it a civilizational commitment it is the equivalent and this is one of the big selling points by the way if you're trying to

sell this to a potential Viking ruler somebody you could back and get behind and say hey let me tell you why you should convert to Christianity and why your people should and what's in it for you I mean it is essentially instant legitimacy for a ruler instant legitimacy for his dynastic

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

we'll start building things we'll start teaching your people I mean the whole thing is state building in a very real sense in the word and state building is a little risky because it does create entities that are more powerful I mean it's more powerful to have a centralized state with

you know an organized army and somebody controlling you know the government and policy and all that that's it's much more theoretically dangerous but it's much more conventional you can deal with the state the way states always deal with each other right we can threaten to go to war with you if

nothing else right there's traditional carrots and sticks and pressures and things you can apply incentives disincentives when you're dealing with pirates and raiders and terrorists and I mean who do you even begin to pressure to get that I mean yeah somebody has to have control

before you can figure out some sort of deal right this is in my mind to get back to the crime sort of an idea I mean this is you're trying to make crime families go legit here and then control their communities themselves if some pirates raid your coast you want to be able to go to the

king of that area and say hey what's up with this you can't keep the people from your territory from attacking me and if you can't I'm gonna attack you and hold you responsible and I can't tell you how many times in the sources you run into the wonderful plausible deniability of decentralization

let's call it that when some Viking ruler who almost certainly is the one doing the rating we'll tell some ruler nearby who's calling them on it hey it's not my people I don't even know what you're talking I'll be happy to investigate I'll find out who it is in one particular one I

was reading I don't even know how to explain this but the gist of it was that the Viking ruler was accused by the Frankish king of raiding he said it's not me I don't know who it is but I'll investigate comes back later says I investigated it's these other people comes back later and says I

got the other people I killed them now you should reward me for doing this and meanwhile he was likely the one doing the rating himself and in fact the people that he may have killed may have been the allies of the people that he was trying to pressure for money that he was also raiding I

mean it's let's just put it this way after a while and as the sources said you had talked about how how the the Danes weren't keeping their promises and you couldn't negotiate with them after a while centralization starts looking like a better deal and if you can get some of these Viking warlords

or chiefs to convert to Christianity and then swing their people along with them well your pirate problem might go away and you might break this cultural phenomenon's momentum in a way that allowed a long term solution to the problem and as we said it's not a theoretical idea it's

one that people like the Byzantines can go check their own records they've seen it work time and time again and the Franks know that it works because it worked on them once upon a time so if that is your multi generational victory strategy to win a multi generational war on terror what do

you do in the interim I mean if you're going to solve this three or four generations from now what about the piracy that's going to happen in your domain next year and the year after that I mean is your are your people even going to be around if this continues to get worse at the pace

it's going right now so I mean there's got to be a multi pronged approach don't you think well the Byzantines will do a lot of the same things that they do in the west it's interesting how the strategies sort of parallel the Byzantines do it in a much more Byzantine way though I mean

the word Byzantine doesn't just refer to the Roman empires continuation into this era it also has a meaning connected originally to just how intricate and exquisite Byzantine diplomacy is right the highest refinement of the Roman Empire art can you imagine them dealing with an unsophisticated

people like the roostering this time period I mean it would be like a villager coming in for a contract meeting over whether or not you know he should sell his property to a high level sports attorney today or something in the same room when you be selling man hatton for a bunch of beads

again here just put your little X right here and we'll call it I mean Byzantine diplomacy is famous they'll have these people fighting and dying for their empire before this whole thing is over with and that's a great way to deflect you know the attention and ferociousness of this people in another

direction right maybe even a direction the Byzantines would find it to be a positive outlet for their enthusiasm right there murderous enthusiasm here go work off that energy against this step-tribe for us would you and then there's of course the ultimate answer which is the military

response and the military response has two levels doesn't it one level is the higher level one right the strategy level one and the other level one is the tactical level one what happens when you know your people with axes meet their people with swords that kind of thing the strategy part

you start to see a reaction that's part of that newtonian thing we were talking about earlier right this for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction while the Vikings keep raiding your coast you're going to start trying to figure out how you can counter punch or at least

defend yourself and then the ways that that cropped up I want to say organically but maybe I'm not you know not being a historian that qualified to go there but but it seems like feudalism is the outcome how about that 75 years ago when people were much more direct and black and white and said

a led to be led to see and it was also easy they would say that the feudal era you know the early knights in the middle ages and feudalism and castles and all that was a direct outgrowth of these Viking attacks this is the response right and it seemed to make sense because well it is a pretty

good response to the Viking raids but it's much more complicated of course like everything now including the fact that feudalism is sort of a always around kind of thing it seems but in the era following the Viking raids maybe you could say spikes feudalism is like a decentralization

and you decentralized to try to allow the peoples on the scene to respond to a problem that happens quickly and goes away quickly right if you can't respond from the central authority fast enough to do anything about you know lightning Viking attacks you need someone on the scene who can

count so and so Duke you know what's his name maybe even another one of these Viking people to guard the territory from other Vikings this becomes a wonderful tool as we've said but strategy wise during this period the methods that are eventually adopted and encouraged and the

momentum begins to you know push these things will then have an effect on the surrounding society right so the response to the Viking raids if that's what they are prompt this response that response then changes society that society then is like the middle ages right how how clear cut

were those wonderful old history books but there's enough truth in there for the short term description to be kind of correct that that on the strategy level looking for ways to respond to attacks that happen really quickly becomes paramount and the Romans and the Byzantines of course

had had long had to deal with similar problems and had organized their militaries and ways to be more Johnny on the spot to deal with threats that were far too you know quickly manifesting to go ask the central authority for help right so this is not all of these things follow a sort of

a rhythm cause an effect threat and response and as we had said all these changes are not just to deal with the Nordic Scandinavian types there may be the number one problem if you're a guy like Lewis the pious but if you're a guy like Lewis the pious you have rating and piracy and

brigandage nibbling at every border you have you've got step tribes doing it in the east you've got muslim pirates in the Mediterranean rating all up and down into Italy you've got problems on the Spanish March continually so it might make sense to change this organization to allow for some sort of flying column ready relief force whatever you want to say you know law enforcement on the scene um in general during this time period right but then you get to the second part of this problem right

is that if everything works the way you're hoping it does and you're able to catch these people what then because traditionally raiders and pirates and brigands and those types do not give the authorities in air quotes whatever the authorities might be much trouble you don't generally

hear of pirate fleets fighting it out you know head on with the navies of states do you but it isn't always easy and it depends on what sort of force shows up I mean the Vikings aren't like cornering the fox that stole a couple of hens from your chicken coop they're more like cornering

the bear that kidnapped a family member and the first part of the battle is cornering the bear the second part of the battle is fighting the bear and of course discussing how to corner the bear is strategy discussing how to fight the bear is tactics and if you're into war gaming this

period as I am tactics are what it's all about right it's all about what the Vikings do on the field of battle versus their opponents so let's talk about that for a minute the first question worth asking about this whole thing is how many people do you have to have to have an in a military

encounter to call into battle is there a minimum number I'm just the reason I ask is because this is warfare in the early middle ages in the European theater and in this time and place the average size of battles seem smaller now it doesn't mean you don't get big battles from time

to time it just means the battles that would be considered too tiny to even count as battles in other places and times count I mean you could have 900 guys against 900 guys in Anglo-Saxon England and that could easily be legit but a thousand years before this period that's a reconnaissance clashed

between the Romans and the Carthaginians and one of the Punic Wars right so this is not exactly the high watermark of the European you know military history section of the history book it is a great period for other militaries I mean China's got a good one in this period

the Persians are always strong the Islamic areas of the Middle East and in Spain even in this period tough good militaries but the civilizations in western Europe during this era can't support the same kind of militaries that they could support in that same region hundreds of years before

this time when the Roman Empire was running the show not on the strategic level and not on the tactical level and not on the you know whole society level I mean the Romans had something nobody knows right something like 500,000 men under arms now that's not on any one battlefield at any

specific time but that's the size of their military think about the think about what's involved in the state supporting in a military edifice like that and everything that goes with that they can't do that in western Europe during this time period central Europe during this time period

even the great Carolingian state here that has the largest amount of European territories under one ruler that you're going to have until Napoleon's times can't do that and it can't do it on the micro level either where you know on the tactical level the Romans can put

20,000 30,000 40,000 people in the field right the Chinese can do that too how do you feed that and how do you logistically support that how do you get what you need to the people who need it I mean that's again something they can't do in the European theater in this era which is why the

armies are smaller 900 guys against 900 guys could be a legit battle in this place in this time so I'm trying to figure out what even counts it's worth pointing out that I don't think you have this Viking in quotes problem in an earlier era because I think they're just too tiny of a

of a population to do much more than act as a bunch of gnats right just sort of bothering you as opposed to threatening you and there was a great question asked in Han style Brooks histories of more than a hundred years ago you know the reason that they still

print these histories is not because they're accurate because they're completely out of date in so many ways it's because there's certain elements of them that still touch us HG Wells's history from a hundred years ago does too but in Del Brooks piece he'll talk about the numbers that

the you know the Franks under a guy like Lewis the pious or Charlemagne the kind of numbers that of people like that could theoretically put in the field if this is a modern day if it's the first world war you have the Frankish empire like this and they can conscript you know this giant

amount of their population which is huge they could really just make Scandinavia go away so you got a navy's got one of what did we say maybe a million maybe a million five hundred thousand people in this era maybe less so the Franks should be able to crush these people in

Scandinavian this period and and don't broke ask the question you know why the millions available to the Franks wasn't able to do that and then he answers it and the way he answers it is by talking about the amount of the population that goes to war in these various societies the Vikings he says

the Scandinavians in this period are in a warrior society military level of development and in those kinds of societies it's pretty much every free man is a soldier and when you show up to the battlefield everybody brings their own weapons and their own armor and they show up

they're prepared to fight it's a big cross section of the adult male part of the population but and this is Del Brooks thinking but it's it was popular during the time and I'm not so sure it's out of date but when societies become more specialized and this isn't even a modern thing

you see the same dynamic between say the Assyrians in the biblical age and the nomadic and you know so-called barbarian peoples you know around them once society becomes more modern it begins to separate into categories and specializations right people do different jobs and one of the jobs

is soldiering and the society supports a small segmentate an upper crust of the population who does the fighting for them and then the rest of the population either through their tax dollars dollars you know what I mean their taxes or their um you know they're in the Carolingian state for

example if you own a certain amount of land you have to fight and a bunch of other people can then outfit the warrior so that everybody sort of pulls their resources and puts a good you know well-equipped well-armored warrior in the field um but it's not the whole population and so Del Brooks

says what that means is that on the day of the battle when everybody shows up to the battlefield this smaller society these Danes for example are able to put a larger percentage of their population onto the field than the people in the Carolingian state they're

fighting now here's where I want to break it down a little bit more because this is where it gets interesting to me I don't think the Vikings are particularly better as warriors or soldiers or fighters than the best troops of their enemies and we should first make a disclaimer that there's basically two stories here and in the Anglo-American West we really only followed one probably until the 1980s 1990s amused started really getting into it after the fall of the Soviet Union but there's

two Viking worlds right as far as we were concerned and Kat Jarman and River King suggest we should fuse these and start treating them as one Viking world because that's how the Vikings would have treated it but what's going on in the east is so different than what's going on in the west the

Vikings that when east have to face very diverse you know kinds of armies and not just one of them I mean the the challenge of facing those nomadic horse archers of the step is a very different challenge than facing you know Byzantine forces which are organized a little like the old Romans

were in terms of I mean they do have a modern style military they do equip their troops uniformly they do pay out of a treasury right they they supply them out of a supply depot that's not how things work in Western Europe during this period in fact you've probably gone to a party once upon

a time where they've they've said on the invitation that it's BYOB bring your own beer in this period in fact in most of human history up until modern times it was much more common to have a BYO G system of warfare rather than be you know something like the Byzantines or the Romans or the Chinese

or the way we are today BYOG means bring your own gear I was trying to imagine if we still did this today or if we had a single event where we had to and they organized they wore and they said we're going to have a big battle in this giant open field you know near the hills nearby

everybody in your whole town has to line up there you know all the fighting age males is what they'd say in the old days it's BYOG can you imagine what shows up to that field and you'd line up in my mind's eye you line up just like they did in the old days whether you're Vikings or whether

you're your your Franks I mean they did it by either towns or clans or kin I mean but but you were associated with people that live near you right so you'd line up with your neighborhood maybe and you can imagine the differences in the equipment based on any number of factors right I mean

certainly the wealthy are going to have nicer stuff than the poor folk right and the people who have a real interest or experience or who do this all the time likely to have better gear than those who don't so I'm imagining you know one neighbor shows up and they're a gun enthusiast

and they have an AR 15 with a nice scope and they come with body armor that they own and they've got a big truck with a big spotlight up on the top of it I mean very useful when you're going to have battle day and their next door neighbor shows up and they've got the nine millimeter handgun

that they keep on the nightstand for home defense and their kids football helmet and their other kids hockey and baseball catchers gear for their armor I mean that's a little what it's going to look like in this period there's nothing uniform about a BYOG era battle and the kind of equipment

someone's going to have is going to be based on any number of factors including you know how many previous engagements they've taken part in I you know it's like a it's like a Dungeons and Dragons character here and the amount of quests that you've gone on already kind of impacts what you

have to fight with because after you know you may start your first campaign with almost nothing and after a few of those you come back and you've gotten some armor from one of these quests that you went on and you made enough money to buy a sword at Berkha with another one and you show

up on the day of the battle with better stuff than you know you would have shown up with a couple of years previously now in terms of what people are fighting with this is an interesting aspect too first of all let's talk about you know how hard it is to get your hands on some of this stuff um

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

see the Franks cut off access to this equipment to people that they don't want well armed Charlemagne will declare that the you know the the best swords and the armor that the Franks making their workshops are not to be exported to the Danes and the Viking peoples and then it's

Charles the Bald that descended of his I believe that makes it a capital offense you get your head cut off or you get hanged if you get frankish swords to the Viking people right can't give them the best military hardware available they're dangerous enough without it and the question of armor

is a good one and this is for geeks like yours truly but all during my life the feeling on how common armor was in this era and in these places has sort of fluctuated and gone through phases when I was a kid it was thought to be really rare and then we went through a period there I want

to say 80s 90s where um there was this idea that maybe it wasn't as rare as previously thought and now we're back toward this it was very rare kind of an attitude um and I was reading one book where they were trying to come up with a an amount of effort required an amount of time required

to make some of this stuff and they were talking about a male shirt so think about a standard shirt not not the extra long version that goes down to mid thigh or down past your elbows for sleeves just the really like a t-shirt of interlocking iron rings right male chain male and in the one

book that I was reading it said that it might take four smiths right these are trained individuals professionals of their time period craftsmen four smiths 18 months to make a male shirt and you have to add the cost of the metal which was not inconsiderable at that time

and then according to a seventh century frankish legal tax it was explaining the relative costs of equipment and it said that a helmet right so your you know helmet's going to protect your head pretty important in warfare right like a football helmet and football so that a helmet cost

as much as a shield spear and sword combined so you could have a shield a spear and a sword for the cost of a helmet and then it said a coat of male cost twice the price of a helmet it's like an algebraic word problem isn't it but so two helmets for a t-shirt of ring male

so that gives you an idea of how expensive this stuff is and perhaps how rare modern testing has shown just how protective a nice you know chain male shirt and a helmet is especially against sword cuts which were one of the really big threats during this time period

and you can always tell what the threats were because you look at the armor and you can see what the armor is built to stop so the helmets that are going to be all the vogue coming into the period and into the next period are the so-called nasal helmets the ones that look usually pointed but

they can be rounded at the top but they have one piece of metal that extends from the helmet down sort of over the nose and it is so clearly designed to stop a sword cut across the face right horizontally across the face but these kinds of things as you could see would be really important

on a field of battle and if some people get to where you know helmets in the football game and some people have to go without you can see why it would be something that was coveted whether or not you were stealing it from someone else on a raid or whether or not you're part of that

wonderful entourage of the professional elite who serve a warlord or a Viking yarl or king the herdman the house carols the posse the entourage or as my army list once referred to them the warlords rettenew the historian we quoted earlier said that this was a consumption society

and that it was based on gift giving and power was heavily connected to gift giving and one of the best gifts must have been military equipment and the people who formed these rettenews of elite troops who were well armored and well equipped and well trained and very experienced with you know

elite sort of status these people formed either the tip of the spear for the Viking forces or you could and this applies to other armies in the middle ages as well or you could mix them through the formations of the lower quality troops to stiffen them as it would be called right so

these are your first class troops in any Viking army now the situation for the Anglo-Saxons in England are going to be like you know Viking sort of organization mixed a little bit with the kind of organization that they would have in the frankish territories on the continent now let's

contrast this for a minute with something like what they do in Charlemagne's realm or Louis the Pius's realm the Carolingian Franks there the central authority is going to set minimum standards for people and they're they're not going to give you equipment the way the Byzantines perhaps

will do for their troops they're going to tell you what you have to show up with and they're going to tell you if you have this much land you have to have this kind of equipment right so the the more land you own the more likely it is you have to have better gear and oftentimes a bunch of

people will sort of pool their resources to outfit one warrior well but what that means is generally the Carolingians are going to have better stuff on more of their soldiers than the Vikings they face which brings me to this idea of the kind of troops that we're dealing with here Vikings have a

fearsome reputation and they had the reputation at the time so there's a psychological intimidation question that the best units in warfare have always possessed if you're looking for my boxing analogy on this you look at your sunny listens your George form and your Mike Tyson's and boxing

trainers used to say that some of their opponents were defeated before they even came into the ring Michael Spinks before he fought Tyson he's already lost the fight and the same is probably true on a lot of battlefields and in fact as many of you have emailed me there's a sort of a revisionist

idea going on right now about whether or not the Spartans in the ancient Greek world were as nasty fighters and as organized and and raised the way we thought and always treated them or whether or not they just had a sort of a psychological edge on their opponents and the Vikings certainly

had that but otherwise if you were to get an artist rendering of a Viking a well equipped Viking warrior and put it next to an artist rendering of a well equipped Anglo-Saxon warrior from England or a well equipped you know heavy cavalrymen from the Frankish one of the Frankish kingdoms put them all next to each other other than the cosmetic differences right the hairstyles and those kinds of things and the clothing from a military standpoint they are pretty interchangeable aren't they?

I mean they're all going to have the round shield that's so common in Europe in this era they're all going to have some combination of swords spears axes neither weapons are not different although the Scandinavians make somewhat more use of archery than they do on the continent or Anglo-Saxon

England conversely on the continent they have true cavalry which they do not use in England or in Scandinavia yet when they fight from the saddle a lot of people use horses and just dismount on the day of the battle in the Frankish world they have proto-nights a little bit on that just

as in the side because I'm geeking out now and you're stuck with me but it's a big controversy over when nights first begin when you can confidently label a European heavy cavalrymen a knight I think I'm on safegrounds saying that most people will say that the Norman knights that

invaded England in 1066 under William the Conqueror were knights early knights but knights if that's the case these heavy cavalrymen from central and western Europe in 850 ADCE say they're proto-nights to me not as nasty as early knights and early knights were not as nasty as the knights of the high middle ages but if we were going to have a one-on-one battle between a European proto-night in 850 and a well-equipped Viking warrior in 850 I think that's a toss up.

I mean these Frankish proto-nights are probably going to have a lot of the best armor and equipment that the Frankish state can provide and ironically enough the same applies to the top of the line Viking first stringers too they probably have some of the best stuff the

Frankish state can provide but when troops are armed and equipped similarly when they fight in similar formations when the tactics are similar you're reduced in the number of things that can impact the outcome of a battle which means that the things that are left over

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

so I don't see a big advantage for either side on the first string question the place where I see the Scandinavian armies in the west having a huge advantage over their opponents though is when it comes to the second stringers because the Viking second stringers seem to be a lot

better than most of the second stringers they're going to encounter for a couple of reasons I would say the first would be a hand still brook kind of reason he would say well you know these Viking second stringers are still warriors these are people that go on raids every year that come from a

society that you know requires them to carry weapons and know how to use them and know how to take care of them and celebrates their prowess in using them in their book Vikings at war authors Kim Yardar and Vigard Vika describe it this way based on you know things that the later sources

laid out and they write quote free men in the Viking age were expected to carry weapons they had both a right and a duty to be armed and there was a strong obligation on every man to maintain the weapons needed for the defense of the land the laws required free men to have three basic weapons

spear shield and either sword or axe if a man failed to attend the annual weapons inspection or if his equipment was deficient he would be fine end quote now while that may sound like an early medieval Scandinavian version of the United States his second amendment to the Constitution

right the right to bear arms and a well regulated militia and all that it really is just the sort of requirements that well regulated militias all throughout history have always had and most armies throughout history probably could be classified as well regulated militias I mean the

ancient Greeks of the hot light era that's not a warrior society I wouldn't consider it one bunch of farmers but when the collective defense required it they put on armor took spears lined up shoulder to shoulder and fought in failanxes to protect their land and if somebody shows up

with you know a bad spear or poor armor they endanger the safety of the collective whole so minimum standards in your well regulated militia just makes sense right but clearly all militia armies are not created equal I remember reading dub rook and he was talking about the failanx

as a military formation and said that it doesn't really help very much if the people inside the failanx are all cowards so there's a combination between sort of the fighting attitude of the people involved and the way they fight there are obvious differences between say your Greek farmer

hot lights and your Viking warriors and I would say it's very akin to the difference between say an American settler or pioneer or farmer in the old west who probably kept a rifle above the fireplace you know use it whenever something threatens the herd whether human or animal

when they can be very dangerous against indigenous natives if push comes to shove but they're not warriors by nature they're warriors by necessity as needed their counterparts though amongst the Native Americans often are warriors and it's a part of their makeup personally and the many steps

that one goes through in terms of respectability and building one's reputation over time are military related I mean things like counting coup among the plains Indians is a perfect example of something that no farmer you know amongst the settler population would give a hoot about but would be worth

somebody risking their lives for amongst the Native American warriors of the plains right so just a whole different way your worldview is constructed and the hot light farmers are principally farmers who fight whereas the Viking warriors are warriors who farm but they have something special

attached to them militarily speaking and I was trying to figure out how to get into it and I thought you know I could spend 15 or 20 minutes really trying to explain this or I could just use a cheap metaphor based on game mechanics that we're all gonna understand and go from there so of course

being the non-professional non-history and that I am I chose the cheap metaphor of course and there's a macro and a micro version of this we'll start with the micro version the tactical version the individual version if you are playing a role playing game or Dungeons and Dragons type game

or you are playing a computer or miniature figure war game and you are the Viking or playing the Vikings you're going to expect certain bonuses in the game aren't you die bonuses pluses things like that the special ability of the Vikings that acts as an equalizer to a bunch of armies

that normally you wouldn't think they stood a chance against but if you've ever done as I have and fight military encounters outside of your period everybody fights with miniatures in the old days in the pre gunpowder era armies from wildly different geographical areas and periods there's

just nowhere around it so you'll fight your new kingdom Egyptians against your Romans and your Romans against your knights and all that's pretty typical and if you're commanding a Viking army against Romans or Chinese or step peoples or Alexander the Great's army you're going to think to

yourself well I stand no chance except for the great equalizer that the Vikings have in every gaming system known to man and if they didn't have it and you were playing Vikings you would think it was a crappy gaming system you're going to get some sort of bonus for some combination of trying

to think of the terms that would apply here and I came up with three and they all have to start with a letter F but I mean ferocity, fanaticism and fearlessness some combination of those things are commonly associated with the Vikings and so much so that if you're playing a game and that game

mechanism doesn't account for that you're going to think it's a bad game so it may be just conventional wisdom on all of our parts and maybe a falsity that we've sort of ingrained into a sort of a stereotype or it may be reflective of something that was really there what is that

give me back up and try it from the macro level another game mechanics question if you've ever played one of those world building civilization games in your life you'll remember that at the very beginning you have to choose which civilization you're going to play as you might choose Russians

or Iroquois or Zulu right or Aztec there's a whole bunch of them and they traditionally all come with some bonus right every society gets their advantage so this one might be plus two science another's plus three C-faring another's plus one commerce whatever it might be and usually there's

a couple of societies that the special ability that they have is that their culture produces a special kind of entity maybe a warrior so if you're playing Japan for example during a certain period you may be allowed to build a unique sort of a unit called a samurai just like if you're

playing Scandinavians during a certain era you might be able to build a certain unit called a Viking these are units that are a facet of the culture and that's why these societies get them and other societies don't that's why you don't have a German samurai and a Japanese Viking

but again what is that game mechanics element representing there right that's something about the culture produces a unique entity that is particularly feared or fearsome on the battlefield and it's funny because if you look at samurai or Viking I think they both classify as the kind of

troop types you would give a special ability to in a game a bonus right and a plus four die role for fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity even if in my mind it's like a stew with those three ingredients and the Viking stew version of the mixture is going to be somewhat different than the

samurai version right different ratios of fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity in each and by the way the Japanese version isn't even really a period thing because I feel like it lasts until the end of the second world war I mean you look at an imperial Japanese army force in 1942

and they are jaw-droppingly willing to sacrifice their lives and and their fearlessness is legendary so much so it shocked their opponents I mean a Japanese general gives away a lot of advantages to an allied force right firepower logistics all kinds of things but the one thing he's gotten his

toolbox it's better than anything they have in theirs is he can order his people to do anything and they'll do it and they'll do it even if they know it's suicidal and they'll do it even if they know it will contribute to victory not one iota charge that dug in American fire position sure no

problem here's the interesting thing though while that's a great tool to have in the toolbox if you're a Japanese general in 1942 there's a lot of things that minimize that advantage right fire power for example the fact that your people will go charge into firepower and die to a man

might be useful but it's not effective it doesn't really change as we said alter the victory conditions but you take away a lot of those variables like firepower for example and you equalize a bunch of other factors same armor same weapons same formation same tactics and all of a sudden

what's left over can become exalted dominant even including this question of plus four bonus for fearlessness fanaticism and ferocity and i was trying to figure out what this is right this is the twilight zone that i love to play in and we always use the same example we'll say toughness

right toughness because it's the same sort of thing it's it's this thing that keeps a foot in the in the academic discipline of the humanities because what is it we have no problem calling an individual tough or the opposite but you started applying that sort of an adjective to societies

or peoples and it starts getting weird they didn't have a problem doing that a long time ago for obvious reasons they don't do it much anymore but we're left with this sort of gray area you know you don't want to use the old way of doing things we don't have anything that really

represents what that plus four bonus is so i like talking about it even though there's no answers because i think in the case of the Vikings or a samurai it's pretty key issue isn't it and unlike the japanese in 1942 charging that american fire pit

suicidally in a battle between say Vikings and francs with all the other things that are equal in the battle like that like two fey lengths is coming together right farmers on each side no other differences what determines the outcome well if one group of people has the plus three

fearlessness for anaticism and ferocity bonus and the other side doesn't well that sounds like it could be a pretty dominant thing and i think in this era it probably was worth also pointing out that the psychological advantage that happens after many victories would begin to build up i mean

if the Vikings weren't scary enough to the people like the francs when they first encountered them after losing to them a bunch of times you begin to fear them you begin to go into the fight like michael spinks against Tyson you begin to go in not with both sides you know having an equal chance

but one side disadvantaged psychologically before the combat even starts now it's worth asking another key question about this special ability is it really a special ability or is it something that everyone has in warfare and everyone talks about it everyone knows about

just turned up to a very high amplitude i mean are we talking about something as simple and basic as morale here because as everyone knows morale is a key element in warfare go read your sun suit go read your clouds with the military maxims of so many generals um morale is key when we talk about

this plus bonus for samurai and Vikings and others like them is that simply because they have sky high morale or is this another quality entirely can it exist side by side with morale one of my war game rules used to refer to it as impetuousness interesting adjective

um delbrook referred to it as savage courage if this is simply morale well then that would seem to explain why knights seem to have a similar sort of quality writing impetuousness savage courage some sort of die-rode bonus on the fanaticism ferocity and fearlessness bonus

but i think we all know and hollywood tells us it is so that there's more of a barbarian borderline crazy edge to the Viking version of this savage courage right the knight is at least publicly with the public face of piousness righteousness and justice playing his anointed role in society

as the protector of the weak and all that sort of stuff and only when he rips the mask off in battle does he become the pagan savage barbarian butcher again right the channel that file and tendency for the good of all in this era there is no mask in the Viking show everybody

exactly what they are and while i was reading about the teeth grooves the other day and that would freak anybody out right the carve i guess would carve like grooves into their teeth and then fill them in with ink or other color some of the members of certain brotherhood see this is all the

stuff that's just made for hollywood isn't it teeth grooves but here's the part i always try to remember this isn't a specifically Viking thing very little of this is specifically Scandinavian stuff the Vikings are as i may have already said to me i see them like the american bison the buffalo

that once upon a time these odon worshipping types or these Celtic peoples who had sort of similar cultural you know values when it came to sort of military stuff had a wide range of habitat and then over time the settled societies of the Mediterranean tame them converted them co-opted

them and now you're down to the last little hinterlands the last holdouts the bit of habitat that has not been gobbled up yet in a colonial way and the indigenous people and culture transformed wiped out would be the way a member in that culture a cultural conservative may see it civilized might

be the way that the church or the king of the francs might have seen it or emperor of the francs it's all a matter of perspective in order to prove my point there is a wonderful source account and i'm not going to go into deeply into everything that happens when you some sort of source in the

foreign tongue at least before in tongue to me arise in our hands and how many permutations and translations and fragments that are put together go through to make something but many of you i'm sure have read more recent strategic on because it is a rather singular piece of pre-modern military

gear for people like yours truly i guess you could say and what it is is it's a sort of a handbook if you will for it seems like a general would know more than a handbook like this would help them with but maybe there's something to it we're either the emperor more recent people writing us

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

stuff but they have several chapters all dealing with different things and one of them is sort of advice on how to deal with particular enemies because as they say in boxing styles make fights same things true in warfare there's a very rock paper scissors element to some of this stuff and

in the pre-modern era it was much more diverse than it is now and much more tied to culture everybody's military is pre-homogenized these days the Iranian military and the US military today have a lot more in common than they have in terms of cultural differences everybody uses

you know modern military gear everyone studies the same military manuals i mean you can find cultural differences but it's nothing like it is in the ancient world when the medieval world where the society and the culture often dictates what kind of warriors you have available to you

and how they fight and the way your people fight could be very different than the way that people you're fighting fight a lot of time these styles last four centuries instead of changing all the time the way our military tactics do right every time there's a war or something's changing

sometimes if it's a big war entire military revolutions take place right you have even have an acronym for that a military a revolution military affairs rma you didn't have that very often in the pre-modern world what that means is the way people fought sometimes stayed the same or

relatively the same for generations and there are regional similarities in styles racist some people like that will sometimes over the air is make this into a racial question but race has nothing to do with it it has to do with you know your culture where you develop how the people around you fight

for example along the step which is a huge expansive land which as we said has Europe on one side and China on the other you have an entire vast you know gumbo of ethnic makeup every kinds I mean there are Turks there are Indo-Europeans there are Europeans there are Asians Mongolians I and all

mixed together right a cultural estuary and ethnic estuary and they all fight like horse archers so something's going on there right well in the strategic con there's a chapter just on how you fight those people and then there's a chapter on how you fight these people that if not the Vikings

because when this was written in the late 500s early 600s the Vikings as the Vikings didn't exist yet but these people that would be indistinguishable if you showed a photograph of them to the emperor Maurice did and ironically one of them are the Franks long before this Charlemagne civilized

version of them know when the Franks were people that looked exactly like the Vikings and worship gods with the same names the strategic cons chapter on how you deal with people like that is entitled dealing with the light haired peoples such as the Franks lombards and others like them

now let me just say others like them is where I would put the Scandinavians truthfully before this period I would also put the earlier Celts the people the Julius Caesar faced and and their ancestors they're not the same ethno culturally maybe you could say different gods and whatnot but a sort

of a similar military style and approach to the big picture things right and the big picture things are where the Byzantine sort of cliff notes on how you fight these people including you know with a few asterix I would say and maybe a couple of footnotes talking about you know subtle differences

will it's like we're dealing with indigenous native tribes here and we're talking about the differences between you know Cherokee and Crow right you and Comanche to an outsider they may all look like indigenous Native Americans from North America but they can tell each other apart and

experts can too but these Byzantine military cliff notes talk about you know an almost movie like hero here from the Western perspective it sounds a little like Rambo for a while and by the way I should mention that I am using the version of the strategic on that is translated by George T.

Dennis and the strategic on says in fighting the light haired people's quote the light haired races place great value on freedom they are bold and undaunted in battle daring and impetuous as they are they consider any timidity and even a short retreat as a disgrace they calmly despise

death as they fight violently in hand-to-hand combat either on horseback or on foot if they are hard pressed in cavalry actions they dismount at a single pre-arranged sign and line up on foot although only a few against many horsemen they do not shrink from the fight they are armed with

shields lances and short swords slung from their shoulders they prefer fighting on foot and rapid charges and quote so our Rambo like character in the movie here sounds just about perfect right but the Byzantines are going to start you know there's going to be a tone I feel like that comes

into the writing here where they're making fun of the barbarians who consider the Byzantines so weak and maybe you know so so feminine would be the way maybe they would think about them because they're clever and they don't just get up there and and you know wrestle in hand-to-hand

mono a mono combat and the Byzantines think that's just stupid and they're going to use all these wonderful Rambo like qualities against the very practitioners in a very jujitsu type fashion the next paragraph says quote whether on foot or on horseback they draw up for battle not in any

fixed measure and formation or in regiments or divisions but according to tribes their kinship with one another and common interests often as a result when things are not going well and their friends have been killed they will risk their lives fighting to avenge them

and quote again it sounds like the hero in our movies being heroic right but you get a sense as you get farther into the piece that this is the Byzantines just explaining what sort of cheese you can bait a trap for these people with right now all you have to do is kill a few of their friends

and they'll just throw their lives away to avenge them this is all stuff a general could use right this is how you play you know the the game of poker here and these are some inside tricks let me tell you about the guy you're playing it continues quote in combat they make the front of

their battle line even and dense either on horseback or on foot they are impetuous and undisciplined in charging as if they were the only people in the world who are not cowards they are disobedient to their leaders they're not interested in anything that is at all complicated

and they pay little attention to external security and their own advantage they despise good order especially on horseback they are easily corrupted by money greedy as they are and quote if you're a Byzantine general about to face one of these light-haired peoples or others like

them that's a pretty good scoop there isn't that's something you can use the next paragraph is interesting because it defies the stereotype especially of the Scandinavians because I can't believe the Scandinavians are more bothered by cold than people from a warm climate

like the Byzantines but maybe they're much more bothered by heat but this is the next chapter on you know how you beat these light-haired peoples how you fight them quote they are hurt by suffering and fatigue although they possess bold and daring spirits their bodies are pampered and soft

and they're not able to bear pain calmly in addition they are hurt by heat cold rain lack of provisions especially of wine and post-ponement of battle when it comes to a cavalry battle they are hindered by uneven and wooded terrain they are easily ambushed along the flanks into the

rear of their battle line for they do not concern themselves at all with scouts and the other security measures their ranks are easily broken by a simulated flight and a sudden turning back against them attacks at night by archers often inflict damage since they're very disorganized in

setting up camp end quote this to me is a great it on a curve so to situation because sometimes you'll resources from a part of the world where everybody by Byzantine standards is laxing camp security right or scouting and they'll judge each other based on you know how did the Vikings

compare to the Anglo-Saxons but from the Byzantine standpoint they all suck at reconnaissance right the next paragraph you know once again there's going to be probably more boxing and gaming analogies in this show than anyone we've done but it it always lends itself to it there was a

line Muhammad Ali used as one of his poems about fighting smoke and Joe Frazier who was basically Mike Tyson and that's exactly what the Byzantine emperor or his ghost writers is suggesting you do with these people because like Joe Frazier or Mike Tyson these western light haired people are

ferocious sluggers head on punctures who disdain any sort of cleverness or slickness at all right just come on up here we'll settle it you know in an arm wrestling match or whatever and they're fighting you know more of an Ali type character who said of Joe Frazier I'll be pecking and

poking pour and water on his smoking and that's what the Byzantine emperor says you're going to do to these people but just don't get into a slugfest with them early take him into the later rounds and he writes quote above all therefore in warring against them one must avoid engaging in

pitched battles especially in the early stages instead make use of well planned ambushes sneak attacks and stratagem delay things and ruin their opportunities pretend to come to agreements with them aim at reducing their boldness and zeal by shortage of provisions or the discomforts of

heat or cold and quote and while these aren't specifically comments about Vikings and they come earlier than the Viking era there are Byzantine accounts from right after the Viking era from people who are recent descendants of the Vikings that talk about this same sort of plus

four bonus thing I mean the Byzantine princess Anna Kahnanna writes about it and she talks about she calls them Celts which I think is wonderful because then we're recycling these old names again there they could be Celts they could be Vikings they could be Franks they could be I mean they're

just light-haired peoples right latins they call them sometimes these Greek speaking Byzantines but she basically describes it as this irresistible force that these Celts have initially but that if you can withstand that it diminishes right they get tired they begin to flag they get discouraged

so if you can survive the initial impetuousness bonus they return to sort of a normal standard of fighting after that it can be defeated in one encounter Kahnanna says the emperor of the Byzantines ordered his men to shoot the horses out from under the Celts and then once they fell to the ground

with their big shields and their heavy spurs they lost their impetuousness and were vulnerable so this to me shows more of a style of fighting than something specifically Viking but if we want to talk about specifically Viking because they didn't fight specifically like the Franks for

example let's turn to historian and Viking expert Neil Price who wrote the children of Ash and Almond he described it and he also taking a shot maybe a little strong description here but but points out that so much of what's portrayed as Viking styles of fighting and all this sort

of stuff is really based on tenuous information and that we know less than the popular culture would suggest is known he says quote it is hard to know what a Viking age raid or battle was actually like several books have been written claiming to give detailed treatment of tactics battlefield

formations and the like but these are almost entirely drawn from later practice applied retrospectively and often from literal readings of textural sources with debatable reliability in reality he writes we know comparatively little other than the impressions of noise chaos and violence that are

conveyed so vividly in poetry and in the names of the Valkyries and quote then he gives a run down of kind of what we do know which is sort of traditional foot warfare in this era in the western central northern europe area and he writes quote the primary battlefield strategy involved

the shield wall in which a force formed up in a line several men deep with overlapping shields as a cohesive unit it could be used to advance and push opponents back by sheer impetus while spears and knives could be employed to stab forward between the ranks swords and axes could

also come into play and the legs of anyone facing a shield wall were especially vulnerable from the underhanded thrust the formations strength lay in unity as a collective and the greater degree of protection afforded from frontal attack shields could also be raised to deflect incoming arrows

and quote now I love a good Viking shield wall as much as the next guy but I need to point out for those who might not otherwise know there's nothing special about a shield wall formation in fact I think it's probably I don't know if I'm safe to say this but probably the most common

formation before gunpowder was invented worldwide all throughout history I mean there's Sumerian art that shows Mesopotamian warriors in a shield wall and just like all militia armies aren't created equal all shield walls aren't either I mean there have been armies that could turn

you know their entire force 90 degrees on command drill like fashion you know in their shield walls these shield walls are not those this is a very primitive sort of level of warfare but what that means is without anything else to differentiate you know one side from another what's left over

becomes even more important as we said exalted your morale or your plus four bonuses or whatever it might be experience right warrior hood versus farmers whatever it might be it's worth asking the question if something like this plus four bonus thing would account for supposed phenomenal like

the berserkers or the berserks this is a group of people that's associated with Viking warrior hood let's be honest though it's a little dubious I mean it comes from the sagas and the poetry which is you know we'll get into it later because it's it's you have to but in terms of the historicity

of something like this if anything it looks to me these berserkers look like outgrowth of the sorts of things that the Romans would have written about dramatic tribes centuries previously in other words sort of a known type on the battlefield I think one could make a case that when you filter

out all this stuff about them being psychotic or using hallucinogenic drugs which is still an open question but I think I think the stuff I've been reading lately seems to trend against it but all of this could just be simply the descriptions of elite units right on the battlefield that were

simply known as being like the other great units but with some you know amplification of some of the differences and thinking that you are immune from the enemy's weapons and acting that way is a sort of a psychological self hypnosis trick that would not be unique to Viking warriors right

I mean I think you almost have to work yourself up into something like that sometimes to be the first ones to charge into somebody else's spear points but you know again nothing I know about personally I think the same holds true for the women warrior idea there are women warriors

throughout history famously the ones that are called amazons who were probably you know women from some of these step tribes that seems completely confirmed but the question of decisiveness and numbers is interesting I mean how common was it I would suggest from what we know

now probably more common still uncommon but more common on the amongst the horse archer tribes than in Scandinavia but they do find women buried with weapons but nothing I've read suggests that there would be many women warriors that it would be a rarity when it happened and neither the

women warriors nor the berserks are likely to play pivotal roles and anything we're talking about here but worth mentioning during this time period when we're talking about armies and stuff and some of the military side of this to me the most interesting aspects of the Viking military stuff though

and the stuff that really is different to me obviously the ships and the naval stuff which will get into more later but the other thing is that there's this and this may be something that is an illusion from the sources but there's this untethered nature to the Viking armies and

especially during this period where they seem to be able to defy the normal laws of things like supply lines and logistics and all that I mean their mobility is crazy and we think about it being a naval mobility but think about it this way if you're looking to move an army during this time period

there's a very sort of a ponderous point to point to point sort of approach that an advance takes because you're moving from supply hub to supply hub on land you want to stay on the road so that your your carts and your wagons and your pack animals can go easily with you if you're being supplied by

rivers and stuff like that you need to be close to the barges and the ships but it creates a sort of a very slow point to point to connect the dots kind of approach the Vikings don't do any of this during this era because by the middle eight hundreds in the west they've ensconched themselves in

certain places and they can't be dislodged it's like gangs when we talked about earlier the police plotter kind of an idea it's like gangs have taken over certain areas in modern day france and the Netherlands and places like that and the the powers that be can't dislodge them and they

usually try to control these areas where they can where it's right where the rivers and the sea come together so that they have easy access to the you know it's the subway turn styles of these places river transport systems and trying to figure out what Viking hosts or armies or many

armies or whatever you want to call them trying to figure out what they're doing is like trying to follow you know gangs around and during the eight fifties eight sixties these these groups of Vikings will actually get names you know they'll be the army of the same they'll be the army of the

Psalm eventually they'll be the great heathen army and the great summer army and to think about these as armies is crazy because the first thing in any modern militaries when you sign up for a military you're in and if you leave without permission they may shoot you you're a deserter or

you go a wall that's not how these armies work and cat Jarman the bioarchaeologist put it well when she said that these military forces would ever we want to call them hosts or the way the primary sources sometimes refer to them that they could pick up and lose members along the way

there's going to be a core of people that are there because they have oaths or responsibilities or their members of a warlords retinue or entourage and they're going to you know they're going to do whatever they want to do uh the warlords says we're going to raid this area you're in

but there's a whole bunch of people that are sort of following the moving party here like the second group of people that show up in a gold rush or teenagers looking for something to do on a Saturday night and they hear rumors of where the latest parties are and they just show up

and they break up the same way in the um primary sources of uh St. Burton at one point he talks about armies Viking armies splitting up into several different flotillas and then he writes that they quote sailed off in different directions according to their various choices

and the quote what army does that but it's not like an army it doesn't act like an army it acts like a pack of wolves or a bunch of looters or people that are just running around um in it's like it's like trying to be the police officer at central command that keeps track of all these groups

you have multiple groups operating i mean one of the histories i was reading is following one of these fleets and you can you can trace it because it'll hit things all along the way it'll hit Spain and then as it goes down to the Mediterranean it hits you know what's now like

the southern Spanish coast and then it hits the southern French coast and then it sacks cities and Italy and you can literally follow its progress in eight sixty one some of these groups burn Paris now Paris is not as we said this great city during this time period it's more of a town

it's not anyone's capital but it is important and it's been hit before right this is not unusual by this time period but it sounds specifically bad and Charles the bald who is the king of that region finally does something about it in in the next couple of years he has a bad reputation

for how he handles Vikings he's Charlemagne's grandson by the way and in the eight forties Charlemagne's grandson split up his former united empire into a bunch of different parts that morph into modern countries Charles the bald rules franquilla which will morph into France after Paris is burned

in eight sixty one that creates a sort of an equal and opposite reaction on Charles the bald's part he puts into place a bunch of rules that we've already covered some of the details of one of them is the creation of sort of a a ready reaction force a rapid deployment force to try to catch these

Vikings in the act and maybe either punish them or prevent them from doing what they want to do he prohibits the sale of weapons and armor to these people also because the Franks make as we said some of the best stuff if not the best stuff in this part of the world and no one wants the

command cheese having repeater rifles except of course the command cheese and apparently whatever his grandfather had put into place was not strong enough because he strengthened all the penalties right now now they're going to hang you or cut your head off as we said so he puts that into play

at the same time and then finally and this is fascinating to me he finally manages to get whatever needed to get done to get bridges fortified because he's certainly not the first person that ever did this but for one reason or another it hadn't happened now it's going to happen you burn Paris you

get everyone's attention and fortified bridges are like turning bridges into castles you know you'll see towers and all sorts of fun things walls and battlements and if you're a Viking that's the equivalent of blocking the turn styles that lets you into the subway you put a fortified bridge

in a key spot and they can't get into the river system and that screws up everything when they've already sort of stolen all the easy stuff to steal on the coast all the good stuff in the interior and to block these places is to frustrate and make any Viking ideas about raiding

much more risky and costly but this doesn't make the Viking stop it just sends them elsewhere if Charles the Bald wants to play Superman and wants to get in front of his people and block the incoming Viking bullets he needs to understand or maybe it's not his job to care that those bullets might

bounce off a Superman's chest and kill a bunch of innocent bystanders in a place like Anglo-Saxon England for example Charles the Bald's response to things like this burning of Paris in 861 is often tied into what happens in 865, 866 in another location England Britain really the north of Britain by York now where they're going to get hit with something that all the histories portray as something out of the ordinary well up until now soon to be all too ordinary a change in the way

Vikings do things and we mentioned it earlier when we said that they were starting to overwinter in the 850s and the 850s by the way it's hard to keep track of all this stuff isn't it look at the scope of what they're doing in the 850s they start to take over Ireland but it's the 860s that

this starts to happen in Britain and it will change the course of everything and once it gets going it becomes like a happening it's hard to figure out what these things are we mentioned earlier that there are these entrepreneurs and it seems like they're the ones who call the shots you know maybe

they own 12 ships and they know another entrepreneur who has 10 up the coast and another one down south who's your cousin who has five ships and you get these people together they all bring their entourage and they sort of go to where this year's party is going to be and then all the other

Vikings looking for parties or to pan for gold or to pick fruit in John Steinbeck's version you know of the people from the dust bowl coming to try to make a living whatever it might be those people show up they follow the party they're like grateful dead fans who go from place to place

following the band although they look probably a little bit more like motorhead fans in 865 866 the big party is going to be in Northumbria and the group of people that shows up to watch and participate in that shows going to acquire a name which might work for some of the motorhead

get together too they're going to be called the great heathen army the origin of the great heathen army is literally legendary it involves at least the traditional story involves one of these Vikings whose name we have but that's a rare thing in the middle 800s believe it or not after

all this discussion we've already gone through this is the early Viking age and it's the next hundred years when the sources are going to comparatively explode so even having names during this period to work with is a little problematic but the most famous name if you were to talk to people

on the street who have no connection to history at all and ask them do you know any names of any Vikings the name you would get most of all because of what popular culture has done to this figure is almost certainly ragged in our lovebrook and trying to get your mind around who that person was

in real life in history is one of the many things in the story above my pay grade some people will suggest he'd ever existed at all I think most of what I read would would go to the other direction and say that he did but like so many figures in early history

you know ancient or medieval history he was one of these figures that over time maybe got turned into something like a demigod a person whose name shows up here and there in historical chronicles but is most known because of things written about him in sagas and the epic

edic and scaldic poetry of Scandinavia which is what allows the Viking side of this story any interplay in it at all even with all of its problems more on that later but so who this ragnaar lovebrook guy is his heart to figure he's supposed to have been one of the leaders in the great attack

on Paris in the middle eight forties where those guys were slaughtered by the Vikings you know hanged in front of their compatriots but on an island in the same river he was one of those guys this is a couple decades later and the way this story starts and remember ancient and medieval

people love these kinds of things were whole geopolitical conflict start because somebody steals another guy's wife or something but this supposedly starts because of something done to ragnaar lookbrook and because of the thing that was done to him his sons come looking for payback and in the society like Scandinavia known for its blood feuds during this era that's not hard to believe but what they kick off if that has any connection to truth at all is one of the most important geopolitical

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

five years and it just sort of slides to this destination but regardless when I was growing up I was reading things like a history of the Vikings by Gwen Jones and here's the way Jones describes this era and ragnaars involvement in it and writes quote we've already seen the nuisance raids of

individual leaders develop into big well organized expeditions which exploited local divisions and lived off the invaded country for lengthening periods of time a new stage he writes that of conquest and residence now followed in eight sixty five a big heathen host or hoard at a guess five hundred

to a thousand men arrived in England to initiate a more sustained and coherent assault than had yet been attempted their leaders were ivar called the boneless abba and halftan legend tells us that they came from Scandinavian Ireland to avenge the death of their father ragnaar

about whom we know nothing very much after his withdrawal from the saying in eight forty five that was the attack on paris and eight forty five which he was supposed to be one of the leaders of with seven thousand pounds of silver and the seeds of plague in his army save that he was

reputed to have come to England with two ships crews and been defeated by king Ella of Northumbria who had him thrown into a pit and stung to death by snakes before he died he was heard to say prophetically the piglings would be grunting if they knew the plight of the bore and suddenly

here they were snouting and tusking in England end quote that's a great story how much of it is true is completely open to question the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of course is much more dry uh this is not a saga this is not you know the the scalding poetry this is just the facts maim

and in eight sixty five according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle here were the facts quote this year sat the heathen army in the isle of fanat and made peace with the men of Kent who promised money their width but under the security of peace and the promise of money the army in the night

stole up the country and over ran all Kent eastward and quote the next year is also a continuation of what's going on and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says for eight sixty six quote and by the way when they're talking about uh ethyl red and ethyl berth they're talking about kings of one of

these kingdoms that make up you know the British Isles during this period quote this year ethyl red brother of ethyl berth took to the west section government and the same year came a large heathen army into England and fixed their winter quarters in east anglia where they were soon horseed

and the inhabitants made peace with them and quote horse that's a great term isn't it what it means is that deals were struck the Vikings have this quality of you know people who show up in your neighborhood and say something like you know nice kingdom you have here be ashamed of something

happened to it we had some horses maybe nothing would go bad for you um the angler saxon chronicle has this great line and the people here or they're made peace with the Vikings well they didn't just say you know you don't hurt us we won't hurt you made peace with the Vikings means you know

you say what do we need to give you for you to go somewhere else and and they tell them and they land in Kent but they quickly move up into another one of these kingdoms at the time called north umbraeah you know right around where the major city of york is uh they're using the

Roman roads too isn't it wonderful that they can just sort of uh adopt the uh you know the way that the locals get from place to place on these wonderful roads that were made by people centuries ago and they just use them to get up to north umbraeah where the Vikings wonderful intelligence that

they always seem to have has told them that there's you know civil war problems up north right a dynastic struggle things are going to be disorganized chaotic and that's just the kind of thing that Vikings enjoy you know when they're looking for a place to strike right number one thing we're

looking for you're not ready and it's a bad time for us to do this and in 865 866 it's a bad time for the people of north umbraeah to get hit with a Viking attack which coincidentally is exactly what it happens the Anglo-Saxon chronicles entry for the year 867 talks about this sort of

dissension in the royal house of north umbraeah mentions that the rival claimants to the throne decide to unite though in the face of the Viking threat somehow and it doesn't tell you how this happens the Vikings get inside the big city or the major city in that part of Britain

York within the walls occupying the city and then these north umbraeah and claimants to the throne have to unite and try to retake their own city somehow i should say that when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle during this period says the army they mean the great heathen army until later when

they'll start calling it the Danes which will just get more confusing so according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle though these rival claimants to the throne quote return to their allegiance and they were now fighting against the common enemy having collected a vast force with which they fought

the army at York meaning the great army and breaking open the town some of them entered in then there was an immense slaughter of the north umbraeans some within and some without of the walls and both the kings were slain on the spot the survivors made peace with the army

and quote the survivors made peace with the great heathen army this is one of those moments though that you really get these sorts of things in early medieval warfare where the kings fight and at the end of the battle you have dead kings on the

battlefield or whatever passes for kings as we said the the whole king thing gets a little bit more exclusive when you get to the high middle ages in this period there's a little bit more democratized you have more often uh you ran into kings in this era but still kings dead on the

battlefield to north umbraean claimants to the throne dead on the battle field in 867 at the hands of the Vikings uh is shocking and gives them control of north umbrae uh which is a very different thing than deciding you're gonna smash and grab and leave or you're gonna overwinter

in a little fortified you know long port on the coast this is conquest and there's always been some sort of inference that some of these kings deaths at the hands of the Vikings are not in battle but maybe more like executions you know on the field of battle afterwards in cold blood

and several of these kings that the Vikings will kill over their course of time in Britain will be executed perhaps uh some in the sagas for example if if this is the ragnar story as it was traditionally told then one of these kings from north umbraean who dies here is the guy who threw

ragnar into the snake pit so his sons find him and carve the old blood eagle on his back I split his rib cage from behind pull his lungs out it kind of looks like a bird's wingspan I was reading max atoms he a footnote that just said most historians are very skeptical

of anything like that ever happening but certainly one would imagine given you know behavior after this event that it would be in keeping if the Vikings got their hands on one of these kings that they would kill them on the spot we should go into how many people were talking about here since my early 1960s Gwynn Jones quote there a moment ago said 500 to a thousand in his mind um I think those numbers were obsolete the closer numbers that I've seen you know with my own biases thrown in right

pin but people threw around 4,000 or 5,000 Vikings and that seems logical for all sorts of different reasons um but that's a lot of Vikings in one place at one time even though that's a minuscule army throughout most of history again a sign of the level of warfare and of you know infrastructure

and capabilities and capacities in the early middle ages in this part of the world where a you know 5,000 man Viking army is unstoppable the contemporary leadership of a place like China or you know the empires in India or the Islamic world would consider that number to be something

you dealt with as part of a police action in this part of the world it is overwhelming I have read multiple accounts from multiple good people um who have different takes on what this is we used our analogy of a robing party led by some uh you know very organized and uh targeted and and

logistically sound leadership but there are people that will suggest everything from this is a giant raid for looting that just keeps going right until until it gets any natural pushback it just keeps flowing forward and others who suggest that this is an outright attempt at conquest

conceived as such planned as such and carried out as such now there's another theory that was floated around for a couple of decades pretty strongly in the last 30 or 40 years and that's the idea that maybe the violence has been over emphasized in this whole Viking thing and that maybe they

came more as sort of peaceful settlers or immigrants or whatnot I think that's been discounted at least to a certain degree but I like the way Neil Price sort of fuses the traditional view of the Vikings as these you know conquest oriented super raiders and people who are you know looking for more

of a migration and a new life and he calls it it's sort of an armed family migration and I thought to myself there's a lot of times in history where you could describe something as an armed family migration and they're definitely at least in my mind seem to be echoes of you know the American

mythology of the pioneer conquest of the west you know with the covered wagon and all that in substitute of Viking longship for the covered wagon and like I said you could almost do a little bit of mad living here little plug and play with those two societies price also has this absolutely

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

of a social experiment you know we're going to start a new country we're going to do whatever it might be and his his idea was that during this period as we've mentioned where governmental systems are changing and today we would look at it and say that personal freedom was you know being

under threat because all of these people that were used to having a sort of decentralized farmer base but everybody sort of gets a vote in the all thing get together I was being threatened by consolidation and Scandinavia was going to go all European and become a kingship and well we're

out of there we're fleeing to the new world and for them the new world is Anglo-Saxon England amongst other places and they will keep just like the settlers in the old American West they'll keep going farther west won't they as time goes on it's also very possible that this starts

one way and morphs into something else that you get a clash of armed forces here for a while and then once things settle down the Vikings who are in Anglo-Saxon England send for their relatives you know we've got a little land taken we're off here in New York it's wonderful it's beautiful

there's no glaciers anywhere to be seen come on over and bring some of your friends right we're going to settle this area this area initially is going to be Northumbria that the Vikings have just captured and Northumbria is going to be sort of ground zero for Viking them in this in the

British Isles for quite some time it's a great sort of striking out spot to hit other places and during this time period there were four main kingdoms that make up Britain a Northumbria which the Vikings had just taken south of that mercia over to the east of that east anglia where the

Vikings had originally landed made some sort of deal and became horse and then west six ruled by King Athol red in eight sixty eight which is the year after the initial taking of Northumbria they try to take the next kingdom over mercia they do this by a method the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is

going to say that they do over and over again fixing their winter quarters they call it it's essentially the moving of the concert venue in this sort of grateful dead motorhead analogy thing we have going and everyone comes in they fortify a camp sort of rather quickly and then the

crowd moves in and then there they are right in the middle of your neighborhood in a fortified camp the interesting thing about these camps is that they would give no trouble at all to any of the major powers during this area or any earlier ones it's not that's sophisticated but in this time

period and in this geographical area siege warfare is sort of you know at a low point and if the Vikings decide to you know put up some earthen mounds and some woodplashing on top of that you might as well just negotiate with them in an eight sixty eight the king of mercia who had asked

for help from the king of west six and who brought his army and so that both their armies sort of face off with the Vikings but the Vikings won't come out in place the merseans pay them to leave the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the you know devastating you know sentence where it says over and

over again by the way in its pages the merseans made peace with the army so the Vikings go back to their main base which is now Northumbria they put a puppet king on the throne but they do whatever they want the next year they sort of rest the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as an eight sixty nine this year

the army went back to York and sat there a year I have one history book that says this was the a key time period for the second wave of this invasion to happen right the people that are going to turn conquest into country come and create the infrastructure providing me women's children

the whole thing right movable wealth who knows then in eight seventy the Viking army sets out from York across his over mersea and attacks the place where they originally landed east anglia where they were hoarse so maybe the the deal lapsed by now whatever they were paid or maybe this

is just a breaking of whatever arrangement they had uh in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that in 80 eight seventy quote this year the army rode over mersea into east anglia and they are fixed their winter quarters at Thetford and in the winter king Edmund fought with them but the Danes gained

the victory and slew the king whereupon they overran all that land and destroyed all the monasteries to which they came the names of the leaders who slew the king were hingvar and hubba and at the same time they came to methamstead burning and breaking and slaying abbot and monks and all

that they they are found they made such a havoc there that a monastery which was before full rich was now reduced to nothing and quote so they kill another king here uh the traditional story for this guy who he will be canonized and turned into a saint I believe is that he was tied up

the the Vikings demanded that he renounces christian faith when he did and they shot him full of arrows and cut his head off as his usual for this error the evidence is fragmentary on the details but what's clear is the Vikings have killed yet another king in britain and taken yet another

territory so they now have north umbrae and east anglia and now they set their sights on west six before they do in eight seventy the great heathen army breaks up or at least one chunk of it moves away that's the chunk that goes northward maybe under ivar you hear sometimes

attacks the scottish kingdoms and will eventually end up in irland fighting against other Vikings it's a wonderful part of the story the irish as i may have said i don't know that they have names for the different Vikings that they run into because irland is originally one of these places that's

heavy duty norweegian Viking territory and there's a lot of crossover i mean these rating parties often involve people who are just interested in fighting and they come from all over the place but basically norweegians in irland and then daines show up and the the Vikings are known to the irish

as the light haired pagans or the dark haired pagans and the light haired pagans are the Norse and the dark haired pagans are the daines but they both involve themselves in irish politics will fight each other i mean the kings of dublin are norweegian brothers i believe and this part of the great

heathen army will head on over to irland and fight there the remaining part will be reinforced there's going to be another group that shows up called the great summer army and these people head on over into west six to take on what will turn out to be the most formidable of all the kingdoms in

britain and eight seventy one is going to be a key year in the whole affair it's known as the year of nine engagements and that gives you an idea of how many battles are fought the Vikings establish their camp at a place called redding and then they start facing off against the king of this

region called ethyl red and his younger brother Alfred now the sheer fact that they're mentioning the younger brother of the king as often as they're going to in this document should give us a clue that this document is not exactly an unbiased source it will actually be compiled a couple of

decades after this era and the person who's going to be involved in its compiling is this Alfred guy so you already get a sense of you know we're shoving a very important person in this later story into this earlier story and making sure you know where he is in the earlier story

here's the way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has its entry for eight seventy one which as you might imagine is one of its longer entries it goes on for a minute and then it says quote about four nights after this king ethyl red and Alfred his brother led their main army to redding where they

fought with the enemy and there was much slaughter on either hand alderman ethyl wolf being among the slain but the Danes kept possession of the field and about four nights after this king ethyl red and Alfred his brother fought with all the army on ashdown and the Danes were overcome and

quote thing goes on to explain you know the tactics of this battle and apparently the Vikings got the high ground first and separated into two separate divisions you know two separate shield walls and so this was emulated on the other side and ethyl red commands one shield wall and Alfred the

other as I was reading this story it has a sort of you know Alfred's a very important figure in British history arguably the most important I mean you could make a case this is the the father of England and his story is in so many places positively Churchillian you know the 1940 version of

Churchill we will fight on the beaches on the landings you know with the Vikings playing the parts of the Germans and I all of a sudden remembered that Churchill actually wrote about this era he published something called a history of the English speaking peoples and he covered Alfred the great

in it and so I thought well I wonder if Winston Churchill's portrayal of Alfred the great in history is Churchillian turns out it is this is Winston Churchill talking about Alfred the great and it sounds like he could be talking about himself he writes quote the results of this victory

did not break the power of the Danish army in a fortnight they were again in the field but the battle of ashdown justly takes its place among historic encounters because of the greatness of the issue if the west sacksens had been beaten all England would have sunk into he then anarchy

since they were victorious the hope still burned for a civilized Christian existence in this island this was the first time the invaders had been beaten in the field the last of the sacks in kingdoms had withstood the assault upon it Alfred had made the sacksens feel confidence in

themselves again they could hold their own in an open fight the story of this conflict at ashdown was for generations a treasured memory of the sacks and writers it was Alfred's first battle end quote it will hardly be his last in his classic 1950s work the age of faith historian

will derand gives his life the quick rundown when he says quote Alfred mounted the throne of west sacks in the age of 22 asr a chronicleer describes him as then illiteratus which could mean either illiterate or latinless he was apparently epileptic and suffered a seizure at his wedding feast

but he is pictured as a vigorous hunter handsome and graceful and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill a month after his a session he led his little army against the Danes at Wilton and was so badly defeated that to save his throne he had to buy peace from the foe but in

eight seventy eight he wanted decisive victory atethanden eddington he says half the Danish house crossed the channel to raid weakened france the rest by the piece of wed more agreed to confine themselves to northeastern england and what came to be called the dain law end quote

i admire derance brevity there but the truth of the matter is the rest of alfred the great's life is going to be trying to deal with this arch nemesis of his these viking peoples either defending his territory from them or trying to reconquer the lands that they took from the english some of the

vikings at this time settle down and the sources talk about the viking rulers in these territories parceling up the land and handing them out to you know members of these viking groups that are like oklahoma sooners the ones who want to settle down get a farm start a family do so the ones who

want to continue living the scantan avian version of levita loca just sort of crossed the channel looking for softer targets and as fate would have it just as anglos action england's getting tougher the places that drove them there in the first place when charles the bald played superman and let

those bullets bounce off his chest and hit alfred's kingdom now ricochet off of alfred right back to where they originally came from there are some primary source entries and most of the history books i have have suggested that the great heathen army can be tracked as it goes back over the

english channel to the continent and raises hell over there i've got some other histories that suggest that after the alfred the great treaty you shouldn't call whatever's left the great heathen army anymore because of course as we said these viking hosts have an organic sort of flash mob kind

of field of them and pick up members and lose members all the time make alliances with other groups of vikings that are squatting you know in territories that they move to these groups are very fluid and hard to you know keep track of what they're doing but when these vikings make

peace in anglosaxe in england and this is the pattern it the violence just crops up elsewhere whether it's the same band doing this or it just so happens i don't know maybe it's all the roving people looking for the next you know where's the next oil strike right where's the next

gold rush um but in the early eight eighties you see it back in freesia again and freesia's always getting hit right because it's the modern and day netherlands as we said it's right by den mark so you're right there but this time in the early eight eighties the raids moved down into germany way down into germany in places like cologne and tree or get hit famously ironically and symbolically the vikings will stable their horses in the royal palace at achen where charlamagne you know used to rule

all this was recorded by adam of braiman a couple hundred years later he had access to a Danish king and supposedly you know this is what the dain history said from a couple hundred years previously but the description follows a similar sort of an account that you were heard in many of the places

struck by the vikings and adam of braiman writes quote then was saksini laid waste by the daines and north men duke bruno was killed with twelve other counts and bishops deat hard and markvard were slain at that time freesia was depopulated in the city of eutreque raised saint radbod bishop of the

town retired before the persecution fixed his sea at deventer and taking his stand there took vengeance on the pagans with the sword of anathema then the pirates set fire to cologne and treeer they stabled their horses in the palace at achen the people of maids began to erect fortifications

for fear of the barbarians why say more cities with their inhabitants bishops with their whole flocks were struck down at one time stately churches were burned with the faithful and quote now this is an interesting period in carol engine history at this same time because this is the

end of carol engine history you get the last guy who tries to put Humpty dumpty back together again his name is charles the fat and charles the fat gets an army together goes up to this area confronts the Vikings in germany and gives them like twenty four twenty five hundred pounds of

silver to stop oh and some land to settle on and they're going to convert to Christianity if you happen to be a person from cologne for example or treeer or any one of these places who's just had their farm destroyed all your stuff stolen family members killed others taken into

slavery and the emperor shows up with an army that can really deal with these people and I don't care what size Viking army you had they do not want to deal with anybody's royal army if they can avoid it I'm thinking this is the chance to show you what you get when you mess right with my

people it's payback time and charles the fat essentially looking like he knuckles under here obviously he's not going to play well now there is a sort of a back channel that there's always been a historical thought that maybe charles the fat had something going on here that we don't

know about and that maybe this is intelligent behavior if you understood his position at the time in a way that our sources don't allow us to understand it now I don't know but he's got a bad rap at least some people have said that he is the one of the most maligned figures in all

Viking history because by paying off these Vikings like that it just displays weakness and as the evidence has already shown is it just showed an Anglo-Saxon England if you calm things down in one area they're just going to go somewhere else and it turns out the somewhere else is in

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

times but the so-called siege of Paris from 885 to 886 is one of the more famous Viking incidents ever it is also one where we have an eyewitness account but it's a really difficult eyewitness account to use it's from a guy a monk actually called abo and he writes a piece that the translator of the version that I have calls a piece of magical realism where the ordinary he says becomes fully charged with the otherworldly but that's not abnormal for the literature of the time period and this is a

poem actually but it's a poem by a guy who watched the siege of Paris it's the first eyewitness account we have but it's not all that trustworthy I mean when the battle goes bad and the reason it turns around is because a couple of saints intervene well you know you need to take it maybe with a grain assault right a piece of magical realism but the only piece of magical realism by an eyewitness so for example when abo describes a Viking climbing up a ladder getting a mixture of tar wax and oil

that has been boiled poured on his head and his head explodes one can say that that's the sort of thing an eyewitness would know that maybe we can tease out of the rest of the story that might be a little unbelievable but if you want to see the you know dilemma facing the Vikings here just go

look at a satellite photo right now the island in the middle of the scene it's the part of Paris that the really old part where Notre Dame is and everything else and it's an island right in the middle of this river it's an ancient place recognized as important I mean clovus the first king of the

Franks had his throne there I believe I mean it's it's sort of a seed of power area main sort of center of Paris even back during this time period and for 20 years ever since Charles the ball had said you know we're going to start a ready reaction force we're going to stop selling best weapons

to the pagans and we're going to create fortified bridges they've been working on fortified bridges right and there's one almost done here and there's another one made of wood that is done and those two connect this island in the same to the two banks of the river and the Vikings want through

there now abo is called by some a surreal exaggerator uh del brook is merciless in saying his convoluted hexometers are not to be believed in any way shape or form but as I said sometimes you can pull out the little nuggets like what happens to someone's head when you pour boiling oil

on it he says 700 ships show up in the river uh which is a huge exaggeration no matter how you slice it but these Vikings were making deals with local Viking groups on the scene and they often did these sort of joint expedition arrangements and there may have been 8000 Vikings which you know

that's a ton of Vikings um supposedly they just want passage right to raid down river and according to abo who may have been in the room again what can we trust what can't we trust he's got his own reasons for writing this he says that the Viking warlord who he says is not a king

but does command a lot of warriors shows up and and ask for the deal and um um my translation of the Viking attacks on paris is by uh doctor uh neuromaldos and in it um the bishop spell differently i'm just going to give him his traditional name which is jazlin

the other person in the story is count odo who's important to it and then the Viking leader zigfried and in the poem abo says of this conversation where the Viking leader shows up and basically says don't be a fool just let us go by we don't want any trouble with you uh i

should also point out that abo doesn't describe these Vikings as sort of any sort of stereotypical barbarians loudish drunk broots you know uh in uproarous i mean he he calls them grim several times that's the translation grim man and he writes quote and went in two days these ships made landfall

hard by the city zigfried did make his way to the great hall of the famed shepherd though king in name only he still commanded many warriors after bowing his head he addressed the bishop in these words oh jazlin show mercy to yourself and the flock given you that you may not come to ruin

grant our plea we ask you give us your consent that we might go our way well beyond this city nothing in it shall we touch but shall preserve and safeguard all the honors that belong to you and odo meaning count odo who is the noblest of all counts and who is the future king and quote

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

part of the french tradition that's similar in vibe to the outford tradition in britain right these are the heroes that stand up to the Vikings when the major authorities like charles the fat won't right this is batman and this is the french version of the time period and it's interesting

their contemporaries of outford right and abo writes the response the bishop and odo have to this Viking this grim man's demand is quote then the lords bishop in greatest loyalty offered these words by our king charles have we been given this city to guard by him whose majestic realm spreads

almost over the whole earth by the lords will and who is king and master of the mighty the realm must not suffer by the destruction of this city but rather this city must save the realm and preserve the peace now if by chance these walls were entrusted to you as they are to us and you were asked to

do all that you have asked to us would you deem it right and agree then zigfried answers by my honor rather my head were lopped off by a sword and thrown to the dogs however if you do not agree to my requests we shall have our sea g engines at daybreak hurl poisoned darts at you

with sunset you shall no hunger's curse it shall go on for years thus having spoken he went his way and assembled his men and quote historians have no idea how many people this warlord commands the translator for my abo says that the number abo gives his 40,000 Vikings versus 200 defenders

should be discounted it's a religiously symbolic number not to be taken literally but once again that leaves us with no numbers my encyclopedia military history says this is the high water mark of Viking attacks on the continent you know against the formerly or current frankish empire

i don't know if that's exactly true but it's pretty safe to say that this is one of the largest groupings of Vikings that the world has ever seen and eight to ten thousand seems a very possible and that's a lot of Vikings they have a camp nearby we are told by abo that they

are raping pillaging taking slaves killing everybody in the vicinity he makes them sound over and over again like Tolkien's orcs there's a lot of Tolkien in this actually in the defense of the Vikings though this is standard operating procedure in the pre-modern world much more normal

to have this happen in a siege situation than not go back to your ancient Greece right where the traditional hoplite deal unwritten agreement is that if you hide behind your walls and say come and get us we can scour your territory right until you decide to come out and fight for it

the other thing in defense of the Vikings here is that this is an army that has to feed itself where are they going to get the food from these aren't Roman troops or Chinese troops or you know troops that are going to have long supply chains that continually feed them from continually

reinforce supply depots these people live off the land as Napoleon and his revolutionary troops what that does to the land but these people in Paris are kind of shut up especially in the one central island which we should imagine having an entire sort of early medieval stone wall around it

with those two bridges that we talked about and the Vikings are going to fight essentially a battle against fortifications and fortifications are as we all know a force multiplier so if they out number the defenders by quite a bit it's not as big of a deal as if we were talking about a field

battle here and in October November 885 the Vikings assault these defenses and if you want a sense of the rhythm the rhythm is that there are several big pushes over the next 11 months and in between those pushes it settles down to sort of a typical blockade situation there's a lot of innovation

that happens and a lot of it involves fire at one point the Vikings will take I think the sources say three big ships load them with incendiary material light them on fire guide them down the river with ropes you know both banks and try to steer it into the bridge and at least burn up all the defenders there may be a clue into the building practices of the early middle ages when we find out that they've been working on the defenses here for 20 plus years and they're still not totally

completed they build them really well but maybe it takes a long time the stone tower on the stone bridge is not quite done yet and this becomes a focal point in the early battle but you will read abo says about you'll read about them essentially dropping things on the

Vikings all the time as the Vikings have ladders or on ships below the bridge and they're trying to make their way up at one point that giant wheel and it makes it sound like it's massive is thrown over the side now both says it crushes six Vikings who are then dragged back to the boats

where they're apparently keeping the corpses the mixture of pitch wax and oil that is boiled and thrown over the side we talked about it earlier to me the most interesting part of that part of abo's poem is that the soldiers on both sides talk to each other during the fighting and I forget

that this happens but in an era where people were close enough to do that I guess it's only natural what would you say to somebody you were trying to kill or that was trying to kill you and abo has another interesting line I had to read the translation several times and I hope I got it right

but I had thought it was one person that was yelling stuff from the Christian side to the Viking side but abo makes it pretty clear that this is like a group chant which begs the question how did these people know what to say so they must have said it multiple times and and the way he writes it

makes it sound almost like a sports chant like a soccer chant and like every time that they throw the cauldron of boiling you know pitch or whatever over the side and scorch a Viking they all yell the same thing here's a taste of the battle as abo describes it talking about the Viking assault on that unfinished tower and they made a lot of progress one day and then they go to sleep come back for the next day to continue where they left off only to find that the people of Paris have come out

with their hammers and chisels and nails and everything and with wood instead of stone rebuilt a lot of what the Vikings destroyed the day before so here's how the story goes from abo quote now the tower did not shine forth with all its magnificence for it was far from finished

but its foundations were solid and stood firmly grounded proudly it rose its crennels were sound during the night that followed after the battle had ended a wooden tear was built all the way around the tower raised a top the old bastion and half as high as before thus together the sun and the

Danes be held this new tower the latter were soon locked in a frightful fight with the faithful meaning the Christians arrows flew here there through the air blood gushed and flowed darts stones and javelins were hurled by ballista and slingshots nothing was seen between heaven

and earth but these projectiles the many arrows made the tower built in the night grown out it was the night that gave it birth as I have chanted above fear sees the city people screamed battle horns resounded calling everyone to come and protect the trembling tower

Christians fought and ran about trying to resist the assault end quote he then talks about how amazing victorious Odo as he calls the count was again this is Batman stepping in when the central authority is either you know too corrupt too ignorant or too hapless to step in and do

their job and he comes in and he's he's everywhere to be seen once bishop jostle dies apparently of disease it's Odo all the time he's as we said a little bit like Alfred the great in England at this moment abo says of him quote he fortified those who were exhausted revived their strength

and rushed on about the tower striking down the enemy as for those who sought to dig beneath the walls with iron picks he served them up with oil and wax and pitch which was all mixed up together and made into a hot liquid on a furnace which burned the hair of the daines made their skull

split open indeed many of them died and others went and sought out the river and then our men with one voice my emphasis with one voice loudly exclaimed right badly scorched are you end quote to make matters worse if you are a blistering dying viking and you retire towards your ships

in the hopes you can get a little medical attention or whatnot it turns out abo says their wives are there but instead of being in a mood to you know moisten their brow give them some water you know and comfort them they're heckling them basically saying what the heck is this why are

you coming back here get back in the fight you wimp you know that kind of thing now you'd be inclined to discount this as some sort of exaggeration or weird invention of abos accepted actually fits as a data point in a long running amount of historical evidence we have for at least

pagan Germanic women doing this and maybe even a broader section of europeans going back to Celtic times doing this with the the wives and the women of the group are there at the battle in fact the Icelandic sagas of the viking era from later in this period actually say the same

thing so this is another data point that suggests that the wives are there and in the old Germanic tales by the Romans there were wagons that were behind the battlefield and the and the wives were there here it's the ships that play the same role and the women have several different approaches

they can use this is the the one you see all the time the heckling but they also have the ones you know the Roman things they would bear their breasts and tell their loved ones what would happen to them if they lost this battle and the other side conquered them right think about what

will happen to your family that's here I mean would you fight harder if your family was at the battlefield you were fighting on and finally the last thing that sometimes the women in these situations do is actually do what you would hope if you were a viking that they would do

moisten your brow give you something cool to drink and maybe give you some food and and nurture injuries but not this time abo says that they're heckling sort of go to the men back into the cauldron and the fight there is a ton of almost like commando activity maybe is the

best way to describe it that happens between the big attacks you know people will scale the walls in one spot you know a couple dozen and then a couple dozen of the defenders have to take them on so there's a bunch of force 10 from navaron stuff in this abo including the way that they

eventually solve the problem because the Batman count auto character is going to slip out of the blockade get all the way back to the command palace of you know the emperor himself Charles the factor if you want to be a little kinder Charles the stout says please come and help Paris he's

inclined not to the sources say but has some advisors say it would look really bad if you just let the Vikings do this so he goes through the laborious slow process of putting a royal army together the laborious slow process of having it may having it make its way up to where the battle is happening

then they establish a camp there and they start killing every Viking that they find outside the Viking camp and now you have a bit of a face off right royal camp with Charles the fat Viking enclosure nearby and then of course you know Paris under siege and bodies rotting in the sun

which is going to equal disease you're not going to want to have to sit there very long waiting for something to happen when people are dying as I said Bishop bishops jostle supposedly dies from disease so the Vikings make a deal with Charles the fat and it's the exact same sort of deal it

sounds like that they asked for before this entire 11 months siege even started in other words the Vikings got the same deal that they asked for originally and the emperor gives it to them can you imagine how the people of Paris having endured 11 months of this feel when the royal

army finally shows up and you have a chance to chastise the people who've inflicted this pain and suffering on you and instead he gives them a bunch of silver and let's them continue down past the now broken and destroyed bridges of Paris down the saying to raise havoc deeper into the interior

of France right the things that Bishop jostle and abo says had said we have a responsibility we have to protect France and the deal the emperor says is I'll give you a bunch of silver and you can go raid these people in burgundy who are in revolt against me anyway this will contribute to the fall

eventually of Charles the fat whose empire is going to splinter into multiple kingdoms and the guy who gets to be the king of this part of the former Carolinian empire is going to be Count Odo who is going to start his own royal line in French history which is it one of the again one can

make a case that this is like the founding foundations of France. Charlotte Maine would be another one of those possible candidates for that title by the time Count Odo becomes king Odo in France in the late eight eighties the spike in the piracy stock market that we call the Viking age had been

going on for a hundred years and the economic costs are unquantifiable if we want to get a little teeny window into what the cost might look like historian Dan Jones in his book powers and thrones quotes another historian who estimates that 14% of all the silver pennies minted by the entire

Frankish empire over the entire century of the eight hundreds went to pay off the Vikings just for protection money just for go away funds right doesn't include any of the money the Vikings directly stole or looted in their many many many attacks doesn't include any of the money

that the empire had to spend to defend themselves or fight the Vikings doesn't include any of the lost productivity or emotional costs of all the people the Vikings killed or stole and sold in slavery 14% of all the silver pennies and direct payments for protection

sometimes when you see estimates of what organized crime drains away from a society's economy kind of looks similar doesn't it in some societies anyway nonetheless you would think that with the nine hundreds approaching that finally after a hundred years of steel sharpening steel and weeding out the incompetence and bringing the effective people to the fore that things would look good for the traditional opponents of the Vikings here right King Odo in France and Alfred in Anglo-Saxon

England but by about nine hundred nine oh one nine oh two both guys are dead and in fact you know the Batman that is King Odo will live to eventually see the hero become the villain when he will disappoint his fanboy abo and pay off the Vikings himself at one point right pulling a Charles the

fat if you will it just shows how unavoidable it was sometimes but if you're looking at this in nine hundred you can't help but notice that these Viking groups that had been disjointed fragmentary groups of people under warlords or chieftains are starting more and more to unite into more

viable larger economic and political entities they're in the process of state building and they're getting stronger all the time it's almost like you can hear the ominous Darth Vader music in the distance approaching Alfred dead Odo dead the Vikings consolidating the nine hundred looks

particularly scary if you are a Viking opponent the weird part about this era though as you could also apply sort of a rosham on lens here and say that if you're a Viking you may be hearing ominous Darth Vader music going into the nine hundreds as well we quoted a couple of recent historians

who point out that the Vikings in this period were well aware that their culture and belief system and way of life was under siege they are by nine hundred and endangered species the cultural equivalent of a white rhino a representation of a style of Germanic language paganism on its way out

in the last convulsions of its dying days soon to see its values supplanted and its gods abandoned but even if you have mortally wounded a white rhino doesn't mean you still can't be gourd so far as far as we've been discussing elves and trolls and sorcery and female spirits

inhabiting all Viking peoples don't seem to have played a huge role in the story but if that's the framework that your reality is constructed upon it's hard to tease out exactly what kind of an important role it plays in the world view of a people who in some cases are fighting to preserve

a world view the nine hundreds in the period we're entering in now is in books like Gwen Jones' Viking history book the one I grew up with this is the period where he really starts the conversation and everything we've already talked about is almost like prehistory which should tell you something

in part two we'll get into a little bit of the material troubling difficult and strange as it is it gives the Viking soul at least a little bit of a chance to sing that and some runes and a long shipper too and you can get very far in the world and in part two

we'll see exactly how far the Vikings get before that wave breaks and is rolled over by the exact same opponent that rolled over all of these people's precursors the end of a process that's been going on since the Roman Republic all that and more in part two of Twilight of the

Isher. I've always said I'm an uncomfortable pitchman because I really need to like or use whatever it is that I'm talking about and I seem to like or use few things these days but I do use this or at least I use the first version of this then I use the second version of this and in February

2023 the third version of this is coming out and I will instantly snap it upside unseen and I haven't seen it I've got a list of features that are going to be involved with it but it doesn't matter to me I know I know what I'm getting here I almost feel like this ad should just be me saying

hey company of heroes three is coming out in February 2023 some some products sell themselves into me this is one of those games that at least from my standpoint I can't stop playing I mean the company here is two has been around quite a while and I'm still playing it and they have all these

mods that people create so there's this endless sort of growth tree that comes off of at least one and two where it just seems to never get old never get stale and once you have sort of your base foundation there you can play it for years and I'm living proof of that I mean I'm told that

the graphics are better I like the graphics on two I'm going to like the graphics on three legendary battles that they're including are going to be like LLMaine the landings at Anzeo the Modicus Hino struggle in the central Italy area they have some things that I don't know what they do but I'm

excited about them a turn-based dynamic campaign map so that sounds strategic to me that'll be fun something that they call a full tactical pause feature again I'm all ears they have one thing under a heading here I'm just going to read it verbatim it says lead both

the Deuchus Africa core and their assault across Libya and the Allied War effort to liberate the Italian peninsula in our biggest single player offering to date excited about that I'm easy to excite about this game though like I said I've been playing it for years and I played

the precursors to this game which are some of the greatest games that have ever been invented for PC platforms anywhere so like I said I feel like I should just be saying that it's coming out in February 23 get yours in February there's a tease here for the graphics I think when it says

battle from the sweeping deserts and OACs of North Africa to the sleepy fishing villages and rolling mountains of Italy okay I'm in company of heroes three you'll be out in February 2023 get yours and let me know what you think and you know I should have I should have mine by February right I'm not waiting till March