Show 69 - Twilight of the Aesir

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 a fee. 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 Hollywood-ized barbarian tropes. 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 vikings iris 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 they 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 Samba 7 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. The events. The figures. The figures. I take pride in the words. It's been I'm feeling the drama.

“The deep question. If we dig deep in our history in our document, and remember that we are not”

descended from a fearful man. It's hard core history. One of my favorite quotes in all history. 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, an autocratic leader of the former Soviet Union, a communist state. 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 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

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, meaning armor and soldiers and guns and those kinds of”

things. Stalin doesn't want to talk about spiritual help. He wants to 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. Thor's Angels extra utilizing some of the cutting room floor stuff

“that we had to cut out. But that show is about what happened to a religion that started off as a”

minority offshoot religion from Judaism goes to a much persecuted religion, a minority religion in the Roman Empire, to eventually getting a Roman emperor converting to Christianity and then a later Roman emperor converting the whole empire to officially Christian and you have the pope and Christianity in a pretty good position until the Roman Empire 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. People known as the Franks located in the modern-day area

sort of France just changed 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 Carl Deere Grossa has a

lot of name, Charlemagne's how he's known to history is probably you could make a very good argument.

“The most important geopolitical figure in European history after the fall of the Western Roman Empire”

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

that people to really the heights of European power and dominance Charlemagne will be when he starts out a king of the Franks and by the time he ends he's the emperor of a renovated Roman Empire is the way it would have been seen and the church with him all the way but somewhere along the way the sword arm of the church this protection provided to the Pope by this Frankish people turned from defensive in character to offensive in character and it's hard to know how much the

situation was actually playing out on the ground but by the time you get to Charlemagne the way

“it's playing out on the ground is genocidal and has a direct bearing on what happens afterwards”

Charlemagne was famously involved in a multi-generational war against a people to his east who are called the Saxons now using ancient sources to describe people's ethnicities cultures

or political affiliations of tribal peoples is difficult because they're not always consistent

and people change the Saxons though were a people that before this period were part of the great immigration of peoples from in western Europe around the north of Germany and Denmark and 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 with the Saxons are to try to convert that pagan people as you might”

imagine sometimes the Saxons were amenable to this and sometimes they weren't Charlemagne isn't about giving them choices in the matter though his wars against the Saxons will go on for like 30 years and get progressively nastier Saxon is a tough place to fight by the way in his book Charlemagne father of a continent historian Elessandro Barbaros sets up the conflict this way quote it was a ferocious war in a country with little or no civilization with neither roads nor cities

and entirely covered with forests and marshland the Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods

as Germans had always done before converting to Christianity and the Franks did not hesitate to

“put to death anyone who refused to be baptized and 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 the numbers 4500 Saxons beheaded in a single afternoon at the edge of a river in a town called Verdant 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 plan to conquer Saxony and incorporate it into his kingdom and his kingdom was Christian and they were

going to have any pagans and 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 are to be killed Saxons who don't follow the

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

frisions 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 he then the barbarian he then my favorite amongst these is a Saint called lebwin and lebwin like so many these other people trying to convert the people in

to be martyred he's going to be one of these ones who survives he goes to preach to the Saxons

and these guys would come in by the way and they would do things like burn or chop down their sacred trees that they believed you know like held up the universe or were the pathways from the gods to 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 C.H. 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 biggest assemblies that they have it 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

vestments which might have looked like a superhero outfit to these barbarian types he's got the gospels in in the crook of his arm which is like a book of magic and he's got a cross with him which is almost like a religious weapon if you're looking at it from a people who believe heavily in things like magic and according to the unknown author who chronicles lebwin's life this is how it goes quote suddenly lebwin appeared in the middle of the circle closed 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 it is 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're 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 priv you of your inheritance slay you with the sword and hand over your possessions to whom he has a mind and afterwards you will be slaves both to

him and to his successors end quote now I can't figure out if that is a warning or a prophecy or a threat but that king he's talking about is Charlemagne and he does just what 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

kingdom or state of any kind there are lots of what are called petty kings sometimes these sorts

“of entities are referred to as chiefdams I mean Norway for example I believe during this period”

has something like 15 different petty kings who are more like warlords and a lot of these cases University of Oslo historian and Viking expert John Bedar Sigurdson 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 juttland that but's 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 vitu Kent who may be married to one of the daughters of one of these Danish petty kings and when vitu Kent 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 Charlemagne 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 Charlemagne already sang stuff like that when he writes quote perhaps the first seeds of trouble were sung when vitu Kent the Saxon fled before the swords of the Franks and took refuge in Juttland 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 daines gave shelter to vitu Kent but they sent fair words to Charles and did their best to turn away his wrath yet when vitu Kent yielded and was baptized in 785 they must have felt like their own turn to face the oncoming storm had now arrived in the quote the Danish kings during this era will fortify and perhaps expand and already the existing fortification which separated sort of the territory of the daines from the territory

of the Saxons or soon to be the territory of the Carolingians it was called the Dan work or the Dan of Erika or the Dan of Erika and you can still go see the remains by the way of that long something like miles and miles of wall across the entire sort of

“narrow area of jettland 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 people's during the Viking age is much better examined for example history in Neil Price in his book the children of ashen elm suggests that these Danish people the Scandinavians in the Viking era felt threatened the entire time and may have thought of themselves the ones who are 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

was being carved out at the point of a sword by charlomains 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 charlomain died in eight fourteen decades after the seaborn attacks had begun the ninth century division of the charolingian 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 and quote now i don't know about you but i have to really try to get my brain into the right head space to see these Viking warrior raiders whose nickname given to them by the English is the slaughter wolves to see the slaughter wolves is 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

“charlomain but there's others one of the advantages is it answers a key question in this whole affair”

the question of why now why do you have the Viking age kick off when it does and not 100 years earlier or not 100 years later if it's a response to certain actions on the part of a well-armed militant Christianity continually moving north will then the reason it happens when it does is due to charlomain'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 on

other root causes and you get a spike in the stock market maybe even an extended sort of bull market and maybe you could look at the Viking age as a three or so century unprecedented bull market in piracy

“another key root cause that's often cited for this era's explosion in piracy is”

we'll call it the equivalent of having a place to fence your stolen goods right I mean if you steal something how do you convert that into cash for example or how does cash get converted into something tangible that's usable because during this era you see the growth in these imperiums these trading centers these nodes of economic activity in the Scandinavian world that pop up places like Berke 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 include Europe and Asia and Northern Africa and the Middle East places where you can take stolen goods and fence them places where you can convert cash or pretty metals that don't have any other purpose into usable goods and Berke as a good example

of one of these places where there's a ton of legitimate commerce going on here if you have a farm in you know what's now modern day Sweden and you want your excess food to make you some money or get bartered for something else you bring it to one of these trade imperiums and you can do it there maybe you've got wood that you've chopped or maybe you have traded with

to trade those or maybe you've just gotten back from a raid some place else and you have slaves

“or you a silver or something like that that you want to convert into more tangible usable goods”

that fit your needs well 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 also possible that all this wealth coming into Scandinavia through piracy is creating a level of inflation I mean they're finding

tons and tons of coins from the Islamic states in Viking era Scandinavia and always have it may

be the largest repository of certain kinds of Islamic coins anywhere but that might mean that the cost of everything is going up I mean Scandinavia is a society where gift giving is the road to power right gift giving is how you create friends and relationships and friends and relationships are the sort of supporters that propel Scandinavian leaders into rulership roles

“according to historian John Bighard Sigerson he says that violence was the Vikings most important”

export but that at home quote they were not particularly blood thirsty 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 and 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 artists conceptions or even the skeletons of these ships that they've 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 rating 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 used 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 volcanic leak 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 need to survive from farther afield so there's never any

shortage of possible root causes I tend to myself always default towards this idea of collective human behavior and I've talked about this many times and it's the idea that as individuals we are unpredictable as all get out but when you get us in larger groups we sort of devolve toward the mean and then our activities become a little bit more understandable and predictable in advance and can you imagine being in let's just say some small Norwegian fishing village during this

era with no centralized kingdom where you have hundreds of different you know chieftonships

flashing around a whole bunch of conspicuous wealth better clothes wife running around with some very

“expensive looking broochies to pin their cloaks with they paying for everybody's drinks at the”

tavern with some hacksilver and maybe a new slave or two by their side you're going to sit there and say hey Olaf or life or Eric or Harold would 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 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 to 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 he then 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 often times they're located on islands just offshore they are all at once sites for

monkeys 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 wine making 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 as 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 were a Christian living nearby one of the worst things you could do in your world view to imperial your mortal soul would be to go steal stuff from the house of god and kill his servants that's bad Christian karma anyway 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 again

Charlemagne you know he'd leave going some other expedition they'd have a giant revolt first thing they do is burn the monasteries and kill the monks so it was 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 gun sounding for the Viking era you know which is famously like 7 93 at Lindisfarne in the monastery up in northeastern Britain that this is probably a bit of an illusion created from our lack of knowing about other earlier raids they've found for example a famous now

they're a quickly famous Viking burial in what's now the Baltic area that predates the famous Lindisfarne raid of 793 by decades and so it's pretty possible that this low level of piracy was going on all the time especially in Scandinavia and 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 a 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

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 killed the Reeve right they murder the king's official and this is often looked at

is 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 the father in the family finds someone who's

father was actually killed by Billy the kid an old timer who tells the young boy listen this

person you're romanticizing is not worth your romanticizing right they were bad people and this was an exciting fun stuff this was murder well there's a similar sort of point made by his historian neoprice 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 adventuring 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 way side

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

board 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 the end of all man I think I'm safe in saying

“I mean if you want to study the roots of warfare you're gonna find that the earliest historical”

account you can find and read about our from the middle of the story I mean you need to go into

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 and they study conflict between simians they 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 whatever time period and you don't protect it somebody's gonna 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 Americans societies will build these tall sorts of abodes or in rock cliffs where they can pull up ladders if the dangerous raiding peoples nearby them show up right so we're just gonna flee and escape them

and 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 it 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 cannon 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 knots 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 international naval patrols go out there and take on these you know fast boats with guys armed with AK 47 somewhat 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 man hat and 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 cave 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 47's

stealing everything they can get their hands on by the time the residents wake up you've got

“screams and smoke and armed men and before you know it there's five guys in your room taking your”

stuff stealing your wife into slavery and killing you 200 Vikings in Laguna Beach would create absolute havoc and if they're gone before the sun sets again we don't have very long to respond do you now in the modern age you don't need very long to respond which is why the last 100 or so years as 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

area reconnaissance would have seen him 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 hands-down broke 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 striking 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 landed in emerald bay what kind of 200 people are you gonna 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 as societal element that well let me put it to you this way one of my professors wants that 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 he the inversion of the Vikings believe in are gods that do this kind of thing too these are not turned 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

“chance is you're going to be at the important table in Valhalla with Odin the way you handle”

your weapons matters whether you're flier or not matters and the more you gloriously seek out death and don't fear it the better your chances if you know having a place to sit when the music stops at either Valhalla or some of the other places you can go in the Viking and Germanic you know 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 with a

societal carrots and sticks encourage fearlessness 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 making stronger making faster just making 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

China doing kung fu or anything we're talking about you know the the guys who have their heads

“shade 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 fearsiveness 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 remind me of my own culture in the United States or the traditional one that we celebrate anyway

“in both good and bad I mean you can see one of these elements going on in Viking society”

that reminds me of the old American trope of go west young man right that line and that would play equally well to young Viking males too right go make your fortune venture forward risk and get reward right 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 this ship and it's a little like forging off on a giant grand male bonding expedition with some threat posed and some

challenges faced and some daring do established and some you know treasure looted and you come home and you can afford the wife now and you can put it down payment on the farm and you get your life started right you've made your bones there's a little bit of an element of

“that in this whole Viking sort of culture that encourages people to go out and do something”

like this and then the fearsomeness and the fearlessness well has a difference of cast about it doesn't it if you're a monk having to try to fend off of Viking acts with your crucifix 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 we meant 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 793 all through up until the early 800s England Scotland Ireland the islands around those islands are getting hit a lot and we probably only know about the major raids it's likely there were lots of little attacks and even if one Viking ship with 30 Vikings in it pulls up near the shore somewhere that's quite a bit to have to deal with especially if they're back in their ships in 20 minutes right that those 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 historical lens is that the people during this early time period that are getting hit the hardest right that 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 rated so often into what's now Scotland that the Roman name for some of these Irish scody or scody

eventually evolved into the name for the entire region and of course the only reason you have angles and Saxons that gave the name Angeland right England to England is because hundreds of years before they came over in a very similar sort of wave of Valhallaish pantheists arriving on the shores of this island and terrorizing the locals in a very similar way as Hans Delbrook had written about this time period and he cast it in sort of cycles but this is what we talked about in

Thor's Angels too and he had said quote we now see a repetition of the conditions that developed in the Roman Empire after the Lymees 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 than the Saxons in the realm of the now Christianized Saxons. The era of very easy targets is going to end in the not too distant future for the reasons we mentioned

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 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 or I think you'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 Carolinian Empire starts sort of devolving into civil war and disintegration in 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 fry 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 trader or a raider yes regardless what it means is if you've got lots of these Scandinavians in all the trading centers in the entire region you are getting

first class you know information on the ground we met as well think of a lot of these traders slash raiders as intelligence operatives right or if we're gonna 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 watchmen 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 rating 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 Mueller, 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 and arguably the hardest hit during the entire Viking age but i won't follow the timeline verbatim i was trying to get a

sense of the time though in how long something takes and what a person alive during the time period might have noticed and understanding as we said that there's going to be a lot of Viking raids that are too small to have been recorded that would have been a part of these people's rumor mills and life and sort of you know what are you here's going on else we're kind of information that we don't get today just going from the ones that were big enough to make it into the

stick that's arguable but let's just say eight for the sake of argument let's say you're an

“Anglo-Saxon kid we'll call you Athal Dan and you get apprentice out to the court of Sharlamain”

not an impossible thing to have happened i put you there so that you'll be able to be one of the few people in this time period that's actually privy to the news might have heard of all these things might be getting reports and if you're eight years old in 789 and Athal Dan is in Sharlamain's court

he will certainly hear of that first incident we mentioned earlier the fate the famous arrival

on the shores in England where the Danish man show up the reef 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 Athal Dan is young he's eight now it's four years later 793 when you have lindest hard famously right and that's the one that shocks everybody that is the traditional kickoff

date for the Viking age and Athal Dan here would have gone from eight in 789 to 12 in 793 so

all those Viking raids that were flying out of 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 794 795 so while Athal Dan is 12 13 14 these occasional raids these places being hit here in there as part of his reality there's to be a little bit of a break on the big timeline and then in 798 the Vikings raid the coast of Ireland so Athal Dan would be 17 years old when that happens the very next year he'll be 18 years old when the Vikings launch a raid large enough to

make it into the history books in southern France and Aquitaine when he is 19 years old Charlemagne in 800 will strengthen the defenses the anti-piracy defenses the fleet the coastal

“watch all that kind of stuff right so for every action there's an equal an opposite reaction”

Charlemagne heartens the Vikings targets now of course this can do a number of things can't it the hope 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 what you're really asking for is a more serious effort if 20 40 60 Vikings can no longer get the job done maybe 500 600 2000 Vikings can more on that in a minute when Athal Dan is 21 years old the monastery at Iona in northern

Scotland will be raided a second time three years later when he's 24 years old in 806 ADCE

Iona will be raided a third time and between 60 and 70 monks will be slaughtered by the Vikings so these are all things that Athal Dan and his living memory would have known about by the time he's 24 and the next year 25 there are more raids on the Irish coast this about brings us up to speed to where we were when we started this story in Charlemagne is defeating the Saxons and finding himself the new next door neighbor to at least some of the

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

can get extremely confusing there was a wonderful footnote attached to my copy of the Adam of Brayman 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

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 cigarettes and suggests that it's pretty well understood that both the Swedes and the Danes had something akin to a royal family but that kingship was something

that was sort of if not elected then appointed by a group of also powerful chieftains or warlords

and they could choose other people from other branches of the I mean it's very confusing but the reason it matters is because the first if not the first maybe one of the first of these Scandinavian kings whose name makes it into the history books is this guy that Charlemagne runs into when he conquers the Saxons this guy who for five minutes looks like he's going to fight a war against Charlemagne and the record shows that that's a suicidal thing to do Charlemagne beat

“everybody he came from a time period in Frankish history where they were just badasses and they beat”

everybody which is why it's so shocking it's like Mike Tyson when he eventually loses it's so shocking when Charlemagne goes away and then all of a sudden this bad assery collapses but for five minutes there's this challenge where this king of the Danes in air quotes a guy named you'll see it a bunch of different ways got a freed got freed got a freed he will sort of puff up his chest as Einhart 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 Dan 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 he's 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 higher article 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 it 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 chiefdoms into just a few or maybe even one king is now underway and it makes them more dangerous to a person like Charlemagne the Frank's 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 and 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 that they have armies facing off and then in 810 famously raids the fusion coast freezeland 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

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 in mix he estimates 30 is a good conservative number”

so if you really had 200 ships then that's going to be about 6,000 Vikings and the primary sources at the time period say that these Vikings absolutely scoured the coastline of Frisja which is Karolinji and 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 Godafrid get shanked in the back or something like that by one of his body guards

allegedly and there's a you know little JFK assassination type speculation going on here but 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 king ship”

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 iron hard 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 Northman 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 Godafrid was so puffed up with vain aspirations that he counted on gaining empire over all Germany and looked upon Saxony and Frisia as his provinces he had already subdued his neighbors the abode retire and made them tributary and boasted that he would shortly appear with a great army before Ahkan where the king held his court some faith was put in his words empty as they sound and it suppose 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 Godafrid 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 irisgan to navia in fact it's almost a recipe for the opposite sort of results so when this Danish king Godafrid 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 Godafrid died and he points out that all of the sons of Godafrid were called kings so this is like a civil war amongst kings but listen how often

they're you know fighting amongst each other is 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 juttland 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

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 but it's really going on here is you know if you were to put it into modern terms these people who gain power leadership type roles you know petty rulerships these are people who build up large

followings of powerful supporters they're building up posses and they're doing it over the course

of their careers the problem with the Scandinavian system is that when these people die their posses 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 possy 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 possy happy and if you don't have

a possy well then you're probably in somebody else's possy in his history the Viking wars

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

chief to know what have you just an average you know Scandinavian Joe I was gonna say but if you more like a Scandinavian lay for 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 Valkyries your prowess to get you

better seat with old and eventually but you're gonna come back a made man and maybe even you know hit the jackpot I mean it's it's something that would attract young and surprising 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 in a lot of warriors societies that practice rating to 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 new price in the children of Ash and Elm was talking about what a self-reinforcing prophecy this sort of is in the sense that if you're good at this and you lead some successful raids and then decide to take your winnings and reinvest it in the enterprise right by bigger ships

more ships acquire a larger entourage with which to carry out these sorts of attacks you can sort of parlay your winnings into sort of a war chief status or something like one of the famous

“sea kings as they're called these are people by the way and I believe that dozens have been”

identified that actually are more like your pirates from the 16th and 17th centuries in the Caribbean people with very small land holdings maybe in island or a cove or something like that but they have ships and they have men right they've got their herdmen their housecarols

and the two of those things put together warriors and ships in this time period that might be all

“you need to be a viable economic sort of entity now throughout the course of Charlemagne's”

lifetime and as we said several times already and there's nothing confusing about that he dies in eight fourteen 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 eight fourteen you've had almost a century of

really powerful Frankish leadership had that continued I don't think you would have had the Viking age

the way you had it I think you'd have had to have been a history nerd focusing on early medieval studies to have even really noticed the blip in piracy caused by the Viking era if what we've talked about to this point is all there were but it's what happens to Charlemagne's empire that opens up the door to something at a much higher level of threat and impact to anything that

“it's seen you know up to this point with monasteries and small towns and things like that the occasional”

extra intense attack but as we've mentioned if you look at a timeline there are going to be a period after the initial first twenty 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 eight thirty when things get very serious again eight forty eight fifty eight sixty it's shocking what happens but that's all precipitated by other shocking things that happened in the various places that are going to be victimized by these Vikings Charlemagne's empire falls apart the wheels completely come off in the next rulers reign and he gets a lot of

flag for this i it's hard to know now how much he deserves it because after all Louis the Pius as he'll be known Charlemagne's only legitimate surviving son when he takes over Louis the

Pius has a very different job than his predecessors who had to conquer a place he has to rule it

and there's a lot of different entities that make up this frankish empire that don't want to be in this frankish empire and Louis has to deal with them he also has to deal with a bunch of male relatives most importantly his sons who do not like his plan for the inheritance

“a little bit about Louis the Pius now because he's very important but you wouldn't think in”

heritons should matter right away after Charlemagne dies but famously Louis the Pius has like a near death experience bunch of people are killed and enacted and he's almost killed too which makes him think right away famously i better get this inheritance thing in order just in case so he divides the empire amongst his sons which is typical frankish practice 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 gonna be this son and y'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's gonna 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 Louis' 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 exileings accusations of witchcraft and adultery leveled

in june eight thirty three he writes at a meeting in Rothfield in the Alsace Louis was confronted

“by his eldest son lothar who had proven himself an attentive student of carolingian family history”

and persuaded Pope Gregory IV to back him as supreme ruler. Lothar's play for power spooked Louis' 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 and the quote the field of

lies though would not end Louis' career he would get the throne back basically forgive the children

jones says and this would be his opinion but he says that like Alexander the Great before him charlament 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 Hansel broke at written hundred years ago when he said quote charlament's empire had no inner unity it was the creation

“of the dynasty the are enough family and quote so if it devolved into a family squabble I suppose”

that's somewhat understandable but charlament pointed out also over a hundred years ago that the

various sons of Louis were being also used by the component parts people who represented parts

of the empire like the lumbar who didn't want to be a part of the empire so you use Louis' son as a way to you know help break up or help secure a better portion of the empire for your self or whatever it might be what this means though is that every piece of the empire and a bunch of the empires surrounding peoples become like pieces on the chessboard for all these different players in these civil wars to use the Slavic peoples for example will become one of these

you know pieces on the chessboard and so will the Danes in the same way that the Carolingians had

metled 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 Louis' sons or having one of Louis' sons use them depends on your point of view they're able to throw their hat in their 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 Charloane was destroying the Saxons and the Danes felt like they had a gun to their head and now all of a sudden the tables are turned by the eight 30s and if you look at your timeline the eight 30s 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 godfreed or godfreed launched in eight ten against the the coast of Freesland right big big endeavors unusual before this time period much more usual as we move into it though and if you start to ask why again the primary sources are gonna 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 we quoted some from

a hundred years ago that gave this perspective from the point of view of the dains and how they might have felt threatened by the carolingian expansion but this outbreak of new violence on a higher level and more amplified scale can also be viewed as a sort of a response to a you know efferound and find out kind of situation i mean we lose the pious gets on the throne he continues a lot of the things that his father was doing with the dains right he's pushing his own

dainish names by the way to emerge from the mists in the fog prehistory a guy named harald

“clack and harald is one of those you know it's one of the favorite Viking names you'll run into 10”

million haralds and Viking history h a r a l d and harald clack is this guy who's famous because he

becomes i don't know if you can call him the lap dog of the carolingian ruler but he's certainly the one that will do whatever it takes to have the backing of somebody who can help him get a advantage over his you know competitors back in denmark and in the late eight twenties harald 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 store 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 he then men can do and bravely convert them

“and remember converting them is an interesting thing if you're looking at this from Louis's perspective”

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 worshiping 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 eight thirties happen there's a way to look at this as kind of the equivalent of blowback is with the way we would describe it in a CIA you know failed operation when it's taken you know over the long haul right you try to instill your own ruler and boom all of a sudden you know you've made enemies of the people well it's possible Lewis the Pious messing and Danish politics f around and he found out and the eight thirties was you know his wakeup 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 there only offer 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 doorstep 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 eight thirty four when all of a sudden somebody does the animals of saint birch and are kind of like the frankish empires Anglo-Sax

and chronicle for this period all these chronicles I mean there's nothing dramatic about them they're very bare bones and there's no eyewitness accounts of either the point of view of the Raiders or the point of view of the Raiders victims for any of these Viking raids so it's all a little bare bones

“but let's remember that the Viking era is not about particularly nasty raids it's much more”

about the quantity of them and when you read sort of a rundown of like 20 years of Viking raids it makes your head spin how many places are being hit and sometimes over and over again over what period of time it's a quantity versus quality kind of a phenomenon and in the

meanwhile a fleet of dains came to fresha 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 Birka by the way Dorostad and destroyed everything they slaughtered some people took others away captive

and burned the surrounding region and quote Dorostad is for this second Viking phase what

Linda's foreign famously is for the first one of these moments that just sort of announces in hindsight that everything's about to be taken up and notch and in the children of Ash and Elm historian Neil Price says this quote in the year eight thirty four Dorostad the wealthy Emporium at the fork of the Rhine about one hundred 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 it will and took shiploads of slaves the surrounding region was devastated the same was to happen every single summer for the next four years in the face of ineffectual frankish responses that included failed piece negotiations the Viking seemed to have played a careful hand combining famed diplomacy

supported by the rating that they never had any intention of renouncing and quote like tribal

ratings 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 in the Native American situation which is of course

“my favorite thing to compare things to you saw it all the time the u.s. or Mexico or Spain would”

go to some ruler and say I thought we had a deal nobody was going to raid anybody and they'd say well I don't control those people and some of these histories refer to elements in the Danish hierarchy as hawks and dubs 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 that this time period the Anglo-Sax and 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 westics doesn't want that told me there's a lot of theories I'm certainly one of those people that thinks the tax was still happening just at the lower level but why you would all of a sudden after decades of not saying anything start saying things again isn't

interesting question you know if we take that made up figure that we had of that kid it was eight

years old when the Vikings first showed up in Britain right what do we call them ethyl dan

well if ethyl dan is eight in seven eighty nine by the time the Anglo-Sax and chronicle starts mentioning he then men again he's in as early fifties should he live that long and as I said the chronicle gets the dates a little wrong by a couple years because dorset 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 dames apparently the Anglo-Sax and chronicles says quote it says eight thirty two here

“I believe the right year is eight thirty five which would make it the year after dorset that was hit”

and the chronicle says quote this year he then men overran the isle of shepie and the quote now that doesn't sound like such a big deal but the fact that all of a sudden it's talking about he then men again and after all these these years are not saying anything should make your ears prick up and then when you take a look at the satellite view of the island of shepie today and it might be subtly different but this is the thirty mile island just off the coast or really

in like a river estuary it's forty 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 he then men so we don't know who they are

terms is a relative concept by the way you could have two thousand guys on each you could have

“let's put this but 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 shepies overrun so we can assume maybe it's the same group of people and the chronicle says quote this year fought king Egbert with thirty five pirates at means thirty five pirate ships at Sharma where a great slaughter was made and the daines remained masters of the field and 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 talents 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 field 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 chronicles says quote

this year came a great naval armament into west whales they mean of 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 Hengeston where he put to flight both the Welsh and the daines and quote by the way I don't know if that mention in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle would really mean it

was Vikings and Welshmen it might be Vikings and Cornishmen I'm not sure so no mention of these people for half a human lifetime and all of a sudden their back and get multiple mentions multiple years in a row right at the same time Doris stats 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 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 lay on woman and dog knocked over per stole and then 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 closet 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 fake dumb and what becomes apparent 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

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 Ashman about I love that term that's what Adam of Bremen who's”

a famous chronicle from the era said that the Germans called the Viking the Nordic people the Ashman probably why Neil Price calls as book the children of Ash and Elm right to 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 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 three

“hundred 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 nineteen fifties the age of faith by will derand 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 but 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 Pius which happens in 840 ADCE and if you thought it was bad”

during Lewis the Pius is rain in terms of the you know Carolinian state disintegrating it gets worse after he dies and so do the Viking raids and derand 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 Pius these raids became great expeditions with fleets of over a hundred vessels fully manned with orsman slash warriors in the 9th and 10th 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 gonna 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 7,000 pounds of silver in 846 while the Saracins were attacking Rome he says the Northman conquered Frisja burned dortrect and sacked limojée

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 too 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

his head spinning is all that sounds let's recall that Durant is basically talking about

and only one limited area affected by the Viking era so you'd have to do the equivalent of adding up

a full accounting of what's going on here and I was trying to think about how to even talk about it

and it occurred to me somewhere along the line that the reason you can't is because it's both decentralized and centralized so it'd be like the equivalent of trying to talk about

“crime and you have to talk about street crime done at the individual level with 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 its driven and purposeful and other 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 on 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 say 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 ors and powerful long ships and every year

they have expeditions right sort of like a limited liability company as far as they're concerned right all of some erics and hackens and 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 compared”

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 a gleam it would 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 place so

I'm going to 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 dains attacking Hamburg but there's the mid level owners of the means of production to who come in and pull their resources into a partnership and buy a mine or something and then there's the lower level people like the Scandinavian who could change his life with a big score on a raid they come in and buy a burrow, a pick and a pan and they go panning for gold or something try to find a claim somewhere so it starts attracting

regular people I mean you don't even need to have some big wigs organizing an expedition

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 the economic incentive just attracts people and it was obviously”

working because the archaeologists during this time period in Scandinavia are finding tons of stuff

and always have from these areas that are being hit with the Viking raids it's this giant

sort of wealth redistribution phenomenon going on during this era where wealth is transferred from the places that do a lot of writing and chronicling and all that sort of stuff to some of the places that don't from Christian areas to non-Christian areas from you know the center of Europe to its periphery and an economist would have a field day with this wouldn't they because you can see how the economic incentives become ingrained in the culture and the rhythm of life

if you will because this is the era where many historians believe that the practice of raiding

“becomes a part of sort of the annual yearly calendar in Scandinavia it's just a time of year right”

after you get the seeds in the ground for farming that's raiding time 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 inhumane and bloodlusty when you compare them to the other people in this era while the Carolinians for example had a rhythm of life that wasn't that dissimilar either they didn't call it raiding they called it the campaign season right so we've planned 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 you're raiding is one of those great human practices we said and the Apache's name is Palmer Valer 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 100 years old and he described it as this is how we made a living and he said for example of raiding the Mexicans and it sounds a little like this could be a Viking talking about raiding the Anglo-Saxons or the Irish right and Palmer Valer said in the early 1930s about his raiding days with the Apache's quote our 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 changes evident and the histories we'll 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 residents too I said we're gonna 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 that they're disposal right how would you deal with this phenomenon how are you going to punish these people who attack you how are you gonna stop them in the Mediterranean during the the Roman era for example

bases and root them out but who's going to be able to do that in this area 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 priming 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 rating 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 boy song I get around because genetically and culturally speaking so to 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 genetics stuff from you know the people you send genetic stuff away to I'm not sure I do but it's Norse Irish

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 Chardar and Vigard Vike describe the Irish situation when the Vikings decide that they're just gonna 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 land bay 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 we're soon drawn into Irish internal conflicts landing on the emerald aisle they write they were treading on a uniquely complex political viper's nest Ireland was divided into over 150 independent kingdoms which in turn belong 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 orjee's of violence which would spread throughout the whole island before dying down until the next conflict flared up strong local loyalties they write prevented the Irish from coming together in a single kingdom and coordinating their defense against the Vikings but this also prevented the Vikings from gaining control over large territories in Ireland the Vikings were both willing

and unwilling participants in the never ending Irish power game end quote to show you how crazy

it can get at one point in the Irish Viking experience there will be Vikings from Norway that the Irish will have one term for and Vikings from Denmark that the Irish will have another term for all of them fighting in like three way combinations against each other for control of the territory I mean it's crazy but the bottom line is that by the 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 in 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

50s 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 Sons and then their 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 ball to 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 their context and their neighbors were pretty barbaric by our standards too the same applies to this famous arrangement that's going to be put in place to try to get the Vikings

to help you out right by protecting your territory from people just like them gets hassled a lot in the sources over time it's seen as just a suicide lead dumb strategy absolutely negotiating with terrorism just give them up your territory and then say you know protect me you know here I'll kind of take this territory and protect me from ISIS with it there is by the way a similar sort of dynamic going on here with what you have if you're a ruler trying to deal with this Viking age

phenomenon that you have on your hands I mean it's something between a law enforcement problem and a 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 did when they had a fielderati for example but other peoples have used some of these Viking leaders would be turned into the equivalent if we were having this conversation in a 400-year era after this you'd say dukes or counts or something like that roles they're sort of to govern or control these royal territories for the royal entity right so if Vikings come and attack the royal lands you living in these royal lands at our behest will defend these royal

lands right this is the same way by the way hundreds of years before this time the Frank's first

sort of made their bones historically speaking they had this same sort of deal going with the Romans and maybe history would teach it 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 by themselves a couple of lifetimes of safety because of these deals then they're going to judge whether they're successful or not differently than we are if we look at them and go you know 300 years after this period this really worked out badly for them really do they care I mean if the

things once upon a time that they used to think I think Edward 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 poised in 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

doing so in their favorite currency and I often think by the way the Vikings come to these places

“and say we want to 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 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 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 Burton almost side by side you see two attempts to try to deal with this Viking problem in two different ways the first attempt is something that almost makes you sad because it's it's the equivalent of you know if the bad guys take over your neighborhood and turn it into a crime den maybe the locals all band together right in a citizen

“organization or a positive or vigilante groups or whatever to sort of you know you know to stick up”

against the narco terrorist you know who control you or what have you and in the annals of

Saint Burton 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 deans as they're called and the annals of Saint Burton right quote the deans ravaged the places beyond the shelter he means the shelter river some of the common people living between the saying and the law are formed a sworn association

amongst themselves and thought bravely against the deans on the same but because their association

had been made without due consideration they were easily slain by the more powerful people

and quote 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 them 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

“Burton talks about one of these sons of Louis the pious I believe deciding that since he can't”

make a deal with one group of deans which may just mean Vikings of any kind he's gonna hire another group of deans and the chronicle say quote King Charles deceived by the empty promises of the deans on the song 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 deans had promised that if 3,000 pounds of silver weighed out

under careful inspection were handed over to them they would turn and attack those deans who were busy on the same and would either drive them away or kill them and a quote in Neil Price's book he mentions that sometimes the deans 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

levels are the Byzantines the Byzantines of course would not have thought of themselves as

“Byzantines they would have thought of themselves as Romans who speak Greek and whose capital is”

located in modern day Turkey and the Franks are set up to kind of be competitors of theirs by the marketing messages right I mean they market themselves as the renovation or the restoration or the rebirth of the Roman Empire and if you're the Byzantines you don't think that there needs to

be any rebirth at all right don't call it to come back 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 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 front of me is not a bad word to describe this relationship but it will be the Byzantines

“that introduced the people of the west to the Vikings of the east and that's the part of the story”

that comes into play right around where we are we said eight fifties Vikings are establishing a permanent basis 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 neighbors 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 in 11 you make the headlines extra extra read all about it and by eight 60 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 r u s you'll see it written r h o s r o s all those versions and yes it sounds like the root word for russia because it probably is but when the Byzantines start writing records that we can still that were preserved that made it to today that we can look at about these people we already have found out about these people because they showed up in western records first it's a little ironic isn't it

“this brand new people because that's how history always treats it right the illusion of the written past”

it's like the old parable that if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it did it really make a sound well if a people weren't written about where they really in existence until somebody chronicled it and the first chronicled account that's made it to us today so we can read it right because some things were in inadvertently lost of course and even the stuff we do have went through permutations and fragments and all this kind of stuff but in 839 that's

when that that name gets heard first or rust and it happens in the court of Louis the Pious Charlemagne son the year before he dies 839 is right before he dies and you know we've already told you the kind of life he had and by 839 most of it's behind him so this is a guy who's had you know his son's deposed him multiple times he's watched his dad's empire and his inheritance crumble he's got Vikings nibbling large chunks of his land of ways that Viking PTSD let's be honest and then the

Byzantines his frenemy is show up at his court in 839 which is chronicled in the records and want his help getting some people back home and when he says who are these people the Byzantines say

the rust 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 rust or Swedes

from one of the groups who live in Viking era Sweden Louis the Pious and his advisors are suspicious

and that's the last you ever hear of them in the records anyway must have freaked a guy out

“those 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 is 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 modern days Sweden at the time did in some in Denmark and

you know the Vikings could all talk to each other language wise there was a lot of hiring on for jobs

“and me go read bail wolf and 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 Scandinavian to 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 Burke earlier and head to be in all these places you know uh door stud 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 here look at the modern-day countries of Biela Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia the Baltic states and 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 bioarchiological 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 Burke and Sweden as one of these things that all of a sudden plug the Scandinavians into a system that was essentially as far as these people are concerned in this time period worldwide and I thought historian's 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 hoarded in easily readable religious institutions Vikings found themselves on the northern edges of scattered settlements within vast trading networks that stretched from China and India to the Mediterranean. Constantinople offered one node Baghdad another with perhaps hundreds of cities providing connections across 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 and quote cat jarm and in her book river kings described the east as being a

transportation of a semi-pressious 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 in northern India and so she would follow you know the trade route sort of the starts in northern indian finds its way to Viking era Scandinavia it's fascinating but it's a sign of exactly how interconnected these trade routes are and how these ideas we had a long time ago 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 meandered 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 serengeti planes live in 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 step tribe confederation to Azure and there's also multiple large tribes of people it's an ethno let's call it an ethno cultural identity of people we would call Slavs today often times 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 what wait a minute anybody can adopt a pottery style and wait a minute anybody can

learn a language the first time I ever encountered this it blew my mind because it made me change

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 over throw 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 but ethnically pure basically Germans spoke the language had the culture had the same basic belief system had origin myths dating to Scandinavia

hervig wolf 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 Goths

“escaped slaves from all kinds of societies and then I had another professor once and I believe we”

said this may be 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 some minutes it's it's much debated and talked about

the Nazis didn't do anybody any favors by latching on to it it'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 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 Greek group of people that they were going to say was the major makeup of the people that became Russians

step people you know and multiple other groups that all of that stuff was minimal and there

have been theories you know pushing every kind of combination or ethnic makes you can think of genetics of course as you might imagine then 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 Slavs trading lots of you would say in an American town you say it's four corners

we're a bunch of places come together and the Scandinavians in the East because it is such a tough neighborhood do more trading than rating but they do rating too I have sort of a mental image of it these are my numbers they're totally made up and not based on anything but this is just

“how I think about it we thought that you know 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 right your story in the history books but

you cause problems and you're going to make it into the arrows equivalent of the police blotter for acting up 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 they'll be a famous

“attack on Constantinople in eight sixty ADCE now I should say to protect my rear end right here”

the experts argue about some of this stuff this is very early in the story in the East and 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 when 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 in attack in the eight thirties in the suburbs of Constantinople by a people that most likely were these

russ 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 russ people they did it I'm 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 I'm going to quote in a minute the detective work involved in piecing together Ramosaic 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 um 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 Wolfe 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 russ were in frequent conflict with their most powerful neighbor the Byzantine empire the earlyest recorded raid took place sometime in the eight thirties when the russ attacked the sea of Marmara and then several cities along the path Ligonian coast the life of St. George of Amastras documents the campaign and describes the russ as quote now quoting from the source the people known to everyone for their barbarity, ferocity and cruelty and quote the authors continue

quote in eight sixty the russ led their largest military campaign against Constantinople 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 Icelandic historian and I hope I pronounce his name right there's going to be some challenges in this show us Speverier Jacobson in the varangians god's holy fire his ability to try to piece together these pieces and make them into something you can look at and

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”

patriarchy 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 and 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 Constantinople the capital of the eastern Roman Empire it did not

experienced such an onslaught in many decades let alone from a people which had hitherto played an insignificant role within the perspective of the Roman elite and quote he then quotes the early

“sermon by this patriarchy 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 they goes back to the Laguna beach example we used earlier of the ability in the pre-modern world to find yourself attacked as in wartime by somebody you don't even know you don't even know who they

are again this is a more like a crime than a war also isn't it I mean seems pretty rare and weird doesn't it to think you could fight a full-on war with another kingdom or state of some sort and not know who the enemy was but in a criminal situation let 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 patriarchy's name by the way who gave this sermon is and I found multiple pronunciations his photos photos or fatias and Jacobs 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 eight sixty 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 two hundred rumored ships that are supposed to have shown up in eight sixty then something's bubbling beneath the surface even if you don't have the primary source material in eight fifty eight forty eight thirty 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 and that's the Viking way right the Laguna Beach attack in a nutshell you wake up

first morning lighting you see those tell tales 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 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 countrymen of these captives hung them all right

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 skiffy and race called Russians advanced across the black sea to the phosphorus plundering every region and all

the monasteries and they also overrun 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 and a chronicler saw it or got wind of it surely that's the kind of things that you'd have written about you know if journalism is the first draft of history and if it bleeds it leads the history geek in me at this point is all set up for this encounter now what's going to happen to these alleged Russ 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 it would take thousands of lives by the way to do is thwarted because like so many of the Viking raiders in the west the Russ get away when the authorities come

to punish them for their crimes never get to see what would happen if the Byzantines and the

Russ faced off the primary sources say that the Byzantine emperor once he in the sort of does his investigation figures out what had happened implements what I guess you could call sort of maybe

“general order number one for the Romans and remember the Byzantines are like a continuation of the”

Romans general order number one standard operating procedure whatever you want to call it I always like to refer to it when it comes to the Romans dealing with people like this it's the recipe 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 visagoths and the Austrogoths and the Lombards and the Vandals and yes a couple of centuries before this time period even the Franks themselves were in this same situation and the Romans cooked them using the recipe into nice civilized states now the term cooked is the way the Chinese used to describe this process when they used to do almost the very same thing to the so-called barbarians on their borders

you know there's a lot of people that believe history has cycles and that's much 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, Louis the Pious and his sons are all doing in the west he sends out missionaries and evangelists and these people that are going to be the St. Bonifaces and the St. Lebbins of the East and they are involved in a long term strategy here right there planting seeds to be harvested generations from now

a multi-generational war on terror and 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, the 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 peoples you're 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 our instead demons and devils you are showing them the air of their

ways and this makes you a better person for doing so at the same time this will create conditions on your border that are much more stable controllable answerable and that will long term eliminate your

pirate problem that's the second part of this and this is the sort of things that the Chinese

“version of cooking their recipe would entail but it's taking these places that have no real”

strong central authority right lots of different sheathens or warlords you know calling their own shots and making their own arrangements and policies and moves and consolidating them you do 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 rate you're coached you want to be able to go to someplace 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 one 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 phenomenon 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

rating 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

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 an instant literacy just adgesis we're going to bring an 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

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 in incentives distance incentives 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 going to attack you and hold you responsible let me can't tell you how many times in the sources you run into the wonderful plausible deniability of decentralization let's call it that when some Viking ruler who almost certainly is the one doing

the raiding will tell some ruler nearby who's calling them on it hey it's not my people I don't even know what you're talking I'll be happy to investigate I'll find out who it is in one particular one I was reading I don't even know how to explain this but the gist of it was that the Viking ruler was accused by the Frankish king of raiding he said it's not me I don't know who it is but all investigate comes back later says I investigated it these other people comes back later and says

“I got the other people I killed them now you should reward me for doing this and meanwhile he was”

likely the one doing the raiding himself and in fact the people that he may have killed may have been the allies of the people that he was trying to pressure for money that he was also raiding I mean it's let's just put it this way after a while and as the sources said you had talked about how how the the deans weren't keeping their promises and you couldn't negotiate with him 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 you're 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 strategy sort of parallel the Byzantines do it in a much more Byzantine way though I mean the word Byzantine doesn't just refer to the Roman Empire's continuation into this era it also has a meaning connected originally to just how intricate and exquisite Byzantine diplomacy is right the highest refinement of the Roman Empire art

I mean it would be like a villager coming in for a contract meeting over whether or not

“you know he should sell his property to a high level sports attorney today or something in the same room”

when you'd be selling man hat and 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 well the Vikings keep rating 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 story not

qualified to go there but but it it seems like feudalism is the outcome how about that 75 years ago when people were much more directed black and white said A led to B led to C and it was also easy they would say that the feudal era you know the early nights in the middle ages and feudalism and castles and all that was a direct outgrowth of these Viking attacks this is the response right let's seem to make sense because well it is a pretty good response to the Viking raids

but it's much more complicated of course like everything now including the fact that feudalism

is sort of a always around kind of thing it seems but in the era following the Viking raids

maybe you could say spikes feudalism is like a decentralization and you decentralize to try to allow the peoples on the scene to respond to a problem that happens quickly and goes away quickly right if you can't respond from the central authority fast enough to do anything about you know lightning Viking attacks you need someone on the scene who can count so and so doke 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 little history books but there's enough truth in there for the short term description to be kind of correct that on the strategy level looking for ways to respond to attacks that happen really quickly becomes paramount and the Romans and the Byzantines of course had long had to deal with similar problems and had organized their militaries in ways to be more Johnny on the spot to deal with

threats that were far too and a 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 Pius but if you're a guy like Lewis the Pius you have raiding and piracy and brigandige nibbling at every border you

have you've got step tribes doing it in the east you've got muslim pirates in the Mediterranean raiding all up and down into Italy you've got problems on the Spanish March continually so it might make sense to change this organization to allow for some sort of flying column ready relief force whatever you want to say you know law enforcement on the scene in general during this

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 hands 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 it a 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 in place the average size of battle seems smaller now it doesn't mean you don't get big battles from time to time it just means the battles that would be considered to tiny to even count as battles in other places and times count I mean you could have nine hundred guys against nine hundred guys in Anglo-Saxon England and

that could easily be legit but a thousand years before this period that's a reconnaissance clash between the Romans and the Carthaginians in one of the Punic wars right so this is not exactly the high water mark of the European 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 Carallinian 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 when 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 and earlier era because I think they're just too tiny of a population to do much more than act as a bunch of nats right just sort of bothering you as opposed to threatening you and there was

a great question asked in Hanstall Brooks histories of more than 100 years ago you know the reason that they still print these histories is not because they're accurate because they're completely out of date in so many ways it's because there's certain elements of them that still touch us H.G. Wells's history from 100 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 Louis the Pius or Charlemagne the kind of

numbers that a people like that could theoretically put in the field if this is a modern if it's

the first World War you have the Frankish Empire like this and they can conscript you know this

giant amount of their population which is huge they could really just make Scandinavia go away

people in this era maybe less so the Franks should be able to crush these people in Scandinavia in

“this period and Del Brooks asked the question you know why the millions available to the Franks wasn't”

able to do that and then he answers it and the way he answers it is by talking about the amount of the population that goes to war in these various societies 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 in their own armor and they show up there prepared to fight it's a big

cross-section of the adult male part of the population but and this is Del Brooks thinking but it's

it was popular during the time and I'm not sure 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 segment and upper crust of the population who does the fighting for them

and then the rest of the population either through their tax dollars you know what I mean their taxes or their you know they're in the Carolingian state for example if you own a certain

“amount of land you have to fight in 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 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 and me used to 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 Cad Jarman and River King suggests 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 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 probably go into a party once upon a time where they've they've said on the invitation and it's BYUB 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 BYUG system of warfare rather than be you know something like the Byzantines or the Romans or the

Chinese or the way we are today BYUG means bring your own gear I was trying to imagine if we still did this today or if we had a single event where we had to and they organized a war and they said we're going to have a big battle in this giant open field you know near the hills nearby um everybody in your whole town has to line up there you know all all the fighting age males is what they'd say in the old days that's BYUG 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 your Vikings or whether 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

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 BYUG 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 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 then 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 make in their workshops are not to be exported to the Danes and the Viking peoples and then it's

“Charles the Bald and descended at his I believe that makes it a capital offense you get your head”

cut off you get hanged if you give Frankish swords to the Viking peoples right can't give them the best military hardware available they'd 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 when we went through a period there I want

to say 80s 90s where there was this idea that maybe it wasn't as rare as previously thought and now we're back toward this it was very rare kind of an attitude and I was reading one book where they were trying to come up with an amount of effort required and an amount of time required to make some of this stuff and they were talking about a male shirt so think about a standard shirt not 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 inner locking 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 in considerable at that time”

and then according to a seventh century frankish illegal tax it was explaining the relative costs of equipment and it said that a helmet right so you know helmet's going to protect your head pretty important in warfare right like a football helmet and football said that a helmet cost as much as a shield spear and sword combined so you can have a shield a spear and a sword for the cost of a helmet and then it said a coat of 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 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 there so called nasal howl was 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

important on a field of battle and if some people get to wear 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 are 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 retinue the historian we quoted earlier said that this was a consumption society and that it was based on gift giving and power was heavily connected to gift giving and one of the

best gifts must have been military equipment and the people who formed these retinues of elite troops who were well armored and well equipped and well trained and very experienced with you know elite sort of status these people formed either the tip of the spear for the Viking forces or you could and this applies to other 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 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 is around the Carolinian 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 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 Carolinians 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 list and your George Formans 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 Viking 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 and with 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 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 either 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 you know the Frankish world they have proto knights 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 knights first begin when you can confidently label a European

“heavy cavalrymen a knight I think I'm on safe ground saying that most people will say that the”

Norman knights that invaded England in 1066 under William the Conqueror were knights early knights but

their proto knights to me not as nasty as early knights and early knights were not as nasty as the knights of the high Middle Ages but if we were going to have a one-on-one battle between a European

“proto knight in 850 and a well-equipped Viking warrior in 850 I think that's a toss-up I mean these”

Frankish proto knights are probably going to have a lot of the best armor and equipment that the Frankish state can provide and ironically enough the same applies to the top of the line

Viking first stringers too they probably have some of the best stuff the Frankish state can provide

but when troops are armed and equipped similarly when they fight in similar formations when the tactics are similar you're reduced in the number of things that can impact the outcome of a battle which means that the things that are left over 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 broke 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 they 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 and their book Vikings at war authors can be hard or in 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 fined and quote now while that may sound like an early medieval Scandinavian version of the United States's 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 hoplight era that's not a warrior society I wouldn't consider one much of farmers but when the collective defense required it they put on armor took spears lined up shoulder to shoulder and fought in failings as 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

hole 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 broken he was talking”

about the failings as a military formation and said that it doesn't really help very much if the people inside the failings 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 hop 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 could be very dangerous against indigenous natives if push comes to shove but they're not warriors by nature their 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

are military related I mean things like counting coup among the planes Indians is a perfect

“example of something that no farmer you know amongst the settler population would give a hood about”

but would be worth somebody risking their lives for amongst the native American warriors of the planes right so just a whole different way your world view is constructed and the hop 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 were all going to understand and

go from there so of course being the non-professional non-history in that I am I chose the cheap

metaphor of course and there's a macro and a microversion of this we'll start with the microversion 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 gun powder era armies from wildly different geographical

areas in 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 greats army you're going to think to yourself well I stand no chance except for the great equalizer that the Vikings have in every gaming system known to man and if they didn't have it and you were

playing Vikings you would think it was a crappy gaming system you're going to get some sort of bonus for some combination I was trying to think of the terms that would apply here and I came up with three and they all 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 it may be a falsity that we 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 Erokoi 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 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 of bonus right and it did plus four-dial 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

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 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 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 now while that's a great tool to have in the toolbox if you're Japanese general in 1942 there's a lot of things that minimize that advantage right firepower for example the fact that your people will go charge into firepower and die to a man might be useful but it's not effective doesn't really change as we said all to the victory conditions

but you take away a lot of those variables like firepower for example you equalize a bunch of other factors same on our same weapon 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 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 start applying that sort of an adjective to societies or peoples and it starts getting weird they didn't have a problem doing that a long time ago for obvious reasons they don't do it much anymore but we're left with this sort of gray area you know you don't want to use the

old way of doing things we don't have anything that really represents with 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 Franks with all the other things that are equal in the battle like that like two faylenses 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 frenatism 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 area it probably was worth also pointing out that the psychological advantage that happens after many victories would begin to build up i mean if the Vikings weren't scary enough to the people like the

Franks when they first encountered them after losing to them a bunch of times you begin to

fear them you begin to go into the fight like Michael Spinks against Tyson you begin to go in not with both sides you know having an equal chance but one side disadvantaged psychologically

“before the combat even starts now it's worth asking another key question about this special ability”

is it really a special ability or is it something that everyone has in warfare and everyone talks about and everyone knows about just turned up to a very high amplitude i mean are we talking about something as simple and basic as morale here because as everyone knows morale is a key element in warfare go read your sun suit go read your clouds with the military maximums 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 delbroke referred to it as savage courage if this is simply morale well then that would seem to explain why knights seem to have a similar sort of quality right in petuousness savage courage some sort of diero bonus on the fanaticism ferocity and fearlessness

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 is anointed role in society is 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

they carve i guess would carve like grooves into their teeth and then fill them in with ink or other

color um 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 old and 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 Franks might have seen it or emperor the Franks it's all a matter of”

perspective in order to prove my point there is a wonderful source account and i'm not going to go into deeply into everything that happens when you some sort of source in a 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 racist 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 it's a sort of a handbook if you will for it see 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

“as 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 how many it's really basic stuff but they have several chapters um 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 uh 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 eronian military and the u_s_ military today have a lot more in common than they have in terms of cultural differences everybody uses you know modern military gear everyone studies the same military manuals i mean you can find cultural differences but it's nothing like it is in the ancient world where the medieval world where the society and the culture often

dictates what kind of warriors you have available to you and how they fight and the way your people fight could be very different than the way the people you're fighting fight a lot of time these styles um 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're even having an acronym for that a military a revolution military

affairs r_m_a_ 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 racists and people like that will sometimes over the areas uh... make this into a racial question but racists nothing to do with it it has to do with

along the step which is a huge expansive land which has been said has Europe on one side

“and china on the other uh... you have an entire vast you know gumbo of ethnic makeup”

every kind of me there are Turks there are Indo-Europeans there are Europeans there are Asians bongolians 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 on there's a chapter just on how you fight those people and there's a chapter on how you fight these people that if not the Vikings because when this was written in the late five

hundreds or six hundreds 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 moris did

did and ironically one of them are the francs long before this sharlimean civilized version of

“them know when the francs were people that looked exactly like the Vikings and worship gods”

with the same names these strategic cons chapter on how you deal with people like that is entitled dealing with the light-haired peoples such as the francs lombards and others like them let me just say others like them is where I would put the Scandinavians truthfully before this period I would also put the earlier calts the people the joyous 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 cliffnotes on how you fight these people including you know with the few asterisks I would say and maybe a couple of footnotes talking about you know subtle differences well it's like we're dealing with indigenous native tribes here and we're talking about the differences between you know Cherokee and Crow right you and Komanci 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 cliffnotes talk about you know 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 hunt that is translated by George T. Dennis and the strategic hunt says in fighting the light-haired peoples quote the light-haired races place great value on freedom they are bold and undonited 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 light character in the movie here sounds just about perfect right but the Byzantines are gonna start you know there's gonna 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 a feminine would be the way maybe they would think about them because they are clever and they don't just get up there and you know wrestle in hand-to-hand

mono a mono combat and the Byzantines think that's just stupid and they're gonna use all these wonderful Rambo light 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 peace that this is the Byzantines just explaining what sort of cheese you can

“bait a trap for these people with right done 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 the general continues right

tell you about the guy you're playing it continues quote in combat they make the front of their

“battle line even and dance either on horseback or on foot they are impetuous and undisciplined in”

charging as if they were the only people in the world who are not cowards they are disobedient to their leaders they're not interested in anything that is at all complicated and they pay little attention to external security and their own advantage they despise good order especially on horseback they are easily corrupted by money greedy as they are end quote if your Byzantine general about to face one of these light-haired peoples or others like them that's a pretty good scoop there isn't it

that's something you can use the next paragraph is interesting because it defies the stereotype especially of the Scandinavians because I can't believe the Scandinavians are more bothered by cold than people from a war on 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 wounded 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 and quote this to me is a great it on a curve sort of 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 do the Vikings compare to the Anglo-Saxons but from the Byzantine standpoint

they all socket reconnaissance right the next paragraph you know once again there's going to be

probably more boxing and gaming analogies in this show than anyone we've done but it always

lends itself to it there was a line Muhammad Ali used as one of his poems about fighting smoking Joe Fraser 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 Fraser or Mike Tyson these western light-haired peoples are ferocious sluggers head on punches who disdain any sort of cleverness or slickness at all right just come on up here will settle it you know in an arm

wrestling match or whatever and they're fighting you know more of an olive type character who said of Joe

“Fraser I'll be pecking and poking poor 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 slug fest 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 strategyms 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 arts 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

“and a comeman writes about it and she talks about she calls them calts which I think is wonderful”

because they're more recycling these old names again they're they could be calts they could be Vikings they could be frank 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 calts 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

his men to shoot the horses out from under the calts 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 now and he describes it and he also taking a shot may be a little strong description here but points out that so much of what's portrayed as Viking styles of fighting and all the 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 battle field formations and the like but these are almost entirely drawn from later practice applied retrospectively and often from literal readings of textual sources with debatable reliability in reality he writes we know comparatively little other than the impressions of noise chaos and violence that are

conveyed so vividly in poetry and in the names of the valkyries 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 formation 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 now 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 ninety degrees on command drill like fashion you know and their shield walls the 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 phenomena like the bezzerkers or the bezzerkers 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 historic osteady of something like this if anything it looks to me these bezzerkers 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 we're 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 enemies weapons and acting that way is a sort of a psychological self hypnosis trick that

something like that sometimes to be the first ones to charge into somebody else's spearpoints but

“you know again nothing i know about personally i think the same holds true for the women warrior”

idea um there are women warriors throughout history famously the ones that are called amazon's 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 see just 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 besirks 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 we'll get into more later but the other thing is that there's this and this may be something that is an illusion from the sources but there's this unethered 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 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 that an advanced takes because you're moving from supply hub to supply hub on land you want to stay on the roads 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 it creates a sort of a very slow point to point to connect the dots kind of approach if the vikings don't do any of this during this era because by the middle late hundreds in the west they've ensconched themselves in certain places and they can't be dislodged it's like gangs you know we talked about earlier the police blotter kind of an idea it's like gangs have taken over certain areas in modern day France and the Netherlands and places like that and the

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 mini armies or whatever you want to

“call them trying to figure out what they're doing is like trying to follow you know gangs”

around during the eight fifty zade sixties these these groups of vikings will actually get names you know there'll be the army of the same there'll be the army of the psalm eventually there'll be the great heathen army and the great summer army and to think about these as armies is crazy because

the first thing in any modern 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 at catch arm in the biarchyologist put it well when she said that these military forces whatever 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 do whatever they want to do 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 primary sources of Saint Burton at one point he talks about armies viking armies splitting up into several different float tillers 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 doesn't act like an army it acts like a

pack of wolves or a bunch of losers or people that are just running around 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

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

“it is important and it's been hit before right this is not unusual by this time period but it sounds”

specifically bad and Charles the bald who is the king of that region finally does something about it

in the next couple of years he has a bad reputation for how he handles Vikings he's charlamains grandson by the way and in the 840s charlamains grandson split up his former united empire into bunch of different parts that morph into modern countries Charles the bald rules Francia which will morph into France after Paris is burned in 861 that creates a sort of an equal and opposite reaction on Charles the bald's part he puts into place a bunch of rules that we've already covered some

of the details of one of them is the creation of sort of a 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 he's not the best stuff in the 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 gonna 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 for defied 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 gonna happen you burn Paris you get everyone's attention and four to five 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 let you into the subway you put a fortified bridge in a in a key spot and they can't get”

into the river system and that screws up everything when they've already sort of stolen all the

easy stuff to steal on the coast all the good stuff's in the interior and to block these places

is to frustrate and make any Viking ideas about rating 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 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 this 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 shot 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 on toroges 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

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 eight hundreds 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 asked 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 our love broke 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 ragged our love broke 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 late 40s 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 ragnar luck broke 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 bloodfused 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 ragnar's involvement in it

and writes quote we've already seen the nuisance raids of individual leaders developing to 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 residents now followed in eight sixty five a big heathen host or hoard at a guess five hundred two 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 healthdan legend tells us that they came from Scandinavia and Ireland to avenge the death of their father ragnar about whom we know nothing very much after his withdrawal from the same 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 North umbria 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 flight of the bore

how much of it is true is completely open to question the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of course is much

“more dry this is not a saga this is not you know the these scaldic poetry this is just the”

facts man and in eight sixty five according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle here were the facts quote this year sat the he then army in the Isle of Fannett and made peace with the men of Kent who promised money they're with but under the security of peace and the promise of money the army in the night stole up the country in overran all Kent eastward and quote the next year is also a continuation of what's going on and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says

right sixty six quote and by the way when they're talking about a 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

“Saxon government and the same year came a large heathen army into England and fixed their winter”

quarters in East Anglia where they were soon horseed and the inhabitants made peace with them and quote horseed 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 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has this great line and the people here

are there made peace with the Vikings well it didn't just say you know you don't heard 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 Northumbria you know right around where”

the major city of York is they're using the Roman roads to isn't it wonderful that they can just sort of adopt the you know the way that the locals get from place to place on these wonderful roads that were made by people centuries ago and they just use them to get up to Northumbria where the

Vikings wonderful intelligence that they always seem to have has told them that there's you know

civil war problems up north right a dynastic struggle things are going to be disorganized chaotic and that's just the kind of thing that 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 eight sixty five eight sixty six it's a bad time for the people of Northumbria to get hit with a Viking attack which coincidentally is exactly when it happens the Anglo-Saxon chronicles

entry for the year eight sixty seven talks about this sort of disension in the royal house of Northumbria mentions that the rival claimants to the throne decide to unite though in the face of the Viking threat somehow and it doesn't tell you how this happens the Vikings get inside the big city or the major city in that part of Britain, York within the walls occupying the city and then these Northumbrian claimants to the throne have to unite and try to retake their own city somehow

I should say that when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle during this period says the army they mean the great he than 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 being the great army

and breaking open the town some of them entered in then there was an immense slaughter of the Northumbrians some within and some without of the walls and both the kings were slain on the spot the survivors made peace with the army and quote the survivors made peace with the great he than army this is one of those moments though 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

claimants to the throne dead on the battlefield in eight sixty seven at the hands of the Vikings

“is shocking and gives them control of Northumbria which is a very different thing than deciding”

you're gonna smash and grab and leave or you're gonna overwinter in a little fortified

long port on the coast this is conquest and there's always been some sort of inference

that some of these kings deaths at the hands of the Vikings are not in battle but maybe more like executions you know on the field of battle afterwards in cold blood several of these kings that the Vikings will kill over their course of time in Britain will be executed perhaps some in the sagas for example if this is the ragnar story as it was traditionally told then one of these kings from Northumbria who dies here is the guy who threw ragnar into the snake

pit so his sons find him and carve the old blood eagle on his back i split his rib cage from behind

pull his lungs out it kind of looks like a bird's wingspan i was reading max Adams he had a foot

not 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

“Gwen Jones quote there a moment ago sent 500 to a thousand in his mind i think those numbers are”

obsolete the closer numbers that i've seen you know with my own biases thrown in ripen but people throw around 4,000 or 5,000 Vikings and that seems logical for all sorts of different reasons but that's a lot of Vikings in one place at one time even though that's a minuscule army throughout most of history again a sign of the level of warfare and of infrastructure and capabilities and capacities in the early middle ages in this part of the world

where a 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 who have different takes on what this is we used our analogy of a roping party led by some you know very organized and targeted and

logistically sound leadership but there are people that will suggest everything from this is a giant raid for looting that just keeps going right until until it gets any natural push back it just keeps flowing forward and others who suggest that this is an outright attempted 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 it may be 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 in a new life and he calls it a sort of an armed family migration and i thought to myself hmm there's a lot of types 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 long ship 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 and 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 never going to start a new country we're going to do whatever it

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 a 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 then 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 one day 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 the 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 trials for quite some time it's a great sort of striking out spot to hit other places and during this time period there were four main kingdoms that make up Britain Northumbria which the Vikings have just taken south of that mercy uh over to the east of that east anglia where the Vikings

had originally landed made some sort of deal and became horse and then westx ruled by King Athored in 1868 which is the year after the initial taking of Northumbria they tried to take the next kingdom over mercy out 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 era 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 wood plashing on top of that you might as well just negotiate with the minute and eight sixty-eight the king of mercy uh who would ask for help from the king of westx and who brought his army into the both their armies sort of face off with the Vikings but the Vikings won't come out in place the mercy and pay them to leave and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle gives the you know devastating you know sentence where it says over and over again by the way in its

pages the mercy ins made peace with the army so the Vikings go back to their main base which is now northumbria they'd put a puppet king on the throne but they do whatever they want the next year they sort of rest the Anglo-Saxon chronicles as an eight sixty-nine this year the

“army went back to York and sat there a year one history book that says this was the key time period”

for the second wave of this invasion to happen right the people that are going to turn conquest into country

come and create the infrastructure provide me women children the whole thing right movable wealth who knows then in eight seventy the Viking army sets out from York across as over mercia and attacks the place where they originally landed east anglia where they were horseed 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 and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle says that an eighty eight seventy

quote this year the army rode over mercia into east anglia and there fixed their winter quarters at that foot and in the winter king Edmund fought with them but the dains gained the victory and slew the king were upon the 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 metham stead burning and breaking and slaying habit and monks and all that they

they're found they made such a havoc there that a monastery which was before full rich was now

he will be canonized and turned into a saint I believe is that he was tied up the the Viking

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 era the evidence is fragmentary on the details but what's clear is the Vikings have killed yet another king in Britain and taken yet another territories so then now have Northumbria and east anglia and now they set their sights on west six before they do in eight seventy the great he then army breaks up or at least one chunk of it moves away

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

rating parties often involve people who are just interested in fighting and they come from all over

the place but basically norwegians in Ireland and then Danes show up and the Vikings are known

to the Irish as the light-haired pagans or the dark-haired pagans and the light-haired pagans or the Norse and the dark-haired pagans or the Danes but they both involve themselves and Irish

“politics will fight each other I mean the kings of Dublin are Norwegian brothers I believe and”

this part of the great he the army will head on over to Ireland and fight there the remaining part will be reinforced there's going to be another group that shows up called the great summer army and these people head on over into west six to take on what will turn out to be the most formidable of all the kingdoms in Britain and 871 is going to be a key year in the whole affair it's known as the year of nine engagements and that gives you an idea of how many battles are fought

the Vikings established their camp at a place called Redding and then they start facing off against the king of this region called Ethel 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 documentary 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 the earlier story and making sure you know where he is”

in the earlier story here's the way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has its entry for 871 which as you might imagine is one of its longer entries it goes on for a minute and then it says quote about four nights after this king, Ethel 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, Ethel Wolf, being among the slain but the Danes kept possession of the field and about four nights after this

king, Ethel Red and Alfred his brother fought with all the army on ash down and the Danes were over calm and quote then goes on to explain you know the tactics of this battle and apparently the

Vikings got the high ground first and separated into two separate divisions you know two separate

shield walls and so this was emulated on the other side and Ethel 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

of this victory did not break the power of the Danish army in a fortnight they were again in the

“field but the Battle of Ashdown justly takes its place among historic encounters because of”

the greatness of the issue if the West Saxons had been beaten all England would have sunk into 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 Saxon kingdoms had withstood the assault upon it Alfred had made the Saxons feel confident in themselves again they could hold their own in an open fight the story of this conflicted Ashdown was for generations a treasured memory of the Saxon writers it was Alfred's first battle and quote it will hardly be his last and 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 Saxon at the age of 22 as sir 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 has pictured as a vigorous hunter handsome and graceful and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill a month after his assertion he led his little army against the dains at Wilton and was so badly defeated that the safest throne he had to buy peace from the foe but in 878 he wanted a decisive victory at ethendon adding to he says have the Danish

host cross the channel to raid weakened France the rest by the peace of wed more agreed to confine themselves to northeastern England in 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 settled down and the sources talk about the Viking rulers in these territories parceling up the land and handing them out to you know members of these Viking groups that are like Oklahoma sooners and the ones who want to settle down get a farm start a family do so the ones who want to continue living the Scandinavian version of levita loka just

sort of cross the channel looking for softer targets and as fate would have it just as Anglo-Saxon

England's getting tougher the places that drove them there in the first place when Charles the ball

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 out for the great treaty you shouldn't

call whatever is 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 Anglo-Saxon England and this is

the pattern it the violence just crops up elsewhere whether it's the same band doing this or it just so happens I don't know maybe it's all the roving people looking for the next you know where's the next oil strike right where's the next gold rush um but in the early eight eight

eighties you see it back in free she again and free she's always getting hit right because it's

the modern-day Netherlands as we said it's right by Denmark so you're right there but this time in the early eight eighties the raids move down into Germany way down into Germany in places like Cologne and Trier get hit famously ironically and symbolically the Vikings will stable their horses in the royal palace and often where Charlemagne you know used to rule all this was recorded by Adam Brayman a couple hundred years later he had access to a Danish king and supposedly

description follows a similar sort of an account that you were heard in many of the places struck

“by the Vikings and Adam of Brayman writes quote then was Saxony laid waste by the Dane's and”

Northman Duke Bruno was killed with twelve other counts and Bishop's deethard and Mark Vard were slain at that time Frisia was depopulated in the city of Utrecht raised St. Radbod Bishop of the town retired before the persecution fixed his sea at Deveter and taking his stand there took vengeance on the pagans with the sort of enathema then the pirates set fire to Cologne and Trier they stable their horses in the palace at Aachen the people of Mains began to erect fortification

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 Carolingean history at this same time because this is the end”

of Carolingean 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 Trier or any one of these places

whose 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

of historical thought that maybe Charles the fat had something going on here that we don't know about and that maybe this is intelligent behavior if you understood his position at the time in a way that our sources don't allow us to understand it now I don't know but he's got a bad rap at least some people have said that he is 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 as it just showed an Anglo-Saxon England if you come things down in one area they're just going to go somewhere else and it turns out the somewhere else is in Charles the fat's empire also so all he's done is remove a problem from one area and send it to Paris this time and Paris is part of his realm too and Paris as we had said it already been hit multiple times in 845 the middle 840s maybe by Ragnar Lothbrook the 860s it gets a couple of times

but the so-called siege of Paris from 885 to 886 is one of the more famous Viking incidents ever it is also one where we have an eyewitness account but it's a really difficult eyewitness account to use it's from a guy a monk actually called Abbo and he writes a piece that the translator of the version that I have calls a piece of magical realism 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 at 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 Abbo 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 and eyewitness would know that maybe we can tease out of the rest of the

the Vikings here just go look at a satellite photo right now the island in the middle of the

saying it's the part of the 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 clovis the first king of the Franks had his throne there I believe I mean it's it's sort of a”

seat of power area main sort of center of Paris even back during this time period and for 20 years ever since Charles the ball had said you know we're going to start already 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 Abbo is called by some a surreal exaggerator Delbroke is merciless in saying his convoluted hexameters are not to be believed in any way shape or form but as I said sometimes you can pull out the little nuggets like what happens to someone's head

“when you pour boiling oil on it he says 700 ships show up in the river 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 eight ten thousand Vikings which you know that's a ton of Vikings supposedly they just want to passage right to raid down river and according to Abbo 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 come in a lot of warriors shows up and and asked for the deal and my translation of the Viking attacks on Paris is by Dr. Neurmal Doss and in it the bishop spelled 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 leaders”

zigg freed and in the poem Abbo says of this conversation where the Viking leader shows up and

basically says don't be a fool just let us go by we don't want any trouble with you I should also

point out that Abbo doesn't describe these Vikings as sort of any sort of stereotypical barbarians loudish drunk broots you know in uproar us I mean he's he calls them grim several times that's the translation grim man and he writes quote and when in two days these ships made land fall hard by the city zigg freed 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 josslin 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 you tell you right there that maybe you shouldn't trust this totally because you know how does zigg freed

know that count odo is the future king nonetheless it gives you a sense of the feeling and as we said Abbo may have been there the response from bishop josslin and count odo is part of the French tradition that's similar in vibe to the Alfred tradition in Britain right these are the heroes that stand up to the Vikings when the major authorities like Charles the fat won't right this is Batman and this is the French version of the time period and it's interesting

their contemporaries of Alfred right and Abbo writes the response the bishop and odo have to this Viking this grim man's demand is quote then the Lord's bishop in greatest loyalty offered these words by our king Charles have we been given this city to guard by him whose majestic realm spreads almost over the whole earth by the Lord's will and who is king and master of the mighty the realm must not suffer by the destruction of this city but rather this city must save the realm and preserve

the peace now if my chance these walls were entrusted to you as they are to us and you were asked to do

by my honor rather my head were locked off by a sword and thrown to the dogs however

“if you do not agree to my requests we shall have our siege engines at daybreak heral 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 Abbo says that the number Abbo gives his 40,000 Vikings versus 200 defenders should be discounted it's a religiously symbolic number not to be taken literally but once again that leaves us with no numbers my encyclopedia 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 10,000 seems a very possible and that's a lot of Vikings they have a camp nearby we are told by Abbo 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 hop-light deal one written 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 they're going to get the food from these aren't Roman troops or Chinese troops or you know troops that are going to have long supply chains that continually feed them from continually reinforced supply

depots these people live off the land asked Napoleon and his revolutionary troops what that does

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

“and in October November 85 the Vikings assault these defenses and if you want to sense of the rhythm”

the rhythm is 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 within sendiery material light them on fire guide them down the river with ropes you know on both banks and try to steer it into the bridge and at least burn up all the

defenders there may be a clue into the building practices of the early middle ages when we find out that they've been working on the defenses here for for twenty 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 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 but 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 Abos 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 Abos has another interesting one 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 of the Viking

side but Abos makes it pretty clear that this is like a group chant which begs the question how did these people know what to say so they must have said it multiple times and the way he

that they throw the cauldron of boiling you know pitch or whatever over the side and scorch of

“Viking they all yell the same thing here's a taste of the battle as Abos 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 Abos 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 crannels were sound during the night that followed after the battle had ended a wooden tier was built all the way around the tower raised atop the old bastion and half as high as before thus together the sun and the Danes beheld this new tower the latter were soon locked in a frightful fight with the faithful

“meaning the Christians arrows flew here there through the air blood gushed and flowed”

darts stones and javlins were hurled by ballista and slingshots nothing was seen between heaven and earth but these projectiles the many arrows made the tower built in the night grown out it was the night that gave it birth as I have chanted above fear seized the city people screamed battle horns resounded calling everyone to come and protect the trembling tower Christians fought and ran about trying to resist the assault and quote he then talks about how

amazing victorious auto as he calls the count was again this is Batman stepping in when the

central authority is either you know too corrupt to 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 jostland dies apparently of disease it's auto all the time he's as we said a little bit like Alfred the great in England at this moment Abba 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 dain's 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 and quote to make matters worse if you were a blistering dying Viking and you retired towards your ships

in the hopes you can get a little medical attention or whatnot it turns out Abba says their wives are there but instead of being in a mood to you know moisten their brow give them some water

you know and comfort them they're heckling them basically saying what the heck is this

why are you coming back here get back in the fight you wimp you know that kind of thing now you'd be inclined to discount this as some sort of exaggeration or weird invention of Abba's 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 whether the wives and the women of the

group are there at the battle in fact the Icelandic sagas of the Viking era from later in this period actually say the same thing so this is another data point that suggests that the wives are there and in the old Germanic tales by the Romans there were wagons that were behind the battlefield and the wives were there here it's the ships that play the same role and the 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 I both 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

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 Johnson supposedly dies from disease so the Vikings make”

a deal with charles the fact and it's the exact same sort of deal it sounds like that they asked for before this entire eleven 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 eleven 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 same to raise havoc deeper into the interior of France right the things that Bishop jocelyn abos says had said we have a responsibility we have to protect France and

“the deal the effort says is I'll give you a bunch of silver and you can go read these people in burgundy”

who are in revolt against me anyway this will contribute to the fall eventually of charles the fact whose empire is going to splinter into multiple kingdoms and the guy who gets to be the king of this part of the former carolingian empire is going to be counterdo who is going to start his own royal line in French history which is one of the more again one can make a case that this is like the founding foundations of France charlomaine would be another one of those possible candidates for that

title by the time count auto becomes king auto 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 unquadifiable 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 percent 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 into slavery

14 percent 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 and 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

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 is looked particularly scary if you were a Viking opponent the weird part about this era though as you could also apply sort of a roshem on lens here and say that if you're a Viking you may be hearing ominous Darth Vader music going into the nine hundred 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 of”

you of a people who in some cases are fighting to preserve a world view the nine hundred's in the period we're entering in now is in books like Gwen Jones's Viking history book the one I grew up with this is the period where he really starts the conversation and everything we've already talked about is almost like prehistory which should tell you something in part two we'll get into a little bit of the material troubling difficult and strange as it is 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 give 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 peoples 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 that 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 up. Side 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 and to me this is one of those games that at least for my standpoint I can't stop playing I mean the company here has 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 you know one

and two where it just seems to never get a 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 LL main the landings at Anzeo the modicasino 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

africa core and they're 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”

excited about this game the luck I said I've been playing 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 oasis of North Africa to the sleepy fishing villages and rolling mountains of Italy okay I'm in company of heroes three will 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 way too much