How the barbarian invasions shaped the modern world : The Vikings, Vandals, Huns, Mongols, Goths,
and Tartars who razed the old world and formed the new / Thomas J. Craughwell.
844 - 851 AD
THE RESURRECTION
OF HASTEIN:
THE VIKINGS IN THE
MEDITERRANEAN
AT THE BATTLE OF
TOURS IN 732, T H E
FRANKISH WARLORD,
CHARLES MARTEL,
DEFEATED T H E MOORS
AND SAVED WESTERN
EUROPE FROM
MOORISH CONQUEST.
THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA WAS THE ONE PLACE IN EUROPE
the Vikings learned to avoid. Unlike England, Ireland, northern
France, and the Ukraine, there was a power along the inland sea the
Vikings could neither frighten nor defeat. That power was the Moors.
Concentrated along northern Africa and in Spain and Portugal, the
Moorish empire possessed a war machine that made Europe and Byzantium
nervous. The Moors had invaded the Iberian Peninsula from present-day
Morocco in 711 and within eight years had conquered Spain and Portugal (in
contrast, it would take the Spanish and the Portuguese 700 years to get their
countries back).
In 732, the Moors thundered across the Pyrenees into France. They got as
far as Tour, about 150 miles south of Paris, when they were turned back in an
epic battle against the Franks, led by Charles Martel, "the hero of the age," as
the historian Edward Gibbon called him. The de facto ruler at a time when
the Frankish kings had become very weak, Charles was also a skillful
commander who had already enjoyed victories over at least four different
Germanic nations before he fought the Moors. By crushing the army of Emir
Abdul Rahman (who was killed in the battle) and driving the survivors back
across the Pyrenees, Charles saved western Europe from Moorish conquest.
South of the Pyrenees, the Moors were still a major military power. The
Vikings they regarded as a nuisance, but a destructive, disruptive one that
could not be ignored. That is why, in the wake of Hastein and Bjorn's raids on
southern Spain in 859, the emir of Cordoba built the first Moorish fleet to
fight and beat the Vikings on their own turf. One crushing loss to the Moorish
navy was all it took for the Vikings to learn their lesson: The surviving dragon
ships limped northward, never to return to the Mediterranean.
T I M E L I N E
7 1 1 - 7 2 2 : THE MOORS,
MUSLIM INVADERS FROM NORTH
AFRICA, CONQUER ALMOST ALL OF
SPAIN A N D PORTUGAL.
844: THIRTY BOATLOADS OF
VIKINGS ATTACK A N D CONQUER
SEVILLE IN SOUTHERN SPAIN.
THEY PLUNDER THE SURROUNDING
COUNTRYSIDE UNTILTHE MOORS
DRIVE T H EM OUT.
c. 849: TWELVE-YEAR-OLD
BJORN, A DANISH PRINCE, IS SENT
TO LIVE WITH HASTEIN TO LEARN
HOW TO BE A VIKING RAIDER AND
WARRIOR.
SUMMER 859:
IN NORTH AFRICA, HASTEIN AND
BJORN TAKE CAPTIVES TO BE SOLD
IN THE SLAVE MARKETS OF
IRELAND.
WINTER
859-860: FROM
THEIR WINTER QUARTERS ON
THE FRENCH RIVIERA, THE
TWO VIKING CHIEFS LEAD
SUCCESSFUL ATTACKS ON THE
FRENCH CITIES OF NIMES,
ARLES, AND VALENCE, AS
WELL AS PISA IN ITALY.
860: HASTEIN AND
BJORN RAID T H E ITALIAN
TOWN OF LUNA, MISTAKING
IT FOR ROME.
861 : T H E VIKINGS SAIL
FOR HOME BUT FIND THEIR
WAY BLOCKED AT T H E
STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR BY
A MOORISH FLEET. ONLY
TWENTY VIKING SHIPS
MAKE IT THROUGH T H E
BLOCKADE.
c. 965-971:
THE VIKINGS OCCUPY
GALICIA IN NORTHWEST
SPAIN UNTIL A SPANISH
ARMY COMMANDED BY
COUNT GONSALVO SANCHO
DRIVES THEM OUT.
C. 950-1204:
THOUSANDS OF
VIKINGS TRAVELTO
CONSTANTINOPLE TO
ENLIST AS MERCENARIES
IN T H E BYZANTINE ARMY.
Charles Martel saved western Europe from the Moors, and the Moors
saved the Mediterranean world from the Vikings.
A M O R A L D I L E M M A
The men on the battlements could scarcely believe what they were hearing. In
front of the main gates of the city lay a man on a litter, surrounded by a small
band of Vikings. "Open the gates!" their spokesman shouted. "Our lord is very
ill and wants to be baptized before he dies."
Earlier that same day in 859, when sixty two dragon-prowed ships sailed
into the harbor of Luna on the western coast of Italy, the alarm bells had rung,
the people in the suburbs had raced for the safety of the city, and the garrison
had barred the gates and taken their posts on the walls, bracing themselves for
a Viking attack. Instead of an assault, however, they were faced with a moral
dilemma: As Christians, could they turn away a dying man who asked for
salvation? So the soldiers sent their own messengers to the count who ruled the
city and the bishop to let them decide what was to be done. Meanwhile, the
Vikings waited patiently at the city gates.
After a quick conference, the count and the bishop agreed to admit the
Vikings. They sent a guard of soldiers to escort them to the cathedral, where
the bishop baptized the sick man—his named was Hastein—and the count
served as his godfather. Throughout the ceremony, Hastein's attendants
remained quiet, solemn, and respectful. As for Hastein, he feigned a mix of
piety and weakness. When the baptismal rite was concluded, the Vikings
lifted the litter and bore their newly christened lord back through the town
and out to his ship. Once the Vikings were gone, the guards barred the gates
again—just to be on the safe side.
"A L E W D , U N B R I D L E D , C O N T E N T I O U S R A S C A L "
Details about Hastein's life are hard to come by. He was probably a Swede. He
must have been an experienced, respected Viking leader otherwise he never
could have raised a fleet of 62 longships in 859 for a raiding voyage into the
Mediterranean. A typical longship held between thirty and forty men, which
would have place Hastein in command of about 2,400 Vikings. William of
Jumieges, a Norman monk and historian, described the scene:
On the appointed day, the ships were pushed into the sea and the
soldiers hastened to go aboard. They raised the standards, spread the
sails before the wind, and like agile wolves set out to rend the Lord's
sheep, pouring out human blood to their god Thor.
We do not know what Hastein looked like, but another Norman monk and
historian, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, writing more than one hundred years after
the fact, left us an assessment of his character. Dudo described Hastein as
"accursed and headstrong, extremely cruel and harsh, destructive,
troublesome, wild, ferocious, infamous, destructive and inconstant, brash,
conceited and lawless, death-dealing, rude, everywhere on guard, a rebellious
traitor and kindler of evil, a double-faced hypocrite, an ungodly, arrogant,
seductive and foolhardy deceiver, a lewd, unbridled, contentious rascal."
Dudo was not exaggerating. Hastein's raids in northern France had been
so destructive that King Charles the Bald bought him off by handing over to
Hastein the city of Chartres. The Viking chief had no use for a town, so he
sold it to a Frankish count named Theobald. In Brittany, Hastein made a more
practical peace treaty with Count Salomon, promising to cease all raids on the
province in exchange for a payment of 500 cows.
About ten years before the voyage to the Mediterranean, Ragnar Lodbrok,
the king of Sweden and Denmark, had placed his son twelve-year-old son
Bjorn in Hastein's care, instructing him to teach the boy how be a proper
Viking warrior. Bjorn became Hastein's most trusted lieutenant and joined
him on the Mediterranean raid. By then he had acquired a nickname—Bjorn
Ironside, because, the Vikings said, his mother Aslaug had cast a spell that
made the young man invulnerable on the battlefield.
THE V I K I N G R A I D I N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N
After days of digging beneath Seville's walls, a handful of Vikings set fire to the
wooden beams that held up the tunnel, and then sprinted outside to watch the
result. The burned beams gave way, the tunnel collapsed, and with a thunderous
crash, a section of Seville's defensive walls fell and 1,000 battle-crazed
Viking warriors surged into the city. Moorish soldiers who had manned the
walls now retreated at a full run to the citadel, the only refuge within Seville
strong enough to withstand the Vikings.
Unable to breach the citadel walls, the Vikings gave up the attempt and set
about looting the city. They took their time, spending a week amassing treasures
from the palaces of the Moorish aristocracy and the houses of the city's
wealthy silk merchants. They rounded up the strongest and most attractive men
and women of Seville—Moors and Christians—for future sale to slavers and
herded the weeping throng down to their ships on the Guadalquivir River.
HASTEIN LED INTO
THE MEDITERRANEAN
A FLEET OF SIXTY TWO
VIKING LONG SHIPS
SIMILAR TO T H I S ONE,
DEPICTED IN A
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
TAPESTRY.
The year was 844. In preparation for their first raid on Spain, the Vikings
had beached their fleet of thirty ships on Isla Menor at the mouth of Spain's
Guadalquivir River. From their base camp on the island, the Northmen
attacked Seville, where the plunder proved to be so rich the majority of
Vikings established a branch operation in the ransacked city, riding out on
horseback to raid the surrounding towns and shipping their spoils and captives
down to Isla Menor. For six weeks, the Vikings lingered in the battered city,
giving the Moors ample time to regroup and launch a counter-offensive.
The Moors called the Vikings "Majus," derived from the Persian word
"magus" for a priest of the Zoroastrian religion, a sect renowned for fireworship.
Magus also is the source for the English words "magi," "magic," and
"magician," but among the Moors Majus meant "heathen."
As the Vikings took their time stripping the countryside around Seville,
Abdurrhaman II, emir of Cordoba, gathered his army. He sent small units to
ambush Viking raiding parties, while he led the main force to Seville where he
took the Vikings by surprise. He captured 500 Vikings, so many that there was
no room to hang them all on the city gallows; to accommodate the overflow,
the Moors strung up Vikings from palm trees.
To celebrate his triumph (and perhaps to intimidate the recipient)
Abdurrhaman sent 200 Vikings heads to a friend and ally in Tangiers.
Meanwhile, the Vikings, who escaped the Moors' counterattack, were
surrounded and stranded on Isla Menor, where they and their captives were
starving. They sent a message to the emir with an offer: The Vikings would
release all their captives in exchange for a guarantee of safe passage out of
Spain, as well as a quantity of food and fresh clothes. Abdurrhaman paid the
"ransom," taking great pleasure in seeing the Vikings depart and having his
captive people returned to him.
The first Viking incursion into the Mediterranean had ended badly, but
word spread among the Northmen of the wealth of the towns, the abundance
of food and wine, the fruit and livestock in the countryside, and the warm
climate, all of which made the region irresistible to other Vikings. Fifteen
years later, Hastein and Bjorn took what they considered to be a virtually
invincible fleet of 62 long ships into the Mediterranean to plunder the
southern paradise.
AT T H E CONCLUSION
OF HIS "FUNERAL,"
HASTEIN LEAPT OFF T H E
BIER A N D WITH HIS
VIKINGS MASSACRED THE
CONGREGATION IN T H E
CATHEDRAL OF LUNA.
B A C K F R O M T H E D E A D
Once safe on his ship, Hastein climbed off his "sickbed" to put in action the
next step of his scheme. After nightfall, his messenger called on the count and
the bishop bearing the sad news that Hastein had died. On his deathbed he
asked for one more favor—that the bishop offer his funeral Mass and then
bury him in the cathedral monastery. Without a moment's hesitation, the
bishop agreed and set a time for the funeral the next day.
Meanwhile, the story of the bloodthirsty Viking who had converted on
his deathbed and now would be buried in the cathedral had spread to every
household in the city. The next morning, a grave procession of fifty Vikings,
each dressed in long, dark-colored robes, passed slowly into the city bearing
Hastein's corpse on a bier. Lining the streets the entire way from the gates to
the cathedral door stood the entire throngs of onlookers.
On the broad steps of the cathedral stood the bishop robed in elaborate
black vestments, his golden crosier clasped in his left hand. Beside him was the
count, and all around them stood a large number of priests and monks, as well
as a crowd of altar boys, each one bearing a tall, lighted candle.
After blessing the corpse with holy water, the bishop led the grieving
band of Vikings, along with a large crowd of curious townspeople, into the
cathedral. Inside the crowd filled the nave, the monks filed into the choir,
and the priests and altar took their places in the sanctuary. When the
funeral Mass was over, the bishop gestured to the Vikings to follow him to
the burial place.
Suddenly Hastein leapt off his bier, drew his sword, and before anyone
in the church could react, killed the bishop. Turning on the count, who was
HASTEIN KNEW
ROME LAY NEAR THE
TYRRHENIAN SEA
ON T H E WESTERN
COAST OF ITALY, BUT
HE MISTOOK LUNA FOR
THE ETERNAL CITY.
too astonished to defend himself, Hastein killed him, too. As several of
Hastein's men ran down the nave to bar the church doors, the rest of the
Vikings threw off their mourning robes, pulled out their weapons, and
attacked the defenseless congregation. In the bloody free-for-all that
followed, the Vikings spared only a few young men and women who would
fetch a good price at the slave market.
There must have been some prearranged signal, perhaps the tolling of
the bell at the conclusion of the funeral, because as the fifty Viking
"mourners" spilled out of the cathedral, their nearly 2,000 comrades leapt
off their ships and charged into the city. For the rest of the day they killed
and looted and took prisoners. When they had filled their ships with as
many captives and as much loot as the boats could hold, the Vikings set fire
to Luna and sailed away.
The sack of Luna had been a brilliant success except in one respect—the
Vikings had attacked the wrong city. Somewhere during their adventures they
had heard Christians speak of Rome as a great city of white marble buildings
where every church and monastery held a fortune in gold and silver and
precious jewels.
No Viking had ever plundered Rome, but Hastein and Bjorn intended to
be the first. They knew Rome lay in the country of Italy near the coast of the
Tyrrhenian Sea, but they had no directions more specific than that. When they
entered the Gulf of Spezia on Italy's western shore and saw a lovely city of
white marble churches behind high defensive walls, they assumed the town
must be Rome, and poor Luna's fate was sealed.
V I K I N G S O N T H E R I V I E R A
"Blue men!" the slave trader bellowed. "Black Men!" A fascinated crowd of
Vikings and Irish gathered around the auction block, staring at the strange
men up for sale, fresh off a Viking ship from the Mediterranean. It was a late
summer day in one of the port towns the Vikings had founded on the Irish
coast, but compared to their homeland near the equator, the Africans must
have found this strange island cold and damp. While the Africans shivered
and the Irish stared, the auctioneer began taking bids from eager Viking
buyers.
The "blue men" were probably tattooed Tuaregs, members of the Berber
ethnic group found in modern-day Libya and Algeria. The "black men" were
probably sub-Saharan Africans and may already have been slaves of the Moors
of North Africa when the Vikings captured them.
THE TUAREGS WERE THE
"BLUE MEN" OF MODERNDAY
NORTH AFRICA WHOM
THE VIKINGS CAPTURED
DURING THEIR TRAVELS
THROUGH THE
MEDITERRANEAN AND
SOLD IN IRELAND.
In the summer of 859, Bjorn and Hastein led their fleet of sixty-two
ships up the Guadalquivir River to Seville, hoping to have better luck than
the first Viking raiders. In fact, they did much worse. The Moorish garrison
defended their city with primitive flamethrowers that used a simple hand
pump to spew burning naphtha that consumed ships and roasted men. After
a disorderly retreat down the river, Bjorn and Hastein retaliated by plundering
and burning the towns Algeciras and Cabo Tres Forcas in the
province of Cadiz. Next they sailed to North Africa, where they seized their
exotic slaves. Which North African towns they attacked or what success they
enjoyed, aside from the captives, is unknown.
With winter coming, the Vikings made a seasonal camp in the south of
France. The weather was still good, so they attacked Nimes, Aries, and
Valence. When the Franks sent an army against them the Vikings retreated to
a new location—the Cote dAzur on the French Riviera—from which they
sacked the town of Pisa in Italy. It may have been from captured Pisans that
the two Viking chiefs first heard of Rome.
For two years, the Viking fleet ricocheted around the Mediterranean,
from southern Europe to northern Africa and back again. Hastein and Bjorn
may even have attempted an assault on Alexandria in Egypt—there are
rumors of such an attack, but nothing definitive in the records from the
period. By 861, Bjorn and Hastein were ready to return home. As they drew
close to the Strait of Gibraltar, they found their way blocked by a Moorish
fleet. The Moors had never had a navy before, but after the last attack on
Seville they built one specifically to crush the famous seafarers. The Vikings
had generations of experience in naval warfare, but the Moors trumped it
with their flamethrowers. Of the approximately sixty ships Bjorn and
Hastein took into battle, only twenty managed to fight their way through to
the Atlantic.
The Moors had adopted the flamethrower after the Byzantines had used it
on them a century or so earlier. It was a heavy metal tube with a hand-operated
pump. It operated just like the modern-day water cannons children play with
in the summer. The tube was filled with a flammable chemical and then, by
employing the pump, spewed liquid fire on one's enemies. Like the Byzantines,
the Moors had found that the flamethrower was especially effective when used
against enemy ships, as they were built of wood and caulked with pitch. At the
first spurt of flaming liquid a wooden ship would burst into flame.
T H E M O O R I S H C O N Q U E S T O F S P A I N
SPANISH AND
PORTUGUESE ARIANS,
CATHOLICS, AND JEWS
ALL FELL V I C T IM TO
THE MOORS AS THEY
CONQUERED THE
IBERIAN PENINSULA.
Islam gave the Arabs what they had
never had before—a cohesive idea,
bigger than any tribe or clan, around
which all the tribes and clans could rally.
Once they had been poor desert
wanderers; now they were the chosen
people of God. The truth of this
statement was confirmed by the Prophet
Muhammed, whose successful wars
against his opponents convinced the
Arabs that if they united against a
common foe, they were virtually
unstoppable.
After the death of Muhammed in
632, the Arabs found themselves in an
interesting political situation. The two
greatest empires in the region, the
Persian and the Byzantine, had just
finished a prolonged, destructive war
that left both sides exhausted.
Recognizing an opportunity to expand
their power and their new religion, the
Arabs swept down upon Persia, Syria,
and Egypt. Worn out by their last war,
the inhabitants barely put up a fight: The
greatest lands in the Near East fell into
the Arabs' laps. Then from Egypt the
Arabs moved westward, conquering
about half of North Africa.
In the year 710, Wittiza, the king of
Spain, died. Wittiza had belonged to the
Arian Christian sect, which the Catholic
establishment viewed as heretical.
Unwilling to see another Arian on the
throne, the Catholic bishops of Spain, in
a hastily organized ceremony, crowned a
Catholic nobleman named Roderic king.
Wittiza's outraged relatives fled to
North Africa to seek the protection of a
Spanish Arian count named Julian, who
ruled the region around present-day
Ceuta in Morocco. To drive out Roderic
and install an Arian king in Spain, Julian
invited or perhaps hired to fight for him
an army of Muslim Moroccans—Moorsled
by a general named Tariq ibn Zayid.
Julian even offered his own ships to
ferry the Moors across the Strait of
Gibraltar to Spain.
With Julian serving as his guide,
showing him the best harbors, the richest
towns, and all the other secrets of Spain,
Tariq enjoyed the kind of advantage that
rarely comes to an invader. There was
one other advantage that Count Julian
overlooked but that Tariq saw at once:
Spain was a divided nation. Catholics
and Arians were at each other's throats,
and even within King Roderic's own
family there were relatives who felt
they deserved to be king. On July 19,
W711, at the Battle of Guadalete at the
southernmost tip of Spain, Tariq's
Moorish army defeated and virtually
massacred Roderic's army. Roderic
probably died in the carnage, but his
body was never recovered.
Encouraged by news of such a
promising beginning, the Moorish
governor of North Africa sent
reinforcements to Tariq. Capitalizing on
the dissension in the country and the
treachery of the Spanish, as well as on
the Muslims' own sense of invincibility,
Tariq conquered all of Spain and Portugal
within five years. The only holdout was
the Christian kingdom of Asturias in the
northwest corner of the country.
After Hastein and Bjorn's near escape from the Moorish fleet, the
Vikings steered away from the Mediterranean but continued to raid the
Atlantic coast of Spain. In the late 960s, the Vikings sacked eighteen cities
in the little Christian kingdom of Asturias on the Bay of Biscay. They
captured the town of Santiago de Compostela, looted the shrine of St.
James, killed the bishop Sisenand, and finding the country to their liking,
decided to stay. For three years the Vikings occupied Galicia, living off the
local population, and sometimes taking captives to sell as slaves, until in
971 a Galician count, Gonsalvo Sancho, raised an army and drove the
Norsemen out.
The Vikings settled extensively throughout northern Europe, but they
found no place for themselves in the Mediterranean—with one exception, the
city of Constantinople. These Vikings, however, did not come to the great
city through the Strait of Gibraltar; they traveled south on the rivers of Russia
and the Ukraine to the Black Sea, where Byzantine generals recruited them to
serve the emperor as mercenaries. The Byzantines liked to think of themselves
as the heirs of the old Roman Empire, and in this respect at least they were
imitating the caesars who had used barbarian warriors to buttress the strength
of Rome's legions.
Contact between the Byzantines and the Vikings who had settled in and
around Kiev must have begun no later than the early ninth century, because
we know that in 839 Emperor Theophilus persuaded Viking chiefs, or "Rhos,"
as he called them, to let him hire some of their fighting men. Communication
between the Vikings in the Ukraine and the Byzantines became more frequent
after Olga, Princess of Kiev, and then her grandson, Vladimir, converted to
Christianity.
T H E V A R A N G I A N G U A R D
By the late tenth century, there was a large Viking detachment serving in the
Byzantine army—at least 6,000 men, each of whom had sworn a personal oath
to fight in defense of the emperor. They were called the Varangian Guard,
Varangian coming from two Old Norse words that mean "to swear an oath."
When Emperor Basil II attacked the rebel general Bardas Phocas, he
brought the entire Varangian Guard with him. In the final battle, as Phocas's
soldiers ran from the battlefield, the Varangians chased them down and, as one
Byzantine chronicler put, "cheerfully hacked them to pieces." After that day,
Basil made the Varangians his personal bodyguard—a function the Varangians
performed for succeeding generations of Byzantine emperors.
Eventually, the Varangian Vikings converted to Christianity and adopted
Greek as their first language. But they clung to some of their traditions. They
had a preference for using axes in battle and a weakness for heavy drinking—
although in Constantinople they drank wine rather than mead or ale. Their
drunkenness was so conspicuous that when King Eric the Good of Denmark
made a state visit to the Byzantine court in 1103, he delivered a speech to the
Varangians, saying they were giving their countrymen a bad name and urging
them to moderate their drinking.
There was one more thing the Varangians remembered—the runic
alphabet of their homeland. Rune graffiti has been found on columns and
other monuments in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), as well as on a
pair of marble lions that were once in Athens but are now displayed in Venice.
In 1204, when the men of the Fourth Crusade were persuaded to sack
Constantinople rather than march to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem, the
only section of the city that was not overrun by the Crusaders was the part
defended by the Varangians. After that final victory, the Varangians disappear
from the historical record. In the entire Mediterranean world, Constantinople
was the only place where Vikings made a lasting impact.
