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Home , Battle of Edington, Erik the Red, Rurik, Viking Age, Vladimir the Great

Laval University

From the SelectedWorks of Fathi Habashi

March, 2020

The iV Age Fathi Habashi

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/fathi_habashi/615/ The Age

INTRODUCTION

The (793-1066) is a period in history during which the Scandinavians expanded and built settlements throughout . They are sometimes referred to as and known to the Greek as . They took two routes: the East - - the present-day and , and the West mainly in the present-day , , , , Italy, and the . The Viking were competent sailors, adept in land warfare as well as at sea. Their ships were light enough to be carried over land from one river system to another.

Viking ships

The motivation of the Viking to invade East and West is a problem to historians. Many theories were given none was the answer. For example, retaliation against to by by killing any who refused to become baptized, seeking centers of wealth, kidnapping slaves, and a decline in the profitability of old routes.

Viking ship in Museum

The raids in the East and the West of Europe VIKINGS IN THE EAST

The Dnieber The Vikings of came by way of the Gulf of and sailed up the Dvina River as far as they could go, and then carried their ships across land to the River, which flows south to the . They raided villages then they became interested in trading with the Slavs. Using the Dnieper, they carried shiploads of furs, honey, and wax south to markets on the Black Sea, or sailed across that sea trade in .

Rurik There was much quarreling among the villages, and this often led to battles and bloody vengeance. Each village was independent of the others, and was ruled by elders elected by the people. There was nothing to hold the villages together. The people of Novgorod sent a message to the Vikings asking for help. A Viking chief named and his people did come in a fleet of ships to live in Novgorod where he became the chief there and ruled over the scattered towns of the northern rivers.

Detailed map of Dnieper and

Rurik ( ?- 879) Oleg (?-912)

Kiev Two of the Vikings, Askold and Dir left Novgorod and sailed south down the Dnieper. They came to the town of Kiev where they settled and became its rulers. Later, other Vikings joined them. At that time Kiev was paying tribute to the that flourished in the region between the and the Persian Empire. Although these peoples seem to have ploughed the earth and cultivated the land almost all were nomads occupied with hunting, fishing, and warring. They were considered barbarians by the Greek and Romans. Rurik died in Novgorod, leaving his close friend Oleg to rule until his son Igor (ca. 878-945) came of age. About the year 878 Oleg gathered a large army of Finns, Varangians, and Slavs and set sail down the Dnieper. At the town of , he went ashore and told the people that Igor the son of Rurik was the Prince of all Russians. The people thus swore to be loyal to him. Oleg left a few of his men to rule the town and continued southward.

Oleg In 907, young Prince Igor was old enough to take charge at Kiev. Oleg organized a large army and sailed down the river to Byzantium. He raided the villages along the Bosporus. The emperor sent out ambassadors to him with offers of peace and gifts. Oleg made a trade treaty with them and returned to Kiev with his ships loaded with fine clothes, gold, sweet wines, and fruits, linen, grain, flax, and slaves. Oleg was recognized as the grand prince. The states paid taxes to Oleg mainly because they needed his help.

Igor (ca. 875-945) Olga (890-969 Sviatoslav (942-972)

Kiev Expands Oleg died and Igor became the . The towns were constantly at war with each other during his rule, for almost every prince wanted to enlarge his territory. Igor dreamed of taking Constantinople and in 944 he attacked it with a fleet of a thousand ships. The fleet of Byzantine warships that sailed out to fight him was not nearly so large. But it carried one of the most closely guarded secrets of Byzantium. A secret weapon known as Greek fire. Flaming tongues of fire shot out of tubes and landed on enemy ships, burning them. Most of the Russian fleet was ablaze. Igor and a few ships managed to escape and return to Kiev.

Greek fire

Olga Upon Igor's death a few years later, his wife Olga took his place as ruler, calling herself the grand princess of Rus. She sailed to Constantinople for a social visit in the year 955. She was so impressed by the churches that she became a Christian and was baptized by the of Constantinople. But she could not convert her son Svyatoslav who followed his father's example and became a great warrior. He was fighting the Bulgars, the Byzantines,, and the . The Pechenegs finally trapped and killed him.

Vladimir In the 10th to 11th centuries Kievan Rus' became one of the largest and most prosperous states in Europe. The reigns of the Grand Prince of Kiev (960-1015) from 980 to 1015 son of Svyatoslav and his son (978–1054) constitute the Golden Age of Kiev, which saw the acceptance of Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium to repel the Moslems. Christianity brought fundamental changes in the life of these peoples like marriage which did not exist before. By 980 Vladimir had consolidated the Kievan realm from modern-day Ukraine to the and had solidified the frontiers against incursions of Bulgarian, Baltic, and Eastern nomads.

Vladimir spent much of his time on the problems of Christianity. Churches had to be built and more priests had to be brought in from Constantinople to teach the new religion. Since the Russians did not have an alphabet or a written language, the priests from Byzantium gave them the alphabet they had invented for the and the Slavs long ago. Then the Bible had to be translated into the .

Yaroslav This work was continued by Yaroslav, the son of Vladimir, after his father death. Yaroslav was the most successful and probably the most powerful of all the rulers of Kievan Russia. During his rule, the first code of Russian laws was begun. Yaroslav brought in priests, artists, scholars, architects, and craftsmen from Byzantium. They helped him build Kiev into a beautiful city with a library, several churches, a , and one large cathedral which was a small copy of St. Sophia in Constantinople. The Byzantine churches in Kiev served as models for churches built in other communities. With the introduction of Christianity came Byzantine art and culture, Byzantine law, church schools, and the idea of a strong central government under an absolute ruler. The church organization brought new unity to the country and gave the grand princes of Kiev more power than they had ever had before. But Kievan Russia remained a loose federation of city-states.

Vladimir the Great (980–1015) Cyril (826-869) and Methodius (815-885)

The destruction of Kiev After the death of Yaroslav in 1045, the country was divided among his five sons, and Kiev lost much of its influence as the leading city. The princes were far more interested in getting more territory and increasing their own power. Civil wars and treachery became the normal state of life in Russia. Some states came to hate their neighboring states so bitterly that they even joined forces with their old enemies, the Cuman nomads of the steppe, to fight against their own kinsmen. The Cumans had conquered the grassy plains from the Pechenegs. They waged constant warfare against the Slavic towns, including Kiev. They raided, burning, and killing and sometimes carrying off whole populations to be sold into . The Cumans struck again and again, for one hundred and fifty years. Kiev was particularly hard hit. Her trade fell off. People of Kiev and of all the other towns in the southern border regions began leaving for safer places to live in the southwest and in the northern forests. Many of these people went as far into the northwest as Novgorod on the banks of the River. The northeast territory came under the rule of the prince of Suzdal, Andrey Bogoliubsky. He moved his capital from Suzdal to the town of Vladimir and built it into a great city with strong walls and a Golden Gate like the one at Kiev. In his territory lay a small settlement called , which had no importance at the time. Andrey soon became a powerful prince. In 1169 he sent an army against Kiev and captured it. Andrey left his younger brother to rule over that city. The city of Vladimir prospered while Kiev grew weaker and weaker. Kiev had to use much of its strength fighting off raids of the Cuman nomads. Kiev's foreign trade was suffering too, for the needs of the country were changing. With the steady increase in population, fields had to be enlarged to grow more food. Forest lands were cleared to make more room for fields. Wild animals of the forest were disappearing in many areas.

VIKINGS IN THE WEST

England Most of the English kingdoms could not stand against the Vikings, but King Alfred of defeated 's army at the Battle of Edington in 878. Alfred and his successors eventually drove back the Viking frontier and retook . A new wave of Vikings appeared in England in 947. The Viking presence continued through the reign of the Danish prince Canut the Great (reigned as King of England: 1016–1035), after which a series of inheritance arguments weakened the hold on power of Canut's heirs. King Eystein II of plundered the east coast of England, sacking Hartlepool and Whitby, as well as raiding the Yorkshire coast. The conclusion of these raids, marked the end of the English Viking age.

Viking invasion of England

King Alfred of Wessex Canut the Great

Scotland The monastery at on the west coast was first raided in 794, and had to be abandoned some fifty years later after several devastating attacks. The isles to the north and west of were heavily colonised by Norwegian Vikings. , and the came under Norse control, sometimes as fiefs under the King of Norway. Shetland and Orkney were the last of these to be incorporated into Scotland in as late as 1468.

Wales The Vikings settled in small numbers in the south. The Vikings, however, were not able to control Wales, owing to the powerful forces of Welsh . The combined Anglo-Saxon and Welsh army eventually overtook the Vikings before defeating them at the Battle of Buttington.

Cornwall The raided Charmouth, in 833, then in 997 they destroyed the Dartmoor town of Lydford, and from 1001 to 1003 they occupied the old Roman city of .

Ireland The Vikings conducted extensive raids in and founded many towns, including . The Vikings pillaged on Ireland's west coast in 795, and then spread out to cover the rest of the coastline. During the mid-, raids began to push deeper into Ireland. Navigable waterways made this deeper penetration possible. The Vikings were driven out of Ireland in the in 1014. After the battle, Viking power was broken in Ireland forever, though many settled Norse remained in the cities and prospered greatly with the Irish through trade.

Normandy The Viking presence in Normandy began with raids into the territory of the Frankish Empire, from the middle of . Viking raids extended deep into the Frankish territory, and included the sacking of many prominent towns such as and . The inability of the Frankish king , and later , to prevent these Viking incursions forced them to offer vast payments to prevent any further pillage. The language of Normandy heavily reflected the Danish influence, as many words were borrowed from or Old Danish.

Normandy in France invasion by the Viking

West and Middle Francia Francia, also called the Frankish Empire, was the largest post-Roman barbarian kingdom in . In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Vikings raided the Frisian and Frankish towns lying on the coast and along the rivers of the Low Countries. Although Vikings never settled in large numbers in those areas, they did set up long-term bases and were even acknowledged as lords in a few cases. Antwerp was raided in 836. Later there were raids of Ghent, Leuven and the areas around the Meuse river, the Rhine, the Rupel river and the tributaries of those rivers. Around 879, Godfrid arrived in Frisian lands as the head of a large force that terrorized the Low Countries. Using Ghent as his base, they ravaged Ghent, Maastricht, Liège, Stavelot, Prüm, Cologne, and Koblenz. The Vikings were compelled to come to terms in which their leader, Godfrid, was converted to Christianity. Godfrid was assassinated in 885, after which Gerolf of Holland assumed lordship and Viking rule of came to an end.

Viking raids in Francia

Iberian Peninsula In some of their raids on Iberia, the Vikings were crushed either by the or the Emirate armies. The most prominent event was a raid in 844, when Vikings entered the Garonne and attacked and Asturias. When the Vikings attacked A Coruña they were met by the army of King Ramiro I and were heavily defeated. They then proceeded south, raiding and Seville. Evidence for Viking activity in Iberia vanishes after the .

Italy and Sicily Varangians may first have been deployed as in Italy against the as early as 936. Later, several Anglo-Danish and Norwegian nobles participated in the of southern Italy. , who later became king of Norway, seems to have been involved in the Norman conquest of Sicily between 1038 and 1040.

Iceland, Greenland, and Iceland was discovered by Naddodd who was sailing from Norway to the but got lost and drifted to the east coast of Iceland. Iceland was first settled around 870. In the year 985, was believed to have discovered Greenland after being exiled from Iceland for murder in 982. Greenland became a dependency of the king of Norway in 1261. In 1379, the northernmost settlement was attacked by . Crops failed and trade declined. The Greenland colony gradually faded away. Expeditions from Greenland, some led by , explored the areas to the west, seeking large timbers for building in particular. A short-lived settlement was established on Newfoundland.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

King Harold II (ca. 1022 –1066), was the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England. He reigned from January 1066 until his death in October the same year at the , fighting the Norman invaders led by during the Norman conquest of England.

King Harold II

William I (ca. 1028 –1087), Duke of Normandy known as William the Conqueror, a descendent of the Vikings, became King of England at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. He was crowned King of England in December 1066, he retained the fiefdom of Normandy for himself and his descendants. The rest of his life was marked by struggles to consolidate his hold over England and his continental lands and by difficulties with his eldest son.

William the Conqueror Battle of Hastings in 1066