The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

While Charlemagne was making himself the emperor of the north, the popes continued to have problems in Rome. Placed between the still-flourishing Byzantine Empire and the new Prankish Empire, they seemed – and were – rather insignificant. Pope Leo III was undoubtedly something of a weakling, and was detested by the relatives of the previous pope, who felt they could provide better candidates for the throne of St Peter. In 799, some of these rowdies seized Leo in the street, announced their intention of gouging out his eyes and cutting out his tongue and, while the pope writhed and struggled, slashed at his eyes with a sword – he bore the scar on his eyelids for the rest of his life. They were interrupted by some of Charlemagne’s envoys, and Leo escaped to the domain of his most powerful ally. Charlemagne heaved a sigh of exasperation; in his late fifties, he was getting tired of fighting, and probably felt that the pope was not worth fighting for anyway. But he sent Leo back to Rome with a suitable escort, the attackers were brought to trial and exiled, and order was finally restored. To signal his gratitude, Leo crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West in St Peter’s on Christmas Day 800 A.D. Charlemagne became the first Roman Emperor since the boy Romulus was deposed more than three centuries earlier. But he seems to have regarded the position as something of a liability. He went back north, ruled for another fourteen years, and died at his favourite palace in Aachen.

And – the refrain becomes tiresomely predictable – as soon as he died, his empire began to fall to pieces. Nothing could provide a more emphatic contradiction to the argument that Tolstoy puts forward in War and Peace that ‘great men’ are not really the driving force behind history than this constant refrain: ‘As soon as so-and-so died, his empire began to collapse…’ And the cause is usually the same: the heirs quarrel amongst themselves, newly-conquered subjects take the opportunity to revolt, and weakness turns into chaos. Two of the three sons among whom Charlemagne proposed to divide his empire actually died before they could succeed; but Charlemagne’s ineffectual son Louis the Pious compensated by dividing the kingdom between four sons. At a time when it desperately needed unity, Europe was again split apart.

Even before the death of Charlemagne, there were new menaces on all frontiers. Fierce Slavic warriors swept across the Balkans and into Greece. The Arabs continued to make inroads from the south, and Charlemagne’s attempt to drive them from Spain was his least successful campaign. And from the north came the most terrifying and ruthless of the new barbarians, the Vikings. These were the most frightening invaders since the Huns. To begin with, they fought like madmen – their own word for the mad frenzy -they displayed in battle was to go ‘berserk’ – it has been suggested that they took some kind of drug before battle. Like the Saxons, they also sacrificed their enemies to their northern gods, with a particularly nasty ritual called ‘the blood eagle’, which consisted of sawing out a man’s ribs while he was still alive, then tearing out his lungs and spreading them apart like an eagle’s wings. They seemed to have no conscience and no mercy. Possibly sheer hardship made them brutal. Their long, narrow ships were scarcely bigger than large rowing boats, by modern standards, and they were quite open, with no decks, so that the thirty or so men on board had to sleep in the open. The compass had not been invented, so in cloudy weather they had to steer by instinct. When they found a promising-looking settlement near the coast, they slaughtered, raped, burned and pillaged as if to take revenge for their long nights of hardship. Our modern view of them as noble warriors would not be shared by a traveller returning to his native village and finding every house burnt to the ground and every man, woman and child murdered. Nowadays we should regard them as vermin who had to be exterminated at any cost. The Franks, English, Italians and other nations who suffered from their raids no doubt took the same view. But there was no medieval Pompey to flush the rats out of their nests. Charlemagne is said to have cried as he saw the black sails of the Vikings in the Channel, and he built forts against them. But he was dead by the time the Vikings became the scourge of Europe, and his grandsons were too weak to organise adequate resistance. Villages and monasteries simply had to be rebuilt inland, as in the days of the Mediterranean pirates.

And what was it that made the Vikings into ‘criminal rats’? The question itself offers the clue: overcrowding. The forefathers of these robbers were farmers who lived in the bleak lands of the north. They cultivated the ground – where possible – but the soil was poor and thin. Their main food was meat – reindeer meat. With a few tame reindeer they could catch the wild ones. As their farms were divided amongst their children, there was not enough land to provide crops. Since they were living in a country of fiords and waterways, they took to the sea and became traders. But there was always danger from pirates, so they went heavily armed. And quite suddenly – probably within a space of a decade or so – they realised that their prosperous Frankish neighbours could be plundered… For Europe, the fateful ‘year of the Viking’ was the year Charlemagne was crowned Emperor – 799.

These ‘heroic adventurers’ depended on a technique of hit-and-run. In head-on battles, they were usually beaten. But their swift boats had them out of harm’s way before the defending army arrived. And when the army was weak, they moved in. They descended on England in the middle of the ninth century and burnt York to the ground; the king of the Northumbrians, Aelle, suffered the blood eagle sacrifice; so did Edmund, king of the East Angles. In 870 they attacked the West Saxons and marched up the Ridgeway to the Berkshire downs, where a great white horse had been cut into the turf by the Celts. The king’s younger son, Alfred, led an impetuous charge against them, and by nightfall the white horse was stained with Viking blood and the ground was covered with their bodies. But the men of Wessex had no standing army; they were farmers who had to leave their land to fight the invader. So Viking forces, under their leader Guthrum, penetrated into Wessex, and Alfred – now the king – had to take refuge in the swampy country around Athelney in Somerset. English history hung in the balance. If Alfred had decided to give up at that point, England would have become an outpost of Scandinavia, and the language of modern England and America would be Danish. In fact, Alfred built a fort and began to make forays against the Norsemen. His messengers went out to call Englishmen to his standard. And in May 878, his army attacked the Norsemen at Edington, not far from the white horse, and inflicted total defeat.

The sequel is completely typical of the Middle Ages. Alfred knew the Danes were in England to stay. Three weeks after the battle, Guthrum came to Athelney with his leading men and was baptised as Alfred’s godson. There followed days of feasting. When Guthrum left, he was a friend and ally. The Danes went back to East Anglia and shared out the land as farmers – their portion of England became known as the Danelaw. And Alfred went on to build himself a navy, and fortified towns and to become a small scale Charlemagne of southern England.

Now in a sense, the most decisive part of this story is the last part – the baptism and feasting. It was the establishment of a personal relationship that turned ‘criminal rats’ into good citizens. Like all criminals, the Vikings had regarded their victims as abstractions, non-persons; it was the law of xenophobia in operation. So they could pretend that moral laws were non-existent – or at least, that they did not apply to these foreigners any more than to the reindeer I hey ate. The moment the foreigners became ‘people’, the time for rape and pillage was over.

Charles the Simple of France was finally forced to adopt the same remedy in 911 A.D. The Vikings had sailed up the Seine in 845, 851, S61 and 885, pillaging Paris three times and burning it twice. In 885, they besieged the city, which held out grimly under the leadership of Odo, count of Paris; the Parisians were forced to eat dogs, cats and even rats. Finally, the king, Charles the Fat, arrived on the scene with a vast army, but was too cowardly to fight the Vikings; so he offered them ‘Danegeld’ and bought them off, to everybody’s disgust. Naturally, the Vikings took the money and then went on to burn and loot the rest of the country. Understandably irritated, the Franks deposed Charles and made Odo king; but Odo’s luck was little better and he was also forced to the humiliating expedient of Danegeld. His successor, Charles the Simple, offered the Danish leader, Rollo, the land we now call Normandy (Normans were originally Norsemen), and it was their descendants who invaded England in 1066 under William of Normandy.