Vikings and Kings and Battles, oh my
Later this week I will be traveling across the Atlantic to one of the biggest conferences for medieval historians in the world, the Leeds International Medieval Congress. This year I am moderating a panel as well as presenting some of my own research. For my own paper I was curious about how the Vikings were used as a rhetorical device in Carolingian era texts, either for praise or for criticism. As I am currently revising the paper, I decided to spin off part of it into a post! Be warned, this is still a work in progress, and I am using this paper as a way of thinking through some of these ideas, so don’t go taking any of this as the last word on the subject!
One of the most dramatic events of Arnulf’s reign was his victory over the Vikings at the Battle of Leuven in 891.1 This victory was evidently big enough for news to travel across the Channel to Wessex, where it was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
In this year the Danish army went east, and King Arnulf with the East Franks, the Saxons, and Bavarians fought against the mounted force before the ships arrived, and put it to flight.2
The most detailed account of this battle comes from the Bavarian continuation of the Annals of Fulda. Despite most of our sources noting how great a victory the Battle of Leuven was, the Vikings returned in 892, so it was certainly not a complete victory.3 As becomes clear from reading the Bavarian annalist’s entry for 891, it was intended to be highly dramatic and present Arnulf as a redemptive figure for the Franks. That is, the victory at Leuven was not simply a military success, but a political and cultural resource that could be used by the Bavarian annalist.
The shaping of the annalistic and historical tradition by Carolingian authors is a well-known and much discussed practice by modern historians. Often, narratives were shaped to fit prevailing political and cultural agendas. There has been much discussion on how the Carolingians shaped the past to justify their own claims to royal authority in replacing the previous dynasty, the Merovingians.4
The Bavarian annalist is certainly able to tell a compelling story. In the run up to the battle the archbishop of Mainz was killed and part of the army seemingly betrayed Arnulf and went home. This is all building to the encounter between the Frankish army and the Vikings near the river Dyle. The annalist depicts Arnulf as being concerned to risk such a large army due to the terrain, but in the end decided to lead an attack against the Vikings. Here the annalist inserts a long “speech” given by the king to the men that emphasizes the divine element of the Franks’ task:
Men, while you have honoured God, and have always protected the fatherland under God’s grace, you have been invincible. Take courage, when you think of revenging the blood of your pious relatives shed by an enemy raging in a most pagan fashion, when you behold the overthrow even in your fatherland of holy churches dedicated to the honour of saints and of your Creator, and when you see the deaths of God’s ministers of the highest rank. Now, soldiers, act! You have the authors of these crimes before your eyes, and when I get down from my horse and signal with my hand, follow me! Let us attack our enemies in God’s name, avenging not our shame but that of Him who can do all things.5
Naturally, we should be deeply suspicious of any “speeches” given by a historical figure and then written down later. These are, in all likelihood, not the words Arnulf spoke before the battle, although some elements may be real. Regino would also note Arnulf leaping off his horse and exhorting the men in his early tenth century chronicle.6
After the battle Arnulf ordered litanies be held and “he himself proceeded with the army in order to sing praises to God, who granted so great a victory to them.”7 Throughout the Carolingian period victory in battle was often interpreted as a sign of divine approval and aid.8 Holding litanies and proceeding with the army would have reinforced the divine aid given to Arnulf, but also his own role as the king and leader of the army.9 Further, by holding them at the site of the battle the procession would have literally trodden on Arnulf’s defeated enemies.
The Bavarian annalist is clearly interested in highlighting the divine favor on Arnulf’s rule. That other sources likewise express interest in how the battle represented divine help against the Vikings suggests that the Bavarian annalist was not fabricating something to make his favorite king look good. Instead, contemporaries were working with a shared set of ideas and assumptions about how their kings should defeat the Vikings. Because of this, they could also use it against kings. In one case a source notes that a king battled the Vikings but still fled and that “thus was manifested a divine judgment, for what had been done by the Northmen obviously came about by divine, not human, power.”10 Funnily enough, the author was the archbishop of Reims Hincmar, and the battle was actually a victory, not a defeat. Hincmar was using these norms about how a king should succeed against the Vikings in order to criticize the ruler, who evidently did not favor Hincmar as much as his predecessors.
The victory at Leuven in 891 also likely had an impact on Arnulf’s court, because we see an increase in the usage of the epithet invictissimus or “the most unconquered” in the signum line of his charters. From 887 to 891 this word appears in ~47% of his charters, but from 892 to 895 this jumps to ~64%.
Arnulf won a series of military victories in these years that probably gave the court more confidence, and thus expressions of Arnulf’s rule as militarily unconquered became more pronounced. That is, there was a corresponding feedback loop between rhetorical ideas around the king’s duty, military success, and royal presentation. We only have traces of this, however, but in a ninth century manuscript from Lorsch there is a single column that contains the phrase Arnolfus fortis victor (“Arnulf the powerful conqueror”).11
It is unknown who wrote this brief note between 891 and 893, but it highlights how the Vikings were both a rhetorical device and a military threat. The Vikings could serve a variety of purposes all at once, and Carolingian authors and courts took advantage of these meanings. The physical violence was one element that drove fears around the Vikings, and the threat of this violence to the political order made it a valuable resource for contemporaries to use both to praise and to critique.
I am using Vikings here out of convenience, even if Northmen is perhaps a better term.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 891, trans. D. Whitelock, p. 53.
AV, s.a. 892, p. 72; Regino, Chronicon, s.a. 892, p. 138.
There is a lot that could go here, but some good starting points: R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World and H. Reimitz, History, Frankish Identityy, and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550-850. See also C. Gantner, R. McKitterick, and S. Meeder (eds), The Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe and the earlier Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages; R. McKitterick, “Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of the Royal Frankish Annals,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997): 101-129; R. McKitterick, “The Illusion of Royal Power in the Carolingian Annals,” The English Historical Review, Sixth Series 115, no. 460 (2000): 1-20; P. Fouracre, “The Long Shadow of the Merovingians” in J. Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society, pp. 5-21.
AF (B), s.a. 891, p. 120, trans. Reuter, Annals of Fulda, p. 122.
Regino, Chronicon, s.a. 891, pp. 137-138.
AF (B), s.a. 891, p. 121: ipse cum omni exercitu laudes Deo canendo processit, qui talem victoriam suis tribuit. For the role of these types of celebration see E. Goldberg, “”More Devoted to the Equipment of Battle Than the Splendor of Banquets”: Frontier Kingship, Military Ritual, and Early Knighthood at the Court of Louis the German,” Viator 30 (1999): 41-78 at 60-72, p. 71 notes Arnulf’s victory in 891 and n. 27, below.
See J. Nelson, “Violence in the Carolingian World and the Ritualization of Ninth-Century Warfare,” in G. Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 90-107. Also see M. Alberi, “”Like the Army of God’s Camp”: Political Theology and Apocalyptic Warfare at Charlemagne’s Court,” Viator 41, no. 2 (2010): 1-20.
On liturgical celebrations see M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 342-362. M. McCormick, “The Liturgy of War in the Early Middle Ages. Crisis, Litanies and the Carolingian Monarchy,” Viator 15 (1984): 1-23.
AB, s.a. 881
Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 133, fol. 144v. The phrase appears next to another, Gerhartus pius pastor who was the abbot of Lorsch until 893, so it was written presumably between 891 and 893.
Great stuff! Looking forward to hearing the paper next week.