ABSTRACT
The pressures to which Europe was exposed from the Norse, the Magyars and the Saracens culminated in the later years of the ninth century and the earlier decades of the tenth. After this their pressure began to relax. In 885 the Norsemen besieged Paris, ravaging the countryside, massacring its inhabitants, and raiding deep into Burgundy. But twenty-five years later the Danes were making their homes along the Seine valley, and within a few decades had joined with the local Frankish population to build one of the most progressive states in early medieval Europe, the Duchy of Normandy. Vikings from the fjord coast of Norway had already settled in northern Britain, and had founded a town on the future site of Dublin in Ireland. The most northerly of the Scottish islands, indeed, remained part of the Norwegian crown into the fifteenth century. Danes from Jutland (Denmark) raided eastern England in the eighth century, and eventually established their control over the area lying approximately east of the old Roman road from London to Uriconium (Wroxeter) in the Welsh Border. Danish political control was not ended until early in the eleventh century, and the last Danish raid coincided with the Norman invasion in 1066. The Magyars raided deep into Germany and Italy. They overwhelmed the Great Moravian state; reached Bremen in Germany and Aquileia in Italy, whose inhabitants took refuge amid the lagoons which surrounded the future site of Venice, and in 926 destroyed the Swiss monastery of St Gall. But in 955 their army was met near Augsburg by the German host under Otto I, and utterly defeated. Thereafter their activities were restricted to the Hungarian plain. In the western Mediterranean the Muslim danger continued longer. Raids were made on coastal towns; Genoa was captured by an African band in 935, and, as late as 972, raiders from Garde Freinet penetrated the Alps of Dauphine, and actually captured abbot Maiolus of Cluny and held him to ransom.
