ABSTRACT
This might well be taken as the epitaph chiselled by general historical opinion on the Viking gravestone. The phrase-there is absolutely no evidence that it was ever added to the monastic litanies-sums up the hostile treatment usually given to the Vikings by historians of the early middle ages: the wild Vikings proved a temporary threat to the progress of western civilization. They belong, it is said, on the periphery of events, far removed from the central events of the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries. They were, like the Magyars and the Moors, irritants, negative and destructive, hostile to Francia, the historical centre of Europe at that time. The traditional story begins or, at least, rises to a high pinnacle with the coronation of Charlemagne at St Peter’s in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. We are told variously that this event was the central point of the early middle ages, that it was the first attempt by the Germanic peoples to organize Europe, that it was the event which provides a focus for European history till the eleventh century and beyond. Political theorists have taken this event, however they may interpret it, as a landmark in the struggle between ‘church and state’ (to use the anachronism still, alas, alive among us). And, we are told, the main lines of European history follow. Charlemagne established an empire or, at least, a large area of western Europe under Frankish control: from the Danish March to central Italy. This so-called empire collapsed under his son and his grandsons. With the treaty of Verdun in 843 there began, so the story runs, the dismemberment of this empire, and within a hundred years the once united empire of Charlemagne had been fractured and left in hundreds of pieces, some tiny, others large, all virtually separate and autonomous units. Then the East Franks in Saxony slowly began to rebuild and Otto I took the imperial title in 962. His successors
developed a strong East Frankish state; in 1049 this development reached its climax when Henry III placed Leo IX, who started the work of papal reform, on the papal throne. The promise of Charlemagne was now fulfilled. Thus, in this accounting, the story of European history from the beginning of the ninth century till the mid eleventh century is the story of the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire and the rise of its German successors. Who can doubt this?
