Viking, Muslim, and Magyar Invasions, c. 790–955

Beginning around the time of Charlemagne’s imperial coronation and extending to the mid-tenth century, new groups—Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars—confronted the Carolingian Empire and many of the other kingdoms of Europe. The Vikings were the first invaders. About the same time as some Vikings made their eastward forays into the region below the Gulf of Finland, others moved westward as well. Traveling in small bands led by a chief, the Vikings were merchants, sailors, and pirates. Some crossed the Atlantic in their longships to settle Iceland and Greenland. Around 1000, a few landed on the coast of North America. Others navigated the rivers of continental Europe.

As pagans, Vikings considered monasteries and churches—with their reliquaries, chalices, and crosses—no more than convenient storehouses of plunder. They hit the British Isles particularly hard. By the middle of the ninth century, the Vikings were spending winters there, and in 876 they settled in the northeast quadrant as farmers. This region was later called the Danelaw.

In Wessex, the southernmost kingdom of England, King Alfred the Great bought time and peace from the Vikings by giving them hostages and tribute. The tribute, later called Danegeld, eventually became the basis of a relatively lucrative taxation system in England. After Alfred led his army against the Vikings, set up strongholds, and deployed new warships, the threat of invasions eased.

On the continent, too, the Vikings set up trading stations and settled where originally they had raided. Beginning about 850, their attacks became well-organized expeditions for regional control. At the end of the ninth century, one contingent settled in the region of France that soon took the name Normandy (“land of the Northmen”). In 911, the Frankish king Charles the Simple ceded the region to Rollo, the Viking leader there. In turn, Rollo converted to Christianity.

Normandy was not the only new Christian polity created in the north during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Scandinavia itself was transformed with the creation of the powerful kingdom of Denmark. There had been kings in Scandinavia before the tenth century, but they had been weak, their power challenged by nearby chieftains. Some of these chieftains led the Viking raids, competing with one another for foreign plunder in order to win prestige, land, and power back home. During the course of their raids, they and their followers came into contact with new cultures and learned from them.

Meanwhile the Carolingians and the English supported missionaries in Scandinavia. By the middle of the tenth century, the Danes had become Christian. Following the model of the Christian kings to their south, the Danish kings built up an effective monarchy, with a royal mint and local agents who depended on them. By about 1000, the Danish monarchy had extended its control to parts of Sweden, Norway, and even England under King Cnut (also spelled Canute) (r. 1017–1035).

Southern Europe largely escaped the Vikings, but parts of it were attacked by Muslim adventurers from North Africa, Sicily, and northeastern al-Andalus who set up bases in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the Magyars (or Hungarians) settled in Europe’s very center. A nomadic people from the Ural Mountains (today northeastern Russia), they arrived around 899 in the Danube basin, driving a wedge between the Slavs near the Frankish kingdom and those bordering on Byzantium. The Bulgarians, Serbs, and Rus were forced into the Byzantine orbit, while the Slavs nearer the Frankish kingdom came under the influence of Germany.

From their bases in present-day Hungary, the Magyars raided far to the west, attacking Germany, Italy, and even southern Gaul frequently between 899 and 955. Then in 955 the German king Otto I (r. 936–973) defeated a marauding party of Magyars at the battle of Lechfeld. Otto’s victory, his subsequent military reorganization of his eastern frontiers, and the cessation of Magyar raids around this time made Otto a great hero to his contemporaries. However, historians today think the containment of the Magyars had more to do with their internal transformation from nomads to farmers than with their military defeat. Soon they converted to the Roman form of Christianity. Hungary’s position between East and West made it a frontier region, vulnerable to invasion and immigration but also open to new experiments in assimilation and integration.

The Viking, Muslim, and Magyar invasions were the final onslaught western Europe experienced from outsiders. In some ways they were a continuation of the invasions that had rocked the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Loosely organized in war bands, the new groups entered western Europe looking for wealth but stayed on to become absorbed in the region’s post-invasion society.