Barbarians from the north
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Three
Feudal Europe
Chapter I
The Dissolution of the Empire
3. The Enemies Without
I'm skipping the Saracen domination of all the islands and coasts of the Western Mediterranean and the Swedish (or Russian) trading activities in the East.
...
p124 Owing to the situation of their country, the Danes and the Norwegians looked to the West. The lands which tempted them to adventure were not, like the Byzantine Empire or the Arab Empire, flourishing States, full of cities, and promising great commercial profits, but purely agricultural regions, having nothing to buy or sell. Thus, while the Swedes... were anxious above all to trade... the Danes and Norwegians made their appearance as pirates and pillagers or sea-rovers.
...The Anglo-Saxon kings were unable to repulse the invaders. By the middle of the 9th century the greater part of Eastern England belonged to them, and in 878 Alfred the Great was obliged by treaty to abandon to them all the country lying to the east of a line drawn from London to Chester, which for long afterwards was known by the name of the Danelaw.
p125 ...Dublin, from the middle of the 9th century to the beginning of the 11th, was a sort of Norman colony... They infested the coasts of Portugal and Spain... passed the Straits of Gibraltar... reached the mouths of the Rhone, and at times... landed on Italian soil.
The Frankish Empire... was... the greatest sufferer at the hands of the Northmen. From the reign of Louis the Pious to the beginning of the 10th century their incursions were incessant... At last, in 911, Charles the Simple, unable to repulse them, ceded in fief to their chieftain Rollo the regions lying between the Seine and the Epte, which thereafter constituted the Duchy of Normandy. This was the end of the invasions...
p126 The success of these aggressions is to be explained only by the weakness of the Carolingian State and its increasing decomposition. To resist the Barbarians a fleet would have been necessary. But how could a fleet be built without financial resources? And how could fortresses be built to defend coasts?... the kings abandoned the attempt [to counter the Normans], leaving it to the aristocracy to check the invaders as best they could, by local and uncoordinated efforts...
p127 The cession of Normany to Rollo took place only a few years later than the conquest of Kiev by Oleg. [Footnote: ...In 1018 Kiev was still wholly Scandinavian.] The comparison between the two States is interesting. In Russia the Northmen were and remained the masters of the country, and they instituted a government in accordance with their national customs, treating the Slavs as their subjects. In France, where they were in contact with a superior civilization, their attitude was very different. Rollo and his followers went over to Christianity, and the process of assimilation began immediately. It proceeded with astonishing rapidity. Twenty-five years after their arrival the Scandinavian tongue was no longer spoken save at Bayeux, and doubtless along the coast, where the place-names ending in beuf remind us of the presence of people speaking a Germanic tongue. The process of Gallicization was so complete that there is not a single Scandinavian word in the Norman dialect... Fifty years after Rollo's time Normandy was as French a province as Burgundy or Champagne... So little had survived that when the Normans invaded Sicily, and then England (1066), they appeared as French conquerors. What did survive was the spirit of adventure, which from the beginning of the 11th century, drove masses of them southwards to Italy...
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