Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

the Northmen were demoralising, the notion that it was mere bestial appetite which had propelled them across the sea did at least serve to reassure their victims that, inviolable amid all the rapine, the values of Christendom remained those of virtue and order. Women might be abducted, monasteries plundered, even whole cities burned – and yet the memory of such atrocities, growing ever more lurid with the retelling, only helped to confirm in most Christians an impregnable sense of their own superiority. Just as the monk murdered by a Northman could draw his last breath confident in the knowledge that he was bound for a throne in heaven, so could the warrior who unsheathed his sword against the pirates and stood to block their path know with an iron-forged certitude that he was performing the work of God.

So it was that even by the time of the Millennium, a century after the worst of the firestorm had passed from France, great princes were still in the habit of flaunting battle honours won by their forefathers against the Northmen. A dynasty which lacked them, indeed, was felt to verge on the illegitimate. Nothing, for instance, had been more fatal to the martial reputation of the Carolingians than their failure, back in 886, to finish off an army of pirates who had presumed to lay siege to Paris; just as the Capetians, one of whose ancestors had performed prodigies of valour during the great assault on the city, never let anyone forget their own family’s heroic record as Northmen-fighters. ‘Swords and spears slippery with bright blood’;” ‘skewered bodies sprawled as though asleep in town gate-ways’; ‘gobbets of carrion stuck to the claws and beaks of crows’: such were the scenes of carnage that had first served to fertilise Capetian greatness.

And the greatness of many other Frankish dynasties too. It was no coincidence that many of the most formidable princedoms of the kingdom, from Flanders to Anjou, stood guard over broad-flowing estuaries: those fatal confluences where waters from the heart of France met and mingled with the sea. Just as it was the Seine which had enabled the Northmen, ‘oars thrashing, weapons crashing, shields striking shields’, to penetrate to the bridges of Paris, so too had other fleets thrust their way up the Loire, snaking deep into the very innards of the kingdom, so that even Orleans, back in 856, had been captured and brutally despoiled. On the lower reaches of the river, not surprisingly, the devastation had been more protracted: the county of Anjou, which by the year 1000 would stand so thriving, so puissant, so (air, had been, not much more than a century earlier, so infested with Northmen as to appear almost lost to Christendom. Angers, the proud city that would serve Fulk Nerra as his capital, had been repeatedly occupied by pirates, and transformed into their lair. Other towns, one jittery contemporary had wailed, ‘are emptied so utterly, alas, that they are become the habitation of wild beasts!’

But this had been to overdo the pessimism. In truth, even at the height of the Northmen’s assault, outposts of Frankish rule had endured along the entire reach of the Loire; nor had the structures of governance there ever wholly collapsed. Proficient at carting off loot the pirates may have been — but they had signally failed to lay their hands on any effective levers of power. It had not taken long for the new masters of Angers, planted in the city after its final liberation in 886, to demonstrate the full scale of this error. By 929, the Vicomte of Angers had cheerfully promoted himself to the rank of ‘the Count of Anjou’; a few decades on, and even the greatest in the land had accepted his right to be reckoned their peer. Francia being what it was, an ancient and Christian realm, loot pilfered from its monasteries could never hope to compare as a long-term investment with lands and a glamorous title. Fulk Nerra’s ancestors, because they had instinctively appreciated this, had been able to raise a princedom that, by 1000, could stand comparison with any in France. The Northmen, because they had not, had long since been swept from the Loire back into the sea.

And yet, to a menacing degree, they had always been fast learners. As pirates, living by their wits, they had needed to be. Whether it was raiding a monastery on the occasion of its saint’s day, or sweeping into a market place just as the stalls were going up, or mastering, perhaps, the unfamiliar Frankish arts of horsemanship, the Northmen had long shown themselves adept at profiting from an attentive study of their prey. They were certainly not oblivious to the underlying strengths possessed by a Christian state – nor to the threat that these presented to themselves. Along the lower reaches of the Seine, for instance, where the Northmen had settled to for more formidable effect than they ever had along the Loire, the props of Frankish power truly had been obliterated, and its foundations systematically smashed to pieces. By the early years of the tenth century, not only had the local nobility been destroyed, and all traces of native officialdom wiped out, but even the Church itself, as a functioning organisation, had begun to disintegrate.

It was true that in Rouen, on the very mouth of the Seine, the local archbishop had somehow, against the odds, managed to cling to office; but all around him and his beleaguered flock, as palpable as a gathering twilight, there had been the sense of a deadly wasteland closing in. ‘Invia’, such a wilderness was properly termed by the learned: a dimension of trackless forests and bogs and scrubland, where no decent Christian would ever think to venture, but which had long been the haunts of the heathen, the theatre of their loathsome rituals and the womb of their ambushes. ‘Out in the field no man should move one foot beyond his weapons,’ the Northmen sang. ‘For a