Warning! Unavoidable History Content
In my last post, I casually mentioned the Vikings as a reason for Radbod to live in Deventer instead of Utrecht when he became a bishop. Time for me to tell a bit more about the Vikings in the Low Lands and the consequences their visits had.
Vikings is a common name for the people from Scandinavia, who had started to raid the North Sea coasts in the late 8th century. They are first mentioned in the English Anglo-Saxon Chronicles under the year 793, as Heathens who raided the monastery of Lindisfarne Island and slaughtered all the monks.
Vikings depicted on a 12the century painting. This picture is in the public domain
These Vikings however, were not new on the scene. They were a Germanic people who inhabited the southern parts of Norway and Sweden and the whole of Denmark. Besides being called Vikings (which usually only applies when talking about them as pirates), they are also referred to as Norsemen or Danes. The Frisians had already from an early age been trading with these Danes, and actually kept doing that, even though some of them became pirates.
The Danes were never conquered by Charles the Great and therefore not part of the Frankish Empire. They did however have close contacts with some of the Frankish kings, who tried to convert them to Christianity, and offered them land in exchange for protection against raids by other Vikings and other rival Frankish kings.
So it was possible that between 841-885 large parts of Frisia came under the rule of Danish dukes, but unfortunately this didn’t mean that Viking raids were a thing of the past. The large merchant town Dorestad was plundered several times and so was Utrecht, the See of the bishop of Utrecht. In 857 the then bishop of Utrecht, a man named Hunger, asked the king for a safe place to hide from the Viking raids. Hunger and his clergy were given a home in the monastery of St Peter in St Odilienberg on the River Meuse.
The year 885 (our Radbod is by then in Tours), brings an end to the ruling of the Danish dukes over Frisia. The Viking raids continue, but by building fortresses along the coast and further inland, the people felt more secure. The bishop of Utrecht was by now a man named Odilbald and he decided to move from St Olilienburg to Deventer, where the new duke had built a fort. Utrecht was still found to be unsafe and this was why in 899, when Odilbald died and Radbod became bishop of Utrecht, his residence was in Deventer.
How very interesting – I had no idea that the term “Vikings” had such a negative connotation – in most presentations I’ve ever seen or heard, the name was used to portray explorers or sometimes warriors, not as pirates (as we think of them as looters and pillagers).
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Yes, over the last 10 years there seems to have been a bit of a change in the use of the name Viking by European historians. These days ‘Viking’ usually means pirate, pillager (in general a bad guy). The explorer/settler Vikings are now often called Danes to distinguise them from the pirates and identify them as the good guys.
The general public however, usually still uses the word Viking whether they talk about the good or the bad guys.
I think this change in name has to do with the realisation of historians that even though some peoples were for a long time seen as stupid wild barbarians, they are actually far from that. This doesn’t only apply to the Vikings but also to other peoples like the Germanic tribes who were never conquered by the Romans.