We Have No King: How Viking Raiders Remade Medieval Europe

On June 8, 793, a band of Vikings, probably from Norway, came ashore on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a monastic community off the northeast coast of England. They killed the inhabitants, burned buildings, seized whatever had value, and sailed away. Historian Lars Brownworth, author of *The Sea Wolves* and host of the early history podcast *12 Byzantine Rulers*, tells Lex Fridman that this was the first Viking raid in force. He treats Lindisfarne as a sound beginning for the age because the terror it produced, more than the body count, announced what the next two to three centuries would feel like.

The shock traveled through literate Europe in letters. Alcuin, Charlemagne's favorite scholar and a central figure in the Carolingian Renaissance, wrote to King Ethelred of Northumbria that the English and their fathers had lived in this land for nearly 350 years, and never before had such terror come from a pagan race. It had not even been imagined, he added, that an attack could arrive from the sea. Brownworth notes that the spaces between words, and much of the punctuation later readers take for granted, likely owe something to Alcuin's work; this was one of the most literate men alive, and fear is audible on the page.

The deeper wound was a broken taboo. In a nominally Christian Europe the church was treated as an ark, a zone of safety in a violent world; English custom even let a killer take sanctuary for up to 40 days. Violating that protection was among the worst offenses imaginable, which is why the later murder of Thomas Becket inside a church so horrified England. Monks had sought remote islands precisely to flee temptation, and the North Atlantic was supposed to be the direction of peace, not of war. The Vikings hit that place on purpose, and Alcuin later wrote that the dead were left "as dung in the streets."

Who they were is hard to recover, because the story is almost always told by the people they attacked. English, Frankish, and Irish writers called them Danes, pagans, heathens, or Northmen, without pausing to ask whether a given crew had come from Norway or Denmark. The Vikings' own runes were used for spells, sword names, and curses, not for long literature, so the only Norse writing we have comes at the end of the age, after they adopted the Latin alphabet. Brownworth's blunt conclusion is that you can almost never see the Vikings in their own words.

Viking was not their day job. Most were merchants and, above all, farmers who lived in little bays called *viks* in Old Norse, which is probably where the word comes from. Life near the Arctic Circle sat at the limit of what contemporary technology could support, and the climate bred hard people; mercy, Brownworth says, does not seem to have been a quality they prized. A famous story has a Swedish Viking placing a sword in his newborn son's crib and saying the child should have nothing in this life except what he could gain with that blade.

The boats that carried the self-selected tough ones were clinker built, planks overlapping, undecked, with tents for shelter. Crossing the North Atlantic in such a hull meant huge seas and about an inch of oak between the crew and the water, with no compass. Navigation was a reading of sun, stars, birds, the color of the water, and floating leaves, over distances of two thousand miles. That intrepidness, Brownworth thinks, is part of why a sanitized modern world still finds them fascinating, even while recoiling from what they did on arrival.

The same ships could cross an ocean and, with a draft of less than two feet, run up rivers only two feet deep; if something blocked the way, twenty men could pick the boat up and carry it around. Speed was the military secret. An English army on a well-maintained Roman road might make 10 to 15 miles a day; cavalry traveling alone might make 20. Viking longships averaged 70 to 120 miles a day. They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and be gone before a defending army even assembled, which Brownworth calls absolutely terrifying.

The Vikings knew what they were doing with fear. Like the Mongols, they used terror as a main weapon, timing attacks for high holy days such as Easter and Christmas, when richer clothing, richer offerings, and more cash would be on hand. They were not dumb brutes. Brownworth stresses a sophistication that rarely makes the legend: they would appear as traders in an English port, learn everyone's schedule, sail away, and come back as Vikings, already knowing where the churches were and how the Christian calendar worked.

Monasteries looked, from a raider's deck, like winning the lottery: gold, decorated books, jewels, all guarded by old men who did not know how to fight. The pattern was older than Christianity; Romans had stored wills with the Vestal Virgins for the extra protection of religion. Once Europe was Christianized, the faithful donated huge sums, and houses of monks who had taken vows of poverty became some of the richest places on the continent. By the French Revolution, far in the future, the Church would be the largest single landowner in France, a strange dichotomy the early Vikings simply cashed in.

Brownworth does not see a single cause for the explosion of raids. Will Durant put one theory best: the fertility of Viking women outstripped the fertility of Viking land, which is to say overpopulation and a search for food. Another is the keel, plus pressure from Charlemagne's consolidation, which removed buffer peoples and left Denmark facing a wealthy, sprawling, poorly communicated empire that called itself Rome reborn. Charlemagne was crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800; the thing looked impressive and was, Brownworth says, wealthy and weak, which attracts predators.

Early attacks were often probing raids, proof of concept before larger invasions. When France was exhausted they switched to England, then back again. King Ethelred the Unready, a pun Brownworth enjoys, once paid 7.5 million silver pennies in a single year to make the Vikings go away, the equivalent of some 48,000 pounds of silver, or about 50 adult elephants. Over his reign the total ran to something like 20 tons of gold and silver, taxed out of his people, which is trusting silver to do the work of swords, and inviting more muggers.

Asked whether Ragnar Lothbrok really existed, Brownworth answers as a romantic: he would like to believe it, and there is probably a seed of truth, a someone named Ragnar, compiled with other ninth-century leaders. The surname is a clue that we are in myth. Lothbrok means hairy breeches, and the sagas give him magic pants that fend off the poison of dragons and snakes. What matters more than the biography is the template. If you want to know what Vikings wanted, Brownworth says, look at their success story.

The story has him penniless, from Norway or Denmark or Sweden, the countries still argue, sailing up the Seine in his late teens or early twenties and raiding Paris. He is said to have taken a hinge from one of the gates as proof he had been there. The Frankish king who paid him off was Charles the Bald, one of a line whose subjects named them by how much they were hated: after Charles the Great came Louis the Pious, then Charles the Fat, Charles the Bald, and Charles the Simple. Brownworth likes those names because they are a public scorecard of the reign. The ransom was about 7,000 pounds of silver, enough to wreck Charles the Bald's kingship.

Ragnar went home too rich and too magnetic for the Danish king's comfort. He was a ring giver, in the sense of *Beowulf*, able to keep a personal army, and so he was encouraged to go elsewhere. He raided England for something like 15 years, then was shipwrecked and captured by King Aella of Northumbria, who threw him into a pit of vipers. The snakes failed at first because of the famous breeches; pulled out and asked why he was not dying, Ragnar rather foolishly explained the pants. They came off, he went back in, and his last words were "When the boar bleats, the piglets come," meaning he had twelve sons and they would avenge him.

They did avenge him. The Great Heathen Army landed in 865, and unlike Ragnar himself, leaders such as Ivar the Boneless and Bjorn Ironside are historical names, men who attacked England, Islamic Spain, and much of Europe. Aella, according to the legend, was the first victim of the blood eagle: cut open while still alive, lungs placed on his back so that they fluttered like wings when he tried to breathe. Brownworth does not pretty it up. It is disgusting, he says, and in the sons' logic it was what the piglets owed their boar.

Ragnar's most famous wife, Aslaug, walks out of a riddle that Brownworth reads as a portrait of the cleverness expected of a Viking woman. Ragnar wanted a clever wife and set three conditions for the next morning: come to the ship with no clothes on but not naked, having not eaten a meal but not fasted, without a companion but not alone. She arrived with a dog, a bite of onion, and hair long enough to cover her. They were, Brownworth says, well matched, the ideal couple, and they had twelve sons, several of them nearly as famous as their father.

A scene from the 845 siege of Paris, Europe's introduction to a Viking army rather than a hit-and-run raid, captures the political structure. A Frankish ambassador asked who their king was. The Viking looked at him and said, "We have no king. We are all kings." Leadership was flat and meritocratic: you led if you had won and could give out the rings, and you stopped leading the moment you were no longer effective. Fridman compares it to Genghis Khan's meritocracy, one of the components of an extremely effective military force.

Meritocracy has a succession problem. Alexander's answer, that the empire belongs to the strongest, all but guarantees civil war; primogeniture is more stable and more likely, Brownworth thinks, to produce a Caligula. The Great Heathen Army was a coalition of war bands, each following its own man, sitting in a room to argue a plan until they could live with it. That loose machine was still able to conquer a kingdom. Then, as in every theater they touched, the raiders evolved with unsettling speed: explore, raid, conquer, build a state, convert to Christianity if it helped, and let the thing we call Viking dissipate.

France is Brownworth's favorite exhibit of how fast the transformation could run. The Northmen settled in a duchy later shortened to Normandy. Rollo, whose real name was Hrolf, named his son William, which is not a Viking name. Within a generation, Brownworth says, the language was gone, the Viking names were gone, and the worship of Odin was gone as far as anyone can tell; the Normans were building churches and marrying into the local aristocracy, their Viking-ness reduced to a single remainder, an incredible vitality.

As a Norwegian-descended historian, Brownworth sides with Norway in the old quarrel over Rollo's birthplace. The young Hrolf was so tall he could not ride the little Viking ponies and was called Hrolf the Walker. Probably poor, raised on stories of Ragnar, he may have joined the 860s raids on the Seine before plundering the coast that would become Normandy. In 911 he made the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with Charles the Simple, a nickname Brownworth reads as straightforward rather than stupid. Charles's offer was that Rollo settle, join the aristocracy, and defend the French coast against other Vikings, which Brownworth compares to putting a burglar in charge of security.

It worked. Rollo was probably in his mid-fifties to mid-sixties, a man who had already lived the full Viking life and, if the sagas' coin counts are added up, held something like 20 or 30 tons of silver. In one career he moved from raid to conquest to treaty to statecraft. His son William Longsword enlarged the territory and was assassinated; every ruler after Rollo enlarged Normandy until it was more powerful than the French king.

The feudal ceremony that sealed the treaty is the relationship in miniature. Rollo, towering over Charles, refused to kiss the king's foot and ordered a still taller guard to do it; the man lifted the foot to his mouth and dumped the king on his back, with both armies watching. The treaty's title was ambiguous: not quite duke, not quite earl, just subservient to the king, which meant Normandy was not clearly a duchy or a principality. Being good Vikings, they simply called themselves dukes and took whatever power they wanted. One grandson, kidnapped by the French king at 14, escaped and kidnapped the king.

Brownworth says it is hard to overstate Normandy's impact on medieval Europe. The Normans conquered England and, at the other end of the map, Sicily, founding two of the foremost states of the age. They led the charge in the First Crusade. Fridman calls the whole sequence a creative-destruction engine; Brownworth is happy to take the phrase.

The argument began on a walk with his twin brother, who asked how Europe, that backward place in the early Middle Ages, became the dominant force in the world. Brownworth's answer is the Normans. They mark the change from an inward-looking continent to a confident, outward-looking one. Before the Vikings, England was a heptarchy of seven kingdoms; the Vikings destroyed all but Wessex, and had taken about half of that, leaving a young king who turned out to be Alfred the Great. Alfred's grandson Athelstan was the first man called king of all England.

They did something similar to Charlemagne's empire, which looked good on paper and could not be run. Communication was terrible; the sprawl was replaced by something leaner, meaner, and more compact. Europe learned to fight Vikings with fortified bridges and changes to the army. By destroying what they destroyed, Brownworth likes to say, they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow.

East of that story sits a buffer. The Byzantine Empire, the eastern Roman state, absorbed threats that would otherwise have poured into Europe. Constantine's decision to move the capital to Constantinople put a choke point on the map; the Islamic invasions of the seventh century could not get past it and had to take the long way across Africa. By the time they reached Spain and the Pyrenees, they were overextended, and Charles Martel stopped them at Tours. Brownworth thinks it is a very different story if they can come in through the Black Sea, and Fridman adds that the modern world pivots on a few such geographic and leadership choices.

Rewinding to belief, Brownworth describes a cosmology that has been sanitized for modern readers and is, in the sources, quite terrifying. The basic picture is an eternal struggle between chaos and order in which chaos eventually wins. Concentric circles put Utgard, the outer realm of frost giants and world-destroying monsters, against gods who stand for order and stability. Thunder is simply Thor fighting the ice giants; the system is less a church than a way to understand the weather.

The gods do not all like one another, and some of the famous ones, Loki and Freyja, come from outside the Aesir. Odin is the elite's god of war, kingship, wisdom, death, and poetry, which means literacy, which means a few people; Thor is earthier, protection, thunder, fertility, the one farmers pray to when they want the waves to calm down. Brownworth finds Odin the most disturbing, god of madness and of poetry, which he suspects are related. Berserkers were considered Odin's chosen: they showed no pain, attacked with nails and teeth, kept going with an arm hacked off, and would even attack other Vikings. One of Odin's names is the raven feeder; make corpses, and you are doing his work.

The afterlife had little in the way of punishment for ordinary bad behavior. The truly wicked might haunt their graves as evil spirits; the brave were taken to Valhalla, the house of the dead, to fight every day, heal magically at night, and do it again, practicing for Ragnarok, the final battle, which they would lose. Fridman underlines the point: losing is not the point, the battle is. Unlimited food, drink, and deaths make Valhalla the highest place in the construction. Ragnarok itself swallows the gods, Odin eaten by a wolf, Thor killed by Loki's child the Midgard Serpent, sun and moon caught, then darkness, though Brownworth warns that Snorri Sturluson, writing at the end of the age and probably a Christian, may have fused in a new earth and a new god.

Most people went to Hel, one L, a daughter of Loki, a colorless twilight rather than a torture chamber, closer to the Greek underworld where you fade unless someone speaks your name. Fate was spun by the Norns at the roots of Yggdrasil. In a northern climate, hospitality was a survival rule, encoded as Odin traveling incognito, blessing those who opened the door and murdering those who did not. Religion, Fridman and Brownworth agree, is a social technology: it gives a worldview and a morality, and then people project politics and war back onto it. If your destiny is to become gray, you might as well run at the spear.

As explorers, Brownworth puts the Vikings in the first rank of world history. They reached North America five centuries before Columbus and tied together ocean and river systems from England and Spain to Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East. What boggles him is the map with no compass on it: shoving off from a Norwegian fjord with west as the plan. The first Norseman to reach Iceland, Naddodd, did it by accident, landed, and found two humans already there, Irish monks who had come north in a skin boat to get away from the world, and who, very wisely, ran as soon as the Vikings arrived.

Fridman plays a Werner Herzog clip of a penguin leaving its colony and walking toward the mountains, toward certain death, as a picture of that spirit, whether the hardcore raider who will not stop or the monk who wants distance from sin. Brownworth answers with Tennyson. His favorite poem is *Ulysses*, and the last line, "to seek, to find, and not to yield," is the Viking purpose as he hears it: to sail beyond the baths of all the western stars until he dies. They may die, but they are going to do this, and they are not going to yield.

Leif Erikson's father, Erik the Red, had the family habit of exile: he fled Norway as a boy because his father had killed people, the saga saying "for a few killings," then killed a neighbor in an already overcrowded, deforested Iceland and was thrown out of the place his father had been thrown out of. He hired the crew of a man who had sighted land further west, settled Greenland's western and eastern colonies on the extreme southern edge of what Viking technology could handle, and named the place for green fjords and salmon you could scoop with your hands. Brownworth calls the pitch a lie and the greatest real estate scam in history, still the most misnamed place on earth. Land meant wealth in Europe, so 500 people in 25 ships followed; 14 ships and about 300 people arrived, the cattle died the first winter, and resupply meant a 2,000-mile run without a compass. The colonies lasted into the 1400s, then went silent, in Brownworth's view because the settlers refused to stop practicing husbandry on an island with no trees.

Leif, short of wood and food, hired another lost sailor's crew, took his half-sister Freydis, and landed in a place he called Vinland because he found something he could ferment. He did not know he was on a new continent with inexhaustible timber and food; he did know it was inhabited, probably by Algonquin people he named Skraelings, screechers, because he could not understand them. They stayed three years, fought, went home, and mostly kept the story in northern sagas. Brownworth gives three reasons: stubborn husbandry at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a supply line past 2,000 miles, and native resistance at millions to one. An ivory cross now in the Cloisters in New York, carved in England from walrus ivory that had come from the New World through Norway, is his emblem of the trade that did exist, and of the hair's-breadth alternate history in which a Scandinavian-Native society meets later Europeans already mixed and somewhat immune.

The eastern surprise, when Brownworth first mapped the book, was that Vikings went east at all. A useful rule is that they launched in whichever direction their country faced: Sweden east, Denmark toward Germany, Norway toward England and the New World. A Swede named Rorik set up at Staraya Ladoga, a launchpad onto the Volga and the Dnieper, rivers that run to the Black Sea and the Caspian and therefore to the caliphates and to Byzantium. Being Vikings, they attacked Constantinople; the Byzantines set the Sea of Marmara on fire and burned the ships. Unable to take the city, they joined it.

Along the rivers they traded, then built more stable states, taking Novgorod in 862 and Kiev in 882 and forming the Kievan Rus that led them toward the city they first tried to sack. The Varangian Guard, men of the oath, became the most famous unit in Byzantine history, an analog of Rome's Praetorian Guard: loyal to the throne, not necessarily to the person sitting on it, and major power players. Basil II, the Bulgar Slayer, institutionalized them in the late 900s, and they lasted until the empire's end. Famous Vikings including Harald Hardrada served in the guard. In Hagia Sophia today, Norse runes are carved into the marble railing of a second-floor balcony, graffiti from men bored in a long sermon they did not understand.

Greek fire, used against Viking fleets in 941 and 944, remains a state secret in the strict sense: even now no one is sure of the recipe, though naphtha and oil are in the story. It ignited on contact, thrown in clay pots or sprayed from siphons like flamethrowers, and because it was oil it floated, so a sailor who jumped from a burning ship could burn under the water. In 944 the Byzantines sent decrepit old ships loaded with the stuff into the swarm and turned the tide; the emperor was impressed enough to recruit the survivors as a bodyguard. Word of mouth made the guard a career: good pay, and you kept what you took on imperial campaigns. Along the Volga, furs and amber went south, slaves went north, and a Buddha has turned up in a Swedish coin hoard.

River geography rewrote the map. Eric Bloodaxe could hold pieces of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England from York, a patchwork that makes no sense unless you think in water; Brownworth cannot think of a major European city that is not on a river, which meant hundreds of miles inland were now on the table. Destroyers are common, builders rarer, which is why he finds Augustus more interesting than Caesar. Dublin and Limerick, almost every major Irish city, were Viking foundations, kept because the kingship and the taxes worked. His favorite unsung figure is Canute the Great, called Emperor of the North, who held England, Denmark, and Norway and more besides, introduced the penny, went to Rome in 1027 for a coronation, and once had his throne carried into the sea to command the waves, then to show his court that he could not.

Brownworth's other great subject is the empire that, in his framing, is why European-based Western civilization exists in the form we know. Byzantium preserved the books. Greek had died in the West as early as Justinian in the 500s; Latin died in the East by the fourteenth century, so you needed Byzantine teachers to read Plato and Aristotle. As Constantinople's fall became inevitable, scholars migrated to Italy just as Italy was becoming receptive to its Greco-Roman past, and the Renaissance had its spark.

Asked for a favorite emperor, Brownworth goes, romantically, to Justinian, who dreamed of reconquering the West and built Hagia Sophia, still the closest a visitor can come to the fifth century. Outside Great Britain, European legal systems rest ultimately on the Code of Justinian; Louisiana, because of its French connection, still has a different bar exam. He loves Justinian and would not have wanted to be his subject. The same goes for Basil I, a builder and a bloodthirsty tyrant.

His account of collapse starts in 1025, with the death of Basil II, last monarch of the Macedonian dynasty that had made the empire the most powerful, wealthy, and literate state on the Mediterranean. Courtiers memorized Plato; the emperor's idea of fun was to start a quotation you had to finish without knowing where he would begin; literacy inside Constantinople was close to 100 percent. Then the bureaucracy convinced itself it could run the empire and did not need a real emperor, so it selected weak rulers. That path led to Manzikert in 1071, the destruction of the Roman army, and the flooding of Anatolia by nomadic warriors. Lose the heartland, and you lose troops, taxes, and food; the First Crusade, on this reading, was Emperor Alexius trying to recover Asia Minor more than Jerusalem.

On the great-man debate Brownworth does not hesitate: he cannot swap out Martin Luther and still have a Reformation, or Augustus and still have the Roman Empire, or Genghis Khan and still have the Mongol one. The moment needs the person, and the person needs the moment. Fridman adds Napoleon, Washington giving power away, and the way absolute power in one pair of hands reverberates for generations; Brownworth adds Cincinnatus going back to the plow. Lord Acton's line about absolute power sits over a long Byzantine list. Fridman pushes the problem into the present: nuclear weapons are Greek fire that can be applied to the whole species, and the project of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is how to build a society that lasts a thousand years.

A practical lesson Brownworth had not yet mentioned is grooming. Almost everything in the popular picture is wrong: no horned helmets, hair often blond because lye killed lice. In England the Vikings were mocked as soft for taking too many baths, a sentence that still blows Brownworth's mind. A Muslim traveler in the east called them God's filthiest creatures for shared bathwater and for passing a cup of rinse from mouth to mouth. In the Danelaw, the insult stacked: these people had already kicked you militarily, and now, because they washed and minded their teeth, they were too attractive to local women.

Asked for larger lessons, Brownworth is impatient with the statue wars. A statue of Columbus, as he reads it, does not endorse every act; it honors the spirit it takes to cross an ocean without knowing the other side. The Viking version is a fearless, pragmatic stance toward the world, and for an American it is the rags-to-riches myth in period costume: start with nothing, end as a sea king sung by poets. When a society stops doing that, he says, it runs into trouble.

Byzantium offers a less poetic checklist: immigration, inflation, war, peace, diplomacy, how to build a stable society, in a polity that was polyglot and Greco-Roman-Christian and also deeply alien, hostile to democracy, with men sitting on pillars. You can count on one hand the governments that lasted a thousand years, Byzantium and Venice, and Venice was a Byzantine offshoot. Fridman notes that the Viking lessons are poetic and the Byzantine ones are literal. Both, in this telling, are usable.

What gives Brownworth hope is a line from Frederick Douglass, who said he could sit with Plato and Cicero and they would not flinch: the great conversation is for everyone. Ancient people were psychologically identical to us, which is why you can read *Meditations* as a human talking about being human, not as a dry voice from an unreachable culture. Human nature will not change; we are flawed and broken, and if you misdiagnose that, you will not learn the right lesson from history, whether you start from a blank slate, from original goodness, or from original badness. Brownworth has to teach his children to be kind and does not have to teach them to be unkind; the capacity for better is real, perfection is not. Fridman closes with the gutter and the stars, and with a joke that if you do murder your neighbor, there is always Greenland.