Download PDF | Ann Christys, Ian Wood - Vikings in the South_ Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean-Bloomsbury Academic (2015).
153 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgements
Several years ago, I spent a halcyon afternoon sailing or, to be more truthful, becalmed in a replica Viking ship with a group of eminent scholars of the Viking Age who were meeting at the Roskilde Ship Museum. Peter Sawyer suggested that, as I had studied the Latin and Arabic historiography of medieval Iberia, I might look at the evidence for Vikings in the peninsula. Peter’s request was prompted by the ‘Bibliographia Normanno-Hispanica’ published the year before in the Saga Book. He was conscious that treatment of Iberia in general histories, including his own Oxford History of the Vikings, was brief. In her chapter on the Vikings in Francia, Jinty Nelson had noted that:
Occasionally Vikings ventured far beyond the Carolingian realms. In 844 Galicia and al-Andalus were raided. In 859 (according to the annals of St-Bertin for that year) “Danish pirates made a long sea-voyage, sailed through the straits between Spain and Africa and then up the Rhéne. They ravaged some towns and monasteries and made their base on an island called the Camargue. Muslim sources of the tenth century and later record other episodes on this voyage: al-Andalus was raided, and then the little Moroccan state of Nakur, whose royal women were carried off, then handed back after ransoms were paid by the amir of Cordoba; ‘more than forty ships’ were lost on the way home; and, perhaps a final success on the same expedition, the king of Pamplona was captured and ransomed in 861 for 60,000 gold pieces. A basis of historical fact thus underlies the epic Mediterranean journey described in the later medieval Hiberno-Norse version of Ragnar’ Saga. All this was spectacular but exceptional.
(Sawyer 1997: 29-30)
Hispanists are used to being exceptional, to existing in the margins of general histories of the Middle Ages. Jinty’s exemplary summary of the more important Viking exploits in the South and the intriguing stories attached to them was a further incitement to take up the challenge to bring these Vikings into the main body of the text.
I have used Iberia as shorthand for what is now Spain and Portugal and moved towards consistency in the spelling of personal and place names reproduced from a wide variety of sources. Place names in modern Spain, Portugal and North Africa are given in the spelling familiar in English. Arabic names are transliterated according to the practice of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Islam. Old Norse names are given in the form common in modern English, which Peter used in the Oxford History of the Vikings. I have consulted nearly all the Latin and Arabic sources in the original language, but the Scandinavian sources only in translation.
I have cited all the sources in English, sometimes making minor changes in the spelling of place and personal names. All the translators are credited; other translations are my own. A few terms and phrases are also cited in the original; to do this for all the passages cited would have made the book too long. Each of the primary sources is cited by the name of the author, if known, and/or a short form of the work's title and is listed under this form in the bibliography. The manuscript and publication history of the works of Ibn Hayyan is complicated, so I added the years covered by each edition. An appendix gives an annotated list of the most important sources. Readers looking for more detail will find entries for many of these sources in the Encyclopaedia of the Medieval Chronicle. Linehan (1993) wrote a comprehensive survey of peninsular historiography in Latin and Romance. No single volume on the Arabic historians of the peninsula has yet been published, but there are several useful introductions to Islamic historiography in general, including Khalidi (1994) and Robinson (2003). Collins (2012) surveyed the history of the peninsula for the period covered in this book.
For academic and other reasons I have taken a long time to fulfil Peter’s commission. I have not written on Vikings before, and in the research for this book I incurred many debts. Those who answered specific questions, offered bibliographical advice and helped me to clarify my thoughts include Lesley Abrams, Chris Callow, Juan Antonio Estévez, Clemens Gantner, Alaric Hall, Catherine Hills, Jesus Lorenzo, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, David Peterson, Carl Phelpstead, Else Roesdahl and Roger Wright. Wendy Davies and Graham Barrett were my consultants on the charters and the ‘Bucknell/Woolstone group pondered over the Laudomanes. Roger Wright and Ian Wood translated some of the Latin and John Wreglesworth tried to improve the accuracy of my use of the Latin sources. I am grateful to Joyce Hill for her specialist help with the saga material in the concluding chapter. John Hunt drew the maps and Ian Wood took the photographs.
A constellation of scholars read the book in draft. They gave me advice on its overall shape, and detailed criticism. So my particular thanks go to Wendy Davies, Niels Lund, Jinty Nelson, Peter Sawyer, Pauline Stafford, Ian Wood, John Wreglesworth and Roger Wright and to Bloomsbury’s anonymous readers. They have made great improvements, but the end result is, unfortunately, still my own.
Studying to postgraduate level in two fields, I enjoyed much good fortune. My parents, Cynthia and John Hill, encouraged me towards a much better education than they enjoyed. A benevolent state not only paid for my medical studies, but subsidised my return to education twenty years later. Ian Wood supervised my postgraduate study of medieval Iberia and he has been a constant source of information, advice and encouragement ever since. The state no longer being benevolent, this book is dedicated to Ian, to my father and in memory of my mother.
Introduction: Don Teudo Rico Defeats a Viking Raid
In the fishing port of Luarca, near Gijon on the northern coast of Spain, nineteenth-century houses cluster the hillside overlooking the harbour. On one of the walls, a row of colourful plaques represents significant moments in the town’s history. The first shows a local hero repelling a band of sea-raiders, who are easily identifiable as Vikings by their horned helmets (Figure 1.1). The caption reads: ‘In the year 842, Vikings came ashore at Los Cambarales and were driven off by the men of Valdes, led by their lord Don Teudo Rico of Villademoros, who with his own mace killed the Viking chief? Here, with a little artistic and chronological licence, Luarca commemorates what may be the first Viking landfall in the Iberian peninsula.
After at least one more attack on this coast, the Viking band sailed south towards Muslim Spain, al-Andalus. A historian writing in Arabic, Ibn Idhari, described their appearance off the coast in colourful prose that matches Luarca’s plaque:
Vikings (Majis) arrived in about 80 ships. One might say they had, as it were, filled the ocean with dark red birds, in the same way as they had filled the hearts of men with fear and trembling. After landing at Lisbon, they sailed to Cadiz, then to Sidonia, then to Seville. They besieged this city, and took it by storm. After letting the inhabitants suffer the terror of imprisonment or death, they remained there seven days, during which they let the people empty the cup of bitterness.
(Ibn Idhari Baydn, vol.2: 88-89, trans.: Stefansson: 35-36)
We can picture Viking long-ships coming over the horizon, their square red sails billowing. The passage has a note of dramatic irony, for the inhabitants of al-Andalus may not have known what to expect. To modern readers, the panic that Ibn Idhari evoked recalls the sack of Lindisfarne half a century earlier, which Alcuin (d.804) lamented in his letter to abbot Higbald (Alcuin, trans.: 72). Alcuin was in contact with eyewitnesses to the Viking onslaught. Ibn Idhari, on the other hand, saw Vikings only in his mind’s eye. We know very little about him except that he was a judge in Fes who compiled a history of al-Andalus and the Maghreb in Marrakesh early in the fourteenth century (Martos 2009). Ibn Idhari is one of the more remote witnesses to the Viking Age. He copied some of his information from earlier accounts that still survive, but much of the detail of his narrative is unique to this historian. Although it is not as anachronistic as the horned helmets of Luarca’s plaque, it is equally difficult to read as an account of ‘what actually happened.
Modern scholars have made far less of references to Vikings in the written sources for Iberia and the Mediterranean than they have of snatches of information about those who travelled to other parts of Europe and beyond. The dominant conflict in Iberia during the whole of the Early Middle Ages was, of course, that between the Christian north and al-Andalus. Its importance is reflected in the peninsula’s historiography and it coloured both Christian and Muslim writings on Vikings. It also generated a significant quantity of material on Vikings written in Arabic, which has perhaps proved a bridge too far for scholars of the Viking Age, who need to handle material from a wide variety of languages and cultures. Most of the sources have long been available in editions and translations. In 1881, the Dutch Arabist Reinhart Dozy translated into French the most important Arabic sources and put them side by side with passages from Latin chronicles and charters that seem to refer to the same events (Dozy 1881, vol.2: 250-315). This dossier of sources was the basis for collections in Arabic (Seippel 1896, vol.1, translated into Norwegian in Birkeland 1954), in English (Stefansson 1908-1909, from the French of Dozy) and most recently and comprehensively in Spanish (Morales 2004); in these collections the reader can find longer versions of most of the passages cited in this book. Although later scholars added a few details, Dozy’s work represented the state of scholarship on Vikings in Iberia for more than a hundred years.
The Arabic sources pose challenges that appear at first glance to be unique. Most of what we know about Vikings in al-Andalus and the Maghreb was set down centuries after the events described, often elaborated with implausible details and anecdotes. The result can be a sort of Arabian Nights re-telling; it is literature but, to our eyes at least, not history. Even the accounts of travellers such as Ibn Fadlan, who memorably described a Viking ship burial, and Ibn Hawaal, who visited al-Andalus c. 949, cannot be regarded simply as reportage (Montgomery c. 2010). The Latin sources appear to be more reliable, since they are usually earlier and more laconic than those in Arabic. Yet Latin sources were also subject to reworking. Christian writers in Iberia may have exaggerated the depredations of Vikings, just as the monks of Northern Europe may have done and for the same reasons — to attract patrons for the reconstruction of churches and monasteries. Latin hagiographers and chroniclers also gave to the Scandinavian raiders a role in new versions of history that reflected recent ideology and current political concerns. Vikings in the South also attracted the attention of the saga writers. Writing in the cold north, they seem a world away from Ibn Idhari in Morocco. In the twenty-first century, we can juxtapose these different traditions, to their mutual illumination.
The primary purpose of this book is to integrate the Vikings in the South into general histories of the Viking Age. It focuses on the ninth and tenth centuries, but the concluding chapter extends the study to the twelfth century.
Vikings are defined as the men of Scandinavian origin who figure prominently in the history of Western Europe as raiders, conquerors and colonizers. Balanced against the search for these facts is an emphasis on the process of rewriting Vikings. Later versions of events may be sometimes given the same attention as earlier and apparently more reliable narratives. This approach reminds us of the pitfalls of interpretation posed by those episodes for which only late records survive. Stories are included that are almost certainly untrue, because they reflect attitudes to Vikings in the Middle Ages and later - and because modern commentators have been unwilling to discount them. Thus today two of the best-known ‘facts’ about Vikings in the South are that they made cheese (Lévi-Provencal 1950-1953, vol.1: 224; Aguadé 1986) and that a poet from Umayyad Cordoba served as ambassador to a Viking court (Allen 1960; Gonzalez 2002b). The structure of the book is both chronological and thematic. The raiders are labelled “Vikings, even though none of the medieval authors writing about the Iberian peninsula used this term. ‘Viking’ is a shorthand, and will usually be accompanied by the actual term used in the source under discussion.
This strategy will be justified by the first, thematic, chapter, which is an excursus on the names that medieval authors writing in Latin or Arabic used for sea-raiders. These names reflected beliefs about the origins of the raiders that were rarely, if ever, based on eyewitness accounts. Readers wishing to go straight to the narrative should begin with Chapter 3, which uses reports of the earliest raids to illustrate the way in which stories about Vikings were passed on through chains of chronicles in Arabic, Latin and Romance. Chapter 4 takes the narrative through the expedition of 859-61 and situates Viking activities in the Mediterranean in the wider context of Mediterranean piracy. In the ninth and tenth centuries, efforts were made to defend the coasts of Iberia and the Maghreb against attack from the sea. These defensive measures and their relationship to later Viking raids are the theme of Chapters 5 and 6. A concluding chapter brings together the evidence for Viking attacks in the late tenth to the twelfth centuries, when at last there is documentary evidence to add to the narrative sources, but when Iberia and the Mediterranean were increasingly seen as saga destinations.
The framework upon which hung recollections of the Vikings in the South was one of ‘normal Dark-Age activity’ (Sawyer 1982: 196): trading and raiding by seafarers of various origins along the coasts of the Iberian peninsula. For more than a millennium, ships from what are now France, Britain and Ireland sailed into the open sea to make landfall in Iberia (McGraill 1990: 46; Menéndez 2001: 71 and 101-102). The earliest trade was probably in minerals, for which Galicia, in the north-west corner of the peninsula, was famous in the Roman period. Gold and other minerals were exported via the river Navoén and the port of Flavionavia; it not clear exactly where this was, but Luarca, which lay on the Roman road connecting Cantabria with Asturias and Galicia, is one of the possible candidates (Santos 1996: 82). Galicia was also praised for the fertility of its soil and for its horses. Archaeology shows a previously unsuspected vitality lasting into the seventh century, after which there was fragmentation, with the strengthening of local power, until Galicia was gradually incorporated into the kingdom of Asturias (Sanchez Pardo 2013).
The coasts of Iberia attracted the attention of pirates based in Francia in the fourth and fifth centuries and perhaps earlier (Wood 1990: 94; Hayward 1991: 1). The western coast in particular could have been made for Vikings: it is indented with bays and creeks where they, like other seafarers, could shelter. There are islands to serve as bases for over-wintering. Several of the rivers were navigable by small vessels up to important settlements such as Seville and Cordoba in al-Andalus and Santiago de Compostela in the north. Coastal sailing in this region was not considered particularly hazardous. It was not far from Francia to Iberia, noted an eleventh-century chronicler, Adam of Bremen: ‘from Brittany at Pointe de Saint Mathieu to Capo de Vares (La Corufia) near Santiago, three days and three nights; thence to Lisbon, two days and two nights’ (Adam of Bremen Book 4: 99, trans.: 187). A century later, the geographer al-Idrisi, emphasized the risk of sea-sickness, but praised the rivers of Galicia for their navigability. Leaving Santiago by water, he said, it took three days to Lisbon (Dubler 1949). The estimates may have been optimistic, but even the south of Iberia was within the scope of a summer campaign from Viking bases elsewhere in western Europe.
Yet some fifty years passed after the attack on Lindisfarne before Vikings turned towards Iberia. During this time, their depredations on the islands, coasts and waterways around the North Sea had intensified. It was Francia that provided the jumping-off point for the earliest expeditions to the South. Vikings are first recorded in the Frankish sources as traders in 777. In 810, they attacked Frisia, and they were soon arriving almost every year (Nelson 1997).
Some of these men may have been Norwegians from Vestfold, who attacked Nantes in 843 with 67 ships (Ermentarius: 301; Annales Engolismenses a.843). Their activities entered a new phase when they started to over-winter at the mouths of the Loire, and of the Garonne in Aquitaine. It was probably from a base on the Garonne that they sailed to the Iberian peninsula in 844, making the attacks commemorated at Luarca and by Ibn Idhari. They returned in 859, again probably from Francia, and this time, after raids on Galicia and Lisbon, they sailed on through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean, where they harried the southern coasts of al-Andalus and Francia for up to three years, crossed to the Maghreb and may have sailed to Byzantium. More than a century seems to have elapsed before they returned in significant numbers, to threaten Santiago in the north and Lisbon, once again, in the south. These are the three principal phases of Viking activity in the peninsula. In the eleventh century, with the Christianization of Scandinavia and the settlement of Normandy, the Viking Age proper came to an end. Iberian charters and local chronicles, however, continued to record sporadic raiding going on into the twelfth century. In Scandinavia and Iceland, saga writers narrated the expeditions of “Holy Vikings’ (Phelpstead 2007): crusaders who sailed to Jerusalem from Scandinavia, attacking the coasts of Iberia on their way.
It is not easy to see what Vikings expected to gain. Elsewhere in Europe, Vikings made easy pickings from churches and monasteries whose founders sought isolation from the world, but had often found it, unwisely as it turned out, close to a navigable waterway. It is assumed that they sailed to Iberia with similar intent, but this is very difficult to document. The emphasis in recent Viking studies has been very much on material culture, especially the evidence for trading. The Iberian peninsula is very different in this respect.
There is as yet no proof that Vikings came as traders, no emporia comparable to those excavated around the Baltic - although this may reflect the current state of archaeology. There is no material evidence for Viking settlement in the peninsula, although the written sources and toponyms hint at short periods of over-wintering. With the exception of fortifications that may have been erected in response to Viking attacks, there is very little archaeological evidence for their incursions - in any case, most of the fortifications, whether built by or against Vikings would have been constructed of earth and wood and do not survive (Coupland 2014). There is some written evidence for raids on religious foundations in the north-west of the peninsula in a scattering of references, some better supported than others, to the rebuilding or re-foundation of monasteries and churches; these will be discussed in Chapter 6. Further south, there is less documented destruction, apart from damage to the mosques of Seville and Almeria. None of these reports can be corroborated by material remains. Two artefacts and a handful of tiny bones have been linked to Viking activity. Locals from O Vicedo in the extreme north-west of Galicia think that anchors uncovered by recent storms may be Viking (Pontevedra 2014). A small whalebone casket of Scandinavian manufacture survives in the treasury of San Isidoro, Leon, where it was reworked for use as a reliquary (cover picture).
Unfortunately, the provenance of the casket is undocumented; it may have been donated by a pilgrim, arrived as a diplomatic gift or been collected by one of the donors to Leon (Roesdahl 2010a; 2010b; Martin 2006: 15, 45). Recently archaeologists have uncovered evidence that Viking ships may have travelled as far as the island of Madeira (Rando, Pieper and Alcover 2014). Fragments of mouse bone excavated at Ponta de Sao Lourengo, the earliest mouse populations to be found on the island, have been dated between 900 and 1036, long before the Portuguese conquest. Mitochondrial DNA sampled from the current mouse population shows similarities with the mice of Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with those on the Portuguese mainland. Further analysis of this DNA supports the hypothesis that mice colonized Madeira from Viking ships. Scandinavian mice also scampered onto the shores of the North Atlantic (Jones et al. 2012). This line of research may eventually help to delineate Viking activity in Iberia and beyond - and we may hope for the discovery of more substantial archaeological finds.
During the early phases of Viking activity, the potential pickings of pirates may have been small. In the ninth century both the Islamic emirate of al-Andalus and the Christian kingdom of Asturias and Galicia in the north-west of the peninsula were still in the process of consolidating their control over their rivals in the long period of instability that followed the Muslim conquest of 711. The brilliance of Cordoba under the caliphs ‘Abd al-Rahman III (929-961) and al-Hakam II (961-976) has obscured the Umayyads’ uncertain control of their realm before this period. The forces of the conquerors, who had briefly advanced almost to the north coast and to the frontier with Francia, had retrenched in the later eighth and ninth centuries. They were unable to control Toledo, the former Visigothic capital, except for short periods. The Umayyads faced rivals in the shape of small rebel kingdoms based on cities such as Toledo and Merida, or around individuals such as the family known as the Banti Qasi, who played a role in struggles against Vikings as well as against Cordoba, as we shall see. Andalusi armies fought annual summer campaigns against the Christian north, but until the tenth century, to little apparent effect. The wealth of the Umayyads is difficult to document, but may be indicated by fluctuations in the quantity and quality of Andalusi coinage. At the time of the first Viking raids there may have been only modest amounts of coinage in circulation. A few gold dinars were minted between 713 and 744-5 (Manzano 2006: 58-63).
The emirs of the eighth and ninth centuries minted silver dirhams, but they were forced during times of insurrection to reduce their quantity or silver content (Manzano 2006: 311-316). Silver coins in large quantities, and a return to minting gold, are not attested until the ninth century. Very few Andalusi coins have been discovered in Scandinavia; the largest hoard, of 24 coins, was uncovered on Gotland (Morales 2004: 112-113). Although more than a quarter of a million Arabic coins have been discovered in the lands along the southern shores of the Baltic (Makeler 2005), none of them are Andalusi in origin. Umayyad coins are rarely found in Viking Age silver hoards; there is only one in the Cuerdale hoard, for example (GrahamCampbell 1992). Arabic coins from Iberia could have circulated as bullion, particularly in the period c. 910-c. 930. Metallurgical analysis of several hoards from northern England suggests that Arabic coins were also melted down into ingots, ornaments and hack-silver (Sheehan 1998, 2001). This process began in the Baltic region, using coinage obtained through trading along the Russian river system. Yet the Arabic silver that Scandinavians obtained in this way cannot be traced back to al-Andalus (Makeler 2005).
The wealth of towns and cities in al-Andalus in the eighth and ninth centuries is obscure. Even for Cordoba, most of the evidence relates to the tenth century and later. Of the cities nearest the coast, Lisbon, apparently the first goal of Viking raids on al-Andalus, was clearly a desirable target. In 798, the Asturian ruler Alfonso II raided Lisbon and carried away booty, some of which he sent to Charlemagne (Annales Regnum Francorum: 102 and 104). Yet although Arabic geographers of the tenth century and later praised the fertility of the countryside surrounding Lisbon, they rarely mentioned the town itself except in connection with Viking attacks. There is little archaeological evidence for urbanization, or for a port area, before the eleventh century (Amaro 1999; Torres, Gomez and Marcias 2007: 119; Bugalhao 2009). Further inland, but also a target for Vikings, Seville - the metropolis of the see of Baetica - was probably bigger than Lisbon. Little remains of the early-Islamic city, however, to corroborate this supposition; the impressive walls and mosque were constructed centuries later by the Almohads. In Cordoba, members of the elite owned rich fabrics, ivory caskets, fine metalwork and pottery, but they acquired most of these luxuries only in the last years before the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate early in the eleventh century. It is unclear whether the mosques of al-Andalus had much gold or moveable goods. Cordoba’s Great Mosque held a copy of the Qur’an that was said to have belonged to the third caliph Uthman (Bennison 2007), but there are few references to other treasures. Across the Straits of Gibraltar, as we shall see, the ports of the Maghreb that Vikings raided were small and offered little booty to reward such a long journey.
The Christian kingdoms of Northern Iberia were equally slow to establish themselves. The most important of these, the Asturian kingdom based on Oviedo, had a complicated and fractious relationship with Galicia to the west, which was only intermittently under Asturian control. The Basque kingdom of Pamplona, sometimes known as Navarre, was another rival. Surviving Asturian buildings, such as the palace at Oviedo (Figure 1.2) are small. By the end of the ninth century, the kingdom of Asturias started to expand into Leon and Castile. In the tenth century, and in spite of the devastation of raids by the forces of ‘Abd al-Rahman III and al-Mansi, the Leonese kings took more territory from the Umayyads, although only in retrospect could this be made to look like the beginning of the Christian recovery of the peninsula. The wealth of the kingdom began to accumulate.
In the tenth century, some time after the supposed discovery of the body of St. James/Santiago in Galicia, pilgrims began to make their way to Santiago de Compostela, which grew up around his shrine (Lopez 1988: 139). The Asturian church accumulated treasures, such as the crosses of Oviedo and Santiago, and the liturgical vessels and vestments listed in charters recording bequests or the transfer of church property. Yet the towns of the Christian north-west, even Santiago, were small, and may have been relatively poor. Clerics are rarely recorded as moving their wealth out of the reach of pirates, in contrast to the situation in England and Francia at this period. Much later, in the twelfth century, the monks of Mondofiedo moved some ten miles inland. They may have done so because of the threat of seaborne attack (DHEE: 1717-1721), although this seems too late to be a response to Vikings alone. Muslim pirates also harried the coasts of Galicia and Asturias. Andalusi Muslims made annual campaigns by land against the north, bringing back captives and booty. An Andalusi expedition destroyed the monastery of Cardefia in 953 and the bells of Santiago hung in the Great Mosque in Cordoba after al-Mansur’s raid of 997. Even so, from the many accounts of these campaigns in both Christian and Muslim sources, it appears that the destruction of churches and monasteries was the exception rather than the rule (Collins 2012: 172). They may not have been an obvious target of Viking interest.
Yet there was one commodity that could be seized from even the poorest settlement: human beings. Accounts of Viking raids in the South emphasize the seizure and sometimes the ransoming of captives rather than the removal of goods and treasures. Slave raiding and trading was important to the early medieval economy of both east and west and occupied men of various origins (McCormick 2001). Unfortunately, most of the evidence comes from the eleventh century and later; for early medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean ‘it is difficult to determine the identity, religion and geographical origin of either slavers or slaves’ (Constable 1996: 266-267). Vikings traded in Slav captives, known as Saqdliba, with Islamic merchants in the East (Bolin 1968: 50). Ibn Khuradadhbih (c. 825-912), perhaps the earliest author writing in Arabic to mention people who could be Vikings, noted that merchants called Riis traded in the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, transporting their merchandise by camel as far as Baghdad.
These men travelled from Scandinavia via the Russian river system. Ibn Khuradadhbih did not record Vikings bringing slaves from Iberia to the East, although he mentioned Jewish slave traders in Baghdad who came from western Europe and al-Andalus via the coast of the Maghreb (Ibn Khuradadhbih: 154). Saqdliba were also traded in al-Andalus and the Maghreb (Mishin 1999: 103-109). Most of the slaves in al-Andalus, however, were Christians captured by Muslims in border campaigns. The existence of Viking slaving in the South rests precariously on references to captives in narrative sources and charters. A late and fragmentary source from Ireland referred to the ‘Blue men; whom Vikings brought to Ireland from Mauretania; we assume they were black Africans (Fragmentary Annals: 163; Chapter 4).
But slaving was never the main object of expeditions launched from the Viking settlement in Dublin and although it is attested in the ninth century, it did not become important until two hundred years later (Holm 1986). Captives acquired in Iberia and the Maghreb may have been held for ransom rather than being traded elsewhere. Two eleventh-century charters from what is now Portugal document the sale of property to redeem debts incurred in ransoming women captured by Vikings (Pires 2011; see Chapter 7). According to the first, the ransom was paid in silver. In the second, the raiders left with a number of everyday items: clothing, a sword, a cow and some salt. Supplied with these provisions, they continued their voyage.
Although Vikings active in the South took little that was recognizably Iberian or Maghrebi back to their homelands, their exploits may have been commemorated in inscriptions. Runestones were erected in memory of Scandinavians who died ‘in the south; a stone at Stenkumin in Gotland mentions a man who ‘dealt in furs in the south’ and another in Uppsala cathedral refers to a man who ‘died in the south (Jansson 1987, trans.: 57, 73; Sawyer 2000: 119). None of the stones specify Iberia. Some or all of them could refer to men who travelled to Byzantium via Russia. Yet there is a hint that ‘the south’ might sometimes mean the Maghreb. The Gripsholm stone, a memorial to a member of Ingvar’s expedition to Byzantium in 1040, says that “They went gallantly for gold/And in the east fed the eagle. They died in the south in Serkland@ (cited by Jesch 2005). The exact location of Serkland is unclear and will be discussed later, but it may be ‘part of Africa’ (Fagrskinna, trans.: 185). This may be corroborated by the inscription on a small sandstone implement now in the British Museum. The runes on this implement, which have been dated to the eleventh century, name four peoples or places: the Greeks (Byzantines); Jerusalem; Iceland; and Serkland. Page speculated that the runecarver itemized “Byzantium for trade, Jerusalem for pilgrimage, Iceland for settlement, the Middle East for adventure’ (Page 1995: 12). In runic inscriptions Serkland ‘has emblematic status as the south easternmost destination of the far-travelled Vikings’ (Jesch 2005: 125). Wherever it was, Serkland was the last corner of the Viking world and the least memorialized.
To reconstruct the history of Vikings in the South, the emphasis has to be on the written record; this is also true for Francia before the Norman settlement. The main legacy of Viking activity in Iberia and the Mediterranean is a fund of narrative. Some of the stories have a core of truth, which the book will attempt to uncover, although it will not be easy. On the skeleton of sporadic references in chronicles and charters to attacks by seaborne raiders, medieval authors constructed a role for Vikings in the histories of Christian and Muslim Iberia that sometimes became increasingly significant with time. They also recorded stories about Vikings whose factual vertebrae - if such ever existed - have collapsed beneath the weight of later accretions.
This is a commonplace of Viking studies. I began with Don Teudo Rico and the Viking attack on Luarca - even though our hero may be an invention of the Early Modern period and thus outside the time frame of this book - because Don Teudo Rico serves as a synecdoche for those Iberians who faced Viking attacks. Luarca’s plaque may recall a genuine raid, although 842 is perhaps two years too early (see Chapter 3). The people of Luarca seem to have held off Vikings until the 980s, when the port was abandoned; it was not resettled until the end of the thirteenth century. The family of Don Teudo Rico were prominent throughout the lean years, according to an account of their lineage written in 1654 by Diego Barreyro, King at Arms to Philip IV (Pérez de Castro 1981). The Rico family, said Barreyro, occupied the first house to be built after the repopulation of the port, in the quarter (Los Cambarales) that was named after the defeated Viking leader, and on the site of their previous house — and they had papers to prove it. Los Cambarales is today thought to be named after one of two pirates, one a Viking, the other a Berber, or for the cambaro, a shellfish (Eco de Luarca 8 May 1955, cited by Perez 1981: 245, n.5) and this part of the Rico family story could have been less than a century old when the genealogist recorded it.
The antiquarian Prudencio de Sandoval (1553-1620), who may be the first to refer to Don Teudo (Adiciones a la Historia de los cinco Obispos: f.153, cited by Pérez 1981), was in the habit of taking his information from false chronicles written by one of his contemporaries (Garcia Moreno 2013: 480, and n.1659). Nevertheless, Prudencio said that the ruins of the Rico family house were still visible in his own day. A generation later, and with a flourish of what Pérez labelled hidalgomania (the excessive glorification of one’s ancestry) Barreyro pointed out that, leaving aside the nominative determinism of the name Rico (rich), the family were clearly related to Gothic heroes of the same name such as Alaric (Alarico in Spanish) and Theodoric, as well as to the many Asturian bishops whose names ended in -rico. The Rico coat of arms vaunted the family’s participation in Spain's three pivotal victories against the Muslims: at Covadonga (c. 718, if it ever happened); at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212); and with Ferdinand and Isabella before Granada in 1492. Barreyro noted that the defeat of Vikings was also represented on the shield, by the key to the Rico house in Luarca that Don Teudo successfully defended. Never completely overshadowed by Catholic Spain’s greatest triumphs, Don Teudo’s victory remained a keystone of family honour. In the Early Middle Ages too, the inhabitants of Iberia were proud to claim not only that they had fought Saracens, but that they had also driven off Vikings.
Vicarious fear of and fascination with Vikings, who continue to attract wide popular and scholarly interest, have been blamed for exaggerating their destructive effects on medieval society. Vikings did not come‘as a bolt from the blue’; they were not more violent, nor did they ‘put people to death in particularly horrible ways’ (Halsall 1992; 1998). But medieval writers feared that they might. Halsall argued that to understand why, when medieval societies faced the threat of violence from many sides, Vikings were placed in a category of their own, ‘we have to conceive of the Viking attacks as a clash of cultures’ (Halsall 1992: 6). The crimes of these warriors offended contemporary Christian norms of warfare. In Iberia, cultural plurality predated the advent of Vikings. Much scholarly effort in the last few years has been expended in discussing whether the cultures of Christianity and Islam did indeed ‘clash’ in the peninsula. What is clear is that the historians of Christian and Muslim Iberia did not record the past in the same way. Yet the same fear and fascination is palpable in both Christian and Muslim memories of Vikings in the South.
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