Introduction

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       lands and of Norway, and there is increased emigration to the Norse settlements overseas as a result of the rigorous rule of Harald Fairhair, would-be lord of all Norway.
      
       PHASE IV. A.D. 900—926:
(n) Harold Fairhair completes subjection of Vestland (c. 900) and Norsemen settle in N.W. England; English reconquer the Danelaw (910—926).
(o) Rollo invades Francia and Normandy is ceded to him (911); renewed attack on the Loire country (919).
(p) Fresh incursions of vikings into Ireland (914—926).
(q) Oleg of Kiev attacks Constantinople (907) and a treaty is made between Russians and Greeks (911). The Volga Swedes raid the Caspian lands of the Caliphate (910, 914).
      
       The chief territorial gain of the early tenth century is the winning of Normandy, the buffer-duchy whereby Charles the Simple sought to defend his realm from a repetition of the horrors of the preceding century. But this success is followed by an almost complete eclipse of Danish power in England, and for some sixty years the vikings made no other notable land-winning in the west and no devastating attacks upon the countries that were not already their own. Yet in the final phase of the history of their expansion it is England that succumbs to their greatest and most formidable attack.
      
       PHASE V. A.D. 980—1050:
(r) Danish conquest of England; Svein and Cnut as kings of England. Decline of Danish power after Cnut's death (1035).
(s) Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav of Kiev raise the Swedish-Russian principality to its greatest power.
(t) Colonization of Greenland by the Icelanders (c. 986).
(u) Brian Born, the high-king of Ireland, defeats a great levy of the western vikings at Clontarf (1014); but the Irish vikings retain their hold upon the harbour-towns.
      
       The fifth phase is first of all remarkable for the sudden and dramatic entry of the northern people into the European commonwealth of Christian states. About A.D. 970 Denmark became for the first time a single kingdom and the Danes were made converts to Christianity by their sovereign, Harald Gormsson; about 990 Vladimir the Great ordered the conversion of his Kievan principality in Russia and in 995 Olaf Tryggvason began
      
      
      
      
      
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       to enforce the new faith on the hundred-year-old realm of Norway, while Olof Skotkonung at this same time likewise sought, though much less successfully, to convert the ancient kingdom of Sweden. But it was only in Denmark and in Russia that this new importance of the northern nations as Christian powers brought a prosperity commensurate with so notable an advance.
       For under Svein and Cnut in England, under Vladimir and Yaroslav in Russia, the vikings abroad won the most substantial success and the most honourable status in all their history; indeed in the first half of the eleventh century the Anglo-Danish kingdom and the Kievan Principality were alike powers of European importance, bodies politic of a significance never attained elsewhere in the outside viking world, not even in Normandy, so soon Frenchified, nor in Frisia, and certainly never attained in Ireland nor in the lonely islands of Scotland, nor in far-off Iceland. But this brilliant period was of short duration, in England a bare thirty years and in Russia not much more than eighty, so that after the beginning of the second half of the eleventh century nearly all that remained of viking power abroad was vested in the Norse colonies in the Celtic lands and in the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland.
      
       Few problems of viking history are more difficult than the determination of the nationality or nationalities of those engaged in any one operation, for the adventurous spirits of the folk of each country sent them forth roaming at random, ready to take their share in whatever fighting was afoot or to beach their boats wherever trade seemed good. In general terms it is true enough that in the west the viking forays and armaments were those of Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes from Scania, who were then counted as Danes, while in Russia the settlers were mostly Swedes; but once the viking movement was begun many of the attacking forces in the west began to lose their national character, for viking enterprise, as will be shown, was never in the early days an expression of a considered national foreign policy, and was seldom engineered, equipped, and controlled by kings in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Nevertheless while allowing for this sometimes inextricable mingling and for the capricious character of many ventures, there remains a discernible national movement in each instance indicative of the parts played by the three peoples in the viking movement, and this may be summarized here and now.
       The Swedes were the folk who achieved the mightiest and most remarkable triumph of viking history, namely the creation
      
      
      
      
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       of an independent Swedish-Russian state. This they did not by force and fury, but by the orderly development of trade through the eastern Slavonic country along the river-routes familiar to their forefathers and by the undeniable statesmanship of the early Swedish princes of Kiev. They governed and protected the wavering Slavs, and they opened for them, and held open, the golden but dangerous road to Constantinople. It was of Swedish choosing that the influence of the Byzantine Empire shaped Russian modes and manners and thought, and that the Patriarch of Constantinople became the spiritual father of the Russians; therefore this noble and amazing episode whereby the destiny of Russia was determined assuredly takes rank as the most important adventure of the vikings in constructive politics and was certainly the most fateful and significant part played by them in the great drama of European history.
       The Danes, except for the Jomsborg outpost and for certain wars along the Baltic littoral, turned to the west and south-west. Frisia was their first prize and the grants to their leaders of fiefs in this province were the most important of their early gains; but in the second half of the ninth century, after the long and bloody ravaging of the coasts of France and England, they achieved a more remarkable success, for they won Northumbria and founded the English Danelaw. At this time, too, they made a bid for the control of the Norwegian towns of Ireland, but at the end of the century fortune went everywhere against them and it was not until Rollo's army, which was mostly Danish, suddenly and surprisingly won Normandy in the second decade of the tenth century that success once more attended their arms. Normandy, however, was very rapidly swallowed up in France and lost its identity as a viking province, so that even if its winning can be counted as a Danish achievement it cannot be deemed so remarkable a triumph for the Danes as the second conquest of England in the early eleventh century, a magnificent success that was won under the leadership of Svein, King of Denmark. This was the first occasion on which a viking campaign was a deliberated act of national policy engineered and led by the monarch himself, and Svein's victory was crowned by the formation of a huge and powerful Anglo-Danish kingdom under his son Cnut. Yet it was but a short-lived triumph, for when Cnut died in 1035 once again Danish power declined and with the death of Hardecnut in 1042 their dominion over England ended.
       The Norwegians sailed westwards and north-westwards. Beginning with the peopling of the Orkneys and Shetlands they
      
      
      
      
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       spread rapidly over the Western Sea, taking the Hebrides, overrunning Man, and establishing themselves in Scotland and Ireland; in the early days of the tenth century some of them also settled in north-western England, and just before this there began a migration to the Faroes and to Iceland, this being followed later by the colonization of Greenland and the wonderful discovery of America. The Norse colonies, however, were all of them remote from the main pulse of European life and therefore have a history different from and much longer than those of Sweden and Denmark; thus it comes about that when the Anglo-Danish kingdom was no more and after the principality of Kiev had become wholly Slavonic, the Norse earldom of Orkney and the Norsemen of the Scottish islands and Ireland were still playing a dominant role in the history of north Britain. The most brilliant period in the story of the Orkneys was the reign of Earl Thorfinn, who died in 1066, and the Norse kingdom of the Isles and Man was more important at the end of the eleventh century than ever before; indeed, at the beginning of the twelfth century the might of Norway in the west was proved by the coming of King Magnus Barefoot with the purpose of creating from the Norse colonies a realm that should submerge Scotland and rival the kingdom of England. In the thirteenth century the Irish towns were seized by the English and the fate of the remaining Norse and Danish colonists in Ireland sealed; but the kingdom of the Western Isles and the earldom of Orkney remained as a menace to Scottish power and so continued until the fateful days when King Haakon Haakonsson came west intending to establish decisively the fact of Norse supremacy in Scotland. But Haakon failed, and after his death in the Orkneys Norse colonial power in the Western Seas came quickly to an end; henceforth, now that further military aid from the mother-country was no longer to be expected, these poor Norsemen could not hold their own as rivals of the Scots, nor could Norway herself make any serious struggle to retain their allegiance, and so in 1266 Man and the Western Isles were ceded to the king of Scotland, and a century later there followed the mortgage of the Orkneys and the Shetlands. Only in the far north did the colonies of Iceland, the Faroes, and Greenland, endure miserably to represent the great land-winnings of the early Norsemen. And not all of these survived, for cut-off and forgotten in their cold and remote land the men of Greenland were left to die in horrid starvation and neglect, so that by the middle of the fifteenth century the colony was extinct; but in Iceland and in the Faroes the scions of the Norsemen still possess