Vikings in the South by Christys Ann

Author:Christys, Ann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474213776
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

5

Waiting for the Barbarians

Compared with elsewhere in western Europe, Iberia was brushed only lightly by the Viking scourge. Yet the irruption of marauders from the sea inspired fear. From the late ninth to eleventh centuries, the people of both northern and southern Iberia took defensive measures against them. Written sources and inscriptions refer to Asturian kings and clerics and to Umayyad emirs and their officials as the sponsors of walls, towers and fleets. The construction and maintenance of effective defences was incumbent upon any ruler. This duty was rarely spelled out, but a scholar based in Iraq, Qudāma ibn Ja’far (d.948), stated that the governor of a coastal region was responsible for its sea defences. Towers were to be constructed and a watch maintained (cited by Picard 1997a: 146). Watchtowers and fortified garrisons appeared along the coasts of northern Iberia, al-Andalus and the Maghreb. Dockyards were constructed and fleets launched to deter the marauders from landing. Some of these structures remain; archaeologists have found traces of others. Now there is some material evidence to balance the witness of the written sources. Putting the two together, however, is not straightforward. It is often the case that the dates given in the written sources do not fit the material remains. Among the few surviving inscriptions relating to defensive structures, some relate to the narrative of the chronicles, but others seem to have no context. All this evidence must be treated with care. For this reason, this chapter examines the question of defences separately from the narrative of specific Viking attacks, as far as this is possible. Some of the evidence for fortifications and fleets rightly belongs with the two ninth-century Viking campaigns already discussed. Most of it, however, is no earlier than the tenth century. Improved defences may have been, at least in part, responsible for a long period free of Viking attack. But if the rulers of Iberia and the Maghreb were fortifying their coasts against Vikings, the timing is odd. This was not a period of documented Viking raiding elsewhere in Europe. The status of Vikings in the world beyond Iberia was changing as they morphed from freebooters to rulers and settled into embryo statehood in Normandy and Kiev. It seems that there were no significant Viking campaigns in the Iberian peninsula in the tenth century until the end of the 960s. Thus the evidence that the new coastal defences of Iberia or the Maghreb were ever used against Vikings, rather than against pirates of other origins whom the sources occasionally mention, is tenuous. This chapter considers a range of defensive measures that may have been deployed against Vikings. The narrative of the tenth-century Viking raids is deferred to the next chapter.

The first line of defence was a wall. There is no indication that Vikings ever managed to enter a fortified settlement in the South – unless one believes the two implausible stories considered in the last chapter, of Hasting’s capture of Luni and the Viking attack on Pamplona. On

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