Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Oath of Strasbourg

This division is interesting because it shows two of the nationalities of Europe already emerging from the imperial melting-pot. When the brothers Louis and Charles met at Strasbourg in 842 to confirm an alliance they had formed against Lothar, Charles and his followers took the oath in German, Louis and his nobles in the Romance tongue of which modern French is the descendant. This they did that the armies on both sides might clearly understand how their leaders had bound themselves, and the Oath of Strasbourg remains to-day as evidence of this new growth of nationality that had already acquired distinct national tongues.

The Partition of Verdun, signed shortly afterwards by all three brothers, acknowledged the division of the Empire into three parts, France on the West, Germany in the East, and between them the debatable kingdom of Lotharingia, that, dwindled during the Middle Ages and modern times into the province of Lorraine, has remained always a source of war and trouble.

It would be wearisome to trace in detail the history of the years that followed the Partition of Verdun. One historian has described it as ‘a dizzy and unintelligible spectacle of monotonous confusion, a scene of unrestrained treachery, of insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal to his father, no brother can trust his brother, no uncle spares his nephew.... There were rapid alterations in fortune, rapid changing of sides, there was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood or crime.’

In 881 Charles ‘the Fat’, son of Louis the German, of Strasbourg Oath fame, succeeded, owing to the deaths of his rival cousins and uncles, in uniting for a few years all the dominions of Charlemagne under his sceptre; but, weak and unhealthy, he was not the man to control so great possessions, and very shortly he was deposed and died in prison on an island in Lake Constance. With him faded away the last reflection of the Carolingian glory that had once dazzled the world. In France the descendants of Charles ‘the Bald’ carried on a precarious existence for several generations, despised and threatened by their own nobles, as the later Merovingians had been, and utterly unable to defend their land from the hostile invasions of Northmen, that, beginning in the eighth century, seemed likely during the ninth and tenth centuries to paralyse the civilization and trade of Europe as the inroads of Goths, Huns, and Vandals had broken up the Roman Empire.

The long ships of the Northmen had been seen off the French coasts even in the days of Charlemagne, and one of the chroniclers records how the wise king seeing them exclaimed, ‘These vessels bear no merchandise but cruel foes,’ and then continued, with prophetic grief, ‘Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure me; but I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should be so near a landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my offspring and their people.’

The Northmen, we can guess from their name, came from the wild, often snow-bound, coasts of Scandinavia and Denmark. Few weaklings could survive in such a climate; and the race was tall, well built, and hardy, made up of men and women who despised the fireside and loved to feel the fresh sea-wind beating against their faces. Life to them was a perpetual struggle, but a struggle they had glorified into an ideal, until they had ceased to dread either its discomforts or dangers.

Here is a description of the three classes, thrall, churl, and noble, into which these tribes of Northmen, or ‘Vikings’, were divided.

‘Thrall was swarthy of skin, his hands wrinkled, his knuckles bent, his fingers thick, his face ugly, his back broad, his heels long. He began to put forth his strength binding bast, making loads, and bearing home faggots the weary day long. His children busied themselves with building fences, dunging ploughland, tending swine, herding goats, and digging peat.... Carl, or Churl, was red and ruddy, with rolling eyes, and took to breaking oxen, building ploughs, timbering houses, and making carts. Earl, the noble, had yellow hair, his cheeks were rosy, his eyes were keen as a young serpent’s. His occupation was shaping the shield, bending the bow, hurling the javelin, shaking the lance, riding horses, throwing dice, fencing and swimming. He began to wake war, to redden the field, and to fell the doomed.’

‘To wake war.’ This was the object of the Viking’s existence. His gods, ‘Odin’ and ‘Thor’, were battle heroes who struck one another in the flash of lightning and with the rumble of thunder as they moved their shields. Not for the man who lived long and comfortably and died at last in his bed were either the glory of this world or the joys of the next. The Scandinavian ‘Valhalla’ was no such ‘paradise’ as the faithful Moslems conceived, where, in sunlit gardens gay with fruit and flowers, he should rest from his labours, attended by ‘houris’, or maidens of celestial beauty. The Viking asked for no rest, only for unfailing strength and a foe to kill. In the halls of his paradise reigned perpetual battle all the day long, and, in the evening, feasts where the warrior, miraculously cured of his wounds, could boast of his prowess and rise again on the morrow to fresh deeds of heroic slaughter.