A greater chieftain of the Northmen than Hastings was soon to follow his example, and found Normandy in France; but before Rolf, that is, Rollo, came and gave the name of his race to a French province, the piratical Northmen were again to attempt a greater blow against France and to suffer a great reverse.
In November, 885, under the reign of Charles the Fat, after having, for more than forty years, irregularly ravaged France, they resolved to unite their forces in order at length to obtain possession of Paris, whose outskirts they had so often pillaged without having been able to enter the heart of the place. Two bodies of troops were set in motion: one, under the command of Rollo, who was already famous among his comrades, marched on Rouen; the other went right up the course of the Seine, under the orders of Siegfried, whom the Northmen called their king. Rollo took Rouen, and pushed on at once for Paris. Duke Renaud, general of the Gallo-Frankish troops, went to encounter him on the banks of the Eure, and sent to him, to sound his intentions, Hastings, the newly made count of Chartres. "Valiant warriors," said Hastings to Rollo, "whence come ye? What seek ye here? What is the name of your lord and master? Tell us this; for we be sent unto you by the King of the Franks." "We be Danes," answered Rollo, "and all be equally masters among us. We be come to drive out the inhabitants of this land, and to subject it as our own country. But who art thou, thou who speakest so glibly?" "Ye have sometime heard tell of one Hastings, who, issuing forth from among you, came hither with much shipping and made desert a great part of the kingdom of the Franks?" "Yes," said Rollo, "we have heard tell of him; Hastings began well and ended ill." "Will ye yield you to King Charles?" asked Hastings. "We yield," was the answer, "to none; all that we shall take by our arms we will keep as our right. Go and tell this, if thou wilt, to the King, whose envoy thou boastest to be."
Hastings returned to the Gallo-Frankish army, and Rollo prepared to march on Paris. Hastings had gone back somewhat troubled in mind. Now there was among the Franks one Count Tetbold (Thibault), who greatly coveted the countship of Chartres, and he said to Hastings: "Why slumberest thou softly? Knowest thou not that King Charles doth purpose thy death by cause of all the Christian blood that thou didst aforetime unjustly shed? Bethink thee of all the evil thou hast done him, by reason whereof he purposeth to drive thee from his land. Take heed to thyself that thou be not smitten unawares." Hastings, dismayed, at once sold to Tetbold the town of Chartres, and, removing all that belonged to him, departed to go and resume, for all that appears, his old course of life.
On the 25th of November, 885, all the forces of the Northmen formed a junction before Paris; seven hundred huge barks covered two leagues of the Seine, bringing, it is said, more than thirty thousand men. The chieftains were astonished at sight of the new fortifications of the city, a double wall of circumvallation, the bridges crowned with towers, and in the environs the ramparts of the abbeys of St. Denis and St. Germain solidly rebuilt. Siegfried hesitated to attack a town so well defended. He demanded to enter alone and have an interview with the bishop, Gozlin. "Take pity on thyself and thy flock," said he to him; "let us pass through the city; we will in no wise touch the town; we will do our best to preserve, for thee and Count Eudes, all your possessions." "This city," replied the bishop, "hath been confided unto us by the emperor Charles, king and ruler, under God, of the powers of the earth. He hath confided it unto us, not that it should cause the ruin but the salvation of the kingdom. If peradventure these walls had been confided to thy keeping as they have been to mine, wouldst thou do as thou biddest me?"
"If ever I do so," answered Siegfried, "may my head be condemned to fall by the sword and serve as food to the dogs! But if thou yield not to our prayers, so soon as the sun shall commence his course our armies will launch upon thee their poisoned arrows; and when the sun shall end his course, they will give thee over to all the horrors of famine; and this will they do from year to year."
The bishop, however, persisted, without further discussion; being as certain of Count Eudes as he was of himself. Eudes, who was young and but recently made Count of Paris, was the eldest son of Robert the Strong, Count of Anjou, of the same line as Charlemagne, and but lately slain in battle against the Northmen. Paris had for defenders two heroes, one of the Church and the other of the empire: the faith of the Christian and the fealty of the vassal; the conscientiousness of the priest and the honor of the warrior.
The siege lasted thirteen months, whiles pushed vigorously forward with eight several assaults, whiles maintained by close investment, and with all the alternations of success and reverse, all the intermixture of brilliant daring and obscure sufferings that can occur when the assailants are determined and the defenders devoted. Not only a contemporary but an eye-witness, Abbo, a monk of St. Germain des Près, has recounted the details in a long poem, wherein the writer, devoid of talent, adds nothing to the simple representation of events; it is history itself which gives to Abbo's poem a high degree of interest. We do not possess, in reference to these continual struggles of the Northmen with the Gallo-Frankish populations, any other document which is equally precise and complete, or which could make us so well acquainted with all the incidents, all the phases of this irregular warfare between two peoples, one without a government, the other without a country. The bishop, Gozlin, died during the siege. Count Eudes quitted Paris for a time to go and beg aid of the Emperor; but the Parisians soon saw him reappear on the heights of Montmartre with three battalions of troops, and he reëntered the town, spurring on his horse and striking right and left with his battle-axe through the ranks of the dumfounded besiegers. The struggle was prolonged throughout the summer; and when, in November, 886, Charles the Fat at last appeared before Paris, "with a large army of all nations," it was to purchase the retreat of the Northmen at the cost of a heavy ransom, and by allowing them to go and winter in Burgundy, "whereof the inhabitants obeyed not the Emperor."
Some months afterward, in 887, Charles the Fat was deposed, at a diet held on the banks of the Rhine, by the grandees of Germanic France; and Arnulf, a natural son of Carloman, the brother of Louis III, was proclaimed emperor in his stead. At the same time Count Eudes, the gallant defender of Paris, was elected King at Compiègne, and crowned by the archbishop of Sens. Guy, Duke of Spoleto, descended from Charlemagne in the female line, hastened to France and was declared king at Langres by the bishop of that town, but returned with precipitation to Italy, seeing no chance of maintaining himself in his French kingship. Elsewhere Boso, Duke of Arles, became King of Provence, and the Burgundian Count Rudolph had himself crowned at St. Maurice, in the Valais, King of transjuran Burgundy. There was still in France a legitimate Carlovingian, a son of Louis the Stutterer, who was hereafter to become Charles the Simple; but being only a child, he had been rejected or completely forgotten, and, in the interval that was to elapse ere his time should arrive, kings were being made in all directions.
In the midst of this confusion the Northmen, though they kept at a distance from Paris, pursued in Western France their cruising and plundering. In Rollo they had a chieftain far superior to his vagabond predecessors. Though he still led the same life that they had, he displayed therein other faculties, other inclinations, other views. In his youth he had made an expedition to England, and had there contracted a real friendship with the wise king Alfred the Great. During a campaign in Friesland he had taken prisoner Rainier, Count of Hainault; and Alberade, Countess of Brabant, made a request to Rollo for her husband's release, offering in return to set free twelve captains of the Northmen, her prisoners, and to give up all the gold she possessed. Rollo took only half the gold, and restored to the countess her husband. When, in 885, he became master of Rouen, instead of devastating the city after the fashion of his kind, he respected the buildings, had the walls repaired, and humored the inhabitants. In spite of his violent and extortionate practices where he met with obstinate resistance, there were to be discerned in him symptoms of more noble sentiments and of an instinctive leaning toward order, civilization, and government. After the deposition of Charles the Fat and during the reign of Eudes, a lively struggle was maintained between the Frankish King and the chieftain of the Northmen, who had neither of them forgotten their early encounters. They strove, one against the other, with varied fortunes; Eudes succeeded in beating the Northmen at Montfaucon, but was beaten in Vermandois by another band, commanded, it is said, by the veteran Hastings, sometime Count of Chartres.
Rollo, too, had his share at one time of success, at another of reverse; but he made himself master of several important towns, showed a disposition to treat the quiet populations gently, and made a fresh trip to England, during which he renewed friendly relations with her King, Athelstan, the successor of Alfred the Great. He thus became, from day to day, more reputable as well as more formidable in France, insomuch that Eudes himself was obliged to have recourse, in dealing with him, to negotiations and presents. When, in 898, Eudes was dead, and Charles the Simple, at hardly nineteen years of age, had been recognized sole King of France, the ascendency of Rollo became such that the necessity of treating with him was clear. In 911 Charles, by the advice of his councillors and, among them, of Robert, brother of the late king Eudes, who had himself become Count of Paris and Duke of France, sent to the chieftain of the Northmen Franco, Archbishop of Rouen, with orders to offer him the cession of a considerable portion of Neustria and the hand of his young daughter Gisèle, on condition that he became a Christian and acknowledged himself the King's vassal. Rollo, by the advice of his comrades, received these overtures with a good grace and agreed to a truce for three months, during which they might treat about peace. On the day fixed Charles, accompanied by Duke Robert, and Rollo, surrounded by his warriors, repaired to St. Clair-sur-Epte, on the opposite banks of the river, and exchanged numerous messages. Charles offered Rollo Flanders, which the Northman refused, considering it too swampy; as to the maritime portion of Neustria he would not be contented with it; it was, he said, covered with forests, and had become quite a stranger to the ploughshare by reason of the Northmen's incessant incursions. He demanded the addition of territories taken from Brittany, and that the princes of that province, Bérenger and Alan, lords, respectively, of Redon and Dol, should take the oath of fidelity to him. When matters had been arranged on this basis, "the bishops told Rollo that he who received such a gift as the duchy of Normandy was bound to kiss the King's foot. 'Never,' quoth Rollo, 'will I bend the knee before the knees of any, and I will kiss the foot of none.' At the solicitation of the Franks he then ordered one of his warriors to kiss the King's foot. The Northman, remaining bolt upright, took hold of the King's foot, raised it to his mouth, and so made the King fall backward, which caused great bursts of laughter and much disturbance among the throng. Then the King and all the grandees who were about him, prelates, abbots, dukes, and counts, swore, in the name of the Catholic faith, that they would protect the patrician Rollo in his life, his members, and his folk, and would guarantee to him the possession of the aforesaid land, to him and his descendants forever; after which the King, well satisfied, returned to his domains; and Rollo departed with Duke Robert for the town of Rouen."