[787-1090 A.D.]
But in the view of general history Normans and Northmen must be carefully distinguished. The change in the name is the sign of a thorough change, if not in the people themselves, yet in their historical position. Their national character remains largely the same; but they have adopted a new religion, a new language, a new system of law and society, new thoughts and feelings on all matters. Like as the Norman is still to the Northmen, the effect of a settlement of Normans is utterly different from the effect of a settlement of Northmen. There can be no doubt that the establishment of a Norman power in England was, like the establishment of the Danish power, greatly helped by the essential kindred of Normans, Danes, and English. But it was helped only silently. To all outward appearances the Norman conquest of England was an event of an altogether different character from the Danish conquest. The one was a conquest by a people whose tongue and institutions were still palpably akin to those of the English. The other was a conquest by a people whose tongue and institutions were palpably different from those of the English. The Norman settlers in England felt no community with the earlier Danish settlers in England. In fact the Normans met with the steadiest resistance in a part of England which was largely Danish. But the effect of real, though unacknowledged, kindred had none the less an important practical effect. There can be no doubt that this hidden working of kindred between conquerors and conquered in England, as compared with the utter lack of all fellowship between conquerors and conquered in Sicily, was one cause out of several which made so wide a difference between the Norman conquest of England and the Norman conquest of Sicily.
These two conquests, wrought in the great island of the ocean and in the great island of the Mediterranean, were the main works of the Normans after they had fully put on the character of a Christian and French-speaking people, in other words, after they had changed from Northmen into Normans. The English and the Sicilian settlements form the main Norman history of the eleventh century. The tenth century is the time of the settlement of the Northmen in Gaul, and of the change in religion and language of which the softening of the name is the outward sign. By the end of it, any traces of heathen faith, and even of Scandinavian speech, must have been mere survivals. The new creed, the new speech, the new social system, had taken such deep root that the descendants of the Scandinavian settlers were better fitted to be the armed missionaries of all these things than the neighbours from whom they had borrowed their new possessions. With the zeal of new converts they set forth on their new errand very much in the spirit of their heathen forefathers. If Britain and Sicily were the greatest fields of their enterprise, they were very far from being the only fields. The same spirit of enterprise which brought the Northmen into Gaul seems to carry the Normans out of Gaul into every corner of the world.[c]
We may for the present leave the ethnology and early history of the Northmen to the later history of Scandinavia, and fuller details of their invasions of France and England to the histories of those countries, giving here only a brief résumé of their wanderings, and a fuller account of their career in the powerful little kingdom in Sicily where they meddled busily with the affairs of all Europe, and much of Asia and Africa. This was, as Freeman[c] says, “the most brilliant time for Sicily as a power in the world.” Even under the Greeks it was not so prominent. But before reaching this period, some mention of their first appearances in continental European history is necessary.[a]
Evils still more terrible than political abuses were the lot of those nations who had been subject to Charlemagne. They, indeed, may appear to us little better than ferocious barbarians: but they were exposed to the assaults of tribes, in comparison with whom they must be deemed humane and polished. Each frontier of the empire had to dread the attack of an enemy. The Saracens of Africa possessed themselves of Sicily and Sardinia, and became masters of the Mediterranean Sea.
[787-870 A.D.]
Much more formidable were the foes by whom Germany was assailed. The Slavonians, a widely extended people, whose language is still spoken upon half the surface of Europe, had occupied the countries of Bohemia, Poland, and Pannonia, on the eastern confines of the empire, and from the time of Charlemagne acknowledged its superiority. But at the end of the ninth century, a Tatarian tribe, the Hungarians, overspreading that country which since has borne their name, and moving forward like a vast wave, brought a dreadful reverse upon Germany. All Italy, all Germany, and the south of France, felt the scourge; till Henry the Fowler, and Otto the Great, drove them back by successive victories within their own limits, where in a short time they learned peaceful arts, adopted the religion, and followed the policy of Christendom.
A Slavonian of the Tenth Century
If any enemies could be more destructive than these Hungarians, they were the pirates of the north, known commonly by the name of Northmen (Normans). The love of a predatory life seems to have attracted adventurers of different nations to the Scandinavian seas, from whence they infested, not only by maritime piracy, but continual invasions, the northern coasts both of France and Germany. The causes of their sudden appearance are inexplicable, or at least could only be sought in the ancient traditions of Scandinavia. For undoubtedly the coasts of France and England were as little protected from depredations under the Merovingian kings, and those of the Heptarchy, as in subsequent times. Yet only one instance of an attack from this side is recorded, and that before the middle of the sixth century, till the age of Charlemagne. In 787, the Danes, as we call those northern plunderers, began to infest England, which lay most immediately open to their incursions. Soon afterwards they ravaged the coasts of France. Charlemagne repulsed them by means of his fleets; yet they pillaged a few places during his reign. It is said that, perceiving one day, from a port in the Mediterranean, some Norman vessels which had penetrated into that sea, he shed tears, in anticipation of the miseries which awaited his empire. In the ninth century, the Norman pirates not only ravaged the Balearic Isles, and nearer coasts of the Mediterranean, but even Greece.