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03.02.2020

The rise of kings

Medieval European chroniclers observed with fear and frustration the growing size of Viking fleets that repeatedly raided their shores. What they witnessed, perhaps unknowingly, was the consolidation of political power among fewer and more successful Norse chieftains, many of whom eventually rose to become kings.

This consolidation was the natural outcome of the processes through which chieftains accumulated power. Those chieftains who attracted the most skilled warriors won battles, amassing both plunder and prestige. This allowed them to hire even more warriors who, in turn, earned prestige by fighting for the most successful chieftains. Over time, these highly successful chieftains expanded their power, often by conquering smaller chieftains and establishing themselves as kings over larger territories. True to their Viking nature, they were not hesitant to do so.

The transition from chieftains to kings was a gradual and uneven process, unfolding at different rates across Scandinavia. Denmark was the first to witness the rise of kings, with some emerging as early as the eighth century AD. Norway followed suit, with its first kings coming to power in the tenth century. Sweden, while still relatively decentralized during the Middle Ages, had largely completed this shift by the mid-thirteenth century.

Kings differed significantly from chieftains in terms of their rule. They had more in common with other European monarchs than with the Viking chieftains who preceded them.

As rulers' power expanded, maintaining the bonds of direct personal loyalty and the gift-based economy that characterized chieftain rule became increasingly impractical. These elements were gradually replaced by more impersonal and bureaucratic administrative and military structures. The king's followers assumed more specialized roles in both times of war and peace, as opposed to being primarily warriors with secondary functions, as was the norm under chieftains.

Norse chieftains governed loose and ever-changing confederations of people, while succession often led to conflicts. In contrast, kings established clear rules for succession and governed defined territories, encompassing all those who lived within their boundaries. Rather than acquiring wealth for ruling through raids on other peoples, as chieftains often did, kings collected taxes and fees from their own populace. These levies were theoretically intended for the protection of the taxpayers against foreign threats. However, in practice, the king's response to foreign aggression varied considerably from case to case, and the extent of protection provided was not always consistent.

The rise of kings

The Vikings’ shift from chieftains to kings occurred at roughly the same time that the Vikings were converting from their native pagan religion to Christianity. Intriguingly, there seems to have been a religious dimension to how the political transformation was interpreted.

As we’ve seen, the relationship between chieftains and their warriors was primarily one of mutual obligation, despite the great difference in power between the chieftain and his warriors. Pagan sacrifice – where the people would offer sacrifices to the gods in exchange for success in battle, bountiful harvests, or any number of other desired outcomes – manifested this same idea of mutual obligation between highly unequal parties, maintained by a gift economy.

There was an element of unconditional fealty present in the chieftain-warrior relationship as well, exemplified most strikingly by the expectation that an honorable warrior would sooner die by his chieftain’s side than flee and live. But this was largely subsumed by the sense of mutual obligation; a warrior could, after all, choose to whom he offered his mortal loyalty, and leave one chieftain for another if he thought that another would treat him with more generosity.

With the rise of kings and the importation of Christianity, the emphasis was reversed. The relationship between the king and his fighters – which had necessarily become much more impersonal with the great increase in the number of fighters each king commanded – was spoken of in terms borrowed from Christian language. In the same way that Christians were supposed to serve God unconditionally as his “slaves and thralls,” so, too, were a king’s men supposed to serve him.

Nevertheless, an element of the older relationship of reciprocal duties survived in the form of the taxes-for-protection model, which became, in an important sense, the updated version of the loyalty-for-generosity model.

So while the rise of kings made the Vikings more formidable raiders and fighters in the short term, in the end it proved to be part of a constellation of deeply intertwined developments that doomed the distinctively Viking way of life by bringing the Scandinavians into the European mainstream. By the thirteenth century, Scandinavia was, in the eyes of Europe, no longer a savage land of barbarians that lay to the north of Europe; it was a part of Europe.

The rise of kings

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