6 A province, in short, not to be surrendered idly; and sure enough, for many centuries, ever since the first coming of Clovis into Gaul, it had served as a prized adornment of the empire of the Franks. And yet, under the heirs of Charlemagne, the empire of the Franks had let it slip. So terminally, indeed, that with the dawning of the second millennium a new word was starting to be used to describe the region, a word that branded it the property, not of the Franks at all, but of barbarians who had long seemed, even more than the Hungarians or Saracens, a horror risen up from the most anguished depths of Christian nightmares. “Normandy,” people were coming to call it: the land of the “Nordmanni” – the “Northmen.”It was a name fit to inspire terror. That the frozen rim of the world might make for danger had been appreciated since ancient times. “A hive of nations”:7 so one historian, writing in the early years of Constantinople, had termed the furthermost North. Centuries on, and a more detailed knowledge of the intimidating expanses of Scandinavia had done nothing to impair this judgement. Given their interminable winters, what else was there for the inhabitants to do, save to copulate and breed? It had certainly come as little surprise to venturesome missionaries to discover that many of the demons worshipped by the Northmen should have been prodigious fornicators: one of them, for instance, a giant-slaughtering hammer-wielder by the name of Thor, was a compulsively enthusiastic rapist; while a second, Frey, boasted a “phallus of truly enormous dimensions.”8Alarming revelations, to be sure: for people capable of worshipping gods such as these, violent in their ambitions, insatiable in their lusts, could hardly help but prove a menace to Christendom, rather as lascivious promptings might beset a virtuous soul. The North men, certainly, were notorious for setting few limits on their ravening. To harvest women, “leading them down to a bright ship, fetters biting greedily into their soft flesh”;9 to deny their bodies to rivals; then to father on them a teeming plenitude of sons: these were held the surest proofs of manliness. “And so it is that these people soon grow too numerous for their native land to support them – and the consequence is that a war band of young men has to be selected by lot, according to an ancient custom, and these are then sent out into the world, to seize new lands for themselves at the point of a sword.”10Such, at any rate, among Christian moralists, was the favoured explanation for the deadly waves of pirates from Scandinavia who, surging and withdrawing and then surging yet again, upon a seemingly endless tide, had been bloodying the shores of Christendom for more than two centuries, ever since the time of Charlemagne. Whether the theory was true or not, there was certainly a grim satisfaction to be had in believing it. *Although the depredations of the Northmen were demoralising, the notion that it was mere bestial appetite which had propelled them across the sea did at least serve to reassure their victims that, inviolable amid all the rapine, the values of Christendom remained those of virtue and order. Women might be abducted, monasteries plundered, even whole cities burned – and yet the memory of such atrocities, growing ever more lurid with the retelling, only helped to confirm in most Christians an impregnable sense of their own superiority. Just as the monk murdered by a North man could draw his last breath confident in the knowledge that he was bound for a throne in heaven, so could the warrior who unsheathed his sword against the pirates and stood to block their path know with an iron-forged certitude that he was performing the work of God.So it was that even by the time of the Millennium, a century after the worst of the firestorm had passed from France, great princes were still in the habit of flaunting battle honours won by their forefathers against the Northmen. A dynasty which lacked them, indeed, was felt to verge on the illegitimate. Nothing, for instance, had been more fatal to the martial reputation of the Carolingians than their failure, back in 886, to finish off an army of pirates who had presumed to lay siege to Paris; just as the Capetians, one of whose ancestors had performed prodigies of valour during the great assault on the city, never let anyone forget their own family’s heroic record as Northmen-fighters. “Swords and spears slippery with bright blood”;11 “skewered bodies sprawled as though asleep in town gate-ways”;12 “gobbets of carrion stuck to the claws and beaks of crows”:13 such were the scenes of carnage that had first served to fertilise Capetian greatness.And the greatness of many other Frankish dynasties too. It was no coincidence that many of the most formidable princedoms of the kingdom, from Flanders to Anjou, stood guard over broad-flowing estuaries: those fatal confluences where waters from the heart of France met and mingled with the sea. Just as it was the Seine which had enabled the Northmen, “oars thrashing, weapons crashing, shields striking shields,”14 to penetrate to the bridges of Paris, so too had other fleets thrust their way up the Loire, snaking deep into the very innards of the kingdom, so that even Orléans, back in 856, had been captured and brutally despoiled. On the lower reaches of the river, not surprisingly, the devastation had been more protracted: the county of Anjou, which by the year 1000 would stand so thriving, so puissant, so fair, had been, not much more than a century earlier, so infested with Northmen as to appear almost lost to Christendom. Angers, the proud city that would serve Fulk Nerra as his capital, had been repeatedly occupied by pirates, and transformed into their lair. Other towns, one jittery contemporary had wailed, “are emptied so utterly, alas, that they are become the habitation of wild beasts!”15But this had been to overdo the pessimism. In truth, even at the height of the Northmen’s assault, outposts of Frankish rule had endured along the entire reach of the Loire; nor had the structures of governance there ever wholly collapsed. Proficient at carting off loot the pirates may have been – but they had signally failed to lay their hands on any effective levers of power. It had not taken long for the new masters of Angers, planted in the city after its final liberation in 886, to demonstrate the full scale of this error. By 929, the Vicomte of Angers had cheerfully promoted himself to the rank of “the Count of Anjou”; a few decades on, and even the greatest in the land had accepted his right to be reckoned their peer. Francia being what it was, an ancient and Christian realm, loot pilfered from its monasteries could never hope to compare as a long-term investment with lands and a glamorous title. Fulk Nerra’s ancestors, because they had instinctively appreciated this, had been able to raise a princedom that, by 1000, could stand comparison with any in France. The Northmen, because they had not, had long since been swept from the Loire back into the sea.And yet, to a menacing degree, they had always been fast learners. As pirates, living by their wits, they had needed to be. Whether it was raiding a monastery on the occasion of its saint’s day, or sweeping into a market place just as the stalls were going up, or mastering, perhaps, the unfamiliar Frankish arts of horsemanship, the Northmen had long shown themselves adept at profiting from an attentive study of their prey. They were certainly not oblivious to the underlying strengths possessed by a Christian state – nor to the threat that these presented to themselves. Along the lower reaches of the Seine, for instance, where the Northmen had settled to far more formidable effect than they ever had along the Loire, the props of Frankish power truly had been obliterated, and its foundations systematically smashed to pieces. By the early years of the tenth century, not only had the local nobility been destroyed, and all traces of native officialdom wiped out, but even the Church itself, as a functioning organisation, had begun to disintegrate.It was true that in Rouen, on the very mouth of the Seine, the local archbishop had somehow, against the odds, managed to cling to office; but all around him and his beleaguered flock, as palpable as a gathering twilight, there had been the sense of a deadly wasteland closing in. “