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03.02.2020

The rise of kings

Medieval European chroniclers observed with fear and frustration the ever-expanding fleets of Vikings raiding their shores. What they may not have fully realized was that this phenomenon marked the consolidation of political power in the hands of fewer and more successful Norse chieftains, eventually leading to the emergence of kings.

This process was a logical outcome of the ways in which chieftains accumulated power. Chieftains who attracted the most skilled and numerous warriors often achieved victory in battles, acquiring wealth and prestige. This, in turn, enabled them to employ more warriors, who further enhanced their reputation through combat. Over time, the most successful chieftains became mighty enough to conquer and subdue other, lesser chieftains, establishing themselves as kings over larger territories. The Vikings were not hesitant to pursue this path.

The transition from chieftains to kings unfolded gradually and unevenly across different parts of Scandinavia. Denmark was among the first to see the rise of kings, with some already establishing themselves in the eighth century AD. Norway followed, with its first kings emerging in the tenth century. In Sweden, this transition was largely completed by the mid-thirteenth century, although Sweden remained relatively decentralized throughout the Middle Ages.

Kings were not merely more powerful rulers than chieftains; they also adopted a different style of governance, resembling other European monarchs more than their Viking chieftain predecessors.

As rulers' power expanded, it became increasingly impractical to maintain the personal bonds of direct and friendly loyalty and the gift-based economy that had characterized chieftain rule. These systems were gradually replaced by more impersonal and bureaucratic administrative and military structures. The followers of a king had more specialized roles, both in times of war and peace, unlike the chieftains' era when nearly all were primarily warriors, with some holding secondary positions.

Norse chieftains governed loose and constantly shifting coalitions of people, and succession often involved conflicts. In contrast, kings established clear rules of succession and governed distinct territories, encompassing all who resided within their boundaries. Instead of raiding other peoples for wealth, as chieftains did, kings collected resources from their own subjects in the form of taxes and fees. While these levies were theoretically meant to protect the taxed population from external threats, the king's response to such threats varied considerably in practice from case to case.

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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