Gottfried Haraldsson

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Gottfried Haraldsson (* around 820, † around 856) was a son of the Viking king Harald Klak von Haithabu . He was baptized in 826, together with his parents and their 400 entourage, in St. Alban's Abbey near Mainz , with the later Emperor Lothar I being his godfather . Harald Klak was finally expelled from Denmark by his rival Horik I in 827 and received the county of Rüstringen in Friesland as a feudal man of Emperor Ludwig the Pious , from where he subsequently carried out profitable raids in the North Sea area.

Gottfried stayed in the wake of his godfather Lothar I from 826 to the 840s. Then he went into strife and, together with his cousin Rörik von Dorestad, spread fear and terror in Friesland, Flanders and Northern France from 850 to 855 through numerous raids . After the two had conquered Dorestad and Utrecht in 850 , Emperor Lothar was forced to hand over control of almost all of Friesland to Rörik, in the hope of preventing further visits to the area by marauding Vikings. With that, Rörik also got de jure what he de facto already owned for a long time.

Rörik stayed in Friesland, but Gottfried continued his raids in Flanders and Artois before sailing back to Denmark to spend the winter. In the following year, 851, he and his people visited Friesland and the Rhine delta and sailed up the Scheldt to attack Ghent and the nearby Drongen Abbey . In 852 he appeared in northern France with his longships . In October he sailed up the Seine , past Rouen to Pont-de-l'Arche , where he set up camp on an island near Les Andelys . Charles the Bald called an army together and requested additional military help from his half-brother Lothar, Gottfried's godfather. Since the Frankish army had no boats to attack the Vikings on their island, both sides watched each other throughout the winter before Gottfried finally sailed away in the spring of 853, probably taking with him an appropriate tribute (later called Danegeld ).

After the death of King Horik I in 854, Rörik von Dorestad and Gottfried tried again in a war of succession that broke out again in 855, but in vain to gain control of Denmark. In the same year they returned to Friesland, where they regained Dorestad and most of what is now the Netherlands . Gottfried died or fell during this time or shortly after, because he then disappears from history.

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Gottfried Haraldsson is often confused with the Count or Duke Gottfried von Friesland , who was involved in the conquest of northern England by the great pagan army of the Danish Vikings, who visited Flanders in 880 and the Rhineland in 882, and was baptized in 882 as a feudal lord Charles the Fat Duke of Friesland, and was murdered in 885. Almost 25 years passed between the last written mention of Gottfried Haraldsson and the first of Gottfried von Friesland. This does not necessarily rule out an identity of the two, but it is very unlikely - especially in view of the fact that one was baptized in 826, the other only in 882.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Gottfried Haraldsson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Viking prince
DATE OF BIRTH around 820
DATE OF DEATH around 856