Great pagan army
The Great Heathen Army ( English Great Heathen Army , Old English mycel heathen here ), also known as the Great Viking Army or Great Danish Army , was an army of Vikings who came from Denmark in the late 9th century and plundered and conquered much of England . The army was extraordinarily large for the time and probably comprised several thousand fighters. It was not an army under unified leadership, but rather many groups, which mostly acted separately from one another and sometimes also fought one another. The English name Great Heathen Army comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . The most important historical findings about this army come from this work.
The origins of the army can be seen in a group of Viking warriors who attacked Paris in 845 and established themselves in the region from 850 and repeatedly plundered Rouen . They landed in East Anglia late in 865 . Under the command of the brothers Halfdan Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless, and with the support of their brother Ubba Ragnarsson , it attempted to conquer England and create settlements. The trigger could have been the execution of her father Ragnar Lodbrok by Ælle in 865.
In 866 they conquered the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria and in 870 East Anglia . In 871 they received reinforcements in the form of the Great Summer Army from Scandinavia . The army, which had grown in this way, also conquered Mercia in 874 . At the same time, the first settlements began in the conquered areas, a second batch followed in 877.
Halfdan went north to war with the Picts , while Guthrum, who had come with the Great Summer Army, remained in the south as a general. In 876 troop reinforcements came again and so they defeated Alfred the Great of Wessex at the Battle of Wareham . Alfred won the Battle of Eddington in May 878 and made peace in the Treaty of Wedmore .
Some of the defeated Vikings settled in continental Europe and moved their raids to the coastal region of the English Channel , northern France and Flanders . As a result, the Vikings also launched major raids in the Rhineland for the first time .
The settlers who remained in England founded the Kingdom of Jórvík ( York ), which (with interruptions) lasted until 950 and was part of the Danelag .
literature
- Richard Abels : Alfred the Great. War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (= The Medieval World ). Longman, London et al. 1998, ISBN 0-582-04048-5 .
- Dominik Waßenhoven : 1066. England was conquered by the Normans. CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-69844-6 .