BAVIK001 - Dark Age Viking Army
Model Size - 28mm
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FURY OF THE NORTHMEN
If you read popular histories of the Scandinavians it is easy to assume that one-day in 790AD a new phenomenon was unleashed upon Christendom in the form of a sea-borne raid by northern barbarians upon a settled shore. This, however, could not be further from the truth.
The peoples of the far north of Europe had been raiding civilisations to the south for a thousand years, first continental Celts then Baltic Germans assaulted the British Isles, followed by the Saxons, Jutes, Angles and other motley adventurers. Recent research suggests that even the Picts may have originally sailed from Germania to colonise the tip of Britain.
The Germanic peoples carried on a long and dishonourable tradition of piracy that saw some spectacular successes and dismal defeats. One group ambushed a Roman flotilla in the Mediterranean and sailed the captured home via the straits of Gibraltar. When the Batavii tribe rebelled against Rome they ‘acquired’ a Roman flagship by attacking while the commander was otherwise engaged with his mistress!
Of all these forgotten pirates the most incorrigible were the Slavs. From the frozen Baltic to the gates of Constantinople these skilled boatmen mounted raids of varying size and success for centuries. In fact it may have been their success against the Scandinavians that prompted the latter to take up piracy in the first place. Slav-style ships were copied and used by the Visigoths, Heruls and Ostrogoths to raid Imperial territory, one such expedition saw them invade mainland Greece and the islands of Cyprus and Crete in the 3rd Cent AD with great success.
So why do we still regard the Scandinavians as the pre-eminent raiders of the early medieval period? Probably because the victims used a common written language (Latin) and more sources have survived. What is true is that the men (and women) who went a-Viking are remembered because of their bravery and adventurous spirit, their word-craft and ingenuity. Their history is far more interesting than a bunch of hairy bloodthirsty chancers charging around the ‘dark age’ world raping and pillaging.
THE SCANDINAVIAN VIKING ARMY
The warriors who made up the Viking armies were divided into several, social, types each fulfilling a battlefield role that is recognisable from other Germanic and ‘barbarian’ armies throughout history.
The leaders of Viking armies could range from a motivated merchant, mercenary captain, disinherited prince to a great King at the head of many allied contingents. The smaller raiding parties (often a single ship of 50 men) would have been similarly equipped and of a similar social standing, it is the larger armies that would give examples of the range of warriors who could take the field.
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