Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XII.djvu/512

 498 NORTHMEN NORTHMEN, and Normans, names usually giv- en, the former especially to the ancient and mediaeval inhabitants of Scandinavia, or Den- mark, Norway, and Sweden, and the latter to that portion of them who conquered and settled in Normandy. From the year 787 the Danes made incursions along the English coast. In 851 they wintered in England, and in the reign of Etlielred a footing was estab- lished ; and they finally ruled England for more than 30 years. As early as 852 the Scandi- navians had a king in Dublin, and there were princes of the same race governing petty sov- ereignties at Waterford and Limerick. The Shetland isles, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides were early conquests of the Northmen. Scot- land was visited by them at different times between the 8th and llth centuries. Iceland was discovered by the Northmen in 860, and settled in 874. In 876 or 877 Greenland was discovered, and a colony was planted there by Eric the Red in 983-'5. (See ICELAND, and GREENLAND.) This led, according to the Ice- landic sagas, to the discovery of the mainland of America by Bjarni, son of Herjulf, in the year 986. About 1001 Leif, son of Eric the Red, set sail with 35 men to pursue the dis- covery of Bjarni. He visited first an island seen by Bjarni, and named it Helluland (Flat- stone Land), supposed to be Newfoundland; next Markland (Wood Land), supposed to be Nova Scotia ; and last Vinland (Vine Land), supposed to be the coast of New England. Leif built houses and wintered in Yinland, and in the spring loaded his vessel with timber and returned to Greenland. About 1002 Leif's brother Thorvald went to Vinland with 30 men, and wintered at the same place, which is supposed to have been on Mount Hope bay, Rhode Island. In the succeeding year he sent a party to examine the coast, who were gone all summer. In 1004 he himself explored the coast eastward, and was killed in a skirmish with the natives ; and in 1005 his companions returned to Greenland. In the spring of 1007 Thorfinn Karlsefni, a rich Icelander, set sail for Vinland with three ships, 160 men, and some cattle. He passed three winters on the coast of Massachusetts, where his wife bore a son, Snorro ; but finally, finding the natives hostile, he went back. The old Icelandic manuscripts make mention of visits to Vinland or to Mark- land in 1121, 1285, and 1347. The truthful- ness of the sagas is confirmed by Adam of Bremen, almost contemporary with the voyage of Thorfinn, who states, on the authority of Sweyn Estrithson, king of Denmark, that Vin- land received its name from the vines which grew wild there. The latest documentary evi- dence in relation to the intercourse between Greenland and America is the Venetian narra- tive of the visit of Nicol6 Zeno, about 1390, to Greenland, where he met with fishermen who had been on the coast of America. (See ZENO.) In Russia the Northmen were called Varangians, or sea rovers. Rurik, a Northman, occupied Novgorod in 862, and founded the dynasty which gave sovereigns to Russia until 1598. About 865 the Varangians appeared with a fleet before Constantinople ; and it was not until an alliance made between Vladimir the Great, who adopted Christianity, and the Greek emperor (988) that the incursions ceased. Soon afterward a Varangian body guard was adopted at Constantinople, and from this time until the fall of the eastern empire the Byzan- tine sovereigns trusted their lives to no other household troops. The Codex Flateyemis of Iceland gives the number of the Varangian guard in the llth century at 300. Among the antiquities in the museum of Christiania are Byzantine coins of 842-'67, found in ploughing the fields of Aggerhuus in Norway. A Danish invasion penetrated to the Meuse in 515, and was repelled. Gottfried, king of Jutland, rav- aged the French and Spanish coasts, even within the strait of Gibraltar. Their great in- vasion of France, however, was delayed until after 841 ; from which period the whole coast of western Europe from the Elbe to the Gua- dalquivir was a prey to the Northmen. In 837 they had sacked Utrecht and Antwerp, and fortified themselves on the island of Walcheren. Rollo devastated Holland, and appeared upon the Seine, while Gottfried ravaged the valleys of the Meuse and Scheldt. They burned and sacked Cologne, Bonn, Treves, Metz, and other cities, stabling their horses at Aix-la-Chapelle in the cathedral church of Charlemagne. A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine, came to be part of the Catholic litany. Hasting, at the head of a band of Northmen, sacked Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Seville; defeated the Moorish conquerors of Spain at Cordova; crossed the straits into Morocco ; overran Tuscany; returned to France, and embraced Christianity. With safe winter quarters in Spain, they extended their ravages to Naples, Sicily, and the coasts of the Greek empire, and in the autumn of 885 laid siege to Paris. At last King Charles the Fat bought off the North- men with 700 pounds of silver, and a free pas- sage to the upper Seine and Burgundy. The most redoubtable of the Northmen afterward was Hrolf, better known as Rollo, first duke of Normandy, and direct ancestor in the sixth generation of William the Conqueror. From Charles the Simple he accepted the hand of a daughter, together with a tract of Neus- trian territory N. of the Seine from Les An- delys to the sea (the N. E. portion of mod- ern Normandy), in exchange for Christian bap- tism and an oath of fealty (912). Rollo dis- tributed among his followers the lands of Neus- tria, to be held of him as duke of Normandy. Thus were laid the foundations of the feudal system which William transplanted into Eng- land (1066-'87). The Normans adopted the language of the vanquished province, but great- ly modified it. It was the langue d'oil (the langue d'oc being south of the Loire), which be- came the peculiar medium of romantic poetry.