Военная история / Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity across the Frankish Realm (c. 750– 940)

Название: Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity across the Frankish Realm (c. 750– 940)
Автор: Christian Cooijmans
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2020
Страниц: 293
Язык: English
Формат: True PDF
Размер: 51 MB

As the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near)contemporary evidence, this volume approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, allowing overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity to be detected and defined – and thereby challenging the notion that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities – or 'hydrarchies'. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to a number of distinct regional case studies. The parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment.