According to the Frankish Royal Annals, the king of the Danes at the time of the earliest Viking raids was Sigfred, who probably ruled from around 770 to 800. The first recorded Danish king since the time of Angantyr, little more is known about Sigfred than his name. Nothing is known about his ancestry – was he a descendent of Angantyr or did he belong to another dynasty? – nor is it known if he ruled all of the Danes or just those who lived in Jutland. Despite that, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the steady expansion of the Frankish Empire towards the Danes’ southern borders caused Sigfred great unease. In 734, the Franks had begun to spread east along the North Sea coast and had conquered Frisia. Then, in 773, the Frankish king Charlemagne began the conquest and conversion to Christianity of the pagan Saxons, whose territory bordered directly on Denmark in the south. The Danevirke, which guarded the Danes’ border with the Saxons, would not have been built if relations between the two peoples had always been friendly. It must have been clear to Sigfred, however, that the mighty Franks would make altogether more dangerous enemies, so he supported the Saxons in their struggle to preserve their independence and provided a refuge for their leader Widukind.
Sigfred’s support was not enough to stop the Frankish steamroller and by the time he was last heard of, in 798, Charlemagne had subjugated all the Saxons who lived west of the Elbe river. Saxon resistance continued north of the Elbe until 804, when Charlemagne finally secured their submission, bringing the Frankish empire to the Danish border. That Charlemagne gave the newly conquered lands to the Abodrites, a Wendish tribe allied to the Franks, rather than incorporate them into his empire (the Wends were a group of Slav tribes whose lands extended along the Baltic coast from the neck of the Jutland peninsula east to the river Vistula), suggests that he had no immediate plans to conquer the Danes but their new king, Godfred, could hardly be sure about that. Charlemagne invited Godfred to a meeting, perhaps to reassure him about his intentions, perhaps not. Godfred brought his fleet and army to the border as a show of strength but came no further. Charlemagne was a militant Christian and he had justified his conquest of the Saxons on the grounds of their paganism as well as their raids on Frankish territory. The Danes were pagans too: would Charlemagne demand Godfred’s baptism and co-operation in evangelising his subjects? If Godfred refused, would Charlemagne see this as a sufficient casus belli, especially as his subjects were now launching pirate raids on the Frankish empire? Godfred had good cause to be suspicious of Charlemagne.
In 808, Godfred led a fleet to attack the Abodrites in alliance with one of their Wendish rivals, the Wiltzians. Godfred captured and sacked many of the Abodrites’ fortified towns, levied tribute, and captured and hanged one of their chiefs. It’s very likely that Godfred sacrificed this chief to Odin as hanging was the usual way that the god’s sacrificial victims were killed. Before sailing for home, Godfred destroyed the town of Reric, which was one end of an overland trade route between the Baltic and the North Sea. Reric’s location is not known for certain, but it was most likely at Groß Strömkendorf on Wismar Bucht, where the remains of a substantial planned Slavic settlement of the eighth century have been discovered. Reric was under Godfred’s control, and it provided him with substantial income from tolls and taxes, but it was now no longer secure. Godfred ensured that Reric would be of no benefit to the Abodrites by rounding up its merchants and craftsmen and taking them back to Denmark with him: he had plans for them.
Anticipating Frankish reprisals for his attack on their ally, Godfred set about refurbishing the Danevirke rampart when he returned home. At the same time, Godfred resettled Reric’s merchants and craftsmen at Hedeby (‘heath-town’), at the eastern end of the Danevirke, by the head of the Schlei Fjord, a narrow, reed-fringed, 15-mile long inlet of the Baltic. The feared reprisals fell upon the Wiltzians rather than the Danes and Hedeby quickly began to flourish, becoming the most important town in Viking Age Scandinavia. Hedeby’s location, right at the neck of the Jutland peninsula, made it the natural focus for trade between the southern North Sea and Baltic Sea regions. Merchants could avoid the long and dangerous voyage around Jutland by offloading their cargoes at Hedeby and carting them 9 miles overland to Hollingstedt on the River Treene. Here, cargoes could be transferred to another ship and sailed down the Treene, into the River Eider and so into the North Sea. Some historians have suggested that the ships themselves might have been portaged from one sea to the other, much as the Rus carried their boats from one river system to another in Russia, but there is no hard evidence for this. Hedeby also lay on the Hærvej (the ‘Army Road’), an ancient north-south route running from Viborg in north Jutland to Hamburg on the River Elbe. Despite its name, the road was mainly a trade and cattle droving route.
At its peak in the tenth century, Hedeby covered an area of about 15 acres (6 hectares) and had a population of around 1,000 to 1,500 people. The town was protected from attack by land by a semi-circular earth and timber rampart, which was 1,400 yards (1,280 m) long and is still over 10 feet (3 m) high. Today, this rampart is the only visible evidence of Hedeby’s existence. The waterfront was open but the entrance into the harbour was protected by a barrier of wooden stakes that had been driven into the bed of the shallow fjord. A channel through the barrier could be closed off in wartime with chains or floating logs. Such barriers were a common precaution against pirate raids in Viking Age Denmark and Sweden. The Schlei Fjord also gave the town a measure of protection – no pirate fleet would be able sail down its 15-mile length unseen and launch a surprise attack.
On its low-lying site by the fjord, Hedeby was probably a damp and muddy place to live. The small town was laid out in an orderly way on either side of a small stream using a grid of narrow fenced rectangular building plots along two main streets running roughly parallel to the waterfront. Like many other Viking Age towns, the streets were paved with split logs to stop them becoming completely impassable in wet weather. The town’s single-storey houses were built with timber posts, walls of lattices of branches made windproof with a coating of clay, and thatched roofs. A typical house had a single room, which functioned as both family dwelling and workshop. Inside, the houses were dark, with the doorway being the only source of daylight, and smoky. Families lived and worked around a hearth in the centre of the floor and, as there were no chimneys, smoke had to find its way out under the eaves or through the thatched roof. The houses had small enclosed yards containing wells and latrines in close proximity to one another. Many of the buildings were German or Slavonic in style, suggesting that the town had an international population. Hedeby’s houses were not built to last – most would have needed to be completely rebuilt every ten to thirty years. The town’s waterfront was lined with timber quays, some of which extended almost 200 feet (60 m) out into the fjord. The quays were strongly built and many had warehouses and other structures built on top of them. There is archaeological evidence of craft activities, including metal-, bone- and amber-working, glass-making, pottery, weaving and ship repair. By around 825, Hedeby also had a mint, which produced imitations of Frankish silver deniers bearing representations of Viking longships and trading knarrs.