Apart from a possible toll house near the harbour and a meeting hall, no administrative buildings have been identified in Hedeby. The town was probably governed from the high-status settlement at Flüsing, about 2½ miles away on the north shore of Schlei Fjord, not far from Schleswig. This settlement, which was only about one-fifth the size of Hedeby, focused on a great feasting hall and had a mainly military character. It was probably here that Godfred gathered his forces in 804. The site continued to be occupied until the middle of the tenth century, when the hall burned down. Iron arrowheads embedded in burned timbers show that this was no accident but the result of a violent attack.
Hedeby’s main trade links were with the eastern Baltic and Norway, and with England and the Rhineland. Two merchants who are known to have visited Hedeby were Ottar and Wulfstan. Both men visited King Alfred’s court in England, where scribes wrote down their accounts of the trade routes they followed. Wulfstan, who was probably English, used Hedeby as his base for trading voyages to the Wendish ports along the Baltic’s southern coast. Ottar was from Hålogaland in Arctic Norway and he spent his summers hunting walrus in the White Sea, heading south to Hedeby to sell their ivory teeth. It was a lucrative trade because disruption to Mediterranean trade routes meant that the better quality elephant ivory was almost unobtainable in early Medieval Europe. Some merchants came from much further afield, however. A Jewish merchant from Córdoba, al-Tartushi, who visited around the middle of the tenth century, thought Hedeby a poor and squalid place and he hated the singing of the townsfolk, which he thought was ‘worse than the barking of dogs’. Around this time, his home town of Córdoba was one of the world’s largest cities, with great mosques, palaces, libraries and universities so Hedeby was little more than a farming village in comparison.
Godfred did not live long enough to see his new town flourish. Charlemagne’s response to Godfred’s attack on the Abodrites was to build a fort at Itzehoe, north of the Elbe and less than 40 miles from the Danish border. In 810, Godfred retaliated by raiding Frisia with a fleet of 200 ships. The raid was successfuclass="underline" Godfred extracted 100 pounds (45 kg) of silver in tribute and long before Charlemagne’s forces arrived on the scene he was back home. And then, apparently at the peak of his power, Godfred was murdered by one of his retainers. Events of the next few years fully demonstrated the fragility of the early Danish kingdom. Godfred’s successor, a nephew called Hemming, survived two years and was succeeded by two brothers Harald Klak and Reginfred after a brief civil war that left two other claimants dead. Such arrangements were not uncommon in Viking Age Scandinavia: joint kingship was a practical way of resolving competing claims where two or more claimants had equal support. In 813, a third brother, another Hemming, turned up to share the throne. Hemming had been in the service of Charlemagne and this seems to have made him suspect in the eyes of the Danes, who transferred their allegiance to four of Godfred’s sons, who had been in exile in Sweden. Hemming fled back to the Frankish court, where he was promised help to regain the Danish throne. A long struggle between the two fraternal factions followed until by around 834 all the rivals were dead or permanently exiled bar one, Horik, the last of Godfred’s sons.
At first Horik maintained friendly relations with Charlemagne’s successor Louis the Pious and on occasion even captured and executed pirate leaders who had raided Frankia. Horik’s main concern was to consolidate his own authority and he did not want his subjects provoking Frankish interventions. The civil war that broke out in the Frankish empire after Louis’ death in 840 emboldened Horik. In 845, he sent a large fleet to sack Hamburg and two years later Horik refused demands by the emperor Lothar that he prevent his subjects raiding the Frankish lands. Horik was in any case far too insecure to enforce any such prohibition. In 850, Horik was forced to share his kingdom with two nephews. Then, in 854, a third nephew, Gudurm, turned up to claim a share of the kingdom too. Gudurm was every Viking Age Scandinavian king’s worst nightmare – a successful pirate leader with royal blood, a hoard of plunder and a large and loyal warrior band to back him up. Gudurm’s arrival threw the kingdom into a vicious civil war in which Horik and most of the rest of the extended royal family, including his three nephews, all perished. Stability did not return to Denmark for nearly a century.
Virtually nothing is known about events in Denmark in the second half of the ninth century. Writing in his Deeds of the Bishops of the Church of Hamburg, our best informed source for the early Danish kingdom, the German ecclesiastical historian Adam of Bremen summed up the confusion: ‘How many Danish kings, or rather tyrants, there were indeed, and whether some of them ruled at the same time or lived for a short time one after the other, is uncertain.’ Adam was commissioned to write his history by archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg (d. 1072) and had access to a wide range of sources, including the archives of the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, which had led efforts to evangelise Scandinavia. Adam even visited Denmark himself in 1068 – 9 and met King Svein Estrithson (r. 1047 – 74), whom he cites as a major informant for his work. If Adam had no idea what was going on, probably no one else did either.
By around 890, part of Denmark, at least, had come under the control of a Swedish king called Olof. Two runestones commemorating Olof’s grandson Sigtrygg have been found at Hedeby, suggesting that the town was the dynasty’s main powerbase. Hedeby returned to Danish control in the mid-930s when Sigtrygg was overthrown by another obscure ruler called Harthacnut Sveinsson. In saga traditions, Harthacnut was said to be a grandson of the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok, but Adam of Bremen says he came from Nortmannia, by which he probably meant Normandy or maybe northern Jutland. Harthacnut’s main claim to fame is that he was the father of the man Danes regard as the as the real founder of their kingdom, Gorm the Old (d. c. 958). Gorm most likely earned his nickname not because he was particularly long-lived – it is not known when he was born – but because he was the ancestor of the medieval Danish kings. The actual extent of Gorm’s kingdom is not known but he certainly did not rule all the Danes; the first king to do that would be his son Harald Bluetooth (r. c. 958 – 87), who succeeded him after his death in 958.
Outside their own private lands, the early Danish kings exercised authority indirectly through subordinate chieftains. This meant that royal authority was inherently weak and in many parts of Denmark completely non-existent. Whatever the claims of rulers to be kings of the Danes, chiefs in areas remote from the royal power centres ruled in effective independence. Harald’s achievement was to make royal authority real throughout the whole of Denmark. It is unlikely that this was a peaceful process because the most obvious physical evidence of Harald’s authority is a chain of six or seven forts that he built right across the country, at Fyrkat and Aggersborg in north Jutland, at Nonnebakken on Fyn, Trelleborg and Borrering (also known as Vallø Borgring) on Sjælland, and at Trelleborg and (probably) at Borgeby in Skåne. There was no fort in southern Jutland, where Harald’s authority was strongest.