published in Mediaevistik 4 (1991), pp. 157-178.

Baptising pirates was for centuries ineffective, and became a commonplace joke among the historians, chroniclers, hagiographers, and biographers of the Middle Ages(1). Pirates themselves were, of course, no joke, although the exact extent of the damage they did is difficult to determine, and modern historians oscillate between accepting, on the one hand, the assessment offered in the chronicle of St. Wandrille, numquam tale exterminum in his territoriis, and assuming the skeptical posture offered, with tongue well in cheek, by J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, when he suggests that the Viking were, "little more than groups of long-haired tourists who occasionally roughed up the natives."(2) Eventually, however, after enough land and people had passed into their political control, the pirates were converted to Christianity, leaving their descendants with the task of representing their pious metamorphosis. One of the most interesting problems which they set themselves was the task of fabricating a dramatic conversion-scene. The solution generally adopted by Norman historians with

literary aspirations -- particularly Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Wace, and Benoit de Saint-Maure -- was to fabricate fabulae or, at best, argumenta, to serve as historia(3). Marius Victorinus provides a brief definition of these terms:

Since medieval writers did not affix such labels to their narratives, what is outright fiction, what is fact, and what is plausible though fictional cannot always be determined confidently.

Models for the three kinds of narrative existed in earlier texts, composed by writers in the service of the pirates' opponents; in historia, argumentum and fabula, they encoded Christian suspicion of the sincerity of pirates' baptisms, as well as suspicion of the baptisms and political submissions of Saxons, Arabs, heretics and other pagans(5). Their narratives also often encoded the political fact that baptism and conversion were functions of transactions involving the exchange of land(6). In Duby's sense of the terms, then, baptizing pirates involved all three functions: warrior, priest, and the more ambiguous category associated with labor, food, and fecundity(7).

The Carolingian aspiration to convert the pagans finds its simplest, most direct representation in a passage probably composed in 796; in the course of his elaborate panegyric, Ad Carolum Regem, Theodulph imagines pagans bending their necks and knees to the triumphant Charles, in simultaneous acknowledgement of temporal and spiritual hegemony(8):

In a more complex representation, involving two of the three functions, the early ninth-century poet Ermoldus Nigellus provides an ideal model for converting pirates(9). In the course of depicting the baptism in 826 of the Danish leader Herold (ll. 2164-2365), Ermoldus composes an apostrophe, calling upon the Norseman to cast his own gods away, or turn them into plowshares, thus, in a sense, converting the false images of the second function into practical implements of the third function(10):

Poetically, then, the apostrophe encodes the Carolingian's perception of the link between religious conversion and control and use of land.

After depicting Louis generously providing the Norseman with a royal feast, a hunt, and many fine gifts, Ermoldus represents Herold kneeling to submit his Colla jugo Christi (2464). The Dane then declares that he is now satisfied, both spiritually and physically, Corde Deo plenus, corpus habundat ope, (l. 2469), and therefore will recognize Louis as master of the Danes:

Although, as Faral points out, Herold had sworn fealty twelve years before his baptism, no exchange of land is recorded at that time. The Royal Frankish Annals, however, records a gift of land that accompanied the baptism in 826. Recognizing, then, that the sacred ceremony needed secular, material support -- that is, the second function performs most effectively when supported by the third -- Ermoldus had some justification for collapsing time, melding the two ceremonies to permit sacred and secular rituals to support each other(11).

For the most part, however, successful conversions in the eighth and ninth century were rare, and the comic anecdote offered later in the ninth century by Notker the Stammerer, in his historical farrago, De Carolo Magno (II.xix), reflects some of the frustration involved with the task of converting Scandinavians(12). Like Ermoldus' passage, the late ninth-century scene is part of a Carolingian panegyric, however it eventually modulates into a jeremiad. Notker introduces the incident with a Biblical analogy:

In one of his encounters with the Northmen, Notker's Charlemagne asks if they are willing to accept Christianity, and they proclaim themselves willing to obey him in omnibus. Their willingness is not a sign of sincere religious conviction, but of political expediency, as Notker makes insistently clear in his remarks on the sartorial symbols of their submission:

The fifty, according to Notker, confess their sins, undergo baptism, and line up to receive their new clothes. This time, however, their expectations are disappointed:

One of the Norsemen, an old hand at baptism, complains that his previous conversions were more rewarding:

Iam vicies hic lotus sum et optimis

At this point Notker drives his point home with Biblical allusions, as well as with a complaint about his own times:

Notker's anecdote is comic partly because the conversion does not involve the exchange of land, but only the literally superficial exchange of ceremonial garments. Futile baptisms, however, frequently produced more violent results, as a tale told by Richer late in the tenth century suggests. After winning a fierce battle, with the aid of his standard-bearer Ingo, King Eudes captures the leader of the pirates, and makes him an offer he cannot refuse:

King Eudes now demands a gesture of piety from the pirate -- a three-day fast -- and proceeds to carry out the ritual of baptism. The pirate leader, however, does not survive his baptism; instead, Ingo murders him as the ritual is about to be completed:

Ingo then clings to the altar of saint Martial, until the king abates his fury sufficiently to grant his standard-bearer a forum for his own defense. He defends himself so well, that he receives not only a pardon from king Eudes, but the castle of Blois, together with the chatelaine of Blois for a wife. Unfortunately, he dies soon after his gentrification, of a disease described with elaborate, and apparently professional competence, by Richer.

Ineffective baptisms, however, did not usually result in violence against pirates. Approximately twenty years after Richer composed his text, early in the eleventh century, Dudo of Saint-Quentin provided two dramatic examples of pirate conversions in his Deeds and acts of the first leaders of Normandy. The first offers an example of treacherous, sacrilegious brutality on the part of the pirates; the second offers the image of a successful, permanent conversion. Dudo invents Hastings, an almost entirely fictive figure, to absorb some of the negative qualities that probably belonged to the historical original of the second figure, Rollo, a Norman of questionable piety, whom Dudo turns into a mostly fictional figure(15). Together they contribute to Dudo's purpose, as Duby describes it:

To lend resonance and dignity to the brutal achievements of the pirates, Dudo performs pyrotechnical feats, in a mixture of prose and various forms of verse, importing references from philosophy, theology, music, and rhetoric(16). In the course of his performance, Dudo encodes the change from pirate to landowner, with a consequent emphasis on labor, the means of production, and on women, the means of perpetuating ownership.

To represent the worst of the barbaric past, Dudo retrieves the figure of Hastings, mentioned neither by Flodoard nor by Richer, heaping upon this shadowy figure, who may be a conflation of at least two ninth-century pirates, every conceivable abhorrent quality, in spite of the fact that, as Prentout points out: "... de tous les faits relatifs ‹ Hasting que mentionnent les annales franques, il ne s'en trouve pas un qui concerne la Normandie."(17) Rollo, then, becomes an equivocal, transitional figure, playing approximately the role that his son William had played in Richer's account(18).

In Dudo's text, the contrast between Hastings and Rollo is only implicit; however, more than a century later, Wace, early in his Roman de Rou, makes Hastings' function as an antithesis to Rollo and his descendants explicitly

clear(19):

If the figure of Hastings becomes the locus of all pirate vices, and Rollo the transitional figure, then Rollo's son William Longsword, and William's son Richard are free to absorb as many positive qualities as Dudo can invoke from the early eleventh-century storehouse of panegyric commonplaces. Hastings' baptism, then, is false, the better that Rollo's may be true.

In Dudo's text, Hastings' behavior is paradigmatically execrable at Luna, where he submits to a Christian baptism, not to save his soul, but as part of a ruse to take the Italian city, which he believes, presumably with pirate stupidity, to be Rome. Claiming to be mortally ill(21) and desperate to be baptized, Hastings is brought on a litter to a cathedral within the city walls, where his men proceed to murder everybody in sight. Dudo's representation of the slaughter is conventional, and significant mostly as a dramatization of the violation of the second function by those momentarily in command of the first function:

To produce this argumentum if not fabula, Dudo may be recollecting a passage from Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, in which, immediately after describing the precautions taken by Charlemagne to reduce the damage done by Norse pirates and by the Moors, Einhard lists two exceptions to the success of Charlemagne's policy; Civita Vecchia was destroyed by the treachery of the Moors, and certain Frisian islands were harried by Vikings:

Dudo seems to have melded the Moorish and Viking threats, and, on the hint of Morrish treachery, filled in a background by reinventing the stories of treacherous pirate baptism(23). Pagans raging against helpless Christians, as the second function is violated by the first, is the image firmly established by the scene, that is based on no incident in Flodoard or in Richer.

At this point in his version of the incident at Luna, Wace expands Dudo's commonplace comparison, involving wolves and sheep, by adding peasants, and a rudimentary farm-scene, thus augmenting the first two functions with the third:

Thus Wace, in an instance of his tendency to amplify his sources in the direction of a more comprehensive representation of historical reality, adds to the scene the third function, in the form of laborers.

The tendency might be attributed to the nature of the genre in which he worked -- and, to an extent impossible to determine with any certitude, to Wace's own temperament(24). Perhaps as a result of his more comprehensive vision, as well as, "une certaine malice,"(25) he lost the job of official Norman verse-historian to Benoit(26).

Benoit also adds the third function to the scene, while restoring Hastings as a cutthroat; however, in keeping with Duby's perception that Benoit feminized the third function(27), the text offers not peasant-laborers, but, perhaps in a poetic reinvention of Wace's decapitation, the mutilated arms and breasts of weeping women, thereby feminizing horror:

After such horror, then, to make Rollo more appealing than Hastings would not be the most difficult rhetorical task imaginable.

As part of his comprehensive panegyric of Norman aristocrats, Dudo describes Rollo's military prowess as so great, that only God can stop him. In addition, however, Dudo must provide Rollo with pious possibilities. Consequently, a vox divina, combining the Augustinian commonplace of the voyage of life and Gregory's pun on the beauty of the English(29), announces to the sleeping Rollo that he must first travel to the British Isles:

A convenient Christian interprets the message, stressing its baptismal aspect:

Rollo, however, still hesitates, and Dudo provides him with a second dream vision, whose primary visual elements are a mountain, a purifying fountain, and birds of many colors, whose left wings are red. When his advisors lapse into silence at the prospect of interpretation, one of his Christian prisoners explains the meaning of the vision, again anticipating the Norseman's baptism:

Thus Rollo is persuaded, after a relatively peaceful interlude in England, to cross the channel to find his home in France. Yet another test, however, awaits him; assailed by a violent storm in the midst of the crossing, Rollo responds with a pious outbreak, composing a prayer of eleven hexameters, resonantly nasal(30), acknowledging both his own guilt and the power of the Christian deity:

The sea, of course, immediately subsides, demonstrating the efficacy of subordinating the first function to the second.

Having planted the seeds of piety in his character, Dudo now brings Rollo to land, and to immediate military success. Less brutal than his predecessors, Rollo shows compassion to Raginerus, thus remaining memor visionis, semperque sperans affuturum sibi quod viderat in somnis. In one of the many apostrophes which he composes throughout his text, Dudo calls upon Rollo to think of the future, and particularly of his impending baptism:

Praemiae perpetuae capies cum munere vitae.

In the course of ravaging France, however, the pirate king suffers his first defeat. When the Archbishop of Chartres marches forth from the besieged town with a set of holy relics, singing, the combination of relics and song strikes terror in the heart of Rollo, who flees, followed closely by his men. Thus the military power of Christianity, and the pious potential of the pirate reveal themselves simultaneously(31).

Flodoard has no comparable scene in the Annales. Although he does record the conversion of the pirates, without specifically mentioning Rollo(32), he says nothing of feudal submission or marriage. Significantly, in Flodoard the conversion follows the defeat at Chartres, with no intervening scene in which the French demand that their king negotiate with the overpowering pirate:

Clearly, then, Dudo is involved in fabricating a scene that allows Rollo to maintain his primacy in the first function, that permits the power of the second function its peculiar hegemony, and that incorporates what must have been an historical fact -- the pirates were defeated at Chartres.

Dudo imagines the scene dramatically, with the Archbishop delivering a sermon emphasizing everyman's human limitations, then offering salvation and real estate:

Neither in the discussion with the king, urging him to negotiate with the pirates, nor in the Archbishop's negotiations with Rollo, does Dudo permit anyone to mention the severe damage done by Rollo's men. In an earlier passage (pp. 164-165), Dudo does give a vague description of their destructive activity, but it follows a truce foolishly broken by the Franks, so that the results, mostly involving killing peasants, seem, in a sense, "just," particularly since Dudo's sense of the significance of those who labor in the fields is slight.

Wace, however, provides a more judgmental, less diplomatic ecclesiastic; when his Archbishop addresses Rollo on the necessity for conversion and feudal submission, he suggests that the pain inflicted by the Viking in life will be symmetrically awarded to him after death:

Once again Wace provides a passage that reflects his general tendency to give a more complex account of historical reality than what Dudo and Benoit provide.

The pirates recover, however, from their miraculous defeat, to continue their triumphs until the French are brought to their knees. When the nobles assemble to urge Charles to make peace with the pirates, Dudo uses the occasion to compose yet another encomium of Rollo, as a chorus of Frenchmen heap honorific epithets upon him:

The relentless panegyric continues for ten more lines, and contrasts sharply with Wace's version of the scene, which allows far more of historical reality to break in. Instead of a chorus of undifferentiated aristocrats, Wace offers several distinctive perspectives, each of which emphasizes the destructive powers of the pirates; describing the damage done several times, not as an exercise in "epic repetition," but to provide several perspectives, again produces a more comprehensive vision of historical reality. First he describes the destruction from the perspective of the narrator, then from the perspective of the notables in general, and then, dramatically, from the perspective of the negotiating Archbishop.

As the narrator, he locates the geographical limits and the damage to property and to human beings: old and young, men and women, the great and the small, husbands and wives, all suffer, paradoxically alike in pain, though members of conventionally antithetic categories:

From the perspective of the clergy and the nobility (i.e., the first two functions), the king is to blame for the major problem caused by Norman aggression -- a fall in production and distribution (third function):

However, although Dudo is concerned for the most part with producing unrelieved panegyric, he acknowledged the destructive activities of the pirates in an earlier scene, that, significantly, takes place in another country. When Rollo promises king Aethelstan, in return for one half the land and wealth of the kingdom, to repress the rebellious factions in England, he proposes a series of destructive accomplishments that culminate in three elements, or aspects, of the third function:

Significantly, Benoit's Archbishop reduces Rollo's destructive function by distributing the blame between Hastings and Rollo (ll. 8472ff.), while magnifying the appeal for conversion to 110 lines.

At this point in all three texts, the Archbishop urges Rollo to marry the king's daughter, which he agrees to do, leaving only one final transaction to be accomplished: a ritual submission, which Rollo perceives as humiliating.

Instructed to kiss the king's foot, he resists, assigning the task to one of his soldiers, who performs the gesture without bending over; as a result, the king ends up on his back, with everyone laughing:

Rollo's behavior here is represented in language that deliberately recalls the earlier description of his father, a man too proud to bow his neck before any man:

The scene displeased Michelet very much: "Telle était l'insolence de ces barbares,"(33) but he might have felt even greater repugnance towards Wace's version of the scene, in which Rollo himself, and not one of his retainers, overturns the king:

A milder version of the scene, in a chronicle compiled in the early thirteenth century, also offers a comic element in the conversion of Rollo, but it emphasizes the linguistic, rather than the religious differences between the pirates and their unwilling hosts.

This version of the incident encodes the necessity that accompanied the religious conversion of converting from the Norse language to Latin. However, according to Ademar of Chabannes, William Longsword himself accomplished the religious and linguistic shift after the death of Rollo:

Although Dudo could not have found a scene like this in Flodoard or Richer, he could have found a scene that encoded a similar historico-political fact -- that the balance of power in north-eastern France lay in the hands of the pirates when Carolingian power diminished -- in a incident Richer relates involving Rollo's son, William Longsword.

Richer imagines a scene in the royal quarters at Attigny, where Hugh the Great, Herbert of Vermandois, Arnold the Old, Louis d'Outre-Mer -- four of the five most powerful men jockeying for power, more frequently as brokers than as warriors, in northern France in the middle of the tenth century, meet with the emperor Otto, having excluded, for some mysterious reason, the pirate prince:

Understandably, William Longsword grows angry, and literally breaks into the meeting:

The sight that greets his eyes displeases him mightily, since Otto, not Louis has the seat of honor; the pirate proceeds first to establish his right to be present, and then to put the two men in their proper places:

Symbolically and single-handedly, then, William restores order, and, more importantly for Richer, Carolingian hegemony, to northern France. Whether fabula or argumentum, the scene, like the one Dudo fabricates for the conversion of Rollo, encodes an historical-political truth about tenth-century politics in northern France: the faction to whom the Normans threw their support would win.

However, the scene has no sacred elements. Part of Dudo's contribution to Norman panegyric was to combine the truth encoded in Richer's scene with the even more difficult rhetorical task of dissipating the audience's well-founded suspicion of the notion that pirates made good Christians in the early tenth century. Therefore Dudo, followed by Wace and Benoit(35), goes to great lengths to prepare a convincing baptism for Rollo, in which feudal submission, marriage, and baptism -- rituals to represent all three functions -- follow each other in rapid succession. The results encode and dramatize two historical, political facts simultaneously: in the tenth century Norsemen held the balance of power in Northern France; their religious conversion was brought about not by eloquent, inspirational missionary preachers, but by grants of land and alliances through marriage(36).

(1) This essay is based on the hypothesis that history during the middle ages was a branch either of grammar or of rhetoric (i.e., it was a part of literature). For a densely compacted discussion of this hypothesis, see Herbert Grundmann, Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalters, Göttingen, 1965. For a more extensive, lavishly detailed discussion, see Bernard Guenée, Histoire et

culture historique dans l'occident médiéval, Paris, 1980. In English, the argument was popularized by R.G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946. The most elegantly epigrammatic representation of the perception belongs to Paul Zumthor, who momentarily obliterates the distinction between fiction and history when he remarks, "Historiographie ni roman n'avaient pour fonction de prouver une vérité mais de créer." Langue, texte, énigme, Paris, 1975, p. 245). Two recent examples of useful practical criticism are: Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainment, Chicago, 1977; John O. Ward, "Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century," in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach, Kalamazoo, 1985, pp. 103-165.

(2) J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History, New York, 1976, pp. 220, 222.

(3) For further discussion of these terms, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols., Munich, 1960, I.146-240 on structure. For some useful applications of the terms, see Michael Lapidge, "Gildas' Education and the Latin Culture of Sub-Roman Britain," pp. 41ff., in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. Michael Lapidge and David Dumville, Woodbridge, 1984.

(4) Rhetores Latini minores, ed. C. Halm, Leipzig, 1863, p. 202.

(5) For Frankish suspicion of Saxon baptisms and political submissions, see the Royal Frankish Annals, or Einhardi Annales, for the year 776 (MGH, Scriptores I, p. 156). The composer of the Reginonis Chronicon makes the following judgement:

(6) For the argument that baptism in Carolingian times involved military and political motivation, see Arnold Angenedt, "Taufe und Politik in frühen Mittelalter," Frühmittelalterliche Studien VII (1973), pp. 143-168; see also Karl Hauck, "Karolingische Taufpfalzen im Spiegel hofnaher Dichtung. Uberlegung zur Ausmalung von Pfalzkirchen. Pfalzen und Reichklöstern," in Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Göttingen, I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1985, 1), 3-95. Hauck edits a poem that represents Charlemagne's conversion of the Saxons in 777 by military force, without a specifically imagined conversion scene.

(7)For a discussion of these terms, see Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined Chicago, 1980 (original, Paris, 1978). Duby develops the scheme, originally devised by Dumezil, of Warrior, Priest, and a function more difficult to define, in the area of labor and fecundity. As Dumezil describes the difficulties of delimiting the domain of the third function, he seems to be describing Joyce's Molly Bloom:

See also Jean Flori, L'Essor de la chevalerie, Geneva, 1986, for an attempt to apply tri-functionality to a study of feudal ritual; Joel H. Grisward's Archéologie de l'épopée médiévale, Paris, 1981, offers an application of trifunctionality to a specific medieval genre.

(8) Mon. Germ. Hist., Poetae latini aevi carolini, ed. Dummler, I, Berlin, 1881, p. 483.

(9) As Arnold Angenendt points out (Kaiserherrschaft und Königstaufe, Berlin, 1984, pp. 215-223) the conversion was also accompanied by a gift of land.

(10) Ermold le Noir, Poème sur Louis le Pieux, ed. Edmond Faral, Paris, 1932, p. 178.

(11) Ermoldus' alteration is not the most cavalier alteration of pirate chronology to have taken place during the early Middle Ages. A far greater chronological discrepancy occurs when Richer, the late tenth-century historian with Carolingian proclivities, ascribes to 988 AD the offer of land in exchange for baptism made by the Franks in 911 AD; see Histoire de France, ed. by Robert Latouche, Paris, 1967, pp. 12-14.

(12) De Carolo Magno, ed. Philipp Jaffe, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicorum, vol. IV, Berlin, 1867, pp. 696-697; translation is by Lewis Thorpe, Two Lives of Charlemagne, Baltimore, 1969. pp. 168-169.

(13) For another example of praise of pagans to castigate Christians, see Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, ed. D. Whitelock, 2d edition, London, 1952, p. 25, where Wulfstan complains that heathens are regularly more attentive to their Gods than

Christians.

(14) Richer, vol. 1, p. 26.

(15) For an assessment of the historical evidence concerning Rollo's identity and accomplishments, see D.C. Douglas, "Rollo of Normandy," English Historical Review, 57 (1942), p. 422.

(16) Dudo's performance certainly justifies the indignant definition of panegyric given by Isidore of Seville:

(17) Henri Prentout, Etude Critique sur Dudo de Saint-Quentin, Paris, 1916, p. 97. Jean Flori's description (p. 146) of Hastings as, "le farouche guerrier païen, rude mais juste," obviously is at odds with my interpretation of his character and function. Frederic Amory, on the other hand, reads the character of Hastings as a function of the character of Rollo:

(18) See below.

(19) Perhaps following the rhetorical model for such antitheses provided by the poet of the Song of Roland, when he regularly declares, Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.

William's firm stand, however, was undermined by the interpolations of Robert de Torigny, who reintroduced some of the material on Rollo, in yet another example of the vulnerability of medieval texts to the demands of later times.

(36) Although Rollo's son William was not produced by Gisla (if Rollo actually received her from Charles the Simple at the time of his baptism), but by Poppa, a woman whose discontinuous presence in Rollo's bed provides problems for Dudo, Wace, and Benoit. In the fourteenth century, Jean d'Outremer simply elides her, declaring that Gisla was the mother of William Longsword (Oeuvres de Jehan des Preis, {Jean d'Outremeuse}, ed. A. Borgnet and S. Bormans, 7 volumes, Brussels, 1864-87; IV, p. 88). In addition, the nature, quality, and effectiveness of Rollo's conversion, as the three Norman apologists represented it, was not entirely convincing. For Adémar of Chabannes (c. 988-1034), for example, Rollo was a far more ambiguous cardo rerum. To celebrate his conversion, Adémar's Rollo first orders captivos plures to be decapitated, as a nostalgic gesture

towards his abandoned gods:

His next step is to distribute significant amounts of gold among various churches, in honor of the "true God":

Chavanon points out the modification made in the C manuscript at this point, by a scribe who thought that the passage called for a gloss. He specifies the number and religion of the captives (100 Christians), the amount of gold (100 pounds), and provides a motivation, or explanation for the decapitation (Rollo went mad with fear of dying: imminente obitu in amentiam versus).