CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE ( 2 )

THE VIKING CONQUEST

OF BRITTANY

Neil Price

T

hroughout the Viking Age, the small province of Brittany – the westernmost
Atlantic peninsula of what is now France – stands out as an anachronism. The
Celtic-speaking Bretons continually maintained a determined independence from the
Frankish Empire, across a defensible border on the imperial ‘mainland’ of Continental
Europe. The Breton March, in only slightly varying form, would survive temporary
occupation by Carolingians, Vikings and eventually Normans to continue even today as
the boundary of a polity that many of its inhabitants would still prefer to see as a nation
in its own right.
When Scandinavian raiding parties began appearing around the shores of Francia in
the ninth century, Brittany was nominally a client state of the empire, ruled by a Breton
regent – Nominoë – in the name of Louis the Pious. Faithful during the emperor’s
lifetime, Nominoë’s regime saw off repeated Viking raids on monastic sites around the
Breton coasts that from a Scandinavian perspective simply formed part of the overall
seaborne assault on Francia. However, on the emperor’s death in 840 , Nominoë declared
independence in a move which set the pattern for the following century. Interspersed
with brief periods of peace, over the next eighty years his successors would fight increas-
ingly vicious and internecine wars on two fronts, against both the Carolingians and the
Scandinavians (all primary and secondary sources for the Viking contacts with Brittany
are discussed in detail in Price 1989 , to which the reader is referred for deeper references;
subsequent material is taken up and reviewed in Price 1991 , 2000 and 2008 ).

THE HISTORICAL PICTURE

The fulcrum of Viking operations in Brittany, initially in the form of aggravated raids
but later expanding in scope, was the base established at the former monastery on the
island of Noirmoutier. Controlling the mouth of the Loire and thus access to one of
the great arterial rivers of Francia, it was natural for Scandinavian fleets to occupy this
strongpoint as they did from 843 onwards. For the rest of the century several different
Viking forces campaigned in Francia and Brittany, fighting a range of Carolingian and
Breton factions who were in turn engaged in civil wars with colonial ambitions. Scandi-
navians fought as mercenaries for all sides, and occasionally even against each other.