The dynatoi might sometimes chafe at the emperor’s directives and rebel, but the
emperor had his Varangian guard to put them down and an experienced, professional
civil service to do his bidding. The king of England depended less on force and
bureaucracy than on consensus. The great landowners adhered to the king because
they found it in their interest to do so. When they did not, the kingdom easily
fragmented, becoming prey to civil war. Disunity was exacerbated by new attacks
from the Vikings. One Danish king, Cnut (or Canute), even became king of England
for a time (r.1016–1035). Yet under Cnut, English kingship did not change much. He
kept intact much of the administrative, ecclesiastical, and military apparatus already
established. By Cnut’s time, Scandinavia had been Christianized, and its traditions
had largely merged with those of the rest of Europe.
In fact, two European-style kingdoms—Denmark and Norway—developed in
Scandinavia around the year 1000, and Sweden followed thereafter. In effect, the
Vikings took home with them not only Europe’s plundered wealth but also its
prestigious religion, with all its implications for royal power and state-building.
(Consider how closely King Alfred linked God to royal authority, morality, and
territorial expansion.) The impetus for conversion in Scandinavia came from two
directions. From the south, missionaries such as the Frankish monk Ansgar (d.865)
came to preach Christianity, while bishops in the north of Germany imposed what
claims they could over the Scandinavian church. From within Scandinavia itself,
kings found it worth their while to ally with the Christian world to enhance their own
position.
The Danish King Harald Bluetooth (r.c.958–c.986), much like Khan Boris-
Michael of Bulgaria a century before (see p. 82), proclaimed his conversion through
an artifact. Boris-Michael had used seals—items prestigious for their association with
Byzantine imperial government. Harald built a mound—prestigious precisely for its
non-Christian, pagan connotations—and then, about a decade later, added a giant
runestone to the burial place of his father, whose body he moved from the mound
into a new church he built for the occasion. The runestone, which included an image
of Christ, announced that Harald had “won for himself all of Denmark and Norway
and made the Danes Christian.”^12 Thus graphically turning a pagan site into a
Christian one, Harald announced himself the ruler of a state that extended into what
is today southern Sweden and parts of Norway. His successors turned their sights
further outward, culminating in the conquest of England and Norway, but this
extended empire largely ended with the death of Cnut in 1035.
The processes of conversion and the development of kingship in Norway are less
