Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity across the Frankish Realm (c. 750-940) (Routledge Archaeologies of the Viking World)

As the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm remain, to a considerable extent, obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, this volume approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, allowing overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity to be detected and defined - and thereby challenging the notion that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character.Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities - or ‘hydrarchies’.By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiat