THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
DUTCH STUDIES DIV./
OPERA BEAT

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“Das Rheingold gives the background to the events that drive the main dramas of the cycle. It recounts Alberich‘s theft of the Rhine gold after his renunciation of love; his fashioning of the all-powerful Ring from the gold; and his enslavement of the Nibelungs; Wotan’s seizure of the gold and the Ring, to pay his debt to the Giants who have built his fortress Valhalla; Alberich’s curse on the Ring and its possessors; and Erda‘s warning to Wotan to forsake the golden Ring. The early manifestation of the curse’s power comes after Wotan yields the Ring to the Giants. The Gods enter uneasily into their Valhalla, across the Rainbow Bridge, but under the shadow of their impending doom.”

Quoth Wikipedia, Das Rheingold

Isn’t it ‘Das Rheingold?‘ The business end of the Rhine is in Holland, aldus…

In researching Utrecht’s civic history, I was excited to learn about archaeological discoveries on the now-silted-up-and-dammed Oud Rijn channel, that have uncovered the medieval emporium (or vicus) called Dorestad — fabled as “Vicus Magnus,” “Vicus Famosus,” etc. Learning about it provoked thought in the various View departments.

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Dorestad was a wijk, or wic, or wick, or wich, in the string of merchant trading posts Frisian-speakers set up all over North Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries. They were the first post-Roman, barbarian-owned-and-operated, inter-tribal European trade organization. They were a network of harbors and inlets along the North Sea coast, and the Channel coasts of Britain and France, and up into Scandinavia, with easy access to central Dorestad. Ipswich was Gip’s Wic; Greenwich was the Green Wich. York of course was Jor-vik, and for that matter New York is New Jor-vik. The site of an ideal Frisian wijk is a safe harbor at the mouth of an inlet wherever a lord can keep the pirates out; where merchant barges with inland produce could meet sea-faring vessels plying the coasts. Dorestad was the central hub of the Frisian system, and minted its gold and silver coin. It traded at a premium over lump gold and silver, for it was purity-guaranteed.

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The forgotten wick was in plain sight, underneath the little Dutch town called Wijk-bij-Duursteede. In the illustration below the insignificant bowed ditch, top right, is the Oud Rijn, the fount of treasure sung of in Het Rijngoud. You can see how it wandered away from the harbor.

Dorestad was known to have existed long before it was excavated, indicated by those excellent silver and gold coins, which have been dredged up all over Europe. These were marked by the Frankish kings as minted at “Dorestatus.”

Dorestad was founded as the capital of the Frisians, the center of their wiki-net. The Frisians put a wic here, right on the Wall Street of Medieval Europe, literally at the wall of the old Roman Limes, to harness the wealth, and coin the gold, of the Frankish Empire, as that wealth and gold came down the Rijn. Rijngoud!

VISIONS OF FRISIANS

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You do know the Frisians, and quite well, under other names. English and Scots both descend from Old Frisian, a branch of West Germanic closely related to Old Saxon. The nation of shopkeepers, it seems, were shopkeepers even before they became a nation.

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“Thanks to the Frankish conquest of Dorestad, what was originally just a Frisian affair became Frankish-Friesian commerce. Revenues from customs tariffs flowed into the Merovingian and Carolingian treasuries. From the time of Pippin II, a customs regime supervised shipping traffic and imposed taxes. In addition, it was the most productive mint in the Frankish empire. The first Frankish coins had been struck there as early as c.e. 635; and around 650 the Merovingian mint-master, Madelinus, was resident in the city. To satisfy its own demand for gold coinage, Dorestad minted its own coin, the donrijp.”

— Dirk Meier, Seafarers, Merchants and Pirates in the Middle Ages, 2006

Frisian King Radbad was both rad and bad, but in 695 he finally submitted to Pepin II of the Franks and surrendered Dorestad to Frankish control. Radbad saved his people’s life, and the seignorage of the mint at Dorestad, by submitting to be merely a duke — a peer, but under the Prince, the overweening Frankish “emperor.”

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To secure a durable transition, Pepin played a bishop. He installed a mission in the ruined Roman fort at Trajectum just downriver from Dorestad, led by the Northumbrian (that is, Anglish) St. Willibrord. If a group of Anglo-Saxon monks could convert their kinsmen the Frisians and Old Saxons, to the Roman religion, they would thereby submit to the “Roman” emperor. But in 716, Radbad re-took his own. He re-conquered Frisia and Dorestad from the Franks, and sacked the Utrecht mission. Willibrord barely escaped, and many English monks were lost. Radbad’s glory lasted only three years. When the old Frisian king died in 719, there was a new Frankish king, too, Charles Martel. He quickly seized Frisia and put the Dorestad mint back in operation. Then he sent Willibrord back to Utrecht.

THE NEW ‘BORDERLANDS’ HISTORY

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The Rhine was not only the flow of gold. It was the Limes Germanicus, the limit of Roman Empire that had been decreed by the Emperor Claudius. This gives a totally different face to the Frankish/Frisian rivalry/collusion. The rise of Dorestad matched the pattern of events on the border 300 years before, when the Romans were on the other side. Recently historians have discarded the old view of “barbarian invasions.” Instead, relying on archaeological evidence like that at Utrecht and Dorestad, they see that the Roman frontier, with its heavily-garrisoned walls and castella and trajectae, was a lure for the dealing and stealing that could be got there. Coins and armor and swords and wine, jobs in Caesar’s Praetorian Guard, trips in ships to Rome and Constantinople, distributions of silks and slaves, is what tempted the German tribes to jockey for position on the border in the first place. The Frisians were farthest of all border tribes from Rome, but in their tight little corner at the mouth of the Rijn, they found the cat-bird seat. And the river meant they could manage journeys to Rome faster than almost anybody else. At least for a while. That’s why the missionaries were excited to get the fort at Utrecht — it was an easy commute with frequent boats either way, to Rome or home to Northumbria.

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“A key point about all this new wealth flowing into the German world, was that the profits were not evenly distributed in social terms: particular classes benefitted disproportionately. Nor were they equally distributed geographically. Most of the wealth-generating contacts distinctly favored groups settled in the immediate frontier zone. Transport logistics made it much easier for them to supply the Roman soldiers, the basic source of demand. High-value exchange networks, like those of slaves or amber, stretched far into the interior of Germania. Most of the wealth flows benefitted, solely or unequally, the frontier zone. And even longer-distance trade had to work its way through middle-men — kings taking tolls, if nothing else. [The Rijn, the Roman Limes] was the center of a zone of cultural and economic contact stretching out for some distance on either side, rather than a preclusive border.”

Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 2009

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century caused a huge amount of disruption in established intra-regional trading structures in Northern Europe. By the seventh century, however, trade flows were strong enough again for kings to establish trading centers. The deal was straightforward. The king guaranteed protection for all mercantile activities taking place at the market he established, and in return charged the merchants a percentage in tolls and customs duties. From the age of the wood cut for its wharf pilings, Dorestad was in action by c.e. 650. Through the eighth century, other [wicks] opened up around the Baltic circle.

Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

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Taking control of the coinage and the wicks, and the determined effort to convert the Frisians and continental Saxons to do so, was exactly the achievement we call the Carolingian Renaissance. This wealth, these sea lanes, were what lured yet another Northumbrian monk, Alcuin of York, to dazzle Charlemagne’s court at Aachen. Once Charlemagne’s family got hold of the Rhine Valley, it went to great lengths for several hundred years to keep it as a gerrymandered fiefdom at the very center of the Holy Roman Empire.

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The Scandinavian Expansion came to Dorestad soon after 800. After Viking attacks in the 830s crippled Dorestad and Utrecht, the real trouble started in 841 when the Danes showed up to conquer Frisia back for the barbarians. Though sometimes called Vikings, Rorik, Hroerekr, and his brother Harald, Haraldr, were powerful Danish sea-lords. By 850 they had control of Dorestad, and the Franks….didn’t. The Franks had to cut a deal. The deal was Rorik would stop his cousins from burning the place down, in exchange for the seigneurage of the mint; but he had especially to keep the Vikings out, and to keep the coinage going for the crown. It was a tricky relationship.

“Hrørek the Norseman (Roric) held the vicus Dorestad as a benefice with his brother Haraldr in the time of the Emperor Louis the Pious. After the death of the emperor and his brother he was denounced as a traitor – falsely as it is said – to Lothair I, who had succeeded his father in the kingdom, and was captured and imprisoned. He escaped and became the faithful man of Louis the German. After he had stayed there for some years, living among the Saxons, who were neighbours of the Norsemen, he collected a not insubstantial force of Danes and began a career of piracy, devastating places near the northern coasts of Lothair’s kingdom. And he came through the mouth of the river Rhine to Dorestad, seized and held it. Because the emperor Lothar was unable to drive him out without danger to his own men, Hrørek was received back into fealty on the advice of his counsellors and through mediators on condition that he would faithfully handle the taxes and other matters pertaining to the royal fisc, and would resist the piratical attacks of the Danes.”

— Annales Fuldenses, for the year 850

“Once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.”

— Rudyard Kipling.

Not until the Dane dies. Which Rorik did, about 870. Dorestad was an unprotected wijk and wide open to attack. Anyway, it was nearly silted up again.

GOING VIKING?

So how did Dorestad go under the silt? Oh, the Vikings. What does Viking even mean — oh, I get it. Going viking meant going to plunder the vikes. The wijks. To clip a wic. ‘Going out viking, honey, to bag a Sandwich, back after lunch.’

Summa pia gratia nostra conservando corpora et cutodita, de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna. “Our supreme and holy Grace, protecting us and ours, deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms” 

— Antiphon for St. Vaast, 8th century

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“By about c.e. 700, ocean-going ships superseded in-shore war canoes. Clinker-built strakes combined with a one-piece central keel and elevated prow and stern to create a hull with sufficient freeboard, and which was both strong and flexible enough to plough through ocean waves without either foundering or being battered to pieces. Second, sail technology appeared in Scandinavia. This involved learning not just about the sails themselves, and how to make them and use them to tack against the wind, but also about how to fix masts to hulls. The whole Scandinavian diaspora would have been impossible without this revolution. Why should this technology have been imported into the Baltic only around the year 700? 

— Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

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“It was precisely to serve the growing Western European demand in the markets; to grab a share of all the new wealth generated by [the wick-net] of markets, that Scandinavians developed ocean-going naval technology. The Norse raiders and traders not only took the trade into their own hands, but also redirected it to centers under their own control. Sacking the emporia was a game enjoyed by all self-respecting Vikings, and by the 10th century, the only ones in operation, which included Rouen, York and Dublin, were under Scandinavian control. The whole Viking diaspora of the ninth and tenth centuries must be seen as a consequence of the emporia system of the seventh and eighth.”

— Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians

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“And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers; some they took away with them in fetters; many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults; and some they drowned in the sea.”

— Simeon of Durham, 793

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“It is some 350 years that we and our forefathers have inhabited this lovely land, and never before in Britain has such a terror appeared as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen. Nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made. “Then the Lord said unto me, [Jeremiah 1:14] ‘Out of the North an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.’ “

— Alcuin of York, after hearing at Aachen about the Viking sack of Lindisfarne and Northumbria

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The cultural memory of Dorestad must be behind the legend of the Rheingold or Rijngoud. A Ring, the Precious, forged from stolen lump-gold, even though its magic was guarded in purity by three virgin nixies; for its golden power, the Dwarf forswore love, and the Heroes and Gods and Giants fought, and Siegfried slayed the dragon, and for which the Valkyre lost her chance to love like a human. And by which power, the Gods had the Giants build their dream house on high, but left the debt in arrears — so they were cast down again, and their mortgaged house went up in flames, then “underwater,” tumbling back down into the Rijn, at twilight… all this, the cultural remembrance of the shiny coins you could schlepp home from your risky Rijn Journey to trade with the giants at Dorestad.

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EPILOGUE: HOW UTRECHT ROSE AS THE NEW DORESTAD

Dorestad’s ability to draw traders from all over Europe proved that the Rijn Delta was the “Money River” — Vonnegut’s phrase – in Europe. Traders were sold the privilege of a few yards of river-front, permission to lie down and lap at the Money River. When the Oud Rijn silted up once too often, and Dorestad was sacked once too often by its erstwhile Viking protectors, it took a few hundred years, under the new Counts of Holland, and the Prince-Bishops of Utrecht, to tame the business end of the Rijn.

Utrechters dammed and canalized the landschaap, and compacted the town layout behind walls, retaining for most burghers that important access to their strip of wharf. In 1142, the same year the damming commenced, the City of Utrecht was formally chartered as an urbis and officially given the seignorage of its mint. In essence, it was the New Dorestad. Like the old emporium, it faced constant armed threat from the grasping Counts of Holland and the half-barbarian Saxon Dukes of Guelders on the other. As at Dorestad, Utrechters bought and sold on credit, but reckoned, finally, in the gold and silver coins they minted for you. They gave the trader a premium, but the city took its cut. This was but replicating the central position of Dorestad as the source of het Rijngoud. Utrecht kept this spot until about 1630; when silt and currents, of the Rijn and of history, shifted the Rijngoud to the coast, leading to the rise of Amsterdam. As we shall View.

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