Rollo
A Viking chief was given a stretch of northern France in 911 and his descendants conquered England, Sicily and Antioch. Rollo appears in the sources as a Scandinavian leader — Norwegian in the Icelandic tradition and Danish in the Norman one — who had been raiding the Seine valley for years and had besieged Paris and Chartres. The Frankish king Charles the Simple, unable to remove him, took the standard remedy of the period and hired him: the agreement at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911 granted him territory around Rouen in exchange for baptism, homage and an undertaking to defend the river against other Vikings. The story that he refused to kiss the king's foot and had a follower lift it to his mouth instead, tipping the king over, is told a century later by a partisan chronicler. What is not disputed is what the settlement produced. The Norse settlers took Frankish law, Frankish speech within two generations and Frankish Christianity, and combined them with their own military organisation and an appetite that had nowhere local to go. Rollo's descendants extended the duchy west and south, and by the eleventh century Normandy was the best-organised principality in France. His great-great-great-grandson took England in 1066; other Norman families took southern Italy and Sicily from Byzantines and Arabs, and Antioch from the Seljuks in 1098. He died about 930, and the Norman dukes counted their descent from him for five centuries. His remains are in Rouen cathedral, and a statue of him stands in Ålesund in Norway, given by the city of Rouen in 1911 on the thousandth anniversary. Whether he was Norwegian or Danish is still argued in both countries.
- Lived: 846 CE – 930 CE
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: military_leader, leader
