I’ve never really believed in the mayhem caused by the Vikings and their southern counterparts, the Saracens. Much of their violent history, I’ve proclaimed more times than I should have, is down to crabby contemporary monkish authors. These writers were palpably prejudiced historians. They despised these new-age entrepreneurial types who not only took to the embryonic feudal mores of the era, but also eschewed Christianity. Be it Lindisfarne or San Vincenzo al Volturno, 9th-century clerical rhetoric was pretty much the same. These pagans violated the sacred monasteries and created havoc. The archaeology doesn’t exactly bear out this history. Instead, it shows that the agrarian economies of Latin Christendom, despite the Saracens and Vikings, grew and grew successfully. This last uncomfortable fact, it still amazes me, seems to be lost in the afterglow of various streaming TV series by many professional archaeologists and historians. But then, as it happened, I was granted special insight into the mayhem caused by the Saracens at the site of my excavations at San Vincenzo al Volturno.
Damascene moments
From the start of the excavations in 1980 at the Benedictine monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno, in the lea of the Mainarde mountains at the source of the Volturno river, there was one constant – a regular afternoon visitor. An obese balding man, looking for all the world like a caricature of a minor bank executive, would arrive in a spotlessly clean Fiat, and head determinedly for me. My fellow excavators would smirk and then turn away. They knew what was coming. This enthusiast had read the 12th-century account of the early monastery’s history, the Chronicon Vulturnense, and wanted me to know about it. Always the same story: he boomed on about the sack of the great monastery on 10 October 881. The Saracens had slaughtered the defenders after the monastic servants changed sides and joined the warband. At that point, so the 12th-century chronicler stated, and my visitor breathlessly advocated, Abbot Maio fled with his surviving monks to safety at Capua. Only in AD 916, under a new abbot, was the community to return. The Saracens, my visitor bellowed without taking a pause, violated the monastery. All its riches were stolen. It was a calamity.
Now to be fair, my visitor had a point. The 12th-century Chronicon Vulturnense includes a passage of Beneventan polyphonic music to dramatise the savagery of the sack. The chronicler felt the need to emphasise the disaster that befell San Vincenzo because, by his time, the monastery was a mere shadow of its former 9th-century glory. What caused my fellow archaeologists to smirk cynically was that this amateur historian had breath that bowled one backwards. Soon, to everyone’s merriment, I hid on seeing him punctiliously park his car by the River Volturno. From the fragrant depths of the vineyards that existed around the site at this time, I would watch him declaiming to the poor excavators, whose Italian was limited to ordering a birra grande (per favore).
Mobility in mortuary contexts