The bitter reality that relatively small bands of Vikings had been able to spread such fear and chaos over an entire continent, painted an ominous picture of European conditions during those years. Had these invaders appeared only a few decades earlier, they would have met with a far different fate. But this was no longer the Carolingian world of Charlemagne; while his successors were fighting each other in vicious battles, allowing the great empire to fall apart, the state had become utterly impotent, unable to make even the feeblest attempts at any sort of defense. Without the financial resources of an organized state it was impossible to raise the armies or to erect the defenses necessary to protect the land, and kings watched in resignation as their domains collapsed all around them. Some, like Charles the Simple, tried to bribe the invaders into cooperation, but for the most part they simply ignored the threat altogether, leaving it to their lords to defend their domains as best as they could. The result was total anarchy.
It was during that time that many a Frankish lord made a great reputation and an even greater fortune for himself. With no one to control them, the strongmen throughout the land grew stronger still, fighting bloody battles for ever more power. The strongest among them built castles and fortifications and set out to increase their domains at the expense of the weaker. More than ever before, the individual, the peasant, the small farmer, could survive only under the protection of someone in authority. But with state governments all but non-existent, most of these people had no choice left but to join some lord’s manor. The European kingdoms during those years crumbled into hundreds of little domains, each ruled by the iron fist of a lord, a bishop, an abbot, and 9th and 10th century France, in particular, became a society filled with political assassinations, with incredible violence and turmoil – a society where the only law was the law of the lord of the manor, and the only security rested within the walls of that manor.
Theoretically, at least, the king sat at the top of the hierarchy, the one person to whom all the lords owed their loyalty as vassals of the crown. In reality, however, men like the dukes of Normandy, Burgundy, and Aquitaine in France, the dukes of Swabia, Saxony, and Bavaria in Germany – such men had become virtual independent rulers who only nominally, if ever, acknowledged a monarch. They led their men to war whenever and to wherever they saw fit. They imposed taxes and collected them ruthlessly; they presided over their own courts with laws they themselves had issued, and they personally decided on all matters of importance. In fact, they now acquired their own vassals, known as barons, who in turn had vassals of their own, each owing his allegiance to their superiors, until the pyramid-like structure of the feudal world was complete. The foundation of this structure was the knight, the very backbone of every feudal army, and the military strength of every lord was counted in the number of knights on whom he could depend as vassals.
To the peasant, the serf, was left whatever slight subsistence he was able to wring from his tiny patch of the manorland, and most lived in abject squalor, ignorant, uneducated, and perennially near starvation. Infant mortality was appallingly high; most children took one brief look at this remorseless world and died. Those who survived faced little more than a short life of drudgery and misery, until an early death was a welcome relief from this suffering. And if their lord might have been able to protect them against some of the human enemies, even that lord was powerless against the ravages of large-scale wars, of uncounted epidemics of scurvy, influenza and leprosy that swept across 10th century Europe.