MINDLESS MUSINGS

Conquering nearby tribes was not always a means of expansion alone. Sometimes it was necessary to eliminate hostile neighbours. Those boorish savages could be rather nasty sometimes. They might attack any unwary citizen who stumbles into their region, and they would most certainly be stealing shit from the wealthy empire every chance they got.

Stealth would be the ideal method to prevent being caught and crushed. Of course, if you’re clever you would raid villages that had a few tribes between them and yours. Either way it’s a dangerous and foolish game, but all that surplus was just irresistible! Plus, those imperial fuckers will eventually be coming for us anyway, so screw ‘em! Part opportunism, part bravado and defiance.

Now if you keep on the move…You know? A hunter/gatherer/stealer type tribe. Just another form of gathering really. I wonder if anyone who got caught tried using that excuse. A gang of thieves or a fair dinkum H&G tribe that sends out raiders when the opportunity arises; it could work. Life expectancy wasn’t that great anyway really, so the life of a guerilla thief at least kept things interesting.

In the end, unless your tribe relocated a good distance, there was one of two outcomes: You got swallowed up, or you were fortunate enough to see the collapse of an empire and maybe get to lay a few boots in for good measure and go rummaging through the ruins for booty. You may get to live through an empire free decade or more. Eventually another will take its place of course.

Another alternative might be the barbarians themselves mobbing up and becoming a force to be reckoned with. A group of nomads like the Huns who kicked ass and conquered. They weren’t your run of the mill raid and run barbarians. They fucken steamrolled and smashed anyone in their path. They scared the shit out of Europe and created an empire of their own, although not a long lived one in relative terms. They burned bright and burned out.

Eventually we come to those infamous Scandinavians; or more specifically the groups that decided to make raiding their forte. A combination of seafaring mastery and ruthless violence led to these guys being the bane of anyone they decided to visit. While they did have ‘trader’ on their resume, their specialty was first and foremost pillaging.

The Vikings were a formidable plundering force! They could travel great distances by water and strike with such ferocity that most of their victims could scarcely mount any kind of defence. They would then make a hasty escape with the booty, off beyond the horizon.

Few mariners had the skill or guts to follow and the few that did would not have been in a hurry to catch up with a longship filled with bloodthirsty nutters. The idea of landing on a Viking shore and attempting a retaliatory strike would be even less appealing, I’m sure.

These lunatics believed they wouldn’t get into Valhalla unless they died in battle. Fucking hell! I often used to ponder the fine print of this dogma. Must it be a ‘glorious’ death?

What if you slipped and fell off a cliff?

What if you were getting old and tired and decided to do death by foe?

What if you panicked and got killed while you were running away?

Is falling overboard during the voyage covered?

What about getting killed during training or a fight in your own village?

Or just getting outright murdered out of the blue?

I suspect the stern answer to these would be no, tough shit! I’m not sure if the alternative was hellfire or nothingness, but I reckon it would get a little freaky spending eternity with a bunch of people who spent their lives trying to get killed, who are now immortal.

The Viking scourge was a unique entity and maybe not an empire per se. However, they would fade like all the rest. They seem to have gone the way of an aging corporation that became a shadow of its former self. They were once savage competitors who never took a backward step; always hustling and striving; disapproving comfort and resting on laurels.

Eventually the spoils of conquest would spoil the younger generation and they would go soft. The blood and guts old guard would complain about ‘the youth of today’ and how rampant attack had simmered down to defence. They start to settle down. Farming and family begin to dominate the culture, and the trade of Viking becomes an illustrious bunch of stories. Christianity would replace Norse mythology and help speed up the tenderisation process. They would evolve and re-conquer the world (markets) with plastic building blocks and affordable home furnishings.

Many more empires would rise and fall. The Mongols would rise to raise hell centuries later. These barbarian hordes eerily resemble the cliché of the little guy battling the big guys – winning – and then becoming the new big guys – and then dissipate, or more appropriate become assimilated into the new cultural organism.

We can all trace our ancestry back to one empire or another. All except for the ones whose forebears managed to get oceans between themselves and the human swarm. These people would remain blissfully unaware of the plague of progress until the rise of maritime mastery and competition. The new empires were no longer land locked and expansion could continue around the globe. The age of colonisation was about to begin.