Viking incursions into Gascony

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Viking incursions into Gascony began with a first raid in 840 and ended in 982 with the battle of Taller.

Since 1911, the historians have considered that only the Vikings who distinguished themselves north of the Loire and founded Normandy were well enough documented to be worthy of interest. In the wake of Lucien Musset in France, they have never studied the actions of the Vikings south of the Loire. Lucien Musset wrote as follows: "The Norwegian raids south of the English Channel, pure pirate ventures, left no lasting traces, on the Loire, the Garonne or the Bay of Biscay"....^[1] For their part, Aquitaine historians, following in the footsteps of Charles Higounet, consider the 9th and 10th centuries as "white pages" of history. "Between the catastrophe of the mid-9th century and the end of the 10th, the history of Bordeaux is almost a blank page, for lack of documents".^[2] In 2008, the historian Frédéric Boutoulle^[3] concluded that the sources in Gascony did not allow us to form an idea and that salvation could only come from an archaeological discovery. However, sources do exist, some contemporary -Annales Bertiniani, Andreas of Bergamo- and others later. These sources clearly state that the Vikings carried out operations south of the Loire that went far beyond simple attacks on defenseless monasteries. They describe massive attacks followed by installations and takeovers of the territory. In other words, these sources describe an invasion. Moreover, in the 1990s, medievalist Renée Mussot Goulard described the Scandinavian presence in Gascony as "the longest known Scandinavian occupation in the kingdom".^[4]