In the year 804, a grizzled Frankish army under the command of the great king Charlemagne,

the most powerful ruler in Western Europe since the fall of Rome,

marched north through the recently conquered lands of Old Saxony,

subjugated through fire and blood over the previous three decades.

The Franks rode north, into the unknown, far beyond any lands conquered by the Romans, beyond the borders of the Christian world, to the Jutland Peninsula on the southern edge of Scandinavia.

What they found there, waiting for them Peninsula on the southern edge of Scandinavia.

What they found there waiting for them, on the ancient defensive earthwork between Germany

and Denmark, known as the Daneverk, would not only shock and unsettle that Frankish army, but

eventually go on to change the face of Western Europe entirely.

It was an army of Danes, apparently led to the border by a king named Goodfred,

as a show of force against any potential invasion of his lands.

Whilst Goodfred was almost certainly not the only figure calling himself King of the Danes at the time,

he was sufficiently powerful enough to feature prominently in the Frankish records for the next decade or so, during which time his soldiers

would provide a major thorn in the side of Charlemagne's empire, and eventually, after his death,

their descendants would move in en masse to capitalize upon its gradual decay, decimating

the expansive Frankish coastlines and growing ever more prosperous

as a result.

Whilst Franks, Danes, Saxons and Frisians all share the same linguistic and cultural roots in the ancient Germanic past,

Frankia had long been a Christian kingdom by the time of Charlemagne, its kings having converted

to the religion of the Romans close to 300 years before during the dying days of the empire.

Partially as a result of this affiliation with the late Roman administration, Francia

had since risen to become the most powerful state in Western Europe,

...