AHC: Most powerful possible Vikings?

Did they really have the resources to take all of France?

Did they even have the power of razing Paris?

When you raze a city, you stay a long time to do that, enough for allowing a frankish army to attack you while you're busy to raze something instead of fleeing as quickly possible.

For taking France...They even had trouble to get Normandy settled by 1/4 of Vikings (the other being locals), I prefer to not think how would look like a "viking" France with a viking alone and solitary in every city.
 
Did they even have the power of razing Paris?

When you raze a city, you stay a long time to do that, enough for allowing a frankish army to attack you while you're busy to raze something instead of fleeing as quickly possible.

For taking France...They even had trouble to get Normandy settled by 1/4 of Vikings (the other being locals), I prefer to not think how would look like a "viking" France with a viking alone and solitary in every city.
There was enough of a threat at the time for the Frankish king to give them Normandy. If anything, it might simply have created a power vacuum, keeping about more chaos that Vikings thrived on, instead of having lands pooling their defenses to push back the invaders.
 
There was enough of a threat at the time for the Frankish king to give them Normandy. If anything, it might simply have created a power vacuum, keeping about more chaos that Vikings thrived on, instead of having lands pooling their defenses to push back the invaders.

The frankish king gave him Normandy because Rollo was encline to accept frankish suzerainity and to defend the Seine's mouth against other Vikings.
Without this feudalisation of Rollo's troops, I doubt they would have been able to take Normandy even the 1/3 of the region that was settled by Scandinavians after 911.

To resume, they didn't gave them west Neustria because they conquered or could have conquered them, but because it was the perfect place to put a march against other raiders. It was the last of "foedus" in western Europe if you want.

Besides, if vikings were a threat, it wasn't a threat of "controlling and/or razing everything", it was the usual piracy threat not a conquering one, because Vikings raids were far from having enough men to controlling some region in the continent (Northern England is an exception, due to the very low population, and when they tried to do the same with Murcia and East-Anglia, they failed to).

For the power vaacum, you quite well described the OTL situation. During the 4th siege of Paris by exemple, the defense wasn't planned by the power in place, but by the inhabitants and local authorities without help worth of mention coming from outside.
 
Well you basically need three things:
1. More reasons for violent clashes/willingness of Scandinavians to risk their lives raiding.
2. More powerful Norse.
3. Other people less able to resist the Norse.

What I'd probably do is put in a Catholic-screw with a Papal schism and/or the rise of threatening heresy. That's create more infighting in Western Europe which would make it harder for them to resist Viking raids (and possibly give the Magyars a bigger opening). That's also slow down the conversion of the Norse to Catholicism, which should help the Viking Age going longer (having a different religion would make it easier to raid rather than trade, especially stuff like looting monasteries). If you fragment Catholicism perhaps have the weaker faction end up converting the Norse (sort of like Arianism converting the Goths) to keep a wedge in between the Norse and a lot of the rest of Western Europe.

As other people have said, the British Isles is a good site for colonization since there was a good bit of that in real life. Vikings operating out of the British Isles could also result in significantly more Viking raids down the Atlantic coast of France and Spain and perhaps even some into the Mediterranean.
 
The frankish king gave him Normandy because Rollo was encline to accept frankish suzerainity and to defend the Seine's mouth against other Vikings.
Without this feudalisation of Rollo's troops, I doubt they would have been able to take Normandy even the 1/3 of the region that was settled by Scandinavians after 911.

To resume, they didn't gave them west Neustria because they conquered or could have conquered them, but because it was the perfect place to put a march against other raiders. It was the last of "foedus" in western Europe if you want.

Besides, if vikings were a threat, it wasn't a threat of "controlling and/or razing everything", it was the usual piracy threat not a conquering one, because Vikings raids were far from having enough men to controlling some region in the continent (Northern England is an exception, due to the very low population, and when they tried to do the same with Murcia and East-Anglia, they failed to).

For the power vaacum, you quite well described the OTL situation. During the 4th siege of Paris by exemple, the defense wasn't planned by the power in place, but by the inhabitants and local authorities without help worth of mention coming from outside.
I wouldn't usually say that the Vikings were much of a threat for razing if it weren't for them outnumbering the Parisian garrisons by over one hundred to one and likely wrecking things if they had managed to get through in their haste to find something of value before another Viking got it. The reason giving for keeping the Vikings at the mouth of the Seine certainly makes sense and did well for the usual habit of the Norse integrating into whatever cultures they came into to the point where they were all but indistinguishable from the locals.

Really, we need to clarify the sort of "Vikings" that we are trying to power up, as that is only one social class/profession of the Norse, and they tended to be the less wealthy or from the losing sides of wars for Scandinavian thrones. I don't see them staying as Vikings once they settle down. They wouldn't be able to unify that great an area either, as they would need to somehow manage to settle and fortify the flooded Low Countries to keep a line of communication between Scandinavia and the English Channel. Not that it might not have been simpler than annual ships to Iceland and other frozen rocks.
 
I wouldn't usually say that the Vikings were much of a threat for razing if it weren't for them outnumbering the Parisian garrisons by over one hundred to one and likely wrecking things if they had managed to get through in their haste to find something of value before another Viking got it.
Well, seeing the 4th siege of Paris, again, you can see that even outnumbering the "professional and semi-professional" (I lack of proper word in english, sorry) fighter (but certainly not the total population and the traditional number of 30 000/40 000 scandinavian is more a fantasy than historical reality), they couldn't take it even in a situation of power vaacum.

The main difference with previous sieges, was that Paris was fortified this time. We could see one of the weakness of Vikings : before a city decided to NOT surrender and with defenses they had to stay on the country and to loose both opportunities of plunder AND motivation of the troops.

In fact they had to allow big part of their army to abandon the siege to raid surrounding regions.

You have a similar exemple with Sens, the following year, that resisted Siegfried's army.

Vikings raids were sucessful because they were able to "hit and run" quickly. When it comes to forming a standing/besieging army, it's already more easy for frankish fighters.

The issue is that you NEED to make standing armies to hope controlling a territory against legitimate owners or wannabe.
 
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