There’s an apocryphal story about Charlemagne seeing Vikings near the end of his reign. They were not yet the large problem they would be a few decades hence, but the story is relayed as a sort of premonition. A monk named Notker, writing in about 887 (Charlemagne died in 814), claimed that the emperor was visiting what is now modern-day France near the coastline and saw a lone Viking ship. Affronted by its boldness, and with tears in his eyes, Charlemagne could supposedly see the future—that is, that it wouldn’t be long before these Vikings would become a nightmarish headache.
