In 882 a Viking army that had spent the previous winter despoiling Frisia entered the river Rhine and advanced toward Charlemagne’s palace-city of Aachen. They took over the palace and used Charlemagne’s once-beloved imperial chapel as a stable for their horses.58 Throughout the Rhineland, the invaders “brought to their death servants of [Christ] by famine or sword, or sold them beyond the sea.”59 To the chroniclers (almost all of whom were based in monasteries and thus directly in the sights of the raiders), it seemed as if the devastation would never end.
