After traveling about seventy-five miles up the river, Ragnar and his followers disembarked their sleek ships to raid and plunder. “Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong,” wrote one despairing chronicler. “Rouen is laid waste, looted and burnt.”45 Far from exhausted—indeed, now pumped up for more excitement—Ragnar’s men carried on up the river until they arrived in Paris, around Easter. A city of probably just a few thousand souls, Paris was not yet the powerhouse it would become in the later
