To be fair, the Vikings attacked Paris several times, but it’s the major sieges that get remembered — the one in 845, when they invaded Paris on Easter Sunday, got bought off with a fairly large ransom, and then the one that started in 885 and ended in 886, after nearly a year of a siege wherein the Vikings, branching out from their usual plundering, used catapults and battering rams and other such non-Viking military paraphernalia, in an attempt to invade the city again. They were doing this on and off, though, and finally the surviving Vikings that hadn’t gone off to sack other Frankish towns dragged their longboats over to another river and went elsewhere. So the Franks had won, though the Vikings had managed to destroy one of the bridges and much of the surrounding countryside, and later one of their leaders, Rollo, would swear allegiance to Charles the Simple of France and become the first Norman, in what became Normandy. Michelle, naturally, found an epic poem written by a monk who was in Paris during that last siege, a poem modelled on Virgil, which contained so many difficult and impressive words that monks would pass it around for decades, to be consulted when they wanted to sound really intelligent. (Hint: Greek sounds fancier than Latin.)
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