History Summarized: The Viking Age

The word Viking is immensely frustrating. Our grasp on the original etymology is tenuous at best, and Viking was barely even used to label the people who went out to sea. The Europeans on the receiving end of these spontaneous, blade-wielding visitors called them Northmen, Danes, Rus', or simply, those jerks who trashed our monastery. And the Scandinavians behind this violent tourism didn't really tell us what they called themselves, because our first good records from them don't show up until centuries later. But history is 20% iffy nomenclature by mass, and the name has since stuck. Still though, even our modern usage is problematic, because the term often gets applied as a catch-all for medieval Scandinavia when its meaning is rather narrow. Viking is the act and associated profession of raiding. Just being a pirate. Vikings themselves were a small subset of Scandinavians, but their historical impact and overwhelming cool factor earned them top billing in medieval history. So although Scandinavian does not by default equal Viking, we can describe their collective ventures under the banner of the Viking Age. To find out how it all went down, and to see just how ludicrously far these Norse boys got, let's do some history. In addition to a wibbly moniker, the Vikings are also a little fuzzy in the timeline department. For narrative convenience, historians often date the age from 793 to 1066, opening with the sack of Lindisfarne Monastery and closing with the Norman Conquest of England. But if Vikings are pirates, then their age should be thorough in its coverage of involuntary treasury allocation. So really, we need to bump those numbers out by at least a few decades. Scandinavians were trading, seafaring, and occasionally plundering long before Lindisfarne. It's always tempting to imagine a culture just kind of appearing onto history as a fully formed entity, but Scandinavia had several Viking traits from early on, and the society gradually evolved through the first millennium AD. Trade networks in the Iron Age reached into the Celtic and Roman worlds, and the maritime culture was already fairly robust. Scandinavia was a tough place to traverse, as inland areas were either full of trees or covered in mountains, so people and supplies had to travel by water if they wanted to get anywhere. Luckily, these guys had trees for days, so they became wizards at woodworking and shipbuilding. With the convenient training zone of the enclosed Baltic Sea, Scandinavians developed a truly brilliant ship design, using an overlapping plank construction on a long, narrow, and shallow hull. This meant that ships could sail the open sea and row along rivers, which, to the delight of Scandinavians and the abject terror of Europeans, will make the Vikings quite versatile travelers. While Scandinavia was outclassing the rest of the world in the seafaring skill tree, their land situation differed from Europe's post-Roman migratory reshuffle. Instead of kingdoms full of cities and shiny monasteries, Scandinavians lived on small farmsteads and had no overarching government. But who needs government when you have a boat full of warriors in the favor of Thor? So, by the 700s, Scandinavians were becoming familiar with the wider European world, sailing eastwards in the Baltic and hopping westwards to the Frisian coast. This trading was sometimes a little aggressive, on the order of buy these furs or so help me Tyr I will axe you, but that's just piracy for ya, and it worked out decently well. However, the Vikings set themselves apart by just going for it. Northern Europe and the British Isles happened to have some shiny monasteries stacked with Because who would be so craven as to plunder a monastery? Well that Pollyanna delusion shattered like a stained glass window when the Vikings rolled up to the British island of Lindisfarne in 793 and trampled the place, stealing the artifacts and selling the monks they didn't kill into slavery. Because, as they soon found out, the Muslim world was incalculably rich and had a substantial market for slave imports. Christians weren't supposed to be in the slaving business, but the markets in Frisia, Rome, Venice, and Constantinople clearly weren't losing any sleep about it. So the Vikings of the early 800s enjoyed a stunningly efficient business model. Sale, sack, steal, sell, celebrate. And the Europeans were horrified. This, dear viewer, is why some of our sources for the Vikings are so uniquely screwy. Scandinavians left some inscriptions on runestones but otherwise didn't write anything about themselves during the Viking Age, so our documentation comes from the people who lived in constant fear of being waylaid by a surprise fleet of longships. Now, as a human with functional empathy, it's obvious why these accounts are so biased, but as a historian who wishes we understood the Vikings a little bit better, it does me a big sad. We do eventually get Scandinavian sources on their history and culture, but they're about three centuries late and were all written post-Christianization, so we're 0 for 2 on original Norse works. And this is where archaeology especially has come in clutch for us, because settlement remains and burial patterns across Europe have been doing the heavy lifting in recent scholarship. As it happens, our newest discoveries are coming from Eastern Europe, which had long been sidelined in the Viking narrative and wasn't accessible to research because of that pesky Iron Curtain. Yeah, I know, there were bigger problems in the 20th century, but Viking stuff, man, come on. Anyway. The earliest evidence we have for the old Raiden trade routine comes from the system of waterways, running from the Baltic, down the Volga, and to the Caspian Sea. The swindle here wasn't in sacking monasteries, because there weren't any, but in trading furs, lumber, amber, and wool, plus capturing local Slavic people and selling them into slavery. The morality of that last operation was rather bankrupt, but the economics were quite the opposite. The only problem is Vikings had to work with middlemen in the Bulgar and Khazar Khaganates. So in the mid-800s, they bopped westwards away from the Volga River and onto the Dnieper. This route fed into the Black Sea and landed them right on the doorstep of the biggest and shiniest city in the Christian world, Constantinople. This being the Vikings, they tried to sack it, but the Byzantines had the benefit of actual defenses and were able to hold out just fine. They did, however, become fascinated by the Vikings, whom they called Varangians, and hired some for the Emperor's personal guard. Scandinavians were thrilled to deal directly with Constantinople and built up trading towns along the Dnieper River, such as Kiev. The demographics at work here are a little murky, because it seems like the Scandinavians of the so-called Rus became a minority population among the native Slavs and Finns, but research is ongoing. To the collective thrill of the Byzantine Empire, the Rus adopted Orthodox Christianity in 989, and this becomes a running plotline elsewhere in Europe. So let's jump west and look at the Carolingian Empire. After some raiding in the early 800s, the Vikings figure out that they can make significantly They also start exploiting entire cities for payment of Deingeld in exchange for not attacking. This process was made significantly easier by the near-constant civil warring between the Three Frankish Kingdoms after its partition in 840, so there was zero coordinated resistance to the raids. By 865, the Vikings had cleared out Central Europe a little too well, so many hopped the channel to go bother the Isles instead. We'll go ravage England in a second, don't you worry, but at the turn of the 10th century, our beloved North Bend doubled back over to France, and the Frankish king was flat broke, so he paid them off with land. The Vikings gained the county of Rouen, which was later promoted to the Duchy of Normandy. This was great for everyone, because the Vikings stopped sailing down the Seine to make a mess in Paris, and the newly settled Normans got comfy in their new digs, speaking French, adopting Christianity, and cooperating with the church administration to more effectively govern. The Normans quickly stop acting like your typical Vikings and go off on their own historical trajectory, but safe to say, they become a big deal. Okay, so now let's destroy the British Isles. In the early 800s, they were prime targets. Kingdoms were small and weak, and Irish monks prepared a buffet of beautifully sackable monasteries. We had the standard Viking playbook until 865, when the Great Army arrived from Francia, Denmark, and Norway to absolutely wreck shop. In the span of a few years, a Scandinavian army makes a base in East Anglia, marches north to conquer York and the Kingdom of Northumbria, swoops down to take half of Mercia, and loops back over to East Anglia to make it over half of the Saxon kingdom stopped, the only full survivor being Wessex. Unlike in Normandy, the Vikings weren't able to establish a proper state, but they did set the rulebook for this big new land, so we call it the Dane Law. Meanwhile, back in Wessex, King Alfred knew that it was nut up or shut up, so he reformed his state to meet the Scandinavian threat, and his successors later conquered up to create the Kingdom of England. And the Anglo-Danish hybrid culture in the North seemed pretty chill with the arrangement, what with all the easily arable land and good royal administration. Then there's Ireland, which didn't end up being a place where Scandinavians came to live, but it did become the money pot of the Viking world. Because after they cleaned out the countless monasteries, they built up coastal merchant towns at the bases of rivers to raid in land for slaves to sell at markets in Spain. Of course, they raided some Iberian towns along the way, but what did you expect? Norse settlers had more long-term luck in the wider Celtic world, like the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Lowland Scotland. But if we want to talk about settlement colonization, we've got to go off the edge of the known world for the A-tier Viking accomplishment. Iceland. Situated smack in the middle of the North Atlantic, Iceland is a little out of the way, and seems to have been discovered by accident. When some poor sailors overshot the Faroe Islands and presumably freaked the hell out when they discovered a giant uninhabited island about two postcodes out from Niflheim. Setting aside the non-zero chance of veering wildly off course while sailing over, it's easy to see why Iceland instantly became prime real estate. Tons of good land, no locals to fight, and the Valkyries put on a light show every winter. Dinner and a show, what else do you need? After Iceland's discovery in the 870s-ish, fleets of Norwegians sail in to settle and create a quasi-democratic island assembly. As centuries go by, it remains a fairly insular corner of the Scandinavian world, and the old oral storytelling tradition gets put to writing, resulting in one of the most stacked literary cultures anywhere. The myths and historical sagas that we have aren't perfect, history is embellished and mythology is through a post-Christian lens, but they're still the source for our understanding of Viking Age culture. So as we've seen, the Scandinavian diaspora covered pretty much everywhere, but the Viking Age itself eventually wrapped up. Hey Blue, this next part is insanely complicated. Mind if I step in? Oh my word! Friend of the channel Yellow aka Ludohistory! That's me. You, my good sir, have two whole degrees in this field, which means on average we each have one degree in this field. That's definitely not how math works. Oh, I studied classics, Red's the one with the math degree. Don't you dare bring me into this! Yellow, why don't you take it from here? So Christianity was interacting in much more interesting ways than mere victimhood in the Viking Age. It's not like Norse people had no clue what this Christianity was. Traders had been marked with the sign of the cross from early on, full-scale missionary attempts had happened as early as the 820s, and raiders in Europe would convert, sometimes even voluntarily. But the big wave of conversions among the Scandinavian elite happens in the late 10th century. Now, you'd think this would stop raids, but you'd be wrong. Knutr the Great was baptized in 1014, and he gets the distinction of most successful Viking, actually becoming king of England in 1016. And Teg, the patron saint of Norway, was a mercenary and raider in England in the 1010s too. So you can't exactly call conversion an ending. Christianity's link to the end of the Viking Age is even more tenuous in the Baltic. Sweden and Denmark kept raiding there well into the 12th century, though they eventually justified it as a crusade. What Christianity did do is let local leaders use Christian models and tools, such as the tithe, to justify and consolidate their power. Doing so allowed for more centralization than was possible before, and models of sacral kingship assisted in state-building in Scandinavia and the formation of the countries into very roughly the shapes they have today. This is a slow process, though, and it wasn't like 1066 hit and they went, ding, we're now well-behaved Christian kingdoms. In fact, uh-oh, I'm running out of time, uh, phew, nailed it. Whoopsies, that's the late medieval alarm, which means that if we go any further, I'm gonna start compulsively talking about Florence, so let's wrap it up here. Thanks so much for stopping by, Yellow! So it's clearly hard to put a firm end date on the Viking Age, because the methods, motivations, and goals all changed during that time, but 1066 does have a nice irony to it. King Harald of Norway tried to conquer England using some classic great army tactics, but was defeated in battle. But then, one month later, Duke William of Normandy led an army of knights at Hastings and won himself a kingdom. The Scandinavians who played by the old rules were left out in the cold, and the Scandinavians who adapted to their new homes and a changing world did a lot better for themselves. So all told, the Viking Age is a class above simple piracy because it effectively terraformed the landscape of European politics, economics, and culture. And though their legacy has been appropriated in ways ranging from dubious to flat-out dangerous, the Viking Age proves that history only gets cooler the more we learn about it. Thank you so much for watching, and special thanks to Yellow for both helping out with the script and jumping in to talk about the lengthy denouement of the Viking Age. You can see Yellow analyzing the historical chops of popular video games over on TwitchTV slash Ludohistory. And as always, thank you to the patrons who make this show possible. See y'all in the next video.