Viking Raids and Expansion: From Lindisfarne to Constantinople

Introduction

The Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries are the most famous part of the Viking story. Beginning in 793 with the attack on Lindisfarne, the raids escalated into massive armies, settled winter camps, and ultimately conquests that redrew the political map of Europe. At the same time, the Viking expansion was not only a matter of raids. It was also a great movement of settlement and trade: Norse settlers colonized Iceland, Greenland, and briefly North America; Norse traders opened up the rivers of Russia to Byzantium and the Islamic world; and Norse soldiers served in the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors. To understand the Viking Age as a whole, it is essential to understand both halves of the expansion, the violent and the peaceful, for they were intimately connected. The Viking who sacked a monastery in the morning might be a trader at the same fair the following year. For the broader context, see the Viking Age; for the maritime technology that made it all possible, see the Viking ships and technology.

The Western Theatre: The British Isles and Francia

The first major Viking raid of which we have a written record was the attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, and the British Isles remained the most frequent target of Viking raiding for the next two centuries. Within fifteen years, Iona, the great monastic center of the Hebrides, was sacked, and a string of monasteries in Ireland was attacked. The Irish monasteries, with their rich collections of metalwork and their coastal and island locations, were particularly tempting targets. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to undermine the monastic culture of Ireland and to contribute to the political fragmentation of the country.

In England, the great escalation came with the arrival of the “Great Heathen Army” in 865. Unlike the small raiding parties of the previous generation, the Great Heathen Army was a force of several thousand warriors, well organized and well supplied, that had come to conquer, not merely to plunder. It took York in 866, destroyed the independent kingdom of Northumbria, killed the East Anglian king Edmund in 869, and drove the Mercian king Burgred from his throne in 874. Only Wessex held out, under the leadership of King Alfred. The treaty of Wedmore in 878 established a frontier between Alfred’s kingdom and the Viking territory, the Danelaw, and a decade later Alfred’s son Edward the Elder began the reconquest of the Danelaw, a process completed by Æthelstan in 927. For the English background, see the Anglo-Saxon England.

Viking attacks on Francia began in earnest in the 820s and intensified in the 840s. The major rivers — the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, and the Scheldt — became highways of Viking attack. Monasteries along the rivers were sacked, and the cities at the heads of navigation were repeatedly threatened. Paris was attacked in 845, 856, 861, and again in the great siege of 885, when a Viking force of perhaps thirty thousand men besieged the city for almost a year. The defense, organized by Count Odo of Paris, became a model for other Frankish cities. The Frankish response, after a generation of paying off Viking armies, was to grant them land in exchange for peace. The most famous of these grants was the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, by which the Frankish king Charles the Simple gave the Viking leader Rollo and his followers the land that would become the duchy of Normandy, in return for baptism and a feudal oath. For the broader political context, see the Charlemagne and his reign.

The Viking presence in Ireland produced a different pattern of political development. Norse settlers founded a series of towns, of which Dublin was the most important, and established trading networks that reached as far as the markets of the Islamic world. The Norse of Dublin were defeated by the Irish high king Brian Boru at the battle of Clontarf in 1014, but the towns they had founded continued to thrive. The slave trade, in particular, was long-lasting, and the Norse merchants of Dublin maintained contacts with Byzantium and the caliphate long after their political independence had been lost. The Hebrides, the Isle of Man, and the Scottish islands remained under Norse rule for centuries.

The Southern Theatre: The Mediterranean and the Atlantic

The Mediterranean and the Atlantic were secondary theatres of Viking activity. In 844 a Norse fleet raided the coasts of al-Andalus, briefly sacking the city of Seville. In 859–861 a large Norse force, under the leaders Björn Ironside and Hastein, raided the Iberian peninsula, attacked the great Frankish monastery of Saint-Philibert-de-Grand-Lieu, and reportedly reached the Italian coast. Earlier, in 807, a Norse fleet had already entered the Mediterranean and attacked the Balearic Islands.

The Norman settlement of Sicily, in the eleventh century, was a separate Viking-age phenomenon. The Normans who conquered southern Italy and Sicily in the 1020s and after were the descendants of Viking settlers in Normandy, and they brought with them a Viking appetite for adventure. By 1091 the whole of Sicily was in Norman hands, and the resulting kingdom of Sicily, with its famous fusion of Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and Arab cultures, was one of the most cosmopolitan states of the high Middle Ages. The Norman kings, however, no longer thought of themselves as Vikings; they were Christian knights in the French tradition.

The Northern Theatre: Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland

The most lasting of the Viking settlements was the colonization of the North Atlantic. Iceland was settled, primarily from Norway, in the decades around 870. By 930 the settlers had established the Althing, the assembly that would be the center of Icelandic political life for centuries. Iceland was never part of the Norwegian crown; it remained an independent republic until it was forced to accept Norwegian rule in 1262. The Icelandic Free State, with its distinctive blend of pagan and Christian institutions and its rich literary culture, is one of the most remarkable political experiments of the medieval world. For the cultural products of this Icelandic world, see the Viking society and culture.

From Iceland, the next move was to Greenland, settled by Eirik the Red around 985. The Greenland colonies, with their two settlements of around 4,000 people, were the most remote Norse settlement and the one most exposed to climate change. The Norse colonies in Greenland disappeared in the fifteenth century, probably a combination of climate cooling, soil erosion, and the loss of contact with Norway.

From Greenland, Norse sailors reached North America. According to the Icelandic sagas, Leif Erikson, son of Eirik the Red, was driven off course on his way from Norway to Greenland in the late tenth century and found a land he called Vinland, with self-sown wheat, vines, and timber. Brief Norse settlements were established at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, but the colonies were abandoned after a few years, probably because of conflict with the indigenous inhabitants. The Norse voyages to Vinland are the earliest documented European contact with the Americas. For the rest of the story, see who discovered America before Columbus and who was Leif Erikson.

The Eastern Theatre: The Rus and the Rivers to Byzantium

The eastern expansion, led by Swedish Vikings, took Norse merchants and warriors down the rivers of present-day Russia to the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the markets of the Islamic world. The Rus, as the Slavic chronicles called them, established principalities at Novgorod, Kiev, and other centers. The trade they conducted was enormously lucrative: furs, slaves, and other northern goods exchanged for the silver dirhams of the Abbasid caliphate. The huge hoards of Islamic silver found in Scandinavia, often in the form of cut-up dirhams that served as bullion, are the most direct measure of the importance of this trade.

The Vikings also reached Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Rus attack of 860 was the first, and so shocked the Byzantines that Patriarch Photius preached a famous sermon on its meaning. The Rus attacked again in 907, when, according to the Primary Chronicle, the Rus prince Oleg led two thousand boats against Constantinople and forced the Byzantines to sign a trade treaty. The Varangian Guard, an elite force of Norse and Rus warriors, served the Byzantine emperors from the late tenth century onward and became one of the most famous military units of the medieval world. The Norwegian king Harald Hardrada was one of the most famous Varangians before he returned to Norway and became its king, only to die at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.

The Place-Names of Settlement

The Vikings left a dense imprint on the place-names of the regions they settled. In the English Danelaw, more than a thousand place-names end in the Old Norse elements -by (“farmstead, village,” as in Grimsby, Derby, Whitby), -thorp (“outlying farm,” as in Cleethorpes, Kirmington), and -thwaite (“clearing,” as in Braithwaite, Linthwaite). Personal names also entered the English onomasticon in large numbers; the English Domesday Book of 1086 records hundreds of Scandinavian personal names. In Normandy, the place-name -ville and the personal name endings -ot and -ulf mark Scandinavian settlement. In Russia, the very name of the country is of Scandinavian origin, and the names of the great cities — Kiev, Novgorod, Smolensk — reflect the Scandinavian origins of the Rus ruling class.

The Economics of the Raids

The Viking raids have often been explained as pure violence, but they had a strong economic logic. The Frankish and English kingdoms of the ninth century were enormously wealthy by Scandinavian standards, with their churches full of gold and silver, their monasteries full of cattle and grain, and their kings able to raise large sums in tribute. The Vikings, by contrast, lived in a relatively poor region with limited manufacturing and limited bullion. Raiding was a way of acquiring the wealth of a wealthier world. The payment of danegeld brought enormous sums of silver into Scandinavia, and the discovery of large hoards of ninth- and tenth-century English and Frankish coins in Scandinavian graves is a direct measure of the importance of this transfer.

The raids were also a way of acquiring status. A successful Viking warband could acquire a fortune in silver, slaves, and fine goods, and the warband leaders became the new aristocrats of a society whose traditional hierarchies were being disrupted by the consolidation of royal power. Many of the great chieftains of the late Viking Age were men who had made their fortunes abroad, and the return home of a wealthy raider was a regular feature of Icelandic and Norwegian saga.

The End of the Viking Raids

The Viking raids did not end all at once. The 980s and 990s saw a fresh burst of Viking activity in Britain, especially under the leadership of Norwegian and Danish warbands, and the early eleventh century saw repeated attacks on England by the Danish kings Swein Forkbeard and Cnut. The last great Viking attack on English soil was Harald Hardrada’s invasion of 1066. The political consolidation of the Scandinavian kingdoms, the adoption of Christianity, and the integration of the Vikings into the wider European world all made raiding less attractive and less profitable.

Conclusion

The Viking raids and expansion were a phenomenon of extraordinary scale and reach. Within three centuries, Norse raiders, traders, and settlers had reached Constantinople in the east, the Mediterranean in the south, and Newfoundland in the west. They had founded kingdoms in England, Normandy, Sicily, and Russia. They had converted to Christianity and joined the Latin Christian commonwealth. They had also, in the process, transformed the language, the laws, and the political institutions of the regions in which they settled. The Viking expansion was one of the most consequential movements of peoples in the early Middle Ages, and its traces are still visible in the modern world.