Viking expansion
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries. To the west, Vikings under Leif Erikson reached North America and set up a short-lived settlement in present-day L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. Longer lasting and more established Norse settlements were formed in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ireland, Normandy and Sicily.
Motivation for expansion
There is much debate among historians about what drove the Viking expansion. Researchers have suggested that Vikings may have originally begun seeking out women from foreign lands. The concept was expressed in the 11th century by historian Dudo of Saint-Quentin in his semi-imaginary History of The Normans. Rich and powerful Viking men tended to have many wives and concubines, and these polygynous relationships may have led to a shortage of eligible women for the average Viking male. Thus the average Viking man could have been forced to perform riskier actions to gain wealth and power to be able to find suitable women. Viking men would often buy or capture women and make them into their wives or concubines. Polygynous marriage increases male-male competition in society because it creates a pool of unmarried men who are willing to engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behaviors. The Annals of Ulster states that in 821 the Vikings plundered an Irish village and "carried off a great number of women into captivity".Raiding parties offered not only the opportunity for violence and wealth, but also the chance to be noticed by their peers and superiors. They offered the opportunity to build a reputation for skill, reliability, cunning, or courage. Just as raiding leaders had more to gain than just material wealth, their followers could also gain intangible social capital by participating. File:Evariste-Vital Luminais - Pirates normands au IXe siècle.jpg|alt=|thumb|328x328px|A depiction of Vikings kidnapping a woman. Viking men often kidnapped foreign women for marriage or concubinage from lands that they had pillaged. Illustrated by French painter Évariste Vital Luminais in the 19th century.Another theory is that it was a quest for revenge against continental Europeans for past aggressions against the Vikings and related groups, such as Charlemagne's Saxon Wars in which he forced pagans to convert to Christianity by killing any who refused to become baptized. Those who favor this explanation point out that the penetration of Christianity into Scandinavia caused serious conflict and divided Norway for almost a century. However, the first target of Viking raids was not the Frankish Kingdom but Christian monasteries in England. According to historian Peter Sawyer, these were raided because they were centers of wealth and their farms well-stocked, not because of any religious reasons.
A different idea is that the Viking population had exceeded the agricultural potential of their homeland. This may have been true of western Norway, where there were few reserves of land; however, it is unlikely that the rest of Scandinavia was experiencing famine. Some scholars propose that the Viking expansion was driven by a youth bulge effect: Because the eldest son of a family customarily inherited the family's entire estate, younger sons had to seek their fortune by emigrating or engaging in raids. Peter Sawyer suggests that most Vikings emigrated due to the attractiveness of owning more land rather than the necessity of having it. However, no rise in population, youth bulge, or decline in agricultural production during this period has been definitively demonstrated. Nor is it clear why such pressures would have prompted expansion overseas rather than into the vast, uncultivated forest areas in the interior of the Scandinavian Peninsula, although perhaps emigration or sea raids may have been easier or more profitable than clearing large areas of forest for farm and pasture in a region with a limited growing season.
A decline in the profitability of old trade routes may have driven the Vikings to seek out new, more profitable ones. Trade between western Europe and the rest of Eurasia may have suffered after the Roman Empire lost its western provinces in the 5th century, and the expansion of Islam in the 7th century may have reduced trade opportunities within western Europe by redirecting resources along the Silk Road. Trade in the Mediterranean was at its lowest level in history when the Vikings began their expansion. The Viking expansion opened new trade routes in Arab and Frankish lands, and they took control of trade markets previously dominated by the Frisians after the Franks destroyed the Frisian fleet. One of the main aims of the Viking expansion throughout Europe was to acquire and trade silver. Bergen and Dublin are still important centres of silversmithing. An example of a collection of Viking-age silver for trading purposes is the Galloway Hoard.
Pagans from Eastern Europe came to be the most popular targets for slavery in both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Arab world during the Early Middle Ages, where they were forced to convert to Christianity and Islam respectively after their enslavement. The Vikings trafficked European slaves captured in Viking raids in Eastern Europe in two destinations from present day Russia via the Volga trade route; one to slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East via the Caspian Sea, the Samanid slave trade and Iran; and one to the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean via Dnieper and the Black Sea slave trade. During the 8th to 10th centuries, slaves from Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea were traded to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dnieper and Volga river systems, the Carolingian Empire and Venice. The slaves may have also been transported to Hedeby or Brännö and then transported through the Volga trade route to Russia, where slaves and furs were sold to Muslim merchants in exchange for Arab silver dirham and silk, which have been found in Birka, Wollin and Dublin; initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Khaganate, but from the early 10th-century onward it went via Volga Bulgaria and from there by caravan to Khwarazm, to the Samanid slave market in Central Asia and finally via Iran to the Abbasid Caliphate.
One of the reasons Kievan Rus' came to be was that Scandinavian settlers established themselves and traded with captured slaves. Arabic merchants from the Caspian Sea and Byzantine merchants from the Black Sea brought their goods to the trade markets in Rus', where they met the Viking traders and warriors known as Varangians, and they traded their goods for the slaves captured by the Vikings in Eastern Europe. The Viking slave trade was the source of the Arab dirham silver hoards found in Scandinavia and functioned from at least 786 until 1009, when such coins have been found there. The silver would have been so lucrative that it contributed to the continuing Viking raids, which was used by the Vikings as a slave supply source for this trade with the Islamic world. Such hoards include the Spillings Hoard and the Sundveda Hoard.
Settlement demographics
Viking settlements in Ireland and Great Britain are thought to have been primarily male enterprises; however, some graves show nearly equal male/female distribution. Disagreement is partly due to method of classification; previous archaeology often guessed biological sex from burial artifacts, whereas modern archaeology may use osteology to find biological sex, and isotope analysis to find origin. The males buried during that period in a cemetery on the Isle of Man had mainly names of Norse origin, while the females there had names of indigenous origin. Irish and British women are mentioned in old texts on the founding of Iceland, indicating that the Viking explorers were accompanied there by women from the British Isles who either came along voluntarily or were taken along by force. Genetic studies of the population in the Western Isles and Isle of Skye also show that Viking settlements were established mainly by male Vikings who mated with women from the local populations of those places.However, not all Viking settlements were primarily male. Genetic studies of the Shetland population suggest that family units consisting of Viking women as well as men were the norm among the migrants to these areas. This may be because areas like the Shetland Islands, being closer to Scandinavia, were more suitable targets for family migrations, while frontier settlements further north and west were more suitable for groups of unattached male colonizers.
British Isles
England
During the reign of King Beorhtric of Wessex, three ships of "Northmen" landed at Portland Bay in Dorset. The local reeve mistook the Vikings for merchants and directed them to the nearby royal estate, but the Vikings killed him and his men. On 8 June 793, "the ravages of heathen men miserably desecrated God's church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter". According to the 12th-century Anglo-Norman chronicler Symeon of Durham, the raiders killed the resident monks or threw them into the sea to drown or carried them away as slavesalong with some of the church treasures. In 875, after enduring eight decades of repeated Viking raids, the monks fled Lindisfarne, carrying the relics of Saint Cuthbert with them.In 794, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a small Viking fleet attacked a rich monastery at Jarrow. The Vikings met with stronger resistance than they had expected, and their leaders were killed. The raiders escaped, only to have their ships beached at Tynemouth and the crews killed by locals. This represented one of the last raids on England for about 40 years. The Vikings focused instead on Ireland and Scotland.
In 865, a group of hitherto uncoordinated bands of predominantly Danish Vikings joined to form a large army and landed in East Anglia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes this force as the mycel hæþen here and states that it was led by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson. The army crossed the Midlands into Northumbria and captured York. In 871, the Great Heathen Army was reinforced by another Danish force known as the Great Summer Army led by Guthrum. In 875, the Great Heathen Army split into two bands, with Guthrum leading one back to Wessex, and Halfdan taking his followers north. Then in 876, Halfdan shared out Northumbrian land south of the River Tees amongst his men, who "ploughed the land and supported themselves", founding the territory later known as the Danelaw.
Most of the English kingdoms, being in turmoil, could not stand against the Vikings, but King Alfred of Wessex defeated Guthrum's army at the Battle of Edington in 878, resulting in the Treaty of Wedmore and then the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum in 886. These treaties formalised the boundaries of the English kingdoms and the Viking Danelaw territory, with provisions for peaceful relations between the English and the Vikings. Despite these treaties, conflict continued on and off. However, Alfred and his successors eventually drove back the Viking frontier and retook York.
A wave of Vikings appeared in 947, when Erik Bloodaxe captured York. The Viking presence continued through the reign of the Danish prince Cnut the Great, after which a series of inheritance arguments weakened the hold on power of Cnut's heirs. When King Edward the Confessor died in 1066, Harald Hardrada of Norway challenged his successor as King of England, Harold Godwinson. Hardrada was killed, and his Norwegian army was defeated by Harold Godwinson on 25 September 1066 at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Godwinson died when William the Conqueror defeated the English army at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. William was crowned king of England on 25 December 1066; however, it was several years before he was able to bring the kingdom under his complete control. In 1070, Danish King Sweyn Estridsson sailed up the Humber with an army in support of Edgar Ætheling, the last surviving male member of the English royal family. However, after capturing York, Sweyn accepted a payment from William to desert Edgar. Five years later one of Sweyn's sons set sail for England to support another English rebellion, but it had been crushed before the expedition arrived, so they settled for plundering the city of York and the surrounding area before returning home.
In 1085, Sweyn's son Canute IV of Denmark planned a major invasion of England, but the assembled fleet never sailed. No further serious Danish invasions of England occurred after this. Some raiding occurred during King Stephen's reign, when King Eystein II of Norway took advantage of the civil war to plunder the east coast of England, where they sacked Hartlepool, County Durham and Whitby, Yorkshire in 1152. These raids marked the conclusion of the Viking Age in England.