From the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to Baghdad's silver, the walls of Constantinople and a camp in Newfoundland: how far the Norse travelled, and how they reached North America five centuries before Columbus.
Stop 01 · 8th century
Ships From the North
In the 700s, Scandinavia was a land of farmers, chieftains and small kingdoms, with trading towns such as Hedeby, at the neck of Jutland, and Birka, on an island in Lake Mälaren, founded around 750. Its people had one great advantage: the longship, a flexible clinker-built hull driven by oars and a woollen sail, light enough to cross open sea and shallow enough to row far up rivers. Why the raids began is still argued over: the lure of rich, poorly defended monasteries and towns, upheaval at home, and perhaps too many young men without land, though historians disagree over how much population pressure mattered. Contemporaries mostly called them Northmen or Danes; in Old English, wicing simply meant a pirate.
In the 700s, Scandinavia was a land of farmers, chieftains and small kingdoms, with trading towns such as Hedeby, at the neck of Jutland, and Birka, on an island in Lake Mälaren, founded around 750. Its people had one great advantage: the longship, a flexible clinker-built hull driven by oars and a woollen sail, light enough to cross open sea and shallow enough to row far up rivers. Why the raids began is still argued over: the lure of rich, poorly defended monasteries and towns, upheaval at home, and perhaps too many young men without land, though historians disagree over how much population pressure mattered. Contemporaries mostly called them Northmen or Danes; in Old English, wicing simply meant a pirate.
Four years earlier, three ships from Hordaland in Norway had landed at Portland in Dorset, and their crews killed the king's reeve who came to meet them. But the raid of 8 June 793 on Lindisfarne, a tidal island off Northumbria and a great centre of Celtic Christianity, shocked the Christian west. Monks were killed, drowned in the sea or carried off as slaves with the church treasures. The Northumbrian scholar Alcuin, at Charlemagne's court, wrote that such terror had never been seen in Britain. It is the traditional start of the Viking Age. Iona and the north coast of Ireland were raided in 795, and by the mid-800s Norwegians had settled the Orkneys, Shetland and Hebrides.
Raids became conquests. In 841 the Norse built a fortified ship camp, a longphort, at Dublin, which grew into a busy slave-trading port. In March 845 a fleet of about 120 ships under a chief the Franks called Reginherus rowed up the Seine and plundered Paris at Easter; Charles the Bald paid 7,000 pounds of silver and gold to make them go. In 865 the Great Heathen Army landed in East Anglia, took York in November 866, and overran Northumbria, East Anglia and much of Mercia. Only Wessex held out: Alfred the Great won at Edington in May 878, and the north and east became the Danelaw. When Vikings besieged Paris again in 885–86, its walls held.
In 844 a Viking fleet raided Asturias, held Muslim Lisbon for 13 days, then sailed up the Guadalquivir and took Seville in early October. Emir Abd al-Rahman II of Córdoba sent an army that crushed the raiders at Talyata in November; Muslim sources say 500 to 1,000 were killed, hundreds captured and 30 ships burned. Córdoba then built a fleet and coastal defences, and Vikings found al-Andalus far better guarded than Francia or England. In 859–861 Björn Ironside and Hastein led 62 ships through the Strait of Gibraltar, raiding Algeciras, Nekor in Morocco, the Balearics and the Rhône valley, then Italy, where they sacked the town of Luna, by legend mistaking it for Rome.
Swedish Norse crossed the Baltic and followed the great rivers of eastern Europe, trading furs and slaves for silver. Called Rus' and Varangians, they founded or ruled towns such as Ladoga, Novgorod and Kyiv. According to the Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1113, Rurik was invited to rule Novgorod in 862, and his kinsman Oleg later seized Kyiv. Down the Dnieper they reached the Black Sea, and on 18 June 860 about 200 Rus' ships fell on the suburbs of Constantinople while the emperor and his fleet were away. Later, in 988, Vladimir of Kyiv sent 6,000 warriors to Emperor Basil II; they became the core of the Varangian Guard, the emperors' axe-bearing bodyguard.
Another route ran up the Volkhov, over a short portage and down the Volga, through the lands of the Volga Bulgars to Atil, the Khazar capital near the Caspian Sea. From there, the geographer Ibn Khordadbeh wrote around 885, Rus' merchants crossed the sea to meet traders from the Abbasid Caliphate, and sometimes carried their goods on by camel to Baghdad. In 922 Ibn Fadlan, secretary to the caliph's embassy to the Volga Bulgars, watched Rus' traders camped by the river: tall, tattooed, never without axe, sword and knife. He also described a chieftain's funeral on a burning ship. Silver flowed north in return: the island of Gotland alone has yielded more Arab dirhams than anywhere else in western Eurasia.
In 911 Rollo, a Viking leader who had been at the siege of Paris in 885, was beaten back from the walls of Chartres. That autumn the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted him the land around Rouen, at the mouth of the Seine; in return Rollo was baptised, swore loyalty and promised to defend the river against other Vikings. The grant grew into Normandy, 'land of the Northmen'. Within a few generations the Normans spoke French, and they set off on conquests of their own. Norman knights crossed from Calabria to Sicily in 1061, and Rollo's descendant William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey on 28 September 1066 and defeated and killed King Harold at Hastings on 14 October.
Norse sailors went west over the open ocean. They settled the Faroe Islands in the early 800s, and from about 874 Iceland, where tradition says Ingólfr Arnarson made his home at Reykjavík; the 12th-century Íslendingabók claims a few Irish monks were already there and left. By 930 most of the land was claimed, and the chieftains met at Þingvellir in an assembly, the Althing. Around 982 Erik the Red, outlawed for three years after a string of killings, sailed west and explored Greenland. He returned in 985 or 986 with 25 ships of settlers, of which 14 arrived. Estimates of the settlements' peak population run from about 2,000 to 10,000, with recent work favouring the lower figure.
Around 1000, Erik's son Leif Erikson sailed from Greenland to lands to the west and south. The Icelandic sagas, written down in the 13th century, name three: Helluland ('land of flat stones', probably Baffin Island), Markland ('land of forests', probably Labrador), and Vinland, where, they say, grapes grew. In the 1960s, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad excavated a Norse camp at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland: eight sod buildings, an iron smithy and a workshop for repairing boats. Tree rings in its timber show wood was cut there in 1021. The Norse called the peoples they met Skrælingar. They did not stay; the settlements in North America were short-lived.
By the 1000s, the Scandinavian kingdoms were becoming Christian monarchies like the rest of Europe; Harald Bluetooth had declared Denmark Christian around 965, and Cnut the Great ruled England, Denmark and Norway together from 1028. Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, had spent 15 years in exile in Kyiv and as commander of the Byzantine emperor's Varangian Guard. In September 1066 he invaded England with some 300 ships, beat the northern earls at Fulford outside York, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. That battle is often taken as the end of the Viking Age. The Greenland settlements survived until the 1400s, then vanished; the last written record of them is a wedding at Hvalsey church in 1408.
BattlesStamford Bridge, 1066 · Fulford, 20 September 1066