Throughout the Viking Age, which lasted for 300 years from 800 AD to the 11th century, the Vikings' spirit of adventure and swift ships brought them to great lands. Vikings, Scandinavians from the modern day countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, were great warriors skilled in raiding and looting. But they were also successful merchants and farmers who settled in newly discovered lands. Travel with the Vikings in search of fortune and land from Britain to the North Atlantic and from Russia to the Middle East!
Britain
The first recorded Viking raid took place in 793 AD, when these pagan warriors shocked the Christian inhabitants of England by looting the sacred Lindisfarne monastery off the coast of Northumbria. Financially motivated raids would soon lead to military campaigns with territorial conquest as a goal. In 866, the landing of the largest Viking army yet seen in England -- called the Great Army -- set off a long and bitter war against the Anglo-Saxons for control of England. By 878 the Vikings controlled the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, successfully held off the Vikings. In 885, a treaty of coexistence between the two powers gave the Vikings control of England's north and east -- an area that became known as Danelaw and whose Viking legacy is present to this day in town names.
However, the fight for control of England continued for centuries. The English were able to regain all lands lost to the Vikings by 954. During this time, the Scandinavian warriors terrorized England and demanded danegeld, payment to ensure peace. The English lost control again when the Danish King Svein launched an attack in 1012. His son, Cnut, became the sole ruler of England, but Cnut's death triggered another power struggle. Harold Hardrada, king of Norway, arrived in 1066 to fight for the throne. The English King Harold defeated this Norwegian claimant at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but the struggle for England would rage on. Not long after crushing the Norwegian invasion, Harold would face an historic defeat at the Battle of Hastings by William of Normandy, a Viking descendant who was later crowned king of England and known thereafter as William the Conqueror. The course of British history had forever changed.
France
The earliest Viking raids in France occurred in the beginning of the 9th century in the wealthy coastal towns of Frisia (in modern Belgium and the Netherlands), a territory controlled by the Frankish or Carolingian Empire. When civil war broke out within the Franks' empire, Vikings took advantage of the chaos to mount an unsurpassed campaign of raiding and as in England, demanded large amounts of danegeld. Three large Viking armies ravaged France: the Army of the Loire, the Army of the Somme and the Army of the Seine.
Lasting Viking settlements, however centered in Normandy. Suffering devastating Viking raids, Charles the Simple, a Frankish king, in desperation offered the Vikings a land grant north of his kingdom. This area became known as Normandy. The Vikings there rapidly integrated with the Frankish population, making it difficult for the Frankish kings to reconquer their lost land. Instead, the Normans -- as these Vikings became known -- saw their power steadily increase throughout Europe and reach its zenith with the conquest of England in 1066.
Scotland and Ireland
Like England and France, Scotland and Ireland suffered from seasonal raiding by Vikings along its coasts in the early 800s. In Scotland, Vikings soon settled in the Shetlands and in the Orkneys, where Scandinavian influence would prove lasting; Norn, a Scandinavian dialect, was spoken until the 18th century and many Scandinavian place-names are still used today. Norway ruled the Orkneys until 1468 and the Shetlands until 1468. Although these Scottish lands were sometimes used as jumping-off points for raids on Ireland and England, the Vikings' main occupation here was farming and fishing.
In Ireland, decades after their initial raid in 795, Viking armies began staying the winter, rather than returning home, in order to set up bases for further looting. By the mid-ninth century, Vikings had established small enclaves such as Dublin, which developed into a short-lived Viking kingdom. Although the Irish eventually gained supremacy in Dublin, the Vikings were integrated into the community as merchants, controlling international trade.
North Atlantic
The Vikings who first arrived in the Faeroes -- (meaning "sheep islands") in the early 9th century -- discovered an uninhabited land. Farmers stayed to cultivate the island while still more moved further west to Iceland. By the 860s, large numbers of settlers had arrived and within 60 years an estimated 20,000 Vikings had come to Iceland. The Vikings exploited Iceland's fertile coastal lands including Reykjavik, the country's modern capital. The development of the Althing, a judicial assembly of all the island's free men, was one of the most important aspects of Viking settlement in Iceland. It was a regional Althing that banned explorer Erik the Red, guilty of murder, from Iceland in 980. After banishment, Erik the Red sailed on to a largely unknown land, a territory that this intrepid Viking would call Greenland to attract settlers.
The Vikings' first forays towards North America began with Bjarni Herjolfsson, one of the original Greenland settlers, who was blown off course en route to Greenland and sailed within sight of North America. Bjarni eventually reached Greenland where news of his sightings reached Erik the Red's son, Leif the Lucky. Fifteen years later, in 1000, Leif retraced Bjani's route and discovered Vinland -- what is now called Newfoundland. The name Vinland, meaning "Wine Land", may have come from giant huckleberries that Leif thought were grapes.
Russia and the Middle East
Viking adventures east and south of Scandinavia were carried out by Swedes traveling to the Baltic region, Russia and the Middle East. These Vikings were mostly in search of wealth through trade rather than raids. The Swedish Vikings began their eastward movement in the Baltics, where they traded in the coastal markets of modern day Germany and Poland. They continued south on the Vistula River to the Black Sea where they were within reach of the great riches of the Byzantine Empire. Others opted for a more eastern route that took them through Russia. Vikings, in the East known as Rus, from the Finnish word meaning "Swedes," developed the trading center of Novgorod to become the capital of a Rus state in 860. By 900, the Rus state expanded to the west, into present-day Ukraine, and Kiev, en route to Byzantium, became the capital.
Instead of moving southwards to Byzantium, daring Vikings ventured further east via the Volga River and the Caspian Sea to Central Asia and the Middle East, where they encountered the western route of the Silk Road and large supplies of Arab silver. Trading furs, slaves and walrus ivory, the Vikings hoarded these silver coins -- archaeological finds of over 60,000 Arab coins were later found in Scandinavia and many others in former Viking colonies.
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