Most people today envision Vikings as battle-hardened marauders, but this caricature doesn’t represent the full picture of these seafaring Scandinavians. While Vikings were certainly elite warriors who amassed wealth through pillaging, they were also masterful merchants. Their trade routes sprawled all throughout Europe and even reached into Asia.
A new study, published in Archaeometry, has revealed the international influence of Viking trade based on a hoard of 9th- and 10th-century silver artifacts that ties Viking Age England to the Middle East. A sizable amount of Islamic silver coinage in the hoard shows that Viking riches weren’t just looted from raids, but also came from dealings outside of their own domain.
The Viking Bullion Economy
When the Vikings began to invade England in the 9th century, they encountered an economic system vastly different from what they were used to. Vikings typically used weighted silver as currency; the silver bullions they exchanged were valued based on their size and weight. The Anglo-Saxons already present in England, on the other hand, used coins of varying values as currency.
Vikings were exposed to all manner of cultural differences as they established trade networks and extended them all the way to Russia and the Middle East. A major source of silver in their bullion economy was the dirham, a coin from the Islamic World that was imported in mass quantities to Northern Europe.
Vikings didn’t exactly use dirham coins as expected, though. They would deliberately cut them into smaller pieces (called hacksilver, a sign of a bullion economy) or fashion them into ornaments.
Read More: Vikings Didn’t Just Raid and Pillage – They Had Diplomacy and Trade Networks, Too
Contents of the Bedale Hoard
The wealth of Vikings — from silver coins and ingots to ornate jewelry — is preserved in hordes that have been dug up across England. The new study is centered around the Bedale hoard, found in 2012 near the small market town of Bedale in North Yorkshire.
The hoard includes 29 silver ingots and several elaborate neck rings, all dating to the late 9th or early 10th century. At the time, the Vikings had ruled over a region of northern England known as Jórvík (or Scandinavian York).
In the study, researchers used a combination of lead isotope and trace element analyses to identify three sources of silver in the Bedale hoard: Western European coinage, Islamic dirhams, and mixed sources reflecting a blend of both. While most of the silver came from Western European coinage, nine of the ingots were geochemically matched to silver minted in the Islamic Caliphate, around modern-day Iran and Iraq.
This silver would have been transported across trade routes that went through Russia to Scandinavia, and it eventually moved to its final destination in England.
“I love to think how Bedale — today a quintessentially English market town in north Yorkshire — was, in the Viking Age, at the heart of a much wider, Eurasian Viking economy,” said study author Jane Kershaw, a professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford, in a statement. “The Vikings weren’t only extracting wealth from the local population, they were also bringing wealth with them when they raided and settled.”
The Complex Viking Trade Network
The researchers also found that Viking metalworkers in Scandinavia and England were refining silver by using locally available lead. In one case, a large neck ring formed from multiple twisted rods is believed to have been crafted in Northern England from a blend of Eastern and Western silver.
The study demonstrates that Vikings weren’t all about looting and pillaging. While this was a notable part of their identity, they also became an economic powerhouse by building such thorough, interconnected trade networks. This is seen in how they were able to acquire silver dirham from the Middle East and integrate it into their own bullion system by cutting, melting, and recasting it.
Read More: Viking Skulls Reveal the Ancient People Were Hardy, but Not Healthy
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