Viking expansion was the process by which Norse Vikings, explorers, and traders travelled far and wide to the British Isles, North America, the North Atlantic, Western and Eastern Europe, and parts of Southern Europe and North Africa to pillage, settle, or serve as mercenaries. The Norse established lasting settlements in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the British Isles, Normandy, and Russia, while they briefly settled in Newfoundland in North America. The era began with the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and ended with Harald Hardrada's defeat and death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.
Background[]
With tillable land scarce in Scandinavia, those without suffered. No land meant no livelihood - and more prosperous societies were there for the taking. The peoples of Scandinavia lived as farmers, keeping cattle, sheep, and pigs, and growing crops, but land was at a premium. Much of the interior was mountainous, so people clustered around the coasts and the pressure on arable areas was intense. Landless men without prospects at home set out to prey on other, more successful, civilizations. To the extent that, initially at least, they were impelled by environmental factors, the Vikings can be compared with earlier raiders like the Huns.
Era[]
On 8 June 793, the great monastery on Lindisfarne, an island off England's Northumbrian coast, was sacked and pillaged in the first known Viking raid. As the monk Alcuin of York reported: "Never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. The Church of St. Cuthbert has been spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plunderings of the pagans." Unfortunately, such terrible, nightmarish scenes were to recur only too frequently as Viking raids became a fact of life.
Seafaring adventurers[]
Monastic houses were a favorite target—they had rich treasures, isolated settings, and helpless inhabitants—but ordinary towns and villages also fell prey to the brutal invaders. Danish Vikings sailed back and forth across the North Sea to eastern England. Vikings from Norway, though, took a more westerly course, stopping off at the islands of Orkney and Shetland en route for Ireland with its ancient monasteries. Vikings established bases at Dublin and along the Seine and Loire rivers in France where they could wait out the winter, ready to resume raiding with the onset of spring. The Vikings were skilled seafarers. While some headed westward across the Atlantic, setting up colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and ultimately North America, others explored the warmer waters of the south. The 9th century saw raids along the coasts of Spain, Morocco, and even the Canary Islands. Swedish Vikings, meanwhile, had ventured to the Black Sea.
Ambitious incursions[]
In 860 Vikings raided Constantinople. However, they primarily came to the Byzantine metropolis in peace in order to find a market for the slaves they had captured on their journey south. In fact, they brought so many Eastern European captives to the city for sale that the Greek word sklabos (Slav) was adopted as the general word for "slave." Many Vikings hired themselves out to the Byzantines as mercenaries, forming an elite unit, the Varangian Guard. Increasingly, war-parties banded together for more ambitious raids. In 991 a fleet of over 90 longships appeared off the coast of Folkestone in southeast England. It landed an army of up to 3,000 men -including both Norwegian and Danish Vikings. Marching up to Maldon in Essex, a trail of destruction in their wake, they finally defeated an Anglo-Saxon militia force led by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth. The invaders soon withdrew on payment of a large ransom but not before the Anglo-Saxon leader was killed.
Warrior kingdoms[]
The Vikings were not just raiders, they were also highly formidable in larger-scale, static warfare - though they were always individualistic in their fighting style. Their battle-axes, swords, and circular, hide-covered wooden shields were items of immense prestige—often beautifully worked and richly adorned—while their owners had intimidatory war names (Eric Bloodaxe; Bjorn Ironside; Ragnar Hairy-Breeks) and had heroic poems composed about them by their bards. Men who came as raiders began to stay as settlers, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 876 records: "In this year Halfdan shared out the lands of Northumbria, and they started to plow and make a living for themselves." The Vikings were beginning to behave more like conventional conquerors. In the late 9th century Olav Tryggvason made a kingdom out of Norway, while early in the 11th century King Cnut the Great joined Norway and Denmark with England to form a Nordic empire.
Norsemen to Normans[]
Meanwhile, Norwegian Vikings or Norsemen (the name "Normans" comes from Norsemen) had started to put down permanent roots in France, adopting the language, culture, and Christian religion. The Normans kept their longships but took up the French way of fighting, most obviously in their use of armor and heavy cavalry, as the events of 1066 would show. On 28 September of that year, certain the English throne was his, William of Normandy (the Conqueror) launched a fleet of 700 ships, landing a formidable army on England's south coast. King Harold's English army had been forced to march from Yorkshire, where just days before it had fought off Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king.
On 14 October, Harold ranged his troops at the top of Senlac Hill, near Hastings. William ordered his forces to feign retreat before Harold's Anglo-Saxon army. The ploy enticed the English down from their advantageous position to the boggy ground below, where they were at the mercy of William's cavalry. Even so, the struggle continued for hours, and might easily have ended differently had Harold not fatally fallen. By nightfall, victory for William was complete, and the English throne was his. Another Norman was meanwhile establishing himself in Italy. In the 10305 Norman armies had gone to assist the Byzantines, who had wanted to rid their westernmost possessions of Arab usurpers. Having arrived as mercenaries, the Normans came back as conquerors, wresting these vulnerable territories from Byzantine rule. It was Robert Guiscard who won what turned into an unseemly struggle of Norman warlords, and carved out a kingdom for himself in Sicily and southern Italy.