The Vikings staged their first raid overseas in 793AD, when they attacked Lindisfarne off northeast England and thoroughly looted the island’s abbey.
Raiding throughout Europe
The Vikings went on to maraud their way through France and Spain, assaulting the port of Cadiz in 844AD. Moving on through Italy, they attacked the Balearic Islands and crossed the Mediterranean to raid North Africa.
To their victims, it seemed as if the Vikings, who came mostly from Norway and Denmark, could go wherever and do whatever they wanted. Viking warships staged hit-and-run raids, grabbing loot, loading it onto their vessels and sailing away before their stunned victims could react.
Brilliant Seafarers
One reason why all this became feasible was that the Vikings were superlative sailors. They loved the sea and devised beautiful names for it. One was “the silver necklace of the Earth”, another “the happy place”.
Viking oarsmen achieved astounding speeds, up to a maximum of 15 knots or 17 miles per hour. They were able to make long journeys, not only in the open sea but along rivers.
Vikings Sail European Rivers
They sailed down the River Rhine and the Elbe to plunder rich targets in Germany. Paris was attacked more than once as the Vikings reached the French capital by navigating up the River Seine.
Other Vikings headed up the River Rhone or penetrated deep into northeastern France along the Loire, making for the fabulous booty to be found in the wealthy abbeys of the region.
To the east, Swedish Vikings sailed the length of the great Russian rivers Volkhov, Dneiper and Volga and later staged raids across the Caspian Sea.. The Swedes also circumnavigated Europe, a feat made possible by the very shallow draft of Viking longships.
Doing the “Impossible”
These were remarkable achievements, unique in their time and therefore all the more frightening to people who had assumed that the “impossible” could not be done.
“It was not thought possible that they could have made such a voyage” wrote the scholar Alcuin of York after the Vikings sailed to Lindisfarne, a voyage of some 400 miles across the North Sea in winter, with no landmarks to guide them.
The genius of the Vikings derived from their instinctive understanding of the sea and their ability to read its changing moods like none of their contemporaries were able to do.
Sailing the Open Sea
Most voyages undertaken in their time involved “coast hugging”. But not only could the Vikings navigate out of sight of land, they charted their destinations so accurately that they were only about two per cent off target at landfall, compared to the reckonings of present-day satellites.
They could sail along and clear waterway, such as a river, lake of channel and so reach almost any destination, however remote. No one, it appears, was safe from them. The Vikings even voyaged beyond the immediate boundaries of the world as they knew it, crossing the north Atlantic Ocean to land on Iceland and Greenland as well as Labrador in present-day Canada.
The seas the Vikings crossed to reach these exotic destinations lay in the far northern latitudes of Europe, close to the treacherous Arctic icefields, which did not often provide calm waters or clear weather.
Heavy sea mists, fog, rain or thick overcasts could block out the sky and obscure the Sun or the stars, which the Vikings used as navigational aids.
Navigational Aids
On such days, the Vikings used a “Sun stone” made of Icelandic spar, a calcite mineral sensitive to light. When turned in the direction of the Sun, the spar changed color slightly. So even beneath cloud and fog cover, the “Sun stone” was still able to detect the Sun’s location.
The superior Viking seamanship enabled them to do much more than raid, rob, enslave and then sail home to Scandinavia. Unlike many other pirates, they were seeking land to seize and settle.
Their wide-ranging raids enabled them to view other parts of Europe and beyond, where the land was more fertile, the climate more clement and the long-term prospects for settlement more feasible than they were in their native Scandinavia.
Raiding the British Isles
Luxuriantly fertile England was a prime target, but it was by no means the only one. Ireland, too, had its attractions for Norwegian Vikings. As a center of Christian art and learning, Irish churches and monasteries were a lucrative source of plunder and with its lush green countryside, Ireland was also a promising place for settlement.
By the mid-9th century AD, Viking invaders had established coastal settlements in Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Arklow. At first, they used these bases as winter quarters for hot-and-run raiding on the mainland, using the rivers of Ireland, notably he Shannon.
Viking Foundation of Dublin
Later, though, the coastal settlements became jumping off grounds for campaigns further inland as well as the starting points for more permanent settlement. The most important of these was the one planted in Dublin Bay in 852AD by the joint leaders Ivarr the Boneless, a Dane, and Olaf the White, the son of a Norwegian warlord.
Olaf achieved the best of the deal, becoming king of Dublin in 853AD. Ivarr had to find fresh fields to conquer, but that did not prove difficult. Despite sixty years of regular raiding on England, numerous promising targets remained to be exploited.
Viking Capture of York
In 865AD, together with his brothers Halfdene and Hubba, Ivarr led the Great Heathen Army in the invasion of East Anglia in eastern England.
First, they headed north towards York, which was then the Anglo Saxon city of Eoforwic. Unfortunately for the Anglo Saxons, they were embroiled in a civil war at the time, so facilitating Ivarr’s capture of their city, which was subsequently renamed Jorvik.
Sources
Jones, Gwyn: A History of the Vikings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA 2001) • ISBN-10: 0192801341/ISBN-13: 978-0192801340
Bugge, Alexander: Seafaring and shipping during the Viking ages (Nabu Press, 2010) ISBN-10: 9781176973787/ISBN-13: 978-1176973787/ASIN: 1176973789
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia
Brenda Ralph Lewis - My interest in history dates from childhood. I am presently the author of 120 books and hundreds of articles, all on historical ...
