How the Vikings ran the medieval world’s slave trade

The extraordinary new research into Britain’s richest Viking Age treasure hoard – found in Galloway, southwest Scotland – is shedding fascinating new light on an era of conflict and change.

Around 20 Viking period treasure hoards have so far been discovered in Britain – but most of them were almost certainly buried by the Vikings themselves.

By contrast, the Galloway Hoard appears to have been owned and buried by Anglo-Saxon churchmen – specifically to keep it out of the hands of the Vikings.

The hoard is giving archaeologists and historians a rare glimpse of a community under threat – and the actions they took to protect their most valued possessions.

It demonstrates, archaeologically, at a micro level, the fear that people had of the Vikings.

But, historically, we know that their fears were extremely well-founded.

Although not all Vikings were involved in carrying out raids on defenceless communities, much of the Viking economy was certainly dependent on it.

Although looting gold and silver was a common Viking activity, an even greater pillar of their economy was raiding for human captives – who could then be sold as slaves.

Indeed a mainstay of the Viking economy was slave trading.

Hundreds of thousands of people were seized by Viking raiders from the coasts of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland and northern Germany between around 800 and 1100 AD - and subsequently sold as slaves to customers in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In southern Iraq they were sent to sugar plantations. In Europe, they were set to work on agricultural estates – and in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa they were used as agricultural labour, as slave soldiers and as concubines.

Major Viking slave markets and distribution centres included Dublin, Hedeby (in northern Germany), Birka (in Sweden) and Wolin (in Poland). Other - non-Viking - towns also sometimes profited from the Viking slave trade. Indeed, in England, the city of Bristol originally came into existence as an Anglo-Saxon port importing slaves from the great slave market of Viking Dublin - and exporting slaves to that Irish Viking slave trade entrepot.

The Vikings’ slave-raiding activities were made possible by their superb maritime technology.

They ruled the early medieval seas – and therefore ran the Old World’s medieval slave-raiding and distribution system. In a sense, they were therefore the forerunners of a much later geopolitical power - Britain - which ‘ruled the waves’ and dominated so much of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century.

The people of Galloway (including those who buried the Galloway Hoard) had good reason to fear the Vikings.

Indeed, in the decades before the hoard was buried, very substantial numbers of ordinary people in Britain had been seized by Viking raiders and sold into slavery. Known examples included an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 seized from the coasts of north-west Britain in 870, and a thousand seized from Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 869. Then in the 10th century more raids took place, one of the largest being the seizure of 2000 people from the Anglesey area of Wales in 987.

Viking slave-raiding and slave-trading not only generated huge amounts of income for the Viking world – but also created additional money-making opportunities. One lucrative Viking side-line was, for instance, the ransoming of wealthy captives – who could be sold back to their relatives, thus yielding even more income than those individuals would have fetched on the slave market.

What’s more, raiding turned the Vikings into experienced warriors – and that experience then became a commercial commodity in itself. The English, the French, the Irish and other conventional states greatly valued that experience – and employed Vikings as mercenaries. Indeed, the first official professional paid standing army in the Western European medieval world was a force of Viking mercenaries, employed by the kings of England in the first half of the 11th century.