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These raids continued for the entirety of the Viking Age and Vikings would target monasteries along the coast, raid the towns for their booty, and were known to set fires in their wake. While there is evidence that Viking arson attacks did occur, more recent scholarship has cast doubt on quite how severe the physical damages (rather than their ...
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
One of the sons, Lothair I, had welcomed the support from a Viking fleet. [34] By the time the war had ended, the Vikings had discovered that monasteries and towns situated on navigable rivers were vulnerable to attack. In 845, a raid on Paris was prevented by a large payment of silver to the Vikings.
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As a result, the Vikings set all the buildings of the monastery on fire. The abbey burned down to the ground, "since there was no one left alive to fight the fire". [14] Among the monastery's greatest treasures was one of the most precious relics of Western Christianity, the Sandals of Christ, which were carried to safety before the Viking ...
Medieval monasteries and abbeys were frequently the target of Viking raids because they were wealthy landowners, [3] and stored vast amounts of gold and other precious materials. Vikings plundered abbeys, like Iona Abbey, for riches, food, and even their holy texts—which were, at the time, often inscribed with gold leaf.
The first monastery to be raided was in 793 at Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast, and the first recorded raid being at Portland, Dorset in 789; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described the Vikings as heathen men. [13] Monasteries and minster churches were popular targets as they were wealthy and had valuable objects that were portable. [14]
Unfortunately, there is no record of whether the abbot and the historian are one and the same. The historian had died by the mid-860s. [2] Ermentar records the first Viking raid on continental Europe against his monastery in 799. According to him, from 819 the monks were forced to spend summers on the mainland because of the Vikings.