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Vikings themselves were expanding; although their motives are unclear, historians believe that scarce resources or a lack of mating opportunities were a factor. [ 90 ] The slave trade was an important part of the Viking economy, with most slaves destined to Scandinavia although many others were shipped east where they could be sold for large ...
Generally, Vikings used axes as weapons due to the lessened amount of iron required for their creations; swords were typically seen as a mark of wealth. Spears were also a common weapon among Vikings. Great amounts of time and artistry were expended in the creation of Viking weapons; ornamentation is commonly seen among them. [159]
Viking Age swords were common in battles and raids. They were used as a secondary weapon when fighting had fallen out of formation or their primary weapon was damaged. While there were many variations of swords, the Vikings used double-edged swords, often with blades 90 centimetres long and 15 centimetres wide. [2]
By this time, only the kingdom of Wessex had not been conquered. In May of 878 Alfred the Great defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Edington, and a treaty was agreed whereby the Vikings were able to remain in control of much of northern and eastern England, a region later known as the Danelaw.
This shows that there were already close contacts between the two peoples, and the Vikings would have been well informed about their targets. [ 14 ] The next recorded attack against the Anglo-Saxons came the following year, in 793, when the monastery at Lindisfarne , an island off England's eastern coast, was sacked by a Viking raiding party on ...
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.
Viking landing at Dublin, 841, by James Ward (1851-1924). Knowledge about military technology of the Viking Age (late 8th to mid-11th century Europe) is based on relatively sparse archaeological finds, pictorial representations, and to some extent on the accounts in the Norse sagas and laws recorded in the 12th–14th centuries.
Donnchadh Ó Corráin is a proponent of this view and claims that a substantial part of Scotland—the Northern and Western Isles and large areas of the coastal mainland—were conquered by the Vikings in the first quarter of the 9th century and that a Viking kingdom was set up there earlier than the middle of the century. [32]