Why did the Age of the Vikings end? Inequality, sex… and Jesus. Let’s go back in time to one of the most bloody and brutal sagas in Europe and beyond.
It was a time when Viking longboats carved with dragons would emerge from the fog, and savage fighters would pillage entire cities. No one was safe from Viking raids, but eventually, this warrior culture disappeared. Where did they go?
What actually happened to the Vikings? Let’s find out. Before we dive deep into the Viking past to uncover what happened, it is important to note that many of the accounts we have on the Vikings and their raids come from people who were on the receiving end of their brutality.
This obviously means that these histories were written with a clear bias. To try and paint a complete picture of the Vikings and what led to their downfall, we will draw from historical sources from both the Vikings themselves and their victims, along with archaeological evidence. By looking at the past through the lens of various sources, we can pinpoint what actually caused the extinction of the Vikings.
Unfortunately, this analysis runs into a major problem right from the beginning. Before going any further, we must discuss who the Vikings were. When we use the term Viking, we are talking about a specific subset of people from Scandinavia, or present-day Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.
But not everyone in this region was a Viking. The origin of the word Viking is unknown. It is believed that it may have originated from the Old Norse word víkingr, which meant “pirate” or “raider.
” Yet, the name Viking seemed only to come into existence sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries. Many scholars believe that the term víkingr may have derived from an even earlier Old Scandinavian word predating or contemporary during the time of the Vikings. Regardless, what we do know is that the Vikings were a specific subset of Scandinavian people who thrived from approximately 790 CE to 1100 CE.
Vikings were both men and women who left their homelands to raid and pillage towns and cities across Europe. Regardless of where the term Viking actually came from, it is essential to understand that not everyone in Scandinavia was a Viking. Instead, only the warriors and raiders who left the Peninsula to ravage communities along the coast and riverways of Europe and as far away as Russia and Constantinople were considered Vikings.
Most Scandinavians were farmers, carpenters, or anything else that contributed to society. The Viking Age lasted from approximately 790 CE to 1100 CE, so this will be the timeframe we will focus on. Knowing this, let's now delve into the history of the Vikings and examine some of their most deadly raids.
We will gather evidence along the way to discover how inequality, the integration of communities through the mixing of people, a. k. a sex, and Christianity, led to the eventual extinction of the Vikings.
There is evidence that sometime around 4000 and 2300 BCE, a thriving culture had developed in Scandinavia. Archaeologists have uncovered depictions of ships in stone, burials, and metal tools and weapons. However, it would still be thousands of years before the raiders known as Vikings would come to be.
The first major step towards the Viking Age was the invention of ships in the style of the Nydam Boat, named after the Nydam bog, where it was located by archaeologists. These vessels allowed the Scandinavian people to travel long distances over rough seas. It is generally agreed that the Viking Age began around 790 CE.
This is because at this point, we have written documents and historical evidence that Scandinavian warriors, also known as Norsemen and who would later be known as Vikings, sailed across the North Sea and landed in Wessex. These rugged-looking men were greeted by a messenger whom they killed. The Norsemen had no desire to exchange ideas and culture; they were in England for one reason and one reason only: to raid.
On June 8, 793, the Vikings attacked St. Cuthbert church at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, England. Ever since Christianity spread across Europe, it was generally accepted by warring armies that Churches and religious institutions were to be left unmolested.
This was because regardless of the holy buildings' territory, they all belonged to the same God. Obviously, the pillaging of church-held land and structures happened occasionally, but it would almost certainly condemn the souls of those who did so to hell, which was a major deterrent for many. On the other hand, the Vikings cared little about the Christian God or the institutions set up to worship him.
This was why when St. Cuthbert church was raided, and the people inside slaughtered or taken as slaves, terror swept across the realm. The survivors of this Viking raid recorded the event in the Domesday Stone, which became one of the first accounts of a Viking raid in history.
However, as time progressed, Christianity would infiltrate Scandinavia, and one of the major factors that led to the end of the Vikings would take hold. In the beginning, the Vikings had no desire to conquer land and claim it as their own. The only goal was to hit a location hard and fast and to return home with ships full of loot and slaves.
In the coming years and decades, the Vikings would continue targeting the British Isles before focusing on the continent. Frankia, or modern-day France and Germany, was ripe for pillaging as the kingdom was experiencing internal turmoil. After paying ransom to the Vikings for the release of prisoners and entire towns, Charlemagne launched an aggressive campaign to try and spread Christianity to the Scandinavians in hopes of minimizing the constant threat of raids.
He organized military campaigns to destroy sacred Norse sites and subdue the heathens who terrorized his lands. Unfortunately, this aggression and forced spreading of Christianity only seemed to enrage the Norsemen and increase Viking activity. Whether these new sets of brutal raids were out of retribution or to take advantage of Frank’s misplaced military forces is unclear.
Charlemagne’s foray into the lands of the Vikings did not have the desired outcome, and very few Scandinavians converted to Christianity during this time. However, it is worth noting that this was the first time the religion had been introduced into Scandinavia in a meaningful way. Even though very few Norsemen were Christianized, some were, and this would set the foundation for a change in ideology when power in the region was consolidated.
In 836, the Vikings launched an enormous raid across the North Sea, past England, and into Ireland. The Vikings' attack on Clonmore, Ireland, was the first deep territorial expedition during which the Vikings took a huge number of prisoners solely to be sold into slavery. Untold numbers of Irish people were captured and brought back to Viking trade ports, where they were sold across Scandinavia.
In 841, the Vikings founded Dublin, one of their first major permanent settlements outside of their own realm. While Ireland was being ravished by the Vikings, a Chieftain by the name of Ragnar Lothbrok set his sights on Paris. If he could take the city, his raiding party would secure untold wealth.
Ragnar recruited thousands of men and launched 120 ships that would sail up the Seine. The Frankish king, Charles the Bald, tried to gather an army to fend off the onslaught of Vikings careening towards the city. When the Frankish soldiers met the Vikings in battle, half of their army was immediately slaughtered, and the remaining soldiers hastily retreated.
By Easter of 845, the Vikings had entered the city. They took anything and everything they wanted, as there was no one to stop them. The Vikings occupied the city and held it for ransom.
Charles was forced to pay 7,000 French livres or about 2,570 kg of gold and silver to get the Vikings to leave Paris and return home. In 850, the Viking raids around Europe began to pick up in intensity. More Viking settlements were also being established in Ireland.
For the first time, a major Viking force remained in England through the winter. The Vikings even began to establish footholds further south and east at Wiskiauten in what would become Germany, where over 500 Viking burial mounds would be constructed. The following year, practically every kingdom in England, minus Wessex, was raided by Vikings.
During this time, the Norsemen conquered East Anglia, Northumberland, and Mercia. By 844, the Vikings had extended their raids of terror as far as Seville in what would become Spain. At that point, this part of Europe was under Arab control.
The Vikings proceeded into the Mediterranean, where new lands were ripe for raiding. However, being so far from home meant that the voyages were long and treacherous. In 859, while Viking raiding parties scoured the Mediterranean coast, an Arab fleet descended upon them, decimating many of their ships.
The Vikings were pushed out of the region and would never return, as their way of life was under siege from both external and internal forces that would cause their culture to collapse in the coming centuries. While some Vikings traveled along the western coast of Europe to reach the Mediterranean, other groups sailed along the rivers and inlets in eastern Europe and what would later become Russia. The Viking Rurik and his band of raiders began plundering towns and villages in Ukraine as early as 859.
In 860, a band of Vikings known as the Rus’ tried to sack Constantinople. On June 18th, a fleet of approximately 200 Rus’ Vikings sailed into the Bosporus Strait and began raiding the villages around Constantinople. They set entire towns on fire and stole whatever they could get their hands on.
It was recorded by Patriarch Photius that the attack on the Byzantines was a surprise, and the coming of the Vikings was "like a thunderbolt from heaven. " Unfortunately for Constantinople, both its army and navy were battling with the Arab empires in Asia Minor. The siege of the city by the Vikings lasted for just under two months when they gave up.
This was likely due to the fact that the city walls were formidable, and the raiding parties had already secured a vast amount of wealth from the areas around Constantinople. It is worth noting that the Viking attack on Constantinople was an early precursor to one of the factors that led to the Vikings' collapse. More and more cities were building fortresses and barricades, which made the once highly successful raids more difficult and costly.
As fortifications became harder to penetrate, the Viking way of life became less and less viable. In 865, Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdan amassed an enormous Viking force, which came to be called the Great Heathen Army. They landed in East Anglia in 865 and launched an invasion across the region.
In November of 866, the Vikings seized York, where Ivar sought revenge for the death of his father, Ragnar Lodbrok. Once York was under their control, the Vikings put a puppet king in place who was quickly overthrown. By 871, King Alfred the Great of Wessex had defeated the Vikings.
They were pushed north to what was called Danelaw, where many Norsemen gave up their marauding ways to become farmers and traders. In situations like this, the once fearsome Vikings integrated into other cultural landscapes. This is also where the sex that led to the disappearance of the Vikings comes into play.
More and more Vikings gave up their life of raiding and pillaging to settle down for a different lifestyle. Instead of forming raiding parties, sedentary communities were formed, and the former Vikings started marrying, procreating, and being integrated into local populations around England and the rest of Europe. However, and destruction in France that the King of West Frankia, named Charles the Simple, gave the great Viking chief Rollo the land that would later become Normandy or the Land of the Northmen.
In exchange, Rollo was to prevent Viking raiders from sailing down the Seine and attacking Frankish towns and cities. This would solve France’s Viking problem for the time being and allow them to build stronger fortifications and more formidable obstacles for invaders in the future. Around 950, the Viking way of life started to stall.
Important trading centers such as Birka in present-day Sweden began to decline. This wasn’t to say that the Scandinavian people were in trouble; on the contrary. Scandinavia itself was just changing.
Power was becoming more consolidated, especially in the southern regions. Christianity had begun to infiltrate and replace the pagan religion that had reigned supreme for so long. Change was coming, and these changes would eliminate the Vikings in just over a century.
In 981, Eric the Red led an expedition past Iceland and scouted the east coast of Greenland. Eric was not impressed by the harsh coast of the large island but was nonetheless determined to establish a settlement there. He determined that a larger exploratory force was needed to assess this new land, especially the western coast.
He returned to Iceland, where he recruited more men and settlers. Eric the Red set off once again in 985, this time with 25 ships, of which only 14 reached the promise of Greenland. The Norsemen established an eastern and western settlement.
These lands were uninhabited, but the island was home to other people. The Inuit had inhabited the northern regions of Greenland, where they had thrived for centuries. As far as we know, there was no contact between the indigenous populations and the Vikings in Greenland.
The Viking settlements would eventually collapse over the course of the next few centuries. Even though King Alfred had forced the Vikings out of Wessex and the Norsemen had settled in Danelaw, England was still not safe from raiding parties. In 991, King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark recruited a massive army that sailed across the North Sea and landed in Kent.
The first major battle of this campaign was the Battle of Maldon. Forkbeard decimated the English resistance and began a bloody campaign across the island. His military conquest was so successful that Sweyn Forkbeard eventually became King of England in 1013, albeit only for about five weeks.
However, during this time, he would be baptized Christian, another step towards the once-great Vikings moving towards a religion that would eventually lead to the extinction of their way of life. Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson led his Viking explorers to the coast of North America. They landed in what is today Newfoundland and declared the newly discovered land as Vinland, or the land of wine.
This Viking colony would last about ten years before it collapsed, likely due to confrontation with indigenous peoples who already inhabited this part of the world. Regardless, Leif Erikson’s voyage made the Vikings, and not Christopher Columbus’s expedition approximately 492 years later, the first Europeans to reach North America. When King Swein Forkbeard died in 1016, his son Cnut took over his rule.
By this point, Cnut was king of England, Denmark, and Norway. Within Scandinavia, power had become more consolidated. When the Viking way of life first emerged, Scandinavian society was more or less egalitarian.
People owned the land they lived on, and although there were chiefs and leaders, most Vikings had the ability to go raiding whenever they wanted. This was no longer the case. The kings would spend more time planning conquests for land or creating alliances than leading raids.
1066 is regarded as the official end of the Viking Age. It was this year that the major Viking trading center of Hedeby was sacked by the Polabian Slavs, from which it never recovered. However, the event that most scholars agree with is the final nail in the Viking coffin, which is the death of Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
Harald Hardrada launched an invasion force from Norway. It is estimated that Hardrada brought between ten and fifteen thousand men on 240 to 300 longships. This force met up with Tostig, the renegade brother of the King of England, Harold Godwinson, and marched south.
The combined Norwegian and rebel forces defeated the English at the Battle of Fulford Gate on the 20th of September. Harold Hardrada’s campaign seemed unstoppable, so he ordered his forces further south. Unfortunately, King Harold Godwinson of England had received word of the Viking forces raiding their way down the countryside and immediately ordered his army and 3,000 elite troops to march north to meet them.
As the two armies drew closer, Hardrada took York on September 24th. However, this meant that his men had been traveling dozens of miles a day and fighting in battles when English forces reached them. The invading forces of Hardrada were caught by surprise when the English troops appeared in an open field near Stamford Bridge.
The two armies clashed on September 25, 1066, but the exhausted Vikings and their allies were worn down while the English troops were still fresh. King Harold Godwinson and his forces decimated the Viking army, and both Hardrada and Tostig were killed. A chronicler noted that the fighting at the Battle of Stamford Bridge had been so brutal that the river was filled with the bodies of dead soldiers and that the carnage "dyed the ocean waves for miles around with Viking gore.
" The defeat of the Norwegian forces and Hardrada marked the end of the Viking Age. That being said, there were still smaller Viking raids occasionally. So, what happened to those Scandinavians who wanted to continue the Viking way of life?
Where did they go? Are the Vikings really extinct, or are they still around today? Throughout the history provided for the Vikings, we’ve discussed the raiders who left Scandinavia and all of the farmers, weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, etc.
, who lived there to sail around Europe, Britain, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and parts of the Mediterranean to plunder and pillage precious metals, livestock, and people. We have also mentioned the influences outside forces, such as Christianity, and internal forces, such as less egalitarianism, had on the Scandinavian people. We now need to analyze these various factors to understand how the Viking culture itself went extinct.
The changing of Scandinavian society from egalitarianism to a more central authority meant that the Vikings went from owning their own land and keeping much of what they pillaged to owing the King more and more tribute. With an increasing population, Scandinavians found themselves spending more time farming or engaging in activities to appease the central authority of the region than joining a raid on faraway lands. As the population grew and power was consolidated, there was a real risk that if a Viking left to go raiding, there was no guarantee that their home would still be theirs when they returned.
Unless a Viking was joining the King’s conquest of new land, the days of just joining a raiding party were quickly coming to an end. The raids that did happen were much more organized than a band of like-minded individuals setting out to steal and plunder loot. With Kings gaining more power and encompassing more land, alliances needed to be taken into consideration.
The Vikings could no longer go and raid wherever they chose. If they happened to attack a town that belonged to their King’s ally, there would be severe consequences. As time progressed, lucrative raids became all but impossible unless the Vikings were willing to travel vast distances.
On top of this, fortifications were becoming more formidable, meaning that the Vikings were having a harder time making a profit and securing goods during their raids. As Scandinavian society shifted, the Viking way of life became less viable, and the number of individuals engaging in raids, which in turn is what made them Vikings, dwindled. A second factor that led to the extinction of the Vikings was sex, or more specifically, marrying, having children, and creating family ties amongst the people who originally inhabited the lands where Vikings were permanently settling.
Outposts in Ireland and England slowly began to lose their Viking identity and either saw themselves as descendants of the once fearsome warrior culture or just became fully enmeshed in the already existing cultures of the region. Eventually, each permanent settlement the Vikings established outside of Scandinavia became independent of the Viking way of life. The number of people in Scandinavia grew, but the Vikings never tried or wanted to create an empire to spread their ideologies.
This wasn’t the goal. Instead, the Vikings solely focused on raiding and bringing their loot back home to live a comfortable life in Scandinavia. The permanent settlements elsewhere were never established to spread Viking culture; they were built to act as trade centers or as a way to move further from the constant fighting and raiding and live a simpler, more sedentary life.
All of these populations would eventually mix with others. Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to the decline and eventual disappearance of the Vikings was Christianity. Norse mythology was one of the last major pagan religions to withstand the spread of Christianity across Europe.
Much of the continent had already been converted, and with every decade that passed in the Viking Age, attempts were made to bring Christianity to the Scandinavians in order to save their mortal souls. The main problem with Christianity for the Vikings was that the moral values didn’t quite align with looting and pillaging to gain wealth when followers of the religion were supposed to “love thy neighbor as they self. ” Therefore, the Vikings had very little use for Christianity except to plunder whatever valuable objects were held within their churches and monasteries.
However, in the 10th and 11th centuries, more and more missionaries ventured into the Viking homeland. They had mild success converting people initially, but eventually, the newly forming Scandinavian elite and central powers were convinced that Christianity was the way of the future. As power in Scandinavia was consolidated, the rulers forced their subjects to follow the Christian religion and belief systems.
Therefore, Christianity was no longer being introduced from outside the Viking homeland but from within, which meant it replaced the Norse gods and beliefs that drove the Vikings for hundreds of years. At the same time, Vikings were coming into contact with Christians throughout their travels. Sometimes, this was to pillage and sell them into slavery, but other times, it could be through trade or even in defeat.
As raiding became more difficult, it is not hard to imagine Vikings taking notice of the strength and resources Christians had obtained to combat raiding parties. When Vikings went to sell their hard-earned loot at major trading ports, Christians were there to purchase their plunder. By the end of the Viking Age, Christians were everywhere, and the Viking culture and religion were becoming obsolete because of it.
Eventually, Christianity enveloped much of Scandinavia. The kings were Christian, their subjects were Christian, and everyone else around Europe was Christian. The pagan beliefs of the Vikings were being snuffed out like a candle reaching the end of its wick.
Christian values did not coincide with the Viking way of life and, therefore, could not co-exist as more Scandinavians identified as Christians less saw themselves as Vikings until the entire Viking lifestyle vanished. This is not to say that the Scandinavian identity disappeared; on the contrary, Scandinavian kingdoms continued to grow and flourish. The Scandinavians who settled abroad integrated their own cultures into others, and at home, beliefs shifted.
The Vikings had spread Scandinavian architecture, language, military practices, food, clothing, and shipbuilding across Europe during their raids and trade ventures. The Viking Age ended in 1066, and the Viking way of life likely ended soon after, but the legacy of the Vikings and the spread of Scandinavian culture across Europe endures to the present day. Now watch “What Caused the Roman Empire to Collapse.
” Or check out “How Richest City in History Collapsed.
