As an interesting aside, it seems the Vikings were post-apocalyptic.
Recent research indicates that the Fimbulwinter is a reference to the 536-540+ period. Tree rings in Scandinavia shows a distinct lack of growth and archeological evidence shows a horrific collapse in population and development. Humanity seems to have gone extinct in some parts of Scandinavia during the period. Recovery of human populations do not seem to have taken place until around 650 and onwards.
While these has some overlap with the plague of Justinian, no sign of palgue has been found. It seems the plague just backed off Scandinavia at the time going “Nope!”
Actually, a more detailed analysis of the Rurikid haplotype seemed to show that it was a very rare variety of the haplotype that contracts to an area of middle Sweden before the Rurikid dynasty. Was it Jaakko Häkkinen who did the analysis, or did he just write a paper on it? I am on vacation and have poor internet access.
Of course the dating and location raises the intriguing possibility that it could trace back to the “lost nordic nation” of Kvænland.
But that was a minor market, and 10% of England’s population were slaves in 1086 so this was not the case of the Northmen being more evil, just as evil.
Note this is compared to the funding of the first renascence or the establishment of Venice which can be argued to be one of the first steps to the rise of urban-ism in Europe.
No, it is simply a branch off of N1c1/n-m178, which is also my haplogroup, which is very common among the Finns, Karelians, and other Finno-Uric peoples. In Karelia about 60% of the population has a fairly recent common patrilineal ancestor with the Rurikids.
The part of Sweden that you reference above was ethnically and genetically related to those peoples and not the more typical European Swedish groups until the past couple of 100 years. Really the cultural portions changed after Finland was lost to Russia in the 1700s.
This poses a problem for those who subscribe to Nordicism, but yes it is developing rapidly. Everyone wants to be a Viking, and most of these groups historically discriminated against, or looked down on Karelian/Ugric/Finns.
As this is the patrilineal line, which is actually a tiny percentage of actual ancestry but critical to the belief that Rurik was a Viking, or Varangian, prince. Which by it’s nature is patrilineal and the fact that is not true is causing a bit of a crisis of faith among those parties.
It will take some time for some historians to accept the empirical evidence, but that evidence is well established at this point in time that Rurik was not descended from Norse male lines.
Dublin became the largest in 11th century, due to Papal decree and other bans, but was mostly trading captives northwards and the laws England passed in 1102 reduced even that.
I am not saying anyone was being good here, but that is kind of like being the biggest buggy whip manufacture in the 1930’s, the writing was already on the wall (for the Eurasian sourced slaves)
Charlemagne and others traded millions to the near East previous to that time.
There was no single group of the ‘vikings’ and the idea that it was even a single group has more to do with religious intolerance, myths mixed with some eugenics, and a desire to justify a racist “nordic” theory.
While most people don’t use the term that way, perpetuating the myth that these were the same groups, or that they were some specific genetic grouping is false. The Danes knew they could stack Paris because they heard of the success by the Men of Vestfold, and there was no awkward same village drama by Rollo related to these to events. Although I do admit to liking that show.
Yeah, mind the Roman Republic was centered on the actual city of Rome. Only people born within its borders was a citizen, and only if they were born of free Roman mothers I believe. Also women held a limited form of citizenship tied to the citizenship of their family and later husband.
Initially as the Roman Republic accumulated vassal states, these states might have their own sub-governments and their own citizens, but these people were never Roman citizens. Later on, as an instrument to shore up the Republic and bind closer the vassal territories, the Senate would extend “grades” of citizenship with some portion of full Roman Citizenship rights to specific cities/regions at various times, based on various conditions.
This practice continued on into the imperial era. It wasn’t until the 3rd century AD that a Roman Emperor issued a declaration that all non-slaves in the Empire were Roman Citizens, but for the prior ~400 years of Roman history this was just not the case.
In the era of Julius Caesar, the recently conquered Gauls would be seen as essentially subhuman monsters/barbarians, no doubt about it.
Interestingly because of the way Roman citizenship was classified some of the “barbarian” Kings who toppled the empire were actually themselves Roman citizens by law, having been born in the empire itself.
Interesting if true, my understanding has always been that by the 800s the native Celts had all been pushed north into what today is modern Scotland, West into Wales/Cornwall, and modern day England was dominated by the Germanic peoples that had started pushing their way in hundreds of years before. I guess given the region of England we’re talking about (far northern), it isn’t too shocking it would have had significant remaining Celtic peoples.
Oh god, now I’m having flashbacks of third year’s Ant. Hist. module on Africa (the Roman province, not the continent) and cramming the differences between latin, Roman, peregrine legal statuses and the millions of possible exceptions, privileges, local treaties, sub-rules and so forth :smack:. That was a fun exam…
But speaking of, one thing to mos def bear in mind is that “the Roman Empire” is very much a historian’s shorthand. Or, to put it another way, a complete political fiction. There wasn’t anything standardized anywhere in the Empire and every bit of conquered land ; hell every conquered *city *was administered according to treaties and compromises and give-and-takes quid-pro-quos established when that specific piece of land got acquired and how. To add to that, Roman administrators were parachuted into their foreign provinces all the way from Rome with a one year mandate (non-consecutive, I believe ? In theory at least, I know some administrators got extended stays to deal with punctual crises) and they spent most of that one year travelling around the province to meet-and-greet and hold judicial hearings. Also to rake in the moolah, of course.
Suffice to say most of the *actual *legislative, judicial and administrative work was handled by more permanent local clerks - who by and large weren’t Romans (at least not Romans from Rome) and in many cases just ran things the way they’d been running them before the Romans came along.
Just curious, wasn’t the Apostle Paul, born in circa 5 A.D. to a Jewish family in Tarsus (modern day Turkey) a Roman citizen? I know there is little information about his early life and maybe his citizenship was one of these various grades to certain cities. I just thought extending citizenship happened earlier than 300 A.D, but I could be wrong.
I find it unlikely Paul’s father or Paul, Jews from Tarsus, would have had full Cives Romani. To try to keep it brief since this has nothing to do with Vikings:
Initially Roman citizenship was tied specifically to birth within Rome of people not slaves, to existing Roman citizens. (So a Carthaginian trader’s child born in the city was not Roman.)
This meant all territories loyal to the Roman Republic, were essentially tied to Rome by treaties (like you would have with a foreign power.) Each treaty with each ally was different and could entail different rights and privileges. The privilege to vote/hold office in Rome was not ever part of these early Republican treaties.
The Latin War from 340-338 was between Rome and its allies and the Latin League, Rome won and now had undisputed control of most of what is today modern Italy. As a means of keeping people happy Rome created what has been called by historians the “Latin Right”, which was extended to all non-Roman Italian cities allied to Rome before the war, and all the cities from the Latin League conquered during the war (initially they extended full citizenship to only the faithful, non-rebellious cities, but during the war they extended it even to the rebels out of a desire to end the rebellion). The Latin Right was a form of limited Roman citizenship that allowed:
-Right to trade/enter into contracts on equal footing with Roman citizens
-Right to marry, specifically to marry into a full Roman citizen family
-The right to migrate various places and retain this right
While it’s more complicated, in many circumstances (eventually all circumstances) Latin peoples who had the Latin right and moved to Rome, could actually assume full Roman citizenship rights.
Eventually this status became intolerable to the non-Roman Latins. Mind that these people had to provide soldiers to man the legions, had to pay taxes and such, but had no right to vote in Roman elections. They got upset and revolted in the 90s-80s BC, and as a consequence of that Revolt the Romans gave all the Latins South of the River Po full Roman citizenship rights.
Keep in mind the Roman voting system was complex and varied from era to era, it was never “one man one vote”, there were always complexities to it that are too much to talk about here.
Roman non-Italian provinces were frequently given the “Latin Right” in the late Republican period. The Latin Right as mentioned above included significant rights but not the rights to vote or hold office. This right could be granted to entire cities or entire provinces. Sometimes true Cives Romani, full citizenship, was also granted to provincial by specific order to specific people. This was often done to local magistrates or military leaders, to help make them feel like they were part of Rome. Keep in mind that to my knowledge there was no absentee voting, even if you were a full Roman citizen you generally had to live in Rome to vote in Roman elections.
My suspicion is that in the late early imperial period which is when Paul’s father was born (biblical sources tend to indicate it was his father who was a citizen, and are not quite as clear if he actually inherited that citizenship or was just prominent because he was the son of a citizen), I suspect he held a form of the Latin Right, but not the full citizenship.
It was in 212 AD true full citizenship was extended to the entire Empire, albeit with tons of restrictions, limited franchise and etc.
Acts 22:28 has an exchange where a Roman soldier says he bought his citizenship and Paul replies he was a natural born citizen. Looking up that passage on biblehub it says it was extremely probable people born in Tarsus were citizens from a charter from Julius Caesar for who it was named Juliopolis, Tarsus is called a no ordinary city in the wiki article on it.
In the relevant passage of the Book of Acts, when Paul invokes his civil rights as a Roman citizen, the official mentions he paid a lot to become a citizen and Paul answers, I was born one.
The Viking incursions were largely over after 1066 in any case, and the men still sort of viewed as Vikings (like Harald Hardrada) were by then pseudo-Christians, with rapid Christianization under way. I think some of our best sources for information on the pagan marauding Vikings of the 800s-1000s come from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which indeed is a biased source. Pagans in general are not represented well in any Christian texts from the era of Charlemagne through into the 1900s.
By 1066 the Normans were an odd lot, they weren’t really Scandinavian culturally, remember the ruling line was descended from a Scandinavian, and he did bring Scandinavian settlers to his lands, but it was kind of a mashup culture. The Scandinavian rulers intermarried heavily with Frankish/French families and they were speaking their own distinct bastard language at the time (Norman, which later morphed into Anglo Norman in England and then slowly died out.)
Even most of the “Vikings” were Dutch kings that same from the same areas that the Anglo-Saxons had based their invasions from after the departure of Rome.
Some of the invasions in the late 900s were actually people fleeing forced conversions, or failed attempts at forced conversions to Christianity in Denmark and in some cases the limited success by these refugees emboldened the Kings they were fleeing to invade and those invasions are still attributed to the vikings.
Note that Briton had only really been converted in the 700’s so this can be thought of as local warring factions too.
