Hi
Is there any evidence to support the view that Viking raids on various European coasts and waterways were revenge attacks for the pillaging/plunder committed by Europeans during the Crusades?
I look forward to your feedback
Viking raids on Northern Europe began hundreds of years before the first Crusade. The Vikings may not have been Christians but they were certainly not Muslim.
I wonder what made you ask this? I can’t imagine the logic behind it. I’m not trying to be snarky as I know you like to ask specific, well-grounded historical questions, but this one seems way out there.
I also have never heard of this rather leftfield view. However, I did see this in the news the other day:
Why did Vikings have ‘Allah’ embroidered into funeral clothes?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41567391
OB
Here’s a quote. I don’t have the link. but it should be easy to find. I suspect a lot of it is rubbish. Which parts are the most egregious? The part of deliberately building churches over heathen sites as a pretext for raiding?
“Exaggerating Atrocities
“Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race. … Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.”
So wrote St. Alcuin of York
But it was also in the interest of the churchmen to exaggerate the atrocities of the Viking raiders in their reports. Many of the Christian rulers at the time behaved equally unpleasantly or worse, without being condemned on religious grounds.
Many scholars are now coming to believe that the Viking Age of conquest and plunder was a desperate and furious form of pre-emptive self-defense against further Christian encroachment of their ancestral tribal lands and over 300 years of religious wars and genocide at the hands of ruthless Christian kings. This Guerrilla War by heathen freedom-fighters against the encroaching tyranny of Catholic France, was merely a Sea-based continuation and broadening of the Frisian & Saxon wars of 690-804.
Many Catholic monasteries were often intentionally built on top of pre-existing Heathen holy sites. Therefore, sacking and burning them to the ground was retribution, not wanton destruction. Catholic monasteries, backed by the powers of the state, pillaged the countryside through tithes and taxes that bled to the people dry. It was from those very taxes and tithes that the Christians funded all the mercenaries in Charlemagne’s crusading army. The Vikings “plundering” those monasteries were merely “stealing back” what had been taken. As an act of self preservation, the Vikings had to steal that gold from the monasteries - lest that gold pay mercenaries to raid, rape and pillage more of their home lands!”
Later on, Scandinavian countries — not to mention the Normans — were very prominent crusaders.
Monasteries didn’t do much taxing. Tithes, as much as they existed in that period, would have as in later centuries gone to the state church, running priests and parishes.
I am not a christian, and I have considerable sympathy for Norse religion, but this is simply anti-christian propaganda. Certainly in that age all sides were utterly vicious in warfare, just as others were in the Near East and Ancient China from pre-history to around 1500 AD; but to suggest our northern ancestors acted out of idealism, not normal robbery with violence would have annoyed them greatly
That quote is littered with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and chronological absurdities. It’s true, for instance, that many Christian sites were located at previously-sacred pagan sites, but they were sacred to the people who were converted to Christianity, not to the Vikings who arrived a couple of hundred years later from an entirely different country, and most likely neither knew nor cared about the history of the settlements they raided, and probably had no preferences as between the competing religious traditions of the places they were attacking. Similarly, the notion that the Vikings were raiding monasteries to take back taxes that had been levied on them by Christians is without foundation; Christian rulers taxed their own subjects, not the Viking raiders. Likewise, the notion that they took gold from monasteries to prevent it being used to pay armies that would attack them doesn’t stand up; wealth which has been given to a monastery is not available to be given a second time to an army. Even a powerful feudal lord has finite wealth, and every groat he gives to a monk is a groat he cannot give to a mercenary.
You can overthink these things. The Vikings attacked monasteries for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks; because that’s where the money is.
Vikings had Allah embroidered on their clothes for the same reason they had Chinese silks and Byzantine coins - they were widely travelled and also at the time goods were traded much more widely than most people think. There’s no need to postulate Muslim Vikings.
TheEuropean Crusades were against pagans, and largely post-date the Viking age - and were often Scandinavians fucking up other Baltic people.
There is a theory (the Ideological Model) that an impetus for the raids was a response to Charlemagne’sSaxon Wars. But it’s not the best one IMO. And anyway, the Saxon Wars were not a Crusade .
There is absolutely nothing to back up the assertion in the OP. Even if the “Allah” motif is true (there some doubt) , there no evidence at all the Islam was common among Vikings (they raided and traded all over the know world so had artifacts from all the major cultures), and the timing makes no sense at all (the first viking invasions were contemporary to the Arab invasions, not the Turkish invasions that triggered the crusades)
By the time of the first crusade, the vikings (along with other Germanic northern Europeans) were well established as the elite imperial bodyguard of the Byzantine empire the Varangain Guard. So would have actively fought against the Turks in that period (along with other enemies of the Byzantines).
One interesting footnote is after the Norman Conquest of England, many exiled Anglo Saxons ended up in the Varangian Guard, so there was a re-run of Battle of Hastings years later when the Normans and Byzantines fought in the Mediterranean.
Also, you’d think medieval Islamic explorers like ibn Fadlan and ibn Rustah, who interacted with Vikings, would have noted if there was any connection there.
OK so the idea its a response to Charlemagne’s Saxon Wars is slightly less ridiculous. But seems a massive stretch IMO (and even if it was claiming it was somehow an act of self-preservation is even more of a stretch).
The Wiki link MrDibble gives also suggests that the spread Christianity in Norway may have contributed to the raids, by increasing the internecine strife in Vikings lands. This seems plausible (that it was this strife was a big contributor to the raiding is not a controversial statement), though nothing more than postulation.
To a Christian, all non-Christians might seem to be the same, part of the “other”. But then, to a Muslim, all non-Muslims might likewise seem the same.
Though this discussion begs the question. Do we have any viking descriptions of the raids of St. Alcuin’s era? They were a literate culture, do we have any descriptions from the Vikings themselves of why they carried out the raids?
Why do you say that? Religion was used as the pretext to establish Christian rule over lands inhabited by non-Christians. Charlemagne even had the support of the Roman Pope.
Funnily enough I was thinking the opposite.
Trying to imagine other (time-travelling) groups getting “revenge” for the crusades is trying to go back to the familiar story as christians as victims, when the crusades are far as the evidence goes right now, was pretty one-sided.
Some very dubious justification for war followed by mass slaughter mostly of civilians.
They were certainly religiously inspired wars (arguably more so than the actual Crusades, since they explicitly required the defeated Saxons to convert or die), but the term “crusade” refers to a specific historic phenomenon.
This is debunked. (Google “vikings allah debunked”, if nothing else.) It is what seems to be the result of dishonest “research” for ideological reasons. If the vikings were muslims then islam is our heritance and then islam is good and all the racists in this country (Sweden) will go away. We get some of that here. Good to wish away nazists and ractists, bad to try to fake news them away.
Hint: It will get the opposite effect.
Maybe to an uneducated Muslim. I’m not familiar enough with the Koran to speak about what it says about Christians, but there are clear references to Jews in it, and I don’t think it’s fair to say they are just like any other non-Muslim.
There are explicit references to Christians too, as well as to “Sabaeans”.
To Islam, Jews and Christians are people of the Book *, worshipping the same God in their own misguided way; but given more respect than Fetishists or Pagans.
Still had to pay extra taxes and wear yellow badges.
- Plus a few other religions.