There has been quite a bit of work, both scholarly and public-facing, in the past few years to rehabilitate the image of the Vikings as brutal pillagers, often summed up with the pithy “traders, not raiders.” While this sort of work is important, we should not lose sight of the reality that the primary trading commodities of the Vikings were human beings, and they went to great lengths to capture people in seasonal raids. The slave trade was a lucrative business, with markets in the Mediterranean cities of Constantinople, Venice, and Baghdad driving the traffic.

What did a Viking raid actually look like? We possess one medieval account claiming to offer near eyewitness testimony, though its path to the present day is convoluted. The account centers on an attack on Nantes in modern-day France, taking place on the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24), 843. One version survives as a fragmentary annal in a tenth-century manuscript, now housed in Angers (Angers, Médiathèque Toussaint, MS 817 (733)). A potentially more complete version existed in a text dubbed the Chronicon Namnetense (Chronicle of Nantes), an eleventh-century annal that no longer survives in its original form. Instead, we rely on scattered citations and a fifteenth-century French translation by the priest Pierre le Baud. Consequently, we are viewing ninth-century events through the lens of a fifteenth-century translation of an eleventh-century text. However, the editor of Pierre le Baud’s edition, René Merlet, argues that the priest likely had access to original charters, potentially preserving corroborating details of the account’s validity. Both the Angers fragment and the Chronicon paint a vivid picture: the Norse disembarked from the Loire River, scaled the city walls with ladders around noon, when they knew mass would be happening, and forced the bishop, clergy, and worshippers to barricade themselves inside the cathedral. The text below picks up from this moment.

Transcribed and translated from Latin by Jacob Bell. Following standardization in René Merlet, La Chronique de Nantes (Paris: Alponse Picard et fils, 1896), 16-17. Portions of the text appear  in a tenth-century manuscript, Angers, Médiathèque Toussaint, MS 817 (733), f. 136v. This translation CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

But [the Vikings], having broken down the doors and pushed in the windows, burst ferociously into the temple. They struck the unwarlike and unarmed multitude alike with the sword and raged with such great cruelty against the flock of Christ that—except for those whom they transferred to their ships for the purpose of enslaving or of selling—they cut down the entire multitude of priests, clerics, and laypeople, along with the aforementioned bishop, inside the church. They slaughtered some of the monks outside and others inside the church; moreover, upon the very altar of the temple, they butchered very many like sacrificial victims. The rest, however, they led away with them at nightfall and put them on their ships…having scraped up all the wealth, they returned to their ships with flocks of captives of every rank, sex, and age. Afterwards, a great sum was collected by the survivors of this disaster for the captives’ ransom.

Discussion Questions

  1. This text comes down to us in a complex way. Can we trust it? Does this “documentary” history impact the reliability of this source?
  2. The chronicler identifies several overlapping motives for the Viking raiders. Identify them. What can they tell us about what these raiders valued?
  3. What can this annal tell us about economic incentives of the slave trade? Why might it be a lucrative activity for a seasonal Viking raider?

Related Primary Sources

Related Secondary Sources

  • Christian Cooijmans, Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity across the Frankish Realm (c. 750–940) (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
  • Poul Holm, “The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries,” Peritia 5 (1986): 317-45.
  • Ben Raffield, “The Slave Markets of the Viking World: Comparative Perspectives on an ‘Invisible Archaeology,’” Slavery & Abolition 40, 4 (2019), 695-97.
  • David Wyatt, Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800-1200 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009).

Themes

Captives, Kidnapping, Raiding, Trade