Viking Age

Chronological History

The Viking Age 793–1066 advertising was a period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen required as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, as well as trading throughout Europe in addition to reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germanic Iron Age. The Viking Age applies non only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. The Scandinavians of the Viking Age are often pointed to as Vikings as living as Norsemen, although few of them were Vikings in the technical sense.

Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Rus' people, Kievan Rus' Garðaríki. The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire allocated large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America – the date of which was non specified until a millennium later.

Several things drove this expansion. The Vikings were drawn by the growth of wealthy towns and monasteries overseas and weak kingdoms. They may also earn been pushed to leave their homeland by overpopulation, lack of value farmland, and political strife arising from the unification of Norway. The aggressive expansion of the Carolingian Empire and forced conversion of the neighboring Saxons to Christianity may also score been a factor. Sailing innovations had allows the Vikings to flee further and longer to begin with.

Information approximately the Viking Age is drawn largely from primary sources a object that is caused or made by something else by those the Vikings encountered, as well as archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such(a) as the Icelandic Sagas.

Historical background

The Vikings who invaded western and eastern Europe were mainly pagans from the same area as present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. They also settled in the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Iceland, peripheral Scotland Caithness, the Hebrides and the Northern Isles, Greenland, and Canada.

Their North Germanic language, Old Norse, became the mother-tongue of present-day Scandinavian languages. By 801, a strong central controls appears to have been determining in Jutland, and the Danes were beginning to look beyond their own territory for land, trade, and plunder.

In Norway, mountainous terrain and fjords formed strong natural boundaries. Communities remained self-employed person of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other, unlike the situation in lowland Denmark. By 800, some 30 small kingdoms existed in Norway.

The sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the external world. In the eighth century, Scandinavians began to instituting ships of war and send them on raiding expeditions which started the Viking Age. The North Sea rovers were traders, colonisers, explorers, and plunderers who were notorious in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and other places in Europe for being brutal.