Author : Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher :
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 13,97 MB
Release : 1988-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300041217
This book is the first work in English to examine the institutuion of slavery in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland from the Viking Age to its end in the fourteenth century. Drawing on a wide variety of cources-- law codes, will, charters, sagas, chronicles, and archaeological data-- Ruth Mazo Karras discusses the social, legal, and economic aspects of slavery in Scandinavia, comparing them with conditions of servitude in the rest of medieval Europe.
Author : Stefan Brink
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 21,17 MB
Release : 2021
Category : History
ISBN : 0197532357
The result of my research was turned into a book published in Swedish in 2012. This present book is a revised translation and extensively extended version of that book.
Author : Stefan Brink
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 48,26 MB
Release : 2021-09-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0197532373
Nordic slavery is an elusive phenomenon, with few similarities to the systematic exploitation of slaves in households, mines, and amphitheaters in the ancient Mediterranean or the widespread slavery at American plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scandinavians in the early Middle Ages lived in a society foreign to us, characterized by different and shifting social statuses. A person could be at once socially respected and unfree. It was possible to hand oneself over as a slave to someone else in exchange for protection and food. One could be sentenced temporarily to enslavement for some offense but later purchase his manumission. Young men could enter into a kind of "contract" with a king or chieftain to join his retinue, accepting his authority, patronage, and jurisdiction, while at the same time making a quick social elevation. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. However, the Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia; instead, their "business model" seems to have been to raid, abduct, and then sell captured people at major slave markets. Their goal was not people but silver. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most thorough survey of slavery in the Viking Age.
Author : Felix Biermann
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 35,73 MB
Release : 2021-11-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 3030732916
This volume is the first comprehensive study of the material imprint of slavery in early medieval Europe. While written sources attest to the ubiquity of slavery and slave trade in early medieval British Isles, Scandinavia and Slavic lands, it is still difficult to find material traces of this reality, other than the hundreds of thousands of Islamic coins paid in exchange for the northern European slaves. This volume offers the first structured reflection on how to bridge this gap. It reviews the types of material evidence that can be associated with the institution of slavery and the slave trade in early medieval northern Europe, from individual objects (such as e.g. shackles) to more comprehensive landscape approaches. The book is divided into four sections. The first presents the analytical tools developed in Africa and prehistoric Europe to identify and describe social phenomena associated with slavery and the slave trade. The following three section review the three main cultural zones of early medieval northern Europe: the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Slavic central Europe. The contributions offer methodological reflections on the concept of the archaeology of slavery. They emphasize that the material record, by its nature, admits multiple interpretations. More broadly, this book comes at a time when the history of slavery is being integrated into academic syllabi in most western countries. The collection of studies contributes to a more nuanced perspective on this important and controversial topic. This volume appeals to multiple audiences interested in comparative and global studies of slavery, and will constitute the point of reference for future debates.
Author : Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher :
Page : 1096 pages
File Size : 39,68 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Slavery
ISBN :
Author : Phillip Pulsiano
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 770 pages
File Size : 14,3 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1351665014
First published in 1993, Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia covers every aspect of the region during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art. Written by a team of expert contributors, the encyclopedia offers those who lack command of the various Scandinavian languages a basic tool for the study of Medieval Scandinavia from roughly the Migration Period to the Reformation. With full-page maps, useful supplementary photos, cross-references and a comprehensive index, this work will be a valuable and absorbing volume for students of the Norse sagas, the Viking age, and Old English history and literature, and for anyone interested in the cultural and historical heritage of Scandinavia.
Author : David Wyatt
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 31,6 MB
Release : 2009-04-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9047428773
Modern sensibilities have clouded historical views of slavery, perhaps more so than any other medieval social institution. Anachronistic economic rationales and notions about the progression of European civilisation have immeasurably distorted our view of slavery in the medieval context. As a result historians have focussed their efforts upon explaining the disappearance of this medieval institution rather than seeking to understand it. This book highlights the extreme cultural/social significance of slavery for the societies of medieval Britain and Ireland c. 800-1200. Concentrating upon the lifestyle, attitudes and motivations of the slave-holders and slave-raiders, it explores the violent activities and behavioural codes of Britain and Ireland’s warrior-centred societies, illustrating the extreme significance of the institution of slavery for constructions of power, ethnic identity and gender.
Author : Jacek Gruszczyński
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 25,10 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 135186615X
That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is well known, as is the fact that the largest concentration of hoards is on the Baltic island of Gotland. Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? The fur trade has been proposed as one driver for transactions, but the slave trade offers another – complementary – explanation. This volume does not offer a comprehensive delineation of the hoard finds, or a full answer to the question of what brought the silver north. But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship. Contributions to this volume shed light on processes and key places: the mints of Central Asia; the chronology of the inflows of dirhams to Rus and northern Europe; the reasons why silver was deposited in the ground and why so much ended up on Gotland; the functioning of networks – perhaps comparable to the twenty-first-century drug trade; slave-trading in the British Isles; and the stimulus and additional networks that the Vikings brought into play. This combination of general surveys, presentations of fresh evidence and regional case studies sets Gotland and the early medieval slave trade in a firmer framework than has been available before.
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 36,98 MB
Release : 2020-08-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9004433457
Peasants, Lords, and State: Comparing Peasant Conditions in Scandinavia and the Eastern Alpine Region, 1000-1750 compares peasant self-determination in relation to manorial and territorial power structures in Scandinavia and the eastern Alpine region between 1000 and 1750.
Author : Neil Price
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 629 pages
File Size : 27,84 MB
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0465096999
The definitive history of the Vikings -- from arts and culture to politics and cosmology -- by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise The Viking Age -- from 750 to 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.
