“Viking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe's littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean -- while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople.
We tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of Leif Erickson in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.” [1]
1. Bezos, Branson and the Vikings
Herman, Arthur. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]24 July 2021: A.13.
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