River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  Gotlandic society was remarkably stable and wealthy, showing no sign of a king or an aristocracy, but with a population that knew how to take advantage of their position as middlemen in a well-adjusted and fine-tuned trading system. With so much material coming in from abroad, researchers have been keen to find out if foreigners arrived here too. A few years ago, a team of Canadian and US scientists wanted to investigate the origins of the Viking Age Gotlanders by using strontium isotopes to study burials.[2] They sampled sixty adults from the seventh- to eleventh-century cemetery of Ridanäs, one of the island’s trading ports, to find out how many of them had been immigrants. The results were surprising: the researchers concluded that only three of the individuals had grown up elsewhere and the remainder were local. The result was at odds with the archaeological evidence; surely the high proportion of imported artefacts on the island would also have brought with it people from the outside? The suggested explanation was that very few of those who came to Gotland as traders took up permanent residency there; they were transient, mobile visitors. It has also been suggested that the distance across the sea would have been too great for many to make such an extensive move – an idea that is improbable, knowing what we do about seaborne travel at the time.

  However, when an analysis of ancient DNA was used to study the Gotlandic Viking Age population it revealed something else altogether. The team from Copenhagen, who had worked on the large-scale ancient DNA analysis of the Viking homelands, examined Gotland’s graves too and came to a very different conclusion. Compared to the rest of the Viking sites that they had studied, they found that the island environment displayed the greatest genetic variation: the researchers even described it as ‘extreme’, relatively speaking. This means that the island had far more diverse communities, with a bigger influx of people from the outside, than had been seen in most of contemporary Scandinavia. That result seemed more in keeping with what we know from the archaeological record: with so many objects having been traded far and wide, surely people must have come along with them too; we just hadn’t been able to prove it before.

  The genetic evidence suggested that these foreign visitors weren’t always transient, but that many stayed and settled. One particularly intriguing conclusion was that the genetic signals on the island were much more like those found in Denmark, Britain and Finland than among Swedish populations. In other words, this was a location where people didn’t just hail from the neighbouring Swedish mainland, as you might have suspected. Interestingly, a similar pattern of diversity can be seen on Öland, another island off the coast of Sweden.

  So why was the Gotlandic result so different from what the isotopes had suggested? There are two possible explanations. First, the strontium evidence could be misleading. What the researchers were able to show was that these individuals fitted within a range of values that could be expected from the island. However they weren’t able to exclude the possibility that those people had grown up in other areas with similar geology and therefore similar strontium values to the soils and waters found on Gotland. In fact, the vast majority of the burials from Repton could also fit with the Gotlandic dataset, meaning that we can’t exclude the possibility that immigrants are disguised in plain sight. Second, the genetic data give us information that could go back many generations, making it unclear at what point in time these individuals migrated. Nevertheless, the combined bioarchaeological evidence does support a diverse and cosmopolitan population living on Gotland in the Viking Age.

  Thinking about all this silver coming in, and the assumption that slaves were being exchanged for silver elsewhere, one question we need to ask is whether Gotland was involved in the lucrative slave trade. If we assume that the silver in the west was directly related to the slave trade, this could be the case here as well. Like other long-distance traded commodities, enslaved people must surely have passed through Gotland and the Baltic port regions. We know slaves were part of the Gotlandic societal structure because the Guta Law, a law code of the island that was written down sometime in the early thirteenth century, discusses various situations involving slaves and details how they should be looked after. At that time, for instance, you had to be extra sure that if you were enslaved you didn’t work on a holiday (this was, of course, after conversion to Christianity) because your master would be fined and you would have an extra three years added to your servitude. In another part of the law, a returns policy is spelt out: you could buy a slave to try out for six days and if you weren’t entirely happy you could return your purchase, in an arrangement that essentially treated enslaved people like inanimate objects. Although these laws date to the thirteenth century, the practices may well have continued from origins in the Viking Age.

  You could also argue that the exceptional wealth of Gotland seems rather suspicious, even for a society of successful farmers, traders and middlemen. One author has likened Gotland, and especially the town of Visby, to a northern Venice where a mercantile oligarchy grew rich on dominating the trade that flourished across the Baltic Sea. What’s clear is that Gotland and the Baltic served as crucial connectors for both goods and people between east and west. It is from here that we can start to see how the River Kings fully engage with the network that is key to understanding not only how but also why, ultimately, a carnelian bead ended up in Repton: the Silk Roads.

  TOWARDS THE SILK ROADS

  The term ‘Silk Roads’ has been in use since the nineteenth century, when a German geologist, Ferdinand von Richthofen, gave the name to a network or web of trade routes and connections that had been in existence for millennia. Described as ‘the world’s central nervous system’,[3] this network was one that had a profound impact on the development of world history but also one that, at least in the west, has often been neglected. Yet when we study developments in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, and especially the eastwards expansion from Scandinavia, it is vital to understand that those movements didn’t develop in isolation. Instead, the Scandinavians very skilfully tapped into something that had been successfully established thousands of years before. Entrepreneurship formed a key part of their success, as did the ability to respond to a specific system of supply and demand. Violence played a crucial role too, of course.

  The origins of the silk trade and thereby the Silk Road networks as we know them lie with the Asian empires of Persia and China in the first millennium BC. Key catalysts were the conflicts and trade relationships between the Chinese empire, especially the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), and various nomadic tribes in the steppe territories – the vast plains stretching across central Asia – whereby payment of tribute was common: luxury gifts would be given by the emperors to tribes on the steppes of Mongolia in exchange for peace.[4] These gifts included large quantities of silk, which was treasured for its unique, fine qualities and which China could produce in substantial quantities. Subsequently silk became more than a luxury item: it began to be used directly as a currency, which was far more useful in regions where coins had little or no use-value and perishable items, like grains or other foodstuffs, could be vulnerable to the elements. Further to the west, silk would be first introduced to the Roman Empire some time during the first century BC. Its continued popularity as a luxury item was one of the main drivers of growth for the trading routes that stretched from the far east to Europe. However, although silk was significant in the development of these networks, it soon became just one of many commodities that were traded far and wide along the routes. Importantly, the Silk Roads were instrumental in transporting not only goods but also ideas, culture and religion from east to west and back again.

  Of course, the Vikings weren’t the first northerners to connect with the Silk Roads or the regions in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet what is clear is that this inroad from the Baltic formed a route east that had not been previously utilised by western European powers to any degree. While the advent of the so-called Dark Ages meant that the networks established in the Roman Empire would no longer exist in the same
form, this did not mean that post-Roman England and continental Europe were unable to trade and make contact with the east; far from it. In England, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk contained elaborate pieces of Byzantine silverware, while garnet from India and Sri Lanka was relatively abundant in the fifth and sixth centuries in north-western Europe. Stunning examples of these bright red jewels adorn weapon fittings in the elaborate seventh-century Staffordshire hoard, possibly the finest collection of early medieval artefacts ever discovered, and they are a common sight among other Anglo-Saxon jewellery too. The garnet trade at this time came through the Mediterranean and relied on links with continental Europe – Frankia, in particular. Much as with carnelian, luxury commodities like garnets are particularly well placed to help us track down long-distance connections.

  In Scandinavia, the roots of contact with the Silk Roads run deeper still and can be traced back to the so-called migration period that preceded the Viking Age. Yet at the beginning of the Viking Age something happened to propel it further east. So what caused such a knock-on effect that it was felt all the way north to the Scandinavian Peninsula?

  While this period is often (unfairly) referred to as the Dark Ages in both England and in much of western Europe, owing in part to the apparent loss of wealth and development in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the situation in the east was very different. There it was an age of gold. Important to this prosperity was the foundation of the city of Baghdad in 762 as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, which had overthrown the Umayyad caliphate just over a decade earlier. Baghdad rapidly became a central hub for the Silk Road trade. This was a multicultural and multilingual capital: somewhere that information and knowledge could be exchanged and obtained, where merchants and trading partners with information about lands as distant as China and east Asia could mingle with those who wrote and read the works of illustrious scientists, geographers, historians and other scholars. The west soon engaged with this culture and extensive trading and exchange networks across Europe came into existence, nicely symbolised by a gift sent to Charlemagne of Frankia when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor[fn1] in 800 by the pope: he received an Indian elephant from the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, which had been shipped to Pisa from a North African port after originally belonging to an Indian raja.

  Coin hoards, like those found on Gotland, are what really allow us to track how change affected the dynamics of faraway places in the cold and dark north: it’s been said that the dirham finds are the manifestation of the beginning of Viking expansion to the east and, therefore, the first established contact with what is now Russia. Over the years much time and energy have been spent by numismatists cataloguing and classifying the dirham hoards found across Scandinavia. The coins have been divided into groups, the earliest of which, discovered in Russia and Scandinavia, mainly contains dirhams struck by the Abbasid dynasty. These coins come from a range of places in the Middle East and central Asia, as well as from North Africa, for example from al-Abbasiyya in what is now Tunisia. Another group of finds is dominated by Samanid coins originating from the Persian dynasty from central Asia. When studying hoards, much of the numismatist’s time is spent attempting to reconstruct particular journeys and degrees of contact from the content of one particular collection. However, this can be problematic. There was no control over the circulation of dirhams within the caliphate, which meant that coins struck almost anywhere could be used as legal tender, thanks especially to their consistent weight and high silver content.

  The first Islamic coins reached eastern Scandinavia by the late eighth or early ninth century: in Birka, Sweden, Ribe in Denmark, and Staraya Ladoga in Russia around 786 – the latter being the earliest collection of eastern coins known to have reached the area around the Baltic. The very first Islamic coins found in the border zones of Europe, though, are from the Caucasus, i.e. southern parts of modern-day Russia and what are now the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This may well have been the first link in what was to become the chain of exchange between the Islamic caliphate and eastern Europe.

  This, then, is where the expansion eastwards began, and there’s a good reason why it took place in the second half of the eighth century. At this time trading relationships were able to develop in this part of Eurasia because the political situation there was becoming more stable, with peaceful relationships developing between the Khazars in the northern Caucasus and the Arabs of the caliphate.[5] This meant that trade between the Abbasids and places like Armenia could flourish, which led to vast quantities of dirhams produced from mines both there and in North Africa circulating in the region.

  That political problems could impact on relative coin numbers found in the north is clear, as the availability of each type would have been affected by ebbs and flows in coin production. In the first half of the ninth century, for example, the number of coins struck in the caliphate decreased dramatically because a war was raging internally between Caliph Harun al-Rashid’s sons: this particular caliph (who, incidentally, may partially have inspired the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights) decided to apportion his empire between his two sons. That turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea, because after his death in 809, civil war broke out for a prolonged period of time as the brothers fought one another for supremacy. At the same time the Islamic world was bearing the brunt of religious conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The ripples from both events were felt far up in the north when the disruptions affected the minting of coins. Consequently, the lower number of hoards found at that time reflects not a lack of contact, but rather a lack of supply.

  Similarly, changes in supply could take place for more natural reasons, as at the end of the ninth century when huge silver deposits were discovered in Afghanistan. In 892, the Samanid emirs began mining for silver in central Asia on a massive scale and this had a positive impact on the overseas silver trade. Huge quantities of coins were produced in the trading cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which both lay north of the Oxus river. The silver used for minting in the caliphate was usually derived from the nearest mines and the quantities involved were enormous. Mines in Yemen, for example, could produce an estimated twenty thousand dirhams every week, or about a million each year.[6] The export of silver continued until about 965, at which point the mines seem to have been more or less exhausted. With silver supplies from the mines in the caliphate decreasing, the moneyers began to debase their silver, reducing the coins’ silver content to make it go further. The testing nicks seen on coins found in England and Scandinavia are testament to the Vikings’ knowledge of these practices.

  SALME

  The numismatic evidence makes clear that by 800, some seven years after the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, the route to the east lay open: a fact that is far more significant than reports of sporadic attacks to the west. Albeit on a smaller scale than what we were to see later, by this time nodal points around the Baltic Sea had been well established and trade had already begun along the rivers of the east, the trade that would eventually bring those vast quantities of silver to the north. But who were the people involved in the travel to and transactions with the east? There is a reference to this region in the legendary Ynglinga saga by Snorri Sturluson: in it King Yngvarr, one of the Swedish kings, raided the Baltic Sea and went to Estonia, where he fought a battle. The Estonians were so numerous that Yngvarr was defeated and died: he was buried there in a mound close to the sea. The place where he died is named as Sýsla, likely an abbreviation of the Old Norse name for the island of Saaremaa. And it is precisely here, in a small coastal village called Salme, that a recent discovery has given us some important clues about those early travellers to the east, if in a gruesome way.

  Saaremaa sits near the coast on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea, nestled like a too-small bottle top over the Gulf of Riga. This gulf marks the entryway into the riverine networks through the River Daugava, which was one of several ways you could move inland towards
the eastern waterways. Bar a Soviet-era monument commemorating fallen soldiers of the Red Army, there is little to see as you arrive on Saaremaa, leaving visitors to take in the woods and the constant presence of the Baltic; Sweden and Finland are less than a day’s ferry journey away.

  Until 2008 there was little of archaeological significance to be found, but a chance discovery during roadworks that year put the sleepy village of Salme on the map with an extraordinary find: not just one but two ships filled to the brim with artefacts and human remains.[7] The two ships turned out not to be shipwrecks but deliberate burials: they had been dragged about a hundred metres inland from the beach, and would once have been marked by a mound or some other identifier. Storms battering the coastline over the years had ensured that they were eventually completely covered by marine sediments that had been washed ashore. If they were originally visible from the surface or marked in some way, any knowledge of their presence had been lost over time beneath the sandy deposits.

  When the ships were excavated, it became clear that they were both of clinker-built types that have come to be associated with the Vikings. The first of the two, the smaller vessel, was a rowing boat with six pairs of oars: within it, the remains of seven tall young men had been buried inside the hull. At least two of them had been placed sitting up, as if still on a journey, with objects around them (though disappointingly, the overzealous construction workers who first found the boat had moved the artefacts without recording their locations). There were the typical items you’d expect from this kind of grave: two swords, spears, arrowheads, knives and axes, and even decorated antler combs. Animal bones were found nearby, perhaps the remains of a funeral feast or offerings to take to the afterworld. Remarkably, these included two decapitated hawks.