Delancey Place has an excerpt from Empires of the Silk Road about vikings in Constantinople.
Delancey Place has an excerpt from Empires of the Silk Road about vikings in Constantinople.
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I’ve been saying for years that all this business about trade is true enough, but historians often overlook what exactly that trade was. The major earner for the eastern trade, the true cash cow, was human slaves, generally kidnapped from Slavic lands (which is how the word for thrall in English came to be “slave”).
Call me narrow minded, but I don’t consider slave-taking a peaceful occupation.
You’re the resident expert. I cannot disagree. Why do you think historians who take this view to ignore what is being traded? Is there some sort of academic pressure to re-imagine the Vikings as businessmen? Is it a way of teasing war out of history?
My view is that historians see the “violent Vikings” theme as a holdover from a Christian view of history. The monks described the Vikings as violent barbarians. Monks are Christians. Christians are bad. Therefore, anybody the Christians hated and feared must be good.
What does Will Durant say? Did he write a history of Western Civ?
I don’t know. Never read Durant. He may have written before the deconstruction of history really took hold.