Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [111]
The Viking raids began abruptly on June 8, A.D. 793, with an attack on the rich but defenseless monastery of Lindisfarne Island off the northeast English coast. Thereafter, the raids continued each summer, when the seas were calmer and more conducive to sailing, until after some years the Vikings stopped bothering to return home in the autumn but instead made winter settlements on the targeted coast so that they could begin raiding earlier in the next spring. From those beginnings arose a flexible mixed strategy of alternative methods to acquire wealth, depending on the relative strengths of the Viking fleets and the targeted peoples. As the strength or number of Vikings relative to locals increased, the methods progressed from peaceful trading, through extorting tribute in return for a promise not to raid, to plundering and retreating, and culminated in conquest and the establishment of overseas Viking states.
Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia went raiding in different directions. Those from the area of modern Sweden, termed Varangians, sailed east into the Baltic Sea, navigated up rivers flowing from Russia into the Baltic, continued south to reach the heads of the Volga and other rivers flowing into the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, traded with the rich Byzantine Empire, and founded the principality of Kiev that became the forerunner of the modern Russian state. Vikings from modern Denmark sailed west to the coast of northwest Europe and the east coast of England, found their way up the Rhine and Loire rivers, settled at their mouths and in Normandy and Brittany, established the Danelaw state in eastern England and the Duchy of Normandy in France, and rounded the Atlantic coast of Spain to enter the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar and raid Italy. Vikings from modern Norway sailed to Ireland and the north and west coast of Britain and set up a major trading center at Dublin. In each area of Europe the Vikings settled, intermarried, and gradually became assimilated into the local population, with the result that Scandinavian languages and distinct Scandinavian settlements eventually disappeared outside of Scandinavia. Swedish Vikings merged into the Russian population, Danish Vikings into the English population, while the Vikings who settled in Normandy eventually abandoned their Norse language and began speaking French. In that process of assimilation, Scandinavian words as well as genes were absorbed. For instance, the modern English language owes “awkward,” “die,” “egg,” “skirt,” and dozens of other everyday words to the Scandinavian invaders.
In the course of these voyages to inhabited European lands, many Viking ships were blown off-course into the North Atlantic Ocean, which at those times of warm climate was free of the sea ice that later became a barrier to ship navigation, contributing to the fate of the Norse Greenland colony and of the Titanic. Those off-course ships thereby discovered and settled other lands previously unknown either to Europeans or to any peoples: the uninhabited Faeroe Islands some time after A.D. 800 and Iceland around 870; around A.D. 980 Greenland, at that time occupied only in the far north by Native American predecessors of the Inuit known as the Dorset people; and in A.D. 1000 Vinland, an exploration zone encompassing Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and possibly some other coastal areas of northeastern North America teeming with Native Americans whose presence forced the Vikings to depart after only a decade.
The Viking raids on Europe declined as their European targets gradually came to expect them and to defend themselves, as the power of the English and French kings and the German emperor grew, and as the rising power of the Norwegian king began to harness his uncontrolled hotbed of plundering chiefs and to