Viking-Age Trade

Silver, Slaves and Gotland

Jacek Gruszczyński, Marek Jankowiak, Jonathan Shepard, Jacek Gruszczyński, Marek Jankowiak, Jonathan Shepard

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351866156
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

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.

1 Why Gotland?

Jonathan Shepard

The single largest concentration of silver hoards known to man is on Gotland. Some 180,000 coins have been found. Around two-fifths of these are Arab dirhams or dirham fragments, with the remaining silver pieces struck in German, English and other mints.¹ Many hoards also contain quantities of hack-silver, and/or silver ornament, which had almost certainly arrived on the island in the form of dirhams. One also has to reckon with stray finds of one or two coins. The phenomenon invites a range of questions. At one end of the spectrum, there are such questions as whether similar concentrations of dirhams once existed elsewhere in northern or eastern Europe, but were subsequently melted down or unearthed and dispersed without coming to the notice of the authorities or receiving scholarly attention; whether dirhams were hoarded in comparable numbers in the Islamic societies where they were struck; and, quite simply, what exactly is a ‘hoard’.² Then, somewhere along the spectrum, sit issues of numismatics and archaeology: determining the dirhams’ silver contents, and taking advantage of the dates and mint locations provided on most coins to try and chart ups and downs in the inflow from the Islamic world. Such efforts have to take into account the archaeological contexts of hoards, alongside the problem of dating: the latest – ‘youngest’ – coin in a hoard gives a clue, but if the hoard is incomplete, calculations based on this may be misleading. Debate anyway goes on about the likely interval between the date of the youngest piece and when the hoard was deposited, as over how long a coin took to reach northern Europe. These questions segue into economic history and anthropology: what was the ratio of silver found in the hoards to the amount of silver circulating at any one time in the ninth and tenth centuries, the period when most of the dirhams reached Gotland? And what was the point of hoarding: does a single explanation fit all, or should one allow for a variety of reasons, including symbolic and ritual ones? Finally, at the straightforwardly historical end of the spectrum are the questions: what brought so much silver to the island, who were the carriers, where were they taking it and whence? Did the silver on Gotland serve as bullion, currency or raw material for craftsmen to rework? And, if all three roles were in play, did any one of them predominate?

In the background lurks the question of whether all this silver necessarily registers commerce: might not some, at least, be the outcome of plundering, tribute demands or gift exchange? And if acquired through trading, what commodities were offered in exchange? Had they been grown or manufactured on Gotland? Were the Gotlanders processing items of foreign origin for re-export? Or was the island essentially a clearinghouse for transit trade? These questions raise the problem of ‘exceptionalism’: was Gotland’s economy and society a case apart, functioning differently from those on other Baltic shores, including the Swedish mainland? Was the island significantly richer in silver? And, if so, why?

To begin to answer such questions one has to scan distant horizons: not only eastwards and south-east to Rus and the Eurasian steppes (across which most of the dirhams had travelled), but also to the North Sea and the Atlantic. Evidence of the trafficking there may provide points of comparison with Gotlandic goings-on, for all the variations in societies and economies within the British Isles themselves. Moreover, one must allow for the fact that trading networks stretched far to the west as well as eastwards, and the possibility that Gotland itself amounted to a kind of mega-emporium for high-value commodities shipped from afar.³ Taking a turn to the west brings another advantage: the archaeological and literary materials from Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England do something to make up for a serious gap in the Gotlandic evidence. Our earliest writings from the island, a law code (Guta Lag) and a saga (Guta Saga), date from well after the Viking Age, while the handful of runestones bearing brief inscriptions do not fill the void.⁴

And here is the nub. The extraordinary wealth of Gotland – ‘silver island’ – has long been inferred, and gains corroboration from the studies below. But the dearth of indigenous written sources means that even less is known for sure about Gotland’s socio-political structure and economic history than about, say, central Sweden, of which foreign churchmen offer a few descriptions.⁵ A growing body of archaeological evidence, sometimes congruent with literary works, concerning Scandinavian arrivals and invaders in the British Isles, particularly their handling of silver and monetary competence, may shed light on the finds from Gotland, too. It may even help us begin answering the questions posed above. ‘Begin’ is the operative word, though, and few definitive answers are given. What is on offer is neither synthesis nor panorama, but a series of soundings and sightings carried out from and around the platform that Gotland constitutes. If much of Gotland’s history remains enshrouded in uncertainty, this book may at least set out the ‘known unknowns’ and some legitimate grounds for contention, whilst making positive contributions to knowledge. The soundings sometimes go down unlikely – even sordid – channels, but they are suggestive about the dynamics of slave-trading, an activity bearing closely on dirhams and Gotland.

As in the Baltic, so in this book, Gotland sits in the middle of things, with our section on ‘Gotland’ taking up a third of the chapters. A recurring theme is the need for further excavations of the archaeological contexts of hoards. To fit the hoards into Gotlandic society, one needs to know the lie of the land – literally so, and in terms of their connection with settlements and individual buildings. The rolling countryside lends itself to easy cycle-riding in the twenty-first century, with few wholly inaccessible parts and nowhere more than 85m above sea level. The terrain is – and in the middle ages was – no less propitious for agriculture. However, the amount of cultivable land is finite and there are extensive tracts of ancient forest sometimes reaching down as far as the sea. Sandy beaches encircle long stretches of the island, although its rivers are not abundant and should more properly be termed brooks.⁶

Thorough reassessment of the settlements and of social structures is provided by Gustaf Svedjemo. Drawing on later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps, he argues in favour of the underlying stability of settlement patterns on Gotland, of both villages and solitary farmsteads. The former were often quite small, consisting of two or three farmsteads. These farms could, however, shift around within the bounds of a village. A certain trend towards sandy soils on higher ground from moraine soils is discernible in the Viking Age. Awareness of the agricultural potential of different soils was quite compatible with the amassing of silver through trade. Svedjemo envisages an elite engaging readily in commerce, whilst subject to and upholding legal constraints on the sale and reallocation of land, and he notes that although silver hoards mostly occur quite near settlement sites, only around half seem to have been deposited actually inside buildings.⁷ Here he parts company with some of the other contributors to this volume, including the pioneering work of Majvor Östergren. The truly minute number of settlements to have undergone even small-scale excavation is emphasised by Per Widerström. His gazetteer of these settlements and their houses and other structures suggests not only a fair degree of prosperity, but also greater recourse to stone foundations than on the Swedish mainland; sometimes stone walls, too. That a great deal can be inferred emerges from Ny Björn Gustafsson’s chapter. He emphasises the concern of Gotlanders for very high standards of silver. The artefacts they produced themselves seem to have been ‘affirmation’ of high quality, and the particular styles of Gotlandic jewellery may have been designed to stand out from other marks of silverware. In favour of this suggestion is the evidence from Fröjel of sophisticated non-ferrous metalworking: baser metals were removed from silver objects by means of cupellation. Many of the hoards may well have been assemblages for the purpose of such metalworking. Östergren highlights clear examples, including the famous Spillings hoard. In support of this, she argues for a close association between hoards and buildings, especially dwelling-houses. She points out the hazardousness of negative arguments from silence, given the very limited number of settlements excavated so far.

The opportunities for inhabitants of villages and individual farmsteads to trade overseas emerge from Dan Carlsson’s study. Noting how many hoards consist wholly of hack-silver, clearly intended for manufacturing purposes, he points to the existence of some sixty places showing signs of Viking-Age activities along the coast. Here, too, generalisations have to be speculative, given the paucity of sites excavated. Carlsson is, however, able to give an authoritative survey of a variety of landing places. Many will have been small-scale, serving individual farmsteads or villages. But some are likely to have been ports, catering for a larger area and accommodating craftsmen and foreign traders. One such was Fröjel, where excavations under Carlsson’s direction have borne fruit, although only a small fraction of its surface-area has undergone investigation. Several of Fröjel’s crafts were reliant on imports, and manufacture was clearly for the market rather than the needs of the household or local neighbourhood. Besides cupellation – attested only rarely elsewhere in Scandinavia – there is plentiful evidence of the manufacture of combs from the antlers of red deer and elk, beasts not found on Gotland. Other products include glass-beads, produced en masse, and lenses made from rock crystal which was imported. Gotland seems to have been the earliest Scandinavian centre of manufacturing rock crystal lenses, and more are found there than in all other Scandinavian find-sites combined. Although exported across Scandinavia, the lenses have silver mountings reminiscent of jewellery found in Slav sites to the south and east. An original eastern derivation is suggested by their occurrence mainly in silver hoards. Women favoured them as ornaments or magnifying glasses, judging by their preponderance in female graves. A particular connection between women and silver hoards is drawn by Christoph Kilger. He discusses the elaborate provisions for bride price in Guta Lag, and its assumption that a bride’s property was a ‘pledge’, reclaimable by her father’s family in the event of her bloodline dying out. These possessions could have included silver given as bride price in addition to landed property and, Kilger suggests, the silver could have been kept in the ground for this reason. Conceding that to regard silver hoards as dowries is only one possible interpretation, he notes Guta Lag’s preoccupation with maintaining family farmsteads intact, especially its injunction that younger brothers should seek their fortune with scrip and scales, going in for trading.

The implications of this are followed through in Jacek Gruszczyński’s survey of the social context of hoards. Highlighting the constraints imposed by the island’s size and terrain, along with the desire of families to keep their landholdings intact, he proposes a connection with the deposition of hoards in marginal – generally sandier – soils: through burying silver on land newly acquired and newly cultivated, a man might symbolically bond with it and hope to retain it for himself and his heirs. Gruszczyński agrees with other investigators on the essentially ‘egalitarian mentality’ of Gotlanders. A substantial elite – an oligarchy of sorts – took pains to maintain its landholdings; but land, resources and power were not amassed by any one family, and (after the early Viking Age) weapons are notable largely by their absence from graves and settlements. And a broad cross-section of society seems to have had uniform access to silver.

How, though, was such silver acquired; how does Gotland’s economy and society compare with other polities and peoples around the Baltic Rim; and what were its relations with them? Chapters in adjoining sections of this book go some way towards answering these questions. Ingmar Jansson sets Gotland within its Baltic context. The evidence of Gotland as a land under the king of the Svear does not go beyond some sort of deferential relationship involving tribute. What is clearer is the difference between ‘the general richness of Gotlandic graves’ and central Sweden, where a king reigned and the numerous boat- and chamber-graves are manifestations of wealthy and well-armed elite families. From his knowledge of burial grounds and designs of ornaments, Jansson argues for greater similarities between Gotland and east Baltic and Finnish societies. Cemeteries on, for example, the island of Saaremaa in modern Estonia show a fair degree of affluence, but without the obvious marks of social hierarchy or a warrior elite. And a sizeable assortment of Gotlandic artefacts have been unearthed on the south-east Baltic coast. However, the Gotlanders do not seem to have exported inanimate goods further east, to Rus, or to have left behind there ornaments and suchlike items of personal use. Yet they exported or re-exported vast amounts of dirhams to Scandinavia. The dynamics of Gotland’s economy...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and notes on bibliography
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Why Gotland?
• PART I: Cogs and drivers
• PART II: Flows from Islam
• PART III: Gotland
• PART IV: Comparisons
• PART V: Conclusions
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index