Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland Gruszczyński Jacek
Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland Gruszczyński Jacek That there was an influx of silver dirhams from the Muslim world into eastern and northern Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries is…
Specifikacia Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland Gruszczyński Jacek
Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland Gruszczyński Jacek
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. What brought the dirhams to northern Europe in such large numbers? Recent discoveries have shown that dirhams were reaching the British Isles, too.
But it highlights the trade in slaves as driving exchanges on a trans-continental scale. 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. By their very nature, the nexuses were complex, mutable and unclear even to contemporaries, and they have eluded modern scholarship.