The voyages and sagas of the vikings are very interesting, but something I find to also be fascinating is the economic and cultural history that brought about the viking age and then several centuries later ended it. It does seem kind of sudden; there was a niche that suddenly caused vikings to travel everywhere, and then it was just over.
I think mainly it was, that they became civilized/baptized and christians were still free to plunder and enslave non christians, but not fellow christians.
So the vikings did not just stop, but rather became crusaders:
"In 1107, Sigurd I of Norway sailed for the eastern Mediterranean with Norwegian crusaders to fight for the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem; the kings of Denmark and Sweden participated actively in the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries"
(But otherwise of course many factors contributed to the rise and fall of the vikings and there indeed seems to have been a niche, with a temporary weakness, no christian nordic fleets etc.)
I do not think that stacks up as an explanation. The crusades were not financially remunerative - the crusaders mostly lost money. They might have made money if they were hired as mercenaries though - the famous example of that being the Varangian guard.
I do not think its entirely true to say Christians were "free to plunder and enslave non-Christians". Even against non-Christians war required justification (OK, you can make something up, but there is an extra barrier) and slavery (and slave trading in particular) was increasingly discouraged (until its revival in early modern times, of course).
One of the big examples of a formerly Viking people participating in the crusades was Norman Sicily which was one of the most enlightened (religious freedom, for example) societies of its time.
The Normans also settled down in Normandy and England and stopped raiding.
The runestone fad was kicked off by Harald Bluetooth's runestone, featuring a picture of Christ and a boast about making the Danes into Christians, and half these runestones (all emulating the Bluetooth one) mention God. But at first the politically expedient religion was just a performance, I guess, until later on they started to mean it. They probably still wore hammer amulets and so on.
How are civilized and baptized comparable concepts? The vikings surely had a civilization before christianity took hold and ascribing sone kind of higher ethics to christianity is also quite a stretch.
"Civilization" is ill-defined anyway. What's certain is that long before they embraced Christianity in a form other European Christians would recognize as such, they admired Europe. Europe had great buildings, castles, cathedrals, palaces, walled cities, places of learning, markets, unlike anything in Scandinavia at the time. They wanted those things. And they could only get so far as pirates and slavers.
Interesting that you see it as a higher ethics to be OK with only enslaving non christians, because I really did not mean anything like that, as I do not see it as a higher ethic.
And like the other commenter pointed out, civilization is ill defined.
I was mainly using it here from the christian point of view, where pagans are not civilized by definition. Not that the norse had not a complex society themself.
Depends on how you're using the terms. Norsemen/Danes were the people, Viking was a job. The viking raids of the summer months were replaced by longer term settlements/political agreements (eg Danelaw, London, Dublin, med coast, Seville) but that still necessitated plenty of waterborne travel.
So the vikings did not just stop, but rather became crusaders:
"In 1107, Sigurd I of Norway sailed for the eastern Mediterranean with Norwegian crusaders to fight for the newly established Kingdom of Jerusalem; the kings of Denmark and Sweden participated actively in the Baltic Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings
(But otherwise of course many factors contributed to the rise and fall of the vikings and there indeed seems to have been a niche, with a temporary weakness, no christian nordic fleets etc.)
I do not think its entirely true to say Christians were "free to plunder and enslave non-Christians". Even against non-Christians war required justification (OK, you can make something up, but there is an extra barrier) and slavery (and slave trading in particular) was increasingly discouraged (until its revival in early modern times, of course).
One of the big examples of a formerly Viking people participating in the crusades was Norman Sicily which was one of the most enlightened (religious freedom, for example) societies of its time.
The Normans also settled down in Normandy and England and stopped raiding.
How are civilized and baptized comparable concepts? The vikings surely had a civilization before christianity took hold and ascribing sone kind of higher ethics to christianity is also quite a stretch.
And like the other commenter pointed out, civilization is ill defined. I was mainly using it here from the christian point of view, where pagans are not civilized by definition. Not that the norse had not a complex society themself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Long-Ships-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1...