Slavery had already existed in Ireland for centuries by the time the Vikings began to establish their coastal settlements, but it was under the Norse-Gael Kingdom of Dublin that it reached its peak, in the 11th century. [1]
Slavery had already existed in Ireland for centuries by the time the Vikings began to establish their coastal settlements, but it was under the Norse-Gael Kingdom of Dublin that it reached its peak, in the 11th century. [1]
Early medieval legal texts provide a wealth of knowledge on the practice of slavery. Gaelic raiders kidnapped and enslaved people from across the Irish Sea for two centuries after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire destabilising Roman Britain; Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Gaelic raiders. [2]
In the Brehon Laws, Senchus Mór [Shanahus More] and the Book of Acaill [Ack'ill], a "daer fuidhir" ("servile inferior") was a name applied to all who did not belong to a clan, whether born in the clan territory or not. This was the lowest of the three classes of the non-free people. This class also was sub-divided into saer and daer, the daer fuidhirs being the class most closely resembling slaves. Even this lowest condition was not utterly hopeless; promotion was possible, and in constant operation. Therefore all families did not remain permanently in this kind of servitude but had the possibility of gradually rising from a lower to a higher degree according to a certain scale of progress, unless they committed some crime which would arrest that progress and cast them down again further. [3] Slaves could be obtained through war, purchase and marriage to outsiders. The inheritability of slavery depends on the precise original relationship, while fuidher have been seen as a transitional status, after three generations serving the same lord, their children fell under the category senchléithe, akin to a semi iereditary serf status, while the law texts also provide details of downward mobility as well. [4] [5]
From the 9th to the 12th century Viking/Norse-Gael Dublin in particular was a major slave trading center which led to an increase in slavery. [6] In 870, Vikings, most likely led by Olaf the White and Ivar the Boneless, besieged and captured the stronghold of Dumbarton Castle (Alt Clut), the capital of the Kingdom of Strathclyde in Scotland, and the next year took most of the site's inhabitants to the Dublin slave markets. [6]
When the Vikings established early Scandinavian Dublin in 841, they began a slave market that would come to sell thralls captured both in Ireland and other countries as distant as Muslim Spain, [7] [8] as well as sending Irish slaves as far away as Iceland, [9] where Gaels formed 40% of the founding population, [10] and Anatolia. [11] In 875, Irish slaves in Iceland launched Europe's largest slave rebellion since the end of the Roman Empire, when Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson's slaves killed him and fled to Vestmannaeyjar.[ citation needed ] Almost all recorded slave raids in this period took place in Leinster and southeast Ulster; while there was almost certainly similar activity in the south and west, only one raid from the Hebrides on the Aran Islands is recorded. [12]
Slavery became more prevalent throughout Ireland the 11th century as port cities built up by Vikings flourished, with Dublin becoming the biggest slave market in Western Europe. [12] [8] Its main sources of supply were the Irish hinterland, Wales and Scotland. [12] The Irish slave trade began to decline after William the Conqueror consolidated control of the English and Welsh coasts around 1080, and was dealt a severe blow when the Normans abolished slavery in 1102. [13] [9] [12] [14] The 1171 Council of Armagh freed all Englishmen and women who were enslaved in Ireland. [15] It was clear from the Decree of the Council of Armagh that English were selling their children as slaves. "For the English people hitherto throughout the whole of their kingdom to the common injury of their people, had become accustomed to selling their sons and relatives in Ireland, to expose their children for sale as slaves, rather than suffer any need or want." [16]
As was true for societies across Europe, Asia, & Africa during this time, there were individuals born in Ireland who became involved with the Atlantic slave trade between 1660 and 1815. [17] [18] Librarian Liam Hogan [19] has described how Irish merchants profited from the trade, mostly indirectly as provisioners.
In more direct involvement for example, William Ronan worked for the Royal African Company and rose to become chairman of the committee of merchants at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), running one of the world's largest slave markets between 1687 and 1697. [20] Antoine Walsh, a Frenchman of Irish descent and prominent Jacobite based in Nantes, used his wealth generated from the slave trade to finance the Jacobite rising of 1745. [21] Benjamin McMahon worked for eighteen years as an overseer on Jamaican plantations, later becoming an abolitionist and writing about his experiences. [22] Tralee-born Irishman David Tuohy emigrated to Liverpool and became a captain on slave ships before settling down in the city to manage his business activities, which included the slave trade. [23] Felix Doran (1708–1776) was an Irish Catholic, born in Ireland and moved to Liverpool where he became very wealthy from the slave trade, financing at least 69 slave voyages. [24]
Several Caribbean Islands have significant Irish communities descended from indentured servants deported from Ireland by colonial British authorities following the 15th & 16th century Plantations of Ireland, with the like of Montserrat once hosting large Irish owned and run sugar plantations that were dependent on slave labour. [25]
Prominent US Civil Rights campaigner Jesse Jackson acknowledges his descent from a “Scots-Irish” (i.e. colonial settlers from Britain who arrived in Ireland in the 17th century during the crown’s Plantation of Ulster) plantation owner, in South Carolina. [26]
An Irish slave-owning great-great grandfather of US Senator Mitch McConnell also came to the US from Ireland. McConnell brought up this family history during the 2020 United States presidential election campaign to liken himself to Barack Obama. [27]
The UCL Legacies of British Slavery database identifies the Irish Slave owners, compensated by the British Government, on abolition of legal slavery, in the British Empire. [28]
The US Department of State criticised Ireland in 2018 for "not meeting the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking"; types of modern slavery and forced labour include prostitution, trawler fishing and domestic service. [29] [30]
The Viking Age (793–1066 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germanic Iron Age. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. The Scandinavians of the Viking Age are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen, although few of them were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy.
Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia, who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe. They also voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Greenland, and Vinland. In their countries of origin, and some of the countries they raided and settled in, this period is popularly known as the Viking Age, and the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a whole. The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, Estonia, and Kievan Rus'.
The Norsemen were a North Germanic linguistic group of the Early Middle Ages, during which they spoke the Old Norse language. The language belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages and is the predecessor of the modern Germanic languages of Scandinavia. During the late eighth century, Scandinavians embarked on a large-scale expansion in all directions, giving rise to the Viking Age. In English-language scholarship since the 19th century, Norse seafaring traders, settlers and warriors have commonly been referred to as Vikings. Historians of Anglo-Saxon England distinguish between Norse Vikings (Norsemen) from Norway, who mainly invaded and occupied the islands north and north-west of Britain, as well as Ireland and western Britain, and Danish Vikings, who principally invaded and occupied eastern Britain.
The Swedish slave trade mainly occurred in the early history of Sweden when the trade of thralls was one of the pillars of the Norse economy. During the raids, the Vikings often captured and enslaved militarily weaker peoples they encountered, but took the most slaves in raids of the British Isles, and Slavs in Eastern Europe. This slave trade lasted from the 8th through the 11th centuries. Slavery itself was abolished in Sweden in 1335.
A thrall was a slave or serf in Scandinavian lands during the Viking Age. The status of slave contrasts with that of the freeman and the nobleman.
Saqaliba is a term used in medieval Arabic sources to refer to Slavs, and other peoples of Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. The term originates from the Middle Greek slavos/sklavenos (Slav), which in Hispano-Arabic came to designate first Slavic slaves and then, similarly to the semantic development of the term in other West-European languages, foreign slaves in general.
The Kingdom of Dublin was a Norse kingdom in Ireland that lasted from roughly 853 AD to 1170 AD. It was the first and longest-lasting Norse kingdom in Ireland, founded by Vikings who invaded the territory around Dublin in the 9th century. Its territory corresponded to most of present-day County Dublin.
Aud the Deep-Minded, also known as Unn, Aud Ketilsdatter or Unnur Ketilsdottir, was a 9th-century settler during the age of Settlement of Iceland. The main source of information about her life in Iceland is Sturla Þórðarson's Landnámabók; Laxdæla saga, which calls her Unn, gives a varying account but has more on her background, and she also figures in several other sagas, including Njáls saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Eiríks saga rauða and Grettis saga.
Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of a highly interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery. As European kingdoms transitioned to feudal societies, a different legal category of unfree persons -- serfdom—began to replace slavery as the main economic and agricultural engine. Throughout medieval Europe, the perspectives and societal roles of enslaved peoples differed greatly, from some being restricted to agricultural labor to others being positioned as trusted political advisors.
The Norse–Gaels were a people of mixed Gaelic and Norse ancestry and culture. They emerged in the Viking Age, when Vikings who settled in Ireland and in Scotland became Gaelicised and intermarried with Gaels. The Norse–Gaels dominated much of the Irish Sea and Scottish Sea regions from the 9th to 12th centuries. They founded the Kingdom of the Isles, the Kingdom of Dublin, the Lordship of Galloway, and briefly ruled the Kingdom of York. The most powerful Norse–Gaelic dynasty were the Uí Ímair or House of Ivar.
The Uí Ímair, also known as the Ivardynasty or Ivarids, was a Norse-Gael dynasty which ruled much of the Irish Sea region, the Kingdom of Dublin, the western coast of Scotland, including the Hebrides and some part of Northern England, from the mid 9th century.
Cerball mac Dúnlainge was king of Ossory in south-east Ireland. The kingdom of Ossory (Osraige) occupied roughly the area of modern County Kilkenny and western County Laois and lay between the larger provincial kingdoms of Munster and Leinster.
Slave raiding is a military raid for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them from the raid area to serve as slaves. Once seen as a normal part of warfare, it is nowadays widely considered a crime. Slave raiding has occurred since antiquity. Some of the earliest surviving written records of slave raiding come from Sumer. Kidnapping and prisoners of war were the most common sources of African slaves, although indentured servitude or punishment also resulted in slavery.
In the Middle Ages, the Volga trade route connected Northern Europe and Northwestern Russia with the Caspian Sea and the Sasanian Empire, via the Volga River. The Rus used this route to trade with Muslim countries on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, sometimes penetrating as far as Baghdad. The powerful Volga Bulgars formed a seminomadic confederation and traded through the Volga river with Viking people of Rus' and Scandinavia and with the southern Byzantine Empire Furthermore, Volga Bulgaria, with its two cities Bulgar and Suvar east of what is today Moscow, traded with Russians and the fur-selling Ugrians. Chess was introduced to Medieval Rus via the Caspian-Volga trade routes from Persia and Arabia.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation and until the 11th century, when the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom, and all slaves were no longer recognised separately in English law or custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries. To the west, Vikings under Leif Erikson, the heir to Erik the Red, reached North America and set up a short-lived settlement in present-day L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. Longer lasting and more established Norse settlements were formed in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Russia, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ireland and Normandy.
The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group native to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. They are associated with the Gaelic languages: a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
Viking activity in the British Isles occurred during the Early Middle Ages, the 8th to the 11th centuries CE, when Scandinavians travelled to the British Isles to raid, conquer, settle and trade. They are generally referred to as Vikings, but some scholars debate whether the term Viking represented all Scandinavian settlers or just those who used violence.
The Danish slave trade occurred separately in two different periods: the trade in European slaves during the Viking Age, from the 8th to 10th century; and the Danish role in selling African slaves during the Atlantic slave trade, which commenced in 1733 and ended in 1807 when the abolition of slavery was announced. The location of the latter slave trade primarily occurred in the Danish West Indies where slaves were tasked with many different manual labour activities, primarily working on sugar plantations. The slave trade had many impacts that varied in their nature, with some more severe than others. After many years of slavery in the Danish West Indies, Christian VII decided to abolish slave trading.
While the Vikings are perhaps best known for accumulating wealth by plunder, tribute, and conquest, they were also skilled and successful traders. The Vikings developed several trading centres both in Scandinavia and abroad as well as a series of long-distance trading routes during the Viking Age. Viking trading centres and trade routes would bring tremendous wealth and plenty of exotic goods such as Arab coins, Chinese Silks, and Indian Gems. Vikings also established a "bullion economy" in which weighed silver, and to a lesser extent gold, was used as a means of exchange. Evidence for the centrality of trade and economy can be found in the criminal archaeological record through evidence of theft, counterfeit coins, and smuggling. The Viking economy and trade network also effectively helped rebuild the European economy after the fall of the Roman Empire
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